by Ivan Pope
From the open countryside power lines started to run closer together; lorry parks clustered next to shopping arcades; street furniture increased. Allen sat in hypnotised silence as the inexorable growth of the city enveloped them. They were drawn in quickly, surrounded by a network of ramped concrete roads and power substations, canals and traffic lights, more and more, faster and faster as the bus wove through the increasingly dense road system, twisted by camber and centrifuge until the open countryside was gone and they were descending into the core of the city.
On all sides his perspective became limited as clusters of concrete buildings came to dominate his view. The driver, practised in his route, swapped lanes regularly and ducked and dove, now up, now down. The buildings leered at them, now close, now far. Fragments of roads, echoes of schemes planned but never finished, or even seriously embarked upon, drew the eye up side-alleys and into the openings for underground car parks and service roads.
At that time of the morning nothing was quite real. Most of the city still slept as Allen’s bus rushed deeper into the cold grey city, stopping occasionally for incomprehensible reasons in unknowable corners to drop off individuals who quickly disappeared into the warren. Allen pondered his belief that you should never get off the bus until you have to. Never exit any situation before you are made to. Exchanging comfort and security for the unknown is a risk that you don’t have to take, he thought. That morning as he anticipated the end of his journey his mantra worked in two ways: you had to finish the journey; you had to get off at some point.
Watching the outskirts of Belgrade fly past, Allen realised that under every city is a negative city, a reflection of the endless buildings and tower blocks and shopping malls and stations and roads and canals. Under every tower, a smaller mirror version, dug deep into the ground, entombed, and locked away. An entire megalopolis, he thought, that few knew about – but that few included takers and keepers.
He had once asked a civil engineer how much subterranean space there was under London. More than you can imagine, came the answer, tiny spaces and vast football pitch-sized embrasures; staircases and wells; rooms with no windows and arched Roman vestries. Everything that had been built left a trace, a subterranean space.
There were people who sought out these secretive spaces and attempted to penetrate them for their own gratification, seeing in these liminal spaces a sort of man-made cave system, to be explored and mapped in the same manner as vast water-washed limestone scourings under the Chilterns, entered through an impossible child-sized hole in a city hillside, dangerous for the potential brick fall or onrushing of a forgotten underground stream in flood.
From his vantage point high on the bus, Allen took the opportunity to peer into every window, garden, backyard and private space revealed to him. A woman tumbled out of a doorway in jeans and bra, fell and held herself from collapse for a moment by her fingertips, then caught her balance and turned and shouted into the black cut-out of a doorway. Through a window a couple lay on a bed, entwined in the grey morning light, naked. The man looked up from his position underneath his partner and caught Allen’s eye, accusingly. Over there a child emerged, blinking, into the morning light, a school satchel on its back, socks pulled up tight above shining black shoes. A fat man sipped an espresso on the doorstep of a suburban bar with a blinking neon beer advertisement, Flitch Pilsner.
Then the bus turned onto a wide, tree-lined avenue and he realised they must be close to the centre of the city. Allen pulled his jacket closer around him and anticipated getting up and off into this strange city. They travelled down this thoroughfare for a while and then, suddenly, with a whooshing of brakes, the bus pulled up sharp, pneumatics going whish. Then an impossibly sharp turn took them into a tiny alley where the sides of the bus almost touched up against the grey striated brickwork on either side. Allen, in slight shock, found himself staring for a second into the eyes of an old man, with no hair, in a vest, who stared out from a grimy, almost impenetrable window. Then he was gone. More whish, whish, whish, and the bus backed with a bip, bip, bip into one of dozens of coach parking spaces in a cavernous bus station.
Allen pushed his legs out in front of him before he stood up, stretching them tenderly in the aisle as he waited for the doors to open and the crush to clear. He scanned the view out of the window, looking for a skinny bloke wearing a leather jacket, waiting by the police booth. You can’t miss him, the contact had said, because he won’t miss you. He’d better not.
The passengers, thrown into intimacy during the long strange night, were suddenly strangers again, looking for their welcoming parties or shuffling off to find buses and taxis or the shared cars of family and friends. As always, he felt isolated, a stranger not only to the town but to the language and to the manner of things, to himself. He tried to imagine what he looked like, standing there, waiting for his luggage. He tried to appear confident but that involved making decisions. He wanted to take his time, to find a coffee and a sandwich, to find a vantage point from which he could survey the city centre. It seemed important to get his bearings before making the next part of his journey.
A hand clapped him on the back.
‘Allen?’ He turned quickly. A skinny man with bad teeth in a leather jacket smiled at him.
‘Hello. You look for me?’ He made a steering wheel motion with his hands. ‘Allen?’ he said.
‘That’s me,’ said Allen.
‘Boss sent me. Car near here,’ said the driver. He stuck out his hand. ‘Stefan,’ he announced. Allen shook the offered hand weakly and Stefan motioned to follow him.
He didn’t like the centres of towns. It seemed as if every square foot was spoken for or fought over, but he knew that there were always corners and shards that were up for grabs, overlooked and forgotten. On the outskirts, in the suburbs, in the industrial zones there were bigger spaces, basements, nooks and crannies where a sort of life continued unseen. He was interested in this architecture of space, of places where an underclass operated.
They exited the bus station, Allen walking behind Stefan, and crossed a few streets before entering a public square where a large black Mercedes was parked badly, half on the pavement. It was the type of car that East European lowlife drove, Allen thought. Stefan opened the boot and Allen dumped his bag among assorted junk. They climbed in. The floor was littered with cigarette packets and paper junk and it smelled in the musty way of cars that were over used, that were almost lived in smelled.
Allen settled into his seat while Stefan negotiated a complex route through the city.
They drove quickly out from the centre and by way of an inner ring road to a housing estate. Stefan pulled to a sudden halt in front of one of the vast slabs of flats. He gestured upwards. ‘Seven floor. Seven,’ he said. Allen climbed out and retrieved his bag from the boot. He slammed it shut and banged on it. Stefan leant his head out of the window and shouted ‘Party later.’ Then he gunned the engine and was gone.
Allen looked up at the block. These were the buildings he’d seen, in the distance, from the motorway. Up close they were hulking monsters from an old school of socialist architecture. Pile ’em high and fill ’em cheap, he thought. He looked across the landscape. There was nothing much else out here except more of the same, circling the city, each block surrounded by identical towers that stretched out across the hillside in serried ranks. There were more blocks beyond these, as if an insane authority had decided to cover the whole landscape in big white buildings with minimal variations between them. These towering structures, the worst but somehow also the best East European architecture, made in the service of a nation where such ideas could be imposed from above. They had crammed their breeding young into these warrens, built when this was still Tito’s model socialist paradise. It didn’t look much like a paradise.
They stood solid on the landscape, rooted to the rock under the surface. After the war in the great dream of state building, engineers and gangs of displaced people were brought in to create a workers�
�� realm. These labourers weren’t slaves, but there was little choice. You worked and you ate. Otherwise, maybe the chance to walk across the border to Greece, to try and reach Germany, but few took that route. They saw the plans, the gleaming modern metropolis, and they worked, they dug and they carried. This was no Chinese-style mass mobilisation. Tito wanted to emulate Stalin, he trained drivers and construction workers by the thousand. Together they excavated deep into the soil, drilled and blew out the bedrock and planted what became Eastern Belgrade deep into the rock. Under the buildings they constructed shelters against the coming onslaught from the West, a place where every citizen could take refuge. There was to be no Swiss solution, the citizens were not to be trusted with guns, just hidey-holes in case the capitalists came for the country in the night.
The hidey-holes were built but locked against intruders. The cadres initially held the keys. But as years passed and these huge spaces were never called on to fulfil their purpose, those keys started to be traded on the black market along with cheese and tobacco and wine. The dark caverns under the feet of the tower dwellers filled up with whatever needed to be kept away from the ever-wider gaze of the police. Things that needed deep, dark containment were taken down and locked away. They were the perfect spaces to get on with your business away from the ever-present watching eyes of the state.
Allen strode into the building through double glass doors to a smell of stale cabbage and alpine rose disinfectant mixed. He looked around for the lifts, but when he got over to them a large sign proclaimed them out of use in language he could not read but which he could well understand. Same all over, he thought, and started towards the stairs, his bag over his shoulder. Concrete step followed concrete step and he started to sweat slightly as he climbed higher, floor by indistinguishable floor. By the time he got to the fifth level he realised there was someone leaning over the banister high above him looking down. He stopped for a moment to get his breath, leaned on the steel banister and craned his head back, looking upwards at the silhouette above, but couldn’t make out who it was. Then he slowed his pace for the final two floors while his mind raced to anticipate the meeting. He took a glance up and the face came suddenly into focus. He knew this face. His heart accelerated.
He hadn’t anticipated knowing the contact but he realised that it suddenly made a lot of sense. Flushed and sweaty from the climb, he stood and gasped for air. Roger looked down at him with a degree of hauteur.
‘Roger?’ he said. ‘What the fuck!’
‘Come in, old chap. Come in. It has been a while.’ And as if they were meeting for a drink at his London club, old friends or colleagues, Roger motioned behind him. One of the doors that lined the corridor stood wide open.
Roger
Allen had met him in prison. Roger was doing a stretch for some form of abuse, something involving abduction, Allen was never clear. Roger never talked about it and, if asked, he would wave the crime away with an exasperated flutter of his hand, as if it was all something of a misunderstanding. He was educated and erudite, worth a bit of anyone’s time. He hadn’t been born into privilege, but a good teacher had spotted potential and pushed him into a grammar school from where he’d scraped into Cambridge. He turned himself into a typical lower-middle-class graduate, the type that rose with effortless ease through the ranks of whatever organisation they first encountered. Roger became a large, solid hunk of an Englishman with floppy blond hair and an inane grin. His chosen profession was in the civil service. Anyway, he had landed on his feet. Eventually he left the civil service and somehow found himself a contract working for his old department as they rolled out some form of support through Eastern Europe. This had become both his opportunity and his undoing.
He had a full beard, short, blond, and dark around the edges. Blond hair gave him the remains of a boyish look, though the rough straw-like quality of it also made him seem more grown up than Allen felt. Allen wore his hair cropped short. Although he often had stubble by the afternoon it always made him feel untidy and grubby.
Roger had a fruity voice. Allen was sure he was putting it on, but it was the sort of pretension that had so grown on him that it had become part of his personality. It fitted with his girth, straining to escape his shirt. He was a type, large but not horribly fat. Dandruff on his shoulders. Very English, uncomfortable in life but comfortable in his large suit. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.
Roger was not a nice man. Not because of the prison or because of anything that had ever been done to him. He was, on the surface, a lovely chap, an old-fashioned type, who would go out of his way to help you out. Back then when they’d shared a cell, Roger had been sweetness and light itself. But there was always the incontrovertible issue of what Roger had been in for, which led to fundamental questions about what went on in Roger’s head. And more than what went on in Roger’s head, what went on in Roger’s life. The nastiness was hidden deep inside him. He had bad interests, as he put it.
Roger led Allen into the flat. The BBC World Service played on the radio, a story about two British men who were handed over to the US military in Afghanistan turning up in Morocco. They had accused the British intelligence services of being complicit in organising their torture. The Foreign Office had issued a statement saying that they never ordered or condoned torture.
‘Spent much time in Belgrade before?’ Roger said.
‘What?’ said Allen, realising he was listening too hard to the radio and not really listening. ‘Oh, none.’
‘Lovely place. Full of thieves and murderers, but great for business. They’ll rip you off good and proper if you don’t watch them. You have to come down hard, you understand? Hard.’ He punched one fist into the palm of the other hand and looked Allen in the eye. Then he laughed.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not like that here. Actually, it’s a bit of a soft town. The Albanian boys have sorted them out. Drink?’
‘Whatever,’ said Allen.
Roger picked up a bottle and two glasses from the sideboard and gestured towards Allen.
‘How are you doing? You seem to have found an interesting career.’
‘I’m working on it,’ said Allen. ‘How about you?’
Roger paced around the room with large strides, past the windows that overlooked other similar blocks, round the sofa and back beside Allen. Then he said, ‘I’ve got this flat. I bought it cheap, they started to privatise everything. It’s not the nicest of places as you will have noticed, but it’s quiet – I don’t get bothered. It’s like a home from home. I come out and drink myself stupid sometimes. I’ve taken to the local brew. Anyway, somewhere along the line I decided I wanted somewhere to stay, and I found this crap-hole. Funny thing is, I really like it.’
He did sound contented. It wasn’t as if there was any point in making it up to Allen. Why would he be interested in what Allen thought of his circumstances?
‘It’s like my holiday home, if you like this sort of holiday. It’s my corporate headquarters as well.’
He laughed at this joke, then said, ‘I’ve got a girl here now, too.’
Allen took the proffered whisky and sat down in a fat armchair.
‘I’m not really surprised,’ he found himself saying. ‘I thought you’d land on your feet.’
‘Well, it’s taken a long time,’ said Roger. ‘After I got out I went back to London. I thought I could pick up where I left off, but that was all closed off to me. I couldn’t even get the time of day from my crowd. I went on the piss for a while, thought I was going to become one of those guys you see on the street. Then one day I got an offer of some work out here, and I never looked back.’
‘Have you still got that house in London?’ Allen said. ‘The Glory House?’
Roger scowled at him. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But I can’t live there now.’
In their cell together, during their prison time, Roger had told Allen a story of his missing cousin. He said that, when he was seventeen, he had quite incredibly inhe
rited a house that had belonged to a great aunt. She had lived unexpectedly on and on, into her hundreds. Nobody else from her family or friends had lived anything like as long, leaving her beached and alone for decades. It was a large, gloomy house in North London, no use to a seventeen-year-old boy. His mother insisted that he offered it as a home for her recently widowed sister and he did so, grudgingly.
He never forgot the house was his. That was much of what mattered. It gave him heft and ground, it stood him apart from anyone he met and those who came to know him. After university he moved in with his aunt and cousin. Sometime around the end of the last century, when she was a teenager, his cousin had disappeared or, as Roger put it, run away with a man from the motor trade.
After that life had changed in the big house, Roger said. He and his aunt became closer, relying on each other. His life set him apart from his family, who had remained in their small, tidy, middle-class semi-detached and terraced houses. He stopped seeing much of them. After a while he never saw them at all. Roger took his own route through life.
‘But what the fuck …’ He stopped suddenly and called out. ‘Alicia.’