Grime, page 7
Peter was so nervous that it caused his system to shut down completely. Somehow he managed to make it back to the apartment. Somehow he started to breathe again. He sat motionless on the floor for a week in the apartment that was missing a mother. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, wet himself. Nobody questioned why Peter wasn’t at school. Hey, he was a Pole, he was a loser, he was a freak, so nobody wondered where a loser kid was when he didn’t show up for class, where he wasn’t going to learn anything anyway. Peter had forgotten school, forgotten himself. He crawled around the apartment. The heat was shut off. Ditto the gas. The water still worked. His mother really had left money. With careful planning it would last for a month’s worth of food. Peter ate tinned ravioli, he froze, and he looked out the window. The internet was dead. Nothing to read. Nothing to divert his attention. Peter waited without knowing what for, without missing his old life he waited on a new one. Something would have to happen. Something always happened—for instance, the water was shut off. After a few more days, with the money nearly gone, an eviction notice arrived. Of course, after the previous invoices concerning the rent. An eviction meant the arrival of police. And police would suppose that, in Peter, the situation concerned a child, and then they’d seize upon measures presumed to be appropriate for children. So Peter packed the things he considered essential, a couple of books, an alarm clock, the phones, a sweater, and a pair of pajamas, and closed the door behind himself. Out on the street, as always, indecisive. Peter stood there at a loss, probably like anyone else who for the first time didn’t have a home would stand there at a loss. Complicating things was the fact that Peter was not yet an adult and had no friends, because he didn’t even understand what the term meant. He would probably hit upon an idea as he walked, so he set off walking. He wasn’t frightened, because he didn’t know what to be frightened of. Of the cold, or the night? Of death—that would be ridiculous. Peter knew everything about so-called death. It was a condition like before birth. A condition as if he were sitting inside himself but unable to get out. Except not sitting.
He didn’t feel fear, rather a great aversion to having to adjust to a new situation. One advantage was the fact that he didn’t ask himself questions. Like, what would become of his life now, where he would sleep, what he was supposed to eat. Peter just walked. At some point after some two hours of walking, during which he had circled the crappy little town five times, he sat down at the entrance of the parking garage downtown and waited.
They’d be off any minute
DON
knew.
They had a trip ahead of them. In order to strengthen the mother–child bond, the little family was going to London. A bus ride. Dreamed up at some point while the legal guardian was high. It was, as far as Don could remember, the first trip in her life. Nobody she knew went on vacation. The daily life of the people in Rochdale was a never-ending celebration of idleness. Don had for weeks been looking forward to visiting London. She was so excited she could barely sleep. Just the sound of the name of the capital city made her heart beat more quickly. She’d wandered the streets via Google, and what she’d seen was—alive. In contrast to the prevailing sensation that in Rochdale everything that had ever lived had been boiled to death.
Don’s mother laid out a thin dress that she sprinkled with water. Yes, she sprinkled it. In lieu of an iron, it was a good trick for smoothing out cloth. The family slept fitfully the night before the trip. Don woke up far too early, jumped out of bed. While she was in the bathroom trying on muscle shirts, the doorbell rang. It took a while for Don in her excitement to assign a name to the sad little figure at the door. It was her father.
He stood there crying. Bracing himself with his arm on the door frame in order to absorb the trembling of his body. Don’s mother came running immediately in her smoothed dress. Father was having difficulties with his new woman, as his bloodied eyebrow attested. Don’s mother was totally out of her head with happiness at seeing the old bastard again. Like a dog who saw its master again after a long time, she jumped around the idiot, and the children stood mutely behind her in the entryway, a feeling of disappointment welling up in them. In short: a little while later they were all sitting on the bus. Don’s mother sat on her ex-husband’s lap, snogging, while the children sat silently behind them. Don’s brother threw up at some point; it was his first bus ride. It was Don’s first bus ride, too, but she knew how to control herself. Her mother was so woozy from joy and from drinking from the bottle of liquor her father had brought along that she didn’t notice the mishap. Don cleaned the brother up with the stuffed animal he carried with him as a result of infantilism. Don’s brother was no longer a child. He, too, was in the midst of puberty and already had fuzz on his upper lip. Don heard him jerking off in the darkness of the children’s room. About five times per night. Don couldn’t get the noise out of her head when she looked at the moron. Anyway—
Shortly after the family had left the outskirts of Manchester behind, Don’s lust for travel had completely evaporated, and when the bus pulled into the bus terminal in London several dull hours later—the moment she’d imagined would be so intense and incredible—she just wanted to go home. She had perhaps never in her life experienced such a feeling of disappointment like that moment, because the part of her that was still a child had hoped that something miraculous would occur. When the bus driver ordered them to exit the vehicle, Don woke her so-called parents. Then they all stood there perplexed in the drizzling rain and the parents began to fight about the map. All around the bus station people lay on the floor with blankets and suitcases. Don saw a woman urinating on the curb and a baby lying on top of a duffel bag as if dead.
The group made it to the nearest pub. The parents drank on. At some point Don’s father started to cry again, because nobody was taking care of him or he was alone or he was a failure. Don’s mother fell off her stool. The children picked her up. And then they rode back.
When they arrived in Rochdale it was dark. Silently the family shuffled down the main street. Don lagged far behind, yearning. For something unusual that could save the day. For music, something loud, for love or a bank robbery. And then she saw him sitting at the entrance of the parking garage. The most beautiful person she had ever seen. A thousand times more beautiful than Beyoncé. He was slumped there, staring into the distance. Don stopped and looked at him from a few meters away. He looked so unusual here in front of this eyesore of a parking garage. As if a superstar had mistakenly wandered into the little city. Don had only ever seen someone like that in music videos or movies. As if lit from within. So perfect. So blond and thin. The boy looked truly astonishing. Here of all places. In total contrast to Rochdale. A few drunks staggered down the street, the businesses were all closed, the lights were out, no bars nearby, the Costa Café was closed as well. And the boy sat there without moving. Perhaps he was stuffed. Don sat down next to him.
“She’s gone,” said the boy after a while.
Don wasn’t interested in who was gone. In her world someone was always disappearing. Usually it had to do with legal guardians who ended up in jail, psychiatric facilities, or the cemetery. Nobody here talked about their family situation. It was boring, since it was always a variation of the same story: adults who had failed at life.
It occurred to Don that the boy didn’t look her in the eyes. He wasn’t particularly talkative, either. “Come on.” She said, standing up and pulling Peter to his feet. Which unsettled him a bit. She took him to Hannah in the squatted building.
From that night on the group became a foursome.
This is the story of
DON, PETER, HANNAH, AND KAREN
who from now on spent all their time after school and on weekends together. They’d found their family. And with it a space like a portable cave that was always with them. They had recognized each other. As outsiders, as fringe phenomena, as outcasts, and this was astonishing enough because they don’t normally recognize each other, those who stand around the edges of the schoolyard. They always look toward the masses, to the weirdos, the geeks, the nutters, the too fat or too thin, the gay or verminous, and they never recognize themselves for what they are: strange. The ones at whom other kids, normal kids, will point to years later while looking at class pictures on their phone and say: “That one—can’t remember his name, what a nutter—don’t know, he was just weird somehow.”
A miracle happened with that little group, or maybe the weather was to blame, a quirk of the surroundings had brought them together, and it was unclear whether they were bound together by something other than the surroundings, other than the fact that the majority found them odd.
Because nobody had told them what was good and what was evil, they’d adopted their own law: nobody will hurt us anymore.
This was nonsense, of course, since humans were disposed to hurt each other. They couldn’t do otherwise, humans, though this was not yet known to the foursome, who didn’t even reveal weakness in front of the group, like crying once in a while, because they didn’t know any better. Because they were still children and sometimes just had no clue how they could manage everything. Establishing a life and reconciling themselves to the idea that nobody is waiting for them. And the daily grind. My goodness, just don’t think about the daily grind. Ever longer lines at the soup kitchen, ever more bullshit at the welfare office, ever more knife fights at school, it can be overwhelming as a child.
But—
they’d found each other and were no longer alone.
The four of them were friends and were sure they’d stay together until the end of their lives. Nobody would ever separate them. They thought.
One day after a few weeks,
During which they were so happy with each other it was as if they had just fallen in love, while sitting at the playground, among used heroin needles and some rusty swings, they swore a blood oath. “Any of you have AIDS?” asked Karen, who disinfected her hand after any contact with objects or people. As she considered what infections could be carried by another person’s blood, Hannah had already made a cut on her hand. Hannah wasn’t scared anymore. She had lost everything that a child could lose, and once in a while she cut her arms with razor blades just to feel something. Then she looked at the wounds and felt ridiculous for engaging in this stereotypically female form of autoaggression. Peter held out his hand silently and let Hannah cut him even though he didn’t understand what the oath was supposed to be good for. Still, he was happy in the group. Like all of them. The children who now placed their hands one on top of the next seemed to light up on the little playground. They were no longer the weirdos. They were a unit.
Then it started to rain again, as it always did in Rochdale during the longest days of the year.
It was summer
Which, in the world of
MA WEI
Meant the air quality would deteriorate a little. Otherwise everything was the same as always. Conspiracy theory number 569, to explain the fast-paced change in the world, was as follows:
China—and when we talk of China, we’re talking about within the so-called Party—had adopted a forty-year plan thirty years ago. The plan contained the steps necessary to scale to the heights of world power.
First, become the cheapest global producer of everything. Which helped the Chinese population attain modest wealth. And also served to gain access to the technical know-how behind all the products developed abroad, which were produced and copied and finally perfected in China.
Reports about the precarious status of the Chinese labor force originated at that time. Brutality, backwardness, and so forth. The documentation for these reports was all shot in Chinese movie studios in order to spread to the rest of the world an image of a backward third-world empire. Artists loyal to the Party also reported abroad about the inhumane conditions in China. They accused. So to speak. And manifested the reputation of the country. Which in the meantime stabilized the currency. And increased state revenues. And with absurd speed, thanks to the mass of cheap labor and to the dictatorship, restructured the country. Everything old disappeared. New buildings popped up all over the place, shopping malls, cutting-edge factories, infrastructure, ecological and environmental protections were perfected, the air got—better. The Western world outsourced among other things its industry and manufacturing to China. The markets, you know the story. Which led to step 2 of the plan. In coalition with Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and some Arab countries, the weakening of the West was tackled in earnest. Hacking, spying, vote manipulation, the electronic manipulation of the divisions within Western societies proceeded efficiently—also because most phones and the bulk of the software they ran were made in China.
You know the story.
The countries of the West were increasingly ruled by absurd, fatuous dictators. Sad men who reeked of failure, who accelerated the collapse of the Western system.
China bought half the world. Land in Africa, Pakistan, in the East, ports all over the world, businesses, buildings, mines, oil reserves, sites for mining rare earth elements. The domestic population had discovered the joy of consumption; they wouldn’t give it up for anything. They could buy new apartments, cars, and domestically produced Apple devices and Gucci bags. They were
Happy because they could consume.
So much for conspiracy theory number 569. Perhaps there was a bit of truth in it, perhaps not. Mr. Ma Wei was definitely very pleased with the developments of the world at the beginning of this glorious millennium.
It was summer
which meant
THE CHILDREN
Had summer holidays. Which consisted of days that turned to night without any transition after 198 hours. In the yard, withered grass covered with plastic bags as if to admonishingly remind the observer about the plastic waste in the world’s oceans. Against the fences leaned bored children with no money to go to a pool. Of which there were none anyway. Days during summer holidays began with a good breakfast—which very few of them received because either their mother was sleeping off her depression or had left for the filthy jobs that you got as a single mother, most of them related to cleaning, prostitution, caring for old people, or the packaging of some machine part or other. Many got white bread. White bread always did the trick if you spread it with mayonnaise. Sometimes that wasn’t available. In which case a stout-hearted gulp of water and then to steal something later. From the yard came the constant sound of balls being mindlessly kicked against a wall. The bleakness made it so the body wanted to lie down again almost immediately upon getting up; it couldn’t lie down, though, because it was too nervous. At some point the children went out to be with the others, to stand around or to kick balls against the wall. After a few hours, shortly before they smashed their heads against the concrete out of boredom, they left their block to go lean on a fence somewhere else and look at music videos. Their stars came from places that looked similar to Rochdale and had still managed to produce a life. Which meant gold chains, large cars, gold bags, Gucci, and collector’s sneakers.
What the children understood as a life had only to do with money. Money was what separated them from those in real cities, meaning Manchester, which they visited once in a while. Riding public transport without a ticket to go look at people strolling around Selfridges. They all dreamed of living in Selfridges, and they hated the people who drank tea there and bought porcelain dogs. The children belonged to the newly defined Generation Z. The end of the alphabet. The end of the food chain, well-researched, in order to better sell them products. They were the second wave of digital natives. Connected physically to digital technology, they’d become a performer generation through lack of perspective. The more crowded the world became and the more interchangeable people became, the more desperate was the desire to be seen. Even though there was no point.
DON, KAREN, HANNAH, AND PETER
Had of late only taken photos of themselves where they were unrecognizable, owing to the idea that they would probably want to become criminals later on.
Since then, only hoodie photos.
Since exceptions had been made to allow the army to take action against demonstrations.
Since there had been discussions about privatizing the police and the army.
Which didn’t matter. And which didn’t lead to outrage among the populace. The British weren’t inclined to public, vulgar displays of protest. Peter had read that in an article. Everything the children knew they’d learned online. They’d been born in the new millennium and didn’t know anything else. They didn’t consider ADHD a disease, old people were just unbearably slow. And they considered the city where they lived the dreariest city on earth. Ever since algorithms rated areas by their profitability, nothing happened here anymore. The last halfhearted investors had jumped ship when they’d been strongly warned by an investment app about the wayward inhabitants of Rochdale.
Generation Z lived on their devices, where there was always more happening than on the boring streets of their shithole towns. They talked to each other in chat groups, stared at selfie accounts, they spent eight hours a day glued to displays and had no idea what could possibly be wrong with that because the online world consisted of photos, movies, and games while the offline world was made up of bad weather and junkies, dilapidated buildings and boredom.
So online it was.
“Yes.” Said
MI5 PIET
“Very nice. The high level of compliance of the general public when it comes to questions of security. Occurs to me randomly. I’ll show you the experimental setup now. Would you like the short version, that is, the one everyone can understand?”
