The Hill

Lonely water droplets fell from the towering ceiling, breached the opaque glass like drips of condensation formed in a deep cavern, through shrouded smoke, projected collages of religious iconography and flora and fauna and the Statue of Liberty wearing a garland of barbed wire coloured in psychedelic neon backlighting them all the way down. Onto the dimpled brass of a colossal old fermentation vat – one of eight in this red brick building that loomed like genie’s lanterns in a vast desert – each of them bigger than twenty men, all dirtied with loosely handled drugs and people with dreadlocks down to their ruddy ankles. The lonely drops fell down, faint murmurs of a torrent crying outside, hurling itself into hillocks of snow that benumbed his feet and left him pensively sad, as if he were watching the whole world turn brown from the crest of a rainbow.  Every murmur was a microcosm of decay.

The small black hairs around her areola come away so easily! Slackly they hang, few in number, like frayed wires bordering a little pinkish outlet to some immense energy. She asks him not to tug on them: what if they grow back blacker? And it is making her less sexually attracted to him. So he doesn’t do it anymore: he would do anything for her. Ecstatically he licks the outlet; it is like licking a battery end. Her legs are neither smooth nor hairy; her bottom half is draped in a perpetual stubble. The pit of her knees is always sticky, ticklish.

On footpaths of ice she is quick-footed but unaware of her own clumsiness- wonkiness, as she prefers to say. She likes the word wonky. She had never heard of that one before; his gifts to her are that kebab she dropped all over the pavement and wonky. Wombats are her favourite animals, which could, he speculates, have something to do with it.

Several times he must hitch her from the ground bruised and hysterical, velour dress snow-stained, with a cattish lilt to her voice that makes him want to marry her even though it is just days since their first meeting and the sound of a person’s voice is scarcely considered suitable grounds for entering into wedlock. Onward, onward, he urges her up the steep slippery knoll. There are joyous people everywhere. The clamour of urgent feet and joy. She falls and falls. Clinging to a frozen stair rail and inching higher he thinks seriously about proposing tonight, maybe even by the light of this panorama of fireworks awaiting them at the top. Astonished and touched by his seriousness…but alas, she is marrying Jani in an hour. When he looks back her dress has parachuted up again in a fall and her little arse, in peach panties made of lace, is imbedded in the hillside- she finds it excruciatingly funny. When she gets up her gait is all wonky.

Scorching pyrotechnics aflame, gas hissed from the trembling hose; the open ends of fuel lines growled, and a lifeless brewery packing room bled again. Confetti, arranged in troughs similar to those used by weightlifters and gymnasts for their gripping powder, seemed now to be cascading from thin air. It was in everybody’s hair and festooned around everybody’s collars. Women wore angel wings and furnished their faces with pupils like black marbles. Women of sixty dressed like little girls at a fairy party. Men slapped each other with the empty sleeves of their sweaters, big acid-tripping trolls. Gesticulating madly, the old man behind the decks played Goa trance without a smile, without enjoyment, programming impeccably, white moustache prancing here and there across his leathery wrinkled face. And with every crescendo another flame shot high into the air, illuminating the gigantic inflatable insects that prowled across the dripping roof.

English is not her first language. She cannot pronounce the letter H. When he speaks to her he subsequently feels as if his words pass first through a sort of semantic nebula, an affecting murk that both steals and ascribes meaning, just as he imagines her thoughts must be altered according to what she can and cannot say in his tongue. This insoluble mystery – for he will never learn to think or dream in her language, nor she his – excites most of all.
Finally they arrive at the summit to an orgy of colour and languages, men and women, energy, anxiety, a panoptic of Berlin in pandemonium. The countdown is being counted down. Her cold hand wriggles out of his grip, her restless spirit bucking against propriety, against any semblance of how this thing should go. Hurriedly he searches the square for my friends. Bottle rockets are exploding at his heels. There are no familiar faces, just a legion of festal strangers. His gaze trains then upon the bleary sky, draped in a frigid mist, crackling in anticipation- its bleariness the brother to that stink of explosives which has suffused this city for three days already.

He wants to bluff her out of existence until that ultimate moment, when, turning to her alabaster face as to that of a freshly found soul mate, he will kiss her everywhere and say, happy new year, happy new year, making naïve internal and external pledges about faith and eternity.  But she recognises someone– a man with blue eyes, an oddly shaped head. He introduces himself as Jani and tries to shake his hand in the elaborate gangbanger fashion. And because of this he takes stock of her ten seconds too soon. The moment is stripped of its perfection. She seems pleased to see him.

Total darkness – and music close to 150BPM – prevailed in the basement. It had the pitiless aspect of some neuropsychological experiment, one entered into willingly by lunatics. And maybe that was close to the mark. By a chain of palms they led themselves through, unclasping for wrecked ravers too consumed by the order set by their beloved bass to move out of the way. Bodies rattled inside their shells like half-boiled eggs- the synthesisers stabbed at waning sensibility; cleaved chunks of reason clean off. Once a suitable spot was found the dancing began. People bumped into him, checked his expression, tongues hanging out of their mouths like exhausted dogs. There were no droplets down here and the heat was infernal.

In his misery he saw punishment; the fine line between enjoying this horrible carnival and viewing it in the full, garish light of logic had been overstepped…and she had pushed him over. Why didn’t she come? It was all he could do to think positively, think in the present like a Yogi in order to avoid the trip taking a turn for the worse. So, spiralling his arms around fanatically, he wore holes in the toes of his boots. He looked up in the air as though he were receiving a musical benediction. He mouthed happy New Year, happy New Year to anyone who cared to collide with him. But the harder he tried to extinguish the thought of her the more fierily it raged. Face veiled in white muslin. Finger ringed. Walking haphazardly down a vast aisle flanked by purple flowers and gangbanging Fins. God damn it, he was about to enter a demon world with an angel oozing out his ears.

All desirable things he can offer her- all the things she desires that is, except one. He can circumscribe the globe with cursive love poetry, fuck her so many times it becomes as menial an act as buying milk, he can let her punch and elbow him in the chin until he falls unconscious and wake up bleeding from the ears, tell her what he thinks of her desire to commit suicide at twenty three, he can be a stone for her or jumping castle to ricochet off, pick her up when she falls in the snow, he can furnish her English vocabulary with new words, think it plausible that she’s twice as intelligent as he, he can pinch her cheeks like a grandmother and throw her around like a brother, he can kiss her on the forehead like a mother or on the chest like a lover, he can get as sick of her as she can of him, he can boost her up fences and lay the very clothes off his back down over barbed wire for her, for her, for her he can offer it all…but he can never make her a citizen of Europe.
Jani has that over him, despite his deficiencies in so many other areas.
For now, for the change, she is in his arms, the gleeful, hopeful beginning of a new parade of days. When they kiss he looks at her. He tries to say a lot with his eyes- but they are crossed because of their proximity to hers and only make her laugh. Behind her, Jani rubs his hands together as another blonde guy gets the wick of a big red block sparking. The hill rattles with jumping bodies and sparks and loud I love you huddles. The hill seems taller now, as if in the changing of the calendar it has overtopped itself, shed its smaller stature and shot up anew. Fireworks enfold the skyline on every side. The hill is where he will win and lose her.