Guest

by SJ Bradley

  Also, he realised that he had no idea where he was. He did not know this city, nor any of its landmarks. Samhain looked both ways up and down the street, then went to the nearest crossroads, and looked both ways up and down there; then he picked a direction, and started walking.

  Three hours’ walking in a tightening circle, pausing often, brought him back to the old school. The smell of herbs still hung in the air, but the room was already mostly empty.

  A woman appeared from a doorway. She saw him, and jumped slightly. ‘Were you here before?’

  ‘Yes,’ Samhain said. ‘I’ve come for my passport.’

  ‘And you’re British, so...’

  She held out four with red covers.

  ‘Did the police take you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He searched around the floor, found his bag. Everything was still in it. His fanzines, and his screwdriver and socket set. ‘They kept on asking me about somebody called Martine.’

  She started laughing. ‘Martine!’ she said. ‘Who the fuck is Martine?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The pain in his ribs was like the batons all over again; he didn’t want to laugh, but found he couldn’t stop. ‘I don’t know. And neither do the police, probably.’

  ‘Well.’ She gave him a banana, and two apples. ‘That shows you what the fuck the police know. Still, it’s too bad they took you in. You’re the – well, I lose count – but you’re not the first person I’ve spoken to today, who got arrested just for being there. This is a new tactic they seem to have. They take people in, and keep them in there until all the protests are over. Bastarding Carabinieri.’

  That time had left Samhain with marks on his ribs that had scarred. He showed them to anybody who said protest should always be peaceful.

  ‘Jesus Christ, lads.’ Frankie had emptied his bowl. He was sitting with the duck-chested brandy bottle beside his glass. ‘Anybody would think somebody had died. It’s like a morgue in here.’

  Roxy chewed silently, face all bundled up in a frown. She sighed, and threw her spoon down into her bowl.

  ‘Tell you what we need,’ Frankie said. ‘Some music. If we could get these speakers working...’

  He got up and wandered away.

  Samhain threw a mouthful of rum down after the stew, and it tore a Catherine wheel down his chest. ‘Roxy,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing for you to be mad about.’

  ‘So you say,’ she said, stirring her drink, a clear thing. She was drinking from a pint glass, full of ice and mint leaves. It had two straws, though he’d never seen any in here. Roxy always had been a resourceful girl. ‘But that’s because you don’t care about how I feel. You don’t and you never have.’

  ‘Roxy...’

  ‘Shut up, Sam,’ she said. ‘Look, do whatever you want. Hold hands with Marta if you want to. Hell, hold hands with Frankie. See if I care. You do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.’

  ‘I never said you couldn’t.’

  ‘No, I know. That’s always your get-out, isn’t it? Everybody doing whatever they want, all the time, no matter who it hurts. Because that’s punk rock, right?’

  ‘I never said you were my girlfriend.’

  ‘Fuck me.’ She stood up suddenly, and threw her glass right across the bar. Heavy and spinning, it emptied half across Samhain’s shoulder, and shattered against the far panelling. ‘You and Frankie are as bad as each other. Can’t believe I agreed to live here, with you two... dickheads. I could have moved in with Danny and Felix. They asked me to. I must have been mad to say no. Or stupid, or something...’

  ‘You probably still could move in with them.’

  ‘It’s too late now!’ Her voice cut him in half. She was red, livid, shrieking, a boiling baby. ‘How the fuck do you think I’m going to move into a flat with them when they’ve already signed the contract? Christ, Samhain, I don’t know how you think the world works sometimes. It’s like you think everybody’s sitting around, holding places open, operating on the same weird, lazy, not knowing the month basis as you.’

  ‘I’m not lazy,’ he said.

  ‘“Come and live with me,” you said. “I’ve found this great place,” you said. “It’s got loads of room and it’ll be just you and me and Frankie, and it’s massive,” you said. Then we got here, and you couldn’t get away from me fast enough.’

  ‘Let’s not fall out over this,’ he said. ‘This is still a great place to live – you don’t have to leave.’

  ‘Don’t be a twat!’ Now she faced him, devil-red. ‘Don’t you get it? I can’t stand living here and I can’t stand looking at you. Every day. Christ. People warned me about you. Girls – all of your exes. Pretty much everybody you’d ever slept with. Your friends. Stick. Paulie. Stevie. Marta, even. They said I should be careful and I said no, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam is a great guy, you don’t know him like I do...’

  ‘Roxy, please,’ he said. ‘I’m going through some stuff right now.’

  ‘Stuff? What stuff?’

  ‘Never mind. I can’t say.’

  ‘Huh.’ She stopped pacing, and continued, talking almost to herself. ‘I told people you were a great guy – that you were just confused, that’s all. But they were right. Every single one of them was right. And I should have listened. Christ, I was naive. To not even listen to Charley. When she knows better than anyone exactly what you’re like. No wonder...’

  She stopped.

  Swallowed carefully, whatever she had been about to say.

  Frankie had been right, he realised. Girls could be vicious when hurt.

  Samhain picked up the empty glass, and turned slowly towards the bar.

  Speaking every word with great regard, Roxy said: ‘No wonder she disappeared on you like she did.’

  The dusty, grimy glasses. Samhain asked: ‘Do you want another drink?’

  9.

  Fingers on Anaglypta. Samhain was in the dark, blinds closed, somewhere after-hours. Shoulders and spine on a hard wooden floor. Wooden legs around him. He was in the place he belonged – sleeping under a table.

  Then he was up. A fortune cookie crumbled to dust in his mouth, and he was holding the slip of paper. Some things are best left alone. He turned it over: the other side read, You and disappointment are lifelong friends.

  Snack grit on his fingers.

  He woke sweating, and wondering where he was.

  Still floor. Stiff boards. He looked up. Less than half a metre away was a bed. He could see the underside of the divan. It was whiter than anything he’d seen in any punk house. Sun blared in through the Velux and he blinked, grasping the edge of his sleeping bag. If he was away, then he must be on tour. But where, and which country?

  The polyester made a soft crumpling sound beneath his fingers as he tried to remember where he might have left his guitar.

  He heard a movement on the bed, wedged himself painfully into a sitting position, and saw the cat. A triangle of ear, soft ginger and chocolate, fuzzy with the light. She was grooming herself – and still pregnant.

  Samhain made his way downstairs, with the feeling of a passenger trying to disembark from a sinking ship. There was a sour taste in his mouth, to go with a sour feeling. Rum and brandy and god knows what else, something with the taste of rotten peach. However the rest of the night had gone, he knew it hadn’t ended well.

  ‘There he is,’ Frankie called. He was by the bar, pouring thick black coffee from the jug. The sound system was almost working – loud, enthusiastic folk-punk, all scratching violins and good-natured Midwestern shouting, blared from a single speaker. ‘So, how is she – has she had ‘em yet?’ Frankie looked as though he’d been dragged out of the canal.

  ‘Not yet.’

  The music sounded scooped-out, half of it missing. No mandolin, and no double bass. Over by the window, the second speaker was silent – save for a whining, trapped-insect sound.

  ‘What happened last night, Frankie? I had this really strange dream.’ Samhain forced himself up onto the
banquette, holding a screwdriver.

  Outside, hundreds of white towels blazed. They waved on a drying rack and on a washing line, a thousand flags of surrender, and suddenly something came back to Samhain. Coming down from the airing cupboard with his arms full of towels, to set the washing machine running. He had found mouse corpses amongst the linen, whole families curved stiff-still with their paws curled, and their empty eye sockets still open; how, looking at them, the enormity of life and death had hit him, and he’d cried over their hard, clawed little bodies.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let me drink so much,’ Samhain said. ‘Christ.’

  ‘Who am I to stop you?’ Frankie said. ‘You’re a grown man.’

  Something else. Samhain reached into his back pocket, and found a matchbook, with a picture of the hotel on the front, and a phone number along the friction strip. A cheery message on the back read, ‘Thanks for being our guest at The Boundary Hotel!’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, looking at it. ‘I must have been pretty far gone last night.’

  At some point, he remembered, he’d stopped bringing the towels down, and gone to look around the place for matchboxes. He had wanted to give the tiny mouse-tenants a proper burial. But these had been all he’d been able to find.

  He had held one of the mouse bodies in his palm. A grey-streaked thing with white ears. He had been thinking, I must put these out of reach of the cat. This had happened while he had been standing in the doorway of the laundry cupboard. He had lined them all, slowly, slowly – every one along the shelf, neatly, in a row.

  ‘Me too.’ Frankie looked regretful, and sorry for himself. ‘So, come on then, last night. How much you remember?’ He stared into his cup, and took a loud slurp.

  Another thing. Roxy shouting and red-faced, eyeliner sliding all down her face in a coal seam.

  He forced the Phillips-head into the speaker bracket, and noticed a furniture-moving bruise on his upper arm. There were others, too, fist-sized. Now he remembered: Roxy had done that. When he had tried to calm her down.

  ‘Impressive beer injuries, lad,’ Frankie said. ‘Things got pretty heated, didn’t they? For a little while, there.’ No sound but the noise of Frankie turning a teaspoon over and over, over and over. He looked like he had something to say, and no good way of saying it.

  Samhain knew that look. He’d seen it before, when they’d had to ask Matty to leave the band. He loosened the bracket, and brought the speaker down to chest height. ‘What is it, Frankie?’

  Frankie opened his mouth, then closed it again. ‘Erm,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, douche canoe.’ Samhain stuck the screwdriver blade between the back plate and speaker front, as though he knew what he was doing. ‘Out with it. It can’t be any worse than Tallinn.’

  ‘Complete blackout? Nothing at all?’ Frankie left the spoon on the surface, went behind the bar. Turned the taps on. Picked up a scourer, a bottle of spray cleaner. Like he was going to clean everything. Scrub it all down. ‘How...’ he started: ‘How much do you remember?’

  ‘Well, obviously, I remember doing the towels. Something about dead mice. Having an argument with Roxy.’ Wires and screws spilled out onto the table; he started making a pile of the bits that looked useful. A shining circuit slid away from the back plate, and another memory suddenly came. Looking at something on Roxy’s phone. A tiny, pixellated photo. Samhain’s eyes had been woozy; he’d clapped a hand over one eye, to try and help him make sense of the faces.

  He quickly felt the sensation of freewheeling a bike towards a cliff edge.

  ‘We were looking at a picture.’ He laid the screwdriver down, and sat.

  Frankie was scrubbing away at the bar, nearly strongly enough to make the top layer of varnish come away.

  ‘Yes. Keep going.’

  It was some effort to take himself back. The phone blazing with light in her hand. Roxy’s face, lopsided with triumph, lit ghoulishly by the screen. This photograph had been her last word in the argument they’d been having. Evidence of his irresponsibility, his selfishness. To show him how much his other exes hated him, too.

  Thinking about it, he realised he must have found the mice after this, because it was this moment with Roxy that had made him cry. The picture. A smiling girl in a red dress, standing in a garden of sunflowers. A sturdy toddler that was half-him and half-Charley.

  This was the girl that Roxy had told him Charley didn’t want him to meet, that he would never get to meet, because he had shown himself over and over again to be the kind of selfish, self-absorbed loser, that would never achieve anything good in life, and could never be a positive influence.

  She had won that argument, all right.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened after that. Other than that he had cracked into a bottle of something else – that would account for the taste of rotten peaches – and cried, talked to Frankie all night probably, and that at some point Roxy had gone. Now he knew why his elbows were sore: he had been resting them on the bar for most of the last part of the night. It had been one of those awful, black, alcohol-stolen nights, where nothing is fun, and everything gets forgotten.

  Most likely, he would never know what had been said in the early hours of this morning.

  Frankie said, ‘Coming back to you now, is it?’

  Her name. Samhain stared into a large circular stain on the carpet. Black where red wine had once been spilled – bloody. What was her name?

  ‘Two types of Christ, Frankie.’

  ‘Yep.’ Frankie poured more, looking more into his cup than at Samhain. ‘Knew it’d come back to you eventually.’

  ‘A little girl, though. Mine.’

  ‘That would seem to be the case.’

  His head hurt, as though it was all concrete inside. All things heavy and stuck, and nothing moved.

  Trying to remember when he had last been with Charley. They’d still been a couple when he’d gone on tour to Estonia and Latvia with Patrick Stewart The Band. That much he remembered, because of the girls in Tallinn. A wild-eyed thing with a ripped shirt had climbed into his sleeping bag and rubbed herself all over him, and then the morning after had kept on saying: ‘I’m going to come and visit you in Bred-ferrrd,’ and he’d said, ‘No, don’t come – England’s a hole, you won’t like it.’ But somehow she’d got his landline number and kept on calling.

  It had been hard to keep it from Charley, because they’d been living together in a tiny flat by Bradford College. Though in the end, it hadn’t been the Latvian that had split them up. It had been somebody far closer to home.

  In those days, Samhain had hardly known Roxy. Distantly at first, only as the girl who house-shared with Frankie, until he started to get to know her a little better. Long late nights spent with her, watching poor quality VHS footage of bald, bleeding chickens in cages. Roxy cared about animal rights. It was her passion, the only thing she wanted to talk about, long after Frankie had gone to bed. When she got onto something, she’d lean forward in her chair, cheeks flushed and knees slightly parted. It was on one of these nights that she told him about the male chicks. They could never lay eggs, so they were of no use in the battery farms. Boy chicks, a day or two old, were run through the industrial mincer. That was the most efficient way for factory farms to destroy them.

  ‘Christ. I’m going vegan,’ he’d said.

  Roxy had hardly been able to hide her pleasure. ‘Good. I’ll teach you everything I know.’

  She had been vegan for years, so knew all about it. What to eat, and how to cook it. There was a lot to learn. Before too long, he was spending two or three nights a week with her, learning new recipes, trying to absorb everything Roxy already knew.

  Charley didn’t like it. She used to call him at one, two in the morning to ask where he was. Accuse him of all sorts, and demand that he come home. It made him feel exactly like one of the chickens from the videos: trapped. During one of these phone calls, Roxy went out of the room to get more Red Stripe and when she came back, all leg
s and shoulders, he’d taken one look at her and made a decision. Since Charley was so sure they were humping anyway, and since nothing he could say or do could change her mind, he might as well make taking all of the shit worthwhile, and fuck Roxy for real.

  They hadn’t moved out of the room. Roxy slid her vest straps down, and spread her legs right there on the sofa. She was hairy as a badger, and wet as a pot of Vaseline. Samhain knew he shouldn’t have been doing it, but it was too late by then to do anything else. He was hard and inside her, and too turned on to turn back. By the time they finished, he was already regretting it.

  In the morning, he went home to Charley and confessed. She cried in a way he’d never seen before. Awful and red-faced, the tears spouting in a never-ending stream. Beautiful eyes made froggy with grief. It was a face that he’d caused and now couldn’t escape. ‘I knew it,’ she sobbed. ‘How could you do this to me? How? How?’

  He and Charley certainly hadn’t been together then, or afterwards. Two years ago, the day he’d moved out. Saying sorry and trying to leave quickly. Not wanting to stay with that face any longer. Ten minutes to grab his bag and go. Screwdriver – hoodie – notebook – address book – a couple of zines. Everything else, he had left behind. He realised now, thinking back over it, that while he’d darted in and out of rooms, grabbing the few things he couldn’t bear to leave, as he had taken his door key off the ring and left it on the side, apologising again and again and again, as he had closed the door behind him and gone out into the hallway for what he knew would be the last time, that she must have known then that she was pregnant.

  ‘I can’t believe it, Frankie,’ he said. ‘That she’s kept it secret from me all this time. What am I supposed to do?’

  10.

  Today, in a shackling heat, the librarian was a thin man. Samhain handed over his library card, receiving in return a slip of paper with a login code.

  There were four floors in the central library. Cool, stone stairs whose chill filled the air with quiet; as he came to the second floor, the babbling from general lending faded away.