like a banana

i first met van dalen in 1998 in hobart tasmania : i was stealing oranges and - at first i wasn't sure but then... yairs... yep : he was : he was stealing bananas - they're good the lady fingers aren't they... i smirked as we both turned having managed to snaffle away a couple of pieces of fruit each he looked puzzled and worried - ladyfingers... bananas... i said again and pointed at his bag

he dropped his bag and ran

i was pleased with the contents of the bag : apart from a cd by a group i had never heard of called club diana there were two loaves of the good summer kitchen bread and of course the ladyfingers - from the barely legible spidery writing in the fat journal it seems that he was here visiting his great aunt hermina johanna who unbeknownst to him had intended to bequest him her diamond factory but when she discovered (ironically by surreptitiously reading this same journal) that he was playing bass in a band which performed in a sex club called club diana she disowned him and having no money to return to the netherlands he became more or less destitute

i had no idea of the skinny runt's name but he was tall - very tall perhaps six foor four or five - and according to the little card from the local chemist he weighed 43 kilos - from the penultimate entry in the journal which place it marked he lived on bread and fruit

strange : it seemed strange to imagine him writing in this journal in meticulous detail about stealing fruit from the salamanca markets on a saturday before doing it : he would buy his bread first (two paragraphs about the practical problems of stealing from the summer kitchen stall) and then fill the rest of his bag with a banana here a couple of apples and an orange or two there courtesy of the four or five fruit stall holders eking out a living on this small island last stop before the south pole

then at the end of the day he would return for the rest of the week's needs either from the bins or bought for a habbekrats as those same stall holders were packing up

by i.j.oog