Authors: Jason Johnson
9 March 2016
Birthday of St Aloysius
BEEP.
Awake.
Stars above. Hundreds of them, coming into focus, getting clear in the darkness. Neatly drawn locked-together luminous-penned triangles, over and over on the ceiling of the flat.
How and why? Who and why? How long did it take to do that? How sore would your arm get doing that?
I don’t know.
A yawn.
Beep
.
Another yawn, a short, angry one. I rub my eyes and say, ‘Ninth of March.’
Beep
.
I need to think about this flat, about how I am not getting used to it. A one-bed box, three floors in the air. I can’t fully live in it, can’t sleep long or deep in it.
Beep
.
It always feels moments away from being cold, as if there’s an open door or window I have never found.
The place came with total blackout blinds, with those secret Stars of David on the ceiling. It comes equipped with some story that is not mine to know.
It sucks the frigging life out of me, this flat. There’s no welcome here, no sense that anyone has ever had a wholesome day in this place. It’s not a space to think, and I’d like a space to think.
Beep
.
They test vehicles in the garage below. It’s the APK, the Dutch MoT, their NCT. Cars and car horns get checked every day from 7
AM
to 7
PM
, and I am losing my mind.
I remember I was never used to fancy-living. I stayed near an airport, getting a dirt-cheap house nobody wanted right under a full-on flight path and listening to magnificent jet engines climb in and out of my head, in and out of the sky, and marveling all day at the hands-down brilliance of aeroplanes.
Or even some abandoned coop by a good road, some crumbling brickwork kip at some half a highway where engines blend in and out of my personal space.
But no, this kip is my domain. It’s like living in a checkout, in a dishwasher, in a microwave, in a reversing fucking truck where the sound is meant to annoy, to spit and stab.
Beep, beep.
Beep
.
I’m thinking now about the faces I saw yesterday, the random bodies in Amsterdam, and I’m calculating people’s ages by slashing numbers apart and throwing others together to find bits that fit.
And I’m lying here counting stars and beeps, adding up chunks of useless and chopping one sum from the other.
This mind, like a silent battleground, is the mind of a man who turned forty on this day, a mind that has three seconds worth of ambition today, one calorie of ambition today.
Beep
.
I roll over and breathe in, nice and slow.
I reckon we’re talking 7:10
AM
.
And I close and open my eyes.
Beep
.
I reach out for glasses, slide them on, lift up the faintly-lit luminous watch and can’t be sure what I read because the lenses are so smudged, but it’s about 7:10
AM
. I throw off the specs, get out of bed, walk to the door, shrink my pupils.
Now I’m looking in the bathroom mirror at a man of forty-four, a man who was yesterday thirty-nine. I see a man who needs a haircut, a shave, a wash, a good night’s sleep. A man who needs a style, a smile a—
Beep
.
I shower and dress-flick on the TV, pre-parked on my news nipple of choice, where Germans talk about America and Europe like they’re warring lovers.
Beep
.
And that’s the shortest beep, and there’s a guy who always does short beeps. It’s more of a wee blip, of a little toot, of a bee.
There’s a double beep guy, a long beep guy, a mid-range-beep guy, a short-beep guy. And the double-beep guy kills me. His second beeps go like javelins into the ears. That double-beep guy’s after-beeps have me turning up the TV, have me turning on taps and flushing the bog. That guy has me walking off into the shiny sharp-edged industrial end of Amsterdam to get my head out of this jar of a flat. I’ve looked at wooden floors in warehouses and chatted about the colour of garden furniture because of that double-beep guy. I’ve bought earplugs and sat, deafly, in front of the telly because of him.
I called my landlord one time, told him I can’t be here anymore. I asked if he had another place which didn’t have car horns funnelled into it for twelve hours a day.
Beep
.
‘It’s like Chinese torture,’ I said, and he went, ‘No one ever had a problem with it before,’ as if a problem has to have a history to be a problem, has to have a twin to exist.
‘Who the Christ lived here before?’ I asked him. ‘Some deaf, nocturnal artist, some Jewish car-horn fanatic?’
He went, ‘You know I’m too discreet to say.’
I’ll have to move.
Beep
.
I can’t be forty and accepting this. I can’t be forty and feeling like an intruder in my own home, can’t be having alerts gunned into my ears when I’m trying to replan a life.
The only other person living in this building is the woman below, the mad-as-fuck old crone who shouts random shit out the window. She has a ghostly looking helper who comes to see her every couple of days, who takes her out like a dog for short walks around the local sights, to see the flooring warehouse and hear the beeps up close.
I look out the window sometimes, see them walking in or out of this place, and I don’t know which one is which. I see them, both sixty-five, when I’m heading out sometimes and I don’t know which one is mad, which one looks more crazy or caring than the other.
Beep
.
But remember.
Remember.
The way my life is now, this flat works, blows cold on me, keeps me awake, insists that attachment is for some other time, some other place. This flat works because no one knows I’m here, because no one knows who I am. It works because it’s all hard cash and no callers and you never see police, and because the attic door above my head leads fast to the rooftop. And the drop from roof to road is enough.
Beep, beep
.
I’m closing my bedroom door now, but not all the way. I’m leaving a gap, the width of my palm. It’s too narrow for any uninvited guest to pass through, too open to suggest they shouldn’t bother.
The first thing I’ll do when I get back is check it, put my palm on the floor and check if the door has moved, and that will be decide if I really should run.
On the street, bag over the shoulder, I head for the train to Schiphol Airport, thinking about beeps, thinking if I’ll beep going through security.
March 2016
IT FEELS like everyone has emerged late from the big, white north-European winter and shaken themselves down. It feels like they’ve all flown south to find some spring light, like everyone has done it at the same time and we’ve all got stuck in the big rush.
The big queue feels jammed, bottlenecked, and I have nowhere else to go. The only thing that can get me somewhere is the thing that’s going nowhere.
It’s been about forty minutes.
I look around now and I’m thinking flat-out about queues. I’ve been thinking about queues for forty minutes. I’m thinking just one person in front of you makes a queue. Six people in front, and that’s a queue like my queue.
Five now.
Christ, come on
.
And I’m looking at queue faces, poses. I’m looking at tired-legged queue people protesting about queueing without saying anything.
Another one from my queue goes forward, all polite and smiles, her passport open. The guy behind the glass has no interest. She’s ready for him to look back up, and he doesn’t give a shit.
Instead, the guy behind the glass looks up at me.
Second time he’s done that.
Second time he’s picked me out of two hundred people lined up in front of him.
I go as if I haven’t noticed, as if my eyes aren’t the best, as if they’re resting in some middle distance and he just happens to be in the way.
I drop these eyes now, have them look at the back of the feet of the guy in front of me, get them looking at the maroon document in my hand.
Some Scottish girl behind is half-whispering about being fat, or about how she was fat.
She goes, ‘It was like even my head was fat, you know? Like hats didn’t fit?’
I look up and the guy behind the glass isn’t looking at me now and I’m glad of it.
She goes, ‘And it was like people actually hated me because of my weight, and that made me hate myself more, you know?’
I look down again, at the back of the guy’s feet in front of me, at the passport.
That guy in front – some tired Dutch dad – has got cotton wool in his right ear. He takes a step forward, touches his ear now, as if he heard me think it.
Three left ahead, then it’s my turn.
I fill the cotton wool guy’s space and the queue loses a name, changes shape, changes length, holds the order, holds the thing that makes it a queue.
I’ll take a stab at twenty.
Formerly fat-headed Scottish girl behind me is twenty.
Not easy with just a voice to go on.
Cotton-wool man is, what? Say, forty-four?
And I’ve caught myself again, weighing up patterns and calculating vintage. And I’m so fed up pushing this stuff, this useless adding and subtracting, around my mind.
She goes, ‘I know Mia, right? You know the other Mia, right?’
The guy behind the glass looks up at me again.
Eye contact.
And I find myself suddenly dismantling my Mr-Average-in-the-Queue act and staring back.
Tick, tock.
And he stares too.
All right now … there’s going to be some sort of incident.
Tick tock, tick tock.
And his eyes shift to the face of the woman in front of him. He says something, shoves her passport back like change from a drug dealer.
The girl behind me goes, ‘I mean, how well would you say I know Mia, you know?
‘I mean my Mia would text me a thousand times a day, you know what I mean? Text my head, right? I mean you do know what I mean, right?’
Cotton wool guy rubs his neck and I see unwiped boke on the right arm of his shirt, the fresh baby that did it is just ahead of him in his wife’s arms.
‘I mean, you understand me when I say “Mia” – you know who our friend Mia is, right?’
Fuck’s sake, I can’t listen to anymore of this.
I need to get out of this queue.
‘I mean,’ she whispers, ‘B-U-L-E-Mia, right? Ana’s friend, right?’
Her conversation is for a clinic, for a support group, for a quiet night in, not for pissed-off people in a passport queue.
Someone disconnects from the front and we all repeat, moving forward, one more foot of land secured, one foot deeper into the country, one minute older, one minute more fucking dead.
She goes, ‘Haha!’
Cotton wool man sneezes, gets a side glare from his wife, the wee sleeping blob momentarily awake, briefly unfurling its face.
He’s forty-five, I’m saying. She’s thirty-six, I’m saying. I’d said forty-four but I’m saying forty-five. And I’d bet on it now. Man, I’m a black belt at pointless crap.
Glasgow girl goes, tiny whisper, ‘This freak in front of me, right, seriously, is wearing odd shoes. I mean, not like nearly matching, I mean like not-at-all matching.’
This’ll be me she’s talking about, and I’m willing to bet she’s not wrong.
Balls.
‘I know, right?’
I dress like a man who would wear that cardigan at the bus stop, that hat you saw on the railings. I dress like a man who covers himself in glue and rolls through tents at festivals.
Lack of care, of class, of culture, lack of a good role model, an abundance of bad upbringing? Trying to blend in, trying not to stand out, trying too hard not to try?
Spin all those around, take your pick. Guilty as charged. I dress like a clothes horse, like a pizza. If you picked a homeless dog, a rebel mongrel, off the street and made him human, I dress like him.
She goes, ‘I’ve never seen that in real life before.’
So what do I do? Get someone to tell me what to do when I get out of bed every day? Get an advisor, a guru? Follow a fashion icon?
Should I?
Go fuck yourself.
I hear a click, that fake camera noise on your phone, that retro shutter sound. My – no doubt – odd shoes are going live at this moment. They’re bouncing off a satellite, ripping along some fibre-optic cable, bursting onto someone’s screen.
Ta-dah!
I give it four seconds and look down, just to check. I may as well check.
Aye, that’s me, yep. Last one to know, last one to the party. Odd-shoed. A sort of dark-yellow one and a dark-brown one. A partly formerly suede one and a non-suede one.
If I’m honest with myself, there may be other sartorial errors going on here. I have authored some great disasters in the past. This isn’t the first time I’ve been tweeted, not my first Facebooking. Social media hasn’t been good for me as a brand.
She goes, whispering, forgetting I have nothing else to listen to, ‘I know – a sign of madness! There’s a psycho axe-murderer here!’
That makes me smile a wee bit, and I’m smiling still when the man behind the glass looks up, right at my face.
And here you are, my passport-checking friend. May I present to you my smile. It started ironically, but now you’re looking at it, it’s become a big lie. But you can tell that, can’t you? Your training tells you there’s something dodgy about me, doesn’t it?
He looks down and I feel so very ready to get the hell out of this queue, to take any route I can, to take the fast, short route, the mined route out of this airport.
The girl behind me goes, ‘Send help!’ And she’s chuckling away.
I turn to the Scottish girl and her bulimia behind me – yes, twenty. And skinny and tasteless as a fork. She’s twenty, and the last of her beauty has been sucked over and killed on the pretty bones in her face. She’s twenty and she’s done violence to herself. She’s watched as violence drew her a rib cage, as it sharpened her knees and elbows, yet still she went back for more and more.
She shuts up, looks down at her shoes. I smile but she doesn’t see it.
There’s a whole big pause now, some silence I made her do, and I look back to the man behind the glass.
I have this dead-still face when I don’t mean to. I have this face like a face that’s been punched but got away with it, a face waiting for the next thing to happen. It’s the resting face of a pirate on the ocean. It’s bleak with wide, dark, soggy eyes and broad bones and broad corners, with half a dozen little life marks. You don’t know if it will cry, this face. You don’t know if it’s menacing you, contradicting you, supporting you, if it’s impressed or otherwise. This face is just stopped, just stationary, is not being anything.
Maybe the only thing you really see in my face is your face. It could be that you draw your own conclusions on my face. If you’re happy, my face might look happy. If you’re sad, it might look sad.
People look at my face sometimes like they’re looking in the mirror, like it’s cold and familiar. I see them looking around it sometimes, at its eyes and nose and mouth, and I’m always about to tell them their age, but never do.
And the guy behind the glass wags his finger and cotton-wool man with the baby sick on his arm goes forward and nods politely.
Whatever happens next, I will not nod at the guy behind the glass. I will show him this face, and this face on the passport, and he can take it from there, whatever way he’s feeling.
Scotland girl is gravely silent. Maybe she died on the floor. She maybe just malnourished to death, heart-attacked to death, dropped dead gorgeous at the non-symmetrical feet of an axe murderer, a six-foot blank-faced blade wielder, a guy with persuasive shoulders and, right about now, the back of a shirt hanging over his arse.
The guy behind the glass pushes Cotton Wool’s passport back, uninterested, wags my way.
I walk at him, right to his little office window, and stop that bit closer to the glass than I should. I close my passport over as I put it down, inviting him to show me if he has any thoughts on me, on who I am, what I am, because I would like to know. He looks at the cover, at my nation, then up at this face. He opens the passport, flicks to the page, looks at my 2-D face, back to my 3-D face, compares, contrasts.
I don’t know if he’s got something or not. I don’t know if I’m on some list there, if I’m a flashing light, a red flag. He could know one or more things I don’t want him to know, and I stand here waiting for judgement.
He’s got this born-in-the-sun southern-European skin, this skin that looks like it will explode with hair. He’s got eyebrows like thick moustaches.
And he goes, ‘Happy birthday, Aloysius,’ and looks up at me again.
He goes, ‘It was my grandfather’s name.’
He’s thirty-four. Maybe just thirty-five.
I say, ‘I’m sure he was a good man.’
He doesn’t care now, slides the passport back, puts his eyes on someone else in the queue.
I step away, pass freely into Portugal, drop the shoulder bag on the floor, tuck the passport into a pocket, check my watch, stretch my back, yawn freely.
I roll my shoulders and pull the bag up again, begin heading for the bus to Faro.