The Drunks – Part Three

A Short Story in Five Parts

The story so far: Alba, doing her best to atone for the mistakes of her life, continues her dogged quest to get a man in her local tavern to open his heart to her. She comes up with a plan to break into the man’s home in order to find out more about his troubles. She tries to get the man to “write down” his problems as an alternative to talking about them, but he refuses. Eventually, he becomes angry at Alba’s presence in the tavern, as he realises the full degree of her determination to break his silence.

1

Saint Petri, a few days earlier.

The city was an ebullient melange of grandeur, splendour, megalomania and dissolution. The focal point was the historic centre, with its imposing rococo palaces. Some say that the magnificent centre was built in the sky and lowered to the ground. It had a lightness that entranced visitors with its meringue delicate turrets, onion domes and sugarcane spires. There was an uncanny resemblance to Europe’s most alluring cities, suffused with a quixotic, ethereal individuality that made this young city something unique.

A couple of kilometres away to the north, The Admiral Square and its surrounding streets were earthier, less refined, and less frequented by tourists. The sad drinker lived on Rordot Avenue, one of the four roads sprouting from the square. The area, dead and desolate in the dead of night when Alba had intrepidly followed him back to his apartment, now teemed with life. She sat on a bench in the square, swaddled in her faded purple shawl, munching on a bag of figs as the city stretched its arms and yawned off its slumber, with the morning throng of barrow boys yelling at each other, traders from the outskirts of the saluting night-shift transport workers as they wended their way home, weaving past a strip of prostitutes who advertised their multifarious wares to the shuffling multitude.  

Alba was here to break the law: she was going to break into the sad drinker’s home. She had been here since the break of dawn, her eyes fixed on the door of the apartment building across the road from her seat.  But she wanted to be completely sure the sad drinker was out before executing her unlawful plan of action. She didn’t want to go too soon in case he was still at home. No – she could wait, like a hawk, and then pounce on his empty nest, not a moment before seeing him leave the apartment. No way was she going to approach that building door until she was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent sure he had left. No way! There was nothing that would upend her from her nice bench in Admiral Square until she had seen the fellow leave the apartment building on Rordot Avenue.

2

“Oh, to blazes with waiting, he MUST have left by now and I just didn’t notice,” she muttered, lifting herself up from her bench and bouncing over the road to the door.

The door the ungentlemanly swine had closed on Alba’s face when she had followed him into the cold winter night.

But the building had ten separate residences, and she hadn’t seen which one belonged to him when she’d followed him home. There were ten names next to ten buzzers, individually written by their respective tenants.

Alba unfolded a piece of paper from her pocket. “No thank you!” There! The short, angry response the chap had written in answer to her own scribbled offer to help at the tavern. Ha! Hadn’t that confused him? He’d fallen for that one! She’d only wanted a sample of his handwriting! Decades of crosschecking the signatures of customers to the laundry had given her the ability to distinguish between handwriting styles. How handy it would come in now!

All she had to do was compare the man’s handwriting with the lettering of the names next to the buzzers. Most of the names were indecipherable, which made things easy. The answer was unarguable; there was only one name which had the curt, precise lettering of the man’s rushed, yet tidy, hand.

“Kanski!”

Yes, that writing. It was definitely his. The letters of a meticulous man.

“Kanski,” she repeated. She pressed the button, bracing herself. The cold winter air lashed at her face as she stood, shivering. She buzzed again. There was no response. The bloke HAD gone out, hadn’t he?  But…what if Alba had got it wrong, and he was sleeping? Or he was ill? Oh, what the hell was she doing here?

She heard footsteps from within and the sound of someone hurtling down a flight of stairs.

“Kanski?”

A bedraggled-looking man in a pea coat with a violin tucked under his arm burst out of the front door into the morning light.  

It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Kanski.

Alba, who had been standing slack-jawed with horror, caught the door before it closed, and went in. Judging by its placement in the arrangements of buzzers outside, Kanski lived on the third floor – an apartment at the end of a dark corridor furthest from the stairs. She braced herself. There was no backing out now. If he WAS in his apartment, she would just have to deal with the consequences. It wasn’t as if she had anything to lose in her life, anyway. Nothing that could be taken away from her anymore. She took a couple of deep breaths and reached into her pockets for her lock pick.

3

Falling.

He had spent so much of his life running somewhere, he was starting to get tired. Like Icarus soaring too close to the sun, his wings were melting; he was plummeting down to Earth, and his attempts to stay aloft were in vain.

He was spiralling headlong into the sea. He couldn’t face admitting that the execrable chain of miseries that has befallen him had all had started with one colossal act of hubris. But here he was, ineluctably closing in and coming full circle in a life that had catapulted him out of the village of his birth, into Saint Petri, an out into the furthest reaches of the planet. Then he was pinged back homewards, finding himself once more in Saint Petri. Where next, but…

No. Not back to the village. He couldn’t face that. Much as he loathed Saint Petri, it was better to be here than go back to the scene of his first, biggest, most miserable and wretched crime. Here in this amorphous city he was isolated. Here he could be invisible. Here he wasn’t causing any trouble. Here he blended in with the wallpaper – a clerk in a grey city doing his job then drinking away his miseries in the evening.

And here, in his own small way, he could atone for the mistakes of his life. Here, in some small way, he could pay off his debts and live in penance for the pain he had inflicted. Here he could stay shut up and not wreak any more harm.

Here, he was hurting no one…

.

He should be in a cell. He should be in prison for what he’d done.

The look of that man – broken, bleeding, dead, or as good as. The voice screaming for him to stop. The violence he had never shown, not even in war – the violence that burst out of him. This is what happened when he got involved with people. This is what came from thinking he could scrape back something like the life he’d lost.

Once, he had been called a kind man. A thoughtful man. A quiet man. But he was just a wrecker of lives, wasn’t he? He would wait out the rest of his days waking up in his lonely apartment and doing his meaningless job. And then he would go to some inn and drown out the screams in his head. He would sit down and drink and let all the stupid words of all the other broken people wash around him.

But he wouldn’t get involved in their conversations, he wouldn’t confide in anyone – he couldn’t do that.

He deserved to be in a prison cell. He didn’t deserve contact with anyone anymore.

4

Alba was inside.

Picking the lock of the door had been easy. Surprisingly easy, given the amount of time that had passed since her criminal youth. She reflected on how different her life might have been had she continued her life of crime with her little gang. She had not seen them for years. Perhaps they were in jail; or maybe they had married and were now grandmothers. Or perhaps they were like her – a spent alcoholic with nothing to do but obsess over things that didn’t concern her. Nothing better to do than skip work in order to break into a man’s apartment in search of clues to his dejected state of mind.

So – what was there here? What was there here to justify missing work and committing a crime? Nothing. It was like a bloody prison cell.

She sat down on a spartan wooden chair next to the window and gazed outside. Then she surveyed the room itself properly.

Her flat had been this tidy once. Her own room – pristine, not the wretched cave of chaos, bottles and dilapidation which she now inhabited. Once upon a time she’d had few possessions. But that was all when she’d had a purpose. She’d kept a spotless home then, back when she had a family, and wanted to create a sanctuary from the world outside, where her apartment gazed onto the sky with windows like portholes onto an ocean of possibility.

Then, she’d lost it all. When she realised that he wouldn’t be coming back home – that’s when it had all fallen apart. That’s when she had slipped. The bottles took over her home. The bottles took over her. Those bottles she had kept hidden – those bottles she had not touched for months – they hissed her name. They called her. In place of a husband she was seduced again by the wine – the battering, vicious, abusive bane of her existence. When she started drinking again, the first sip had been antiseptic, sickly sweet and unpleasant. And then the second glass unravelled her. The familiar mist settled into her and weighed down her arms and legs. The dangerous, viperous, toxic lover wormed its way back into her. And she managed not to think about everyone else. She managed not to think about Kris. She manged not to think about Artus, screaming in his cot.

She used to have a home, clean and tidy like Kanski’s. That was a long time ago.

5

How did Kanski do it? How did he keep such a clean home when he was always out at the tavern, night after night, drowning his sorrows?

“Must be a military man,” mused Alba. His bed was meticulously made. A thin wardrobe revealed a line of identical pressed shirts. His underwear was folded ever-so neatly. Otherwise – nothing. Nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the bathroom. No adornment anywhere.

Ah – but here…here was something! A box under a small desk filled with woodcarving and carpentry tools – whittling knives, a saw, some small buckets of paint and varnish. So – he was into woodwork. Was it his job? Wait, something else – two roughly-hewn pieces of word being shaped and formed into people. The man was him, clearly. Same dark expression, ha. And the woman?

Alba’s hands shook as she returned the figures to the box. She’d better make a move – goodness knows how long she’d been in the apartment. She closed the door after listening at the keyhole outside for footsteps. None were to be heard so she shuffled slowly to the stairs, where she was greeted by two pale eyes under wispy eyebrows: a cleaner mopping the top steps. Alba gave a start.

“Looking for someone, miss?”

“Yes” said Alba, recovering quickly. “I’m looking for a chap called Kanski. A relative of mine, see. Has a pretty bitter impression – lanky hair, wiry, kind of a face like a slapped arse…know who I mean? Is that his place?”

“Yeah, sure, he lives down there. I guess you knocked on his door, right? Always leaves at the crack of dawn, though.”

“Do you know where he goes? See, a mutual sort of cousin of ours is going to cop it soon, and I thought he ought to know.”

The cleaner stroked her downy chin contemplatively. “I think it’d be a bank or that kind of thing. Hey, Marlon, where does Kanski work? A bank?’

A man, whose face was hidden behind a titanic moustache, wheezed up the stairs at the call of his name.

“Mr Kanski don’t work in no bank. He works in the back office of that pawnshop, remember? Where we pawned off that sideboard from your mam.”

“You ninny, the sideboard was from YOUR mam, not mine. Anyway, duck, so your boy works in a pawnshop down on Grankooley Street.”

Alba thanked the couple and bobbed down the stairs. A pawnbroker’s, eh? She didn’t know why, but she somehow felt slightly disappointed.

6

The first part of his life had been a kaleidoscope of perfect symmetry, built on a foundation of unassailable joy, surrounded by people he loved and who loved him. Like a young child who stares in delight through the kaleidoscope, he didn’t seek to explain its optical beauty or visual harmony. He just accepted it for what it was – the intrinsic bliss of life fluttering before his eyes.

Then he grew older, and the childhood assuredness of a life of unfettered ease dissolved.

It had started with a man who blustered into his life one day in the village of his birth. A man who undercut the feeling that his life was complete. A ravaged wanderer who scoffed at the younger man’s blithe air of serenity. He had allowed the man’s gnomic words to upend what he had once held for certain – that he was a happy man with a happy life and a happy family.

He found himself spending more and more time in Saint Petri, where he worked, than back home in the village. Saint Petri was where his inadequacies, which had been roused by the words of the grizzled wanderer in the village, were amplified. It was in Saint Petri that the certainties of his youth were detonated; crushed by the brilliant minds, beautiful girls, and innumerable ways to spend his earnings.

He felt like he had never tasted any of nature’s bounty, and that Saint Petri was where he could finally start living. He was teased for his village innocence. He scolded himself for being such an uncouth lummox. The allure of the bucolic paradise of his childhood became tainted and made ugly. His life in the village, with doting parents and a doting childhood sweetheart who he’d married early – it all seemed suffocating.

He felt like the life he’d lead in the village had been thrust on him. He felt the grinding, wearying decay of routine, and succumbed to the allure of Saint Petri – the boundless, ravenous city where he found work, and abandoned himself to its intoxicating thrills. He lost himself completely. “You were made for the city, Kanski, old boy” said his dandyish new friends – oh, they were all so cultured and worldly compared to him.

Those scammers, swindlers, adulterers, fakers and inveterate swine who made him deplore himself. Those scumbags who had derailed him from everything he’d loved; who’d encouraged him to squander away so many valuable years, and much of his money in gambling dens, whorehouses and saloons.

The kaleidoscope of his youth was smashed – dashed to smithereens and instead what he had were skewed, fragmented images – a broken mirror pieced together to reveal a man in a dosshouse, or a whorehouse or a drug den, where the laughter became more shrill, and the shining, early promise of youth was covered in a thick layer of grime and self-hatred.

He’d made a colossal mistake. Through the shards of this life he realised the weight of his unhappiness. The city made his head spin. He would have to leave. No, not back to the village – he couldn’t do that. They would hate him there – how could they forgive him?

7

He left Saint Petri. He needed to dispense with all the detritus of his debauched existence and start anew.

He found work on a giant railroad as a sure-fire way to escape the city – the mammoth task of creating a track which would traverse the entire country and stretch eastwards to its borders. He allowed himself to be swept into an anonymous mass of bodies which pressed on with unyielding purpose, each step taking him further and further away from the failures of his early life. He kidded himself into thinking that nothing mattered but the glory of the motherland. He tried to blot out thoughts of the village and the love of his life he’d lost forever, and Saint Petri, where he’d degraded himself further. He tried not to feel anything but the baking fury of the sun as he hauled ballast onto the tracks. He tried to numb himself as he and the other men laid down railway sleepers. He tried not to think of anything at all each night, sat in the mouth of his tent in a new stretch of nowhere bathed in the pale light of the moon, smoking his cigarettes and sharing a bottle of brandy with all the other silent men.

8

Then war was declared – thank God for war.

War would correct everything that he’d managed to destroy. He knew that the railway path had been leading him away somewhere – somewhere he could atone for his mistakes, somewhere he could prove his worth. This would be the chance to fully prove himself; he would sacrifice himself for his country, he would redeem himself.

He had already fought in a war as a younger man, but he’d just been a bystander then, his thoughts set on his sweetheart back home. This war was bigger and would prove the ultimate escape from his ruined past. He and his comrades focused their hatred on this upstart nation in the Far East which had the gall to think it could halt the mother land in its ineluctable expansion eastwards.

The half-complete railway line could not transport troops quickly enough to the theatre of battle, so he was enlisted for naval training and prepared to board a battleship, which would circumvent half the globe before reaching the enemy the best part of a year later. He revelled in anticipation of the fight as they embarked the proud, gunmetal vessel, ready to take on all those bastards in that crummy little country in the Pacific.

…

The nightmare started almost as soon as they set sail. He watched on in horror as dozens of his crewmates were killed in friendly fire in a skirmish with an allied ship near Bristol – men with whom he’d joined the navy; men whose lives were wasted through a dumfounding tactical mistake which opened the hull of the gleaming battleship, sinking it while its surviving crew were hastily bundled into lifeboats.

Shaken, he was transferred to an old corvette which shambled mournfully on its voyage eastward through a thick fog. The anticipation of war turned rapidly to boredom and delirium on this interminable voyage. He tried to focus on the ultimate battle, he tried to stay mindful. Some of his crewmates, stultified by the inaction, took some wild animals on board while docked somewhere on the west coast of Africa. The men thought they could domesticate this menagerie of baboons, leopards and colobuses. Kanski woke up one morning to hear screams from the galley on his deck. He counted three dead crewmembers in various states of dismemberment as he hurried to the galley, where he found a leopard shot in the head at the hand of a shaking crewmember, who was sprawled on the floor, looking at the bloody-muzzled cat with petrified eyes.  The leopard, as hungry and bored as the crew, had followed it instincts and torn its way through as much human meat as possible before meeting its end.

Kanski looked on in horror. He longed to be away from here – he longed to be home. He longed to have a normal, boring job. He wanted more – he wanted the untainted purity of his childhood and adolescence. He had seen enough death and destruction and asinine waste of life for a lifetime – he’d had it to hell with war and adventure.

And he hadn’t yet encountered the enemy.

9

The bell jangled lightly, and the door opened, but Janusch didn’t raise his eyes from the ledger. The only movements the pawnbroker made were the occasional twitches of his nose under the heavy pinch of his pince-nez. So long had he been in the pawnshop, with its sombre air of neglect and dismay, that he could assess the profile of a visitor to his shop without looking up from his tomes, simply by registering the volume and velocity of their footsteps as they entered.  He imagined his visitor now to be a squat, dumpy creature, and the laboured breathing suggested she was getting on in years.

“Ahem”.

He looked up slowly, to have his suspicions confirmed.

“Hi!”

Janusch stared at this singular form, two manic eyes bulging from heavy swathes of fraying purple fabric.

“I’m looking for my cousin, lanky fellow with a suit. He works here, doesn’t he?”

Janusch stared on unflinchingly. Alba wondered if he might be hard of hearing, or perhaps just a little dense. She nervously adjusted the shawl around her face. But then he spoke, in a rasping, high-pitched wheeze.

“My associate is out for his lunch. You can call back another time if you don’t have any articles to pawn.”

“Oh, how long will he be away? See I’ve come all this way to see him, and I would rather just wait and chat to him if it’s all the same to you. Maybe I can wait?”

Janusch narrowed his eyes and grunted. “And pray tell me the name of this ‘cousin’ you wish to see so urgently”.

“His name? Kanski, of course.”

The pawnbroker sneered.

“Does your cousin not have a first time? Or do you really just address him with his surname?”

Alba hadn’t been expecting this. She thought she had prepared everything exactly. She had reasoned, correctly, as she shivered across the road from shop, that the sad drinker would have to take a break for lunch at some point during the day. And she had seen him lope off, taking the chance to gain access to the pawnbroker’s, hoping to have a good snoop around.

“Well, I call him ‘Droopy’ on account of his sad face”.

The pawnbroker didn’t flinch.

“We call him ‘Big Ears’ sometimes too.”

The pawnbroker looked at his watch. “A woman who doesn’t know his own cousin’s Christian name, eh? I’m sorry, but I will have to ask…”

“Now look here!” Alba expanded and filled the room, no longer a squat old hedgehog, but an imperious dowager shaking with fury. Her voice rattled the items on display: the china teetered dangerously on their shelves, and vases started dancing menacingly on their plinths. “I call my bloody cousin what I want. He’s my cousin, I need to see him, and I have not come all this way to be turned away by some shrill old badger. I will wait in his office, and you will take that stupid smug know-it-all look off your face”.

Janusch blanched at the spirited declaration from his visitor, shook his head, blinked rapidly, then turned his head towards the backroom. “Make yourself comfortable there, your cousin will surely be here soon. I will make you a cup of tea.”

10

The back office was as fastidiously tidy and invisible as Kanski’s apartment had been. A filing cabinet, a chair, a neat stack of papers bearing his name and signature.

There was one other thing – a framed black and white picture on the wall next to his desk. Was it from a newspaper? Alba carefully opened the frame and took out a folded piece of paper showing a proud woman with her hair tied back in a bun, arms folded in a smock. She had clearly been photographed as part of a group, but on taking the photo from the frame, Alba could see that the neighbours either side of the woman had been folded away. She furrowed her brow as she read the accompanying text, then returned the cutting to the frame.

This woman. There was something familiar about her. She would need to talk to this woman. She would have to pay her a little visit. She scampered out of the room back to Janusch at the counter.

“I am an impatient woman. I don’t expect to sit here all day for my cousin, he’ll just have to seek me out later.”

Janusch looked on with astonishment.

“But he’ll be here imminently. He’s a very punctual man, he will be here at 14:00 on the dot.”

“No thanks, I dare say likes to keep a girl waiting. That isn’t the kind of behaviour I appreciate”.

Janusch scrambled around for some sense, his mouth slack in confusion. What the devil had this whole pantomime been about?

“But where will he find you? You will surely want to speak to him? You said you came such a long way.”

Alba smiled craftily, recalling Kanski’s first name on the documents on his desk.

“Oh, one of these days we’ll meet at the tavern again I’m sure. He likes a little drink after work, my cousin Eli.”