Free Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick Page A

weapon. A comforter. Get caught by a bolster’s edge and it will excavate your face. Its blade will depress and fracture your skull. Yes, I was laughing because I had won, but I was crying because I might have killed that man. And I was shaking because he could have killed me.
    But now I think they were just playing rough. Rugby men, used to the scrum, bulked up by the weights machines. The boys swearing vengeance, one of them foaming, the father thinking it all over and, if he’s sensible, shrugging it off. Oh yeah. If he’s sensible. With his cologne on my skin.
    Â 
    When I enter, no one speaks but the room acknowledges me. Already I am a familiar and already I have my place, my back to the wall, my eye on the door. The barman puts a pint on the counter. I feel the cold beads of its industrial dew. The barman is another shaven man. Bulging, implacable. He smells of smoke, this man, and a few of the customers have cigarettes. It’s illegal of course, but so is the violence of their streets, the pills and wraps they deal here, up this track behind the car park, the render coming off the brick, the pipework oxidised in the salt air. The Seagull Room they call it, though there is no such name front or back. Yet its protocols are stern.
    Now seagulls I understand. They crowd the landfill. They harry one another for foodscraps. Even when a gull has swallowed a morsel its companions continue pursuit. They swoop on its vomit. They cry like the insane in the hospital in Naujoji Vilnia. But even seagulls, they say, are rarer now. Endangered species.
    What I pay for the one drink could buy me four in the Spar, the Sklep. But I like it here. Money is a problem but it’s not the only problem. And slowly, the routine begins, the regulars’ routine.
    Pancho’s in with his guitar. It’s good busking weather and has been all month. So Pancho’s flush. In more ways than one. Sometimes he even sings in here and is tolerated, a sixty-year old with a duct-taped guitar, the hair on him long and thin, a man in jeans and a denim shirt, a necklace, a bracelet, what few teeth he’s got left tobacco-stained.
    Pancho washed up here years ago and liked it enough to stop moving. I see him on the street and laugh and put some pennies in the open guitar case, a case with stickers of towns where he’s worked the streets. Torquay, Torbay, Saundersfoot they say. And all that’s left of that case’s turquoise silk is a rag around the rim.
    And Pancho will laugh too and go on with ‘Visions of Johanna’. Every verse of that song. His great song he calls it. His prodigious feat of memory. Or I’ll hear him tuning up on the gum-blistered pavement when I come out of the Sklep and then that line, the best line, the only line I listen to. How does it feel ? Pancho who maybe once had a voice, still believing in that line. Still asking the question and knowing its answer. That’s Pancho, who’ll tell me this morning what it’s like to be a rolling stone. And when he’s finished he might add his own story of what it is to sit on the dock with the night fishermen, to lie under the esp and breathe good Moroccan draw into the lungs. Right down until it’s too hot to hold. As if his body was full of sparks. Pancho who’s still asking how it feels. Cracking that word into four shiny pieces. Fee. Ee. Ee. Eel . Who should wash his hair. Maybe his shirt. Pancho with his caved-in chest. The only troubadour of this town.
    Roly’s in too. Strangely, I met him first on the street. I was doing what I do, I was watching the sea. Then this sports car hammers past, brakes, turns round. When it reached me it slowed and the boy in the front passenger seat shouted.
    You fucking shit, he shouted. You ignorant shit.
    Then the car speeded off again, did a handbrake turn and came back. A black Mazda. This time it was the driver who yelled.
    You shit. You bastard shit.
    I stared him in the eye.