Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

We’re standing in front of a shop window with all sorts of shoes on display, a tiny pair right at the front. I look at my watch. In eight hours, I’ll be picking up my bags and disappearing. ‘It’s late,’ she says.

‘It’s late,’ I say and look at the tiny pair of shoes and walk on slowly. I haven’t smoked all evening and I take out my pack and light one up. I turn around, she’s still standing in the light of the shop window, and I take a drag at my cigarette, then I flick it against the wall. A few small sparks fall onto the pavement with the cigarette. She comes towards me slowly. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ I say. ‘Then I have to go to the hotel.’

‘Do you know where I live now?’ I nod. ‘How come …?’

‘Someone told me.’ We keep walking. It’s not far to her flat, and I walk very slowly and stop at every shop window, even the ones only displaying ring binders.

‘If you really stay here …’

‘I’m sure it’ll work out,’ I say, standing in front of a shop; nothing to see in this one, just the counter at the back of the room, long and dark.

‘There are plenty of flats free round my way, if you like, I know someone …’

‘Let’s … let’s not talk about it now.’ I look into the shop, then we walk on, the road empty, just a couple of cars driving past now and then, and I see the lights of the cars and the lights of the lamps on the edge of the street, and then we’re standing outside her house. I light up a cigarette. ‘You smoke?’

‘Sometimes,’ I say.

‘Have you got one for me?’ I want to give her mine, I’m holding it away from me between my thumb and forefinger with the lit tip downwards, but then I push it back between my lips and hold the box out to her. She takes one out and I give her a light.

‘I used to smoke too,’ she says, ‘a while ago now, though.’

She smokes hastily and quickly, and blows the smoke away to one side. ‘When …’

‘Soon,’ I say. ‘Maybe tomorrow even, I have to sort out a couple of things, work and the hotel and that.’

‘I … I’m so glad we met up again, that you’re …’

‘Yes,’ I say, and I want to lean in to her but then I see the taxi driving slowly down the road, the sign on the roof glowing yellow.

I raise my arm and wave, twice, three times, and it comes over slowly and halts. The window’s wound down, and I say, ‘I’ll just be a minute.’

I throw away my cigarette, lean up close to her and say, ‘Look after yourself,’ and I lay my hand on her hair for just a moment. She doesn’t say anything, and I turn away and walk over to the taxi. At first I want to sit in the front, but then I get into the back. ‘The station,’ I say. That’s where my bag is, in a locker. I’ll sit down on a bench and wait for the morning and the train.

All the nights on trains. That’s what I still think of, often. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m back on the trains again, riding the rails from town to town with Blondie. Outside, all the lights, us drinking beer or whisky, usually in silence, rarely making plans, counting up our money.

The conductor looks tired; there’s a man asleep on his seat, his mouth gaping. Blondie looks at me and says, ‘When the time comes … when I’ve got them … don’t ever leave me alone too long with those bastards.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’ll always look after you.’ We were passing through some small town or other. We looked out at the lights in silence.

I met him out in Torgau. He was doing time for something petty, a bit of theft, bit of drugs, that kind of thing.

He was queer, I could tell straight away, not that I usually had an eye for his type. I’d often sat in bars and pubs in strange towns and wondered why there wasn’t a single woman in there, and sometimes one of the guys had bought me a beer, and when I caught on the whole thing sometimes ended down at the police station — but not always, and that wasn’t why I was in Torgau.

I can’t remember how I noticed, and I don’t know where exactly it was that I first saw him. Probably in the corridor but maybe in the yard or the gym. It can’t have been the way he walked, he walked pretty normally actually, not swaying his arse or anything. It was something about his face, about the way he looked at you. It wasn’t that he looked like a woman or acted all girly; he came across as very young, almost like a child, even though he was maybe in his mid, late twenties, and he had this smile … I think if you looked at his smile for too long you got scared, especially where we were, that you’d have to go to him, hug him or something.

I’d met a good few queers in the three jails I’d been in. I’d seen prison gays who couldn’t hold out all the years but only loved women outside. Prison-marriages, lags who’d shared a cell for years and quarrelled about nothing all day long like old grey couples but forgot about it all every night. I’d seen guys get beaten up for looking at someone ‘queer’; usually they hadn’t done anything at all. But in all the years I’d never made friends with any of them. I’d made sure I never spent too much time with them — no good for your reputation.

It was strange. I saw him and I knew right away that he’d never go to bed with a woman, not a chance. Later on he told me it had happened a couple of times actually, on drugs, and that he’d felt so cold every time that he’d had to get up and leave right in the middle.

His hair. I always remember his hair: blond, shiny and pale at his temples; it looked almost like he was starting to go white there. Someone grabbed him by the hair; that was the first time I stood directly in front of him. He had quite long hair, flopping over his forehead. ‘Let him go,’ I said. He peered at me through one eye; the guy’s arm was covering his other eye, the guy holding him by the hair. ‘You keep out of it, it’s none of your fucking business.’

And the guy was right, it was none of my fucking business, but once I’d stopped and said ‘Let him go’ — even though I didn’t know what it was all about, even though I knew the queer wasn’t clean and needed to powder his nose now and then and that kind of thing always made for trouble sooner or later — I’d held out my hand to him and I couldn’t just take it back again, not any more. A couple of weeks beforehand my cellmate had tried to kill himself, wanted to top himself. ‘Let him go.’

I knew the guy wouldn’t let him go. I could have tried persuading him for hours, maybe then a snout might have come along and the guy would have acted like he was putting his arm round Blondie, like they were the best of friends having a wee chat in the corridor. And then it all went very fast, the guy was on the floor and Blondie said ‘Ouch,’ and put his hands on his head, and I saw that the guy was gripping a few hairs between his fingers, rolling to the wall, his arm splayed away from his body. I’d caught him unawares.

I shoved Blondie away from him, pushed him along the corridor, a couple of guys standing by their doors watching us, and I said, ‘Go on, piss off back to your cell.’

He nodded, still holding his head as he walked down the corridor. He hadn’t said thanks or anything, he’d just nodded and left, but when he’d peered at me through one eye, the guy’s arm across his face, there’d been something in his eye … In bed that evening I thought a lot about it, there was something there, as if he’d known at that moment that we’d be riding the rails, later on.

‘You a gay-lover, are you?’ I’d known it’d happen and it’d stay that way, for the rest of my time. ‘Gay-lover, eh? You doing her, are you?’ I hit out, pummelled into the guys, tried to beat the shit out of them before they beat it out of me. I felt time passing more and more slowly. Six months to go.