Keys of Babylon (22 page)

This latest boy's photo is in the paper today, Kazia. Of course he looks a normal boy. Not a corpse. If you get on to Bebo and the other sites you can read the tributes. All written in baby language. Seems one of his friends did it three months ago. Another friend last year.

So Meryl comes up with tea and toast and asked if I was better. I felt so bad about not helping, I said I'd go to chapel with her. To help clean it. Meryl likes cleaning things and I'm starting to see why.

Boy, was she pleased. It's only two streets away, and called Ruhamah. And Kazia, it's huge inside, you could get hundreds of people in. She told me normally there's eighteen. So there she is with this old rag mop which looks like a rag doll, with J cloths and disinfectant. Meryl said she uses a litre of bleach every week, squirting it round the pavement cracks outside the house so the dandelions don't get a hold. No microbe is safe.

There's this gravel area she's proud of. Where nothing must grow. Absolutely verboten. The eleventh commandment. Not a leaf. If God has a smell, it must be pine-scented disinfectant. Or maybe God is the genie in the toilet duck.

But I had a shock. In the vestry as we went in was a pair of long boots.

Jackboots? I asked. Trying to laugh.

Galoshes, Meryl said.

And they were still wet. Apparently there's a tank in the chapel where they baptise people. In holy water. The minister holds them down. It's total immersion. There'd been a special service and there were his wellingtons, his galoshes, still wet. And this dirty mac behind the door.

 
ZX

July 14

Now Kazia, what with cleaning Ruhamah and helping marvellous Meryl, please don't think I'm getting religious. But there happen to be a lot of old churches around here. Yesterday I went into one near the sea. It's called St John's, and there's sand in the graveyard. The door was open and in I went. You know me. Well, it was all very old but stark. A plain beauty. Ho hum.

But then I saw the pulpit and I had to laugh. And you know how I laugh, Kazia. Like a cat being sick. Or that's what the comedian in Alchemia told me. Right in front of the whole audience.

But this leaflet, which I didn't pay for, claims the pulpit was the work of a medieval artist. Yet I could tell immediately what the artist had done. He, or maybe she, Kazia, but probably he, had carved Jesus being beaten by two men. You know, the flagellation. Yes, keep up girl! All three figures were based on local people who must have been around this area seven hundred years ago. They must because they're so distinctive. Little, shrunken, mean people. Badly nourished. Mall nourished, ha ha. Christ is the good one of course and the other two the baddies. But they're all like weasels. How the locals must have laughed when they saw it. A really good joke. It's a seaside church and it looks like Jesus is being beaten with ship's ropes. Or stinging nettles. These days it would be a FCUK tie. But the figures seem so real. There's a pub next door to the church and I bet you can see the three of them in there any day. I bet Jesus is in there now with a glass of white wine and a salad sandwich.

And I thought then, yes, I want to do that. I want to be a sculptor. And move around, selling my work but never signing it. Staying anonymous. An artist going from church to church, adding an angel here, a demon there. There are wonderful demons on the churches here, Kazia. Perhaps they're the ones who've cursed this country.

Indisputably yours, Z!

July 16

Kazia, it's your turn, you know it is. But here I go again. Because this evening I went swimming. Not to the pool with its greasy scumline. All the oldies go there. No, the sea, I went into the sea.

You know where I picked the strawberries? Down that track but don't turn inland. Keep going along the beach until it's all sand and no rocks. Yes, I've been exploring again. Courtesy of this huge map I've bought which is up on my wall.

It was after work, about six. The bus takes only quarter of an hour, but there was nobody else there. I couldn't believe it. Not a soul on the sand. Not a speck. The tide was miles out and I walked through the rockpools. All I did was take a bag, a towel, wear shorts under my jeans, put the jeans, tee shirt and sandals on a rock, and hide my card and ticket nearby. No phone, no camera. And there I am. Up to my ankles. Up to my knees. Black shorts and that old grey bra you hate. Up to my waist and it was so cold at first I peed myself. But not colder than the pool in the Vistula.

It took me ten minutes to pick up the courage. To go under.

But when I did I thought I could hear a bell beneath the waves. It was my heart of course. My blood pounding, telling me I was alive. And I laughed. I laughed because I was alive in a foreign country with a foreign ocean knotting its dirty silk around my legs. And birds low overhead in the blinding light. Eight white birds with only inches between them. Like a silver kite.

So don't tell me off. I wasn't murdered. I wasn't raped. The sand was bubbling as I walked back and I could smell the weed and the salt on me. What a gorgeous smell that is. All I did was float, Kazia, listening to the waves rustling. They sounded like the jackpot from a slot machine. Waves coming in, lifting me up, putting me down. And all the time I was thinking,
mother of pearl, mother of pearl
. If I was a painter I'd paint a huge canvas called
m
other of
p
earl. Violet and rose at the top, merging slowly into silver, into grey. So slowly you never see the change. Yes, that would be my masterpiece.

Because I found an oystershell and I'm stroking the inside of it right now. I'm going to sip some Red Square out of it tonight. Taste a dangerous pearl. And I'll see you soon, my darling. One month's time and we'll be back in Alchemia's candlelight with the others, spilling our beer. Me in my old grey bra with sand in it. You with Mr Right. How is Viktor, by the way? I didn't mean to be rude that time, I keep telling you. But oral hygienist, Kazia? Open wide my bonny bride? Come on.

You see, Kazia, I think I could live here. Because even if this place is an unplace or an explace it might still make me do things. Make me make things. It has a jagged edge. Listen to this.
But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on
… I might read that to the Roid Boys. Walk into the Station Hotel where they play pool with their shirts off, and say it aloud.

Er, don't worry. You know me. I'm only doing what I always do, which is reporting from the frontier. Either I'm looking down from the castle or out from my room. And right now I'm stirring my coffee. Got the strawberries as a screensaver and the light switched off. I'm just waiting for the skirmishing to start.
 
Love from Zuzi X

It's dark now and the Greyhound station is out of town. I sit in the waiting room with the Mennonites in their black bonnets and cloaks. These Mennonite men have square beards like Abraham Lincoln. The Mennonite children seem sad. I wink at one of the girls who looks away and then glances back. I smile at her. She looks away. A little girl, head to toe in black. We're all waiting for the circular.

I used to know a poet who wrote about bus stations. Did a gig with him and he read a doleful piece. We are in it together, he read, until the last buses go out. In it together. He had looked around a bus station and seen Pakistani and Chinese people and he wondered what they were doing. In Bridgend. And what he was doing there. I kissed him on his stubbly mouth and he whispered he was in love with me.

Buy me a drink first, he said. Then we'll run away together.

But not all Mennonites wear uniforms. Years ago, me and my guitarist were booked into the students union of a Mennonite college, way out in rural Indiana. We arrived early, checked out the PA, ordered a beer.

We don't do beverages, miss, was the response from this big black bursar in the refectory.

No way, I thought. So we asked a student about the closest bar. Hey, I'll take you, he said. Fancy a walk?

What a walk. Along these narrow roads in the cornfields, the maize ten feet high, the cobs in their purple sheaths still closed against the stems. And us trudging like pilgrims through the Mennonite corn. After two miles we came to a crossroads. And there was a bar there. Right there. The Country it was called. Well we had a good old chinwag about music, and then took some Moosehead back with us and sat in the woods in the college grounds. Drank out of bottles which we kept in brown paper bags. Very respectful. It was a quiet gig. As I remember, some of the women there wore black. But not the men.

That was just after I'd met Amir, and he did the booking. Now Amir, he always says I talk too much. Which is true. But there is a flickering home movie in my head, starring Amir himself and my parents and characters from
Seinfeld
and
Bleak House
, and the Bible, and ‘Polythene Pam' and the ‘Girl from the North Country', and everyone who has never existed anywhere but my mind.

They're all there. In Barry Island and Inwood and imaginary places that are real to me. So if all that's playing non-stop, I have to talk about it. Yeah, too much. But my mind's an exchequer of dreams. Okay, I had that line ready. I've fitted it into a song and sing it about every third gig.

There's this other song too that I've been trying to write, called ‘37 Cents'. That's what Stephen Foster had in his pocket when he died. Don't tell me you've never heard of Stephen Foster? Best American songwriter ever. ‘Beautiful Dreamer'? Boy, he was far ahead. He just wasn't made for those times. He died in 1864 and his last address was 30, The Bowery, at the North American Hotel.

I went down there once to look around because I was doing this unplugged thing at the Bowery Poetry Club. I told the club owner he should do a Stephen Foster tribute night. He said it was a great idea. I looked at him and spoke a verse.

Gorgeous, he said. So I sang it that night as part of my set, and I've done it ever since. And you know what? People simply love it. God bless you, Stephen Foster. And I'm not joking when I say you belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. These days it's full of crap like Aerosmith. No class.

It's Tuesday I think. But who knows where the time goes? Last Tuesday it was raining. Icy veils were blowing off the Hudson. I had nothing much on so I took the train to meet Amir at JFK. All the way down on the 1 from 207 to 59, then the A out to Howard Beach, then the airport shuttle to Terminal 4. Now, that's fourteen dollars return. Wasted. But I wanted to surprise him. Yet it was me who was shocked.

Amir had been in Amman for two weeks to see his parents. I waited at arrivals long after everyone else had come through. Then I asked at Royal Jordanian. Amir was still at customs. Correction. Amir had been detained by Immigration. Correction. Amir was being interviewed by Homeland Security. They were putting him on the next flight back.

But this is his home, I said. He lives in the city. He's a US passport holder.

Did no good. I kept ringing but his phone was off. Cell phone? The words give me the creeps. But there was nothing to do but go back to Inwood. That night the phone rang and it was Amir. Before he said a word I recited our little joke. ‘If ye cannot bring good news, then don't bring any.' That's what we always said to one another. It was a philosophy. Courtesy of the wicked messenger.

Amir was still stunned. Denied entry, he said. Even with a US passport they put their fingers up his ass. He's back in Amman.

I could see him there. I'd visited with Amir, about ten years previously. We'd just met. Of course his parents thought I was
the one
. Amir's intended. Made me feel a little queasy because Amir's gay as a lark. In New York, before he found our Inwood studio, we often slept together. But only out of necessity. I'd tease him by kissing his neck but he never came on to me. He had these freckles like cappuccino chocolate on his back and black fur on his belly. Dark little cock like a dufflecoat toggle. Sweet and unthreatening. Now I could picture him on the land line in his father's house, the desert dawn streaming through.

One evening we were eating supper there, flatbreads and humus with lemon and thyme. I looked up and saw a lizard on the ceiling. Then Amir's dad caught my eye and everything went crazy. They found an aerosol and a stepladder and started squirting that lizard till the room stank of pine forests.

Amir's mother was hard work. Grievously melancholic. She had sold her business, a nursery school, and now was missing the routine. The new owners were making a success of it and she felt she had nothing. So Amir became even more important to her. She treated me like the betrothed. The special one. She never once asked my age, but I was over thirty-five then, five years older than Amir. Okay, I'm forty-eight. And dealing with it.

I had my own bedroom. At night you could feel the tension. The parents were waiting for Amir to sneak in. I could hear them listening. A man must make his move.

But it never occurred to him. I think they were disappointed. But one of his brothers, a fat kid with a moustache, tried it. Came into my boudoir. By mistake. I told him to leave or I'd tell daddy. So what we did on that visit was to sit around the TV and watch the Bill Clinton impeachment interviews. It was hard for me to credit. I was in Amman and we had satellite TV and Amir's brothers were lying on the floor, sniggering at stories about blowjobs. The most powerful man on the planet, humiliated. Silver hair. Red cheeks. I thought the world was ending. How could they treat a president like that?