Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

“This we know. Black and yellow,” Mladen says, and she can tell he’s quite drunk too. Nick says:

“Right. And guess who used to hang out there? Beside me and some other students, I mean. Guess who was in there every time I went inside there. Every fucking time.”

They all look at him, smile and slightly shake their heads. Nick waits, then leans forwards, like he’s confiding some great secret to them:

“Traffic wardens!”

“Traffic what?” Gábina doesn’t get it. It’s hard to tell if she’s as drunk as the other two but if Heidi had to bet one way or the other she’d go for yes. Nick raises his voice and throws his hands up:

“Traffic wardens! Wardens! They go around slapping tickets on your windscreen if you park on yellow lines. Oh, right, you won’t know this, none of you, but in London they wear uniforms of black and yellow. Black with yellow stripes. There’s, I don’t know, ten, twenty cafés to choose from and they go for the one with the black-and-yellow floor. It’s as though the colour drew them there. In fact, I think it did. And what’s even better, the … the icing — no, the fucking cherry on the cake is this, right: once I saw a bee there, black-and-yellow stripy bumblebee, crawling on a traffic warden’s hat which he’d put on the table top beside his coffee. Isn’t that just …”

His eyes are watering. The memory seems to make him really happy. Heidi likes Nick, ultimately. For all that he annoys her sometimes, he’s good people. And then the whole Ivan’s-death episode has brought them closer, with them crying together afterwards and all that. Not close enough for her to tell him that she’s late, though. It’s almost two weeks now. She’s been late like this before, but only when she was like fifteen, sixteen; since then she’s been regular, give a day or two either way. It’s got to be Ivan: she hasn’t screwed anyone else recently. There was that drunken fumble with Jeffrey at the teachers’ party in November, lasted about thirty seconds as she recalls, but she’s been on since then — about ten days before the party at Jean-Luc’s in fact, which makes it all the more likely that some little Ivan-tadpole’s gone and hit home. After all those years of Sex-Ed and condoms handed out in coffee rooms and bars in little baskets like free candy, or stuck to the back of student newspapers which all had AIDS ads in them anyway on every second page — after all that, not to use a condom: what was she thinking? Although actually she knows exactly how her mind was working when she let him come in unwrapped: all that stuff, her logic went, the HIV and pregnancy and herpes and VD — that shit was to do with the scene stateside. It was something that lived in that whole milieu (that’s a good word, she thinks as Nick talks about bumblebees some more: not one she uses much, at all in fact; she should try sometime to slip it in) — that milieu of high-school dating, rock concerts and proms, then frat parties and clubs; it was native to that scene, just like green swamp monsters are native to B-movies from the Fifties, can’t exist outside them. So when she left Vermont and flew here trying to memorize that line about not breakfasting eagerly which she still hasn’t gotten to use, she left that milieu and its slimy pitfalls for a different world, the Magic Kingdom, where sex won’t give you AIDS or get you pregnant …

But then, the weird thing is, she’s not freaked out. She’s thinking about it non-stop right now, sure, but the point is that it’s not making her unhappy. What it makes her feel is what Ivan made her feel in the first place: real. Even when he blew her out by fucking that ugly Czech bitch Klárá ( then he used a condom: she must have insisted, had her own whole repertoire, another nice word she should use sometime, of images associating sex and danger, gleaned from the equivalent Sex-Ed films they showed in Czech high schools, like Young Comrades Don’t Get the Clap or whatever), it gave her a sense of living , not this half-ass wanting or pretending trip the English teachers and in fact come to think of it virtually every American of her age and race and class she’s ever met are so caught up in. So with Ivan’s death this realness has been multiplied, and exponentially: that she had sex with a Czech artist, a pretty well-known one at that, who’s since died violently and in weird circumstances is, wow! And then to think she might be carrying this realness with her, in her …

Nick’s got something brewing. He’s watching the waiter as he places vodkas down in front of Mladen on the table, and his eyes are kind of glinting still. Eventually he says to the waiter, in English:

“You’re ambiguous, you are,” and bursts out laughing. The waiter turns around and goes, but Nick’s still laughing at his joke, which is what it turns out to be, as he explains to them: “I mean amphibious. Penguins are amphibious. Land and water. Oh Heidi, before I forget: that casserole.”

And he reaches behind him for the shopping bag, which movement makes his chair tip backwards and it’s only because Gábina catches it and pushes it forwards that it doesn’t go right over. He passes her the shopping bag across the table, holding it up high so that it doesn’t knock the glasses over. Heidi takes it, rests it on her knees and draws the plastic sides back to find a red cooking pot inside. Nick says:

“The address is in it. I should have done it but I never … you know — I had all this stuff to do and getting my ticket and packing, and Gábina had her as a teacher back in primary school and would be all embarrassed. Just say you can’t stay when you go there. Make up some appointment or something, or she’ll force you to stay for hours and hours and cook for you and believe me,” he leans towards her now and tries to fix her with his gaze, only his eyes are kind of wonky, “you don’t want to eat what this dame cooks.” And he’s off laughing again, so much that his head drops down into his hands, like he was weeping. She asks him:

“Do you have my glasses?” and Nick says:

“Oh yes! Of course. They’re right here. Somewhere.” He fiddles around in all his bags, eventually finds them and gives them back to her. She takes off her prescription shades and puts them on and for the first time in a month is able to see things that aren’t fucking purple. Gábina picks the shades up from the table top and tries them on: Heidi can see the whole café swim in oily purple on both sides of this beautiful girl’s nose: all the other beautiful women on the walls and the people at other tables and herself and Nick and Mladen, visually fascinating , yeah right. Roger never did film her like he said he would when they went up that staircase. Fucker. Mladen’s saying:

“Nick, you must go now. You’ll miss your train,” and Nick brings his head up and says:

“Oh yeah, train. Fuck the train. I’ll fly there. Let’s all go to the airport. We can have a drink there too,” and Mladen says:

“Sasha is meeting you from this train,” and Nick says:

“I forgot that. But answer me this, Mladen, if you’re so clever: how am I going to recognize him?”

Mladen’s unfazed by this: he just smiles, reaches into his jacket and pulls out his wallet, flips it open on the table and pulls out a photograph:

“Sasha Danilovich.”

Nick, Gábina and Heidi all crane forwards to scope the photo out. This Sasha’s sitting on a lawn in front of a concrete building and oh boy is he cute: what is it with these Yugoslavians? Why’s it them all killing one another when they’re so damn gorgeous? It should be some ugly fuckers like the Germans or the Poles wiping themselves out of the gene pool. He’s quite tall: although he’s sitting you can tell that — not because of his legs, which are foreshortened, but by his chest and shoulders which rise up all proud and masculine, and he’s got an angular, well-defined face and dark-brown hair. Heidi finds herself wishing that it was her going to Amsterdam and not Nick right now although she’s not really in the mood for travelling. She’s been feeling kind of queasy, hasn’t touched her vodka; just looking at it makes her feel more queasy since it reminds her of that party where she passed out on the stuff and then threw up. Mladen’s telling Nick he spoke to Sasha yesterday and Sasha’s all cool for him to stay but that the situation where he’s living is precarious: