Midfield Dynamo, page 8
Six months later I moved to her city, this one I now call home, this one I am an hour outside, my headlights merely registering the moth-wing flares of snow swooning onto my path.
I arrive at a bungalow, and because I cannot believe this is a farm, I pull in to enquire as to the farm’s whereabouts. A middle-aged lady with recently dyed dark hair comes to the door and I ask where the farm with the honey is, where the Bergs live, and she smiles, looks at me sideways and says, ‘Are you Sebastian’s man?’
‘Yes,’ I say enthusiastically.
She disappears into the kitchen and reappears moments later carrying four twelve-pot packs of golden honey, each pot with a red lid, and on the side of each pot, a pale blue sticker with the words berg honey printed in austere white capitals.
I leave, put the pots of honey under a thick shaggy blanket on the back seats of the van and clamber behind the steering wheel. Before I start up the engine again, I sit in the white glow of the snow around me and think about the apartment Bettina and I live in with our four boys. I recall the time Sebastian visited to pick me up for a drink so we could celebrate a book review I had had published the week before in a worthwhile if little-read journal in London. When we got to the pub – a small smoky place four streets away, it was raining and the cobbles were slick – we sat at the bar and the Turkish owner, Frank, approached for our order. Sebastian told him why we were celebrating. Frank furnished our beers with two shot glasses of schnapps, which we downed together, and just as we clinked our beer glasses Sebastian looked to me and said, ‘You need a bigger place.’
‘I know,’ I said, averting my eyes, ‘I know.’
I peer out at the Berg’s yellow windows, rub my hands together, start up Sebastian’s van and ease onto the slip road. My breath puffs and blooms before me, like small brains of vapour that dissipate slowly as I trundle along. The going is terrible and when I turn onto the main road leading back into the city, the carriageway appears utterly desolate and the madness of this trip becomes clear to me. I bring the van to a near-standstill. The snow is coming down so thickly that I can barely see the boundless dark beyond it, so I begin to pull in, but it is too late. A huge truck is sliding sidelong towards me. It is moving so patiently, so quietly, so inevitably at me that I merely cower and wait until the mother-elephant shunt arrives, and when it does nothing breaks or shatters or crushes, but I feel that I have immediately changed direction, smoothly, inexorably, backwards and to the right until the whole van tips over and I am upside down, tumbling, with an aching slowness into the white, and as I roll, incrementally, over and over, I promise to get a bigger place for my kids, away from the planes, away from the four small beds in our tiny second bedroom, away from the bin collector’s alarm clock and away from Sebastian. Then, the muffled tumbling stops and I am lying upside down with my back pressed against the cold windscreen of the van, totally still, and as I wait for the next shiver or rotation or groan I can see that many of the pots of honey are broken and their contents are oozing across the seats above me.
9. We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas
Years back, I worked as an engineer in Dublin. I designed large buildings throughout the trembling city. These animals would unfold dustily to the sky, where they yawned, stretched, bellowed, then settled down to sleep. Then we’d go out and celebrate our labours; we would eat steak and drink red wine.
When all of this stopped, I moved to Abu Dhabi to work. I promised myself I would never return.
I wanted to perish in the desert.
•
The consultancy I worked for in Abu Dhabi was employed by a Mr Van der Woude – a tall Belgian with a mane of thick blond hair. He’d made his money as an hotelier in Antwerp and Brussels, and had a reputation for attention to detail, spending days examining all sources of expenditure, from the reinforcement in the foundations up to the type of font on the penthouse apartment doors. He studied engineering as a younger man so I couldn’t bamboozle him with jargon when he kept me behind after the weekly meetings to have me justify my designs. If these at times lengthy meetings went well, he’d take me out for lunch in a restaurant across town. If a meeting displeased him, he would sit across the table from me and roll his tongue around in his mouth, then dismiss me. Sometimes I’d catch glimpses of him pounding around our district of Abu Dhabi talking and gesturing expansively among groups of pristinely turned-out Emirate businessmen.
Otherwise, working weeks and months and seasons passed with an intense singularity. Van der Woude’s building was eighty storeys and such was the poor quality of construction that my time was consumed with troublesome repairs all the way up the structure. At first I spent my weekends with other Western engineers, all of whom had interchangeably pleasant young families, but the polite familial conservativeness began to bore me, and after a while I found myself spending weekends on my own. I stopped drinking to focus on my work. I saw opportunity in my application to Van der Woude’s hotel.
By then I’d lost contact with my father, my estranged mother, my friends and any old colleagues back home. On quiet evenings in my apartment, I’d recall the last day I spent with my father while my mother and he were still together.
They were sitting at the kitchen table that morning as I wandered into the adjacent sitting room, unnoticed, and my father, mid-sentence and turning towards my mother, said, ‘… he’s such a limited boy really, he seems to make the world simpler to better fit it to his mind. I wish he’d open himself out into the chaos of it all.’
My mother didn’t reply, and I don’t know if it was that she could feel I was near or if she did not agree.
Later that evening as my father dropped me into town, I asked him what he had meant.
He at first denied saying it, then claimed I had misinterpreted, then, he relented. ‘It’s just talk,’ he shrugged, ‘your mother and I … She wants to leave. I wanted to remind her that I could still be insightful, or something.’
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘I am sorry.’
I looked over at him, his hunched shoulders, his soft hands, his balding pate.
‘Stop the car.’
‘Relax,’ he replied, ‘we’re nearly there.’
‘Pull over. I’ll walk.’
‘Foster, please, the road is too –’
But I’d already thrown myself out the door, and was tumbling into a ditch. I came to that night in hospital, covered in bruises, with a broken arm and a shattered knee. My mother was stroking my hair, smiling at me. Her blue eyes were wet.
By the time I could hobble my parents had gone their separate ways, the summer was over and I was going back to university for my final year. My mother, in love, cut contact with us, and my father dissolved into a panel-beaten version of himself and our relationship thinned to occasional emails and texts. We all strayed, in that depressingly mature and adult way, in three different directions. It was a sort of drift that only death or grave illness can interrupt.
•
During lunch one day, in the last few weeks of the hotel project, I was sitting, in a tinkling restaurant, across from Van der Woude, who was chewing emphatically on a large leaf salad. Over his shoulder, stands of high-rises receded into the hazy distance. Cranes swivelled on top of these structures, delicately lifting materials up and down. Though it was smoggy I could still make out tiny shimmering men in yellow hard hats darting around these distant floors carrying out their work in slowly making real another person’s roaring dream. Van der Woude put his knife down and said that he considered me a fine engineer, and that I’d done good work for him.
‘You should visit me in my apartment some evening,’ he said, as he forked a cherry tomato, ‘… if you have nothing else to do.’
I called up the following Friday. His apartment was on the sixtieth floor of an obnoxiously vertical building across town. I was greeted at the door of the apartment by a stout Filipino lady, in her late forties, and who was dressed in a neatly pressed black-and-white uniform. She led me into a cool and expansive living room, fringed with wobbling tropical plants. Van der Woude was reclined on an antique chaise longue, reading a National Geographic. He wore tracksuit bottoms, flip-flops and a silken green dressing gown. He asked the housekeeper to leave and to bring his black cat too. He told me that it was in must and had been mewling horribly at its own reflection all day. He then bade me sit next to him and offered me a beer, which I at first refused, but he insisted, so I gave in, and, at his further insistence, I relaxed. Befriending him, I thought, would serve me well. We drank a number of beers and chit-chatted about the city, his hotel and the plans he had for more. Then, he reached forward and from under the coffee table he produced a dark Tupperware tub, filled with tiny plastic bags of pills and white powder. He enquired if I’d ever taken class-As before.
‘I have not,’ I said.
We took MDMA with a little librium; it was fucking extraordinary. Hours later we were laughing on the couch. My mind had voided upward, heavenward, foreverward. My pupils were rolling back in my eyes – like small breaking tides – and my mouth gurned, ground and chewed on dry, salty cud. I was grinning extravagantly at Van der Woude, who was regaling me about the sex clubs he used to visit in Belgium as a younger man. He said he missed that free and blissful part of his life dearly.
I shook my head, gazed out over the twinkling tubes of the city, took a sip of beer and said, ‘You’re some man.’ Then I rose from the couch, turned up the techno that had been thudding softly through the room and I began to dance.
Hours later as I was leaving his apartment, he called after me. ‘Stay a while longer. I have some grass; we can come down together,’ he said.
He was standing at the entrance to his sitting room sipping tea. He put the cup down, stalked back into the room and slipped out of his clothes. He unfurled his thickening white body onto the chaise longue, shook out his hair and arranged himself onto his side, propped up on pillows with his right hand to the fore, the left resting across his genitals. Then he fixed his gaze olympically out at me. His cat sprang onto the foot of the chaise longue, and the Filipino lady appeared behind him drawing the curtains across the window. This image flickered in my mind as I turned and left. His apartment door then swung to behind me, and in that moment between the click-clump of the door closing and the ping of the hall lights flickering on, I stood, suspended in the cool humming darkness of the corridor, itself tracing a truncated architectural trajectory through the early morning sky I had momentarily just become.
I took a taxi across town to my apartment where I sat out on my balcony, twelve storeys up. I looked towards the sun rising in the east. The buildings glinted, and on the ground, way below, the shadows of these towers folded themselves across each other. I had no idea how far east I was. I yearned for some energy, but I was already succumbing to sleep. My eyelids drooped and the dawn breeze slowed to a near standstill. I felt it creep across my forehead while sucking sweat beads from my pores. I drew on a cigarette and fell further back into my body, my spine, my buttocks, through the straining deckchair canvas and into the floor and walls of my apartment until I felt myself coalescing with the entire building. Then I filled the building, every floor, every corridor, every room and every shoe in every room with an Amazonian inhalation of smoke. The smoke-cloud lingered and curled into the air-conditioning currents swirling through the space; then, I exhaled brutally, voiding the structure. Everything left behind created reverbs through my body. I felt the breeze meet the surface of the windward face of the building, over and again, then moments later I felt the suction of these passing breezes on the leeward face as they gathered around and tugged gently at the back of my neck, dissipating shudders from the top of the structure all the way down to the ground. I felt every beam and column translate these deflections and surface resonances into multitudes of smaller vectors that advanced inward to the lift shaft of the building where these forces and ideas of forces were absorbed, subsumed, then guided down along the calcifying grid-lines of the lift shaft’s abstract pre-history, onward, slowing, downward, crawling, towards a dark and wet subterranean bedrock where all of this was stilled to nothing against the gorgeous inertia of the earth.
•
Within a month my contract had finished and I’d turned down a renewal. I had accrued some savings so I stayed on in my place to kick back during the week, enjoy some time off, go to driving ranges and hit balls, visit the cinema, and every Friday I’d call around to Van der Woude. Each time, I took greater doses and as the weeks passed he’d propose different cocktails. I think he enjoyed my increasingly addled reactions.
I asked him once, during one of our binges, why no one else ever came.
To which he smiled benevolently across the room, ‘I’ve worked closely with you, Foster. I trust you. I’ve seen one side of your personality. Now, I am interested to see the rest. You seem to me to be alone, and I am too, amongst so much plenty, and I find this very beautiful. But also,’ he continued, now laughing gently, ‘I want to help you realize yourself.’
A few months later, on a Saturday morning at around two, a Thai call girl arrived. I was so epically strung out that all I could do was sit in an easy chair and hold onto its arms for dear life as I looked on with horror at Van der Woude have sex expertly, endlessly, with this call girl on his couch. Hours later as the drugs eased into an expansive mellow I felt like I could try standing up. My eyes returned from searching the dark firmament of my skull, and I could see Van der Woude, grinning broadly now, recline, with the call girl sitting on his lap, she smoking a cigarette. Then he slipped his head behind her torso, splayed his arms either side and passed out.
I blinked and when I opened my eyes, the beautiful Thai woman was before me gently pulling my trousers down over my knees. After many minutes of trying to give me head she looked up and said, ‘Your dick is dead.’
Van der Woude was snoring on the couch. He looked dishevelled, disastrous and suddenly very old. I realized he was the sort of man that my father would disdain. I left.
While traversing the quiet streets back towards my apartment I felt an urge to go for a swim. The sun was rising and I could feel the heat growing. I walked past empty high rises and on through stilled building sites, then further, to the slums that surrounded the beach. Hundreds of Pakistani, Indian and Burmese men were emerging from their tents and walking towards buses to shuttle them to a site. I fingered a pill left over from Van der Woude’s place and slipped it into my mouth, then I followed a group of labourers onto a bus, and we were driven back through the silver city, past tower blocks, shining half-domes of shopping villages, unfinished vulva-shaped football stadia.
The site we pulled in at was a grim concrete-framed thing that seemed decades from completion. We entered a broad passageway into a dark furnace-like floor and descended seven storeys in a rattling lift to the pit of the building. Dozens of half-naked men of slight build were strewn across the grey puddled floor, asleep, and in the far corner gaped a huge hole through which water cascaded. Four men were shot-spraying concrete at it, as if they were trying to put out a fire. A sheet of reinforcement bent away from the wall. The men brandishing the hose roared. One of them looked to me and he, thinking I was the site manager and that he had ought to appear dutiful in front of me, approached the wall and pushed the reinforcement back in place as the others covered it and him with concrete. I raced across to cajole him away, but he would not move. I retreated and watched him being covered over with this thumping stream of wet cement, and I thought that he would soon certainly die. I asked the men to cease their work, but they would not listen. I stood back and watched the bending grey torrent through my fingers. Just as I thought this man was lost to the wall he peeled himself away and rejoined the men behind the hose. I slumped to the ground and waited. The man covered in concrete then walked off. I followed him across the basement and up twenty flights of stairs until he turned onto an empty floor. I could see, through a massive unglazed opening, a large hexagon-shaped plaza below – it dotted out with shivering palm trees – connecting this tower to its brother. The sun was high in the sky and the heat was horrible. The light wobbled through a horizontal slit of white and orange. I was sweating and dangerously out of breath as I chased after the man covered in concrete. Then he slowed, stopped and in mid-step completely hardened over. I ran to him calling for help but there was no one around so I tried to break the concrete off with my fingers, but it was too hard. I looked into his eyes for any sign of life, but they were totally still. I punched his face till my knuckles bled; then, I searched for a crowbar or a drill or anything that might break a breathing hole in the concrete, but I could find nothing so I took a run and shoved him over. He toppled and split in two. I shrieked and ran and ran down through the building and out into the chaotic workspaces below, chasing from the buildings until the land opened. I found a concrete pit into which I clambered, panting and pouring with sweat. I paced in a circle for many minutes then lay down in a slant of shadow.
When I woke it was night, and I was cold. I looked to the sky – nothing. I pulled my phone from my pocket, called the police and told them what had happened. I was dithering, ravenous and parched.
They found grass in my pocket, and brought me to a police station where I sat for three days and nights thinking about this split concrete man, and then, I thought of my father, sitting alone in his house. I realized I not only despised home up close, but now I also despised it from afar. And I realized that the time I’d spent in Abu Dhabi was merely an avoidance of this rage I’d felt accumulating before I’d even left home, and it occurred to me too, sitting in that overheated cell, that it was a sort of anger that I had tried for years to shrink with the scale of the constructions I helped to erect around it, believing that making it irrelevant might make it go away. But in doing this, I realized I’d learned nothing new about the nature of this anger towards my father and the country to which he belongs, other than that this anger had not become less fierce and that it still badly needed somewhere to go, and, as I stood up in this police cell, it occurred to me that this rage would never be vented back home.
