Lollygagging out in my place on Siebentausend Road, I’d reached the functional limits of masturbating to phone porn and picking my nose, and was just considering the merits of taking up another hobby. I say my place, but of course it’s really my Hungarian friend’s place, this suburban house on Siebentausend Road.
I was doing the housesitting and minding, caring for the plants – which had all died anyway, saving me that particular chore – and making sure no intruders came in to desecrate the many precious artworks in the house. It was in its own way quite exhausting: all this watching, all this art.
My Hungarian friend was a connoisseur. It looked increasingly like he was dead now, though. I hadn’t heard anything from him in more than six weeks, and this place was therefore probably mine by right of occupation or something. Only thing was, the freezer was getting empty and that was quite concerning. I’d been considering calling my friend between bouts of self-pleasure, but now I’d started on dreaming up a different activity with which to occupy my time – and that tended to occupy a lot of my time.
Meanwhile, lollygagging was just fine. The crysthanthemums had dried up, dropping their petals everywhere. It was pleasant to take in their crushed scent on the wool carpet while I just lay on the couch, thinking of what to do. The ornate clock in the backroom ticktocked chunkily, its crisp slow thud the melancholy metronome beat for a lazy dance of time past. The big clock would run down soon enough because I’d lost the key to wind it up. But for now it was the perfect accompaniment to my drifting and exhausted state of mind. Moods of soft abandon. Dolce far niente.
That was the point when the doorbell chimed for the first time. Sudden, startling. It will chime twice more before my story is done. I towelled off my hands on a soiled undershirt, pulled on my pants, and went into the hallway to answer the door.
The house on Siebentausend Road is situated on a picturesque bend, blind to the left and the right. The lot opposite is vacant, fenced off, home to foxes and scrubby shrubs with (I imagine) dormice and voles taking advantage of the solitude. Interesting sounds burble out of it at night, chirrups and squawks and whatnot, and it’s become my own little wilderness of contemplation.
Rather perfect, really, and it allows me to imagine that Siebentausend Road doesn’t actually exist, that this place of my friend’s is a remote colonist’s cabana on the veldt, that tigers and giraffes roam outside the bedroom window and somewhere, just out of earshot, there are native drums sounding a call to some adventure.
The doorbell chimed once more, just before I opened the door. There was an attractive woman on the doorstep, and I raised my eyebrows both inquiringly and alluringly. I am a handsome devil, or at least that’s what my Hungarian friend always used to say before he wandered far away to his death. I put that now to some use.
She was dressed in a slim-fitting white lycra dress and a brown leather jacket like a bikers’ jacket, but heavier. She had a thick black leather belt with a bulky steel buckle and wore embossed cowboy boots in white buckskin and red trim. Her hair was straight black lustered sheeny and her skin between olive and café au lait. Eyes a clear pale green, despite her dark complexion, ringed around with dark green eyeshadow. For all my recent onanistic propensities and concomitant erotic exhaustion, I sensed within myself a stirringly strong new arousal of a different and quite intense kind.
She studied me in a way that brooked no doubt. Clear interest on her part, though interest of what precise nature had yet to be teased out of her. I waited, eyebrow raised, cool as you like. Arms akimbo in the doorframe. Masterful yet approachable.
She spoke at last: “Do you know where is – ?” and an incomprehensible foreign name followed. Her own accent was soft and exotic, a bit like my Hungarian friend’s mitteleuropäisch soft trilling roll. I realized then that she was actually asking for him, for my Hungarian friend, pronouncing his name in all its foreign impenetrability.
“He’s gone, like, away?” I said, raising that final intonation to be relatable, as I’d heard somewhere on a podcast that this was particularly attractive to women. “On a trip, you know?” I added, though I feared now I was overexplaining and it was best to keep it terse and tight for the moment.
“Oh,” she said, clearly herself also of the keep-it-terse school of thought. She remained standing there for a moment. Then another moment, looking at me.
“And you are...?”
“I am tired and a little thirsty,” she replied. “I had to walk from the train station all the way up Siebentausend Road. No taxis in this shittyhole town.” Her mouth was full and sensual when she spoke, the lips pouting around the consonants quite delightfully.
“No, I mean, what’s your name?” I said. “Maybe he mentioned you, he loves talking about his friends from the old country?”
“Is not very easy to understand my name,” she responded. “Best not the bother.”
She continued to contemplate me from the step below the doorway. A not unpleasant feeling of being gazed upon, and as I’d been missing the touch of human eyes on me in my masturbatory solitude, I chose to stop and relish it a while.
It was a fine late afternoon on Siebentausend Road. A fox or a stray dog yelped in the vacant wasteground across the street. Something small had gnawed a hole in the wire fencing. When I looked back at the woman, there she was, looking at me still. My move, then. It seemed she’d won this phase of the game simply by doing nothing.
“Why don’t you come in, er...? Why don’t you come in?” I stammered, repeating myself like a drooling dunderhead. I stood back a pace from the doorway and retreated into the hallway. She strode in decisively and passed me by, moving directly into the salon. I followed on, feeling obscurely bested and somehow trodden down.
Soon though, with a gin and tonic, a bowl of black bitter olives, and a little light jazz on my Hungarian friend’s vintage gramophone, the tension dissipated considerably. There was a sympathetic vibe materializing; she’d taken off her bulky leather jacket and loosened her thick chunky belt buckle so as to sit more comfortably on the couch. I sat opposite her on a rich red vintage leather ottoman, cracked and charactered like fine wine in old casks.
We loosened up. We chatted about my Hungarian friend. I explained that he’d gone away on a personal visit to his home country, and she allowed that he had told her that, but she’d forgotten, and had just popped up to Siebentausend Road on a whim.
“This piece is by Hockenheim, no?” she said, standing and approaching an off-white canvas riddled with holes and scratched with what looked like fingernails. In fact it looked like there were fingernail fragments still encased in the paint, and dark red streaks that could be bloodstains. I’d never paid any attention to the artwork, and even now, my attention drawn toward it, I was having trouble tearing my attention away from the fine arrangement of her curves beneath the white lycra skirt.
“I think it is a Hockenheim, yes,” I bluffed, and approached closer as if to examine the thing, holes and scratches and all – but really to get within fragrance-sniffing distance. And it really was quite intoxicating, that scent of hers. It was something utterly sophisticated, like one of those fragrances you swipe from the perfume counter to give your mother at Christmas, but with something altogether more earthy and... almost meaty? A bit like dried blood in the corner of your mouth, or a chewy piece of game, some rich boarmeat which had been left hanging out to mature.
“Very fine,” she said. “He has such good taste.”
“Not just in artworks,” I ventured. “I think there may be something else we have in common, related to his very good taste, wouldn’t you say?” I neared her body and reached out a hand toward her. Then pulled it back, sharp. Something like a shock.
She turned to regard me, a smirk or sneer or something else on her mouth. “We going to see about that in time,” she said. “Get me another gintonic now.” And she held out her glass.
As I was going through toward the kitchen, I saw something out by the doorway. I’d forgotten to close the door behind us, and now there was someone standing just inside the door, I mean, in the hallway, inside the house. Two someones. Inside.
It was a scraggy beggar woman in a grubby black headscarf pushing a makeshift trolley or perhaps you could call it a wheelchair but more like one of those cart racers that little kids build out of wood and old bike wheels. In it was a young man, my size, my age, who lolled in the seat and stared up at the ceiling with his mouth open. His flick of blonde hair looked almost familiar, a near-recognition that promised something deeply unwelcome once the recognition was completed.
The woman pushed the chair further towards the interior. The wheels creaked and grated like lost forgotten toys unwilling to be played with. Something about it all was like a dream from when I was very young. What dream was it? I couldn’t think.
“No!” I shouted. “No! You can’t come in here!” I started moving toward them, but suddenly halted. Now I could see the young man in the chair as it came clacking and screeking down the hallway corridor, approaching at the slowest pace. Creak creak.
“Is okay sweetie, I invite them to here,” said the young woman in the white dress, now standing right beside me. “Is Buba and her boy.” Her cowboy boots were off and she was moving very stealthily now in her bare feet. Her toenails were long and pointed like her fingers. Her scent was more rich and meatlike than before. She panted, excited.
The other woman, the ancient woman in black rags with caved-in cheeks, in wrinkled dirty skin and a grubby black headscarf, could have been herself a century older. She began to smile at me gradually as she pushed the cart, and it was the smile of a graveyard’s broken reassurances. I dropped the girl’s glass. It rolled without breaking, its dry hollow rolling sound on the tiled floor playing off the creak of the makeshift cart’s unoiled wheels as it came rocking slowly from the hallway.
Through the open doorway the sun was setting behind the patch of wasteground across the street. Red rays coursed through the branches of scrub brush and a lost thing howled forlorn from somehwere behind the holed chainlink fence. Orange light gleamed through into the hallway and illumined the pair with radiance, the grinning mother and the son, as they moved incrementally onward. They shadowed down the corridor in advance of themselves, great shapes forming uninvited on the walls and silhouettes shifting in unimagined ways. Creak and creak and creak.
They came close enough and I saw it then: the young man in the chair, sitting and smiling and drooling, gazing up in vacant unawareness at the golden sunlit ceiling, was me. Happy me, so content with how it all had gone so far. Unknowing of what was still to come.
I edged round them as they advanced through the hallway, not touching, and pushed past, though nobody acted to stop me in any way. Then I ran out onto the road.
The door clunked shut behind me. I turned back and sounded the bell, then thought better of it and backed off again into the street. The bell continued to chime and chime, but nobody came to open the door. Inside somebody laughed, a dry woman’s hack of dry laughter, and somebody or something indoors yelped then sharp as a fox.
I turned and ran across the road, pushing myself headfirst through the narrow hole in the chainlink to the other side of the fence.
Siebentausend Road looks different from the patch of wasteground, this vacant lot that is yet to be built on. There are soft places and there are hard places. The thing to do is always to find those soft places to lie on. There are things that are living here with me, but they are neither friendly nor hostile. They are indifferent and they keep their distance, they go about their own things. I still don’t know quite what they are.
I don’t ever eat or sleep anymore out here among the withered brown shrubs and the dry spiky grass. I don’t even need to eat or sleep any more. I keep watch during the day, hiding beneath the shade of a scrubby pine, with a torn plastic bag to keep the sun and the rain away. But nobody ever goes in or comes out of my Hungarian friend’s house. I lollygag in my bodybag and I watch and I watch. For what I’m watching, I don’t exactly know. I expect I’ll know it when I see it.
Some nights I howl and yelp beneath the moon, in the silverlight that makes me so melancholy, and the window in the bedroom across the street opens, the better to hear me, and it seems at these times that it’s all going to be alright. I know then that I’m heard and I’m appreciated for my soft lonely song, and that’s all anyone can ever hope for in this world, is it not?
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Love the haunting ambiguity of the ending - so nebulous and strange.
Please... keep howling.