A Short Story in Five Parts
1
Down she went. Down like a marionette collapsing into its box. Down into the tavern. Down into a circle of hell. Down where you can kill yourself slowly. Spiralling down those steps into a dungeon of clown masks selling an illusion of joy. Down to the inevitable denial; down, down, down into Lethe’s bubbling, foaming stream, christening you in a sickening, ephemeral gloss of forgetfulness, before wrenching you back into the cold night of misery. Down into this apothecary of bottles where concoctions prise your pride away and expose the piteous, pleading child within you. But this place doesn’t judge. This tavern lets you wallow in your misery. This place doesn’t imprison you for your ugliness, roughness, uncouthness. This tavern lets you die on your own terms.
…
The weeks following Artus’s departure, when he left Alba drunk, scared and alone in her dark apartment, were followed by the worst rains Saint Petri had seen for centuries. The rain lashed its tentacles at everyone daring to brave the world outside, engulfing both the boulevards and slums in democratising floods of fury. Alba peered through the window at the flooded streets below. Buffeted by the silence inside her flat, she screamed long into the night, pleading to be taken away from this accursed mausoleum of torturing memories.
When the floods had subsided and the sun nudged the city’s residents back into life, Alba was freed from the prison of her home, bringing her misery to the tavern across the road, a sanctuary which had amazingly been unaffected by the flood. She would no longer drink herself into a stupor alone at home, she couldn’t face that anymore. She would suffer in the company of others.
But, remarkably, not everyone seemed to exude the same pain that she felt. Some months after discovering the tavern and making a regular perch for herself on a stool at the counter, she sat crying when Old Anatole came along, as he often did, to try and console her.
“Take a nut, Alba,” he implored, his stock method of inducing conversation with everyone in the tavern. There were pistachio nuts distributed all around the room, yet Old Anatole scooped them up to offer the drinkers, perhaps thinking that they would appear more alluring coming from his huge, hoary hands than from the earthenware containers he took them from.
“I’m alright, Anatole,” said Alba, with a thin smile, before returning to her tears.
The silence was broken by Old Anatole ruminatively chewing his pistachios. He was a constant fixture at the tavern whenever his wife was away visiting her mother in the hills. His wife seemed to be away for most of the year.
“Just come and visit us, love. You need a break. Mountain air will do you good. Find you a nice man!”
Alba looked at this open, artless, saucer of a face and felt something inside her give way.
“You dear,” she said, taking a pistachio from his old hands. “One of these days I will. I will come and join you and your wife in the mountains,” she repeated, tearfully.
She couldn’t go. She wouldn’t. Everything was pointless without her husband and son. But she thanked Anatole, and let herself think, for a few seconds, of the pure mountain air, kissing everything clean and dry.
2
Years later in the same tavern, Alba was the one doing the consoling. But she wasn’t helping sad patrons by handing out pistachios; instead, she was snooping around their homes and workplaces like a drunk detective.
And Eli Kanski was livid.
This woman had been away from the tavern for a few blessedly quiet days, but Eli knew she’d eventually come back to torment him. Sure enough, here she was on her stool at the counter – so cocksure, thinking she’s a saint, with her matted rubiginous hair and shabby purple shawl and all those knobbly beads round her neck. Her amiable face, all pebbly teeth and dimples, was taunting him as she shouted to everyone in the room that he, Eli, was “good with his hands”, that he had all those “chisels and tools.”
Janusch, his boss the pawnbroker, had described her accurately enough, detailing how she’d entered Eli’s office when he was out for lunch one day last week. Eli knew that she’d been in his home, too. For such a bulldozer of a woman, she had left the place immaculate. Yet that smell – that mix of yesterday’s alcohol, cigarettes and the ghost of roses – that was unmistakably hers. Knowing about all the woodwork tools in the drawer under his desk just confirmed it.
“My home and my office – what were you doing there? I could have you arrested for this,” he roared. It was the first time anyone had heard him say anything inside the tavern.
Alba smiled, satisfied at the sight of the man – thawed, choleric, brimming with anger which seemed to melt away the lines of his face and delineate a form of wounded nobility. Yes, he was like a woodcut picture, all jutting and angular.
“Your home? I don’t know why you think I visited your home. But your office? Oh yeah, your boss let me into your office, so I waited for you and you didn’t come. Simple as that. Of course, while I was waiting, I had a little look around to keep myself occupied. Very tidy. You are a very, very tidy man!”
He glared at her. She shifted on her stool.
“I wonder how you keep it so tidy. No doubt your home is tidy too, though I wouldn’t know about that. Impressive! And you do all that without a woman, eh?”
His nostrils flared, his eyes widened at the mention of the word ‘woman’, bracing himself.
“Your woman! I know all about your woman! She’s got such a lovely name: Luna! Lovely name! Oh, I know all about Luna. That photo in your office – that woman in the picture next to your desk. Handsome lady. When were you going to tell me about her? I always, always knew that you were miserable because of a lady. Alba worked it all out again, ha! Now, let’s talk about why you left her all those years ago.”
Eli jolted to his feet like a jet of water from a burst hot water pipe, spraying the assembled drinkers with his boiling fury. Time – his time here was over. The bell of his life was tolling, and they were all jeering at him, weren’t they? He snatched his coat and made for the stairs. Stuff this woman. Stuff her interfering plans to help him – he didn’t want her help. He was beyond that now. He didn’t want to believe…
“Alba!” cried Aditsan warningly with dagger eyes, the flats of his hands pressed to the counter. With glasses spinning dully on the sticky floor, and puddles of drink sidling into the cracks of the floorboards, Alba ignored the bartender as she staggered up the stairs in pursuit of Eli.
3
He was a runaway. His whole life he’d been running away from something.
He’d run away from his wife and their paradise home in the woods near the village of his birth.
After shaming himself in the city, he ran away to the fringes of the empire to help build a rail track.
Then he ran away to join the navy.
His boat, finishing its protracted year-long voyage, was promptly fired at on reaching the enemy in the Pacific. Eli was one of a handful left to drown on the shores of this alien country while his superiors from the sinking corvette jumped into the few lifeboats before being rescued by a battlecruiser.
Eli didn’t drown. He was captured by the enemy and left to rot in a prison camp.
Yet somehow, for some reason, he wasn’t meant to die. Somehow a cobbled group of them bludgeoned their way out.
Somehow, he found himself on a merchant ship slinking away from hell.
…
He was nothing but a naked monkey at the mercy of the elements, crawling up the mast of a ship in the most turbulent of storms, trying to stay awake, trying not to be submerged when he closed his eyes, trying not to drown in the cold faces of the dead, the cruel eyes of his persecutors, the bestial faces of his comrades as they beat their gaolers – the beating which continued long after the prison guards, some of them just boys, had died – their bloody, crushed bodies crooked into the ravenous swampland below.
He bobbed on the sinking, rudderless vessel of his life, unanchored, thrown around at the behest of a cruel, blind, unseeing sky.
The motherland didn’t control the seas. The emperor did not control the waves. Eli had been living a lie.
…
The merchant ship docked in Rotterdam, which buzzed with appalling obliviousness and normality.
The sense of normal was blinding. All these people who seemed to be going somewhere, doing something, charging through life – they didn’t notice, or didn’t care about the pain Eli had felt, all the blood he had seen. They worked to a different clock, the relentless clang and pounding of shipyards and factories, welding and smelting the world into a mechanised, bountiful future.
He woke up, sweating every night, each time in a different bed under a different ceiling. He tried to pick himself up and merge with this sped up, hyperreal world. He looked for work – any work – anything to keep going.
But he wouldn’t go back to the motherland – the country which had betrayed him.
4
He was in Rouen, in a heaving weekend market with cattle grazing nearby. There were children stumbling happily into each other, and couples out for food. A brief escape from his little attic apartment. An escape from the little box where he would eat, sit, sleep, watch the world move by, trying to breathe to the rhythm of life outside his window.
He had found work in an abattoir, a job where whirring, mechanised death drowned out darker thoughts.
He sat on the periphery of society in his squalid apartment looking at the world changing. Watching, but not engaging. Hardly daring to dip his toes into this ever-changing world.
Rotterdam, Bruges, now Rouen, trapped in some balletic spin, still outside the orbit of home – his real home.
When he left the boxy little flat, he wandered around, a pair of eyes in a colourful swirl of changing fashions and unwavering optimism for the future. He tried to keep a semblance of order – he read the papers in the library, trying to make sense of the rumbling discontent seeping through Europe like a rash. He played the odd game of chess at lunch with one or two of the other workers, but never conversed with them outside.
Yet he hated being alone in his sloped attic flat in the darkness of night. This is when he needed a reminder of life. This is when he craved not to be alone and would heave himself to one of the inns lining the little cobbled street below his window, pitching himself into drink until he managed to forget, for a time, everything that had gone wrong.
He would drink until he lost all sense of himself, until he found himself locking lips with someone, anyone, craving the oblivion of intimacy to stave off his nocturnal terrors, waking up in a different sweat-drenched bed under a different ceiling, a new naked back turned to him each time he made his way back to his drudging daily existence.
In the heaving weekend market in Rouen next to the field of cattle, silently threading his way through the stalls, just a pair of eyes watching all these people, impervious to the lonely, wretched pain that seared through him.
There was an old couple huddled under an umbrella choosing meat from a stall, communicating with each other with quiet, seamless, effortless, loving gestures. The husband, like Eli, had an angular yawn of a face and protuberant ears. The wife had a serene sense of composure and majesty, and piercing, limpid, young eyes, which sparkled as they found Eli’s.
He felt a pull. He felt a yanking, a yearning he had long tried to supress.
That old man might have been him in a few years. The woman would have been a future her.
…
He drank very heavily after that, the rain lashing outside and buffeting the doors of the inns where he found himself more and more.
Eventually he started waking up in the same place, with the same girl – a girl with short blonde hair, her same back turned to him each morning. Waking up each morning under the same ceiling, he learned to recognise the freckled map on her back, tracing it with his thumb.
The sound of a key and the girl jolting upright, the girl snapping up like a parking meter.
“Get under the bed.”
A man bulging through the door as she swirled her nightie around herself.
“Where is he?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He pulls Eli from under the bed by the arm.
“The fuck you think you are?”
Punches Eli in the jaw and he falls against the radiator under the window. The man, thickset and furious, rolls up his sleeves. Hoists Eli up with his left hand and swings at his face with the right.
“The fuck you think you’re doing here?”
Eli’s awake. He knees the man, kicks him, lands a flurry of punches on his meaty face. The man is down, and Eli continues beating him, venting wells of fury and shame.
He pounds the man because he’s right for blaming Eli. He punches him for the reminder of how far away from home he is. He kicks him for all those bastards from the sinking corvette who left him off the lifeboat to die in the ocean. He stamps on him for all those devils who led Eli away from his paradise with Luna away to his ruin.
The man has stopped defending himself, his crushed nose seeping blood which trickles into his open mouth. Eli grabs a chair and slams it hard on the unseeing face. He would end it for all of them. The woman screaming, begging him to stop. The man on the floor, gurgling.
5
It was snowing, again.
Eli Kanski was standing on the street outside the crouching tavern in Saint Petri staring into a cold hard nothing.
“So, you haven’t run off away from me this time, then?” wheezed Alba, as she climbed out of the door. “Come back downstairs. Let’s talk about it.”
Eli blinked, breathed long through his aquiline nose, flicked a cigarette he had been smoking onto the ground, rubbing the peppery black ash into the saline hillocks of snow.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he whispered. “I lost Luna twenty years ago. My story is finished. It’s over. I’m over. Please leave me alone.”
6
Alba stood outside the laundry, smoking her cigarette in the afternoon sun. Twenty-one – it felt important. Her real birthday, well, she didn’t quite know when it was. But Agate and Maisie, her first friends, her first loyal followers in her old street gang, they had said they were eight. Alba, being a little bigger and bolder, assumed she must be a nudge older. She assumed she was nine. She celebrated that first birthday with Agate and Maisie with some stolen cake, just as she’d celebrate every subsequent year.
This year she celebrated with Helge, her oldest friend from the laundry, with a little glass of something to go with some delicate apple pastries they shared during their lunch break. She had found a nice rhythm in life with the girls at work. But they were all getting married and younger lasses were coming in – the world was changing. She felt something numb, like she had been ill-prepared for the real, adult world around her.
Up until now, Alba’s one real goal in life had been not to be her mother. She had spent all these years trying not to be Ma – trying to eviscerate memories of that impoverished home. She would never succumb to the demeaning and depraved existence. When Ma died alone at home, sat dead in her chair for at least a day before Alba found her, no one else came to her funeral to say goodbye, no one but Helge, who was only there for Alba.
But Alba saw Helge less outside work these days. Like everyone else, she’d got married. Once they’d been so close – all that fun they’d had – playing cards and drinking wine, laughing down at the old inn near the laundry, Helge playing the accordion while Alba sang boisterous, dirty tunes for the sailors.
Boys liked the way she sang, and she had fun with some of them. Drinks with the girls, fun with some of the lads. Yet nothing lasted long – they made out like actors rehearsing lines with the wrong co-stars, saving their best performances for future plays.
Booze had been there to accompany these first long, intoxicating, magical evenings of adulthood. She drank with her friends and enjoyed the electrifying buzz and walloping laughter. But once everyone else had started growing up, finding husbands and having kids, the drink remained for Alba as a way to plug the gap. She knew she was overdoing it – like a motorcar speeding through a race but continuing even when the others have stopped, the race has ended, and it enters a country lane. She knew that continuing like she did would not be a good idea. But the monotony – she needed to alleviate the monotony.
What was there to do, otherwise? She had fulfilled her mission in life. Her goal had been to not be Ma – to have a proper job, to be useful. Now what?
7
She wasalone in the laundry when he came into her life for the first time.
“Hi, do you think you’ll be able to wash these for me?”
The man sheepishly proffered a bag full of soiled shirts and trousers. Alba took in the young figure with his straggly blond hair, mossy beard and haphazardly buttoned shirt.
“No, I’m afraid we are not suited to washing clothes in such a state. Guess you’ll just have to buy some new clothes, sorry.”
The man’s face fell as he reached out to reclaim the bag from Alba’s grasp.
“Oh, you wally. Of course, we can wash these. This IS a laundry; this is what we do. And there’s nothing wrong with this lot. Superficial stains…been in a scuffle? Or do you like rolling around in mud for a laugh?”
She smiled. The young man smiled back, his eyes twinkling.
They were married six months afterwards, and she moved into his home near the Arts Square. Kris was a quiet, unassuming, unpretentious docker. He was enchanted by the energy and gutsy swagger of his new wife, and they lived the first year of their marriage in quiet harmony.
The birth of their son was the natural next step, an inevitable extension of themselves and their little island, and Alba began to orient her life around the family home. She had poured away the alcohol from her old flat – she didn’t need it anymore – she wanted to be present for every magical moment of her life.
She smiled at the complaining tales of all the other girls about their husbands at the laundry. They didn’t have what she had; they had married because they thought it was the natural order of things to eventually settle down and have a bit more comfort with some chap or other.
Alba had married despite wanting to subvert the story. She had married to complete herself. She transformed their family home into a brightly lit cabin in an ocean liner surfing the waves of paradise. The money she had once spent on drinks with the girls was now spent on flowers to festoon her enchanted garden, Artus’s lamb wool blankets in his crib, the tastiest salmon and herring from the fish market for languorous, heavenly weekends with the man she loved, who smiled at her with pure contentment as he danced their beautiful, gurgling baby boy on his lap. Alba looked into Kris’s smiling blue eyes knowing that her life was complete, knowing that her journey was finished, radiant with the certainty that she would never need anything else.
8
One evening Kris didn’t arrive back from work, leaving Alba surprised as she tucked baby Artus into his cot. She went to the docks the next morning to ask about him, but no one had seen him since the evening before, when he had clocked off as usual. Exasperated, Alba checked the hospital, describing her husband at the counter in reception. She was told that a man matching her husband’s description had been hit by a tram the evening before and was hanging on for dear life in a ward filled with other seriously injured patients.
Kris was on a bed, unresponsive to the world and the touch of Alba’s hand. For two weeks Alba laboured on in the laundry, pummelling clothes while her year-old son crawled between the legs of the other women, oblivious to the concern of his mother and absence of his father, delighted by all these aunts who took turns to hoist him in the air and tickle his smiling, apple-red cheeks.
9
“My darling.”
Alba closed her eyes and willed him to her.
Kris came to her chair. She pressed her face into her husband’s stomach, burrowed in the wool of his sweater. She could feel his heart pounding slowly and reassuringly. Her arms stretched so far around him that they circled her own back. And there they were: mother, father and child, sat together on a spindle stool in the kitchen. She closed her eyes and made this real. It felt so real.
“I can’t do this without you,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to drink, Kris. But I can’t do this without you. Not on my own.”
Her husband smiled.
“Shh, Alba. Shh.”
“I miss you so much, Kris.”
He was gone. She shushed the baby as she laid him in his cot and went to refill her wine glass, feeling the dizzying disorientation of a sacred, magical year of abstinence crumbling.
She lost track of the days, which flicked by in cascades, ricochets and ripples; a whirl of washboards, sympathetic friends, her screaming infant, empty bottles and pools of drink which seeped through the floorboards.
And then she was alone, a widow. He never came back from the hospital ward.
“He’s gone. I’ve lost him.”
She drank harder so she could reconjure his ghost, but he never came back. She tried to drink herself to sleep, but she only stayed awake, screaming long into the night.
And then the years slipped by as she returned to the laundry, scraping away the filth from the night before, going home each night to start again, locked in the tormented cycle of working and drowning everything out, her son sat on the floor next to her, clutching his hairless doll for companionship as he looked at Alba with scared eyes – this spectre his mother had become, the once apple-red cheeks of his caving in.
10
She had never felt more awake than now, outside the tavern, watching Eli try to slip away once more. So truculent, so proud, it was infuriating. First Kris, then Artus, now Eli, after all she had done to make things right.
“Hey, don’t you think about leaving me standing here again. Don’t you dare! Not now, not after all this.”
Eli continued in his solemn trudge away from the tavern. Alba growled, and tore after him, thrusting herself in front of him, his face set into a mask of scorn. He avoided her eyes as she jabbed him in the chest. She reached up to his collar and shook it.
“Hey!” she yelled. She prodded him and slapped him. But he kept moving away.
“You’re just a big bloody coward, aren’t you? An utter loser. The biggest cowards are those who know that they’ve done something wrong but NEVER try to make it right. You want to bring everyone down with you, don’t you? Coward!”
Eli roared and shook Alba off his neck. She tripped and fell backwards into a heap of snow. He towered over her, his hands bunched into fists, his solemn face crumbled into a molten mask of fury. Alba, spread-eagled on the ground like an upturned basket of fruit, glared up at him with defiance.
“Go on, then,” she whispered.
His anger collapsed. He breathed. He closed his eyes. He reached a hand to her.
Alba grabbed the hand and allowed herself to be heaved to her feet. She readjusted the purple shawl around her neck and picked the knobbly beads of her broken necklace from the snow.
He was looking at her, his face coated in tears.
Tom Miodrag 