home again in the evening. This is definitely going to be the winter of my discontent, here in the country of Shakespeare and the Sex Pistols where I always wanted to live. It’s terrible when your dreams come true.
‘But I’m a sucker for a clever man. I always think maybe he’s an Einstein or a Shakespeare and then I could be his muse. Behind every man, you know; all those clichés I was brought up with. Immortality by proxy. I believed George was a genius. A philosophy lecturer – how lucky can a girl get? I felt like a bird-watcher who’d come across the last dodo in existence. And then I discovered he didn’t want a muse, he wanted a mother. Someone to darn the holes in his underpants.’
‘Perhaps that’s part of a muse’s role,’ Jans said comfortingly while he tried to catch the waiter’s eye and order another bottle of wine.
‘No, there’s a world of difference between a muse and a mother.’ She pushed her glass towards him so he could take a mouthful of her wine in the meantime. ‘You can’t convert your muse into Florence Nightingale. You can’t expect Shakespeare’s dark lady also to play the lady with the lamp.’
‘You can’t have your cake and eat it?’
‘No, you can eat as much cake as you like, but you can’t expect a chocolate cake and a custard tart to taste the same.’
Griet began to shake with laughter and realised that she’d had enough to drink. But she raised her wine glass resolutely, drained it, and felt herself waft away on a cloud of recklessness. Jans was looking more and more attractive, with his spectacles low on his nose and that dark shadow of stubble round his mouth.
‘You know, just the other day I read something about a flower that made me think of you,’ said Jans. ‘Have you ever seen a wildemagriet? An ox-eye daisy?’
‘Do you know the story of the sad princess?’
‘It’s a beautiful flower, but very poisonous.’
‘Her father said that the man who made her laugh could have her hand in marriage.’
‘The black people believe it brings protection against the devil.’
‘And it made you think of me?’ asked Griet and started to hiccup in wonderment.
‘I thought that would make you pay attention,’ laughed Jans. ‘Callilepis laureola is its botanical name.’
‘Hell, Jans, this is why I like you,’ hiccuped Griet, flopping down on her elbows. ‘You’re a minefield of useless information. I always wonder when the next explosion is going to get me.’
‘There’s no such thing as useless information,’ insisted Jans, refilling her glass. ‘You never know when it’ll come in handy. Who made the sad princess laugh?’
‘The bumpkin with the golden goose,’ replied Griet, still hiccuping. ‘Don’t you remember, the goose with a whole row of people stuck to it?’
She remembered a Friday night, long ago, when she and George flirted in a pub. There was a guitarist playing the same songs over the same din: ‘Imagine’, ‘Streets of London’, ‘Where do You Go to, My Lovely?’. Maybe it was the same pub.
The next morning they woke up in the same bed.
She could hardly believe her eyes. She couldn’t explain how it had happened. She enjoyed his company, but she wasn’t sexually attracted to him. She was unusually impressed by his bookshelf. That was the only excuse she could come up with for her behaviour.
‘And now?’ she asked, quite at a loss. ‘What now?’
‘What do you suggest?’ he laughed, folding her in his arms. ‘Do you want to get married?’
She laughed with him, touching his body in amazement. He was thinner than he seemed in his clothes, more defenceless. He had a slight paunch, narrow hips, long legs. And a penis as soft as down and warm as a chicken, stirring at the touch of her fingers. She wished she could play with it all day without having it grow hard in her hand, but there wasn’t a good fairy nearby to make her wish come true.
Disappointed, she felt the chicken transform itself into a bantam cockerel. Why does a man always think he’s letting a woman down, she wondered – not for the first time – if his penis doesn’t leap to attention the moment she touches it?
‘I’m not going to fall in love with you,’ she warned him.
‘I’ve been in love with you for ages,’ he answered. But she thought he was teasing again.
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t want a steady relationship. I’m not ready yet …’
‘Hush,’ he’d said and kissed her so she couldn’t protest any further. ‘You’ll make me impotent if you don’t shut up.’
Prophetic words, Griet thought, years later. She never became his muse. She married him and drove him to impotence.
‘You hold me too tight at night,’ she told him that first month. ‘I’m not used to it. I get too hot, it feels as though I’m suffocating.’
‘You’ll just have to get used to it,’ he laughed. ‘I can’t sleep empty-handed.’
‘You never hold me at night,’ she reproached him years later. ‘I may as well be sleeping alone.’
‘I can’t hold someone at night,’ he answered. ‘It makes me feel claustrophobic, I can’t breathe.’
‘I don’t want to be a man’s muse any more,’ she told Jans, who was becoming blurrier, as though she was looking at him through a camera lens that was being turned more and more out of focus. ‘I am looking for a man who is stupid enough not to get impotent if he becomes my muse. Or don’t you get male muses?’
‘Originally they were the Greek goddesses of the arts, but these days everything is so androgynous that the sex of muses probably doesn’t count for much any more.’ Sometimes she thought that Jans was only interested in mythology because most modern people regarded it as useless information. ‘And if he refuses to become a muse, you can always make him your Pegasus.’
‘Wasn’t Pegasus a horse?’
‘Exactly. The winged horse of the muses. Inspiration for the art of poetry. As in: I mount my Pegasus. Means I’m going to write a poem.’
‘I like that,’ laughed Griet and hiccuped louder than ever. ‘Let’s drink to Pegasus.’
‘To the bumpkin with the golden bird.’ Jans raised his glass in yet another toast. ‘May you find him soon.’
4
Goldilocks Loses Her Spectacles
Once upon a time there was a colourful land that was regularly struck by disasters. There were long droughts during which thousands of animals perished; there were flash floods that washed thousands of houses away. There were earthquakes that destroyed historical villages like the Finger of God flattening pawns on a chessboard, and there were man-made laws that had the same effect. The difference between the natural catastrophes and the man-made disasters was that the people left
