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  “I’m always good,” she smiled.

  “You’ve got a beautiful smile,” I said.

  She nodded and looked at Viktor. I looked at him too. Viktor was photographing his bit of road and not looking around anymore.

  “He’s strange,” I said. “But nice. And smart.”

  “That happens,” she agreed. “So, I came to give you something.”

  “From anyone I know?”

  “It’s not from anyone… It’s from me.” She shook her red hair.

  “Oho. Cool! What is it?”

  “It’s this: follow the ray of light.”

  “Follow the ray of light. Me?”

  “Yes. You. Will you?”

  “I will. For sure.”

  “Good.” She winked at me. “See you?”

  “See you!”

  She turned around and walked away. I looked at her as she left, watching her light step, when Viktor comes up to me, putting his camera away.

  “And so, did you promise?”

  I look at him bewildered.

  “You know, you promised so they’d let you go?”

  “Oh… Yeah, it was nothing. Not to climb up on roofs any more.”

  “Makes sense. A good request, a good promise. Can’t say fairer than that. And have you been breaking the promise?”

  I laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. And we walked on.

  • • •

  I braked sharply and stopped by the side of the road. I looked in the mirror. Yep, it was her, no doubt. Oxana. We studied together, were kind of friends. And now she’s hitching a ride on the side of the road in some godforsaken village miles from town. I reverse up to her. She stares at me unsure, smiles, and jumps in the car.

  “Hi, Max! Let’s go!”

  “Where to?”

  “It’s not about going to somewhere, but getting away from somewhere! Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to my gran and grandad’s, out in the west.”

  “Fantastic! Step on it!”

  I step on it. The car accelerates quickly and the village is left behind.

  “So what are you doing here?” I ask, looking in the mirror.

  “Oh, yeah, there…” Oxana waved her hand. “That’s another.”

  “You’ve been out?”

  “Sort of. Went out. Last night to Mango with the girls.”

  “And where are the girls?”

  “The girls stayed in Mango. And I met this guy. Looked like a normal guy. He bought me some drinks, we had a dance, we went for it basically. And then went for a ride.”

  “A ride, then...”

  “Sort of. You know. Hugs and kisses. Nothing more – I’d sobered up a bit by then. We came here in the end. It was late, around three. And then he started trying it on. And I didn’t really fancy him that much. And he then says, “in this case, you can go and sleep outside.”

  “And did you..?”

  “Well, I had to sleep with him. And then I got up and wanted to leave. So I went out onto the side of the road.”

  “What, you slept with him just like that?”

  “What do you mean just like that? Well, yeah – I went for it. What was I supposed to do, sleep in a field? And I’d been drinking.”

  For some reason I was mortally offended by this, even though five minutes ago this Oxana wouldn’t even have crossed my mind, I was driving around doing my own thing, and I’d never felt anything in particular for her. But still, it’s kind of scummy. You know, why sleep with these bastards? She can string a guy along for a month and then sleep with someone we all know is a jerk, just because that’s how it turns out. Scummy…

  “Lady F would never have done that!”

  “Who?”

  “It’s not important… So what are you going to do now?”

  “About what?”

  “About him. Are you going to go out with him or what?”

  “Have you lost your mind?! How could anyone go out with that jerk?!”

  “Then how could you sleep with him..?”

  “Listen, right now you sound exactly like my mum… Leave it! It’s in the past, I don’t want to talk about it. I spent the night with him and that’s that!”

  “And how long have you been dating Viktor? Two months, three?”

  “Bloody hell! So what? A few dates! I don’t fancy him!”

  “But you fancy this guy?”

  “Fancy him?! I hate him!”

  “Then why…?”

  “Right! Stop! Stop the car!”

  “I’ll take you to the next bus stop,” I said.

  I took her to the stop. We sat in silence. The sunset right then was beautiful, the clouds stained magenta.

  • • •

  Silence and solitude – I’m on the roof of the factory. The factory is shut, there’s no one around. I’ve been doing my usual rounds, walking round the large, empty premises. I’ve climbed up on the roof. It’s a tall building, about the same as an eight-storey block of flats. A corrugated iron garage times ten and you’ve got an idea of how it looks. A big green metal box with spots of rust.

  The view from up here is incredible. About two hundred metres away there is the river and the port. Even from here the boats seem huge and it’s very beautiful. The river really is deep blue, and not because the water is clean, but just because at this angle it reflects the sky, and the sky today doesn’t have a single cloud in it. This all seems very real, very present. Pure colours, big shapes. It’s when you look at this that it seems like you can touch reality. Not an object as reality, but reality as an object.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I say out loud.

  “What exactly?” Lady F asks.

  I say nothing for a little while.

  “Have I gone out of my mind?” I ask.

  “Literally or metaphorically?” Lady F asks with cautious interest.

  “Literally. Did I lose my mind there on the roof? Are you imaginary?”

  “No,” she replies with certainty.

  I turn round. As before, she’s wearing white clothes and sandals. There’s a fresh breeze up here, which gently shakes her auburn hair.

  “As far as I’m concerned I’m very real,” she continues, smiling. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well. You know why. You really could have met me there on the roof in the city but here… You couldn’t have got onto the site, not to mention the fact that you got up here without anyone noticing.”

  “And why not?” she asks, moving her arms akimbo. “I tread lightly.”

  “Snowy would’ve barked!” I reply.

  Lady F and I look down to where Snowy is sleeping in a patch of sunlight, a black spot in the middle of the tarmac plain.

  “Yeah and anyway, it would be strange,” I say with growing confidence, “to keep on appearing you would need to be following me constantly! And that’s why I’ve decided that I’ve imagined you.”

  “You’re flattering yourself!” She gets annoyed. “Believe me, I am very, very real. I am not at all a product of your imagination!”

  “Well, sorry.” I shrug my shoulders. “So what am I suppose to think?”

  “Don’t think,” she snaps. “I’m not just here for nothing, believe me. I’m not the creation of someone’s mind! And definitely not yours. Do you remember about the ray of light?”

  “I remember…”

  “Don’t forget! And here’s another thing for you. Remember this for me, OK?

  “OK…”

  “Red fives – a step to the right.”

  “What?!” I’m bemused.

  “Red fives – a step to the right,” she repeats patiently, as if she were explaining something entirely obvious.

 
; “I… I don’t understand.”

  “Then don’t understand. Just remember. I’ll say it again: for the time being you don’t need to think. Leave that for now, OK? Tell me instead what’s so hard for you to explain.”

  I hesitate, gathering my thoughts.

  “Well, it’s hard to explain!.. I’ll just give it a go.”

  She waits, looking at me with a smile. Stuttering occasionally, I start to explain.

  “I perceive the world in a very strange way. I didn’t get that at first. It’s hard to understand that your perception of the world is different, because you’ve got nothing to compare it to. It’s as if with one eye you see green as red. How would you know that you’re seeing the colour wrong? That is, how can you define the benchmark, when you’ve got no feedback apart from your own eyes? And anyway: how do you know that your green matches other people’s green? Suddenly what you see as green is in fact what other people see as red. What is green for you? The colour of leaves. You remember it, and all your life you’ve thought that that is what green is. But what if they’re actually red to other people? There’s no way of being sure, no way…”

  “Interesting,” said Lady F.

  She really was listening with interest.

  “So. Green is just a small example of this. Everything that you know and feel, you’ve only got from your personal experience. From the sound of a violin to the feeling of waking up. I realised a long time ago that I don’t perceive reality like everyone else. Probably up on that roof where we met. I understood it through some indirect pointers. I’d long suspected that something was wrong, but previously I just thought maybe I was just getting worked up about it. Like I just think about this more than I should. And recently I figured out – no, I really do see things differently. My perception works differently. I had the same sort of thing with my skin. You see, my skin gets irritated by woollen things. Basically anything that’s fluffy. I just can’t wear them, it’s horribly uncomfortable. I just want to tear it apart and throw it away, I just can’t stand it. And so on. All the time when I was a kid my mum, my grandma, my aunts they all insisted that this was all just nonsense, that I’d just made it up. “Everyone wears them, it just seems that way to you.” And I believed them. I was in agony, but I wore them. Then, I grew up, stopped wearing them, but still believed that I’d just invented this stupid problem. On some psychological level. And then – bang – when I was already grown-up I found out that my father had the exact same problem. Exactly the same. And I suddenly realised that really was what my skin was like. And that I hadn’t made up anything! That’s just how it was. That everyone feels a certain way and can wear wool, but I’m different. I can’t. For real, it’s not some psychological thing.”

  “That’s cute,” Lady F laughs. “That bit about the skin is cute! And what about reality?”

  “And reality is the same as my skin. I feel it differently. And just like then I thought that I just had some kind of mental issues. And that I feel the same thing as everyone else, but had just dreamed up some nonsense.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, I don’t. I realise that it really is different for me. Well, it might not be that I’m the only person like this, but my perception isn’t like other people’s. And that’s really hard to explain.”

  “Go on, try,” Lady F said. “I’m interested.”

  “I’ll try… You see, looking at all of this,” I motioned at the port and the river, “I see it all separately. Not like a landscape or a picture. But separately. The boat, and the river, and the waves, and the seagulls. And I hear like that too. And feel. Completely literally, as if it’s going on inside me. Without any physical laws linking everything together. As if inside me the zoom of a camera is aimed at everything simultaneously, and it all surges into me simultaneously. Even that tree.”

  I pointed to a willow in the distance and Lady F looked at it.

  “Because of that I don’t like cramped spaces, like dense forest for instance, and I really like it when there is flat ground and lots of sky. Because there’s not much useless extra stuff there, and what is there is big and meaningful. And when I’m alone, and there is a lot of this free space, then everything around seems like it’s suspended in my mind… it freezes! Like a drop of water which is about to burst, and I feel all of this inside me so strongly. I can sit like that for three hours. Like here now. And I don’t feel people. I don’t feel the links between them, their relationships. I don’t understand society and relationships as an additional layer of reality…

  “And do you like it that you see it that way?” Lady F asked seriously.

  I thought for a bit.

  “I don’t know. It’s just how it is. I like to feel the world around me at times like this. It’s so…”

  We sat in silence, watching the boats. Big, puffy clouds swam above the flat expanse of the river and were reflected in the water and this synchronicity fascinated me. The clouds were reflected in the water, but the boats weren’t reflected in the sky. Magic.

  “It’s mesmerizing…” I said.

  • • •

  Me and Oxana were sitting on a bench by the lake and rowing. I don’t know how we ended up together like this. We weren’t dating, and I wouldn’t really say that we were friends. It’s just we would somehow end up hanging out together every now and again. I didn’t feel any lyrical subtext to this, and it’s great when you have a friend who’s a girl and you don’t have to think about that kind of subtext. Useful even.

  At that moment I was giving Oxana an earful.

  “You know, how can you choose blokes like that..?” I asked. “Why do you lot, women, always go for such dickheads?”

  “It’s not that we go for them,” Oxana snapped back tiredly. “It just kind of happens by itself. With some guys it happens, with others it doesn’t, that’s it…”

  “But it’s just not right, you’ve got to see that!”

  “Give it a rest will you, Max! I’ve been hearing the same thing my whole life! Looks like I’ve got myself a mentor. There you are playing the family man and how long have you been single?! Anyway, how come you’ve latched on to me? You in love or something?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” I said. “It’s just so disappointing, so unfair. The more you treat women like dirt, the more they go for you. And if you start behaving like a normal human being, they lose interest immediately. I guess that’s the reason you carry on like you do, yeah?”

  “I don’t carry on like anything,” Oxana said sadly. “I’ve been telling you, it happens all by itself. I don’t even know how to explain it so it makes sense. You reckon that I am bad and everything I do is wrong. But, you know, I don’t have a choice about what I’m like. But really, I just try to be all good and wonderful. And even happy a little bit. But it ends up how it ends up.”

  “Have you tried thinking about what you do for a change?”

  “I’ve tried,” Oxana nods. “It ends up stupid. I always have this dilemma. If I think about it, then I end up unhappy. I mean, everything’s fine, but I completely loose interest and get so bored. And if I don’t think about it, then… all the same it ends badly, of course, but I do experience moments of happiness every now and again.”

  I turn round. Not much I can say to this. It’s her life.

  • • •

  How are cities born? There are theories, yes. Legends too. Sometimes there’s even some exact information about how a certain city came into being. Like, it was founded by some ancient king. Or the city was born as the result of the merger of several ancient settlements. Or it grew up around a small fortress. Or the opposite: barbarians came, sacked one city, swept it away, and built the next city right on top of the ruins of the old one.

  But I can’t bring myself to believe in all these theories. Even though I’m sure that the people who came up with them w
ere very smart and didn’t just pluck them out of the air.

  The way I see it the city is like a living organism. It grows on its own. It emerges, stretches out in fine lines, develops into a network of roads. It picks up homes and blocks like cells. The city brings itself up from lifeless material. And no sooner has it emerged than it begins to breathe, and everything that appears inside or outside the city is a part of it. Even you.

  That’s why all cities live by the same set of laws. Yes, each has its own unique face, soul, body. Cities are as different from each other as people. But draw a map of any city and take a good look at it and you’ll immediately start seeing common features, regions, patterns, as identical to each other as the organs of the human body in an anatomical atlas. These urban organisms live and breathe by one set of rules, just as human organisms live and breathe by one set of rules.

  A little fish in a coral reef doesn’t think too much about his role among the many thousands of subjects in this little underwater kingdom, but the inquiring mind of the scientist defined it long ago: if there were no reef, there would be no food for the fish, and therefore no fish itself, and the function of this fish is, let’s say, to be the reef paramedic, and to be food for eels. The fish could, obviously, leave the reef and go and die of hunger on its own or even end up in some collector’s aquarium and live a trouble-free life in comfort and luxury, but would this change the general laws governing existence in the reef? No.

  • • •

  Me and Victor are sitting on a concrete parapet above the pavement, drinking beer and swinging our legs over the edge. It’s not high up, about two metres, but the people walking down below seem tiny and look up at us despite themselves.

  There is an open can of salted peanuts between us and the beer is a little warm. The weather is good. Clouds, but no rain; not too hot, but not too cold, and today’s a day-off, and however you twist it, it’s all good.

  “I don’t like people,” I suddenly remark out of nowhere.

  “And do they like you..?” Viktor asks, logically.

  “I don’t know if they like me. But they don’t come all together. They come as individuals. And as individuals – some do, some don’t.”