INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

brickwork streaked with the residue of traffic fumes, their roofs steeply pitched, like praying hands, covered in moss. My room at number 13 Davenport Street is ten feet by twelve feet, a little larger than the average English prison cell. The room contains a single bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table. The bed is against the far wall, with its head beneath the window. The wardrobe, which is of the cheap, mass-produced variety that can be purchased in its constituent pieces and assembled in situ , stands at the foot of the bed. There is just enough space between it and the wardrobe to open the doors. The dressing table is kidney-shaped, with a discoloured oval mirror, a monstrosity whose past is likely as long and as obscure as the history of the house itself. When I first came to live in this room I hated the dressing table with an insidious, soul-destroying mania that seemed to suck on my sanity as a parasitical, venomous worm might eat away at my brain. It was as if this outmoded and ugly piece of furniture had been placed there deliberately, to mock me, an emblem of the hopelessness of my situation.
    In time our relationship changed. I began to see myself and the dressing table as comrades, as fellow survivors. I look after it now as a treasured possession, my own sacred monster. I have washed the faded damask curtains that hide its bow legs, I keep the glass top dusted, I polish the mirror. At times I have even tried to picture Marielena seated before it, combing her hair like Sheherazade, studying her features in the clouded glass.
    She glares at me from the corner of one eye.
    You’ve got to be joking, comrade.
    The best thing about my room at 13 Davenport Street is that no one is likely to burst into it and try to kill me. I have yet to find the words to describe the full extent of my journey to this place and time. Perhaps Marielena is right – the sudden absence of imminent danger makes me feel like a fraud.
    I choose to write instead about this room. I write in the manner of Robbe-Grillet, of Perec and Touissant, the titans and tyrants of the nouveau roman who were so fashionable among my peer group at the university. I describe the objects on the dressing table (a box of matches, a packet of biscuits, the key to this room), the blanket on the bed (the money I could not afford to spend but squandered anyway, simply because the blanket’s colours reminded me so painfully of home), the damp spot on the wall (if you gaze at it long enough and hard enough you begin to believe in its existence as a pocket universe). I write in English, trying it on for size like some uncomfortable new garment, a piece of clothing I would not have chosen for myself but reach for now in the absence of an alternative. I imagine the clothes they give you in prison might feel like this.
    My vocal command of English is still hesitant, but it is improving. Even if Marielena returns to me eventually, the person she embraces will be a different man.

    I write my journal for as long as I can bear to and then I go out. I have found it best not to stay in the room for too long, even if – as so often – the weather is unsuitable for walking. It is too easy to imagine losing the courage and the motivation to leave it at all.
    What is a city, when the bland pursuits of getting and spending are all but closed off to you? Shops – even the most commonplace of high street clothing stores, the most utilitarian of kitchen suppliers, electrical repair stores – begin to take on the aspect of mythical emporia, their merchandise the impossible relics of the deep past or the far future. In the dying light of early evening, the denizens of this alien universe guffaw and cavort. As I pass through the concrete canyon of the shopping precinct, I see a group of young people whooping and groaning, excitable primates that they are, in front of the supersize flat-screen TV in one of the windows. There is a football match in progress, but their noise seems to