by Tim Ewins
The small quail who occupied the old, unused car engine, did so for the next year and thought she was happy. From the engine and the street outside she did not see any trees or any squirrels. She did not see any dogs either. The noise allowed her to not think about her eggs, and the darkness felt a million miles away (although it was in fact less than one) from the natural light of St. Djurgården. But every evening, when the noise stopped, and the ringing sound had died, there was something in the back of the small quail’s thoughts that just wouldn’t go away. The old, unused car engine miles away from her old home felt good. Not thinking felt good. But the small thought that occupied her mind knew that it wasn’t right.
* * *
Manjan made no effort in packing his own boxes. There was nothing he cared about keeping and he didn’t know where he would be taking them. He had a flight booked back to England but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know anyone there any more and the boxes wouldn’t be able to fit on a plane. But the flat needed to be cleared in two days so Manjan put everything haphazardly into boxes. He didn’t label the boxes but he could have labelled them all ‘Jan’ because everything he owned made him think of her.
Late that night Manjan drank and chewed some old paan he’d found in one of his old travelling bags. It didn’t taste good but he didn’t care. After spitting it onto the living room floor and putting more into his mouth, he passed out.
The next morning he woke up alone. He rubbed his eyes, got dressed, walked past the newly packed boxes and out of the door.
Down at the Port, Manjan saw that three of the large vessels had people on them preparing to set out to sea, and he waited. When no one was looking he stepped onto the middle vessel, hid in a storage room and waited to find out where he was going.
‘When fate next decides,’ he said to himself, as he felt the ground beneath him move with the waves. Once again, an unknown ship sent Manjan into the world, this time completely alone and with nowhere to return.
Part 5
31
A mosquito
Goa, India. 2016.
The night was quiet again, if not peaceful. The thudding had stopped but it had been replaced by a new sound.
Tapping.
The sound was frantic and was presumably intended to be rhythmic, but it didn’t quite hit the mark. If it was broken down into bars, each bar would last a different length of time and include a different amount of taps. Shakey’s head nodding certainly implied there was supposed to be one, but there was no pattern.
‘Quiet now, isn’t it?’ Manjan observed through gritted teeth. Shakey continued to beat out not-a-rhythm on his thighs with his hands and smiled an insanely wide smile in agreement, completely oblivious to the pretext in Manjan’s tone.
The exclusion of alcohol from Shakey’s last drink had meant that his bucket had been filled with caffeinated stimulant. Without the depressant to level it out, Shakey was, in his own words, buzzing off his tits.
‘It’s probably the vodka,’ he said, staccato, turning his head towards Manjan, and then back away from Manjan in the same short sentence.
Manjan agreed that it was probably the vodka out loud, but he was well aware that a bucket of Red Bull may not have been his best decision of the night.
‘Where do you think,’ Manjan started, before waiting for Shakey to jolt his head back towards him, ‘the music – if you can call that music – has gone?’ Shakey continued to bob his head in time to the music that wasn’t there and tap his thighs to create a noise that no one in their right mind could call music. ‘Every night the music stops at eleven. I can last longer than eleven.’
Shakey laughed, not unlike the Count from Sesame Street, but a little more gormless. He reached down to the sand on his left where he’d left his flyers.
‘Would you say it’s silent?’ he asked, his insanely wide smile getting insanely wider.
‘Well no, I wouldn’t say...’ Manjan started, but Shakey hadn’t finished.
‘Silent disco tonight, old-timer?’ he asked, handing Manjan a flyer.
* * *
It is a curious thing when a vest turns into a moustache overnight. Most moustaches will have spent a couple of months as a vest in a previous existence but there is normally a transition period of around forty years before they become a moustache. The vest would usually meet another vest on a beach in the ‘spiritual home’ (initially attracted to the neon) and then re-meet up after their flights in their ‘actual home’. Here, they realise that the less vest-y version of the vest they met is actually quite nice. It’s more than a little convenient that vests almost always mate with a vest from the same ‘actual home’ as them.
They normally rent a flat, become something useful like doctors, builders or teachers, buy a house and have children. When their children are older they re-visit the spiritual home only to see that it’s been taken over by new vests. They mumble to themselves. I don’t think I need to tell you what they mumble…
At this point you can be sure that the former vest has become a moustache.
The morning that Manjan stepped onto that ship down at the Swedish port and hid in the storage room was the morning that he truly became a moustache. He didn’t know how long he was in the storage room because it didn’t have any windows, but it was clearly rarely used as it didn’t seem to store anything. On the deck above him he could hear what sounded like hundreds of people stomping on the wooden floor, laughing and presumably dancing.
In the dark, Manjan sat, holding onto his knees with his hands, arms folded. He planned to wait until the rocking had stopped and the noise had died down before he would disembark quietly to see where he was. His mood was in stark contrast to the jubilee above him. He didn’t care where he ended up, but wherever it was, he knew it wouldn’t be far enough away from his own life. A mosquito landed on his top lip and he hit himself in the face.
‘Poxy...’ he started, but then stopped and held onto his knees again. A glass was smashed on the wood above his head, much to the party goers’ delight. Manjan’s moody face remained the same. By himself, the wait felt long, and was made longer by the fact that he didn’t know where he was waiting to go or how long it would take to get there. After an hour or so, another glass was smashed and again there was a cheer. But then the cheer turned into two muffled men’s voices seemingly having an argument with each other. The other voices hushed as a high-pitched buzzing sound landed once again on Manjan’s top lip. Again, Manjan hit himself in the face, saving himself from being bitten.
He mumbled so far under his breath that no one would know that he was saying ‘poxy’ again. He looked around the room for his blood-sucking companion but couldn’t see it.
Rolling onto his side and behind a large box, Manjan shut his eyes. It was cold and there was nothing in the storage room he could use to cover himself, so he began to shiver. Every now and again he could hear the high-pitched buzz coming from different places in the room. Looking for one mosquito would be pointless, there were clearly a family of them.
‘I could’ve killed him,’ a man shouted at another man, bursting into the room and holding his nose with a handful of blood. That’s all I’ll tell you about what this particular man said during his time in the storage room, as the language he used was indecent and it made it almost impossible to follow his train of thought, but let’s just say he probably couldn’t have killed the man who’d bloodied his nose.
Frozen to the spot, Manjan listened, hoping to get an idea of where they were going, but to no avail. While the man who said he could but definitely didn’t kill another man washed his face, Manjan silently watched a tiny mosquito buzz around his face and then land gently on his top lip.
When the only red that remained on the man’s face was from anger rather than blood, he waved his hand dismissively and stated that ‘he wasn’t worth it anyway’ before opening the door to leave. Seconds before the door close
d and Manjan would be free to hit himself in the face, the mosquito dug the forty-seven sharp edges of its mouth deep into his upper lip.
‘Poxy mosquito,’ he shouted, thankfully now out of earshot of the angry man.
Now, I don’t know whether there was something in that mosquito’s bite that stimulated hair growth, or whether the bite was simply the last straw for Manjan, but within a few hours he had grown wispy fluff either side of his lips. The next day the stubble under his nose was stronger than that on his chin, and by the end of the week he was sporting a full and flowing moustache.
* * *
Manjan scoffed, because he was by now a fully-fledged moustache and it was in his nature to do so, but he was lying when he told Shakey that he had no interest whatsoever in going to the silent disco. His story had clearly made Shakey a little sad and he was finding it difficult to watch the juxtaposition of Shakey’s energetic thigh tapping and sad eyes (that retained their hint of crazy even in this state).
‘You say you want me to travel beyond this beach,’ Shakey started, in the complete belief that he was about to blow Manjan’s mind with his wisdom, ‘so I say to you, you should travel beyond this beach’. He emphasised the words ‘this’ and ‘beach’ to imply that they meant much more than they actually did.
‘Come with me, man, broaden your mind, see something you’ve never seen before.’ Shakey did want Manjan to come with him, but it wasn’t so that Manjan could broaden his mind by way of a silent disco. He wasn’t sure if the girl from the boat would be there, and if she was, he wanted her to see him talking to an older gentleman. That would surely prove to her that Shakey is a worldly traveller, and then she’ll want to kiss him. It’s basic logic.
‘Will it be silent?’ Manjan asked, and Shakey nodded.
‘Will you stop tapping your thigh?’ Manjan asked, and Shakey looked down at his legs, surprised to see that he was tapping his thigh, and nodded.
‘Will you stop tapping your thigh now?’ Manjan asked, and Shakey nodded. There was silence.
‘Then I’ll come to the silent disco.’
32
An otter
Where Manjan next shored. 1978.
The ship was still and most of the noise had died down. The party goers had disembarked (none of them in a straight line) and Manjan was about to find out where his new life would be – not that he cared particularly.
He could hear someone mopping the deck above him where the glasses had been smashed but he wasn’t too worried about one person seeing him; he had become quite good at talking himself out of situations like this. Maybe the person mopping could tell him where they were. Again, not that he cared particularly.
The mopper did not tell Manjan where they were. Instead he cast a glance over at Manjan, assumed he was a drunk lost member of the previous party, waved and continued mopping.
Manjan looked out across the land. It was a lush green with patches of yellow where leaves had been raked into piles. The sea was restful (much to the displeasure of one otter trying to play in waves that weren’t there) and there were no other ships in sight. If Manjan had given his surroundings any thought at all he would have concluded that his new home was peaceful and beautiful. But he didn’t, so he didn’t.
He stepped off the ship, walked up a grassy bank and along a sea wall, which was long enough to have no visible end. Eventually, he would come across somewhere to live.
‘Where have you come from?’ asked a frail old lady with thinning grey hair. Manjan had been walking aimlessly for some time (although he didn’t know how long, and nor did he care). The lady was sitting outside the only house Manjan had seen since disembarking from the party ship. Manjan pointed back behind him.
‘Sweden,’ he replied.
The old lady nodded and sipped from a glass of juice through a straw. ‘And where are you going?’ she asked in perfect, if heavily accented English. Manjan recognised the accent and tried to put his finger on where he was.
‘That depends,’ he answered, walking up to the faded blue-painted house and leaning on the fence. ‘It depends on where I am?’ The lady nodded but didn’t seem to notice the question mark implied in Manjan’s intonation.
She looked quite ill and Manjan noticed that her skin went paler as she sucked on her straw, making that slurping sound that straws make when a drink is nearing its end.
‘Can I have some tea?’ she called faintly behind her, indicating that she wasn’t alone.
A rattle came from the kitchen and then something dropped on the floor.
‘Aye, course you can, Ebba,’ came a voice from inside the house. Manjan was still trying to put his finger on the accent when the voice from inside walked through the door with two cups of tea. There was a stunned silence until the voice (now outside) spoke again.
‘Hi, lad,’ Manjan repeated the same words back to Hylad.
* * *
Ebba had been born in Sweden in 1912 and had enjoyed a happy childhood. Her parents not only stayed married but also remained very much in love, and Ebba looked up to them for that very reason. She used to pretend to be her mor and one of her friends would play her far. They would look after Ebba’s only doll and push it around in the pram that Ebba’s mor used to push her around in.
When Ebba reached her teenage years, she started finding life a little harder. She’d finished attending an all-girls school where she’d met Olivia, a stunningly attractive girl who was shy but with whom Ebba had managed to start a secret romantic relationship.
Romantic relationships were not allowed at Ebba and Olivia’s school, but a shortage of teachers made it relatively easy, and of course they never really considered that they were doing anything wrong. It was only after Ebba had finished school that her parents noticed her and Olivia spending so much of their free time together. That’s when they started introducing Ebba to a long line of strange boys.
She became good friends with two of the boys but it wasn’t enough for her parents. They were worried about her, although they wouldn’t tell her why.
A year later Olivia’s parents (who hadn’t been as subtle as Ebba’s) moved Olivia to Sollefteå, a small riverside town north from where she had grown up. It had taken Olivia two whole days on a train to get there – one day crying, one day dehydrated. She moved in with a distant relative whom she had never met, and found out in her first month in her new home that her parents considered her to be mentally ill (as did her relative).
Eventually, after several years of ‘playing up’, Ebba married one of her friends (if this story was about Ebba’s husband, I would tell you about how he was madly in love with Ebba, but it isn’t about him, so I won’t). Once a year she would travel up to Stockholm ‘with work’ for a week and Olivia would travel down to Stockholm at the same time on holiday. For one week every year, Ebba and Olivia would re-discover that they were still very much in love, and that Olivia was not yet cured of her ‘mental illness’.
When Ebba was thirty-two, the Government Offices of Sweden decriminalised same-sex relationships, Ebba told her husband about Oliva, and they separated. She bought a small house, painted it blue, and the next time she was in Stockholm, she invited Olivia to come and live with her (if this story was about Ebba’s husband, I would tell you about the years he spent longing to be with Ebba after they separated, how he developed a drinking habit and how he sobered up after meeting and rescuing a stray dog, but it isn’t about him, so I won’t).
Shy Olivia turned down Ebba’s offer to live with her, so Ebba lived alone in her small blue house, once a year visiting Stockholm. She would have been happy in the house if it wasn’t for those weeks in Stockholm. In Stockholm Ebba knew what true happiness was.
In 1970 Ebba met two Englishmen who were searching for a lost boy. She gave them a lift to the police station and told them that they made a lovely couple, but she knew only too well the denial in their lack of response.
Later that same week, the two men had stopped by to thank her and to tell her that they would be staying in Sweden a little longer as they liked how accepting everyone was – would she like to go for a meal with them?
Ebba told them that she would – if only Olivia would feel this comfortable in HER own skin as quickly.
Three years later the two men were still in Sweden, and they accepted Ebba’s offer to visit Stockholm to meet the Olivia that they had heard so much about.
It was in a restaurant in Stockholm that Michael and Nigel had convinced Olivia to join the three of them on the journey back down south. Olivia knew by now that she wasn’t mentally ill, but it took her seeing the English couple being so openly affectionate with each other in public without judgement to realise that she might be – dare she think it – normal.
So, in 1973, twenty-nine years after Ebba had bought it, Olivia came to visit the small blue house.
A year later, when they were both sixty-two, Ebba and Olivia started living together in the blue house, and for the first time they lived the life that they should always have been living.
One morning, two years later, Ebba woke up, happy to be waking up next her Olivia, but Olivia did not wake up happy to be next to her Ebba. In fact, she did not wake up at all.
Olivia’s funeral was small (Ebba, Michael and Nigel attended), local (down the sea wall on the grassy bank) and terribly interrupted. Ebba had decided to give Olivia a private funeral to reflect the person she had been, but the day that they picked to send off the love of Ebba’s life was the same day that the soon-to-be-monthly booze cruise would first shore up on the grassy bank to drop off a party of pissed-up tourists.
