Jolts Read online

  JOLTS

  FERNANDO SDRIGOTTI

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Jolts

  Only Up Here

  Turkish Delight

  Methylated Spirits

  Barbecue And Exhumation In Victoria Park Village

  Ceci N’est Pas Un Mémoire

  The Kid And The Telephone Box

  Something About This Summer And The Summer Last Year

  Notes Towards A Return

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  JOLTS

  If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.

  Chris Marker

  Undated

  A packed unmoving train in Clapham Junction. What happened before is beyond the point — this train could be everything there is to this world. A packed train where the air stinks of café latte and where the passengers are starting to tut and puff in their winter coats and jackets. Faces, one after the other, all bleary-eyed and lethargic.

  8:33 a.m., December 12, 2014

  He’s reading the news on his iPad, learning that some celebrity he doesn’t know has left the jungle on a TV show he doesn’t watch. His train is delayed or cancelled — all trains are, because of the snow. But what really bothers him this morning is the guy who was listening to his music without headphones on the 341 bus from Angel Road Superstores to Waterloo. The guy was listening to Nirvana and suddenly twenty years passed since Nirvana, one after the other, on that 341 bus. It’s not about Nirvana, of course: it’s about time and about him being out of synch with himself.

  3:13 a.m., December 13, 1999

  I’m walking with Walter when we bump into Julio on the corner of Corrientes and Tucumán, Rosario. Julio is pissing against a wall, off his head, talking to himself, almost falling with his pants all the way down to his ankles and a tetrapack of wine in his left hand. It’s a hot and humid summer night and it will rain — mixing glue with wine is a bad idea on nights like these. He finishes pissing and turns around and comes our way, still with his pants down, hopping like a kangaroo, until he pulls them up. He’s wearing his Nirvana tee, the same one he’s been wearing since 1995, and doesn’t recognise me. He tries to mug me. I grab him by the neck and tell him, ‘Julio, you cunt, it’s me.’ He smiles: two of his front teeth are missing. He gets a piece of paper from his pocket and tells me, ‘Look, it came back negative,’ as if it was the most normal thing to say. The paper looks dodgy and people have been saying he’s got AIDS for a while, but he might as well be negative for all I care. He doesn’t apologise for trying to rob me and walks away and shouts, ‘Say hi to the guys.’ I tell Walter that somebody should shoot Julio before he kills someone. Walter doesn’t say anything. Two weeks later Julio gets killed when he tries to rob a drunkard who happened to be an off-duty cop. The news makes me happy.

  Undated

  The train is still packed and once again not moving an inch. People stare at their shiny little screens; their necks will hurt later on. A montage of long miserable faces and then cut to green fields, beaches, Paris, prairies, Kathmandu, Shangri-La, Siberia, Tokyo, Iceland, Cape Verde, lakes and mountains, or just Blackpool — anywhere the passengers would rather be. And a wide river. And Prague. And Dublin.

  2:34 a.m., August 17, 2006

  Marcos is talking and talking and talking and I listen and drink and listen and drink. We’re in a place called Clair de Lune in Montmartre, the only place we could find open. Sabina is here. She doesn’t drink and frowns every time I take the wine glass to my mouth. Marcos speaks in Argentinian and I listen in Argentinian and someone else is speaking in Argentinian at the back of the bar. Someone insults someone else in Argentinian at the back of the bar. There’s some pushing and shoving and someone leaves and the space between us and the back of the bar is cleared and I see Walter. We stare at each other and move fast between the tables and chairs and we embrace. We can’t believe we’re both here, in Paris of all places, living the cliché of the Argentine ‘intellectual’ abroad. We stare at each other as if we are hallucinating and maybe we are. But it’s great to see we’ve both got out of Rosario and didn’t end up in Miami, speaking in Cuban. He comes up to our table and now does the talking and we get seriously drunk, Marcos, Walter and I.

  8:57 a.m., December 12, 2014

  And to make matters worse he’s just received an email from a literary mag saying the editors have read a fiction piece he submitted almost a year ago: the editors have read your piece with interest, and although they found it well written the editors do not appreciate the jolts in time; they also felt that the ending was inconclusive, as if this story was a fragment from a broader story. They now want him to edit it considering their comments. The problem is the piece is called ‘Jolts’ and is precisely about jolts in time and space, about how some of us are more sensitive to fragments and how some of us are more fragmented than the rest, particularly on some days.

  11:34 p.m., September 10, 2008

  I can feel my stomach coming through my mouth as I kneel before the toilet seat. Nothing comes out of my mouth besides my stomach because there’s nothing else in there — I’m vomiting fear. Sabina is standing by the door, saying she’s sorry but that she’s got to do it. She’s holding a small Samsonite suitcase, my suitcase. And she does it, she leaves and takes off for Prague the following morning. And I don’t see her for over a year, until we meet to sign the divorce papers and she gives me back my suitcase. It’s my favourite suitcase.

  9:23 a.m., December 12, 2014

  The editors do not appreciate your jolts in time. Everything about that statement makes him sick: the academic snobbery of avoiding contractions, the passive aggressive ‘appreciate’ instead of a right-out ‘hate’, their use of the third person plural. Who are the editors? Why don’t they appreciate his jolts in time? How do they live lives without jolts? What do they mean by ‘inconclusive’? Should the piece end with a description of Armageddon? How can anything be conclusive when there’s always the next fragment to come? He wishes them death. He wishes them that conclusiveness. Before they kill someone.

  10:43 p.m., February 16, 1998

  The square is called Plaza de los Locos — there used to be an asylum here twenty years or so ago. Cristian, Julio, Chor, and Esteban are here with me; we’re drinking warm white wine and smoking and we’re pretty drunk and stoned. Julio fidgets for a while in his pocket and gets a small replica gun out. He points it at Cristian and pulls the trigger and the hammer makes a dry noise. We all laugh. Then he points it at me but doesn’t pull the trigger. He points it at Chor and pulls the trigger and there’s that dry sound and we all laugh again. Then the same with Esteban. ‘This is the one I used to rob those wankers,’ he says and points it to the ground and pulls the trigger and there’s this loud BANG! and a bullet bounces on the floor leaving a tiny cloud before it disappears into the night. Julio’s face briskly turns pale and Chor jumps up, pulls the gun from Julio’s hand and slaps him across the face. Julio falls from the bench and Chor moves to him, mounts him, and starts slapping him with the front and the back of his hand, calling him a ‘snotty cunt’ over and over again until we stop him. Now Julio’s nose is bleeding and his right eye starts to swell. We leave him there crying and go to the pier to throw the gun into the river.

  We throw it as far as we can, hoping it will sink into the canal that used to carry the big transatlantic cargos before the ships stopped coming and everyone started to talk about leaving.

  Undated

  An empty carriage by the platform. Litter, free newspapers, paper cups, a forgotten smartphone. The doors are open. There’s nobody in the station save for a couple of guards. It starts snowing once again. A beautiful snow that gets into the train and
slowly melts into a shapeless mud.

  9:43 a.m., December 12, 2014

  The editors never appreciate anything and if they do they just sit on it, like with his second book, that only sold forty-three copies and that the publisher refused to promote any further after the launch party because people in Spain and Latin America don’t really read books anymore, you should write something in English for us, they told him. And he did — for someone else — and even swore never to write in Spanish again. But he knows very well books won’t get him where he needs to be or anywhere at all and he’s been waiting for the trains to move in this station café for two hours. He should just break camp and go home. When you spend time in terminals you’re always at the mercy of terrorists. He should just head home, hide his head under his pillow. It’s impossible to keep on living like this, at the mercy of terrorists, editors and trains.

  9:13 p.m., January 16, 2009

  ‘That was the same question!’ ‘No! Not at all!’ ‘Yes, it was! YOU WANKER!’ says Marcos, ‘I told you not to fuck around with the i-Ching. I TOLD YOU!’ ‘I asked a different question, I swear!’ ‘It’s giving you the same answer: the same hexagram and the same changes. That’s because you asked the same question. I told you not to ask the same question. You shouldn’t play with this!’

  It’s nighttime and soon we’ll be heading to a gig down République’s way. I’m living in Paris once more, once more a suitcase and a short-term teaching job at Paris VIII. It’s true I asked the same question and I probably broke the i-Ching and things will never make sense again, because the question was exactly ‘Will things ever make sense again?’ ‘I’ll never do this again for you. Never again,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘You have some thinking to do, bro.’ ‘What did I get, again?’ ‘⻁,’ he says.

  10:23 p.m., December 19, 2001

  It’s impossibly hot and people are wild tonight, even with the curfew. Guille and Manuel are watching the protests in Buenos Aires with Ludmila; I’m rolling under the table with Milena, Ludmila’s sister, while I fondle Ludmila’s leg. Ludmila pushes my hand away several times until she stops pushing and spreads her legs. Milena finds it funny and she pulls Ludmila towards us but Ludmila stays on the table with the other two, mesmerised by the screen. Suddenly the cops start killing people, the president takes off for Uruguay in a helicopter, and four more presidents fail to secure a government in the space of two weeks. In a couple of months I’m on a flight to Dublin, without the faintest idea of what I’ll do with the rest of my life. I’ll start washing dishes the morning after arriving and then spend the next thirteen years changing rooms in several cities. But I’m not thinking this right there with Milena — there and then I’m young, careless, stupid, libertine, and probably free.

  9:47 a.m., December 12, 2014

  An empty table. Croissant crumbs. A half-full café latte in a cardboard cup. A seat, still warm.

  9:43 a.m., July 3, 1986

  We’re fishing with my grandad. We’ve jumped a wall to get into this abandoned stretch of beach, where the sand plant used to be. I pierce the hook through a worm and it wiggles. It makes me feel a bit sick but it’s still a happy moment, only us three, me and my grandad and the worm.

  Undated

  The empty train as seen from the station. Then, black. If writing had sound it would be possible to hear the empty train station and London in the background, over the black page.

  ONLY UP HERE

  Midday. I’ve been rolling around in bed since I quit last week. It happened out of nowhere: I pulled myself a double Jameson’s during a busy shift and sat on the other side of the bar. What are you doing? I’m quitting. You can’t quit. Yes I can: look. Go have a fag and come back behind the bar. I won’t — it’s too busy behind the bar. You’ve got to give me at least a week’s notice. Silence. I finished my drink and walked out of the pub with the voice of the Cypriot telling me I was barred. I left with most of my money in my pocket; not that they would ever notice — they could never get the till right. And then I felt like I owned the world, that I could go anywhere. London was finally smiling at me: no more bar jobs, no more mopping the floor, collecting pints, long shifts serving entitled drunk wankers. The beginning of a new era; a new me; then it was already the future and the future of that future was full of promises. The high lasted for a couple of hours. Soon I realised I was unemployed. And I hit the bed. I must have been in bed for five days.

  Not exactly five days in bed but five days of leaving it only to go for a piss, grab something to eat, smoke a cigarette by the window, have a drink of water. And the same happened to Leo: he fell into introspection at about the same time — two days before me, actually. My moments of ecstasy and sadness were probably a copycat version of his, after he quit his job at the Bricklayer’s Arms. He had come home hyperventilated, coked-up, speaking about his plans to go back to film school and do a film version of Fogwill’s Los pichiciegos, how we should rent a car on Sunday and drive to Cambridge, Oxford, Kent, Cornwall, whatever, like Thelma and Louise, he said and laughed. And then the bed. Just like I would some days later.

  And now midday all through this side of the studio flat and on Leo’s side too. I’m head-to-the-pillow when the sun comes through the huge window. The smell of feet in the room, burnt cigarette butts, lack of personal and general hygiene, the mess all around us, a space too small for two guys. And we ran out of cunting cigarettes too, says Leo. Go get some, I say. Fuck off, he says, not even raising his head from the pillow. Anyway, it’s only a matter of holding on until tonight. Maybe I’ll even fall asleep and wake up tomorrow. I wish I could sleep until the next year.

  _________

  By two p.m. I can’t take it anymore and leave the flat. It’s stupidly sunny while I make my way to George’s Kebab, just around the corner. I walk into his shop with my stomach rumbling and don’t even say hi until I’ve ordered my food: a large shish with humus and a can of ginger beer. Hello first, innit? Hello George! Sorry, I’m really hungry. No worries my friend we’ll feed you. Nice to see you; where were you? he asks. I was away, at a training course to join the Royal Marines, I say. I thought you had to be British to join the army, he says. They’ve relaxed the rules now; they need people from other backgrounds. How did the training go? I passed it! Good on you, son. But I’ve changed my mind, I don’t think the army is for me. Yes, don’t join these English cunts on anything. I won’t! Cunts all of them. Large shish and humus and a can of ginger beer; there you go my friend, he says, and nods towards the back.

  Soon I’m sitting in the back room, accidentally watching Newell’s Old Boys, my team from Argentina, playing a shitty football game; the commentary is in Turkish — it’s all very strange. Eleven thousand one hundred and forty-six kilometres away, I’m watching twenty-two idiots chase a ball in real time. With three or four seconds delay, perhaps, but live. It’s mind-boggling. From Rosario and across the Atlantic, over the Ural mountains, BANG!, Istanbul, then picked up by a Soviet satellite who-knows-how-many kilometres above the atmosphere and BANG! (again) on the telly before me. I tell an old leather-jacket-clad Turk about this uncanny situation. I think he doesn’t understand me — he just smiles blankly and then goes back to his paper. I shut up and eat my kebab.

  The other guy is here as well — the guy with the weird little eye, the second-in-command. He calls me ‘my friend’ too. He soon spots me and sits on the table with me. He asks where I have been and I tell him I’ve been working overtime, managing the pub isn’t an easy job, you see. Then I tell him they fired me. He seems confused, puzzled, or perhaps just drunk. He says something about these fucking English cunts being lazy backstabbers. I tell him the owners of the place are Cypriots. He says they must be Greek Cypriots. I say I’m pretty sure they’re Turkish Cypriots. He doesn’t reply and stops talking to me for a while. Then he says that there are cunts everywhere — he’s absolutely right. He’s drinking raki and his eye, the funky one, gets smaller with every sip. By the end of the bottle he’ll look like
Thom Yorke. But before that happens my team scores a goal and I celebrate by closing my fist and saying yessssss. Little Eye celebrates too — he hugs me and gets a bit overexcited and drops his glass on the floor — it shatters to pieces. He curses in Turkish and leaves the room. The accident doesn’t seem to bother the rest of the guys in here — they’re all busy staring at a laptop, hypnotised by it. Kebab people love gadgets — they are technological people.

  Little Eye comes back and sweeps the floor with a broom, stumbling and singing something in Turkish.

  _________

  This incredible universe of brands, smells, little and medium-sized tins and cans, unpronounceable names and inedible processed meals.

  The off-licence guy asks me where I’ve been. I tell him I was on a meditation retreat on the Isle of Man. I don’t even know how I come up with this. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he asks me about my job, did I take a holiday? I say I’ve quit and he frowns. I pay for the beers, the Supermalt and the Jaffa cakes. Thanks. You’re welcome. A frown, a clearly annoyed frown. He says that I have to work now that I’m young so that I can retire well when I’m older. I knew he would come up with some shit like that. I tell him that I’ve got a job interview in the City this week, for Royal Bank of Scotland, and that’s why I quit my job at the bar and went on a meditation retreat. He says I should have quit only after being sure I got the job. I say I needed time to prepare for the job interview — god, I hate hard-working people. He asks me what sort of meditation I practise. I ask what does he mean with what kind? Vipassana, Zen, Mindfulness? he asks. It’s all the same, I say. No, it isn’t. He seems to know all about it. I say Singing Yoga Meditation. Singing Yoga Meditation? He seems confused. I tell him we do yoga, sing and then meditate. I don’t think he buys it. It’s a sort of New Age thing, very popular round Dalston. Never heard of it. It’s a new thing. Then he asks me about ‘my friend Leo’ managing to sound the quotation marks. I tell him that he’s still at the retreat, that he decided to stay a bit longer, he’s getting good at the singing yoga but needs to improve on the meditative side of things. He quit his job too? Yes, he did. He has an interview at Warner Brothers the same day I have mine at Royal Bank of Scotland. You two are doing fine, he says. It was about time, I say. He tells me to remind Leo that he owes him twenty pounds. I say I will. When’s your interview, he asks. On Wednesday, I say. Good luck to you both. I thank him and walk out.