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FLYING DUTCH
CHAPTER
ONE
It’s always a little startling to hear your name in a public place, and Vanderdecker froze. The beer in his
glass didn’t, and the froth splashed his nose. He put the glass down and listened.
‘The story of the Flying Dutchman...’ the man opposite had said. Slowly, so as not to be seen to be
staring, Vander-decker looked round. His profession had trained him to take in all the information he
needed to enable him to form a judge-ment in one swift glance, and what he saw was a plump young man
wearing a corduroy jacket and a pink shirt with a white collar. Trousers slightly too tight. Round,
steel-rimmed spectacles. Talking at a girl at least seven years his junior. American. Vanderdecker wasn’t
much taken with what he saw, but he listened anyway.
‘Most people think,’ said the plump young man, ‘that Wagner invented the story of the Eying Dutchman.
Not true.’
‘Really?’ said the girl.
‘Absolutely,’ the plump young man confirmed. ‘The legend can be traced back to the early seventeenth
century. My own theory is that it represents some misconstrued recollection of the Dutch fleet in the
Medway.’
‘Where is the Medway, exactly?’ asked the girl, but the plump young man hadn’t heard her. He was
looking through her, as if she were a ghost, to the distant but irresistible vision of his own cleverness.
Vanderdecker knew exactly where the Medway was, and frowned. He disliked being referred to as a
legend, even in his own lifetime. But the plump young man hadn’t finished yet.
‘The version used by Wagner — I say used, but of course the Master tailored it to his own uses — tells
of a Dutch captain who once tried to double the Gape of Good Hope in the teeth of a furious gale, and
swore he would accomplish the feat even if it took him all eternity.’
‘You don’t say,’ said the girl.
‘No sooner had the fateful oath left his lips,’ he continued, ‘when Satan heard the oath and condemned
the wretched blasphemer to sail the seas until the Day of Judgement, with-out aim and without hope of
release, until he could find a woman who would be faithful until death. Once every seven years the Devil
 allows him on shore to seek such a woman; and it is on one such occasion...
‘I always thought,’ said the girl, ‘that the Flying Dutchman was a steam train.’
This had the effect on the plump young man that sugar has on a full tank of petrol. He stopped talking
and made a request that Vanderdecker, for his part, would have found it difficult to grant.
‘Pardon me?’ he asked.
‘Or was that the Flying Scotsman?’ said the girl, realising that the joke needed explanation before an
American could understand it. She might as well have been speaking in Latvian for all the effect she had,
however, and again a moment of bewilderment the plump man started off again with the details of the
Daland-Senta plot from Wagner’s opera. At this point, Vanderdecker let his attention drift back to his
pint of beer, for he loathed the story. He had seriously considered taking legal action when the opera was
first presented, but the problems of proving who he was would have been insurmountable.
By an odd coincidence, although not even Vanderdecker was aware of it, the plump young man was
Vanderdecker’s the final product of an evolutionary process which had started with a fleeting encounter
with a barmaid in New England in 1674. And there was proof, if proof were needed, that the version of
the story that Junior had just gone through was nothing but a pack of lies, for Vanderdecker had been off
and away without waiting to see if the barmaid in question would be faithful until a mild cold, let alone
death. He was younger then, of course —a stripling of one hundred and sixteen— and still obsessed with
wild notions of having a good time every once in a while. Nowadays, on the rare occasions when he met
them, he looked upon barmaids simply as people who were paid to sell him alcoholic beverages.
The girl looked at her watch for the third time in four minutes and said that they had better be getting
along or they would be late for the curtain. Her companion said there was no hurry, he hadn’t finished
telling her the plot. She replied that she would just have to muddle through, somehow or other.
Vanderdecker got the impression that she wasn’t enjoying herself very much.
They got up and left, leaving the Flying Dutchman staring at his glass and wondering why, when so many
things had remained basically the same through the centuries, the human race had chosen to muck about
with beer quite so much. In his young days they slung some malt in a bucket, added boiling water, and
then went away and forgot about it for a week or so. The result of this laissez-faire attitude was
incomparably preferable to the modern version, he seemed to remember — or was that just another
aspect of getting old? Not that he was getting old, of course; no such luck. He looked and felt exactly the
way he did in 1585 — which was more, he reflected, than you could say for Dover Castle.
Melancholy reflections on the subject of beer led him to even more melancholy reflections concerning the
great web of being, and in particular his part in it, which had been so much more protracted than
anybody else’s. Not more significant, to the best of his knowledge. His role in history was rather like that
of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there’s always a lot of it. But this was by
no means a new train of thought, and he knew how to cope with it by now. He finished his drink and
went to the bar for another.
As he stood at the bar and fumbled in his pocket for money, he tried playing the old ‘I-remember-when’
game which had entertained him briefly about a century ago and which now only irritated him. I
remember when money was real money, he said to himself, when it was made of solid silver and had lots
of Latin on it. I remember when you could have bought all the beer in Bavaria, plus sale tax and carriage,
for the price of half a pint of this. I even remember flared trousers. That dates me.
 As he sat down to his drink, he tried to think of something that wouldn’t set him thinking about how
incredibly long he had lived, just for a change. He tired to think of what he was going to do next. But that,
of course, wouldn’t take him very long, because he knew exactly what he was going to do next. He was
going to get pathetically drunk, crawl back to his hotel, and wake up with a splitting head next morning
which would leave him in no fit state to go flogging round Hatton Garden selling gold bars. After he had
sold the gold bars, he would traipse through the bookshops and buy up enough reading matter to keep
him from going stark raving mad for the next seven years. Then he would do the rest of his shopping,
which would only leave him just enough time to get pathetically drunk again before slouching back to
Bridport and his bloody ship and his bloody, bloody shipmates. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to find a
woman who would be true until death; he simply didn’t have the time.
He was following the first part of this programme with almost religious diligence when, several hours
later, the plump man and the girl came back for a last drink. Vanderdecker hoped that they would enjoy
it, since it might make up for an otherwise completely wasted evening witnessing that puerile burlesque of
his life story. For his part, as usual, Vanderdecker had come to terms with modern beer, and was rather
better adjusted to the world in general. He no longer cared if he appeared to be staring. Staring was fun
— at any rate, it was considerably more entertaining than what he had been doing for the last seven years
— and a good long stare might help clear his head.
‘The costumes,’ said the girl after a long silence, ‘were quite pretty.’
Her companion gave her the sort of look that should have been reserved for a tourist who goes to Rome
just to look at the gas works. ‘What did you think,’ he asked — with obvious restraint — ‘of the music?’
‘I got used to it,’ she replied, ‘after a bit. Like a dripping tap,’ she added.
That seemed to wrap it up, so far as the plump young man was concerned.
‘Is that the time?’ he said without looking at his watch. ‘I must go or I’ll miss the last tram.
‘Must you?’ said the girl. ‘Oh well, never mind. I think I’ll just finish my drink.’
‘See you tomorrow, then,’ said the plump man. ‘Perhaps we can make a start on the July figures.’
Shortly afterwards, he wasn’t there any more. Vanderdecker, however, continued to stare. If the girl
was aware of this, she gave no sign of it. She was reading her programme. Presumably, Vanderdecker
imagined, the summary of the plot.
The injustice of it made him suddenly angry, although he recognised in his soul that it was too late to do
anything about it now. He finished his drink and stood up to go. His route to the door and the street led
him past the girl’s table and as he passed over the top of her bowed head he heard himself speak.
‘All that stuff,’ he said, ‘about angels and faithful until death is rubbish. It was the smell.’
The girl looked up sharply, and just as Vanderdecker was going through the door she caught a glimpse
of his face. Some-where in the back of her mind she had a vague, indefinable, inchoate feeling that she
had seen him somewhere before.
‘I remember,’ said the stranger, ‘when money was real money.’
 ‘That’s right, mate,’ said his new friend. ‘Pounds, shillings and pence.’
‘And testoons,’ said the stranger, ‘and groats and placks and angels and ryals and ducats and louis d’or
and louis d’argent...’
‘You what?’
‘And nobles of course,’ continued the stranger. ‘I remember when you could get pissed as a rat, have a
really good blow-out in a bakehouse, see the bear-baiting, and still have change out of a noble.’
The landlord turned his head very slightly. Drunks were no problem, but loonies he could do without.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked the stranger’s new friend, in a tone of voice that suggested that
their friendship might soon end as rapidly as it had begun.
‘Before your time,’ explained the stranger, twirling his beer round in its glass to revive the flagging head.
‘Can’t expect you to remember nobles.’
‘Are you taking the...’
‘No,’ said the stranger. ‘Are you?’
Twenty years of keeping a pub in this particular district of Southampton had given the landlord a virtually
supernatural instinct for the outbreak of a fight. Unfortunately he was at the other end of the bar, and
before he could intervene the stranger’s new friend had hit the stranger in the face, very hard.
‘Christ almighty,’ said the stranger’s new friend. There was blood streaming from his lacerated knuckles,
and the stranger was grinning.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘hit me again.
Before this invitation could be accepted, strong and practiced hands had taken up both parties and put
them out in the street. For his part the stranger landed awkwardly, staggered, lost his footing and fell
extremely heavily against a parking meter. The parking meter broke, but not so the stranger. He simply
gathered himself carefully to his feet, looked around, and set off in search of another pub he remembered
in this part of town. When he got there, however, it was boarded up. It had been closed for the last
seven years, ever since a party of Royal Marines had started a fight with a man they thought was trying to
be funny, and which had ended with five very con-fused Marines receiving treatment for fractured hands
and feet.
At this stage, of course, the Dow Jones was still buoyant, the HangTseng had never had it so good, the
FT was climbing like a deranged convolvulus, futures were trading as if there was no tomorrow, and the
only currency that wasn’t performing too well was the Confederate dollar.
In an alleyway in the centre of Cadiz, a rather disreputable-looking cat was stalking an empty crisp
packet.
 Just as the cat had resolved to pounce, a puff of wind caught the crisp packet and blew it into the middle
of the highway, along which an articulated lorry full of cans of tomatoes was travelling. The cat saw this,
but decided to pursue its quarry nevertheless. He had been stalking it for over half an hour and he was
damned if he was going to let it slip through his paws now.
The lorry driver, to his credit, did his best to brake, but the momentum of a heavily laden Mercedes lorry
is not an easy thing to dissipate quickly. There was a thud, and the cat was sent flying across the road.
The lorry-driver continued on his way, and soon put the incident out of his mind.
The cat wearily got to its feet and looked around for the crisp packet, but it was nowhere to be seen. At
that moment an English tourist came running across to inspect the damage. The tourist was female and
fond of cats.
When she saw the cat get up, she couldn’t believe her eyes. She had seen the poor animal being run
over by the lorry — it must have been killed. But it hadn’t been. She came closer, and it was then that
the smell hit her. She reeled back, with both hands over her face, and groped her way out of the alley.
The cat was used to such reactions, but that didn’t make them any more pleasant. He sulked for at least
ten minutes, until a discarded fruit juice carton caught his eye and he settled his mind to the serious
business of hunting. In a very, very long life he had learned how to get his priorities right.
On her way back home to Maida Vale on the tube, the girl who had seen the Flying Dutchman was
bored, for she had for-gotten to bring a book with her to read on the journey. Not that she had ever
doubted for one split second that she was coming home tonight — perish the thought! It had been simple
for-getfulness, and the tedium of having nothing to entertain her-self with but the posters and her opera
programme was a fitting punishment.
After a random sample, she decided that the opera pro-gramme was marginally less dire than the
posters, and she read the synopsis of the plot again. A modern version of the story, she decided, with the
Dutchman doomed to spend the rest of time going round and round the Circle Line with nothing to read
but vilely-phrased propaganda from the employment agencies, might have some possibilities, but by and
large the whole idea was not so much tragic but silly. The daftest part, she reckoned, was the idea that
Satan could get you just for expressing a determination to get round a traffic hazard — if that rule still
applied, she said to herself, then you wouldn’t be able to set tyre to pavement on the Chiswick
Roundabout for souls in torment. Or perhaps the rule did still apply. It would explain the way some
people drove.
The train stopped at Paddington, opened its doors, and sat very still. In the corner of the carriage there
was a tramp with wild white hair and very distressing shoes, fast asleep with his head almost between his
knees, but otherwise she was alone. The girl abandoned the legend of the Flying Dutchman and turned
her thoughts toward the great web of being, with par-ticular reference to her own part in it. I am an
accountant, she said to herself, working mainly in banking. Why is it that, whenever I remember this fact,
I want to scream?
Perhaps, she considered, the Dutchman story wasn’t so silly after all. Perhaps Satan did hover unseen in
the ether waiting to pounce on ill-considered sayings. She had only said one very stupid thing in her life
— ‘I want to be an accountant’ — but of the various explanations for her present condition to which she
had given consideration before, the Satan theory was as good as any. Was there such a person as Satan,
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