by Peter Wild
We were bent around a century and howling at both ends.
Your first words to me, well, they put it slightly differently–your first words? There were others that tumbled through your teeth. You were smoking, of course, or rolling to smoke or putting one out or puffing. And God knows from where you’d suddenly appeared. Perhaps through a gap in the grouting? But these were the first words of yours that I remember: ‘I grew up during the Thatcher years,’ you said. ‘I have known nothing but loneliness.’
As you spoke, you turned as eerie as the corner of a pub half an hour after chucking-out time. You looked to be scowling or spitting, in silence, your eyelashes scratching at the lenses of your specs.
I didn’t know if you were joking or quoting. But, no, you looked sincere.
‘Coming back?’ you asked, big blue eyes unblinking. You see, it really was half an hour after chucking-out time. Back in the days of smoky snugs and lock-ins and those gleaming green tiles in the toilet. The alternative? I had a bedsit, a box room, a mattress stuffed with seaweed. At least, that’s how it smelled. I wouldn’t say no. I couldn’t say no. Despite your surliness, or because of it, you reeked of adventure. And it was raining, of course, and the passing taxis carried silhouettes of heads to somewhere louder or safer or lost, the gutter-puddles fizzing with just-lit cigarettes. And what had happened to our friends?
You pointed out a fire escape twisting down the back of the Victorian pub. The traffic lights lit up your wonder as well as your spiky orange hair, though you seemed to stand either side of your smile. So we loomed and shrank in the dark, gazing up at this iron staircase, wondering how best to get away.
Your flat turned out to be underground. Where else? You claimed to be a species of mould.
‘My days are determined by ankles,’ you said, looking to the railings on the street above. Then you added something about all a body’s nerves ending in the feet. Down here, you were the closest to those endings. So you vibrate, you said, day and night, to a city passing by. You were situated at source, you said, at the very point where the jitters begin. A whole city’s jitters. ‘And it can be nerve-racking,’ you said. ‘At source.’
I didn’t doubt it.
‘When it rains on the gravel,’ you continued, pointing to the tiny paddock in front of your window, ‘it sounds just like piss. And when people on their way back piss through the railings, it sounds just like rain. And sometimes like a round of applause on the radio next door.’
Next door? I couldn’t believe there’d be anyone else down here. Let alone radio reception. It felt right only for you, vibrating at your own frequency. For a moment, though, I thought I could hear shuffling behind the plasterwork, coughing in the pipes.
Then you disappeared. And in such a small space! You must have unstrapped shadows, ridiculed dimensions, skipped in and out of physics to get away with that. Aha, the kitchenette! A cupboard door to make you come over all diminutive. A squeaky hinge for a whimper. But you were betrayed by a nasal noise that you couldn’t hide in a drawer.
‘My gran,’ you said. ‘There’s no escaping genes. Especially northern ones. Her sneeze carried right across the Pennines.’
Minutes later, you served up this lumpy green stuff in rough bowls probably not long off the potter’s wheel. And it was tasty, this lumpy green stuff. Pea and potato? ‘Another species of mould,’ you said, spooning it up with glee.
‘Anyway,’ you said, getting all intrigued beneath your copper locks, ‘what kind of cutlery are you?’
You vanished soon after with our empty bowls as if they were on short-term loan from whoever was living in the cupboard. Then your slim snout emerged between two mugs. Whisky. Or was it rum? We swigged like sailors in the hold pretending we were ashore. I started taking drags on your roll-ups, little bits of bitterness sticking to my mouth and teeth; on my tongue, traces of your lipstick. Ochre, perhaps, or magenta? In any case an optimistic Gothic. ‘Did you inherit knitting fingers, too?’ I asked, as you rolled another. ‘Yeah,’ you replied. ‘I’m making cushion covers for my lungs.’
That first time we were bunkered for days–or was it weeks?–as we rattled through the registers from academic to tap-room Manc, discoursing on Orwell, Joy Division, Tetley Gold. There were orgasms and arguments, kitchen implements and ejaculations, and sometimes at the same time. When we ventured out, you were always a step ahead, with a movement between a skip and a stride, a rushing shuffle, pointing out fire escapes, one-legged pigeons, a postage stamp on the pavement (‘the whole street wants to get away’). I trailed in your leather and tobacco wake, sometimes coughing to keep up, but when I complained that all this smoking makes you smell of wet pencils, you snorted: ‘Perfume is for the menopausal!’ We bought only milk, bread, eggs and one or two ‘spinster snacks’, as you called them. You had a thing for brown paper bags; you believed that anything that came in a brown paper bag was honest and simple and sacred. In the street I could hear you whistling like a kettle lifted just that moment off the hob, and I assumed it was the wind through your teeth, if not through your bones, if not through you, Jeane, if not right through you.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind. But nostalgia is a form of tenderness, isn’t it? It comes sewn with soft regrets. And it’s strange: even when we were together, Jeane, I was always looking for you.
Sometimes you rose imperious, too tall for your umbrella, other times your shoulders collapsed and it was as if the whole of you was trying to hide behind your nose. On our down days, we were stricken: you, big eyed, smelling of spent fireworks, as husky as a whore and just as desperate, wearing only knickers as you rolled on newspapers trying to erase the state of things. You could not be placated. You’d take a pitchfork to my platitudes, spear me up. Easy meat. Yet when I held you, your body felt like a child’s. For a moment, you said nothing. Your hair had lost its spike. Then I felt your bones pressing against me. We were lost in this city. In the rust and fog. Even the river was running away! In these moments we realised–didn’t we? Emphatically. Unflinchingly–that our quick wits alone might not be enough to get us through.
All this looming and leaving! I didn’t think about it. Just part of your corrosive charm, I thought, just part of our underground life. Intellect with bristle and bone. How else to resist? Then again, you could snap like a trap on my best ideas. You could rubbish my motives with a sneer. It didn’t matter. There we were, at source, trembling in propinquity.
But then you’d emerge from some other patch of darkness, laughing behind your own back, giving it the old Manc swank and middle finger, dragging me out of my mood with a kick up the arse and a dossier of brilliant ideas. ‘What is a human being but a mix-up of tendencies? Today my tendency is to clean. We are nothing but our stains!’ you’d announce as you set about the flat. ‘That’s all most of us leave behind: scent, stench, SPOOR!’ Yellow rubber gloves up to the elbows, you’d scrub and mop and vacuum-clean, singing your head off as you ripped at the bedsheets, occasionally pausing to sniff (‘I remember that one!’ or ‘Jesus, you must have needed that!’), or you’d babble about the time when you rented your flat for a fortnight to a pair of Bulgarian lesbians for whom you gloriously despoiled the bedlinen the night before their arrival–yes, and with a man you’d taken a shine to in the street simply because he had hiccups. (Well, there’s no accounting for…) And you’d clean in such a fury that I sometimes wondered if it was your own spoor you were seeking to eradicate. (Though, admittedly, we were both from backgrounds where a wet tea towel and a boiling kettle cured most ills.) Meanwhile, once outside, your nicotine molars went ruby in the sun.
When the flat was tidy and there were fresh flowers on the sill (if carnations can ever be fresh, that is), you’d resume your quirky grace. Everything you tried on in charity shops fell for your aura, could not resist your frame, angled and insistent, even though your clothes were often inside out. But that’s how you liked it. No high-street designers for you. ‘A label,’ you once told me, ‘is merely a dea
d butterfly ironed on to fool the sick, the sentimental or the fookin’ pig-shit thick!’ And before you could say ‘well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs’, you were taking them all on, from the ‘slappers and runts’ who pissed in your paddock to some halfwit English graduate writing in the paper, from bearded students wearing Che Guevara T-shirts (‘It’s not revolution,’ you’d hiss, ‘it’s merchandise!’) to the ‘bourgeoisie dropping off their blazered bluddy ducklings’ at the private school down the road. There you’d be, a book in both pockets (well, you had to keep balance), careful not to break the spines of these living things, your roll-up a conductor’s baton jerking to each syllable of your rant. My dear lady disdain! Such sulphurous scorn! No one could hold a match to you. No one should hold a match to you.
Once, you railed at the university secretary. Yes, she’d always get your goat, and why? ‘She’s just so fookin’ prim and proper,’ you snarled, your eyeballs rolling with the lacklustre menace of medieval shot. ‘Middle-class immaculate! Utterly asinine! You know what I’d like to do to her?’ And here your tongue emerged as if to lick a particle of poison. ‘I’d like to drag her into the stationery cupboard and cover her in shit!’
You got yourself so worked up that your lungs had a pillow fight and your cough went on for hours.
But, Jeane, it wasn’t so much that we wanted to leave, was it? I mean, didn’t we just want somewhere to come back to?
After all, we were content enough in our Victorian pub, ‘The Briton’s Protection’. We’d laugh as we pushed each other past the ‘death chamber’, the name we gave to the empty back room with an unlit fireplace, even in winter, where we once sat and shivered even more than the loose sash windows. We preferred the snug, waiting at the wooden serving hatch, relieved not to be with those hanging by their ties on the city side of the bar. And we gazed through the windows beyond at the grand buildings going up to resurrect our city of dark bricks and rain: to the left, a train station transformed into an exhibition centre; opposite, a concert hall of sophisticated angles and evening silhouettes; to the right, apartment blocks elegantly disguising their expensive lack of space, and in the midst of all this glass and grind and brickwork, our pub stood firm behind its name in neon. OK, the diggers and cranes made the whisky bottles rattle on their shelves, but we saw these rows of bottles as the pipes on a fairground organ filling the place with music. With our backs to the canal, we sank into our green velvet seats and marvelled at the bulging, gilt-edged ceiling while wondering–don’t you dare deny it!–when it was all going to come down on our heads. Yet we felt safe in the snug. ‘Not so safe,’ you pointed out. ‘It’s “guns” backwards.’ And there were shootings on the streets that summer.
So, tell me, Jeane, when was it that you began to disappear? Or did I simply start looking for you more? ‘I don’t do love,’ you told me, the first time you kicked me out. You went spiky, your hair, your shoulders, all of you shaping like a flint-edged projectile about to be flung. ‘And I don’t do people. And you are a people.’
‘Fine!’ I said, packing up my pride. ‘You can keep a whole city’s jitters to yourself!’
And the next time. Or the time after that. How did it go again?
‘I’m clearing out the urchin-end of my acquaintances!’ you declared, giving me a shove.
‘What a coincidence!’ I replied. ‘I’m clearing out the orphan-end of mine!’
But we phoned most evenings and talked all night, with you so animated that, rather than take a break, you pissed in a pint pot nicked from the Briton’s or I carried on talking while your grandmother delivered her sneeze down your nostrils or you rolled yourself hoarse or went mad with theories, teapots, utensils. We were still resisting and not just each other. Occasionally I brought you things in brown paper bags: a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, a pair of rubber gloves, The Last of Cheri. And that was one of my favourite visions of you: the reading Jeane. Because when you finally raised your head from a book, your nose would be twitching with all the scents of the story.
Yet increasingly when I came to you I found the blinds down and silence the other side of your door. Or else there was loud music. Perhaps another week-long seduction? You didn’t answer the phone. I pissed in your paddock. I went to the Briton’s and sat alone in the death chamber. I wondered: do we keep changing our backgrounds until we find a foreground that fits?
But I knew that your own fate was enough for you to ponder; you didn’t want to get tangled up in anybody else’s. You had to extricate yourself. You had to parade your estrangement. You had to remain odd in any epoch.
Finally, I heard that you had slipped out of the country having won a research post at the Frei University in Berlin. The land of long and angular women! So many posh Fraus for you to despoil! I pictured you in a backstreet kneipe smoking at the helm. I saw you undaunted by an exhaustion of U-bahns and courtyard magpies, by dark steel undersides and rivers of rust, by buildings held up only by graffiti and the mustard off your bratwurst. And finally I saw your red hair flattened by an easterly wind bringing brick-dust and winter and an untellable despair, like the cold shaft of dirt blown along the tunnel just before the train pulls in.
Before long, you sent me an invitation on a postcard of Kirchner’s Rheinbrucke in Köln–just your kind of spindly beauty.
We walked under art-nouveau balconies in and out of the rain. Not in the fashionably downbeat areas of Friedrichshain or Prenzlauerberg (beer bottle, army jacket, ring through lip), but in the backstreets of Charlottenburg, the district of unfrequented galleries and out-of-date salons, where the ageing bourgeoisie measure the lost decades with slow and tiny steps, and we’d marvel at the lighting in an old jeweller’s shop and peer through the doors of the Hotel Savoy to see a lift cage, an intricacy of brass and gold, looking like a royal carriage. Or we’d nip across to Kantstrasse to wallow in the seediness of ‘Big Pimp Hotdogs’, ‘Kant Kino’, ‘Sex King Cascade’.
‘It’s not just history,’ you kept saying. ‘It’s mortality!’
And it didn’t end there, this living installation. You took me to the dim kneipes of Wedding where we absorbed the stares of tattooed men wearing bleached denim and mullets ‘fit to scour a frying pan’, as you put it. Or else we’d dart into a stand-up konditorei, no seats, just high tables and leaning pads, which seemed perfect for your life of discovery and dash, and with your fingertips tapping the steaming bowl of milchkaffee, you raised your head and started reciting the names of the over-iced pastries on display: Quarkplunder, Fruchtwuppi, Mandelschleife, Schweinsoren–Christ,’ you said of the latter, ‘they made a right pig’s ear out of that!’ We nearly eloped with our laughter, raising ourselves to reverie, thinking of these wide streets, each one a song sheet, you said to me before giving it your best Lotte Lenya giving it her best Jenny Diver, and how full of song you were along those streets that were dark like tunnels without roofs, only bare trees marking the score and a few last leaves, ‘also notes’, you said, pointing to them, and I wondered in that moment if your whole life was a search for a song, you know, the right one, whether squeezed from your own lungs or from someone else’s.
What am I saying? I’m not sure. Just that you were in your element in that Einstein-stadt, always this syrupy grin on your chops, you and your mortality finding ever new projects and liaisons: untergrund, an eroticized resistance, a whole city at source! You relished your breakfasts: ‘two eggs in a glass’, which you took with black coffee and three cigarettes. And you immersed yourself in a century’s worth of second-hand shops, coming out one day like a 1920s lesbian in a pinstripe suit with one of your leaky roll-ups stuck in a cigarette holder, the next, popping out a punk in a green leather jacket and tartan mini. Then the Troedelmarkt on Strasse des 17 Juni snared you with a book cabinet, a silver flip-top ashtray, a shaving-brush (!), a Leipzig edition of Neue Gedichte, snuffboxes, hatpins, turn-of-the-century nudes–‘Mein Gott,’ you exclaimed. ‘They didn’t half love a full bush!’
But what was it? Though you t
hrived in academic research–‘my spirit has found a spine!’–the other Jeane, the Jeane without footnotes, seemed less focused, as if you’d been swept up by the faster, more dangerous rhythms of the ‘jitters’ of Berlin. We went to a party in a wardrobe in Neuköln. There were five guys present. On the way home you whispered to me that you had already slept with them all. Yes, it was as if–in your dressing-up, your doomed assignations–you were racing through eras and appetites trying to catch up with yourself. Or escape yourself–your spoor!–for ever.
In the entrance hall to your ground-floor flat the mould was no longer a metaphor. A sign warned of rat poison. The hall was always cold and suffered an ecclesiastical stench. ‘Welcome to my chapel of rest!’ you said, my first day there. You were smoking more and more. You were violently opposed to what you derided as the ‘Gesundheit fascismus!’ now creeping across Europe, depositing smokers on pavements or in tents no bigger than an outdoor bog. Another thing I noticed: despite the nose-clotting, fingernail-filth of the place, your sneeze had all but disappeared.
