“C’est vraiment degueulasse ca,” said someone, as Frank pissed between two parked cars. It was very hot today, and he was very drunk. The offended girl swivelled onwards, talking rapidly to a colleague. Frank eyed their departing posteriors, pincered in the impotent rage of drink.
The heat shimmered in the air. There was dust and fumes. He walked purposeless, the can sloshing in his pocket, foaming. There was a tightness now within him, but he couldn’t pinpoint where.
On he went to nowhere, hot and ill at ease. The sound and presence of other people caused disgust and irritation. Solitude brought mindless rage, and uncomprehending terror. He hurt most of the time. He hurt, and jittered. He walked the streets in agony, propelled forward by a hostile distant body. There was no wholeness or unity, because something had been breached.
Jackhammers ripped pavements, and dust and noise were constant. He was on rue Beaubourg, and up ahead was the enormous Centre Georges Pompidou. A jutting piece of Notre Dame lay further, across the river, scaffold-covered. He spat, and coughed, and spat again. Reached into his pocket and gulped messily. He took a right after Hotel de Ville, and walked riverside to Pont des Arts. Descended to the quai and pissed again, thirsty, sweaty, and hot.
Maybe Frank could cure his own disease. Maybe nights in Buddhist temples, and the endless peace of a vast Aboriginal desert. Maybe this is needed. But this is all external, as distant as falling leaves, or perfect lovers. As untakeable as time. Frank’s problem lies within. It isn’t even really a disease.
The sun burned, next to Pont des Arts. He was directly in its glare. Two girls asked him for a light, and he was rude and didn’t know why. The cruisers hummed past, and the water rolled like heaven. Homeless men climbed down from the beams that were their homes, and went to forage. You could see their sleeping bags and cardboard – makeshift domesticity, sentried by ravenous dogs.
Frank lay down, and tried to be still. There were people sunning themselves all along the right bank quai, and he eyed them gingerly. They didn’t seem nearly as hassled by this glorious weather as he was. They didn’t seem hassled at all. He stretched, and shifted. He knew that whatever was wrong was getting worse. Some days he felt so excited he just babbled randomly at strangers, but most days were so rotten he could lash out at a post-box. He stared skyward, and sighed.
He half-heard someone laughing, and his heartbeat suddenly quickened. He sat up abruptly, some memory reflex triggered, with it the damp feeling of nerves on a sunlit dental Tuesday. He probed his pocket for a tissue, and instead came out with a map of the Berlin U-Bahn. It was crumpled, and frayed. It had parted from a lover, and he’d kept it ever since. Monica, from Italy. The stop names were familiar, but eerie too and foreign. Bismarck Strasse, Friedenau, Markisches Museum, Neukolln.
He looked at it carefully, following train lines, blinking in remembrance. The U7, the U6, the connection between the two at Mehringdamm. The Innenraum. Frank was hot and uncomfortable, but nostalgia was granting merciful relief.
He sighed and cried a little. Days before this torture, and awareness of futility. He blinked and sniffed, and attempted to relax his facial muscles, his shoulders moving up and down as he fought to align his breathing. He saw a seagull on the water. All the vacant dreams he had, and the dead weight of knowing they’d stay in his head. The U7 gets you from Neukolln to Blisse Strasse, and he’d made that journey one time, with flowers in his hand.
January 27, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 3)
January 26, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 2)
Johnny sat there at Piazza Beaubourg, rocking back and forth, his voice reverberating off the Pompidou glass. A group of Belgian teenagers were amassed before him, boys and girls alike awed by his singular presence. “Jah!” he shouted wildly. “Jah!” He bashed that guitar with all the fire in his belly, the ancient strings buzzing and falling short of pitch. His beer spilled and trickled down the paving stones, and he didn’t even notice.
He had developed a singing style of broken reggae harshness, of a living booming instrument. The buttons on his coat scratched the pavement as he rocked, and he whistled through his teeth and clicked his tongue between phrases. This was the performance of the believer, of exorcism and total involvement. His head moved, his legs moved, his dreadlocks danced about like a mop in a plug socket. He mixed English, French, and pure soulful scat. He shouted, he spat, he felt his shades press the bridge of his nose. He was doing just what he was doing.
The Belgians watched entranced. The boys and girls sat wide-eyed, and teacher sensed this was not an appropriate moment to herd them onward. He wracked his brain to find an educational aspect to this lunacy, but, finding none whatsoever, decided to simply enjoy the sunshine instead, and leave his charges at it. His charges were in raptures, and were giving this bizarre African gentleman more attention now than he himself had received in over twenty years in the pedagogical profession. He smiled and de-fogged his spectacles.
Johnny finished the song and beamed widely. Glorious sunshine on his face, beads of sweat tickling. Where was this weather coming from in February? He’d abandoned the Pompidou early the last December, as had become his custom during the winter, and hadn’t expected to make a return till mid-March. But this – this was superb. The past two days had seen him leaning out the window on rue Leon, spitting down below and not believing the sun on the streets, until this morning he’d finally taken the plunge, concluded these splendid conditions were no illusion, and leaped over the Metro barrier guitar and all, Beaubourg bound. None of his associates were around when he got there, but, feeling the energy in his bones once again, he just started singing when he found a place, in love and alive to the glory of the voice, lifting.
The Belgians left. A few of the girls tried to give him money, but he didn’t want it or accept. They were only about fifteen, but pretty. He felt the burdening awareness of sex and beautiful women, noticed the spilt beer can, and struck up another tune. Pigeons were around him, portrait artists too, but Johnny was again removing himself, eyes closed behind the impenetrable shades, the lust-heat of the physical ceding to the sound.
January 24, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 1)
The airport in San Jose is called Mineta. She sits there waiting, her hand luggage on the seat beside her, the rest already checked in. She keeps bouncing her foot, cause that’s what waiting is all about. It’s a daytime flight to New York, then an overnight to Paris. There is waiting before take-off, and waiting between flights.
The humming artificiality of airports affects people unknowingly. There is stress in travel preparations, stress in morning crowds, in electric lighting when it’s clear and blue outside. In baggage, queues, insanely loud gum chewing. In theatrical personalities standing right behind you.
But there is beauty too. Aria is more excited than nervous, and she no longer falls prey to common external stressors. She has a sweet soul. When you sit near the enormous windows you can see the planes taking off and landing, and the tiny men in orange jackets somehow directing the chaos. You can see birds, sun, and the endless expanse of runway. You can see your city’s buildings, a distant glinting skyline.
You can find calm within the hum, and embrace how you feel right now, sitting on this chair. You can see yourself at five and you were splashing in the ocean, and on this airport chair feel that tingling in your legs. You can carry all your heartbreak, that time your father touched you, that man you trusted so completely, and you just didn’t know what to think or what to say.
On the plane the stewardess pointed out the exits.
“In case of emergency, inflate the lifejacket by pulling firmly on the cord.” Aria listened attentively. A big fat man two rows in front stood up too quickly and whacked his head off the air conditioner adjuster knob. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, and the stewardess bade him be seated.
The population of San Jose is 1 million. Aria lives outside the city, near the coast. Many people speak Spanish as their native tongue, and many others learn it in school. ¿Donde esta el Ministerio de Defensa por favor? The summer nights are warm and balmy, so often children just sleep under a simple cotton sheet, wearing nothing at all. Peaches, apricots and other fruits are grown for business and pleasure.
She sleeps and wakes up in New York. Missed the aerial descent, missed the glaring absence of the Twin Towers on the Manhattan skyline. The fat man’s laboured breathing as he fished a bag out from the compartment above her head woke her upon landing. He generously got hers while he was up there, handing it to her carefully, and they all filed off together.
“I do not know what to make of this place,” he told her as they shuffled up the tunnel, emphasising the ‘what’ like a Texas cowboy rancher. Perhaps that’s what he was.
There was a five-hour wait for the Paris connection. She spent it by the window. Once she turned around and spied the cowboy, way over the other side of the terminal, sitting down eating a sandwich, until he was eclipsed by six extremely animated Asian women, all wearing matching white jumpers. It grew dusk, and then dark. There was so much talking among the throng of people in the place it almost seemed like there was silence. People swirled around, telling jokes, reporting to companions on boarding time updates, looking nervously about for toilets. Night-time now, and she felt she might be too tired to sleep on this final journey. Crestfallen momentarily, she suddenly looked up happily, and remembered she was going to Paris.
There was minor turbulence halfway through the flight. It woke her as the dawn broke. It was untroubling to most, but one woman began hyperventilating. Rapid gasping could be heard towards the front, as her body dragged in extra air not truly necessary for this experience. A paper bag and a soothing touch helped restore the oxygen imbalance.
Aria officially turned nineteen ten minutes after. February 6th. She placed her hand on her abdomen to feel the gentle rising falling, and smiled. So this was her nineteenth birthday. Clouds formed God-like formations out the left-hand window – heartpiercing endless death white, crystal heaven sun stabs. It was nearly too much to look at. The aching destined blue of the uninterrupted sky, stretching out unending till the rational explodes. The space, and the calming airplane breath hum, that sends you half to sleep.
She read the in-flight magazine, and drank some water. Time passed. Somewhere someone coughed, amidst the low scattered chatter and the intermittent toilet traffic. There was an article on Berlin, “Europe’s City Of Wild.” It said the whole city centre had been undergoing rebuilding for some time, around Potsdamer Platz. She looked at a picture of a crane filled skyline, and thought it beautiful.
Flicking through the magazine, she was hit with credit card advertisements, fold-out perfume samples, a black and white photograph of Vienna. She returned to the Berlin article. The writer mentioned an abundance of drug use in Berlin. He attempted to speak knowingly of this for a paragraph, but then returned to detailing tourist attractions. The Memorial Church, the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz, built to facilitate spying on the West over the wall. The Brandenburg Gate. She looked at little pictures of these, all backed by a sky that seemed too poetically pink streaked. Enhanced tourist-baiting mood shots. She got up and walked the length of the aircraft slowly, cause what is that blood disease airplanes give you now.
Later more drinks were brought, and she had orange juice. Her legs were restless and tired all at once. She could see the ocean down below, minute seagulls darting, sea-spray. The radio on the armrest had a station playing reggae, but only her left headphone was working. She was getting mostly bass at the expense of treble, and the system was fuzzing under the strain.
Paris was growing nearer. A snake of excitement wriggled in her back, liquid-like, momentarily. She sensed into her body on the seat. A baby started crying, but then changed its mind and laughed. It gurgled and cooed to itself for reasons unknown, and Aria couldn’t help smiling. Was this a boy or a girl she was hearing?
Someone started using a discman, and a stewardess ran frantically down the aisle in search of the culprit. Upon discovery, she issued the hapless baggy-jeaned teen a lecture on the dire effect it could have on the cockpit controls. He flicked his fringe out of his eyes and stared at her open-mouthed. Her cheeks swelled puffer fish-like as she rebuked him. His knee started jumping, and it grew harder to feign nonchalance. The stewardess noticed this, sadistically upped the tempo of her tirade, and Aria felt sorry for the guy. She tried to smile at him when the woman left, but his eyes were boring holes into the seat in front, his body rigid.
And so the flight ended. The plane touched down, all shudders bumps and hiss, and Charles de Gaulle flicked by as they taxied. Sun shining. She stayed seated till the fasten seat belt sign had been switched off, was careful when opening the overhead compartment, lest any luggage had been dislodged. She didn’t steal the headphones. A sunlight laser shot through a far window, illuminating dust rising off the seats. It occurred to her that this much dust was everywhere, whether it could be seen or not, and she tried to breathe less. Her bag strap felt slippy in her slight palm sweat. She readjusted her grip.
Queues, passports, conveyor belts of other peoples possessions, and hers somewhere in among them. How are these bags treated by the handlers? If they could talk, would you weep to hear their sorry tales? Unnerving histories of falls and dismemberment. She saw her own swinging around, and dragged it off onto one of those euro deposit trolleys. This euro was what they all used in Europe now, right? It was a strange little thing, and would grow stranger still when she later came to see how it would dictate her life in Paris. Existence with a pocketful of coinage. She felt it jangling in her jeans.
January 23, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 5)
When Frank left, Berlin had put one thought in his head: freedom soars over all. Then came Chicago, came Sevilla, and freedom started drifting. If he craned around his neck, and stared back into the past, the bus out of Berlin was when the bubble burst.
That soup stain on his trousers is not going away. Its orange has faded a dull and mucky brown, and it looks unsightly if you walk down rue de Rennes. That’s what Frank is doing, this chill December weekend. There are girls with dainty black gloves and precision perfect make-up. There are grown men who could best be described as boys, and some of them with dainty black gloves also. Stylish beige attire abounds, saliva lips of shoppers like aroused blood dogs. Frank is uncomfortable in this. Nauseated.
He reaches Montparnasse and collapses to the ground. He hasn’t eaten in two days, because he wanted to test his strength. He gurgles and spits, and there’s a tingling in the limbs. It’s warm, fuzzy – tiny internal dots of rhythmical motion. Frank is on the ground beside a congealed chewing gum.
A security guard from a lingerie boutique helps him up. He is fixing his collar for him when Frank sags scarily. He is only standing now because of this man.
All around there are people. All around, too much is going on. Voices from everywhere, with a sharpness to the afternoon air. Frank is assisted to a bench by his benefactor. Wood meets bone and tissue as he slumps. The man is enquiring after his present awareness, but Frank can’t remember the French he knows. His whole face is lolling.
What do you do when you’re not you, and your consciousness is refusing to acknowledge it? When the world is strong and cruel, your soul has gone astray, and there is no sense of comfort inside your unknown skin. Where begins the healing course of action?
January 22, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 4)
Karen woke up to the radio. Tuesday. What if God was one of us it wanted to know. What if indeed. She lay silently for perhaps eleven minutes, until the thing had told her it was quarter to ten. She got up and showered.
Breakfast was always muesli and fruit juice, because they all agree this is a fantastic combination to begin a new day’s proceedings. All those authoritative voices on television health shows, which were also quoted by visiting friends reading aloud to her both French and English newspapers. Can’t go wrong with muesli and fruit juice.
Karen’s TV was essentially a bigger, bulkier radio. She often wondered what country had made it, and why the hell she’d taken it when the man upstairs had died and it was destined for the trash. Poor old Monsieur Boulier, who had always been polite.
She listened to it while ironing, or dusting around the flat. It told her many things, and plunged her aurally into hackneyed adventures. When it spoke of healthy eating she listened carefully.
She finished off the muesli and washed the bowl. Started the machine for coffee. It popped away noisily, but coffee machine popping is called percolating. This word had always seemed made-up to Karen, and she had, in the past, conducted discussions with friends on this topic. Everyone had laughed, because think of any word long enough and it’s just a crazy assembly of different sounding letters.
Percolating.
She was wearing the shirt that scratched her wrists while she was reading, which was always second to last on the left side of the shirts and blouses closet. It was next to the one she never wore now.
She went to the fridge and got more juice. Did some ironing. The warm feeling of the fabric where the iron had just been, in comparison with the rest. The warmth of Karen’s clothes. Birds chattered through the open window, some near some far. She leaned her head right out and felt the sun. What If God Was One Of Us came on again. She was on a different station now, but still. He could be just a slob like one of us, and this woman was determined to let us know it.
The ironing got done, and so the board went back into the tiny space between the kitchen table and the wall. It slouched against this wall in relief, free from scalding till the next time. Karen carried the clothes to her bed – she dropped and then sorted.
On the phone she spoke to her mother, enquired after life in leafy Oak Park. Got another call, switched to it, mumbled morning sweetness’s to Michel in French, and switched back to Mom. Dorothy had just adopted an Iraqi baby, who was now to be called Georgie, and Dorothy was Mom’s best friend, having at the age of 58 left husband Archie, and struck out on her own.
Dorothy was Mom’s shining light. She gave hope, while Karen was in France. She had apparently joked about how the Iraqi baby did not need swaddling clothes, because with all the international red tape he had been carried through some had inevitably stuck, and little Iraqi Georgie was now guaranteed warmth for life. Mom thought this was just so funny. Karen laughed a little too.
“So are there any plans to come home honey?” she was asked.
“No, I don’t think so – I still really like it here.”
“And how is the boyfriend?”
“Michel.”
“Yes the boyfriend. How is he?”
“He’s fine Mom,” said Karen. “He’s fine and says hello.”
Later that night, she lay awake and listened to footsteps up above. The not-so-new New Tenant.
Old Monsieur Boulier’s face had felt like an ancient raincoat.
January 21, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 3)
Johnny gets up, and God only knows what her name in that bed is, but he is out the door, with laces not yet tied. It’s seven or eight, an early workday morning, and the air is doing that tickling thing that makes you want to shake with joy. It’s a new day, and you’re in it. He turns up his collar and nearly trips over his laces.
Further down the street, which is called Alesia, he stops and ties them. Stops and ties them, looks like kneeling in a pew. Whatshername had clamped her leg over him when they finished, and left it there, grip-like, till morn. Between his shoulder blades throbbed slowly from the wriggling movements deemed necessary for extrication.
Whatshername was the latest in a long line of whatshernames. The most recent in his ever lengthening tights-ladder of less than twelve-hour courtships. She had kissed like she was thirsty. If he closed his eyes now on rue d’Alesia he could still be back in her room. Looking down upon her in her cramped orange bed, her face blurring, the smell of her skin. If he closed his eyes.
Johnny was 32, sometimes said 30, and others 35. Sometimes mumbled 33 – ‘like Jesus.’ Yes, behold!, the temporary Christ of the lonely single business girl, the ragged fucking Saviour, who rolled his own stone from the mouth of the cave come earthly break of day.
Every day for the past two years he had sat in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou and played acoustic guitar – not for money, not playing for the benefit of the tourists. How he fed and clothed himself was a mystery even to him, or at least was a mystery when he forgot about selling coke. He forgot as often as he could.
He arrived from Senegal three years before, known to all there as Jean, intimidated initially by choked Parisian sprawl. A room in the Goutte d’Or and the phone number of a distant cousin in case things got rough. He’d never called this cousin. Jean did become Johnny, and acquired a full-length leather coat, and lived predominantly on crisps and dry baguette, and cheap domestic champagne. He spoke English to Pompidou sightseers in a good mood, and scowled endlessly at nothing at all in a bad one. He sat there all day, was visited by many, and occasionally went entire weeks without playing so much as a note.
The darkness brought a hunger, and living things will feed. At night he walked into bars in potent places, and he knew the type he was looking for. The stylish attire, the make-up, but the bouncing of the dainty shoe on the foot and the demure dart-away glance betraying an at-heart office girl fed up competing with the boys. Where was her romance? her wistful lipcurl wondered, her mystery enigma – her knight in battered leather, whose breathing made hers fast. Well there he was across the floor, and he was looking at you.
He would wake up in the morning to another commentellesappelle.
He stopped into a bakery on rue d’Alesia and emerged a minute later with pain au chocolat. Stuffed the wrapping into a pocket and devoured. He didn’t think he’d ever been here before, but a sign said Denfert Rochereau up ahead, and that was on Ligne 4, and Ligne 4 went to Chateau Rouge, which was the closest stop to Johnny’s room on crumbling rue Leon. He could return and get the guitar, and be back at Beaubourg before today had even started.
January 19, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 2)
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.
January 17, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 1)
And so that’s a blind girl at the bus stop. It’s windy, busy on the street, and the bus comes along and she doesn’t put out her hand, and the bus doesn’t stop, and her name is Karen. It’s rue de Vaugirard, outside Jardin du Luxembourg, at three o’clock in the afternoon. Her brown hair is blown and whipped, but she has only been told it’s brown, and that doesn’t mean a thing.
Her mother told her age two her hair was brown, and told her many times after. My name is Karen and my hair is brown and my eyes are blue, and I cannot see. But it doesn’t matter.
Karen thinks she hears the bus engine approach and puts out her hand, but it’s a truck, and it’s busy on the street, and it does not stop, because it’s a truck. She is confused and thinks the bus is passing, and calls out stop, holding aloft her white stick. She doesn’t know what’s happening, and people must be looking now. She senses attention, is sure of it in fact, directed at her, but what difference does it make? She pushes back her hair, and moves to the wall.
How many people noticed this? She sighs and coughs, and she’s pissed that bus didn’t stop. Now her boyfriend will be waiting, and he’ll grow anxious, and she’ll grow anxious on his behalf. Everybody tells her to buy a cell phone. Probably she should. She’s twenty-six, and they tell her she’s gorgeous. They told her in Chicago, and everyone tells her here.
Michel is gorgeous. She knows that for sure. The way he feels, the way his breath feels, the way it quickens when they… the way it’s not his skin that’s warm, but more his body underneath. He’s waiting for her now, north of the river, and he’s probably getting worried. She exhales slowly, with shoulders rising falling.
Someone else has arrived beside her. There is the rustle of a jacket, a face being scratched, male, and almost imperceptible breathing. Suddenly a heavy intake and exhalation, nasally, which sounds like a thunderclap as she listens carefully.
The man coughs, sniffs, scratches his face again. Forties? A cougher past his youth certainly. A man with an affliction, an affliction or a prop, born of sinuses, or habit, or tar settled snugly on the lungs. A faint and commonplace prelude of death, and a nag to go along with his having to wait for a bus. Karen rubbed her hands, and waited silently.
Wednesday.
January 15, 2010
Prologue
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.”
*
The coughing has abated, the day is fully night. Frank’s cigarette glows brightly, and you won’t find a light on here. Breathing growing rapid, in a distant, distant place.
January 13, 2010
Intro
Fishing in Beirut is a novel I wrote between 2002 and 2006. Please see here for more details. It begins with a poem called Earth by Federico Garcia Lorca. Thanks for reading, Steven Callaghan (fishinginbeirut@gmail.com)
We walk on
an unsilvered
mirror,
a crystal surface
without clouds.
If lilies would grow
backwards,
if roses would grow
backwards,
if all those roots
could see the stars
and the dead not close
their eyes,
we would become like swans.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
Fishing in Beirut 