Grime, page 5
A fat old man, parentheses thirty-five, opened the door and, if you were to attribute anything to the open fly of his pants, had probably been interrupted while visiting a pedophilia site. The super took them to the lower level of the building—and just look at what they’d been able to do with a simple cellar. The rooms were painted in neon colors, laid with wood-grain linoleum, fitted with Wi-Fi and cable TV. A team of well-compensated city planners had hit on the idea to address overcrowding in the metropolitan area. It had turned out terrific. Windows—well, okay, there were no windows, but what was there to see outside anyway?
“When the furniture arrives…” said her father. It didn’t seem to matter to him where they were or why. And what furniture, anyway?
“Here’s the communal kitchen,” said the super, showing them a communal kitchen. There was a refrigerator where each resident could put their lockable food container, a gas stove that could be operated with a cash card. Same for the laundry machine, “here’s where you get the cards for warm water, and here,” said the super, “are the cards for the TVs,” which were already installed next to the beds in each room. “You have to put money on them. Good day.” Said the super, then he went back to the people he loved.
“Well at least there’s a TV,” said the father, dropping himself onto the bed. A dust of old skin particles danced in the fluorescent lighting, and Hannah was too dulled to come up with a way out.
She could try to get the ball rolling. Get flowers, a poster of a horse, and sheets. Or say: “Hey, come on, we’ll go register at the welfare office so we can get vouchers for the soup kitchen.” Or: “Let’s go explore the city. Dinosaur museum, cafés, whatever else. We can hang out and meet friends.” Or: “I saw some great thrift shops, we could go check them out.”
It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered. “Maybe the agency won’t pay the rent,” said Hannah, “and we’ll be put up in a rubbish dump.” In earlier times her father would have answered: “That’ll be brilliant. There’ll be rats, highly intelligent animals, we can train them. And rubbish dumps are usually quite tranquil. There’s food there, old clothes, we can build a house. As for the odor, well, it’s just an odor.”
But her father didn’t talk. He just sat there, staring off, for so long that Hannah got angry. She was the child, for fuck’s sake. And rather than say something injudicious, it would be better to explore her new home. Labyrinthine subterranean hallways, on the walls graffiti, fluorescent lights, a few doors standing open, inside faint signs of life. Lots of old men; here and there sat a few single mothers who’d worked in industries that no longer existed, all their functions cranked down to a bare minimum.
And suddenly
DON
Was nervous. Her brother wasn’t there, he was probably in the basement playing with decomposing pets. It had just happened. She had just begun to observe herself and her surroundings as if from the outside. Since the vaccination, to be exact. Now she wouldn’t get encephalitis, but she’d also never manage to reoccupy her body. From one day to the next, Don had lost all sense of contentment. As if she had needed a pair of glasses that had now been paid for by medical insurance, bit of a joke there, because there were no glasses for people on welfare, which had led to a drastic increase in the number of rear-end collisions and illiterates. Don had also begun to notice the smell—a mix of cheap food, insufficient ventilation, damp clothes, mold, and carelessly washed people. Outside was the absolute emptiness of a Sunday evening. Don felt so utterly bored that her body started to itch.
Don figured it would be easier to die than to live on with this sense of unease.
The problem was
Don had discovered her sexuality. That’s how you’d say it if you were a nutter. Don hated everything about herself. Her muscles, the stockiness of her body, which made her look like a little wrestler, her skin, her too-big mouth, her crooked eyes, her too-high forehead. Don walked around the apartment, sat around, went out onto the street, and every activity ended with her flopping down in her bed trying to remember Karen’s lecture.
“It’s not bad,” Karen had explained a few days before. “It’s puberty. Hormones. It’s like they’ve swapped you out for an alien. Do you feel like that?”
“Well, let’s put it this way, I never used to think, Wow, this is me. But now all I can think is that I’m no longer myself. You know what I mean?” Don had answered.
“I get it. Chemical processes. It would overwhelm you if I described the exact processes. Or do you want me to?” said Karen, full of hope to be able to deliver a long lecture.
“Nah, never mind,” Don answered.
“Fine. So,” Karen continued. “Puberty is like saying goodbye to a dear friend. To yourself. At some point you’ll be healthy again, like after a cold. It just takes a few years. During which time it’s essential not to make any mistakes.” That in theory Don knew everything about her bodily condition helped very little. She sat on her bed with nervous fidgety legs and began to get interested in the world of pornography. She saw: Man-fucks-woman porn. Many-men-fuck-woman porn. Man-fucks-bound-woman porn. Man-fucks-dog-and-chicken porn. She found the films unsatisfying on various levels, including in the area of language. After the bestiality category, Don landed on hot lesbian sex. Don was fascinated. To put it in a neutral way. She began to fantasize about women. Or more precisely, the illustrations of her awkward imaginings revolved exclusively around
HANNAH
Whom Don had met upstairs in the 1.0 world. The way children get to know each other. Don was standing in the yard, watching the new Stefflon Don video on her phone, Stefflon Don being the person our Don, whose actual name was Donatella, had named herself after. Stefflon Don rapped about diamonds and a Rolls-Royce. Hannah came up to her and said: “That’s shit music.” Shortly thereafter the two of them fell to the ground fighting.
They’d been friends ever since. It made everything bearable for Hannah, because now she had a daylight life and a cellar life. Speaking of which—whenever Hannah thought she had mastered the layout of residents in the cellar apartments, they’d be swapped out as if overnight. Only her father was always there, like he was stuffed.
Since he’d discovered the internet, he never moved. He showed Hannah cat videos. Just picture it—two people in an English basement which a real estate ad would probably describe as a “charming pied-à-terre with cable TV in the heart of the city,” looking at videos of cats in boxes made by people in Asia who were probably also stuck in some basement. The internet—what a magnificent, world-embracing invention. Where people could self-actualize.
Hannah, for example, took dozens of photos of herself every day. Her dark hair fell to her hips, and impressive cheekbones protruded from her face. These things needed to be documented. She let a weather app determine what she wore, she found her way around the city exclusively by Google Maps, tracked her physical activity, her body fat percentage, and sang grime to a playback app. In short, Hannah grew accustomed to the new conditions. She was a child, and they grow accustomed to any kind of shit, because they lack comparisons that would allow them to recognize the wretchedness of their circumstances. Even grief becomes a normal condition. It wasn’t always focused and sharp, it just became a background noise, always there, somewhere in their brains. Hannah could laugh and look at grime videos and talk about boys, and yet the grief was still present and made Hannah feel as if nothing was real. A laughing Hannah avatar made its way through the day, but at night it was cold. The nights, when she couldn’t sleep, she thought of Dr. Brown. Whom she would someday kill. The nights, when screams came from the cellar.
When
HANNAH’S FATHER
ETHNICITY: Asian
HOBBIES: cat videos
HEALTH: endogenic depression after loss
POLITICAL TENDENCIES: none
CONSUMER VIABILITY: nil
Couldn’t sleep. Like so many. Millions lay in prisons, in dark holes, in shanties, lay next to their decaying mother in bed, in slums where the stench was the most pleasant aspect of the place. Many no longer knew why they should stay alive; they would desperately have liked not to be there anymore, but how did one go about that, how does one die? It’s not easy to kill oneself. Where to get the energy when life already feels as if you’ve taken sleeping pills. You can’t just feel your way along the wall blindly. The futility of every motion caused bodily pain. The way to the kitchen through the basement hallways with their flickering lights and the neon-colored walls, and behind the doors always someone sitting there engulfed in madness. Surrounded by promises made by some agency to give them hope. To make them believe they can make it. Which in this social system always involved a yacht.
Life in the cellar was like a halfway point between life and death. There was a marked slowing of thought and increasingly hazy movements, an apathy that gripped every part of the body. This was very helpful for Hannah’s father, because in every life-sustaining measure he saw disgust-inducing evidence that he wasn’t yet dead. He began to hate even Hannah. Because she was there. He hated himself for his hate, but was too tired to examine it.
He saw his dead wife everywhere. She stood next to him. Sat next to him on the bed. Hannah’s
Father knew that he would die here, because he would never again have the strength to transport himself and Hannah anywhere else.
He discovered the
Dream Island Forum
By accident. Well, sort of by accident. It was what happened when you typed “How do I kill myself” into the search engine. Dream Island. Now also available as an app!
Hurrah!
A platform for people like him. Tired of life. Too cowardly to die. He had found friends. They talked together. They cried together. They encouraged each other. Traded tips. They supported each other in their death wishes and accompanied each other down the last path, so to speak. Since Hannah’s father had joined the community, a young man had hanged himself. One girl had jumped from a roof, another had overdosed on pills. The group had watched them die online, they’d sung and prayed until the goal of their fellow member had been reached.
After the departure of a Dream Island member there was a moment of silence in the forum. The ones left behind lit a candle and
When
HANNAH
Came home one night her father wasn’t there. Nice, she thought, that he seemed to have shaken himself out of his stupor. After an hour Hannah went into the bathroom. Where her father was lying in the bathtub with open eyes and open wrists. He was smiling.
On Dream Island, people cried, hearts flooded the profile picture of Hannah’s father.
Hannah knelt beside him.
Now she was
most definitely alone.
Closing the zipper of the body bag did in fact generate the muffled noise like on TV shows. The transporters of the body offered Hannah neither attention nor sympathy. Hannah had stood for a moment in the corridor, looking at the stairs as her father was carried up them. Then she’d packed her things and gone to the playground. There she got from the other children the address of a squatted building. It was on the outskirts of town. Which sounded farther than it really was, because in Rochdale everything was on the outskirts of town. The building itself seemed solid. Thanks to the boarded-up windows. It looked the way you’d imagine a building full of street kids would look if you didn’t take American movies as a guide. A bit squalid. From inside and out the building looked rusted and covered in mold. If there is such a thing, then here it was, and the children who lived in these ruins weren’t cartoon punks, they were just dirty children. The water had been shut off, so barrels in the back garden collected rainwater. Electricity, stolen. And the twenty homeless youth-slash-children were constantly sick, coughing, lying in the corners like dogs, freezing. Children nobody was looking for, nobody missed. Hannah took up residence on the ground floor and stopped going to school for fear of being remanded to an orphanage. In which case a wonderful future among the majority of society would stand at the ready for her. She could sell shoes in a thrift shop. Or get pregnant and go on unemployment. Or die.
Hannah knew that in theory she had no more parents. And that she was supposed to be sad. But there were no feelings. She believed. What was the point of developing feelings which would inevitably end in sadness, when nobody was there to sympathize? Nobody to comfort you. It didn’t make sense even to cry.
Hannah was nearly twelve and looked older because of her build. She had cut her hair to two centimeters in length, her eyes were heavily ringed in black. And of course she’d given herself a few facial piercings; it’s what you did back then.
And outside it was summer.
It was too light out.
Which is why
DON
Saw her brother too clearly. He was sitting at the computer. Either he was in school staring with an open mouth at pornos on his device or he was sitting at home looking at it. Don didn’t care what he did. Her family didn’t matter to her one bit. People didn’t matter. She considered them an aberration. What would be the drawback of the planet flying through space pleasantly decorated with rocks instead of this biomass?
Speaking of which, Don’s mother took sedatives in order to forget that her life had been completely botched.
And as long as we’re talking about the subject of mental illness,
Don’s father
Was either still in prison or back in prison. Don had visited him once. The room where relatives meet men they are unfortunate enough to be related to was full of specialists of every criminal stripe. Tattooed, muscle-bound men whose stupidity sent chills down your spine. Don was full of hope that her father would at the very least become a more accomplished criminal during his stay. He was in for the second or fifth time, and at some point he’d just have to become somewhat more sensible. But if that ever happened, the little family would never taste the fruits of his newfound talent, because as soon as he was released he came to move out his things. During a visitation day he’d met a woman. She was fat and blonde and lived a few houses away from Don. “Goodbye, Father,” said Don as the uninteresting little man departed. Don’s mother took a fistful of pills.
Don’s father’s fat new woman subsequently gave birth to a fat little child, and Don was indifferent about the whole thing. Once in a while he came for a visit. First there would be fighting, always about the money he had invested in his new family, whereupon the father felt aggrieved, as he’d not managed to become rich, and this, naturally, caused him to become aggressive. Then the parents screamed at each other and drank alcohol; subsequently Don would hear noises from the mother’s bedroom that, thanks to porn, she could identify as the sound of fucking. Afterwards the parents screamed at each other again.
And
Don looked out the window at the sky. She wanted so badly to fly away. To a continent free of families. At least the sky looked like home.
PETER
Had arrived a short while before.
It was sometime before sunrise. Had been.
The ride had felt as if it had lasted one hundred days. Peter’s mother had managed to make things easy for herself, and whenever she awoke she’d taken a slug from the vodka bottle she’d brought along, quickly looked to make sure Peter was still there and the bus driver hadn’t dozed off, then she slumped down again. Peter had stared numbly straight ahead. His pupils didn’t move, he wasn’t fixed on any point, everything he saw blurred into an amorphous wash. Peter felt watched. And for good reason. The occupants of the bus who weren’t sleeping or drunk were staring at Peter. He was one of those people who gets stared at. Uninhibited. He knew he looked like an alien, but he was sure that people stared at him because of his repulsiveness. The way you’d marvel at a particularly disgusting insect.
People had grown accustomed to him back home.
Now there was no more home.
There was just the bus, the night that was coming to an end, his sleeping mother who wanted to get away. Anyone with an ounce of sense wanted to get away. Away from a place that looked like 80 percent of the places in the world where people lived. And all of them yearned for TV cities. Someplace where people sat on stoops in front of town houses, whistling, drinking coffee from paper cups while bent over their devices.
And so, England. It was as good as any other country one didn’t know anything about. The English prime minister had welcomed well-educated Polish workers. But for god’s sake, not so many!
Now there were more than two million of them, and they were hated. Poles. It was their fault. Along with the Muslims. Or the hedgehogs. Some group of poor idiots had to take the blame so there was a vent for the apoplexy of the masses that resulted from the overestimation of their prospects. Blah, blah, blah. You know how people are.
Peter and his mother had no idea about the attacks on Poles, the imminent Brexit, the Nazis. They had other things to worry about. Used to have. That was then.
Hello, England.
Hello, you idiots, did you really think we were waiting for you? Then have a look around! The area around the bus station, it looked as if a war had just been lost. There were fire pits, campgrounds, plastic tarps, and hundreds of people standing against the walls of buildings and squatting on curbs. Peter had learned that it didn’t help things to follow his impulse to throw himself to the ground and scream, so he walked behind his mother, staring at the ground he’d liked to have been lying on.
Peter had wanted out of himself ever since he could remember. He was imprisoned in his own body, and it was impossible to make contact with those outside. The situation made Peter so angry that he occasionally slammed his head into walls or began to scream. He wasn’t angry at other people but at himself and his inability to break out of this millimeter of skin that separated him from everyone outside. From people who laughed. For instance. He never laughed about anything beyond the scope of himself, he laughed only at jokes he told himself.
