Diabolic Digest
Khaled Diab
Losing Face
Delhi
departures
Up in arms at the prospect of spending Friday
night in the suffocating and oppressive embrace of his thoughts. Sven downed
the last of his beer and decide to endure all the knowing glances and
sub-breath whispers at the Dappere Leeuw, his local.
On slightly unsteady feet, he entered the
garage and mounted his sturdy, but reliable grandfather’s bicycle which he’d inherited
from his mother’s father. Next to it stood his swanky racing bike which he rode
at the weekend – and like the dedicated hobbyist that he was – in full racing
insignia.
His passion for cycling burned so intensely
that he was usually able to rise above his physical self-consciousness and wear
a cyclist’s skin-tight gear without thinking about what kind of a figure he
cut. Slicing through the wind at speed blew away his hang ups and made him feel
light and in harmony with his surroundings.
He got a bit of that sense of lightness now,
even though he was riding along on the heavier-set and slower frame. The wind
had a refreshing bite to it tonight and Sven pedalled into it with his face
held up to slap some life into his numbed senses.
With tribulation, he pushed open the Leeuw’s
heavy door. The conversation died down a little as people turned discreetly to
view the local TV celebrity, who wasn’t all that celebrated. In appearing on
everyone’s screen, it was as if he’d made his life common property – and the
village was split on whether he’d been right.
Some people were on record with their opinion
that what he did was “very brave. Don’t understand why that Tanja went and left
him.” Others wondered why he’d gone to all that trouble. “He doesn’t look any
better now than he did before that domme programme.”
“‘It’s only a matter of time, you mark my
words’ – that was what I said when they got together. That Tanja was always out
of his league.”
“Never thought he was the type. Always looked so
serious, you know.”
“Yeah, too intellectual, I always said. Not as
smart as he acts, obviously.”
“Why anyone would want to air their dirty
laundry in front of millions of people, I don’t know.”
“Do you think millions watch that rubbish.”
He’d overheard snippets of speculation,
conjecture and expert opinion since his return. But that didn’t hurt as much as
his parents’ derision. “Have I been cursed with nothing but deviants for
offspring,” his father bemoaned.
“Son, pride and envy are the deadliest of the
cardinal sins. You should be grateful for what you have… had,” his mother
chastised. “Humility and humiliation are not the same thing,” she railed.
Walking into the warm and glowing interior, he
saw that the village news agency, Jan de Wit, hadn’t turned towards him. He was
too busy on his mobile phone relaying the latest breaking gossip to his wide
network of geriatric subscribers to look up.
He was obviously on assignment, discreetly, at
least to his own eyes, following the latest exploits of Gina – Divina ex
Vagina, one of the geriatric wits liked to call her – who had won acclaim
and notoriety as the village’s most prolifically promiscuous young woman: an
accolade which both intrigued and outraged the old timers.
Since she discovered sex at 18, she’d been,
over the last three years, gradually working her way through all the eligible
men in Voeren and beyond – on both sides of the language border. Gina was truly
multicultural in her taste in men and liked to experiment with the exotic. She
had been sighted not only with Flemings and Walloons, but also all manner of
Africans and Asians. “At this rate, she’s going to have to ship them in,” Jan
joked as Sven walked past. “I am sure some asylum seekers have already found
refuge in her bed.”
Shaking his head in disgust at the old man’s
crudeness and bigotry, Sven spotted Tom, his old school chum, and one of the
dwindling number of people who took him at face value. “Hey, Tom, all alone?”
Sven asked.
Closing his book, Tom looked up, smiling:
“Can’t you see that I’m on a date with a hot new book.” Tom had always been
something of a reader. Sven and his friends were fond of saying that, whereas a
stork had delivered them to their parents, Tom’s mum must have got him off an
encyclopaedia salesman. Of course, none of his friends were particularly
surprised when he decided to open up a bookshop in town.
“It’s good to see you out and about, Sven
Shui.” Tom had been the one to coin this nickname when Sven started showing an
interest at school in the divine proportion. Luckily for Sven, this had more or
less replaced his former nom de guerre Heilige Kind, Holy Child, son of
Voeren’s Bible queen. His mother had gained a certain infamy when she joined
the campaign to keep religious education on the syllabus at Sven’s Catholic
school.
“How can you have a Catholic school without
Catholic schooling?” she asked a parents’ meeting rhetorically, while Sven
wriggled uncomfortably in the audience.
Among children who thought Genesis was a pop
band and parents who normally associated monasteries with beer and could barely
tell their Joseph from their Judas, striking religious education from the
curriculum only seemed like bowing to the obvious. But the passionate few
defeated the apathetic many, and religion stayed on the curriculum. Many an
ired schoolboy decided not to let Sven forget it. Taking him out of his comfort
zone in the background din, they rechristened him and the sons and daughters of
the Catholic brigade as Holy Children.
So, Sven was eternally grateful to Tom for
giving him a new name – which to some boys sounded like some sort of cartoon
kung fu character – that caught on and helped him blend back into the masses.
“Can I get you a drink, a pintje or
something?” Tom inquired.
“Yeah, thanks.”
As Tom went off to the bar, Sven’s ear began to
wander. “So, you’re staying at the converted farm just up the road?” Gina asked
her date.
“That’s right,” his voice nodded.
“I don’t get why someone from Antwerp would
come and holiday in Voeren,” she exclaimed. “I’m out of here as soon as I
finish technical college. Find myself an IT job in Brussels or something.”
“Well, I hear that the language frontier is
beautiful at this time of year,” her cocky companion joked.
Tom returned with a couple of glasses of beer.
“I see Gina’s got a brand new friend,” he remarked. The old friends exchanged a
few pleasantries and chatted a little about work.
“How are you holding up?” Tom asked.
“I try to put a brave face on it,” Sven
quipped.
Smiling, Tom tells him: “You know you don’t
need to put on a masquerade with me. Has the gossip mill stopped grinding your
reputation yet?”
“It’s slowing down.”
“And Tanja?”
“No news. I haven’t heard a whisper from her in
weeks.”
“Any idea what you’re going to do?”
“Well, I’m going to try to make contact and I
have an idea that will help us start afresh.”
Tom nods helpfully, prompting Sven to continue.
“Well, new face, new place, I was thinking. With all the crap that’s been raining
down, I thought that Tanja and I should move away from Voeren.”
“Where to?”
“We’ll I’ve been offered a job in India.”
Tom, who has travelled all over the world,
particularly in his books, looks pleasantly surprised. “That’s great news! Is
it with those guys in Delhi you collaborate with?”
Sven spent the rest of the evening telling Tom
about the job and his fear of putting a great, big continent between him and
Tanja, if she refused to join him. Despite his better judgement, he knocked
back the beers and wound up rediscovering incredible things about balance and
gravity, as his bike defied his attempts to keep it on a straight trajectory.
Hoping to re-hydrate himself, he poured more water down his throat than he
normally gave the plants, then he took his re-engineered features up to bed.
According to Newton’s Third Law of Bladder
Movement, what flows in must flow out. And, as the sun rose, so Sven felt
gravity pull keenly on his storage tank. Before convection could work its
magic, he leapt out of bed, dashed to the toilet, where he released an equal
and opposite amount of urine to the beer and water that he had swallowed since
his previous visit.
As he sat sipping coffee hoping to regain
equilibrium in his head, Peggy stamped into the dinning room demanding her
breakfast. The where-were-you-last-night darts of accusation from her eyes
stung Sven. “I was hoping we could spend a quiet evening in, just the two of
us,” her grunt seemed to say as she headed back out towards the garden.
Sven went out to Peggy’s shed and upturned a
sack of ripening apples and pears that were not supermarket quality which he’d
bought cheap from a local orchard. With the abandon normally reserved for mud
baths, Peggy dug into her breakfast. Sven, on the other hand, could hardly
swallow anything.
He was nibbling on a croissant and making good
progress with his third cup of coffee, when he heard the key turn in the front
door. “Tanja,” he mumbled excitedly, putting down the newspaper.
She was looking radiant, Sven thought. But something
had changed about her. “I’ve just come to take some more of my stuff,” she
said.
“Tanja!” he said a little too urgently.
“Please, Sven, it’s best not to discuss it
anymore.”
At that moment, Peggy came dashing into the
living room to greet her absent friend. Tanja knelt down to pat the pig. “We
owe that little piggy a lot,” Sven said. “If I hadn’t kissed her, she wouldn’t
have turned into my beautiful princess.”
“Sven, don’t!” Tanja said, as she straightened
up again.
“Now, the magic seems to have worn off and
she’s just a pig again.” Tanja’s face started to lose its composure and she
rushed off. “No, I’m the beast. You were always the beauty – inside and out,”
he told her back as it left the room.
She came downstairs with a couple of suitcases
full of her clothes. “I’ll come back soon with a van to take the rest of my
things. You can keep this place. I’ve found myself somewhere else to live.”
“With Charlie?”
“Of course not. We’re not together anymore.”
“Well, I won’t be needing this house either. In
a month, I’ll be moving to India to start a new job. So, you can move back in.
You could always come with me. I’d love it if you would. We could start all
over again, somewhere where no one knows us. Give me the chance to make up for
my folly.”
“Congratulations. I’m very happy for you. But
I’m still not ready to live with you again – in India or here.”
Sven began looking at her curiously. She’d put
on quite a bit of weight in the past few weeks. “Tanja, you look different, a
little bigger. Are you pregnant?”
“Comfort eating,” she fibbed.
“Your metabolism would walk out on you. You are
pregnant, aren’t you?” he quizzed.
“I have to go.” She picked up her suitcases.
“I want you and our baby – even if he’s not
ours – to come with me to Delhi.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said and walked out
of the house.
ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.