Fishing in Beirut

Frank sat by the river and smoked grass. The October sun made flashes on the water, disturbed only by passing sightseeing cruisers. He spat off the quai, shivered in his filthy jacket, and eyed forlornly a small girl waving from a boat. She smiled with dancing eyes, but he didn’t lift his hand.

‘Andamos
sobre un espejo
sin azogue,
sobre un cristal
sin nubes.
Si los lirios nacieran
al reves,
si las rosas nacieran
al reves,
si todas las raices
miraran las estrellas
y el muerto no cerrara
sus ojos,
seriamos como cisnes.’

Frank knew this poem off by heart, but he didn’t know what it meant. Never picked up Spanish in Sevilla, never had the inclination to. He saw this lack of knowledge as being utterly unimportant, because the sheer act of recitation bore its own weight for him. He rubbed an insect bite on his hand, and by doing so set in train a constant need to do so. Gratification only came when he stopped.
There was a smell of urine from the bank below. He shifted about, his jeans scraping stone. The night before he had been out walking late, and had looked up and seen a man in a window, like a distant yellow TV screen, talking on a phone. Silhouetted dreadlocks, and the warm African French carried down softly on the chill wind.
“Non, mais dis-moi,” the man had murmured. “Je ne peux pas attendre.”
If you could get up to that room, and go down that phoneline, and wind up next to the other speaker, what world would you have entered? Is it a bedroom or a kitchen, a bathroom or a hall? Maybe you’d be in an alley, on a street, and what is it that’s needed, and what just cannot wait? And what if after this call someone called the caller, this man who’s somewhere else, and you went down that phoneline, and on and on. Would you end up right beside someone you know? Would you have passed by needles and agony to get from here to there? Have spied on naked skin, heard yelping dogs? What worlds are behind walls? Can you be connected to that man in the window by a snaking chain of people, and neither of you know it, and never will you know?
Frank had let his mind wander and thrown away his beercan, and wound up nowhere but home, alone and out of drink. Now a day later he sits by the Seine, and he won’t even wave to a child from who knows where, a child who when she’s fifty will say once I was in Paris.
He rolled his neck and spat. Slick saliva puddle kissing pissy Paris ground. He lay down on his back and there were no clouds overhead. Concrete coldness seeped through the hair on his head, permeating the back of his skull, hurting the bones. He sat back up and re-attacked the insect bite. It gave as good as it got.
There was a flutter to the left, and he turned to see a pigeon strutting about like one of those rappers talking ice and bitches, head and shoulders in motions of brain dead arrogance. Raised his arm violently, and it hopped and cooed and flew. There was near stillness by the water now. Ripples.
Frank got up and pissed by the quai wall. Two American tourists marched by, the woman clucking in disdain. The swish of anoraks and jeans. He watched them powerwalk over the cobbles, gesturing as they spoke. They grew smaller, too distant to be heard. Then they disappeared around the bend.

There’s someone dying on the balcony above. They’re coughing and coughing, and it doesn’t sound good. An ominous death rattle. It blends with the music in Frank’s room, and its harshness is somehow exacerbated. It starts and stops, and there is silence, and then suddenly a volley of phlegm-flavoured drum roll crackles in the dusk, and ripples out to mix with occasional traffic, birdcalls, and Frank’s music. Frank’s music from the flat below.
Frank is 23, and lives in Paris. He sits in his room, plays solitaire with a three-card turnover. His hair is too long, but he has no friends here who will cut it. He doesn’t want to go to a hairdresser.
Many people have cut Frank’s hair. Some are no longer friends, and some are, and live in Berlin, and Chicago, and Sevilla, and elsewhere. Dublin too, where Frank was born.
The coughing won’t stick to a pattern. It starts and stops, and there is silence, and then suddenly…The interval is never the same. It’s the sound of an ailing body Frank is hearing. A sharp and frightening cough, braying for all the sick and lonely of the world.
It’s not dark yet, but the sun is slipping. The birds move toward their homes in military formations. Traffic occasionally, but less than before. Frank’s music is making him cry. He wants to hear the air, the space, the distant freeway motion, not this wretched coughing, and no longer this oily tune. He turns it off abruptly, and there’s nothing on the street below. The coughing’s gone, and that’s a faraway carhorn. It’s peaceful and small, and oddly too it’s warm – strangers going home in cars he doesn’t know. He moves to his window and wipes his trickling cheeks, and leans out, solitary, in the cool evening calm.
And then there is the cough.
He pushes back in disgust. Slams the window, but feels too hot and stuffy. Opens it again, resigning himself to this raucous torture. A bronchial hacking, slashing at his ears.
Frank’s trousers are torn in several places. Random holes here and there. His shirt is creased and open.
“Open up your shirt honey,” a girl had said once, with laughter, and gentle calming mockery. A distant, distant time, a half-forgotten place.
“Open up your shirt, and let me touch your skin.”
An Italian girl in a German city, who said shirts opened up, and performance opened out.
“Open up your shirt,” and Frank had complied.
He walks around the room in a circle, making it bigger, smaller, on each tiny lap. He paces about, and God’s sky darkens.
Buttons coming free, his breathing growing rapid.
“Open up your shirt Frankie, open up your shirt.”