The Other Bank

Thomas had looked at the photo of the dead wrist for two seconds, three at most, and told the inspector that no, really, a bit of yellow wool didn't mean anything to him at all, apart from his grandfather's jumpers.

To me, it meant a stitch gone wrong every ten rows.

I said nothing. I stood on the pavement of the Spiegelrei with Thomas's cashmere round my neck and Jasper's scarf underneath, and I watched Goossens get into her unmarked car, and I said nothing. That night, in bed, I made a list of everything I should have said. Inspector, that wool is mine. My mother knitted it in Ostend in 2022, in front of a game show. On Tuesday night I cut it in two with my knife and gave it to a man who was bleeding. He had the architect's face. He gave me a key. The next day, a boy of twenty-four was dead in the Lake of Love with a piece of my scarf round his wrist.

Said like that, out loud, in the dark, under the beams, it made me an accomplice. Or a madwoman. Or both.

I didn't sleep. At three o'clock the Belfry struck, and I counted the strokes as if they were a verdict.

At eight, Aimé began to play. I went downstairs in my socks with two croissants and the key in my fist.

I'm not quite sure why I showed it to Aimé. Perhaps because he was the only person I could show it to without being asked questions. A man who barely speaks any more doesn't ask where you got a key, or why you've got bags under your eyes down to your chin. He looks at you with his faded blue eyes, he pours you a coffee that's too strong into a chipped cup from the '58 World's Fair, and he waits for you to do the talking for him.

His sitting room is full of things that only mean something to him. The practice keyboard, enormous, against the back wall. Handwritten scores stacked to the ceiling. A matchstick model of the Belfry, missing its spire, which he will never finish. Framed photographs of bells, nothing but bells, the way other people frame their grandchildren. And above the fireplace, a photo of two young men in suits, in the seventies, arm in arm in front of the Belfry gate, laughing their heads off. One of them is Aimé, with hair. The other one, I've never asked.

I put the croissants on the table. I opened my hand.

“Someone gave me this,” I said. “I don't know what it is.”

Aimé looked at the key.

He didn't take it straight away. He looked at it for a long time, in the hollow of my palm, the way you'd look at a fledgling fallen from its nest when you're not sure it's still alive. Then he reached out, and his fingers were shaking, his fingers that never shake on the keyboard, and he took the key by its bow, and he read the label.

And he wept.

Not like an old man who cries easily. Like someone receiving news. The tears ran silently down his badly shaven cheeks, into the wrinkles, all the way to the collar of his cardigan. He clutched the key to his chest with both hands, very hard, and began rocking gently back and forth.

“Aimé?”

He didn't look at me.

“Aimé, give it back to me, please.”

He shook his head. He held on tighter.

I waited. A minute, perhaps. A very long minute, in which I heard the clock in his kitchen, the gulls on the roof, a delivery boat going by on the Sint-Annarei, and my own heart. I had time to think that I was going to have to take it back from him by force, from a seventy-four-year-old man who'd had a stroke, and that I wouldn't do it, and that the key would stay there, in that room full of bells, and that perhaps it would be better that way.

Then he opened his hands. He held it out to me. He closed my fingers round it, exactly as the man in the boat had done, and kept his hand on mine.

“Do you know what it opens?” I asked.

He stood up. He went over to the keyboard, slowly, dragging his right leg. He sat down on the bench. He raised his fists.

Le plat pays. The first four bars. Yes.

“What? What does it open?”

He let his hands fall. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a breath, a broken syllable, and he struck the wood of the keyboard with the flat of his hand, once, furious with himself.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. Something else. Should I give it to the police?”

He didn't even think about it. His fists came down on the batons with a violence I'd never seen in him, and the whole house shook to Sur le pont d'Avignon. Once. Twice. Three times, louder and louder, faster and faster, until the cups rattled in the dresser and I put my hand on his shoulder to make him stop.

He stopped. He was panting. He looked at me at last, his eyes still wet, and in his eyes there was something I had never seen in him in six months of silence.

Fear. For me.

The canal never gives anything back.

It was Roger Vandamme, the boss of Rederij De Reie, who told me that, the day I dropped my first phone between the boat and the quay, in April of my first season. He was sixty, with a walrus moustache and forty-two years of canals behind him. He had watched the little bubbles rise to the surface where my phone had just disappeared, and said, without malice, the way you'd state a law of physics: “The canal never gives anything back, meisje. Whatever falls in belongs to it.” Then he lent me his old Nokia for the season.

I went to the Rozenhoedkaai at midday. It was a blue, dry cold, no fog, and the tourists were queuing for waffles on the Wollestraat. Nobody looks at a boatwoman lifting the tarp on her boat. It's like watching a postman put a letter through a door.

The bow bench of De Reiger is a chest. I didn't know that in my first year. Jasper found out by banging his knee on it: the top board isn't nailed down, it rests on two battens and is wedged in place by the curve of the planking, and if you lift it sharply backwards you find a hollow forty centimetres long, dry, black, smelling of tar and old oak. For three seasons we've been hiding our end-of-day beers in there, and the cigarettes Jasper claims to have given up. Nobody else knows. Not even Roger, or he pretends not to.

I wrapped the key in a freezer bag, then in a rag. I laid it right at the back of the hollow, behind a can of Brugse Zot forgotten since October. I put the board back. I stamped on it with my heel. I laced the tarp up again.

The canal never gives anything back. Whatever falls in belongs to it. I straightened up on the quay, knees wet, and for one second it did me good to feel as stubborn as the water.

The restaurant on the Groenerei had six tables, as promised, a ceiling so low that Thomas had to duck coming in, and a bald owner who shook Thomas's hand, looked me up and down and said in Flemish, “At last, one who looks like she's got an appetite.” I decided to take it as a compliment.

I wasn't expecting anything. That's not true. I was expecting everything, and above all to be on my guard. I'd prepared questions, traps, silences. I'd forgotten them all before the shrimp croquettes arrived.

He was funny. He was funny in a way that wasn't trying to be, that slipped out of him, like the whistling. He told me about the façade of the house opposite, and the one next door, and the story of the fifteenth-century wool merchant who had his mother-in-law's head carved as a gargoyle on the gutter, mouth wide open, so that the rain would pour out of her mouth in every storm for five hundred years. He told me he knew every gable in Bruges the way other people know the faces of their family. He told me his mother made the best speculoos in Flanders and that he would prove it. He asked me about the water, about the boats, about the currents you can't see, and he listened to the answers, really listened, chin in his hand, as if what I said was going to be of some use.

I laughed. At one point I laughed so hard, about a canon and a pigeon, that the bald owner came out of his kitchen to see what was going on.

He asked me what I was doing in Bruges, a girl from Namur. I told him about Grégoire, a little. About the dress in its garment bag. About the boats that had saved me. He didn't say he was sorry. He said: “His loss, then.” And he filled my glass.

For two hours I forgot the key. I forgot the Lake of Love, the yellow wool, the inspector with the black eyes. I forgot that a man with this same face had said my name in the fog. I watched Thomas Verlinde laughing over a sole meunière and told myself that perhaps, just for once, I could have a normal evening with a normal man, and that this wasn't too much to ask of the universe.

The Belfry struck half past ten, and Thomas paid, and held the door, and the cold air of the Groenerei hit us in the face.

The water was black and smooth as a wet slate. On the other side of the canal the façades were reflected upside down, perfect, barely trembling. There was nobody about. Just the two of us on the quay, and the little stone bridge further along, and the street lamps laying pools of orange light on the water.

Thomas turned up the collar of his midnight-blue coat. He turned towards me. He was going to say something, or kiss me, or both, and I think I was going to let him.

I looked over his shoulder.

On the other bank, under a street lamp, a man was standing, motionless, arms by his sides. A black beanie. A dark jacket. He was watching us.

He had Thomas's face.

Thomas was standing beside me, his hand on my arm. The man opposite had his right hand bandaged in yellow.