When I considered the turn of events that had led to our initial meeting, it did not seem feasible that another person could ever replace her. I had not been searching for someone like her – she had simply arrived. I didn’t believe she could be replaced. Sure, in the city there were other uncomfortable and dissatisfied people, but whether they were dissatisfied with their lot, or dissatisfied with themselves, was impossible to know immediately. If they were the latter then we might never have the moment when we both recognised an affinity.
The city had a habit of looking old. And the various tourism documents loved nothing more than to draw attention to the areas that were the oldest. When I wandered the parts of the city that were widely believed to be old — near the famous harbour and beneath the famous bridge — the neighbourhoods carried an air of modern prestige that seemed at odds with any reality.
The city had a deep affection for its own history, but only to the extent that it confirmed what many already believed. In the old area, near the famous harbour and beneath the famous bridge, a certain bygone poverty was romantically depicted in oil paintings that hung in expensive bars, bars where straight-backed businessmen barracked for some team or another running about on a TV screen, and tiptoed businesswomen laughed. These people thought they belonged there, and maybe they did, though most certainly they didn’t, and neither did I.
What I had been searching for in disappeared towns was a cherished history. In the city the history was barely verifiable, and probably a myth. None of the people in these bars, eating steaks and drinking carefully brewed beer, had ever needed to search for it. They all thought themselves as belonging to this cherished destitution, via the frayed threads of a mysterious continuum. They believed that they had all been poor once, as evidenced by the paintings, and it made them happy.
*
One morning Ciara got home at 4am and vomited in the bed. Then she poured a longneck of beer onto the vomit and started wiping it onto the carpet, which she then scraped with her hands into small heaps. Then she passed out on the floor next to the door.
We were evicted the next day. We sat on a bench in the park near the central station, and she didn’t say anything for a long time. When the sun shone too brightly she announced that she would move to another more shaded bench. I did not follow at first but inevitably, after some time, I did.
We’d left her cassettes in the hostel. Ciara hadn’t felt like carrying them, and I had my hands full, and the stern European man was too angry to let us come back for a second load of belongings. I wondered how, without the cassettes, she ever hoped to follow more leads, how she could ever play them to a potential ally. But she said she didn’t care too much about the tapes anymore. If she did find their origins in the city it wouldn’t really matter, because she’d always hoped the origins lay somewhere in her disappeared town, or somewhere similar. Besides, she said, people in the city did much stranger things than record mysterious keyboard music. She waved in all directions, like a veteran of the city. She told me that everyone was living strange. That no one had anything to hide. They all acted on whims. They did whatever they wanted, but only during the night. She curled up on the bench.
Later she explained to me how, during one of her nightly wanderings through the city, she’d entered a basement somewhere to the west of the central train station. There she’d found a small room of men and women watching a young man scream into a microphone. He’d not done anything else, she told me. He’d just screamed. Not even words, just screaming. The audience had sat cross-legged or leaning on the walls, transfixed by the man’s abject remonstrations. He’d done this for several minutes, then the audience had clapped politely, and then gone about their socialising.
She told me that I should go see the man scream. That it hadn’t seemed like art at all.
I was very interested in seeing the man scream, except I doubted it would happen again. How could the same thing ever happen twice in a city as large as this?
When Ciara had approached the screaming man he’d acted very humbly, and did not appear as anguished as she’d expected him to be. It had all been a performance, he told Ciara. She’d been disappointed that he hadn’t screamed right in her face. He wasn’t truly anguished to the extent that he had demonstrated. Still, she had been impressed.
Ciara had seen lots of things in the city. She had seen a fight break out among half a dozen men at a bar in the hills near the water. She had been offered drugs several times by elderly men. She had drank with homeless people in poorly lit parks, them giving her alcohol in exchange for her tobacco. She told me that it was only possible to really see the city at night. During the day it hides, is far too coy. She said that during the day the city is occupied with maintaining the conditions that then allow strange things to happen after hours: crafting the tensions it desired to release.
We showered at the train station. Ciara then wanted to walk in the direction of where she claimed the real city was, where she had done all her spectating, and I wanted to find a place to live. So we parted ways and agreed to meet in the park by the central station at seven that evening. I found a hostel similar to the one we’d just been ejected from. A room in this one cost sixty dollars a night. The hostel was mainly occupied by younger people of British origin, who pored over maps in the common room where piles of magazines and atlases were kept. I paid for three nights in advance and then, because my meeting time with Ciara was still two hours away, wandered the main street, browsing bookshops and CD stores. Teenagers crowded the convenience stores and clothing outlets, sipping from tall styrofoam cups of soft drink. There was a cinema, and a video arcade, and each buzzed by day in much the same way they did at night, lights blaring in defiance of the sun. There were too many cross-streets, far too many routes, and none seemed to travel in any compelling direction. Overwhelmed and tired, I returned to the park and waited.
Later, after Ciara had left me for good, my most enduring memory of the city was sitting in the park. I have since learned even more about the city and, like Ciara, suspect it is doomed. I read news articles about men and women brawling in the name of what it means to be a city, or a nation: smashing their bottles on the skulls of others, tearing items of clothing from women’s heads on the promenades that line pristine shores. They say it is not really them, but it is, but also it isn’t, but who knows. They seem to suffer the same symptoms as the people in disappeared towns did. Their notion of who they are belongs to the past, can only be read about in books or found summarised in certain rare songs or films. I, alone and still searching, can’t condemn them for believing they are good. But I also can’t understand how they arrived at their notions and their summaries, and why they seem to need those particular ones and not some others. It seemed to me, as a person in the city for no reason at all, that my searching for anything in particular was a futile activity. I only saw people who were there, who existed. The people of the city, and of the country, are united only by the truth that they are there, connected by the dirt they claim to own.
Ciara had stopped searching. I suppose she figured she could get lost among hundreds of others similarly lost in the city, could relish the proximity of history, of meaning, from certain fragile vantage points. Both history and meaning are always within reach in a city, although rarely at the same time or place. Every block in a city holds a crypt of story, locked in cement or on forbidding faces, in the Subway stores and the many Hungry Jack’s, places that were all something else before, something truer. Story is in the pubs and plazas, once dens of sepia. Story is in the crooked lanes, down in the old part of town where the darkest secrets are hidden, or on the glass corporate avenues far removed from any past, no matter how shallow the passage of time.
Ciara might not have needed herself anymore. She might have begun enjoying no longer being reflected by anything, neither tapes nor other townsfolk. She was in a city with no reflections at all. A city like any other city. She was an unremarkable force moving invisibly through its streets,
finally without a name or reputation, nothing to live up to, nothing to define herself against, tangled in all the competing messages, the sites and sensations that seemed to corroborate widely-held truths, and also those that challenged them. Both satisfying in their own confused ways, but not in keeping with my own searchings.
My own searchings came to an end in the park. I no longer had the energy to comb the streets for whatever I was looking for. Belonging is a condition you are born into, not one won or discovered. The British in their thongs, bantering in the hostel common room, unmistakably British, had no such conundrum. They were complete: a series of events and a true, verifiable culmination. I was just a reluctant notion, a wrong one, an argumentative one. A notion lazily arrived at, the vapour trail of some fleeting condition.
I drank that night with the British. They did not consider me unusual, just someone to whom things must be explained carefully, speech enunciated perfectly, clipped for clarity. I drank more than three beers and I told them about my book, how I could no longer write it, how no book could ever be written about what I had been looking for. My book would have to be fiction, I said, but where’s the satisfaction in that. The three men and two women politely listened and then spoke among themselves about things I did not understand. They spoke about Sweden or the Pacific Islands or Southeast Asia, and it seemed the whole world was theirs. They saw no shimmers. They went everywhere it was possible to go, and in every place they found a piece of themselves. Threads from their collective past dangled down everywhere – especially in the city. I told them they should feel lucky to be from England, an actual place, and they laughed and said they understood, and mentioned the weather and the water. I told them that the water was empty, that it was only an edge, that it meant nothing. Oh yes, they said, it was the sand that was best, and the sun. And I suppose I spoke more than I normally would, and much louder too, like an authority, about how everything they knew about the city and the country here was maybe not so true. I told them everything was true about England, that I could detect it in all of their proximities. That they all radiated truths about England. They started to shy away from me. I was escorted off the premises in the morning, Ciara’s and my plastic bags shoved into my arms. I don’t remember who started the fight.
*
I spent four days in the city looking for Ciara. I followed the streets that fanned outwards from the park by the central train station, though for all I knew she had boarded a plane or swam out to sea. Maybe she had entered one of the buildings and stayed there. I never once thought to look inside of buildings.
Some areas of the city centre were more city-like than others, like the area hidden behind tall buildings on a hill near the sea. People drank there at all hours of the day, and drugs were dealt conspicuously at a street corner near the train station. There were drug addicts here and there, some screaming at passing cars, and muscled men guarded neon-striped nightclubs. They did not really try to block anyone entering, but rather encouraged it, even me in my stained Woolworths uniform. This neighbourhood seemed to demonstrate the most uninhibited essence of people in cities. The men and women wore expressions of tacit aggression: pre-emptive refusals to any contact. They jeered while watching football games on open balconies of drowsy bars, and they sipped their beers deliberately. This region seemed always on the brink of panic, dangerously close to eruption. When the men fought they did so vehemently, like warriors or soldiers, buoyed by witnesses, dulled with the fug of spirits or beer or something else. Only under these circumstances could they reward the impulses the rest of the city condemned. In that region on the hill, men and women entered an arena every day and every evening. The pace and density of the city accelerated their tensions. The strips and the alleys served as a receptacle for everything they usually held too closely. It was little wonder that eventually I found Ciara there, on a bench, calmly monitoring a famous fountain.
I sat beside her and waited for her to speak. She didn’t. She was watching the fountain. I placed a single cassette, ruined from the friction in my pocket, into her lap, and she laughed. Then she tossed it into the fountain. She said she was getting too old for the strange keyboard music. That’s ridiculous, I said. I told her that the strange keyboard music was not for young people anyway, that it was too sad. Young people listen to dance and techno music, or they just scream. She didn’t register my reference. She might have already forgotten.
She said I lived a strange life. I only ever went places and watched people. I didn’t live among them, I only witnessed, as if behind a pane of glass. She said that was all she had ever done, too.
We went to the McDonald’s and ate Value Meals. Pigeons inside tottered between our feet as we shovelled our chips. It was possible Ciara hadn’t slept since I’d last seen her. I had, on the trains on the lines leading far out west and then back. With no book to write anymore, I had nothing to say.
She’d been living in an underground tunnel. You enter near the docks, she said, on a strip of concrete between two traffic thoroughfares. No one ever went there. It was off-limits to foot traffic. There was a rusted metal flap there the size of a man. You lifted it, and there was a ladder. You climbed down for a minute or so and then dropped onto a landing. It was pitch black, which continued until an invisible corner, around which yellow light emanated. Then there was a fairy-lighted stairwell at the end of the passage, leading downwards for a long time, maybe for fifteen minutes. Then there was a large room with many beds and people, and then another stairwell leading further down.
She scrunched her wrappers up and wiped her hands on her pants. She hadn’t gone any further than the first stairwell yet. She hadn’t needed to.
The people there were unlike any she had met above ground. Some were vagrants, and others were just people fed up with life in the city. Others didn’t have any particular reason for being there. There was always music on and someone to talk to, she said. She’d met a man named Rob. He wasn’t the same as the old Rob, but also, in some ways, quite similar. He was a normal man who happened to live nearly a kilometre beneath the city’s surface.
I said I wanted to live in the underground city too, but Ciara said it was forbidden for her to take me, that I had to find it for myself. That was the only rule. There was no referral program, and if you lead someone there then you got evicted. Ciara had already seen it happen. Someone named Iris had brought back a man when she was drunk. Ben, an underground person who was not the boss but played by the rules, did not even give her a warning. He just chained up the gate leading to the first room, and for many days Iris and her man lingered there. That was okay, Ciara said. Anything before the gate wasn’t strictly part of the underground city. But after a while Iris’s protests included threats to advertise the location of the entry to more people unless they granted her and her new man amnesty. So Ben beat him senseless and warned Iris that if she ever spilled the beans, the underground city would find her.
There were artists and musicians down there, but they weren’t in the majority. There was a band that played sad music with a recorder and two guitars. They played all the time and never stopped. Maybe there were other bands on the other floors — she pointed to her feet — but she didn’t know. She was saving her visits to those floors for when she got tired of the top one. If she practiced restraint, and only ever descended when she had become well and truly fed up, then the underground city might hold surprises forever.
I grovelled. Surely it would be okay to tell them that I had found the underground city independently. Surely if Ciara provided the directions I could arrive separately, and we could lie and say that we had never met. She told me that was impossible. It was against the rules.
Sympathetic, she suggested that I might find another trapdoor somewhere else. But I shouldn’t look on normal roads. I needed to look in strange places where nobody ever went. The city was so big that she thought my chances were high.
We walked in the direction of the city centre. Ciara was happy, but ambivalent to
wards me. I think she felt obliged to catch me up on her new life in the underground city. As far as she was concerned I had carried on in our old groove. I wanted to tell her to be quiet about her secret, because wasn’t she breaking the rules? If I could not live there too, I didn’t want to know anything about it.
She said we could still meet up from time to time. Most people in the underground city slept during the day and lived during the night. They sat around on bean bags and talked about ways to furnish the underground city, and ways to keep it secret. There were some people down there who thought the secret couldn’t be kept for much longer.
I struggled to tolerate Ciara’s ramblings. She was much younger than I, barely an adult.
She told me that the people down there said that the world was changing. Everything was all going to be the same eventually, and then all the world’s secrets would be washed away. There would be no room for unusual feelings, nor any time to reflect. This was because people everywhere were preparing to be annihilated. Cities would be gutted towers, all the better to watch the carnage from. The world was getting hotter, would probably be ruined, and nothing could be done about it. It was because everyone knew deep down that things had gone too far, and that everything in the past was better. And if things couldn’t be better they might as well end. The past was a comfort and a source of sadness. From a distance it could demonstrate that we were once something else. But the past also demonstrated what was no longer possible, even if the past wasn’t what it seemed.
Others in the underground city said that they shouldn’t worry, because by living in an underground city they had found something so new and strange that they needn’t think about how old things were different. And when the city above ground did die, they all would survive beneath it. When the city was bombed or drowned, their underground home would remain. They could crawl out once the bombing was finished and start the city afresh, exactly as they imagined it. Or as some of them imagine it, she said. She didn’t yet know how she would imagine it. She wasn’t sure anyone did.
The Town Page 21
