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She gave me back the money for the cinema ticket I'd given her at dawn - "You didn't go?" I asked. "Hmm, just don't...." "What?" "OK... the boys paid for us.""A randiņš, then!" "Daddy... stop it!" 11 years old - her first date: flowers and tickets to a horror film, which she told me about in English as I waited for the wind (internal) to pass in our 15 year-old Mazda. Complicated plot: demons and dead parents. I listened watching the foliage brush against the quiet white buildings in the city side street: how would you describe it? Like somebody's forearm at rest, perhaps. I get the feeling I am living somehow incorrectly - speaking someone else's sentences, if I knew what you meant.
We get to the game half an hour before kick off as requested. The organisations there have already been hammered into the ground intently and thoroughly. The kids are given are given a chocolate and told to report to the Parasite tent (SMS Credit LV - "if the State has forgotten you - allow us to help!"). Apkārt are the glass slabs of bank HQs laid out like the dull buffers of a pin ball game... oh, and there is a male, who appears to be an adult, with a microphone who manages to go without silence, talking about whatever selection of the set menu his consciousness alights on - half of it about the game - half of it about the company whose t-shirt he is wearing - the McDonalds t-shirt he is wearing. Before the game, the teams emerge in procession (process out?) hand-in-hand with CHILDREN wearing the same demonic dress, and the head of said company's marketing department talks to us plastered there in front of her for about 10 forlorn minutes. "Daddy, if you say 'Jesus' again, we can go home NOW." But she's loyal and rests her head against my shoulder, before saying "please!?"
They are awful too - unimaginatively slow in their polite faux professionalism. The Russians and Africans from Daugavpils are just quicker, more intent: faster synapses in their collective brain - they know more. I want them to crush this dry stale, soulless, inept, predictable, corporately rational, aren't I so fucking grown-up Latvianness. The second half's better - the sponsors' soul grab has dissipated and men and boys get stuck in and rattle the cage they've been put in - they almost break out, too - but it ends 2:1. |
