RuKsaK

There’s something about lying on my old sofa, and looking affectionately at a blue sky between the grubby windows frames. I like how it crisps up the frame – that solid, sharp blue taking the glass to its absolute bad-white edges. I’m not sure why, but I feel nostalgic, even though I’ll see this view many times and it doesn’t remind me of anything. It just gratifies me, spreads a feeble smile, and makes me want to laze more. I’m not sure everyone has this and care even less whether they do, I just know Stink didn’t have it for a long time, if ever. Maybe it reminds me of Stink’s tent.
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When we saw it sitting there it looked like a piece of expensive and orange animation rigidly placed on reality. The grass was all scuffed and mostly brown - no flowers were growing, but some less than half-pretty efforts clawed at the wall on the other side of the small yard. Stink’s tent was pristine in its colour, firm and bright enough to be like something out of space. I started going there most evenings. Once inside it you felt not just snug, but kind of protected, secret. The tight netting inside was equally immaculate and like nothing in or around Stink’s house.

He used the house to pick up his meals, have his baths, get dressed for school – that kind of thing. I remember going round and finding him brushing his teeth in the kitchen. All the plates were piled up in the sink, as always, unwashed, oil and ketchup dragged across them by fried food and other plates. I looked on as he scrubbed hastily into his mouth, the fluoride saliva fluffing up and dropping onto the dishes - platting with the grime. I watched in revulsion as globs of paste dripped and slid across the ugly dishes. It was in that moment I felt the most sorrow for Stink I’d ever feel. It was then I could really see why he was sleeping in this orange haven.
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His tent gave us more confidence than we’d had before. Zipping up the door to keep us inside, where someone couldn’t just walk in, made us more invincible. We controlled the place he lived.
‘Stink – how close are you to the record?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Well, you’ve been in this for over a year now. What is the record?’
‘I don’t fucking know,’ speaking like his mother before any of us dared. ‘I’ll look it up.’
‘Have you let them know you’re doing this?’
‘Let who know?’
‘The Guinness Book of Records dudes?’
‘Nah – should I do that?’
‘Stink! That’s over a year wasted then. If they don’t know you’re here, how can you get the record?’

His eyes stared at the zip of the exit.
‘Fuck me! You know how to be a cunt Ruk.’
‘Sorry and that Stink.’
‘Fuck it! I’m not bothered about the shitty record. I like it out here. Just like it and that’s enough for now. I might let them know later.’
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Opinions were cognitively barred from that decade in our existences. It was the last few years before we’d start shopping for our buyable beliefs – buying the right jacket for liking the right people, wearing a musico-politico haircut, a Freudian walk, a set of facial movements for all the questions possible. We weren’t fucking clever like that yet, Stink’s mum might have said.
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We were just bothered about liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting – and it was exactly this that sent Stink to prison. Opinionless and fifteen.
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Read Stink and the suicides - part 5 here.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Stink and the suicides - part 4