Sterling Karat Gold, page 1
Praise for Sterling Karat Gold
“Isabel Waidner collides the real and the mythic, the beautiful and the grotesque, to mind-bending effect. Time-travel constrained by the limitations of Google Maps and trials out of Hieronymus Bosch never out-dazzle the human heart in this novel of friendship, art, injustice, and all that can be imagined and unimagined. From the first page, matadors in North London seem entirely plausible and we wait to see what might be coming around the next corner. Waidner has a live, distinctive intelligence that pushes form to make us see the world around us in new ways and perhaps even for the first time.”
—Kamila Shamsie, Goldsmiths Prize judge
“This Goldsmiths prize-winning romp through austerity Britain is a provocative act of resistance to our morally slippery times. It’s endlessly associative, bursting with ribaldry and Tory-baiting satire; reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas.”
—The Guardian (UK)
“Waidner is subverting conventions on behalf of the marginalized. The result is as impressive in its execution as it is urgent in its themes.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“A risk-taker to rival the best. It is, all at once, surreal, polemical and fun.”
—The Telegraph (UK)
“Sterling Karat Gold reminds me of nothing else. With atypical inventiveness Isabel Waidner steers us through a marvellous spinning parade of matadors, red-cards, time travel, and Cataclysm. A beautifully defiant miracle of a book.”
—Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City
“Ferocious and nebular, kind and strange—where strange means ‘queer, surprising’ and ‘outside of’—Sterling Karat Gold crackles on the edge of new language(s) while simultaneously demolishing language altogether…. Like all Isabel Waidner’s words, each verbal pulse is funneled velocity, gives no F’s, scraps for its place on the page, belongs, glitters. As much an elegy to the loss of mother tongues as mothers (also anticapitalist spaceships, friends, bodies, generations to AIDS, self), Waidner makes soft bombs of binaries, shows again and again how violence against BIPOC, migrant, queer life is not fiction, and that liberation and alliance are inseparable. Sterling Karat Gold is fervid, focused, felt in all of its wholly radical clamor. The stakes? Our chest bones and tender communities inside. The mode? A Born-in-Flames-style reckoning that changes futures/leaves no one behind, i.e., love.”
—Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals
“We join football-shirt-skirted, velvet-and-montera-clad Sterling in a fiction replete with time travel, Chariot Roman Spas, a living pink fountain and queer working-class histories. Let’s face it: Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold deals a fatal blow to jobsworths everywhere! Indeed, in an ever obtuse and hostile Britain, where the flattening of queer and trans expression is borderline de rigueur, Sterling makes me feel heartened and defiant in all its revelry and multiplicity and deftness: and here in the UK! and happening now!”
—Shola von Reinhold, author of LOTE
“A sublime, mesmerizing feat blending the surreal and political. Isabel Waidner is a ferocious, uniquely gifted talent and the world feels all the better for it.”
—Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch
Sterling
Karat
Gold
Also by Isabel Waidner
FICTION
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff
Gaudy Bauble
AS EDITOR
Liberating the Canon:
An Anthology of Innovative Literature
Sterling
Karat
Gold
A Novel
Isabel
Waidner
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2021 by Isabel Waidner
First published by Peninsula Press, London
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-213-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64445-214-1 (ebook)
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2023
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938625
Cover design: Kapo Ng
‘All good fiction is about money.’
Samuel R. Delany
1.
THE WHOLE OF CAMDEN TOWN IS ONE BIG, UNSUNG BULLFIGHT.
I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart.
Today, I’m in a white football shirt wrapped round my waist like a skirt. Red velvet bullfighter jacket on, and black montera, traditional bullfighter hat. Yellow football socks, black leather loafers. Outside my flat on Delancey Street, Camden Town, six, seven actual bullfighters walk up, hustling me. ‘Huh,’ they say. I keep my head down. Focus on loafers, familiar tarmac. Again, ‘Huh!’ Guttural call bullfighters use to get the fighting bull’s attention. Still, head down, I keep walking. They follow.
One torero waves a pink-gold capote, a bullfighting cape. Pinkgold. Pink. Gold. Pinkpinkgoldpinkgold. I lose my bearings. The bullfighters push me, via Arlington Road, into Mary Terrace, off the main road. Feel kicked around like a football.
My father Franz Beckenbauer played for Birth-Town FC. He used to carry my sister in one arm, myself in the other, practising kick-ups. I lost him to penalty shootouts and my sister to international migration. I lost my mother to bankruptcy. Lost the ball. Won it back.
Three Fields Estate surrounds Mary Terrace, windows like the eyes of so many emotional children. On the sixth floor of Fairfield House, one window is open. Distinct blue and white Karlsruher SC poster on the wall, 2. Bundesliga. Down here, pink and gold. I charge wildly. The bullfighters flick their capotes away, gaining critical insights into my defensive behaviour.
Picador on horseback comes at me with a bullfighting lance. Picador is one of a pair of horsemen in a traditional bullfight who jabs the bull with a lance, and also a British publishing house. The cute horse wears no peto, a mattress-like protective padding, standard since the late 1920s at least. Instinctively, I flex my horns. I attack, hitting the horse’s flank. Horse goes down. The dismounted picador retreats quickly. Out of action, he goes to perch on the manual barrier that closes the estate to through traffic. A second picador, on another, equally unprotected horse, comes at me. He lances me just behind the morrillo, the complex of muscle at the fighting bull’s neck and shoulders. Draws blood. The purpose of tercio de varas, the first of three stages of a traditional bullfight, is to weaken the bull’s neck muscles, and to impose the rules of the fight on him.
Is it my fault? Did I elicit the violence, or did I just fail to prevent it from happening? My jacket, too much? Not enough? The football socks? I knew a gay who looked straight like a Gap advert. Got hassle still. Big girl’s blouse written all over his unisex T-shirt.
Second stage, tercio de banderillas. Three banderilleros, so-called, stab English banderillas, barbed sticks wrapped in the colours of the St George’s Cross, into my shoulders. Three, four hanging off of me already, like garlands, like patriotic hair pins. Banderillero walks up, banderillas raised, aiming. He brings them down, and scurries away.
‘Foul play!’ I call. Bullfighters are picking on me, literally. ‘Referee, did you see? Yellow card?!’ But ah, no referee.
No free kick, tercio de muerte—the killing third. The matador, top bully, in his traditional suit of lights, named for its glossy embellishments, waves a muleta, a wooden stick with a smaller red cloth hanging off it. I charge, I have recourse to only the most basic defences. Concave body, the matador flicks the muleta away. I turn round, charge again. Again, the matador disappears the muleta as soon as I get to it. We continue like this until I’m spent. I stand still, tongue hanging out. The matador manoeuvres me into position. Point down, he raises his bullfighting sword over my head—.
A person in trackie bottoms and a jumper, with short hair, sharp side parting, walks down Delancey Street carrying a football. They see me, my predicament. ‘Hey,’ they shout, ‘hey!’ Trackie starts running towards us, blowing a referee whistle ferociously. When they get here, they pull a red card out of their back pocket. They show it, not the matador, but to me.
‘Really, referee?! You’re sending me off?’ I say. ‘Unfair!’
Trackie looks at me urgently, insisting I play along. The penny drops, I’m handed an exit strategy. I hold up my hands—guilty as charged—and make as though to leave the playing field as per the rules of association football.
My father Franz Beckenbauer was hugely concerned with keeping the ball in the air. My mother spent Franz’s football millions, and once they were spent, she spent millions Franz didn’t have. I lost my mother to compulsive spending behaviour, and my father to keepie-uppies. This was before I lost him to HIV/AIDS.
Not so fast, the banderilleros are blocking my exit. Who said I could go? Their side demands a penalty. The matador will take it.
Trackie says fine. But first, they request the matador’s bullfighting sword in exchange for the football.
The request is met with hesitation.
‘Want to take the penalty, or not,’ Trackie asks.
Reluctantly, the matador relinquishes his sword, accepting the football. He places it on the penalty spot, eleven metres exactly from the traffic barrier, our designated goal.
‘There’s no goalkeeper,’ the matador points out.
Trackie asks around for volunteers.
‘Don’t look at me,’ I say, ‘I got midfielder genes.’
‘There’s no one else on your team though,’ Trackie says. It’s either me, or an open goal.
I pull up my yellow football socks, no shin guards. Head held high, I walk past the bullfighters, and position myself in front of the goal. Standing stock-still, I lock eyes with the matador. I don’t blink, don’t reveal which direction I’ll throw myself in. I don’t give anything away, I freeze like goalposts didn’t shift. The matador walks backwards, away from the ball. Trackie blows the whistle, a short trill. The kicker starts running. I stand absolutely still, and he shoots the ball directly into my hands.
Phweet! Final whistle, phweet-phweet! Game over, call it a draw?! o:o?
I put down the ball, and straighten my bullfighter jacket with measured movements. I re-adjust my montera, the bulges on either side representing the horns of a bull. Trackie and I communicate with a look. We don’t wait for the opposing team to gather their wits and dispute the result, we split. We just split, in different directions. We both know that this wasn’t a draw, and it certainly isn’t over. The whole of Camden Town is one big, unsung bullfight.
‘Bull,’ Chachki says, meaning BS. Chachki Smok, a big, white faggot, brutal looking, with critical acumen and a strong love for their mother, is my bestie. We’re in my flat—the largely undecorated top floor of a 1960s office block, corner of Delancey and Albert Street. Underhand private rental, is cheap. ‘Believe, Chachki. Bullfighters, on horseback. Came down Delancey, pushed me into Arlington,’ I say. Chachki lives with their mother in the low-rise council block down the road, also Delancey. A horse going past mine is a horse going past Chachki’s. ‘Bullfights in residential areas?’ they say. ‘I don’t doubt it. Is like the logical extension of class war, anti-immigration policies, transphobic media and state-sanctioned racism.’ Is BS. Is Camden Town.
Chachki’s at work at their sewing machine, turning shiny fabric and some filling into a crop-style puffer vest. Beige, how’s that meant to go. I’m a blond.
‘What else,’ Chachki asks.
‘Ended in a draw,’ I say.
‘No it didn’t,’ they say. As far as bullfighting goes, a draw isn’t a thing apparently. A bullfight isn’t a contest, it’s a ritualised tragedy. The outcome is never in question; the bull always dies. If, rarely, a matador fails to place the killing thrust, the bull is led out and killed in the back. So no, no draw.
‘Since when do you know about bullfighting, Ki.’
‘Since always,’ Chachki says. There’s a small but significant bullfighting tradition in southern Poland, their ancestral region. But even if they didn’t, know about bullfighting, on the grounds perhaps of never having as much as set foot in southern Poland, they know when a contest is rigged. They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a system poised against them; to be positioned as the aggressor, the danger, when having nothing, nothing, on the other side. Did I, Sterling, know that for the most part the purpose of a walka byków, that’s bullfight in Polish, is to render the generally harmless bull dangerous through ritualised movement? That the art of a great torero is precisely to produce the illusion that the bull is an equal and worthy adversary? Is very insidious. ‘Very,’ I agree.
Still. The bullfight ended in a draw.
Wearily, I imagine myself sitting behind the weary Indigenous person sitting on the weary horse depicted on The Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up album cover. All three of us slumping forward—bottle-green figures, battle-fatigued, against a bottle-green background. The difference is, Indigenous peoples have been genocided in America since 1492, I got bullfought in Camden Town earlier this afternoon.
‘Try it on,’ Chachki says, handing me the puffer vest. At thirty-seven, they’re a first-year undergraduate student on the fashion degree at Central Saint Martins. Second generation British, they’re first in family to go uni. Started using terms like ‘toile’ and ‘toiles’, I’m saying nothing. Earlier, Chachki put me in oversize violet trousers and a plain brown T-shirt. I’m also wearing a belt, long tail attached. The tail arches upwards, a mint-green foam-rubber sheet wrapped round its shaft and a light brown feather at its tip. Huge, HUGE, foam-rubber shoes, also mint-green, with claws sculpted into them. Chachki calls this Pastel Dragons TM, a design concept.
Pronounces it, PAS-TEL DRA-GONS TEE-EM.
‘There was a person in trackies,’ I say, slipping the vest on. Ouch, my back. Is sore. ‘Short hair, a gesture of a side parting. Three or four chains on.’
‘Stay still,’ Chachki says, pins in mouth, ‘I’m not finished.’ They mark a stitching line down the side of my vest. Once that’s done, they fetch a pristine block of baby-blue foam-rubber. They chisel away at it. Scissor. ‘Think I know who you mean,’ Chachki says. ‘Rodney something. Rodney Fadel. Friend of a friend.’
Rodney Fadel. ‘They go Cataclysmic Foibles?’
‘Seen them there a few times. Arrives early, leaves alone. Social though. Friendly. Dishy af.’
Dishy af. You can say that again.
Cataclysmic Foibles is a quarterly series of DIY artists’ plays directed and performed by Chachki and myself, held here, in my flat. My responsibility is the writing; Chachki’s is costume design. It all started as a benevolent joke, a staged-on-the-fly, supposedly one-off performance to four or five friends back in, 2002 was it? or 03? We’re talking Chachki and I in back-to-front jackets and training shorts, reading what minimal dialogue there was off of a hastily-put-together script, missing cues and making mistakes. Slipping in and out of our roles was the point—the objective was not to stage a convincing fantasy or simulation, but to glamourise the small part of reality we inhabited. Latterly, on account of doing it for so long, we have acquired a reputation and a level of competence.
Some recent commentary:
CATACLYSMIC FOIBLES IS ANTI-THEATRE.
100 IN A CAMDEN FLAT? BEHIND THE SCENES AT CATACLYSMIC FOIBLES.
REFRESHING, which is code for working-class.
EURO STARS, though Chachki is British.
And, PERFORMANCE ART WITH A DIFFERENCE, which is fair, but what’s ‘different’ about Cataclysmic Foibles, its USP, is far less important to us than what’s shared; what connects Chachki and myself to contemporaries like Linda Stupart and Carl Gent whose All of Us Girls Have Been Dead For So Long ran at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in Summer 2019; or Alex Margo Arden and Caspar Heinemann whose The Farmyard Is Not A Violent Place and I Look Exactly Like July Garland ran at Cell Project Space, Hackney, in Winter 2020; or what situates us within longer traditions such as Kevin Killian’s Poets Theater in the US, or Mojisola Adebayo’s Afriquia Theatre here in the UK, to name just a few.
Chachki hands me a harness with arm-length foam-rubber spikes at the back, to slip on over my puffer vest. ‘Got the script?’ they ask. We were planning a dress rehearsal with a read-through of my script-inprogress tonight.
‘Got ideas,’ I say. Lies. I got nothing.
‘Three weeks till Cataclysmic Foibles 40,’ Chachki says, as if I needed reminding.
I realise now that the weary horseman on the Surf’s Up album cover carries a lance under their left arm, pointing towards the ground. If looked at sideways, they could easily pass for a picador, or a devil.
