Dead Europe (40 page)

The American comes out of the lift and with him is a younger man. The American introduces himself to me as Robert James, but he wants me to call him Bob. Just Bob. His friend is called Nikolai. Nikolai is short, squat, with a flat handsome face and his body is clothed in an ill-fitting acrylic suit. The fabric stretches across his paunch. He blinks at me, shakes my hand furiously, and then stumbles past me into the foyer. He is staggering, pissed, but Bob James is unconcerned. The bill has been paid, he tells me, and I follow him through the doors.

The car is a wide metal-blue Saab and I move to get into the back seat.

—No, you take the front. Nikolai can have the back. A thin dark-skinned attendant opens the doors for us and Nikolai stumbles into the back seat. The car smells of pine and detergent. The interiors are clean and freshly polished. The American manoeuvres himself behind the steering wheel and his large frame is squashed up against the wheel. With a loud expletive,
fucking cunt
, he forces the seat back and Nikolai groans. The American apologises. We speed out of Cambridge.

Bob James explains that he is originally from Lexington and assumes I know where that is. From some of the details he drops, I assume that it somewhere in the mid-west of the United States of America. He works for AGFA, the photographic company, in marketing, in Chicago, and he tells me that Nikolai also works for the company, in Minsk. At this Nikolai leans over the back of the seat; I smell the chemical wash of the alcohol. He is searching his pockets and eventually finds his wallet. He hands me a card. I glance at it. In the dark
I can make out the AGFA logo and a Belarus address underneath. He pats my shoulder. When you come to Menske, I look after you. My wife. Best cook. He slumps back on the seat and looks out into the darkness. Where we go?

—London.

—Fuck London, he spits out, shaking his head furiously. Fuck London, cold, cold London. No one talk to Nikolai in London.

He reels forward.

—Alcohol? There is pleading in his voice.

The American points to the glovebox. I open it and a bottle of Johnnie Walker falls into my hands. I hand it over to Nikolai, who clutches it to his chest.

Bob James starts bitching about the conference. I look out into the night. I am at complete ease, and I am satisfied. I am conscious that my appetite is momentarily asleep, but that it is coiled deep inside me and will possibly awaken at any moment. I am ready for it. I have my orders, I am prepared. I tell myself to relax, I take breaths. I am on my way to London.

The conference, apparently, was a failure. As part of their activities they had organised an exhibition of photographic art from the company's collection in one of the Colleges. As I had overheard, the exhibition had not been a success with the Cambridge critics. I almost ask which photographers were exhibited. I almost ask about the price the company pay for the artwork. I almost ask for a job. But Bob James smells of toner and offices and the noxious sting of airconditioning ducts. He smells of commerce. I look out into the darkness instead. He isn't perturbed by my silence. He keeps on talking, his shrill voice bitching and moaning. The conference had been a failure; nothing had been accomplished. The Asians hadn't participated and he was sick of always carrying the Eastern Europeans. He speaks nostalgically of a decade earlier when he had first come to
Europe. It was the Wild West, he chuckles, money to be made everywhere. He had worked in Bucharest. The most compliant whores in the world, he tells me, but also the dirtiest. Prague. Over-priced and over-praised. Warsaw. The most stuck-up whores in the world. And Moscow. He had loved Moscow. He'd been treated with deference and respect. He had made a killing for AGFA in 1992. A killing. But all pissed up against the wall when they put the Russians in charge. Fucking Russians. Fucking lazy dogs.

In the back seat, Nikolai, who has drunk half of the contents of the bottle which he is nursing tight to his body, is issuing short rumbling snores. The passing headlights of cars flicker across his face. He is drooling.

—He's going to kill himself.

—What do you mean?

—Alcohol. It's going to kill him. There is a smugness to the pronouncement. The American reaches back and grabs the bottle, takes a swig. I look at Nikolai's bloated red face. Alcohol is poisoning his looks. But it has not destroyed him yet: there are still traces of charm and sweetness in that face. There is still life left in him, real and sensual. My cock stirs.

I don't have to go to London. I can make the American stop here on the motorway. I can turn over the sleeping senseless Nikolai, rip down his trousers, fuck him, bite him. Feed off him. I realise without emotion that there seems no trace of morality left in my appetites. I don't care. I feel grand. That's the word for it. I feel grand.
Ontopofthe-fuckingworld, man
. I feel alive. I turn away from Nikolai and look out into the black world ahead. I can sense the American watching me. There is a lewd smirk on his face, as if he knows all about my desires, as if he knows exactly what I need.

Bob James places a CD, the Wu Tang Clan, their first album, into the car stereo. To the chop-chop of the hip-hop
beats, we enter London. The city just crept up on us. We were on the silent motorway, darkness all around, then a flitter of suburbia, and then we were in the city. Noise and light and cars and neon. I am ready for this city. I can smell the grime and the pollution, the stench of a million bodies. I can smell mould and rodents, rancid breath and foul, unwashed bodies. It is the putrid, accumulated odour of tense, neurotic bodies and it is the obscene effluence of the murky Thames. It is a charged, chemical stench and it hangs like a mutant nimbus over the sprawling city. I am ready for it.

Bob James and Nikolai are staying in a hotel in Earls Court. What the fuck is an Earl, queries Bob James, but he is laughing as he says it. Fucking Brits, fucking useless faggot Brits. The hotel is small and tucked unobtrusively between identical-looking Georgian terraces. A small gold laminated plaque is the only clue to its purpose. An attendant pushes open the swinging glass doors and comes out to greet us. Bob James throws the keys at him.

—Can you park it?

The African youth nods.

The American starts to pull Nikolai from the back seat. He stirs and starts searching for the whisky bottle. Still half-asleep, he pitches forward. Bob James slaps the Russian across the face.

—You fucking Russian cunt. Forget the fucking bottle.

Nikolai is rolling his head, his eyes closed, he is dribbling Russian words. I help Bob James get him out of the car and between us we walk him into the hotel.

A young woman in orange lipstick behind the reception desk glances at us nervously, but the American flashes a key-card and she immediately calls for a porter.

Struggling, the three of us carry the drunk man to the lifts, take him to a room on the second floor and drop him on the bed. Bob James hands a ten-pound note to the porter and asks him to retrieve the bags.

The American looks down at Nikolai, who is moaning softly to himself. He has pissed himself in the corridor and the left leg of his trousers is wet. The brutish reek of the urine is intoxicating. I can smell that he has also shat himself: there is the rich flavour of blood. The American tears the pants off the Russian, and discovers the trail of watery shit. He throws up his hands in disgust.

—That's the fucking Russian entrepreneurial class for you.

There is a knock at the door and the porter enters with the bags. Apart from a slight flinch on first encountering the stink, he shows no alarm at the sight before him. Bob James presses a twenty-pound note in his hand.

—Can you clean things up for me in here?

—Certainly, sir. His accent is flat, dull. He bows and leaves the room. Bob James turns to me.

—Are you going to stay?

I want to rip the Russian apart. Throw my face deep into the shit and piss, inhale him, pour my tongue into him and through him and rip my teeth into him, cover myself, sate myself in his stinking shit, his pulsing blood, his sweat and piss. The American is watching me, his arms crossed, his large bearish body standing in front of the lamp, blocking out the feeble light and casting the room in shadow. I shake my head. I must have thanked him, I must have left the room. I must have taken the lift to the ground floor and I must have walked through the lobby.

Shaking, hungry, awash in lust, I find myself on the cold streets of Earls Court sometime after midnight.

I can hear the sounds of traffic, I can hear shouts in the distance. I have no fear as I walk the deserted streets. London, with the English language everywhere, has always felt comfortable and safe. I draw sharply on the oily squalid air. It is thick with layers of sediment. Layers and layers of shit. History, manure, blood and bone under my feet. The dust of death, life, death, life, endless death and life,
repeating repeating, this is what my body is propelling itself through, this is what life on this dirty soil means. I want to be home, in pure, vast Australia where the air is clean, young. I was not fooling myself. There was blood there, in the ground, in the soil, on the water, above the earth. I am not going to pretend that there is not callous history there. Everywhere the smell of the earth is ruthless but I want to be looking up into a vigorous, juvenile sky. The sky above me now is cramped and petty. I can't see the stars, I can't see the edges of any universe. The dome of London reflects back on itself. Europe is endless Europe. No promise of anything else.

I turn into Warwick Road. There are prostitutes outside the closed gates of the Earls Court tube station. I sniff. Rats and sewage, shit and piss and blood, it is all coursing beneath my feet. I approach the women. There are four of them, walking up and down their short strips of the main road. A boy jeers at them from a speeding car. I can see the blinking lights of an off-licence. I can hear the thump-thump of music.

I walk past each of the women. I am smelling them, testing their odour. I am not interested in their appearance. The first woman smells of heroin—was this what my father stank of?—and the abrasive caustic smell is unappealing. The second woman smells of decaying flesh. I know at once that she is dying. The third woman's odour is soft and appealing; she is young. But when I look at her she is startled by my expression and quickly walks off to join the others. I approach the fourth. In a hard cockney accent, almost comical in its television authenticity, she asks me if I have missed the last train. I can smell semen in her mouth, onion, KFC. The first woman yells out to her, Watch him, love. She looks at me, confused. I stand still and wait. She walks off to join the other women. They splinter and begin their pacing, except for the first woman, who keeps looking at me. I turn and keep walking. I hear her furiously tell me to fuck off.

I am approaching the intersection of Old Brompton Road when I first smell her. She has her back straight against the side wall of the off-licence, and is in the shadows, so I can't see her. But her odour is unique. I can smell woman on her: a cheap astringent perfume and something softer, sweeter, the fine dust of talcum powder. But she also smells like a child. I haven't ever been so intoxicated by a fragrance. It reminds me of being in the showers after gym, at school; a fresh pungent scent. I can also smell her fear. It excites me.

She emerges from the shadows. She is very young, with mocha skin and long shining black hair. Her lips are coloured a ludicrous scarlet that distorts her fine small face. You want fuck? She stammers over the coarse words. I nod and she points through into the alley. Twenty pounds. She blurts out the amount, nervously. She is terrified of me. I can sense that, I can sense her distrust and her terror. There is panic in the small oval eyes shining in the darkness. We need a room, I answer. I see her start at my accent. Forty pounds. Again she blurts out the words. I nod. She steps out into the street and I begin to follow her. She keeps turning to look at me, confused. I am craving for her and I am thrilled by the strange stirring of my desire. The mingling of scents has disoriented me and I am hungry purely for the touch of her, to have her. There is nothing of sex in my lust and I have never experienced this freedom from the constraints of the body. She is neither male nor female to me; she is hardly human. It is as if I am looking at the haunches of a dog or a cat walking ahead of me. She stops in front of a shoddy rooming house. She is shivering when she indicates to me to follow her up the stairs.

The corridor reeks of sex and excrement. The young man who hands her a key did not glance up from the magazine he was flicking through. There is no lift and we walk up three flights of the stairs. The door of the room is stained and potholed. She turns the key and we enter.

It is tiny. A bare mattress on the floor—emanating rats and semen and cunt—and a small dresser with a bowl of condoms. An uncapped syringe is lying beside the mattress and the girl flicks it with her foot to a corner of the room. She turns to me.

I think she knew that death was in the room with her. Her shivering had increased but she was frozen to the spot, looking at me with her frightened eyes. She had her arms clasped across her chest. I walked over to her and lifted her arms away from her body. She let out a small whimper and an Arabic prayer. She closed her eyes and waited, shaking, prepared. I lifted her slip. Her slim, undernourished body was dark and boyish. I gently stroked the small cups of her breasts. I could hear her. I could hear her heart speaking. It was asking me to kill her. There was a scar running down her left side, an ugly reddish streak. I touched it and for a moment—the only moment—she was defiant, and she pulled away from me. I grabbed her and pushed her onto the mattress. There was a breathing in the room, an excited desperate breathing. She could hear it as well. She was looking beyond my shoulder, in terror, somewhere into the vastness of Hell. I was the Devil. I knew what Evil felt like, was, could be, had to be: the extinguishing of consciousness. I placed my hand on her throat and began to choke her. She started to struggle, attempted to scream, but she was weak and I was stronger than I had ever thought possible. With a jerk of my fingers I could extinguish her life. I was ready. Her hand reached for my throat. She plucked uselessly at my shirt collar, then got a grip and pulled. The crucifix that Giulia had given me tore and fell across the girl's naked body. I looked at her, and now I could see her. She was a terrified small child and she was crying helplessly, desperately. She wanted to die but her body was willing her to live. I pulled away from her.