‘God Made the World, But the Dutch Made Holland’ by Ronan Kelly

Pacing up and down outside a gift shop in Schiphol, Frank rings Cathy to say that he and Malcolm have missed their flight –

‘You’ve what? How ...?’

– but that they’ll be on the next one available and he’ll explain everything when he gets in. And it’s true: in this moment, as Frank dazedly wipes his eyes, he fully intends to explain everything.

The house is dark when his taxi pulls up, apart from a faint glow in the small front bedroom. ‘Well, I finally made it,’ he calls out in the hallway, flipping on the light there, and the porch light, and the one on the landing.

‘Oh, cool,’ comes Cathy’s voice. ‘Wow, I totally lost track of time ... Come on up.’

For the best part of eight hours, Frank has been racing to get here, but now he hesitates. He reminds himself it’s only been a few days. Through the frosted glass, the turning taxi’s lights flare and drive off. Still he waits. How is it, he wonders, that two minutes ago, when he was paying the man, he knew exactly how to explain all he has discovered?

‘Knock, knock,’ he says, though she never closes the door. The desk lamp pours a bright pool on what she’s been working on, a bird peeping through thickets of branches, part of a series. She’s been copying details from a book, which she closes over now while still keeping her thumb in the page. Six months ago she’d come home from work with an announcement. She’d handed in her notice – she’d just gone and done it: life was too short, she said, to waste in accountancy. She began drawing then, day and night she drew. Things that took Frank’s breath away. Lots of flowers and plants and animals. Her plan, such as it was – they hadn’t discussed it any further – was to become a freelance illustrator. They exchange a pecked kiss now. ‘So,’ she says, ‘what the hell happened?’

Frank shifts a pile of books from a chair and sits down. Her thumb, holding the place where she’s ready to continue, rattles him. ‘So, it was a good trip in general,’ he begins, but Cathy’s face flickers – as if bored, disappointed, already. He makes a short swipe with his hand: scratch that. He starts again: ‘So this morning, bright and early, I’m waiting in the lobby – taxi’s ordered –

‘I’ve had my breakfast and everything, the work is done, we’re going home, right? So I’m waiting there for old Malc to show, but there’s no sign of him. I text a few times, then start calling him, but it goes straight to voicemail. I’m getting a bit concerned when the concierge, he comes over to me and he says, “Mister McCann ...” – perfect English, by the way, they all do – he says, “Mister McCann, I expect you are waiting on your colleague?”’

Cathy cracks a little smile here: she’s intrigued, and Frank loves that.

‘So I say I am, yeah, and he says, “Perhaps we’ll check on him together.” Up we go in the lift – we were on different floors – and we get to Malcolm’s door. We knock. No answer. We knock again – still nothing. This goes on for a bit. I try his phone again, but it’s still off. Then your man says, “We’re going to go in now ...” And he produces this key ...’

Frank missed the moment it happened, but Cathy no longer has her thumb in the book. ‘Go on,’ she says.

And so he makes it sound worse than it was; he can’t help it. The room smelled, that was true, but there wasn’t quite the fog of booze-fumes, cigarette smoke and perfume that he describes now. And Malcolm was undressed, true, but he was under the covers, not ‘starkers on the bed’.

‘Perfume!’ Cathy latches on to the word, as he knew she would. ‘Malcolm, you bastard!’

Frank wags a finger: to his surprise, he’s enjoying himself now too. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions. Perhaps he bought a gift for Joan and it spilled?’

‘Yeah, right. Wow, the fucker. So then?’

‘So then my little concierge friend just leaves me to it! He says he can call another taxi for fifteen minutes’ time – then he’s gone!’

‘Oh my god, Frank ...’ She tucks her folded leg in tighter.

‘So I haul old Malc into the bathroom – starkers, remember – and prop him in the shower and just turn it on full blast. There’s this moan out of him ...’

When Cathy gives a gleeful clap at this, Frank knows there is no going back. There is one way to tell this story now, and this is it. He tells her how he went back into the bedroom and began flinging every stitch of clothing he could find into Malcolm’s wheelie case. He says that when you’ve packed a man’s worn Y-fronts for him, you’re on a new level with the guy.

What he does not say – because it is impossible now, and maybe impossible all along – was that Malcolm had been crying in the bed, and was crying in the shower. Sobbing, in fact. And when Frank asked him what was wrong, Malcolm said, ‘It just didn’t stick, the poor little thing.’ Frank said he didn’t understand, and Malcolm had turned his raw face to him and said, ‘Joan – she lost the baby.’ So then Frank was crying too. He hadn’t known about any baby.

But instead of saying this – because Cathy is laughing now, horrified and happy, and that alone is a win, that alone is something – Frank tells her how they stumbled out of the hotel and into the taxi, Malcolm in shoes but no socks because Frank had been a diligent packer. He tells her that the taxi-man drove like a maniac to the station, that the traffic was insane and they swerved through flocks of cyclists – but not that he and Malcolm sat side by side in the back, both with tears flowing freely down their cheeks. He tells her that they ran through the station concourse with Malcolm protesting and threatening to throw up – but not that they clung to each other like drowning men. He tells her that the train crawled and that the boarding gate was closed when they got there – but not that Malcolm swore at the staff and Frank had to drag him off. He says that Malcolm drank cup after cup of black coffee – but not that they were both red-eyed as Frank said that the same thing had happened to him – to them – too. Four times.

‘Four?’ Malcolm’s face had twisted. ‘Oh, you poor bastard, McCann. Oh, I’m so sorry. Poor Cathy.’ He squeezed Frank’s arm.

‘Oh, poor Joan!’ Cathy says now. ‘I mean, what a bastard. Was it a prostitute, do you think?’

‘I’m not speculating,’ Frank says. In retrospect, he sees the perfume was a mistake. But what harm, what harm?

He does not say that they grieved together – he and Malcolm – in the air over the North Sea, over Britain, and as far as the baggage claim in Dublin Airport. That was where it ended, when Malcolm’s case of samples came out first and he extended his hand to Frank and said, ‘I’m going to shoot off, we’re going in different directions anyway.’

By then – Frank sees this now – he had got what he needed. He got what he and Cathy could not give to each other, because even as they lay in bed together, and were kind to one another, they were living on different planets. When he had suggested at Christmas that they try again, she’d said, ‘Oh Frank, I think we’re done with that now.’ In the air he had mourned as a father might, and so that was over too.

Cathy is still shaking her head, astonished laughter leaking from her, and Frank understands that this is the shape of their marriage, the shape of their love. It has parts missing – gaps between them – but how could it be any different? It just means there is all the more reason to give comfort where you can. Instead of saying all these impossible things, Frank says, ‘I got you something.’

From his pocket he takes the small plastic bag emblazoned with the insignia of Schiphol Duty Free. ‘It’s only small,’ he says.

She unwraps the single sheet of tissue paper. ‘A windmill! I love it!’

Frank has spent all week learning about the latest in geotextiles and geomembranes and ducting and drainage, but the one detail that has stuck in his mind is that windmills in the Netherlands are mainly windpumps: pumping, pumping, pumping to prevent the whole enterprise from slipping under. He’d thought about that as they finally lifted off, when he’d looked down on the grid of long lines streaking into the distance. All those pretty waterways, what were they really except arteries opened in plain sight?

Cathy places her present carefully on the base of the lamp: forever under a midday sun. After a moment’s hesitation, Frank raises himself and comes closer. He selects a pencil from a bristling jam jar. He hands it to her, then gives her the windmill – the windpump – again.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s a sharpener – hilarious!’

She begins to turn the tiny sails. Round and round they go. God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland. How many times did Frank hear that this week? All it takes is never-ending effort. Get up every day, go to work, tire yourself out; do it again. Keep a lid on your disappointment the way you once kept a lid on your hope. After all, that too has passed now, has it not? Round and round go the sails.

‘For your work,’ he says.

On a blank page, she draws a single short dark line.

From issue #15: spring/summer 2023

About the Author
Ronan Kelly is the author of Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (2008). His fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and Winter Papers.