Grime, page 6
Not long afterwards Peter and his mother arrived in Rochdale, where some acquaintance of some drunk from their village had been living for the past few months. Rochdale was a place that with its bad roads and dilapidated buildings was only marginally different from their village in Poland. Their. Ex-village.
The address they had with them belonged to a former school, or maybe it was an insane asylum, with a large hall where dozens of Poles had spread out their suitcases and bags, their children and clothing, among their mattresses. A mattress cost fifteen pounds per week, and Peter’s mother signed a promissory note to a hairy Polish man. Back home his surroundings hadn’t mattered to him. They didn’t bother him. But this was unbearable. Loud. It smelled of food and people and poverty. Peter couldn’t sleep. He listened to his own heartbeat, which didn’t calm him. He yearned for someone to hold him, and knew he wouldn’t be able to stand being held.
Peter’s mother disappeared early in the morning to find work in Manchester; there was a strip where day laborers could cheerfully offer themselves to various idiots. All Peter’s mother had said was “Wait here.” Before she left. She’d given up talking to Peter. The mother-child bond left a bit to be desired, which was Peter’s fault. Like everything. War, poverty, the weather—all his fault. Peter stared at his hand. He ate cookies that his mother brought home each night, and didn’t dare at first to go out into the streets. During the first weeks. After a while, when he’d had enough of the stench of the hall, he stood at the door for a few days and stared out at the nonexistent trees. A few days later he made it to the first cross street, and then at some point Peter wandered around the neighborhood. Through which from then on he took the same circular route. Sometimes for nine hours a day to calm himself.
Peter spoke to nobody.
Something wrong with that boy, said the people who needed to know. Who watched him walk past. Who had nothing wrong with them whatsoever, stand-up folks who never thought about the fact that they were freaks of nature, primates who despised each other and fell out of windows, fell down stairs, hung themselves during sex, took pictures of their toenails to post online, who believed in elections and in the queen who loved to wave to them as she rushed around in her gilded carriage.
Speaking of which,
Peter had looked at photos of his new home back at his old home. England. During the ’70s of the previous millennium. Filthy children in dark alleyways, garbage in the streets, alcoholics in the streets, and what he saw now resembled the pictures. Just a hint of color and some advertisements; otherwise, nothing had changed. The dream of worldwide prosperity for all hadn’t been fulfilled. Yeah, well. Still better than in the Middle Ages. Almost everywhere was better than Poland. The Polish men worked at construction sites in ten-hour shifts, they traipsed in groups through the dead city center in the evening just to land in the sleeping hall, where Polish was the only language spoken, where there was Polish food and a comfy mattress. The women worked ten-hour shifts on farms, cleaning streets, working in tailor shops, shoe repair stores, bakeries, supermarkets—they commuted up to three hours every day, to London, Edinburgh, and whatever all the various holes were called, in order to sell their limited abilities at market. All hail the markets.
It was the time when the majority of the biologically British population sat paralyzed, awaiting the downfall, too tired to think. They had devices, they were busy, and Peter could watch them undisturbed. It made no sense to him why millions from his old home had come here—back there after a workless day they’d sit down on a sofa, here after a ten-hour shift they’d sit down on an inner sofa, which is to say on a mattress, WTF. Could the end goal of a life really be to take out a mortgage on a drafty little house in an area that looked like Poland and subsist on the fantasy that somewhere a few hours away the queen lived, yes, that you might meet her on the street with her cute dogs, that you might breathe royal air, so to speak? While Peter walked and thought, his mother was driven to fields where she harvested asparagus stalks and strawberries and then finished her day working at a bar in Manchester.
After some time has elapsed
While his mother was working the night shift, an event took place that had to do with a Pole. The Pole was named
SERGEJ
INTELLIGENCE: average
POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high
ETHNICITY: white
CREDITWORTHINESS: not available
SEXUALITY: hyperactive
POLITICAL ORIENTATION: inclined to right-wing extremism
FAMILY: somewhere
He’d come to England a year before. He was young and had believed that England would be waiting for him. At home in Pila, in that wonderful city with the exquisite manor house, people constantly told fairy tale–like stories of young Poles who’d become millionaires in England. And now here he was sitting in a filthy hole after he’d found no affordable accommodations in London, doing wretched jobs in Manchester. Up and out of the mattress encampment at five, in the bus to the construction site, working in questionable safety conditions (two losses in recent months, three workers severely injured, with no prospects of recovery, with no prospects of being able to pay for a bus ticket home, with poor prospects of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter).
So, days: steelwork. Evenings back. Drink in a pub. Bye-bye. On his free days (two up to now) Sergej had checked out proper life in Manchester. Well-dressed people strolling into the Radisson hotel, limousines driving up. People who shopped in Selfridges, who laughed, who had normal existences. He didn’t understand the language or the people, but he wanted a life, too, since the one currently being offered was just simply shite. And he couldn’t think of finding a wife. The Poles wanted rich British men, the local girls wanted rich British men. Or women. Or peace and quiet. None of them wanted Sergej. And. That was no way for a young man to live, a young man with job training after all, not partaking in life, feeling invisible. Nobody smiled at him when he walked through the city in his work clothes. Nobody nodded or greeted him or said: “Thanks for doing our dirty work for us, you know our own unemployed are just too depressed to do it. Too tired. They’ve been told for so long that there’s nothing for them to do that they’ve actually come to believe it. They’ve been shown for so long that they’re not worth anything that they’ve come to believe that, too. Now they’re too tired to get up, to make demands, to get upset.”
It didn’t comfort Sergej that he was one of a million Poles here on this unfriendly island. What kind of attitude was it, what kind of system was it, that imported workers only to have them sleep on mattresses and never be greeted on the street? Not so much as a thank-you. And going back home is not an option. And going to America is not an option, there’s no money for that. His money was too precious to spend on a prostitute. Money. It was the only thing Sergej could think about. The only thing that interested him. That it shouldn’t be the most important thing or that it was vulgar to think about was something only people with money said, people who’d never been hungry and who’d never seen life as a choice between just two options—to die in your own filth with your dick in your hand, eaten by a dog, a failure, or to make it. Anything interesting in life took money. The freedom not to have to work or to choose what job you would like to do. Maintaining space between you and other people, traveling to foreign countries, and a proper bed with privacy. For fuck’s sake—the moron on the mattress next to him again. Banging his head on the ground for the past half an hour. “Shut up, you idiot,” said Sergej. Then again, louder. A few others in the room shushed him, annoyed. Sergej decided to shut the little fucker up. Then he can just whimper and won’t have to keep smashing his head.
Then Sergej had grabbed
PETER
with one hand, covering his mouth, and with the other hand pulled Peter’s pajama pants down, opened his own pants, and stuck his penis into Peter’s backside. Peter didn’t know what exactly had happened, he had no idea about sexual things, but it was uncomfortable. It hurt, and elicited in Peter, someone who was always lonely and didn’t know how to make contact with others, a new sort of loneliness, one with an added dimension of coldness. He stopped breathing and waited until the man withdrew from him and disappeared into the dark. An old man next to Peter had watched the entire incident—if you wanted to call it that, because you didn’t want to try to figure out a better word that fully encapsulated all the brutality that went with penetrating a child’s body, ripping things in a child’s innards, caring not about the fact that it was a tiny human being that one was rubbing oneself against—the man had watched the incident and jerked off while doing so, then rolled over and gone to sleep. Peter sat swaying in a corner of the bathroom the next day and the day after that.
A few days later
Peter’s mother came home from her shift at the bar. Home, such as it was.
She was excited because—
She’d been discovered. By a scout for a television production. Movies, TV series, that shit was the last 1.0-based job field where there was still ample work for wetware. People (without jobs) who still had time to watch television didn’t want to see avatars being amorous. They wanted to see real people, with human emotions. Content providers were marshaled to replace every aspect of life, including watching TV, with something similar to television, offering series and films by the ton to keep people who were unemployed or marginally employed from having any thoughts at the end of a day of work or while standing for hours in line at the food bank. It didn’t work. You had to make decisions on those platforms, which few found themselves in any shape to do. So there was still television, kind of. With wonderful light entertainment. For all these various formats and series and programs, they needed, shall we say, performers. Lots of them. The viewers wanted to see new faces; it was enough to have to live with one’s own every day. There were about three million performers on virtual reality shows and movies on the island, all of whom had just one goal: prepare people for their futures. Create habits so that changes in reality wouldn’t attract attention. Just as the American dream had, through state-subsidized books and movies, been used to create a desire in people to consume and accept their roles in society, movies and shows like The Matrix, The Walking Dead, Terminator, and Big Brother had in the recent past prepared people for what the future held for them.
Almost all British reality shows were set in social housing blocks and concerned the foundering poor or gangs or teen mothers or sex slaves, so that anyone who had not yet landed there at the very bottom felt scared and kept quiet, and anyone already there saw themselves and were pacified. Nearly all scripted television series were set in the country and concerned happy, confident domestic servants, edifying country doctors and police officers, all of them roaming through Oxford because it still looked the way everyone wished England looked, the way England had for the majority of people never been—sophisticated, charming, eccentric. Nearly all movies were set after an apocalypse. There were always EMP bombs set off, which knocked out the power. There were always fires, financial meltdowns, plagues, and people who were very fit, running around, because they were so fit, and managed for that reason to escape the calamity.
Peter reacted to his mother’s new career the usual way—not at all. He was occupied for the next few weeks trying to understand what had happened that night on the mattress. He couldn’t figure it out. So he erased the memory of the incident. And filled the gap in his mind by thinking up the solutions to unusual problems. Time and again he developed approaches that could save the world by for instance promulgating bicycles capable of flying. Such ideas were the sort of thing one had during the night. Only most people woke up the next day and realized they’d dreamed up nonsense while half asleep. Peter never woke up. He grew. He’d gotten at least twenty centimeters taller during the months in Rochdale. Thanks to his savant syndrome he could already read and understand English perfectly, though his speech suffered from the fact that he barely spoke, even in the school where he now had to go every day, where he sat alone in the last row. The extra twenty centimeters protected him from the bodily attacks he would have normally been subjected to as a freak.
Otherwise the life of the little immigrant family progressed brilliantly.
With the advance for her first role—a Polish cleaning woman being made redundant by robots—the two were able to move to a new little apartment which had its own bathroom and kitchen and a window onto the street, where Peter could sit after school. He stared at the street, at the goddamn Poles sauntering to their construction sites and back again from their construction sites, and he waited for his mother. Who came home later and later.
Like on this day.
When Peter awoke, he saw her packing her suitcase. That’s how you said it. Nobody had suitcases anymore, but whatever the it was she was packing it, quietly, as if not to wake Peter. The thoughtful
MOTHER
INTELLIGENCE: okay
SEXUALITY: asexual
HOBBIES: Danielle Steel audio books
MARKET UTILITY: below average
FITNESS LEVEL: poor, encapsulated TB
Didn’t take much with her, there’d be all new things, bought by her new boyfriend, a rich Russian something or other she’d met a week ago, at exactly the right moment. The jobs weren’t coming anymore, the entertainment industry had already had enough of her in a short amount of time, a pretty profile alone wasn’t enough to carry the load, her poor English made speaking roles impossible, the offers for Polish performers were limited almost exclusively to porn films, and now she was packing because her new boyfriend wanted her to move into his apartment in London, but unfortunately without
PETER.
Whose head was totally empty. His body was cold. You know, I’m doing this for us, said Peter’s mother, stuffing a pair of lace underwear into her bag. She did have feelings for her child, but. Not particularly strong ones. Not so strong as to turn down the Russian. She relished the image of herself in a large apartment in London too much. With staff. With clothes. And Peter would be taken care of. He’d take care of Peter. Perhaps a tidy boarding school soon and then at some point,
but—
THE RUSSIAN
INTELLIGENCE: excellent
POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high
ETHNICITY: white
CREDITWORTHINESS: okay
NET WORTH: only 8 million left
planned to have—if at all—a few more children of his own. His interest in a disabled son not made by his own sperm was negligible. The Russian smirked whenever he encountered the prejudices of people from the so-called West toward simple, primitive, corrupt, brutal Russians. He saw their contempt and at the same time the fear in their eyes. He liked it.
He’d grown up in an elegant modern apartment in Moscow, the child of a pair of professors, spoke eight languages, had unfortunately graduated only magna cum laude in economics and psychology, and had never wanted anything else except success. None of the supposedly typical motivations for a desire for power and success applied to him. He was educated, loved, he just had no desire to put up with someone above him, he had no desire to have neighbors, he wanted to sue into oblivion anyone who annoyed him, he wanted to be surrounded by beauty, and he wanted to follow his natural inclinations. Darwinism. Be the tip of the spear, not the spear. The Russian didn’t fetishize money in a sexual way. He just wanted enough of it to forget about his mortality. He dreamed about digitalizing himself before his demise. Perhaps, he thought at times, he’d have been less happy if he’d been taller and more handsome. If he’d believed the game was all about muscle definition and pulling the prettiest women. But he was short. And he’d gone bald at twenty. At the beginning of his professional career he’d dedicated himself to the commercial use of the Aral Sea. Which in the meantime had completely disappeared due to the appropriation of water for industry and agriculture and so forth. The enumeration of his business activities bored him. They followed the simple pattern of growth. Unfortunately the Russian and his businesses got in the way of an oligarch with government connections, who for boring reasons feared that the businesses run by the Russian, who had no close contacts in government, would cause a drop in his revenues. His businesses were frozen at the same time he was charged with espionage. He was just barely able to transfer a modicum of capital to Panama and flee the country. Now he was slowly doing better. Now he was doing well enough to fall in love. For the first time in his life.
“It’s actually terrific.” Said
PETER’S MOTHER
who was finished packing and was gaining momentum as she talked. She stood there with her suitcase, which was a duffel, and wanted to leave.
“It’s not for long, I’ll leave money for you and I’ll come visit every week—What am I saying?—every day, well, every second day. You have everything here. Right.” Said Peter’s mother to the silent child. Who no longer looked like a child. “The rent is paid. There’s food in the fridge.” The mother kneeled in front of Peter. She had a tattoo on her shoulder, which identified her as an older person. Young people didn’t get tattoos. What would they get them of?
“It’s not for long, and you’re already…” said Peter’s mother.
“Twelve,” said Peter.
“Right, exactly,” said his mother. “When I was that age I was already—” Peter would never learn what his mother had managed by that age, because downstairs in front of the door the Russian’s driver honked, and Peter’s mother jumped up, took her imaginary suitcase, and left the apartment with a hastiness bordering on rushing. Finally Peter stood up; something seemed to have broken through the leaded glass of his consciousness. Quietly he said: “Don’t go.” But his mother went, she didn’t listen to him, she tried to shut her ears, she hopped down the steps, and Peter followed her, steadily mumbling, “Don’t go, don’t go.” The Russian’s Bentley stood on the street and he was seated in the back of the darkened car. Peter’s mother opened the door and Peter clung to her sweater. “Don’t go. Don’t go.” This was quite a lot of words, given his condition, but it didn’t help. Peter’s mother ripped herself free, the Russian gave the order to drive off. Peter ran a few meters after the car, fell down, and remained sitting in the street. He didn’t know how he would stand up again or continue to move at all.
