by Michel Faber
Most likely of all would be that no hotel of any kind would take in a thirteen-year-old girl and an incapacitated old lady on credit. What was it to be, then? Sleeping on the streets? Margo couldn’t accept that this would be her only option, given that she had a $20 bill to spend. (She’d found the money in a cardigan of her mother’s, which she’d only recently grown big enough to wear.) After the bus trip into town, she might have as much as $17.60 left; $15.20 at the least. For that, there must be some way of avoiding the street.
At last she found the answer, again by studying the toilet newspapers: there was a cinema just outside Milwullah which showed movies about love all night long. She and Nanna could stay there, sleeping in their seats or, if that wasn’t allowed, they could watch the movies, just like they did at home. There was a pawnbroker in town, too, so Mum’s jewellery would surely raise enough for two nights’ cinema admissions. (Margo was sure Mum wouldn’t have minded this, since it was for Nanna’s sake, and anyway Margo would redeem the jewellery as soon as NASA’s cheque cleared.)
Once she’d withdrawn the money from the bank she would catch the coach to Albury-Wodonga ($26 for two) and then book a sleeper train to Melbourne (another $126). In the event that they arrived in Albury-Wodonga too late for the Melbourne train, they would need to spend the night (up to $105) and leave in the morning. A travelling alarm clock cost $15.95.
Nanna’s nappies would need washing; a laundromat would probably wash them for $2, dry them for $1. Then again, disposable pads might be easier to organise, perhaps even cheaper; she would have to check how much disposable pads cost. Certainly on the train there would be no laundromats: she would either have to buy a bucket and some Napi-San ($4.99 + $3.95) or take enough nappies with her to be able to throw some of them away.
Food was a tricky proposition, as Nanna could no longer tolerate many things. Rice cream (85c per tin) and baby food (99c each for the small ones) seemed the safest bet, with baked beans ($69c) being perfectly adequate for Margo. The opening of the tins would require a can-opener, and she didn’t know how much those cost, but it surely wouldn’t be more than $5. For a moment only, she considered taking the one from home, but this was unjustifiable, since her father couldn’t cook and would have no choice but to open a can of something when he got hungry.
In Melbourne she would need to get a taxi to the nearest hotel, and in city traffic this might be expensive: $10, even. But there was no way around it, because she would be dependent on the driver to know where a hotel was and to take them directly there. Accommodation might be as much as $120 a night, and there was no guarantee that Margot would be able to find a flat to rent that was ready to be moved into the next day. If she was unlucky (it was perhaps best to assume she was unlucky) she might have to wait a whole week, going through $840 in the meantime. But then once Nanna was settled in the hotel, Margo would have an opportunity to explore the city and find a cheaper one; they couldn’t all be $120 a night, surely. Margo knew there were flats, even small houses, to be had for $130 a week.
Once she and Nanna had a home, Margo could enrol in a correspondence course and learn a trade. She’d decided, after some heart-searching, that she couldn’t ask NASA to pay for her education on top of everything else. Their cheque would have to cover the costs of everything up to and including the first month in Melbourne. By then, Margo would simply have to have found herself some sort of job, preferably something like delivery work or door-to-door sales which would allow her to stop off home at regular intervals to turn Nanna.
So many things she would need to do in that first month! A refrigerator ($149, reconditioned, if she was lucky, with perhaps $30 delivery on top of that), a television ($95 for a little black-and-white one, or rental for $9 a month), pots, pans, crockery, cutlery (say $40 the lot, second-hand).
And then, if the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body was to be believed, after nine months Margo would be too fat to move, and she’d most likely have to go into hospital to have her baby. But that was far into the future: her life would be unrecognisable by then.
The expenses she would ask NASA’s cheque to cover, according to her most careful calculations, came to $2376 (she resisted the temptation to allow for ‘unforeseen expenses’ and round the figure off to $2400). NASA would be less suspicious of her if she could give an exact figure justified by an itemised list.
NASA’s mailing address was quick to arrive, which was just as well, since Frank had made her strip naked again yesterday evening, and pronounced that the operation would have to be very soon.
Margo wrote her letter as soon as she had somewhere to send it. On a fresh sheet of pure white paper (extravagant, but she could not risk her message being ignored) she neatly printed:
Dear NASA officials,
I inclose the article about you in the Melbourne Age. Disposing of human waste is very important, especially in Space, I am sure. Many people may not understand how important it is, and thats why they get angry at how much it costs. Please try to not be too hurt by their critisism.
However, I believe I have the solution to your problem. I have done a lot of study in the field of Comets and Meteors, which perhaps you havent, being experts in Rocketry. Really it is very simple. Meteors mostly burn up before they get anywhere near the Earth. Even if they are enormous to begin with, the friction created by the speed at which they travel vapourises them in the outer atmosphere.
What has this got to do with your problem? I will tell you. You simply make some valved openings in the hull of your space shuttle, for the astronauts to do their number 1’s and number 2’s in. The vacuum outside sucks the waste into a net. When the net is full, it is attached to the craft the astronauts use when they are returning to Earth. All the waste simply burns up during re-entry, like a soft meteor.
I know this idea would save you millions of dollars, but I am not asking you for millions of dollars. I am asking for $2376 ($1661.92 American) which I need desparately for my grandmother who is very sick with cancer, and myself who am in danger.
An itemised list of expenses is attached, and the address for you to send the money. Please hurry, and best wishes with the space programme and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge,
Sincerely,
Margo De Voort.
ODD SPOT
NASA officials have been blasted for allowing the cost of a new space shuttle toilet to blow out to $A23 million.
Pidgin American
KATARZYNA was doing London.
By night, she sampled dance clubs and slept with strange men; by day, she waitressed at her uncle’s restaurant; during spare hours and weekends she combed flea markets and charity shops for cheap T-shirts. White ones mostly though pale grey, bright yellow and fluorescent green were acceptable too.
‘What, more T-shirts?’ her uncle challenged her in Polish when she rolled up to work at the Café Kraków.
‘I want to stock up,’ responded Katarzyna in the same language. ‘Once I’m back in Poland …’ She shrugged and mimed fruitless searching.
‘You trying to tell me there’s no T-shirts in Poland?’
Her uncle had left Poland in 1980, and such letters as he still received from disapproving relatives had degenerated lately into lists of things you could buy in the shops of Poznań.
Katarzyna tossed one of her new T-shirts into the air and deftly penetrated the sleeve-holes in free-fall with her sharp little hands.
‘The ones in Poland have all got stupid messages on them,’ she complained, muffled as she pulled the big white garment over her head, over her waitress’s uniform. ‘You know: “San Tropez”, “Ultra Sport”, pictures of Ninja Turtles, “I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt” – junk from five, ten years ago. Plainones are hard to get. Especially for 95p each.’ She pulled at the hem of the T-shirt like a frock, and did a mock curtsy. ‘What do you think?’
‘Are you crazy? Two of you could fit into that.’
‘Sloppy is fashion, Uncle. You should see the T-shirts they sell i
n the trendy shops. Large and X-Large, that’s all they stock.’
‘Craziness. Your father could have sewn you a dress out of that T-shirt.’
‘I’ll grow into it, Uncle, I promise. I’ll become one of those enormous old hens.’
‘Is there anybody there?’ called a testy female voice from inside the restaurant.
‘It’s that old whore Halina Kozłowska,’ muttered Katarzyna’s uncle. ‘Time to get moving, Kasia.’ He made a purposeful gesture towards the stove, and Kasia pulled her T-shirt off again. But before walking out into the restaurant she had to adjust her disordered hair in the oven window, because Mrs Kozłowska was as potent a bratwurst of Polish bitch juice as nature ever cooked up.
In fact, when you’re dead, thought Katarzyna as she hurried out to take the old woman’s order, they’ll make stock cubes of the stuff from your ashes.
Then she thought, I must write that down. She was always writing her thoughts and impressions down, getting ready to be the latest literary sensation from Eastern Europe, her face smouldering on a million paperbacks.
‘Well hell-oh there sweet child. You see: I hadn’t given up hope!’
‘Mm?’ responded Kasia, ready to write on her order pad. In fact, she was writing already, because Mrs Kozłowska always ordered the same thing. A week from now, after Katarzyna was already back in Poland, her uncle would find a slip of notepaper lying around the kitchen listing:
HAM+GHERK SW
COFF
POP SEED CAKE
BITCH JUICE BRATWURST/ASHES/STOCK CUBES
‘Very funny,’ he would frown to himself before binning it.
Next day, a Saturday Katarzyna fronted up to the Virgin Megastore and asked who was the Next Big Thing.
‘I’m from Poland,’ she explained with a much thicker accent than she authentically had. ‘The record shops there, it is only Phil Collins and Dire Straits.’
As expected, she came away from the Virgin Megastore (and HMV and Our Price and Reckless and Sister Ray and Vinyl Experience) with armfuls of promotional material – posters, postcards, stickers, flyers, display sleeves – without actually having to buy anything: she’d paid with her exotic accent, her smile, her musical refugee status. The young men behind the high counters, so blasé to everyone else, smiled down on her and her cleavage, and leaned forward to rescue her from Phil Collins and Dire Straits. A girl so beautiful must not be condemned to ignorance of the forbidden fruit of novelty; she must experience it now, in these few precious months before it was discovered by Woolworths, overmark-eted and stale.
‘What’s all this junk?’ Kasia’s uncle wanted to know.
‘It’s free, Uncle,’ she shrugged.
‘Nothing’s free,’ the old man said. ‘Here or anywhere. I’ve learned that much.’
Katarzyna tied on her apron, disinclined to argue. Her air fare from Warsaw to London had been paid by her uncle: in return, she had this apron to tie on and this job to do. The only pity was that she had no uncles in America, because that was the real centre of the world, the control centre. She would have to end up there some day, not because it was so wonderfully different from the places she knew, but because the places she knew were insufficiently different from it.
Out in the restaurant, the expatriate Poles flipped through Polish magazines, then tossed them back on the pile. The topmost one, Kasia had noticed, was always the one which had a colour picture of the crazed-looking bimbo who was accusing the President of the USA of sexual harassment. It bore the legend ‘CLINTON – WINNY ALBO NIEWINNY?’
America was the only authentic country in the world now; all the others were copies and derivatives. Maybe somewhere there existed a country that was still proudly and distinctly itself, but it was probably hidden in a volcanic valley somewhere behind Lapland and populated by starving halfwits wearing sealskin loincloths. Everywhere else was either an American colony or a crude imitation. As a young teenager she’d read, in Polish, Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the end of the story, the astronaut ends up in an alien spacecraft furnished with what seem to be all the comforts of home, including a refrigerator full of packaged food. On closer inspection, this food proves to be fake, an array of 3-D approximations reproduced as if from blurry television images. That’s what the whole world was like now: a shoddy facsimile of the USA. A few years ago in Eastern Europe Levi’s jeans had been unavailable, and instead they’d had denim pants (farmboy pyjamas, Kasia called them) with all sorts of labels and slogans sewn on to them – on the pockets, on the butt, on the knees – misspelled American mottos or just plain nonsense – anything to pledge allegiance to the empire of brand names. You didn’t see those pants so much now. Levi’s had become available in Eastern Europe at last: she could buy a pair in Warsaw for the same price her great-grandfather might have bought his linen factory for. Or maybe a bit less, if she had American dollars.
‘Well, I say the son of a whore did it,’ one of the regulars was saying in Polish. ‘I just hope they make him show his dick in court, the dirty fucker.’
‘Shut up, Andrzej.’ These two obese, tufty-browed old farts came to the Café Kraków almost every day. They were superannuated Silesian oilworkers who had not yet reached that stage of alcoholism where food is unimportant.
‘Hey, there’s that little whore again – look at the tits on her!’
‘Shut up and look at the menu, Andrzej. She’s coming over to take our order.’
‘My order is pretty fucking simple, I can tell you. Just bend over …’
Katarzyna had learned that there was no point hanging around near the desserts waiting for them to run out of gas. They could keep this up for half an hour, then complain about the bad service.
‘So, gentlemen, have you decided?’
‘Yes, young lady, we have. Clinton should show his dick to the world, and then they should send the fucker to the electric chair.’
‘So that’s your order, hm?’ deadpanned Kasia. ‘Fried Clinton?’
The Silesians wilted. Wit from a female always nonplussed them.
‘Soup and a roll, please,’ coughed Andrzej.
‘Same for me,’ said his companion.
‘Uh-humm,’ murmured Kasia as she scribbled. She’d already written down their order, which was always the same. Now she was writing, Bothered gorillas, buttoning tufts of black fur into bulging shirts.
Back in the kitchen, her uncle had been examining the promotional material Kasia had blagged from the music stores.
‘These people look like escapees from a mental institution.’
‘I know. But I’ve made up my mind not to say bad things about your customers. Two soups.’
‘Very funny. I was talking about these pop musicians here. They’re evil-looking.’
‘That’s the image they want, Uncle. They want to look mean, like in an American crime movie. They’re probably very nice boys really.’
‘These fellows look like the Mafia. I’d rather have Phil Collins.’
‘Really, Uncle?’ said Kasia evenly, tossing a couple of minuscule foils of butter into the wicker bread-basket.
‘Yes, that Phil Collins is all right. Are you sure he’s not Polish? He looks Polish to me.’
‘He’s from London, I think,’ said Kasia, frowning as she shifted the typically brim-full soup bowls around on her tray, preparing for take-off. ‘He lives in America now.’
‘Funny … Go to Łódź, and every third guy looks like Phil Collins, right down to the hair.’
‘Is that why you like him?’ smirked Kasia, turning, raising her eyebrows to encompass her uncle’s bald forehead.
‘No, I think he’s got talent.’ Startlingly, her uncle began to sing in heavily accented English, imitating Phil Collins’s antiseptic whine, complete with ersatz American vowels. ‘“One more night, give me just one more night” … “Another day in Paradise …” There’s a tune to his songs, he’s not like these long-haired screamers.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Well, Uncle, maybe you can do the same with this restaurant.’
‘Very funny.’
But one evening, Kasia’s uncle confessed to her that his restaurant was not doing so well. He wasn’t in dire straits yet, but every year he slipped closer. Kasia’s mother, her uncle’s sister, had already told her this, of course.
‘The old Poles are dying off,’ he sighed. ‘The young ones are eating fast food, or they’ve gone back to Poland to make a killing. The old Poles quarrel with one another; one starts avoiding my restaurant just in case “that scumbag” is there again, and finally “that scumbag” stops coming too, because he misses his friend. That’s how I lose them, mostly. That, and death.’
Awkward in the face of her uncle’s uncharacteristic gloom, Katarzyna left the kitchen and fiddled with table napkins and dried bouquets.
‘Look at the arse on that little whore,’ muttered Andrzej to his familiar.
‘Put your dick away and eat.’
After work that night, Kasia decided not to go to a dance club; she was tired and would probably accept more Ecstasy than was good for her. Also, she didn’t want sex tonight, particularly with some shaven-haired big-eared lunatic with pop-eyes.
Instead, she went to a live gig at one of the many venues her friends in Warsaw venerated like shrines of pilgrimage. She caught a tube to Shepherd’s Bush, where there were no shepherds and no bushes: only a foreigner can thoroughly appreciate how much of its heritage a country has lost. No saints or woods in St John’s Wood, no knights or bridges in Knightsbridge, no black friars in Blackfriars.