A woman I had lived with once invited me to the flat she had rented after our split. I couldn’t understand why she was so proud of the place, the colours she’d chosen for walls, the shelves she’d put up and other details that helped make the place hers. But I understand now. Having stayed in a fake home for even a single night, I understand the differences between us, why she was so proud of that flat and why it was such a joy to her to have something permanent underfoot. I’ve never been there. Never rented a place I thought I’d be in for long. Never bought or considered buying my own. I’ve lived on council estates, in posh city-centre flats, quiet suburban houses, cliff-top bungalows, for a year or two at a time, never thinking about settling down, never once considering mortgages or property ladders or any permanent states of being. My dream home is a caravan parked on a piece of land that is mine. Maybe that’s why hotel rooms fit me. Why there’s no sense of separation between their way of life and mine. France, day two I leave Bourges well-rested. It takes me five minutes to go from cosy room to motorway and mad motion again. I remember the bike finally feeling happy somewhere past Clermont- Ferrand. The landscape had risen with the sun, noon flowing through high gorges and rock-strewn rivers, the road a mad mess of hairpin bends. The signs suddenly started reading 90 or 70 instead of 130kph, but I kept my right hand twisted, the speedo needle where it was before. Now being on two wheels begun to make sense. There is no skill in going fast in a straight line, none. It’s in the twisties, leant right over at serious motorway speeds, that the adrenaline kicks in, that the dance begins, the work, fighting the front down, focusing on the next apex, overtaking all those who’ve dutifully slowed down. On a bike, you slow in corners, you miss the point. Maybe only three, four miles of this spaghetti-road treatment, but I’ ll remember it forever. Race pace. Breakneck. Moments stay with you right up until the instant you die. By late afternoon, I keep expecting to see the Mediterranean. The mountains even out, the trees turn to arid shrubs, the air has a hazy quality I associate with something blown in from Africa. And it’ s Africa, not the sea before it, meets me first. Twenty kilometres from the coast, I think a stone has bust the radiator, drained it of fluid, overcooked the engine. The blast furnace heat that meets me just past Lodeve is unbelievable. I’m ready to stop, save the engine from seizing, throw the visor of my helmet open and the same heat just rushes in. Its’ not the engine. It’s the air here. Christ, it was just an instant, a bend, a brow of a hill and the world’s changed by a dozen degrees. The heat continues all the way to the coast, past Montpellier, Beziers, to Valras-Plage, where I almost get lost in a little town full of dazed locals giving me directions in French. A couple of gendarmes point me to a hotel a hundred metres from the beach, from my first taste of the Mediterranean. My room is large and furnished with cheap bits of wicker and veneer, and there’s no complimentary kettle, but the place is wonderfully empty and the pool is like the million pictures I’ve seen in films and holiday brochures. Baby blue, surrounded by white lawn furniture and low palms and completely free of people. I want to dive in, but after another nine- hour stint in the saddle, I need a beer and the hotel, again, lacks a decent bar. The beach, like the rest of town, is empty, the sand darker than I expected. The sea as cold as in Brighton, a solitary woman in a pink bikini standing waist-high, not moving, seemingly unaffected by the temperature. Far off to my right, in an ash-blue mist, the Pyrenees make grand promises for the last leg of my journey tomorrow. The seafront is perfect. Low buildings and only two bars. One a kebab place manned by a skinny black guy with steady English. I order a couple of Kronenburgs, sit outside, watch him doodling in a sketch book. I’d like to get to know more about his life here, in this pre-season limbo land, but I’ve never been too hot at small talk and don’t manage to get far. Just sit there, watching the sea and sky melt into azure darkness, picking sand from between my toes before putting my shoes back on. The other bar is a mini-discothèque, right next door, Thursday nights serving up karaoke. In spite of the heavy heat still hanging over the place, I sit inside, order a beer, get my notebook out. Sitting in the best karaoke bar in the world, trying to work out what it is I miss. I’m meant to miss something. Families in here, red-faced French people, insane decoration (high ceilings, pillars camouflaged as palm trees with brown paint running down the plaster, far too many disco lights for a place this claustrophobic). Pot bellied owner, his wife on high heels and flowing mini, their cute, chubby teen daughter running round, chasing a dog. Sailor-bearded karaoke DJ in full sentimental flow singing “Pour qua?” and I don’t have an answer. I just need beer to make me even warmer than I am already. All French songs sound the same and all French beer tastes of cherries. Good to see French people get sunburnt and can’t dress on holiday either. For all that, there is a longing in this karaoke session I don’t relate to England. It’s not just the feel of the language, the DNA of Gainsbourg and Piaf, but some other, higher longing. There’s a forceful wind now blowing the evening into the place. 80 proof Ricard on top of the bar, a live-wire feel native to a place just across the bay from Africa. The sad shortarse studying the karaoke list like it was a racing form, his butch little woman flirting with the sweaty pissheads at the bar. She’s wearing a leather mini, but her armpits are shaven. See it as she dances, the only one in the place, the DJ belting out songs with bear-like charm. The shortarse has two pouches strapped to his belt, one for his mobile, one for what looks like a knife. Place like this reeks of rushed summers – the manic disco lights, voices chasing lyrics across the karaoke screen, struggling to emulate art, kids running around, trying to ignore their parents’ drinking. It’s not enough, it’s not even not enough. With the sky slate-blue outside, this place, after three beers, feels like humble heaven. And then the DJ sings “Satisfaction”. Watching places like that is great when you’re only passing through. The same goes for hotels. There’s an organised impermanence to them I almost wish existed every day of my life. You walk in, order a room, smile at the proprietor, they smile back. You can’t communicate, but it’s all right. I’m the customer, I’ll be judging him and he’s ready. They show you a room you’ve never seen before, even though it’s just like all the others, you drop your bags, the barest essentials of what you are, and accept. Fresh towels, a remote that half-works, surfaces and fabrics you will never ever have to clean yourself. It’s enough. For a life on the move, for any life, it’s enough. I bring a couple of bottles back from the kebab place and crash on the bed. I’m meant to miss something… but I don’t. Don’t feel any hollowness around me. Some part of that must be self-deception. Earlier, sitting on the beach or outside the kebab place, I kept thinking of who to text from my mobile phone. If not for fear of theft, I’d have left it at the hotel, but I didn’t and so I sent texts to friends in England and Poland, a little teasing description of where I was at. Physically. But emotionally? Even on this page, I struggle to describe that. Friends were far away, women even further, but while the phone brought them no closer, it was still close enough. Virtual distances. Displaced associations. Moving and yet always looking back, thinking of people left behind, strangely alone. I never wanted that. Solitude, yes, but never loneliness. And I am lonely, that’s a fact, though I don’t feel it, which is why I’m not suffering. Which is why hotel rooms are no change from my usual lifestyle, even back home. They’re just more romantic than sharing a council flat with your father. I’m lonely because I wish for people who are either far away or don’ t exist in my life, but that wish has gotten so weak, I fear for my psyche. It is an educated fear, by which I mean it is a fear I experience logically not emotionally. I fear for myself in theory. Fear for an older age, when empty hotel rooms and speed runs from somewhere to somewhere else will not be enough. But for now, lying on a hard king-size bed, watching football highlights in French, wind off the Bay of Lion rattling the curtains, putting out fag ends into bottles I will not have to worry about taking to the recycling dump, I feel free and still and even if not in the right place, maybe not even on the way there, at peace in between. |
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marek kazmierski
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STRIPPER, LIBRARIAN
AND DOOR-TO-DOOR
PERFUME SALESMAN
MAREK RECENTLY
QUIT HIS JOB IN
CULTURAL AFFAIRS
AT A LONDON JAIL
TO WRITE, FILM AND
TRANSLATE MORE.
JOINT WINNER OF THE
PENGUIN DECIBEL PRIZE
FOR NON-FICTION
SOLE RECIPIENT OF
THE BIKE MAGAZINE
PHILOSOPHER OF
THE YEAR AWARD.
FOUNDER MEMBER
OF APART ARTS
AND EDITOR OF
OFF_PRESS
always under construction*
FOUNDER, EDITOR AND
TRANSLATOR HERE...
* THE ARTWORK
NEVER ENDS...
CONTACT:
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00 44 7 984 128 406
TRANSLATOR HERE...
* THE ARTWORK
NEVER ENDS...
CONTACT:
marek@off-press.org
00 44 7 984 128 406
