Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  It just so happens that the mixture of Tyskie beer, jazz and all that clear thinking also makes him want to, as he puts it, appreciate the beauty of the female form. But for those that think they know where this is headed, I can tell you, Jaro isn’t your tenner-in-the-panties type. He just likes to watch the barmaids slink back and forth in their domain while we talk and listen to the band. Occasionally he’ll make light conversation, but no more. He says he likes imagining being young, single, free, and living in a world where he has time for affairs. He says his wife doesn’t mind. And most times, after a drink or two at the Jazzrock, all that clear thinking just makes him want to stagger back to the hotel room and play Osama Shootout on the Xbox until he falls asleep with controls still in hand. For those of us in the business of keeping Jaro breathing and out of prison, this represents another dodged bullet. Last night, I put him to bed at 3 a.m. I took off his shoes and pulled the covers over him. I got water, made him drink some and he mumbled, The thing is, Zyg … you’ve got to sympathize with people’s mistakes. Their reasons. If you can’t sympathize in this job, it’s only fair to retire. Then his head sank into the pillow and his body turned to jelly. Sometimes I wonder, if I told Beata what the face of our campaign was really doing out here, would she drag him home and lock him in her cellar? Replace him with a sober clone? Or would she just shrug, smile, and remind me who’s in charge?

  I look at my watch. Then the door.

  We usually travel together. Or I suppose, I usually travel with Jaro, dealing with all the practical stuff so he can, as he puts it, concentrate on the bloody macro, amigo! That’s his way of reminding me he’s still the guy on the posters and the TV adverts. The one people are thinking of when they pledge their donations and set up their direct debits. Jaro is a cash machine for the movement. He’s a ghost. He glides from commitment to commitment, passing through the air, seeming to be everywhere but never quite being anywhere. He’s making it look like we’re making progress, and that means in financial terms, we actually do. But in private, the progress isn’t exactly consistent. One minute he’s running around the office and screaming, We can still do this! – the next he’s got his head in his hands and saying, I swear to God, I’m going to kill the Chancellor of Poland. Meanwhile, my life is becoming increasingly fucking micro. I carry the bags. I hold the passports and the tickets. I pick him up, tell him where he has to be and why he has to be there, order the taxis to and from meetings. Before those meetings begin I have to make sure Jaro’s tie is on straight so people take him seriously. It’s not quite why I joined the movement, you know? I even carry super-strength chewing gum in case he’s had an early start on the happy juice. Sometimes I pop a piece in his mouth when he’s not paying attention. If Jaro’s mind is buzzing, his mouth hangs open, inviting the flies.

  He’s now an hour late.

  In quiet moments, Jaro admits he’s sliding. Most other times, he denies it. In the car today, on the way to our first appointment, suffering with a stinking hangover, Jaro said, Ten Tyskies a night is the only sensible response to the current reality. He said, Do you know what we’ve done to our planet? I straightened his tie again then he shrugged me off and pointed to the skies, crying out, Listen to me Zyg – never mind the fucking tie. Straight ties are part of the fucking problem! Times like this, he sounds like some kind of crazy preacher. The sort of drunk you’d cross the street to avoid. The kind of person who goes about screaming that the end is nigh – and no one’s gonna believe that now, are they? So it’s no wonder Beata sends him everywhere with a chaperone. If I was his boss I’d send a fleet of them, and I’d pick better ones than me. I wouldn’t even think about the cost. I’m no accountant, but surely to God he could go down on the spreadsheet as a legitimate business expense.

  After another five or six numbers, each punctuated with lengthy break-it-downs, squeaks and squawks, the band finally give my ears a break. Magda walks off the stage, heading straight to the bar, tossing her long, tightly curled hair as she orders a large bourbon. The barman asks, in English, if she’s heard the election result yet. She answers, in a slow Polish-American drawl, that there are no politics in her world. No lies and no compromise. Only the eternal beauty of sound. The barman tells her she’s full of shit and reminds her she’s back on in ten, but despite everything, for a few seconds I think about asking Magda to hire me. I reckon I could play maracas or something. Dance. Fuck it, I could be on vibes – I wouldn’t want much in return. Perhaps a handful of zlotys or a few Tyskies each night, that’s all, to play and to just be free. I may have spent years running from these sounds, but for a moment here I think that maybe they belong in a different world, where essential policy change is a phrase nobody needs to use.

  The door does not open. I’m still alone. Maybe I always will be.

  Mostly I shadow Jaro, so it’s possible to keep close by, but sometimes I’m scheduled to do my own thing. When I’m not babysitting Beata’s money mountain I have coffee meetings of my own, and lunch meetings, and afternoon drinks. I get twenty minutes at a time, or fifteen, or ten, with people who all seem to think I hold Jaro’s ear in my pocket. Lobbyists and consultants. Assistants and special advisers. Even the occasional minister. I dizzy people with talk of conservation targets, energy efficiency, and climate change. (Jaro tells me to talk fast. After all, we don’t have long.) I tell them what we – what Jaro is trying to achieve, on behalf of us all. I cajole and persuade. I shake hands in the way he taught me to before the drink took hold of him: firm but not dominant. Confident but not arrogant. I’m sure to turn up on time, smile, be polite. People can damn the system all they like, but these details are the difference between success and another wasted hour. In my meetings, I tell people we need to rescue our future from the profit motive. (I mean this.) I always use the names of the children we need to rescue it for. (The offspring of whoever I’m talking to.) Back when he used to still give me advice, Jaro used to say you should personalize as much as possible, to maximize impact. So I personalize. I ask politicians how their kids are getting on at university, school, kindergarten, then focus on our core targets. But these fuckers say things like, Where’s the man himself, Zyg? Or, Why don’t we get a face-to-face? Or, Oh look out, Justyna! Here come the Green Nazis! This is how my world works. I hear other worlds run along similar lines. No wonder some reach for the bottle.

  Magda kisses the barman on the mouth and tells him not to worry. She tells him he’ll feel better tomorrow. Then she returns to the stage and reaches for her saxophone. She holds it like a newborn.

  Before the music starts up again I sink the rest of my drink and go back above ground, back out onto the street, waving my phone about for a while, trying to get the magic white bars to show on the display. It takes a while but finally the thing comes to life: no messages from Jaro, and when I call him it goes straight to answerphone (he’s probably jumping off that bridge right now), but I do have an email from Beata reminding me that today of all days, it’s important to stick to the list. Her email also includes a revised schedule for tomorrow, based on the latest set of projected results sent to her from HQ in Gdansk an hour ago. She signs off, ‘It wasn’t glamorous being in the French Resistance either, you know.’ I think Beata knows what’s coming. I go back inside and sit down again. I order another beer, wondering if, when the water comes, we’ll be able to hear it before we see it.

  The last time I actually saw Beata, we met in a hired meeting room in Brussels and she told me about my new assignment. Didn’t she know who I was, I asked? Didn’t she think I was a little overqualified to be a babysitter? But Beata doesn’t have time for messing around. She said, Your problem isn’t qualifications, Zyg. Like everyone else on this continent, it’s distractions. Back then, the movement were still speaking to both sides of this particular electoral distraction. Waiting for the winner to emerge, still pitching to everyone. This last four or five days, there’s only one side whose calls we even bother to answer. The people might not have spoken yet but we have a
pretty good idea what they’re gonna say. Polls close in an hour. They might as well not have opened at all. Anyway, when Beata gave me this assignment she handed over a list titled THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T LET JARO DO BETWEEN NOW AND THE END OF THE WORLD. Her Ten Commandments were:

  Thou shalt not let him talk policy detail.

  Thou shalt not schedule meetings before 11 a.m. or after 7 p.m.

  Thou shalt not let him sack anyone, or hire anyone, without prior written approval.

  Thou shalt not let him go on midnight jogs ‘to work off dinner’.

  Thou shalt not let him drink more than two beers a night. (Whoops.)

  Thou shalt not let him take drugs, even if he says they are merely ‘performance enhancing’. (Double whoops.)

  Thou shalt not let him frequent all-you-can-eat buffets.

  Thou shalt not let him have more than three consecutive hours of free ‘alone time’.

  Thou shalt not let him fall in love.

  Thou shalt not frequent late-night clubs. Remember: scandal could strike anywhere, and WE NOW ALSO REPRESENT A NUMBER OF CHILDREN’S CHARITIES.

  I asked Beata if she had any suggestions about things two powerless men trapped on a dying planet could do in a strange city for nights on end without getting drunk, wasted, talking politics or trying to get laid. But Beata just gave me that look where she’s all eyebrows, and I’ve been working out here ever since. Sometimes I wonder what all this is for. If they actually need Jaro any more. No, they need him all right. All of us do. We just don’t necessarily need him alive. The thing I don’t ever say to anyone is, Imagine what we could do with a dead figurehead. I don’t say it because I reckon Jaro’s already thought of that.

  The band finish another song to the sound of raucous applause. They start another where Magda sings about her Mississippi sweetheart leaving her, walking on down the road and never coming back. She’s singing about how she wishes she wasn’t so lonesome, in an accent which lurches between Texas and Warsaw. Then she starts up with the sax again.

  I think, if only Jaro wasn’t the way he is.

  I haven’t mentioned recent events to Beata, but these last few days of the campaign our man has been displaying what she calls the classic signs. He’s been missing meetings and getting drunk first thing in the morning. Hiding from me. Talking about his wife, how she deserves a better life, and how his kids don’t understand him. How they don’t even fucking recycle. The closer we all get to you-know-what (and he’s convinced we’re pretty fucking close), the worse it gets. Democracy’s great for people who aren’t bothered about the apocalypse, he said. But what we need is a dictator, and quick. This afternoon he measured his pulse every five minutes and asked me (again) what I thought would happen at the end of the world. Without giving me time to answer, he told me he was betting on the Noah’s flood scenario, and that it didn’t matter which party won any more, here or anywhere. He asked me to keep a secret: that after the results, he was gonna give up the game for good. Buy a hut on top of a hill and hope the waters didn’t reach him. Then he shouted, But first we’re gonna celebrate the end of our latest mission! See you at eight. It’s now half-past nine, and I’m thinking, maybe I should have mentioned this to Beata after all.

  Magda is really warming up now. Between numbers she’s telling a story about the town she grew up in, her father’s old Etta James 45s, how she fell in love with jazz, and how really jazz music – how all music – is just the blues with more notes to play with.

  I can see the end more clearly now: I’ll have a pretty fucking similar version of the headache I’ve had for the last two months, and like right now I’ll be alone here in the Jazzrock, in the crowd, imagining Jaro’s death and how I’m gonna explain it to Beata. Then I’ll see him walking towards me. He’ll be drunk, dripping from the rain, and crying about the life he could have had. I’ll sit him down, buy him a Tyskie and tell him we’ve been doing important work. That he’s needed, he’s a man people look up to, that I look up to, and that even if the odds aren’t good, it’s important not to go over to the Dark Side. While I say this, all I’ll be able to think of are the expenses. After a silence I’ll say, Hey, listen. It’s jazz time, amigo. But he’ll shake his head and say, No, no, it’s blues time, Zyg. Soon, we’re all gonna have the blues. Then the band will start up again and he’ll get up to dance alone, just like those teenagers up the back. Na zdrowie, amigo, he’ll say, still dancing, holding his glass to the sky. Cheers. L’Chaim. Slainte! Jaro will smile as if he’s forgotten everything. The responsibility, the future, what we all know is coming. Then we’ll clink glasses, and the water will burst through the door.

  But nothing ever happens the way you imagine it.

  Jaro finally arrives. He’s smiling. He apologizes for being late – he says he lay down for five minutes and woke up two hours later. He’s in a clean shirt and actually looks pretty fresh. He pulls me in close and hugs me. Whatever happens, he says, we’ve done an honest job.

  We watch the band for a while in near silence, then take stools at the back of the bar, so we can hear ourselves better. Jaro is glowing. He says, Oh Christ, I love these places! Even the bass player gets a solo, you know? This music, it’s a musical fucking democracy. He says this as if democracy is what other forms of music desperately lack. As if democracy is something he values. Then something in the brickwork distracts him and he changes the subject. They’ve got no fire exits in here, he tells me. So if the water bursts through the entrance we’ll all be equally fucked. We’ll all go down together. I say, Maybe the band will play on as we rush for cover, like they did on the Titanic. But Jaro laughs and says that’s just a myth. He says, Amigo, we’ll either drown as one, or more likely try to claw our way out, fighting each other, trampling on the soloists and the portraits of Louis fucking Armstrong while making for the door.

  Our voices rising over the sound, we discuss what we might do next in our lives. I admit to having no suggestions. I kind of figured this would be a lifetime’s work, I tell him. Jaro leans in and says, It won’t be obvious it’s coming, Zyg. Before it happens, everyone will think we’re crazy for telling them what’s on its way. We’re not talking about a hurricane here. No machines have been invented yet to predict this. But I can see it. He closes his eyes and keeps talking, but lower now. It starts with a trickle of water through the drains, he says, swelling up at the sides of the streets. There’ll be a slight rumble in the sky, but no more. And people won’t see it coming. They couldn’t. They won’t know what they’re looking for. They’ll be going about their business, thinking about their boyfriends and jobs and holidays and sick relatives. They’ll be running for buses. Worrying about their tax bills. Having affairs in unnamed hotels and wishing they’d made it up with their father or mother before they died. And why not? You’ve got to have love for the people, amigo. You’ve got to forgive what they do. Something else will always seem bigger, until the second before the water bursts through the door. And when it happens? You really think the band will play on? Or you think they’ll panic and eat each other?

  Jaro sees my expression and retreats.

  Actually, maybe it won’t happen at all.

  He leans back and grins. Our table shakes slightly.

  Or maybe it’s about to happen right now.

  Then there’s a sound at the top of the stairs, by the entrance to the club. A force pushing against the door. The band seem to be getting louder. Then they go silent.

  We all look round.

  ‌Meat

  ‌A.L. Kennedy

  Marcko had already posted the permissions that came with the parcel: one on the door and then one each for both of the windows. Even so, he knew that his neighbours would smell the cooking and think badly of him.

  His wife, had she still been here, would also have thought badly of him. She always did.

  And, on this occasion, he would have agreed. He’d spent 6000 panyuan on this – a single meal.

  Irresponsibility.

  The stove was
burning biomass and Sequestchar, just to heat private food when the flat was a sweat box already.

  Waste.

  Any reasonable citizen would accept that, in an ideal world, cooking and eating within your homespace was a Familybond Enhancer. It was clearly stated in most broadcasts that Freedom Choices were Smiled Upon and could be implemented without penalty. But any reasonable citizen also knew the Canteens were energy-efficient and your Bench Absence was always noted and would be kindly deplored and this wasn’t an ideal world. This was Post World, when everyone was in the same lifeboat together and had to act accordingly.

  Marcko didn’t even have a Justification for this latest transgression among his so many sins. It wasn’t as if he was enjoying Remarkable Occasion. He was not marking a Belief-related, or Memory-related, or Individual-related Anniversary. This was simply Need. Marcko’s own personal need.

  Not even that – this was evidence of Marcko’s Want.

  The most unforgivable sin.

  Marcko had harboured Self-Seeking Desire. He had strengthened and indulged it until it had kidnapped his will.

  Meat.

  He had wanted to eat meat. He had wanted his son to come back from Education and be able to sit down in the front room and eat meat.

  Meat.

  It was here now with him: a heavy, cool, moveable bundle in layered wrappers.

  Fascinating.

  Sort of.

  Lifted out of the box, it now felt disturbing against his hands – like something with a shade of life still caught inside.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dibbs came in and interrupted things before they were really ready. ‘Is it a Generosity Day?’