For a time I actually thought my uncle John (his real name) was a bank worker, everyone always talked about him and banks, and of course on many levels he spent more time in banks than actual bank workers, only in an unofficial capacity. When he wasn't in banks, he was either leaning on bars discussing banking, or behind bars discussing banking. That was probably why, when I was offered the opportunity to partake of a looksee at a career in banking, I immediately said yes.
Initially I had presumed that the trip to the bank, to see how the other half lived, was going to be conducted in school hours. But no, for whatever reason, the bank trip was going to be at night. When I told my uncle John this, his eyes lit up. He told me to make sketches of the lay out and to keep an eye on any security devices. Obviously, that was what bankers did. Even stranger, no teacher was going to accompany us. We were, as young, responsible adults, supposed to make our own way to the bank in question, be on our best behaviour, and ask pertinent questions when it was pertinent to do so. Which would have been fine had I understood what the word pertinent actually meant. Nonetheless, it was the only occasion I can recall that I wore that three-piece grey wool suit with cream pinstripes my mum had had tailor-made for me despite my vehement protestations that she ought not have gone to so much trouble and expense on my behalf. The whole thing about the suit still bothered me a lot. Sure, it was fashionable, in 1928. It had those dangerously wide and flared lapels with exaggerated points, the ones which if the wind caught ahold of them, could easily pluck an eye out. The pants were so flared that it was virtually impossible to wear them on any day where even a stiff breeze was blowing, and no boy, no matter his constitution for fashion, should have to listen to the shipping forecast just to judge weather conditions in respect of whether or not to risk flared pants. They had a nice two-inch turn-up on the pants too, and once safely ensnared within it, no boy could have looked more like a gangster other than baby face whoever when he was actually a baby. The damned thing itched like crazy and what with the trench coat over the top and the four-inch compound rubber platform shoes, it was virtually impossible to walk anywhere and look pertinent, or even pertinently pertinent.
Still, somehow despite the abuse, mockery and juvenile piss taking of various members of maladjusted youth loitering here and there, I finally made it to the bank on time, via a branch line. I stumbled in and almost fell onto a table loaded with what I thought was orange juice. A kindly old man helped me up, I looked around, obviously there were more people interested in a career in the banking sector than I had appreciated, although none of those interested parties looked as suitably attired for a fast-tracked career through to branch management than my goodself. I had a drink, it tasted funny. They had the heating in that place cranked-up to max, I began to feel rather uncomfortable, cloaked as I was in the wool of half a dozen sheep. I loosened my tie, who on earth invented ties anyhow? I listened diligently, even pertinently I suppose, to the speech on banking on how great and needed a service it provided, and how it was one of the cornerstones of a civilized society, and then I watched the short film on banking, and then I drank some more orange juice and generally walked around looking like a banker keeping an eye out for pertinent moments. Sooner, rather than later, I discarded the suit jacket and my tie, unbuttoned my shirt as far as it would go, having left my waistcoat on, and rolled-up my shirt sleeves. Rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck-in, was a most English of virtues.
All of the funny tasting orange juice had gone, so they brought out wine. Hell, banking was a civilized industry sector. It never struck me as odd that they were handing out wine to twelve-year olds, it struck me as pertinent. Which was about the moment impertience seized control of my motor neurone sector. No wonder my uncle John was always talking about banking. Insofar as I could see, in banking you got paid to handle cash and alcohol. Who wouldn't want a job like that. I was stumbling around looking for the dotted line, the one on which I could sign my body and mind over to the banking industry. All I kept finding instead was more wine. The more wine I found, and drank, the faster my envisioned career in banking, my bottom line if you will, was diminishing.
When I started jabbering on about security and vaults and alarms, a few of them started to get twitchy. They were hardcore banking types, pin-striped and stiff lipped. I drank more wine, then I needed to piss, like big time. They didn't have a toilet apparently, but someone told me, the bus station was right next door. They were nice people, they gathered up my jacket and coat and escorted me outside, even shoved me gently in the direction of the bus station. It was a simple walk, no more than thirty-yards or so, amazingly however, it took me almost an hour. I knew it had because the giant clock in the bus station said so. I'd never known that we had a talking clock in our town's bus station, so I sat there a while, looking like a dishevelled banker, until I remembered why I was in the bus station. It took me a fair while to remember why, but eventually I groped my way toward the toilets.
Inside, I vomited down my own pants. Then I pissed in the hand basin while simultaneously trying to rinse vomit that tasted like funny orange juice, from the legs of my pants. If my mum saw these pants, after all the trouble this damned suit had caused, and in fact was still causing, I'd be in a brand new world of corporeal punishment. Or so she said. A guy came in, looking like a dishevelled banker himself, and upon seeing me with my pants down, asked me if I needed a hand getting them off. I told him to take a hike, and after I vomited again, he did.
The situation was escalating, I needed to find my jacket and coat, then a bus, then my way home from wherever it was I got thrown off when the conductor found out I didn't have any money. I mean, who has ever seen a dishevelled banker with money? No, money is the root of all of their evils, plain and simple, money and grape juice. Jesus, where in the name of Threadneedle street were my clothes? Oh god, while I'd been wasting time retching, the bus station had filled-up with vagrants, or bankers, hard to tell the difference. One of them was wearing my jacket, I was sure of it. Then I heard my bus called, oh my sweet lord, there wasn't another one until five-thirty the following morning and it was too cold to walk without a jacket and just like a real banker I had no cash on me . . .
I was sitting upstairs on the bus shivering, waiting for the conductor to throw me off. They invariably did. Many of them had failed to get into the banking sector I suppose. Up he came, I smiled droolishly and rather insanely most likely. Then down he went. Uhm, maybe he'd had problems with rogue banking personnel before. So I stayed there with my head bumping against the dirty window in sync with the bus's locomotion until I heard someone yelling up the stairs. I got up gingerly and concentrated hard on not falling down the steps. At the bottom I heard a familiar voice, not god no, my aunt someoneoranother who wasn't actually my aunt by blood or whatever. She said I looked a right mess.
Accused me of being drunk on vodka.
Told me my flies were undone.
Said I stank of gut stew.
In response, I tried to touch her breast (or so it was later alleged), though to be honest, I have no recollection of the incident, or her breast. There was some kind of bus company interrogation and then I was chucked-off the bus by the company. I trudged home, trying to cobble together some excuse which might have sounded even theoretically plausible. My brain was closed for business however and reconciling the day's takings in a secret chamber. I tried to put my key in the front door lock quietly and it was only when Mr. Turpin our neighbour appeared in what I'd presumed was our porch, that the whole Ichabod Crane story somehow congealed in my head. If I could have done my English assignment then and there, I'd have been a shoe-in for banking. No such luck however, and what with Mr. Turpin shouting and me trying to placate the whole situation with verbal abuse, it was not too long before my own father appeared, looking like Charlton Heston at an anti-gun rally.
I had no idea why I was still sitting at our dining room table at six-thirty in the morning. Either I was way late for tea, or, super early for breakfast. When my parents re-appeared, I was asked to again, in the cold light of a fresh day, explain not only where I had been most of the previous night, but who I'd been with too. Why do parents always need to know who you've been with?
So, I regurgiated the sorry tale again in its sickly entirety. And again, they counterclaimed the whole tale as a pack of lies. It was too confusing, my head hurt in strange and unacceptable ways, and then the phone rang and I breathed a sign of relief, having been afforded yet another stay, until I heard my mother say – oh hi whatever her damned name was.
Oops, yeah, well okay, scrub breakfast I suppose.
My ledgers, as it were, could not be tallied. I had been to the bank, the bank itself confirmed as much, but still my parents wouldn't believe me as they distrusted bankers with a vengeance. According to my bogus aunt's version I looked as if I'd stumbled out of a Russian pub, and that was moments before I'd attempted to molest her. She had an affidavit (whatever the hell that was) from the bus conductor which had already been sworn in front of a bank manager. When I told my uncle John all of this a few weeks later on prison visiting day, after my home detention sentence had been reduced for good behaviour, he told me a very similar tale about a banker and my bogus aunt. I told him that if he behaved he'd get his sentenced reduced too. Obviously, it all ran in the family, like red ink: financial mismanagement, impertience, lost suit jackets, unbuttoned shirts and bogus aunts. The ties that bind, and talking of ties . . .
I was happier after that, happy that I hadn't been sucked-in to the cruel and merciless world of enforced bankruptcy and forfeiture and interest bearing terminology. Banking was not for me, I was far too kind on many levels for a predatory industry like that.
biographer's note: having myself been at the very evening young Luiz was referring to in the rather witty preceding chapter, I can atest to everything said, other than the alledged molestation of a bogus aunt and the psueudo homosexual interlude in the bus station toilets. Luiz was indeed totally hammered and after the kindly bank personnel had escorted him off the premises, and they returned (after said escortation) and told everyone still therein that that (meaning Luiz) was a perfect example of the type of people banking didn't need on its payroll.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/sex-knives-and-bouillabaisse/2008/06/06/1212259092425.html
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
the battle of britain in miniature
Chef Teri Louise Kelly has memoirs running hot | Courier Mail
Well, I don't know, it just seems to be one dumb decision after another in my house. First, my dad let me have a catapault, then after I'd all but lobotomized my younger brother, they wouldn't let me have anything, not even a decent pair of scissors to cut pieces about Georgie Best from the newspapers, and, there's a lot of stuff about Georgie that needs cutting out. Now, I see, they are buying my younger brother model aircraft kits, and, the paint and model affixative (glue), that he needs to assemble these WWII planes of mass destruction. Will I never be free of the damned war? I don't know, it strikes me as hypocritical that I can't use scissors, or, even paste glue, yet my younger brother can use razor knives, adhesive, metallic paints and turpentine, as is his wont. He is a spoilt child and just because he almost died when he was six-months old, doesn't mean he should be treated like the next-in-line to the throne, even if he is always second to use our lavatorial family seat after my father – and believe me, he is more than welcome to that place in the queue.
It stinks, all of it, the can after my dad's sat on it for an hour contemplating the electricity bill, the uneven treatment in respect of the use of weapons of destruction, and all that glue and paint my brother has splashed all over his bedroom and himself. I feel as if I am living right next door to some insane creature - constantly giggling to himself as he tries to unpeel his fingers from his bedroom furniture, or, bedding. This cannot be right, why can't he use the shed like a normal geek boy?
Your brother cannot use the shed dear, my mother explains to me as she rips a strip of wallpaper from the kitchen wall with more deftness than any interior decorator you could hire, including Laura Ashley - because as you well know, in winter the it's too cold out there for his chest and in summer it's too cloying for his sinuses, now, pass me that scraper there, will you? there's a darling. Uh, yeah, okay, I think as I skulk off, but obviously solvents and adhesives in his bedroom don't affect his chest? only mine? What a scam the little womble has got going.
They say that familarity breeds contempt, well what's more contemptible is that it breeds familiarity too! There might be four of us in our familiar family unit, only, we aren't the fab four but if we were, I'd most likely be John - the one looking to jump ship first. As things stand at the moment, I have to sleep with one eye, both ears, and a window open. Not simply in an attempt to be rid of this passive solvent inhalling, but in case Madame Cholet next door to me, somehow sparks that chemical cloud hanging over his bed into combustion. It is not fun, and to be honest, it is parentally reckless, and if there were a children's court, I would haul both of my parent's arses into it on the grounds of wilfull endangement of a sibling caused by making said sibling sleep alongside what is obviously a pyromaniac-in-waiting. I can see the signs, and sometimes, I can smell them too. What I really need is third party fire and theft coverage, mainly for the fire element of the policy . . .
Then there is food. Food is a constant bane in my life, or the lack of it. I have a fast metabolism, too fast actually, I burn my calories quick as I'm always running (from assailants), cycling (from assailants) or playing football (where I regularly get assailed both inside, and outside the rules of the game), and when you have that much assailment to contend with, you need a good level of fitness, oh and food able to maintain that standard, like say protein, and not, as is the common English mentality on nutrition; starch.
A continual diet of suet puddings, mashed potato, and animal extremities stuffed into condoms makes me ponder (when I'm not dozing off), how on earth the English won any war, let alone march into Scotland and then fight those high and lowlanders. Maybe it's a good job we've been colonized by more intellectual and food-savvy races than ourselves, at least there's hope. I train three nights a week for the school football team in my year, it is a big squad, and the football coach, Mr. Shankley, doesn't really appreciate my lip. I am too mouthy for his liking, and I have a tendency to not play as a part of the 'team'. Which is easy for him to say, given that he has the whistle and the clipboard. Mr. Shankley will hate me later and then dote on me later on, and then fully despise me much later – although he doesn't know it yet. I am dogged by problems, being me is not easy, but I have no option but to soldier on, little christian defector that I am. At least I have been picked for the upcoming away 'friendly' game against some other school in some other galaxy, and that at least, gets me a day off school and a bus trip. I like bus trips. I liked the school excursion to Longleat where they had lions and baboons running wild, although it seemed to me that there were more baboons inside the bus than out. I got into big trouble anyway, after that trip, because before it I stole out of the house at four in the morning taking five pounds from my mum's purse. It's a big debt to have to re-pay, especially from seventy-five pence a week paper round money. I will never be free of war, debt, or assailants. This is what it is like to be born English; you start with a clean slate and by the time you're nudging twelve, you are so far in debt that volunteering for the next war looks like a damned good idea, if that is, we can find anyone to fight, which is highly unlikely on all fronts, even the cold ones.
Anyhow I go on the bus trip and we go to a posh school where the pupils wear blazers and bowler hats and carry umbrellas and shooting sticks. They have track suits, new balls, a Brazilian-looking coach, and water bottles. A school with facilities as good as these ought to be playing in the football league each weekend against some bunch of losers like Charlton Athletic. Still, good facilities and Carlos Alberto or not, we soon have the better of them - especially physically. Our defense is about as solid as they come at this level, and despite Carlos's pre-match gesticulations of a Latin bent, birth certificates adequately prove that while our two central defenders might look twenty-five, they are in fact within the legal age parameters for this level. So what if they shave?
With that kind of brawn behind you, punting stray balls up into their six-yard box, we don't even require a midfield, all we need are goal hangers; enter me. With eighteen-minutes of the second half expired and us already six goals to the good. I love it when we trounce private schools, and I love it even more when we not only trounce them, but verbalize them too. There is no such thing as sportsmenship in the kingdom, well, queendom, not after we won the world cup in sixty-six, Sir Alf Ramsey or not. Those days, days of gentlemen managers, deerstalkers, pipes, and smoking jackets, are long gone. Mr. Shankley is no Alf Ramsey, and when you've already scored half a dozen, he expects a baker's dozen, or you walk home. I go on full of my usual bravado, and within mere seconds, find the ball at my feet and an empty net smiling beguilingly at me, like taking candy from your invalid aunt. Six-minutes later, I jink in from the left wing looking for my right foot and then curl a peach of a shot into the top corner of their net with such aplomb, that it would have graced the River Plate stadium. Mr. Shankley obviously concurs, as he is on the sidelines shouting loudly about Attack! Attack! Attack!, Mr. Shankley missed the war. Well, we fly forward again, only this time, as I shoot through their lumbering central defenders like an artillery shell, my trajectory is abruptly halted by a stray arm straight across my face. I act up the incident, worth a BAFTA, obviously I have watched too many South American teams. The referee, a balding man with effacious malignancy, tells me in no uncertain terms to get up, or he's sending me off. Me? I get up, spit on the ground (like they do on the Big Match), then, without thinking, pinch the nearest private schoolboy on the nipple. He screams in pain (or maybe ecstacy), then promptly falls to the ground and does a better rendition than me of overacting - because they have their own theatre at his school and he is in the repertory company as understudy to the lead boy, or girl, or whatever. As he rolls around like Hamlet, I spit on him, because I'm both English and unimpressed with his theatrics. And besides, wasn't Hamlet, Scottish anyhow?
The referee then tells me to 'sod off'. I think he means to go away, like my dad means when he says it, but no, as I saunter off, up field, he runs after me much like that bull had once done, only unlike the bull, the referee actually catches me, and then unbelievably, throws me to the ground. At that, out manly central defenders, and Mr. Shankley, all pile on top of the referee while I still stand there totally confused as to what is happening, has happened, or will, happen next. The match is abandoned and we shuffle onto our chariot having been denied a hot shower or after match nibbles. We smell pretty ripe being caked in good quality mud, and are all starving. I get back home at four the following morning and climb into bed with my pyjamas pulled over my mud-caked skin and football kit, whereafter, I realize I can smell smoke . . .
I get up, go next door, switch my brother's bedroom light on, where I see, smouldering in his rubbish bin, a twisted and charred piece of plastic model aircraft. Above his rubbish bin is a hand basin, funny that, so I tip the bin into the basin and turn on the cold tap, which wakes up my brother who sits up in bed and looks at me blankly and before he can say anything, I slap him around the face, turn off his light, and then go climb back into my own bed. I have parental control.
Then my father wrests it back. He is pulling into the driveway in his chocolate brown Mercedes, listening to Bach, when, glancing up, he sees a flaming model of one of Wilhelm Messerschmitt's designs hurtling from an open window, rapidly followed by another blazing fireball, and then what remains of a Wellington bomber - maybe a Lancaster - trailing thick black smoke as it spirals onto our front lawn. I hear my father yell Shizer! Later, after my brother has been made to stand outside and watch all of his models, kits and plastic accoutrements burned to a cinder in the back yard, his fiendish eyes aglow with delight, I am wondering what it must have felt like for my dad, seeing that battle of Britain in miniature. He had after all, been a runny-nosed oik during the real thing and was one of the blitz babies evacuated to North Wales. Even the Nazi's didn't care about North Wales apparently. I'm thinking that maybe my brother should be evacuated there too, permanently.
Well, I don't know, it just seems to be one dumb decision after another in my house. First, my dad let me have a catapault, then after I'd all but lobotomized my younger brother, they wouldn't let me have anything, not even a decent pair of scissors to cut pieces about Georgie Best from the newspapers, and, there's a lot of stuff about Georgie that needs cutting out. Now, I see, they are buying my younger brother model aircraft kits, and, the paint and model affixative (glue), that he needs to assemble these WWII planes of mass destruction. Will I never be free of the damned war? I don't know, it strikes me as hypocritical that I can't use scissors, or, even paste glue, yet my younger brother can use razor knives, adhesive, metallic paints and turpentine, as is his wont. He is a spoilt child and just because he almost died when he was six-months old, doesn't mean he should be treated like the next-in-line to the throne, even if he is always second to use our lavatorial family seat after my father – and believe me, he is more than welcome to that place in the queue.
It stinks, all of it, the can after my dad's sat on it for an hour contemplating the electricity bill, the uneven treatment in respect of the use of weapons of destruction, and all that glue and paint my brother has splashed all over his bedroom and himself. I feel as if I am living right next door to some insane creature - constantly giggling to himself as he tries to unpeel his fingers from his bedroom furniture, or, bedding. This cannot be right, why can't he use the shed like a normal geek boy?
Your brother cannot use the shed dear, my mother explains to me as she rips a strip of wallpaper from the kitchen wall with more deftness than any interior decorator you could hire, including Laura Ashley - because as you well know, in winter the it's too cold out there for his chest and in summer it's too cloying for his sinuses, now, pass me that scraper there, will you? there's a darling. Uh, yeah, okay, I think as I skulk off, but obviously solvents and adhesives in his bedroom don't affect his chest? only mine? What a scam the little womble has got going.
They say that familarity breeds contempt, well what's more contemptible is that it breeds familiarity too! There might be four of us in our familiar family unit, only, we aren't the fab four but if we were, I'd most likely be John - the one looking to jump ship first. As things stand at the moment, I have to sleep with one eye, both ears, and a window open. Not simply in an attempt to be rid of this passive solvent inhalling, but in case Madame Cholet next door to me, somehow sparks that chemical cloud hanging over his bed into combustion. It is not fun, and to be honest, it is parentally reckless, and if there were a children's court, I would haul both of my parent's arses into it on the grounds of wilfull endangement of a sibling caused by making said sibling sleep alongside what is obviously a pyromaniac-in-waiting. I can see the signs, and sometimes, I can smell them too. What I really need is third party fire and theft coverage, mainly for the fire element of the policy . . .
Then there is food. Food is a constant bane in my life, or the lack of it. I have a fast metabolism, too fast actually, I burn my calories quick as I'm always running (from assailants), cycling (from assailants) or playing football (where I regularly get assailed both inside, and outside the rules of the game), and when you have that much assailment to contend with, you need a good level of fitness, oh and food able to maintain that standard, like say protein, and not, as is the common English mentality on nutrition; starch.
A continual diet of suet puddings, mashed potato, and animal extremities stuffed into condoms makes me ponder (when I'm not dozing off), how on earth the English won any war, let alone march into Scotland and then fight those high and lowlanders. Maybe it's a good job we've been colonized by more intellectual and food-savvy races than ourselves, at least there's hope. I train three nights a week for the school football team in my year, it is a big squad, and the football coach, Mr. Shankley, doesn't really appreciate my lip. I am too mouthy for his liking, and I have a tendency to not play as a part of the 'team'. Which is easy for him to say, given that he has the whistle and the clipboard. Mr. Shankley will hate me later and then dote on me later on, and then fully despise me much later – although he doesn't know it yet. I am dogged by problems, being me is not easy, but I have no option but to soldier on, little christian defector that I am. At least I have been picked for the upcoming away 'friendly' game against some other school in some other galaxy, and that at least, gets me a day off school and a bus trip. I like bus trips. I liked the school excursion to Longleat where they had lions and baboons running wild, although it seemed to me that there were more baboons inside the bus than out. I got into big trouble anyway, after that trip, because before it I stole out of the house at four in the morning taking five pounds from my mum's purse. It's a big debt to have to re-pay, especially from seventy-five pence a week paper round money. I will never be free of war, debt, or assailants. This is what it is like to be born English; you start with a clean slate and by the time you're nudging twelve, you are so far in debt that volunteering for the next war looks like a damned good idea, if that is, we can find anyone to fight, which is highly unlikely on all fronts, even the cold ones.
Anyhow I go on the bus trip and we go to a posh school where the pupils wear blazers and bowler hats and carry umbrellas and shooting sticks. They have track suits, new balls, a Brazilian-looking coach, and water bottles. A school with facilities as good as these ought to be playing in the football league each weekend against some bunch of losers like Charlton Athletic. Still, good facilities and Carlos Alberto or not, we soon have the better of them - especially physically. Our defense is about as solid as they come at this level, and despite Carlos's pre-match gesticulations of a Latin bent, birth certificates adequately prove that while our two central defenders might look twenty-five, they are in fact within the legal age parameters for this level. So what if they shave?
With that kind of brawn behind you, punting stray balls up into their six-yard box, we don't even require a midfield, all we need are goal hangers; enter me. With eighteen-minutes of the second half expired and us already six goals to the good. I love it when we trounce private schools, and I love it even more when we not only trounce them, but verbalize them too. There is no such thing as sportsmenship in the kingdom, well, queendom, not after we won the world cup in sixty-six, Sir Alf Ramsey or not. Those days, days of gentlemen managers, deerstalkers, pipes, and smoking jackets, are long gone. Mr. Shankley is no Alf Ramsey, and when you've already scored half a dozen, he expects a baker's dozen, or you walk home. I go on full of my usual bravado, and within mere seconds, find the ball at my feet and an empty net smiling beguilingly at me, like taking candy from your invalid aunt. Six-minutes later, I jink in from the left wing looking for my right foot and then curl a peach of a shot into the top corner of their net with such aplomb, that it would have graced the River Plate stadium. Mr. Shankley obviously concurs, as he is on the sidelines shouting loudly about Attack! Attack! Attack!, Mr. Shankley missed the war. Well, we fly forward again, only this time, as I shoot through their lumbering central defenders like an artillery shell, my trajectory is abruptly halted by a stray arm straight across my face. I act up the incident, worth a BAFTA, obviously I have watched too many South American teams. The referee, a balding man with effacious malignancy, tells me in no uncertain terms to get up, or he's sending me off. Me? I get up, spit on the ground (like they do on the Big Match), then, without thinking, pinch the nearest private schoolboy on the nipple. He screams in pain (or maybe ecstacy), then promptly falls to the ground and does a better rendition than me of overacting - because they have their own theatre at his school and he is in the repertory company as understudy to the lead boy, or girl, or whatever. As he rolls around like Hamlet, I spit on him, because I'm both English and unimpressed with his theatrics. And besides, wasn't Hamlet, Scottish anyhow?
The referee then tells me to 'sod off'. I think he means to go away, like my dad means when he says it, but no, as I saunter off, up field, he runs after me much like that bull had once done, only unlike the bull, the referee actually catches me, and then unbelievably, throws me to the ground. At that, out manly central defenders, and Mr. Shankley, all pile on top of the referee while I still stand there totally confused as to what is happening, has happened, or will, happen next. The match is abandoned and we shuffle onto our chariot having been denied a hot shower or after match nibbles. We smell pretty ripe being caked in good quality mud, and are all starving. I get back home at four the following morning and climb into bed with my pyjamas pulled over my mud-caked skin and football kit, whereafter, I realize I can smell smoke . . .
I get up, go next door, switch my brother's bedroom light on, where I see, smouldering in his rubbish bin, a twisted and charred piece of plastic model aircraft. Above his rubbish bin is a hand basin, funny that, so I tip the bin into the basin and turn on the cold tap, which wakes up my brother who sits up in bed and looks at me blankly and before he can say anything, I slap him around the face, turn off his light, and then go climb back into my own bed. I have parental control.
Then my father wrests it back. He is pulling into the driveway in his chocolate brown Mercedes, listening to Bach, when, glancing up, he sees a flaming model of one of Wilhelm Messerschmitt's designs hurtling from an open window, rapidly followed by another blazing fireball, and then what remains of a Wellington bomber - maybe a Lancaster - trailing thick black smoke as it spirals onto our front lawn. I hear my father yell Shizer! Later, after my brother has been made to stand outside and watch all of his models, kits and plastic accoutrements burned to a cinder in the back yard, his fiendish eyes aglow with delight, I am wondering what it must have felt like for my dad, seeing that battle of Britain in miniature. He had after all, been a runny-nosed oik during the real thing and was one of the blitz babies evacuated to North Wales. Even the Nazi's didn't care about North Wales apparently. I'm thinking that maybe my brother should be evacuated there too, permanently.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
from Russia, with Icepicks . . .
. . . and that was the story, basically.
But as ever, there was a postscript. And isn't there always? Even the fucking dead won't quit ragging your arse, yeah, the dead, but at least they don't force you to go out drinking with them, that's one positive. Anyhow, like I said, the postscript, well, you know she arrived on an Aeroflot jet, alive too. Not too many people could say that, she was always blessed up in the air, it was on the ground she had serious problems. Probably at sea too, she'd have been a Titanic on the sea, going down on her maiden voyage and all that while the band played Sweet Little Rock N Roller or whatever the hell it was when that Irish built chunk o'shit vanished. I digress however, as I'm apt to do when I'm trying to cobble together something barely resembling a story using beer coasters on a sodden bar top. I always fucking lose the ones with the most important bits on . . . so, I'd gone to meet her. That was all arranged by Seamus (who hadn't had a hand in building the Titanic), and Oleg (who had probably had a hand in positioning that iceberg), I'd met Seamus on a Brittania airways flight. He was on his way to some attol in the deepest Pacific, where his runaway bride had shacked up with a Vietnam Vet. He'd asked me, in Singapore while we drank warm beer at overinflated prices, whether I'd wanted to tag along too. Like fuck. That's what I told him. I had my own problems, lots of them, more problems than Captain E. J. Smith had ever had. That fucker went down with the ship, wise decision, if he hadn't have, they'd have keel-hauled his sorry arse for incompetence anyhow.
Oleg was a different tale. A cold war one. I'd first met him in Helsinki, at the icebar, he was slugging back 80% proof shots like they were Gatorade. Him and some fly boy Norwegian called Olaf. I could never tell those commies apart, not that either were commies. Oleg, he was ex-KGB, but on-the-run. The Reds had his whole family under house arrest in Tallin, his three wives and eight kids. Dumb commies. Olaf, he'd just got a job on Aeroflot, he'd been grounded for two-years having flown some jet into an Andean mountain on account of bad weather and getting a BJ from a Panamanian stewardess while he was supposed to have been watching out for bad weather. Anyhow, I was there on other business, unconnected with weather, or whether or not. We ended up drinking shots for shots on the pool table until Olaf lost vision in his right eye and fell through the hotel window. Ugly scene. Oleg and me decamped for Sweden, we had a common friend there who sold hosiery. No harm in that. Which was when we borrowed the free bikes bars in Sweden give you to stop you drink driving, and rode them straight across an arterial highway because we were smashed, and consequently spent a comfortable night as guests of the Kalmar constabulary. They are good types, lugubrious, serve a decent breakfast though a tad too heavy on salted fish for my taste.
Oleg was running some way dodgy Russian bride scam. I was interested. Both in a Russian bride, and the scam involving them. Back then I knew a few hundred pasty English types who'd kill for that kind of action, and in fact, some already had and were doing life in Dutch prisons. The Dutch might be liberal on drug use, but they draw the line at crazy English men hacking up their native females on cobbled back streets.
Svetlana was her name. Oleg showed me her mug shot, lifted straight off the Interpol database. She looked like my kind of woman, desperate in other words. Then he asked me if I fancied doing him an all expenses paid favour. Stalin used to ask the same thing of lots of fools who were never seen nor heard of again. Okay, I told him, what's the catch? I was only half listening to the catch, my eyes had wandered off to pastures nubile. Airport bars are full of nubile pastures to visually graze. On my flight to Copenhagen, the Kroner dropped. What? Daytona Beach? Wasn't that in fucking Florida? It had all seemed seamlessly straightforward when orated in the rustic brogue of an ex-KGB flunky.
Had I mentioned anything about my ban? No, probably not, there wasn't a checkpoint on the whole of the US that'd allow me legal entry – oh, yeah, a get out card. Nice work if you can get it. I faxed Oleg this pertinent detail from a hookah bar in downtown Copenhagen, a city that was never a swinging joint. Then I relaxed. Two days later a woman in a biscuit coloured uniform thrust an envelope into my hand. I had had run ins with summons servers before but when I dropped it in the hotel lobby, she picked it up and followed me halfway down street with it. When I studied it properly, I realized it was a telegram. Not another bloody funeral - good people were dropping faster than mice dropped faeces. I opened it. Oh, I had to go to the nearest Western Union office to collect my fee.
Interesting.
The lady in there was dubious about my claim. I sat there patiently, aware as I was, of the Danish fetish for triplication. Finally, I left with a giant wad of cash. I didn't feel nervous, no one ever got mugged in Copenhagen, sodomized yes, but mugged no. That crazy Russian, sorry, ex-Russian who was always an Estonian, even when Estonia was little more than a backwater suburb of Moscow, had actually wired me the money and faxed me an explicit list of instructions in regard of the delightfully svelte and non-English speaking Svetlana. I was to meet her at Stockholm harbor, where the Baltic ferry docked. Without me there to iron out any messy immigration formalities, Svetlana would be containered straight back to the gulag. She was six feet two apparently, too. That was a lot of woman in any language.
I met the ferry, diligent was my middle name before it got changed to dickwad after the correct period of common useage. No Svetlana. Well, easy come, easy go.
That was when we found out about her fear of water. There isn't much in Russia anyhow so I presumed it was normal, but, she'd have to acclimatize to it if she had even the faintest hope of assimilating in a paddling pool playground like Daytona Beach. Fuck yes. New instructions arrive via the desk jockey at the Hotel Skipo. The plane, yes, no problem, but the plane to Heathrow, who's crazy fucking idea was that? Didn't that idiot realize I was in Stockholm?
Off I went on a twin-engined 24-seater, then up there I sat, circling the home counties waiting for a landing slot about eight-miles from a terminal. No shuttle. Long walk. Over to Aeroflot, where of course, there was the usual security and scrutiny. I sat around there for a few hours, watching the boards. Svetlana's flight, AF411, had been delayed due to fog in Gdansk. What the fuck were they doing flying via Poland anyhow.
It arrived about seven hours behind schedule. There was no argy bargy at the counters. I watched a troupe of ashen faces pass by me, then I saw Svetlana, right at the back, giggling with the Egyptian pilot. Typical. I utilized sign language to direct her to immigration, where, somehow, I had to gain her entry and argue my way through the messy procedures that accompany legal entry to the United Kingdom of Great Britain. What a joke. Luckily, I caught ahold of the immigration personnel post shift change. Celebrity Squares indeed. The guy Svetlana came face-to-face with, had obviously just been fed and watered. He looked her up, and then down, deliberately, I could tell that a strip search was buzzing around his frontal lobes someplace, which is when I stepped in. I explained to him, what was occurring, he listened in a disinterested manner. Transit visa yes, full responsibility, yes, leaving – certainly, funds – no problemo, accommodation – sorted. Sign here, sign there, dot this, cross that, suck this, fuck that. The usual streamlined formula.
I had to pay attention now, you'd be a prick to let a woman like this loose in a country like this. I held on tight. She had icy hands, hands like my granddad had had after he'd layed in the chapel of rest for five days. No sooner were we off the tube, looking for a iron horse west, than Svetlana started pointing to her own crotch. Look, I told her, this is England okay? You can't point at your genetalia over here, these are decent people with a sense of decency. She carried on, pointing, then putting that pointing finger to her own nose and pulling a disgusted face and then offering the pointing finger to me to smell. I declined. People were starting to look at us from over the tops of newspapers and from behind mugs of tea. I didn't like it. Have you pissed yourself? I inquired.
She pulled a queer face.
I pulled one back.
She pointed at my crotch.
I pulled a queer face.
She pulled one back.
We were going noplace fast. Neither was the train alongside us. I accompanied her to the restrooms, waited outside, five minutes later she re-appeared, looked at me very sharply, then slapped a pair of scrunched up panties into my hand. As they unfurled, a stinking rotten odour began to fill the air in my immediate vicinity, a stench only barely masked by the slightly more appalling stench emanating from the craphouses. I immediately threw what had once been pristine Soviet made and issued undergarments, into the overflowing English trash can. They sat proudly on top, opening up like a blooming rose. I did not stop to consider that those might have been the only pair of panties she had, or indeed, owned. Why would I?
London is not the kind of town where lingerie comes cheap. Good news that we were leaving, I didn't fancy rifling through synthetic undies over in Brixton, not unless they were being worn by a limbo dancer at the time. We sat on the train looking at mile-upon-mile of dreary English backyards: limp sodden laundry hanging dirtier than it had been before washing, beaten up kid's toys, beaten up kids, football paraphernalia, sullen looking housewives, the whole mish mash of suburban English life, I wondered what Svetlana made of such squalor, whether she thought that this Western way wasn't anywhere near as glamorous as they'd led her to believe in the Gulag. She had nice hands, a nice complexion, crystalline eyes, pale lips, and a very pungent aroma. I shuffled closer to the window, two weeks seemed an awfully long prognosis, could anyone harness a bitch like this for two weeks? Small wonder they'd let her go.
Yes, Bristol, a swell dump. A university town, cheap beds, music, booze and women. Jewel of the South West. We shacked-up in a nondescript bedsit on a two-week lease. She needed underwear, badly, and then she needed food, too much damned food. After three days I had to go find a fax, aint no kinkos in Bristol, kinkies, yes, kinkos, no. I scribbled an angry message to Tallin, it simply read: more cash or I turn her loose.
Two-days later, I got a reply, it read: no more cash. You turn her loose, we hunt you down.
These damn swine, my options were sparce, getting sparcer. She was putting on weight. I noticed as she got undressed for bed each night. A little more than an inch to pinch here and there. Too much western food, too many fries, pies, hot dogs, roast pork sandwiches, toasted cheese sandwiches, pizzas with the lot plus some to go. For each pound she gained, I lost one in kind. I put it down to stress, and poor diet. For each dollar she cost me from the slush fund, the nearer I got to destitution, false identities and an Interpol file. There had to be an answer someplace, there is always an answer. I went to sit outside of St Barnaby's church, St Barnaby was the patron saint of non-English speaking brides to be. He was next to useless, no, he was useless. No help from above . . . oh, wait up, above, yeah, malnutrition or not, something upstairs was still functioning, running on a longlife cell, yes, I rummaged around in the pockets of the faux leather coat I'd been wearing since that pool game in Helsinki, hadn't I transferred all the crap I'd had in my parka into this piece of oilskin taken fairly and squarely off the back of a rogue trader from Minsk? Ah ha! Yup, here it was, Singapore airlines, a great way to fly, and on the back . . . come on Barnaby put some fucking effort in, and on the back . . . I closed my eyes, flipped the napkin over, opened them, oh lord praise to you, Seamus's phone number in Dublin. Yes Dublin, where the girl's are so pretty, indeed, beautiful in fact, but I digress, what if I dragged the now not so svelte Svetlana across the Irish sea, jayzus, that was more than halfway to the new world and by christ that indy car driver from Florida could just come over to Shannon his goodself and collect her, if he still wanted her that was.
I made plans in haste and chaste. Always wise. When everything else has been eliminated, what remains, no matter how preposterous, must be the solution. Elementary. And thanks Edgar A. Poe. Off we went, after a hurried fax to my ex-KGB puppet masters outlining the change of plans and the reasons behind the change of plans. I didn't expect a reply.
Seamus met us at the ferry, Svetlana was green, like Erin, like the sea, like a bile duct. Too fucking bad, that's why Q-uells were invented. We drove fast, down windy country lanes and through 18th century villages. All very quaint indeed. We found out that Svetlana had motion sickness in cars too. More bad news, especially for her waiting indy car beau I guessed. We got into the warm embrace of the fair city several hours later, sneaking in under cover of dark like republican hitmen. Four days to go. Tick tock. Seamus had had more bad luck than the whole west coast of Ireland. His tattered ancestry was a litany of leprachaun abuse, sodomy, bestiality and root vegetable rooting. He fair stunk of debauchery and ale. The brewery was close, too close for comfort, I could smell it hanging in the air like imminent ruination; barley.
Aye aye aye aye aye. Russian roulette on the black stuff with a little people bandit. A mess yes, but there was always a tiny glint of salvation – Ireland had been all but built on that glint.
I waited on the fax. Seamus waited on the facts. Svetlana waited on the fat. Patience was a virtue, look at that band on the Titanic playing Sailing for the umpteenth time. I kept going down to McKrinkles office supplies. They had a fax machine there. Good people, salt of the earth, the peat in the bog and all that blarney stone bullcrap. If that stone had been nearby, I'd have gone hung upside down with my torso dangling over a four-hundred foot drop into the Atlantic and kissed the damned thing myself, to be sure I would.
Word came, it was angry, McKrinkle wasn't a circumspect type, kept hovering by the Garda hotphone nervously. I was to be at Shannon by this time on that day and wait for flight TWA626 to arrive. Ha ha, sweet news, all's swell that ends well. To the hops my bogus friends, to the hops . . .
postscript to the postscript:
. . . I'd thought of everything, bar the inevitable. I wasn't thinking about that as I was in the bar, studying Morag the barkeep's daughter. While I was studying her, the inevitable happened. That filthy rat Seamus, sowed his oats in foreign fields. I knew they were at it went I got back to the cottage. Then I definitely knew they were at it when I flung open the guest bedroom door and saw Svetlana spread in a position Nadia Comaneci would have been proud of. It was a perfect ten, no doubt, probably on the floor and the pummel horse. Soiled goods. I checked the many faxes. Nothing about pre-useage or secondhand merchandise. I took Svetlana to the airport, we sat there for seven or eight hours, I forget which. The plane landed. Svetlana was whisked away into the transit lounge, dosvedanya.
I hadn't any time to lose. I took a standby to Bombay. Goa was cheap, Ranjid in the curry shop had said. I needed cheap. All was going well. Then I heard the pilot, Olaf, say something about fuel gauges, pelicans and fellatio. What the fuck? The man next to me, a brusque rusky with a hedgerow across his eyes, told me we were being diverted to St Petersburg. Ha, of all the bograt luck. Fuck you St Christophe, probably a rusky too. I found out, in interrogation, that St Nicholas the III was the unofficial patron saint of emergency landings. Well, good for him. I was allowed to leave, in fact, they insisted, took me in a Skoda to the aerodrome, all very James Bondish indeed. The aircraft looked like a Skoda with wings. Where the fuck is this piece of shit going to? I asked nervously. The three men laughed, it was a hearty fuck you kind of laugh. Siberia. They answered. The Russians do have a sense of humour. In fact, I took a low altitude flight to Ireland. How nice, home again. I caught a cab to Seamus's house. It was dark, milk still on the doorstep. I drank it.
I slept at the bus station, took a bus to the ferry the next day, pleaded for deportation.
postscript to the postscript to the postscript:
I received a fax a few weeks later, it had been sent by airmail. I opened it up. No words, just a deftly sketched drawing of an icepick . . . someone had an artistic bent and a malicious streak.
But as ever, there was a postscript. And isn't there always? Even the fucking dead won't quit ragging your arse, yeah, the dead, but at least they don't force you to go out drinking with them, that's one positive. Anyhow, like I said, the postscript, well, you know she arrived on an Aeroflot jet, alive too. Not too many people could say that, she was always blessed up in the air, it was on the ground she had serious problems. Probably at sea too, she'd have been a Titanic on the sea, going down on her maiden voyage and all that while the band played Sweet Little Rock N Roller or whatever the hell it was when that Irish built chunk o'shit vanished. I digress however, as I'm apt to do when I'm trying to cobble together something barely resembling a story using beer coasters on a sodden bar top. I always fucking lose the ones with the most important bits on . . . so, I'd gone to meet her. That was all arranged by Seamus (who hadn't had a hand in building the Titanic), and Oleg (who had probably had a hand in positioning that iceberg), I'd met Seamus on a Brittania airways flight. He was on his way to some attol in the deepest Pacific, where his runaway bride had shacked up with a Vietnam Vet. He'd asked me, in Singapore while we drank warm beer at overinflated prices, whether I'd wanted to tag along too. Like fuck. That's what I told him. I had my own problems, lots of them, more problems than Captain E. J. Smith had ever had. That fucker went down with the ship, wise decision, if he hadn't have, they'd have keel-hauled his sorry arse for incompetence anyhow.
Oleg was a different tale. A cold war one. I'd first met him in Helsinki, at the icebar, he was slugging back 80% proof shots like they were Gatorade. Him and some fly boy Norwegian called Olaf. I could never tell those commies apart, not that either were commies. Oleg, he was ex-KGB, but on-the-run. The Reds had his whole family under house arrest in Tallin, his three wives and eight kids. Dumb commies. Olaf, he'd just got a job on Aeroflot, he'd been grounded for two-years having flown some jet into an Andean mountain on account of bad weather and getting a BJ from a Panamanian stewardess while he was supposed to have been watching out for bad weather. Anyhow, I was there on other business, unconnected with weather, or whether or not. We ended up drinking shots for shots on the pool table until Olaf lost vision in his right eye and fell through the hotel window. Ugly scene. Oleg and me decamped for Sweden, we had a common friend there who sold hosiery. No harm in that. Which was when we borrowed the free bikes bars in Sweden give you to stop you drink driving, and rode them straight across an arterial highway because we were smashed, and consequently spent a comfortable night as guests of the Kalmar constabulary. They are good types, lugubrious, serve a decent breakfast though a tad too heavy on salted fish for my taste.
Oleg was running some way dodgy Russian bride scam. I was interested. Both in a Russian bride, and the scam involving them. Back then I knew a few hundred pasty English types who'd kill for that kind of action, and in fact, some already had and were doing life in Dutch prisons. The Dutch might be liberal on drug use, but they draw the line at crazy English men hacking up their native females on cobbled back streets.
Svetlana was her name. Oleg showed me her mug shot, lifted straight off the Interpol database. She looked like my kind of woman, desperate in other words. Then he asked me if I fancied doing him an all expenses paid favour. Stalin used to ask the same thing of lots of fools who were never seen nor heard of again. Okay, I told him, what's the catch? I was only half listening to the catch, my eyes had wandered off to pastures nubile. Airport bars are full of nubile pastures to visually graze. On my flight to Copenhagen, the Kroner dropped. What? Daytona Beach? Wasn't that in fucking Florida? It had all seemed seamlessly straightforward when orated in the rustic brogue of an ex-KGB flunky.
Had I mentioned anything about my ban? No, probably not, there wasn't a checkpoint on the whole of the US that'd allow me legal entry – oh, yeah, a get out card. Nice work if you can get it. I faxed Oleg this pertinent detail from a hookah bar in downtown Copenhagen, a city that was never a swinging joint. Then I relaxed. Two days later a woman in a biscuit coloured uniform thrust an envelope into my hand. I had had run ins with summons servers before but when I dropped it in the hotel lobby, she picked it up and followed me halfway down street with it. When I studied it properly, I realized it was a telegram. Not another bloody funeral - good people were dropping faster than mice dropped faeces. I opened it. Oh, I had to go to the nearest Western Union office to collect my fee.
Interesting.
The lady in there was dubious about my claim. I sat there patiently, aware as I was, of the Danish fetish for triplication. Finally, I left with a giant wad of cash. I didn't feel nervous, no one ever got mugged in Copenhagen, sodomized yes, but mugged no. That crazy Russian, sorry, ex-Russian who was always an Estonian, even when Estonia was little more than a backwater suburb of Moscow, had actually wired me the money and faxed me an explicit list of instructions in regard of the delightfully svelte and non-English speaking Svetlana. I was to meet her at Stockholm harbor, where the Baltic ferry docked. Without me there to iron out any messy immigration formalities, Svetlana would be containered straight back to the gulag. She was six feet two apparently, too. That was a lot of woman in any language.
I met the ferry, diligent was my middle name before it got changed to dickwad after the correct period of common useage. No Svetlana. Well, easy come, easy go.
That was when we found out about her fear of water. There isn't much in Russia anyhow so I presumed it was normal, but, she'd have to acclimatize to it if she had even the faintest hope of assimilating in a paddling pool playground like Daytona Beach. Fuck yes. New instructions arrive via the desk jockey at the Hotel Skipo. The plane, yes, no problem, but the plane to Heathrow, who's crazy fucking idea was that? Didn't that idiot realize I was in Stockholm?
Off I went on a twin-engined 24-seater, then up there I sat, circling the home counties waiting for a landing slot about eight-miles from a terminal. No shuttle. Long walk. Over to Aeroflot, where of course, there was the usual security and scrutiny. I sat around there for a few hours, watching the boards. Svetlana's flight, AF411, had been delayed due to fog in Gdansk. What the fuck were they doing flying via Poland anyhow.
It arrived about seven hours behind schedule. There was no argy bargy at the counters. I watched a troupe of ashen faces pass by me, then I saw Svetlana, right at the back, giggling with the Egyptian pilot. Typical. I utilized sign language to direct her to immigration, where, somehow, I had to gain her entry and argue my way through the messy procedures that accompany legal entry to the United Kingdom of Great Britain. What a joke. Luckily, I caught ahold of the immigration personnel post shift change. Celebrity Squares indeed. The guy Svetlana came face-to-face with, had obviously just been fed and watered. He looked her up, and then down, deliberately, I could tell that a strip search was buzzing around his frontal lobes someplace, which is when I stepped in. I explained to him, what was occurring, he listened in a disinterested manner. Transit visa yes, full responsibility, yes, leaving – certainly, funds – no problemo, accommodation – sorted. Sign here, sign there, dot this, cross that, suck this, fuck that. The usual streamlined formula.
I had to pay attention now, you'd be a prick to let a woman like this loose in a country like this. I held on tight. She had icy hands, hands like my granddad had had after he'd layed in the chapel of rest for five days. No sooner were we off the tube, looking for a iron horse west, than Svetlana started pointing to her own crotch. Look, I told her, this is England okay? You can't point at your genetalia over here, these are decent people with a sense of decency. She carried on, pointing, then putting that pointing finger to her own nose and pulling a disgusted face and then offering the pointing finger to me to smell. I declined. People were starting to look at us from over the tops of newspapers and from behind mugs of tea. I didn't like it. Have you pissed yourself? I inquired.
She pulled a queer face.
I pulled one back.
She pointed at my crotch.
I pulled a queer face.
She pulled one back.
We were going noplace fast. Neither was the train alongside us. I accompanied her to the restrooms, waited outside, five minutes later she re-appeared, looked at me very sharply, then slapped a pair of scrunched up panties into my hand. As they unfurled, a stinking rotten odour began to fill the air in my immediate vicinity, a stench only barely masked by the slightly more appalling stench emanating from the craphouses. I immediately threw what had once been pristine Soviet made and issued undergarments, into the overflowing English trash can. They sat proudly on top, opening up like a blooming rose. I did not stop to consider that those might have been the only pair of panties she had, or indeed, owned. Why would I?
London is not the kind of town where lingerie comes cheap. Good news that we were leaving, I didn't fancy rifling through synthetic undies over in Brixton, not unless they were being worn by a limbo dancer at the time. We sat on the train looking at mile-upon-mile of dreary English backyards: limp sodden laundry hanging dirtier than it had been before washing, beaten up kid's toys, beaten up kids, football paraphernalia, sullen looking housewives, the whole mish mash of suburban English life, I wondered what Svetlana made of such squalor, whether she thought that this Western way wasn't anywhere near as glamorous as they'd led her to believe in the Gulag. She had nice hands, a nice complexion, crystalline eyes, pale lips, and a very pungent aroma. I shuffled closer to the window, two weeks seemed an awfully long prognosis, could anyone harness a bitch like this for two weeks? Small wonder they'd let her go.
Yes, Bristol, a swell dump. A university town, cheap beds, music, booze and women. Jewel of the South West. We shacked-up in a nondescript bedsit on a two-week lease. She needed underwear, badly, and then she needed food, too much damned food. After three days I had to go find a fax, aint no kinkos in Bristol, kinkies, yes, kinkos, no. I scribbled an angry message to Tallin, it simply read: more cash or I turn her loose.
Two-days later, I got a reply, it read: no more cash. You turn her loose, we hunt you down.
These damn swine, my options were sparce, getting sparcer. She was putting on weight. I noticed as she got undressed for bed each night. A little more than an inch to pinch here and there. Too much western food, too many fries, pies, hot dogs, roast pork sandwiches, toasted cheese sandwiches, pizzas with the lot plus some to go. For each pound she gained, I lost one in kind. I put it down to stress, and poor diet. For each dollar she cost me from the slush fund, the nearer I got to destitution, false identities and an Interpol file. There had to be an answer someplace, there is always an answer. I went to sit outside of St Barnaby's church, St Barnaby was the patron saint of non-English speaking brides to be. He was next to useless, no, he was useless. No help from above . . . oh, wait up, above, yeah, malnutrition or not, something upstairs was still functioning, running on a longlife cell, yes, I rummaged around in the pockets of the faux leather coat I'd been wearing since that pool game in Helsinki, hadn't I transferred all the crap I'd had in my parka into this piece of oilskin taken fairly and squarely off the back of a rogue trader from Minsk? Ah ha! Yup, here it was, Singapore airlines, a great way to fly, and on the back . . . come on Barnaby put some fucking effort in, and on the back . . . I closed my eyes, flipped the napkin over, opened them, oh lord praise to you, Seamus's phone number in Dublin. Yes Dublin, where the girl's are so pretty, indeed, beautiful in fact, but I digress, what if I dragged the now not so svelte Svetlana across the Irish sea, jayzus, that was more than halfway to the new world and by christ that indy car driver from Florida could just come over to Shannon his goodself and collect her, if he still wanted her that was.
I made plans in haste and chaste. Always wise. When everything else has been eliminated, what remains, no matter how preposterous, must be the solution. Elementary. And thanks Edgar A. Poe. Off we went, after a hurried fax to my ex-KGB puppet masters outlining the change of plans and the reasons behind the change of plans. I didn't expect a reply.
Seamus met us at the ferry, Svetlana was green, like Erin, like the sea, like a bile duct. Too fucking bad, that's why Q-uells were invented. We drove fast, down windy country lanes and through 18th century villages. All very quaint indeed. We found out that Svetlana had motion sickness in cars too. More bad news, especially for her waiting indy car beau I guessed. We got into the warm embrace of the fair city several hours later, sneaking in under cover of dark like republican hitmen. Four days to go. Tick tock. Seamus had had more bad luck than the whole west coast of Ireland. His tattered ancestry was a litany of leprachaun abuse, sodomy, bestiality and root vegetable rooting. He fair stunk of debauchery and ale. The brewery was close, too close for comfort, I could smell it hanging in the air like imminent ruination; barley.
Aye aye aye aye aye. Russian roulette on the black stuff with a little people bandit. A mess yes, but there was always a tiny glint of salvation – Ireland had been all but built on that glint.
I waited on the fax. Seamus waited on the facts. Svetlana waited on the fat. Patience was a virtue, look at that band on the Titanic playing Sailing for the umpteenth time. I kept going down to McKrinkles office supplies. They had a fax machine there. Good people, salt of the earth, the peat in the bog and all that blarney stone bullcrap. If that stone had been nearby, I'd have gone hung upside down with my torso dangling over a four-hundred foot drop into the Atlantic and kissed the damned thing myself, to be sure I would.
Word came, it was angry, McKrinkle wasn't a circumspect type, kept hovering by the Garda hotphone nervously. I was to be at Shannon by this time on that day and wait for flight TWA626 to arrive. Ha ha, sweet news, all's swell that ends well. To the hops my bogus friends, to the hops . . .
postscript to the postscript:
. . . I'd thought of everything, bar the inevitable. I wasn't thinking about that as I was in the bar, studying Morag the barkeep's daughter. While I was studying her, the inevitable happened. That filthy rat Seamus, sowed his oats in foreign fields. I knew they were at it went I got back to the cottage. Then I definitely knew they were at it when I flung open the guest bedroom door and saw Svetlana spread in a position Nadia Comaneci would have been proud of. It was a perfect ten, no doubt, probably on the floor and the pummel horse. Soiled goods. I checked the many faxes. Nothing about pre-useage or secondhand merchandise. I took Svetlana to the airport, we sat there for seven or eight hours, I forget which. The plane landed. Svetlana was whisked away into the transit lounge, dosvedanya.
I hadn't any time to lose. I took a standby to Bombay. Goa was cheap, Ranjid in the curry shop had said. I needed cheap. All was going well. Then I heard the pilot, Olaf, say something about fuel gauges, pelicans and fellatio. What the fuck? The man next to me, a brusque rusky with a hedgerow across his eyes, told me we were being diverted to St Petersburg. Ha, of all the bograt luck. Fuck you St Christophe, probably a rusky too. I found out, in interrogation, that St Nicholas the III was the unofficial patron saint of emergency landings. Well, good for him. I was allowed to leave, in fact, they insisted, took me in a Skoda to the aerodrome, all very James Bondish indeed. The aircraft looked like a Skoda with wings. Where the fuck is this piece of shit going to? I asked nervously. The three men laughed, it was a hearty fuck you kind of laugh. Siberia. They answered. The Russians do have a sense of humour. In fact, I took a low altitude flight to Ireland. How nice, home again. I caught a cab to Seamus's house. It was dark, milk still on the doorstep. I drank it.
I slept at the bus station, took a bus to the ferry the next day, pleaded for deportation.
postscript to the postscript to the postscript:
I received a fax a few weeks later, it had been sent by airmail. I opened it up. No words, just a deftly sketched drawing of an icepick . . . someone had an artistic bent and a malicious streak.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Stranger Than Fiction
I didn't know the guy.
My neighbour did, apparently.
The block wasn't communal, though a lot of them used it that way, always dropping in unannounced, lacking plausible reasons to visit. I kept to myself. When I could. He walked in, said his name was Harry, as if, I ought to have known it. I didn't like him; I have an aversion to guys calling themselves Harry, and especially Harrys who have a v-neck sweater about their person someplace.
Harry sat in the chair, as if he'd been there before, only he hadn't, to the best of my knowledge. I waited a while as was customary when entertaining, not that I was, technically, entertaining. I was waiting for the plausible reason. Harry just sat there, rubbing his forehead viciously. When a man falls into a chair and immediately begins to massage his brow, he has either recently committed a crime, is about to commit one, or he has ended an affair or is about to embark upon one, or a combination of any of the preceding reasons.
I know men. That was an integral part of my brief, as a man.
So I permitted him the uninvited luxury of staying sat there, rubbing and contemplating: crime and punishment, the ramifications, the pros and cons, whether mandatory sentencing laws applied in his particular case, stuff like that. I turned my attention back to reading Proust, another guy who read like he'd be the type of guy who strolled into other people's apartments uninvited, then collapse in the nearest armchair or woman's lap and start going at his throbbing temples in a manic fashion. Women always fall for those 'lost in thought' type of guys.
Suddenly Harry asked if I had any wine. I didn't answer – immediately.
I was a drunk. So of course I had wine. If I'd been a writer, I might have had notebooks, but I wasn't. I was a drunk without friends, and especially the kind of friends who'd drop by unexpectedly and then ask if I had any wine. Not that this 'Harry' was my friend anyhow.
Then again, he might have been. Either previously or currently. I couldn't say for definite because I was a drunk and I lost time, huge chunks, whole slabs of the stuff. There were gaps in my memory, probably in the liver too.
I still hadn't answered Harry. Not that he appeared fazed by that. I was thinking that if I said I had wine, then this guy would take that as an inference; that maybe I wanted a drinking companion, which I didn't. I drink alone, and any serious pursuit from flying a kite to procrastination, from bank robbery to drinking, ought to be undertaken solo. Drunks have no time left over for small talk, let alone large talk. Large talk frightens me, it's a voracious eater of time and once you lose that much time you're on a fast slope to defeat, regular employment and the twelve-step program.
So I said no.
Harry simply carried on rubbing his forehead. I didn't know what to say after that no, so I said nothing and went back to Proust, and so we sat there a while in silence two-feet apart like a couple of crocheting maids. Proust was talking about drinking, serious stuff, the bastard. First Harry, now Proust.
Ever decreasing circles.
Meaningless oration.
Uninvited men.
Weekends goddamnit.
I really needed a drink. I couldn't have one with Harry sat there, brooding, and especially not after I'd just told him I didn't have any. Chinese stand off. He just sat there thinking about something. Something bad, against the law, against nature's law, something untoward, foul, ghastly – and he needed the juice to either dull that thought, or float it.
Then he said that he could murder a drink, maybe two, eight, sixteen, who knew? I was glad I hadn't fessed up to being in possession of wine right then, not to a guy hauling a thirst like that around. Then, I asked him what it was he actually wanted, excluding a drink that was, in my apartment. I have no idea why I hadn't asked this previously. It may have saved valuable time.
He looked up at me strangely, not queerly, strangely, then told me we'd been friends for just about as long as he could remember.
I asked him how long he could remember for.
After some temple-rubbing deliberation, and a chuckle, he said for about four days or so.
Thus, we had, according to this Harry, and as then unverified by any independent witness, been friends for about four days. Maybe less, certainly not more. I asked him if he was sure, that we were friends.
He admitted that he couldn't be, sure – not one hundred percent, given the black spots in his memory, but I was Marty, wasn't I?
I said no, I'd never been known as Marty, not to the best of my recollections, which I also admitted, were rather hazy at times.
“Ah goddamnit!” he yelled, startling me, and then he smacked the arm of the chair, the arm of my chair, quite aggressively. “And you look just like him too!” he moaned.
“A lot of people say that.” I responded, calmly.
“What? That you look like Marty?”
Not just Marty, anyone they think they know, Peter, Paul, Ringo, you call it.”
“So who are you?” he asked defeatedly.
“I can't recall,” I began, honestly, “no one's used my name in . . .”
“Too long?” he intervened.
“Many a moon.” I finish.
What was my name? Jesus H. Christ. No, it wasn't that, I was sure, well, as sure as I could be given the holes and multifarious missing links I was plagued with. It wasn't Virginia either, or Marcel, or Ernest or Jerome, of those I was certain, more or less.
Unexpectedly then, for me, and for him by the look on his face, he appeared to be overcome by a great notion – much like Proust, or maybe Nash the numbers guy, and he said: “How about a game of truth or dare?”
“No.” I answered, immediately.
“I dare you.” he taunted.
“I said I wasn't playing.” I reiterated.
“Tell me the truth.” he dared.
I was falling into the sinkhole uninvited guests dig. It was drink time, way past actually, the urge was on me: clammy and clawing, begging, haranguing, nesting, excavating. More holes. “Who was your first girlfriend?” he assailed me with.
“Hot Lips, that one from the hospital.” My retort was unexpected and inadvertent.
“That wasn't a woman, it was a guy, in a frock.”
I realized then, that he hadn't offered me the truth or dare before the question and that I'd been foolish to lurch into the answer . . .
“Shit!” he swore, “I didn't fucking ask you truth or dare first goddamnit!”
“I know.” I said, in a smug manner.
“Okay truth or da . . .”
“Forget it.” I said.
“Ah come on, how could it hurt huh?” he pestered.
“It'll waste time,” I said, “more time, time I don't have to spare, and besides, I've got a terrible memory, everything I say would most likely be a lie anyhow.”
“Me too,” he moaned, “so, what in the hell were we talking about, Marty?”
“Time,” I ventured, “and the lack thereof.”
“Where's it go eh?”
“Into optics.” I replied, seriously.
He sits there, rooted, apparently. I begin to twitch. Then he says: “My friend John just had a fatwah put on him.” This throws me, big time.
“Spell it.” I say.
He looks at me suspiciously, “F-A-T -WAH!” he shouts accusingly, “don't you watch tv?”
I don't. Haven't for sixteen years – I see it, I don't watch it.
“What about octopus?” he tries next.
“What about it?”
“Not it, them, what about them, you mean.”
“Then you ought to have said octopi.”
The clock ticks on, waiting for no man, dog, drunk . . . “What are you, a marine biologist? Anyhow, you ever have it?”
“What?”
“Octopi?”
His questions are becoming more and more meaningless in the greater scheme of time, licensing laws, bar stool ownership. “No.” I say, to placate him as my already withered attention span curls up and dies a dehydrated death.
“Japanese swear by it.”
He waits, seemingly interested in my response, and when none is forthcoming, he ploughs on regardless. “Crazy they are, those hari kari kami kaze sons of bitches.”
“The Japanese or octopi?”
“Both.” he muses.
He goes back to his temples for a while, then blurts: “Shit Marty, how come you don't talk any more, you used to be the real life and soul of the party too . . . once.”
“I know,” I tell him, as I begin to stand up, “Lot's of people have said the same and now if you'll excuse me, I've got business to attend to.”
“Sure, sure, don't mind me pal, do what you've got to do.” he says as he waves me away.
I go to the drawer, get my wallet, lift the coat from the back of the door, glance at him sitting there rubbing his forehead. Then take a last glance around my apartment – sparce as it is, then I open the ajar door, and go to step through it and say “See you again then Harry, maybe, one day.”
He looks up, framed in the portrait of my diminishing apartment and replies “Sure Marty, drop by any time, I'm usually home.”
“Sure.” I find myself saying as I step through my own front door and then close it gently behind me.
Then I head for the bar where no one ever asks my name.
My neighbour did, apparently.
The block wasn't communal, though a lot of them used it that way, always dropping in unannounced, lacking plausible reasons to visit. I kept to myself. When I could. He walked in, said his name was Harry, as if, I ought to have known it. I didn't like him; I have an aversion to guys calling themselves Harry, and especially Harrys who have a v-neck sweater about their person someplace.
Harry sat in the chair, as if he'd been there before, only he hadn't, to the best of my knowledge. I waited a while as was customary when entertaining, not that I was, technically, entertaining. I was waiting for the plausible reason. Harry just sat there, rubbing his forehead viciously. When a man falls into a chair and immediately begins to massage his brow, he has either recently committed a crime, is about to commit one, or he has ended an affair or is about to embark upon one, or a combination of any of the preceding reasons.
I know men. That was an integral part of my brief, as a man.
So I permitted him the uninvited luxury of staying sat there, rubbing and contemplating: crime and punishment, the ramifications, the pros and cons, whether mandatory sentencing laws applied in his particular case, stuff like that. I turned my attention back to reading Proust, another guy who read like he'd be the type of guy who strolled into other people's apartments uninvited, then collapse in the nearest armchair or woman's lap and start going at his throbbing temples in a manic fashion. Women always fall for those 'lost in thought' type of guys.
Suddenly Harry asked if I had any wine. I didn't answer – immediately.
I was a drunk. So of course I had wine. If I'd been a writer, I might have had notebooks, but I wasn't. I was a drunk without friends, and especially the kind of friends who'd drop by unexpectedly and then ask if I had any wine. Not that this 'Harry' was my friend anyhow.
Then again, he might have been. Either previously or currently. I couldn't say for definite because I was a drunk and I lost time, huge chunks, whole slabs of the stuff. There were gaps in my memory, probably in the liver too.
I still hadn't answered Harry. Not that he appeared fazed by that. I was thinking that if I said I had wine, then this guy would take that as an inference; that maybe I wanted a drinking companion, which I didn't. I drink alone, and any serious pursuit from flying a kite to procrastination, from bank robbery to drinking, ought to be undertaken solo. Drunks have no time left over for small talk, let alone large talk. Large talk frightens me, it's a voracious eater of time and once you lose that much time you're on a fast slope to defeat, regular employment and the twelve-step program.
So I said no.
Harry simply carried on rubbing his forehead. I didn't know what to say after that no, so I said nothing and went back to Proust, and so we sat there a while in silence two-feet apart like a couple of crocheting maids. Proust was talking about drinking, serious stuff, the bastard. First Harry, now Proust.
Ever decreasing circles.
Meaningless oration.
Uninvited men.
Weekends goddamnit.
I really needed a drink. I couldn't have one with Harry sat there, brooding, and especially not after I'd just told him I didn't have any. Chinese stand off. He just sat there thinking about something. Something bad, against the law, against nature's law, something untoward, foul, ghastly – and he needed the juice to either dull that thought, or float it.
Then he said that he could murder a drink, maybe two, eight, sixteen, who knew? I was glad I hadn't fessed up to being in possession of wine right then, not to a guy hauling a thirst like that around. Then, I asked him what it was he actually wanted, excluding a drink that was, in my apartment. I have no idea why I hadn't asked this previously. It may have saved valuable time.
He looked up at me strangely, not queerly, strangely, then told me we'd been friends for just about as long as he could remember.
I asked him how long he could remember for.
After some temple-rubbing deliberation, and a chuckle, he said for about four days or so.
Thus, we had, according to this Harry, and as then unverified by any independent witness, been friends for about four days. Maybe less, certainly not more. I asked him if he was sure, that we were friends.
He admitted that he couldn't be, sure – not one hundred percent, given the black spots in his memory, but I was Marty, wasn't I?
I said no, I'd never been known as Marty, not to the best of my recollections, which I also admitted, were rather hazy at times.
“Ah goddamnit!” he yelled, startling me, and then he smacked the arm of the chair, the arm of my chair, quite aggressively. “And you look just like him too!” he moaned.
“A lot of people say that.” I responded, calmly.
“What? That you look like Marty?”
Not just Marty, anyone they think they know, Peter, Paul, Ringo, you call it.”
“So who are you?” he asked defeatedly.
“I can't recall,” I began, honestly, “no one's used my name in . . .”
“Too long?” he intervened.
“Many a moon.” I finish.
What was my name? Jesus H. Christ. No, it wasn't that, I was sure, well, as sure as I could be given the holes and multifarious missing links I was plagued with. It wasn't Virginia either, or Marcel, or Ernest or Jerome, of those I was certain, more or less.
Unexpectedly then, for me, and for him by the look on his face, he appeared to be overcome by a great notion – much like Proust, or maybe Nash the numbers guy, and he said: “How about a game of truth or dare?”
“No.” I answered, immediately.
“I dare you.” he taunted.
“I said I wasn't playing.” I reiterated.
“Tell me the truth.” he dared.
I was falling into the sinkhole uninvited guests dig. It was drink time, way past actually, the urge was on me: clammy and clawing, begging, haranguing, nesting, excavating. More holes. “Who was your first girlfriend?” he assailed me with.
“Hot Lips, that one from the hospital.” My retort was unexpected and inadvertent.
“That wasn't a woman, it was a guy, in a frock.”
I realized then, that he hadn't offered me the truth or dare before the question and that I'd been foolish to lurch into the answer . . .
“Shit!” he swore, “I didn't fucking ask you truth or dare first goddamnit!”
“I know.” I said, in a smug manner.
“Okay truth or da . . .”
“Forget it.” I said.
“Ah come on, how could it hurt huh?” he pestered.
“It'll waste time,” I said, “more time, time I don't have to spare, and besides, I've got a terrible memory, everything I say would most likely be a lie anyhow.”
“Me too,” he moaned, “so, what in the hell were we talking about, Marty?”
“Time,” I ventured, “and the lack thereof.”
“Where's it go eh?”
“Into optics.” I replied, seriously.
He sits there, rooted, apparently. I begin to twitch. Then he says: “My friend John just had a fatwah put on him.” This throws me, big time.
“Spell it.” I say.
He looks at me suspiciously, “F-A-T -WAH!” he shouts accusingly, “don't you watch tv?”
I don't. Haven't for sixteen years – I see it, I don't watch it.
“What about octopus?” he tries next.
“What about it?”
“Not it, them, what about them, you mean.”
“Then you ought to have said octopi.”
The clock ticks on, waiting for no man, dog, drunk . . . “What are you, a marine biologist? Anyhow, you ever have it?”
“What?”
“Octopi?”
His questions are becoming more and more meaningless in the greater scheme of time, licensing laws, bar stool ownership. “No.” I say, to placate him as my already withered attention span curls up and dies a dehydrated death.
“Japanese swear by it.”
He waits, seemingly interested in my response, and when none is forthcoming, he ploughs on regardless. “Crazy they are, those hari kari kami kaze sons of bitches.”
“The Japanese or octopi?”
“Both.” he muses.
He goes back to his temples for a while, then blurts: “Shit Marty, how come you don't talk any more, you used to be the real life and soul of the party too . . . once.”
“I know,” I tell him, as I begin to stand up, “Lot's of people have said the same and now if you'll excuse me, I've got business to attend to.”
“Sure, sure, don't mind me pal, do what you've got to do.” he says as he waves me away.
I go to the drawer, get my wallet, lift the coat from the back of the door, glance at him sitting there rubbing his forehead. Then take a last glance around my apartment – sparce as it is, then I open the ajar door, and go to step through it and say “See you again then Harry, maybe, one day.”
He looks up, framed in the portrait of my diminishing apartment and replies “Sure Marty, drop by any time, I'm usually home.”
“Sure.” I find myself saying as I step through my own front door and then close it gently behind me.
Then I head for the bar where no one ever asks my name.
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