Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

He strikes up a pose. Heidi knows he models for the students at the art school, and has dropped heavy hints that if he could take her with him one day and let her meet the professor and ask him if he wanted a young female model she’d be seriously grateful. But Nick told her each time: “If you want to see my dick you’ll have to take my trousers off yourself,” sometimes adding “With your teeth” which ha ha asshole you try teaching English see if it’s much fun. Nick’s pointing at this black guy Tyrone’s gun and telling a story about some guy with a gun who cheated him at cards on a boat and there was buzzing or humming like the feedback through these amps or something; she’s not really listening, sort of zoning out what with the music and her lack of interest in Nick’s story. She wishes Nick would go away now because Roger’s not really talking to her any more: well, he’s talking to her — but without any flirtiness or exclusivity now. Anton starts telling a joke about sailors on a boat, how they all need new uniforms — a joke Heidi’s heard before; she decides to go crack another beer, but still waits for the punchline before asking Roger, Mladen, Anton and Nick if they want one too …

Back in the antechamber the Cal stoners have abandoned their guitars and started rolling joints. The duvet is still writhing and contorting. More people are arriving through the main door — including Barbara, one of Heidi’s students. She’s got a man with her: an older man, looks slightly surly as he holds her arm; must be her boyfriend. Barbara’s kind of cute in a Czech way: wide face, all innocent. She sees Heidi, says hello and introduces the man she’s with as Jaromír.

“How come you’re here?” asks Heidi.

“I’ve model for Jean-Luc,” says Barbara.

“Modelled,” Heidi corrects her — then, feeling stupid for doing that, corrects her own line: “Models, everywhere! You guys want a beer?”

Barbara says yes; Jaromír nods surlily.

“You can put your coats over with those canvases and all that wood,” Heidi tells them as she opens the fridge door and pulls out — how many? There’s Roger, Mladen, Nick, herself, that Anton and now these two, equals seven. She’s passing the beers on up to Barbara when there’s a sudden muffled but still pretty loud shriek from somewhere in the antechamber. She spins round: it came from underneath the duvet, and it wasn’t a shriek of pleasure. A second shriek, this time less a shriek than the sound of someone being seriously angry, comes out, followed by a string of Czech curses, words she doesn’t need to have come across in Colloquial to get their gist …

Everyone in the antechamber’s turned round to look at the duvet, which now springs back, carried from beneath by Ivan Maňásek who’s scrambling to his feet as a girl in a leopard-skin, or possibly fake-leopard-skin, coat emerges, also from beneath the duvet, shouting at him. Her coat is spread open; her shirt is too, and her skirt has ridden right up to her waist. No sooner has Ivan Maňásek sprung to a safe distance than her fist swings at him, missing his nose by less than an inch. He finds his feet and, duvet still wrapped round his shoulders, leaves the scene of whatever terrible thing he’s just done and moves towards the fridge. The girl shouts something after him, then looks down at her shirt and pulls it back to cover up her tits, which at least are still in their bra, and then does ditto for her legs with her skirt. The stoners, directly above her, are in fits of laughter. She hears them, rises to her feet and looks like she’s fixing to swing at them too — then, seeing they’ve got five-skinners lit up in their hands, changes her attitude and asks one of them for a draw, which, well, he’d have to be quite brave to say no to this request …

Ivan Maňásek comes over to Heidi and is obviously asking for a beer, but in a complicated Czech way which she can’t quite find the grammar to respond to. She starts the whole exchange again with straightforward vocab and asks him if he wants a beer — but of course Ivan Maňásek switches to English and says:

“I would be sincerely grateful if you were to see your way to passing to me one of those beers.”

She finds this very funny: him speaking so formally and even bowing his head slightly as he says this with his hair totally dishevelled, wrapped in a duvet. She pulls out one for him and says:

“I know you. I’m Heidi, a friend of Nick. We met in your place once.”

Ivan Maňásek bows his head again and says:

“A pleasure to meet you again.”

He takes her hand and kisses it, giving it some tongue to boot, which wow , then looks back at the girl he’s been doing whatever it was to, who’s now sitting with the stoners on the bars.

“A bitch!” he says. “Czech girls have no imagination.”

She figures that it would be wisest to get him out of the same space as this girl, hands him three more beers and says:

“Can you help me carry these to the main room? They’re for Nick and some other people.”

“Nick is here?” Ivan Maňásek asks. “That English scoundrel opts to vandalize my magazines!” Then he adds, bowing yet again: “Of course. My pleasure.”

So she’s wondering, in light of I.M.’s serious apparent animosity towards Nick, if she will be preventing a violent encounter after all by shepherding him away from this Czech girl with no imagination apparently, or just doing the old frying-pan/fire transfer — but hey, too late now. They make their way back through the door and into the main room, where the real band from the radio is playing a song called Spin Me Round — or at least she figures it must be called this because these are the only words in the whole song. Roger’s got a new film rolling which shows Earth from space, which is appropriate because, well, Earth spins: she figures they must have planned which songs to play with which film. Nick sees I.M., takes his hand and threads it into Anton’s and says:

“Ivan, this is Anton — Anton, Ivan.” He ducks nimbly round the duvet, takes his beer and asks her:

“So who was it then? We never got our sweepstake going.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “Some girl with no imagination. And a leopard-skin coat.”

“Angelika!” Nick, Mladen and Roger chime in chorus, mouths wide open.

“No imagination?” Roger asks.

She shrugs. Barbara and Jaromír have wandered into the main room. Mladen waves to them and they come over: turns out he knows Barbara too. He introduces them to Roger, Nick and her and so she starts explaining how they’ve just met in the antechamber and how Barbara’s her pupil, although even as she says this she wishes she could also say she was her model or her film-making assistant or something more, you know, authentic . Mladen starts talking to Jaromír and her, but she’s not really listening to him because she’s looking over Jaromír’s shoulder back at Roger and Barbara who are chatting away together. Roger’s standing considerably closer to Barbara than he was to her — and, get this, he’s asking her if she’ll let him film her talking about something. He even rolls out the same “visually fascinating” line, which, asshole, could at least have changed the terminology … Noticing she’s watching them, he flips over into Czech, then leads Barbara off towards the middle of the room where all these other people are dancing, leaving Mladen to man the projector.

Heidi doesn’t want to turn around and watch them because that would be obvious and pretty humiliating, so she fixes her attention on the bedsheet screen. It’s showing a lunar capsule falling down towards the ocean, which is kind of how she feels right now. The band have gone into a Grateful Dead-type wall-of-noise mode, which she wonders how anyone can dance to — although she kind of has this question answered as Jaromír suddenly stops listening to Mladen and strides over to the dancing area. She can’t resist turning round now: turns out Barbara and Roger have progressed beyond the dancing stage and are now making out. Jaromír cuts in and pushes them apart and Roger goes flying backwards into a chair in front of one of these unfinished paintings, the Ithacus-Somethingstein one — a chair on which a small paint can is sitting; the can jumps up and splats its contents across the canvas. And now Jaromír is coming at Roger again, but fortunately Michael the big-toothed older guy apparently in advertising steps in to prevent him, several other people step in too, and Tyrone waves his pistol in the air shouting: