Rio

Louise Stern

In Rio the velvety air felt easy and comfortable. We slept on Copacabana beach and our sandals were stolen by one of the bony, dark-skinned group in rags who had set up camp under the nearby palm trees ringed by bits of rubbish. In the night, after we felt in the sand by our heads for the rubber sandals and discovered them gone, Eva strode over, pointed at some of the boys and then pointed
at her foot.
—Give me back, she gestured. You give me back. She banged her fist against one hand.
—Me fight you. Come on. Give me back. Me fight you.
One of the ragged, wily ones gave her our sandals. Her back seemed very straight next to theirs.

One night we were drunk on the main boardwalk on lemony cold caipirinhas in plastic cups when a man walking by gave us some shells with the date and Copacabana scrawled on them in black Sharpie marker. He was white and had shrivelled calves covered with sunspots. Pale strands of hair hung off them. His eyes were like a rodent’s – hungry and lusty and unashamed that he would eat whatever he could find, but they were not malicious. He handed over the broken shells as if they were rosaries.
I was sitting on the wall between the beach and the street watching Eva. Unusually, she was drunker than I was. Some of the Brazilian law students we had met a few nights before were there that night.
—You crazy, she signed to them, pointing to them.
One finger was going in circles beside her head. She laughed.
We always wondered at her laughter, how people invariably looked at us, startled, when she laughed. Some childhood friends of hers had told her that her laugh sounded like a horse’s neigh, and she had been self-conscious about it since then. I could hear more than she could and told her that it didn’t sound like a horse, but I couldn’t hear well enough to know exactly what it did sound like, and nobody else would give a satisfying description. They just stared, and we never really felt we had any kind of handle on what was behind their bewilderment. Sometimes now I thought it was more bemusement, but whatever it was, it frustrated me to the point of tears.

People would call it a pure sound, and we wondered if it was only pure because we couldn’t hear it. It was like an imaginary friend that everyone could see except for you, who insisted on attaching itself to you with gooey suction lips, and who everyone liked better than they liked you. It frustrated Eva even more, though. In her mind the horse’s neigh had turned into a donkey’s bray, spit flying
everywhere through yellowed teeth like a whale’s baleen. The rodent man was attracted to her laugh. I saw it in his eyes as he looked at her, but then he scuttled away.
I wondered at it for a minute – he seemed to me the kind to want a closer sniff at least. He was the kind to be attracted to shiny bits of broken glass, to want to grab them all up and hoard them in a box.
But then later, when I went across the street to have a piss in the restaurant loo, there he was at a table, watching Eva through binoculars. He was delighted that I had seen him at it. On the paper covering the table he started scribbling, telling me who he was, where he had been, who he had been with, trying to show me the pieces of glass in his box. He had collected a lot. I saw him look at me sideways when he thought I wasn’t looking and he was grinning with sheer delight. He showed me a khaki canvas shoulder bag filled with broken shells like the ones he had given us earlier, and told me that he wandered Copacabana all day giving them out. He had other assorted trinkets in the bag, pads of paper and things that appeared to me either junk or esoteric fetishes, which he held up, tittering.
He didn’t really ask about us, just wanted to tell me who he was. He had been an executive at a paper company, now retired and become beach bum. Eva had come over to the restaurant by that time and was hopping and skipping from table to table. The Brazilian law students had ended up at one table. At another was the huge black man with his heavy gold chains.

With her strong rounded arms that always appeared to me to be a bit masculine in a pleasing way, Eva would tell me again and again how the thickest of his chains swayed into the air when he bent over to write to us on the night we’d first met him. The big gold cross on the end of it swung under our eyes. The way Eva signed it, the cross stayed in the air for a long, emphatic moment, swaying back and forth just a bit but always staying for a few seconds more at the height of its trajectory. That was how we remembered him, because that moment had been re-enacted over and over again, her fingers becoming
that shiny huge cross hanging there longer than it should have. We loved it. Now he was here in the restaurant with all the others.
They were all talking, chattering over me. As a child I had longed to be able to overhear. Not any more, usually. The girl on the right turned to me.
—Oh, you hear not … she gestured. She held two fingers up to her mouth, miming drinking from a bottle.
—Me drink, drink, drink. Her head was thrown back and her eyes closed, the throat in outline. Her skin had yellowish pores. Her hand, with its index finger and thumb extended, went up and down into her mouth again and again.
—Drink, drink, drink. One finger went down one cheek, and then the other.
—Me cry, cry, cry. Cry, cry, cry. Then she turned away and slid effortlessly into animated conversation with the black man.
I wondered exactly where this sorrow she had just told me about was stored in her body, where she held it that she could call it up so fast and then dispose of it so fast. I wondered if it was because she could speak that she knew how to deposit the sorrow outside herself so efficiently. That was the part I envied.

The rodent man came to the table. His eyes were brighter than before. He had caught the fever. He had a plan now and he was eager to tell us, but only if we went with him somewhere. It was a place for us to stay. We had no place to sleep anyway and had planned to sleep on Copacabana next to the same people who had stolen our sandals and who were now cautious, frightened by us. I liked this man well enough; he had already shown me all of his bits of glass, the shiny magpie collection of his
mind, and I felt comfortable with it.
— Okay we will go with you, I told him.
— You stay here, I get car, come back for you, he mimed. Eva was drunker and drunker, flitting around the restaurant, so it suited me fine to stay there and wait for him and let her play it out.
She was passed out flat on the pavement in front of the restaurant when he returned for us in a gleaming black executive car. He had showered and was neatly dressed in a pale blue button-down shirt with long sleeves and black stiff pants, the opposite of the dishevelled beach bum we had first met. I sat next to him in the car with Eva sprawled on the back seat asleep.
After an hour’s drive through the dark warm streets, we came up to a set of imposing gates that matched the car. There was a mansion behind them, but it had an odd feel to it, not quite a house, not quite a hotel, but not quite anything else either. It was square and stolid like one of yhe more expensive chain hotels in the States, but with a tattiness to it that I had never seen in any hotel. A sign
next to it read ‘Panda’.
At the moment the car paused beside the Panda sign ready to go down the ramp into the concrete parking garage, Eva woke up and was overcome by the sight. She’d always had limpid fantasies of sex and luxury and our surroundings were a good backdrop for them. The garage was lit with fluorescent strip lights. The parking spaces were precisely marked out, two for each of the small doors that were set at regular intervals around the walls. It felt as if we were in a Super 8 motel. I wondered what this place really was.

Up a narrow flight of steps was a nice-sized but unremarkable room like one in a pricey but far from beautiful airport hotel. It had the same beige wallpaper with thin brown pinstripes and the same black nubbly carpet that those places have. But the main room had a mirror on the ceiling and a wall-mounted television. The rodent man turned on the television to show us that it played only porn. It was American porn, starring platinum blonde lovelies. There was a waterbed in the centre of the room with a stiff red velvet cover. Off the main room was a white-tiled bathroom taken up almost entirely by a jacuzzi. On the wall in the bathroom above the his-and-hers sinks was one of those theatrical make-up mirrors with round light bulbs all around the top and the sides.
—You two stay here, me come back for you in the morning, he mimed to me.
Eva and I slithered around naked in the hot tub for a while after he left, gossiping and giggling in the bubbles, and then we jumped on the waterbed. We turned off the television and made faces to ourselves in the ceiling mirror. In the morning a maid brought us a huge spread of a breakfast. There were fried eggs with runny rich yolks and Brazilian bread, sweet pineapple and mango slices, strong coffee, tomatoes and cucumber wedges, creamy butter, and fresh-squeezed juices. It was delicious and we finished it all up.
Soon the man came back and took us to a small dark café by the beach with wooden tables and benches, where we had more coffee. He told us it was the same café where the famous song ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ had been written. He had brought a yellow lined pad to scribble to us on.
‘Men always want silent women,’ he said. ‘You two are the perfect women. You are beautiful and no words come out of you to ruin the fantasy, and you can never hear the filth that is said around you. Completely untouched, untouchable. Men would pay anything you wanted, to be with you. I will introduce you to some.’
—What you got to offer us? I said with a tough cheekiness that surprised me. We do it without you. Eva laughed nervously and met my eyes, but of course neither of us wanted to do without the safety of the rodent man.

We would be Marina and Kristina. He had a special affection for these schoolgirl names. We needed the appropriate costumes, he said. We went shopping in small boutiques with bright jewelled chandeliers. The other shoppers were the slender wives of Brazilian businessmen, the kind of rich women who always had a hard, crystallized certainty that I envied. Eva and I chose two tops – a small zebra-print tube that only covered our breasts, and another tight purple tie-dye top with ‘Olá’ written across the front that made us laugh. The rodent man vetoed a whorish pair of clear plastic stilettos that we wanted, to our disappointment. He told us to meet him that night in a café we knew along the Copacabana beach.
The evening was like the other evenings we would spend with him in cafés in Rio, dressed in our costumes. At the end of each evening, he always told us when and where we would meet the next time. Sometimes we would meet two or three nights in a row. Other times we wouldn’t see him for three days before he reappeared. He always pointed out potential clients, mostly large businessmen with soft pouches under their necks and starched shirts. We dismissed each one for some madeup reason, or quoted an outrageously high price for our services. One night I showed him a slip of crumpled-up paper with a telephone number on it, writing to him that the number belonged to a potential client and that I would be sure to bring him in when fee negotiations reached the crucial stage. His eyes brightened and he had that rodent look again.
After a few nights Eva and I wondered whether he actually wanted to close the deal with anyone, or whether sharing these possibilities with us was all he wanted, nothing else.

During the day, if we hadn’t met anyone interesting, we would wander around, eat, sneak into the pools at the fancier hotels, laze around on the beach. We slept on Copacabana beach or at the house or apartment of whoever we’d met that day. The rodent man had asked us if we wanted to take up residence in the Panda, and it was tempting, but we didn’t like the idea of him always knowing where we were. Besides the Panda seemed to us a slightly boring place to stay for more than one night.
We never had problems finding a place to sleep. A taxi driver took us to stay with his family in a favela, where we slept on the floor in the middle of the children’s room, surrounded by five painted metal bunk beds. We stayed up watching soccer on a television set on top of a plastic orange crate in the street with everyone in the neighbourhood crowded around, jumping up and down when Rio scored.
Another night we stayed in a homeless shelter with a Brazilian Indian woman whose short hair curled around her generous face. Long lines spread from the outer corners of her eyes. We sat with her all day on the boardwalk behind the square of blue felt she used to display the cheap beaded jewellery she sold. The crack she also sold she kept safely in the front pocket of her long skirt. The night after, we stayed in the best hotel in Rio, with a glaringly white-toothed music producer from LA we’d met when we snuck into the pool area of his hotel. In our string bikinis – Eva’s was navy blue and mine tomato red – we looked like any other tourists, even though we had been living on the streets for months by then and hadn’t showered for a few days. The chlorinated water of the pool was shower enough. The producer wanted to party and talk. And the day after that we had been asked by the rodent man to meet him in the early afternoon. He’d asked us to meet him on a street corner in one of the better neighbourhoods. Was it a visit to a possible client? I was a bit excited by this idea, but at the same time, I didn’t want to meet a client in their home, in their territory, with their things and their own smell around them. The reality of it, whichever way it actually lay, would have more of a chance to take over then.

This time he was dressed in neat khaki shorts and a mauve T-shirt. He took us up a wide white staircase into a clean, spacious apartment with dark polished wooden floors and French windows along one wall, looking onto the trees outside. A woman with a soft body and greystreaked hair got up from the flowered sofa to come over to us, and a young girl walked into the room. On his yellow pad, the rodent man wrote to us in a few fragmented words that this was his wife and daughter. Turning to them, he started talking, his mouth opening and closing, the thin wrinkled upper lip pressing tightly
against the slightly fleshier lower lip. It was in Portuguese, so I didn’t even have a chance to catch a word or two on his lips, and I was thankful that I didn’t. He gestured towards us a few times, explaining us to them. Later we were served Earl Grey tea and Brazilian cake on a tray before leaving.
We met him at a café in the evening, again dressed in our costumes, but there was a new and strange feeling of something closing in, a possibility of knowing exactly what it was that this man wanted from us, and I didn’t like it…And it had become boring to keep these assignations with him night after night. So one night we stood him up and never went back.

A few weeks later, we saw the rodent man on the boardwalk in the middle of the carnival festivities. He was wearing a sign on his front with some words in Portuguese scrawled across it. Some people near us told us that the words meant ‘I’m a lesbian’. His eyes were fogged over and he didn’t recognize us. He was the only one who said it. I know, even if I often don’t want to believe it, that it is true what he said about the specific quality of our silence. It is potential and remains only potential. It is like water, the liquid clear and thin, something you can feel but not hold down in any way. That is the silence that surrounds me and Eva always.

Copyright 2010 © Louise Stern. This story is from Chattering: Stories by Louise Stern, published by Granta, £10.99. Louise Stern grew up in Fremont, California and is the fourth generation of her family to be born deaf. She came to London is 2002, where she is an artist and the founder and publisher of Maurice, a contemporary art magazine for children. Chattering is her first book.

Old

Sammy Wright

393 – Clapton – Four minutes. Not bad.

Billy stepped back to his favoured spot behind the bin. He plunged his hands in his pockets. It was by far the best way of dealing with wearing a blazer, but you had to make sure the blazer bunched forward and was tight around your back, otherwise it stuck out behind and revealed your belly at the front and made you look stupid. Under the shelter the girls were already there. Two from the private school, who looked a bit alike only one of them was probably fit and the other one definitely wasn’t, and one from the Catholic school who always came to the bus stop with her nan. The girl and her nan were the main reason he never stood under the shelter, not even when it was raining. He hated them. Well, not hated, but he couldn’t be near them. The girl was a weirdo. The uniform for that school was rank anyway, but she was a bit fat and she always wore stockings that only went up to her knees and you could see the tops of them where they bit into her fat knees, and it made her legs look like sausages. The nan was the worst, though. She made his skin crawl. She was just like the girl, only old, and sagged, and just disgusting. She walked like she was a zombie, not a proper zombie, but from those rubbish old films where they couldn’t run.

Two minutes. He held on to his oyster pass in his pocket. He hoped it was just Ryan on the bus. If that other lot were there, Carl, and Joe, and Reece, he’d have to sit with them, but it was quite nice just sitting with Ryan and talking about homework and stuff. And he hoped the Homerton boys weren’t there. They once spent a whole journey calling him gay, and he had to just ignore it, and pretend it wasn’t happening, because once it happened to Ryan and he said something and they waited until they got off the bus and threw a milkshake at him.
He looked at his watch. 7.33. The Stokie boys were normally on the later one. The drunk guy was circling down by the traffic lights. One minute. People started to shuffle around in the
shelter. He walked round the back of it so he’d be in front, ready to flag the bus down. He always flagged the bus down. He knew other people did it too, but he hadn’t done it once because he was embarrassed because the fit girl was looking at him, and the bus had just gone past. The bus was approaching. So was the drunk guy. One time, the drunk guy had breathed on him, and it was
disgusting, he could smell something rotten inside him. Billy edged nearer the shelter.

The drunk guy got closer. Was he going for the bus? Billy held out his hand to flag the bus down. As it slowed, he backed towards where he predicted it would stop. He mostly got it right. But the drunk guy was going for the bus. Billy backed towards it a little quicker than normal, keeping one eye on the drunk guy.
The bus eased to a stop and Billy turned just as he felt himself bump into something and he put a hand out and pure terror washed over him because he’d backed into the nan and her face was about an inch from his and his hand had pressed into something soft and she made some kind of noise and he could smell her and he went “Sorry!” and stepped back and he felt the sweat start under his arms
and he felt sick because he was sure that was her tit. He’d touched her tit.

They trooped on to the bus. His Oyster beeped. He went for the stairs. All he could think of was her tit. The feel of her tit. It was gross, like a deflated balloon. It was
soft. Too soft. And her face. He’d been so close to her face that he couldn’t even pretend it hadn’t happened. Her face was so sagged and fat, her tit must be like that too. Her mouth was the worst. It was like it had melted a bit, so that the hole was lower than normal people and instead of seeing two sets of teeth, above and below, you just saw the bottom half of the lower teeth and a horrible grey lumpy
bit of gum. It was like she had no strength in her lips to close her mouth, and the bottom one just flapped open, a useless bit of flesh.

“Billy!”
He blinked. It was Reece. He was sat with Carl and Joe. They each were spread across a double seat and there was one spare on the other side of the aisle. Ryan was sitting four rows beyond them, near the back. Billy sat down.
“Nah, there was bare gash. It was sick, bruv, honestly.”
Carl was talking to Joe. His face was bright and he was doing that jerky thing, where he looked like he was having an electric shock. Billy only ever saw him on the bus because most of the time in school he was in special needs. “Even that wasteman, what’s his name, that one with glasses, even he was lipsing some year 7.”
Billy knew they must be talking about the fireworks in Victoria Park. He’d gone with his Dad, but he knew everyone else went on their own and met up with the Clapton girls.
“I heard Liban got off with Johnny Palmer’s sister,” said Joe slowly. He always spoke slowly, as if he was thinking over every word. “Matthew saw him. He said he touched her tits.”
Billy saw his opening.
“Nah, bruv, don’t even talk about it.” He shook his head solemnly.
“What?”
“Tits, bruv. Man, that was awful.”
“What?”
Billy leant in, his face animated. He spoke in a piercing whisper.
“Man, I just touched some granny’s tit by mistake in the queue!”
“Urhh!”
All of them burst out into cackles of laughter.
“It was bare rank! And her face! She was proper rank! It was like her face had fallen off!”
“Urhh!”

Billy felt a thrill of excitement. They were properly laughing. It was great when you said something and they all laughed. There was always a risk, though. Sometimes someone might use it against you, no matter what it was. He’d got torn apart a few weeks back for saying he’d fingered Latitia, when he’d thought it was probably the coolest thing he’d ever done.
Carl’s face suddenly fell serious. “Oh, no, I tell you what, though, did you see that thing last night? That monkey thing?”
“Yeah!” Reece’s face was a mask of delighted horror.
“That was bare disgusting!”
“Nah, honestly, I was going to be sick, bruv,” Carl said.
“I was going to vomit.”
“What monkey thing?” said Billy.
“Didn’t you see it?”
“What?”
“Oprah. It’s in the papers. Some lady got her face ripped off by a monkey.”
“Oh my days!”
“She got her face ripped off, her whole face, like there was nothing left, and her hands ripped off too.”
“Oh my days!”

They sat in stunned and appreciative silence for a moment. That was pretty extreme, Billy thought. That was like in Silence of the Lambs. He wished he’d seen it. He’d watched Silence of the Lambs a few months back, and he thought it was the best film he’d ever seen. He remembered the bit where the guy got his face bitten off, and you just saw his teeth without lips. He thought with an odd queasiness about the nan’s face.
Joe was gearing up to say something. He looked thoughtful. “But she got, like, thirty million pounds compensation.”
Reece was intrigued. “Really?”
Joe carried on. “Yeah, she got thirty million pounds. And she was on Oprah.”
“Thirty million pounds, just for getting her face ripped off by a monkey?” said Reece.
“Yeah, but it’s pretty bad, though,” said Billy.
“Yeah, but, like, thirty million pounds!”
“Would you do it?” said Carl.
Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Joe spelt it out. “What, get your face and hands ripped off by a monkey for thirty million pounds?”
Carl nodded. “Yeah.”
Joe thought carefully. Billy could see that everyone else was thinking too. He didn’t really want to imagine it. He felt a bit uncomfortable. He looked around. The bus was pretty full now. He saw, with a sudden lurch in his gut, the girl and her nan sat three rows in front. They sat with the same hunch in their shoulders. The nan was in the window seat. She was facing out. He could see her profile. Her
eyes sagged just like her mouth and they seemed all of a sudden like the saddest things he had ever seen.
“I’d do it,” said Joe. “You could buy a flat screen TV.”
Carl jeered at him. “What! That’s bare stupid. You’ve got no eyes, bruv, your whole face is ripped off. You don’t even have no hands to change channels!”
They all began jeering too. Joe struggled against the noise to say “I don’t care, I’d do it!”
Billy was silent. The noise was sharp and brutal. He looked at Carl’s crazy little face, all twisted and laughing. He felt an odd lightness. His hand rested on the bus seat, and he felt the fabric under it. The sun glinted on the windows of the parked cars they passed, and the bus engine chuntered and roared. He lifted a hand to touch his face, and imagined it old.

Sammy Wright has been writing for several years, but rarely to his own satisfaction. He works by day as a teacher, and sleeps by night (mostly). His favourite sound is the breaking of small glass phials.

Treat Them Like Your Own

Siân Melangell Dafydd

The woman was antsy. A relatively new thing for her, and alien, but she identified it as a certain sort of worry which was like new skin, making her fidget.
Sometimes, she walks about her flat as though something was to be seen in one of the rooms, if she’d just keep searching for it. She’d lift something and put it back down: a post card, dictionary, mug. It was sunny out there; with the windows wide open, heat and the sound of swallows like shuttlecocks blew in once in a while. But she was wearing her socks thin by pacing. So, she’d sit to read a good book but then got up to make tea after not finding what she wanted there on the same page three times, then she’d leave the tea to go cold while she stared at a felt-tip stain on the wall. Something needed baking, new pants were needed for her son, or she needed to go for a jog.
Yesterday, she was walking the underground corridors of the Metro on the way to work, nearing the last corner of her daily route in the rabbit warren and heard a voice.
‘Will you call mommy? Will you call mommy?’
Countless times, she’d rounded this corner, thinking of nothing but a shopping list and meeting agendas and how pretty those shoes are on the feet of the woman in front. But this day, no, she thought of her son. Him, sitting at his desk, putting bite marks on his felt-tip-top, and she listened to that voice shivering above the noise of feet. And there, in the tunnel’s mouth, right at the very end, there was a man. A man in his forties, she’d say, parting the crowd with his question, standing with his hand out in an island of white tiles. And people feared that, feared he’d sing at them, that strange could be dangerous.
‘Could you call mommy, please?’
The woman was the only one who didn’t suddenly develop a huge interest in film posters. She stopped, called that number on his scrap of paper even. There was something about him: his cleanliness. The comb marks in his hair. The fact that he said, ‘please’ and then looked to the ceiling. And the eyes in his head looking as though they’d fallen from their place and bruised. Not that this was unusual. That’s exactly how you are, too, first thing in the morning, but awake like this guy, and alert. The woman explained the clumsy situation to the person on the other side of the phone: the piece of paper and the man in a blue Ralph Lauren jumper, in case that meant something.
A voice replied, thinned by age. ‘My God,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ This was her son.
‘Is he all right?’
‘As far as I can tell,’ replied the woman, and asked him,
‘All right?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right?’
‘All right,’ she said back.

And like that, the woman agreed, being that she had someone else’s son on her hands, that she’d put him safely on Metro line 12, first carriage, seat by the door, so that his mother could fetch him out at the other end. What could she do but agree? She thought for a second: it’s surely what anyone would do. Then again, as someone clipped her shoulder, she thought that wasn’t strictly the case, even if that’s all that was required. No-face-to-face meeting with the voice, the mother. No real inconvenience or deviation from her day to make her late. She lead him by his elbow to the right place. Sat with
him on the plastic seats, an arm’s length apart. ‘Pink seats,’ he said. He closed his eyes while he waited, and after a a length of time that had just about
reached awkward, then asked, ‘Where are we?’
‘Montparnasse.’
‘And the seats in Montparnasse are green,’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Pink.’
He opened his eyes and said, ‘Shit.’ She closed his laces. When the Metro arrived, she placed him in it. He sat a little flimsy as if he needed a strap. He held his knees. A pudding body, she thought: a child’s limbs grown too large. But this man must have been her age. She kneeled to make sure he was on his seat and settled there. But she couldn’t ask him his age.

She waited to see him go and he went, backwards,waving, just as if it was aimed at a mother in an audience, shaking frantically, all the way into the tunnel. She was late to work that day anyway. She sat at a terrace drinking a coffee and gathering her wits again. She failed. She scrunched the scrap of paper with the mother’s phone number on it with the bits of sugar papers. Seeing a tramp with a box full of puppies doesn’t make her feel like this, nor does seeing the girl on line 6 who pole dances on the Metro bars. This was personal. The woman felt this often, now: petulant, lonely, needing to reach under her skin to smooth something over. She felt the strain in her eyes from staring too long at the felt-tip mark on the wall. And even if there’s a bundle of things that needed her attention today, she won’t do any of them.

Siân Melangell Dafydd is the author of the novella Y Trydydd Peth (The Third Thing), which won the Prose Medal at the National Eisteddfod 2009 and was longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2010. She is also co-editor of the Academi’s literary magazine, Taliesin. She lives between Wales and France, researching her next novel, and this year spends time translating The Third Thing into English, as well as being a writer in residence on a HALMA scholarship in Sylt, Finland and Jyväskylä, Finland.

Novel extract: This is a Canvas

Jackson Martin

Chapter One
The first time you saw her, in person, was from the top of a red brick office block. You’d climbed the scaffolding that had gone up all around it, knowing the roof was just about the tallest spot in the area. Site is electronically protected. A cartoon portrait of a falcon or eagle. Where Provost Street met City Road. London Borough of Hackney. N1. New, light-reflective road signs everywhere.
You were sat smoking a roll-up, hot tip of it curled into your palm, forearms on knees, back pressed against the chimneystack. The low parapet hiding all but the top of your head from street level as you watched hi-vis vested workers, gripped in the fist of a cherry picker, wrestling with huge posters above the Old Street roundabout. The glowing hoardings cradled between dark arches, the structure like a huge beetle. Dried and wind hollowed to sparse skeleton but somehow still alive. Liteyed. Crouched and guarding the intersection between where you’d come to live and the rest of the city.
Then there was a flicker, some not quite right movement on the pavement below. Where, leaning onto one knee, stubbing the cigarette out against cracked mortar, you found someone walking, casually, under the eye shaped clock. ROYAL LONDON OPTHALMIC HOSPITAL inch-deep in the granite lintel, (MOORFIELDS EYE HOSPITAL) a goldleafed afterthought underneath. There must have been twenty or thirty others on the same pavement but you latched onto that one capped and hooded head. 1898. 1805. The ground floor window boxes she’d just passed spilling ivy tears. Knowing, somehow, it was a girl, a young woman, rather than a teenage boy. A name or message scrawled where the window boxes stopped.

And, tracking back along the pavement, having to grab hold of the concrete lip of wall to stop yourself from standing, she was doing it again. Something bigger, hand and arm blurring against the head-high brick wall. All those people bustling by behind her. The odd double-take and long glance but no-one missing a step. She simply stood and moved in a certain way. Slipped into a few
seconds of grace. You felt trapped as she finished and moved on. Peerless Street. Baldwin Street. The Old Fountain Pub pincered between them. Real Ales. Beer Garden. Your head darting
around uselessly for a way down, picturing a plane’s inflatable emergency chute just as something else in your periphery made you crouch and grip the wall again. Two police, thumbs tucked in stab vests, walking slowly up City Road from the roundabout. The girl painting again, on the north-facing side of a bus stop. Hidden from view but only a hundred or so metres from them. Working even more slowly. Stepping back every few seconds to check what she was doing, the shelter a plasti-glass pebble separating her from the stream of pedestrians.
So you shouted. More of a noise than a word. And again as she couldn’t hear, or refused to acknowledge she could. Then a third time, carelessly loud, willing the pocket of sound through the air. Somehow pocketing the can before she turned and found you waving then jabbing frantically towards the still oblivious pair as they closed in. Might have directed a little nod up to you after tipping her head to look. Then seemed to slouch into a new self on the plastic bench, gently gripping and tucking her bag out of sight with her feet. Bus waiting, weary. Chin nustling behind her zip as a cupped mobile lit her face a weird green.
You squatted back down, watched her swap brief greetings as they strutted by. One of the men leaning in to whisper something to his partner a few steps on, the murmur of a chuckled reply carried up on the breeze. You rose again the moment they turned onto Cayton Street, trying to wave less manically as she stood too, slipped the small black bag over her shoulders. Peering up. Hands hipped. Not walking away as you checked through the tarpaulin, scrambling down as quickly as you could. Weirdly aware of your limbs as you started to cross the road through a brief gap in traffic. Council Electricity Board hopped over, the square grate cut across by the double white lines. Arms forgetting what to do. Legs uncomfortable on the too-solid ground. Trying to replay what you’d seen her do. That turn to the surface. The flawless combination of movement and stillness. Then, stepping onto the pavement a few metres from her, looking from the brick wall to the shelter side, you heard yourself say, ‘Know you.’ Mumbled and half swallowed, as usual. Had become usual. But there you were. And there she was. As striking as all the other versions of her you’d already seen. Realising as you spoke
that you’d seen those four letters in that combination hundreds, thousands of times.

‘What you mean you know me?’ she said, knocking back her hood with her left hand, tiny phone still clenched in the right. Wiry arms crossing. Pale skin almost white in the night’s strange light. Milky blue eyes flitting you up and down. Summer London dawn blue, for all the handful of those you’d seen. Not much shorter than you. Skin and bones though, as your mum would have said. FH DUCTILE. Another metal grate, heavily dented under her right foot. STANTON PLC H WARRIOR. That odd urge to warn her. ‘Where you from?’ she asked, squinting at you. Trying to work out a first impression, guess at who or what you might be beyond a six-foot something string bean, as you used to be called. An unplaceably brown man-boy. Flinching at every raise of her eyebrow, every almost smirk or smile as her gaze found nothing to tell her anything for certain. Then, realising you’d frozen, she said, ‘Thanks though, for that,’ cap tipping towards where you’d shouted from. ‘Wankers, right?’ OPTOMETRIST. You shrugged, not quite able to speak. Gilray House. The bank spotlessly white. Then, looking past her to where she’d come from, ‘That, those. Seen them everywhere. Seen you all over.’
‘My tag? Should hope so,’ her attention dragged away as siren tones wrapped around the corner from the west side of Old Street. Chicken Cottage. The paramedic bike only second behind. ‘Four years of Cusp now,’ she said to the distance. Then, looking back, ‘What you write then? And what’s that accent, you northern?’
‘Don’t. Write, that is. Looked it up, cusp,’ stumbling as she frowned at your initial response. Not the first to claim you northern. Something in that flat simplicity you’d practised that made people think of Manchester or Leeds or York. Though it never last more than a few sentences. Could always see the guessed at distance rocketing away the more you spoke. Thousands of miles in a few mangled syllables.  ‘It’s a nice, you know, nice word. Nice tag.’
‘You definitely don’t,’ she said, forehead still creased even as her body relaxed. Some set of decisions falling in your favour. ‘Chose it for the letters, mostly,’ arms loosening above her stomach, Weight rocking back onto her right hip. ‘What you want then? What you doing here?’
‘Seen you everywhere. There’s tags everywhere.’
Unimpressed, as you looked back to her. ‘And other stuff.’ Even less so. ‘And live here. Work, mostly. Most nights. All around here. Hoovering,’ trying to clarify, her not seeming to understanding, ‘bins, and – even in that place,’ looking to where you’d seen her from, ‘a couple of times, that was –‘
‘There’s cars everywhere,’ she said, almost smiling, ‘you
chase them too?’
‘Wasn’t chasing you, it’s just,’ having to shake your head, flashes of those you had followed over the last few months making you blink. A banker to the door of his house in Balham. A dentist to his Camden loft. Others who didn’t seem to go home. The lawyer who didn’t emerge from the pub she went into. The postman who boarded the train for Edinburgh with no luggage, still in his short-sleeved uniform. Then, somehow, you said, ‘Don’t know, didn’t – it’s just – didn’t think girls did this,’ stomach knotting, bile creeping up even as you carried on, ‘thought it was too, you know, dirty, or dangerous,’ cursing yourself even before her eyes dropped you, as what you’re still sure will be the worst chat up line she’ll ever hear rattled in your ears. ‘There’s all sorts, up on roofs, in drains, storm tunnels,’ trying to dig down to them with a shuffly, awkward dance as you tried and failed to backtrack, justify.

‘Don’t write in sewers,’ her gaze pinging around behind you, ‘keeps my nails clean,’ bony shoulder angled into your upper arms as she barged past. You followed, a few metres back, unsure what else
to do, the part of you that should have told you to go home having already thrown in the towel. Rubbing your bicep. So unused to speaking to people during those nights and early mornings you worked. Almost all spent without a word said, beyond a few to yourself that no one would understand. Tried to smile, as she turned, checking you were still there, or just looking. Her head moving constantly, sounding out the surfaces all around.
The Colour of Summer. One of the workers smoking up in his crow’s nest, a wine bottle bigger than him floating next to a glowering sun. The windowless brick of the side of the petrol station shop. OLYMPICS BUDGET IN TATTERS behind the fence-like mesh of a newspaper board. WA DO Chinese Food to take away – Kebabs Burgers Chips & Pies. Ring road. SAMEER suppliers of classic & fashion lines to the trade. For sale and to-let signs cluttered on buildings like butterflies. Came gingerly alongside her as she paused to cross Old Street towards Great Eastern Street. Multiple lanes of traffic in both directions separated by a thin concrete island. An electric pink moped ripping between two black taxis. Staring straight at you after she’d watched it go.

‘Didn’t mean that,’ you pleaded with her hood as you reached the island. ‘About girls, women, painting, tagging.’ You breathed, blinked. ‘It was a surprise. A good one. It’s just – why do you do it? That’s what -’ She shot you a sharp, sceptical glance as she stepped off the next kerb, ‘You honestly don’t write?’ Then veering off around the large stone monument towards Tabernacle Street. Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association full of half dead plants. She slowed a little though, let you walk in time. Eyes still scanning ahead.
‘There’s loads out there,’ you tried, ‘see it everywhere out walking, climbing around,’ her glancing at you as you said that. ‘Could show you some great places that -’
‘That an occupation, climbing, walking around?’ her eyebrow raised at a lamppost as you turned onto Leonard Street. She never seemed to look straight ahead, where she was going. Mostly, you soon found out, because she most often didn’t know where she was going. ‘Pay well, decent pension?’ Lingering on a fresh looking ELMO. ‘I know all the best spots. All the best
are gone, till they’re buffed. Wait there. Give me one of your shouts if you see them.’
Already spraying across the blue painted board surrounding an old shop as you turned to ask who. It sold handbags, when you first arrived. Wholesale or walking customer. Handbags, belts and shoes, all leather. Unique Designs 1978. Or 1979. You can’t find any photos of it. Regal Homes. 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments available off-plan. The plastic sign nailgunned
to the blue.

‘Coming?’ she asked. From £75k for a 35% share. There themselves, now, when you check the street view. The Cusp she’d left almost identical to the others in proportion. The shape and weight of
the letters, the relation between each. The whole thing wider though, stretched to fill the long, landscape board. Turned to see her walking away, yelled, ‘Wait.’
‘How old’re you?’ she asked, squinting at you again as you caught up, then yanking open the heavy metal door to what you thought was a disused building. Her head shaking slightly as it traced around the rusted frame, checking the marker and Tip-ex scribbles. Her hand shifting higher up the door as she held it open. ‘Not that they’re going to ask. After you.’
You ducked in under her arm. A moment’s trust you’ll never forget.

Jackson Martin has a BA in English with Creative Writing from UEA, and an MA in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies from Goldsmiths. He lives in Hackney, where he works in his local pub.
The above is an extract from his first novel, This is a Canvas, which explores the graffiti and street art scenes of contemporary east London and was written with the help of an award from the Arts Council. He is represented by Jamie Coleman at Toby Eady Associates.