Keys of Babylon (21 page)

July 3

It's Saturday night, Kazia, and there's a war going on. I just came down the hill from the railway station. I'd been to see another film,
Once
, which is pretty good if you believe in fairy stories. Which I do, so it was great.

But back to reality. There were hundreds of police in the station. Well, about ten. A boy's been killed. They kicked him to death, someone said. This stupid gang. But they were older men so not so stupid. Just brain dead. Desolate souls. They came out of the hotel and the fight went on all the way back up the hill. Skirmishing they call it. And one boy was cornered and they kicked him down. He was trying to escape. He was crying. But they stamped on his head. That's what this man was saying who saw it all. How nonchalant he seemed. Or perhaps he's given up caring. They jumped on the boy's head, he said, like it was a burst football. You could see the brands of their trainers on the boy's face.

All this is one hundred yards away from the flat, Kazia. Under my window they're still coming out of the clubs, Marilyn's, The Matrix, Sacha's. Some are lying in the street even though it's misty and cold. That's men for you. I can't understand them. Why can't I understand men, Kaz? Next year I might want to marry one. Or next week. Seems bizarre now but you never know how your hormones are going to betray you. Because your totalitarian genes want to reproduce themselves. Like moss does. Like mildew. Everything demanding another chance of perfection. Imperatives of the slime mould.

The streets are pedestrianised here, so at 2 a.m. the girls are swinging on the flower baskets and pissing in the doorways. Men are fighting but not properly. They're too drunk. So why don't I understand men? Or the men down there on the precinct. Like negatives of themselves in the orange streetlights. Ghosts in gold chains and designer vests. Ghosts with their heads shaved like stormtroopers.

Remember that football crowd we saw in Warsaw? We were at a café table outside, and there was a grumbling sound. I thought it was thunder. Then everybody started to get up and leave and around the corner came the supporters. Good word, that. Supporters. What do they support, exactly? With their flags and their boots and a thousand broken bottles under their boots. In their white tee shirts their mothers had washed. So clean and well scrubbed. I smelled that crowd, Kazia, and it smelt of aftershave. Of deodorant. A chemical garden. But such a sound. Like it was coming out of the earth. Out of the sewers. Drum 'n' bass shaking the room.

There's no one like that here, really. They're all too drunk to be organised. But what I notice is the men are hard on each other. They don't help each other out like the girls. Where were that boy's friends, the one whose head was split? On Bebo and the other sites you look at the faces of the boys who've topped themselves, and you think, maybe they hated this. The fighting. The glassing. Maybe they hated the hatred.

Note that word.
Top
. As in to
top yourself
. A kind of phrasal verb. Your favourite. Yes this is the perfect place to live, Kazia. For now, and for someone like me, it's good. The flat's like a theatre seat but of course I'm only peeping. You know, between the peeling wall and the tatty curtain. I love nooks and crannies. Remember the art room? I could work there because I had that tiny space in the corner, surrounded on three sides. That's why I love Alchemia. But if they saw me looking down there'd be trouble. Yes there is a war, Kazia, but I think there always has been a war.
Or else we have fallen upon strange times, and Heaven only knows the end of them
. Get it Kaz? Sorry.

Now the boys are sitting around the plastic flowerbed that was put there last week. A token to the summer. Most are half-naked and their tattoos are black in the sodium lights. They're all the colour of those Strongbow cans. How perfect the steroids have made them seem. And now one is lying on the pissed-on concrete. He's down to his jock strap, Kazia. In the streetlight he's like a golden altar. Not the sacrificial calf but the cold stone itself. Perhaps he's dead too.

These might be the Roid Boys. Locally notorious, if you believe the newspapers. Their headquarters is the Station Hotel. I looked in once but deemed it prudent not to linger. Ha ha. There were three of them playing pool. The biceps of bison, Kazia. But the drugs shrink their funny little scrotums. Their dicks become babies' dummies, apparently. And their brains go to blubber. But nobody cares about that. I bet they still smell gorgeous, Kazia, the boys out there. Of manly roses. Of masculine violets. How I want to breathe in their magnificent perfumes. Do you remember the Spartans, my darling? Always combing their hair?

July 5

Kazia! You say it's always about me. But it's not. About me. Not always. I'm not one of those idiots who put my travel diaries on a blog. I could have blogged the sand dunes here that nobody seems to know. But I didn't. And I'm still finding sand in my shoes.

I remember my grandfather telling me a story about when he was a boy. There was a potato field behind their house. Their hut. Well, my grandfather and my father used to go out at night and steal the potatoes. Because no matter how well harvested a potato field is, he said there would always be potatoes still there. It was impossible to get all the potatoes out. And they would sprout the next year. So my father and his father went out stealing. At night of course. Scavenging for potatoes because everyone was poor and some people were starving.

They would dig in the frosted earth. Sometimes the ground was frozen, he told me, hard as concrete. But it didn't stop them. They dug with bare hands or trowels or knives or spades. And my father was the one who always found at least one potato. Sometimes a bag full, but always at least one potato to take back to my grandmother. My father was the best potato thief there was. Potatoes with the frozen soil on them. Potatoes that were icy inside, which was bad news, because they rotted. And grandmother would roast the potatoes. Or boil them. Or make chips with the black fat they used, which was part coal powder and part old oil and part offal. They'd have a fire of sticks and wood shavings and stolen coal from the sidings. Once he told me they even boiled potatoes in a kettle over a candle flame. Imagine how long that would take. Would the potatoes boil before the candle burned out? But it was food. Their food. As good as if they'd grown the potatoes themselves. Better, because sometimes it's harder to steal food than to make it.

And they tasted wonderful, my grandfather would say. There's nothing like a mouth full of hot potato. And there was my father, waiting for the potato to be passed round, his hands still in their filthy mittens, his fingernails broken by the frost.

You know, I was thinking about us, Kazia. About being friends. Remember two winters ago when we said, hey, let's go to Oswiecim? Just like that. Two little Goths with our black nail varnish. So we caught the bus to the village and walked in the frost. How cold it was, your breath like a scarf. I was wearing your brother's leather jacket, remember. With the Harley badges. We laughed because there was a condom in the pocket. And we were the first people in the cafeteria and had cabbage and dumplings, and boy, it tasted like the best food ever.

That cheery waitress said you look famished, girls. So she heaped our plates out of the steaming vats. The first portions that day, she said. There was an old man in, drinking coffee. She said he was there every day, winter, summer, even when it was crammed with tourists. Drinking his coffee. He always took his coffee there.

What was his story? we asked. She said she didn't want to know his story. Anyway, it was obvious what his story was. Everybody had a story. There were millions of stories about that place. And each one of them was the worst story in the world.

But you didn't want to be inside, or in the huts. Being in the huts on our own would have been too much. I always prefer it when there are schoolkids there. Lovers holding on to one another. Some moron with an iPod. So we hitched with the electricity man over to Brzezinka. His leg touching yours. How electric was that? And it was better, you said, because we were outside in the clean air. Absolutely no people, and the ground rumpled and broken as if they'd mined coal. Everything crooked and falling down. Pulverised and frozen into strange shapes. A derelict factory with iron coming out of the ground. The broken ovens. All that abandoned space.

And we walked around and you found the plover, Kazia. A golden plover.

It had been caught in a snare. Or at least a piece of wire coming from the earth. It was dead and perfect. You spread out its wings and there it was. A bishop, I said, but you said no. An angel. It's like a fallen angel, you said, with his wings spread out on the ice.

The grass was white as needles but you were smoking like you were on fire. I thought there was a fire inside you that day. A flame burning in your blood. And we stood there and looked at the plover. How big it was. A bubble of ice at its beak, its leg twisted. It came down on the moor looking for food and it never flew away. The white moor of Brzezinka. We both had our cameras but we didn't take a shot, and we both knew why.

Before we went you freed the plover's leg and we left it there. Because what else could we do, what else but study where the gold of its feathers met the black. Then walk away. There was only us, remember. And the crows hunched up in their overcoats. We walked away and you said you were never going back, even though you live so close. We walked away in the dead of winter and everybody on the bus was too cold to talk.

So you see, Kazia, it's not about me. Truly it's not. It's about you too and about everything. It's about your randy brother and his girlfriends, and the man with his coffee, who is there now in the canteen, I know it, even as I write. Sitting there on his own and sipping that horrible coffee every day of his life. Which is his way of telling his story. It's about him too. And the potatoes. It has to be.

July 8

Kazia, I'm playing Andrea, over and over. More more more. It's a really true connection tonight. You know she's a therapist now? In Florida? And yes, I confess, I'm drinking. Red Square vodka like the mutant crew. I like the mutant crew. They came through town tonight and they were the only people on the streets. Nobody older than fifteen the whole evening. So this is an SOS. What does SOS mean? Save our Souls? Save our Shit, more like. I just don't trust it. Don't trust vodka. But it's only water, after all. Only water. But we should have tried. To trust water. But we never did. So it's out there now. Coming our way. Black. Black and white. Black and white and no colour at all. Roaring. Whispering. Speaking its own language. And coming our way. Coming out of the ground. Coming out of the air. Made in the clouds. Made in the sea. Coming out of me, Kazia. I can even smell it coming out of me. Strong as battery acid. Stinking. Like the brakes on a train. But it's made in us. We're making it. Cell by cell. Making itself in us. And it's coming. It's coming all right. After everything we've done to it. After everything we've done to ourselves. Damned it. Dirtied it. Denied it. Derided it. We should have blessed it. But we blasphemed it. We bastardised it. We belittled it. We should have worshipped it. But we worsted it. We should have worshipped water. Because water's a god. No. Water's the only god. But it's too late now. Because water's coming. It's angry at last. So water's coming. Black water. White water. Black water and white water and water no colour at all. Retribution they'll call this one day. Or justice. The justice of water. Maybe we should pray. What else is there? There's nothing else. Because where can we run when it's in us already. So I'll pray. I'd better pray. But what does praying sound like? A river running? A typhoon turning? Or maybe praying is quieter than that. Like a tap running? Quieter than that. Or a woman crying. Quieter than that. Or vodka over ice. That kind of crackle. Quieter than that. Then maybe it's like a hailstone. A hailstone dissolving. On the tip of your tongue. As quiet as that? Maybe. Yes maybe that's the prayer that's going to save my soul.
Indefatigably, Zzzzzz

July 10

Sorry about the last one, Kazia. I think I'm catching whatever's wrong with this place. But you know me. I like to experiment with my head. And Meryl, the landlady, remember her, was scrubbing the pavement outside with her bleach bombs and the hosepipe straight through to the kitchen. There's a leak in it and she flooded the passageway and called me to help but I pretended to be ill. Somebody had puked on the steps outside and somebody thrown curry sauce around. The usual. Filthy little swine, she was saying. Little swine.

And, as if you couldn't guess, there's another one. Another boy. He's hung himself in a wood. Why do they always hang themselves? Don't they know what that means? Sometimes I think they don't understand what it is to be dead. Now coming from where we do, that's no problem. At least that mystery has been solved. For once and for all. But these boys are children. Which doesn't stop them having their own children, by the way. They're fathers. But I'm still sure they don't understand. That it's oblivion. That it's annihilation.

Last week I passed a place where people had left flowers. Pink carnations in their cellophane. And teddy bears and photographs of Manchester United or the rugby team. Soon it's just compost, like the pizza boxes and kebabs. And don't they know what happens when you hang yourself? You don't just look like a rag doll. All sweet and floppy. No. Your head comes off. The skin of your neck stretches like elastoplast. Maybe you shit yourself. But they don't put that in the paper. All you see are the obituaries and that sexy word, tragedy. You never see the truth of it. The body gnawed by fairground rats.