Fiction: The Literary Underground

False Idols

It was Sunday. The day had started before then, though. Probably Friday. 
Possibly Thursday. Our pockets were empty. Bodies depressed, standing 
in the cold light rain of an ugly Manchester night.

"How we going to get home?"
"Get a black cab and do a runner at yours."
"Fuck that. Last time the driver buzzed everyone in the building and the 
police came. It was lucky my Mam wasn't in. I saw John on the stairs the 
next day and he said he'd kill me if another taxi driver woke him up 
because of me."
"Fuck off! Big John- the big black guy that just got out for murder?"
"Exactly. 16 years, please. He won't need much of an excuse to go back. 
It's the only home he's ever known."

The girl was standing there looking lost. Something switched on in her 
head, and she walked over and flicked Chris hard on the nose.

"What's wrong with your face, Ginger Balls?"

I laughed. I'd forgotten about her. She wasn't with us. She was supposed 
to be with Nick. Nick was supposed to be getting us into a members club 
around the corner, but it looked like we had seen the last of him. Now we 
were burdened with the lunatic.

"Sam, what you doing with her?"
"I'm not doing anything with her. She's a fucking idiot. She just threw the 
last of Nick's coke out of the window of the taxi on the Mancunian Way."
"No shit! Stay away from her, mate. I know her family: she's been 
sectioned twice."
"Cheers, Jimmy. But don't worry about it, like I said, she's with Nick."

The cars pulled away from us and along the street, leaving the wet road 
momentarily patterned from the tread of their tyres. The red rear lights of 
the cars mixed with the white light from the street lamps and the blues and 
greens from the shop windows, all shrouded behind the fine film of drizzle 
that it was almost possible to forget was there until small drops of water 
formed on the tip of my noise. We stood together in silence watching the 
street shimmering in front of us, sharing in all the futility of waiting and 
something that might have been beauty.

"Fuck this. Chris, come on, we're going to have to get a black cab."

Before he could say we had no money, I digged him in the ribs and looked 

at him to shut up by pointing my eyes in the direction of the girl. We had 
no money, but she looked like she did. The taxi she threw the coke out of 
had picked her up from an old, expensive house on Chatsworth Road. If 
she didn't have money on her, she could get it when she got home- we 
couldn't.

We pulled up outside the old, red bricked building where Chris lived- a 
converted Victorian school that would have been worth millions if it wasn't 
sitting atop of one of Salford's most notorious streets- and got out without 
needing to run. The girl lay half-crunched up in a stupor between the seat 
and the door with her back to the driver.

"She lives on Chatsworth Road, mate. Not sure which number, but I'm sure 
she'll point it out once you wake her up. Nice one, pal."

We entered the building through the old "girls" entrance and started up 
the wide staircase that wound up the front of the building and fed off into 
two corridors at each floor. Chris lived on the 4th floor. It was strange to 
see, through the large bay windows that gave back out onto the car park 
down below, that by the time we had reached the 2nd floor the taxi had still 
to leave. When we reached Chris' floor, the taxi had gone and the girl was 
walking unsteadily towards the entrance of the building.

"Chris, check her out. She's going mad down there. She's going to put the 
glass through."
"Fuck her. She should've just gone home. She's not our problem. I'm not 
letting her in ours."

The noise from the banging on the glass rose up to us on the corridor of 
Chris' floor. Buzzing and swearing swelled the crescendo of noise as 
through randomly answered intercoms she could be heard screaming, 
"fucking scumbags." I looked down to see she had taken of one of her red, 
high-heeled shoes and was using it to pound the wooden frame of the 
door.

"Fuck me, Chris, we can't leave her out there on her own. Anything could 
happen to her and it'd come back to us."
"Fuck that. I already told you, I don't want her in mine. Nobody told her to 
get out of the taxi."
"Whatever, we can't leave her at the top of Langworthy Road at 3 in the 
morning."
"You're a fucking soft cunt."
"Yeah, I know. Don't worry about it, I'll sort it out."

Dirty fucking scum bag is what she said as I opened the door. A pair of 
dirty fucking scumbags is how she qualified it later when we got up to 
Chris' flat. Her hair was wet from the rain and clung to the side of her face. 
Her nipples stood out through the thin material of the red dress she wore 
under a long unbuttoned heavy black coat. She hobbled through the door, 
still carrying in one hand the shoe she had attacked it with. She was angry 
and looked wild, but I was sure that even before the "g" of scumbag had 
reached my ear that a twisted little smile had broken across her face as 
she spoke.

Chris ignored her sniping and only rolled his eyes when I teamed up with 
the girl and berated him for being such a bad person. The girl began to 
enjoy herself in the warmth of the small flat and asked about the coke she 
forgot she had thrown out of the taxi window earlier. Chris made a long 
joint of the most beautiful smelling skunk weed, and under a musty red 
cloud illuminated by the cheap, sporadically flashing Christmas tree lights, 
calm and silence briefly controlled the room.

"Is the butter too hard, or the bread too soft?"
"Say again."
"Is the butter too hard, or the bread too soft? It's a question. Are you two 
stupid?"
"Sam, what the fuck is she going on about?"

The girl laughed and fell back into the hard brown back cushions of the 2 
seater sofa we were sharing. Chris stood up from his chair and 
disappeared into the kitchen.

As the girl lay back, eyes closed and contented on the sofa, I ran my eyes 
along her. Up from the small nail polished pink toes, over her delicate 
ankles and along her toned legs, shadowed in the ghoulish half-light of the 
room. Onto the frail hem of the red dress that stuck tight to her, defining 
the litheness of her body, and running up into hooks of thin fabric over her 
shoulders, exposing skin and inviting me to continue searching, following 
the cut of the material as it stooped down toward her chest. From my angle 
the inner protection of a powder pink and white dotted bra could be seen 
shielding pert and slightly swollen breasts.

Chris walked in carrying a red, handless plastic bucket, the brand name 
half visible where somebody had unsuccessfully tried to rip it off, and 
placed it on the floor in front of the girl.

"Here you go. I don't know what you were going on about, but you're 
obviously feeling a bit sick. Do it in there if you don't think you can reach 
the bathroom."

Chris sat back down into his chair; happy with himself at his own joke. I 
laughed and the girl opened one eye, sat back up from the sofa, placed 
her head between her hands and took in a deep breath. Sitting like this, 
her hair fell forward shrouding her face in a blonde veil, and her body 
became a weird beautiful object; headless, passive and brilliant.

"I murdered him, the bastard. It cost 2.6 and I got away with it all."

I moved slightly from my position next to her, shifting my weight on to my 
left side, to try and see her a little better. She threw back her head, 
splaying her hair back, around and behind her, and looked manically 
around the room as though taking in her surroundings for the first time. 
Chris' eyes opened wide in hilarity and he kicked the bucket closer to her.

"What the fuck are you on?" his voice a perversion of his own- high 
pitched and whiney, infected by the girl's madness.
"Who you talking about", I said. "Who did you murder? Where?"
"Who do you think? My fucking husband. In Sweden."
"What? You murdered your husband in Sweden, but got away with it. What 
cost 2.6?"
"The Trial."

I felt sorry for her, but I was amazed. I wanted to put my arms around her 
and make her be calm. I wanted to take her away from this shit hole; 
somewhere where she wasn't mad, or where we could be mad together. I 
wanted to take off her clothes, lie her down on a huge white bed and kiss 
her until she understood that there were only her and I in that world.

Chris had worked himself up into a frenzy of his own and disappeared 
again into the kitchen, then reappeared holding a large kitchen knife that 
he  placed on the coffee table in front of me and the girl.

"It'll be alright", he said with a sickening tone, then sat back down still in his 
chair, willing himself not to laugh.

My stomach turned and real fear gripped me. However many days of 
sleepless nights and long forgotten amounts of drugs and drink were 
being ended right now with this girl and this new madness. I believed in the 
dizzying grip of the moment that, yes, maybe this was the way things 
sometimes ended. A joke isn't a joke if it isn't understood. I looked at the 
black handle of the knife, inches from the girl's hands, and imagined her 
reaching out and thrusting it into my stomach; blood seeping out of me 
slowly in silence, the girl lying back, relaxed against the sofa as though 
nothing had happened, Chris confused, me dying.

"Chris, you're a fucking idiot."

Chris laughed, stood up, picked up the bucket and placed it in front of me.

"I snorted his ashes on camera."

Chris' face bubbled up in a hot flush and his eye brows melted away under 
the strain. A pig's grunt shuddered its way through his body, erupting in a 
wild uncontrolled laughter. Maybe it was because I was sitting next to her, 
but I was calm, trying to take it all in. Chris had lost it.

"Oh, fuck. Fucking hell. I've pissed. Oh, fuck me. Sam, no shit, look at my 
pants- I've pissed in my own pants."

My turn to laugh again. I looked back at the girl who seemed oblivious to 
everything apart from the madness that was going on inside her head.

"Look, look what you've made him do. He's pissed himself because of your 
daft stories. Are you alright? Do you want a drink or something?"

Chris left the room to change his soiled trousers and she seemed to look 
at me properly for the first time. A sly grin, the same as the one I thought I 
had seen when I opened the door, rode its way slowly up her face.

"What's your name?"
"I'm Sam. Do you not remember? I'm the one who went down to get you 
from the street."

She didn't reply, but moved towards me slowly and kissed me softly on the 
lips. We fell back together into the sofa and she lay quietly in my arms, 
running her hand across my chest before tracing out the features of my 
face.

"Right, she's going to have to get off. I'm getting my head down."
"Fuck off, Chris."
"No. No way. My Mam could come home at anytime and she'd go mad if 
you two were in here."
"Why you being a dick?"
"I'm not, but the fun's over", he said as he switched on the main light. "You 
can stay on the sofa, but she's going to have to get a taxi."

The intercom buzzed and I walked the girl down to the car park and the 
waiting car. There wasn't anything to say. The sun was coming up but 
there was little light and the drizzle had persisted. Chris had broken 
something when he switched on the light. Everything was too ugly and well 
defined, even in the half-light of the dawn. The only thing to do was to all 
go our separate ways.

"What's your name", I asked her.
"Amy. Bye, Sam."

I couldn't sleep on the piece of shit sofa in Chris' living room and when it 
was time for the first bus, I noisily banged about the flat looking for loose 
change for my fare. I hated his flat in the light. All over it were little statues 
of Mary and Joseph. A nativity scene beside the tree. And on the wall in 
the living room, a large painting of Jesus Christ bearing his Sacred Heart.

Before leaving I rearranged all the religious paraphernalia into some sort 
of twisted alter in the middle of the living room floor. I found candles in the 
kitchen and using the bucket and knife Chris had had so much fun with 
earlier, I set up a macabre scene that looked ripe for blood letting and 
religious sacrifice. Chris would sleep until at least 4 and I knew his Mum 
would be the first person to make this discovery. Merry Xmas.

Puddles of water ran through the aisle of the 37 bus that I took back home. 
Drops of rain formed like worthless diamonds outside the window then 
dropped intermittently to form little rivers that seeped through the 
seemingly sealed window frames. The smell was damp and the driver was 
a shadow of a man who must have only existed behind the wheel of his 
bus. Outside the window, all the people and things were infused by a dull 
sheen of grey. I kept my head at an uncomfortable angle to avoid seeing 
my own reflection in the glass. I thought of Amy and her red dress, her 
white skin, her blonde hair and her madness.

The following Sunday, I found myself alone at the bar of the pub we used 
to drink in. I was leaving for Italy the next day but unsure as to why. A tap 
on my shoulder and I turned round to find Amy smiling. Next to her was a 
small foreign looking man.

"Sam, how are you? Let me introduce you to my husband, Paolo."
"Ok, shit. Paolo, I've heard a lot about you. You look different than I had 
imagined."

About an hour later, Amy found me again at the bar. She squeezed my 
hand and told me that Paolo had left.

"That's funny. You must have been surprised by his resurrection. I'd 
stopped believing in that shit, but I think you've reaffirmed my faith."
"I know, it's a miracle. Why don't you come back to my house and I'll 
explain it all."
"I can't. I have to wake up early in the morning, I'm moving to Italy."
"Can I come?"
"No, I don't think you can. But I suppose I could wake up a little earlier in 
the morning, or maybe just not sleep at all. Let's go."

The taxis pulled up outside the pub simultaneously. Same coloured cars. 
One empty for pick up. One full for drop off. The drop off was at the front 
of the two. As I walked to the second car, my ex-girlfriend stumbled from 
the first. She lived with her fiancé, but called me constantly, and on nights 
like these often ended up spending at least part of the night at my flat.

I dived back into the pub, anxious to avoid confrontation. Amy stood 
confused in the doorway, and then came back in to find me. I hid from her 
behind one of the wood and glass partitions that split up the pub and 
decided that moving to Italy was probably a good idea after all. A prod in 
the back and I was faced with my ex. She was halfway drunk and struggled 
to maintain her anger as she put her arm around my waist and pulled me 
towards her.

"Who's that girl you were with at the door?"
"It was nobody. I was looking for Chris."
"It looked like you were waiting for a taxi with her to me."

I noticed the taxi still waiting in the car park and pulled my ex outside 
quickly and into the car with me.

"26 Acacia Terrace, please."

My ex fell back onto me drunkenly. I kissed her forehead and ran my 
fingers through her beautiful, long black hair. Outside the window of the 
car, the sun had still to set and there was no rain, but it seemed to me that 
the life outside was only a poor imitation of something else that I could no 
longer remember ever having truly existed before. I caught a glimpse of 
Amy's blonde hair in the doorway as we pulled out of the car park. I turned 
away quickly, fell further back into the seat, and caught the reflection of my 
face in the rear view mirror.

Poetry: Lit Up Magazine

from upon Montjuic

Arambol days
Kingfisher
soft stringy black
duelling beast slipping in the sand
packs of wild dogs the only community
mythology and overly cooked eggs
Russian prophets
like Him in visage
foul mouthed in foreign tongue
3000 faces
unable to communicate with 1
freedom came at the cost of his arse
I don’t judge, but nor can I follow

a city constructed entirely by men’s minds.
a concrete dream
cold stone and metal sleeping
a million miles from its foundations
broken chords of dancing queens played on a sold out instrument of ancient integrity.
valueless.
uncoordinated.
dumb.
tourist coaches pull out for the next stop on the itinerary

stop
get down from your carriage
forsake all your personal jesus.
open your eyes to see a dusty vacuum in the site where sat the monolith you mistook for your soul.
touch the empty sky
breathe in the lack of self
recite 3 times there is no place like home
wrest yourself from the nightmare
sleep walk across dead earth

a light
a star
you don’t know the word in english.
a different place.
desire to live and wonder
traded off against the acceptance of beauty
death.
fight without thought of victory
struggle
scream liguidless tears
defy the flies
act

we

keep walking
searching
together

Fiction: Underground Voices

Rainbow's end 

Niente was a simple man. He lived alone in the middle of a place that had no name and 
which you would not be able to find on a map. For Niente, the question as to where he 
was was as irrelevant as to that which might have asked as to who he was. Questions 
like this, or of any other kind, never crossed his mind. 

He lived in a small, single floored, wooden house. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in 
a corner that was directly opposite the bare window from which the sun came each day. 
Outside and adjacent to the house was a garden in which he grew various fruits and 
vegetables. It never rained in this place, but Niente was able to tend to his garden by 
drawing water from a well on the opposite side of the house. 

In and around this place there was not any other person, or thing. The landscape was of 
an abject bleakness in all directions. The sky was a cloudless, pure, and relentless blue 
by day and by night there existed only a dead black, with neither moon nor stars, that 
enveloped all of the vast emptiness that could be seen by day into one whole, still, blind 
union by night. 

He took all of the things that he had for granted and never thought to ask himself how it 
was they were there, or how he had come to be using them. They were there and he used 
them in order to survive. That these things could one day disappear never entered his 
mind. Notions of any kind of lack were as alien to those of any sense of abundance. He 
was there as were his things, and this was how it would always be. Niente's world was 
fixed and in it there existed no possibilities of change, or surprises of any kind. 

Niente moved only between the house, the garden and the well. He never once thought 
to try and stretch the boundaries of his world and walk beyond the nothingness that 
surrounded him. He was, without any actual formal appreciation of the feeling, content 
with what he had. 

Whilst it was true that he never asked for or questioned anything, he was on occasions 
aware of a previous life that he had led before getting to this place.

From time to time, vague images and recollections of somewhere and some things, 
which were different to this place, would come to him as he carried out his daily tasks, 
haunting him like unobtrusive ghosts floating without direction through his windless 
sky. 

Once as he was leaving his house, the light from the sun - reflected of the glass window - 
had conjured up a dizzying vividness for him that was alien to the stoic life he lived on 
his small desolated spot of land. The outlines of new shapes formed, and bewitched him 
momentarily in a rainbow of colours that he sensed he knew, but whose names he had 
learned to forget. 

On another occasion he slipped and fell to the floor, while walking to his well, and 
became lost as he saw - in his wake - the dusty sand of the earth dance majestically from 
the floor, towards the empty sky, then fall back softly to the ground from which it came. 
This simple movement had pushed him back to a time where he had not been alone, and 
of another person who was not the one he knew himself to be. 

These reveries, or sporadic flights from reality, came and went without any regular 
frequency and possessed all of the significance that Niente attached to them, which was 
none. They were there whenever he wanted to notice them and would be lost, as quickly 
as they had come, as he looked around and was reminded of what he was supposed to 
be doing at the time. 

One day, while retrieving water from the well, he was distracted by one of these 
recollections of another history and walked absent-mindedly, in the opposite direction 
of the house and out into the vast expanse of the flat, arid land around it. A stray drop of 
water fell from his pail, onto the bare skin of his foot, and awoke him from his day-
dream. He looked around into the emptiness that surrounded him. Quickly realising his 
innocent mistake, he turned without a second thought towards the house and to his daily 
tasks. 

The next day, Niente awoke, lit up mechanically, as the sun's incessant rays rained 
down upon his face, bringing with them the first manifestation of life. He left the house 
to collect the water from the well, as he always did at this time, only to see that there 
was a man crouched beside the well. The stranger was replacing the earth over a point 
in the ground where it appeared he had just planted or buried something. Niente felt 
neither curiosity nor fear upon finding another man in what had always been, until this 
moment, this most solitary of places. He made his way towards the man only in order to 
carry out the task that he always did at this time. That the man was next to the well, and 
the well was the place from which he drew water, was the sole reason for Niente's 
movement towards him. 

Without any form of greeting or communication between the two, Niente proceeded to 
fill his pale. While doing so he noticed that this man's appearance was similar to the 
physical idea that he had of himself. However, as with the flashbacks of the forgotten 
past, this idea was soon displaced as he retrieved the now full pail from down the well. 
With his task complete, Niente turned his back to the stranger and walked to the garden 
in order to cultivate the crops. Later when he turned away from the sun, and as he knelt 
to take a tomato from the vine, he saw that the man was walking away, out into the 
barren desert. Upon returning to the well for more water, Niente failed to notice that the 
man had gone completely. 

The day continued as all of the others before it had done and with the swift 
disappearance of the sun, and the black enshrouding of the night, Niente slept. In his 
sleep he dreamt, if at all, of nothing more than the place in which he lived and the 
ascetic life he lived there. In his dreams he would see his hands pulling vegetables from 
the ground, or hear only the sound a rush of water would make as it fell from the pail 
onto the incredibly fecund earth of his garden. However, on the night that followed the 
day where the stranger had appeared, Niente was taken away by a dream that was not of 
the simple life that he lived alone on his empty plot of earth. 

He saw a new world grow up from the spot where he had seen the stranger covering the 
earth. A vast new world opened up to him, within his sleep, of vibrant colours, and it 
was filled with a cacophony of noise, and overwrought with the intoxicating smells of a 
pure nature. His stagnant land of sand and emptiness transformed before his eyes into a 
living place with fields full of the thickest deep green grass, which were surrounded by 
mountains and hills whose peaks and brows he felt compelled to climb and conquer, 
sure in the promise that on the other side he would find more of this new wonder. From 
above and behind came the onrushing of a roaring thunder, and under a thin veil of rain, 
he watched ferocious waves, from a great blue sea, crashing violently in white blasts of 
salty cloud onto the sandy shore. Wild animals ran freely through the forests and fields, 
and the laughter of little children could be heard as they played hide and seek behind the 
protection of the trees. 

Niente was lost in the feast of this new kingdom. Gasping for air, he awoke quickly 
before the morning light had the chance to come and force him to wake. He leapt from 
his bed into the void of darkness and ran to the door in furious anticipation of his dream 
having become a reality. Outside it would all be true, the stranger had sowed the seed, 
and the world he had dreamt would blossom into the most beautiful flower before his 
wild, ravenous eyes. He pulled open the door and tore towards the well and the spot 
where the stranger had been the day before. 

He had run for only a few metres when he stopped dead, under the blinding light of the 
instantly risen sun, in the realisation that all was the same and nothing was any different 
than it had ever been before. The only change being in himself and that his teary eyes 
were now unable to focus clearly upon the well and the spot where the stranger had 
stood, and nothing had grown. 

Niente fell to his knees and cupped his face in the hands he had only moments ago held 
outstretched to a future that he had already lost. The coarse sand offered little cushion to 
his knees and was now nothing more than ugly, yellow dust devoid forever more of any 
hidden significance or meaning. Now, he noticed for the first time that the hands that 
touched his face were wrinkled and old, and that the skin they touched was of the same 
weathered leathery texture. 

He stayed locked like this, frozen on his knees, and began to sob. The warm tears of 
sorrow flowed, searing into and tearing at his battered skin, as he slowly lifted his head 
up towards the reality of the irrevocable dead blue sky and screamed out into the callous 
void in which he was now forced to face his own solitary and simple desperation. 

Fiction: Full of Crow

Kali

by Simon Friel

Joan buried cigarette after cigarette into an old, now certainly cancer ridden coffee cup, and tormented my mind at least two times an hour with the grinding and tearing of the old espresso machine as he got his fix. He moved between the high intensity spot lamp lit disaster of his scorched desk and the kitchen as though bound to an irregular conveyer belt of dissatisfaction. If he fucked up his university project again, the money flowing across from the island was going to be cut off. He had been taunted with the promise of one final payment to cover the cost of the suit that he would need to wear to the job interviews that would follow his final defeat.

I lay on the sofa in the middle world between his fight for a future and the ugly, bubbling stench of the world outside the open balcony door that I now did my utmost to avoid. I bathed in the after burn of Joan’s interrogative bulb and the primary bursts of colour from the almost inaudible murmur of the TV. My eyes followed the fuzzy images on the screen as they bled imperceptibly from one abortion of a program to another. My legs and arms itched constantly from the bug infested, torn brown sofa we had found on the street.

Everything was decomposing.

“Let’s go and drink a beer,” Joan said.

Our street was bathed in the ghoulish pink half-light that signaled the coming of Autumn. With each turning of the earth the day was swallowed more ravenously by the night and dusk settled earlier over the city. But the heat wouldn’t budge and the air was so heavy that you could taste it. Summer had lasted too long. People were tired and moved slowly like drooping, dying flowers. With some steps it felt like you hadn’t moved forward at all and that the world had instead dropped down an inch further into a pit whose face we were losing sight of.

The drunks milling about on the street in front of the bar on the corner. The bald Venezuelan guy who struggled to hire out bicycles. The Pakistanis from the kebab shop. None of the faces of the people in the neighbourhood that I had come to know over the months we had lived here offered smiles or nods of acknowledgment as I passed. They scowled or simply looked away. The exchanges of words amongst these people, which I understood little or nothing of but had once taken delight in guessing at, were now only sharp, threatening sounds of accusation and recrimination.

“Dos,” Joan said to the beer seller who appeared beside us before our backsides had even hit the floor of the MACBA square. The cans he procured were warm and froth erupted over our hands when we opened them. We said “Salud” anyway, locked eyes for a moment so as to avoid the curse of seven years of bad sex, and slumped back against the large black, rock like sculpture that Joan had once told me belonged to an ancient swindler named Sisyphus.

In front of us the smooth granite surface of the square clicked, scratched, and hummed under the pulsing beat of the wheels of the skateboards as they rolled and jumped to and fro through the night. Behind us the long white curves and precise lines of the glass fronted museum were possessed of a weird luminosity borne of the conflict between the high-intensity lights on the inside and the stifling auburn air that enveloped everything on the outside. The sickly sweet smell of Dutch green mingled with the harsher one of tangy Moroccan black. The call of the beer sellers rang out in incessant nonsensical prayer: “Serveisabeer, amigo. Serveisabeer, amigo.” And in the reflection of the museum’s huge glass panes a flamboyant Filipino kid counted his troupe of earnest dancers through their steps. “1,2,3,4. 1,2,3,4.”

“So, she’s lost her voice?” Joan asked.

“I already told you. The Norwegian answered her phone and said Kali couldn’t speak because she’s lost her voice.”

“Fucking bullshit. Stop looking your phone. That’s over.”

I put my phone back in my pocket and smirked at his switch of tactic to tough love as a means to rouse me from what I knew must be for him a weary fight against my listless stupor. I knew very well that the Kali story was over. I wasn’t expecting a message from her, but I was too embarrassed to admit to Joan that after all that had happened, it was Maya who I still hoped for some word from every time I unlocked the screen of my phone.

#####

Kali I’d met a few days earlier. She was the instigator of the meeting. She had taken my number from Josep after I had walked out on her the night we met. At her suggestion we reconvened in the same place of our first encounter for a drink.

I felt uncomfortable in the bar. The circular black leather stool was at the wrong height to lean back against naturally and left my legs dangling in an awkward space of nothingness when I tried to perch myself on top of it. Kali furthered my discomfort with enquiries in the direct Teutonic style about how I was feeling and what it was that had happened to make me so angry. I was in no mood to share with a stranger and returned her enquiries with oblique replies and meditative stares into my beer glass. My refusal to engage didn’t faze her. A look of pitied concern remained a constant on her face.

I hung around only because she looked cuter than the memory I had retrieved of her through the hangover. She was the definition of zest; a very pretty face with dancing blue eyes and flawless pale skin warmed delicately by the sun. I saw her as my antitheses and I wanted to rub some of my muck onto her. I had no great desire for sex or anything else but I knew contact with and the defilement of something as clean and pure as this would bring me back up for air, at least for a while.

She took a call on her mobile while I pondered her debasement in the stagnant white and gold pool at the bottom of my glass. The words she spoke were ugly, fast and foreign. The explanation in English was simple: her friend would be joining us; she had played her get out of jail card and the cavalry was on the way to save her.

My masochistic pride insisted I stay until the friend arrived. When she did, she whispered a hoarse “Hello” in my general direction and then launched into a muted tirade in their speak.
The friend left for the bathroom and I made to make my own move. Kali reached out for my hand as I did. She smiled at me with something different to pity. There was a tenderness in her face that forced me to look away and at the floor.

“It’s not what you might think,” she said. “She’s my flat mate. We live fifty metres from here. She asked to come because her boyfriend has just broken up with her.”

“Whatever,” I forced myself to reply, and walked out without paying for my drink.

I played football later that evening. Bill had invited me to join his team. He was too fat to play, but he fancied himself as an inspirational coach. I scored three goals in the game and kung-fu kicked one of the opposition in the back in an extreme response to a bad tackle. A full-scale brawl ensued. Once things calmed down I was given a red card to go with the smack on the side of my head that one of the other team had got in on me during the melee. Bill was beside himself in the changing room after the match. He thumped me hard on the back and said it had been the most fun he’d had in years.

The game had kicked off late. I missed the last metro and walked five miles to get home.

In the MACBA square a smiling tramp swayed in front of Joan and I. He had very yellow teeth and incredible, turquoise eyes that floundered like misplaced jewels on distant seas of red. He pointed at the cigarette box by Joan’s side.

Joan took two cigarettes from the pack and placed them in the beggar’s shaking hand.
The man’s smile grew bigger and he waved his arms out and up from his sides like a windmill. “Yo soy de la Republica Checa,” he stammered with great pride. He took out the pigeon feather he wore in his hair and offered it lavishly to me.

“Why him?” Joan complained. “I gave you the cigarettes.”

The man screwed up his face and brought one hand up to his mouth like a small child fighting to contain his amusement at what he considers to be a rude joke. He closed his eyes and shook his head quickly.

“No. For him,” the man said. “For him.”

I took the feather from him. It was ugly grey and speckled white. The drone of the skaters continued. “Serveisabeer. Serveisabeer”, chorused in persistent wave. I rested my head back against the black rock. The dancing children jumped in unison to their right. “And… 1,2,3,4. 1,2,3,4.”

“Fuck it,” said Joan, breaking the flow of it all as something deep inside of me reconnected with a feeling that wasn’t all bitter and painful. “Let’s go home and get wasted.”

Joan went to the shop to buy some drink. He paid for things now. Playing Daniel Barry paid my rent and little else.

I had my bed. Joan. The itchy sofa. And the TV. If Joan had become my keeper, TV was my new best friend. If I wasn’t sleeping or pretending to be somebody else, I was watching TV. I didn’t care what was on and I rarely changed the channel from Tele Cinco. The channel that through hours of study I had discovered to be even more commercial and of slightly worse quality than its main rival, Antena 3.

Tele Cinco was a Berlusconi channel. That I would always remember from DC’s rant when he flipped out on the last night that I ever saw him.

My favourite programmes were the news and the Saturday night gossip marathons that I understood one in ten words of. I loved those for the screaming and abject ugliness of everybody involved. At the outset, the array of complete nobodies who had been assembled to talk seriously about gossip and scandal did so earnestly and with some kind of gravitas. A couple of hours into the programme, the vacuous and vicious truth of their beings began to filter through the heavy lights of the studio and they showed themselves to be nothing more than dumb animals fighting desperately to crawl over and above one another to get to the top of the pile they didn’t understand, nor care, was nothing but a mound of human shit.

The news on the other hand was a bright blue world of necessary information. The presenter had salacious lips and splendid cleavage. I don’t know what she felt on the inside, but she had two outward expressions: happy and sad. She used this rich palate in synchronisation with the mood of the story she presented. She sometimes lost track of this complex system and once opened with her most brilliant glossy smile and extended cleavage in close-up on a fast cut from flooding in Central America and the home-video footage of half a village of people being flushed away to certain death.
Tonight she looked sad. The image that followed her desolate face was CCTV footage of a man and woman entering a convenience store. A jump to another camera showed the man and woman on fire on the pavement in front of the store. A passerby and the store owner put them out quickly. The camera cut back to the studio and the correct pretty face of sadness.

“The man died,” she said.

She maintained the same face for the next story. Her cleavage was swollen and magnificent.
We jump to the grainy images from a motorway service camera on a ring road at the edge of the city. A car had broken down at the mouth of a tunnel on a wide bend. The car was stationary on the inside lane with its yellow hazard lights flashing. There was no hard-shoulder and the two people walked on the road in the direction of the camera that filmed them. The mouth of the tunnel lit up with the arrival of a new car. It slammed on its brakes in seeing the empty vehicle blocking its lane. The speed of the collision sent both cars sliding locked together across the two lanes. The men on foot registered their surprise at the noise of the crash but had no time to do anything else before the onrushing blast of metal flicked them like skittles through the air.

“Both men died,” my sad friend confirmed.

I hit the green power button and curled up into a ball on the sofa. A faint sound like that of a cat crying began to impose itself over the white noise that rang in my ears. The sound grew louder and was accompanied by a brittle tapping that seemed to be coming from the front door. I rolled over onto my back and stared up towards the ceiling. I never answered the door.

The tapping persisted and it was clear that the crying wasn’t a cat’s.

I walked to the flat’s entrance and put my eye to the spy-hole. An old woman dressed all in black stood in the stairwell on the other side of the door. She looked slowly to the left and right as though sniffing the change in the air around her. Her hair was pure white and rolled into two tight weaves on each side of her head. She had milky green eyes, grey lips, and taut skin the colour of polished bone.

I stood frozen to the door. She looked directly at the spy-hole and brought her thin white fingers towards it.

“Vecino, vecino,” she cried. Neighbour, neighbour.

I moved back slowly down the hallway. She rapped her nails again against the wood.

“Vecino. Vecino.”

I closed the living room door, lay back down on the sofa, and switched on the TV. My old friend smiled enthusiastically as she introduced the sport.

“Grow lemons,” Joan told me as I poured the last of the DYC whisky into my coffee mug and knocked it back in one. I fought off the urge to vomit and fell sideways onto the sofa. I kept one eye open to focus on Joan who stared back at me from his seat on the floor.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked him

“Grow. Lemons,” he repeated.

“Okay,” I agreed, just wanting him to stop. Being on my side hadn’t stemmed the increasing urge to throw up onto the floor.

“Listen to me, Sam, I’m serious. I saw a program last week about a guy who gave up everything and became a lemon farmer in Andalusia. I think he was English because it was dubbed. Anyway, the point is just to grow lemons.”

“How the fuck can that be the point of anything, Joan?”

“It just is, man. It just is. You’ll understand when you think about it.”

The empty bottle of DYC stood undeservedly proud and empty on the table besides a now cold, full pan of spaghetti that had congealed into an uninviting mass of oil filmed waste. I’d lost more weight feeling sorry for myself in the flat with Joan than I had during my sojourn into heroin with Maya. “When you start smoking less, you’ll understand that it isn’t,” I told him. “And we’re out of alcohol.” I didn’t need more alcohol, but it was either that or the unrelenting horror of the TV.

“Sure,” said Joan. “Smoke this instead.” The joint that he threw across the room landed upright in my ear.

I smoked slowly and deliberately, concentrating on the intense crackling bud of fire as it systematically ate away at the white paper and the plant inside. I smiled. The sweet, redemptive wave of oblivion was coming to knock me out.

My phone shivered against my leg as my eyes softly closed. I took it out and unlocked the screen. I clicked to open the message and through bleary eyes read: Kali: We r outside

“What the fuck?”

I threw the phone at Joan and dragged myself up and off the sofa. I dropped down to my hands and knees and crawled through the open door to the edge of the balcony. On the other side of the bars, Kali and another blonde girl stood on the pavement looking up at our building. Kali took out her phone from her bag and their faces lit up in a spooky green hue.

My phone rang in Joan’s confused hands. He looked at me, at the phone, and back at me.

I bounced off the walls in the hallway to get to the bathroom, threw lots of cold water over my face, and looked expectantly into the broken mirror above the sink. An under-nourished, half a bottle of DYC whisky drinking, completely fucking stoned mess looked back at me.

“Fuck’s sake,” I screamed out in desperation, and threw more water at my face.

“Sam,” Joan shouted from the living room. “Grow lemons.”

Joan went down to the street to let in the girls. Experience had taught us that buzzing people in didn’t always mean that they would be brave enough to enter.

As the voices in the stairwell drifted in through the open door I stationed myself in front of the HI-FI on the bookcase in the side-section of the living room. I grabbed a selection of CDs from the shelves, deciding that this was going to be the most evasive and least conspicuous way of having to greet the new arrivals.

The front door slammed shut.

I opened the first CD of my pile.

Primal Scream, empty.

I shuffled to the next one as Joan began to say something into the space he expected to find me, but stopped when he saw I wasn’t there.

Daydream Nation, empty.

“Sam, your friends are here,” he said with a pleasant voice that I had never heard him use before. “Hey,” I mumbled back from my refuge.

Loaded, empty.

I sneaked a look at the crowd of three who had moved through into the centre of the living room and now stood watching me, their inadequate host, in uncomfortable silence. Kali was wearing baggy, black trousers, a loose open necked green shirt, and a thin, sand coloured scarf around her neck.

Doolittle, empty.

“Sam, are you okay?” Joan asked with his normal voice.

“Music,” I said, without looking at them.

The Velvet Underground & Nico, mother-fucking empty.

My legs ached from the crouched position I had taken up. Out of the corner of my left eye I noticed something black and solid looking behind me. I rested my hand against the bookcase for balance and shuffled crab-like in the direction of my much needed seat. I let go of the support of the bookcase and relaxed back to the relief of the chair.

The base of my spine thudded against the wooden floor. The solid thump of my head followed close behind. I lay stunned and hurt with my eyes fixed on the far away ceiling.

I turned my head back slowly towards Joan and the girls. A black bin liner that I thought to be my seat clung to the moisture on the left hand side of my face. Joan and the pretty stranger looked at the floor. After a couple of tense seconds they both burst into laughter.

Kali remained silent and sad.