Humanity

My mother used to tell me there are two types of people in this world – people who are humane, and people who are not. She told me that there are a great many people in this world who are just not good at being human, at sympathy and empathy and all the elements of human kindness. She described the world to me as being like the centre of a vacuum cleaner; the sort where there’s a central fabric that the dirt clogs up on. Humans are the dirt, connected to each other in howling wind,  kept without consent. It was a mark of how my mother raised me that I understood this not to be a bad thing; it was merely the case. We are all stuck here; why make it more difficult?

My mother died when I was seventeen. She was my only relative. I knew I had uncles somewhere, in another country I couldn’t fathom, but for all intents and purposes I had lost the only person who shared my blood. She was a fantastic woman – two days before her death she told me not to cry, because people who die before they’re old get to be young in Hades. Hades, she said, because to claim she was headed to heaven would be arrogant. I knew her well enough to know that.

I considered myself a success. I had a flat, a four year-old Chartreux, and a job that kept me stocked in long shabby coats and cigarettes. I took trains for important reasons, and sometimes travelled business class. Not today.

“Is this seat taken?” The words were rushed out, mumbled as if they were rude. I’ve found it’s a particular trait of the British that we are embarrassed of politeness, as if somehow daring to speak at all is rudeness in and of itself.

“No, feel free.” I meant it, as well. My welcome intruder was shorter than me, curly haired, with the heavy lilt of south Wales on his voice. I remembered something about Tolkein and cellar door, something from my good degree at my average University.

“Cold, isn’t it?” He was shivering, as if to prove that yes, it was cold.
“Seems so. Winter’s always fashionably late in Britain.”
My companion laughed. That was my favourite weather-line. You need a specialised script in a country with weather like ours.
“You headed to Edinburgh too?” I could already tell the Welshman had a talent for small talk. He had that quality of casual interest; a voice that seemed to wash over you, comfort you instinctually.
“Stirling. But via Edinburgh. I’m visiting a friend.”
“Stirling. All I know about Stirling is there’s a castle. Must be one of those half-child memories.” I smiled. He made ignorance sound like bliss, and I liked that he said half-child instead of half-memories; it was poetic.
“I’ve never been. It’s her hometown. I brought layers.”
He laughed. “Good shout.”

We lapsed comfortably into silence. An old woman settled in across the aisle, and we exchanged a look of indignation, as if our sudden and public conclave should be respected. It was clear we were both unenthralled by our books, so after a while of glancing at each other, the Welshman brought the courage.

“I know it’s childish, but I still find train rides a bit exciting. Like they mean a trip.” He grinned sheepishly.
“S’not childish. I was a London kid. Getting somewhere non-rectangular was a fucking field day for me.”
He laughed at that, and we earned an edifying scowl from the old woman.
“Not a London kid now?”
“In spirit, but I’m Peterborough-dwelt these days.”
“Ah. I’m in Cambridge.”
“As in the University?” I was impressed. He grinned the grin of somebody proud of their achievements and nervous about their possible arrogance.
“Yeah. I’m doing my doctorate in Biochemistry. I study Yeast for a paltry living.”
“How bourgeois.”
“First against the wall, right? It’s a good thing I’m a Welsh miner’s boy, very socialist. Can’t argue with my credentials.” The Welshman flashed pearly whites, uneven.
“Mixed-race child of a single mother; I’m bred for reality television.” I smirked.
“Ah right, you get stuck with all the R&B throwbacks week-to-week.”
“People of colour can’t sing indie. You’re a biochemist, you should know these things.”
“Must’ve slept through that lecture.” We laughed in unison, looked at our books, and fell silent.

The ticket collector shuffled through our carriage a few minutes later, pushing his little cart. Both of us were over-eager ticket-finders; both of us had return tickets.

“So what’re you planning in grand old Stirling?” He was casual again. I paused, letting the hiss of my newly-opened Sprite subside.
“A funeral.”
His eyebrows rose. “A funeral. Oh. Of your fr-“
“My friend, yeah.” I shrugged a little.
“I didn’t mean t-“
“You didn’t.” I looked up.
“What was it?” His curiosity was innocent, it understood the value of sharing.
“Car accident. Standard, you know.”
“Death’s not standard.” He was frowning for me.
“I mean for a car accident.”
“Right.”
We settled into a more awkward silence this time. I could tell he was forming an apology, but I could also tell he thought it would sound insincere. Twenty minutes trundled by.

“Her name was Sarah.”
Welshman looked up. It was the kindness in his eyes. It prompted you. “Sorry?”
“Sarah. My friend. She was an estate agent; she liked to make jokes about how estate agents are evil, but she actually believed all of that rubbish about potential and character – she loved houses. She did her A-levels and went straight into an apprenticeship with the estate agent’s, because she knew what she wanted to do. Used to tease me about University life while she was pulling down more than I do now. Team mother, you know? That was Sarah.”
“Why was she living down south if her hometown’s Stirling?”
“It’s not, really. I mean, not emotionally. But her family’s from there and they get say, obviously.”
Welshman nodded.
“She was just nice. Most people aren’t just nice for shits, you know? They do it because they think it makes them good people or they do it selectively, but Sarah was really honestly nice. She did volunteer work, for fuck’s sake. All I do is sit in my flat and read and stare at the world like it’s going to bite me. Sarah was fucking brave. She’d talk to people like they were an old friend, instantly. She had this talent of...humanity. It was humanity.”
Welshman wrinkled his brow. “How d’you mean?”
“You know how some people do good things but they’re still fundamentally practical? They can look at people and turn them into numbers in their head, even if they really, really care, because they have to?” I was leaning forward, willing him to absorb the words I was saying. He tilted his head in assent.
“Well,  Sarah couldn’t. She was gloriously, wonderfully impractical, and you know - I think practicality’s overrated. I think a lot of practicality is just heartlessness justified – wise heartlessness maybe, but still heartlessness. And I wish we were allowed to call it that without it being a personal attack, because the people who can’t put their heart aside are really fucking rare and deserve recognition for it. Because they’re fucking wonderful, they really are.” I realised I was speaking pretty loudly, and I felt suddenly chastened. Welshman was looking at me with this strange look; this implicit recognition, combined with something like pain, but calmer.

He took out a packaged sandwich.
“Do you want half?” It wasn’t a question. I took it meekly and we broke bread together.
“You cared about her a lot.”
I paused, chewing. “I knew her for a really long time. After my mum died she did all of it right; didn’t try to be family, didn’t encroach on my space, but…pestered me just enough. Allowed me to get annoyed with her, told me when I was being a dick, kept me standing on the ground. Some people just feel like elements, and she felt like Earth. Fuck, her tea. This woman’s tea.”
“Did you love her?” Welshman had sat back.
“Of course. Y’know, platonically.” I smirked a bit, despite myself. “We could’ve spent a whole life together, talking about fuck-all.”
“Did you guys travel in wide circles?” He was avoiding the use of the word “friends”, I think.
“She did, I didn’t. I think that’s probably part of it. I’m not a social person, you know?”
“That’s a shame.” He was watching me, I could feel it on my bowed brow.
“Not really.” I looked up, faced him properly. “I’m a loner, fundamentally.”
“But even loners need people.”
“Yes. I needed her.”
Welshman looked at me for a long time after I said that, but we slipped into silence again. By the time he spoke again, we were pulling into Edinburgh station; our stop.

“I could be that person. I mean, not face-to-face all the time, but I don’t think you’d need it anyway.”
He said it so simply, like it was an offer to look after my cat. I could tell my eyes were swimming. It was that fundamental trait, that humanity. It was slipping off of him as if he was bathed by a moving light, like he was shedding it.
“I just mean – if you need it.”

I looked at him for a few seconds, coughed, and nodded.
“I think I do.”
Like two fleshy pebbles we found our way into the flow of passengers emptying onto the platform, the hubbub of conversation washing over our subsiding exchange. A wrought iron roof magnified the speech, like some vast urban choir playing for a strange Cathedral.  As we left the platform, I turned to him.
“You know, you remind me of my mother.”

Bhanga from a Stereo

My hands wove through his hair like diving birds or a snake through grass; eminently natural, collecting the individual strands of thick black Pakistani curl. I was a field-working woman, gathering together the crop into one swaying basket that tilted as I tilted. Cross-legged behind him, I could have been meditating – and he could have been some Rajah, some great King.

“Now you do my head,” he had said, in his accent thick as the qeema he had served us three or four times, to our naïve Western tongues untouched by the spices of the east. He had a way of speaking that made what he said seem timeless, self-evident and unquestionable – so I had sat behind his wicker chair and now I massaged his scalp, took his hair around each of my fingers as we slipped further into a strange sort of coalescent movement; he, swaying slightly to the bhanga from the stereo, I, tilting both with the music and the undulation of my fingerprints against his skull. We had reached a queer conclave, a bizarre stasis.

We were miles from the nearest city, and maybe that was what made unfurling here so easy. I felt as if over the last few days I had opened, allowed the sun I hid from on any ordinary day to absorb into my blood vessels and warm my body. He was a strange man, alternating between childishness and hopping rage; but I had been brought up an Englishman. I was proud of my stoicism, proud of my ability to withstand stress with a straight face and no trace of embarrassment. My travelling companion, my best friend, dwelt in England but didn’t claim herself English – she was as continental as her parentage. Thus, she said, knee deep in our weeding patches, she was perfectly qualified to complain.

 I had tuned her out a while ago, and since we were working on opposite sides of the farm, I was left to my own silence, left to lose myself like a million tourists in the repetition of manual labour, the calmness of small-scale natural exploitation. We worked eight hours a day and were always finished by two in the afternoon (followed by long walks through the countryside). After our conversation died, we were left to continue on, watching the aquamarine Polish sky bring out the lustre of the surrounding agriculture.

“I know, he’s a Pakistani in Poland who speaks average Polish at best, it’s weird,” my friend had said, tapping at the keyboard to find airline tickets. “But he’s paying for us to go and paying for us to work. So we might as well go.”

I was glad I’d come. We were sleeping in the attic of a barn, but I’d never slept better. I was reliably informed that this was not the real face of rural Poland but a result of him demolishing his house two days before he arrived. There was a lot that had been proclaimed to me as if it was unassailable. Living here was like living without science. But there were upsides; there were moments that seemed unpleasant in conception, but turned out to be calming. Like these massages.

He was a little man with a little head, and I dwarfed him by at least half a foot; so it was not difficult to position my hands correctly, enough so that the novice swirls I pressed against his hairbed were not too uncomfortable. He seemed to radiate calm while I massaged his head – as if I was bringing him a taste of Nirvana. When he fell asleep, inevitably lulled by the sitar music he had playing out of his stereo, I would leave, gentler and quieter for the effort. I did not have to say anything for him to know that my English bones were softer than when I had arrived.

November

I had never been the type to get cold easily; it wasn't some kind of environmental factor, any Siberian upbringing or frozen Scottish winter - it was just how I functioned, wearing my thin jumpers year-round, regardless of hail or sleet. When I was fourteen I bought a sleek black coat and wore it every day; I looked three years older, and dowdy, but I liked it that way; I thought my lack of fashion showed a commitment to my studies.

On the last day, I fumbled around on the floor and found my coat. There was a packet of these disgusting random continental cigarettes I'd bought on autopilot three days earlier. I pushed myself off of the bed as gently as possible, drifting to the open french doors that let in the North Sea wind. There was always something honest about winter to me - you got to see the trees' real shape, the contour of each building - and in ice, your own reflection. Actually, I preferred Autumn; it was like Winter's undramatic cousin, heralding the onset of death with a quiet, respectful sweep of leaves across a Hamburg pavement. I couldn't say what had brought us both here, of all places, except coincidence.

He lay across a waterbed that belonged to neither of us, asleep. The party had ended hours ago, and a pale blue-grey light was beginning to spread across the Binnenalster, calling the residents back to life. It was a very rich friend of a friend's apartment, and it was better than the view I had - of the back of a restaurant called (in a magnificent display of Dummdeutsch) "Empire of Doner und Kebab". We'd laughed about it, but their kebabs were fantastic, and when I flirted enough with Karl on Saturdays, he'd throw in as much Coke Zero as I wanted, as if my virtue could be bought for two litres of caffeine free. For some reason, I wasn't hungover - probably the cold, which would've been very disappointed with a malingerer.

I checked my watch and exhaled my smoke like a chimney, watching it drift, staggering, off of the balcony. I needed to wash my face - I could feel the make-up congealing on me - and so I only stuck around for a few minutes before finding the nearest bathroom (occupied by a sleeping Dutchman I knew from lectures who, thankfully, only filled a bath). The water helped. I liked the sensation of being awake in a building full of sleeping bodies. It felt like being awake before the creation of the world, in my own private universe. I lingered on my way back to our room, taking in the view from every window, as if I'd never be here again. When I came back, he was still asleep on the bed, his torso bare to the cold.

I wasn't impractical enough to bother preparing that much, since I'd hardly be expected to dress like a Queen, but I still brushed my hair and changed my clothes perfunctorily, hoping the new ones would smell less of vodka and cheap (and very dodgy) Bulgarian wine. I checked my watch again, and then found the cupboard, hoisting a holdall out of it with the few clothes I had left. Hanna had gotten most of the swag, Carlotta my kettle, since she'd made more coffee in it than I had. It was vaguely depressing to see my whole life reduced to a holdall. That and six hundred euros.

"Karel?"
His dark fringe twitched slightly, a frown escaping across his skinny brow. "Nnh?"
"Half an hour."
His eyes opened a fraction more, letting the same pale blue-grey light hit his equally pale blue-grey eyes. Slavic eyes, I'd called them. He had said I had read too much sentimental Russian literature, and he was probably right. It wasn't as if he needed to be here. By any accounts, two weeks wasn't enough time to...to make airport-taking commitments. To be up when I was on the morning I left.

But then, I think both of us realised there had been a shift. Something about the way we didn't talk, about the way we could spend hours in silence - two weeks was both enough and cruelly not enough. Ours was something that required physical presence. It was as if both of us were standing mute on each side of an hourglass, trying not to look at the sand. Two weeks wasn't enough to pin our lives on, not logically - but we could feel ourselves doing it, in the glancing eye contact he gave me as I stirred my milky tea, in the cerebral British game shows we watched via skype on my sister's TV - Only Connect and University Challenge every tuesday night for the last (very unromantic) year, utterly silent except to give short, curt answers, as if giving them too enthusiastically would be bragging.

We needed longer to make sure. But we didn't have it. We weren't the types to say I love you before it was unnecessary, but there needed to be something to hold onto in our minds, intellectually - as if conceptualising each others' limbs would make them solid.

"Karel."
"Mm?"
"We should skype."

He nodded. I took the 10:37 flight, Ryanair.