The Third Reel E-Book

S. J. Naudé

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Scott Pack: Books of the Year 2018 Shortlisted for The Sunday Times Literary Awards (South Africa) Twenty-two-year-old Etienne is studying film in London, having fled conscription in his native South Africa. It is 1986, the time of Thatcher, anti-apartheid campaigns and Aids, but also of postmodern art, post-punk rock, and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Adrift in a city cast in shadow, he falls in love with a German artist while living in derelict artists' communes. When Etienne finds the first of three reels of a German film from the 1930s, he begins searching for the missing reels, a project that turns into an obsession when his lover disappears in Berlin. It is while navigating this city divided by the Wall that Etienne gradually pieces together the history of a small group of Jewish film makers in Nazi Germany. It is a desperate quest amid complications that pull him back to the present and to South Africa. However, his search for the missing film continues. Ambitious and cosmopolitan, the material of S. J. Naudé's The Third Reel is as disparate as the cities in which the book is set. Architecture, cinematography, sex, music, illness, loss and love all collide in this exquisitely wrought, deeply affecting novel.

Leseprobe

THE THIRD REEL

by

S. J. NAUDÉ

SYNOPSIS

Twenty-two-year-old Etienne is studying film in London, having fled conscription in his native South Africa. It is 1986, the time of Thatcher, anti-apartheid campaigns and Aids, but also of postmodern art, post-punk rock, and Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Adrift in a city cast in shadow, he falls in love with a German artist while living in derelict artists’ communes.

When Etienne finds the first of three reels of a German film from the 1930s, he begins searching for the missing reels, a project that turns into an obsession when his lover disappears in Berlin. It is while navigating this city divided by the Wall that Etienne gradually pieces together the history of a small group of Jewish film makers in Nazi Germany.

It is a desperate quest amid complications that pull him back to the present and to South Africa. However, his search for the missing film continues.

Ambitious and cosmopolitan, the material of S. J. Naudé’sThe Third Reelis as disparate as the cities in which the book is set. Architecture, cinematography, sex, music, illness, loss and love all collide in this exquisitely wrought, deeply affecting novel.

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

‘I read this haunting and brilliant book in a white heat of wonder ...The Third Reelgives that rare excitement peculiar to great novels: the thrill of discovering a new and necessary world.’ —GARTH GREENWELL, author ofWhat Belongs to You

REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

‘Part thriller and mystery, a story of becoming oneself and then seeing oneself undone. This is a serious book that pulls the reader into realms that many of us are scared to venture Naudé has written a masterpiece of literature with an end that will leave you staring into the heart of light or darkness. But, mostly looking towards the light.’ —Cape Times

‘S. J. Naudé, who also wrote the much acclaimed Alphabet of Birds, has captured the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 80s perfectly: the squats, the depressing grey of London, the anti-apartheid campaigners, the beginning of HIV Aids and of people with big dreams and visions for a better world who join forces to make ends meet. The Third Reel is a complex novel with many layers and allegories. It is an unsettling book that will give you plenty to think about. However, it is compelling reading and is just as compulsive as Etienne’s search for the missing reel’ —BRIAN JOSS,The Gremlin

‘Reading this book I was thunderstruck, with all that it implies: humidity, lightning, sweat, frissons of fear, the commanding of attention. Look at me, hear me. Reading SJ Naudé’sThe Third Reelpinioned me throughout, exhausting, exhiliarating. It is a magnificent, brilliant feat of writing, visceral and unflinching, and marks the point at which Naudé moves to the front line of the best of South African writers … Few books in the past years have I thought of more highly, or affected me as much.”’ —BEVERLEY ROOS-MULLER,Cape Argus

‘A work that definitely pushes the boundaries of convention, hope and desire, it is written in an eminently readable and beautiful style … The story is intricate, ambitious and haunting. Reflective of the cities in which the book is set, you’ll relive the sights and smells of an era that was fraught with sex, music, illness, loss and love. The construction is that of a fine piece of architecture, brilliantly fashioned and held together, taking us on a step-by-step journey through all the rooms of the psyche … Without doubt a book of great literary standing and one that holds the reader in its thrall, never losing its grip on you.’ —BERYL EICHENBERGER,The Books Page

‘A magisterial novel … rarely have I been so captivated by an Afrikaans novel, so fascinated and impressed, kept so busy by it, even after a second read. With S J Naude’sThe Third Reel, we have a formidable new voice in Afrikaans, firmly established. The fact that he is writing in Afrikaans, and on the black wall of pessimism descending around us, takes one’s breath away -- and provides a peeping hole to the light beaming on the other shore.”’ —HELIZE VAN VUUREN,LitNet

‘To describe this novel as captivating would be a euphemism … People will be talking about this novel for a long time … With this book, Naudé’s talent as a writer is confirmed. In my view, it is one of the literary highlights of 2017.’ —DEWALD KOEN,Die Burger

‘Like all good art,The Third Reeldoes not conform to conventional expectations. It is a novel that is unsettling due to its uniqueness and delivers a real punch. It belongs on a shelf with the best Afrikaans novels.’ —NEIL COCHRANE,Rapport

The Third Reel

S. J. Naudé is the author of The Alphabet of Birds, a collection of short stories, and a novel, The Third Reel. His work is published in Afrikaans, English and Dutch. He studied at Cambridge University and Columbia Law School. He has won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize and a South African Literary Award, and was awarded the Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace Writing Grant for 2014. His work has appeared in Granta and journals in the United States, the Netherlands, and Italy. Having worked as a lawyer in New York and London for many years, he currently lives in Johannesburg.

For Pierre

Du warst mein Tod:

dich konnte ich halten,

während mir alles entfiel.

You were my death:

you I could hold

when all fell away from me.

—Paul Celan,Fadensonnen(1968)

I. REVOLUTION OF THE CHILDREN(London, April–December 1986)

Chapter i

When Etienne wakesup, a world map has been imprinted on him. Then the continents start moving and disintegrating: the shadows, it turns out, of cobwebs moving in the morning sun. Above him a ladder leads to a platform and large bronze bells hanging between beams. Next to him lies a sturdy body, hair spread over the pillow. He has kicked off the sheet; one knee is pulled up. Frank the New Zealander. Twenty-five, three years older than he.

In Pretoria, the city of his youth, Etienne used to visualise his awakening in a New City as a Blake drawing. An explosion of light and muscle power. Sunbeams fanning out, lightning shooting from dragon horns. At night, in the silence of the suburbs, he would open his book of Blake pictures across his knees. While the city was sleeping – bodies struck down in airless rooms like plague deaths – he wanted to fling open the curtains and invite visions of other cities into his bedroom.

Only in the military base outside the city was there life. He would close the book and think of soldiers on sentry duty. Of the intimacy of glowing cigarette tracks approaching each other in the dark, crossing and moving apart. As a child, he once visited the base’s hospital with a school friend whose father was a landmine victim just back from the border war. Etienne wasn’t allowed in the hospital room. He walked through the corridors and looked down at the anonymous barracks while trying to imagine his friend’s father without legs. At night in his room he would henceforth visualise rows of sleeping soldiers. Blake’s light, he reckoned, had the same temperature as the air around their grey beds.

That kind of heat was what he’d felt on his skin last night. In the morning hours, he and Frank had climbed the ladder to the wooden platform. Etienne leaned over towards a bell, touching the bronze. They were both naked. Frank – much larger than he – was behind him.

Frank stretched his fingers towards the bronze too, the hair in his armpit brushing against Etienne’s shoulder. ‘There are far more impressive ones. As a continent of bells, Europe is young. Eastern civilisations were far ahead of the West.’ Frank elaborated: about the Chinese history of bells, about Continental village festivals to inaugurate newly cast bells. About how, in England, casting pits would be dug in the church itself. Etienne was listening with his skin, to every little puff of breath in his neck.

Frank knocked against the bronze. ‘The waist.’ He flattened Etienne’s hand against the bell. ‘Made of copper and tin.’ He moved Etienne’s hand higher up. ‘The shoulder.’ Their hands slid down together. Etienne’s chest was now pressed against the bell; their fingers slipped underneath the lip. ‘And the clapper.’

By the time Frank was explaining bell-tuning methods, Etienne’s cheek was touching the cool metal. Frank was saying something about second partials, but his words floated in the tower like down. Etienne hardly heard Frank’s definitions of terms like ‘tierce’ and ‘quint’. Only the tone of his voice registered. Dense and dark, like the New Zealand soil of which Frank had told him earlier that evening. The clapper knocked against the bronze, made it sing. Etienne’s teeth and bones sang too.

Etienne and Frank had met earlier in the evening at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Amid the throng they spilled beer on each other, then, laughing, tried to wipe the drops from each other. Before long they were outside. Away from the drag queens on the little stage and the currents of men flowing as smoothly as honey inside. Only the pumping bass of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ could still be heard. Frank led him to a lawn behind the Tavern. ‘Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens,’ Frank said. On the railway viaduct nearby, train wheels screeched against tracks. The smell of garbage drifted over from the Tavern’s bins. ‘In the nineteenth century, everything looked different here: walking lanes for lovers, tightrope walkers, hot-air balloons, fireworks . . .’ Frank looked around with rising intensity, as if he could see right through1986. ‘Women with umbrellas. Dandies with pencil moustaches. Rococo and chinoiserie . . . And now? Just the trains. And parched grass.’ He took Etienne’s cheeks in his hands. ‘And you and I.’ Frank’s hands were callused; his hair fell over Etienne’s face as he kissed him. It didn’t surprise Etienne, the insistence of a man’s lips against his own for the first time.

They entered the tunnel under the viaduct, turned right in Lambeth Road, amid the fumes of buses and taxis. After ten minutes of walking, they stopped at an old church. ‘I live in the tower. And no hunchback jokes, please. I’m a campanologist.’ Frank read the question mark on Etienne’s face. ‘A bell-master. Someone who knows bells, who fixes and tunes them. And sometimes rings them.’ His hand was on the back of Etienne’s neck; he swung open the church door. ‘Welcome. And don’t be overcome by Protestant guilt. It hasn’t been a church for a long time. A museum of gardens these days.’ Etienne wasn’t too sober. He looked at the little hairs on Frank’s knuckles. They walked up the steep tower steps, the smell of church mould in his nose. Frank’s quarters consisted of a small room with a stone window. And, above their heads, the bells. Below them, the Thames: a black highway dividing the city.

Etienne exits the church, inhales the traffic fumes. Like the sulphuric smoke, he thinks, of Blake’s heavenly fires. Further down the street, he realises: Frank hasn’t rung the bells. Neither last night, nor this morning. And it is Sunday, after all. Not much of a bell-master, our Frank. Lying there spread-eagled while the sun draws musk from his body’s creases, the bells motionless. Wouldn’t it be simpler to mechanise the bells? Etienne wonders. It is the ’80s, after all.

A bell-ringer, nevertheless, with the loveliest round buttocks of all bell-ringers. When a shockwave of sound hits Etienne from behind, he stops. It is pure, like a bird singing for the first time. He turns around. The sound is emanating from the sun, which is shining fiercely behind the tower. Is Frank looking down at him while doing the ringing? Etienne smiles, lifts his hand in a blind salute, fist clenched.

He walks further. ‘A campanologist,’ he says out loud in the wind, shaking his head. The sun warms his shoulder blades; the bells keep ringing. Is this the kind of pealing that might once have welcomed a king back to London after a hunt in the countryside? An image appears in his mind’s eye: a procession of coaches entering the city and, behind them, horse-drawn carriages stacked with deer, slick with blood, horns interlocked like a primitive shelter of branches.

He closes his eyes, smiles as he walks. The bells keep sounding. At Vauxhall station, he turns and passes underneath the tracks, then turns right. He turns left in Vauxhall Grove, walks down to Bonnington Square. The bells’ rhythm is slowing in the distance. He opens No. 52’s front door, takes the stairs to the top. One by one the bells fall silent. Morning sun is pouring into his room. With his eyes fixed on the skylight, trying to recall if the tower can be seen from the roof, he crashes into his drum kit. ‘Fuck,’ he says in Afrikaans, silencing a resonating cymbal with his hand. He undresses in front of the mirror, looking at his new body. It might look like his old body, but every cell has been displaced. Silvery blood is pumping though his veins. There are bruises on his chest. But when he rubs them, they come off: bell soot. His skin is excited by the merest touch. Even when he almost touches it. His nerves are picking up the slightest distortions in the air.

His old flesh has had to yield to something harder, bronzelike. Something that can be polished to a cold sheen. He is ready for the New City. His body is a radar, his skin a new country, his heart a shiny machine.

Chapter 2

When Etienne arrivedin London in late April, fresh from the plane and Tube, suitcase in hand, he headed directly to the offices of The Committee on South African War Resistance, orcosawr. He had no contacts in the city. In South Africa he had known no one else who would consider dodging the draft. For his school and university friends, two years in the army were an opportunity to become a man, to do your part for the fatherland.

During his last year in university, Etienne wrote a letter to the End Conscription Campaign, or ecc. I would do anything to avoid going to the army. Do you have any advice for me?

The evening after he had posted the letter, his father summoned him to his study. Etienne got a scare, convinced his letter must have been intercepted. It turned out to be a vague conversation, amid gleaming wooden panelling, about Etienne’s future. Etienne was in his final year of engineering studies and was still living with his parents. ‘Remember, not only your own interests are at stake where career matters are concerned. A man must be able to support his familyandbe valuable to his country. The time has come to shake off the things of a child.’ His father referred to his own studies as an agricultural economist ‘in times when agriculture was decisive for the Afrikaner’s upliftment’.

Etienne looked his father in the eye. He wasn’t thinking of agricultural history, but of his history teacher. A Mister van Rooyen. Of his moustache and the knob in his nylon slacks. His buttocks sweating while he barked orders during cadet hours.

School cadets: a joint project by the military authorities and education department. Etienne had attended a school for boys. For years he and his classmates had to drill in the heat every Wednesday. The school grounds were temporarily militarised. Teachers were now in uniform, acutely aware of their rank. They had to march across the sports fields in shorts and shirts of brown canvas, sweat darkening armpits and buttock clefts. Van Rooyen was the leader of the pack, stars and stripes on his epaulettes. Afterwards he would shower and dress with the boys. ‘I’m with you all the way, guys. It’s looking good. Soldiers-in-training.’ Little muscle man, Van Rooyen: sweat smelling of conspiracy, bare feet on a concrete floor, scrotum being soaped up under a cold shower.

Now Etienne averted his gaze, mumbled something about skinny cows and rusty ploughs. His father ignored him. ‘What I’m saying is that one must have vision. Idealism running like a golden thread through everything you do.’ His father began his career as a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, but, after his years of student leadership and an early professorship, started making swift political progress. He was elected a member of the Volksraad, and later appointed deputy minister of agriculture. A young star in the Party.

Before he could be appointed a cabinet minister, his political career was nipped in the bud. The press release spoke about other opportunities that I could not refuse. Etienne knows there were murkier reasons. A letter was slipped under their front door one evening. When his father returned from a late meeting, there were whispered conversations, his mother crying. The light in the study shining all night. His father’s voice, urgent on the phone. Etienne never got to the bottom of the matter. In any event, this hardly broke his father’s stride. He was appointed head of the Land Bank, later chairman of an agricultural cooperative. Esteemed and successful, he now serves on various boards of directors: a bank, a life insurer, a tobacco company.

‘You would, of course, first have to complete your conscription after finishing your studies. That’s an honourable way of contributing to the greater good. You’ll quickly work your way up to officer status. I’ll whisper a word in the right people’s ears. But you’d have to show your mettle too. And after the army, I would urge you to do your master’s degree in business administration. A good start for the business world. And, in the long run, you’ll learn that whom you associate with is critical. The Organisation remains important.’ On his father’s desk was a bronze sculpture of a leopard pouncing on an impala. Like an action photo. ‘I shall introduce you to people. In time. Remember,’ he added, ‘clever young Afrikaner men have a special responsibility. Our freedom and survival in this country were bought at a high price, and are increasingly under pressure.’ Etienne became aware of the shape his bare soles were imprinting on the carpet’s deep pile. Bought at a hiiiigh price, he mocked in his mind, but resisted rolling his eyes.

‘One thing you now have to let go of is this nonsense about rock music.’ His father shook his head. ‘All the drum-playing. Child’s play. It doesn’t fit in with your future.’ His father looked up at the shelves, as if he was trying to find his next sentence in a book. For a few moments he closed his lids, his eyeballs moving behind them. He stroked his hair, smiling stiffly. He opened his diary, found a date a few months ahead. ‘How about you and I go hunting for once? Go and shoot ourselves a few springboks. In the Kalahari. I have a friend with a farm.’ His voice had become hoarse; he cleared his throat. ‘We’ll get to know each other again. Out there in the veld.’ It wasn’t the first time his father had tried to arrange a hunting trip. Etienne gazed at him past the fine engravings in the bronze where the leopard’s claws were tearing into impala skin. He was taken aback by the hunger in his father’s eyes, the neediness with which he was trying to find something recognisable in his son.

The ecc didn’t write back. A man called Etienne: ‘Better not to write things down.’ First there were a few suspicious questions; his Afrikaans surname – Nieuwenhuis – didn’t help. An explication of the principles of pacifism followed. And of available options. How it would help others if he stayed on in the country as a conscientious objector. ‘It started with a few courageous individuals, but the ranks are growing. Ultimately they won’t be able to prosecute everyone; the whole system will start collaps—’

‘Practical advice,’ Etienne said, ‘is all I need. I want to go to London. As soon as possible.’ The man lost interest. He provided cosawr’s London contact detail, wished Etienne the best and ended the conversation.

In one respect his father was right. It was time to grow up. A month later Etienne was in the departure hall of Jan Smuts airport.

He thinks back to his arrival in London, like an orphan with his old-fashioned suitcase. He went directly to cosawr’s office, where Ben, a beautiful Jewish Johannesburger, referred him to one Miss Jackson when Etienne told him that he had brought very little money with him. She had a rambling old Victorian house in Kilburn, Ben explained, where she let rooms for a song to young South African men. Everyone in her boarding house was a draft dodger. Not one of them could go back home.

‘She almost never turns anyone away. And for the first month or two one stays for free.’ Ben also gave him information about applying for asylum; they would assist him. And he handed Etienne a small-format magazine: Resister, the paper of the anti-conscription movement.

He took the Tube to Kilburn. Miss Jackson opened the front door in a free-flowing tie-dye dress, linen scarf around her neck, breasts like pendulums. He complimented her on the scarf. ‘Mexican,’ she said. She didn’t invite him in; they kept standing in the entrance hall. Young men came and went. One or two greeted him in passing. Etienne glanced at them. He could see how Miss Jackson gauged his gaze. He gauged her too, this mother for sensitive souls who had escaped Angola and the burning townships: young bodies from the south, their fresh skins still sun-darkened for their first few months in the north.

Etienne enquired about accommodation options. She remarked: ‘What an interesting accent!’ She looked at his pale stalk of a body, at his straight black hair. ‘It is unusual, but I’m afraid every room here is currently occupied . . .’

As consolation prize she introduced him to one of her lodgers. Brent. A Capetonian, a sociologist who had studied at uct. The only trace remaining of the southern sun was a spray of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His hair was thin and dull red, his chin long. Brent took him to a little café in Kilburn High Road. Brent spoke to him about ‘the Cause’, about the illegal occupation of South-West Africa (Namibia, as he referred to it), about the war. The militarisation of South African society. The sacrifices of courageous individuals. He wanted Etienne to become involved in the London anti-apartheid structures.

Etienne looked at Brent’s loose t-shirt, at the drooping corners of his mouth. ‘Do you perhaps know of a place where I can stay?’

When the waitress brought their cups, she spilled milky tea on Etienne’s suitcase. Brent looked intently at Etienne. ‘Do you agree that we, with our privileges and our education, have a duty? That we are uniquely positioned to effect change? The world’s eyes are on South Africa. Now more than ever.’

Etienne looked at Brent’s Adam’s apple. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His eyes were hardly focusing; his skin was sticky. ‘Education?’ He thought of Mister van Rooyen’s buttocks, of his physics lecturer’s golden-framed spectacles. ‘I’ve barely had one. And, in any event, hardly gained any wisdom from it.’

They walked back to Miss Jackson’s place. Under Moroccan light shades in the lounge, Brent made a phone call to an acquaintance in a squat in Vauxhall. ‘You’ll like him. Patrick. A Jamaican. He says there’s always room at their place, especially for someone who’s escaped the South African fascists’ clutches.’

When he arrived in Bonnington Square, south of the Thames, No. 52 in Brent’s handwrit­ing on a piece of paper in his hand, the front door was wide open. He knocked nevertheless. No sign of life. He entered. The house smelled of stale incense and boiled vegetables. In a communal living room, there were cushions on the wooden floor. He went up the stairs. On the first floor a door was standing ajar. Sweet vapours emanated from the room, and reggae from a boom box. Etienne peered in. ‘Hey, man,’ someone said from a cloud of smoke. Etienne just nodded. ‘I’m Patrick. Make yourself at home. Try the attic room. There’s a bed. I think.’ He didn’t move from his mattress. ‘And by the way, respect, man.’ The respect, Etienne realised after a few moments, related to their shared disdain for the fascists in the distant south.

In the top room there was a futon under a sloping ceiling with a skylight. Etienne opened it, stuck his head out. Outside was a flat roof and, a few storeys down, a little park or public garden. There was no cupboard, but there was a corner for his drums that he had shipped before his departure from South Africa. He could now, at last, provide a delivery address to the shipping firm. He rolled his shoulders in their sockets, loosening up. Soon he would feel the drumsticks against his palms again.

When he returns from Frank’s church tower, two weeks after his arrival, there is a letter on his futon. Protea stamps, the address in his father’s handwriting. Strong upward lines, kinks crossing and twisting like lightning. The line under United Kingdom almost cuts through the envelope. He curses his mother. Shortly after his arrival he had sent her a telegram with his address. It started with dont show to dad stop. His father must have put her under enormous pressure.

Etienne closes the door, sits down on his futon in the morning sun. He opens the letter. It will not affect him, he resolves. But as he reads, something starts twisting in his chest. The closing paragraphs read:

And I won’t send you a cent. If you want to go and live in a grey city, far from your own people, don’t expect sympathy from me. If you run away like a coward from your duty to defend your country – after I’d paid for your studies, and in your final year! – let the British support you. Go and queue for the dole. Or do some manual labour. Go and work with your hands, like a Bantu.

Do you have any inkling of the damage you are doing to my reputation? What a scandal it is to have you as my son? If I had known what you were planning, I would have handed you over to the military police myself.

Now, Etienne thinks, I am on my own. ‘Good,’ he says out loud. He doesn’t recognise the sound of his own voice. He has the sense of something plunging inside him, like in a house where things are toppling from shelves and cupboards.

Chapter 3

Apart from Patrick,there are two Brits and a Belgian in No. 52. Etienne rarely sees them. He has had to get used to doors that don’t lock, and to residents of the Square drifting freely through rooms. Here you have no property. You don’t belong to anyone, and no one belongs to you. Everyone has access to everyone else, and to each other’s possessions. Nothing is forbidden or compulsory. No one has any claims. He likes it. One big free-floating body. A pond in which one can swim around unencumbered. No one making rules, no one in control.

The drum kit has arrived. That, he hopes, will remain his. And his passport, as long as he needs it. His application for asylum is in process. It is scorching him, the green booklet he carries around in his underpants. A tainted document, a brand mark next to the scrotum. As soon as he can, he will cast off his origins like a worn piece of clothing.

He concentrates on shaking off his accent. Soon he starts succeeding. He pricks up his ears, imitates others. Patrick remarks that he hardly sounds like a South Londoner, rather like a bbc newsreader. In the evenings Patrick’s marijuana smoke drifts up to him where he is practising his sentences under the skylight. Words and syllables. Phrases. Over and over: pronunciation, tone, cadence.

He has to getpastthings – this is how he thinks of his project here. Like overtaking vehicles on a highway. Past Mister van Rooyen with his sweaty buttocks, past the chunk of bronze violence on his father’s desk, past his mother’s eyes and past the people of theeccandcosawr. Not to say anything about Miss Jackson and Brent. And he wants to empty his mind of his studies in South Africa: the proofs he could always memorise so easily, the plans and diagrams he could draw so precisely. How strange that, despite all the years spent bent over his engineering textbooks, such a deep rift kept yawning between him and the signs on those pages. They are like a strange machine in his hands, those terms and formulae. He wants to drop that machine, let it shatter into solenoids and resistors.

The week after their first meeting, Etienne spends hours with Frank in his tower. The summer afternoons are long. Silver sweat soaking the sheets inside, the silver river flowing outside. The Thames’s currents alternate rhythmically, violently with the tides. And in the cool early evenings they wander through the city. Everywhere Frank elaborates on how things once were. In 1850. Or 1750. Places where pontoons used to cross the river. Or where executions once took place. The site of the city’s first sewage works. He strips the city away, layer by layer.

Soon Etienne realises: he is not the only one for whom the bells are tolled. He hears them ringing at other times. A sound like a flare in the night. ‘Jesus,’ Patrick says one morning, wandering around in a dressing gown, hands covering his ears. ‘That fucker in the tower again. Can’t he stop announcing his conquests to the entire world?’ A dagger in Etienne’s side. Patrick observes him with a sly eye. ‘You too, hey? You’re also a tower visitor?’ He shakes his head, the dreadlocks swaying. ‘For you it’s a summer of first loves. That guy . . . He’s known lots of seasons, man.’ He inhales smoke. ‘He’s gathering a congregation. To worship his arse.’

Etienne starts withdrawing in Frank’s company. He observes him, listens to his damp voice. Everywhere the monologue accompanies him; everything in the city is secret code for something else. Etienne is tiring of all the information about bygone things. There is enough that is new here. Frank – his New Zealand rugby legs and wealth of black hair – is here; the rest of him is dispersed over the centuries. As the enthusiasm of Etienne’s reception starts waning, the speeches become fewer.

There are other noises in London, Etienne thinks, than those emanating from Frank’s tower. The two of them still sometimes intertwine in the tower. But Frank is like a parent killing a child in its sleep with sheer body weight, like someone in a violent coma. When the bells ring, Etienne’s heart no longer kicks fiercely in response.

The houses in the Square vary in their degrees of dilapidation. The inhabitants are constantly at work. Basins, tiles and cement are bartered. Old gas ovens and fridges rattle on trolleys in the streets. Trees are planted: in little gardens behind houses, in the community garden, on pavements. People build wooden sculptures and set them alight when parties end. Everywhere violins and flutes sound. Bands practise: late punk, British or Irish folk, guys whacking engine parts. There is a café where inhabitants, now including Etienne, take turns cooking. Ingredients come from gardens in the Square. Anyone may eat there for free.

No. 37 is used as a bar. The house was grazed by a German bomb in the ’40s. Part of the roof is missing; of most interior walls just wooden skeletons are left. In the back garden, amid the tall grass, there are rusty sculptures, welded together from car parts. Late at night, No. 37 is a refuge; here you will always find people drinking beer. A fire burns constantly in the black marble fireplace, irrespective of the weather. You are simultaneously inside and outside. Under the greenish London sky, drinkers project their silences at each other. Or talk incessantly through the night. The conversations have an undercurrent of revolution. The parliament building across the river is the focus of anger and resistance.

Nothing is stolen in the Square. Things circulate, though, flowing from high to low concentration. Some houses are densely packed with canvases, found objects, rubbish, pots of paint, clay, photographs, old newspapers. Works of art don’t survive for long. They are given away, or taken. Briefly exhibited in rooms, taken apart, sawn into pieces. Lovers make pieces for each other, then destroy them with fire or a garden fork when the relationship sours. Or leave them in the rain until the paint washes away.

One afternoon Etienne hears music outside. He looks out: people congregating in the community garden. All women. An orchestra playing medieval music, people singing and picnicking. He darts down the stairs, goes outside and joins them. A German woman with reticent shoulders offers him cheese and bread. The cheese is from the Bavarian village that she hails from. Her name is Hilde. She wants to know where Etienne comes from, what brought him here. His accent, he realises, is still betraying him. He gives a vague answer.

She tells Etienne about Bonnington Square. In the ’70s, she explains, the Square was cordoned off; houses were to be demolished. She and her lover were among the first people to move into a house here. They cut the wire fencing and slipped in. It was an inhospitable place: windows had been bricked up, pipes and cables pulled out, sewage pipes blocked with concrete. It looked like German cities after the war. Houses often had no doors; just a few had electricity and water. Gradually places were made more habitable. Brick by brick, window frame by window frame. ‘In the beginning,’ she says, ‘there were only a few of us.’ She tells about smoke rising through collapsed roofs on winter days. About rooms in which people would sleep in rows on mats. Like rats. ‘Now it’s home,’ she says. ‘Or almost.’

He moves on, past herb and vegetable gardens. He speaks to Glenda. She is from Glasgow. She is agitating; her voice is vehement, her r s brutal. Even though she is speaking loudly above the orchestra, he has to strain his ears to decipher the accent. ‘We’ll secede! Decolonise the Square, shut it off against the chaos. And when Thatcher sends her henchmen, we’ll block the streets. And then it’s fucking war.’ She imagines the scene out loud: barricades of furniture and mattresses, shouting, petrol bombs. ‘Total resistance,’ she says. And in the same breath: ‘We’ll make a forest of this place.’ She looks at the garden. ‘I’ve been planting trees for years. Look at my palms.’ She shows her calluses, speaking softly now. ‘We wanted to bring intimacy,’ she says, bending down and touching the leaves of a sapling. ‘Tenderness and filtered light.’ The trees will envelop the Square in shadows, that she swears: ‘Like the shade of my lover’s body, like her inner thighs in the London spring.’ They will make the Square invisible to the exploiters, to the enemies in the parliament and the City. These promises aren’t made only to Etienne but to the entire city. Etienne imagines a furious forest from a Scottish woman’s fingers: tree roots that crack open the streets and lift foundations, branches pushing at walls. Breaking and protecting. A revolution of the plants.

Hilde joins them. She has an unusually long upper body, Etienne notices. She is Glenda’s lover, it turns out, of the tender spring thighs. In her gentle German village voice she tells how they are mobilising, how they are resisting eviction. ‘Do you want to get involved? Help us to fend off the wolves?’ Etienne smiles evasively.

Chapter 4

Every day, inthe early afternoon, a 1960s social housing block casts a long shadow over No. 52. When the column creeps closer, Etienne’s room smells of wet concrete.

In such a shadowy hour he clambers through the skylight onto the flat roof. In the community garden people often practise street art: juggling, unicycle riding, acrobatics. Today a dark-blond man is sitting in front of a bed of herbs, sketching. Etienne observes him. The shadow shifts, moves along; the sun bakes down on their shoulder blades. The draftsman takes off his shirt, Etienne too. The man’s pencil stops. He looks up at Etienne; Etienne grins and goes inside. For a while he sits on his futon, his heart beating wildly; then he goes down the stairs.

‘May I see?’ Etienne asks, approaching the man in the garden. He hesitates, then holds out the drawing. A herb plant, freshly extracted from the soil. Precise, photorealistic. Each hair on the stem is reproduced, each grain of sand on the roots.

Etienne asks his name. ‘Aodhan.’ An Irishman, judging by the accent. Blue eyes. Glacier blue, the light of a dead planet. Aodhan closes his sketchbook. They look at each other, walk out into the street together. At the turn-off to Vauxhall Grove they vacillate. The corners of Aodhan’s mouth move. Come, he indicates with his head.

They stop in front of the very block that casts a shadow over Etienne’s room in the afternoons. The front door has been kicked off its hinges. Aodhan enters, Etienne follows. The ammonia smell of urine enters his nostrils. They climb the stairs to the sixteenth floor, walk down the corridor. Etienne looks into empty flats; through the windows one catches glimpses of the city.

‘The Council has condemned the place,’ Aodhan says. ‘It’s supposedly unsafe. There are only a few of us here. Junkies, mostly. Not a happy hippy circle like you guys in the Square.’ From the corridor an electrical cord leads into Aodhan’s space. Inside are a mattress and cardboard boxes, a television in a corner. The floor is bare concrete. Below them lies the city. A bird of prey against a cliff, Etienne thinks, looking at Aodhan.

Against one wall, there are huge drawings of architects’ schemes. Buildings, city plans. On the opposite wall there are dozens of a4 sheets with botanical sketches. Seeds, leaves and flowers. In striking detail. ‘Do you work as an architect? Or a botanist?’

‘My work is what you see on the walls.’ Aodhan points through the window to office blocks on the Thames’s north bank. People are streaming across Vauxhall Bridge. ‘Who wants to work with the briefcase and umbrella zombies?’ He turns to Etienne. ‘So, what do you do?’

‘Music. Drummer. Looking for a new band at the moment.’

Aodhan approaches the architectural drawings. ‘The best music,’ he says, ‘is the silence of concrete.’ He fetches a book, opens it. Pictures of massive buildings in cities that Etienne didn’t even know existed: Tbilisi, Yalta, Belgrade, Kagawa. All the photographs were taken in winter. Bunkers. Fortresses. Government offices. Abandoned hotels. Snow against concrete. Close-ups of concrete seams, of veils of rust and damp. Aodhan’s eyes are becoming ever bluer. He starts talking about brutalist architecture. About crushing weight, shapes that erase the sun. He is trembling, Etienne notices, while telling Etienne about concrete cities so heavy that they push the earth out of its orbit . . .

Aodhan stops mid-sentence. His fingers lock around Etienne’s arms, pull him closer. Aodhan’s hands are hard, as if he is digging for a stony secret. Up here, all obstacles fall away. It is as if all the city’s doors and windows are being blown open by a sudden blast.

When they are spent, they stand naked in front of the plant drawings. Aodhan presses a finger on the pencil drawings, uttering the Latin name of each. Etienne asks about a few that remain unnamed. ‘New sketches. Plants that only exist on paper. Without names. I make them up.’ The detail is as precise as before, as if drawn for a botanical encyclopaedia. Hard to imagine, Etienne thinks, that there is no source species. A while ago he started drawing plants that he had never seen, Aodhan explains. A visual imitation of the sound of the Latin names. And then he started making up his own species. He takes out more sheets of paper from a box. ‘Here’s my latest series. A collection of carnivorous plants. They exist only in sketches.’

Etienne touches the rough paper, looks at the menacing plants. Here, leaves and stems have transformed into traps and jaws. He should introduce Aodhan to Glenda with her compost fingers, Etienne thinks. Aodhan could provide the fictitious plants for a green dome covering the Square. A seam of meat-eating flowers as bulwark against the wolves of capital.

Aodhan wants to take Etienne on a tour of the world’s most brutal architecture. ‘But,’ he says, ‘let’s begin in London.’

When they meet in Vauxhall Grove at dawn, the church bells are tolling. Etienne’s fingers are itching. He remembers the dampness underneath the thick hair on Frank’s neck.

Sometimes they take the Underground; mostly they walk. They go up to concrete colossuses, look up: Finsbury Estate, the Barbican, Hyde Park Barracks, Brunswick Centre, Sampson House, Balfron Tower. Etienne shades his eyes with his hand when gazing at Trellick Tower’s grey cube houses high up in the sky. The lift tower is set apart from the building, just lightly connected with it by means of concrete bridges.

‘The material is refusing,’ Aodhan declaims. ‘It is repudiating everything. Cities in the sky,’ he continues. ‘Foundationless.’ Etienne isn’t sure he is following any longer. ‘Hanging clusters. Suspended over nothing. Staircases and walkways to nowhere . . . The material as god,’ Aodhan says. ‘Emptiness in density. No interior space. Cool exterior, absolute compression on the inside.’ They walk until late in the evening. Aodhan’s eyes gleam like steel. Back on the sixteenth floor in Vauxhall, he sits studying his Polaroid photos of the buildings. ‘Temples,’ he mumbles, but not to Etienne, ‘that are denying birth and death, and heaven and hell . . .’ Etienne is so tired that he hardly hears the church bells when he slips into sleep.

Another concrete tour. Birmingham this time. And then on to Gateshead. All in one day. At daybreak they are sitting on a train. Aodhan is trembling. ‘One has to touch the structures,’ he says. He goes on about the New Street train signal building, which geometrically renounces the world. The Birmingham Central Library, which cheats gravity. And then the highlight in Gateshead: Trinity Square car park. Here they will secretly spend the night. Etienne thinks of the condemned building in London where he now spends his nights with Aodhan. Before long it will probably be imploded while they are sleeping . . . What is he getting himself into?

Aodhan notices nothing but the blunt buildings. Etienne tires of all the concrete, keeps his eye on Aodhan’s swarthy body instead: short and compact, almost hairless. Unreceptive like a chunk of stone. There are moments, during sex, when Etienne reaches the moister parts of Aodhan’s body, and possibilities glisten in the dampness. But overall he remains hard and closed off, like his beloved concrete.

They complete their tour of hulking buildings, and, unexpectedly, Etienne also falls under their spell. Aodhan takes them back to the station; they board a train to Gateshead. During the three hours or so of the journey, neither of them speaks.

When the two of them approach the Trinity Square car park late afternoon, Etienne’s hands start trembling. In the dusk, the black structure towers above everything else. They enter, walk up the helix of the access ramp to the very top.

They sit down on the concrete edge, feet dangling over the edge. It is the last place in England where anyone would want to sleep, Etienne thinks. Even the homeless avoid it. Aodhan’s voice is unsteady. ‘It’s as ugly as I had hoped, this place. And so hostile. It’s fucking with my head, giving me a rock-hard fucking erection.’ They wait until it is emptied of cars, until the concrete echoes quieten down and the city lights shine brightly. Then they walk around. Aodhan almost breaks Etienne’s arms when he suddenly pins him against a pillar. Etienne shoves him away, but Aodhan fights back. They struggle out of their trousers. Aodhan’s body spasms; their semen simultaneously splashes against the raw concrete. They sit down, feet over the edge, look breathlessly out over the city. Aodhan drags a finger through a trail of semen, tastes it, rubs it into the concrete.

When Etienne seeks warmth from Aodhan a little later, he pushes him away. ‘Don’t spoil everything,’ Aodhan says and gets up. He keeps walking under the fluorescent lights, from one pocket of light to the next. He moves around all night long while Etienne is trying to sleep with his cheek against a cold wall. From time to time Aodhan switches on his flashlight, lets the beam slip against grey walls.

Etienne finds consolation back in the Square, in this green hollow within the city’s vortex. Here where seeds germinate and herbs grow almost audibly, where one always smells fires. Where you can seek out other inhabitants’ silences in front of No. 37’s marble hearth.

When he returns after his and Aodhan’s tour, an envelope with his mother’s handwriting on it is waiting in his room. He holds it for a while before opening it. The tone of the letter – her first – is odd. As if nothing is wrong, as if Etienne is on holiday. He looks closely at the handwriting. It is hers. He reads on. There is news about plants in his parents’ garden that have succumbed to frost. About a cousin’s baby. A high-school rugby match. She doesn’t ask a single question.

He frowns. She knows he has no interest in rugby.

The next day there is another letter, bearing the stamp of a different post office. From his mother again. More recognisably her: breathless, full of short or half sentences. Like a hunted animal. She had written three previous letters, she explains; she gave them to his father to have his secretary post them at the office. She started suspecting his father was intercepting them. One afternoon she discovered the unmailed envelopes in his study. She confronted him. (He probably blamed her for his escape, Etienne thinks.) Now he has undertaken to actually post the letters, but she is convinced he reads them first. Henceforth, she will send parallel streams of letters: official ones for his father’s eyes, and secret ones for Etienne’s. The latter she will post herself.

The secret letter explains that she wants to send him money, but doesn’t have access to the bank accounts. And currency control is a problem too. Nobody and nothing can get out of here, she writes, not even money. My heart is broken about all of this. About you. She wants to come for a visit. His father is refusing to fund it. She doesn’t really know whether Etienne would welcome this either. She probes, asks the questions mothers ask: does he have a decent place to stay? Is he warm? (Doesn’t she know it is summer in the northern hemisphere?) Is he eating healthy food? And enough of it?

Something is amiss in her explanation of the double stream of letters. Is she in fact writing the ‘normal’ letters for her own sake? Is she finding consolation in the correspondence that pretends everything is just fine?

From now on he will create two piles. One for the false letters, another for the real ones. He will no longer open the former. And he will decide in due course whether to respond to the latter.

Chapter 5

Since the arrivalof Etienne’s drums,he has been increasingly aware of the band scene. Everywhere bands are looking for members: in the Square’s café, in the Vauxhall Tavern, in the bar at No.37. There are handwritten advertisements on noticeboards: for guitarists, vocalists, drummers. Bands practise in the community garden or in musty Victorian pubs. Etienne jams with a few of them. Shortly before his departure from Pretoria, Etienne started hearing folky rock everywhere. Spiced up with political protest lyrics in Afrikaans. There it was a novelty. Subversive. Here, such music is considered mainstream American, middle-aged. In Pretoria he was in a band with university friends. Sometimes they tried to sound like Bruce Springsteen, then again like Bob Dylan or Rodriguez. They were the only band on campus. At night they would practise in a laboratory – the vocalist was majoring in plant sciences. Etienne’s fellow band members had no desire to listen to his obscure British bands. He had to import the albums that he read about in foreign music magazines, at great expense. In the afternoons – wandering across his parents’ dead winter lawn, Walkman headphones covering his ears – he searched for new sounds.

Here pretty much everyone joins a band at age thirteen. There are folk singers. Wannabe punk rockers. Monotone synth-pop types. Folk one has to have in the genes. Punk rock isn’t synchronised with Etienne’s speed. Too frenetic, although he likes the notion that it requires courage rather than talent. The electronic brigade he admires from a distance – the synthesisers remind him too much of the piano playing of his school days that he gave up so resolutely. This is what gets the most playtime in the Vauxhall Tavern, where he now spends his evenings: the New Romantics. Japan, Ultravox, Soft Cell, Bronski Beat, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode. And anything angry or experimental. The Smiths is a favourite. Morrissey’s ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ always features.

One evening he talks to a man in the Tavern. He has a heart-shaped face and shiny lashes. He is small, with perfect skin. Someone else approaches Etienne shortly afterwards, asks breathlessly: ‘How do you know him?’

‘Who?’

‘Marc Almond.’ So that’s who he was talking to, the singer of the band Soft Cell. The next day he goes out and buys two Soft Cell records, containing songs that are often played in the Tavern: The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom.

On another night he speaks to a man who introduces himself as Jimmy Somerville. Him Etienne recognises. Formerly the vocalist of Bronski Beat. These days The Communards. ‘Where are you from?’ Somerville asks. He looks like a teenager, his face sharp and intense. The devil-may-care shrug of his shoulders demands attention. His head is tilted in sullen vulnerability.

‘Finland,’ Etienne says on the spur of the moment. ‘We are decades behind you when it comes to music.’ They stand in each other’s breath, drinking beer. The music is becoming louder. Somerville presses a palm against Etienne’s lower back when leaning in to talk to him. His lips brush against Etienne’s ear; he hooks a thumb in Etienne’s belt. Somerville looks him straight in the eye. His expression is in turn teasing, challenging. He is dancing and wriggling while he speaks. Etienne asks questions. About music, the scene in London.

Somerville starts asking his own questions. ‘Your accent doesn’t quite sound Finnish to me,’ he says.

‘I have to go,’ Etienne says abruptly. ‘I’m flying back to Helsinki early tomorrow.’ When Etienne extracts himself, Somerville pouts. When Etienne looks back from the exit, he is standing there among the men, hand stretched out towards Etienne. Etienne’s heart keeps racing on his way back home.

The next day he buys Bronski Beat’s album The Age of Consent. On the inside cover, in a kind of treatise on gay rights, he reads that the legal age for sex between men in Britain is twenty-one, for heterosexuals sixteen. He is a criminal in South Africa, Etienne thinks, and would have been a criminal here too had he arrived a year or two earlier. It excites him, makes his scrotum tighten.

He is lying on his futon, sweating. On a turntable that was left behind by a housemate, the record is playing. He holds his ear close to the black blade of the edge. He should have stroked Somerville’s buzz cut when he had the chance. Should have pressed himself against his restless hips and buttocks.

Etienne hones in on the forlornness of Somerville’s song ‘Smalltown Boy’. He returns the needle to the beginning of the track. Over and over again. In the electric moments before the first notes, Somerville’s boyish face appears before him. With both hands resting on his kicking erection, Etienne listens to the ominous falsetto while the shadow of Aodhan’s building is creeping across the skylight. The needle drifts to the end. Each rotation makes it jerk back into the groove: scratch, scratch, scratch.

There are guys who want to start gay bands, and are looking exclusively for gay musicians. Etienne likes the idea, but the canvassers’ talents are limited. Bands come and go, sometimes within days. Names change, members change. It is like ancient slime from which something still has to emerge and take shape, this pond of South London amateur bands. In the spirit of punk, everyone can play or sing. Etienne envies them their blind self-confidence. But perhaps, he thinks, greater doubt would improve the music. He keeps his options open.