by Tom Vowler
Electra left the flat before he woke; hopefully the heat or a need for food drove her out so early, and not another capitulation. As far as he knows she’s been clean for a month; still some way short of his own effort, but a start all the same. He’d stuck with her each time she caved in to the tyranny of cravings, every setback hardening his resolve. Strangely, he found withdrawal, if not easy, then manageable once those first hellish days were negotiated, although he knows such dependence reaches into the marrow and never entirely recedes.
Looking around he estimates a single carload will do: clothes, scores of tools, a bureau that had been his grandfather’s. Where uncertainty exists over ownership, or they acquired something together, he will leave it behind, an act born of guilt or kindness, he is unsure. Her absence this morning has given him the option of cowardice, his farewell scrawled rather than spoken. The kind of letter you write when the mix becomes one part love, two parts loathing. Perhaps she already senses his departure and has chosen not to witness it, preferring a silent cleaving.
He downs the water, rolls the glass across his forehead. Already the floor pulses to the music below, incessant bass that will reach deep into the weekend. He turns the radio on, a politician and scientist blaming each other, arguing about the figures, the tipping point. Outside the city groans and withers and looks skyward for relief.
She struck him last night. Something between a slap and a punch to the side of the head.
‘It’s the heat,’ she said later, stroking the mark to his face. ‘We need to get out of this place.’
Even then, despite what the drug had taken from her, he thought her beautiful, hoped some essence of it might be salvaged, nightfall affording sufficient respite. But when sleep came it brought only images of the baby.
*
He thinks about washing up last night’s plates. It’s an exaggeration to term the flat squalid, but it has long ceased being homely, their upkeep sufficient only for a life of sorts. After getting clean he found work at a scrapyard, welding skips four days a week, cash in hand. The men there, perhaps mindful of a rapid turnover, keep to themselves, sharing nothing but muted cigarette breaks with him. The only ones to converse are the Romanians, eager to practise newly-learnt phrases on him or to discuss the politics of their country. From what he understands, more than anything they miss a food called sarmale, a type of stuffed cabbage best enjoyed with smoked meat and sour cream. That and țuică, a strong spirit made from plums and sold in markets or by the roadside in unmarked bottles. The youngest showed him a family photo once, wife and newborn, told him he was welcome to visit anytime he was in Eastern Europe. When your own country is underwater, he half joked.
Since the latest heatwave, the owner of the yard allows them to start at 5am – it’s bad for business having workers die – and they finish around midday, whereupon he comes home and collapses half-dead in a cold shower, his body brutalised yet purged some more. Electra would still be in bed, her logic that shorter days narrow temptation’s window. When she did get up, a frisson of energy flashed through her and she’d reel off extravagant plans for their escape, to live in the country, clean and healthy, to start over. They would keep hens, make ginger beer.
‘Everyone should be able to see the horizon,’ she liked to say. ‘Everyone should hear birdsong.’
Such manic bouts burned themselves out by evening, replaced with uneasy silence, with sleepless nights where she’d wail and thrash and spit and blame him for their purgatory. It was true he introduced her to heroin, a week or so after they met, when smoking it had been enough.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he’d whisper, trying to hold her, and she’d tell him to say something that wasn’t a lie.
In the beginning, when their bodies took hungrily from each other, her tongue hot in his mouth, his dreams laced with her, it never occurred to him to keep something back, to shore up that part of the self too brittle to expose.
He watches the cars below snarl and stammer nowhere, white light blazing off their roofs, dazzling the gods. Sirens start up to the south, like dogs prompting one another. Last week the young Romanian was sent home with suspected retina burn, a weld flash from someone’s gun as he removed his helmet prematurely. They knew not to go to the hospital, but to bathe the eyes in milk or use a saline solution until someone came round, a doctor of sorts. Two days off, they were allowed, unpaid, and if a fuss was made, someone else, not a doctor of sorts, came round. The pain, he knew from his days as an apprentice, would arrive in the night, like hot sand rubbed hard into the cornea. You might as well stare at the sun.
He makes a strong coffee and listens to the couple next door argue. The side of his face still smarts a little, a hotness overlying the ambient heat. He never retaliated, hadn’t even raised his voice when she continued using. It was the perfect reason to stop, of course, for only the most selfish and cruel junkie continued poisoning a body that encased another.
He rolls a cigarette, listens to the soft sizzle as he draws on it. There’ll be financial contrails to his leaving, some of which he hopes the envelope of cash will remedy. He’ll pay the rent for a month or two, until she sorts something.
He fills a couple of bin sacks with clothes, sweating with the exertion. At the back of a drawer he finds a toddler’s bodysuit, neatly folded with tags intact. A gift from a neighbour, it escaped Electra’s cull when, unable to give everything up, he’d hidden it there. He brings the fabric to his face, inhales its scent, but it’s just his own. He’ll visit the hospital later. There’s a memorial garden in the grounds, an entire plot devoted to the premature, where they’d taken flowers a couple of times soon after and again on the anniversary, until even this lapsed to neglect.
When you befriend heroin, you begin a slow and steady walk towards a rotating buzz saw. Whether or not you can deviate from this trail long enough to escape its gravitational pull depends on several factors: your genes and personality; the number of dopamine receptors in your brain; the drug’s availability and your exposure to those who use it; the presence of a mental disorder; physical or sexual abuse suffered early in life. Addiction to opiates is rarely immediate; numerous tributaries offer themselves as exit routes but their number diminishes with each hit. Bizarrely, most people will experience heroin at some point in their lives, usually in the moments before death, when it’s administered as morphine to ease the passage. Frequent users are forced to search for novel routes to the bloodstream as veins collapse. Alternating sites can prevent this, moving from inside the elbow, down the forearm – avoiding arteries, making sure vessels don’t have a pulse – into the back of the hand or the palm if the pain can be tolerated, into the fingers. Stomach, groin, thigh, calf and feet are all feasible. Neck, breasts, face and genitalia all carry increased risk but offer a last resort when you’ve spent hours stabbing away at flesh. During his most prolific period as a junkie, he knew someone who once injected into her eye.
‘Stay squeamish,’ was her advice.
He places his tools in a plastic crate taken from the yard, leaving spares of those duplicated, enough for her to carry out rudimentary tasks. The landlord works on the principle of not bothering you if you didn’t bother him, so tenants tended to make their own maintenance arrangements.
He will miss the flat, its allusion to a status of sorts. Thirty-five. Halfway along life’s path and almost nothing to show. What had been his lot before it was reduced to suspended animation? Memories surface when he allows: helping his brother build the landscaping business; being rubbish in goal and laughing in the pub afterwards. Of everything it laid claim to, perhaps friendship was the keenest loss.
From the kitchen he hears the flat door open and close. He calls out her name, but by the time he emerges to explain the bin sacks, she has shut herself in the bedroom. Perhaps the shoplifting has resumed, the impulse to take what was not hers gaining new purchase. It occurs to him just to leave, the words he will utter gratuitous, the worst cliché. Why wound each other further? Better to ret
ain a semblance of respect.
Her crying sounds theatrical, strident bursts that are more felt than heard. He finds her crouched beside the bed, the noise – not hers, he now sees – settling to a steady whimper, as if the heat forbade such effort. The baby’s face radiates from a circled opening in the towel as Electra rocks it back and forth in an easy cadence. Small runnels form above its nose in a half-frown, its eyes blinking before fixing on nothing in particular. The thrum of music from below, coupled with the motion, appears to soothe the child, its bawling soon receding to nothing. Electra reconfigures the towel in order to place a finger in the baby’s hand, which after a second or two it grips.
So this is a mirage, he thinks – the sun orchestrating some divine revenge, a punishment befitting their crime. A glimpse at the unrealised. He says her name but she won’t look at him.
‘What have you done?’
She raises a hand to indicate the need for quiet, her febrile smile traversed by a single tear, her forearm blazed with the blistered track-marks that resemble one of the great constellations. He kneels down, careful not to get too close.
‘Electra, where did you take it from?’
She cradles the bundle, humming softly now, his presence incidental. Leaning back he draws the curtain to keep the sun from them, the baby threatening to cry at the noise, before attending again to Electra’s serenade. If that mockingbird won’t sing . . .
He speaks more softly this time, placing a hand on her leg.
‘We have to return it. I can take it back.’
She ignores him so he tries a different approach.
‘It’s too hot in here.’
He holds his arms out and she shifts back like some wild and frightened thing, tightening her grip. If there is any separating the two of them, it will not, he realises, happen without violence.
He supposes the child is a day or two old, its eyes in awe of each new sensation, the beginnings of a smile forming, its new world settled enough now to be of comfort. It won’t always be this hot, he wants to announce, keen to apologise for the previous generation’s decadence. Watching this absurd version of motherhood play out he allows a fantasy to form, one where such unfathomable gifts go unquestioned. Perhaps the world is reordered now; perhaps things like this happen.
He stands and Electra shoots him a look, eyes aflame in maternal defiance.
‘It needs something to drink,’ he says. ‘Some milk or water.’
His apparent collusion relaxes her a little.
‘What shall we call her?’ Electra says.
In the kitchen he can hear more sirens and imagines the panic, the fretful scramble, wonders how someone can be so careless. This cigarette is harder to roll, his hands atremble, his body remembering a more potent remedy, one that begins in the poppy fields of Afghanistan and ends in such lavish misery. It was never really about the rush for him, the fabled fire that tore through his veins in euphoric rampage. More it was the sense of serenity, of being held, as if by a parent or lover, warm and cosseted, the day kept just enough at bay.
He looks out across the scorched city and thinks about the things people live for, the poison and love they depend on. He thinks about the young Romanian, how he’ll keep his helmet on those extra few seconds now if he wants to see his child again. And he thinks about the call he will soon make, that will lure the sirens to them, that will make her hate him even more, perhaps forever. He will give her a few more minutes, though; he owes her that.
The Grandmaster of Gaza
He watches her contemplate the hole she’s dug for herself, her impetuosity the prelude to another losing position. Morning sun dances on the ebony and boxwood pieces, a set carved in this room by her grandfather, his father, during the first intifada. It is flawless except for the black king’s absent finial, lost to a falling section of wall when a tank shell struck the house across the street. He should repair it, find a wood that matches, though he is no artisan, lacking his father’s elan for such matters. For now the piece’s imperfection acts as a harbinger of white’s early advantage, something his daughter is often profligate with.
Yasmeen retreats the bishop, huffs at the realisation her attack was ill-conceived.
‘You have to anticipate all the outcomes,’ he says. ‘Don’t be so easily lured by weakness.’
She pretends it is of little consequence, that another opening will present itself, optimism inherited from her mother. With practice she could be very good, perhaps as strong as her grandfather, who regularly beat the grandmasters of Europe and America in epic correspondence games. At the height of his prowess, there were invitations to tournaments and exhibitions around the world, but even when permission was granted for him to travel, he chose to stay, lauding his beloved city, the sea breeze that billowed in at night, the fresh tuna fishermen barbecued on the beach.
‘Why would I leave?’ he’d say.
They called his father the Grandmaster of Gaza, though he achieved no such rank officially, his status more one of quiet legend. It was said that by the age of six he could beat everyone at his school, and, a few years later, everyone this side of Tal al-Hawa. As worthy opponents became harder to find, he was enticed to the West Bank, to play in the cafés and marketplaces of Ramallah and Jenin, where wizened men four times his age and twice his size would marvel at the bravura of his gambits, the apparent recklessness of his sacrifices. He had no formal instruction, the game learned by watching others play at family gatherings, the house on Sundays a place of great theatre and revelry. When a game between uncles ended in a draw, he would often announce how one of them could have triumphed if only they’d persevered, demonstrating the sequence of moves to a mesmerised audience. Aged 12 he was invited to play a visiting Hungarian master, a series of games witnessed by half of Palestine, the legend went. Two defeats and a draw later, the man returned to Budapest broken and, it was said, never to play again.
His father’s particular strength, his party piece, was playing multiple boards simultaneously, once going unbeaten against a circle of 16 players, drawing only four games. Or he would challenge the local champion blindfolded, the moves communicated to him verbally by an arbiter, his father playing to the crowd, pretending he’d lost track of the position before triumphing. His style, at a time when conservatism had come to dominate, was unswervingly aggressive, often sacrificing his queen in order to secure an outrageous win several moves later. He played quickly whether games were time controlled or not, and became renowned for his ‘announced victories’, remarking to an incredulous opponent, ‘mate in five’, artifice that solicited both admirers and enemies.
Yasmeen is bored now, the days without school long and empty. It is one thing to have an irritable teenager skulk about the house during evenings and weekends, quite another from dawn to dusk. He will send her to buy bird food later. They have been told the classrooms are too badly damaged to open for the new term, and so, in-between their games of chess, he gives her lessons at the kitchen table, indulging his daughter’s appetite for knowledge. When the power is on – six hours a day, if they are lucky – he uses the computer given to them by a fan of his father’s, watching British wildlife documentaries, a little of which he understands. Or he encourages her to write an essay on one of the novels she read last term, sometimes a story of her own. Science is her passion, but he knows little of how it’s taught, and in moments of levity Yasmeen laughs at his clumsy attempts to do so. He hopes she will become a doctor, though talk of such is rare these days; it is hard to look too far ahead while death walks so brazenly among them. She will be offered counselling when the school finally reopens, as all children are, to deal with the trauma of the last fifty days, to come to terms with it. She will refuse.
He savours the last of his morning coffee. Warm air brings on it the sound of falafel crackling in the fryer run by the old man at the end of the street. It is a strange time, once the euphoria of a ceasefire recedes, the realisation it will take years, a decade perhaps, just to
see the city returned to how it was in June. What has changed for the better, people ask, for surely this cannot have been for nothing. It will be different this time, goes the old lie. Rubbish collections stopped more than a month ago and have yet to resume, scores of feral cats and dogs amassing at the piles of detritus. Redolent of some medieval tableau, donkey carts have been deployed to collect what they can. Two weeks ago the pumping stations, bereft of fuel, stopped working and raw sewage now seeps into the streets, the sludge drawing throngs of flies. They say it will find a way into the water supply soon.
Gazans adapt, though; he sees it everywhere. One of their neighbours runs a car on spent cooking oil, the waft of falafel and fries lingering in its wake. Others cram four at a time in the front seat of a taxi to get to work, the scene faintly comic. During the last war, when a shell killed the zoo’s only zebra, the owner’s son bought a white donkey, secured tape down its flanks and painted the gaps with black hair dye, the result a small zebra that brays. You make the best of things.
It was the Russians his father truly admired, though it was unclear whether he saw any of the greats play, his veneration of them likely coming from games he studied. Their influence even contributed to his most enduring affectation when playing, a subtle yet damning flourish that saw him grind a piece into the board after advancing it, unsettling the most stoic of opponents. As a child he would watch his father play out endless positions alone, studying alternative paths a game could have taken, scrutinising the pieces for hours as if they held the code to life. Notation to every game was documented with deliberate strokes of a fountain pen in his leather-bound journal, its pages handmade from the finest Italian paper, the cover held together by a burnished copper clasp. He would listen to coverage of high profile matches unfolding on the other side of the world, playing out the game himself as moves stole through on an old valve radio, the air rich with the odour of hot dust.
