Keys of Babylon (2 page)

So much food had not been touched. So much was abandoned half eaten. Mic and Stanis sat on the grass in the dark and shared a picnic. The red curry. The green curry. They drank from the plastic bottles and gathered the empties at their feet. Stanis had Yorkshire Spring, Tesco Fountainhead Spring, Surrey Down and Highland Spring. Mic found Hydr8 and Lomond Spring, Ty Nant and Ice Valley, Vivreau and Asda Farm Stores. Mic won because Stanis gave up and lay down under a hedge with his tongs and said he was too tired to work, too tired and his head was buzzing with the noise Neil Young and his evil drummer had been making. Yes, a wicked old man that drummer, someone he could imagine meeting in a forest, an old man who ate children, cooked them in a cauldron and ate them as the legends described.

Mic said don't be stupid. The Greendown superintendents were all over the park. They would drive up silently on their electric trolleys, and Stanis would lose his job. Then he'd have to go to the hostel, and he knew what that was like.

Mic thought Stanis had taken some chemical and he pulled him up and put the tongs back in his hands and said at least pretend you're working. But Stanis only laughed and wandered off with a plastic bag over his head towards the screen being taken down from the stage.

As dawn broke, Mic surveyed the scene. They had worked so hard but it still resembled a war zone. Paper and bottles everywhere, sheets of plastic grey and blue, as if the sky had fallen, a tattered sky in ruins upon the grass.

He picked up the silver stomach from inside a wine box. Half full. He picked up a pair of jeans with a belt made of rope. Yes, he would take the jeans home. He picked up a tee shirt with a picture of Neil Young, whose face was huge and cruel. Yes, a cruel god, Neil Young, who had made such a terrible noise. What could have possessed him to make such a din? But Mic took the tee shirt too. It was useful.

Dawn's smoke rose in every direction. There were figures moving through the haze, Greendown's cleaners in their dayglo tabards, barefoot girls creeping over the grass dressed in gauze and mist and almost nothing at all, barechested boys who wandered about in thought, as if they had mislaid something marvellous that had been there a moment ago.

At 7 a.m. the sun was shining and the new shift was arriving, Obi Wan and Obi Two were there. The Ivorian was there, tall as a tree. Mic and Stanis stowed their tongs in a trolley and walked to the Marble Arch exit and into Orchard Street, then north and east towards Pentonville and eventually Hermes Street. It took them ninety minutes to get home.

They shared a room at number 37. Mic went to the shower cubicle down the landing, then back to the room to change. Stanis was already asleep on his couch, still wearing the yellow tabard.

Mic made himself a cup of coffee and put a slice of bread on the hot ring. It burned before it toasted, but he was used to that. By 9 a.m. he was changed into different jeans and a clean shirt, and at 9.30 he was entering the Champagne Bar at St Pancras Railway Station.

He could see himself in the mirrors. Hair combed, face clean shaven. Thin, a thin man, but worth a look. Yes, the girls might look. Or the women now, some of them at least. And a few might catch his eye then glance away from that slim figure, the dark man with grey speckling in his hair. Greek, they might think. Italian perhaps. A waiter on his day off. But as with all waiters it was hard to say how old he was.

Mic never played for Roma. But he had visited the Emirates Stadium and the Arsenal Museum, heard the crowds marching down the Holloway Road and stepped out of their way. A few times he sat in that pub near Varnisher's Yard and watched Sky Sports all morning, sometimes
Serie A
, sometimes the tall Totti leading the line, Francesco Totti who appeared in the mobile phone adverts.

Presto, Totti would say, Hey Presto, which made Mic laugh. Once Totti lay on the pitch after he scored a goal, the ball under his jersey in tribute to his pregnant wife.

How the crowd had roared, amazed. How Mic had cheered with the other Roma supporters in the bar, the rival Lazio fans shrugging it off, and everyone speaking their streetwise Romanesco in that London pub, and Mic happy for a moment. Because sometimes even an Albanian was allowed to cheer. Poor as an Albanian, that's what the Italians said. In Italy, Albanians were scum.

But this was not Italy. This was London and everything was different. Mic lived in the centre of the world. King's Cross was that centre, where the British queen was buried under platform nine of the railway station. The British queen who had fought the Romans, fought Totti's people with scythes on her chariot wheels. And platform nine was where Harry Potter caught his train. Sometimes Mic went to watch the Japanese tourists who thought Harry was a real boy. How he pitied them.

Then she was there. Only a little late. Thirty minutes late, her average. Suddenly, on the stool beside him, sat Li, Li in red, a tight red dress, Li boyslim, smiling, smiling despite her sadness, Li with her tiny handbag, narrow as a knife, her teeth shining, her eyes bright as a blackbird's even as she said hey, hey hello, hello to you, Mr Mic.

And Mic looked up and the barman came over once again and the bar hostess who has been watching him at last, looked away. How Mic wanted to order Dom Pérignon White Gold, 1995. Yes, a jeroboam. For £6500.00. That's what the menu said.

Instead, he asked for De Nauroy Brut NV. Two glasses, please. It came in at £7.50 a glass. Li always said Chinese people could not drink alcohol, but perhaps one glass would be allowed. And Mic knew that Li would take one taste and leave the glass untouched for the next hour, and then finish the champagne in one gulp when it was flat, oily and flat, then splutter and shriek and complain that she was drunk. Yet it seemed to Mic that Li could get drunk on nothing at all, so brightly did her eyes shine for that hour they shared.

But Mic understood that Li needed the drink. Her work started at 11 a.m. and anything that helped her deal with work was welcome. Li took other things to help her cope because so many men wanted to visit her. Mic understood that.

They had met three times this way. Champagne was Mic's idea, although the cost was cruel. But here they were at the Eurostar departure floor, and who could say they were not on their way to Paris with champagne flutes waiting aboard the train? Certainly none of the others who sat along the bar that curved for one hundred metres like a gleaming rail. None of them cared. Yes, the hostess cared, who saw everything and acted as if she knew everything. But Mic's money was good.

Li went first. Always first.

Okay, she said. Okay. Once I remember we went all the way from Huangshan to the Yellow Mountains, up into the air on the cable car, higher than I ever thought I could go. How the cables groaned. The mountains had sharp points that came through the clouds. But the mountains were purple and green; I don't know why we called them the Yellow Mountains. And we had our picnic and then it was time to come down. But it was a public holiday, said Li, and Mic thought her eyes were black moons. So more and more people had come up in the afternoon. The paths were too crowded. We walked on the ledges and were pushed to the very edge. And more and more people were coming down through the trees to our trails, and more and more people coming up the tracks to where we stood.

Soon we were stuck. There on the mountainside. No one could move and it was already evening and I remember the evening star above Golden Turtle View of the ocean. It was winking at us like a warning. Children were crying and women fainting. Some westerner had a panic attack right next to me, a tourist, a fat white man, weeping. That made me feel better. Feel strong.

And then I heard a voice. It was a young woman in uniform, party uniform, telling us what to do. She was telling us to sing and what songs to sing, and soon after that the pressure began to ease.

I knew we'd be safe then. How beautiful she was, the party girl, how gallant. We all loved her, up there in the mountains in the mist, so close to the edge. Yes, we loved her and her strong voice, singing about our heroes. It was a miracle. I was ten years old and in love with the party girl. The boy next to me, with his flat Mongol face, flat as a plate it was, he loved her too.

The party, laughed Mic. My father was in the party. Not that he cared. In the end nobody cared because only the black market made sense. Once he showed me the dictator's grave and I saw him spit on it. At night in the capital we used to walk across Skanderbeg Square, my friends Pjeter and Flutura and me. Sometimes we saw Chinese people. They were the businessmen who were building our factories. My father said it couldn't be right; it was crazy to have Chinese factories. But Li, maybe I saw your people from Huangshan, wandering the square.

Li's eyes were heavy now. Something she had taken was wearing off. Or kicking in. But she roused herself.

Squares are dangerous places, whispered Li.

Under the few lights, Mic continued, the square looked like a frozen ocean. Pjetr said Tirana meant tyranny in English, and sometimes the army boys in their green uniforms would chase us away. It was something for them to do. It's boring being a soldier.

But that's what I always remember, looking out across the square and shivering. It was so empty, so huge. I felt crushed, but now I understand that's what they wanted me to feel. And the dogs were barking in the night, the dogs with rabies, the dogs with mad eyes out there in the dark, the darkness where the witches lived, where everything was broken and spoiled and all used up.

But we still took the BBC man we met to a bar where he could buy arak. He bought everyone in the room a drink. Even us kids. All he had was a card that said
BBC
, but to us he was like a god. I remember he took a quince from his coat pocket and gave it to Flutura. A golden quince. Like a magician he seemed to me then, that BBC man. And soon he was gone.

Mic looked around. The Champagne Bar was busy now, and the announcement for the Paris train was being made in French.

Li, he said. Li?

She was picking at a thread in her red dress. If Mic looked closely he knew he would see the dress was stained, that the crimson paint on her toenails was cracked, that there were scabs on the insides of her arms. Li's fingernails were bitten to the quick. As to Mic, his hands were now his father's hands. Mic had built the Tirana apartments, he had knocked them down. His shirt was from Age Concern, his jeans the blind shop. At least the hostess had moved away.

Li, he said. Li? Please marry me. Marry me, Li. You can escape and we'll go to another part of London. London's so huge no one will ever know where we are. We can go today, Li. Now. Go now.

He touched her arm.

Don't go back, Mic said. One day they're going to kill you.

Li raised her glass and sipped, gargled the warm champagne like mouthwash, swallowed and made a face.

I'm drunk, she said, getting up unsteadily from the stool. Mr Mic, you got me drunk again, you fucker.

Poole in Dorset, that's Dorset, UK, is not a strange place. But perhaps it's a peculiar setting for this story.

I'm Macsen, Max to you, and I've been part of what you call the environmental movement for thirty years. That's long before it became fashionable or cool. Or dreary.

Now, in those days, start of the 1980s, if you had told me that campaigning against new roads or pollution would become a career choice, offering a good pension, a car, ha ha, opportunity to travel and the rest of it, I'd have slapped your face.

Yet most of the people I've worked with over the last decade never did a day's volunteering in their lives. They certainly haven't waved a placard or organised a protest meeting. Or got down and dirty with a multinational trying to opencast a Scottish hillside.

Funny, isn't it. We won the battle. People like me. We bloody won. We raised the profile of all things environmental. Showed how everything was linked – clean air, good food, humane values. Raised the awareness level to such an extent that there's not a telly programme without some greenspeak in it. Chefs and weathergirls spouting off.

Well, great. Sort of. Sustainability rules. Now no one can claim ignorance of climate change or junk food. No councillor, no MP. Not anyone with power. We won.

And as proof of that, there are all those jobs in all those environmental organisations. Everybody saving the planet. But claiming time in lieu. Everybody with a computer and broadband someone else is paying for. With offices. With office cleaners for Christ's sake. With parking spaces. With the internet to do their thinking for them.

Yeah, but without the remotest clue about the people who created it for them. The pathfinders. The originators. That's right. People like me. And don't tell me I'm wrong because you can't. I was there. On the front line. And I don't remember seeing you.

These days, if I walked into that new Greenpeace office there's not a soul would know me. Friends of the Earth? They'd call security. Should have seen it coming, I suppose. But I was too busy saving your arse.

After a while I became more like your high-street green than a campaigning type. Fair trade, local and organic stuff. That was where the action was. I was part of a co-operative and we had this place in Cheam. Coffee bar, radical bookshop, performance space all in one. Ahead of its time? I'll say. That's been my curse.