The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2026. For January, we are delighted to publish a new piece by P. C. Evans.

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The Attic Over the Weigh House

Then one day, over coffee, Nicky said, ‘Why don’t we go out for dinner after work one night’.

So a few nights later, Nicky finished up at the strip club at around one a.m. She got showered and dressed, said goodnight to the bouncer at the door, who opened it with a kindly smile and ushered her out into the night. She walked through the neon-lit crowd that trailed along the canal. Her face was a rigid mask. A couple of guys stopped to watch her go, until she turned off into the alley and crossed Junkie Bridge, heading for the Mekhong River bar.

The Mekhong River was a late-night hang-out for Thai girls, or rather lady-boys, and their pick-ups, and it served good Thai food until the early hours. Nicky liked to go there after work to re-fuel after a night’s dancing, and to be left in peace, because there’d be no guys in there from the strip bar, or indeed any straight guys at all to hassle or to ogle her. It was a sanctuary to unwind from the exertions, pressures and pretences of the show, and to set aside her mask until tomorrow.

I called last orders on The End of the World at about a quarter to one. Then I shepherded the last drunks into the alley. Roach, the other bartender, counted out and divvied up the tips, which were always generous because he would siphon off the proceeds of each few drinks and toss the coins into a plastic beaker beside the till. I siphoned as I was told, but demurred to take the cash. So much so that after a few months word had got around and Big Andy asked me to do his books.

I locked the cash box in the office, and dropped off the keys with the night-watchman, Ibrahim, who was half asleep at the hotel reception desk, nursing an electric guitar, his comfort blanket and dream of escape.

 

I exited the alley and passed by the church of Our Dear Lord in the Attic, and walked along the canal to the Mekhong River. Its name was imprinted in red Thai letters on the front of the white and green facade. I leant my shoulder into the door, but it was opened as if of its own accord by a Thai girl-concierge in a grey suit, who looked me up and down before allowing me in. I seemed to pass muster.

Nicky was sitting at the bar, already eating a dish of Thai food.

‘You’re late! I’ve ordered, I was starving. Do you want anything?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Panang,’ she said, as some rice dripped from her mouth onto the dish.

‘I’m not all that hungry, just a bit peckish.’

‘Serving bar doesn’t work up as much of an appetite as dancing does,’ Nicky said.

The waitress came over, and Nicky told her, ‘He’ll have some Khao Pad.’ Then she slid a handful of crackers across the bar to me.

The barmaid came over to take our drinks order. She was clearly a trans, in her grey pants and white blouse.

‘New bloyflend, Neecky.’

‘Just a flend, friend.’

‘Then you no mind I lape him!’

‘He’s here under my protection.’

‘Let me know you change you mind, hey Neecky. You let me know you change your mind bloyflend.’

She walked off and leered at me over her shoulder, showing off her arse in her tight grey pants. I shifted my stool a little closer to Nicky’s, who looked at me and smiled.

‘I come here because it’s a safe place for me; I hadn’t realised it might not be a safe place for you!’

‘I don’t mind. It’s a compliment?’

I looked the barroom over. The walls were covered in pictures of Thai beaches and palm trees, and the Thai royal family. Sitting around the bar were mostly middle-aged guys, all pretty unappealing, making their moves on the Thai girls, who were mostly prostitutes, some on the hunt for a trick, others for a steady bloyflend to take them on full time.

A gaggle of girls had gathered by the fruit machines on the far side of the bar. They shrieked each time the bandit spewed its change. They were all slender and beautiful in their tight, tapered dresses, flowery, with slits up the back or side. Their long black hair was bound in buns and fastened with wooden hair-combs.

‘I’m trying to work out which ones are original women and which ones are trans?’

‘They’re all trans.’

‘No, she can’t be over there. She’s drop-dead gorgeous. I can tell the difference. Straight guys have the opposite of gaydar. Whatever that is.’

‘Stray-dar,’ Nicky said.

‘So which one do you think is the prettiest?’

‘She is, she has very soulful eyes. She’s definitely a girl-girl.’

‘No, she’s trans, too. In fact, she’s pre-op.’

‘No way!’

‘I’m telling you, I know her personally… Why don’t you ask her out?’

‘Because I’m here with you.’

‘Yes, but we’re friends, we’re not dating. You can do whatever you want.’

‘I don’t want. Anyway, I’m glad to be here with you.’

 

We hung out at the bar until around three. Then I started to feel a little unwell: nauseous, shaky.

Nicky said, ‘Shall we call it a night?’

‘Yes, sure. I’m sorry.’

We got up to leave. The concierge opened the door, and we drifted out into the night. The punters along the canal had thinned out by now; there were just a few junkies shuffling down by the bridge. I was feeling weak, and I was shivering too.

‘I should be getting back home, I don’t feel too good.’

Nicky was about to say goodbye when she looked into my eyes.

You really are sick, aren’t you? You’re shaking all over.’

She put her arm around me.

‘You’re coming home with me; I’ll look after you.’

Nicky led me across Junkie bridge and through the alley past the bright, yellow FEBO snack-bar sign. A vision of hell warmed-over; the cardboard-cut-out snacks in battery-chicken compartments made me want to puke. Inside the snack-bar were a few haggard bums feeding on croquette-sausage, one of them licking the mustard off a hot-dog bun.

Nicky led me along the deserted Zeedijk, her arm around my waist, passing Chinese restaurants and the shuttered brown cafes, and the Buddhist temple with its latticed roof to our right, until we arrived at the Nieuwmarkt square.

‘I live up here,’ she said. ‘Fifth floor.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

She helped me up the four flights of stairs to her attic. I had one arm around her shoulder, the other hand gripping the rail of the steep, narrow staircase. She opened the door to her tiny, one-room apartment. The moon was gleaming through the bay windows, its fingers of light splaying over the white-plank floor as far as the door. She helped me inside, and led me over to her mattress beneath the bay window. She gently lowered me onto the mattress and peeled off my jacket.

‘You can take the rest of your things off yourself,’ she said.

So I took off my sweater and T-shirt, and unbuttoned my trousers. But I was too queasy, so she undid my shoes and pulled off my trousers for me. Then she laid me back on the pillow.

‘Get some rest.’

I started to shiver uncontrollably.

She drew the sheet over me, got undressed and climbed in next to me in only her knickers. She put her arms around me and cradled me until the morning, as I lay there shivering.

 

When I woke up many hours later, the sun was high in the sky, and through the bay window I could see the hoisting hook with its arm stretched out over the square like a gallows.

Nicky was in the kitchen at the far end of her apartment, making coffee. When I turned over in bed, she stuck her head around the corner of the toilet compartment that half obscured the view from the kitchen.

‘Hiya, you’re awake at last! How are you feeling?’

She walked through the apartment in a white blouse and knickers, as if she were striding over a warm, white beach, lit by the skylight above her.

‘A little better, I think.’

I propped myself up on my elbows. She knelt on the mattress with the plate that she was carrying. She’d cut up some fruit – grapes, apples, tangerines – and popped a piece of the tangerine in my mouth. Then she took it in turns to feed me and herself.

‘I’m not working for the next couple of days, so you can stay here.’

‘I wonder if you could call The End of the World and tell them I’m sick?’

‘Sure.’

The warm smell of coffee was beginning to drift through the apartment, and she got up to fetch some.

‘Do you want me to bring any coffee for you, or are you still nauseous?’

‘I wouldn’t mind one, thanks. It’s difficult to tell what’s illness and what’s caffeine craving.’

‘I know the feeling.’

She went into the kitchen and came back with two blue bowls cupped in her hands.

‘Oh, maybe this isn’t the best idea. Can you sit up?’

I raised myself up on my elbows again and she stuffed her pillow under my back. Then she handed me a bowl of the hot black coffee.

‘Sip it, but not right to the bottom.’

‘Why?’

‘The dregs.’

‘Dregs?’

‘Yes, it’s Turkish coffee. That’s the way it’s supposed to be made.’

Her brew switched me on right away.

‘I make it in a cezve, a Turkish pot that I bought on the market. You pour out the sugar, coffee, dregs and all. It’s bitter-sweet that way, but I love it.’

‘I think I do too.’

Then she went over to the table and picked up a newspaper. She came back and sat on the mattress and read out some of the stories to me, providing me with commentary.

The news got her as wound up as if she had a personal stake in how each story, conflict, or injustice would play out. But the running commentary lurched wildly from the ultra-liberal to the arch-reactionary. So I started to think, ‘politics and blonds haven’t always been the ideal combination?’

So I asked her only half-jokingly, ‘You aren’t some kind of crazy right-winger, are you?’

‘Left-wing and right-wing are just bullshit,’ she shot back. ‘They’re not real standpoints. You have to use your own brain and decide for yourself how you think the world should be, and what influence you can have on it.’

‘Influence?’

‘Sure. To persuade people to give up their pre-conceived opinions, and think for themselves for a change!’

As much fun as I thought it might be to play Devil’s advocate with her, I wasn’t quite up to it at the moment, either physically or mentally.

‘I’m feeling sleepy again. I’m going to shut my eyes for a bit.’

She slipped off her blouse, lay down next to me and held me in her arms. I could feel her breasts pressing into my chest as I fell asleep.

 

When I woke up again, she was still holding me. I opened my eyes, and she kissed me on the forehead.

‘You’re back!’

We lay there for a while, and then I started to think to myself, ‘She must be into me, otherwise she wouldn’t be lying here naked, holding me in her arms like this’. So I started to caress her back and side.

‘Don’t do that.’

I stopped. She held me and kissed me on the forehead again. We talked easily, lazily for a little while about nothing in particular, lying in each other’s arms, her breasts still pressed into my chest. Then my hand instinctively began to caress her again.

‘No, don’t.’

So this time I stopped for good. We just lay there holding each other in silence. After a while, she got up and went into the kitchen and started clattering around with cutlery and plates. ‘This is okay the way it is, it’s really kind of her,’ I thought, ‘to look after me like this’.

Then I started to take in the room a little more. The walls and floorboards were pristine white. And on the floor at the head end of the mattress was a wooden board covered in ceramic penises: white ones, and black ones, and yellow ones, flaccid and erect, with and without testicles. They looked like the dismembered remains of a Chinese warrior army.

‘Do you bake these clay penises for a hobby?’

‘They aren’t clay, they’re gypsum,’ she said by way of explanation.

Then she came back to the mattress in her knickers and no blouse; she had beautiful little breasts. She was carrying a platter of cut-up fruit. She put the platter down on the floor beside the mattress and slid off her knickers. Then she lay down on the mattress and made a trail of fruit over her belly from her bush to her nipples.

‘You can lick this off me, if you like.’

I stopped. There was no fucking way I was licking that fruit off her body. I didn’t know what was going on, but she was treating me like some abstract guy; she even had a vacant expression on her face now, as she looked away from me and then back at the window. I picked up a piece of the kiwi from her belly, held it in my fingertips and ate it.

‘Oh, it’s great that you’ve made us brunch.’

Then I plucked a couple of the tangerine hearts from between her breasts and popped those in my mouth too. She looked at me, really looked at me, and then she started to eat some of the fruit herself. From that moment on, she relaxed. Something in her had changed.

 

By the third day, I hoped that I could lie here with her forever, in this world beyond time. I was curled up with my head on her belly, my cheek on her bush, which was the lightest blond, with streaks of white, like bleached bones on a dry savannah. She stroked my hair. My finger traced the small scar on her belly.

‘An abortion,’ she said.

‘What happened with Wolfgang?’

She didn’t reply, but kept stroking my hair.

‘Do you really want to know, why is it important to you?’

‘I want to know everything about you.’

‘I dumped him.’

‘I know, you told me.’

‘He was fucking someone else.’

‘What, he was cheating, on you?’

Nicky sat up, her hands on her knees. She stood up and walked over to the bay window and sat in the window-seat, staring out over the square. I got out of bed too and went and sat facing her.

‘Who would he cheat on you with?’

‘A waitress, with big tits.’

Nicky was utterly perfect physically, but the one thing she didn’t have was big tits.

‘I found a necklace of hers, here, under the mattress. She probably left it there on purpose.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I found him playing pool in Poacher’s. I walk in. He looks at me. I walk up to him, ever so slowly. I lean into him, into his mouth, I feel his moustache brush against my lips, and I bite. I bite off half his fucking lip. It’s just hanging there. Then I walk out again, come home, pick up the mattress that he’d fucked her on and throw it out of this window.’

‘Wow. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be loved by someone with such passion.’

‘Too much.’

‘No, there’s no such thing as too much.’

‘Then be careful what you wish for.’

She looked away from me and out over the square. More and more people were milling on the street below. The big sandy-coloured clock opposite was showing 11.00.

I said, ‘I can’t imagine how anyone could cheat on you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re beautiful and kind. How could he find anyone better than you?’

‘You think I’m beautiful?’

‘Yes, of course. I don’t just mean your physical beauty, or rather not only that, but all the things I’ve seen you do, and others have told me you’ve done, which you think are commonplace, but would never enter anyone’s else’s mind. Your actions are driven by your unique instincts, and that’s what gives you your exceptional beauty.’

‘You forget that beauty is always in the eye of the perceiver, the subject merely invokes a perception of beauty.’

‘You know, I’ve wondered about this a lot in terms of art, but it’s applicable to people too. People’s tastes vary, which is fair enough, not everyone has to like or love the same thing. But there are pieces of art where it’s irrelevant what person A or person B thinks about them because the beauty inhabits the thing itself. So, if Joe Bloggs likes the Sistine Chapel, but not Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, then fuck him, because they are both beautiful, but the Picasso is more true.’

‘That’s such erroneous thinking!’

‘Erroneous?’

‘Yes, erroneous, that’s the right word, isn’t it? How can you deny that beauty is in the eye of the perceiver? It always is – no exceptions. How or why we perceive something as having a specific quality is always in a state of flux, depending on our conditioning or experience; never in an object’s, or a subject’s innate indisputable beauty, or otherwise quality.’

What the fuck had she been reading? She was like an encyclopedia of art history. But she was getting as wound up now as she had been with the newspaper. She was absolutely determined to prove to me that she wasn’t beautiful, as she swung between abstract thought and emotional uncertainty.

‘You live for beauty, don’t you? For literature, for art. It’s not an option, it’s a hunger, maybe because you encountered something in your past, and that bothersome emotion will never go away. Our yearning for beauty, I don’t know if it’s a compensation, a desire for things to be as they should be. But beauty never has anything to do with the object, or the person. It’s what that object inspires. The beauty comes from the perceiver. And you’re a fucking fool if you think any different.’

‘Thanks. But I’ll show your beauty to you one day.’

‘Yes, sure you will.’

She rocked forwards and got up, scooped her blouse from the floor and put it on. Then she slipped into a pair of cut-off shorts and flips flops.

‘I’m going down to the square to get us some lunch.’

 

She was gone for about fifteen minutes, so I took a quick shower. My pants and T-shirt weren’t too whiffy because I’d hardly worn them for the last three days, so I put them back on. Nicky came in looking pretty breezy now, the sun and air had done her good.

‘Shall I make us some more coffee to go with lunch?’

‘Yes, great.’

She walked into the kitchen and mixed up another treacly brew in her cezve. Then she sliced up the rye bread that she’d bought and smeared it with cream cheese and sprinkled it with chives. I was still sitting in the bay window, looking out at the people on the square, the clock, and the sky. When she came back over, we sipped our coffee in silence and ate our bread.

‘I love the view from up here. It’s like your own private eyrie,’ I said

‘The apartment’s four hundred years old. Look, you can see the date underneath the window: 1662.’

She leant far too far out of the window to point out the date to me. I laid my hand on her shoulder, held her.

‘Careful!’

As well as the square, the window looked out on the old Toll House, a squat, red-brick bastion with turrets and latticed windows, and a brass flag of Amsterdam fluttering at the crest.

‘They call it the ‘Weigh House’ in Dutch,’ she said. ‘The Dutch love to weigh up everything…to give everything it’s price.’

She smiled at me.

‘Everything comes with a price tag. How old are you, actually?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-six. And you?’

‘Twenty-five. When Rembrandt was twenty-six, he painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp in that building. That day, they’d executed a criminal for theft, then they took him there to dissect him. It was a public show, so everyone bought their tickets to watch. The hall was crammed. Dr. Tulp sliced open the criminal, and he held up organ after organ for the crowd to inspect, surrounded by his admiring guild of surgeons. But in the painting, Rembrandt got it wrong! He got the muscles in the arm backwards! He must not have been looking carefully enough, or he was too squeamish, and afterwards, he had to look it all up in a book!’

I laughed.

‘And there’s a motto inscribed on the wall above the surgeon’s coat-of-arms: ‘Those who cause damage in life can still be of use after death’… I give you their fingers, kidneys, tongues, heart, lungs, brain, bones as proof of life.’’

She fell silent.

‘I think I’m going to take a shower,’ she said.

First, she went to take a pee, sitting on the toilet with her head peeping out around the wall like a turtle, and still chattering away.

‘I’ve got to work again tonight. Stan phoned. Arrgh! I’m not looking forward to it. But the show must go on!’

 

By now, I was fully recovered; I was merely running on the fumes of my disease. I started to think, ‘I’m imposing on her now, I’d better go’, so I started to collect my things. She came back from the shower, dressed in her knickers, and was watching what I was doing. She sat down on the mattress, with her back propped stiffly against the radiator.

‘I’d better be heading off, if you’re going back to work. Thanks for looking after me these last few days. It’s meant everything. Will we see each other soon?’

‘Yes, soon.’

I walked to the door and turned back again. She was still propped against the radiator, staring vacantly at the wall, like some western settler tethered to a wagon wheel, through her chest a spear, in her lap a fire, and on her face a look of dejection that I did not understand.

I went down the stairs and out into the blinding sun of the Nieuwmarkt square. I stopped and thought, ‘What the fuck has just happened to me’. But from that moment on, I was hers. Whatever she wanted from me. There was this bond between us.

P.C. Evans is a Welsh poet, writer and translator of poetry, novels and drama, resident in Amsterdam. His latest publications are Grand Larcenies (Carcanet) and The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street (Scribe).