Grime, page 2
Don hated the stupidity, the brutality, the deviousness and deceitfulness, the stench, the hairless, sweating bodies and the slimy fingers that tested everything for commercial potential.
“You want war, you got war.”
Said Don. To herself.
This is the story of
HANNAH
ETHNICITY: Asian?
SEXUALITY: heterosexual
INTERESTS: self-absorbed
INTELLIGENCE: proven
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: none
FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS: only child, loving parents
Before she met Karen, Don, and Peter.
When she didn’t yet know what Rochdale meant, or tragedy.
To backtrack just a little:
Hannah lived in Liverpool, with two genial parents who were typical of the fading middle class. They’d rented a house with a shabby back garden, owned two bicycles, and were able to pay their electricity bills. Hannah considered love from her parents the normal state of things—that they would throw her in the air and caress her. That they’d hold her hand and be proud of her, that they’d sit with her at bedtime and come to her room to check on her when she was asleep, all this she took for granted. Through the constant affection of her parents Hannah had developed an outsized ego as a child. Hannah didn’t doubt herself. She was tall and thin and never looked like a cute little kid. More like a miniature version of an interesting adult. Hannah never wanted long hair or dresses or pink stuff; instead she studied old photos of Katharine Hepburn online. That’s how she wanted to look one day. Aloof and instilling a bit of fear. Hannah’s home was located in a problematic part of a city that consisted mostly of problematic parts. But her problematic part of town was unequivocally the most problematic. You often heard shootings outside, you rarely heard sirens, the police had long since given up on the area. But Hannah didn’t care. Nothing outside could affect her when she was in bed listening to her parents quietly talk to each other.
That sensation of being sheltered and loved would later save her from many things.
From killing herself, for instance—
Something which seemed to
DON
Completely incomprehensible—to be dead, gone, no longer enraged. The fascination Don felt about the dead ended the day of what was called the Massacre. That sort of incident—meaning: a crazed teenager shooting other teenagers—was largely unknown in the country at that point, because there were hardly any fathers with well-stocked gun cabinets, at least if you disregarded the hunting rifles of the upper class. Fathers in Rochdale had beer. If there were fathers at all, since Don’s experience with parents, as was true of most children, consisted primarily of contact with overburdened women.
Don hadn’t retained much memory of the incident. Just shots, which sounded like New Year’s firecrackers, screaming children who sounded like they were under water, and slow-motion images of people running or crawling in every direction. While lying on the floor, Don wondered about the way the killer must have revealed his intentions online. Had he worn a hoodie? Had he sat or stood with a gun and said something that included “system, disrespect, women, never taken seriously, and now I’ll show you…”? What music had he played in his video? Slipknot? Something more thumping. Pitbull? He probably wasn’t the brightest bulb, like most people here. Some of the children lying on the ground took pictures of themselves during the so-called massacre. Some of them had iPhones. The poorer fuckers had crap Chinese phones. The approximately eight hours a day they spent on their devices was supposed to make Don’s entire generation into a bunch of unfocused idiots.
Man, oh man, thought Don, who on earth sticks fake plastic nails onto their fingers? Don was lying on the ground next to an older girl, staring at her nails. She’d never seen anything so awful. You could see the yellow horn through the back of the fingernail. The girl was ten or thirteen and looked like a baby hooker. The downside of grime videos. They really didn’t offer positive lessons for discourse surrounding gender or queer theory. The women in the videos showed a lot of bust and backside, along with gold jewelry and fake nails. They mostly waltzed over to the passenger seat of some showy car that a gangster rapper had stolen or bought with his mad riches. Money doesn’t make you happy, Don thought randomly, and started laughing just as the police commando team came storming in. Then there were more shots. The dull click of the attacker’s semiautomatic rifle faded into the rich stew of noise produced by the commandos’ proper machine guns. When it was over it was quiet and the shooter was dead. Along with a few girls. Don had finally seen corpses. It was less grandiose than in Don’s fantasies. People were just lying there and no longer existed.
This is the story of
KAREN
SEXUALITY: heterosexual
INTELLIGENCE: highly gifted
CLINICAL PICTURE: predilection to obsessive behavior (licking light switches)
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR: inadequate
ETHNICITY: genetic defect
FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS: two brothers. Single mother.
I’m alive, thought Karen. She didn’t know whether she should be wildly happy about this. She wasn’t the emotional type.
She was injured and had suffered trauma. Said a paramedic. “What’s your name?” asked the paramedic while dealing with Karen’s head wound. “Karen,” said Karen. And the paramedic’s glance wandered past her, searching for a more interesting victim, someone with a bullet hole through which he’d have to shove intestines back in, or someone whose leg needed to be sawed off immediately, right there. Without anesthesia, like in the movies. Here, bite down on this, it’s going to hurt for a minute. He would have saved a life and then would rise, covered in blood, with the severed leg backlit. The paramedic said: “You probably have trauma.” “That’s normal,” said Karen. “Can I leave?” The paramedic nodded. Karen removed herself without rolling her eyes. All children had trauma. It was a permanent condition. Karen didn’t care. Trauma was her middle name. Karen lived with her mother, who was always on the verge of a breakdown, an older brother, who tortured her whenever he felt like it, which was often, and a younger brother, who would die soon, though that didn’t keep him from being an evil asshole, all in an apartment that would have been too small for one person. Karen didn’t care about that either. She was, as mentioned, not the emotional type. She believed in genetics. Her genes must have jumped generations. There must have been a scientist somewhere in her ancestral line. Because Karen was smarter than her entire family, probably smarter than all the residents of Rochdale put together. Her life took place in books and online. She operated in a wonderful world of microbes, genes, bacteria, viruses, and microorganisms to which she gave names. She dreamed about them. Karen’s life became uncomfortable only when she had to leave her own head and do things regarded as normal. Like going to school, eating, washing herself. The only joy Karen took in so-called normal life was the weather. It rained so often in Rochdale that at least on the street she could use an umbrella. Beneath an umbrella Karen was invisible. She tried the trick at home. But it didn’t work.
“For the love of god.”
Cried the mother of
DON
In the next room. She’d heard about the incident on the news.
There were still news programs on the state television station, rain constantly blowing into the faces of sturdy blonde reporters. Who were always standing with microphones in their hands in front of police tape, commenting on catastrophes.
So Don’s mother cried, “For the love of god.”
“You kids could have died. You could have died,” she cried.
And wrapped her arms around Don’s brother euphorically. Her arms trembled with fear. Arms again. It seemed as if English women were made of nothing else. Don stared at her mother’s body and was sure that masses of flesh like that could never grow out of her.
“Go on, bring him something to eat,” ordered Don’s mother—her son pressed to her breast.
So much for family structure.
Mass shootings and misogyny are siblings, Don later read. And it’s mostly young men who go crazy. Something in their lives didn’t work out the way they’d imagined. Something to do with power. Or penis. Or because everyone didn’t fall at their feet as they imagined would happen as a result of the way they were used to being treated by their mothers. Don wasn’t surprised. She knew a thing or two about weakness. She had a brother, after all.
And a mother who didn’t particularly value any creature that lacked a penis. Nearly all the women in Don’s orbit worshipped men and boys and scorned women. They were probably ashamed to belong to the losers, because the only thing lower than women were foreign women. The only thing that linked Don and her mother seemed to be their sense of deficiency. A massive sense of loserdom that expressed itself in everything they did. Don decided very early in her life never to become a woman. At least not the kind Don knew from Rochdale and from the videos. Not the kind who distinguished herself primarily by playing up gender stereotypes with her clothes and painting her fingernails with glitter polish—victims. A man or boy, no matter how weak, would always be valued more than a woman, even if she was a professor or cyberneticist. And speaking of weak, Don’s brother had a lot of shortcomings. Beginning with his way of walking. Don’s brother always stepped forward with just the front of his foot and lurched after it with every step, giving him the aura of a complete idiot. He breathed too loudly, smacked his lips when he ate, his mouth always hung open—and
Don couldn’t remember.
Her mother ever having hugged her. Or touched or patted, or that she had undertaken anything you’d see a movie mom do. But—at some point things not done become embarrassing to even contemplate doing. Perhaps her mother was dying to hold Don close but she’d unfortunately let the moment pass when it was possible to start. And anyway she was busy. She had to constantly run along behind her son to wipe his face, to pinch his cheeks, and to listen rapturously when he talked about his equally idiotic friends. Don’s brother needed only to breathe to provoke elation in the mother. Don, on the other hand, she rarely contemplated, and when she did her gaze betrayed the same helplessness with which she regarded herself and her own life.
“I took part in the uprisings,” said
DON’S MOTHER
CREDITWORTHINESS: none
ETHNICITY: Black
INTELLIGENCE: average
HOBBIES: BBC television programs, the royal family, rummaging in thrift shops
SEXUALITY: masturbates to photos of Prince Charles
FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS: 2 children, 1 absent husband
Often.
Don could never picture her mother as an upstanding Black Panther revolutionary. She probably exaggerated her role in the London street battles. That was supported by the fact that Don’s mother used bleaching cream, straightened her hair until it hung from her head like sliced cheese, that the skin color of the supposed father of her children was ambiguous, and that she had no friends from those supposed circles. She preferred to keep company with whites, she rhapsodized about the capital. That her parents left London after the unrest back then was a huge source of humiliation to her, since Rochdale was the brick-and-mortar manifestation of the fact that Don’s mother would never nibble scones at an English flower market with white ladies in twinsets. Don’s mother had learned a decent trade. She was a trained retail saleswoman, or something equally useless from the 1.0 era of the economy. She’d worked for a transport company, a supermarket, and an appliance store and was always replaced at some point by someone in another country, because the trend was to send jobs abroad, because the trend was that a handful of people wanted to make ever more money to protect themselves from the end of the world. This desire had to be respected.
Don’s mother was only able to find temp jobs. At a laundry, as a cashier, at a gas station. And, for long periods, none at all. She was scared during those phases. And she was scared when she had a job that she’d lose it again. She couldn’t sleep, could barely eat, barely breathe, and always lost the job. Scared. Always scared of everything. She dreaded winter the most, because that was the time when the children got sick, which meant at least eight hours sitting around the hospital, which meant she’d be out a job once again. Then she’d have to go to the unemployment office, let herself be treated shabbily, and be forced to take a course, like for instance one on how to compose a properly written job application. Which, upon every gas station owner in town, most of whom are illiterate—now, now, let’s not be racist—naturally makes a huge impression. When the money from the unemployment office was gone and Don’s mother still had no job, she had to go to the Christians and their food banks.
DON
Hated the visits to the Christians. They meant: waiting an hour or two outside. And then standing in front of women whose teeth were too big and who smelled of old, wet kitchen rags, whose red faces had big noses with burst veins and whose yellowish gray hair was always matted down in the back. Letting people like that fill your pockets with canned beans was deeply humiliating. And here’s a little something nice for the wee ones. Who were these horrid-looking people, what gave them the right to their condescending charitableness that didn’t distinguish between welfare recipients and dogs? Don always imagined going back to see these gracious people, with a machete. She pictured herself, and the Christians in their own blood, their skirts riding up, their legs twisted on the floor. And then Don saw herself leaning over the victims and for a finishing touch shoving tins of beans into their mouths.
Which was completely unfair, of course, since without the Christians who fed and petted the poor, most of them would probably already be dead. The aim of the state was to reduce social services to a minimum in order to foster the strong, hardworking segments of the populace. As well as. Just to save money. As well as. To maintain the country’s neoliberal course.
The contempt capitalists held for the poor had become institutionalized. Homeless, unemployed, those with disabilities, the sick, the feeble had to fulfill painstaking, incomprehensible, idiotic bureaucratic requirements just to receive a minimal sum that barely kept their vital functions going. The unusable part of society could lose all assistance because of small technical errors, and then they were just stuck. In their rancid gaffs with no electricity or heat or food. And who helped them then? The Christians helped them then, people who got their serotonin fix by dedicating themselves to the preservation of those unworthy of preservation.
Don started to hate almost everything around her. The police who patted down every kid, every day, who lived in social housing.
Out of habit, for fun, or just because they could. The children had to stand in rows, empty their pockets, pull down their pants, put their hands on their heads. Something about power or respect meant that probably one or two million kids grew up knowing with all certainty that they were not protected by the state.
The police virtually never found any drugs or weapons, because, after all, what kind of children would be so stupid as to carry suspicious things when they knew they were being surveilled. Weapons were stored in empty old factories. Same with the drugs.
Don hated. The worn-out looking people at the agencies who treated her mother as if she was just too lazy and stupid to keep her life in order; she hated the public housing authority’s maintenance man who barred children from doing anything, from running, talking, laughing, breathing. She hated her father—
Whose influence on the upbringing of his children was negligible. Occasionally he sent money. Rarely, actually. But when it happened, Mother always gave a long speech about the goodness of this man, she said she’d be lost without him, then she cried. What Don had learned was: women took care of all the never-ending, practical, unpleasant things that were necessary in life. They stood in line at agencies, dragged their children to doctors’ offices, and disappeared into their apartments to take care of other women’s duties until they eventually became mentally ill, which in their circles always meant depression, which in their circles always meant: Mother laid in bed, cried, and didn’t get up anymore. Women didn’t accomplish the extraordinary. Extraordinary accomplishments were male things. Interesting activities emanated from men. They stood beneath streetlamps, listened to music, smoked, drank, dealt drugs. Boys made the cool music. Back then there were still no women in the grime scene who were important. Who were as threateningly angry and loud as the men.
Men annoyed
PETER
DIAGNOSIS: psychologically peculiar
RISK FACTOR: unestablished
SEXUALITY: heterosexual, maybe
IQ: unclear
ETHNICITY: white, referred to as Caucasian, right?
FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS: no siblings
It had simply been dumb luck, Peter’s birth, and on a day when it didn’t even rain. Something had probably gone wrong. It happens more often than you think. On the day of his birth, when his mother saw the face of the midwife and then of this child. Which was luminous and clearly not from her husband, who was also long gone by then. The very dark-haired, very stupid husband. And Poland, yeah, well, in fact, out in the countryside in Poland, do something when you’re young, when the country’s latent fascism makes you sick, when you already know all there is—the cowardice of the people, the empty shops, the dusty streets, and, first and foremost, the absence of all hope. Do something with a luminous child who barely talks, who never looks anyone in the eye and spends hours staring at the ceiling or having silent conversations with his fingers. Do something if the ten moronic men in the village offer no suitable sexual prospects for you whatsoever. So, England it was. There were already millions of other Poles there, and you rarely heard any complaints. Many of them found on the island something they couldn’t find at home. Work. Money. Change. Interesting foreigners and, with time, perhaps a vacation home back in Poland, which was undeniably scenic. That was enough for a new life. And it was possible—if you weren’t too discerning; and if folks from the East were anything, they were frugal.
