‘She was here at the start of June, shagged herself out, and left.’
‘What about Georgette?’
‘That banshee hasn’t shown her face around here yet.’
‘We haven’t seen her since last year. She’s stuck in her parish.’
‘Earned a reputation round here, must be going to Rowy now… They don’t know her there yet.’
The Toilet Lady from Oleśnica
And then Oleśnicka takes a bottle of vodka out of her satchel and in the good old park-bench tradition wraps it in a plastic carrier bag. Then she offers us some, maybe with a Popular or a Strong, and maybe another sip; she wipes the neck off with her fist and drinks with us. For the chaser she pulls out two litres of artificially coloured and flavoured shite, the cheapest thing she could find at Frog Mart. For her, getting drunk meant escaping into madness, escaping her miserable fate. She barks:
‘Angelica! Get over here!’
Angelica is off rooting in the dunes, looking for a shag. I hustle Oleśnicka for a story, and in the shadow of the afternoon, sipping her vodka and chaser from mugs emblazoned with the face of Old Dear No. 1, she tells me the following:
‘Times certainly have changed… A few nights ago I went out cruising on my own, back home in Oleśnica. I gave the toilet lady two zlotys and wrote graffiti about myself above the urinals: “Bożena is a whore. Bożena is a slut…” and signed it “Bożena, age 40”. I walked out and whispered to the toilet lady:
‘“Excuse me, ma’am, do you realise that three homosexuals are sitting in there?”
‘And what do you think she says?
‘“Oh, I know, they warned me when I started working here, I know all about it. I have so much trouble with them…” And after a moment she shooed the air with her hand. “They can sit in there all day, for all I care.”’
The Lorca Expert
Save your breath, the blankets have already been pulled together; ours is the main one, making a Bald Mountain of sorts, a sabbat for all the witches tonight, ooh, it seems they’re preparing for St John’s Eve… For the moment, however, it’s still daylight, though we’re all sitting there listening to Oleśnicka as if we were gathered round a bonfire, or rather, as if the fire itself had summoned us there with its story…
Then Madame speaks up:
‘I was on the bus, on my way back from Sobótka to Wrocław, and this boy gets on, cultured, young, nice-looking. Not drop dead gorgeous or anything, but a nice lad. Well, one thing leads to another, and after an hour he tells me he’s gay.
‘“I’m telling you,” he said, “because I feel as if I can trust you.” I hadn’t said anything to him, but he already knew. We got to Wrocław, and he says:
‘“Come on, let’s go to a bar and have a beer.”
‘“No, why do we always have to sit in bars, drinking beer, with all that smoke. We should just go to Ostrów Tumski if all you want to do is chat. We’ll buy some beers, find a bench with a view of the Odra.” They’ve renovated all those nineteenth-century benches; it looks like they’ve even put up gas streetlamps there.
‘So there we were, sitting, drinking, him going on about poetry and Lorca (Lorca, remember that), you know, a cultured lad. Nix. I go off to have a slash in the bushes and come back, we drink another beer, and I start feeling a bit drowsy; I still remember saying something like “This beer is making me really sleepy”.
‘I wake up to the phone ringing. I’m in my own bed, it’s Małgosia calling. I was supposed to be at her place for lunch – three days ago. What happened to me? I’m thinking:
‘“Just a second, just a second… There’s something I need to get sorted here…” I sat up in bed. All at once everything flashed before my eyes. The whole sequence of events. Good Lord, he must have slipped something in my beer when I went off to pee – I’d left my beer on the bench! My flat had been cleaned out, of course. Later on, the police found out that he’d cashed three cheques for a thousand each under a false name, an identity he’d also stolen. Naturally he signed them all with my name, but nobody at the post office bothered to verify the signature, even though they had mine on file in their computer.’
Kangaroo
‘Kangaroo once took this grunt home, a bloke named Shogun, who stole her passport. No big deal. She reported it to the police, blah blah. They got her a new one, and she forgot all about it. All of a sudden, years later, Kangaroo was taking a trip to Turkey, to meet Turks. As a rule, the worse off a country is, the better the cock. The more they violate human rights, the less they violate the right to cock. Cuba’s the best as far as that goes.
‘They detained her at the border, your passport please, blah blah. She handed them the new passport. Oh the looks they gave her! “Oh. My. God! Me. Kangaroo. Wanted for murder. An international criminal! That is, until I started camping it up and said to them, ‘Oh beat me! Beat me, Mister Customs Officer!’”
‘Later, when she’d got back from Turkey, she says to me:
‘“Can you even imagine what this means? I shared a bed with that passport-stealing grunt, and that means I slept with a murderer, an internationally wanted man! An Al Capone! A mafioso killer! He was amazing; I couldn’t be any happier about that matter of the passport!”
‘Back on the Ukrainian border, they tackled her to the ground, and dragged her off the coach. The other tourists all looked at her in horror, of course, and the things she must have been spouting, swishing it up as usual (if I know her, she’d been knocking it back a bit on the coach). All those stories she made up about being in prison, and went around telling everyone, how all the convicts raped her, and so on (that she was locked up, I know is true). Anyway, the story was that the grunt was some kind of big shot among villains, and he’d been using her passport; he got caught for something, escaped, but they had a record of it, to search for so-and-so for such-and-such. But that’s not the least of it. You know what Kangaroo is like, what a diva she is, what a madwoman. The scene she made during the interrogations… Just imagine:
‘“I fall at your feet, I beg you! Please don’t kill me, for I am innocent! It’s Kangaroo, Kangaroo from the picket line! I let that grunt into my home, and he stole my passport…”’
Kangaroo’s Prison Tales
‘That much may have been true. The rest was probably all made up: how she languished in prison for three weeks before the truth came to light, how an unknown woman in a niqab passed her cosmetics through the bars in her window so that Kangaroo wouldn’t go to pot during her confinement. You believe that?’
‘No.’
‘Oh sure, she was in a cell with a murderer who drank her perfume, and sure, she gave everybody blowjobs – all she wants is to make people jealous. But you know how she is. She goes off to Turkey and comes back saying things like:
‘“I did the Turks, all of them! They’re so desperate for it there, their women have to be virgins until they are married (and then, on their wedding night, once they have their cherry well and truly popped, the men hold the bloody rag up for all and sundry to look at). They can’t even ask women out on a date, so all we had to do was stand on the hotel balcony, and there on the next balcony across some Turkish workers were busy, so we gave them a little show” – here Kangaroo demonstrates: she licks her finger, preens herself, pokes out her tongue and pulls it back in – “and they made gestures with their eyes towards a shack. We looked out on to a narrow courtyard; shops backed on to it, there was rubbish, leftover flowers, fruit and fish – a regular Campo dei Fiori – and there was this shack there, and they kept looking over at it, they wanted us to go there that night.”
‘And everything would have been fine, and we could have broken open our piggy banks for the trip and had something to live off, but unfortunately there was a flaw: the story was coming from Kangaroo, and you can’t believe a word she says, and it’s not worth dragging your arse all the way to Turkey to check, only to find out she was lying, making it all up, having us on with that nonsense of hers… And now the little c
rook’s nicked a twenty from me.’
Madame: ‘But let me finish my story about that bloke with the Lorca…’
‘All right then.’
The Lorca Expert: Part 2
‘… As soon as I got to the police station they drew my blood to analyse it – “Ah yes, that Lorca expert put ‘truth serum’ in your drink, sir, the stuff used by Americans in their interrogations; it’s against the law. It’ll make you do anything.” I was terrified: how had I got home? I might’ve committed acts of murder during that time, and without knowing what I’d done I’d have denied it! The investigation also showed that first he found out my address (I must have graciously blurted it out to him on that bench), left me there, burgled my flat and left the door ajar. I’d then found my way home on my own; the neighbours testified that they’d seen me outside the gate, dumping out the contents of my bag as I looked for my keys; they thought I was drunk. Then they let me in – they looked, and the door to my flat was open. I don’t remember a thing! Naturally I didn’t get one penny of my money back and even had to pay overdraft charges. And then, what a nightmare, those neighbours of mine being interrogated at the police station, a fat lady with an even fatter wart sitting behind the typewriter, not an ounce of understanding or tact, just sitting there with her scratched nail polish, just like during communism, and the whole time she kept saying:
‘“Please just stick to the facts, sir! So, you arrived home at ten p.m.?”
‘And I said: “I don’t know. I was unconscious. That’s what my neighbours said.”
‘And she would say: “So did you or not?” – And then more rubbish, and she writes: homosexual, Lorca expert. I say to her: “What?” “Well, that’s what you said, sir…” And although the police themselves discovered that “truth serum” in my veins, they hadn’t told this woman about it. She still didn’t understand a thing I was saying, just that I had “arrived at the premises at or around ten p.m.”. Later on it came to light that the Lorca expert had taken almost all of the chanteuses to the cleaners. Flora Trattoria, for instance… And then there was that thing Flora and I called the Mystery Spot…’
‘Mystery Spot?’
‘When I woke up in my flat, although I’d been robbed blind, the first thing I realised was: he’d been there. And then: I had no clue what had happened. I mean, he could have murdered someone and hidden him in my sofabed. And in the middle of the grey carpet in the hall there was this conspicuous, damp spot. Flora found one on her sheets.’
‘Oh my goodness!’
‘Exactly! Those idiot police dusted all the doorknobs with white powder as they looked for fingerprints, but they paid no attention at all to those spots…’
The Man Who Nicked Kangaroo’s Passport
It all started very romantically… She picked him up in front of the young offenders’ home. Beautiful. Simple as a flick knife. Kangaroo rang me up after the romance had already progressed some ways, happy as a lark. Bah! See what those lads are capable of? He used to write her poetry! Just ordinary little poems, on cards, in long hand, maybe not quite like Lorca, but all the same… Anyway, it turned out later that he really was a major league criminal, a murderer. They called him Shogun; and this Shogun, this murderer, used to write poems about flowers and little birds and butterflies and love to our very own Kangaroo… All they can write about is flowers. Well, it made that whore happy to show off her poems; she’d read them aloud to me over the phone: ‘Love – Springtime. To my darling Kangaroo’. I understood everything after she once told me when and where she was going to meet him, and how I should go and watch them from a distance. The essence of grunt: legs up to the heavens, great big bulging packet, straight Roman nose, gently receding hairline, biceps. Words can hardly do justice… He walked over to where she stood under that needle in Szczytnicki Park with a swagger, like a sailor. Right, just like a sailor! Like a tank would walk if tanks had legs! Ten generations of certifiably proven heteronormativity! Eventually I could bear it no longer, and I left my hiding place and said to her:
‘What, don’t you recognise your girlfriend, Kanga? Why don’t you introduce me to your friend here…?’ Like it or not, she had to introduce me, and that’s when I met him. What was it about his face, his eyes, about the form of him, that had us all fluttering headlong into the flames, even though we knew he was a criminal? I mean, his eyes were almost bulging out of his head. And below each eye protruded the most delicate ridge of flesh. On his cheek he had a scar, and his beard was patchy, and he had such extremely varicose veins on his hands; everything about him was extreme, like something out of a comic book. Exaggerated. For instance, he had sideburns like some Russian Ivan, right out of the nineteenth century; huge ones covering half of his face. Oh honey! And how did it all turn out? We ended up at Kangaroo’s place. The usual: vodka, beer, I started acting like a rich queen from America; something in my subconscious told me that the more I showed off how much money I had, the more he’d be interested in me. So I took out a hundred zlotys and started squishing it on the floor under my heel, but he shouted at me instead – how dare I throw money bearing the Polish eagle on the ground. He was… what was he now? Some kind of nationalist something or other. Something about respect for our country, our land, our national emblems. But I was wankered, and I ripped up that hundred-zloty note and set it on fire with a lighter, like Nastasya Filipovna. The moment I saw him, those mammoth legs of his, there under the Needle, I had this fantasy: me in the bath, him standing over me, so I could look up at his legs towering like two columns, and pissing. All over my chest and face. And spitting on me. So I whispered in Kangaroo’s ear: ‘Come on, Kanga, lock the bathroom door, let him drink all the beer, but don’t let him in. Don’t let him come in! Lock it shut for me, if you’ve ever liked me even a little bit, if you’ve ever been my girlfriend! Just lock the fucking door, don’t let him near the toilet, don’t let him set one foot through that door.’ I put the keychain around my neck; Kangaroo lived in an old building, the toilet was in the same room as the bath, and it was all locked shut with a skeleton key. I hung the key over my heart and returned to the living room, where he was taking off his boots. We explained everything to him, and he said:
‘OK,’ and chewed his gum.
O-K… Two letters that could only sound like WC to me. Now to get him well and truly pissed. Drink up, drink up. What can I say: my dreams were coming true. Kangaroo stood in the bathroom doorway smoking a cigarette, utterly jaded.
A short time passed. I ran into Shogun in town. He was nice enough, I invited him for a drink, offered him a cigarette. I happened to have a fair bit of cash on me. He instructed me to buy him boots, a pair of knee-high combat boots. He led me to the top floor of Podwale, already knowing which ones he wanted, they cost three hundred zlotys, a lot of money at the time. Stupid me, I wanted to impress him so I started throwing my money around, buying both him and myself this, that, and the other. Until I confided in him that I was being called up for army service. He told me not to worry, but to pay a visit to his uncle at the command post; for six hundred zlotys he’d pull some strings and get me passed as unfit for military service. We got in a taxi and rushed off to see the uncle; I was completely pissed, because every time we’d bought something we celebrated with a drink in another posh bar. The taxi turned into an old street in the Bermuda Triangle. He said:
‘Wait for me here in the car.’ He took my military card and the money and disappeared into the building. I waited, waited. After half an hour the cab driver, who was beginning to squirm, said to me:
‘Excuse me, sir, but I don’t think your friend is coming back…’ Only then did I realise that he’d gone into the front of the building and out the back; but what can you do, those big eyes of his, those big raccoon eyes of his… And after all that he actually had the audacity to go and see Kangaroo and ask her how I was getting on. And to nick her passport. And use it. Years later he slipped this letter under my door, about how he was waiting for me with my military card at the Ne
edle, and only if I came and brought such-and-such amount of money with me would he give it back, and if I didn’t show up he had a syringe full of infected blood he’d stick me with… But what can you do, those raccoon eyes of his, those scars on his cheek… I completely ignored the letter, and there were no repercussions, except that I can still see those thighs of his towering over me even now, and I don’t regret a thing. So as it turned out, I, too, went with a major thug, a mafia leader… It’s just a shame he never wrote me poems, because even today Kangaroo keeps that doggerel of his stored between empty bottles on a shelf in the bar, reading them aloud to anyone who’ll listen…
Doctor Mengele
A deadly poisonous queen, from Oświęcim, she looks like a beaker full of cyanide. And on top of that beaker someone had stuck a pair of round wire spectacles. Skinny, tall, ruddy-freckled. She’d done time for murder, was released early. Now she’s here visiting us.
Right away a whole circle coagulates around her on the picket line. The cream of the criminal crop: Radwanicka, Crooked-Nose Jadwiga. I look over: who’s the new local saint? Then Patricia whispers in my ear: Poison!
‘Watch out,’ says Patricia. ‘Watch your step. That one on the bench over there, she’s a horrible, pernicious queen; they call her Doctor Mengele. She’s staying with Duckie. Go and have a look, but don’t say a word, just listen, because you never know… she gets into your head, I mean, she can really fuck you up.’ She was wearing glasses and really did look like Doctor Mengele, blonde hair – a Nazi on our bench! She was telling a story, sorting out some business with Duckie there, something about money, about cock…
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