by Becky Blake
I climbed the stairs, then stood for a moment in the doorway looking in at them: at the home they’d made out of found objects, at the family they’d made out of found people. If I ever wanted to really belong on the inside of this door frame, I had to patch things up with Annika.
Everyone was sitting in a circle around the table, and I joined them. “Hola,” I said.
The squatters made muted gestures of welcome. There was a baguette on the table and an open jar of strawberry jam. I was hungry again, but I didn’t touch the bread. I hadn’t helped Annika with the shopping. Maybe that’s why everyone seemed pissed.
“Hey,” I said to Pau. “Did the lizard girl come back to visit you?”
“No, not yet.” He gave me a small smile.
“Jane, there’s something we want to talk to you about,” Annika said.
“Okay.” My stomach dropped. This was some kind of intervention. Maybe they were going to kick me out.
“We live here together like a collective.”
I didn’t like the condescension in her voice.
“And we all have to do our part to make things run smoothly.”
“Sorry. I know I haven’t been helping out much for the last couple of days. There was just something going on. And now it’s over.”
“I have things going on too,” said John. “We all have things going on.”
Beside him, Enzo nodded.
I looked down at my hands. I felt like I was in the principal’s office waiting for a scolding to end.
“I found a man’s wallet beside your bed,” said Annika. “Where did it come from?”
I didn’t answer. I hadn’t technically stolen it, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me.
She waited for a second and then continued. “Well, I think we all know where it came from.”
I looked up. “Do you want me to leave?”
“Jane,” Pau said, “that’s not what we want. Try to be calm.”
Even Pau was being patronizing. I was sick of the squatters acting so superior. They were thieves, just like me; living in a building that wasn’t theirs. Annika called squatting “a justified crime,” but it was still stealing. All stealing could be justified if you looked hard enough for a reason.
“Jane,” Pau said again, and we locked eyes. He took a breath, and I did the same.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m being calm. What do you guys want me to do?”
“Well,” said Annika. Sylvain was holding her hand. “If you want to stay here we just need you to make a commitment to help out with the cleaning and shopping, and we also need you to stop stealing things. If the police come to evict us and they find stolen goods here, we could all go to jail.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“And, if you need money, just tell us,” Pau said.
John snorted. “I’m not giving her money.”
“Just tell me,” Pau said.
“Okay.” I turned to Annika. “I promise I’ll clean up the whole place tomorrow. And do the shopping.”
“Good.” She nodded.
I looked around the table. The squatters seemed to be waiting for me to say something else. “And I’ll stop stealing stuff.”
“Great!” said Sylvain. He squeezed Annika’s hand.
John was leaning way back in his chair, picking his teeth. I hoped he would fall. “Just make sure you clean up the pigeon shit this time,” he said. “It’s everywhere, and it’s poison if you breathe it in.”
“Fine. I’ll clean it up tomorrow.”
Pau stood and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re very happy you are going to stay.”
I knew this might be true for him, but I doubted if everyone felt the same way. I glanced around the table at the others. Together, they seemed to form a unit – one that was complete without me. If I forced myself to stay at the table, maybe the feeling would pass, but at the moment I just couldn’t deal with it.
“I actually have to get going,” I said. “I’m meeting a friend downtown.” I touched Pau’s hand and he released me.
Annika gave me a saintly look. “I’ll save you some dinner.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t know why she thought her lifestyle was so much better than regular people’s. Except for some pigeon shit in the corners, it was almost exactly the same.
In the sleeping apartment across the hall, I changed into a short dress from one of the Free Store boxes: it was the colour of a raspberry Popsicle, or more like the colour a Popsicle would leave on a tongue. I picked out a black purse and hung it over my shoulder so it would look like I had some money – more than just the handful of coins I had left from the wallet.
Downstairs I grabbed some pens and a marker in case I wanted to make some sketches for the mural. At the little sink in the corner, I washed my face and smoothed down my hair. When I was with Peter I’d been pretty – the kind of pretty men followed with their eyes – but I didn’t know if I was anymore: not without makeup and needing a haircut, not with wrinkled second-hand clothes. The scar on my cheek was shiny now, a little initial signed in metallic pink.
I went outside and started toward the city centre. It was my cancelled wedding night. I thought I might sleep with Atlas if I could find him.
17
By the time I got to La Rambla, it was dark and most of the human statues had packed up for the day. I went to the Black Sheep to check if Atlas was there and found him sitting with a loud bunch of buskers at a long table.
“Hey, where’ve you been?” he asked.
“In Gràcia,” I said. “Mostly.”
“With Manu?”
“No. Manu’s gone.”
“Here, come and join us.” Atlas made space for me to squeeze in beside him on the bench and poured me a glass of beer from a pitcher. “Salud.”
“Salud.” I moved my glass in a half-circle to include everyone at the table. I recognized the operatic chef busker who juggled kitchen knives, and the woman who dressed up as a giant butterfly. I wasn’t sure who the others were. It was impossible to tell without their costumes on.
The buskers were speaking in a lot of different languages, and it was hard to follow their conversations. I drank my beer fast, and Atlas refilled my glass. The bar was noisy, with patrons standing around barrel tables, yelling over ’90s rock music. A hot guy across the room looked over at me.
“I think I need a gun,” Atlas said.
“What?”
“A gun. Something to scare off the fucking Romanians.”
“What’s going on with the Romanians?”
“They want my spot. They’ve been sending their mobster thugs every day and it’s scaring off the tourists.”
I pictured Atlas and the other statues on La Rambla springing into action, pulling out firearms from under their costumes, tourists screaming. “Can’t you just move to a new location?”
“No! Why should I move? I’m not scared of those assholes. It took me over a year to get that spot. It’s the best place on the whole strip.” Atlas pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and fanned them in my direction. I decided I wasn’t going to sleep with him.
The hot guy glanced over again. He was wearing a black T-shirt, and part of a tattoo was visible at the edge of his sleeve.
“Can I get out for a second?” I said to Atlas. “I have to pee.”
Walking past the guy’s table, I could feel his eyes on me. I waited for a couple of minutes outside the locked door of the women’s bathroom, but no one came out. The men’s bathroom was open and empty, so I went in. The stall I entered was covered in graffiti: dirty pictures and boastful messages. One guy was bragging about how he’d slept with ten different women who were all in the bar that night.
After leaving the stall and washing up, I found a clear space of wall above the mirror and pulled a marker from my purse. It squeak
ed as I wrote the letters in bold thick lines.
Just as I finished, the guy with the black T-shirt walked in. He looked at the marker in my hand, then the word on the wall.
“Who’s a liar?” he asked in English.
I put the marker back in my purse. “I don’t know. Guys?”
He nodded, then walked over to the urinal and turned his back. “I have some spray paint in my bag,” he said, “if you want to make it bigger.”
I paused on my way to the door. He had nice shoes, good jeans, was fit and solid. “No, that’s okay. Thanks though.”
He finished peeing, then zipped up and turned around. “Women can be liars too, you know.” He went to the sink to wash his hands. We looked at each other in the mirror.
“Maybe,” I said. “But not me.” That was a lie. I’d spent most of my life pretending to be other people, acting differently from how I really was.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me something true.”
I thought for a moment. “I’m a thief.”
“Ha. I think you’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
Another man walked into the bathroom and frowned at us. I stepped out through the door and the guy in the T-shirt followed me. Atlas raised an eyebrow from across the bar.
“So you’re a thief and you write graffiti in men’s toilets? That’s what you do?”
“More or less,” I said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a photographer.”
“That’s nice.”
“I also paint graffiti, but not in men’s toilets.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. I can show you, if you want.”
I looked down, studying the composition of beach sand, cigarette butts and toothpicks on the floor. I hadn’t really flirted with anyone for two years, and I had to force myself to look up.
“Okay,” I said. “You can show me.”
Our motorcycle helmets bumped together as we jerked forward into the night, first through the chaotic city centre, then up the curving mountain roads of Tibidabo, the lights of the city receding below us. At each turn, the bike seemed to tilt further to the left or to the right, and I relaxed into the motion until it felt like rocking – until I thought, This is what my life is like: sitting astride the moment, a single headlight moving through the darkness. It wasn’t all bad. Inside this particular moment, nothing hurt. It was the wishing I could stay like this forever, that’s what hurt.
At the top of the mountain, Xavi parked the bike. He was Catalan, and he told me he would rather speak English than Spanish.
“Fine by me,” I said. “Unfortunately, I don’t speak any Catalan.”
“You should learn,” he said, “if you’re living here.” He stooped to pick up a pine cone and placed it in my palm. “Pinya.”
“Pinya.” It wasn’t a very useful word, but it was a start.
I tucked the pine cone into my purse as we followed a series of signs that led down a path to a lookout. When we arrived, Xavi pointed into the distance at some ugly contorted faces spray-painted onto a wall. “You see down there?” he asked.
“Did you paint that?”
He nodded. “I hate the idea that millions of people follow these signs, that they all come to this same point and take the same picture. Why should the city be telling people where to go? And why do people listen? It’s like we’re just waiting for another dictator to tell us what to do. Like we didn’t learn anything the last time.”
Pau had told me a few things about Catalan history – how the language and culture had been banned under Franco – but I didn’t know enough to say anything intelligent. “So you ruin the view?” I asked.
“Yes. If I put something ugly in their way, it forces people to find a new perspective. Their own perspective, you know? Like this one.” He pulled me off the path and over some uneven uphill ground. Through a gap in the branches I could see the towers of the Sagrada Família church lit up below us like a sandcastle on fire. He put his hands in front of my face and made a frame. I could feel his breath on my neck.
“It’s nice,” I said.
He dropped his hands onto my shoulders, then down to my waist. When I turned toward him he kissed me in a way that felt almost like there was love passing between us, but I knew that couldn’t be true. I took a step back. It was the first time in two years that I’d kissed someone other than Peter. Maybe the sensation of love was coming from me – maybe I’d forgotten how to kiss someone without it.
Xavi and I looked at each other.
“Do you want to paint something?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He flipped open his shoulder bag and pulled out a can of spray paint. After shaking it, he handed it over. “Hold it like this,” he said, adjusting the can to a vertical position. “It helps minimize the splatter.”
We walked back toward his motorcycle along the main path. Every time we came to a sign with an arrow on it, I added another arrow pointing the other way. Xavi was spray-painting the word català over every sign that was in Spanish.
When we put on our helmets again to ride back down the mountain, Xavi reached over and opened my visor. “It’s better like this,” he said.
I climbed on the back of the bike and squeezed my knees in tight, then wrapped my arms around his waist. I could feel his rib cage moving in and out, the muscles of his stomach tensing and releasing. He flicked up the kickstand and we drove off down the mountain, circling around and around, like a screw tightening into the city below.
At the bottom we idled at a red light.
“Where do you live?” Xavi asked.
I waited for a moment, hoping the light would turn green and we could drive away from the question.
“That’s okay,” he said. “We can go to my place.”
Xavi’s apartment turned out to be just a few blocks from the squat. He parked and locked up his motorcycle on the sidewalk, then opened the front door of his building. He had a lot of keys on his key ring.
“I hope you’re in good shape,” he said. “I live in the attic. It’s 113 stairs to the top.”
When I stopped partway up to catch my breath, he pressed me against the wall and kissed me for so long that the timed light in the hallway went out and we had to grope our way to the next landing in darkness. The same thing happened twice more as we climbed, and by the time we got to the top we were almost undressed.
We crossed a small stretch of rooftop terrace to get to his front door. Inside his tiny apartment, the sloping walls of the single room were covered in black-and-white photographs. More photos hung clipped to a clothesline that crossed the room. Xavi set the helmets on a shelf and pulled me toward a futon in the corner. His warm skin was sticking to me in places: at my wrist, across my belly, along the inside of my thigh.
After being with only Peter for so long, sex with Xavi was like a new activity, one where every sensation was different: the pressure of his lips, the coarse hair on his chest, the sound of his breathing, his smell, his rhythm, his taste. When we were finished I lay back on the bed, my heart beating fast. It was the kind of sex I hadn’t had for a long time: urgent and basic. One-night-stand sex. Something I had thought I would never do again.
I looked over at Xavi, and he laid a hand on my leg, as if he wanted to make sure I didn’t get up. We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. We both knew that we were going to do it again in a few minutes. That we were going to do it as many times as we could until one of us fell asleep.
By the time I slid out of the bed it was starting to get light. Several of Xavi’s photographs had come unstuck from the walls. I remembered a pair of them slicing down through the air like swooping birds. I started to look for my clothes.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep a bit?” Xavi asked. “Maybe eat breakfast in a while?”
“No, that’s okay. I live near here. I think I’m just going to go home.”
“Do you have a phone number?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to take my number, or …”
I did want his number. But I knew if I had it, I’d just want to see him again and again until, eventually, I’d start to depend on him for feeling good and then he’d disappear.
“I’m sure we’ll run into each other,” I said. Probably we wouldn’t.
I slipped the raspberry-coloured dress over my head and pulled it into place. Most of the photographs hanging around the room were pictures of rough-looking elderly people, their eyes gleaming with a hard wisdom. “You’re good,” I said. “The photos.”
“Thanks.” He glanced at the photos, then back at me. “Are you really going to leave?”
“Yeah. I have to go.”
“Okay. Should I be checking your pockets? Your purse?”
I reached into my purse. “I was planning to take this with me, but I guess you caught me.” I set the pine cone on his bedside table.
At the door, I bent down to adjust my shoe and pulled a can of paint with a red lid from his bag, then slipped it into my purse with exaggerated stealth. I stood up and glanced over at Xavi to see if he’d been watching me. He definitely had, and his smile nearly drew me back to the bed.
“Thanks for taking me up the mountain,” I said. “It was really fun.”
I let myself out, then paused on the other side of his door, remembering how good it had felt to hold on to Xavi as we drove up Tibidabo – to be two people sharing the same headlight for a moment. But I couldn’t hold on to him forever. One good night was one good night – no more, no less.
I crossed the rooftop terrace, then started down the dim-lit stairs, counting softly as I went. At the bottom, I pushed open the front door and stepped out into the morning. There were 113 stairs. Just like he’d said.
Part Three
18
The city seemed to have layers that became saturated with detail once I noticed them. First, it had been street people, filling the corners like swept-up piles of trampled flowers. Then half-open purses and bags had appeared, their most valuable contents rising to the top like cream. Treasure in the garbage had popped up next, and now, as I walked back to the squat from Xavi’s, the neighbourhood was overflowing with graffiti: colourful tags and stencilled images, quotes and slogans, declarations of love. The styles of different artists wove through the streets leaving trails I could follow.