Free Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick Page B

Seventeen maximum. Dark hair with blond streaks. Good-looking kid with Ray-Bans and a big gold necklace. In a wax-polished car. A car like a scarab. There’s money here, you see. Villas with high hedges. Personalised number plates. Oh yes. I noted the number.
    So I shrugged as if to say, you got the wrong person. But he shouted again, then gunned the Mazda down the straight road towards the beaches.
    That’s when Roly rolls up.
    Take no notice, he said. I know his parents. I’ll intercede.
    I liked that word. That intercede .
    No problem, I said.
    No, he said. It’s unacceptable behaviour. High spirits because their exams have just finished. They’re under pressure at this time of year. But a poor reflection. I hope they haven’t been drinking.
    And here’s Roly now. Who is certainly drinking. Roly holding court in the Seagull Room. The barman has taken the Dewar’s off its bracket on the wall and it waits at Roly’s elbow. His blazered elbow. Roly wears a striped cricket blazer and a red bow tie. Roly is a fat man and his white flannels are stained yellow. And yes, Roly is giving the room his rape stories. Roly knows a good deal about rape. He was once a lawyer and is now a bar-room barrister. His jury grins, winces. Or maybe Roly is an opera star and this his proscenium.
    The detail Roly provides is unsparing. The ambushes, the underwear. Every loving spoonful the perpetrators can squeeze out of themselves. Girls used like tissue paper. The eighty year olds accosted with broom handles.
    Madge sucks on her Rizla.
    Get off, she says. He’s making it up.
    If Madge was a candleflame you would expect her to go out. She is a happy-go-lucky anorexic, red haired, arms like fire tongs. She sits on a barstool and I can see the cracks in her heels and the dirt in those cracks, the dirt that I know will be there for the rest of her life.
    He’s making it up, she cackles. He’s never seen a minge since his poor old mother got rid. He hasn’t a clue. Have you Rolyo? Not a fucking clue.
    But as Roly subsides, no one else feels like talking. To me, they’re a predictable bunch. A postman with his loaded pouch, bundled letters tied with elastic bands, orders a second pint. A supermarket shelfstacker is sipping the own-brand vodka he brings in himself. Dullards, for the most part. Stammerers and twitchers. Porn-addled doleys. A roomful of ghosts on this July morning with the sun already hot on the tarmac and the light unbearable on the sea. And yet, for an hour, comrades of a sort. They will nod, each to each, on the street. They might even go to the same funerals.
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    At two minutes to nine I walk out to the car park and at nine Justin arrives with the van. The doors are open and Justin slows down but he doesn’t stop. I get in head first through the back.
    Now perhaps this is the best time to tell you about a mistake I’ve made. A mistake about my name. My first name is Nerys. When I arrived I didn’t know Nerys was a girl’s name in this part of the world. My mother called me Nerys after the river that flows through Vilnius. I hated it. My father hated it. But my mother insisted on Nerys as she insisted on few things in her life. I was her river god. I was the water spirit. That’s what she told me.
    Even back home it was difficult. My name felt wearisome. Sometimes it plagued me. If it had been up to my father, I would have been Andrius . A good masculine name. A warrior’s name. But my father was rarely at home. He worked in an office for the Communist Party and after work he sat in bars, smoking, drinking Bajoru. That’s all I know. I suppose he commanded a desk and moved papers about. That he spoke into a big black telephone. But if being called Nerys was a problem, having a father in the party in Vilnius was worse. When he died, I tried to atone. For being the son of a collaborator. Who ate sausage when the others ate bread. Who wore good