The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  Against one wall, there are huge drawings of architects’ schemes. Buildings, city plans. On the opposite wall there are dozens of a4 sheets with botanical sketches. Seeds, leaves and flowers. In striking detail. ‘Do you work as an architect? Or a botanist?’

  ‘My work is what you see on the walls.’ Aodhan points through the window to office blocks on the Thames’s north bank. People are streaming across Vauxhall Bridge. ‘Who wants to work with the briefcase and umbrella zombies?’ He turns to Etienne. ‘So, what do you do?’

  ‘Music. Drummer. Looking for a new band at the moment.’

  Aodhan approaches the architectural drawings. ‘The best music,’ he says, ‘is the silence of concrete.’ He fetches a book, opens it. Pictures of massive buildings in cities that Etienne didn’t even know existed: Tbilisi, Yalta, Belgrade, Kagawa. All the photographs were taken in winter. Bunkers. Fortresses. Government offices. Abandoned hotels. Snow against concrete. Close-ups of concrete seams, of veils of rust and damp. Aodhan’s eyes are becoming ever bluer. He starts talking about brutalist architecture. About crushing weight, shapes that erase the sun. He is trembling, Etienne notices, while telling Etienne about concrete cities so heavy that they push the earth out of its orbit . . .

  Aodhan stops mid-sentence. His fingers lock around Etienne’s arms, pull him closer. Aodhan’s hands are hard, as if he is digging for a stony secret. Up here, all obstacles fall away. It is as if all the city’s doors and windows are being blown open by a sudden blast.

  When they are spent, they stand naked in front of the plant drawings. Aodhan presses a finger on the pencil drawings, uttering the Latin name of each. Etienne asks about a few that remain unnamed. ‘New sketches. Plants that only exist on paper. Without names. I make them up.’ The detail is as precise as before, as if drawn for a botanical encyclopaedia. Hard to imagine, Etienne thinks, that there is no source species. A while ago he started drawing plants that he had never seen, Aodhan explains. A visual imitation of the sound of the Latin names. And then he started making up his own species. He takes out more sheets of paper from a box. ‘Here’s my latest series. A collection of carnivorous plants. They exist only in sketches.’

  Etienne touches the rough paper, looks at the menacing plants. Here, leaves and stems have transformed into traps and jaws. He should introduce Aodhan to Glenda with her compost fingers, Etienne thinks. Aodhan could provide the fictitious plants for a green dome covering the Square. A seam of meat-eating flowers as bulwark against the wolves of capital.

  Aodhan wants to take Etienne on a tour of the world’s most brutal architecture. ‘But,’ he says, ‘let’s begin in London.’

  When they meet in Vauxhall Grove at dawn, the church bells are tolling. Etienne’s fingers are itching. He remembers the dampness underneath the thick hair on Frank’s neck.

  Sometimes they take the Underground; mostly they walk. They go up to concrete colossuses, look up: Finsbury Estate, the Barbican, Hyde Park Barracks, Brunswick Centre, Sampson House, Balfron Tower. Etienne shades his eyes with his hand when gazing at Trellick Tower’s grey cube houses high up in the sky. The lift tower is set apart from the building, just lightly connected with it by means of concrete bridges.

  ‘The material is refusing,’ Aodhan declaims. ‘It is repudiating everything. Cities in the sky,’ he continues. ‘Foundationless.’ Etienne isn’t sure he is following any longer. ‘Hanging clusters. Suspended over nothing. Staircases and walkways to nowhere . . . The material as god,’ Aodhan says. ‘Emptiness in density. No interior space. Cool exterior, absolute compression on the inside.’ They walk until late in the evening. Aodhan’s eyes gleam like steel. Back on the sixteenth floor in Vauxhall, he sits studying his Polaroid photos of the buildings. ‘Temples,’ he mumbles, but not to Etienne, ‘that are denying birth and death, and heaven and hell . . .’ Etienne is so tired that he hardly hears the church bells when he slips into sleep.

  Another concrete tour. Birmingham this time. And then on to Gateshead. All in one day. At daybreak they are sitting on a train. Aodhan is trembling. ‘One has to touch the structures,’ he says. He goes on about the New Street train signal building, which geometrically renounces the world. The Birmingham Central Library, which cheats gravity. And then the highlight in Gateshead: Trinity Square car park. Here they will secretly spend the night. Etienne thinks of the condemned building in London where he now spends his nights with Aodhan. Before long it will probably be imploded while they are sleeping . . . What is he getting himself into?

  Aodhan notices nothing but the blunt buildings. Etienne tires of all the concrete, keeps his eye on Aodhan’s swarthy body instead: short and compact, almost hairless. Unreceptive like a chunk of stone. There are moments, during sex, when Etienne reaches the moister parts of Aodhan’s body, and possibilities glisten in the dampness. But overall he remains hard and closed off, like his beloved concrete.

  They complete their tour of hulking buildings, and, unexpectedly, Etienne also falls under their spell. Aodhan takes them back to the station; they board a train to Gateshead. During the three hours or so of the journey, neither of them speaks.

  When the two of them approach the Trinity Square car park late afternoon, Etienne’s hands start trembling. In the dusk, the black structure towers above everything else. They enter, walk up the helix of the access ramp to the very top.

  They sit down on the concrete edge, feet dangling over the edge. It is the last place in England where anyone would want to sleep, Etienne thinks. Even the homeless avoid it. Aodhan’s voice is unsteady. ‘It’s as ugly as I had hoped, this place. And so hostile. It’s fucking with my head, giving me a rock-hard fucking erection.’ They wait until it is emptied of cars, until the concrete echoes quieten down and the city lights shine brightly. Then they walk around. Aodhan almost breaks Etienne’s arms when he suddenly pins him against a pillar. Etienne shoves him away, but Aodhan fights back. They struggle out of their trousers. Aodhan’s body spasms; their semen simultaneously splashes against the raw concrete. They sit down, feet over the edge, look breathlessly out over the city. Aodhan drags a finger through a trail of semen, tastes it, rubs it into the concrete.

  When Etienne seeks warmth from Aodhan a little later, he pushes him away. ‘Don’t spoil everything,’ Aodhan says and gets up. He keeps walking under the fluorescent lights, from one pocket of light to the next. He moves around all night long while Etienne is trying to sleep with his cheek against a cold wall. From time to time Aodhan switches on his flashlight, lets the beam slip against grey walls.

  Etienne finds consolation back in the Square, in this green hollow within the city’s vortex. Here where seeds germinate and herbs grow almost audibly, where one always smells fires. Where you can seek out other inhabitants’ silences in front of No. 37’s marble hearth.

  When he returns after his and Aodhan’s tour, an envelope with his mother’s handwriting on it is waiting in his room. He holds it for a while before opening it. The tone of the letter – her first – is odd. As if nothing is wrong, as if Etienne is on holiday. He looks closely at the handwriting. It is hers. He reads on. There is news about plants in his parents’ garden that have succumbed to frost. About a cousin’s baby. A high-school rugby match. She doesn’t ask a single question.

  He frowns. She knows he has no interest in rugby.

  The next day there is another letter, bearing the stamp of a different post office. From his mother again. More recognisably her: breathless, full of short or half sentences. Like a hunted animal. She had written three previous letters, she explains; she gave them to his father to have his secretary post them at the office. She started suspecting his father was intercepting them. One afternoon she discovered the unmailed envelopes in his study. She confronted him. (He probably blamed her for his escape, Etienne thinks.) Now he has undertaken to actually post the letters, but she is convinced he reads them first. Henceforth, she will send parallel streams of letters: official one
s for his father’s eyes, and secret ones for Etienne’s. The latter she will post herself.

  The secret letter explains that she wants to send him money, but doesn’t have access to the bank accounts. And currency control is a problem too. Nobody and nothing can get out of here, she writes, not even money. My heart is broken about all of this. About you. She wants to come for a visit. His father is refusing to fund it. She doesn’t really know whether Etienne would welcome this either. She probes, asks the questions mothers ask: does he have a decent place to stay? Is he warm? (Doesn’t she know it is summer in the northern hemisphere?) Is he eating healthy food? And enough of it?

  Something is amiss in her explanation of the double stream of letters. Is she in fact writing the ‘normal’ letters for her own sake? Is she finding consolation in the correspondence that pretends everything is just fine?

  From now on he will create two piles. One for the false letters, another for the real ones. He will no longer open the former. And he will decide in due course whether to respond to the latter.

  Chapter 5

  Since the arrival of Etienne’s drums, he has been increasingly aware of the band scene. Everywhere bands are looking for members: in the Square’s café, in the Vauxhall Tavern, in the bar at No. 37. There are handwritten advertisements on noticeboards: for guitarists, vocalists, drummers. Bands practise in the community garden or in musty Victorian pubs. Etienne jams with a few of them. Shortly before his departure from Pretoria, Etienne started hearing folky rock everywhere. Spiced up with political protest lyrics in Afrikaans. There it was a novelty. Subversive. Here, such music is considered mainstream American, middle-aged. In Pretoria he was in a band with university friends. Sometimes they tried to sound like Bruce Springsteen, then again like Bob Dylan or Rodriguez. They were the only band on campus. At night they would practise in a laboratory – the vocalist was majoring in plant sciences. Etienne’s fellow band members had no desire to listen to his obscure British bands. He had to import the albums that he read about in foreign music magazines, at great expense. In the afternoons – wandering across his parents’ dead winter lawn, Walkman headphones covering his ears – he searched for new sounds.

  Here pretty much everyone joins a band at age thirteen. There are folk singers. Wannabe punk rockers. Monotone synth-pop types. Folk one has to have in the genes. Punk rock isn’t synchronised with Etienne’s speed. Too frenetic, although he likes the notion that it requires courage rather than talent. The electronic brigade he admires from a distance – the synthesisers remind him too much of the piano playing of his school days that he gave up so resolutely. This is what gets the most playtime in the Vauxhall Tavern, where he now spends his evenings: the New Romantics. Japan, Ultravox, Soft Cell, Bronski Beat, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode. And anything angry or experimental. The Smiths is a favourite. Morrissey’s ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ always features.

  One evening he talks to a man in the Tavern. He has a heart-shaped face and shiny lashes. He is small, with perfect skin. Someone else approaches Etienne shortly afterwards, asks breathlessly: ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marc Almond.’ So that’s who he was talking to, the singer of the band Soft Cell. The next day he goes out and buys two Soft Cell records, containing songs that are often played in the Tavern: The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom.

  On another night he speaks to a man who introduces himself as Jimmy Somerville. Him Etienne recognises. Formerly the vocalist of Bronski Beat. These days The Communards. ‘Where are you from?’ Somerville asks. He looks like a teenager, his face sharp and intense. The devil-may-care shrug of his shoulders demands attention. His head is tilted in sullen vulnerability.

  ‘Finland,’ Etienne says on the spur of the moment. ‘We are decades behind you when it comes to music.’ They stand in each other’s breath, drinking beer. The music is becoming louder. Somerville presses a palm against Etienne’s lower back when leaning in to talk to him. His lips brush against Etienne’s ear; he hooks a thumb in Etienne’s belt. Somerville looks him straight in the eye. His expression is in turn teasing, challenging. He is dancing and wriggling while he speaks. Etienne asks questions. About music, the scene in London.

  Somerville starts asking his own questions. ‘Your accent doesn’t quite sound Finnish to me,’ he says.

  ‘I have to go,’ Etienne says abruptly. ‘I’m flying back to Helsinki early tomorrow.’ When Etienne extracts himself, Somerville pouts. When Etienne looks back from the exit, he is standing there among the men, hand stretched out towards Etienne. Etienne’s heart keeps racing on his way back home.

  The next day he buys Bronski Beat’s album The Age of Consent. On the inside cover, in a kind of treatise on gay rights, he reads that the legal age for sex between men in Britain is twenty-one, for heterosexuals sixteen. He is a criminal in South Africa, Etienne thinks, and would have been a criminal here too had he arrived a year or two earlier. It excites him, makes his scrotum tighten.

  He is lying on his futon, sweating. On a turntable that was left behind by a housemate, the record is playing. He holds his ear close to the black blade of the edge. He should have stroked Somerville’s buzz cut when he had the chance. Should have pressed himself against his restless hips and buttocks.

  Etienne hones in on the forlornness of Somerville’s song ‘Smalltown Boy’. He returns the needle to the beginning of the track. Over and over again. In the electric moments before the first notes, Somerville’s boyish face appears before him. With both hands resting on his kicking erection, Etienne listens to the ominous falsetto while the shadow of Aodhan’s building is creeping across the skylight. The needle drifts to the end. Each rotation makes it jerk back into the groove: scratch, scratch, scratch.

  There are guys who want to start gay bands, and are looking exclusively for gay musicians. Etienne likes the idea, but the canvassers’ talents are limited. Bands come and go, sometimes within days. Names change, members change. It is like ancient slime from which something still has to emerge and take shape, this pond of South London amateur bands. In the spirit of punk, everyone can play or sing. Etienne envies them their blind self-confidence. But perhaps, he thinks, greater doubt would improve the music. He keeps his options open.

  Etienne studies the buildings and city projects on Aodhan’s wall. Strips within old Continental cities are razed to the ground, replaced by new schemes. Buildings span rivers and highways, are erected on pillars over old buildings: cities above cities. Aodhan dreams of parallel cityscapes, imposed on existing ones. There are cross sections of floating concrete masses, networks of invisible steel rendering it weightless. Etienne smiles. The drawings have exquisite detail, but they defy physics. He looks at Aodhan in front of the window, only his profile showing. A kind of dictator, one who wants to supplant flesh with the weight of other materials, who wants to reign supreme over form, flout gravity.

  Aodhan hardly possesses anything. He does have a videocassette recorder and a television. The latter’s wires are hanging out; the light tube is exposed. Sometimes the image disintegrates. Aodhan then rummages about inside the television box, hits the screen, bends the wire antenna. Sometimes there are sparks, or electrical buzzing noises. But if one can tolerate the intermittent white flashes on the screen, and Aodhan’s eruptions, it is possible to watch videos.

  ‘I want to show you a film,’ Aodhan says one afternoon. ‘I think you’ll like this. Russian.’

  The director is Tarkovsky. The Mirror is the name of the film. They lie watching on floor cushions. Chains of images from a child’s perspective roll over the screen. In one sequence a mother is bent over, her head in a bowl of water. She lifts out her dripping hair; it keeps swaying like seaweed in front of her face. All in slow motion. Water runs down the walls and pours through the ceiling, which is caving in. On a gas stove a huge flame is burning . . . There is a kind of eruption inside Etienne; he is completely hypn
otised.

  Aodhan, lost in the drawing he is working on, hardly registers Etienne’s departure at the end of the film. Etienne walks through the city in a daze. Everything looks different, more sharply drawn. Images have been burnt into his retina; highways have been rerouted in his brain.

  Scarcely an hour later he returns. ‘What else do you have?’ Aodhan gets up from his drawing board, distractedly inserts a new video. A film by director Werner Herzog. Fitzcarraldo. Aodhan sits down, continues his drawing. Etienne watches on his own. It is about a man who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon. He is alone in his wild obsession. In his rage he decides to have a team of Indians heave a boat over a mountain. He wants to harvest and ship out rubber from the other side of the mountain and use the profits to build his opera house. Etienne is amazed that lunacy can be translated into visual images in this way. Halfway through he looks up at Aodhan. The glow from the television catches his cheeks and forehead, his eyes like frozen stars. Aodhan turns his head. His gaze pins Etienne down at a distance. He has a lover, Etienne thinks, who wants to cast him in cement. He feels his own pulse. His heart is pumping cold blood.

  Etienne is now constantly watching films. He borrows Aodhan’s video­cassette recorder, goes and sits in the only room in No. 37 that still has all four walls and where there is a television. He connects the machine to it, closes the door, stays in there for hours. He borrows videos from squatters, or takes them out from film libraries. And he frequents cinemas. After three months in London, the money he has brought with him from South Africa is running out. Somebody makes him a fake student card. He gets discounts everywhere: at the new Renoir Cinema in Bloomsbury, the recently renovated Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, the British Film Institute’s cinemas in the bunkerlike building on the South Bank. He spends his life in the dark, sees four, sometimes five films per day. One by one he discovers the European auteurs. Pasolini and Visconti. Fellini and Antonioni. Godard and Truffaut. Herzog and Fassbinder. Wenders and Schlöndorff. In the mornings, when he is still half-dreaming, projector light merges with the scent of saliva on hungry skin.