Dark Satellites E-Book

Clemens Meyer

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

International Booker-longlisted author Clemens Meyer returns with Dark Satellites, a striking collection of stories about marginal characters in contemporary Germany. A train driver's life is upended when he hits a laughing man on the tracks on his night shift; a lonely train cleaner makes friends with a hairdresser in the train station bar; and a young man, unable to return to his home after a break-in, wanders the city in a state of increasing unrest. From the home to places of work, Meyer transforms the territories of our everyday lives into sites of rupture and connection. Unsentimental and yet deeply moving, Dark Satellites is a collection of stories from our time, as dark as the world, as beautiful as the brightest of hopes.

Leseprobe

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‘Clemens Meyer’s great art of describing people takes the form of the Russian doll principle: a story within a story within a story. From German jihad to a Prussian refugee drama, so much is so artfully interwoven that his work breaks the mould of the closed narrative. Images of history extending into the present are what make this collection a literary sensation.’

— Katharina Teutsch, Die Zeit

‘Dark Satellites proves once again that he is one of the strongest German writers. His short stories possess depth and truth, linking East German history with the present and painting dense and perceptive portraits of what we call ‘common people’ – without a trace of mawkishness or kitsch.’

— Heinrich Oemsen, Hamburger Abendblatt

‘Meyer’s writing is brittle, laconic, clear, intense – and once again on top form. Short stories are clearly his forte. He finds memorable images for his themes: a dance without music in an unused Russian canteen; a midnight haircut; a man who slides into another identity after a break-in to his home and leaves his briefcase, the last requisite of his old life, in an abandoned shop. Meyer’s stories are quiet, tragic and once again populated by ordinary people, for whom he has always harboured sympathies.’

— Steffen Roye, Am Erker

Praise for Bricks and Mortar

‘Meyer’s multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices … [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many 4places brilliant – a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.’

— Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement

‘[Bricks and Mortar is a] stylistic tour de force about the sex trade in Germany from just before the demise of the old GDR to the present, as told through a chorus of voices and lucidly mangled musings. The result is a gripping narrative best described as organic.’

— Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

‘A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’

— Chris Petit, author of Robinson

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’

— A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet

‘The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing’s “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for 5fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’

— Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers

‘The language is dizzying at times, frank and colloquial in others, but through Katy Derbyshire’s glorious and award-winning translation, the reader is guided around this intoxicating, unflinching underworld without getting lost. Some of the content in Bricks and Mortar will be shocking to many, but this sombre drift through lonely nights and clandestine activities offers a fascinating and compelling take on post-Cold War Germany.’

— Reece Choules, The Culture Trip

Praise for All the Lights

‘His is a voice that demands attention, unafraid to do different, sometimes seemingly wrong-headed, things, confident in its ability to move, confront and engage his readers.’

— Stuart Evers, author of Your Father Sends His Love6

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DARK SATELLITES

CLEMENS MEYER

Translated by

KATY DERBYSHIRE

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEONEBROKEN GLASS IN UNIT 95LATE ARRIVALTHE BEACH RAILWAY’S LAST RUNTWOTHE CRACKDARK SATELLITESUNDER THE ICETHREETHE DISTANCETHE RETURN OF THE ARGONAUTSIN OUR TIMEABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

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ONE

We were working on an overgrown stretch of land next to a petrol station, right by a dual carriageway. It was hot and there were only a few trees for shade. The grass came up to our waists and we mowed it with strimmers, cutting off the little bushes just above the ground as well. We had spades and other tools with us for pulling up the roots. Someone wanted to build on the plot of wasteland, and we wondered who’d want to live next to the dual carriageway.

It got so hot by noon that we took a long break. We’d started work early in the morning when the sun was still low and red beyond the dewy fields. We walked over to the petrol station; there was a tap round the back which we used to freshen up.

Three men were sitting on the ground against the wall, their legs drawn up, their backs leaning on the concrete. They had water bottles in front of them, probably just filled up from the tap. They looked like Apaches sitting there like that, longish dark hair, but which of us had ever seen an Apache, except in films?

We went to get one of our Turkish guys – they were drinking coffee in the petrol station and they weren’t actually Turkish at all – and he made himself understood somehow with the three men, who kept pointing at the patch of woods behind the petrol station. The middle one of the three was almost a child, still; he didn’t look at us and he clutched his water bottle to his chest.

Our Turkish guy pointed at the woods too now, and we marched off to take a closer look.

A handful of women and men were sitting in a clearing. One of the women had scratched her face underneath her headscarf, and another woman was holding her arms 14down. They were squatting around a small boy lying on the forest floor. He had vomited blood and there were pine needles and grass and a bit of earth stuck around his mouth. We leaned over him but he was dead.

Our foreman used to work in forestry. He picked up a couple of wild flowers lying crushed next to the boy.

‘Autumn crocuses,’ he said, cautiously moving their pale pink petals. The boy must have eaten some of them.

We stood for a while around the boy and his family, come from far away to this patch of woods, and then we thought about whether to call the police or an ambulance or both. One of the women said something to us but we didn’t understand her. Later, when the boy was in a van and we’d signed some papers or other, we went back to the petrol station and the stretch of land right next to the dual carriageway.

The day was long and hot, and we worked in silence until evening came.

15

BROKEN GLASS IN UNIT 95

The nights were dull and endless, started at six and ended at six, they were like dark days that touched in the middle, and when they stopped being dull they got even darker and more endless and we wished we were bored again, hours half-asleep between our inspection rounds, our heads never allowed to touch the table top, we’d doze sitting up, but Unit 95 had become unpredictable and some of us had got unpredictable too and lost our nerve and got taken off the job, but I tried to stay calm, I knew the new part of town, the satellite town where Unit 95 was, I knew the nights when people went crazy, I’d been working in Unit 95, been doing my rounds all over town since the mid-nineties, I knew the hostels the other guys sometimes called ‘roach motels’, where the asylum-seekers lived, no one had ever liked working shifts there, and now it was all getting even worse.

Some of the old guys at work said: It’s all starting over again. And they were right, I remembered the time and the nights when it was dangerous and there was no counting on the police, ‘the pigs’ as we called them back then. It seemed a long time ago, seemed a long way away, and then I realized I was an old guy as well.

Unit 95 was in the middle of the 1970s blocks and the new high-rises of the satellite town.

The blocks from the seventies had all been done up, their once-grey concrete walls decorated with brightly coloured shapes and patterns, and by day I saw a lot of the pensioners who lived there looking out of the windows when the weather was good, their arms resting on cushions, though there wasn’t much to see in the satellite town or in Unit 95.

But there was the refugees’ reception centre. Some of 16the guys at work said Unit 95 was the reception centre, the ‘RC’, but that wasn’t right.

Unit 95 was a square of ten-storey concrete blocks, a large courtyard between the blocks, and the RC a bit further outside the square; a property company had bought it all and done it up years ago, and now someone had to look after it, the nights were long in the satellite town, and as usual they wanted to save money and had signed up one of the cheapest security firms even though the reception centre was part of the package they’d bought from the council. I don’t want to put us down, we were a good team, cheap but good, and at least some of the guys knew what they were letting themselves in for when they put on the uniform.

I started my round without the dog, like I always did. It was still almost light and the dog had hip problems like most of the work dogs, he was an old Belgian Shepherd, well trained but with a slight limp, the onset of HD, hip dysplasia, and I didn’t take him on my round until after midnight. He stayed in the security cabin until then and rested. Our cabin was right next to the road on a grass verge and the light was on from six till six – you couldn’t turn it off – so everyone could see us. A security guy and a dog in a glowing Plexiglas cabin, and outside, the night.

‘One to Twelve, One to Twelve, come in, over.’

I unclipped the radio from my belt. It was heavy and much too large and a better weapon than the rubber baton I also wore on my belt. The radio was a relic from another era, we had mobiles and smartphones and all that crap, but the radio sent out beeps and white noise in the frequencies of the night, it spoke to us through time and space as I saw her again that night in Unit 95.

But it wasn’t her. How could it be her, unchanged and 17so young, after more than twenty years?

‘Twelve, go ahead.’

I started my first round without the dog. It was autumn. I touched the first magnetic tag against my guard patrol reader. A low beep. I put the black device back into the side pocket of my uniform jacket; it looked like an electric shocker. The walkie-talkie crackled and began to speak, and I heard the voice of the old dispatcher back at base, far away from the satellite town, on the western edge of the town proper, out of which the satellite town grew like… days that… I shook my head, too many rounds, too many shifts over the past few weeks.

‘One calling Twelve,’ came the dispatcher. We’d been waiting years for him to retire. They said he used to be a big gun in the secret service but ever since I’d known him, since I started working for the security firm, he’d looked like an old man.

‘Twelve, go ahead.’

‘All quiet in Unit 95, over?’

‘Expecting something?’ I asked into the radio and walked to the next checkpoint, fixed to a wall a few buildings along, next to a children’s playground. There were two children playing there even though it was almost dark. They looked like they’d come over from the RC, straight black hair, dark skin, they usually came to play in the evening once the other children had gone. My patrol reader beeped quietly as I touched it to the magnetic tag. The two children sat down on the sand under the climbing frame and held hands. And they sat there, hand in hand.

‘Nothing in the weather report, over,’ said the old dispatcher. Then I heard the click of his lighter. A lot of the guys at work smoked like chimneys. I’d given it up ten years ago, or maybe seven or eight, and when I began my 18week’s shift, which usually went on for five or six or seven days even though that meant I was overstepping the statutory weekly working hours, I’d empty the ashtray in our security cabin onto the gravelly ground outside. Only occasionally did I go over with the hundreds of fag-ends to one of the stone rubbish bins the property company had put up all over Unit 95, immovable.

‘Then I’ll trust the weather report, over,’ I said. I heard the old dispatcher breathing or blowing out smoke, his nicotine-yellow finger on the transmission button, ‘Have a good shift then, over and out.’

I had touched in at a few checkpoints before I slowly approached the RC. In the nights, and sometimes in the early evenings, but usually in the nights, people would gather outside the RC, mostly young lads. Some came from the buildings in Unit 95, others from the depths of the satellite town. Everything seemed quiet today though. Even though it was a Friday. Some of the pensioners had said hello to me in the courtyards between the blocks, a last few bits of shopping in a plastic bag, a chat outside the building, an evening cigarette by one of the stone bins. And behind the concrete blocks of Unit 95, before the red-black, dark-blue sky, rose the residential complexes of the satellite town. Slab constructions and grid squares from the days of socialism, all over for more than twenty-five years now. When I looked at the map fixed to one of the glass walls of our security cabin, I saw the parts of our town, I saw Unit 95 on the edge of the satellite town, right where the concrete sets in; I don’t know who had stuck the map to the glass. Our units were marked with felt-tip pen and I’d done shifts in most of them by now, the industrial estates, the Mockau Centre at the other end of town with all the shops on two floors and the long corridors, where I stood outside 19the jeweller’s window and looked at the stones and the rings in the light of the night-time display. Only the old Russian barracks where we’d guarded the vacant buildings for a long time had gone, torn down over the years.

I held onto the fence and looked at the open window on the ground floor where the young woman was sitting on the windowsill, watched her through the fence. She was sitting on the windowsill, her legs bent, her head resting on her knees. She looked out into the evening with the room’s light behind her. I could make out some kind of poster on the wall, shelves, a sofa with a blue bag on it. I clutched the guard patrol reader so tightly I thought for a moment the plastic casing would splinter. Where was the patrol tag where I had to touch in?

She had red-brown, medium-length hair and her skin was very pale. She was frowning, I could see that much. Perhaps she was thinking about important things while she looked out into the night, in which I stood behind the fence and understood nothing. I laid my hand on the cool metal strips and looked at her face and her small nose, a button nose, such a nice word, but she didn’t seem to see me. I don’t know how long I stood there; at some point I heard voices behind me, voices getting louder, calls from the night, and I knew the weather report had got it wrong again, and then I saw something happening on the grass between the RC and the fence, more and more refugees coming out of the building, I moved my head, saw a mob of young lads and boys and old men between Unit 95 and the RC. And while I moved my eyes between the two groups in front of me, my hand still on the fence, something changed – was it the light? Did the moon rise and cast shadows, or did clouds draw in across the sky? I looked through the mesh of the fence again. Where was she? Where was the bright window 20she was sitting in?

She stood out amongst the dark-skinned and dark-haired residents standing behind the fence outside the reception centre. There were a few fair-skinned and fair-haired ones – it was the time of the Russian Germans who came to us from the gigantic collapsing empire, but most of them didn’t end up in the hostels. Our beat ended at the fence. We were only responsible for the old barracks, abandoned by the Russians and the size of a small town. Grass grew in the narrow roads between the buildings and there was broken glass everywhere. Sometimes the roads got wider, and sometimes I thought I heard the clank of tank tracks on the cobblestones.

Our room was in a small tower right next to the main gate. There was a plug point for a fan heater, a rotting sofa we used for our fitful naps, sitting up, head against the back because our team’s patrol car sometimes came by, there was a coffee machine on a table and piles of newspapers and magazines everywhere, hundreds of newspapers and magazines – what did we know about the net in those days?

A few of the window panes were still intact; we’d boarded the others up with cardboard. That was where we sat in the days and in the nights. Went on our rounds with the dogs, taking us up to the fence separating the Russian barracks from the reception centre. The buildings were crumbling away, even though the Russians, the Soviets, had only withdrawn two years ago.

I stood by the fence, my hand on the cool metal. Where was she? Where was the bright window in Unit 95? The dog must have sensed I was by his side but somewhere else entirely. He howled quietly and took a few tense steps and rubbed his collar against the fence, like he wanted to get rid of it.21

I always picked up the dog at base, where he waited in a kennel, and took him to the barracks that the Russians had left two years before. I stroked the Belgian Shepherd’s soft grey fur, and suddenly it was a young Belgian Shepherd again. No, even back then most of our dogs were old and unwanted, and only I was young, and her. But there wasn’t a dog beside me, the dog was in the security cabin, Unit 95, and my hand moved through air, stroked the air.

We walked our daily round. We walked a few years with our dogs until they started to go lame, and then they took them away and our firm gave us new dogs we had to get used to, cheap, unwanted dogs from vanished and vanishing borders, we got the dogs’ names muddled up and the dogs often walked confused and tense beside us, rubbed their collars against fences and walls like they wanted to get rid of them, I stood with the dog by the gate of the Russian barracks and started my round through that small town. Broken glass crunched beneath our feet.

It was spring. Was it spring? Later, I gave her a flower with a purple blossom. I gave her a flower later, it grew in the rubble between the buildings. A spring flower. It was often cold in the nights and our breath turned to steam in the empty rooms.

I walked with the dog along the roads of the old Russian barracks, went from patrol tag to patrol tag. I sometimes wondered who’d smashed all the windows when the Russians pulled out. Some nights I’d heard the smashing, hadn’t left our room, I’d looked at the lit-up gate, all quiet over there, I’d heard the glass smashing some nights, it was usually all over again soon enough, and in the morning, on my first patrol before the next shift came, I inspected the damage, walked 22carefully with the dog over the shards all over the roads.

She was stood by the fence, her head leaned against the metal – that was how I saw her the first time. She was wearing a coat that was far too big for her.

I stood a few yards away. After the council opened the RC next to the empty barracks, we had to touch in to a patrol tag along there too, on one of the fence pillars. ‘The Russians left, the Yugos came,’ the guys at work said.

She had red-brown, medium-length hair and her face was very pale, the skin on her hands was almost white too, and for a moment I thought maybe she worked in the RC; she didn’t look like one of the dark asylum-seekers in the ‘roach motel’. I used the word now and then too, when we were having coffee, before my shift finished and the next guy’s shift began, just the way you talk sometimes so you don’t look weak, even though I never had a problem with the asylum-seekers.

She had red-brown, medium-length hair, her forehead resting on the fence, and when she raised her head and looked at me, I saw the mesh of the fence had pressed its pattern into her skin there.

Even her eyes were pale, blue as I saw later, but sometimes it seemed, later when she vanished into memories, like her eyes got darker then, opened dark and enlarged, like the colour of water changes when the sky clouds over or the evening comes.

It wasn’t just the too-big coat she was wearing, the rolled-up sleeves slipping over her hands again and again that made her look strangely lost and small, even though she wasn’t all that small as she leaned against the fence like that, as I went up closer to her and looked at her. How old might she be, eighteen? Nineteen? The dog ran ahead, tugged at the lead, wanted to go to her, even 23though I kept saying ‘Heel’. Maybe he remembered the fences at the borders where he’d worked. I wanted to put the leather muzzle that I always carried with me on him but he was already at the fence, and the girl squatted down and pushed her hand through the mesh, and the dog sniffed at her hand and flapped his big tongue onto her fingers until I pulled him away. ‘Stop it!’

She looked up at me. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Dog good.’ And again, the dog tugged at the lead and went to her, and she smiled because it looked like he was wrapping his big tongue around her hand.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello, Mr Officer,’ she said. She spoke with an accent, like the Russians, the Soviet soldiers, spoke before they were withdrawn.

‘I’m not an officer,’ I said.

She stood back up and I went up close to the fence, and she patted her shoulders with both hands and said, ‘You officer.’

I felt one of the epaulettes on my blue uniform jacket. I smiled and said, ‘I’m just security.’

‘Ah, Securitate, you make sure we not bad.’ She pushed her hand through the fence again and tapped me on the chest.

‘No,’ I said and looked past her at the low-rise, metal-cladded buildings of the RC, a few people sitting outside, some of them on plastic chairs, men standing around a large mushroom-shaped ashtray and smoking, windows were open, an old lady was leaning on a cushion on her windowsill, brightly coloured clothes hung up to dry in some of the open windows. ‘My army’s only there.’ I turned around and pointed at the abandoned barracks behind me.

‘You officer!’ she said. Then she turned and went 24back to one of the buildings. As I was about to leave too, she stopped again. ‘Your dog,’ she called out, ‘your dog very…’ she hesitated. ‘Krasivaya,’ she said, but not as loud, I could barely understand her this time, ‘krasivaya’.

‘Beautiful,’ I said, and then again, slightly louder: ‘Beautiful,’ and I saw her smile, then she turned away and walked on, the coat dragging along the ground behind her like a train. My Russian wasn’t that great, I’d never been good at it at school and school was a few years back now, but ‘krasivaya’, that much I understood. I touched in to the patrol tag I’d almost forgotten and walked back to the roads of the barracks, back to the broken glass.

When I met her a few days later by the fence, she asked me the dog’s name.

‘Your dog no name, no?’

‘We call him number three,’ I said. ‘And you, what’s your name?’

‘Number three? Dog needs name.’

‘You can call him whatever you like. If you tell me your…’

The dog had settled down quietly on the ground next to me, tired.

She didn’t answer, didn’t tell me her name. She looked at the dog and then me, she leaned against the fence, her arms spread wide and her fingers locked around the wire, and she lifted her feet, bent her legs backwards a bit, like a girl hanging off a climbing frame. ‘I had dog too,’ she said, ‘at home.’

‘And… where is that, where was that?’ I took a step closer, our faces now directly in front of each other, only the metal mesh of the fence between us.

‘We had dog too,’ she said again and looked past me through the grid of the fence at the slowly crumbling 25buildings of the old barracks.

‘You’re from Russia,’ I said. ‘From the big Soviet Union.’

‘Not Russia,’ she said, ‘small country, very far. And mountains. Our village… near the mountains.’ She moved both hands like she was shaping giant mountains, and then she put her palms side by side, facing downwards, as though the village she came from was there, on her hands, at the foot of the mountains, in the valley. We sat on the steps leading to the roofed entrance to the old officers’ mess. I had let the dog off the leash and he sniffed at a couple of walls, then lay down in a patch of sunlight on the cobbles of the little road.

‘It’s funny,’ I said, ‘he’s actually a… a sharp dog…’

‘What is… sharp dog?’ She didn’t understand.

‘I mean, he… had to be fierce, back then, on the border, with the police, granitsa, politsiya… panimayesh?’

‘He old now, want peace.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Moshet.’

‘Your Russian good,’ she said.

‘I learned it at school, you know, in the old days. But I speak much too little, much too small. Malyi, malyi.’

‘My dog name was Gigi.’

‘That’s a nice name for a dog.’

‘Yes?’ She smiled. ‘I call him that, but Papa say…’ She stopped talking, and we were quiet for a while and watched the dog dozing in the sun.

‘Your German very good,’ I said.

‘Too little,’ she said, ‘malyi, malyi.’

‘No, Marika,’ I said, ‘you speak good German, you… very beautiful.’ She looked at me, a crease above her small nose all the way up to her forehead. I couldn’t help smiling, and then I laughed – sometimes you say these things, you’re so stupid and clumsy it’s like you 26suddenly turn back into a boy, a schoolboy, a child.

‘You laugh at me.’

‘No, Marika, I never laugh at you. You are…’

‘Little officer always love women, no?’ She slid one finger under one of the epaulettes on my uniform jacket and tugged slightly at the blue fabric.

She had stopped in her tracks after we’d met at the fence the second time and she’d turned back to the RC buildings.

I had touched in to the patrol tag and she had turned around, and she looked very helpless and very lost as she stood there halfway between the fence and the housing facility. I could see her hands stroking over the fabric of her coat, up and down. She was standing very straight and pressing her arms to her sides, and then she came back a few steps towards the fence and told me her name.

She was still wearing the too-big coat, its sleeves rolled up but still always slipping down over her hands. ‘You scared in the night, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘no, I mean, he looks out for me,’ I pointed at the dog, still dozing in the last rays of evening sunshine, ‘and I… I’m a specialist, and what would happen here anyway?’

‘Yes,’ she said after a while, ‘nothing,’ but I could tell she was somewhere else entirely. She’d let go of my epaulette and leaned forwards and rested her elbows on her knees, her arms crossed in front of her chest, her hands gripping her upper arms. She looked at the house opposite, a brick building, the bricks dark red and black in places, and the windows were smashed like almost all windows in the old barracks, and the broken glass was scattered on the road and the narrow footpath.

Cautiously, I touched the fabric of her coat, put my hand on her bent back, below the back of her neck, so 27she knew I was there. She’s somewhere else. She looked at the broken windows.

I saw her lips whispering something, was it names? But I didn’t understand. ‘Marika,’ I said and leaned forward, squatted down in front of her and tried to look her in the eye, her head bent low. Her blue eyes seemed to get darker now, her pupils huge, and I got up, had to look away because I was scared of getting lost in them. I don’t know how long she sat there just gently rocking her upper body, whispering to herself. I’d lit my cigarette, the dog trotted over to the gate, to our staffroom that we weren’t supposed to leave in the nights, probably the firm didn’t want any trouble if we broke our necks in the dark, half-derelict buildings… and then she was standing next to me.

‘Dog dead,’ she whispered as she leaned against me.

I put my arm around her and said, ‘Everything… everything’s fine.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘nothing fine.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe. But now, you… you’re…’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘now I’m here. You good.’

‘Mala Marika.’ I pressed her to me and we stood like that for a while and watched the sky turn red behind the old barracks buildings and grey clouds drift through the red, then the sky grew dark, it had turned cool, and she clutched her too-big coat together over her chest, and then I walked her to the end of the fence, where it looked like the fence joined up with a brick wall but there was a gap there, between wall and fence.

I sat in our staffroom all night and smoked. I only had a few cigarettes in a leather case because I didn’t smoke much on the job, one or two cigarettes, and when the next guy came in the morning for his shift he and I would smoke one or two cigarettes together, talk about 28this and that or not say anything, before I went home.

A few times I fell asleep, woke up again and blinked at the semi-dark room, but she didn’t come. I went down to the gate and did my midnight patrol touch-in and gave the iron chain a quick shake before I went back up. The hum of a distant motorway, the lights of the town, the strange smell of spring. I wrote in the duty book: Nothing to report. Flicked through the duty book, read the other guys’ notes. Children on the property, vandals at 1 am, informed HQ, scrap metal scavengers on the property, informed HQ…

The dog lay on his mat, asleep. I took my Maglite and went down to the ground floor. There was a little room there. Glass crunched beneath my shoes, only a little light falling from the staircase into the empty room, I squatted down and undid my trousers. She’d kissed me before she’d crawled through the gap between wall and fence.

I was ashamed when I went back upstairs. But I’d been so wound up. Her hand on my face. ‘You come back… tomorrow?’ Her turning around and smiling. And raising her hand. And waving. ‘How old are you, Marika?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘And your parents?’

She doesn’t reply, resting her head on her hands. She has medium-length red-brown hair and a mole on the back of her neck – I can feel it when I run my hands through her hair.

Her turning away when I want to kiss her, and then her kissing me before she vanishes onto the RC grounds, behind the fence.