by S J Naudé
Etienne’s interest in the band scene has been waning. The drum kit has been abandoned in a corner of his room. It would hardly bother him if someone welded it into a piece of sculpture. Henceforth he will dedicate his life to images on the screen. Of that he is certain. How exactly he doesn’t know. How disheartening that he had been cooped up in such a small cage in the distant south – how much there is to catch up with! He thinks of how he would slip his Blake book under his mattress when he heard his father’s footsteps in the corridor, of the smell of glue when he and his father used to build model aeroplanes on summer afternoons.
It is late in the evening; his skylight is wide open. He has recently traded his Sony Walkman for a neighbour’s record collection. He is listening to the Communards album, to Somerville’s insistent falsetto in the cool night sky. Should he ever come across Somerville again, he would swiftly hook his thumb into his belt. But Etienne rarely goes to the Vauxhall Tavern any more. And Somerville hasn’t made an appearance again.
Aodhan no longer seeks Etienne out. Etienne is, in any event, done with those hard hands. How he fits into Aodhan’s schemes is impossible to know. Aodhan with his eyes like the arctic night, with his concrete heart in which hallucinatory plants germinate: new species for a new kind of city.
Chapter 6
Etienne exits the British Film Institute. He blinks against the afternoon light. The river is grey, the afternoon muggy. He has just seen another Tarkovsky film. Stalker. Three characters travel together through a forbidden zone where the rules of physics have been suspended. Their destination is a mysterious room where desires become reality. The takes last for minutes; hardly anything happens. But what techniques of hypnosis were employed? Why does he keep wandering in circles through London’s streets?
He walks and walks. His armpits are itching; streams of sweat are running down his sides. When he approaches Tower Bridge, he smells something sharp. A vinegar factory, according to a sign. He walks down Tanner Street, turns towards the river on Bermondsey Street. He has been here before with Frank, who educated him about the cramped fur factories that had once operated here in backyards and leaking attics. Etienne peers into alleys and dim spaces, vaguely hoping to encounter carcasses and piles of untanned hides.
He crosses Crucifix Lane, enters a tunnel beneath the train viaduct. There is moss on the vaulted Victorian ceiling; the pavement is crusty with pigeon shit. His eyes adapt to the gloom. He stops next to a man sitting on his haunches. In a dark niche in front of them, under a warning sign with a yellow lightning bolt, sits an angel. Etienne widens his eyes. A picture of an angel, in fact, freshly stencilled against a black door. Bright white. Wings folded behind the shoulders, wearing jeans and boots. Buttocks on the pavement, arms around the knees. The angel’s head hangs forward; he has a cigarette between his fingers. There is a bottle of poison in front of him, marked x.
It feels to Etienne as if the city outside the tunnel is ablaze. He switches his gaze from the angel to the man below him. Tree roots trail out of his white vest, creeping over his neck: a tattoo. The man’s intensity is like a blade; he reaches forward, towards the poison.
‘There he is. Cast out. Raped by the head angel, perhaps by God himself. And then thrown to the wolves.’ As the man says this, he gets up abruptly. He is taller than Etienne, and so close that Etienne can smell him. Sweat, with an undertone of cordite. He doesn’t turn around; the tree roots on his neck are right by Etienne’s face. He leans back against Etienne’s chest, lifts his knee. Etienne can see past his shoulder; his Doc Martens boot strikes the angel. The counterforce makes Etienne stagger. The lock breaks, the steel door clangs open, the tunnel echoes.
He pulls Etienne through the door by his wrist. There is a black buzz of electricity in the air. Etienne’s trousers are stripped off in the dark. Something takes hold of Etienne; he forces the man’s shirt over his head. There is the sound of tearing. The chest in front of him is smooth. A cool tongue moves over Etienne’s stubble like wind through burnt grass. In the fumes of bat piss they count each other’s knuckles, feel the tendons in each other’s wrists. Their bodies lock. It is as hot as hell. Etienne couldn’t care less where there are transformers in the dark, or live cables. The volts have entered him already; he is plugged into the city’s grid. His cheek is against the rough brick; he is reduced to muscle and sinew and power. A thick current is flowing right through him, to abattoirs and factories.
Thundering trains cross above them. White flames erupt in the dark. Etienne hears the man’s teeth clatter, wonders whether he has bitten off his tongue. He can’t make out the man’s face. Sweat is glistening on his Adam’s apple.
They disentangle. The man doesn’t bother picking up his shirt. He fastens his belt, walks out. Without a word, his upper body bare. By the time Etienne has come to his senses and stepped out onto the pavement’s pigeon shit, the man has already walked some distance down the tunnel, approaching a half-circle of light. On his back the tattoo is exposed: an uprooted tree, crown branches fanning out across the lower back. On the middle back, a knotty trunk. Roots grow over defiant shoulder blades, and up his neck.
The man leaves the tunnel; the tree dissolves in light. Etienne looks down at himself: he is standing stark naked there on the pavement. He is surprised that no bark is clinging to him. His hands are trembling. He smells of the sweat of a stranger.
He involuntarily thinks of his father’s study, of the smell of stale pipe smoke.
Six weeks earlier, just after Etienne had started working his way voraciously through the catalogue of European auteur films, like a caterpillar, he encountered Brent on a pavement in Soho. After a back-and-forth of a few polite questions, Brent’s face became solemn. ‘The country is burning, you know. It’s time to tighten the screws. We could make the regime falter. We have the ears of everyone who counts.’ He spoke about Matthew Goniwe and the other Cradock leaders, of the peace conferences in South Africa.
‘Are you talking about Thatcher’s ears?’
Capillaries shone through the skin over Brent’s temples. ‘Well . . . everyone except Thatcher and co. The opposition, in fact.’ He leaned forward. The light was catching fine strawberry-blond hair on his upper cheeks. ‘There’s so much to do. Protest actions to organise. Posters to distribute. All small contributions will—’
‘I’m going to film school.’ Etienne was surprised. The realisation that this was exactly what he should do had coincided with his utterance. ‘I don’t have the time.’
‘That’s a first, that excuse.’ Brent turned his face away from the sun. He rattled off a list of names, a moment of silence between each. ‘All in detention in South Africa. Conscientious objectors. Here we are, safely ensconced in London. Don’t you feel any sort of responsibility?’ His freckles disappeared in a flush of indignation.
Etienne just kept shaking his head slowly. Brent mumbled something about ‘bigger issues’ and walked away.
If this guy had been a real player, Etienne thought, he might have been more amenable. Someone with authority, who was proposing something spectacular. Something that required imagination, and that would capture Etienne’s. An offer, for instance, to let him travel to the Soviet Union for revolutionary training. Or to coach him in the art of disguise. To smuggle him to South Africa to blow up pylons and train tracks. Or to let him pose as the prodigal son who ostensibly returns chastened, but in truth intends to extract information from his father. And who then plants a bomb in the boardrooms of companies who are in cahoots with the regime. Or even better: an assassination. Etienne who shoots one of his father’s senior politician friends in the forehead in his parents’ lounge. Or slips an explosive device in aforementioned politician’s briefcase, thus succeeding in blowing up the entire cabinet. Or what about a scheme entailing that Etienne must prove his loyalty by strangling his own father in his bed? A lightweight, our Brent, an amateur. Didn’t even attempt to address Etienne as ‘comrade’.
Hasn’t done any research about Etienne’s family connections. No strategy, no vision. An utter lack of dramatic instinct.
Anyway, Brent and his judgements were immaterial to him. With absolute clarity he now knew: his calling had always been to make films.
He went knocking on cosawr’s door again. When he had first visited, Ben had offered help: ‘We have contacts in many spheres. Institutions here are very receptive to apartheid exiles.’ Ben received him hospitably again this time, updated him on the progress of his asylum application. Etienne explained his film-school plans, enquired about scholarships. Ben undertook to take the matter further, sent him away with a new copy of Resister. Mindful of his earlier reception at Miss Jackson’s, Etienne didn’t have much hope.
The meeting in the tunnel stokes turmoil in Etienne’s chest. His ears are now attuned to the city’s electrical hum, and the silence of all things subterranean. The things Frank would elaborate on: tunnels, sewage canals, crypts. Abandoned Tube stations and catacombs with their stacks of bones. Sweat trickles down his spine when he thinks of the electrical substation in the tunnel; blood pulses in his lower abdomen. He has to find him, the man with the tree on his back. But how?
Every afternoon he returns to the tunnel, waiting at the angel’s grimy shrine. People walk by, start when they notice Etienne and the angel. The tattoo-man doesn’t make an appearance. Etienne tests the door. The destroyed lock has been replaced. He has to find a way in. He prods the angel with his foot. Gingerly, to start with – perhaps there is a secret unlocking mechanism. He pushes with a finger on the x of the flask of poison, places his palm on the largest wing feather. He stands back, kicks the angel in the head. Nothing. He has been excommunicated, expelled from the oily nether-city of which the tattoo-man is surely the mayor and the angel the gatekeeper. Pedestrians gather behind him, watch him kick and push. His soles are marking the white wings, his fingers dirtying the poison flask. The angel isn’t budging.
A clue comes sooner than Etienne had expected. Late one night he is sitting in No. 37, on one of the half-rotten velvet sofas. There is a fire in the hearth; drizzle is sifting through the roof. Hilde and Glenda are sitting in the firelight, each with a beer. Etienne joins them. Hilde is wearing a batik dress that makes her upper body look even longer, her shoulders even warier. She is telling Glenda about southern Germany’s lost oak forests, of the last bison being shot there in the 1920s. She doesn’t seem to mind that Etienne is listening. She is talking about a centuries-old hunting lodge near her parents’ Bavarian village. Once it was in the middle of a forest, she says. Now it is crumbling in the yard of a factory. She turns to Etienne. ‘I haven’t been back to Germany in years. I want to visit my parents. But I’m afraid that I’d lose my home. That I’d find, upon my return, that the Square has been razed to the ground. Everything under the rubble . . .’ She looks down at her flat leather sandals.
‘That’s absurd,’ Glenda says, wiping beer from her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘They’ll never bury me.’ She hits her own chest with her palm. ‘I’ll fight until my last breath. That much you know.’ Glenda has ginger hair. Short sides, curls piled on top.
Hilde tells how she and a childhood friend used to play around the old hunting lodge. They would dig up bones and deer horns. She still has dreams about the interior of the lodge. They had wanted to peer inside, hoping to find stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. But the windows were too high. ‘The smell of old wood is what I miss. My southern German heart is really made of oak . . .’ She looks into the flames. ‘And I’m not the only one. I know of a German in London who has an oak tree tattooed on his b—’
Etienne sits forward; the flames in the hearth are burning high. ‘Who?’ His voice is urgent. ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know him well . . .’ Hilde says hesitantly. She frowns.
Etienne’s heart is beating wildly. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘I’ve met him myself . . . I want to – have to – get in touch with him.’
‘I’ve only seen him once, at a squat party. Somebody challenged him to strip off his shirt. And then a massive oak tree appeared . . .’
‘Where is he?’
‘All I could think was: I too want such a tree on my b—’
‘Where is he? What’s his name?’
Glenda puts down her beer. Hilde’s voice is cool. ‘That I don’t recall. He’s a child nurse. That’s all he told me. At St Thomas Hospital, I think.’
The women get up. Etienne is left behind, sweating in the glow. Three half-empty beers are standing on the little table.
For three days in a row, Etienne has waited outside St Thomas. For hours on end each time. On the first day he asked for a list of paediatric nurses at the hospital reception. He was refused. Today he attempts to enter the paediatric section. A nurse stops him, wants to know where he is going. ‘I’m from Finland. I’m trying to find a long-lost friend.’ She frowns. Only family members of patients are allowed in, she explains over her reading glasses. She looks as if she is on the verge of calling hospital security. Or the police. He retreats, resumes his waiting outside. He looks at the parliament building opposite the river, at the water accelerating around bridge pillars. The currents are fatal, Frank once told him; they will suck you into the mud. He went on to explain the history of river crossings, ferrymen and bridges.
It suddenly occurs to Etienne that the hospital may have different exits. At that very moment the German tattoo-man walks out the main entrance. He immediately sees Etienne, casually walks up to him, takes his hand and feels every knuckle. Etienne feels his knobbly knuckles too. One by one. They start walking.
‘I’m Axel.’
‘I’m Etienne.’
There are fine hairs on the tops of Axel’s fingers. Etienne sniffs the air, greedy for a hint of sweat. He looks surreptitiously at the green uniform hiding the tattooed tree. An antiseptic smell rises from the gown, or that of burnt skin. Etienne wants to press his face in the gown. He remembers the armpits, the kneecaps, the spine like a snake skeleton. Saliva tasting of soot and electricity.
Axel doesn’t ask how Etienne has managed to find him. While they are walking, Etienne extends his hand, feels Axel’s pulse. Unlike his own, it is beating strongly and steadily. His heart is not made of wood.
If it is so easy to find Axel, Etienne thinks, nothing can ever escape him again.
A mid-August afternoon. When he returns to his room, two letters await him. One is from the Home Office: asylum has been granted. He opens the other envelope: cosawr has managed to arrange a scholarship for him! Also, an exception has been made for late admission to the London Film School. A Labour Party mp had personally taken up the matter with the film school. Etienne will be starting his studies in barely a month’s time.
He takes the Underground to Covent Garden, heads to the film school. The soot-black buildings are keeping him out for now, but soon his northern life will start properly. His feet barely touch the ground. He is travelling at the speed of light.
In his room, again, there are two envelopes: his mother’s parallel letters. He opens only one. Do you have proper accommodation? Are you earning something to live off? Why am I not hearing from you?
He lies down on his futon, thinking of the face-brick walls and steel windows of his parents’ home, the swimming pool with its blue mosaic tiles, the German Shepherd in its cage. The slate-tiled veranda, the smell of freshly mown grass. Of himself practising piano in the heat. His father never openly disapproved of the piano playing, but wasn’t interested either. After Etienne had completed his last music exam, he never touched the keys again. For months he pleaded with his mother for drums. Then she bought him a set. She had asked his father for money to buy a new lounge set, chose a cheaper set and spent what was left on a drum kit. This is it, his father decided a month later: the drums had to go. Only a swift glance from Etienne was required for his mother to intervene. Etienne never said a word.
His mother had to fit in her arguments quickly before she was interrupted by her husband. The drums stayed. In the corner of his bedroom, like a war monument.
Etienne only resisted his father once. He was fifteen or sixteen. A Sunday afternoon. Etienne had thought his parents were asleep and was too engrossed in his Blake pictures to hear his father in the corridor. Before he knew it, his father was in the room and grabbed the book. With one hand, so that the spine bent the wrong way. ‘And what is this?’
Etienne grabbed the book back. ‘Give it back, it isn’t yours!’ His father reprimanded him for his cheeky tone. Etienne put the book down on the bedside table, picked up a school textbook. He pulled up his knees and pretended to be studying, keeping a furtive eye on his father. His father retired to the corner where the model war planes that they had built together were hanging from the ceiling. His breath made the planes move; his shoulders bumped against them. The bombers started sweeping in a chaotic formation, making his father duck. Etienne kept his nose in his textbook. His father approached the bed, moved the Blake book so that the edge neatly lined up with the bedside table’s. His fingers momentarily rested on the cover. Then he walked out into the corridor.
