Out of Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

breath again. Your eyes start to water when you look at one spot for a long time. The shopping bag moves more and more often from one hand to the other and you meet fewer and fewer people's eyes. But this is different. More a general feeling of unease than a specific symptom. But no, it would be nonsense to think there is something really wrong. 'I'm still going strong!'
    I must not make a habit of this, of talking aloud to myself, especially not now that Robert and I are approaching the inhabited world. Robert dashes through a white open gate, and down a garden path. Must have smelt another dog. He disappears behind a house. I walk on. He'll catch up with me soon enough.
    Now you can see the harbour clearly, cutting deep into the land; the concrete landing stages and the cranes in front of the white fish factories and cold stores. Here and there, rows of wooden poles of former landing stages stick criss-cross out of the water, in some places still connected by cross-beams.
    Cod and lobster. Lobsters as big as your head. Thanks to the tourists there is still a bit of a living to be made here. And some export to Boston and New York in those large, silver- coloured freezer trucks that drive back and forth every day.
    I don't have much to do with the world as such any longer, but I still enjoy observing all these daily activities. There's not much going on at home these days. That is why you have to get out, not sit indoors all the time. Your world would shrink too fast.
    In the past a ferry used to cross from here to the other side but now you have to walk all the way round the harbour to reach the town. And the nearer you get to the centre the more steeply the road climbs. I am beginning to feel my legs. If the tavern is open I'll take a rest there.
    Change has struck in the tavern, too. Where six months ago there was still a billiard room with six of those green meadows on bulbous brown legs, slightly mysterious under low-hanging steel lampshades, there is now a stage crammed with sound equipment and microphones. There is probably dancing here on Saturdays. But the long bar is still the same. I look around. The barmaid is standing by the cash register with her back towards me.
    When she turns to face me I have to hold on to the raised rounded edge of the bar with both hands. I order a pint of draught.
    Of course, I must have changed a great deal in fifty years. Grown fatter. Her nails are painted bright red. The nature of the work requires it. When the phone rings I hear that her voice is deeper, rawer. From smoking, of course. Even in those days she used to smoke a packet a day. Beautiful firm round buttocks. Again she turns, still speaking into the phone. Her eyes meet mine, then rove further away, around the empty café. When she has finished phoning she puts a cassette into the recorder. I ask her if she would please turn the music off. There is already so much noise in the world. I shan't say anything about the restlessly flickering but soundless television, obliquely to my right, on a protruding shelf above the bar. It is the sun of every establishment, determining the customers' visual focus, and food for conversation.
    She nods briefly and does what I have asked her. When my glass is empty she looks at me questioningly. The same light-brown eyes and high cheekbones. Of course it can't be her. I can do nothing but nod, caught once again in that gaze (it can't be her, do you hear, it simply can't be, everyone grows older, excepting no one, no one). She puts a full glass on the beer mat and takes some money from the little heap of change in front of me.
    Even these days I still think of her sometimes, the way we used to walk along the straight North-Holland canal where, hidden behind a dike, lay her parents' weekend cottage to which she took me to make love for the first time.
    Someone enters, a young man in navy-blue rollneck sweater and jeans. She calls him by his name, Geoffrey. They talk about the band that is coming