Twist 1

ONE Steve Houghton, 30, experienced, well-travelled, still good-looking and tidily-dressed, stepped lightly into the Marriott Hotel in Warsaw. He stepped out of the cold and into the warmth. He stepped out of the grey dirty dreariness of a downtown Warsaw street in January and into the sepia toned cleanliness and warmth of the Marriott. He failed to recognise that the Marriott was almost as impoverished as the street outside. For him it represented a tiny piece of Western riches. English newspapers, Cuban cigars, white niggers giving shoeshines, a Versace boutique, “American” steakhouse, expensive coffee house (such a privilege to pay Paris prices here in Warsaw for a hot cuppa), perfumery, jeweller’s. All there in the shopping arcade attached. He’d come in to buy a newspaper. A privilege too to pay more than double the British price for a British newspaper. He read the Guardian. Or more to the point, he was a Guardian reader. Or more to the point he had become a Guardian reader since settling in in Europe, learning a few ropes, finding his own culture. His own ideas about culture. His own cultural reference points. He was a man of culture this Steve. That was what he liked to think. He thought that often. He never told anyone about it, at least not directly. He picked up a copy of the Guardian, glanced at the headlines to see if there was anything worth reading in more depth. He only bought a paper if he found at least 2 or 3 articles that held his attention for a while and were too long to be comfortably read standing. This time there were enough to justify the purchase, the expenditure of 7 zlotys, followed by the expenditure of another 7 and a ½ zlotys on a correctly brewed cappuccino (they didn’t do flat whites, they never did in Warsaw). He sat down and deliberately opened his newspaper. He put the newspaper down and he reached into his pocket for a packet of cigarillos. It was a great privilege to pay 12 zlotys a pack for these small symbols that nobody else smoked. Nobody except Gustaw, but he was special. The coffee arrived just in time. A few seconds after he had lit his cigarillo. He sipped his coffee, puffed his cigarillo, looked around to see if anyone was watching. He went back to his newspaper. He went to the counter to pay. He preferred to leave the money on the table, but they didn't do that here. He went back outside into chilly corridors, walked half-looking past dreary shops and smoky bars. He bought his train ticket and waited in the cold for 15 minutes. He didn’t read his paper at the train station. He didn’t open it up while sitting at the platform. He preferred to look at the big billboards, the grey sky, the pigeons gathering. He boarded, sat down in the interior cold, watched his breath form in front of his face. For 45 minutes he looked out the window at the snow, observed the increasing depth the further you moved from the city. He then departed and started walking to the office, crunching through the snow that was starting to ice up underfoot. All was quiet out here, even quieter than Warsaw in the snow which also seemed fairly placid under a snowy blanket. A few birds were sitting in tree branches, conserving their energy. He trundled up to the office and let himself in, as one of the privileges of his job was a key to the office door. He stamped his feet on the doormat, instinctively felt his face which had turned icy. Out of the cold and back into the warmth. It was a fairly rudimentary office, this- a computer with no internet connection and one long table which served as a desk for teachers to prepare their lessons. The secretary was in the office, and no other teachers. He was beatifically glad of this and deeply hoped that this situation would last for at least an hour, or maybe the rest of the afternoon. He started talking to her about the Polish language, and about the difficulties he faced in trying to learn it, and about how he needed somebody to help him with translations. He said he had a Polish magazine and could she explain what some things meant. She agreed. He pulled the magazine out of his bag. It contained a series of semi-nude pictures of a well-known fashion model. She giggled just a little when she saw it, then got to work on translating. It didn’t matter what the words meant, he just needed to see her reaction to the pictures. He pulled out another magazine. This contained pictures of men and women having sex. The focus was very sharp on genitalia penetrating genitalia. She giggled a little more, and again set to work in earnest explaining the meanings of the words. This pleased him hugely. He very much enjoyed watching a woman watching the women in the pictures as they got done double and triple and guzzled and slurped. Unfortunately, one of the teachers arrived 15 minutes after they started looking at the magazines together. Steve quickly tidied away the magazine. Mirella less quickly and little red-faced went to the door to let James in. Steve wondered if he would do this again with Mirella, but suspected that he would not. With slightly reddened face and shaking hand Steve greeted James. James gave no indication that he was suspicious of anything. Mirella returned to the staff room, gave a secret smile to Steve. Steve had to work now. He had to help James, who was older, and new to teaching, and difficult to help. He had to help James prepare his lessons. James was a junior teacher, Steve was the senior teacher, and thus had a responsibility to help the other teachers, all of whom were very junior. Steve was a good teacher, or so he’d been told. Steve was good-looking, or so he’d been told. Maybe these two things went together, he hadn’t yet been told. James wasn’t as good-looking as Steve, or so Francis had been told. Yes there had to be a connection somewhere. James wasn’t as well-dressed as the other teachers. Nobody had been told. It was something they knew without needing to be told. Another possible connection. Steve helped James prepare his lessons, or tried to, then he prepared his own lessons, then he crunched through the snow for the ten minute walk to the school, which was a state school, Polish, in this town of Komonow they found themselves in, about 25 kilometres from Warsaw and is sometimes called “the Beverley Hills of Poland” because well known Polish actors tended to live there. Someone said that perhaps this was a reflection of Poland rather than Beverley Hills. Perhaps the schools in Beverley Hills were a little more well-appointed than the school (not schools, there was only one) in Komanow. Nobody could be sure, except for Michael, because he was the only 1 of the 4 teachers at their school who had actually been to Beverley Hills. And he probably hadn’t been into any of the schools because he’d lived in a different Los Angeles neighbourhood. Steve set his books on his desk. He had 4 lessons to teach. The first lesson was English, the second lesson was English, the third lesson was English and the fourth lesson was English. The children came into the class. They were 12 or 13 years old. Their English was near non-existent. Many of them seemed to have learning disorders, or maybe that was 12 and 13 year olds. Steve had problems controlling their behaviour. Just 12 and 13 year olds. The next group came in, an hour later. These were 5 and 6 year olds. Steve had had problems controlling this group- even more than with the 12-13 year olds, but not any more. Mirella, the secretary, came in to ensure that the behaviour problems would cease, and they did cease, so Mirella kept coming back to make sure they didn’t return to blight the atmosphere of the lesson, and indeed this strategy worked as the children were afraid of Mirella, even though she was only 19 and pretty and more innocent-looking than the porno girls. They feared Mirella because she spoke Polish, and she had a direct line to their parents and she let them know all about it, and she hissed at them if they started stirring too much or speaking to each other too much in Polish. Steve liked to call this game good cop/bad cop. Mirella was the bad cop. This made the other teachers laugh. They said they could not imagine Mirella being anybody’s bad cop. But they weren’t 5 years old and Mirella wasn’t anybody’s bad cop, but she was their bad cop. The next class came in, 50 minutes later. Just a short lesson for the brief attention span of the 5 and 6 year olds. Steve thought that perhaps their attention span didn’t reach as far as 45 minutes. You could never be completely sure in this game, this crazy caper. They were older, this next class- teenagers and a very attractive 20 year old, Iza, who was easily as pretty as any of the porno girls, and neither more nor less innocent-looking. No doubt she’d been pumped a few times, she looked as if she’d been broken in and Steve hoped that she would want more, but never admitted it, at least not to her. He just sat back and looked at her pretty face and imagined what he’d like to do to it. He imagined the cream dripping off her face, like in the videos and magazines. Iza smiled that pretty, knowing smile of hers. She’d once said something male-unfriendly, which had upset poor Steve, but she’d been egged on by Kasia, who was a rabid feminist. At least that was how Steve liked to think of her- she was a rabid feminist in Steve’s knowledgeable opinion, his man of the world, well-travelled and somewhat up himself opinion. The last class was uninspiring. No cuties here, no honies, no hot babes, no fuckable young cunts. Just a bunch of middle aged housewives and one young boy of 18. After work a taxi was waiting for them outside the building which whisked them back to Warsaw. Steve stared out the window as the trees and billboards whizzed by. He liked to see the billboards, in their ever-increasing numbers as the taxi approached Warsaw. He particularly liked to see billboards with English slogans printed on them. It made him feel that he was doing his job properly. Steve’s girlfriend Ewa was waiting for him when he arrived. She hadn’t cooked anything but she’d ordered pizza. They sat and munched pizza in front of the TV in near silence, flipping channels occasionally. They climbed into bed soon after, falling asleep without having sex. Sex was just for the weekends nowadays, sometimes not even that. He awoke the next morning some time after Ewa had left. He wearily picked himself up and took himself to the shower, then put on some scent and some clothes, flipped on the TV, put the kettle on and started cooking some bacon and eggs. He sat and drank coffee and munched on his fryup while absorbing the day's headlines on BBC World. After he'd finished eating, it took him a while to tear himself away from the television. It was grey outside. The thought of going out there, in the cold grey humidity, the low air pressure, didn't inspire him to leave his comfort zone in front of the television. But eventually some primal force, some urge to keep moving and wandering, dragged him up and out the door. It was cold outside. The snow, which lay six inches deep, had started to thaw today. Little avalanches came down from rooftops. This made him happy. He watched the icicles melting and dripping and crashing down to earth. That made him happy. He wondered how many people got killed every year by falling icicles. The right trajectory and height and weight, to the back of the neck and it would be over in seconds. He kept clear of the rooftops and ledges. He walked down Niepodleglosci looking into the occasional shop window. Perfume shops made him happy. He liked to note the names of the different fragrances, the labels, the marks of status. So many names now, so much information. Sex shops made him happy. They seemed to him a mark of liberty, a symbol of Eastern Europe’s hard-won new freedom. When he travelled to a new city in Eastern Europe he always made a point of investigating the sex shops. It didn’t matter that the selection was poor and the atmosphere grimy. The important thing was that they existed, that they were free to exist. It had always seemed to him that if you wanted porn, it was always available somewhere, even in the dark, repressive days of Queensland in the 1980’s. South Africa lite. He'd read that somewhere as a descriptor of Queensland in the 70's and 80's. The awareness of commercially available, illicit sex went right back to his childhood. This awareness, it made him feel as if he had grown up in a culture that was corrupt to its core. As he walked, thoughts of the present kept coming to mind. He very much liked to focus on his present existence. This made him happier than any other happiness he could think of. He would note the smells of each season, and the different types of happiness each would bring. The happiness brought by grey-black skies, drizzle, snow and blasts of northern wind was quantitatively different from the happiness of clearing skies and suddenly rising temperatures in spring. But always there was that same underlying happiness which came about because of that particular smell: the East European city smell- a dusty mustiness. It was the smell of old Europe which had completely vanished further west. The enduring mustiness was the core note in the particular perfume of the East European city, and laid over it were the shifting scents of each season. Winter was the most subtle, and as far as Steve could tell, reflected most deeply the soul, the atmosphere of Eastern Europe. He knew that he really wanted to become East European, or at least he did in the present moments that he was there. Each present moment brought another happiness, another reminder that he wanted to root himself to this time, this place. If winter was the archetypal season across Eastern Europe, then it most certainly brought with it the archetypal happiness. The happiness that comes from being free to be as sad as you like, of not having to put on airs or professional smiles, of being nice to people when you felt like being nice, and rude when you felt like being rude. He often preferred it when shopkeepers and other professional smilers behaved in a rude or surly or unprofessional way. It reminded him that he was somewhere different. He avoided thinking about the past, or rather, spent so much time concentrating on the present moment that the past was completely displaced. He could never go back to the past, to Brisbane, that town of learned smiles and pseudo happiness. That town where he’d been so unhappy they’d had to lock him away and feed him with different pills the names of which he couldn’t remember because he was too busy concentrating on his current happiness. A town of almost continuous summer and short, psychotic winter. Why did he always get sick in winter there? Could it have been the harsh light, the menacing dry winds or some other thing. Maybe it was the sadness that came from knowing that the winter season was the only time of real beauty or promise, and it would end very very soon. In his last six years in Brisbane Steve had been sent to the hospital three times. Six years in Eastern Europe , no hospitalisations so far, and no chance of any in Winter especially. The deep cold and the wet greyness were calming, rather than winter Brisbane’s sharp, disturbing brightness which kept one awake at night, listening to the crackle of electricity in the air. * Weekends found him in the Drink Bar on Wspolna. It was a tiny place, this Drink Bar- a small hole in the wall lit by candles and draped with oriental fabrics. He would meet Gustaw there, and Max and Edmond and Jim. Gustaw and Max were Polish, Edmond English and Jim was Canadian. But this was unimportant really. Steve didn’t think of them as being from any particular place. They were here, now, and that was the important thing and they were citizens of this planet like him and they had no permanent ties to any particular place like him. One thing that was important was that Edmond didn’t like to be called Edmond, or rather nobody ever called him Edmond. Just Eddie, or Ed, or a combination of the two. Gustaw lit a cigarillo, sipped his whisky on ice and observed the babes. Eddie, or Ed, smoked a cigarette, sipped from his pint glass and observed the babes. Jim laughed raucously, took another swig of beer and observed the babes. Max came back from the bar with another beer, slapped Jim on the shoulder and observed the babes. Steve pulled out another cigarillo, drank the froth off the top of his beer and observed the babes. Someone said “There are some nice looking babes here tonight.” Someone raised their glass, clinked with the others and said “Here’s to live sex on stage.” He didn’t say that because of any live sex that was on any stages. There was no live sex and no stage in the Drink Bar. He said it because someone else, who wasn’t in the bar at that moment, had started saying it as a toast and everyone else followed suit. Or at least everyone who knew anyone who had been connected closely with Jason had followed suit. Jason’s closest friends and regular drinking partners followed suit and then the closest friends of Jason’s closest friends had followed suit. There were quite a few suits being followed around town, oft used phrases which had been introduced to the city by a single English speaker and had spread, like a virus, around the city. For example Steve’s oft-quoted “Yeah right”, which was always said in a particularly dismissive, sarcastic drawl to indicate disbelief or disgust, which Max had then grabbed tightly hold of and promulgated to all of his many “friends”. How successful he’d been in introducing this phrase into the lexicon of Polsko-Angielski was perhaps debatable, at least it hadn’t come back to Steve yet from the mouths of any Polacks, but there was no denying the valiance and sincerity of Max’s attempt to infect people with that particular bit of Australian. The reference to live sex on stage was no doubt in part an allusion to the fact that there indeed some pretty nice looking babes in this joint tonight. No shortage of hot young tots tonight Steve thought. Unfortunately he always had a problem in Warsaw picking up girls in bars. They dressed sexy, these girls. They looked a little submissive, these Polish girls that panted and purred and teased and tantalized with their make-up, their short skirts and pumps and heavy perfume. And yet, and yet, their defences went right up when you approached them in a bar. Where did all that distrust come from? 40 years of communism? Maybe it was something even deeper than that. Something profoundly lodged in the paranoid Polish mindset, land of occupation and partition and deportation and of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Steve met girls to fuck he met them at work. They were his students (most commonly) and his fellow teachers (more infrequently). Just how many had he had while he was on one-week conferences, or when Ewa was away at her parents’ on weekends or holidays. Hmmm, maybe 5 or 10 or possibly more over the last year or two. He wondered if there was anything exceptional in that. Most of the Polish males he met were aged 25-40, married and alleged they were always faithful to their wives. He wondered just how much they were lying and how many. He couldn’t say for sure. He did suspect that a good number of the women he slept with were lying to him about being faithful most of the time. They claimed they were usually virtuous and good, but he couldn't really buy it, otherwise why would any of them bother with him? They pressed on with their beers, their cigarettes and whiskies and cigarillos. As the pace of babes entering the drink bar began to decelerate and the pace of those exiting began to accelerate, they came to a democratic decision to move on to another place. A place with more babes than the Drink Bar. A place with more light than the Drink Bar. A place with more space than the Drink Bar. A place with more noise than the Drink Bar. They left the bar and staggered out into the snow, wandering a few hundred metres down the road to Ground Zero, so named because it had once been a nuclear bunker. It seemed appropriately desperate and sleazy for the time of evening and state of inebriation. They made their way down into the bowels of the club, in the underground bunker, ordered some more beers and observed the babes. Steve left the bar at 4 in the morning. He walked home, approximately 2 kilometres, through wet, dark streets. This made him happy. It relaxed him to take long walks in Warsaw and found that it cleared his head. His head needed clearing this night. As he started walking his mind was filled with thoughts of rage, which may have been the result of an excess of drink. He walked past darkened shops, blackened buildings and flickering neon. He returned to an empty flat. The TV went on, a cassette went into the VCR. His wallet was opened, a small calling card that had been retrieved from under the wiper of a car was extracted. A phone number was called. Steve waited. He’d been told he would have to wait 20 minutes. 20 minutes became 45 minutes. The doorbell rang. A large man appeared in his doorway, blocking out the light from the hall. He took Steve’s money. A small girl appeared from the shadows. She entered the room as the man withdrew. “How old are you” was always the first question. She said she was 23. He’d been promised 20, but decided not to say so. She removed her clothes expertly and lay down on the bed. Steve told her what to do. She did it. He watched. Then he told her what he wanted to do to her next. She let him do it. Then he told her something else. She didn’t let him do that, so he didn’t do it. She was small but she was strong, he could tell by the way she had flicked his hand from her head. He showed respect. He was finished after 20 minutes. He’d paid for an hour, so they lay on the bed, and smoked and talked for 40 minutes, until the doorbell rang again. She told him about her child, a boy, who was six years old and lived in Czestochowa with his grandparents. He told her about travel and places he’d been, and about his friends. He told her about one friend of his who took pictures. He showed her the pictures, which were taken in India. They showed street people, people in Calcutta streets. They were portraits, close-ups of the face. She said they were “super”. She hadn’t said that about the video he’d been watching when she came in. She had told him to turn it off. He’d respected that. When she left, she asked if she could keep one of the pictures. He let her. She asked for his name and an address for correspondence. He gave her his email address. She didn’t understand that. First he said “email” then he said “internet”, remembering the billboards that had that word on them. “Ah, internet”, she said, but he knew that she wouldn’t be sending him too many emails. They both had all their clothes on when they said goodbye. He started to cry then. “I’ve got a lot of problems”, he said. “What problems”, she said. He didn’t say. She hugged him a little, then left. He went to bed and fell asleep, feeling relaxed after having released several different types of bodily fluid. Sometimes he didn’t fall asleep very quickly. It was at those times that he wished that someone would enter his room with a gun, and put 2 holes in the back of his head. He lay face down, imagining the pleasant release that the shots would bring, but it never came. Steve was not usually a morbid person, except at those moments when he was waiting in vain for sudden death, or when he had a large hangover to take care of. Sunday’s hangover was a big one, the result of 5 pints of beer consumed at the Drink Bar and three more at the disco bar. The forces of gravity always seemed far heavier at such moments. He found it difficult to move around. His step lost its lightness. For some reason he felt older. He often locked himself in his room on Sundays. He always felt even more depressed if Sunday was an inviting, clear, warm day. He would stay in his room, in the darkness, with his television, his books, his fridge full of food. * Ewa returned at six o’clock on Sunday evening. He’d done his best to make himself presentable to her. Had showered, napped, removed the smell of beer and perfume and pussy from his body and breath. He always imagined her embracing him, stepping back, taking a haughty sniff in the air and announcing “you smell of bitch” every time he was guilty of something. But she never did, even when he really reeked. No sex this weekend. That would be Ewa’s solution for any problems she might now have. It always seemed to be that her usual solution to any type of stress was to withdraw from sexual contact. He could feel that this was going to happen tonight. “How were your parents”. He said, not being able to think of anything better to say. “Not bad. OK.” She said, also quite lost for words. It was not a topic they enjoyed talking about. Steve had a problem with them. He thought that his main problem with them was that they existed. He’d told Ewa that once, at which point she’d started to cry. At that particular moment he didn’t mind. He felt that she could do whatever she wanted but decided not to tell her so, instead opting to put his arm around her and say “sorry” He had prepared a hot meal for them both. That was his usual weekend consolation to her, his way of making up for the late nights, the unwashed dishes, the absence of any housework throughout the week. She didn’t thank him for this. Giving thanks was not one of her stronger points. He remembered how, two years earlier when they’d started going out together, he had taken her to expensive restaurants, and paid, and not received a word in thanks. He couldn’t expect it now. They ate in silence. Food seemed a good buffer, a way of ensuring that no unpleasantness in the form of conversation may take place. It was a way of protecting them against each other. The television was the other buffer against communication. Steve made a point of leaving it on any time he was in the room. They had cable. 60 channels, here in the east they’d learned to become competitive. Watching the BBC world service, or CNN or MTV here in Warsaw made him feel that he was connected to something much bigger than himself. He flipped the buttons on the remote, trying to find a pleasant tune or an interesting news headline. If there was nothing else worth watching he tended to gravitate towards BBC. This represented culture to him. It represented a balanced world view, being savvy and up to date and politically correct. He could watch it for hours, letting the torrents of information wash over him. Later they lay down in the bed, she with his back turned to him. He embraced her from behind, tried to convince her to turn in his direction. “Come here”, he said “I am here,” she said. He tried a few more times then gave up. He grabbed his cock, tugging with his back turned to her, operating quietly in the hope that she would not notice. He knew she wouldn’t mind too much even if she knew what he was doing, but he didn’t want to cause her even the slightest bit more alarm or distress. She didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t do anything to indicate she’d noticed. Most of the time it seemed to him that she preferred to remain indifferent, oblivious to what was going on around her. "Niewiem," was a word she often used. In Polish it meant "I don't know." However, he detected a subtext which read "I don't want to know." Underneath that he could make out another subtext which said "Fuck off."