Communion Town (19 page)

The good slaughterer can’t live in two places. He has to choose between the city and the abattoir. He has no story of his own: that’s something he has to do without, because he has no place in the world outside. I had been resisting the choice, I saw now, but I couldn’t do it any longer. The moment comes to say goodbye. I stood for a long time with the paper in my hands and my eyes unfocused, and allowed myself a last farewell. I let myself remember an afternoon, not long ago, when I had walked down to the Strangers’ Market. I remembered the polyvinyl awnings with their broad blue and yellow stripes growing hot, the crowd thinning and thickening and the sun moving in and out behind a trailing curtain the colour of zinc. Everywhere hands felt in pockets, rubbed notes and coins, and strayed towards dark green melons, second-hand pots and saucepans, racks of leather coats, cheap clocks and watches, jewellery, sweets, medicines, bath salts, chestnuts in scalding paper bags. The avenues between the stalls were solid with browsers. I imagined the Flâneur here, moving through the crowd, patrolling the heart of his principality incognito.

I had loved the Market when I was younger. The women at the greengrocery stalls would look at this boy towering over them, his face implanted with sore lumps, and crow that I needed some meat on my bones. I used to browse the tables in the plaza, and had a compulsion for crumbling paperbacks. Later I gave it up, but for a time I would devour everything I could get, always in cheap, obsolete editions. I had a great need for all those stories. Once I bought an old novel for a few pence and for months came back to the stall to check for more by the same writer, feeling that if I searched through all she wrote I would discover something crucial. Thinking of those times, I was filled with the memory of mad excitement bottled secretly inside, the world succulent, rinsed and lit. Back then everything astonished me. I could be dumbstruck by the smell of rain and the slow gather of light on a green stone wall.

A viaduct cut across a corner of the marketplace, creating several deep arches in which stallholders had their pitches: vegetarian curry stands, coffee stalls, specialists in dyed silk scarves, purveyors of art posters. On the bricks above, a weatherbeaten sign spelled out the Market’s name in circus lettering. Inside one blue and white kiosk, three handsome black-haired young men in striped aprons, winking at their customers, ducked around under the strings of cured sausages and the dangling plastic bags in which pale balls of mozzarella floated. They trimmed the meat into deft, bloodless pieces, weighed them out and wrapped them in waxed paper before handing them over in elegant rectangular bags.

I remembered the day, soon after I had started working at the slaughterhouse, when I visited that stall. On the white refrigerated slabs, the cuts were displayed in their shades of lavender, plum, pastel and candy-pink. Someone spoke to me. I looked up. The young man flicked his fringe out of his eyes and asked again how he could help. When I didn’t answer, the crease in his brow deepened, but he pointed at sliced bacon of the palest coral.

‘How about this, sir? It’s rather special today.’

I nodded, and watched his gloves peel the floral tissues apart. I wanted to let him know who I was, so he would understand that we were both part of the single great scheme that linked my bleed rail and his blue striped canopy. He and I were brothers dedicated to the hunger of the city. But I couldn’t work out how to tell him and in the end I said nothing. It was only as he rung up my purchase on the till that I found I hadn’t brought my wallet.

You can go out among your fellow creatures but you can’t stay out there forever. You have to come back in. It’s not so easy to leave your account once you’ve begun it. It always wants you back. The pink slip is in your hands: rub the paper between finger and thumb. Think of Fischer. Think of the Flâneur.

One of his eyes is looking out between the first and second fingers of my gauntlet, and the eye is asking me a question. This won’t take long. There will be no suffering. I’ve said what I can, I’ve given my account, and what happens afterwards is not my concern. The good slaughterer knows his skills have their place. He does the work.

Three Translations

Dawn was walking home along the seafront when a voice called her name. As she looked around, a tall, fair-haired girl hefted a rucksack on her shoulder and started forward, shading her eyes against the hard sunlight, almost colliding with a cyclist as he zipped by. The tall girl, whose name was Andie, called out again. A man selling treats from an icebox slung across his chest was watching with interest.

Dawn returned the greeting with a small smile and a wave of the hand which, she felt at once, must look badly lacking in surprise or enthusiasm, or even as though she’d made an instant, calculated decision to be rude. She had been at school with Andie in another country and the last time they had spoken to each other they had been fourteen years old. For a while they had been well known to others and themselves as best friends. They had both stayed at the school until they were sixteen, when Andie had left. But after the last time, they hadn’t spoken.

Andie had just arrived in the city, she’d literally walked here from the station, she hadn’t even found a hostel yet or anything. What a coincidence that Dawn should be here and they’d met like this! She’d only been backpacking a fortnight so far, but she was having a great time. There were six weeks more on her ticket but she could see herself extending it further. She’d had no idea Dawn was in the city. How long? Two years so far. What doing? Teaching assistant at a language school. This was amazing. Andie wanted to know everything. She could hardly believe she’d found Dawn like this, it had to be more than a coincidence. She loved travelling but the only problem was not being able to read the signs or get people to understand you. But Dawn practically lived here! She could tell Andie everything. Andie had only been planning on a night and a day in the city, two days at most, but now she thought she might stay longer.

Dawn was already conscious of a desire to unfold the city. She wanted to claim the blinding ingot of the sea and the men hauling their nets up the wharf, and to present a city more true than the one mapped out in Andie’s brand-new guidebook. At the same time she felt how little she knew, even now.

They continued along the seafront, picking their way through the preparations for a public event of some kind. Long trestle tables had been set up on the broadest stretch of the promenade, and young men were shinning up the lamp posts to hang bunting. Dawn explained that her apartment was not far from the Boulevard Mino, just a few minutes’ walk away. Andie could easily come back there if she wanted, if she didn’t have anywhere else to get to. She could freshen up, even leave her bag for a few hours. If she liked?

In the apartment, Dawn watched Andie unshoulder her rucksack and let its tail thump into the floor, then knit her fingers, stretch her arms and rotate on the balls of her feet to take in the apartment. Despite the fairness of her skin, the sun had not burnt her. Instead, it had given a healthy rose-and-gold varnish to her face, throat and arms, paled her blue eyes, and turned her thick fair hair silver. It suited her, and only heightened the Nordic look that, it was already obvious, made her conspicuous here. Dawn herself represented a more common physical type in this part of the world.

What a nice place, Andie said, so bright. (It was bright; a textbook lay on the windowsill, and the inpouring light kicked a spray of buttercup yellow from its cover across the white wall.) Did Dawn live by herself? Dawn explained that her flatmate, another assistant at the school, had given up her job a week ago and moved out without warning. It had left Dawn short for the month’s rent.

Andie was shocked to hear this, but then delight broke across her face. What if, listen, she’d stay here. Not for long, just for now, for a while, the rest of the month at least. It was the perfect idea. She could change her ticket no problem. Dawn needed someone to help with the rent and Andie was sick of staying in hostels, she’d love to see what it was like to really live somewhere. They’d be flatmates.

Dawn didn’t know what to say. But, well, why not?

Once Andie had changed into a white summer dress that, she said, she had not yet worn, they went back out. It was late afternoon, and the town was full of foreign backpackers and families on holiday. They walked down to Tall Quays, where Andie exclaimed appreciatively and held Dawn’s arm as they looked over the parapet, then back up the seafront to where rollerskaters stitched around pedestrians and prams, occasionally pointing their toes in opposite directions to whirl to a stop. Dawn and Andie left the path and picked their way down the stony beach.

Tarry clutches of lobster pots lay here and there, and the reek of decaying fish rose everywhere from the water and the pebbles. Gusts of wind battered along the strand. Andie stopped to watch some men launching a boat, rattling it down the stones and splashing in after it, thigh-deep, roaring at each other. She laughed when the wind snatched at her dress and chucked sheaves of her hair across her face. Dawn observed the long central groove of Andie’s abdomen appear under the thin wind-flattened fabric. Some youths with bicycles had stopped above to watch, too.

Andie barely looked any different now from her long-necked, gracefully equine school self, except that she had become a fraction fuller in the upper arm and around the waist. Dawn was able to judge these changes because she had spent a lot of time over several years gazing at Andie. She knew the appearance of her arm crooked on an exercise book, and that of her neck bent forward, revealed by fallen hair, viewed sidelong from the next seat. She knew well the stances Andie adopted when viewed full-figure from a distance, long after they had ceased to speak. Today Andie was no longer quite so self-contained in her movements. When she was excited – when she expressed astonishment at a detail of the life of a language assistant, or as she tried to pick her way back up the pebbles while evading the wind – her eyes seemed to point askew for a moment.

They climbed back up to the promenade. Andie licked her upper lip and said she could taste the salt. Among the trestle tables and the bunting, the young men were now laying a series of small bonfires. Here the promenade was not marked off from the sea by any railing: instead the ground sloped straight down into a broad, shallow slipway. As they watched, one of the men chased another into the water, shouting, then pushed him so that he fell, and immediately dived headlong after him. They began to wrestle, coughing and hooting.

Dawn explained that these were the preparations for a festival they had every year. Tomorrow there’d be a kind of party. No, she wasn’t intending to go, it wasn’t like that. It was really just for the locals. An indigenous tradition. Andie noticed that the tables were arranged in a bulging semicircle, as if backing away from the city towards the sea. I wonder why that is, she said; but Dawn didn’t know.

They walked on. Andie had been working as a receptionist in a solicitor’s office until a few months ago, but she was going to apply to train as an actress when she got back home. She had always liked drama at school. Not that this was enough in itself, she knew, but what could you do except give it a good try? When it was a passion there was really no choice. But that was for next year. For now she was seeing where her travels took her. To begin with, she and a friend had been travelling together, but it hadn’t worked out and they’d gone their separate ways. Don’t look so worried, she told Dawn, it’s not a problem! Anyway, she preferred travelling by herself. Really, that was the whole point.

Before they could say anything else, a body blocked Dawn’s path. She tried to move past but he dodged to keep in front of her. He was doing it on purpose. The young man’s arms were spread, his palms exposed. He was watching for her reaction. He wore a sag-necked T-shirt and threadbare, bleached-out cotton shorts; several other young men, identically dressed, were loitering on the far side of the street. One drawled out a comment either on the accostment or on something else entirely.

She tried again to walk on and again the youth prevented her. She ought to know better how to deal with this, she thought furiously. She was supposed to know her way around here. She couldn’t guess what he wanted from them. She risked a look at his face. His lips were dark red, and narrow as a cut except for a central cherry; his eyebrows were dense bars, so regular and sharp that they might have been plucked. She realised that she knew him. She had seen him around the language school, and he’d been in one or two of her classes. She was nearly certain his name was Charles. They had never spoken, but now, seeing her recognition, he grinned, and spread his palms wider.

He pointed from Dawn to Andie and back, establishing the relationship between them. He introduced himself to Andie and, when she looked blank, Dawn translated for her. Andie gasped in happy comprehension and told him her name in return, separating the syllables with care.

But the conversation went no further, because a small young woman with dark, short hair appeared beside them and spoke sharply to Charles. Her voice was low-pitched and hoarse. The rhythm of her words matched the jabs of her forefinger in the air, but Charles didn’t seem troubled at all. He gave a quick humorous bow to Andie and Dawn, then walked away with the girl. He caught her hand with a darting motion and twined his fingers into hers. For a moment she tried to resist.

In the streets, later that evening, several men made a show of admiration. Dawn had not had time to put in her contact lenses and once, as they walked, a man seated on a street-corner bollard made an obscene observation, in a loud, cordial voice, about girls in glasses. Andie asked what he had said, and then had to stop walking in order to laugh. The youths killing time on the streets, with their tar-streaked shins and stained cotton shorts and their body hair showing dark through their T-shirts, had a way of gaping, with heads forward and mouths hanging, that implied a violent, voluntary stupidity. Dawn could imagine them battering their skulls together like goats until their foreheads were dented enough for the lives they wanted.

Up ahead the preparations for the festival looked complete. Flags and banners fluttered from the lamp posts above the tables and the unlit bonfires. A group of men in cut-off trousers dumped an enormous tuna fish, bigger than a person, on the paving stones. Andie grabbed Dawn’s arm at the sight of it. Once the men had laid it out, dappled and gleaming, they moved away, wiping their hands off on their thighs. They were replaced by five women with knives and buckets, who began to butcher the fish, wrapping lumps of its meat in paper and passing them to a school of small girls who darted around the carcass.

Dawn explained that, as far as she understood it, the festival was for the city’s unmarried men. It was supposedly a celebration of some figure of archaic local folklore, some legendary personification of the city. But all it meant was that they had a barbecue, sang and danced, and took part in feats of strength and machismo: wrestling, drinking competitions, games of luck with painful forfeits. The meal was prepared by the city’s unmarried women, who also waited on the revellers, but didn’t themselves take part. It began in the afternoon and continued into the night.

Andie was highly amused to hear all this. That’s how it used to be, said Dawn, or at least that’s what I’ve read. It’s probably changed nowadays.

The women did seem to be preparing for something, carrying heavy-looking cardboard boxes, covered tureens and sacks of fuel pellets. A few groups of young men lounged at the tables, watching them work and drinking beer from small brown bottles. There were other early signs of festivity. A carnival figure, wearing white greasepaint and a scarlet ringmaster’s coat with a giant sunflower bobbing from the lapel, was prancing in between the passers-by, accosting the unwary with flourishes of a long-necked bottle. A fright wig protruded in stiff white tufts from beneath his bowler hat. He approached in a mincing waltz-step. Halting in front of Dawn, he poured clear fluid into a tin beaker, lifting his bottle up high to make a thin, bright stream in the air, and mimed an invitation to drink.

Dawn shook her head, and he transferred his invitation to Andie, mugging and winking madly. She wavered, then – oh well! – she accepted the beaker and tried a cautious sip. As she screwed up her face, the clown squealed in grotesque pleasure. He pointed after her, cackling, as they walked on.

Andie was smiling sportingly. That was sea water!

Next Andie wanted to try a bistro she had spotted near the promenade. She ordered metal saucepans full of mussels for both of them. She’d pay, she wanted to. Then she told Dawn that since they last saw each other, she had been married. It had been a year or so after she left school. He was nine years older and very good-looking and charming, but dishonest, as it turned out. It had been a mistake: she preferred not to go into the details.