Guest

by SJ Bradley

  ‘We’ve no stairs at all in the bungalow. I’m a bit out of practice.’ His breath seemed to still. ‘So – this is a nice place. A very nice place, indeed. Will there be more of you coming?’

  ‘No.’ Samhain knew what this man feared. A constant, smelly rat-pack of drunk punks, spilling out into the yard and maybe even into David’s garden. The incessant noise of banjos and shouting and beeping, bassy techno. Everything on into the early hours. He half-feared it himself. ‘It’s just the three of us – me, Frankie, and Roxy.’

  David nodded contentedly, closing his eyes. ‘Good. Well, it’ll be good to have you here. Sometimes I think this crescent’s too quiet.’

  The Ambland Road squat, a place with bedrooms the size of whole apartments, and ceilings the height of Glasgow tenement flats, had been a home for anybody who wanted it. Dozens of people had lived there, the place full of their tat and squalor, and broken bits of drum kit. Its house band had been every band that came through the North. Groups would play at the social club, then come back to Ambland Road to sleep, but first they’d play in its living room again, usually at one or two in the morning.

  Samhain had never got too much sleep whilst living there.

  Frankie had liked to say they were living the Anarchist dream, in the Ambland Road squat. No landlord, no need to work if they didn’t want to. Everything decided by collective. If they wanted to put on an art exhibition or a gig or anything else in the living room, they could. It was free living, in every sense of the word. Eating misshapen bagels hauled out of the industrial bins behind the bread factory, punk stew made from vegetables thrown away by the restaurant suppliers on the outer ring road. No money ever changed hands, and nobody had to pay rent. You could do what you wanted, providing it didn’t bother anybody else.

  He used to compare it to ‘Ungdomhuset in C-Town,’ a legendary squat in Copenhagen where he had played with his old band, once, and which he kept on bringing up in conversation, years after the fact. ‘We’re Europeans now, Sam,’ he used to say. ‘Every punk and crust band in Europe can make this place a stop on their tour.’

  And true enough, Samhain had heard every language. Arguments in Finnish and Magyar, drinking songs in Swedish, German, Flemish, French. They used to have these parties – he’d known they’d had one from waking with a leaden head and dry mouth, although he never could remember even half of them – they went on for days, sometimes. He remembered lying awake on a mattress, where he could feel the floor underneath him, listening to a crowd of people in the living room downstairs. Mouth still burning from absinthe, feeling their voices tingle in his bones and in his spine. Talking as the light came up and through the curtains. Mumbling, laughing, sudden bursts of anger; somebody was drumming against the wall. An uneven paradiddle that never settled to a steady rhythm.

  There had always been something happening, something to do, somebody to talk to. And so many girls. New ones, all the time. Ones with interesting names and interesting tattoos under their clothes. They’d appear once, crawling into his sleeping bag for warmth or conversation and other things, and then, in the morning, be gone.

  It had been a shame when that squat had got overcrowded. Some parts of it he still missed.

  ‘Well.’ David was getting up. ‘I should really go home. Barbara will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  ‘Let me show you one of the rooms before you go.’

  Samhain opened a door at random. The nearest. The bed was made with tucked corners and tight sheets. A haze of moonlight lit the centre of the bed, hopefully.

  ‘Very nice,’ David said.

  In another slice of moonlight, landing on the sill, winged insects lay, their limbs folded as though in sleep.

  When Samhain closed the door again, the hall seemed even more dark. They might have been picking their way through a ghost train after hours. ‘Let me run up and get my torch. Help you down the stairs.’

  ‘No need. Absolutely no need, Sam.’ David had a serious handshake. He squeezed Sam’s hand as though trying to force water from a lump of clay. ‘Nice to know you. I’ll see you again soon.’

  6.

  ‘Here’s your code for logging in.’ All in grey today, the librarian. Everything on her drooping forward – skin, hair, clothes. Her dress hung like emptied carrier bags.

  In the seat beside him sat a woman in a worn blazer, shiny black, with the life ironed completely out of it. She looked tired in the face, as though she’d been a real person once, and then something had happened to wash the good fortune away.

  He clicked over onto the Red and Black news blog. Every other day now, he’d been coming here, to look for the news story. His big fear was that it would appear one day, and that somebody would connect the dots, the same way Marta had.

  Click here for news on the radical Guatemalan Coffee Co-operative – now taking orders for international delivery!

  He breathed out. The site hadn’t been updated for a month.

  Red and Black, run by volunteers, sometimes went for months without being updated at all. It covered whatever radical news stories its opaque, backroom operation were interested in. Samhain had learned much from its paper newsletter, which had once slid out from between a fanzine’s pages and into his hands at a gig.

  The first one he’d ever read had been about Tesco supermarket. That farmers were being forced to sell their fruit and vegetables to the supermarket giant for less than they cost to produce; and that Tesco zipped produce from all over the world into UK distribution centres the size of a hundred football pitches. No food was stored anywhere for any length of time. It went from the trucks to the distribution centre, and in under a day from there to the supermarket shelves. There wasn’t two days’ worth of food anywhere in the whole supply chain. If the lorries stopped, the whole country would be hungry and rioting in under a week.

  Red and Black had written about Tesco a lot, in those days. When he had first started reading the blog, there had been a story about them pretty much every single day. Then slowly, slowly, it had started to stop. Samhain was still interested, but it seemed that the volunteer who’d been writing these stories wasn’t. Either that, or he’d gone off on tour with his band, and forgotten about Red & Black entirely.

  The coffee farmer story was accompanied by a grainy, pixelated picture of serious faced men and women wrapped in black flags, forming a straggly blockade around their crops.

  We need your solidarity, Comrades! Revolution Coffee available to purchase now!

  There was an address for sending money orders. But nothing about the activist women and their children, and nothing about Deep Green Resistance.

  Samhain breathed a sigh of relief, and opened another tab for MySpace.

  Mart,

  My mum’s away at the moment and I can’t reach her, so I haven’t been able to ask her about all this. But I think you might be right. Now that I think about things, it all seems to add up.

  I haven’t told anybody about all of this, and I don’t know if I will. Would you mind keeping it to yourself for now?

  Sam x

  PS Squat is in the old Boundary Hotel off Fox Lane. Either me or Frankie will always be in. Come round any time.

  PPS. PLEASE don’t tell anybody where the squat is. We don’t want it turning into a party house.

  On his email, there were a couple of messages about the tour.

  Hi, I am sorry. The person in our collective who used to set up gigs has gone away on activist activity, we don’t know how long, or when she will be back. The rest of us are no good at organising gigs and it is best that we don’t try and fuck it up. You might have some luck with Lukas who lives in Hamsaft (50K away) and puts on bands sometimes. His email address is…

  The second message read:

  Samhain, yes we can put you on. We will put on a punk / crust alldayer around the dates 18th August. With bands you, Fuck Destroyer, Big Boys Small Room, Simone DeBoudoir, and others as well. This will be our sixth year of putting this festival on n
ow. It is always popular and we can pay you plenty of Euros for the trip. You can stay here also, there is lots of room in the squat.

  Just down the road (about 100Km from here) there is a new squat and social centre too. Their email contact is thrashthrashthrashthrash@yahoo.com. Contact there is Janka, she listened your demo at weekend and likes, please get in touch with her.

  He started typing answers, and felt a tap on his shoulder. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to log out in one minute.’ The droning, church nave voice of the librarian. ‘There are lots of people waiting.’

  There was no time to write anything but, ‘Thanks,’ and ‘I’ll be in touch soon.’

  Then the librarian’s hand again, soft on his shoulder, a falling leaf, and Samhain shoved his notebook into his rucksack and pulled his rucksack onto his shoulder, and walked out of the library to go home.

  ‘Frankie?’

  Samhain pushed open the heavy door.

  The hotel was quiet, but he could hear his friend scratching away somewhere. The slow scrape of sandpaper, its rhythmic fizz.

  ‘Frankie, you there?’

  There was no need for light, but he tried anyway. Flicking the hallway light switch: nothing. Samhain stood looking at the fixture as though he might solve the problem by staring hard enough at the bulbs. On, off. On, off.

  Roxy wasn’t home. He knew that coming past the first bannister, and seeing that her bag wasn’t there. When she was in, she left it in the hallway. Always left things lying around, even though he had told her a thousand times not to. Roxy didn’t believe that even in their community, there were thieves. To Roxy, all things were communal. If something went ‘missing’, she would say, it had most likely been taken by somebody in greater need of it than she was. Roxy had always been too trusting. It had been one of the things he’d liked most about her, at first.

  He swung around the next rail, and it came off in his hand. Screws and plaster exploded free from the lower end, and momentum alone carried Samhain up to the next landing, where he landed against the wall, face to the artex, wondering what the hell had happened.

  Bottom end of the rail stuck across the hallway like a train station barrier. It leaned diagonally across the stairs, pointing. You, it seemed to say, to whoever might come and try their luck next. You. He stood a moment, looking at it. Then he thought he heard somebody in the front yard, and took the final set of steps at a gallop.

  His door was open slightly, a way he hadn’t left it. That was no surprise, from living with Frankie. He’d probably been to borrow tools, knowing Samhain wouldn’t mind.

  But there was something else, when he went forward into it – a heat like a baker’s back door. This was a problem Samhain hadn’t known about when he’d taken this top room – the broiling. He wilted, and leaned against something. Went into a cloud which gathered, sticky and stuffy, touching all four corners of the room.

  Samhain’s face dripped. He wiped it, and started ditching his bag on the bed.

  Then stopped, still holding on by the strap, bag dangling at arm’s length.

  There was a cat. In the spot where his bag normally lay: a black, white and tortoiseshell thing, laying on a nest of band t-shirts, licking its paw as though it had always lived there. Belly distended and stretched with soft white fur, a womb that was fat and hard, and obviously full with young.

  It paused in grooming to look at him with cockleshell blue eyes. As though saying: What are you doing in my room?

  ‘Frankie!’ he shouted. ‘Frankie!’

  ‘I don’t know how it got in.’

  Frankie was at work on the back door. Sanding, he explained, to make it close better. He answered Samhain’s questions with the sweat of the day on him and wood dust on his brow. ‘Nothing you can do about it, mate. Just settle where they settle, don’t they, when they’re due to drop.’ Frankie put the sandpaper in his back trouser pocket. He was wearing a wicked grin, as though he knew something Samhain didn’t. ‘Better get some cat chow in, eh? You won’t be able to move her now.’

  ‘You left the bloody door open.’

  ‘How else do you expect me to fix it?’ Frankie said. ‘Been in and out of the back all day here, trying to get a few things done. Somebody’s got to fix things up. Cats, right, they can sneak in quick, if you’re not looking. And I didn’t know I was looking out for a cat – see?’

  Another pocket full of fuses. Frankie had them out, squinting at them in the light coming in from the back door. ‘They say they’ve switched this power on. But it’s still not bloody working. Why don’t you phone them, and see what’s going on – eh? Pull your weight, like the rest of us.’

  ‘She looks like she might have them any minute, Frankie. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. What if they all die?’

  ‘Don’t have kittens about it! Look at you, bringing life into the world, when you can’t even hardly look after yourself. Won’t remember the time I had to ask Russ where you live so I could get you home, will you? Carried you all the way back there myself. Thought to myself, now there’s a guy who knows how to party.’

  ‘That’s not even true.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Know how you got home after watching Against Me, do you? Remember catching the bus, walking home, all the rest of it?’

  ‘No, but–’

  ‘Course you don’t. That’s because I carried you. Like Jesus, in the story.’

  ‘Dickhead.’

  ‘Ah! There’s the fucker.’ Pinching a nine-amp fuse between thumb and finger. He looked at it the same way a jeweller might eye a diamond. ‘That was only the second or third time we met. Course, you wouldn’t remember.’

  A knock.

  ‘That’ll be Mart with my phone,’ Samhain said. ‘Reckon she’ll know anything about looking after cats?’

  Frankie mumbled an answer. Sounded like: ‘You’d better hope she does.’

  7.

  Marta steered her bike into the hallway, glinting. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Is this it – where you live? Mind if I bring this in? I don’t really want to leave it outside.’

  Her gaze made its way around full ceiling height. Cobwebs in the cornicing; slow dust, lit by lazy beams of light through the top window. ‘Who’s here – just the three of you?’

  Samhain tried to think of a good explanation for leaving the rest of the rooms empty. ‘We’ve only just got into it,’ he managed. ‘We’re thinking of installing a bike rack outside.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She started back down towards the bike. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Ignore him, Mart.’ Frankie was up on a chair by the stairs, with a torch between his teeth and a screwdriver in the fuse box. ‘That boy was dragged up. He doesn’t know how to treat a guest. You leave your bike where it is.’

  ‘So what happened to the owners?’

  She walked down the hallway towards them, holding Samhain’s gaze with those large, espresso eyes. Up close she smelled faintly medical. Antiseptic, the scent of doctors and nurses.

  A click, and suddenly light.

  ‘He’s done it!’ Frankie shouted. ‘By God, he’s only gone and bloody done it!’ He jumped down, clapping his hands. ‘Now, for the important bit. Anybody fancy a pint?’

  ‘In a minute.’ Samhain turned to Mart. ‘Want to go upstairs?’

  *

  Things looked different with the lights on. Anaemic light, pale yellow, but light all the same. By the shy buzz of lights in their fittings, he saw dust on the door handles, on the bannister, an amount of shored-up silt that he hadn’t noticed before. There was a layer of it on the picture frames in the hallway.

  Mart had this way of stepping quietly, like a museum visitor. A foreigner with backpack worn chest-forward and an eye for wonder. ‘This is some squat,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Come up.’ The cat was still in the centre of the bed, curled up with her eyes tight closed, paying neither of them any attention. ‘Now what am I supposed to do about this?’

  ‘Hello, beautiful.
’ Mart took a spot gingerly on the bed, and scratched the cat in a spot behind one ear. ‘I didn’t know you had a cat.’

  ‘I didn’t, until about four o’clock today. She just came in and made herself comfortable.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘What are you meant to do when they give birth?’

  ‘You’ll probably need towels – for all the goo and blood, when she has them. And to keep them warm. You’ll have towels somewhere – won’t you – this was a B&B, right?’

  In eight days he hadn’t thought to look. ‘Towels. Yes. I’ll find some. Then what?’

  She put a hand softly on the cat’s belly, and it rubbed its cheek against her wrist. ‘Ah, you’ve no collar on, poor thing.’

  ‘What if I make her a really soft bed on the floor – in a box? She might sleep in it.’

  ‘You can’t move her, Samhain. Look how much at home she is. She’s comfortable. You’re the one who might have to sleep on the floor.’ She glanced around the room. ‘Probably should get her a litter tray and whatnot. Some food. Poor thing’s probably starving.’

  ‘The whole point of moving into a squat with lots of bedrooms was so that I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor. And now–’

  ‘Come on, it’s only for a couple of nights.’ Scratching the purring cat on the back of its head. ‘Maybe not even that. She looks fit to burst.’

  He started backing out of the door. ‘I’ll see if I can’t find those towels,’ he said.

  The linen cupboard was on the first floor.

  A mouse family were living inside one of the sets of sheets: they’d chewed a hole the size of a two pence piece. When he stepped inside, he could hear them rustling around inside it – the sound of living things making themselves at home.

  Samhain pulled a towel from the shelf. It came unfolded, scattering moths’ wings to the floor, and the next one was the same. He took six altogether, all billowing with dust.

  Samhain came back to Mart cross-legged on the duvet, a little way from the cat and his phone, dead, laying on the sheet in front of her.