On Thursday night, my wife briefs the youngest one regarding the weekend ahead. “You’re in charge of the dog,” she says. “And the cat. We’re going to be in Amsterdam.”
“Antwerp,” I say.
“Yes, Antwerp.”
“Why are you going to Antwerp?” the youngest one asks.
“It’s like a dare,” I say. “We dared ourselves to go on a mini-break, and now we have to go through with it.”
Twenty-four hours later, fresh off a train, we are wandering through a deserted quarter of Antwerp with our friends Kate and Alex, looking for a place to buy a drink. It is 9.30pm on a Friday, and the rain-washed streets are empty. There must be some people in Antwerp, but it is hard to tell if we are headed towards them or away from them.
“Maybe there’s been an evacuation,” I say. “And we missed the siren or something.”
“I’m going to start complaining in a minute,” my wife says.
“Left here,” Alex says, following his phone.
“You might need to stop complaining for a minute first,” I say, “so that everyone knows you’ve started again.”
“Shut up,” my wife says.
Eventually we happen across a bar full of people. As I step inside, my glasses steam up. I take them off and clean them, and when I put them back on and look around, something occurs to me: I am old. This obviously happened while I was busy worrying about something else, but there is no denying the evidence. I am easily the oldest man in this bar; possibly the oldest in Antwerp.
I carry a beer to my wife, who is seated outside under an awning. Next to her, a man and a woman are having an animated discussion in Dutch. I sit on a wet chair. “I feel old,” I say.
“You are old,” my wife says.
“Fuck the Germans!” the woman shouts suddenly.
The man shakes his head. All conversation under the awning pauses for a moment.
“Do you think it’s too late to eat?” I say.
“Fuck the French!” the woman shouts. She stands. Jabbing her lit cigarette in what I imagine to be the general direction of the rest of continental Europe, she issues various complex imprecations to the citizens of several countries, and to a driver who is trying not to run her over.
“Is your friend OK?” my wife asks the man.
“I don’t know her,” the man says.
“She seems a tiny bit angry, is all,” my wife says.
“Good English, though,” I say.
After our beers, the four of us go in search of another bar, one with a clientele more skewed towards our demographic. This backfires spectacularly: the next place within range is full of even younger people. The music is also very loud, but there is a large sofa at the back. My wife sits on it, only to be immediately shooed off it. Two young men then carry the sofa away, as the entire seating area is transformed into a dance floor. After three songs, we give in and dance; after four more songs, we leave. On the way out, a girl grabs my wife’s arm and shouts into her ear.
“What was she saying to you?” I ask.
“She said it was inspiring to see me enjoying myself,” my wife says, her eyes shining with fury.
“Ouch,” I say.
“She said I was brave.”
The next day, we walk many miles. We are loudly chastised in a museum for trying to go around it clockwise instead of anticlockwise and, despite our best intentions, we close out a long evening under the awning of a bar full of young people.
“A young man just made me an indecent proposition,” my wife says on her return from the loo.
“What did he say?” I ask.
She tells me.
“Maybe he was practising his English,” I say.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“You said no, right?” I say.
“I love Antwerp,” Kate says.
A light rain begins to fall. We decide to have one last drink before going back to our Airbnb to fall down the stairs.
