All the Lights (10 page)

All the nights on trains. That’s what I still think of, often. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m back on the trains again, riding the rails from town to town with Blondie. Outside, all the lights, us drinking beer or whisky, usually in silence, rarely making plans, counting up our money.

The conductor looks tired; there’s a man asleep on his seat, his mouth gaping. Blondie looks at me and says, ‘When the time comes … when I’ve got them … don’t ever leave me alone too long with those bastards.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’ll always look after you.’ We were passing through some small town or other. We looked out at the lights in silence.

I met him out in Torgau. He was doing time for something petty, a bit of theft, bit of drugs, that kind of thing.

He was queer, I could tell straight away, not that I usually had an eye for his type. I’d often sat in bars and pubs in strange towns and wondered why there wasn’t a single woman in there, and sometimes one of the guys had bought me a beer, and when I caught on the whole thing sometimes ended down at the police station – but not always, and that wasn’t why I was in Torgau.

I can’t remember how I noticed, and I don’t know where exactly it was that I first saw him. Probably in the corridor but maybe in the yard or the gym. It can’t have been the way he walked, he walked pretty normally actually, not swaying his arse or anything. It was something about his face, about the way he looked at you. It wasn’t that he looked like a woman or acted all girly; he came across as very young, almost like a child, even though he was maybe in his mid, late twenties, and he had this smile … I think if you looked at his smile for too long you got scared, especially where we were, that you’d have to go to him, hug him or something.

I’d met a good few queers in the three jails I’d been in. I’d seen prison gays who couldn’t hold out all the years but only loved women outside. Prison-marriages, lags who’d shared a cell for years and quarrelled about nothing all day long like old grey couples but forgot about it all every night. I’d seen guys get beaten up for looking at someone ‘queer’; usually they hadn’t done anything at all. But in all the years I’d never made friends with any of them. I’d made sure I never spent too much time with them – no good for your reputation.

It was strange. I saw him and I knew right away that he’d never go to bed with a woman, not a chance. Later on he told me it had happened a couple of times actually, on drugs, and that he’d felt so cold every time that he’d had to get up and leave right in the middle.

His hair. I always remember his hair: blond, shiny and pale at his temples; it looked almost like he was starting to go white there. Someone grabbed him by the hair; that was the first time I stood directly in front of him. He had quite long hair, flopping over his forehead. ‘Let him go,’ I said. He peered at me through one eye; the guy’s arm was covering his other eye, the guy holding him by the hair. ‘You keep out of it, it’s none of your fucking business.’

And the guy was right, it was none of my fucking business, but once I’d stopped and said ‘Let him go’ – even though I didn’t know what it was all about, even though I knew the queer wasn’t clean and needed to powder his nose now and then and that kind of thing always made for trouble sooner or later – I’d held out my hand to him and I couldn’t just take it back again, not any more. A couple of weeks beforehand my cellmate had tried to kill himself, wanted to top himself. ‘Let him go.’

I knew the guy wouldn’t let him go. I could have tried persuading him for hours, maybe then a snout might have come along and the guy would have acted like he was putting his arm round Blondie, like they were the best of friends having a wee chat in the corridor. And then it all went very fast, the guy was on the floor and Blondie said ‘Ouch,’ and put his hands on his head, and I saw that the guy was gripping a few hairs between his fingers, rolling to the wall, his arm splayed away from his body. I’d caught him unawares.

I shoved Blondie away from him, pushed him along the corridor, a couple of guys standing by their doors watching us, and I said, ‘Go on, piss off back to your cell.’

He nodded, still holding his head as he walked down the corridor. He hadn’t said thanks or anything, he’d just nodded and left, but when he’d peered at me through one eye, the guy’s arm across his face, there’d been something in his eye … In bed that evening I thought a lot about it, there was something there, as if he’d known at that moment that we’d be riding the rails, later on.

‘You a gay-lover, are you?’ I’d known it’d happen and it’d stay that way, for the rest of my time. ‘Gay-lover, eh? You doing her, are you?’ I hit out, pummelled into the guys, tried to beat the shit out of them before they beat it out of me. I felt time passing more and more slowly. Six months to go.

The guy I’d knocked down had a couple of business ventures going, and he gave me everything back. I’d known that too when I’d said ‘Let him go,’ because by that point I’d already punched him. And when he went down, Blondie’s hair between his fingers, I could already feel the fists on my back, my belly and my face.

‘Sorry,’ said Blondie.

‘Forget it.’ His name was Stephan. He was half-Polish but you couldn’t tell from looking. Now and then we stood side by side in the yard and he smoked a cigarette, although he didn’t usually.

‘Have you got a wife outside, I mean, is there a girl waiting for you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but don’t get your hopes up, little brother.’

He grinned; no, he smiled. ‘You’re not my type anyway.’

‘What happened there?’ I pointed at his eye, almost touching his face with my finger, then withdrew it again. His eye was blue and green, swollen half-shut.

‘And you?’ I raised my swollen top lip and whistled through the new gap in my teeth. ‘I asked you, gayboy,’ I said, whistling two or three off notes.

‘Walked into a door,’ he said, still smiling.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘easily done, too many doors round here.’

He got out two months before me. We didn’t say goodbye. He’d told me once he’d be going to Halle. I was there now and then myself, and I kind of knew I’d see him again, that the story wasn’t over yet, hadn’t even really begun, in the corridor in Torgau where Blondie had lost a few hairs.

‘Your pussy gone now, is she? Bet you’re sad now with no one to fuck, huh?’

I didn’t hit out any more, didn’t pummel into the guys, didn’t try to beat the shit out of them any more. I just walked past them, walked down the corridors and round the yard on my own and felt time passing more and more slowly.

My sister had never written to me but I knew she was living in Köthen, that she had a kid with some guy who worked in some bar in Köthen.

My sister sat on the edge of the sandpit, next to her brightly-coloured sand moulds and little plastic spades, and in front of her the kid sat in the sand, digging a hole and putting the sand in a blue bucket. I stood between the trees and looked over at them. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there, it was nearly evening. I didn’t even know if the kid was a boy or a girl. It had blond hair and a small round face with a large nose. But I was a long way off so maybe the nose wasn’t all that large, and maybe all little kids had large noses. Two, two and a half; I tried to work out how old it was, but then I gave up and walked back between the trees to the station. I had a room above a bar there, maybe it was even the bar where the kid’s father worked, I had no idea, I’d been away too long, but I didn’t really care anyway.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine, thanks. Nice of you to come by. It’s been a long time. This is your uncle.’ She picked up the kid and handed it to me. ‘Hello,’ I said, stroking the blond hair cautiously. Sometimes I imagined her making coffee and serving cake, some kind of cake, and then I started wondering what sort of cake it might be and if she might have made it herself and how many teeth little kids are supposed to have before they can eat cake, with apples or cherries on top, but with the stones taken out … I sat in my room and knew I’d leave again without visiting her, maybe back to Leipzig, maybe to Halle … The window was open and I looked outside, even though it was dark by now and all that was opposite was a derelict house.

There was a club not far from the station. I could hear the music at night, I could hear the trains as well, sometimes I heard women’s voices, or were they still girls? They were down on the street, probably going to the club. It must have been a pretty big place; I heard cars coming and driving off. I hadn’t been to a club for years now.

I stood at the bar, watching the dance floor. It was pretty full, Friday night. Most of the people here looked pretty young: eighteen, nineteen, early twenties. Two young women stood next to me at the bar, drinking white wine. They’d looked over at me a couple of times but I didn’t know what to do. I watched the people dancing and sipped at my beer.

I’d been with a woman I used to know in Leipzig for a couple of days. Actually I’d gone to visit her husband but she was divorced now and alone, and it hadn’t worked out. I’d been away too long and I’d forgotten everything, even though I’d dreamed almost every night of not being alone when I got out.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘It’ll sort itself out,’ and she was probably right, but when we lay together and she stroked me and I stroked her the fear and the cold didn’t go away, and I left while she was asleep.

I drank shots with my beer, and after four shots I noticed I needed to dance. The music was pretty good, sounded like George Michael, I’d liked him as a kid, but I’d even have danced to Beethoven. I wanted to move in among the dancers, shut my eyes and feel them, feel them close and hear only the music. I downed another shot. The girls next to me had disappeared, and I went over to the dance floor, wanting to disappear too, closed my eyes and started moving slowly. I was a bit scared I might have forgotten how to do that as well, but once I moved my feet to the rhythm my shoulders started relaxing, my arms still dangling on either side, but then I raised them slightly, moving them at chest level. Someone nudged me in the back, pretty hard, but it didn’t bother me, I was dancing and forgetting everything, not thinking of Blondie and the long corridors any more, not thinking of my sister living a few streets away with her kid and her man, and at that moment, in among all the people touching me and nudging me now and then, at that moment I thought there must be something like happiness, somewhere out there, and the fear and the cold I’d been dragging around with me since I’d got out were gone. I’d never have thought our trip would start here, but maybe, probably, it had already begun long before that, inside, on the corridor, when he’d lost a bushel of hair.

The girl was pretty far gone but so was I. We’d been dancing together, or not really together, just facing each other, but on some songs we held hands and looked at each other, our faces up close. I saw she had on a pretty thick layer of make up, with sweat running down over it. And she smelled strongly of alcohol, something sickly-sweet, but that didn’t bother me when she suddenly leant towards me and leaned her forehead against mine and I had to kiss her. We danced. We danced for a long time, we danced until we sweated and the sweat ran down our faces, and then we staggered to the exit.

‘What are you doing here, Stephan?’ I asked, holding onto the girl as she tried to drag me on towards the exit and then clung onto me.

‘Pretty little girlfriend,’ he said. A few minutes back, when we could hardly dance any more and I’d laid my head on the girl’s shoulder, I’d had a feeling I’d seen his blond hair somewhere in the crowd. But there were plenty of blond guys out there and he’d never told me he did business in Köthen. And he was doing business, I could tell straight away, even though the girl was tugging at me and wanting to leave and I had to concentrate to stop Blondie from swaying and whirling. Some guy palmed him a note, and he pressed something into his hand. The guy clenched his fist, opened it again for a moment and looked at his hand, then grinned, turned away and headed for the toilets. ‘It’ll take a while,’ Blondie called after him, ‘but then you’ll go mental.’

‘What’s all this crap?’ I said, shoving him in the chest. The girl let go of me and stumbled against the wall. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, turning her face to me. Her eyes opened and closed, but it was just the sweat running down her face.

‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘Just a bit. Wait a minute, sweetheart.’ But she didn’t want to be my sweetheart any more, and I watched her swaying to the exit, raising both hands and saying something I didn’t understand.

‘Don’t you want to go after her?’ Blondie put his hand on my shoulder.

‘What are you doing in Köthen, Stephan? If they catch you here – Christ, you’re not even being careful!’ I took the note out of his other hand and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

‘Don’t worry, little brother,’ he patted my shoulder a couple of times. ‘They’re all village idiots here, they’ve got no idea, they won’t even notice.’ He winked at me and smiled. There it was again, his smile; he looked as innocent as a child. You wanted to help him, even though he might not even need any help, like a child you couldn’t help being fond of. Even if he’d done something really bad all he had to do was smile and you’d stroke his hair and everything would be all right again. I stumbled and held onto the wall where the girl had just been leaning. I looked towards the exit but she’d disappeared.

‘And you know what the best bit is?’ I closed my eyes, but he was right by my ear. ‘Painkillers. You get it, painkillers. I’m ripping these village idiots off and they don’t even notice!’ He laughed, and then I heard him rummaging in his pockets. ‘No one knows the brand; they’re from Poland with this little star on them. Like a pill, like ecstasy.’ I opened my eyes and saw the little white pill right in front of me, saw the star in the middle as well, and then there were two guys, they gave him two notes, and he gave them the pill and got another pill out of a little bag that he put back in his jacket pocket afterwards. ‘And be careful, lads, they’re …’ But they were gone. I gave myself a shake and tried to clear my head. I’d need a clear head soon enough, I was sure of that.