Belgian Passion MP3 - click to play
Read by Silas Hawkins
Before I met you, I didn’t believe in suicide or love at first sight. No matter what happened during the day, I would come home, cut up a potato without peeling it, sauté it and have it with mayonnaise, followed by a cigarette.
I am a Belgian, which means I don’t really exist. Belgians can be either French or Dutch. My emotions were frozen.
I had a wife named Marie. We liked to watch TV together, especially cooking programmes. Our favourite was Nigella Lawson. On Belgian TV, Nigella talked in Dutch with French subtitles running below her bosom. Her lip movements didn’t match the dubbed voice of another woman. Sometimes Nigella would stop talking but her Dutch voice would carry on. I used to find it hilarious. My wife didn’t: “Why don’t they let her speak English? We all know English in Belgium.”
We would often order a takeaway of mussels, French fries and strawberry beer. Then we used to shower, make love, have another shower and then fall asleep, back-to-back, making sure that our buttocks were not touching. If we didn’t make love, we would go to bed dirty. If I saw Marie having a shower before going to bed, it meant she expected me to have one, too.
Marie talked a lot. She was half French. I was only a quarter French. “You are so Dutch,” she used to say. I didn’t think I was very Dutch, French or Belgian. I didn’t think it really mattered. I didn’t believe in nationality, flags, or borders. I didn’t even have any faith in languages and their separateness – they all grew from one another like potatoes, which could be cultivated on any soil.
I worked as a forester outside of Brussels. We had lovely forests in Belgium, not very big, though. I knew every tree. But not even in the middle of the forest would I feel alone with myself. There was always a light somewhere in the distance.
Once a child got lost in my forest. I found him; I offered to carry him to the police station. He bit me on the leg.
I didn’t want to have children. They scared me. I didn’t know how to talk to them.
My wife’s chest, too, fascinated me no more than camel’s humps on a desert island or two balloons filled with water in an empty room. I didn’t want to touch them too much in case they burst.
Marie asked me once if I fancied Nigella.
“Yes,” I answered. But I wasn’t so sure. She burst into tears. We never watched Nigella again.
That night I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. I took the last drag on my cigarette and looked inside a pub called “Belgian Passion.” I saw you ordering your chips.
Everyone I had shared a plate of chips thus far would devour them without any thought, but you were a slow eater. You put one chip between your fingers and stared at it. You smelled it. You made little indents in its flesh with your fingernails. You broke it up into two perfect halves. You arranged the rest of the chips on your plate into a perfect circle, like a child’s drawing of the Sun, full of rays. You looked at me through the window; you smiled; I walked in.
You reminded me of myself in a way I couldn’t quite define: a flashier copy, maybe slimmer, or younger? Not even for a moment did I think about my wife, and whether or not she would try to fight you as if you were another woman, a Nigella of a different kind. I already knew how – back at your place – you would cut up a potato in thick slices, each slippery as a fish, its white flesh softened in the hot oil, pores opening up.
We sat together, watching each other eat, as the chips disappeared from the plate. When there was only one left, you reached for it and then hesitated. I picked it up and threw it behind us. It landed on a woman’s face. She screamed.
“Silly tart,” you whispered in my ear. You grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the door. It was only then that I noticed that we had the same haircut, the same baggy trousers and similar blue shirt with white stripes. It didn’t matter if we were being chased or not.
A week later I moved out of Marie’s flat. You suggested we went for a little trip to the Ardennes before deciding what to do next. We stopped at a frituur, a little roadside chip hut. You asked them if you could prepare a portion of frites for me. They let you in the kitchen. You cut up a potato up in thin slices. The boy serving chips looked at you and smiled. He asked you for your number. You wrote the number on his forehead with a Montblanc pen. My heart clenched like a fist.
I had a gun in my bag; all foresters in Belgium do. We walked into a small valley that hid us from the rest of the world. The boy followed us. It was only then that you saw me crying.
“Love me – love my boys,” you said.
I took out the gun. It fired twice. You made a thud like a deer. I don’t remember what the boy sounded like. I was ready to kill myself, too – please, believe me – but there were no more bullets left in my gun.
You stayed there, with the boy. I caught the last train to Brussels; I couldn’t wait to get home.
I grow my own potatoes now in the middle of the forest, between the birch and the pond. It’s the binst variety, from my region, the best in the world. Try frying them twice in beef dripping, once at 160 degrees, then again at 175. They mustn't be cut too thinly.
(c) Agnieszka Dale, 2013
Agnieszka Dale comes from the Polish lake district but now lives in London. She writes best in transit, anywhere between a lift and a flight. She was a runner-up in The Fine Line Short Story Prize in 2011. Her work has also appeared in Tales of the Decongested.
Silas Hawkins is continuing the family voiceover tradition (he is the son of Larry the Lamb and Earnest the Policeman). Recent credits include the narration of a 4-part documentary on Latin music for the BBC and the voicing of a singing pink alien frog thingy for animated children's series Wonderpets. Voice Agent: [email protected] Acting Agent: [email protected]
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