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@ 2017-09-23 17:46:00

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Madness in the Well Fed Toad (3)
There’s a bar about 15 kilometres in: the Well-Fed Toad. It’s situated just off the main road in the village of Cadava. It used to be a busy little travellers’ stop with a few rooms in the grounds. Now, Vija, the owner is pinching enough pennies to be up for taking a few of our perishables for a little kaposta.

I park the van at the usual point round the back, and Nuchi opens his eyes immediately. “Mmmmm” he goes, for either his or my benefit, and with no more words he is off to do the business. I start to feel my engaging force (the clutch that transfers vital force to movement) slip out of my head and fall down my arse, and so I go inside for a coffee. It’s empty save for a man and his kid. The man, who is in his early forties with curly greying hair and a burnt red burst to his face, is sitting at a table clutching a bottle of wheat spirit; and his kid, standing and tugging at his forearm, is begging him to talk to someone on the patch he’s holding:

“Dad, come on – talk to her.”

“You’ve got some fried potato, haven’t you? (his attention swiftly and miserly transferred from the spirit to his child – actually I can see it’s Mansion Spirit, from the inside of the bottle, you can see a grand country lodge on the back of the label fluctuating in the flux of liquid and glass)… so what are you whining about?”

“Come on, dad – she wants you to come home.”
“That is of absolutely no interest to me.”
“Speak to mummy, dad – just speak to her.”

He waves his son away, and then looks up at me, smiles in a half-arsed confrontational manner, and returns to his bottle. After another ingestion, he turns to his son, who is talking in spurts on his patch to his mother (“He won’t…. I can’t, … Mum, you come.”), and once again declares in a tired tone,

“You have some fried potato. What else on this planet do you want?”

Vija’s daughter appears from the kitchen, and I ask for a coffee. The kid sits down at another table with his back to his father, eats his fried potato, and looks out of the window into the darkness. It’s quiet save for a romantic song on the radio about memories of love that had sprung from jointly weeding a strawberry patch – the fruit sweet and red and full of seed.

I pay with a couple of sheaths of kaposta, and as she’s finding the change I see something settled in next to the till: a black box that seems dense with technology, smooth and sleek with authority; and, consequently, a little incongruous here and now among the chipped furniture, the chewed up lino, and the cheap stew misting up the transparent plastic display cover.

“It looks as though it comes from another planet.” I say nodding to Vija’s daughter.
“Yeah, it does look funny.” She replies.
“What is it?”
“Don’t you watch the updates?” She smiles and gives me the change slowly with her calm young hands. “The tribute agency were here yesterday. They put it in. Soon we are all going to have to use it. Look, it’s called an ATM or a ‘pan’. Funny, isn’t it?”

And then she tells me how it works, and as she does so the young kid comes over and climbs on to a stool by the bar to watch. He seems to be about 10, I guess – the same age as my eldest daughter. He has his plate with him and biting off half a chip of potato he settles down with his chin in his cupped palms.

“When you pay for something, you put your hand in here.” And turning the pan around she shows me the slot – about 20 centimetres by 5. “It’s mixy, actually. When you put your hand in, something folds around it – like a glove, and then I enter the amount here, and do something else – I don’t know what exactly, yet – we’re supposed to go on a course. And, anyway, it gets taken off your Rialto account.”

“Ha! Rialto account.” snorts the father behind us. I take a backward look at him: he’s been drifting downstream for a few days now. There are beads of sweat on his sunburnt face, and his greying curls have a damp look to them.

“Lind, can you phone my mum?” asks the kid “I haven’t got no credits left.”

She tells him ‘sure’. His father takes another hit, and I take my coffee outside. The night is alive with sound: the wind rustling the young birch leaves above and the insect and reptile life vibrating in the damp vegetation below. This place will close in a few hours, but over the way on Swamp Street in an annex of the Post Office is the local drinknica – open for the enjoyment of booze in disparate company from 11 in the night until 7 in the morning. There are already a few teenagers sitting on the one bench outside: two boys and two girls. Between them, two litres of cider are doing the rounds, and the girls laugh and the boys fire curses with gestures untrammelled.

A self-made motorbike cackles into view; low-slung, small-wheeled, with the fuel tank exposed, and before its rider dismounts one of the girls has already straightened her back and cast her shoulders back. The lad opposite her greets the dismounted newcomer with a friendly “Get on my dick, you cunt – and then fuck off back home, you arse-loving retard!”.

The rider walks over, taking his helmet off as he does so, and before he takes a seat at the table, he takes a playful blow at the one who welcomed him. Soon, they fall into a comforting to and fro; and as they play out another scene, their words are absorbed with seeming indifference by the swamp and the woods. At least, of course, that’s how it seems to me, but then I’m trying to pinpoint how and when something hardens this young gamesmanship – when it kicks in, when it hardens what had been innocently fluctuating boundaries in the perception and understanding of romance, lust, and obsession – when and how it takes a hold over… these kinds of events, when the father comes out, lights up, and stares at me. I try to ignore him, but he eventually he gets off a “What do you lot want here?”

“Who’s my lot?” It’ll do for a retort.

He stands there a while, looking at me. I don’t look at him, but I sense him take a drag, and then flick the ash off his cigarette tip. He spits out the words with the saliva into the split asphalt.

“What’s our lot?”
“What’s in store? Who can say?”
“You been over the river, yeah?”
“Uh huh.”

He’s building up to it; I can feel it. But he doesn’t get there in time because after half a minute of silence, Nuchi arrives from the storage shed by the back of the pub. He then takes in the scene, puts one hand on his hip, and in his high delicious manner declares,
“Very nice! Now, Jani, don’t be shy: ask him for a dance!”

“Fucking pederast,” mutters the father, and slinks off back into the light of the bar. We wouldn’t have taken him over in any event. Not worth the risk.

“Have I broken the spell?” asks Nuchi. “Oh my God! Another tragedy! And there are already so many in this loveless Northern place where all you really serious people live.”

I go back in, leave the coffee cup on the bar top and nod a farewell to Linda. The drunk is leaning on the counter with his head in his hands. As I consider him, his son walks up behind him and starts tugging one of his back pockets. Alerted, he shifts his focus to his kid and then swiftly straight at me. He makes a swipe for me as my back is turned. I hear it coming with the creak of leather and scrape of shoe. I duck and push him off me. He falls onto one of the chairs by the table, which fails to take his weight and makes a racket as it crashes and skids on the tiled floor. He gets up in stages. When he is on his one knee he looks up at me. We make eye contact and he nods. I turn to leave. Linda picks up the chair, and his son leans against the bar with his hands in his pockets assessing, somehow, his old man.

Once back in the van, the headlights pick him out in the doorway as we pull out of the carpark. He seems to be throwing punches: punches that arc round to connect with his own flank.

“The Virgin Birth – what madness.” sighs Nuchi passing me a few sheaves of kaposta.

Pretty soon the wind gets up and the rain starts to dash against the windscreen. Nuchi becomes talkative, and the theme for the half-hour drive to Teka is family; namely, the lack of primitive, innocent affection for said establishment up here in the north. Coming from the south, it’s one of those things that he sees, you see. We display, he declares, no easily discernible inter-generational love: we are cold, reserved, and miserable etcetera, etcetera: ah - you get the picture – you know what the Latins are like. You can take it for a while, but sometimes that patronising sentimentality gets a little much.

The point at which the old motorway slips into the tank-wide avenue of Freedom Street is marked by the flickering lights of the old modest Norland-era mansions that are parked behind the thinning woodland that accompanies the road to the capital. The road loses its natural embankment as we pass into the suburbs, replaced by kiosks and bus stops and, behind them, looming in the dark, the dirty grey ten-storey blocks of housing. I follow the lights of the Audi in front of me, copying near perfectly its route around the potholes (so it’s an old joke now, but just in case – how do the police spot drunken drivers in Letzonia? Easy: they’re the ones driving straight down Freedom Street).

The further down the artery to the heart of the city, the more the buildings diminish in size, and the closer they hug the road. The large squat superstores with their neon advertising give way to the more humble product shops, and the slabs of apartment blocks cede to the solid and more ornamented three floors of the independence-era period. I take a right by an old church, and head off down Sinner’s Street. Not far now to my place: one of the five-storey blocks of the early Prole-era that are just set off Source Street. I pull up by the turn into the yard. Nuchi motions for me to continue, and I ease the van through the deep puddles, stopping for a black cat that darts out from behind the line of garages to the right. I look up at the light of the kitchen in our fifth-floor flat, which is shrouded by the wind-tousled branches of the birch.

“Are things still stormy in paradise?” Nuchi asks.
“A little.”
“Well, it will blow over, I’m sure,” he posits, adding that he “will give me ten minutes.”

I get out and walk to the door. You need the code to get in, but anyone can see you need to press the ‘five’ and the ‘seven’, as those are the only buttons that have been polished by the inhabitants’ ever-pressing fingertips.

As I’m opening up the post box in the corridor (a final demand from the electric company and a couple of political flyers), Vera, the sole inhabitant of the first floor, opens her front door an inch.

“Jani” she whispers, breathing hard.

As I make my way towards her I realise we hadn’t picked up what she needed – what I had promised her. She opens the door a little further – it’s dark in her flat, and I can only just make her out there in the corridor with her old hunched frame wrapped in a black shawl.

“Sorry, Vera” I say, cursing myself. “Can you wait till Wednesday?”
“Oh, Wednesday. Fine, dear – you hold on now.”
“Sorry, Vera. There wasn’t any in.” I lied. “But Wednesday for sure.”
“Fine, dear.” She manages before a fit of coughing shakes her down.
“Will you be alright?”
“Yes, dear, yes…” She says, softly closing the door.

I get up the five flights of stairs and open the front door quietly. The shoes are scattered in the corridor, the radio is on, and a calm confusion abounds. In the kitchen, my wife is busy serving up dinner, and the children are at the table.

“Hi kids!”
“Hi!” they reply.
“You alright?”
“This smells bad!” says Andris, my son.
“Don’t move! It’s hot!” says my wife, laying the pan of hot stew on the table.
“Yeah?” I say looking at Martha, my eldest daughter – “how’s things?”
“Okay.” she replies.
“Is this broccoli?” asks my son in something approaching amazement.
“Just eat it!” commands my wife.

He takes a mouthful as I take a seat.

“It is! Maamu!! It’s broccoli!” he says – the food residing unwelcome in his unhappy gob.
“Don’t eat with your mouth full!” I say, and my daughter laughs as my son rolls his eyes.
“How am I supposed to eat? With my mouth empty?”

Martha’s in stitches, and I sense the mood tilt: so much so that I catch my wife’s eye, and offer a silent ‘sorry’.

Which gets sucked into her orbit, flies around at dizzying speed, and then is flung back at me:

“Sorry?” she whispers, “sorry, sorry, sorry (each word rising portentously in volume) – just a word! You are sick! You know that? Sick!”

And she takes her plate and leaves to sit in the living room. The kids fall quiet, and start eating their food. I walk over to the kitchen window and look out into the street in time to see Nuchi slip off the brake, push it into first, and pull away.


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