Читать книгу Naked Angels - Judi James, Judi James - Страница 12

Mikhail had decisions to make. He had lived on the streets for over a year and the truth was he was not a natural survivor. Lots of boys were. He thought of them as corks, floating along on the surface of all deprivation while he was sinking, slowly but consistently going under.

He ate but he was still starving. In the winter he froze and in the summer he was ill. He felt unwell all the time. Sometimes he even thought he was dying. The idea terrified him, but after a while things got so bad that he thought it was what he wanted, after all.

He had not spoken to anyone properly since Andreas’s death, although sometimes he addressed himself to Andreas personally. At first the lack of companionship was the hardest thing to suffer but before long he almost relished it. He was a dark shadow on the streets; in a way it was rather romantic.

He had grown a lot in the last couple of years, despite the lack of proper food, and his brother’s coat was no longer too big for him. Although he was still only fourteen people had stopped reacting to him as though he was a child, which made him feel safer. A child alone got relentless hassle from the police. A young man, though, was largely ignored, as long as he broke none of the laws.

Despite his deprivations, Mikhail was methodical about reading a newspaper. Sometimes he stole them and often he just took them from litter bins, but always he read as many as he could lay his hands on, as they were his only link with the proper world. When you stopped knowing what was happening in the world you were no longer a part of it. Andreas had read a lot. It was he who had taught Mikhail that.

Mikhail was doubly pleased if he could get the Daily News since he could still read a little English as well as Hungarian. Andreas had learnt English at school and he had taught Mikhail too, for he said it was the language of America, where he was bound when he became famous. These things were important, Mikhail could see that. Keeping in touch was important and so was speaking another language. Their mother had made Andreas learn English and, although Mikhail spoke it badly, he needed to remember what it was he had learnt, otherwise he would know he had given up. Giving up was like waiting to die.

When he caught sight of himself in mirrors he was always shocked. His hair was longer and darker. He asked one of the other boys he met to cut it with his knife but the boy turned on him and stole fifty filler from him instead.

Sometimes he did make friends of a kind. There was a boy with the nickname of Tincan he sometimes met down in the metro. Tincan had given him useful advice about where to sleep without being bothered too much. And then there were the men.

Mikhail was approached on average twice a week in winter and as much as three times a day in the summer. They all wanted to help him and they all wanted to be friends. It was Tincan who told him to be careful. The religious ones were the worst, he said, the ones who said they’d pray for you and show you a warm hostel where you could sleep the night for nothing.

‘Nothing is for nothing,’ Tincan told him, though even he had a couple of regular men friends he would disappear with now and again.

There was one man Mikhail saw a lot, around and about the city streets. Sometimes he would find Mikhail on a bench in the park and just sit chatting, and sometimes he would pass him in the street and nod his head as though they were old acquaintances. The man seemed pleasant enough and even Tincan appeared to like the look of him. He was shortish and middle-aged but smart and well-dressed, like an ordinary businessman.

The man’s worst fault was that he appeared to be a little shy, which made him rather boring at times. Mikhail felt safe enough with him, though – the man had never tried propositioning him. The most he had ever done was to share his sandwiches one day when Mikhail was too hungry to refuse them.

Tincan told him the man was wealthy.

‘How can you tell?’ Mikhail asked.

Tincan shrugged. ‘His haircut. The cologne he wears. And did you see his watch? Tell me it’s not real gold and then let me tell you you’re a fool.’

‘I wonder where he lives?’ Mikhail asked.

‘Dunno,’ Tincan said. ‘Why don’t you follow him if you’re so interested?’

That winter the sleeve of Andreas’s coat split open and Mikhail grew still more depressed. Too dispirited even to steal food or new clothing, he would often mooch up to Castle Hill and look down on the city and its river and dream of hot pork stew and chocolate and nut pancakes.

Tincan grew desperate at the state he was in.

‘You must get money, Mikhail, or you’ll starve! Look at you – you don’t wash, you don’t eat. What’s the matter, don’t you want to live?’

Mikhail did not have the words to explain how he felt. To Tincan existence was all; the good life lay in the future, and if he could just get through the winter then things would pick up by spring. He told Mikhail he was going to become a famous actor and he never voiced any doubts over the possibility of a sparkling career.

‘Take money where you can get it, Mikhail,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a fool. Stupid men die, you know – it’s the clever ones that survive.’

Tincan survived by meeting men under the iron bridge in the park.

‘You just have to wait there, that’s all. They give you money, Mikhail, it’s OK. Some give a lot – look.’ He held some notes out for Mikhail’s perusal.

‘I don’t want to get money like that,’ Mikhail said.

‘But you don’t argue when I offer you food it has paid for,’ Tincan said.

‘I don’t need your food.’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Tincan grabbed him by the arm. He had hair the colour of linen and a line of matching fuzz across his pale top lip. His eyelashes were nearly white. ‘Look, Mikhail,’ he said, ‘it’s not that bad, you know, what I do. What do you think? You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it. Tell me, do you masturbate? Ever? Eh? Of course you do. Well, do you hate yourself so much for that? No. Well think of this as being similar, only with someone else, that’s all. I do it only to live, Mikhail. It’s not so important – life is what counts. One day I’ll be working in the film studios in Hollywood and I’ll look back at all this and laugh and be glad I was so crafty. Then I’ll remember my poor stupid friend Mikhail who died of cold and starvation because he was so foolish and stubborn. That’s how it is, you know, that’s what will happen.’

Tincan took Mikhail to the park the following evening. At first it was half-light and there were children around, so they smoked a cigarette and shared stale cake until it got darker, and then the children were gone and the whole park fell silent.

Tincan went off for a piss and Mikhail almost bolted. There was a wind hissing through the trees and the branches creaked overhead. He was afraid of ghosts and glad when Tincan got back. Then he saw that his friend was followed and his heart leapt with a greater fear.

The man kept his head down. He wore a knitted cap and his hands were firmly stuffed into the pockets of a greatcoat. He cleared his throat a lot but didn’t speak.

‘This is Pepe,’ Tincan whispered, ‘I call him that because of the moustache. He’s a policeman but I’m not supposed to know that. He comes here once a week when his wife visits her mother. He’s a bit shy of the bathroom so try not to breathe in too much, but apart from that he’s not bad. He won’t speak in case anyone recognizes his voice.’

Mikhail stared across at the man, who was hopping from one foot to the other in the cold. White breath rose in a plume from his nostrils. His head nodded once. OK.

Tincan had evaporated, though Mikhail could hear his rasping breaths from behind one of the metal posts. The thought that his friend was within earshot made him feel even more awkward.

He walked across to the man. Tincan was right, he smelt of stale fish and cabbages. He was chewing something – tobacco maybe – and he spat it out as Mikhail arrived.

‘Have you got the money?’ Tincan had told Mikhail to ask first. The man held his hand out; there were coins in his palm, glinting in the lamplight.

It was the clumsy attempts at tenderness that appalled Mikhail more than the lust. The man pulled his face closer beneath the lights, and tried to kiss him on the cheek, but Mikhail turned away. The man’s eyes looked regretful. He sighed a deep sigh and unzipped his flies, exposing a thick white cock. He gripped Mikhail’s shoulders as he was masturbated and Mikhail worried that Andreas’s coat might tear.

Tincan was right; it was nothing, really. The man came quickly, with a grunt, and his knees buckled heavily, which meant he almost pulled Mikhail over. He looked different when he had finished – the sadness had gone from his eyes to be replaced by a cold look of disgust. He pushed the coins into Mikhail’s hand in a business-like way and pressed his cock back into his trousers.

There was a splash of white semen on Andreas’s coat. He walked quietly down to a small pond and washed it off with his handkerchief. He thought he saw Andreas’s face reflected in the dark water, smiling back at him, and he almost screamed. The water was ice-cold. He took a mouthful without caring how dirty it might be, rinsed his gums, and spat it out. It made his teeth begin to ache.

The man stayed in his mind; his sad eyes, his smell, the grunting he had made. He wanted to wash the memory away, too. He wanted to cry for his mother, even though he had never really known her. When Tincan came over, though, he stood up and laughed instead, flicking one of the coins into the air.

‘What did you have to do?’ Tincan asked. He looked cold through from the waiting.

‘Nothing much,’ Mikhail told him.

Tincan grinned. ‘See? I told you it was easy money. OK?’

‘OK,’ Mikhail said.

Andreas had told him about the parties their mother used to have after the last stage show on a Saturday night, when there would be huge plates of gleaming salami and cold sausage and bottles of Bull’s Blood to wash it all down. Mikhail had never tasted wine but he thought it sounded wonderful.

Sometimes he would stand alone on the ridge of Castle Hill for hours, until it grew dark. He liked watching the floodlights come on along the bridges because they looked like diamonds strung across black velvet and this, for some reason, also reminded him of his mother.

He had never seen his mother dressed up, though, except in his imagination. The one thing he wanted was what he knew he could never have, which was to go back in time and live happily with his mother and Andreas, in the days when she was a successful club act and not living in prison, which was all he could recall of her.

Tincan still worried about him.

‘You look ill, Mikhail. You should take care. I saw you yesterday, just wandering about in the cold. Now that sort of thing will kill you, don’t you know that? Stay where it’s warm, Mikhail. Eat plenty. Beg if you have to; the money is good in this weather because the people feel their consciences prick when they see us standing there, blue with the cold. I got fifty forint in half an hour yesterday, did I tell you?’ He grabbed Mikhail by the shoulders and stared him full in the face. ‘Do well, Mikhail,’ he whispered, ‘we are going places, you and I. We’re special. We have been marked out for importance. Take it how you can and when you can and don’t worry how you get there. Just do it, OK? You think too much. Thinking can kill you.’

But Mikhail was no longer interested. When Tincan tried to cut him into his drug dealing schemes he left the shelter of the metro altogether and never went back.

The businessman approached him just as he was sure he would die of it all. At first they just chatted as usual but then the man leant across closer and Mikhail could smell the expensive cologne Tincan had noticed.

‘You look a little unwell,’ the man said quietly. ‘May I offer you a bed for the night?’

Mikhail looked at him. The man’s face had turned pink with embarrassment and his eyes looked comically mournful. How could he turn him down? He had no choice. It was either go with him or die out here.

The man talked nervously and cleared his throat a lot as they walked. His name was Claude and he came from Switzerland, though his Hungarian was almost perfect. He was not enormously wealthy – Mikhail saw that the minute they entered the building he lived in, which was in a small shabby street off a modern square behind a synagogue in Obuda. He had three locks on his wooden door and once they were inside the apartment he reached up to close a large bolt on the inside.

Claude did not live alone in the apartment. His father, a bedridden invalid, lived in a room at the far end of the passage. The old man was deaf but not so deaf that they could afford to talk in anything above a whisper. All the curtains were drawn because the old man was allergic to prying neighbours. Mikhail didn’t mind this so much, though, because it meant the place was warm. He felt as though he had never been so warm before in his life and he took Andreas’s coat off for the first time that winter.

Claude made them tea and then talked about his job. He worked in a bank – nothing important, just mundane stuff – but he also worked as a photographer, which excited him, and which he said prevented him from going insane with boredom. He had converted a bedroom in the apartment into a studio and took his shots there, some of which had been subsequently published in various magazines. He was proud of his work, Mikhail could tell by his eyes when he spoke about it.

‘I would enjoy doing some shots of you some time,’ Claude said. He wore nail varnish on his fingernails. The warmth of the room had overcome Mikhail; he was struggling to keep his eyes open. ‘If you don’t object, of course,’ Claude added.

He cooked Mikhail a meal and ran him a scented bath before showing him where he could sleep. The softness of the bed filled Mikhail with melancholy and he went off to sleep with tears running down his cheeks.

The first morning went well. Claude showed Mikhail proudly around his ‘studio’ and then he brought out some shots he had taken previously. The walls of the room were painted dark and there was a stained sheet hanging in one corner, as a backdrop. In front of the sheet was a white umbrella on a stand and Claude’s camera on a tripod.

The photos were innocent enough: soft-focus shots of a woman with too much lipstick on her mouth, a couple of black-and-whites taken at a railway station, and a shot of a boy a bit older than Mikhail, sitting on a stool and smiling at the camera. The boy was wearing old-fashioned-looking clothes: a cream-coloured nylon shirt and the sort of jumper Mikhail had worn to school as a kid, but he looked pleased enough.

Claude had gone into the kitchen to cook breakfast and the smell of the bacon made Mikhail’s stomach start to complain. He mooched around the studio. There was a cupboard with the door half open. Inside the cupboard was a pile of cardboard boxes. He pulled the top one open and there were shots in there of the same boy, only this time he didn’t have his cheap shirt and jumper on. This time he didn’t have anything on.

Claude was whistling in a dreary style. Mikhail replaced the box and crept out of the studio and along the corridor to the old man’s room.

Claude was still whistling. Mikhail listened at the door for a second before pushing it open. He wasn’t scared of making a noise; he had developed a talent for moving about silently. The room was dark, apart from a dull light that seeped through the holes in the brown lace curtains. There was a warm smell of sickness and urine and disinfectant.

The old man lay on a large wood-framed bed, his head lolling back onto a couple of white pillows. It was a moment before Mikhail realized his watery eyes were open and looking directly at him. A spasm of fear ran through his gut, even though he knew the old man could do nothing to harm him.

‘Fuck off.’ The old man’s voice wheezed out of a thousand bellows.

Mikhail shut the door quickly and crept back into the studio. Claude arrived a few minutes later with a jug of fresh coffee.

‘Did you like the photos?’ he asked. ‘What do you think?’

Mikhail shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know good from bad. They look nice enough.’

Claude took the photos from him.

‘Do you think you could do better? I could pay you to model for me.’

The coffee was too sweet on an empty stomach. Mikhail took the bacon sandwich Claude offered him and grease ran down his chin as he bit into it. Claude had fed his father first – he still smelt of the sickroom. No wonder he wore such expensive colognes; the stench of illness clung like wet fog. It reminded Mikhail of the mortuary.

‘Did you pay that other boy?’ he asked. Claude looked down at the shot.

‘That one? No. He is a relative. My nephew.’

‘How much?’ Mikhail asked.

‘What?’ Claude looked surprised.

‘How much will you pay me? For artistic shots?’

Claude pulled a face. ‘Twenty forint? You have a roof over your head too now, you know.’

‘Twenty-five, or I tell your father.’ Mikhail looked him straight in the eye.

Claude looked disappointed. OK,’ he said, ‘if you like.’