I sit at a table in the foyer with my stolen flowers and my erection. My eyes sting from coming out into the daylight. It is still early afternoon.
I’m aware of having been part of something devious.
Buchenwald was known as a concentration camp, because it was a place where a high concentration of prisoners lived; they were used as slave labour to build weapons. The extermination camps – Auschwitz being the daddy – were designed purely for gassing and massacre.
I sniff the back of my hand. I nuzzle the flowers for contrast.
It would be easy to believe that Zoe and I are going to spend the rest of our lives together.
Mr Linton said that one-fifth of the prisoners in Buchenwald died or were killed, many were used for dangerous medical testing. So to call Buchenwald a concentration camp is almost to suggest that it was not also a place of extermination and death.
I smell my hand. I smell the flowers.
I look at the clock on the wall. The play’s still got another ten minutes to go.
I think it’s her relationship with Aaron that is the problem. I need to sort this out.
I stand up and hobble back through the doors towards the control booth. I stop at the landing, halfway up the stairs, and take a left through the heavy sound-proofed door. I close it delicately and walk along a grey corridor; there are doors on the left side only. I go to the end of the corridor and down a stairwell. At the bottom is a fire exit and a set of grey double doors.
I pull them apart and step into a large high-ceilinged room. The wall on my left is made entirely of chipboard, supported by wooden struts. A slim door has been cut into the wood. On my right-hand side is a paint-flecked kitchen counter that runs along the wall, stopping at another fire exit.
I hear voices from the stage:
‘A world ruled by God. Divine justice. Wishful thinking. Who is there to punish us, destroy us, scatter our people?’
‘The civilized nations.’
My stiffy starts deflating.
The dialogue seems to drift in and out, like listening to a radio play with bad reception.
The sound of the actors’ voices is muffled – they could be talking about anything.
On the far wall, a large steel air-conditioning pipe climbs to a box-shaped vent, painted orange, fronted by a slatted grill. Bits of dead shows are piled in a corner: cardboard trees, bad charcoal portraits, roman columns made from polystyrene. Grubby Nazi uniforms and a wooden rifle hang from a clothes rail that stands in the centre of the room. Next to the rail is a kind of half-ladder-half-crane on wheels – a bit like the machines they use for taking pairs of trainers down from power lines.
Hayyah – the hot one – is singing a song. I recognize her voice.
We’re dragged through the mud
And we’re swimming in blood
Our bodies can’t take any more.
So stand and unite – move into the light
You see how our people betray us…
All over the floor, yellow tape has been stuck down to make seemingly random shapes. A sheet of tarpaulin has also been fastened to the floor; it’s splattered with brown, gold and black paint.
The stage-door handle turns silently. Aaron backs into the room, headphones on his head. He is carrying, not pushing, a pram. He keeps his back to me as he lifts the pram into a parking space of yellow tape on the floor. He is wearing baggy jeans and black Converse shoes. The back of his T-shirt has a list of tour dates on it. One of them says: ‘Swansea Patti Pavilion 5/6/97.’
I hold the flowers out and wait for him to turn around. I know what I’m going to say.
He is stifling laughter.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he says, quietly.
He turns around and sees me. His eyes are blacked with mascara. The mascara has not run. His T-shirt asks ‘Therapy?’.
‘I’ve come to explain –’
‘Shhp.’ He puts his finger to his lips. He tiptoes towards me over the tarpaulin and whispers in my ear.
‘Whatever you are going to say, you have to say it very, very quietly.’
It must be getting near the end of the play. There’s a brief drum roll, leading into a big sing-a-long:
Never say the final journey is at hand
Never say we will not reach the promised land…
It’s the rebellious Jews singing a rousing resistance song.
Aaron pulls his headphones off. He has small ears.
I whisper: ‘Zoe and I went to school together.’ I decide not to mention her nickname. ‘And I wanted to help her out with a pamphlet but she changed schools before I could give it to her. Then I came here because I was worried that she would never change, and she seduced me, which was not difficult because I am still getting over my previous relationship.’
He hushes me with his palms. I relower my voice.
‘I’ve just realized that she did not want to have sex with me but, in fact, only wanted to make you jealous and angry because that is the sort of person she has become. And I’m sorry. I didn’t know what she was doing. Have these flowers.’
Our tomorrows will be bathed in golden light
And our enemies will vanish with the night…
He puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘I’ll just be one moment,’ he says.
He picks the rifle and the uniform off the rail and slips out the door.
On the counter are a number of empty wine bottles, bags of nuts and bolts and a book entitled The Story of the African Form. On a piece of hardboard pinned above the sink, the outlines of various tools have been painted in white: a paint-roller, a wide brush, a hacksaw.
From the stage, I hear Gens calling out:
‘Stop it! Stop playing!’
The music and singing stops.
Aaron comes back in, smiling lightly, one ear of his headphones on, one balanced on his temple.
He speaks very quietly, almost mouthing the words.
‘Oliver, you don’t need to be sorry. Zoe’s a bitch. Aren’t you, Zoe?’ He raises his eyebrows, waits for a moment, and then nods. ‘Zoe says yes, she’s a bitch. She was just fucking you around.’
‘I know she was; I realized.’ I step towards him and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘She was using me to get at you. It was an elaborate trick.’
‘Look, Oliver, basically, the thing is, me and Zoe have way too much time on our hands. Everyone else gets to have this orgy scene and we’re the lemons who get left out.’ He lowers his voice to a whisper: ‘She bet me that she could have sex during a show. We thought it’d be funny.’
From the stage I hear:
‘And another, and another, yet another! You go to the opera, nothing but Jews.’
I speak through my teeth: ‘But we didn’t have sex.’
‘No shit – Zoe’s no actress.’
I can hear the tinny sound of her laughter coming through the cans. He puts his hand to his headphone again, listening to something, then he puts his lips very close to my ear:
‘Look, I’m sorry, Oliver, no hard feelings. Why don’t you keep those flowers?’
Two girls appear through the stage door, leaning on each other, trying to stifle laughter. They are dressed as prostitutes. They stop giggling when they see me.
One of the girls waves at me. The other one hisses: ‘Who’s this?’
‘Oliver from Derwen Fawr,’ Aaron whispers.
Their mouths turn into ‘o’s.
‘God, Zoe is awful,’ says the girl. Her dress has fallen off her right shoulder. I can see a couple of ribs and a collarbone.
They lean on each other.
From the stage, I make out some of the dialogue:
‘Comrades, dear comrades. I proclaim the Kingdom of New Freedom.
We are free of this bloodsucker.’
‘Don’t worry about it, love,’ says the other girl in a motherly way. ‘Zoe’s a virgin anyway.’
They link arms as they start smiling. They watch me.
Aaron caref
ully leans on the bar across the fire doors; they swing open on to the car park behind the theatre. It is bright outside.
‘Oliver – why don’t you go out the back way before everyone comes offstage?’
From the stage, I hear:
‘A brilliant effect. Magical! Bravo, gentlemen.’
I console myself that I have been tricked by actors.
The two girls can’t take their eyes off me.
‘You could do better than her, anyway,’ says the one with the bones. They are both better looking than Zoe.
We hear: ‘Load gun! Ready!’ and the ka-chuck sound of a gun being cocked.
I want to behave like a child. I want to shout something about Nazis or Jews. Something like ‘Gas the fucking Jews’, but I can’t. I want to be juvenile. I want to do something for children.
I pick up an empty wine bottle and hold it above my head.
There is the sound of loud machine-gun fire from the stage. I wait for it to finish.
They are murdering them.
I don’t lob the wine bottle at the ladder where it would shatter and reverberate to the back rows. I don’t smash the wine bottle against the sink and then dig the cut glass into my spare wrist.
Instead, I run out the fire door, and I follow the arrows for the car park’s one-way system, and I keep running until I’m halfway across the car park before throwing the bottle – it is Liebfraumilch, made in the city of Worms – dropping it really, on to the damp tarmac.
Indoctrination
On the way home through Singleton Park, I get involved in some crying.
I am still carrying the battered white flowers; the tips of the petals are ripped. I decide to walk along the path that me and Jordana used to walk with Fred, the martyred dog. But I walk the route in reverse – anti-clockwise – and as I pass each landmark I lay down one of the tatty white flowers. When I am very sad, I tend towards symbolism.
I imagine that she will be walking the same route – but clockwise – and also putting flowers down and our hands will meet as we both go to weave a flower into the railings by the entrance to the botanical gardens.
It’s bright and the park is busy: there are dog-walkers, a hexagon of people playing Frisbee in direct sunlight, a youngster on a bike looking pleased with himself although his stabilizers are doing the hard work.
I climb up into the rock garden and place a flower in the uncomfortable alcove where me and Jordana used to snog.
I lay a flower at the fork in the path where we once argued about which way was the more direct route. A golden retriever appears from around the bend and bumbles dumbly towards me. I wonder if the owner of the dog will be Jordana or, at the very least, a beautiful woman. I wait. Appearing from behind the wide, veined leaves of some tropical plant, the owner turns out to be a man. He is about fifty, with no hair. I have never seen him before. I feel strange to be standing still at the fork of a path, holding a handful of flowers.
The dog jogs towards me, sniffs at my penis, then at the flowers.
‘Tim, leave the gentleman be.’
I stay still. I am a gentleman. The dog is called Tim.
*
The gates to the botanical gardens are locked. The old man has gone home for a snooze. I thread a flower through one of the links in the chain-lock.
I put one flower on the doorstep of the Swiss cottage. It is a red wooden house with hanging baskets, two chimneys and a white picket fence.
Another dog appears – a Scottie – sniffing along the fence, checking for piss-scent. I think of how much easier it would be to accidentally-on-purpose bump into Jordana if, firstly, I could detect the smell of her piss and, secondly, she was prone to marking out territory. The Scottie’s owner is a woman – short, blonde hair, a light suntan.
I reach the dense umbrella-shaped tree with the tiny white flowers that we used to agree would be the ideal place to take cyanide capsules. I lay a flower to rest against the trunk. There is a bench that is positioned under the tree’s canopy. The plaque says:
DEDICATED TO THE LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP OF ARTHUR MOREY AND MAL BRACE.
We used to sit on this bench and joke about Arthur and Mal being homosexuals. And then we’d touch each other.
There was one time when we were hiding in the rock garden, setting fire to things, and we watched two men go behind a bush. At first, we thought it was cool because we were about to witness a real live drug deal. But then they didn’t come out for minutes and the sound they made was of men playing squash.
The only exit from our hiding place would have led us right past them, so we stayed in total silence until they finished. It took four minutes and thirty seconds. The first man came out from the bush and he had his hands in his pockets. The second man waited for about twenty seconds, then he walked out and he was grinning like it was the greatest day of his life.
There are some flies knocking around and the smell of leaves.
I sit on the bench and put my head in my hands. I think about what would be the most interesting way to commit suicide: a skydive on to a Kremlin steeple, hanging from the hanging gardens of Babylon, falling on my own sword at the annual Singleton Park medieval recreation battle. I ruffle my hair and rub my eyes. I want to make it clear to passers-by that I am unhappy.
I think about how, now we’re on revision break, the next time I’ll see Jordana will be in the exam hall. And after that, who knows where she’ll go. She was threatening to go to Swansea College and study sociology. She said she was interested in people. And I may not even stay in Derwen Fawr for sixth form. My parents suggested that I might like to go to Atlantic College to study the International Baccalaureate. I have noticed something totally pointless: both words are thirteen letters long.
I think that if Fred were still alive then at least I could have waited here for a couple of days and eventually Jordana would have turned up. We could have had a chat on neutral ground.
I go inside my head and have a fantasy about someone – maybe a dog-walker, maybe a woman, maybe a man – noticing that I am unhappy, sitting down next to me and telling me a story about their life. The story would be ridiculously traumatic. Maybe someone very close to them died. Died in front of them. Maybe they watched their teenage son or daughter die. Or maybe they were driving the car and their only son was in the back seat, directly behind them, and he had not put his seat belt on and they had not checked whether he had put his seat belt on, which they normally would remember to do, but they were late for yoga – yoga, of all things – and they drove quite quickly and another car pulled out in front of them and although it wasn’t exactly the parent’s fault, they knew that it would probably not have happened if they had been driving more slowly and it was quite a bad crash, but not so bad a collision that it makes seat belts irrelevant, and their son wasn’t wearing a seat belt and his face went into the plastic headrest – it was one of those old square Volvos with the hard plastic headrests – and it was enough to send his nose back into his brain and leave him dying and ugly on the back seat; meanwhile the driver of the other vehicle was already out of his car, rubbing his sore neck, stumbling on to the grass at the side of the road, and the narrator of this story, the parent, was still stuck, strapped into the front seat with a sore neck and a damp neck and a face full of airbag and they are asking the question: ‘Oliver?’ – oh my God, their son has the same name as me – and they’re saying: ‘Oliver, Oliver, are you okay?’
I stay with my head in my hands until the colour of the sky catches up with my mood.
I concentrate on how hungry I am. I think about my stomach eating itself. I bite a chunk from the inside of my cheek. I will swallow anything.
I think about Zoe. About how much she has improved.
I hear some loud barking nearby. I lift my head up. A grey greyhound is glaring at me, straining at its leash, barking arrhythmically. I see the inside of its mouth, its tonsils.
It is being dragged away. The taut lead stretches out of sight behind a wide oak tree. T
he dog’s toenails scuff through the grass as it tries to get purchase.
I stand up and take a few steps so that I can peer around the tree. I see a girl walking away across the lawn, one arm stretched out behind her, gripping the leash. The dog is barking and leaping, fighting the pull at its neck. The girl is in a tug of war with it, leaning forward just to keep her position.
It’s getting dark but I can see that she has brown hair. I walk a step closer. She has brown hair. She is using one of those retractable leashes.
I start running towards her across the grass.
‘Jordana!’ I say. ‘Jordana!’
For this will be that bit where it is getting dark and I mistake a girl for Jordana – a girl with brown hair and a retractable leash – and when the girl turns around I will see that her face is nothing like Jordana’s and she will ask if she knows me and I will look traumatized and say, ‘No, I’m sorry, no, you don’t know me, nobody knows me.’
The dog runs with me, yapping at my heels.
The girl doesn’t turn around. Her arm is still out behind her even though the leash is now slack. I notice dried blood and scratchmarks on her wrist. I stand back. The dog is panting, watching me.
She turns around.
I state the obvious.
‘It is Jordana,’ I say.
She’s wearing a black jumper with red stripes down each arm and a pair of muddy tracksuit bottoms. In her spare hand, she is carrying a see-through plastic bag full of dog shit. Her hair is unwashed.
My belly is cramping. It’s making me wince. Jordana looks at me with what I hope is sympathy.
I explain: ‘I’ve been thinking about telling people that I’ve been thinking about killing myself.’
She doesn’t say anything. She presses a button on the leash that reels the slack in. The wire slithers back into the plastic casing like sucked-up spaghetti. Without taking her eyes off me, she takes a step towards the greyhound, bends her knees and lets it off its leash. It bolts, sprinting off towards the pond. The sound of its paws thumping against the grass is reminiscent of my current heartbeat.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
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