Grime, page 10
Now. Unfortunately
THOME’S FATHER
was absent. Late love and political ambitions were a disastrous combination. He needed the support of his friends to become prime minister. It couldn’t be allowed to transpire that all his efforts would be rendered futile by the impulses of his old penis. From then on Thome’s father took part in every middling hunt he was invited to, revitalized his contacts to the royal family, and hoped that society would forget his wife as long as she was invisible. Society was obstinate, never forgave and forgot. “Oh my dear, what a pleasure to see you,” began the conversations conducted with his father. “Will we see you at the Moorhuhn hunt?—Oh excuse me, I need to firm up a few details with Lord Summerburn. We’ll have the pleasure later.” His spouse was never mentioned. Never. Invited. She roamed around the villa in a bathrobe and was bored, if she didn’t happen to be selling oligarch-preferred diamonds or Bentleys or a German-owned company or Rolls-Royces or a German-owned company. The country’s IT firms belonged to Russians and Americans, the bulk of the city to Arabs and Russians.
XIANG MAI
“Nothing belongs to the Russians or Arabs anymore, or the Germans. Especially not the Germans.”
“Pipe down, you idiots,” thought
THOME
that weekend, as he sat in his room and Russians rubbed shoulders downstairs. Women who managed to look cheap despite very expensive clothing, men whose brutality couldn’t be hidden by bespoke suits. That’s real international understanding, that’s globalization, here’s to the people. All of them mutter: “Cheers.” That people so often operated within the parameters of their own clichés was amazing. Thome went down—at times with utterly no other goal than to bother them—and joined the Russians, who seemed a bit insecure. He watched the lady of the house. Looked at her breasts that pressed out of the neckline of her top. Thome didn’t even find the thought objectionable that his father, whom he could only picture in flannel suits, had allowed his penis to be sucked by this woman. It was a brilliant moment. When Thome pictured his father with his pants pulled down and this Versace-bitch in front of him, it was the moment when he lost all respect. It was before hate filled him,
Months later
With hatred for everything. His life. Cambridge. His studies, which Thome had hoped would mark the emergence of his personality from the chrysalis—caterpillar, butterfly, and so on—were a flop. His expectations lagged behind. Same with his intellectual aptitude. Nearly every day Thome ran up against the limits of his comprehension. He watched fellow students pass him by intellectually, he remained seated behind a sign in his mind that read: “Done.” Sometimes he beat his head against the wall to loosen the synapses. Success continued to elude him. He got up to the sign, pushed and pressed against it as if constipated, but he could get no further. This is what it’s like to grasp one’s mediocrity, realized Thome, a destiny he shared with millions of scientists, engineers, artists, and athletes around the world, who all knew that for them it would never come to anything phenomenal but who nonetheless pressed on and kept up hope despite all reason. That a miracle could still occur, a valve would burst, some mental eruption would set their creativity free. Even setting aside his mental failure, Cambridge was also a social disaster. Rumors of his father’s misalliance had made their way around the Empire within days. There was barely anything society wouldn’t forgive. The love of children, dogs, including sexually, cheating, homosexuality, the loss of wealth, drug addiction, everything seemed pardonable and would be stylishly hushed up—but not fraternization. If there was one thing the upper class disdained more than poverty it was new money. Arabs, Russians. To screw someone from this strata was acceptable, as long as it took place discreetly. But one did not marry such people. Everyone still remembered the last scandal, with Lady Diana Spencer and her Arab. As well as how this problem had been taken care of. It was the ruling class’s worst catastrophe since Edward VIII wanted to marry a divorced American in 1936. Moments that put into question the future of the monarchy were more traumatic than the attacks of 2005. For Thome, his father’s late lasciviousness had horrible consequences. He was socially
Dead.
His former roommate was now sleeping with the 6th Earl of Canterbury. Thome’s second bed remained empty. The rowing club had kicked him out, ditto the lunch club and secret society. There’d been talk of new bylaws. One didn’t ask for details, one accepted one’s destiny like a man. A man who no longer had any friends. Nobody wanted to shower with him. Or have him at sex parties. Or speak, smoke, drink, or—let’s put it simply—have anything to do with him. Thanks, Father. Thome’s life had reached what at the time was its low point. He saw himself as an unattractive, mediocre person for whom suddenly a comfortable upper-class life was no longer waiting. Hate, which had always constituted an indeterminate part of Thome’s character, promulgated itself digitally—the future development of the world was for the most part due to frustrated bros like him. Who ruled and shaped 99 percent of the world’s knowledge in Wikipedia and Wikimania and Wikileaks and blogs. They coded, they hacked the economy, they wrote algorithms that in their minds would rule the world with artificial intelligence that reflected their own. Cheers! Thome began to create his first platform. He called it: Dream Island.
At some point
DON
Gave
Up.
On the summer. On herself. On the collective pressure to enjoy her youth. Please, how’s that supposed to work anyway? How are you supposed to be happy about something you didn’t ask for? Should she sit around and drink beer, destroy bus stops, have sex with one or more of the sickly boys from the area just to get it over with? Don stayed in bed. She was young and had what felt like a hundred years to fritter away. From the bathroom the sounds her brother made on his smartphone. Probably honing his sexual competence.
Those endless summer weeks were a catastrophe.
Because Don’s mother discovered alcohol. The most vulgar of all drugs. At first Don didn’t know what had changed her mother so much. Made her so moody and aggressive. But at some point she realized the personality change had to do with the bottles always standing in front of her. Gradually she learned to recognize her mother’s condition based on her halting gait, her saucer eyes, and the slurred consonants. Don’s mother always found a good reason to beat the children. Of course, it’s important to know. That bodily pain is not the biggest problem when it comes to getting beaten. It’s the outbreak of violence and vulgarity that makes the incident so miserable. The air becomes toxic, objects lose their innocence because they are witness to the humiliation. All of this made the period during which Don’s mother drank the most unpleasant of her entire childhood. All of her later memories were exclusively from that year, condensed into bodily pain and mental revulsion.
Sometimes Don went to the pub with her brother to plead with friendly insistence on her return home.
In order to avoid her staggering through the apartment later, screaming. (“Hey Mother, the walls at home are a bit moldy, and we don’t have any money to pay for electricity, but we could sit in the damp kitchen and eat bread and margarine.”)
Like in some shitty Dickens Christmas movie, the two of them would stand at the bar where their mother was sitting with men who always had something sticking out somewhere and who laughed too loudly. After a while it would become too embarrassing even for the drunks and she would follow her children. At home there were beatings.
One night Don’s mother tried to use an ax (where did she get a fucking ax?) to break down the bedroom door behind which the children had locked themselves. Don and her brother rappelled down from the window using sheets and spent the night at a playground. Don consoled her simpering, whining brother and calculated how much longer she had to be a child. Clearly too long. She wondered what alternatives there were. Now. The opportunities for a small child who hadn’t finished school to make a living on the free market were limited. All the ideas that quickly popped up—working on a ship (as what, for god’s sake?), making child porn, entering the drug trade—were unappealing. The world Don knew consisted of Rochdale, the idiotic family, school, and her friends. She couldn’t imagine anything else.
Childhood, with all the diseases it can entail, is probably the most horrid period of life. A child’s perception of the seemingly infinite duration of life multiplied the sense of unease. To feel like an independent person but not to be one, dependent on the moods and temper of legal guardians who themselves didn’t know any better. Don had no idea that there were childhoods where young people sat in the back of cars on long summer days, looking out the window as their parents navigated toward a holiday spot. Childhoods where if they fell, someone put a bandage on their wound and sat next to their bed and patted their head. Children’s misfortune wasn’t a result of being able to compare their situation to other children’s but rather the result of their inability to know what they needed in order to create a feeling of well-being.
Don’s mother started to bring men home. As if she wasn’t unpleasant enough on her own. People who slurred, were loud, and with every motion seemed to lay claim to something that they would in case of any doubt take with aggression. The men staggered into the furniture, pinched the children’s cheeks, or simply ignored them and shoved their mother toward her bed with glassy eyes. Don always worried about her mother because she didn’t know what was going on inside the room, in front of which she sat with a kitchen knife so she could intervene in case of emergency. One of these men became her mother’s steady boyfriend, which was discernible by the fact that he came over more often. He was an absurdly big white guy with strange rust-colored hair and a little hump where his neck met his back.
The man moved into the apartment after a few days with two plastic bags. With a serious look on his face, he put out books and writing materials on the kitchen table, as he was doing a distance learning course in theology. He prayed. Nonstop. Before every piece of bread with margarine, after every bowel movement. Mornings when he emerged from the bedroom. He kneeled in front of the sink and thanked god for this and that. “Walter could serve as a role model for you,” said Don’s mother, looking lovingly at the dirty bastard. “Now we have a man in the house again who will look after us,” she said. Don’s brother withdrew and pounded his fist into his bed. Even though he saw his father only every few months, he looked up to him greatly.
As if the universe wanted to have some fun with the new family arrangement, Don’s mother found a job at a cafeteria in Manchester. She left home every morning at seven. And so the children stayed with the man who was named Walter and who started his day with prayers. He kneeled in front of the kitchenette and spoke to god. One day Don was watching Walter as he prayed and had to quietly giggle. The burst of laughter just came out—at the sight of this strange man in a social housing unit talking to his master. Walter turned, saw Don, and sprang toward her. He punched her in the face. “You laughing at me? You don’t laugh at me!” he screamed, flying into a rage.
WALTER
INTELLIGENCE: average
POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high
ETHNICITY: white
HOBBIES: masturbating to photos of cross-dressing Nazis
CREDITWORTHINESS: not available
USABILITY: uhh
Was just one of millions.
A million Walters, and every day there were more who were. Mad. So very mad because they knew they were right. Because they were a million Walters. And were right, and nobody cared. They hated it when the margarine went off. When women passed them while driving. And when it rained and their shoes got wet. And when dogs barked at them. And when children spoke with those unnaturally high voices that sounded like the voices of porn stars. And when Blacks had better teeth. Walter was never comfortable inside. He could never sit down with a nice cup of, let’s say, Thai mountain tea, beneath a Cypress tree, and just let everything slide. There was always a tension that desired something, and never something good. The desire had to do with a release. If Walter wasn’t fucking someone or fighting, if he couldn’t kick a dog aside or kill a squirrel with a rock, the red-haired swine, then he sat on a chair in the kitchen where he had already destroyed everything that could be destroyed. The chair was made of steel. What kind of an idiot thought of making a chair out of steel? And on that chair he sat, both legs nervously bouncing up and down at a frantic pace he was unable to stop. The windowpane was already shattered. Same with his fist. Walter passed on what he had learned. He had grown up with his father, god rest his soul, in a flat he himself had later taken over. The father had been unemployed and had a badly enlarged liver. His mother was gone, she was a hooker, which is why she was gone, and Walter grew up with the knowledge that nothing in the world mattered except strength and aggression. His father thrashed him with every object in the apartment that was sound, and he was beaten up at school because he smelled bad, because he lied, because he couldn’t look anyone in the eye because when he looked his father in the eye he got beaten. Walter wet himself, he chewed his fingernails, he stunk. And why wouldn’t he, since the apartment was filthy; fruit flies did their rounds, maggots wriggled in old jam jars, and his father wore underwear he never washed; there was a dried ring of puke around the toilet. When there was dole money his father set out and bought alcohol, then there’d be fighting, then the money would be gone, and Walter would have to go out and steal food. That’s how it had been for Walter, and when he was finally grown-up and unemployed like his father, when his father was finally dead and Walter discovered that there were people who were afraid of him—that is, women and children—he began to blossom. To become loud and to find god; indeed he was so happy that there just had to be a superior being who had set him on this path. God, of course.
This god was a man, who gave him an idea of why he was on earth. And Walter finally knew how he could put structure in his life. Then he had met a woman. And then he moved into her place. Shut your mouth. He screamed, and
DON
Was silent, and that made Walter even more upset for some reason. Walter screamed that he would show her what pain was. He grabbed her arm and twisted it out of its joint.
When Don came to, the television was on. Walter had made margarine sandwiches. There’s no punch line.
From that day on Walter had made it his mission to make Don into a believer. He locked her in the bathroom. He made her kneel on peas. Learn Bible passages by heart, and he was never happy with the result, which meant punishment. The most memorable punishment involved the toilet, into which Walter shoved Don’s head, under water, over and over again under, until Don became panicked and flailed around—and so forth.
If an uninvolved, mentally healthy adult had observed the situation, the person would be afflicted with a total absence of hope for the child. Don trembled, and she knew she was about to die. Die. The concept was pure terror, cold bottomlessness. Don lost control of her bladder. Urine ran down her legs. Walter stepped away from Don, lying on the floor, at the exact moment when Don’s mother came home. She pissed herself, said Walter, and Don’s mother slapped her face. Then she went into the bedroom with Walter and a bottle she’d brought home with her. Don’s brother never rose from the computer.
The next day Don waited for her mother at the bus stop. When she arrived after Don had been waiting there for an hour, when Don told her everything, her mother walked silently with her to their housing estate. She said to Walter, who was cooking something in a pot: “My daughter lied to me. She made up bad things about you.” Then Don’s mother began to cry and yell at Don that she begrudged her happiness in life, and to Walter she said: “You have to punish her.” Walter dragged Don into the bedroom, shoved her onto the bed and ordered her to take down her pants and not to piss herself again. Don heard Walter remove his belt from his pants. Then he hit her. For several minutes. One could withstand being hit, if one distracted oneself. By taking a vow, for instance. Don swore that nobody was going to harm her. Never again. She no longer felt the humiliation, she saw the pitifulness of Walter, of her mother. It was just a question of time until she would get out. Disappear. Walter, however, took care of himself. He met a new woman and moved with her to London.
That was the summer when everything went wrong.
Or something new began.
“Go on, make a face like you’re dead,”
Said
HANNAH
The children tried to conjure up dead looks. Dull eyes staring at the ground. Slumped shoulders. For the sake of art. Hannah had decided to start a YouTube career. Maybe she’d turn out to be a born influencer. She was always searching herself for some sort of talent. Her channel was called: Life in the Cellar. Mostly she shot the others crawling around downtrodden locations—a fashion show with clothes from the Salvation Army, interviews with the homeless.
“How did you end up in this situation?”
“Well, I got sick.”
“Okay, got it, thanks a lot. Have a nice life.”
The earnest social reporting was not very successful. Not even a hundred views. There were far more clicks when Hannah convinced boys to glue their eyelids with superglue, get SpongeBob tattoos on their foreheads, or crash full speed into a wall on a stolen bicycle.
On the day they were all supposed to make dead faces, she recorded a makeup tutorial. Karen, Peter, and Don looked despondent, quasi hopeless, the light of a crummy afternoon seeped into the factory. Hannah made up the dead-looking children and filmed it.
Hannah looked like one those manga characters, the children who traipse around with bodies like Barbie dolls. Her hair now platinum blonde and one centimeter long, coupled with her odd, gangly body,
Just look at them,
Thought
KAREN
“A totally new world order is nearly upon us,” said Hannah into the camera, and Karen found herself in a really bad mood. If cartoon figures were going to explain the world now, she might as well just go home. “What do you mean,” asked Karen. “What new world order? You talking about the role of the Vatican? It’s said in the Book of Revelations that the Holy Roman Empire will rise again during the end-times. An orchestrated apocalypse in which the Catholics are left as the new world power, now that’s an idea. Speaking of which, did you guys know that there are now drones that are smaller than the palm of your hand? They can drop a small amount of explosives right on the forehead of the target and take them out.”
