Keys of Babylon (20 page)

Aadam laughed and rolled his eyes. Not so loud, he said. Not so loud.

That day in the Plaza Mayor, I had looked at the human statues. No, not a poet. No, not Clint Eastwood. Instead, a terrible thought had entered my head. I gasped at myself. I reeled at the impact of such a thought.

Why couldn't I be the crocodile? The crocodile dressed as one of the Bedouin still dress, in the black jalabiya of Badiet esh Sham. Those desert-coloured robes. Yes I could be the crocodile. The crocodile with his fierce moustache. His hand held up in peace.

Hey Lazza, said Roisin, reaching out to touch me. It was as if she woke me from a dream. When are you going to tell us what door your key opens?

June 17

Dear Kazia

Hey, I did it. I knocked on the door and asked if the warden was there. I told him I wanted to visit the castle.

When?

Is now convenient, please? I said.

Fair enough, he said, and pulled out an iron key from a drawer in the hat stand in his hall. We crossed the green and he opened that door, the one with the studs and bolts. And I was in and he just left me there. Alone. No history lecture, no nothing. Went back to his telly. I had the castle to myself. I was the queen.

So you cross the lawn and go up the steps and through the
portal
. I love that word. It felt like a ship. Above the portal is a broken wheel in stone, an arc, an arch, an enormous ammonite in a stone whiter than the rest of the walls. Those are rubble, not blocks like I'd imagined. I could go up the staircases to the windows and look out. Holding the bars of course. A damsel. A wimp in her wimple. Keep up, Kazia! And views in every direction, over the houses and the fields up to the mountains and down to the river and all over this town.

But iron key or not, the kids had got in. Might have been the previous night, there were about twenty Strongbow cans scattered around. The black and the gold. And the plastic bottles of White Lightning and the takeaway trays. What a place for a party if you can scramble over the wall. If you can steal the money to give to strangers to buy the booze for you. Remember the bushes outside the Jagiellonian and the vodka oranges?

Anyway, I can see those children now, lighting their fire on the lawn, more excited than by anything else in their lives, the pages of their magazines blackening and rising up, the burning tits and arses flying away over the town. Those kids sharing the spliffs and the whizz and running around screaming their heads off or lying back and saying things that are deeply wise and which they'll never remember. Then wondering who's going with whom. Yes, whom. Who's going to be selected. And who's not. The best times ever. Awesome.

And I bet they were doing the same eight hundred years ago. Looking down through the darkness from the firelight. Looking down at this frontier town because yes, that's what it was then. That's why they built the castle. And it still is a frontier, of course. It's taken me all this time, ten months, to understand, because you never see it in the papers or the TV programmes they are making about this place. We're famous, Kazia. You see people in the street with DV cams. All these journalists looking for a good hotel. An expense-account meal. But none mentions the frontier. And if you'd realised that Kazia, perhaps you would have stayed too instead of scarpering back to good old Krakow.

I had my sandwiches on the lawn,
Krakowska
from the
sklep
. You'd have been proud of me. Then I put the litter in the bin. Inside were three aerosols of Palmolive Soft and Gentle anti-stress deodorant. These children like to sniff. And all those golden cans. It was Strongbow Super, Kaz. That's 7.5 per cent alcohol. It could rot your pants.

Hey, you can come back any time, the warden said. He's a lazy type, I can tell straight off. But I will be back. It's one of the best places I've found around here and you know how I collect places.

 
Love, Zuzanna

June 21

Look, Kazia, longest day!

Yesterday was Sunday and I took the bus to the seaside. Loads of people got off at the amusement park entrance, so I did too. There's a swimming pool, a cinema, shops and a bar with a sign that says it can hold 1400 people. They have a signpost in the middle of the pub – on it is London 200 miles, New York 3150 miles, Paris 325 miles. I thought that strange. It's like asking the people why they're not somewhere else. Somewhere that's bound to be better. By the way, it doesn't mention Sosnowiec. Funny that.

The fairground was best because it was hot weather and I bought real candyfloss off a man called Pat who was doing good business. Then I picked up courage and went on a ride called All Around the World.

But you don't do anything. You just sit. So I sat in a carriage on a rail that went past the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids and ended beside a red double decker in Trafalgar Square. The painted people on the bus wore bowler hats. Like, come on.

Anyway, the boys working the rides were from all over. I heard two speaking Lithuanian.

Labbas ritas
, I said, and they stared open mouthed and then shrugged, as if to say, hey look, we made it. We said we would and now we have.

But it's no fun on your own so I kept walking. Soon I was at the wall they've built around the camp. And I could see the beach and behind the beach these huge sand dunes. So you know me, Kazia. Me and my places. Maybe there's a place for me up there, I thought. So I walked on, remembering landmarks like a green lifeguards' shed, and keeping the sea on my right, staying on the path.

It's hard work too, travelling in sand. But gradually the track grassed over and turned inland to the dunes. An hour later, Kazia, I was at the top. And how high I was, with the greatest view you could ever imagine. The town was hidden on my right, the funfair with its huge wheels somewhere over there too. But the sea was bigger than anything I expected. Blue, blue and such a blue. A blue that invaded you. I wanted to drink that blue but it felt like the blue was drinking you. Me. And where I stood was a hill of flowers. There were so many I had to tread on them. Stars in the grass. Yellow spears taller than I am. And roses, Kazia. Everywhere roses growing out of the sand.

I should be a botanist, I thought then. Maybe teaching Charles Dickens to thugs and dimwits, going to the bars in Kazimierz on a Friday night with the gang isn't so ambitious. But flowers are like challenges. What do they mean? Up on that ridge the flowers seemed more alive than some of the people we know. And a lot more mysterious. Because it was wild, Kazia. How could that be? Because I could almost see Burger King.

Ten more minutes, I thought. Then I'll turn round. It was only 3 p.m. but so hot. Sometimes it gets hotter here than we thought it would. I was burned, I knew. Red and bitten and burned. But indefatigable, Kazia. You know me. (Look it up, you lazy trollop. You can always call me a termagant, remember.)

So I walked out on to the ridge. It was like a spine, the land falling away into a wood at one side, the plain on the other. That's when I saw them. I crouched down to see what these red things were. And they were strawberries, Kazia. Wild strawberries. First there was one, then two. When I looked again there were a hundred. All along that ridge, a thousand strawberries, maybe a million. Strawberries the size of my thumbnail. And no one else in all the world had seen them or knew about wild strawberries.

I've told you about the prices here, haven't I? Mad cabbages. Insane beans. And how expensive the strawberries are, the Californian strawberries like cows' hearts we used to see in the butcher's. But these were the real thing. These were prehistoric strawberries. What all the strawberries since must have been bred from. Oh, it made me laugh, Kazia.

Here was I, on top of the world, filling my handkerchief with strawberries, filling my mouth and my bag with strawberries sweetened by the sun and the sea air, strawberry juice on the knees of my jeans and running down my chin. And there are Anna and Petr and all the others, I thought, picking strawberries in polytunnels somewhere, ludicrous strawberries, grotesque and tasteless, weighing them, getting paid. Getting paid money for picking strawberries. Learning to hate strawberries.

If only they could see me, I thought. On top of the ridge, the bees around me, the yellow spears. The sky was that weird white, like the sheet they put over my father's coffin. And that soundtrack in my head that I couldn't forget, the song they played at All Around the World. Andrea True Connection singing ‘More, More, More'. You remember, Kazia, they always play it in the students' bar. Wow, Andrea's had a life, Kazia. She only made that record because she was trapped by a volcano on a Caribbean island. Can a porn star be a role model? Well, Andrea can.

June 25

Kazia, guess what? Another one's happened. Though now it doesn't take much guessing. And this one is different. This boy had gone missing about a year ago, months before we arrived. Nothing unusual in that. He was 22. Off to London, they thought. Find a new scene. But somebody discovered him in sheds behind the fairground. Where I was this week. Apparently it's all derelict there. They call it the Backs. They've been going to knock the sheds down for years but nothing gets done. He was there. In that horrible place. Only rats, Kazia. And broken glass. Old carriages from the funfair rides. A carousel horse with the name ‘Nathaniel' painted on it.

He'd been there all that time and nobody had the wit to look, despite the missing person posters and the newspaper articles. So although he's the latest, which makes him the twentieth, they're calling him one of the first. The first to do it. He'd hanged himself like most of the others and now it's on the television. His famous face on all the big programmes. And he looks so lonely in that picture they use of him. His hair shaved in swirls, with this silly tuft on his forehead, dyed red. His eyes bewildered.

But when I watch those shows I can't help but laugh. The journalists are always struggling to describe this area. Industrial. No, ex-industrial. Or unlovely. Or unremarkable. Always ex or un. Something that it's not. Defined by what it isn't. Even undiscovered. Yes, that's what one of the TV people said it was. One of the undiscovered parts of the country. Because nobody famous comes from here. Nobody anyone's ever heard of. And there's despair here. And hopelessness. And it rains. And there's cheap drugs. And everything's unpronounceable anyway so let's not bother. Maybe they should try Soznowiec. So here I am, Kazia, wandering about the same place, keeping my eyes open, and to me it's obvious. It's like, blinding.
There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of
… Ha ha, Kazia. Keep up.

After work yesterday I caught the bus to the Odeon in the retail park. Took my pizza to the usual seat where we went that time, right at the edge where you can look down the glass wall into the atrium and watch the kids messing about. Some of the girls were off their heads, but from up there you can tell how they take care of each other. Motherly protocols. It's all ritualised.

The Mutant Crew they call themselves. I think it's ironic. Some programme last year asked if we're creating a new species of young person. Anyway, I couldn't really understand what the girls were saying because they all seem to use text language to one another. And all their ring tones were going at once. But, as soon you get over how loud they are, they're quite sweet. Easy to see their priorities. Straight out of school, get the rhinestones and slap on. Then down the centre and pretend to be bored. Pretend to be bored when really you're terrified. And you're terrified because you don't understand how it all works yet but you're there to learn. Even if the north wind is blowing down the crack of your arse and Red Square vodka tastes like cat litter and makes you puke. You are determined to learn. Because there's no alternative.

Sorry, yes, there is an alternative. The alternative is not to survive in this unplace. This explace. Everyone else has already written you off, but you're determined to prove them wrong. So you scream at nothing. You text crap. You eat junk. You drink poison. And then you paint each other perfectly in heartbreaking L'Oreal. Foundation, concealer. Block up every pore. And you learn, Kazia. You learn down there amongst the plastic palm trees and the takeaway kebab trays. I call it
mall-ediction
. I call it
mall-ancholy
. Tell me you get it, Kazia.

But I'm learning too. I'm learning up here with a margarita slice and a coffee with as many sugars as will dissolve in it. Writing my letter to you, Kazia, but about to pay half price for
Into the Wild
, which should be good because Sean Penn directed. It's about this silly, sweet kid, Christopher McCandless, who drove away from everything. Pulled the plug on the world. With the inevitable result.

Maybe he should have met the girls down there, with their silver belts from Primark and their denim shreds. Uniforms for the front line. Maybe if he had found an interpreter they might have taught him something. Because there they are in the life class, all of them down there, determined to graduate, bawling under these huge pieces of polystyrene fruit. A five-metre long banana. An orange bigger than a chillout room. I think it's part of the healthy eating campaign, Kazia.