Free The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast Page A

the passing cars made her nylon tights shimmer.
    And so I lost my virginity underneath a bookshelf that also held a diary somewhere — in between W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to be precise. She pressed her hand on my mouth. She had lost her virginity at fifteen. The person in question had been a bad boy, she told me when we were lying next to each other in the morning. Quite a bit older. He had also slept with her best friend. She had expected it to be a special experience, virginity being something you can only give away once. The second time had been much nicer. It was with another boy, her childhood sweetheart who’d stayed behind in Wouw. He had a spluttering Zündapp and a quiff.
    I was afraid to tell her that I had lost my virginity to her. We spent the rest of the morning in bed. We kissed, we had sex again — and then we had it a third time. Her name was Laura. It was Saturday, it was September, it was sunny. In the ice-cream parlour I knew my mother would be leaning over the ice-cream, my father holding a tray with coffee aloft, and my brother filling the Cattabriga cylinder with a mixture of milk, sugar, egg yolks, and ground almonds.
    On the train home on Sunday, I couldn’t stop thinking of Laura’s sex. I had kissed it, the urge stronger than myself.
    â€˜What are you doing?’
    I had no idea; I couldn’t help myself. My heart was pounding like a fist on a door.
    â€˜It tickles.’
    I kissed the whitest part of her body until she said in a firm but velvety whisper, ‘I want you inside me.’
    When I got home, Luca could see it, I knew it. Just as I entered the ice-cream parlour, he came out of the kitchen with a tub of virtually white pineapple ice. Our eyes met — his dark, like Kalamata olives — and he knew it. You can tell. Sometimes you can even smell it. A certain glow, pheromones. When I’m on my way to an international poetry festival and too tired to read poems, I play a little game: I try to guess who has just had sex. The early-morning flights are the best. You see the fresh faces, the rosy glow on some cheeks, the recently washed hair of the women. And then you look into their puffy eyes, the bags under them. The alarm clock that woke them from a deep sleep, the alarm deliberately set too early so there would be some time for snoozing. You think about the men having to travel to Shanghai for work, and their wives snuggling up against them, mounting them. You think about stewardesses having to hurry and their boyfriends not wanting to let them go, hitching their skirts up and taking them with their hair still wet. Once, on the train to the airport, I saw a dark-skinned woman in a sky-blue uniform rubbing a stain from her jacket.
    For a moment I worried that my brother might drop the container of pineapple ice, but he made his way stoically to the front of the shop, where my mother was serving an elderly lady. He set the tub in the chiller display, turned on his heels, and walked back to the kitchen. This time he avoided my gaze.
    My mother asked if I was free to help. It was going to be a warm day. I nodded and walked to the back to fetch an apron.
    â€˜Feeling guilty?’ my father asked when he saw me.
    â€˜No, I’m happy to help.’
    â€˜We started making ice-cream at six this morning.’
    I knew. I could tell by his puffy eyes, the bags underneath. That was all I saw, that was all I wanted to see. I went outside and walked over to a couple sitting in the sun. The woman had to tell me her order twice. It was a late summer’s day that felt like spring. ‘The heart is pounding and not here,’ the poet J.C. Bloem wrote in ‘First Day of Spring’. I thought of Laura, of the freckles on her nose and of her sex.
    Every time I entered the ice-cream parlour that day I could see my brother through the small window in the kitchen door. He held the ice ladle in his right hand like a gigantic phallus. He had never had sex.