by Michel Faber
England’s Englishness was tourist brochure stuff, history book stuff, like the fairytale palaces of Krakow surrendering to acid rain and Kodak flashes, like Queen Anna Jagiellonka, buried ever deeper by wars and ideology. The English Queen was only good for putting on tea-towels and coffee mugs for Americans to take home, and all those castles were just crumbling to rubble, waiting to be used as backdrops in Hollywood movies about Robin Hood. Kasia had seen Hollywood’s latest Robin Hood movie in Warsaw. Robin of Sherwood was played by New Yorker Kevin Costner, and he’d brought his own black sidekick to medieval England, just to give all the black moviegoers back home somebody to root for. If that wasn’t colonisation, what was?
The band she’d come to see tonight was Spiritualized. They were, according to the Virgin Megastore, one of the Next Big Things; the tardiness with which the music papers reached Poland would ensure that by the time Jan, Krzys, Alicja and her other friends read the feature articles on Spiritualized in the NME and Melody Maker, Kasia would be on hand to describe having seen them play. She’d better reread the articles herself first, though, to help her remember.
In the magazine articles, the godly Kraftwerk were invoked as influences, the Balanescu Quartet, My Bloody Valentine, ancient Sufi music, Terry Riley. In the confines of the club, Spiritualized were none of these things, of course. The sounds they made, hosed at high volume through an oversized PA, achieved the shimmering din of anonymity. Labouring intently at their guitars and keyboards, they projected beautiful and intricate arcs into an Elysian field of their own imagination, while all around them the distorted thicket of decibels walled them in, as private inside there as prisoners in an exercise yard. Kasia had been to gigs in Germany, in Hungary; in Poland of course: all different flavours of groups, all sounding much like this: Sisyphean chord progressions never scaling the cacophonous haze, a ringing in the ears, a turgid rumble of bass and drunk people braying, ‘Mind my drink!’ ‘D’you want another drink?’ ‘Is the bar crowded?’ ‘Fuck, I’ve spilt it!’ ‘No, it’s all right, I’m just tired’: the language of rock’n’roll.
Spiritualized T-shirts had been on sale before the band started playing. Kasia hadn’t even looked at them: she wasn’t going to pay £14.99. Even £2 for a drink was a bit much: she paid it just once, before attracting a guy to buy the rest for her.
She’d been through this pas de deux many times before, in Germany, in Hungary, in Poland, at other gigs in London: the stumbling ballet of nightclub courtship. The ritual was played out in semi-darkness, in a claustrophobic bunker toxic with cigarette smoke, alcohol and body odour. Why here rather than somewhere airy and open? Because here all communication must be shouted straight into the ear-hole, in hoarse abbreviated sentences. A truce on all nuances, then; an amnesty on any finer expectations; the struggle was to be merely heard rather than understood.
‘Poland!’ she yelled into his ear, giving his Concorde nose a clear flight path to her luminous bosom.
‘Holland!’ he confirmed, nodding semaphorically.
‘Poland!’ she yelled again.
‘Gotcha! Gotcha!’
His name was something she would not remember a week from now, and he lived in a hotel called the Delta. Katarzyna had thought that in England only wealthy people or tourists lived in hotels, but when she arrived at the Delta with her man, she found that there was room for the poor as well. Not much room, though: her man lived with five other men in a rabbit hutch five floors up, an attic used not for stashing broken sinks, toilet cisterns and other dubious prostheses, but for superfluous humans.
‘Kasia, this is Dougie, Tim.’
‘Pull up a piece of floor, babe!’ A crewcut white man and a fuzz-headed black man raised beer cans in greeting.
The floor was indeed the only place to sit, as the bunk beds claimed most of the room, three squat stacks of old wood and bedding like monstrous oblong Big Macs. A chest of drawers drooling socks and shirtsleeves claimed much of what was left; on top of it a portable CD player rattled out the Manic Street Preachers and Nirvana. Dougie and Tim were hunched in a litter of beer cans and cigarette butts, their eyes plexiglassy under sweaty brows. Kasia’s man began to explain that Pete, the occupant of the bunk nearest the washbasinette, was missing, whereabouts unknown; Dougie explained more succinctly: ‘He’s a fucking nutter!’ The other two were out buying more beer and had better not drink it all before coming back, the cunts.
Katarzyna decided she would not be sleeping here tonight after all, and gave her man a casual, reassuring hug around his midriff, to let him know that he could relax, sit down, open a beer for her. She wasn’t anxious about her safety: the smell of impotence was so pungent here that it cut right through the miasma of alcohol, smoke and unwashed T-shirts.
‘Where are you from, Tim?’ she enquired, settling her back into the bony sofa of her man’s parted thighs.
‘Papua New Guinea,’ the black man grinned. ‘You?’
‘Poland.’ He looked a bit confused, so she added, ‘Home of Solidarity, you know?’
‘You speak Poland language?’
‘Sure. Of course.’
‘Speak us some Poland language, babe.’
‘Ja rozmawiam po Polsku i ty mnie nie rozumisz.’
‘Far out.’
‘How about some Papua New Guinea language?’
‘I speak only English. English and Pidgin. Pidgin’s not a language. You know Pidgin?’
‘Who says it’s not a language?’
‘Everybody knows that. Pidgin’s just shit English, know what I mean? It’s imitation English but … just shit. Bipo mi kam singaut na yu no i stop. Yu go we?’
‘Sounds like a different language to me.’
‘Bull-shit, bu-u-ull-shit! Bepo – that’s “before”, right? Mi kam – “me come”, right? You see what’s goin’ on? English is the real thing. Anyone thinks I’m better off in fuckin’ New Guinea needs their fuckin’ head read. This is the place for me. Right, Dougie?’
‘Right, Tim.’
The other two men arrived with the beer reinforcements. They had been delayed by one of them falling victim to a mysterious exhaustion which made him attempt sleep on every public bench and shop doorstep. He now crawled into his bunk, pleading for the music and the light to be switched off.
‘Fuck you, man!’ jeered Dougie. ‘I have to put up with your fucking snoring all fucking night, every fucking night, right? So you can put up with my fucking music, right?’
These men had been living with each other in this toiletless toilet of a room for two years. They were the guinea pigs of endless unemployment, subsisting half insane in their vertiginous pen.
Kasia and her man were almost horizontal now, their heads propped up on pillows dragged off one of the beds. His arms were around her breasts, from behind, loosely. His wrists pressed vaguely down on her nipples through the fabric of her top; he lacked the courage to use his hands, except to open cans of beer for her and light cigarettes.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking,’ he crooned teasingly. ‘You’re still a baby.’
‘Yes, a very big baby,’ she teased back, stretching against him. ‘One and a half metres.’
He pressed his face momentarily into her hair, with no noise of a kiss, then tipped his head back and let the alcohol drain into his palpitating throat. Kasia turned and looked up at him indulgently, maternally almost. Her own country was a morass of drunken male despair; she was used to it. She realised now that it must be the same the world over: the nominal countries demarcated so distinctly on maps were in fact covered over by an ocean of alcoholic male despair. It was Kasia’s mission to sail on that ocean, keeping her feet dry and her eyes open for every little Ararat.
I must write that down, she thought.
‘You got a pen?’ she asked her man.
‘No,’ he said. Kasia looked around the room from where she lay, but didn’t really expect to see a pen. Apart from anything else, the pall of smoke could hardly have been thicker if some over-zealous milit
iaman had thrown tear gas into the room. It was even difficult to make out if the life-size Baywatch poster of a topless Pamela Anderson was misty by itself or through poor visibility. Kasia blinked and squinted at the elusive nipples.
Dougie asked: ‘You here on holiday or what?’
‘I’m working in my uncle’s restaurant. The last waitress he had, quit very suddenly.’
‘How come?’
‘It was sexual … sexual ha – harassment?’
‘Your uncle a sleazebag?’
‘Maybe. I didn’t ask him. I think it was the customers. I don’t know.’
Her man was sort of touching her now, the alcohol having calibrated him to that magic notch just short of comatose sleep where he had the confidence to cup his palms over her breasts. She rubbed her head gently against his neck.
‘I’ve got some applications in,’ Dougie was saying. ‘I’m on the shortlist in a couple places.’
‘Jesus Christ, please, can you turn the fuckin’ lights out and let me sleep!’ came the voice from inside the layers of Big Mac.
‘You got to be super-mobile these days,’ Dougie elaborated, ‘for the top jobs. If they can smell on you that you got anything holding you back, they don’t wanna know. You gotta be prepared to live inside a car with a mobile phone, sleep where they put you. That’s why I’m biding my time in temporary accommodation like this. I’ve got this girl that wants to settle down with me, fucking beautiful girl, but short on brains, you know? She works part time in a What Everyone Wants store. She don’t understand you need more than that to make it in this world …’
The caresses of Katarzyna’s man seemed to come from far away, remote control commands which lost strength and clarity as they travelled through a million miles of alcoholic space. We bring you greetings from the planet Cygnus, his fingers seemed to be saying as they fumbled a purchase on the damp hillocks of her bosom. And yet, for all that, it was nice to get some greetings from a distant planet.
All he wanted from her was sex. His clubfooted inability to vault over the language barrier and his typically British fear of deep waters rendered him harmless compared to her friends in Poland, who all wanted much, much more from her than mere sex, and had ways of punishing her for not surrendering it. She was used to feeling her soul under scrutiny from all angles; boys intent on disclosing the meaning of human existence snapped her back to attention if she let her eyes drop momentarily; girls did the same, while also taking note of that extra centimetre of fat on her thighs, those dark shadows under her eyes, that tense exchange she’d just had behind closed doors. Friendships poked around for the vein in her heart, trying to find a way in so they could fix her up – infusion, exfusion, transfusion. No one could resist the urge to tamper. This English guy just wanted to fall asleep next to her, or on top of her. Nothing could be simpler.
One of the men who had gone out for more beer was asking her questions, trying to verify his conviction that capitalism had turned Poland into as bad a place as England. He meant the divide between the haves and the have-nots: like many Western foreigners, he was getting a bit nostalgic about communism, a system he’d never known.
‘Yes, things are bad in Poland now, if you’re not very rich,’ agreed Kasia. She was sleepy: a meaningless stock response was easiest. ‘People stand in front of shop windows, looking at all the goods they can’t afford to buy. The goods are like things in an art gallery … or no, like in a movie. Like a big Hollywood movie.’
‘Wow: that’s pure capitalism, right?’
‘Right,’ she yawned, but she didn’t really think so. It was human nature to look in shop windows; it was the eternal way of the world to be too poor to buy what you wanted most. Pure capitalism was something which hadn’t reached Poland yet, but it would soon. She could see it everywhere here. It was when people had less interest in what was available than in what might soon become available – when they hankered only after the things which would make what they already possessed obsolete and undesirable.
‘At least turn the music down, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Tim, turn the music up for our little snoring friend.’
‘I’m not your fuckin’ slave, man. Leave ’im alone.’
‘Aaww, don’t be like that, Timmy-boy.’
‘I’m not your fuckin’ boy.’
‘Aaww … have another beer.’
‘There’s no more fuckin’ beer.’
‘Well, let’s go out and get some, then.’
‘Too fuckin’ drunk, man.’
‘The shops are shut now anyway,’ added the other man who had gone out before.
‘Give up!’ moaned the man swaddled in his bunk. ‘Today is over. It’s tomorrow already.’
Tim the Papuan was collapsing into a compact bundle, his head and arms slipping out of sight between his updrawn legs.
‘Penis, penis,’ he seemed to be mumbling, making Katarzyna snort involuntary laughter and cigarette smoke.
‘He’s saying, “Pinis, pinis,”’ her man murmured in her ear. ‘It’s Pidgin for “finish” – the end.’
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ yawned Kasia. Her man shifted sluggishly beneath her; Tim was hauling himself into his bunk; Nirvana had stopped playing all by themselves; a snore started up in one corner of the room and Dougie said nothing. By consensus, then, it was bedtime.
‘Down one flight of stairs,’ said her man, squinting up at her as if trying to fix her features in his mind. ‘There’s a big trolley of linen outside, you can’t miss it.’
Kasia pulled herself up on her feet by a beam of bunkbed. Her back was instantly cold, the perspiration in the fabric of her top cooled by the cross-current of air from the single window and the opening door.
‘See ya.’
Downstairs, sitting on the toilet, Kasia refreshed her makeup and made sociopolitical analysis while she pissed. She could see certain differences clearly now. In Poland since long before she was born, society had been something that existed independently of its citizens. Indifferent to the needs and desires of everyone living, it lumbered ever on, carrying out the instructions of long-dead Frankensteins. No one can truly love a monster, especially a dangerous one, but they can exploit it, and this was what the Poles had always done – and still did, even now that the monster was flailing around aimlessly, its instructions revoked. They exploited it in every possible way, grey-haired dignitary and green-haired punk alike, united in disdain for the system. It didn’t seem to matter what you wanted, you weren’t supposed to have it, whether you were an old codger hankering after fluffy slippers, a would-be Psychick Youth dreaming of a nipple ring, or newlyweds wanting off-white curtains – only by breaking the rules could such basic treasures be had. In fact, the corruption of the Poles was so unanimous it was almost ideally communist.
What was going on in England struck her as essentially different. Society here was more like a religion to which all its citizens belonged, or at least imagined they belonged. But not a focused, evangelical religion, no … a McDonald’s kind of religion, ubiquitous and watered down. People might complain about society, but it was like people making disparaging remarks about the size or nutritional value of a McDonald’s hamburger – while eating one. English society offered what English people wanted, and they stood in the queue for it, more patiently than any Eastern Europeans could have managed. But of course, no religion, no fast-food restaurant, no matter how universally welcoming its slogans, can offer a pew or a cheeseburger to everyone. There had to be some losers, some biedaki.
London seemed to be crawling with these losers: they might even be the majority. Society had taken them in, found them bitter-tasting, spat them out, and now they were human garbage. A moat of human garbage eddying around every McDonald’s, disqualified from sharing the Happy Meal.
But oh, the shame of their exclusion! The stigma of their failure!
No one in Poland could ever have felt that way, because society there had always been designed to make criminals of everyone a
nyway. It was difficult to feel like an outcast in a society where your basic humanity put you and everyone else at odds with the ideals of inclusion. Cunning risk-takers at every level managed to attract all that was officially unavailable; the rest Lived safer lives of envy, minor pilfering and despair. But nothing like this English shame … no, it wasn’t even shame … it was something more desultory and cringing than that. It was embarrassment.
On the main street not more than a hundred metres from the Delta Hotel, homeless beggars were wrapped up for the night in shop doorways, little parcels of grey wool and Sunday supplement. Neon slogans beamed messages down at them, such as, ‘YOU WANT IT? YOU’VE GOT IT!’ and ‘TO THE MAX!’. Messages from another galaxy, from the planet America. At that distance, the message-senders couldn’t be expected to notice if these sleepers were dead or just resting.
A Turkish restaurant was still open. Kasia ordered a coffee and drank it slowly.
‘Yawwah-yawwah-yawwah-yawwah-Tom Cruise-yawwah-yawwah,’ said the Turks around her.
‘Yawwah-yawwah-Sylvester Stallone.’
When Kasia got back to the Café Kraków, it was about three o’clock in the morning and her uncle was still up, an unusual thing. He had never yet made any comment about her nocturnal escapades, and he made none now, though her clothes and skin brought into his kitchen a heady aroma of tobacco, 100 per-cent-proof alcohol and male armpit.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ He gestured. A small pot of soup burbled on the stove, an old-fashioned paperbound book which might have been a cheap Polish New Testament was balanced in the empty breadbasket, and on the cutting-board O. J. Simpson’s story lay open, headlined Sprawozdanie z Ameryki.
‘Neither could I,’ brazened Katarzyna.
‘Very funny,’ sniffed her uncle. Without actually ignoring her, he went about his business of stirring soup, buttering slices of bread. She fell into rhythm with him naturally, filling the kettle for coffee, clearing away vegetable peelings.
‘You know, Kasia … this girl Zofia, that’s starting next week …’ He paused to taste the soup, blowing on it gently. ‘She can take or leave this job, you know what I mean? She wouldn’t be heartbroken … I mean, it’s not written on tablets of stone that she has to come.’