Grime, page 3
Poor folks from the East, it should be specified. Poor people from the East knew how to get by, they were hungry. They were unsentimental. They could fight and weren’t spoiled. Here’s to clichés!
In the village where Peter came from, the place his mother wanted to escape, there was a Sand Street. In Peter’s mind Sand Street was made of muck and would open up at some point and swallow everything, but there were houses on the street that could seem romantic, at least when they were totally surrounded by snow. Old garden fences, broken windows, sagging doors, holes in the flooring. Of the hundred people in the village, almost all were over fifty and looked over seventy. Helplessness incarnate, people who’d never managed to make it to another city or flee to a foreign country. Scraps of meat staggering down the dusty street as soon as their welfare checks arrived to buy a stockpile of alcohol from the kiosk that, alongside alcohol, also sold pickles in dusty jars, and oatmeal. The stuff alcoholics like.
Peter was hated by the men in the village. He was different. That was enough. He was always near his mother. Which was where the village idiots wanted to be. There were only a few other women in town. Anyone who could, left. And they’d be gone soon, too, Peter’s mother often told him. Until then she wanted to have fun. And whatever she meant by that, it always began with her walking down the dusty street of that Polish backwater in a short skirt, looking as if she were going to some sort of casting. Peter knew what casting shows were, he knew everything, because even in the far reaches of Poland they had the internet. Peter found the way his mother conducted herself strange. She laughed too loudly whenever some alcoholic spoke to her, her skirt slid up to her crotch, and she forgot her son, that is Peter himself, as soon as a man showed up. Peter had no idea why she preferred the company of toothless alcoholics to his own company. There was nobody here who could appreciate beauty in any form. It took practice to recognize beauty, training that could never have taken place here. It was ugly in this hole of a town. Flat, no trees, no hills, just fields and houses like ruins. As already mentioned, most of the people had disappeared, Peter was the only one who didn’t want to leave. He didn’t care about the location. It was familiar. That counted. Peter liked his own company if he didn’t have to talk to people or hear noises or squeeze under a gate that had just jangled shut, or if his mother was away. Being with his mother was the norm. When norms were disrupted, Peter panicked. He had no idea why. He only knew it was the way he was. Mostly he felt as if he were sleeping and wanted to wake up. His mother disappeared into their apartment with some alcoholic. Peter didn’t like men.
There were too many of them.
Thought
DON
Anywhere things were interesting, they were sitting around. When they showed up in groups it was unpleasant. The group in front of Don’s house—well, more like “house”—managed to lure over a little stray dog the other day. The cadaver sat there for several days.
Don didn’t know why men did such things. But she knew you had to be scared of them. You couldn’t provoke them. They could yell without it sounding like screaming. They talked nonsense in broken sentences. But you wanted them to like you. You wanted to please the coolest gangster. Or serve him. So as not to get beaten up. Like Don’s mother. Like all the mothers on the block, who mostly raised kids on their own because the men left as soon as they didn’t feel like beating their women anymore. Among women, stress-induced depression was the most common disease in the country. Sort of a disease. Whatever. Women. The suicide rate among women over forty rose to an absurd level, the exact percentage Don had forgotten. A lot of kids with depressed alcoholic mothers lived in constant fear of coming home to find family members lying dead somewhere or hanging or facedown in a bathtub. The coming generation, made up of psychotic former children of poverty, Ritalin-crazed psychotic former children of the dying middle class, and the sadistic former children of the elite, would be well prepared for the new era.
Incidentally—just emerging back then was the movement of
The
LEFT BEHIND.
Men.
Young and middle-aged throughout the Western world who found themselves in homoerotic unity under various names. Alt-right, neo-Nazis, National Action, Aryan Brotherhood, White Nationalist Party, League of St. George, Blood & Honour, Stormfront, Identitäre, Vigrid, Deutsche Heidnische Front—the involuntarily celibate
Groups—
That gave them back a feeling of power that
Women
Had taken from them. Millions of white men had been emasculated. Right. Wrap your head around that.
Fucking hell. They had too much testosterone or not enough, both painful conditions, and found themselves in a world that no longer needed them. Useless and angry. Not loved and not listened to. Doughy around the middle,
Women,
That is—individuals that you could purchase, as so-called policewomen, judges, doctors. Like foreigners with glasses. Like if a dog were to become a politician. Women were something they could all agree upon as responsible for this malaise they felt in a world that was no longer comfortable. Which had never really been comfortable, but at least you weren’t confronted with it in the old days, for fuck’s sake. In the old days there’d been no internet to tell you how uncomfortable it had become. It could really make you bitter.
Well, it was not proper to wander through the streets of the Western world beating women. So somebody else had to be on the hook. Foreigners. Same as women, just with bigger penises. With which they stole the women away from white men, the women the white men hated. Okay, it was complicated. Fuck it.
The left-behind ironed their shirts, lifted weights, peeked at the penises of men next to them, thought about all those penises in action. If you’d strung them together you could have fucked the world back into order. Linking up around the globe they created a massive shitpile of healthy, armed, radically right-wing fascists hopped up on a fear of fading into insignificance.
In
DON’S
surroundings, there were no Nazi groups or Nazi parties. The men around her were too lazy to gang up together. The sensation of uselessness the third generation had allowed them to become flaccid, the once proud fishermen, construction workers, proud—whatever shit it was—meaning they’d done honest work with their honest hands on some honest bullshit or other that made some other man rich. Whose descendants, now holding government offices, decided on the unemployment benefits for honest workers. That a person who doesn’t—let’s just say—manufacture wire, is no longer of any value, and will get angry as a result, is understandable. And is, in fact, considered a mitigating circumstance if a man from the area lands in front of a court for beating his wife or child completely or only nearly to death.
When women survived the morbidly predictable, socialized rage, they patched each other’s wounds once the sporadically appearing, humiliated men had lost control. Subsequently the men withdrew, confused about the mess they’d created. Then there was peace, the wounds healed, then the men returned and everything started over again: women lost themselves in rapture to the appearance of a toothless man who spent the entire day sitting in front of the TV with his hand on his crotch, until he went to the pub in the evening and sat there instead. Almost all women felt incomplete without a man. Or to put it in formal aesthetic terms: men livened up the scene inside the horrid apartments and in front of the houses.
Speaking of
Don’s surroundings.
Eighteen row houses, two stories, brick, fences, nobody expected any trees or plants of the concrete. Here lived: refugees, unemployed, people with missing limbs, bad eyes, alcoholics, junkies, ever more of them arriving from London because their social housing units had been transformed into private owner-occupied flats. Just not owned or occupied by them.
Don had never seen buildings surrounded by whispering treetops, had no experience of high-performance heaters, windows without drafts, clean bathrooms, or fountains, as Rochdale was a very equitable city, where things were equally shitty wherever you went.
If you left her block and went out into the city, which Don often did with Karen, for lack of anything better to do, you found a main thoroughfare. The attractions of this main road were thrift shops, where items donated or found on the side of the road were sold to residents of the thriving community. Aside from various bet shops and one-pound shops there was a shopping center, where half the storefronts were empty, and a Costa Café, where they liked to stand out front and watch the tourists. That is, the three per month who mistakenly strayed into Rochdale because they’d read in a bad online guide about some food-and-drink festival or about Dippy, the dinosaur in the natural history museum. Okay. Those three people who then hustled down the main road petrified and, in desperation, visited the parking garage at the shopping center—they loved to watch those people. The tourists gave off a luster like gold. They could. Just leave after they’d downed their overpriced Costa Café and had a sufficient fright from the pregnant minors and all the young Pakistani men tromping through the shopping center.
They could disappear to places that were definitely better.
On days when there were no tourists to be observed, Don and Karen checked out the old clothes and morbidly sad people trying on old clothes in the thrift shops. Three-quarters of the residents of this city of eternal rain were unemployed. So they had a lot of time to examine the trash their neighbors dragged to the thrift stores and pawn shops in order to put the proceeds toward a bit of lager. Once, it was said, this had been a city bursting with prosperous workers. The empty shells of the formerly grand, bombastic, prosperity-giving factories stood all around, evidence of this distant, wonderful era. They’d been closed because nobody needed the crap they produced. In the new millennium you needed banks, financial services, and IT workers. They called it evolution.
These days the factories were empty and served as adventure playgrounds, as drug and weapons stashes, and as meeting places for sex in exchange for payment. Jobless old men fucked away their monthly benefits there, and young girls fucked there to get a bit of affection. Ditto for a handful of homosexuals. Karen and Don often watched people having sex in the factories, which they found disgusting. When they weren’t spending their time on the main road, watching grime videos at a playground, or creeping around factory buildings, they got up to things that involved annoying passersby, stealing things, or fighting with other groups of kids. With the help of YouTube tutorials, Don had from the age of six practiced martial arts in Mandale Park, which was empty aside from a few homeless people who were too drunk to pay her any attention. Wasn’t such a brilliant park. More like an indeterminate cluster of scrubby trees and shrubs. Don had really gotten into Krav Maga. A technique that was very effective and could ensure survival. Like the shooting classes Don had watched online, the tutorials by FARC rebels on how to kill or build a shelter. Don found it exciting to look at pictures and videos about armed resistance. Women who could assemble a machine gun in seconds flat or finish off an enemy with a quick jerk and turn of the head. She’d found something that made her burn with desire, something bigger than her. She trained hard, and her body changed and grew. In width. Compact, like a pit bull. Thought Don.
This was the period when her brother wasn’t just wetting the bed once a week but daily. Because of his trauma-induced feelings. That he could only express via urine. Don lay in the stinking little children’s room and felt excited. She knew she’d soon disappear from here. Away from the scent of urine, the glare of the lamp outside, the shuffle of people waddling behind their invisible walkers. Don closed her eyes and tried to imagine a future. Though she never really succeeded at it. She didn’t know what it smelled like at the seaside or in Bangkok, she had no idea what rich people in elegant apartments did. So she just imagined London. White, gleaming, and modern. And right in the middle of it, herself. Picturing this unknown world kept her excited until the following morning. She held on to it until school, where of late Don was no longer laughed at as gay or cursed as lesbian. The other kids had begun to fear her. A development she enjoyed. She’d been sneered at and derided for as long as she could remember. She didn’t conform to average specifications. Her average classmate was white. Or Pakistani. Girls wore dresses or skirts. They began using makeup at age seven and had sex for the first time at ten. Boys smoked, drank beer, and wore hoodies, they were white with bags under their eyes, or they were Pakistani, in which case they had nothing to do with the others. There was no room for interpretation, no in-between. In between there was only Karen and Don. The freaks. The ones you could beat up. But that was in the past. Now when Don set foot in the schoolyard with Karen, everyone looked at the ground. Like in the animal world, thought Don, as she swaggered across the yard like a fucking cowboy. Karen walked behind her, or at her feet,
Never fully there.
KAREN
Sat in her room, which was actually a closet, with no windows, but at least a door. It doesn’t take much to satisfy people. She read about Bajos de Haina, a city in the Dominican Republic that had been contaminated by a battery recycling company. City of freaks. They intrigued Karen, who wondered what it would be like if everyone in Rochdale looked like her. Or if they were all interested in the same things she was. At age five, Karen had found a book on system biology and ever since had been obsessed with microbes, blood, hormones, and computers. Those had become the worlds in which she preferred to live instead of on the shabby surface of this so-called world. Karen ran her hand over the scar on her head—
After the incident, which, we remember, was euphemistically described as a mass shooting, when Karen’s superficial wounds were being treated at the hospital, she had tried to imagine how surviving the shooting would fundamentally change the structure of her family. How she’d leave the hospital and her mother and brothers would be standing there, and they’d all hug, and then go together to McDonald’s. Tears, hugs, and so on. That didn’t happen. Karen didn’t like to go out in the street on her own. Even though it was all she had ever known, now it bothered her to be gaped at all the time. It felt as if the stares were boring through her skin and into her organs. Stares. Scornful, disgusted, horrified, disapproving. Karen looked different.
She wore bifocals and could have used braces. Nobody around here had braces. Or good teeth. A lot of people had no teeth at all. Rochdale was a place where nobody sculpted their bodies with plastic surgery or in fitness studios, and there were a thousand forms of neglect to marvel at,
But Karen had really gotten it bad. A recessive genetic inheritance, a glitch in the production of melanin, was responsible for Karen’s white, frizzy hair, the light, freckled skin, the colorless eyelashes and eyebrows and the light blue eyes. In politically correct terminology Karen was said to have albinism, but that didn’t help her maintain a healthy self-esteem. Her mother and her older brother were dark-skinned and beautiful. At least in Karen’s eyes. Everyone else was beautiful, and she looked like a dinner roll that you’d find under a dumpster. Karen had come to terms with being an outsider. At least come to terms with it as well as a young, nearly pubescent kid who’s reviled by nearly everyone as extraordinarily hideous can come to terms with it. Reviled by toothless old fat-sacks, by cockeyed foul-smelling women with lopsided heads and by pimply, reeking boys. Karen was the kid who stood alone in the corner during recess. She was the kid smaller kids stared at and adults made comments about. She was the kid with a dysfunctional relationship with her brothers. Even her little brother despised Karen, which was amazing since he had Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. If anyone knew what that was, it was only by the name progeria. Most people just called her little brother “alien,” and though he should have been a tiny, needy person he somehow was a malicious little asshole. Genetically speaking, something had gone wrong in Karen’s family. In an English social drama, the cursed little family could have been a haven of warmth, humor, and love. But unfortunately they were just people who happened to live in a social housing unit together and got on each other’s nerves. Or beat each other up, like on the day Karen came home from the hospital after the incident, disappeared into her room and then at some point needed to go to the bathroom. Her brothers had partied the night before, meaning hanging out on the street partaking of a mix of drugs and alcohol. Then the little brother would probably be pushed down the baby slide or used as a human shot put. Fun into the wee hours, at least to judge by the babbling voices from the living room.
The apartment was too small to provide even a modicum of privacy. There was the bedroom for the brothers, the living room, where their mother slept, Karen’s closet, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchen, all wedged into forty-three square meters. All in ochre. That perhaps had been white at some point in the distant past. Or red. It didn’t matter. Everything a bit—run-down. The curtains were closed, the living room reeked of booze. The brothers sat on the sofa looking like a man and his puppet. The larger one good-looking, the little one strange-looking. They were watching YouTube videos of people who glued their foreskin shut with superglue. Their brains were already irrevocably damaged by constant stimulation. The TV was also on, with the sound muted, showing catastrophic reports from Japan, which had just been hit by a massive tsunami. The idiots made jokes and Karen stared, frozen, as old women squatted on a hill and gaped at their wildly romantic coastal town where a container ship had been washed in. The two dumbfucks Karen was supposedly related to squealed with delight. Fatalities. There were fatalities. Maybe they’d show a corpse. It never ceased to amaze Karen how many hours the two of them could waste just staring at something or other. Or drinking alcohol and talking nonsense. And how little time they devoted to things that might have made human beings out of them. Like reading something or even bathing. One of them noticed Karen and yelled at her to get them a snack. Karen knew there was no point in arguing and set bread and margarine out in front of the two morons. The older one kicked her, perhaps because he didn’t approve of the quality of the proffered food. Karen fell to the floor. The younger brother screamed with laughter. Poor bastards, Karen thought. The brothers were bored with the emptiness in their heads, with the disastrous effects of the hormones that made them feel like they were the rulers of the world. Testosterone kept them from seeing themselves realistically for what they were, two young men without any prospects for a decent life. If you believed the statistics, one of them would be dead in a few years. The other would probably succumb to a gunshot wound soon enough. Unfortunately the date of their demise wasn’t fixed. Until then, they’d hunker down here with the spliffs that were supposed to calm them down.
