Tammy is frying eggs. The sizzle competes with the hits straight from Nashville says the promo, no middle man, on Mountain Country 103.9 FM blaring from the transistor. She loves listening to Buddy Bailey’s afternoon drive-time show. Outside, the North Orchard mobile home park sizzles itself in the sunshine afternoon, 85° hum and rattle of the air conditioning unit. Free-roaming yard chickens rustling through the dry pine needles, in the back, making that low, guttural clucking noise. Pine Straw & Mulch, Toccoa Lumber mill, sippin Jack in sneaky sips. No drinking water at her wedding. She chortles. No wedding no how. She is happy. She adds more salt to the pan. She stands propped against the laminate counter, shifting her weight from one swollen ankle to the other with a heavy, grinding patience. The electric burner underneath the skillet glows a dull, dying orange. She hears about a lemur running free in Zavalla,Texas. Kick your shoes off and stay awhile, you’re in Mountain Country, Buddy intones.

Breathing beneath the weight of her chest was work, compounded by four decades of inhaling tobacco smoke. When Buddy Bailey finishes a station ID, her breathing fills the gap, a low, wet whistling through her nose that catches whenever she bends to reach the lower cabinets or shifts her hips against the counter edge.

She carries a chipped melamine plate, piled heavy with three salted, runny eggs and four strips of limp bacon, into the front room. She drops into the sofa with that deep-compression hooooosh, setting the plate down on the coffee table right next to a glass ashtray heavy enough to crack a skull. She clicks the remote for back-to-back reruns of Deadly Women. Her favourite part of the afternoon.

She loves the dramatic reenactments. She settles in on the narrator’s serious voice explaining how a housewife in Pigeon Forge poisoned her husband’s meatloaf with antifreeze for a $50,000 life insurance policy.

For a second she thinks of Cletus and sighs, mid-chew. She takes a sip of the Jack and iced tea. The thought puts her off her food for a moment. Poor Cletus. She sits there in the dim, amber light filtered through yellowed vinyl blinds, then shovels another forkful in, chewing her bacon, dipping a piece of white bread into egg yolk.

The $50,000 life insurance policy payoff reminds her. The phone call. The somber voice on the other end to tell her there had been an accident at the plant involving Cletus. He had been injured by some stone slabs. EMS was on the scene and they had transported him to Piedmont Mountainside Hospital. They told her she needed to head to the hospital immediately.

Mae, who lived three lots over, drove her to the hospital, the Buick’s vinyl seats stuck to the back of Tammy’s knees the whole way. Everyone had heard about the accident already. She could tell by the way the girl at the ER desk wouldn’t quite look at her. A hospital social worker named Glenda walked her into a private family consultation room, her hand hovering near Tammy’s elbow without quite touching it. There, the attending emergency room physician came in with a Pickens County Sheriff’s deputy, his hat held against his stomach with both hands. They sat her down face-to-face to break the news that Cletus had succumbed to his injuries, fatally crushed when roughly 7,000 pounds of unsecured marble slabs fell on top of him.

Deadly Women breaks for commercial and suddenly, Tammy’s replay of that tragic day ends.

Attention. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation

Her payout had been $90,000. She uses the last torn strip of white bread to sweep the rim of the plate, dragging it through the cool, congealed yellow yolk and the slick of bacon grease until the blue floral pattern shows clean. She shoves the bread into her mouth, chewing with a heavy, rhythmic jaw motion that works the muscles along her neck.

She doesn't reach for a napkin. She licks her thumb and forefinger with two sharp, wet snaps of her tongue, then wipes her hand directly down the faded cotton front of her housedress.

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Tonya Cobb had been driving her Toyota Corolla, that faded silver rattletrap rescued from salvage with the broken air conditioning, for forty minutes, worried she would run out of gas.

She’d been driving through northeast Georgia farm country. It was hot. The air was dead and humid, nearly suffocating. Not even driving at 70 mph with the windows down helped. Worse, the stink from the long, low metal poultry houses and cow shit wafted in and out of range. Finally, she pulled into the last gas station she’d see for a while to fill up. She slammed the car into park, her head brimming with a sentence. The sentence, she thought, she would use later at whatever reading or podcast eventually asked her about this.

I went because a woman who had nothing gave me everything she had left, and I felt I owed her the courtesy of my presence. It was a good sentence. She said it aloud twice to hear how it would sound coming out of her, warm and a little wounded, the voice of someone humbled by generosity rather than someone driving a sty on wheels toward a woman’s trailer to track down a story.

The first thing you should know about Tonya Cobb is not that she is a largely unsuccessful children’s story writer. There’s no real crime in that. You could almost feel for her. But after years of drifting along without much money she found inspiration in these same long poultry houses she’d just been driving past, thousands of birds being raised for slaughter behind their metal walls. She heard those mechanical hums and saw the flickering security lights and suddenly started drawing characters. From those characters came the inspiration for Balls and Chains, a serialised scatterpunk series she wrote under the name Alberta Wynona. Much to her surprise, Balls and Chains found an almost immediate, loyal following.

Before getting out to pump the gas, she caught herself in the mirror; heavy black liner smeared at the corners of her eyes, failing to mask the puffiness. She didn’t look long out of fear of discouraging herself. She just checked that her hair, pulled into an off-center topknot, was still holding, not blown too far astray by that humid, stultifying air.

The polyester blouse she had bought at Cato’s off the bypass in the Toccoa/Eastanollee area was already soaking through and somehow managed to feel both slick and sticky at the same time.

While she waited for the tank to fill, she gazed out at the road ahead running straight and gray before rising into the rolling, orange-red hills baked by the heat into a hard dusty crust. She caught the asphalt shimmering in the heat waves and thought about lighting a cigarette before she remembered where she was and shook her head, smiling.

She had checked, of course. Angelicwings77 had given more than anyone else that quarter to the Balls and Chains page, more than the two men who signed their pledges in memory of dead wives, more than the retired dentist in Ohio who sent forty dollars a month like a standing order to God, faithfully, chapter after chapter, for a serial about a cult that harvested its converts’ teeth.

Four thousand dollars from a woman in a trailer park outside a town Tonya had needed to look up twice because she kept forgetting how to spell it didn’t make any sense. At first she’d allowed herself to imagine a rich benefactor. An eccentric. Maybe even a patron. Someone for whom four thousand dollars wasn’t very much money.

Finding out, as she eventually had, that Angelicwings77 was a widow living in a trailer park had been disappointing, sure, but disappointment soon gave way to curiosity. There had to be a reason. Maybe she’d meant to pledge forty dollars. Maybe four. Maybe she’d confused Tonya with another writer. Tonya believed in herself enough to know she’d found her niche, but she was under no illusions that she was a great writer. She certainly wouldn’t have given four thousand dollars she didn’t have lying around to one. If Tammy Tutweiler had, there had to be a reason.

She direct-messaged a gracious thank-you note through the serial’s member page. Angelicwings77 had no profile picture and no information, so she was writing blind. Still, Tonya was profuse in her gratitude, recounting how much the $4,000 would help, buying her a little relief from her financial struggles and allowing her to focus fully on her writing for a while. All of which was true. She never got a reply, which deepened the mystery further still.

Since learning a little about her, Tonya had pictured a widow of a certain modest dignity. A woman with a garden.

What she had instead was the name, Tammy Tutweiler, and an address, courtesy of a kid named Cody. She met Cody, a barista at the Bokma Coffee Company in Carnesville, when she bought the whole stock of sea salt caramel cookies and then slipped on a wet spot on the floor in front of the cash register. Cody was terrified that she’d sue the business and he’d be out of a job. In his panic, he let out that he needed the job to help pay for his tuition at North Georgia Technical College in Clarkesville where he studied Information Technology.

She hadn’t really been injured by the fall, more embarrassed than anything, one glass of wine too many at lunch. But she had, of course, feigned a bit of backache just in case, which is what freaked Cody out. That bit of information, Information Technology, calmed her immediately. She offered a deal. If he could track down a name behind a social media handle, she’d forget the fall ever happened.

He wasn’t altogether sure he could do it, but after a few days, with the help of his Information Security Fundamentals teacher, Mr Cameron, he called her back and provided her with a name and an address. Cody hadn’t hacked anything. Mr Cameron had shown him that people who thought they were anonymous usually weren’t very imaginative about it. Angelicwings77 had been Angelicwings77 elsewhere, too. One old account led to another, that one to a real first name, the first name to a surname, and eventually Tammy Tutweiler was sitting there in a public record with an address.

So this is where she was headed. She didn’t know if she would even go to the address and knock. She might just drive by a few times or park in front of the building, waiting for more information to reveal itself before deciding how to proceed.

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Silence is his music.

Henry Johnson had been sitting at the picnic table on the terrace behind the hut, looking up at the darkness which held the mountains. He’d been doing it for days, watching the moon emerge through clouds while the mountain disappeared back into blackness.

Since his teens, his life had been songs, studios and stages, one album feeding the next tour and every tour sending him back into the studio. It had worked out well for him. Until it didn’t.

He wasn’t going to give a sob story about a singer’s booze and failed marriage curdling into disillusionment; it went deeper than that. He’d started seeing more clearly what people wanted from him. They helped him so they could help themselves, and every one of them called it friendship. He didn’t need friends like that. What he couldn’t stand was being looked after by people looking after themselves, his good fortune a happy side effect of theirs. He first saw it plainly with Joey and Rod: the monitored calls, the control over who reached him, the heavy percentage off the gross. All of it sold to him as protection.

The other issue that had nagged at him was pleasure. He gave his audience pleasure, which in turn gave him pleasure. He could go into the psychological reasons why but that’s where his gears had started grinding in the first place, wondering why he wanted to work so hard to give pleasure to so many people he neither knew nor cared about. So he needed to get away from that. By that he meant the manager, the fans, the marketing, the social media, the whole shebang.

When he announced his plans, everyone went apeshit. The tour had ended, but studio time had been booked, musicians retained and another run of dates was already being discussed. People were terrified they would lose their meal ticket. Fans didn’t want to be deprived of live performances. Nobody cared what he wanted. Sure, they all said that it was him they were worried about, but he had enough money. He wasn’t losing his mind. He wasn’t sick. What he didn’t have was peace of mind.

Granted, he didn’t have that here either. Within weeks, he had disconnected himself from the life it had taken decades to build. He was gone from them all, remote, standing in his insignificance surrounded constantly by the stark, pale-grey limestone cliffs rising abruptly above deep green alpine meadows. But he did have silence. And that, for now, was his music.

Eventually, the stars faded into a pale blue and then a muted-orange glow appeared behind the eastern ridge while the upper sky remained true to itself. He plucked at chords of his guitar, tuning the silence, trying to reach something unreachable. An immensity that no words could define, no music…well…music had been his life and it was his only barometer so he was determined to turn what he felt into something concrete.

He went days like that until finally it was unearthed: the memory behind that soft-pedal ache, the pebble in his shoe driven deeper with every step.

He and Dolores had been fishing early for smallmouth bass on Dale Hollow Lake a little more than a decade before, well, twelve years exactly although not to the day, and she said to him that she’d always believed the sunrise was much more beautiful than the sunset because the day was still a possibility. Sunset closed it off. It might be more dramatic and beautiful but only because it meant the end.

He hadn’t thought about that much until now when these pre-dawn skies revealed themselves slowly. He kept thinking stripper, the way a stripper takes off a piece of clothing and shows a little more flesh. So did this sky, taking off a little bit more darkness until the valley passed from monochrome into full colour.

And that’s what made him want to write to her for the first time since it was over. That and the first rooster at 04:48.

He went back inside and looked for something to write on and with. In one of the kitchen drawers he found a ballpoint pen and a junk-mail envelope. Good enough, he thought. He’d probably never send the letter anyway so it didn’t matter.

Hasso didn’t pace; he bolted ahead, clearing a patch of wild garlic before he even scented the stranger, his heavy chest hitting the picnic bench before Henry had time to lift his pen.

Ulla caught up a second later, her breath steaming in the thin air, her eyes dropping instantly from Henry’s startled face to the writing covering the junk-mail envelope and the guitar lying flat in the grass.

She had been out for her morning walk. She’d seen smoke from the chimney the night before and knew someone was staying at the Brandauers’ hut. The place stood in a meadow beside a mountain channel that looked harmless now, almost decorative, but could turn dangerous when the weather changed.

“You shouldn’t stay out here after five this afternoon.”

Henry looked at the flawless sky.

“The storm comes from behind there,” she said, pointing toward the limestone. “You won’t see it until it’s here. And this water rises.”

Henry nodded and set down the pen. Hasso came around the bench and pressed himself against Henry’s leg. Henry scratched him behind the ears.

“Hasso,” she called, “come, let’s leave the man alone.” She looked at him once more.

“I only wanted to let you know,” she added, awkwardly.

She stood there a beat longer than manners required, her hand resting on the wool of Hasso’s collar, letting the silence stretch between them until the dog leaned his full weight against the stranger’s shin.

When he only looked up, blinking through the gray light like an owl dragged into daylight, she didn’t wait for him to untangle his tongue. She turned on her heel and left him to his lonely patch of grass while the five o’clock blue began to curdle against the limestone ridge.

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He apologised before he spoke, which is how these things begin, I guess. I was on the terrace at Café Hummel on a warm evening when the man at the next table leaned over. He’d heard me speaking French on the phone and wanted to know where I was from.

The day before, that week’s Der Spiegel had been hanging from the Zeitungshalter beside me with Marx on the cover. Now the man at the next table had almost exactly the same head: the heavy white beard spilling off the jaw, the wild corona of hair, the dark coat. Marx down to the hairline. His voice, though, was Kissinger: gravelly, patient, educated, unhurried, mitteleuropäisch. He said he had been an economist.

He said he lived in Währing, the eighteenth, which I’d read was a posh old academic sort of neighbourhood. Yet here he was, in this local, on this terrace.

He said he had a daughter living here in Josefstadt, the eighth, studying linguistics. She wasn’t at the table.

Did she even exist? I couldn’t stop myself from wondering. He was clearly a regular at a café in his daughter’s neighbourhood, without his daughter. All perfectly possible: he had just visited her, or visited so often he’d become a regular, or she was in a hospital nearby dying of cancer, or she didn’t exist at all.

The fact that this real or imagined daughter studied linguistics gave him his hook line. He talked about the place I come from, the Spanish-speaking world, and language. He admired the newspapers the café keeps on their long wooden rods, the NY Times, Le Monde, and wondered why El País was no longer among them. Perhaps something had changed with the editors, he thought, or there simply weren’t enough Spanish readers anymore. He seemed genuinely bothered by its disappearance. He could read Spanish, he told me, but neither speak nor follow it spoken — demasiado rápido, he said more than once.

Then he recited something. The people of Sevilla, the Andalusian tongue, carried across the ocean by the conquistadors and becoming, over centuries, the Spanish of the Americas. He delivered it as established fact, and I received it as one. I never afterward bothered to confirm whether it was true. By then it didn’t matter.

That was the hour, more or less. A man reciting things I would not verify, about a country whose language he could not speak, a profession he would not discuss. He did not mention Austria. He spoke of French but never of Paris. Everything he offered was a fact about somewhere else, and every fact was the kind one cannot check by looking at the man in front of you.

The café ended it before we did. They turned off the lights along the terrace around 11 pm: closing time, stated in the only language cafés use for it. We rose with something like regret, and he went off toward the eighteenth, or toward wherever it was he went. I never learned his name.

I have since decided, for my own convenience, that it was Gerhardt. I have exactly as much evidence for that as for everything else he told me, which is to say none.

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This is a small town so there isn’t much diversity. There are maybe three or four cafés in town.

My dialect aide-de-camp wants croissants. She is surprised that in a small Salzkammergut village, there are croissants but they are not Parisian-quality croissants. Croissants are not Austrian food, I say. When in Rome, I ask, what do you do? Do you shout the odds about croissants, or curl up into a Semmeln or a bit of hearty, dark Bauernbrot? A few mouthfuls of Kornspitz?

We are in Das Kleine Café. It seems to occupy the top rung of the local café hierarchy, the Archduke of cafés. Newly renovated. Pastels. Quiet. The sort of place that wears its concern for quality lightly. Not ostentatious. Just quietly convinced that everything should be a little better than necessary.

The owner also has a yoga studio and does a local podcast. The guru of Bad Aussersee.

The terrace was already full of locals, so we took refuge inside. Three sunburnt men sat drinking coffee. Not labourers exactly. More like artisans. Sculptors perhaps. Watercolourists who drank beer in someone’s back garden until midnight while arguing passionately about zoning regulations.

Then came the clipboard. Not a menu. Not a bill. A clipboard with boxes for us to tick ourselves.

Apparently I had been promoted to waiter.

The poor lad serving us merely ferried the completed document back to the kitchen. It struck me as a curious division of labour. If I was writing the order myself, why stop there? Let me collect the plates afterwards. I was also puzzled by the environmental arithmetic. This was clearly the green café, yet every breakfast required sacrificing an entirely fresh sheet of paper. A waiter with a recycled Moleskin carnet could have fitted six breakfasts onto one page and looked chic while doing it

The bread, however, was magnificent. Good enough that the €1,50 charged for two tiny squares of butter suddenly seemed almost charitable.

Then came the bill. Mit Karte, I said confidently. Oh, his face dropped.

“Sorry, cash only.”

He watched us carefully, as though foreigners had been known to react badly. Perhaps an outraged man had overturned a chair the week before shouting how in Paris nobody uses filthy coinage any more, what is this, the 19th century?

He informed me there was a bank by the Billa, a local supermarket.

That should have been straightforward. I knew where the Billa was. I even recognised the bridge he’d mentioned. I congratulated myself on my growing mastery of this tiny town before my linguistic machinery quietly misfired. Had he said the machine was in the Billa? Beside the Billa? Beyond the Billa? My brain, delighted with itself for understanding half the sentence, stopped listening to the other half.

Naturally I marched straight into the supermarket where there was no cash machine to be found. Human history thwarted me no matter how many grocery stores I’d been in that had cash machines. No cash machine in Billa.

The stock clerk sent me back outside, where I immediately noticed the bank standing exactly where it had been all morning, directly beside the building I had charged past in my eagerness to be right.

**

Next stop, after handing over cash money to the kid, was the post office.

The man behind the counter had clearly expected I was there to pick up a parcel. I’d been consulting a piece of paper in my hand. That paper had our calculations of stamp needs for the next several days. We still stubbornly write postcards, you see. Thousands of them.

So every single village and city requires us to find first where to buy stamps and second, where to buy postcards. Some places are simple. Austria is straightforward. Stamp for Austria. Stamp for all of Europe. Stamp for the rest of the World. Simple.

Whereas in the Baltics, a 20-gram postcard to France from Latvia for example, requires the same quantum calculus as calculating the event horizon of a black hole. And you end up with fifteen stamps for € 3 ,73 of postage. The stamps cover the entire postcard. If you can still fit the address, congratulations. A greeting, a haiku message? Fugettaboutit.

For this man in this post office, expecting me to hand him a parcel delivery form, my request for stamps was a curveball, an intergalactic eephus pitch. Stamps belonged to somebody else’s department, I could see the mouse wheel spinning its quiet calculations. He approached the task with the concentration of a man trying to remember training he’d received decades before, using antiquaited technology.

“What country?”

“The world.”

He nodded gravely. I know before he does that it is € 2 for a world stamp and € 1,40 for Europa. But he needed to know it for himself. So we got to spend uncountable minutes watching him research the countries. How many different countries does he have to look up before he realises they are all covered by 2 € stamp? All of them.

We need fourteen international stamps. Ok, good, we are moving.

Now, Europa, I clear my throat with confidence, we need nine. Only I said neuf. His brain shifted, gears grinded. Neuf, Europa doesn’t mean anything. Not in German, not in the local dialect, not even in Esperanto. It was as if he had asked me how many pancakes I wanted and I’d told him with confidence, “Blue, because ice cream doesn’t have any bones.”

My dialect aide-de-camp elbowed me. “You said it in French.”

Ah.

“Neun. Neun für Europa.”

The dam burst. Everyone laughed. Civilisation resumed.

By then we had grown confident enough to tackle the greatest challenge of all.

Laundry.

**

The apartment notes suggested the washing machine was in the flat. It wasn’t. The owner messaged back that it was in the basement. Except there is no basement. There is the ground floor and no visible stairwell to go further down.

A woman appeared magically out of the lift. Hello, Madame. Can you tell me where the washing machine is for clothes, I asked in spotless High German irrespective of her Austrian local yodel dialect. She understood the words but not the question. “Laundry machine? I have no idea. I have a washing machine in my flat.”

Well, la-dee-da, as Annie Hall famously sang. Not all flats come with their own washing machine apparently. Elitist trash.

The basement, as it turned out, meant one step below the ground floor. Concrete walls, exposed pipes, a red metal frame around the washer and dryer, practical notices taped everywhere. It looked like a Cold War bunker that had been repurposed for socks.

The only map available was the building’s evacuation plan, so I asked my faithful assistant Velin to decipher it. He did, and the laundry room was exactly where he’d predicted. The machines, however, ran on tokens. No indication where you get tokens. They fall magically, like rain, from the sky on Tuesday evenings, after 6 pm.

I stepped back out into the building entrance hallway and magically, a man was standing there, waiting for the lift.

“Greetings, Fine Sir. Where does one get tokens to operate the machine?”

Unlike the woman before him, he knew precisely what machine I was on about.

“Oh, you get them from the Hausmeister.”

“Where is the Hausmeister?”

There, the trouble began. Nobody knows. He might be on holiday. He might be somewhere around. Oh yes, look, his Mercedes is parked right outside. He should be around here somewhere.

How will I know the Hausmeister when I see him? Will he look like Dwayne Schneider from One Day At A Time, tool belt and all?

“He has a very hot wife. So if you see a guy with a very hot wife, that’s him.”

I had a feeling the resident had many things about the hot wife he wanted to share but didn’t dare do so with a stranger. The lift arrived and he disappeared into it.

As I was standing there wondering if I should stand next to the Mercedes and shout “Hausmeister o Hausmeister, wie treu sind deine blätter?” (For those of you new to this game, that is the opening line of O Tannenbaum, whose lyrics arrived unbidden,) a door opened and a bright-faced young blond fellow wandered out of what I assumed was the caretaker’s flat. He looked somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three.

“You’re not the Hausmeister by any chance, are you?”

“Yes. I am!” He smiled brighter than five suns and stepped forward to shake my hand.

“And I can buy tokens for the machine from you?”

“Yes of course!”

So off we go after shaking hands, into the laundry room where he sells me the tokens out of a back room and explains how they work. I later discovered he was a sound engineer whose family owned at least one other building nearby. A modest little real-estate empire.

Only afterwards did I notice the framed sign beside the lift.

The answer had been in front of me the whole time.

One ringy dingy away.

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Vroni, the ferrywoman, ran her wooden flatboat the way a mother runs a difficult table. Dogs to the front, she barked, and the two dogs went, the black one belonging to a large, bald Czech sládek, covered in tattoos and governed entirely by his magnetic scowl, and the cream-coloured Pomeranian that belonged to a sallow squall of a woman with a pinched-up face. It was the dog that started it. Before we'd reached the middle of the lake that woman was already living alone in a flat in Eisenerz, chain-smoking in front of the telly, reading die Krone and coughing into the evening. By then she was beyond rescue.

The fat man in the Tyrolean hat Vroni moved to the inside so the skiff wouldn’t tip over. His friends laughed at him. He laughed too. A man who chooses a hat like that in public isn't looking for anyone's approval.

“Passt scho,” he said, settling.

Weight distribution.

Vroni explained it in a dialect the other passengers unscrambled without noticing. She talked the whole way. Geology, waterfalls, the money.

My dialect aide-de-camp, who must remain nameless for health and safety reasons, kept asking what they were saying, and after a while I told her they'd just warned us about the dragon inside the sheet of limestone that comes out every so often to attack the knees of passengers. I couldn't be arsed translating every word. I was on holiday too, trying to watch the lake, the passengers and the mountains instead of working as a simultaneous interpreter. Besides, Ausseer dialect sits to standard German much as Québécois does to Parisian French. The grammar keeps luring you in, then the vowels wander off into the hills and whole words disappear. By then the dragon seemed the more efficient translation.

On Grundlsee the water was so clear the reflection had depth, the mountain going down and down into the other world. Then we crossed into the black lake, into Toplitzsee, where below twenty metres the water turns to salt and swallows the light and gives nothing back, and where the Reich once sank its forged British pounds, millions of them, engraved by prisoners, credible enough to fool the Bank of England, meant to flood Britain with them and rot the currency from underneath. The lake keeps them perfect down there in the dark, whole banknotes of an empire that was never real, unspendable forever.

Sixteen souls sat above the salt and the counterfeit and the prisoners who engraved it, and no one tipped, and no one asked.

The man in the hat looked at the black water for a moment.

“Passt scho.”.

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A child assumes his world is the world.

Cracked concrete, leaking balconies. A one- bedroom flat in a tower in Grigny. Maman sleeps on the sofa. He and his brother sleep in a bunk bed in the lone bedroom.

He plays football in concrete courtyards. Dreams of being Makélélé.

At twelve, another kid says: “Come on, we’re going to Paname.”

“How?”

“We jump.”

He watches an older boy vault the turnstile at Grigny-Centre. His own heart is pounding. Not because of the law, but because this is the first independent expedition of his life.

The train itself is part of the story. The RER isn’t transport. It’s a corridor between universes.

For thirty-five minutes they’re loud, laughing, shoving each other.

**

Bofosa has been to Les Halles six or seven times. He’s loud with his mates. They eat McDonald’s, try on trainers, watch girls. This is freedom. But then it is not.

The police stop them:

“Carte d’identité.”

The smile dies on Bofosa’s face before he even fully realises it’s leaving, sliding right off like grease down a cold plate.

He thinks it’s for turnstile hopping. It’s not.

He has no identity card. Nobody warned him.

“How old are you?” Eyes narrow, searching.

“Twelve.”

They wave him on. Too young. Next time.

One of the other kids pulls him away when he wants to know why.

« Calcule pas, t'inquiète c'est l'habitude. Reste carré. »

Don’t sweat it, get used to it. Stay clean.

He doesn’t even know what it is but he shuts up.

**

“Maman, what is a carte d’identité?”

He asks her a few nights later, while she is sitting at the small kitchen table, dabbing her tired feet with a damp cloth under the dim yellow light of the overhead bulb.

Her eyes narrow instantly.

“Why do you want to know that?”

He shrugs, keeping his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms, trying to look as casual as possible against the doorframe.

“Un poto was talking about needing one.”

“You don’t need it. You are twelve. You stay where you belong, you don’t need papers to walk in the street.”

Now he associates Paris with trouble, not freedom. He invents excuses not to go back.

**

He does go back. He’s fifteen now. In Grigny, you are invisible, stuck behind concrete walls and broken lifts. In Châtelet, you are surrounded by millions of people, yet you feel intensely watched by the cameras, by the guards, by the tourists who pull their bags a little closer when a group of teenagers walks past.

He never got the ID card. Too many documents, maman is too busy. He goes back to Paris a few times no problems, but then he gets stopped again. He isn’t caught by surprise. He shrugs. Non. Pas de carte d’identité.

“Pas de carte?”

“Non,” Bofosa says.

His voice doesn’t shake. He practiced the shrug in his head a dozen times since the last time, keeping his hands loose in his pockets so they can’t see his fingers twitching. He knows the drill.

The cop sighs, a short, heavy puff of air that smells faintly of garlic, and gestures with a jerk of his chin toward the back of the station exit where the modular security post sits, tucked near the RER platforms.

“Avance. On y va.”

They don’t let him walk with his mates. One officer steps close, his hand resting casually, not violently, but heavily, on Bofosa’s elbow, steering him away from the group.

His friends don’t try to intervene. They watch with a mixture of anger and absolute resignation. One of them calls out something low, “Laisse-le, il a rien fait,” and a second cop just turns, resting a hand on his belt, and gives them a flat, dead-eyed stare that tells them to keep walking or join him. The group backs off, dissolving into the passing crowd of shoppers and commuters.

Bofosa has already learned not to care. Nothing wrong. He sits on that bolted-down plastic chair for two hours, the officers are running his details through their terminal.

Finally, they hand him a procès-verbal de vérification d’identité.

**

The following Saturday, maman is at the kitchen table, waking up to coffee. Staring at nothing. Eyes open. He reaches into his bag, pulls out the crumpled white slip, the procès-verbal de vérification d’identité, and drops it flat on the linoleum table next to her coffee mug.

***

When maman helped him process his carte d’identité, he saw it. On the birth certificate. Père: Jean-Pierre Likunde.

Nothing. He carried on.

Now he spends more time in Paris. It’s another world. He goes beyond Châtelet, beyond Les Halles. The world is opening up to him. That world costs money.

A backpack full of untaxed cartons or unmarked packages dropped off at a specific cafe near Porte de la Chapelle. He takes the RER D up, hands over the bag, takes the envelope of cash minus his cut, and comes back down before dark.

It is cash in hand, folded small into the coin pocket of his jeans. It pays for phone credit, tobacco, and whatever he leaves on the kitchen table so his mother doesn't have to ask where this month's electricity money came from.

Time has no real shape. One week is no different than the next. Nothing to fear, nothing to look forward to. Waiting to get a text back from a girl. Waiting for a bus. The months are different because the seasons change. It gets hotter or colder. People come and go.

Somebody vanished behind the heavy doors of Fleury-Mérogis or Fresnes for six months over a stash bag or a stolen scooter.

He was 9 when France won the World Cup. He remembers the fireworks and shouting. He followed football but not enough to care. He didn’t feel French any more than he felt Congolese. His father was out there somewhere.

This summer he watched Congo play in the World Cup. They all stood around a cracked 40-inch plasma propped on a milk crate outside the épicerie at the foot of the tower. The neighbourhood was tense and excited. Eighteen million countrymen he didn’t know. Every match was electric. He felt something for once. Time had meaning. Waiting for Yoane Wissa to score.

When Congo presses down the left wing, the whole row leans forward as one body, heels coming off the pavement.

“Wissa—vas y, putain—Wissa!”

That was weeks ago. He misses that sensation of belonging to a hope. Time had meaning at that moment but now, time is back to zero.

It was a surge of energy he’d never felt. Non. Once, when he was first with Lili.

He got a taste and he wants more. He wants to go to Kinshasa. He lies to his circle, brags and says his father is going to buy him a ticket to visit. The boys are jealous. They’ll forget it and not ask in six months what happened when he never goes.

But he knows.

The word “père” is abstract to him. Like billet. Like Kinshasa.

He looks up travel agencies and finds the cheapest ticket is around 700 €. That’s the cheapest. Some are double that price.

A week or two later he asks maman one evening late, when she gets home. Has she ever thought about going back to Kinshasa?

A little laugh escapes her that she is grateful for. She looks at her son carefully.

“Go back? For what? To find your father?”

He shrugs then shakes his head reluctantly.

“I’m sick of having no hope.”

Her eyes open wider despite her fatigue. She’d never heard him complain.

“I didn’t leave just so I could run back later. This is where I am. This is where we are, my son. Home.”

“It doesn’t feel like home, Maman.”

“Mwana, your father stayed here long enough to produce two boys he would never see again. He hated it here. He said he felt like a half man.”

She leans in closer, nearly a whisper of fatigue. “He wasn’t a half man. He was just a man who couldn’t figure out how to be small.”

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I imagined water negotiating with earth. Not overcoming it. Persuading it. A soft movement, a pause, another soft movement, as though the darkness itself had found a slower language.

I walked out through the village and nobody stopped me. One door closed as I passed it. That was the entire opposition. A door closing softly, the way you close a door on something you have already decided not to know.

The frogs stopped first. A few crickets persisted somewhere beyond the palms, then they too fell silent. Only then did I notice that the breeze had gone. The air was heavy enough to taste. Dust gathered on my drying lips and slithered into my mouth, across my tongue.

I looked up. The stars were gone. Not hidden behind cloud but erased, the sky rubbed over until only a brown weight remained above the village.

The darkness was no longer just dark; it was brown, granular, a night with sediment in it. I found the water by walking downhill until the dust turned damp in my mouth.

I couldn't stop watching the canal because something about it felt wrong. The wind travelled one way. The water wrinkled the other, patiently, upwind, like a thing swimming.

I stood there at the edge the way you stand at a counter, waiting to be served.

The voice, when it came, did not come to my ears first. It raised the hairs on my arms and neck. It arrived the way she had, with no point of origin, leaning forward, dropping to a husky, dusty whisper. I felt that folded scrap of paper, heard it rustling in my palm as if it were being written again. Right to left, announcing her arrival.

It said the first syllable of my name.

And waited.

In the weight of time between I felt the surge of a dangerous electricity and its smothering, intimate gravity.

That was the whole of it. No hand from the water, no figure, no light. Just the first syllable, hanging, and the wrinkles moving upwind, and the understanding, delivered the way the tea had been delivered, without my asking, that the second syllable was mine to come and get.

I stood on the bank until the sky went the colour of the inside of an eyelid. The wind dropped near dawn and the water resumed obeying it, and at some point I was walking back through the village, and at some point after that I was in the bed of a pickup with two women and their coriander, and nobody asked me for the fare. Nobody has asked me for anything since. That is not a figure of speech. Something about me now settles accounts in advance.

I did not go back to the bar in Zamalek. I tell people this proves something and they are kind enough not to ask what.

That was two years ago. I have never left Cairo since. Not to go home, not to search for Aisha. I don’t need to. Any voice can deliver that sound: a woman on a métro platform saying a name that is nearly mine, a kettle reaching temperature, wind crossing water anywhere at all. Each time, I lean forward. Each time, I catch the taste of that sound. Each time I wait, calm, emptied, certain, for the second syllable.

She never finished it.

That is the whole of what happened to me. Everything since has been the rest of the sentence.

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The village did not turn me out. That would have required a decision, and decisions leave residue. Instead I was given a room the way you make room for weather. A blanket appeared on a rope bed. A boy set down bread and white cheese inside the door and left before I could spend any of my six words on him.

The khamsin arrived in the night, not as wind at first but as pressure. The air came in under the door the colour of weak tea and settled on everything, an invisible dust: the bread, the notebook, the backs of my hands, until the room and I were the same temperature and roughly the same substance. Outside, the palms made a sound like paper being sorted by somebody in a hurry.

I lay on the rope bed and took inventory of what I could still hear. The palms. A dog, far off, arguing with the wind until only the wind remained.

I listened to an irrigation pump coughing into life. It worked for about ten minutes, then it too went quiet.

And underneath all of it, with a fidelity that had no business surviving time and a hundred kilometres of desert, Aisha's voice saying the word Nadaha. I could still see the pencil touching down on the right-hand side of the page.

I report this without explaining it, because I have never managed to explain it. Everything else from that night in Zamalek had gone soft, the way memory softens under the slow friction of the present.

I could not have told you the bartender’s face, or what I drank, or the colour of the wall behind her. But her voice I had intact. The exact drop of it. The lean. She had leaned forward and lowered her voice, and I had thought at the time that she was performing the story. It did not occur to me until that night in the village that the story might have been performing her.

I got up and found my scraps of paper. The dust had been at them, or the sweat had finished what the dust started. “Shukran” was a smudge. “Kam” had dissolved into its own fold. “Fedemin”, the word that had carried me from the overpass at Mounib to this bed, was gone completely, as if the paper had decided I would not be needing directions anymore.

One scrap was still legible. The smallest one, folded the most times.

I did not sleep. I want to be exact about this: it was not that I could not sleep. Sleep had simply become one of the things, along with hunger and the return journey and the man I had been in Cairo, that no longer applied. I lay listening to the wind sorting its papers, calm in a way I had never been in my life, the way I imagine an emptied building is calm. Somewhere after three the pump started again, ran, stopped. Somewhere after four the dog conceded.

Then the wind changed direction, and I heard the water.

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The first thing they gave me was tea. Not because I asked for it. It simply appeared in my hand while I was still trying to work out who had decided I was staying. By then half the village knew I existed.

A foreigner had arrived in the back of a rusty trombil and was immediately wrapped in the obligations of a guest, a social contract I could not refuse.

I knew that I was being watched, catalogued, and perhaps marked in my denim cut-offs, a Frankie Say Relax T-shirt and those sandals I bought in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar.

Cairo was bad enough but each turn I’d taken, each step, had carried me further from Westerner, closer to alien.

Here, standing before a panorama of sun-baked mud-brick houses, dust settling over everything until the village itself seemed ghosted, I knew I’d reached a place tourists did not reach by microbuses and tuk-tuks.

Who was more curious, me or them?

I had spent days looking at Egypt. Now Egypt was looking at me.

Narrow alleys swallowed light. The irrigation canals moved slowly or stagnated, reflecting the light in a way that felt unnatural. A place where time had silted up.

I had prepared for this, at least as much as I could. I had my hand-written phrases in Arabic with phonetic pronunciations. Shukran. Kam? Fedemin. A few words that, I hoped, might get me what I wanted.

A few children popped out from the emptiness first. They must have known from casual experience that I would have something to offer.

They were followed by the men who gathered around me, more curious than suspicious. That was how the tea found its way into my hands.

We shared perhaps six words between us, but questions do not always require language. One of them pointed at me, then made two fingers walk across the palm of his hand before opening both hands towards the village.

Why have you come here?

Another smiled and pointed to his own chest, inviting me to answer.

I reached into my pocket and unfolded the scraps until I found the right one.

“Ana... adawwar,” I said carefully, then, when that produced only puzzled expressions, I tried the only word I was certain would be understood.

“Imra’a.”

A woman.

The mood changed immediately, though only towards amusement. One of the old men laughed, another mimed slipping a ring onto his finger, and a third pointed vaguely down the road as if every village contained at least one woman worth travelling for. They all attempted to lighten the weight of my request by making light of it.

Then one of them tapped his chest again and raised his eyebrows.

Her name?

I hesitated. The final scrap of paper had been folded smaller than the others. I unfolded it slowly and glanced at the phonetic spelling I’d copied a day or two before.

“El... Nadaha.”

Nobody corrected my pronunciation.

That was the first thing that felt wrong. They had corrected every other word I’d attempted since arriving. Fedemin. Shukran. Even the way I greeted them had become a communal lesson.

Now nobody said anything.

The laughter evaporated without anyone appearing to notice it had stopped. An old woman who had been watching from a doorway quietly disappeared inside. One of the men murmured something I didn’t understand. Another reached over, took the untouched tea glass from my hand and placed it on the ground beside him with ceremonial care.

No one told me to leave. No one became hostile.

They simply stopped trying to help me.

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I found her, or she found me, but neither one cared. It’s a place in Cairo, at that hour, in the way. Dim intimate light. Polished dark wood. Cane-backed chairs. A teak sideboard. Silhouettes cut against the glow. It felt like things happened here without intention or premeditation. A tribal dedication to chance. It was too loud and too close and yet, exactly right.

Her high-beam eyes and pickpocket smile emerged out of the mist of Mahraganat music and drifted near me, amused and amusing at the same time.

There is a person behind all that. She sat down without asking. In Cairo at midnight, they told me, this is not rude. It is simply how space works at that hour. More absorption than invasion.

We talked about nothing for a while. She wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing, why I was alone.

Before she’d arrived I’d been observing. A little hash high. Isolating that piercing synth or that mesmerising mizmar. I hadn’t ever heard this music before, this Electro-Shaabi. Ordering my first drink, I’d asked some guy at the bar what it was called. Now I was knee deep in it, swaying.

Then she slid into the picture suddenly. People don’t usually start talking to you out of the blue at this hour unless they are drunk. People are more cautious when they are sober.

But she didn’t drink. She was her own drink. The dazzle.

I said I was staying with friends. She made a face that suggested she understood exactly what kind of friends. I said I was out to explore without them, remembering them leaning on sofas and smoking from bubbling pipes and sinking deeper into the raw wool kilim. I’m looking for something different, I told her, half truth, half bluster.

Her face registered something. Or changed from aura into professorial enthusiasm.

Something different? She smiled to herself. I have just the thing for you.

Just the thing for me.

She alleged to have zeroed in on what I needed before I did. And yet my suspicion dwindled as she told me about the Nadaha the way you tell someone about a dream, leaning forward, voice dropping, eyes bright with the pleasure of it. A delighted intimacy.

I wrote “Nadaha” down on a scrap of paper. I asked her to write it in Arabic script.

I pushed the scrap towards her. She trapped it with the edge of her left little finger, barely touching it, as though that was all the paper required. Her right hand found the pencil. I expected the point to drift left. Instead it touched down on the right-hand side of the page.

It was like watching a left-handed guitar player. Your eyes adjust their expectations. The world seems to almost go back to normal.

And then she was gone, as suddenly as she’d arrived.

I stayed, maybe waiting for her to return but staying away from hoping. I distracted myself by writing down some phrases a man at the bar told me, phonetically. The phrases would help me, he promised. Useful to every traveller.

I asked him if he believed in it when I showed him the scrap with Aisha’s writing.

He smiled inwardly. Nodded.

I believe, he said, that the khamsin is coming. And that you should go before it does, or not at all. Aisha knows. Better than most.

I’d just had that one little taste of Aisha, barely a crumb snatched up from the floor before anyone noticed. I couldn’t wait. I had less than a week before my flight back.

That was my first mistake, or my last piece of luck. I still don’t know which.

**

Getting there turned out to be easier than finding out how.

Everyone in Cairo knew where the villages were. Nobody seemed entirely convinced I should go.

The bartender drew me a map on the back of a cigarette carton. A taxi driver crossed half of it out and drew another.

Just get to Mounib, he said. After that you’ll figure it out.

Mounib was less a station than an argle-bargle about transport.

Hundreds of white Toyota microbuses sat beneath the overpass with their sliding doors open. Drivers and conductors shouted destinations into the dust. Fayoum. Beni Suef. Giza. Places I’d never heard of were being announced as though the entire city had been waiting all morning to leave for them.

I stood there with my backpack and my scraps of paper, failing to look like someone who belonged. Every few seconds somebody asked me a question in Arabic. I smiled apologetically and answered with one of the six words I knew. Most of them laughed. One man pointed me towards a microbus with half the seats already occupied by farmers carrying sacks of vegetables and two bewildered chickens.

Nobody asked for a ticket. We simply waited until there were enough human beings packed inside to make departure economically sensible.

The city thinned reluctantly. Apartment blocks gave way to unfinished concrete skeletons. Then came the desert road, flat and pale beneath a sky already beginning to whiten with dust. The khamsin had not fully arrived, but you could feel it warming up in some Mawwal of longing. The air had acquired weight. Even the horizon looked irritated.

Ninety minutes later the driver stopped in the middle of what appeared to be complete confusion and everyone except me climbed out.

I had reached Fayoum.

Or, more accurately, the point where Cairo became the past tense.

The chaos would change form, I sensed. Whatever lay ahead obeyed different rules.

The second leg of the journey happened without discussion. I walked through a dirt lot repeating “Fedemin?” to anyone who made eye contact. Eventually a man smoking beneath the tailgate of a pickup truck nodded once and jerked his thumb towards the open back. That was apparently all the conversation required.

The truck collected passengers the way rivers collect tributaries. A farmer climbed aboard carrying live ducks tied together by the feet. Two old women squeezed onto the bench opposite me with bundles of coriander balanced on their laps. A boy no older than twelve hung off the rear step until somebody hauled him inside.

Nobody paid until they got off. When my turn came I watched the old man in front of me hand over a few crumpled notes. I gave the driver what I thought was exactly the same amount. He didn’t even look at the money. He just nodded, as if I’d passed a small, unspoken examination.

The last part was by tuk-tuk. By then the road had become a track, the track had become dust, and the dust had become two wheel ruts threading between irrigation canals and mango orchards. We rode about as out of control as you can get in a tuk-tuk without tipping over. Stomach in mouth. Churn, repeat. Palm trees bent in the strengthening wind. Somewhere ahead, invisible behind the fields, was the village.

I remember thinking that Cairo had finally disappeared.

I was wrong. Cairo disappeared only after the first cup of tea.

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Rusty called from Cairo. This was 1985, which means he called from very far away on a line that cost more per minute than either of us could afford. Why? He said he needed me to bring something down to him. His birth certificate. His mother had it. Could I swing by, pick it up, fly down? We have an extra room, he said. The drugs are spectacular.

Rusty and I had been in a band together once. He played bass. Not brilliantly but well enough that nobody winced. The band broke up, he moved away and I hardly heard from him again until Cairo. Cairo. The word itself felt exotic. Yet there he was with his bird Marla, calling me out of the blue, perhaps because I was the only working number left in his address book. Rusty had always been a heavy drinker. Never violent, just unreliable. The sort of bloke who disappeared for months and then phoned asking you to fly to Egypt. He needed a courier, he said.

I was on the dole which meant a couple of things. One, I had no real responsibilities. I was exactly the right person to disappear to Cairo at a moment's notice. Two, I barely had enough to cover food and heat costs. It was the middle of winter and Cairo was significantly warmer. I had to sign on every two weeks meaning I could head for Cairo for 13 days. Rusty was paying the airfare and giving me a free place to stay so I’m laughing. 13 days of warmth and hash. He didn’t need to ask twice.

His mother gave me an envelope and looked at me the way mothers look at people who are flying to Cairo to bring their son his birth certificate. I didn't ask what the birth certificate was for. Cairo sounded like the sort of place where people needed papers for mysterious reasons. That was enough.

The flight was fine. The airport was not.

Cairo from the air looks like someone started building a city and then got distracted and then came back and got distracted again, repeatedly, for a thousand years. The concrete frames with rusted rebar poking into the sky like calcified fingers. Everything seemed either half-built or half-destroyed.

Marla and Rusty were not at the airport to greet me. I should have expected as much. Sure, I had the address, but he'd paid my airfare to bring his birth certificate to him in person. I thought that might at least have been worth a trip to the airport.

I walked out of the terminal and was immediately swarmed by aggressive taxi drivers shouting for my attention. I had no idea what a taxi should cost. I'd turned my dole savings into 150 Egyptian pounds at the currency exchange. I bought a Stella and calculated in my head that I could buy 150 of them with this. Not bad. A week's dole money was about two months' wages in Cairo. No wonder Rusty liked it here.

The address was written on a scrap of paper, but would anyone understand it? I hadn't written it in Arabic.

Everyone said “yes, yes, come, come.” The louder I shouted "How much?", the wider they would smile, nod vigorously, and shout "Yes! Dokki! Very close! Good price, come!" Nobody would tell me what the fare was.

I thought I might never get out of the airport. Then this kid, maybe 12 or 15, hard to tell, appeared from the crowd. He spoke surprisingly fast, slang-heavy English. I had no idea how he'd learned it.

He walked right up to me, completely ignoring the shouting taxi drivers, took one look at me and said in his higher-pitched voice “Hey mister, no problem, don’t listen to them. They are crazy. Let me see the paper.”

I handed him the paper with the address on it. He read the English address easily, and then turned to the drivers and spoke to them in rapid-fire Arabic.

The boy took charge. He spoke, they answered, then argued among themselves before finally nodding reluctantly.

Then he turned back to me with a charming smile and said “Okay, meester, I fixed it. Dokki, Seven pounds. Very good driver, my uncle. You give me a small tip for helping you?”

Sure, of course. Anything to get out. Seven Egyptian pounds plus one for him and that was eight Stellas out the window before I’d even got to Rusty’s. That fuck. He could have just come out and saved me this hassle; I had his birth certificate. If I could have figured out a cheap place to stay I’d have let him sweat it out a few days before showing up.

The flat was on the fourth floor. No lift. The bed bugs introduced themselves that night.

Marla and Rusty had been in Cairo for eight months. They had arrived with a plan and a budget and something to prove and the city had taken all three and replaced them with hash and aimlessness. They wandered the souks in the mornings before it got too hot. In the afternoons they lay on the floor under the ceiling fan when the electricity was working, which was not always. When the power cut the apartment became an oven and they lay on the floor anyway, in the dark, in the heat, waiting for the city to let them go again.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to understand Marla and Rusty’s lethargy. Not just the hash but the aimlessness. Cairo doesn’t break you, Marla informed me one night between coughing spells. It just makes forward motion seem like a category error. You stop asking where you’re going. You wander the souks in the morning. You lie on the floor in the afternoon. You listen to the city breathe around you constantly, a million people and their million problems running on infrastructure designed for a fraction of that, creaking and groaning and somehow still standing.

The more urgent discovery was that although my passport had been stamped on arrival, every foreign tourist was legally required to register their local address with the police within seven days. Rusty hadn’t thought to drop that information on me until after a few days and a few deep hits had me already floating through the city streets.

“Oh yeah mate,” Rusty exhaled. "If you don't get that registration stamp, they'll hammer you with a massive fine when you leave."

Rusty didn’t say so but I suspected that’s why he and Marla had ended up staying.

Since I was staying thirteen days, this was a big problem. Well, not a problem. More a direction. I would not be sightseeing. I would be looking to get my registration stamp.

That meant I needed the Mogamma. The Mogamma is at Tahrir Square, a brutalist monument to administrative density. Twelve thousand civil servants under one roof. Cavernous halls with tiled floors that turned every sound into an echo of itself. People sleeping on the floor waiting for offices to open. Staircases that spiralled up into departments that may or may not have existed. Every document requiring a stamp. Every stamp requiring a superior’s stamp. Every superior located on a different floor, in a different queue, in a different wing of a building designed to make you lose your will before you reached them.

I spent an entire day there, struggling not to let the bureaucracy enter me. A few days earlier I was still sitting around Bradford writing song lyrics that, as it turned out, nobody would ever hear.

I made up for lost time by staying awake all night because the city was bearable then. Every evening I left Rusty and Marla to their stupors and wandered alone. El-Fishawy at two in the morning. Mint tea. Musicians. Al-Alfi Street. The ahwas. I wasn’t sightseeing anymore. I was simply being present, slightly lost and increasingly comfortable with being lost.

I was still under the impression that I had come to Cairo because Rusty had phoned me.

Years later I would wonder whether that had ever been true.

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I woke to a barking voice. Staccato sounds. Gun bursts of words. Somewhere out there in the high vertical slot between the buildings. Was it ranting or expressing joy of the day that had arrived? I couldn’t tell if the speaker was three doors down or two floors up; the limestone walls of the Terravecchia held the sound and bounced it around until the geography of the alley became impossible to map.

I lay flat on the thin seaweed mattress, my skin already covered in a fine, greasy film. You didn’t need to look out the gun-slit window to know what the day was doing.

I could tell the heat here wouldn’t wait for the sun to rise; it would simply stay behind from the night before, thickening like grease in a pan.

When I rolled over, my thigh muscle twitched, a dull protest against yesterday’s climb. I groaned, a low, guttural sound that surprised me in the small room. I didn’t know why I did it. There was no one there to hear it, no one to offer sympathy or ask what was wrong.

Then the phone buzzed against the stone floor.

It had been buzzing intermittently since dawn. The screen was a crowded wall of notifications, a persistent, urgent sequence from her.

Where are you? Answer me. Please.

Each message felt like a small, sharp tug on a line I was trying to snap.

I didn’t want to explain the twenty-euro hole, the ferry schedule, or the four days of dead time I had to survive in Sciacca. I typed out a single line:

Still alive, still looking.

Cryptic enough to keep her from calling, short enough to let her know I hadn’t vanished into the sea. I turned the screen face down.

**

The shower stall in the corner is nothing more than a rusted pipe sticking out of the tufo rock, blocked off by a yellowing plastic curtain that smelled like vinegar. I turned the tap and waited. The water didn’t get warm, which was the only mercy the room offered. I stood under the thin, freezing needle of the stream, teeth chattering, holding my breath until my skin went numb. It was a necessary violence.

I wanted to read a newspaper. I had a sudden image of me sitting at a metal table, sipping a coffee, chewing a pastry, reading the paper as if I knew. I had my first goal of the day.

**

Out the door we go. The steps grow steeper, cutting past low, blank doors and the occasional iron grate. I keep my eyes up, pushing past the hanging laundry that draped between balconies, looking for where the masonry finally breaks.

Halfway up Salita Castello, the lane narrowed to the width of two men’s shoulders. The air here is trapped, stagnant and heavy with a thick basement smell; old stone and wet stucco that had never seen proper sunlight. That’s how claustrophobic it feels walking under the lines of wet clothes overhead. The thick walls closing in. There is the sharp, chemical sting of cheap lavender detergent, the heavy suds dripping down to sizzle on the hot stones.

At eye level, the flaking plaster of a windowless ground-floor flat gives way to a low, shallow balcony. It is nothing more than a rusted iron cage jutting over the steps, crammed full of faded plastic rubbish and empty beer cans that had rolled against the bars, a small, public hoard of someone’s private waste left to bleach in the heat. Pushing past it, my shoulder nearly brushing the rusted iron, the stale, metallic stink of warm beer dregs and souring milk hits me, mixed with the greasy scent of scorched garlic and old olive oil venting from an open kitchen vent nearby.

I pushed upward, the desire for the paper staying with me as I neared the crest.

**

At the very crest of the hill, the suffocating walls of the Terravecchia suddenly gave way, spilling out into the wider, sun-bleached expanse of Piazza Gerardo Noceto. The transition was blinding. Right there, facing the old stone facade of San Michele, a few square aluminum tables sat out on the pavement under a faded awning. Caffetteria San Michele. But the metal shutters were down, the interior dark. No tourists up here; just two old men in flat caps watching a small delivery truck navigate the cobblestones.

With the first option closed, I had to venture out onto the open stone shelf. To the left, the ground drops away into a blinding, white-hot slope of asphalt and limestone that frames a stark patch of the blue Mediterranean sea far below. On the right side of my path sits the massive, imposing flank of the Church of San Michele. It is a huge, heavy fortress of rough-hewn stone blocks that looks more like a castle than a house of worship, rising up from the modern asphalt. A few lonely palm trees with thin, shaggy trunks stand like toothpicks against its side, casting almost no useful shadow on the wide, tiled pavement below them.

A small island of dusty trees sits in the middle of the square. Everything else is heat and open space. Out in it, the heat is a direct, heavy pressure. I wouldn’t sit at an outdoor table; the sun is already a weapon. Instead, I kept moving toward the far side, retreating straight inside the dark, narrow mouth of Bar Baby Luna. Stepping into the cool, shaded interior, the tiles underfoot were cold, and the air smelled purely of dark coffee grounds, sugar, and the metallic hum of the pastry fridge.

**

The sound of spoon and cups and saucers. More staccato bursts of words. I order espresso with confidence I don’t feel. I feel eyes on me. Stranger. I feel their judgements. I decide not to care. I take my coffee to a table with a copy of the Giornale di Sicilia.

50 mila…mafia…ah yes, of course, mafia…Mattarella…

Someone thought it was important enough to paste all over the front page in large lettering.

I turned another page.

Carmelo.

The name floated out from somewhere behind me. Carmelo. Then the rest dissolved back into a stream of vowels and gestures. I listened for it again.

Carmelo.

Like a dog recognising its own name.

The newspaper wasn’t helping. Fifty thousand. Mafia. Mattarella. A scandal perhaps. A football transfer. A murder. For all I knew they were discussing irrigation permits.

I folded the paper and looked through the open door.

Outside, people crossed the square carrying bags, cigarettes, loaves of bread. They weren’t doing anything remarkable.

I checked the time.

Four more days.

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She mops around their plinth. Les Méchants. Enormous and violent. She never bothered learning their story. She knows from reading the plaque that they are called Chevaux de Marly. She remembers watching them out of the corner of her eye when she first started. She had not been afraid they would wake. She had been afraid they would fall. In the silence, the marble was in mid-collapse. Every time she bent over her mop and straightened up, her inner ear tricked her into imagining tonnes of stone finally tipping over to crush her. She would distract herself by using her dual-chamber yellow wringer bucket. One side for soapy water, one for rinsing.

The smell of Javel is familiar. She sticks to routine. She lives in the grooves. She can feel the encrusted chemical residue time-woven into the grey industrial rags in her hand. They help her sense of control: her war is against dust and dirt. Or scuff marks on the floor. Even the trolley squeak is an operation. She anticipates the dull ache in her right shoulder before she pushes forward. She whispers hello in her mind, letting a crooked little smile leak out of the side of her mouth. This job had started as an escape from one solitude. She hadn't imagined it would be one form of solitude into another. The solitude at the Louvre was different. Mastery.

**

She takes the lift marking the contrast between the utilitarian, staff-only, unglamorous transport and the soft grace of the empty Louvre.

She goes from the basement to the top of Richelieu with her trolley, the squeak momentarily trapped in a small metal box. Then the doors open and she’s in the 17th century.

She starts here because it feels most like hers. After three years this wing at this hour has the quality of a room she lives in. The other wings she works too, but Richelieu 2 is where she begins. Where she settles into the shift.

And her two are there. Gilles and Le Singe Antiquaire.

She won’t go to them immediately. She works first. The parquet, the brass, the baseboards. She moves through rooms of powerful men in oils without stopping.

She has the sensation that the portraits are watching her. That used to unnerve her, alone in the museum. Over time, she had learned to confront them. Staring into the eyes of people who once had power. That's what she understood. They had power. They might have been cruel. But they were immortalised in the painting. They were gone. Good or bad.

She used to avoid their eyes, unnerved. Now she looks back. Different coats, different beards. Same cruel men. Gone in real life

She didn't believe, after so many personal losses, that there was an afterlife. So these portraits of important men, the ones shaping the pain and the loves of others, did not matter. These men were not going anywhere. She doesn't read the names. It doesn't matter. They were all the same type of man over centuries. Their clothes changed, their facial hair changed but their roles hadn’t.

**

There were two paintings that she always felt compelled to go back to. She might pretend, as if she were being watched, that she had missed a spot. Just so she could go back. Every morning between 2am and 3am, when the work was done in this wing and she had a moment that wasn’t quite a break but functioned as one.

The air changes here. It gets staler, smelling less of marble and more of old wood, floor wax, and the faint, dry scent of centuries-old oil.

Then she sees him. Gilles. Or Pierrot, as the little plaque says. It’s just a man in a costume that doesn't fit, standing there like an idiot. She leans over her mop and looks at him. His head is tiny, almost shrunken, perched atop a body that looks like it’s been blown up with a bicycle pump. The white satin suit is too big, the trousers bunching at the ankles, the sleeves too long. What is it about him? He isn't performing. He isn't juggling or making a face. He’s just standing there with his arms hanging limp at his sides, his feet turned out in a clumsy 'V.'

She recognises that stillness. It’s the stillness of someone who has no power. In her mind, the people in the background of the painting, the ones whispering and peeking out from the bushes, are the ones who forced him into that ridiculous white satin. They are the ones who find his overinflated body a joke. He is the only one who looks as out of place as she feels. She gives the floor in front of his frame an extra pass with the mop. She doesn't use the Javel here. The curators are picky about the fumes near the canvases. But she makes sure the parquet shines.

**

Then there was Le Singe Antiquaire, a monkey dressed as an art dealer. She knew now that it was painted by Chardin sometime around 1740. The guides explained that it was a joke about collectors and antiquarians. But that wasn’t what she saw.

The monkey looked tired. Serious. Like a little administrator condemned to continue working forever.

The oversized robe swallowed his tiny body. White cuffs at the wrists. A magnifying glass held delicately in one hand as he inspected some tiny object with exhausted concentration.

In her fantasy, the monkey was the manager of her apartment building. No language, no justification.Just the authority of screeching, or rapping knuckles with a ruler, then noting the debt, granting another week. Power exercised without explanation. Few needed one.

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The first thing I came to understand the next morning was that the maritime crossings to Tunis from Palermo were infrequent. After a bit of research I discovered they only ran twice a week on Tuesdays and Saturdays. That meant my next chance would be Saturday, four days away. There seemed little reason to try to escape the torpor of Sciacca prematurely.

Escape requires incentive, and the Seltz, Limone e Sale had only anchored me deeper into the metal chair once the postcard was written. If Saturday was the hard boundary, the immediate problem was arithmetic. Camera 4 was bleeding me at sixty-seven euros a night. Four nights there would swallow the remaining cash I needed for the ferry ticket and the automated terminal fees.

I hate caring, I need to sink lower than caring. What about my job? What about Maya? These questions needed burying.

Lodging was imperative. Not a hotel, but a hole.

The heavy, paprika-dusted crisps baking in a glass bowl under the awning had finally killed the copper taste in my mouth, thank fuck.

I watched a man in the stained apron. He was wiping down the adjacent plastic table with a grey rag that had seen too many summers. His movements were rhythmic, a slow, circular friction that matched the drone of the refrigerator.

“Signore,” I called out, my voice airy with the optimism of pretending I knew the language because I’d mastered one word. No, many. The building blocks of speaking. “Per favore”, “scusi”, and “grazie.”

He didn’t stop wiping, but his chin tilted slightly.

“You speak English?” It was a dumb question and I knew it was a dumb question the minute it left my mouth. He paused for a micro second to shake his head then went back to his wiping.

Fuck.

This isn’t the 1950s. I have means. I looked for the word I wanted. I didn’t want to ask for a pensione. I wanted to ask for a stanza. A room. Somewhere close, low, where the tax man didn’t look. I let my thumb rub against my index finger in what I hoped was the universal gesture of off the books.

“Stanza?” I asked into the ether of the hot afternoon sun.

He stopped wiping. The rag stayed flat against the red plastic, a grey knot under his heavy palm. He looked at my thumb and index finger, then up at my face, his eyes hooded, assessing the quality of the shirt, the degree of the sweat, the specific category of mess I represented.

“Stanza,” he repeated. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t offering hospitality; he was calculating the nuisance.

He didn’t speak. Instead, he turned his head and barked a single, sharp syllable back into the dark cavern of the tavola calda. A boy emerged, no older than twelve, skinny, with the same defensive, heavy-lidded eyes. The man muttered something to him in a low, gravelly dialect, a sequence of throat-clearing sounds where the vowels were crushed flat, and pointed a thick finger up toward the rising maze of the Terravecchia district behind the bar.

The boy nodded once, looked at me, and jerked his chin. Come on.

I left three euros on the metal table for the Seltz and the stale crisps, gathered my postcard, and stood up. My knees were stiff from the torpor, the heat radiating off the concrete floor like an oven newly opened.

**

The boy ran ahead, excited to have a task, moving up the steep, cracked stone steps of the salita without looking back to see if I was following. The alley was so steep and tight that the sun barely reached the ground. Only a thin blade of light cut between the old stone buildings leaning toward each other overhead.

We moved up the maze of cracked limestone steps and ancient incline paths built to keep invaders out and trap the shade.

Within fifty paces, the sea breeze from the piazza died, cut off clean by the high, leaning walls of the old quarter. The air changed instantly, trapping the narrow stone throat of the alley in a dense domestic warmth. At ground level the walls were mostly blank tufo stone, broken only by low doors and small iron grates left open for air. As I passed, I caught glimpses straight into the dim interiors, kitchens against bedrooms, voices scraping against the masonry, lives stacked on top of each other with no real boundary between them.

Higher up, the buildings leaned closer, narrowing the sky to a grey ribbon. Black wrought-iron balconies jutted out so close that neighbours could almost touch hands. Washing hung dripping above my head (white sheets, a child’s dress, a pale pink bra swaying slightly in the trapped heat) and the smell of cheap soap and geraniums mixed with the damp stone and frying garlic. It smelled of something softer underneath, too. Tomatoes, maybe. Not fresh ones, but the small Sicilian tomatoes I’d seen earlier at the market, sitting too long in wooden crates under the sun until their skins tightened and began to split, the sweetness drifting down through the open shutters.

**

Through an open window with a green plastic shutter hooked back, Pietro Pumilia’s voice exploded through the masonry. I heard him everywhere, a vocal ghost and shadow, as if he was in every home, shouting and laughing and singing along. Reciting names. I heard the refrain and theme song of Radio Torre Macauda. I heard Pietro shouting over the intro of what he said was Heather Parisi’s “Cicale” with a manic, electronic energy before the track cut out entirely.

I didn’t get much of what he was saying but concentrating on trying to decipher certain words kept my mind off the burning pain in my lungs and the throbbing in my head that was making a comeback.

Then came the commercial break, a woman’s voice rattled off the menu for Sapori del Sud—Pizzeria, Pala Romana, Tavola Calda, forno a legna...—the words bounced off the limestone like loose change.

Then Pietro dropped the needle on Riccardo Cocciante. “Bella senz’anima.” I heard a slow, heavy piano line drift out into the alley, followed by a raspy, bitter voice that sounded like it was being dragged over gravel. It was pure what they called musica leggera. Summer chaff meant to flatten the brain. But up here, echoing within the walls of the Terravecchia, it sounded like a chorus of time measurement. Light beats. Di niente. Solo innamorato. Cioccolata rolling off the tongue. Three other radios down the lane were tuned to the same frequency, the melodies overlapping, slightly out of phase with one another, a chorus of cheap speakers filling the dead space of the afternoon.

I didn’t understand much, but the language itself seemed to shift between hardness and caress. The consonants struck sharply against the stone while the vowels stretched and melted into one another. Even the commercials sounded sensual.

All of this happening together, the rigour of the climb, chasing the boy, the aromas and music from the open windows, the sun, the rapidly improving panorama over the Mediterranean.

I felt more at home than I had ever felt in my life.

I wanted to stop and take it all in, but the boy moved faster with his excitement, so I had to double my efforts. Finally he stopped in front of a heavy wooden door that sat three steps below the street level, squeezed into a corner beside a shrine to a faded madonna under cracked glass. He didn't look back to see if I had survived the climb. He kicked the bottom of the door with his heel and waited for the latch to click.

A second later, the heavy door creaked inward.

**

An old woman stood in the cool, dim corridor. Her hair was tied back tightly in a grey nylon net, and her apron was identical in its dark, utility canvas to the one the man was wearing down at the Bar Capitol. She didn’t offer a greeting. She looked down at the blue plastic bag containing the t-shirts and briefs, then up at my face, her eyes narrowing as she took in the sweat and the dust on my collar.

“Venti,” she said. Her voice was like dry grass rubbing together. “Venti al giorno. Anticipato.”

“Twenti euro al day.” The boy translated for me suddenly. “Cash inna avance, capito?”

I pulled a crumpled twenty-euro note from my pocket and handed it over. She took it, folded it twice into a tiny square with her thumb, and tucked it directly into the bosom of her dress.

She turned without a word and walked down the dark tiles, her slippers slapping a flat rhythm against the stone.

The room was exactly the hole I’d bargained for. An iron cot with a thin, striped mattress that felt like it had been stuffed with dried seaweed or straw. A single high window, small as a gun-slit, looked out onto a blank stone wall three feet away. No radio here. No Maria, no Lucio, no horoscopes. Just the dull silence of a place where people go to be forgotten.

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The colour gradient is what makes me look up. The transition from cold blue into peach and pale gold. Fleeting light. Ten minutes later it becomes ordinary daylight and the whole mood collapses.

**

There are only so many ways to describe pain. Eventually language begins repeating itself. Ache. Throb. Burn. Pressure. So you begin constructing comparisons instead. A private inventory.

The hamstring tear in mid-race felt like being shot. Clean, catastrophic, unambiguous.

Someone smashed a pipe down on my head. Knocked me out cold. There was no pain. Just the shaved scalp to allow them to stitch it up.

After the crash I walked to Roy's house on my own. I looked in the mirror, found the gash in my cheekbone with a kind of fascination, then the police arrived and the next thing I knew, there was a woman attempting to give me a sponge bath in a hospital bed.

**

Above, the clouds hang motionless between the buildings like pale surveillance craft, absurdly beautiful. Not relief exactly. More a temporary interruption in the continuous administrative process of pain.

**

The acetabular fracture was unknown. When they forced me to go out and walk on it, insisting I was looking for excuses to stay in bed, not injured, I made it for ten minutes before the leg refused to move any more. It just refused to move, like a stubborn dog sitting down, refusing to be dragged by the lead. For thirty minutes I stood there in the street wondering what to do. No man is an island. Eventually the leg could move again. I walked back with an elaborate limp. Next day the x-rays confirmed it. They’d forced me to walk on a broken leg. Just to be sure. I couldn’t even use crutches because the wrist was already in a cast, a cyst removed that same week.

These things accumulate. The body keeps its own records, more reliably than memory.

**

There is a canyon effect that the streets of this city sometimes create, where the sky feels suspended above you like a painted ceiling. Almost de Chirico-ish if de Chirico had briefly become optimistic. I do not bother looking at the streets. I am only looking at atmosphere trapped between buildings. The city becomes framing architecture for cloud and light.

**

I woke on the floor. Electric pain from the chest down into the gut, the kind that pins you horizontal. She was no longer here. She would never be back again. Death has that crow bar of finality. That was the information the morning presented. I lay there for some time. The floor seemed reasonable. Standing did not.

The psychic deficits don’t announce themselves as pain until decades later, when I discovered I had been compensating in every room I’d ever entered.

**

Hard shadows now. Blue sky fully awake. Graffiti, shutters, cafés half-closed. The romantic haze has burned off and the city has become physical again. The sky mapped and crossed with jet trails, ordered, active, inhabited. Morning has transitioned into day proper.

The body continues its inventory. Arthritic. Occasional. The ordinary stabbing that has no story attached to it.

Just this. Just now. The administrative process resumes.

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La ville est encore à moitié endormie, saisie dans sa phase de maintenance plutôt que dans son habituel simulacre de performance. De là, vous dériverez vers le fleuve, presque automatiquement, la gravité vous entraînant vers le bas à travers les vieilles rues.

L’identité égarée au sortir du sommeil.

Un drop de collection streetwear, une vente privée, une sortie de sneakers, du glanage vintage high-end. bien avant l’ouverture officielle des grilles.

L’uniforme ne trompe pas :

silhouettes noires,
casquettes vissées,
tons neutres,
toute l’esthétique étudiée

La posture:

un indice révélateur.Identité perdue après le sommeil.

C’est l’énergie d’un pèlerinage consumériste, le gobelet café Coffee Chic en carton blanc décoré, vissé à la main.

Contraste saisissant. Vous dérivez dans un Paris poisseux d’humidité, une civilisation parallèle fait déjà la queue à six heures pour des surchemises en édition limitée.

À cette heure, c’est à Paris que vous appartenez vraiment. Pas aux monuments. Aux passages comme celui-ci. Des pavés froids et humides qui s’accrochent désespérément à la pluie nocturne, un syndrome de Stockholm. Des murs si proches que le son et l’esprit se compriment, avant que le commerce ne tente de rallumer le bruit.

Les pas deviennent disproportionnément forts à l’aube.

Des siècles de pluie, de suie, de doigts, de tissus, de charrettes, de fumée, de restauration, de révolution, de pression, de sébum dû au contact humain. Le calcaire parisien, en particulier, développe cette patine adoucie car il est relativement poreux à l’origine. Le temps le polit de façon irrégulière.

Un sans-abri, la tête couverte, marche de son abri de fortune jusqu’à son point de départ pour la journée.

On distingue clairement la structure poreuse. Toutes ces minuscules cavités, ces imperfections qui évoquent des fossiles.

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The transistor in the bathroom comes on like an alarm. I stare up at the ceiling high, vaulted, heavy damp stone, the belly of a convent or a merchant’s cellar turned guesthouse. The mattress is sand and salt air and something that never fully dried. The taste of chemical copper still coats the back of my throat.

The journey is a series of blurred, overexposed slides. The Corriera from Palermo, a handful of crumpled euros into the driver’s palm while the edges of the world softened. Or a ceramicist hauling kiln-fired heads, the Sicilian interior bleeding from green to dusty yellow against the vibrating window.

The room smells of floor wax. The windows are open. Light breeze from the north-west, which means no Tunisian smells. No air choked with harissa or the scent of Tunisian jasmine, the smell of tiny, tight white buds hand-bound into small bouquets sold on street corners. No honeyed floral or sharp, pungent heat of red peppers being pounded with garlic, caraway, and cumin. I am disappointed. I expected to be in Tunisia by now.

The radio: Maria… Lucio… la mamma di… un abbraccio, grazie… tre cinque uno novanta due venti…

I guess this is the telephone number. Shall I call in and say: mama mama Lucia, mia mama mama Lucia, and then hang up? But why? Because I need attention. It’s not the radio static. It’s in my head.

…pronto, pronto. Anna. Francesca. Filomena. Costanza ha mamma Angela. Una bambina chiamata al telefono dalla mamma – saluta, augura auguri – ciao ciao grazie ciao.

I hold a phone in my hand and think: Lucia. Mia mama. And then I put it down. It must be Mothering Sunday here.

On the table beside the bed, a note.

Camera 4 — Pernottamento. Soggiorno €65. Caffè e brioche: offerto, o incluso nel disturbo. Tassa di soggiorno €2. Totale: €67.

Below the total, blue ink, slightly smudged:

Il bus per Palermo parte dalla piazza alle 14:00. Non ci sono barche per la Tunisia da Sciacca. Inutile guardare il mare, il mare non risponde.

And below that, in dialect, leaning into itself like the houses in the Terravecchia:

Forza, ca u mari d’unni ccà nun porta a nudda banna.

The sea from here leads nowhere.

I get up anyway.

**

Palermo Catania direzione prossimità occidentale duecento metri Marsala una provincia —

I realise the radio has already forgotten Filomena, already forgotten Francesca and her mother, already moved on to the next thing because that's what the radio does, that's what everything does.

duecento metri, una provincia, the sea from here leads nowhere, I get up anyway.

**

The radio cut through the fog of whatever I swallowed between London and Palermo. It wasn’t just drink. No, alcohol has a messy, heavy gravity. This is different. More of a jagged, hallucinatory clarity, the kind that comes from shrooms or a bad batch of something synthetic taken in a Heathrow toilet.

It comes back piece by piece, as though the voice directing the traffic of my thoughts only feeds me small, easily digestible pieces. Too much at once, I might choke. The grit of the Bristol platform, the shouting…my voice or hers, I can’t distinguish anymore, or don’t want to, I know inside that I have nothing to gain from knowing.

Maybe that vertical drop of the flight. “We are now descending,” the pilot intones over the speakers. We know. I was a man possessed by a singular, administrative goal: Tunisia. It was that story about the Romans sowing the soil with salt, ensuring that nothing, not even a memory, could ever take root again. I wanted that sterility. Cleansed of regrets.

But I’m not in Palermo or Tunisia, I’m in Sciacca, trapped in the humid weight of overripe lemons and the endless, fertile loop of the local radio.

**

“Musica italiana… Italia love-a…” the man intones. “Le più belle canzoni italiane. Love… le canzoni più belle italiane…”

So this is 80s music in Italy. The Dire Straits-like guitar, the Vasco Rossi, the sound itself, the percussion, as if everyone used the same drum machine back then…

Did they not make it to the 21st century?

**

The woman in the lobby is folding napkins with a precision that frightens my internal chaos. I settle the bill of course, get on their good side. I take the coffee. It’s viscous, a black oil that tastes like scorched memories. I have done that. Impulsive. Fucked again. This is not the first time. The crutch of the radio is gone.

“The sea from here doesn’t lead anywhere,” the note had warned in that sharp Siciliano script. It’s right. From this port, the Mediterranean is just a sequence of shifting blue plates. It looks like a gateway, but the logistics are a wall. I’ve sown my own path with salt, it seems, and now I’m stuck.

I need to move, but not far. I need to descend further into the mundane to stop the vibration in my head. I’ve worked out a cheap agenda. Find a place I can stay a few days or a few weeks for cheaper. Is there tourist shop? I want to send a postcard to Maya and tell her where I am in case she cares...

I don't want to make her jealous with the sun and sea while she rides in sunken lanes and centuries of rain. I want her to think about what she could be doing. If I send the postcard I can slip in there, into her thoughts...She wouldn't just bin the postcard without looking so that's the first goal: one postcard, postage stamp to her, up there in Devon...

****

The sun turns the white limestone of the piazza into a glare that forces me to squint. The yellow liquid in my glass is a Seltz, Limone e Sale, the local cure for the heat. Vibrant, stinging, and topped with a layer of fine salt that clings to the rim. It’s a sharp contrast to the spectral flavour of raw iron in my mouth.

The town is in a state of suspended animation. Across the square, two old men are leaning against a low wall, their skin the texture of cured leather, watching the port with a patience that only comes from knowing the fish don’t care how long you wait. The nets are piled in the shade, smelling of brine and slow decay.

**

The Bar Capitol is not a place for seekers. It’s a roadside stage of red plastic and sun-bleached awnings, a functional slab of concrete without any convincing shade. I sit here, anchored to a metal chair that’s been baked by the Sicilian sun until it threatens to sear through my tan trousers, listening to the hum of the refrigerators and the occasional hiss of a steaming espresso wand.

The facade is a cluttered mess of commercial promises: Pizzeria, Hamburgeria, Tavola Calda. It’s a temple of the immediate, the kind of place that exists to feed the hunger of people who are actually going somewhere. The red canopies overhead don’t cool the air; they just trap the scent of old frying oil and exhaust from the scooters that buzz past like angry hornets.

The light bounces off the pale pavement with a violence that makes the “Bar Capitol” sign look like a neon bruise against the sky. Everything is too bright, too exposed. It’s not the right place to write. I will write anyway because I’m here. I’ve got my postcard and my stamp.

It isn’t a photograph of a sunset or a Baroque cathedral; it’s a clinical, topographical map of the island. If you squint, you can see Sciacca.

“Dear Maya, I’m here. A man in a stained apron stands in the shadows of the doorway, watching the street with a blank, heavy-lidded indifference. To him, I am just a white shirt and a bill to be settled.”

I feel the grit of the limestone dust and the dried salt from the harbour. Everything smells of salt or fish or crispness until the burning sun covers it all in the subtle smell of suffocation.

I look at the postcard. In Devon, there are tea rooms with lace curtains and damp gardens. Here, there is only the red awning, the smell of diesel. Maybe I could hire a boat and go somewhere. Where, though? Tunisia straight ahead but I can’t go out there that far. I pick up the pen again. The contrast is the point. I want her to imagine me here, in this temple of the mundane, drinking salt while the land runs out.

I leave the card on the table for a moment to let the ink dry in the Sicilian heat. I stand up, the salt from the glass still on my lips, and walk toward the Tabaccheria. I must find a new place, less depressing. The shift is sudden: they seem to be reading horoscopes now on the radio inside “Bar Capitol”.

L’amore è il protagonista.

This scrap will let her know that I am still here, at the end of the land, waiting for the next thought to arrive.

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There are things that arrive before they arrive. The smell of a particular tobacco, for instance. The knowledge that somewhere a young man is being led from a street in Alytus into a police vehicle, that this has been coming for two years, though nobody knew it was Alytus, or him, or the man from Lagos with a contract and a kit number and not much else.

**

I smell the smoke before I see the woman. A burnt silver that cuts through the smell of damp Easter pavement. Drum tobacco. I know it the way you know a voice from another room; before the words, before the face. I used to roll my own. Three years ago, I stopped. The well ran dry. The smell remains.

Little Café sits on the corner of Rue du Bourg-Tibourg and Rue du Roi de Sicile.

The “King of Sicily Street” is my favourite street name in Paris because it takes its name from Charles of Anjou, brother of Saint Louis, made King of Naples and Sicily in 1266.

He lost Sicily in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, a massacre at evening prayer outside Palermo that stripped him of the island overnight.

Peter III of Aragon took it. Charles spent the rest of his life trying to get it back. He died, having failed.

All that remains here is this street, which translated into plain English, sounds like our one hit song, Little King of Broken Hearts.

Little King of Broken Hearts was a reverse blues; not a man living pain but causing it, which is a different instrument entirely.

The café on the corner is called “Little”.

Not “Le Petit”, not anything that acknowledges it is standing in the Marais on Easter Sunday surrounded by every nationality except French. Just “Little”. In English.

The covered terrace holds maybe a dozen people. The pavement still damp from the night before.

She is at a table of four, lighting one cigarette off the end of another. To her left a man with a Belmondo face and a John Waters moustache. A man who was once something and has decided to be something else. The upper lip is his manifesto.

I will call her Yersinia. She doesn’t know this. Nobody at her table knows this. She is in her early forties, a Touraine Sauvignon in front of her, constructing the next cigarette already while the current one still burns. Spider-webbing through the subconscious existentialism of an Easter Sunday bank holiday weekend.

I want the smoke. Not her, the smoke. She won’t know.

Belmondo-Waters reads off his phone in a voice dragging the chains of self-abuse noisily behind him. He has the look of a man who enjoys delivering catastrophe to a table. Shake the spare change loose. He finds tidbits on the internet the way a certain pig finds truffles.

He reads his offering with pride, as if he’d made up the story himself:

“A stabbing in Alytus,” he says. “Lithuania. A Nigerian footballer. A kid from the local high school had been planning it for two years.” He repeats this for the table. “Two years.”

Yersinia lights the new cigarette off the dying end of the last one and says nothing. The Touraine sits untouched for a moment.

I return to my Gubernija Tamsusis. The velvet tongue twister.

**

The young man in Alytus had been planning a serious violent crime for approximately two years, prosecutors said. His victim appears to have been chosen at random. Which means he planned everything except the target. The weapon, the moment, the long interior preparation: all of it arranged in advance. The victim was a variable left blank until the last second, filled in by whoever happened to be there. This is not planning. This is steeping. Marinating in intention until the intention became unbearable and anyone would do.

Alytus is a city in southern Lithuania, on a long loop of the Nemunas river, surrounded by pine forests that hold their silence the way forests do when they have seen too much. It was a medieval fortress town, then a commercial center. The Soviets turned it into an industrial hub, filling it with factories producing cement, chemical fibers, furniture, refrigerators.

In 1991 the factories closed. A third of the population left. Unemployment hit seventeen percent. The forests remained, holding their silence.

In the forests outside Alytus there are mass graves. Vidzgiris forest, thousands of bodies. The Alytus forest, thousands more. Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, people who were in the wrong place when the wrong army arrived. Nearby there is a place called Grūtas Park, known informally as Stalin World, where Soviet-era statues have been collected and displayed as attractions. History as a theme park. Trauma with an entry fee. The forests do not charge admission.

The Nigerian footballer came to Alytus because a Lithuanian club sent scouts to Abuja and found him cheaper than a local player.

This is the satellite model: sign a prospect in Lagos, send him to a small town to get minutes, move him up when he’s ready. He had a contract and a kit number and a city that had no place for him. He was visibly, unmistakably the only one of himself in Alytus, which is not a city where difference has tended to go well. He was there because a spreadsheet said so. He was the variable the student finally filled in.

**

I am already inside the story, fresh from a museum, observing Géricault’s shaved head: productive self-mutilation, rendering himself socially unpresentable by design. Painting the dead before the living.

He locks himself away to finish the work.
The dead first, then the living.
The long preparation before the act.

The order matters.

**

Scientists at the Australian National University have reported the first confirmed observation of atoms engaged in one of the most perplexing behaviors known to modern physics: the apparent ability to exist in two entirely separate places at once. The phenomenon is known as entanglement. No individual particle can be described independently from the state of others. The researchers did not mention Alytus. They did not mention a covered terrace on Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. They did not mention Drum tobacco or a Touraine Sauvignon or a man with a John Waters moustache reading catastrophe off his phone on Easter Sunday. Nevertheless.

Belmondo-Waters puts his phone down. Two years, he says again, shaking his head with the satisfaction of a man who has successfully introduced darkness into a Sunday morning. Yersinia exhales. The smoke goes up. I watch it go and think about a city on the Nemunas where the forests hold their silence and a young man has finally stopped waiting and a footballer from Lagos is in a hospital or a police statement or both at the same time, and none of them chose their coordinates. All of it was always going to be exactly this.

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Achille Zucchini.
Hmmm.

Qui riposa. As if he had a choice.

Onesto, laborioso, caritatevole. Stimato da quanti lo conobbero. Morì nel bacio del Signore in età di 66 anni, il 9 ottobre 1907. Pace implora.

What did he do, Achille?

A salumeria seems right — a man named Zucchini who sells cured meats has the correct Italian irony built in, the vegetable and the dead animal in permanent proximity. Behind the counter, slicing. Onesto, laborioso, caritatevole. Sure.

Or an electrician. 1907, electricity still new and slightly miraculous, Marconi threading signals through the air, a man running wires through Bologna’s medieval walls, the future passing through the past at his hands. Dies in the kiss of the Lord. Which could also be read as electrocution. Onesto, laborioso, caritatevole. The stone doesn’t say.

Baker. Baker is the least interesting unless — baker who makes bread from the dead.

The flour absorbs. The hands that knead have been where they’ve been. The ovens remember.

Not direct. Not visible.

Onesto, laborioso, caritatevole.

Nothing wasted. Nothing left inert.

They would not object. They have already gone where they go. This is only continuation. Transformation. Return.

Stimato da quanti lo conobbero.

They just don’t know what they’re eating.

All this stone. All this inscription.

Het leven is een mortfabriek.

Pace implora.

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