Perhaps there was something trembling. Perhaps it was me, perhaps some plant, perhaps something invisible, hidden. Moosmann played Souvenir and I opened my eyes and was already on my way, restless, nervous, on the hunt, with the others, on the way to the squat, the bus, all that shit, and I saw us there, relaxing on Becca’s worn-out sofa, drinking something, chilling on the balcony, Becca and Kati telling us about the job they’d had in Copenhagen, at a massage salon offering so-called happy endings, they pulled men off for money but they said it wasn’t prostitution, it was massage, and the men never, under any circumstances, touched them, and anything but a handy was completely forbidden, any girl who did more got fired on the spot. One time, Becca told us, I tricked Kati, she was new and we pretended to accuse her of having slept with a guy, me and the manager, a dominant sixty-plus madame, she’d been a model in the sixties, I’ve forgotten her name, she played along and screamed at Kati with this put-on rage, you fucking slag, how could you do this to us, and all this shit, and Kati broke down in the end and we gave her a hug and told her we were only joking, and Becca told us another story too that we taped and sent to a friend, it was a story about how she’d slept with her boyfriend and then afterwards, when he went to the loo, she started masturbating, and he came in and said what are you doing? so she replied I’m having a wank and tasting it and it turned out he didn’t know how his sperm tasted and she thought that’s the kind of thing you should know and made him taste it and he didn’t like it as much as she did, she said, and then they decided to taste their own piss, or she decided, she said, and they each pissed in a glass, they didn’t mix, and she tasted hers and he his, he didn’t want to but she forced him and that was the whole story, I don’t know if you liked it and I don’t care either, bye, she said on the recording, and as well as minesweeping myself, I also used to piss in my own beer bottles then put them in strategic places so that the other people minesweeping would get my warm piss in their mouth. I almost died laughing. Later we were sitting on white plastic chairs – so cosmopolitan, someone said, you see them everywhere – drinking Nescafé. You know I hate fucking Nescafé. But you never learned to drink black tea instead? Ah, watch your arse out of here. You’llneverlearn, your middle name. Yeah, well I know never to say never. Well I never. Aren’t you clever! Top marks. Next stop, university! Naptime, must ring that Daisy or Maisy or whateverhernamewas, fell asleep again on the night bus. Saw the others getting up and going to work. The depiction of the immigrant slums was so hair-raising it was hard to put the book down. In Glasgow it rains constantly. I put my hood up, curl up in a ball and shiver. The whole time I’m scared of being jumped and getting one of those Glasgow smiles, as they call them, having to go around with it forever. You see it now and then in this area around Gorbals. Skinny, malnourished guys with scars, visible and hidden. But I’m cautious and I train hard. Drive a forklift at a warehouse and really appreciate the camaraderie our team has developed. No racist bullshit, the so-called identitarians keep themselves to themselves and Becca’s presence keeps the laddishness at a bearable level, though the gay-haters are another story. I often have visions of getting assaulted, cut, even killed. Sometimes I have visions of doing the assaulting, on the verge of delirium, killing. Hard blows to the larynx. Got stopped by the cops a few weeks back, and the whole time the pig was talking to me, asking his stupid questions he already knew the answers to, the whole time I was imagining beating him shitless. Him begging me to stop, and me going on beating. It made me feel so incredibly calm that in the end the cops said OK, you seem kosher, as they put it, so we’ll let you go, but we’ll take the gear and next time remember that personal use doesn’t mean however much you like, and so on, there are limits, you know, they’re flexible, and they’re relative with these things, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and so on, you’re on the borderline, you’re cool, you have a job, there were no kids about, and so on, we don’t think you’re selling, but think about this, think about it, kiddo, buddy, laddie, and so on, as per, and I had to do another round, out to the crane, then the gym, then to sleep, then to work, and the whole time I was smashing the cop’s larynx in. A quick blow and he’s lying down, unable to breathe. Kicks, knees. And so on. One evening I sit in the yard with Aidan M, one of the kids I’ve got to know here. When his mates aren’t here he’s not as tense and wired. We laugh at the fact that Aidan’s mum called him a sonofabitch, and suddenly his dad comes by and starts talking about the old gangs, telling us about how it goes back a long way in Glasgow, apparently even in the 1700s they were throwing stones at each other down by the Clyde, then the Catholics came over when they were starving in Ireland, and then The Cumbie Boys, Tongs and Toi and Come On were all formed, Die Young and Brighton Billy Boys and Govan Team and all the different Mad Sqwads and Young Teams and whatever else they were called, and now, says Stuart – that’s what Aidan’s dad was called – every ramshackle fucking tower block, every mouldy little hovel has its own gang protecting the area. But everyone knows, he says with a stupid grin, that it’s just about unfucked, bored teenage boys with cheap booze and bad drugs in their veins. Right, Aidan? he says and whacks his son over the back of the head, that’s right, you’re not dangerous are you, not really, and Aidan pushes Stuart’s hand away and says fuck do you know, you fucking cunt, what do you know about me? Come on, his dad says then, I didn’t mean anything by it, and Aidan takes off and Stuart shakes his head. He looks at me and laughs for a long time. All mouth, that boy, he says, before bumming two cigs off me and going on his way. Fucking tramp, I think and regret not having Aidan’s back. The dreary brick facades that faced onto the street tended, however, to conceal most of the squalor and decay. Passers-by couldn’t see much of the slum buildings that grew up in the yards, which were utilised to the last square foot. The ingrained assumption that labourers needed neither sun, air, water nor elbow room proved to be as good as ineradicable. Then Kiko rings and I think I can’t take any more, but we’re out on the way to a squat somewhere anyway, I’m sitting in a van with Kiko and Rawna and some guy behind the wheel who I don’t even know and I’m asking where is this place anyway, and Kiko says Elephant and Castle. For a few seconds I can’t hear or see anything and I’m just thinking EC, EC, Elephant and Castle, Elephant and Castle. I see Rawna scratch her left arm, which is covered with some kind of bleeding rash. And then I remember, the Heygate Estate, EC, and I say it out loud, there in the car, that that was where Darek and Amine lived, the guys I worked with on the Atropos, a few years back, and I can suddenly taste it, feel the nausea in my mouth, as though it was just yesterday, no, as though it was today, actually, right here and now. It’s about respect and honour and integrity, all that shit. Standing up for all that they are, even though they hate all that they are. Everyone knows, deep down inside, that self-hate is the strongest hate of all. The most powerful driver. Heygate, Kiko says, doesn’t exist any more. They pulled that shit down, built airy estate agents’ offices or an art gallery or something, Rawna says. Shit, I’d almost forgotten it, I say to Kiko and Rawna, but now it’s all coming back. So true to life it’s actually unpleasant. As if time has stood still. That taste in my mouth, I say, a mix of sweat and labour, weed and alcohol, rust and salt water, the smell of vomit and scopolamine tablets for the seasickness, it’s the taste of Belladonna. I swear, I say to Kiko and Rawna, Belladonna, what a joke, but that’s what he called her, you know, the captain of the Atropos, the ship we enrolled on, Atropos, the little luxury cruise ship for bored yuppies with no imagination and too much money and time. A crappy job, without a doubt, but still much better than the job I’d had before, behind the counter in a little porn shop just off the Reeperbahn. You know, I say to them, at that point I was living on Sternstrasse, on the other side of the fairground, and I used to crawl home in the mornings, past the cop shop and the whores, the piles of crusty punks, crawl over the Heiligengeistfeld, the empty funfair, full of plastic palms and clowns and airbrushed kitsch, overshadowed by this enormous nazi bunker,
sunrise and silence, birdsong, fucking depressing, but it still had some kind of draw, that life, that way of dying, protracted, idiotic, low, it suited someone like me, best at being worst, as they say, but yeah, one evening I was sitting drinking in Lehmitz and I started talking to this guy who introduced himself as Mush, we shared a spliff and it turned out he was chief cook on the Atropos, and he asked me if I knew my way around an espresso machine, could chop onions, grill a steak and fix a Caesar salad, and I said of course, no problem man, even though I didn’t know shit, but he grinned and said the job was mine. Kiko wasn’t listening to me any more, he was studying some scrap of paper he’d dug out of his pocket, so I turned to Rawna, who was still scratching away at her scabby arm, and said the Atropos, I swear, the first thing you had to learn was which areas were off limits, no-go zones or whatever they were called, and in principle that meant the whole ship, apart from the restaurant itself, the cabins below the waterline, where we slept, and a small area up on deck which was shielded from view so the yuppies wouldn’t have to see us any more than necessary. All the people working in the kitchen were men, and all the people working on the floor, that is the waitresses, were women, and behind the bar was a mix. The yuppies were both men and women, mostly white hetero couples, even if the odd black or homo turned up from time to time. We worked Thursday to Tuesday and were off on Wednesdays, when we often took in at some port and picked up new yuppies. The staff was also security guards, glass collectors, a DJ and a so-called restroom valet in a white shirt and black bow tie. Moody, or Moody Blues as some called him, or Moody Black as others called him, or Mulinge as he was actually called, was in the gents; he held out paper towels after the guests had washed their hands and offered them a shower in aftershave: some cheap kind with a chemical citrus scent, an offer they tended to refuse with barely concealed distaste or pity. Mulinge told himself he was there to preserve order, and actually that wasn’t completely untrue. Officially it was his job to report any drug abuse, that is, all drug use, to the security guards, whose responsibility it then was to discipline the person who’d committed this illegal act, if necessary with a moderately appropriate degree of violence, as Vinny, the security guard, put it. It goes without saying that no one followed these rules for shit, or we wouldn’t have had any guests. In the ladies there was Farai, who didn’t have any nickname, perhaps because she never talked to anyone, she never said more than was necessary, never more than hello, yes, no, I don’t know, thank you, please, goodbye. But Moody insisted that she was extremely smart, studying law via distance learning and that one day she’d be the first female Secretary-General of the United Nations or something like that. Then she won’t have to stand in a toilet listening to white people’s drunk bullshit any more, then she won’t have to work among rich white yuppies farting and pissing, shitting and snorting coke, looking at her with disdain while they dry their hands and blow their noses, apply lipstick or bathe their throats in their own expensive perfume. Maybe then she’d remember her friend Mulinge, who used to stand on the other side of the wall, in an identical room, almost the mirror image, and carry out the same work as her. Maybe then she’ll spare a thought for me. I hope so, he said, I hope she doesn’t forget her roots, so to speak. We worked together after all, even if we were in separate rooms. I’m stood under the same blinding lights, with the same repulsive noises and the same nauseating smells, I’ve had the same taste in my mouth after two hours in there. The distinction is I’ve been among men, and men are a bit different. I guess you know that, everyone does. They’re a little more aggressive, a little more dangerous, but I have no problem being in their midst. I command respect. And I’m strong. I can handle most things and most people, he said. And one morning – I was standing there chopping onions, tears in my eyes – I heard Argo ask Moody, who’d come in to collect his wages, why he stayed there, in his tile-clad kingdom as he called it, year after year, while the women came and went, as Farai probably would eventually, UN or no UN. He didn’t mean anything nasty by it though, right, he just meant Moody was worth much better and so on, but somewhere in there was still the accusation, the question, why are you debasing yourself? And I looked out through the hatch and saw Moody rocking his upper body a little as he smiled at Argo. You know… Maybe I’m too strong. It’s not always good to be strong. You get me? Maybe not, said Argo. Or else you just have to use your strength in the right way. I tipped the chopped onion into our largest pot, swapped knife and chopping board and pulled out a pan of vegetables to be peeled and prepped. But you know, there’s some things in life you have no influence over, Moody said. Mario walked past. What are you talking about? Life, man, Moody said. Fate. Fate? I know all about fate, my friend, Mario said. Have you seen my tattoo? I’ve had it since I was sixteen. He unbuttoned his shirt. In the middle of his chest was written AMOR FATI, in heavy capitals, in scar tissue. You have to love your fate, he said laconically. Shit, man, said Argo. Is that a scar? Did it hurt? Mario did his shirt up again. Sometimes pain’s a good thing, you know? A reminder, something that heals. You know? Fucking hell, said Argo, love my fate, I don’t know to be honest bro. Moody laughed. Amor fati, bro. The guy’s lost it. Think about it, man, said Mario. This knowledge is older than everything around us. Our forefathers were smarter than us in many ways, and more, how can I put it, in harmony with our nature, if you get me. It’s old-school knowledge. Choose your battles. That’s what it’s about, nothing else. Choose your battles, bro. Suddenly the door was thrown open by Andrea, the alcoholic Italian, who nodded at us and said: Mush here? I shook my head. Go hard, dude. Andrea always played metal at unpleasantly high volumes when he was working. At least when Mush, who liked the kitchen quiet, wasn’t there. Later, said Moody, and walked off towards the office as Andrea took out the cassette of trancey techno that Anders, the pill-popping Swedish guy, had been listening to and put on Slipknot’s ‘People = Shit’ at top volume, shrieking Here we go again, motherfucker and, with a kind of suppressed rage, pulled out knives, utensils, sacks of onions, pats of butter, bags of flour, sugar and salt, pans of various sizes and chopping boards in various colours, like a bizarre little whizzed-up cartoon character. Mush was really called Massoud (I don’t know why he was called, or called himself, Mush, my guess was that some bastard of a chef had called him Mushroom, and got everyone else to do it too, to keep the little Arab down). He’d started as a kitchen porter but had worked his way up, trained himself, and now he was a chef, chef de cuisine, as he was fond of saying, and he sat at the bar, drinking cappuccino after cappuccino, smoking Marlboro Lights and reading recipes, which he very rarely and almost grudgingly approved of, and if you went up to him he’d raise a hand as if to say don’t disturb me, and if you didn’t go away he’d look at you with a lopsided smile and say: haven’t I told you about my big balls? Have you ever seen a beetle from behind? I mean it. I’ve got big, hairy, extremely heavy balls. Why can’t we see them now, if they’re so big, we said. Baggy jeans. As god is my witness, said Mush. Not particularly baggy, Mush, we said. Look at Andrea, that’s baggy. It’s an optical illusion, he said. Andrea’s trousers are just full of air. Just like his head. OK, show us then. What? He smiled. Your balls, man. Nah, can’t do that. Sorry, friends. Only women get to see them. Men can’t handle it, they go crazy with jealousy. Then they try and kill me. Look. He pointed at a scar on his neck, seven, eight centimetres long, thick as an earthworm. And Liz said: just show me then. And then he turned red and fell silent and held up two fingers and no one had a clue what that was supposed to mean. Mush was Algerian and made no secret of the fact he looked down on the Moroccans, the cook Tahar and the porter Amine. Tahar was Mush’s right-hand man, the sous chef, as Mush put it, but he was slack and had no charisma. He also suffered from something called bilateral ptosis, drooping eyelids in both eyes, so it always looked as though he was about to fall asleep, something that brought out his lethargic side even further, and all this probably added up, made Mush feel secure in his position. Amine had low status. He wa
s chef de plonge, chief of the washing-up, or something like that, as Mush said with a grin. He was the one who lived on the Heygate in Elephant and Castle, in a little one-bed flat with his fundamentalist dad. The dad worked as a cleaner on the Tube. They sent money to the rest of the family who lived in some little village in Morocco. Amine was seventeen years old but was still a child in many respects. He was essentially illiterate, was extremely inexperienced and knew very little about the world beyond his dad’s flat and the route to and from work. He would come and stand with his face ten centimetres away from yours, and just stand there, breathing and watching what you were doing. It got Anders really riled and he’d hiss: back off, for fuck’s sake Amine. Have you never heard of personal space? Personal space? Amine said innocently. Shit. Mush, tell Amine about personal space. No, no, no. You can’t. He doesn’t get it, it’s too complicated. And in Arabic: go down and do the washing-up, Amine. Yalla emshi, don’t stand here gawping. Fucking peasants. They’re like children, Mush might say about the Moroccans, they can’t help it. They don’t know any better. You have to treat them like that. Like donkeys. Listen, Kiko, I said, are you asleep or what? What’s up with you? What’s this shit you’re staring at? Rawna, listen to me now, this is important, I remember how Andrea used to love winding Amine up too, you know – we used to send the washing-up down to the basement in big blue plastic crates via a little lift, and sometimes he’d come up to check the crates and send them down if they were full, and each time he came into the kitchen, Andrea would force a drink on him. There was a little shelf with white wine, red wine, cognac, rum, pastis and a few other things you might find yourself using while preparing food. Most of it found its way down Andrea’s throat, but he was good at hiding it. He knew Amine would get the sack if it came out that he’d been drinking the kitchen booze, we were actually all banned from doing it, but they tended to overlook it with the cooks, and Andrea in particular, since he’d worked there a long time and was good at his job, especially during the lunch rush, when it was most stressful, and before he got smashed. He also knew that drinking alcohol was against Amine’s religious convictions. But he still poured a glug or two into a measuring cup and whistled to Amine. Look, for you, my friend. Try it. Amine gave an awkward smile and shook his head nervously. No, no. Not for me. Come on now, Andrea said encouragingly. Be a man. Amine lifted both hands to his face and waved them slowly. Anders walked past with two white five-litre buckets in his hands. Said: let him be, Andrea, with a smile. No, no, no. My father, said Amine and drew his finger across his throat a couple of times. Back and forth. My father will kill me. He stacked the clean dishes on the shelves. How’s he going to find out? Andrea laughed, and flung his arms out to the sides. Who’s going to tell him? Tahar, would you say anything? Tahar, who was deboning a shoulder of pork, looked at Andrea with tired eyes and just shrugged his shoulders limply. He wasn’t particularly amused by Andrea, he never was. Amine put a crate of dirties in the lift and closed the hatch. You Muslims are fucked in the head. Come on Amine. Be a man, screw Tahar, he’s just jealous. Amine didn’t say anything else, just stood at the sink, washing his hands. OK, be a pussy then. I’ll have it, Andrea said, downing the contents. Amine looked away and went down to his station, always the same thing, you know, Mush couldn’t really tell the names Andrea and Anders apart, he used to call Andrea Anders and vice versa, or he’d just call them both Andrews, so in the end they both wrote their names in Arabic on the fronts of those white disposable chef’s hats we had, so Mush could just shout his Yalla, yalla! Work, work! Andesh! Andrah! Move yourself! in between the Arabic harangues that had Tahar and Amine clenching their jaws in humiliation, dropping their gazes and going back to mopping the floors, loading up the dishes, scrubbing grease off the stove, or whatever they were doing. Same old, same old, said Rawna, it’s the same old shit. It’s still raining. What’s happening, Kiko? I say. Are we at the Elephant already? Who’s driving anyway? Cool it, bro, Rawna says, pulling her sleeve down over her messed-up forearm at last, and I look at her and say nothing at first, but I’m thinking about the mouse on the floor of my room that time she came to see me. Then I can’t help myself, and I say Rawna, do you remember? Do you remember that time you stayed with me, when you were trying to come off horse and all that? What are you talking about, she says, leaning her head against the window, which mists up, as if erasing the streets and the rain and the different coloured lights, and I think both of us are thinking about that grotty room in Brixton where she was living with her sister and boyfriend, what was he, Czech or Slovak or something like that, they didn’t even have their own bathroom or toilet, so when you went to visit they had to sit and shoot up right in front of you, even though they didn’t want to, they just turned round so you didn’t see the actual injection, the actual needle, the actual puncturing, it was a kind of boundary they’d overstepped and they knew it, even then. Fuck you talking about, Rawna says again, and I realise she’s embarrassed. That apathetic junkie style is pretty fucking idiotic if you’re not seeing it from the inside, and if you are it’s not long before you’re as repellent as any other junkie, from the outside at least, it can be quite different inside you, and Rawna really had a fire inside her, she was a lovely person, strong and worldly, and she was going to get herself out of the worst of it, not like her sister and that guy she lived with. Rawna helped me when I was green and my angst got the better of me, I couldn’t cope with that shit, I couldn’t switch off, couldn’t sleep, got paranoid, got depressed, and grass didn’t help, and booze only helped a bit, and no one dared take E on the job. It was like a nightmare, as though the whole floor was going to swallow me up, down into an unending hellhole, and I wanted to cry like a child, and I had to work hard to keep the mask on, and I kept the mask on, I was hard, but Rawna knew, Rawna saw the panic, I don’t know, in my eyes, in my body language, or smelled it in my scent, and she just stood beside me and took my hand, we both stood there like that behind the bar, it was early evening, not many punters, just a few yuppies having their post-work beers, we just stood there side by side in our uniforms, our company shirts, I think there was a Bacardi logo on the right breast, that cool logo that was kind of like a bat, and our black aprons, and in the end I landed, in the future’s warm embrace, with a gentle morning spliff on the top deck of the 38, and she was gentle and freshly fixed up, calm and balanced, with glowing, glistening eyes, and she held my hand, yeah, I was like a child then, it’s going to be fine, she said, you’ll be fine. So when she said she was going to kick the heroin, of course I was there for her. She came round one afternoon, we hung out, I was drinking and smoking, she was feeling lousy and we sat and chatted, didn’t even think about fucking, till I fell asleep on the floor and she lay there writhing and suffering in my bed. I had to work in the morning and she was sleeping when I left, and when I came home that evening there was a dead mouse on the steps, a soft little grey mouse with small pink paws, and Rawna was gone. No note, nothing. And I swear, for a few seconds I thought, kind of against my will, that she was that mouse. That she’d died and that was, like, her real body, that this was quite simply who she was, a little rodent, vermin. You’re screwing with me, says Rawna, that never happened, man. You’re just screwing around, bro. No way, Rawna, I smile, don’t you remember those typewritten messages we used to give each other? Should I pursue a path so twisted. Should I crawl, defeated and twisted? And Argo writing: Why must I be the thief? Why must I be the thief? Cody, says Rawna, you’re talking to someone who’s not here. We don’t know what you’re talking about. I turn to Kiko, but his place in the car is empty. Kiko? Where are you? What do you mean, Rawna? Don’t you remember that Montenegrin guy, Marko or Mirko or Mario, yeah, that was it, Mario, who was always chatting about Montenegro’s independence from Serbia. Whatever the topic of conversation, whether you were talking about cheese production, holey socks, skunk, turntablism or contemporary Russian literature, anything at all, whatever you were discussing, he could redirect the discussion onto Crna
Gora, the Black Mountain, and then he’d sing ‘Oj svijetla majska zoro’. Our future national anthem. Majko naša Crna Goro. Isn’t that important any more? Shit, how come I can remember it then? Kiko? Mario turned to Paola, the Italian girl he called Isabella because he thought, and he was sort of right, that she looked just like a young Isabella Rossellini, but with a gap between her front teeth, and sang ‘O sole mio’, and said something cheesy, and the bodybuilder David from Madrid offered us some coke, and the bartender Mohammed, he called himself Dan, who tried to hide his hash-smoking during Ramadan – he’d smoke his spliffs in secret in the little staff toilet in the basement, until he realised it was ridiculous, that everyone knew, then he said he’d realised this was between him and god, we could all butt out, though in fact we’d never butted in in the first place, and Darek, the Polish guy who always wanted to hang out with me, who was always washing his clothes in the washing machine, which was only for work clothes, so he wouldn’t have to pay for the laundrette, he was constantly sneaking about with some carrier bag full of damp jeans, hoodies and underwear, he was a real bull neck, a real barbarian, a slapstick figure who’d walk into lamp posts while ogling girls with that stupid grin of his, that wide-eyed attitude to queers and their lack of shame, in his face you could see just as much curiosity as panicked fear, I used to shave his head in the filthy staffroom in the basement, between the washing machine and our lockers, the damp concrete and the constant stream of employees coming past to smoke spliffs by the ventilation shaft over the toilet, just like Dan, and what was her name, the Italian girl, not Paola, the other one, the one who was with my dealer, who’d come in to chat shit about the boss, that fucking dickhead, and I’d stand behind Darek who’d be sitting on a crate, watching the washing machine where his clothes were still spinning round and round, and I’d press the clippers against his skull and the whole time he’d say harder, more, deeper, and I pressed that goddamn clipper against his nut with all my strength expecting bits of skin to start flying in every direction any moment, and him just saying harder, bratku, mocniej, harder, mocniej kurwa, and me pressing and pressing, but he was never satisfied. Fuck Rawna, I should have scalped that little pig, scraped the skin off with Massoud’s knives, which he sent off to be sharpened with lasers every other week and when they came back they were so bloody sharp there was always someone cutting themselves and Darek came in and he just wanted to have a look, just have a feel and laugh, ja pierdolę, those damn knives are sharp. I shaved my own head with a razor, it was a nice feeling to wake up in the morning a few days after shaving and run your palms with the grain of the hair, to feel that smoothness, and then to draw them backwards, to hear that sandpapery crackle, the roughness, to feel the sleep gradually leave your body. And outside the window of the cabin lay the ocean, the endless sea, the empty, terrifying, meaningless sea, with its rocking and its splashing. The sea, Rawna, do you miss it? Or have you forgotten it? We’re sitting in the taxi now, in Glasgow, heading out along the Clyde, on the Southside, out towards Gorbals, where Dima’s got something going. Dawid pays for the taxi, he’d already let us have two lines, he’s behaving a little strangely, I think, what’s with him? Dima laughs hoarsely, he’s working in demolition. And lives in a flat that’s about to be demolished. Are you going to demolish yourself, mate? Get a wrecking ball and swing it at your head? You know it’s true. Now now, don’t get your knickers in a twist, says Rawna. Getting dimmer with Dima, he laughs. We go. We had a fair bit of trouble with youth gangs, the old man says, the Mulberry Street Gang, the Cherry Street Gang, and even girl gangs like the notorious Robinettes – in my days it was The Whyos, The Potash, The Molasses Gang and others who threatened Mulberry Street and Five Points. We appointed a special contact and tried to convert the gangs into youth clubs and organisations. There was weightlifting, ball games, fencing, leatherworking, coppersmithing, ceramics, tap and ballet classes and art classes. We got a store of boxing gloves and tried to interest the gangs in resolving their differences with more sporting methods, so to speak. Instead, the club interiors and so on got destroyed a number of times – and on one occasion a pacified gang attempted to raid the organisation’s coffers to purchase various weapons for self-defence. Some of the young people’s social dysfunction found expression in music, in roughly the same way as in Hell’s Kitchen, or Port of Spain, Trinidad – and several calypso bands and a dance orchestra, the Riis Ramblers, achieved a certain degree of fame. I tell them about a job interview in a bookshop James had fixed up. A bookshop in the West End. The Voltaire and Rousseau. A bloody serious bookshop full of old books, with a Czech tea room and everything. Sounds like a normal job, says Dima. Sick. Don’t screw it up, bro. It’s cushy having normal friends. What do you mean? Sounds like afternoon tea. What do you think I mean? Seriously, what do you mean? What do you mean, what do I mean? Are you completely thick? He means you’ve got other, normal friends and we’re tramps. Gypsies. Gyppos, for real. That’s why it’s gonna work out for you. A normal job, a normal life, all that shit. Sounds like a walk in the park on a sunny day. And you? I know, Dima says, pointing at them one by one. Prison, overdose, terrorist, cleaner, social services, loony bin. Ey, how come I’m gonna be a cleaner, that’s the worst one. You talk a lot of shit, Dima, I say. You’re all gonna be fine. I know it. I’m totally convinced. I’m gonna fuck up this job as per and then everything’ll be same old, same old. Same old, same old, says Rawna. Same old, same old. And then? Then? You know. Then. You know what happens then.
Wretchedness Page 6