We walked to the corner shop. ‘I’m taking you home after this, Rac. I want to
understand what’s
happened.”
But I know what’s happened.
I wince as my surroundings come into focus under the corner shop’s yellow
glare. I can see an
underclass just about doing something we call ‘living.’ I can see students and bums
filling thin plastic bags with cheap alcohol and goodies that wouldn’t decompose in
ten years but would rot the lining of your gut. I’m looking at the dust-topped shop
fittings rusted to an un-tiled stone floor and a shop keeper who knows he shouldn’t
serve Rac for the fourth time that day, but his fortune is made on street misery and
to not serve Rac would only add to that pain.
I know what’s happened, though he’s broke and drunk, he still wants to pay for
my cigarettes; he’s proud to slump down the sleazy backstreets with the ‘most
beautiful girl in the world’ by his desire deluded side.
I know what’s happened as we sit on his doorstep and he laughs, ‘Rose, you’re
the fittest person I know, you’ve just done a ten mile run, why are you smoking?
Last time I saw you, you were still talking about the Olympics.’ Because I’m guilty
as sin, guilty as him.
‘You’re just filling metaphysical holes Rac. Can’t you smoke instead?’ He nods
his head but he isn’t
listening. He’s in that other place. That place where everything narrows down
to a nothing that can’t be distracted. That nothing heightened to a passion, an itch,
an obsession, a wasp trapped in a paper lampshade. Everything narrows down to a
supreme concern to eliminate nothing. Writing an essay: nothing. Eating breakfast:
nothing. Nothing distracting you from the business of life.
He fumbles with the keys and we drop down to his dim basement flat. The
sofa’s piss-stained and rotting where the valance drips onto sticky laminate. The
ubiquitous thin plastic bags are strewn round a room crowded with cheap wine
bottles and empty Stella cans. The Karate Kid is frozen on a TV screen facing the
place where he doesn’t even move to pee.
‘Oh Rac, I’m so upset, what’s happened? You had your flat so nice that evening you cooked me dinner and we watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’
‘Do you still remember Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’ he booms, incredulously.
‘Of course I do.’
37