Ha - if a building could cry, it’d be this one. Tears are last thing to dry up in a human body, I’m sure.
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The slotted concrete stairs tangle past three flats on every floor. The stairwell smells of smoke, alcohol and cats – all of it strong and mingled, immovable. The structure is buckling, like a marathon runner paused on his last legs. All of it seems a little too thin, precarious - the banister is a battered metal that even the weary are afraid to use as rest for a hand. All the walls are painted a wretched green or brown – the kind of paint that looks ten years old a day after being painted. Each door is little different –they all need the same winter-fighting thickness, some of them with padded leather bolted on, others with messy wood.
The thing is they all have the same amount of tears behind them.
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Pyotr’s mother knows what it is to weep – so much that she cries as a matter of habit now. To many Russians tears are as natural as breathing, pissing. Our pitiful English lexicon withers next to theirs in the crying department.
She’s spilt so many tears she knows the flavour of happiness and sadness in them in minute degrees. They come for almost anything now - a sneeze, a swift reminisce, a slice of onion, a soap opera. Handing over the money to Pyotr at the door she feels them tunnelling upwards. Why do tears feel the need to travel up the body? Where do they come from? Wherever they come from, she needs a couple of minutes to understand what these particular ones mean.
Pyotr senses her question:
‘I’ll be back later mum. I’d like to stick around for a while. It’s just I need to see an old friend tonight.’
‘So, you’ll be back later. I’ll get your favourite pillow for you.’
He’s forgotten about that hard sack of feathers. He did like it though – how his head moulds into it. The fucking thing is probably full of ten million invisible bugs, but fuck it, he likes how it wraps onto his cheeks. He actually looks forward to getting the side of his head burrowed into it.
‘Yeah – I’ll be back for the pillow mum.’
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Winding down the stairs, past the other flats, his mind is in the bar before his body is. It’s been some time since he’s sat in that kind of reek. He’s got the bar figured before he even arrives there. Pyotr can do that – take the atmosphere of a room or place he knows and stick it in his head. Like a glass box around his brain, he can fill it with anywhere he’s been. It’s a three-dimensional, smell-o-vision, or something, he’s got. The thing is, he just tunes in and he’s anywhere he wants. It’s just got to be somewhere he’s been, somewhere he knows.
There’s the fucking rub, isn’t it?
All the same, a great place it is. Even if he had desert island paradises, ridiculous sunsets and palatial lavatories in his head, he’s not sure he’d change them for his old haunt. It has, after all, got more than enough liquid in it to dilute all those shitty tears.
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