He hadn’t the time to get changed and the collar of his shirt was starting to annoy him. It was a stiff collar, almost ceremonial. Considering the total price of the shirt, that short strip of fabric must have been worth at least ten pounds. More or less the reimbursement fund for a whole day spent at ‘work’. And, to be at ‘work’, this kind of shirt was compulsory. There wasn’t a real uniform, apart from the price-tag of the clothes.
He slowed down on approaching the traffic lights and loosened his collar. Maybe, some time before, he would have felt anger, now it was only a vague feeling of annoyance. And with annoyance one can be patient, wait for the traffic lights to turn red and get rid of it with a fingers’ snap. Otherwise, one can always distract oneself.
F put a cigarette between his lips, looked at the traffic lights and tapped the accelerator. His ‘job’ was called Sketch and it wasn’t a real job. First of all, at Sketch no one considered themselves to be a worker. They were all organizers, facilitators, designers, artists. Sketch wasn’t just a luxury restaurant and a private club. It was a lifestyle. A very privileged one. F, for his part, was even less a worker, as he wasn’t even paid. What he was doing at Sketch was an internship. An initiation. That was why he wasn’t getting paid. On the contrary, it should be him who should have to pay for the privilege of breathing the same air of their clients and of learning how gods live.
The street was relatively empty and F pressed the button of the cigar-lighter and that of the radio. A talk-show was on. ‘It’s been a long time since the seas have been empty. For sure, our parents would have never imagined this. No more fish in the seas. And forests of seaweed invading the water day after day, without any creatures left to eat them. Do you think that this is going to be an irreversible trend, Professor...’ Radio 4, definitely the wrong station. F took the incandescent cigar-lighter and again pressed the button of the radio. Michael Jackson. They still played Michael Jackson’s songs, forty years after his death. F dragged a couple of puffs from his cigarette and changed station. It was just a bit of annoyance, nothing to worry about.
The new radio station was broadcasting some standard house music. Perhaps this music was also forty years old, but house music, after all, never had any ambitions of progressing over time. It is like the buzz of a hair-drier or the sound of someone crying - the beauty of it is exactly in its always being the same, without the need for imagination. Most of the time, imagination doesn’t bring any rewards. Considering his situation, F had no doubts about that - had it not been for the perverse imagination of the Chef at Sketch and of his ravenous clients, he wouldn’t have been trapped in this car, on his way to the coast of northern Scotland. London to Scotland takes at least eight hours of driving. And this was all happening because, for someone, the idea that fish had disappeared from the seas wasn’t just an annoyance, but a challenge. Maybe that was the reason why they were the owners of Sketch, while he was just an intern on a forced trip.
The day they gave him the order to make this trip, he was called into the director’s office. Obviously, this would not have been a normal office, and, when F entered it, the director’s assistant walked him through a big suite, to what seemed to be a bedroom. The director was sitting on a corner sofa and with a movement of his hand invited F to take a seat on a stool in front of him, between the window and a four-poster bed.
“You see, son, what I would like to talk to you about today is something rather private,” started the director, crossing his legs. F remained still, slightly surprised to find himself alone with the director - in his work bedroom. “It is a very innovative project. Experimental, I might say. It isn’t something easy, and I will not hide that there could be some risks involved in it. But, as you know, we at Sketch dare to take risks.” The director stopped and slowly moved his gaze along the luxury of his bedroom, as if he was pointing at every detail. “As you can see,” he concluded, softening his voice, “taking risks pays back.’ He smiled, and F started to relax. He had never been given so many explanations before receiving an order, and this almost made him feel in a position of power. He could not have refused the order, of course, but being the object of the seduction and of the time of the director was something quite surprising in itself. It was as if he was finally worth a price - a high one.
F accelerated and the industrial warehouses scurried away faster out of his car windows. The beauty of London is that factories had always been built relatively centrally, and the suburbs quickly turned into open countryside. English people had always been quite honest with themselves about work: in the city centre there weren’t as many cathedrals as there were factories. At least, that had been the trend until the age of places like Sketch. From then on, the difference between factories and cathedrals had become only an academic controversy.
Their meeting only lasted a few more minutes. The rest had only been technical details. F left the suite and was led out by one of the director’s assistants, who walked him to the kitchen to meet the Chef. A true artist - according to what he said of himself - and as such, manically demanding. The Chef gave him very precise orders on the modalities of transportation and maintenance of the goods. It was very important - he said - that the goods were not contaminated by external agents. Thus, no stops in pubs were allowed, no alcoholic drinks or coffee. The goods could only drink water for the entire duration of the transportation. F found the whole thing rather amusing. Not just the fact that the old fisherman was considered ‘goods’, but more this obsession by the cleanliness of his bowels. After all, it was clear, it was all a rather ritualistic matter.
The old man lived in a small cottage on the beach of Auchmitie, a tiny village of ex-fishermen in north-east Scotland. A place where people only remained to die, now that the sea was empty and the boats were rotting in the harbor. The old man had been selected from several candidates, in consideration of the years he had spent on fishing boats and of his past diet, almost entirely composed of fish. F wondered at the look on his face when he received the confirmation letter. His heart must have been bursting with joy. ‘We are glad to inform you that you have been selected for the talk show that will be recorded in London on the day... One of our studio assistants will come to collect you by car and will take care of your comfortable travel to our studios..’ Etcetera. F had sent that letter himself, one of the days that he was on mail duty.
He didn’t find much irony in the fact that the old man had put himself forward as a candidate. Many people would have willingly offered themselves to be slaughtered just to feature on a TV talk show. Certainly, the old man believed that he was really going to be on TV - but was it not a more privileged destiny to be ending up in the stomachs of the clients of Sketch? Rather than in the eyes of masses of common people, the old man would have gone into the bowels and the veins of the most exclusive members of the most exclusive club in London. Still better than rotting in some provincial graveyard.
The morning progressed and the highway started to get crowded with cars contending the lanes with trucks. Would it feel different to be killed by a truck full of designer clothes than by one shipping tons of frozen chicken? F asked himself this, while overtaking a long convoy of articulated lorries.
What F was struggling to understand was how the clients of Sketch could have managed to really believe that the old man could taste like fish. On the other hand, what F was able to understand was that his very inability to believe was the true difference between him and the clients of Sketch. F just didn’t have enough faith. That was the reason why he could never have been like them. That was the reason why he would never become rich, or famous. F obeyed the orders, without complaining or rebelling. But he wasn’t able to believe. And, if there was one thing he had learned, it was that one needs true faith in order to be accepted among the gods. Those who pretend don’t last too long.
F passed a cheap car decorated with LED lights and shiny alloy wheels and once again felt annoyed. Even in order to be poor one needs faith, he thought. Otherwise one ends up being a tramp, and doesn’t get anything out of it. No tranquility, no happiness. All in all, if one really had to believe, F preferred to make an effort and try to believe in the faith of the wealthy, rather than in that of the poor. Maybe one day he too would have gone to a dinner party, and eating the tough flesh of an old fisherman he would have been able to taste the flavor of fish and of the sea. But how to give oneself faith?
The morning became afternoon and F turned to the exit lane of the highway, towards a gigantic service station built in glass and steel. The rickety sun of the Midlands was frantically shining on the roof of the structure, as if it had been paid by the owners of the area for some extra effort. F steered towards entrance to the parking area and drove slowly along the lines of parked cars. One doesn’t buy a luxury car to drive it, but to park it, he thought, leaving the car loaned to him by Sketch between two miserable economy cars. He amused himself for a few seconds thinking that the prohibition of coffee might have been extended to him too, then put on a haughty expression and walked into the bar of the service area.
The food in service stations on the highway had always been a big passion of his. Maybe its attractiveness lay in its being the only food available for miles. One had the impression of having landed in an oasis in the desert and people looked at each other just like survivors would do, with a hint of diffidence. F didn’t believe those who hoped that an apocalypse could clean the world of its wrongs and would leave everyone naked and equal. Even among survivors, hierarchies would appear immediately, just made of gazes.
The boy behind the counter gave F a quick glance and asked him what he wanted, while hysterically washing some cups, humming and continually wiping a sleeve on his sweaty forehead. Amphetamine, F recognized. Then he moved a hand to the breast pocket of his jacket, felt the thickness of a small packet and ordered some chips and a jacket potato.
Before motioning him out of his suite, the director had smiled to him again and told him that there would be a surprise for him. He didn’t add anything else, but, when the assistant came to meet F, the two of them exchanged a look of accomplicity. F was hoping for some money, but the surprise was going to be less surprising than that. Five grams of cocaine and a bit of amphetamine. “Some for your trip and some for when you get back,” said the assistant, trying to mimic the director’s voice.
F took his tray and sat at one of the plastic tables lining the window facing the car park. Maybe that’s how one can give himself some faith, he thought, mulling over his five grams. But that’s too much of a short-term faith, and way too expensive to be kept up. At least one might be able to get some girls out of it? he wondered. But even then, it doesn’t last too long, just the time for her to find someone with more coke, or with more faith, which is the same. He chewed a mouthful of chips, soft like worms, and considered the evolution of his thoughts. There must be a way out.
F left the frantic bar assistant behind and went back to the car. Maybe that guy is even enjoying himself now, he thought, lighting a cigarette, but when the amphetamine washes off it must be really shit to come down in a place like this. He leaned both elbows on the roof of his car and looked at the landscape of industrial chimneys, fields and warehouses spreading to the horizon. The rest of the U.K. is like come down of London. This is why London keeps expanding. It is like an addiction. F pressed the alarm button and the soft bip of the door reminded him that he was driving a luxury car. It was only a light annoyance that it would never be his.
The highway passed by a few dozen identical towns. Mono-family square houses, train stations, shopping malls. F switched off the radio and moved his head round in a circle until he felt his neck unblocking itself. He would have loved to stop and rest for a while, if only he had not been late already. The sky started to darken and, at the sides of the asphalt, large fields surrounded by hedges started to open. And, from time to time, a grazing cow or a few scattered sheep.
It was difficult for him even to believe in those rectangular green expanses, to the lines of trees, to the rare, wooded hills. It wasn’t just the fact that everything there had been planned and designed by someone. Rather, the problem was London. That place only existed as such because of London. Without London, there would not be a highway there, the cows wouldn’t be locked in the enclosures and, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t have been too bad a place to live in. Without London, all the rest of the island wouldn’t be leftovers. And yet, cars and trucks ran back and forth along the highway, shipping around designer clothes, tabloids and the inferiority complex of the provincials. London was never too far, not even from those deserted fields.
The sun nosedived in the exact moment when the highway curved on the top of a hill and, for the first time, the sea appeared on the horizon. The light dimmed softly, as if there were someone regulating it, and the beach took on the color of the golden sofas at Sketch. F looked at the sea, already turning black in the distance. After midnight, the head maitre d’ used to soften the lights in the lounges and Sketch seemed to fall suddenly into a twilight scent of sex and champagne. That sea, on the opposite, didn’t have a scent any longer. F thought that somewhere, sometime before, there must have been some sharks lost in the sea, starving to death. Maybe that was why they had decided to come out of the water and now they were so determined to eat something that tasted like fish. While thinking this, F’s face broke into a grin unexpectedly.
On his left side, the sea turned suddenly red and filled the car window with its blinding light. F saw again the restaurant room at Sketch and its walls covered in sparkling crystals, impossible to look at for too long. Maybe Sketch was a sunset forgotten in loop, too - a light that doesn't make anything else visible but itself. F turned the steering-wheel to the right and long lines of hills took the place of the sunset, while the air itself seemed to become heavy and green. Gradually, the cars disappeared from the highway and on the sides of the hills, fields gave place to forests. A fog-bank covered the road, turning the headlights into long, phosphorescent stripes. F turned on the heating, lit up a cigarette and rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t help thinking about that deserted sea.
The voice on the radio, that morning, talked about the forests growing under the sea. Since there were no more fish left to eat them, seaweed was free to satisfy its own whims in every possible way, filling every available centimeter of space on the sea floor. That must be a very, very different spectacle from that offered by the forests that were now surrounding the highway on both sides, F thought. No highway in the middle, and no reflecting signs warning about roaming deer. No deer at all, actually. Nothing at all, only micro-organisms and kilometers of seaweed, up and down submarine mountains, in the caves, in the valleys that somewhere, down there, spread maybe as large as the whole of England. That should be a safe place, F told himself. No predators there.
His eyes were hurting and he would have liked to put on his face some of that terrifying silence he was driving through and rest for a while. At that moment, in London, people were wandering on the streets with their ties undone, looking for a beer. Outside the pubs, crowds were busy networking and shouting themselves to exhaustion, while underneath them, in the tube, bodies were squashed one against the other, silently waiting for the thundering trains. Had he been in London then, F would have gone to buy himself a ready meal from Marks and Spencer’s. He would have looked at the prices, would have chosen the cheapest option and, inside himself, he would have felt ashamed. Once out of the supermarket, he would have taken a couple of pounds and thrown them in the first bin, scornfully, just to feel better.
A few thin towers appeared in the distance, studded with lights. In the lightening air at the end of the forests, F recognized the industrial suburbs of Glasgow. The cars seemed to appear all together out of the blue, as if from some hiding place beneath the asphalt, filling that piece of night with sounds of overtaking and hammering radios. The enormous billboards that surround every city appeared as well, like an updated version of medieval walls. F recognized one of them, with a beautiful girl lying on a sofa, promising aftershave and easy sex. There was the same billboard next to his house in London. He also recognized the aftershave bottle, standing out of the centre of the image. He had one of those in his room in London. He tightened his hands on the steering wheel and felt exhausted. “That whore,” he murmured, accelerating beyond the wall of advertisements.
F kept driving in the alternate traffic of those going back home and those going out for dinner. The suburbs started to take the shape of long lines of houses spaced out by pubs, fairy lights forgotten from some past christmases, flowerbeds growing bottle shards. F switched on the position indicator and slowed down, turning towards the pavement. Seen from close up, those suburban houses had a strangely identical air - even the graffiti on the walls seemed to be always the same. Young people walked down the streets with hoods on their heads and fighting dogs on the leash. Couples were showing off their combinations of stripy shirts and short dresses. A few old people were rushing back home, holding plastic bags in their hand as if they were weapons. F pulled over and switched off the engine. He rubbed a hand on his face and on his neck, and for a few seconds he kept massaging his arms, stiffened by the long drive. Outside the car window, the neon lights of a kebab shop were staining the pavement with green and yellow flashes.
The shop’s lights must have been designed by the same people who had composed the techno music coming out of the speakers on the walls. F squinted and moved, stumbling, towards the counter. There was something reassuring in the trays overflowing with dressing and in the shiny meat spinning around the roaster. F kept looking at the food even while ordering a lamb shawarma from the boy behind the counter. He followed his hands meddling with the hot pita bread and the fillings, moving along the meat pillar, slicing it thinly and letting the slices fall on a plate. The boy opened the pita bread and added some salad and onion rings, green chili peppers and garlic sauce, two slices of tomato and a cascade of lamb meat. Three pounds fifty. F paid and withdrew towards a corner of the shop, holding the warm wrapping in his hands.
The first bite is always somehow awkward and shy. One opens his mouth too wide or not enough, and the fillings escape between his lips. The steam coming out of the lacerated pita spreads around his eyes and takes over his breathing. And this is all true, F thought, as soon as he swallowed and had one moment to think. The meat softly surrendered to his teeth, mixed with the cream and for a moment covered the walls of his mouth, becoming flesh itself, just slightly sweeter, slightly tenderer. And this is all true, F repeated to himself, there’s no need to imagine anything. Not like with that flies’ shit of caviar or those hymens of salmon on canapes. That’s just money pretending to be food, food for those who have faith. This one, is the opposite...three pounds fifty and it wouldn’t taste any better had it been one hundred pounds. F caught his breath, wiping the oil off his lips with a tissue. Between the folds of meat, the tip of a chili pepper was peeping, bright green, doused with the white of the garlic sauce. F opened his mouth again and closed it on the wet paste of the pita bread. I wonder how much they will make them pay for those fisherman steaks, he asked himself. A few thousand pounds and the effort of imagining a taste for that old flesh. And having to sit all together around a table, looking at each other simulating orgasms. This time, F didn’t feel annoyed any more. He chewed the last mouthful of shawarma and picked up the leaves of salad fallen on his plate. He felt rage and smiled.
More than once, he had slept with girls loaded with coke. He never took much of it, to avoid that, sooner or later, everything would end up in soft embraces. From time to time, though, he really had to take some, just to bear those hysterical fucks. He came out of the kebab shop, lit up a cigarette and stopped in front of the car. Memories of those nights were still clear in his mind. It made no difference at all who she or himself was. Not even whether their bodies were dead or alive. She was fucking the coke, not him. He was fucking like an accountant, calculating and piling up self-esteem. He opened the car door and threw the cigarette butt on the pavement. And now, he was in the suburbs of Glasgow, in a luxury car that wasn’t his, traveling to pick up an aspiring suicide. He was stuck in an eight hour drive on behalf of the bowels of Sketch, and all that self-esteem and a shirt worth two hundred pounds were not being of any use. He switched on the engine, turned on the lights and curtly entered the traffic flow again.
The highway skirted the city without getting too close, from that distance, Glasgow showed herself shiny and heavily made up, as if in a peep show set up for drivers. The cars seemed to slow down just for the show, and even F threw his share of glances to the lights of the skyscrapers and deserted office blocks, while the darkness was taking the street back again and dragging it towards the north, towards the sea. As the miles went by, the traffic thinned out and the fields started to swallow the gigantic sarcophaguses of abandoned factories. Even from inside his car, F could feel the sky broadening and the horizon becoming flatter around the rough plateaus of the north.
“I don’t give a shit about that old man,” F said out loud, breaking the silence. He waited a few seconds to get used to the sound of his own voice. “Not that I need a justification,” he continued. “That guy is old, he saw the world when things were better. He might have even had a wife and kids. He has seen fish in the sea, and slept under the sun on the deck of his fishing boat too. He has had way more that I could ever hope for. I don’t give a shit if he dies now. And it doesn’t bother me if he gets eaten by the people at Sketch. They already own everything anyway, it doesn’t make much difference if one of their subjects is outside or inside their mouths. At the end of the day, the old man really wanted to go to London,” F said with a grin. “There he goes, what’s waiting for him is London indeed. He could have stayed at home, relaxing, rotting away with his dogs, but he’d rather play a TV star. He wanted to be eaten, and he will be pleased. People should stop thinking that they could be important.
F squinted and looked at the headlights trying to defend themselves from that complete, immense darkness. The tiredness concentrated at the bottom of his shoulders, in his neck, in his back and from there it slowly started to melt into adrenaline. F realized he could keep driving for hours, until he fainted. He kept talking out loud, mixing his voice with the throb of his temples. “This is true for me too,” he said. “At least I know it though. I will never be important, and unless I get a real lucky strike, not even remotely rich. Not that I’m dying to become rich or important. Those who go to Sketch, I know them well - skinny faces, swollen stomachs, agonizing eyes. All their money will never be enough to keep at bay that disease that they all share. What it is, is of no interest to me. Like it’s of no interest to me the drunkenness of the workers at six pm and their tabloid-tailored hopes. Their depressions, their complexes, their hard-worker’s anxieties, there’s nothing for me in there. What’s left for me, then? Perhaps to become a hermit? And where could I? Maybe in another picture taken by satellites?”
Judging from the non-existent landscape and the sparse villages, rhythmically appearing and disappearing, F couldn’t have said whether he had gone through hundreds of miles or if he had not moved at all. Slowly, the road signs - the only visible sign of the road - became more detailed, making the highway fray into a number of side streets. In a climax of silence, F followed the signs to the coast and soon afterwards he found himself busy disentangling the curves of a countryside road. The sea, F thought to himself.
In that darkness increasingly filled with wind, the sea could have been everywhere. He could fall into it at any time without realizing. And then, he could finally rest a bit. F thought something, then his thought wriggled out and he looked for another one that could keep him awake. He switched on the radio and immediately switched it off again. His cigarettes were running low and the one he lit up had the delightful taste of scarcity. Was the old man a smoker? Probably he smoked some of those stinky, old cigarettes. Or maybe not. Probably not. The Chef at Sketch would have never served a smoker to his clients.
The road became boring and deadly, spotted with invisible precipices on the sides of the asphalt. Just one wrong curve, F thought to himself, and I end up rolling down this hill. He surprised himself holding his breath. “I’m really fine if they want to eat each other,” F said, in a soft voice, “there’s no-one I would mind seeing disappear. As well as there’s no-one who would mind seeing me disappear.”
Time started playing its usual night-time tricks and F gave up trusting the clock. It couldn’t have been only eight hours, or that eight hours felt like more. He was feeling as if he had been traveling for an infinite time and as if he had never really started. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent such a long time alone, without a computer or a TV to get distracted. Anyway, all in all, he hadn’t found himself too bad company. Sure, if anybody had listened to his thoughts, he would have passed for a monster. But those ‘anyones’, actually, were also nothing but monsters themselves. Its just that they never had to spend eight hours alone, listening to their own thoughts. They were still able to pretend to not know who they were. Perhaps, F told himself, this is why they spend their lives in fear of their own neighbors and pretend to fall in love with each other. If only they realized the monsters they really are, they could have a possibility to finally talk to and recognize each other. In the current state of things, though, they were just monsters masked as landscape. Nothing for the disappearance of which anybody would have felt any pain.
To his utter surprise, F looked at the road sign at the end of the curve and saw the writing ‘Welcome to Auchmitie’. It took him a few seconds to realize that he would have to slow down and stop. The first part of his journey was over. Auchmitie was a slope with a few detached houses at the sides of the road and half a dozen street lamps. At the end of the road, a flat sandy field disappeared into the depth of a darkness that was probably the sea. Only one of the houses had still its lights on and F didn’t have to double-check the address of the old man. He turned off the headlights and stopped in the middle of the road. He didn’t feel quite ready to meet the old man and to swallow his unavoidable and stupid excitement. He remained sitting still, with the seat belt on and his stare trapped by the reflections on the windscreen. He could feel the level of adrenaline in his blood lowering until it almost disappeared. He didn’t even want to smoke.
Slowly, he ran his hand along the fabric of his jacket, as if it was someone else’s hand. The come down had come anyway, in another one of the thousands of deserts that spread outside London. His fingers slipped inside his breast pocket, randomly moving around like a hermit crab’s legs. The bag was still there, compressed and warmed up by eight hours of tight contact with his body. F kept his stare on the windscreen while taking the bag out of his pocket, putting it on his leg, grabbing his wallet from the dashboard and taking a credit card and the bus pass out of it. His hands were moving autonomously and precisely, like doctor’s hands. He needed to sleep or to snort a line, and he was too exhausted to sleep.
Now that the engine was off, from inside the car he could hear the waves bashing back and forth on the beach. The road was windy, and somewhere a dog was half-heartedly sticking to his role, barking from time to time. F carefully poured the coke on the side of the bus card and tidied it up with the credit card, making the plastic tick in imaginary rhythm with the waves. It didn’t take long for the expectation to wet his mouth and take the place of his tiredness. F threw a glance at the white, plump line jut before moving his head closer and snorting it up. Then he squinted a couple of times, cleared up the last crystals with a finger and licked their bitter taste.
“At the end of the darkness there’s the sea,” he said out loud, resting his back on the seat and looking hard beyond the windscreen. “There’s no directors in the sea, no manic chefs, cannibals or old men.” He was craving a cigarette. Cocaine could well kill him, but was so good for him. “Anyway, better to be killed by charlie than to end up in those drooling mouths at Sketch,” he said, taking the last cigarette. “As my best case scenario is that I will manage to get old too, I will have to consider this option at some point. Maybe by then there won’t be any coke left in the world and they will want to try its taste,” F laughed, lit up and pulled a hissing drag. “They’re better off eating one of the girls at Sketch, they’d get much more that way. Yeah, but those chicks, skinny as they are, are not even good to eat. God, a line was just what I needed. At the end of the day this shit journey maybe has been on of the best adventures I’ve ever had. Why kill it now? Going to bed in the man’s house and tomorrow morning taking him back with me to London. Him, going to be cooked. Me, going to be buried again under ten million people. Too many people, Christ.
On the street, only the wind was left, now that even the dog had fulfilled his duty and had stopped barking. F was still inside the car, smoking and feeling his mouth getting dry. His thoughts were loud and he was trying to speak them out, to lower their volume. “What a crazy situation, I really needed it. God, this silence... They can keep playing their minimal techno at Sketch, but this is much better. He sucked another drag of smoke. Shit, now it’s all clear! It doesn’t make any sense to go back to London. It doesn’t make any sense to go anywhere, except that into the... He threw a glance toward the lit windows in the old man’s house. What shall I do with him? Should I tell him? Should I tell him, man they want to eat you? No way he’s gonna believe this. And even if he believes it, I bet he’d be happy to get killed just to get to London anyway. Idiot. No, I won’t tell him. But I’ll sponge a cigarette off him, even one of his stinky ones. And a glass of water. My mouth is so bloody dry. I must be fair, that whore of the director gave me some really good shit. With all his sleazy moves, his sofas, his silky bed. That guy spent a lifetime just to build his brothel room. But now I can see. He wants me to smell his sexy life just to make me go a bit further, a bit further, until the bottom. Until the bottom of the sea.” F stopped talking and half-grinned. The bag came out of his breast pocket again, and another line rolled out on the bus card.
The old man had dressed up. He looked slightly nervous, but with the eagerness to please typical of a provincial person who deals with a Londoner. “Please, come in, I was waiting for you,” he said towards the shadow immobile in front of the door. F opened his eyes wide and rubbed his nose. “Good evening, evening, I’ll stay just a second, can I have some water please? Yeah, just some water, I won’t stay too long.” The old man seemed to be taken aback for a second. “Sorry, you are the person from the TV, right?” he asked. “Right, that’s me, they sent me here to pick you up, but there’s been a change in the plan, but can I have some water fist?” “Sure, sorry, just one second please,” said the old man, as if afraid, dragging his cheap suit through the two rooms on the ground floor. F followed him, quickly glancing from the plastic furniture, freshly dusted, to the huge television in front of the sofa. It was turned on the same talk show the old man thought he was going on. “And so you work for the TV, my compliments sir,” he said on his way back from the kitchen, holding a beer glass filled with water. F dipped his mouth and nose into the glass and drunk greedily. Coughed, goggled and awarded the bewildered old man with a smile. “Yes, I work for the TV, and I know the presenter very well, you know? We’re very close, the other day he even showed me his bedroom. Maybe you’ll get to see it too. But that’s not what I have to talk about now.”
F could feel his teeth creaking for how they were scratching against each other. “To get to the point,” F continued, waving the glass in front of him, “outside there’s the car that will take you to London. I left you a note with the address on the dashboard. The place is in the city centre, you won’t get lost. Early tomorrow morning, gas up the car and leave immediately. They’re waiting for you in the early afternoon. I am afraid I won’t be able to come with you this time. Tell them in London that I went to look for another one, they will understand. Better, tell them I went to the source. Anyway, I’ve already been here too long. Here are the keys,” F said, stretching out his hand, “I have to go.” He caught his breath, looked at the stupefied face of the old man and added “have you got a cigarette?”
The old man stood at the door, looking at the silhouette of F disappearing towards the beach. “I almost forgot!” F shouted from the darkness, “don’t drink any beer or coffee or they at the TV will get indigestion!” The dog started barking again and F’s laugh mixed with a series of wind bursts that sprayed the street with salty water.
F was walking fast on the beach, stumbling on the sand, determined as if he had really realized something urgent. He was breathing deeply the humid air that was soaking his clothes and his sweaty forehead. Even in those thousand, growing layers of waves, wind and swarming sand, F could hear the sound of his heartbeats.
He got closer to the undertow and slowed his pace. The sea in front of him was hiding darkness even more dense than that of the air. And forests, F thought, and billions of empty dens and infinite spaces of peace, without predators. He moved his arms forward, moving through the darkness as if looking for a glass wall.
The waves withdrew a few meters and when they moved forward again, they did it with a special care, almost suspiciously. They coiled around F’s feet and moved back again, and then forward, this time more bravely. They were smelling him, they were wooing him. F stopped, tightened his breath around his hammering heart and left the water exploring him. The reflections of the sea foam impressed themselves on his shrunk pupils, like sudden shades of fear.
He asked himself if he had to take off his clothes, then decided not to. “I’ll be the most elegant fish!” he shouted in the roaring of the growing waves. He felt relieved by not having anyone to say farewell to, and nobody to say hello to, in his new life. “No predators,” F repeated to himself, his eyes made shiny by the wind, while the water was rising to his belt.
Hours later, hundreds of kilometers south, in the twilight of a room wrapped in silk, a dozen evening dresses looked at each other, excited. Some soft electronic music in the background was spreading around, filling the silent air and the empty plates on the big black table. One of the dresses moved on its chair, took its breath back and coughed gently. “Isn’t it incredible,” it said, “to think that there will not be any more fish in the sea ever again? We are going to taste the very last sea creature left.” The other dresses smiled and didn’t reply. Perhaps, in the secret place where truth hides, even in the emptiness inside dresses, they inexplicably knew that that was not the case.
Federico Campagna
20-03-2010, London
