RuKsaK

My favourite rented apartment lived in so far was my Moscow flat, with a suicidal view of a Kremlin spire and rooms which came the closest to making me a reincarnated tsar. Now I’m in a stretched box and without raising my soles I can plant my palm firmly on the ceiling. The view is a neon blob of red and green through a murky, frosted window. I’ve lived in thirty-one homes from a few months to no more than ten years as a child. Where you put your body is what you put in your head. I know this, and I gratefully weep, in a distant manner, for Stink because of knowing this.
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Me and Bryan looked for something to clean my eye on. I didn’t want to go back upstairs and I really didn’t want to use the kitchen sink. Because everything else was sucked full of dust, dead skin flakes, I started using my t-shirt – this just smeared a muddy, blue streak down my face. Our jumpy chuckles were slammed shut by the thunderous opening of the front door.
‘Donny! Donny!’

It was Stink’s mum, her carnivorous yell made our arm muscles contract. This was a woman using all the gravity she could get her hands on. I could feel my lips shaping like a horseshoe losing its luck. She came into the room, and the door jackhammered on its hinges. She looked at me and saw what I’d done. I could see her naked eye glaring at the blue side of my face. Her blued eye looked placid and dumb next to the raging, exposed one.

It was Stink entering the room which stopped her third shift towards me. She swung to him and let out a growl, her hand raised up. She flung her built, semi-open palm into the side of Stink’s face. He trembled a little and quickly.
‘You useless, little, fucking cunt!’
Another wallop.

‘You are such a set of cunts! You couldn’t fucking tell me you little bastard!’
Another.

‘You’re just like your dad. A pathetic little cunt with no fucking mouth on you. Cunt!’

Stink strode back. His mother’s back to us, him facing us. He was awful in redness.
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He started to sing. Arms stuck down his sides. His voice juddered - it had pauses to allow more tears to gush down his face. There was almost no tune, just a throat full of thick water, a high-pitched, slow rasp. It was a song we knew:
‘Take your hand off me
I don’t belong to you, you see
Take a look at my face for the last time
I never knew you
You never knew me
Say hello, goodbye.’

We’d never been shown what to do when this happened. We gaped, on still-pause. Stink’s mother knew what to do though. Her brick punch cocked back and razed into his nose. We heard a crunch and Stink went to the ground in a precisely craned angle.
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We were at the bottom of Stink’s street with our thighs burning from the sprint before we even thought about anything.
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We returned to Stink’s house a week later.

He moved three metres from his home the first time, into a solid orange tent, stuck firm in the centre of the small square of grass in his back yard. There was no explanation of why, we just went round to see him.
‘Go round the back – he’s kipping in the back fucking yard now.’
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‘I’m going to break the world record.’
‘Which world record?’
‘For sleeping in a tent?’
‘What? For sleeping in a tent aged thirteen, in your mum’s back yard?’
‘No – just for sleeping in a tent.’
‘Okay, Stink – cool enough!’
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We had no idea he was going to stay in there so long, through two winters. We especially had no idea where he’d go next.
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You can read Stink at the suicides, part 4 here.

Friday, April 08, 2005

Stink and the suicides – part 3