Teller #3

Teller A magazine of stories.

Issue #3

£ 7.00 $ 12.00 C 8.00

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Gurgaon: Call Centre Capital 4

by Chloe Dewe Mathews

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After a series of mishaps during a trip to India I followed a redirected package, and stumbled into Gurgaon by chance.

Unwittingly, I found the call centre capital of the world, the anonymous place we speak to when inquiring into local train timetables or new mobile phone deals.

Within fifteen years, this suburb of Delhi has been transformed from a set of muddy villages into a city of 1.4 million inhabitants. Cybercity, as it’s known, is now home to much of the young Indian talent who returned from overseas to profit from their country’s economic boom. Corporate business headquarters, manicured gated communities and enormous malls are coming to define the urban landscape of modern India.

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The Chaperone by Oliver Harris

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Early in August 1918 I was called to the Air Ministry, commissioned as a second lieutenant and told I would be going to No. 42 Squadron. ­I had been packed for days and I went home ­ and kissed my mother and jumped on the train.

I was in France the next morning. It seems incredible now, but in those days it was what you were waiting for.

A car had been sent for me, with a driver.

He was there on the dock as I disembarked, leaning against a model-T Ford.

‘Bienvenue,’ the driver said. ‘Cartwright, I presume. Jolly good. Harkins. Pleased to meet you.’

How he knew it was me, I don’t know.

I thought maybe someone had wired ahead with a description. It was all very mysterious.

Harkins was a ginger-haired chap; high-spirited.

‘I’m to be your chaperone,’ he said. ‘Take you to the front.’ He called his vehicle The Experimental and patted it on the bonnet.

‘Throw your bag in,’ he said. ‘No time to waste.’

We were out of Boulogne in an hour. I remember the clash of uniforms. It was the first time I’d been further than Margate. Most of the signs were down and the port was a sea of khaki.

We were practically the only motorised vehicle about but it was crowded with horses. Then we were on open road.

‘Have you any cigarettes?’ Harkins asked.

I offered my packet. I had three of them with me. Harkins slipped a cigarette out with nimble fingers. He snapped it in two and placed half in my mouth and waved a match flame beneath my nose.

‘Ah, here we are,’ he said a short while later.

‘You don’t mind if we stop for a moment?’

We stopped at a little estaminet in a town called Henneveux: pretty, a lot of pink houses.

Harkins said, ‘Oh, we’ll have some champagne.’ So he got a bottle of champagne and we finished it between us as he told me about France, all the chaps I’d meet and things I’d see.

‘How much money do you have?’ he asked.

I had some note from my father and aunt, but it was sterling.

‘I don’t have any French money,’ I said. I don’t think I’d even seen French money at that time. It simply hadn’t occurred to me.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘They take English money.’

This struck me as a strange and wonderful thing. There was something comforting about it.

‘Should I get us a glass?’ I said.

‘And some of those little sausages.’

So I went to the bar. And I got us some of the smallest sausages I’d ever seen and a bottle of champagne. I said ‘how much’ and they said ‘five shillings’. I thought: that won’t break me. Brought that out and we finished it up.

Of course, I’d never been near real champagne; you didn’t get it much in Ealing. We had a couple more glasses. And very pleasant it was too. If this is war, I thought, it seemed highly agreeable.

‘To women,’ he said, deeply chivalrous. Then, ‘To the legs of women.’

We toasted that, and the queen, and even the Hun, as far as I remember. It was all very jolly.

‘To horses,’ he said, and I thought: an eccentric chap. But you have to remember I hadn’t seen anything in those days and it was all new to me.

‘Look,’ he said, and he took from his inside pocket what I thought looked like a pill case.

You could get these in those days, little treasure chests, very fancy sometimes. And he opened it and inside were teeth.

We stopped again a couple of miles outside of Longueville at a village which was really no more than a couple of farmhouses and a bar.

‘I can smell fresh bread’, he said, so we parked up beside this little bar and he ordered tarte au fromage, cider, coq à la bière, little loaves of bread. I was starting to wonder if I’d ever see the war. Vehicles passed us, endless army vehicles stirring up dust from the road.

‘Can you get more money?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ I said.

‘Not now, later. Are your parents alive?’

‘Yes.’ ‘What do they do?’

My father was a chemist in those days.

He had a shop in Holborn. And my mother did some needlework. Mostly she’d been busy with us.

‘Have you tried paté?’ he asked.

‘Never.’ I thought maybe it was a drink.

‘When we get to Brunembert I shall buy you paté,’ he said.

We’d pass fields of wheat, barley, wild meadows with not a cow in sight, and he’d say, ‘Look at those flowers. Look, Cartwright, look at those yellow flowers. What are they? Are you the sort of man who knows the names of flowers?’

He seemed a bit of a character. I wouldn’t say a fool. I don’t know what I thought of him: that he was harmless, I suppose; a bit of a harmless fool.

I remember a forest of oak up on a hillside which Harkins said had been growing since this was ours: ‘All one nation back then. Twelfth century.’ Then we passed an abbey.

‘That’s where the cheese comes from,’ he said. ‘The Abbey of Maroilles.’ Well, it looked ruined to me. But sure enough there was a little stall where we stopped and bought cheese and dark brown beer and stood beside the car eating and drinking.

‘Look at that windmill. How old is that do you think?’ he asked. And, once we were driving again, through Quesques, ‘This is one of my favourite villages. You really must try the jam they make. And look at the view!’

‘You should meet the mayor,’ he said. ‘He’s almost a hundred.’

‘Look at those birds,’ he’d say. ‘What are they? Do you like brandy? I’ll buy you brandy as smooth as silk.’

The third stop we made was at a little estaminet in the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed. It was the village of Coulomby, I believe. The place had blue checked tablecloths. We had garlic soup, buttery carp—‘From the River Ternoise, just the other side of that field’—and finally sweet custard tarts from a wood-fire oven. Harkins ate about five. I had never seen the like. And then other pastries. Tremendous pastries. I think he would have licked the icing sugar off the plates if I hadn’t been there.

‘Do you play cards?’ Harkins asked.

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I said I played a bit of bridge. He produced a set of cards. I remember thinking how well he’d preserved them. And on the backs were hunting scenes, redcoats and horns. He cut them and shuffled and fanned them across the table.

Obviously there weren’t enough of us for a hand of bridge but we played whist.

‘Cricket player? The chaps down here are all cricket-mad,’ he said. ‘We play whenever we get the chance. Eighth Squadron need a keeper.

How are you at keeping wicket?’

We finished our drinks and I found myself ordering more, my aunt’s money disappearing fast.

‘It’s ok, sir,’ the waiter said. ‘We take credit.’

And he was laughing. It was a joke, you see.

‘What shows are on in London?’ Harkins asked as we drove. I remember seeing what I thought were fields of glass, then I thought it was ponds, maybe marshland. ‘What sort of girls do you like?’ Harkins asked. ‘Have you ever met a French girl? Have you got a girl?’

I didn’t. There had been a girl I’d been stepping out with back in London. She’d knitted me a scarf to take to France.

‘The girls at these estaminets...’ So we stopped ‘just for a coffee’ in Lumbres. The beef stewed in local beer had to be tasted, so we shared a pot.

‘Try this. You will never have anything like it. But God, what is that they do?’ He called the girl over. ‘What do you do to this? What is the secret?... She’s a little poppet,’ he said. He showed me the small brewery at the back of the bar. ‘Brewed with chicory. Used to be medicinal.

Monks.’ He had me buy some dark chocolate for the road. We ate it while driving alongside these stark chalk hills, blinding in the sunlight. I can taste it to this day.

‘Want to hear a story?’ Harkins said. ‘We were flying south of the Isle of Wight, on a mission to get a sub. We were told the submarine was on the surface, and we thought that was a particularly marvellous opportunity.

It was a very, very misty day, one of those low sea mists you get in the Channel. A fellow shouted to me, when we were about thirty miles south of

the Needles. He said, ‘Harkins, there’s a submarine there, can you see it, through the mist?’ I looked down and could see a grey hulk on the sea, yes, and we turned round quickly and we dropped four 100-pound bombs on it.

To see a submarine fully awash is something out of this world. Marvellous. And we circled a bit, and I was wondering what would happen, whether or not I would see any survivors swimming about. But no, it didn’t change, except in the fact that it changed slightly in its colour. It went from a dull grey to a kind of dirty cream. And then there was blood. So we came down lower in the mist to see what it was.

And there was bleeding into the sea for... half a mile? Like an oil slick. It was a whale. You guessed that. You can guess.’

I rarely knew what to say in response to his stories. We drove in silence for a precious moment. A little later he said, ‘Have you any gloves? May I try them on?’ And when I showed him my gloves he said, ‘You’ll need better gloves than these. I know a man who makes them, a glover in Alincthun. We can stop there if you wish.’

We stopped in Alincthun and ate pumpkin waffle­—‘there’s no rum. Best with rum’—and drank more beer. The glover was never mentioned.

‘You should breathe the air here,’ he said.

‘Here, the air is special, the start of the Mistral, and you can almost taste the sea. Have you heard of the Mistral? Great wind, comes right from the north down to the south along the Loire Valley. Mistral’s a word in dialect, Languedoc, means masterful. It’s on its way south now, like us. That’s why they build their farmhouses facing south, backs to the wind.’

He had a pocketful of my money by this time. An eccentric, I thought. But one to watch.

One who knows how to look after himself.

‘Bees. Listen to them. And there will be butterflies in a week or two. Look at those children. How old would you say they were?

French children are very polite. Breathe that air.

It would be good to grow up breathing this air.’

A few miles from the line Harkins said The

Experimental needed filling up (‘Don’t want to be stranded out here’) so we stopped at a flight squadron—eight or nine, I can’t remember which. ‘Stop in to see a friend,’ he said. They were billeted in an old chateau. The planes there were RE8s, reconnaissance bi-planes made of wood with canvas stretched over and held together by wire.

The chateau had old rooms with terrible furniture. There was an upright piano in the mess, rescued from one of the bombed homes nearby. And all the men had black fingers. At first I thought it was from playing the piano, but they said it was from using a developing solution­—anadol, I think. It was a photographic reconnaissance unit. They had prints up around the walls and clipped to lines of string. And so it was that I had my first look at the lines. One always heard ‘behind the lines’, ‘this side of the lines’; the lines, the lines... But I hadn’t a clue what the things looked like. And it was quite fascinating because, you see, what had happened was the battle had become crystallised. And this whole system had been built up over months and months until really, from the air, it looked more like the edge of a lace doily. I couldn’t stop looking at these pictures, while Harkins took a drink and had a joke with the squadron.

‘No Matthews?’ Harkins said, and, of course, all the chaps were quiet then. They took Harkins aside. I couldn’t tell what they were saying but I could see his face and it was the only time I saw it grave. He stepped outside for a moment. And I thought: am I ever going to get there? And eventually he comes over, brisk, bright again, and says: ‘What do you say to one last bottle for the road?’ In all this he never seemed what I’d call drunk. Never out of control. I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not in any hurry to get back.’ It was like a daytrip for him. He thought he’d make the most of it.

I thought of him, over the next few months, before I was invalided out: Harkins stopping and drinking, and his laugh. I’d hear his laugh and look around expecting to see him with a bottle and glasses: ‘One more for the road.’

But that first night, as we got nearer the front, it

was quite an experience really, because the whole line from north to south was lit up with flashes. Finally we were getting there. It was dusk and there was a steady rumble from all around. And I remember thinking to myself: I got here in time. Thank goodness I got here, after all the work I have done. But it was an extraordinary experience. And the nearer you got, the louder the guns got. And, of course, it seemed to me that my chaperone took no notice at all.

Fin.

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I work in the sales department of a plant that produces soft drinks. At 9am I must put my admission card to a special sensor to register my punctuality. I walk down a long empty corridor where all the doors are closed. On the walls there are pictures of giant fruits. Within a few minutes I am in the office. I say hello to my colleagues and sit down at my workstation.

I switch my computer on. While it is loading, I move a frame on a wall calendar to the day’s date and count how many times I will do this before the weekend. I open my inbox and delete unnecessary emails. Then I make some

daily reports. I boil water in a teapot.

I drink a cup of tea.

Lunch comes eventually. We have the advantage of eating in a good canteen.

After lunch I make a couple of phone calls, work on some Excel tables, and drink one more cup of tea. Once in a while someone drops in to chat with me for a few minutes. But not every day. At 6 pm I stand up, put on my coat and say goodbye to those staying on.

Passing by reception, I say to the secretary: ‘How come you’re still here?

It’s time to go home!’

Tomorrow morning I will wake up at 7 o’clock and there will be a new day.

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Hanging on to Things 28

by Steven Connor

My flash drive, known by more names than almost any other modern object­—USB drive, external hard drive, memory stick, dongle— is a kind of tuning fork, which I use to keep the four different computers on which I regularly work, in three separate offices and on the top deck of the 91 bus, synchronised and singing the same song. It knows everything there is to know about me, indeed, far more than I do myself.

Not only is it expert in me, it even has something of my own power of self-reference.

The data on it is of course encrypted, with a password of such fiendishly unguessable complexity that I dare not trust it to my fitfully fevering memory; so I have saved it in an even more deeply encrypted file which sits like a spider in the midst of the data to which it gives the unique, inscrutable key.

It is a pleasing thing, and I am tempted to expatiate on its many virtues and felicities, not the least of which is that, though it can store 60 gigabytes of data, it is little more than the length

of the top joint of my thumb. It is the most recent in a line of such devices which, as they have failed, or been lost, have been replaced with versions that are at once more miniature and more numinously voluminous. But I realised as soon as I had this thing out of its packaging that it was actually too small for me to be able to keep contact with; it lacked the reassuringly lumpy heft of my phone, or the friendly toothiness of my keys, which enable me to pass them in tactile review many times an hour during the day, along with the other things about my person that help keep my person about me.

This object, wafer-thin, gossamer-light, seemed to have dropped below the critical mass necessary for me to verify its presence, and was thus likely to be swept away any time I reached into my pocket for change. In fact, the prescient boy in Maplin who sold it to me knew that all this was in store and offered to sell me as an accessory, and at almost the cost of the flash

drive itself, a lanyard, hinting that they were hotly in demand and he had only one left in stock. One of the pleasing things about things is the way they can institute or solicit a thinglike curiosity or solicitude towards the words that name them. I could only have given the most hazy description before this point of what a lanyard was, beyond sensing that there was something nautical about it, and so am quite likely to have confused it with a capstan, say, or a bowsprit. In fact lanyard is an English adaptation of the French lanière, first cousin to the words line and French lien, link. It just means a short piece of rope, or twine, or perhaps leather, attached to something to secure it to something else. Nowadays, the centres of cities are thronged at lunchtime with people with laminated identity cards bumping on their chests, secured, as middle-aged lady treasurers and scripture teachers used once to secure their reading glasses, with little strips of fabric looped round their necks, that are known, I now knew, as lanyards. By the time I had realised that I was indeed in need of a lanyard for the otherwise incipiently evanescent device I had purchased, and had hastened back to Maplin, the youth assured me with a mock-regretful smirk that it had been snapped up by a purchaser wiser than I to the ways of the world, and of its things.

Things, we are sure of it, are less than we are, the proof of this being that we can contain them, while they cannot contain us. We enfold them, in our concepts, in our projects, in our feelings about them—in our dreams. We are subject, they are object. They must be kept in their place, and our place secured by keeping them clear of it.

But with every acquisition comes a new need, for objects are needs. And, since Maplin, I have been on the alert for alternative or improvised forms of lanyard with which to bind myself to this device. It turned out that I needed something more than the lanyard—I first needed something to fix to the flash drive to which I could in turn attach the lanyard, once I got hold of one. I found such a thing on a key

ring and discovered that, exquisitely, the flash drive has a little hole drilled in one corner through which to thread the lug of this nameless contrivance which I have decided to call, for the time being and, very likely for the rest of my days, a vincula. So my sleek flash drive now sports, like the extravagant earring of some pirate, a vincula that is almost the same size as it is, the sole purpose of which is to enable it to be attached to something else, yet to be acquired, that will enable it in due course to be attached to me. I have tried threading it with a gymshoe lace (scruffy and down-at-heel) and various lengths and colours of ribbon (rather too Grayson Perry for me). I was, now and again, when visiting some institution or other, issued with a temporary security card with a lanyard of Platonic perfection, which I often thought of stealing, but always had to return to the eagle-eyed attendant on my way out.

Early dictionaries gloss the word lanyard with the Latin ligula, a bond, from which we get words like obligation, liaison and liability. We are truly bound to the things that bind us to things by ties that have religious solemnity, religion being another of these allied words of allegiance. As Philip Larkin says, things ‘link us to our losses’. We are not merely attached to things, things are themselves the forms of our attachments to the world. By tying to us the things we are like to lose, we keep in close contact with the ever-present possibility of their absence, the impotential in which they are profligate. There is anxiety, the anguish of possible letting go, in all this articulation of links. We lose ourselves, we take leave of ourselves in things, that is what they are for, that is why it is so important to cleave to them.

Things are our true others, and to that degree vital to our existence in a way in which other persons, the mere simulacra of otherness, are not. If we could truly keep hold of objects, truly close the gap between them and us, the gap at once closed and held open by all the strings and laces and lanyards and other ties that bind,

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then we would lose them more absolutely than ever. The role of objects is to resist our assimilation. Objects must be able, as the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott so wisely says, not just to receive our love, but also to survive it.

We are impelled to try to assimilate to ourselves that to which we have feelings of attachment, but if we were ever actually able or allowed to assimilate them, we would have succeeded only in annihilating them, and, with them, the tension between them and us that keeps us in being.

We can never reach the things of the world, which is exactly why they are so indispensable to us, since only things can give us the faculty of reaching out, of extending into the world. The only way to be delivered from the illusion of being everything, from the soul-death that such absolute and all-encompassing selfhood must be, is through the possibility of pathos amounting sometimes to agony that objects keep open. So, like the line of ligatures connecting me to my flash drive, the line connecting thinking and being is stretched out further than Descartes thought. In place of the simple slip-knot or noose of the Cartesian slogan, cogito ergo sum, the line might run: I think, that is, I feel things, which means I feel things,

which is to say, I can suffer from the loss of things, meaning that, therefore, I am.

My flash drive remained, miraculously unlost, in my pocket.

And then, last weekend, I was in Sweden examining a PhD and the student to whom I had acted as public opponent, startled to hear me admire her lanyard, to which her car key was attached, gave me a spare. Just as it had never occurred to me that I would need a lanyard in the first place, it suddenly became obvious to me that, of course, I too should at all times have, like her, a lanyard, or two, in reserve.

We need things because only things can guarantee for us the sovereign status of the no-thing we are and wish to be.

And, precisely because that relation is a need, a matter of life and death, and not a mere abstract congruence, it hums with passion and pathos. Our relation with the world, which only the things of the world can keep alive, is a daredevil, do or die, midair thing, full of rapture, peril and unexpected comforts. So our dependence on objects is not one source of emotion among others—it is emotion (‘moving out’) itself. Things bear our weight, the weight they accord to us. They take the strain.

The Gilderbook

by Alexander Massouras

Paul was a gilder.

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He loved the glint of gold.

One day, Paul gilded all of the picture frames in his house.

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It wasn’t quite right, so he gilded the walls, too.

In the kitchen he mused: something was wrong.

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So he gilded the table;

the chairs; 34

and then his parakeets, Myrtle and Mae.

Upstairs (and those were gilded too), 35

with much deftness, Paul gilded his bed, to better dream of gold.

The time came when Paul’s entire house was golden and shone like the sun.

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And then the doorbell rang.

Friends were calling, and Paul felt immediately happy.

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Together they set off.

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And Paul soon forgot his golden house. the end.

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the one minute siren squeals its warning; its bluntness echoing off lurching bunds. the plant is silenced, a neat rank of bore-holes readying themselves for the hit. it comes like lightning over sea. the thud of the det discharged, a ripple of displaced stone, the shock-wave rising, climbing your legs like autumn damp. a brief dance of orange smoke hanging like genies over the shelf. & the dust will settle, as usual, the calloused earth split, the vacuum sigh of separation, the slow lurch of broken land.

Union

by David Gray & Paul Summers

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the end

The Big Stink by Iphgenia Baal

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The Big Pink: a 1960s high rise, twenty-one floors and bright salmon. A lone bastion of a bygone age when council flat meant massive rooms and lino flooring, hidden cupboards and a wildly apocalyptic view. Everyone says hello, and everyone smiles. It stands at the eastern edge of Victoria Park in idyllic climes, on an offshoot of the Grand Union Canal that runs up towards Fish Island. But most people don’t know that.

To people who don’t live here, it’s a no man’s land. Not cos it’s dangerous. More cos it’s dead.

Though only minutes from the quaint cobbled backstreets of E2, now overrun with thirtysomething media types procrastinating over procreation and hipsters’ S&M lingerie boutiques, Bow E3 is off limits. A sprawl of council estates where little boys in black and red practise fighting for when they are grown and can cross over to the other side of the Roman Road Market and into Bow proper.

As far as the new east London elite are concerned, there is nothing here. And they are as right as they ever are: there is nothing here.

Bow E3 is people’s homes, and corner shops and market stalls selling cheap plasticky clothes; a monument to the shittiness of normal people’s

lives. A banging jerk chicken place and too many men, too many many men.

There is a bouncer on the door 24/7, it makes some visitors uneasy but they’ve got the wrong idea. There is Mo, a small Pakistani who plays tinny bhangra on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and Trevor, an equally titchy Jamaican who brings in his own stereo, which filters jah jah music up the lift shaft whenever he is on duty. At nights, security is increased. Rita, an enormous Irish woman, who never talks but will buzz the door open for you no matter what hour it is, has half the shifts, and an enormous Angolan takes the rest. He doesn’t like sitting in the office by the CCTV (none of the cameras work beyond a static fuzz that looks more like thermal imaging than anything the police might be interested in). When on duty, the Angolan is sprawled on the bench in the lobby, stinking of marijuana (where was you brought up?) muttering yalrights whether someone is walking past him or not.

TBP dates from a time when social housing was built with a socialist intent; heating operates on a single system, and because of that, it’s included in the rent. There is one on switch and

one off switch for the whole bloody building.

Water is the same. You can run your tap all day long and still get charged the standard rate. One day the water stops.

Something, somewhere has rusted to a stage where it is bust: A piece of pipe has gone missing: nothing comes out of the taps. At 8am, letters on headed paper are posted through every letterbox: at seven this morning the water in Clare House was switched off. Plumbers are working on the issue. Please ensure you have your taps turned off before leaving your property, sincerely yours Maureen Cooper, Old Ford Housing Association.

There is no water all morning. It feels like a holiday. In every flat, residents check to see how much is left inside their kettles to ration out cups of tea throughout the day. Bowls of dirty water waiting to be washed up are laid down cautiously beside the kitchen sink, just in case.

Early risers congratulate themselves on having already had baths and brushed teeth. Everyone wonders how long this is going to go on for.

The usual congregation in the foyer who take it in turns to throw smug looks at key workers as they leave to go to work—knobbly rastas, grandmas who have shrunk to teeny-wee and one tubby Irish fag who owns seven chihuahuas and walks them individually in rounds so comes and goes all day—have been joined today by normally more reclusive residents: the mentally unstable and the long-term unemployed. And the usual conversation—frequently, whose decision it was to paint the fucker pink—has been replaced with more urgent chit-chat, if only slightly so.

– I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen.

– Used to be three of these tower blocks, but the other two got pulled down in the ’90s.

– 1994 to be exact.

– What time do they say it’ll come back on?

The doors to the street are propped open and Mo is smoking a fag and nodding along with the saner suggestions. Shyer participants thumb through notices pinned to the board: a

combination of petitions, adverts for local religious cults and information on ‘plumbing lessons for women’. Below the legal notices are scams to steal electricity scribbled on the insides of torn envelopes.

– Rotting from the inside out, says Carlton.

Carlton is an ex-con and an alcoholic but it is hard to have sympathy for him because he is so wet. Tall and skinny, he never seems comfortable in his own skin, like his skeleton is suspended in some sort of liquid which there is not enough of to fill him. He used to be a lorry driver.

– Long distance. The first one got torn down in 1991 and the next in 1994. I’ve been petitioning to get out of my flat ever since.

He lost his HGV licence when he was in the clink.

– You’ve got to pay to renew it every year and since I was looking at a five-year stretch it didn’t make sense. Made more sense to lose it, then do the test again when I got out.

He’d never got round to it.

– The council’ve had a scheme in place for over a decade that pays single people to move out of two-bedroom council flats and they still can’t find me anywhere.

At 2pm, there is an explosion. A jet of dirty water shoots up from the roof into the sky. On the street below, the waiting tenants run outside, shouting and pointing up into the air.

– They’ve fixed the pipe I see, says Carlton.

The tap in the doorman’s office coughs a couple of times, splutters out some beads of water, then falls silent. The electronic numbers on the left lift’s display system start rolling down, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1, then the doors open. The plumber who has opted to be messenger is greeted by uproar.

– We have identified the problem.

Only with the main water tank twenty-one floors up, to pump water all the way round the system again, they’ve had to blast through water at enormous pressure, and they’ve overshot the mark.

It’s burst the tank, and is now fountaining up into the air, dwarfing the feeble water feature in the pond in Vicky Park below.

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The initial propulsion dies down, but the water keeps coming, not dripping down the building, more spurting up in the air and moving wherever the wind takes it, landing in a semicircle around the block. The sun is shining and as it falls, it’s making rainbows. The rozzers park up on the corner and watch people filming the proceedings on their phones, occasionally winding down a window and asking for a name and address.

Ten minutes later, the fire brigade arrives.

They are straight up the stairs, even though the lifts are still working. Slowly, news trickles down.

One hundred and sixteen flats over seventeen floors are ruined. There is no health and safety here. Everyone is roaming the corridors, peeping into flats (most of which have had their doors kicked in).

– There’s water coming out of the walls.

– Shouldn’t have left your taps on.

– You think this came from the bloody kitchen sink? Do you? Do you?

You can jab your fingers into soggy plasterboard and streams of clear water just pour out.

What would have once been a suburban hilly view now has the Olympic stadium rising up.

It sparkles and glows and glares and blocks the gentle roll out of London entirely.

– It’s amazing being so high up, don’t you think?

On the other side, you’ve got the whole of London. From Crystal Palace, across the City and St Paul’s, all the way to Wembley on the horizon, and Ally Pally in the north. Once you’ve got your eye in, you can almost make out the path the Thames cuts through town.

– I don’t mind heights.

He doesn’t mind heights?

Surely the only reason to move here was to be high up.

– Don’t you…

And that’s when you start to realise—totally different mentality. You chose to live here. He was put here.

– Fifteen years I’ve been trying to get out.

Down below, Mo is enjoying himself, welcoming residents who missed the dramatics, and are just coming home for the day.

– It’s your flat, he says, innocent and wideeyed to a woman as she walks through the door.

– What happened?

Having seen the fire trucks, images of lit cigarettes smouldering all night flicker through her head.

– Hahahaha, he laughs, I’m joking.

– Hahahaha, she laughs too.

Another woman walks through the door.

– It’s your flat, the doorman says again.

– Hahahaha, says the first victim, still lingering.

– No really, it is.

–O – What’s happened?

– Explosion.

– Flood.

Everyone talks at once.

– I only moved in yesterday.

She blurts it out, as if it’s relevant, as if somehow, because of that, it shouldn’t be her flat over someone else’s.

– All my stuff is still in boxes.

– They’ve deemed the flats unliveable.

They’re moving everyone out.

– Where to?

– I dunno.

Turns out it’s to Leyton.

– Fucking miles away.

– They’ve had to switch the electricity off, in some flats there’s water knee–deep.

– I’m not going anywhere, one old woman says. I’ve got people coming for tea.

And with that, she dings the button for the lift.

A grizzled old Ukrainian appears in the lift doors.

– So, I’m out of here (it’s no. 96), but I’ve just done my week’s shop and it seems a shame to let it go to waste. D’you want it?

Mo nods eagerly then receives the procession of bulging Iceland bags with dismay: A giant sack of fat white sausages, frozen spinach, frozen beans, frozen carrots and a four-litre bottle of milk.

Rank.

– That’ll last you the week.

– I’m not touching any of this evil fucking shit, he says, once no. 96 has departed.

He packs it into his mini fridge-freezer all the same, and as he does, he realises that in here, as much as out there, he is an anomaly. No doubt he is as skint as no. 96, but with £2 to feed hisself, he’d buy a fucking tomato. And if he had £500 to last the week, he’d buy a tomato too: cos it’s not about wealth, it’s about lots of other things. Being rich feeds you fish to make your brain grow, and fresh vegetables to make you strong. It lets you go where you choose, rather than putting you somewhere and seeing what you make of it. But once you’re grown, it’s sort of different. Having readies sucks. He’d known boys he’d grown up with who had thousands to burn—and what do they do? New York, LA, beach holiday. Thinking they are gangsters, working on perfect pecs, but Mo knows that you can equate the amount of time a man spends in the gym with exactly how scared shitless he is of everything. Then again, even baby gangsters shop for tomatoes from time to time. Fuck it.

– A few of us are going up to the roof. See the damage, says Carlton.

– Sure, says Mo. Just then, Trevor arrives for his shift.

– What the bloody hell... ?

The three of them are joined by the near– mute Ghanaian who usually loiters around the 16th floor’s rubbish chute in his underpants: a spindly fellow who tells you that he got the flat after his mother died. (He had been her carer.

Before that he’d been a London bus driver.) As they ride up in the lift, Carlton talks. The Ghanaian nods along to his story, which uses his divorce from his wife in ’81 as an anchor for every misery put upon him since. Every time he mentions it, he follows it with the words: but that doesn’t matter. Both Mo and Trevor like these two, always have. They don’t offer cups of tea, or Xmas pressies, like some residents, but they’ve always got a couple of hours to kill in the afternoon for a chat, or in the Ghanaian’s case a jovial smoke/staring competition.

The roof is a massacre. Broken chairs and bed springs freed from rotting mattresses make it impossible to walk anywhere, so the four men just stand by the fire escape, looking out over Babylon. Rain starts to fall, irritating the water than has by now comfortably formed pools on the concrete. As the drops get harder and a cloud blocks out the view almost completely, Trevor starts to laugh.

– It had been more fyah I was praying for, he says, but now it seems we only have to wait for the flood.

Ende

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Unclassified (76–83)

by Seba Kurtis

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From 1976 to 1983 Argentina’s military junta waged a brutal campaign against suspected dissidents, known as the Dirty War, in which up to 30,000 people were disappeared. Agents raided private homes. Sometimes they blundered in like ordinary burglars, lifting electrical goods and jewellery. Sometimes they raped and tortured the occupants.

Often they stole address books and photo albums, hoping to discover clues to secret networks, plots born within friendships, and the suspicious destinations of family holidays.

In 2003, the U.S. embassy in Argentina released thousands of documents relating to the Dirty War, which revealed the complicity of three U.S. administrations in the junta’s activities.

These documents contained evidence that could have been used decades earlier to bring charges against the perpetrators of these human rights abuses. They also provide clues to the fate of many of the disappeared.

These images combine fragments of the declassified documents with photographs gleaned from the personal photo albums of Kurtis’s friends and family, dating back to the years of the Dirty War.

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Organizational Chart of 601, February 6, 1980

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U.S. Interested Human Rights Cases, June 29, 1978

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Disappearance of Ceramics Workers in 1977, June 14, 1978

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GOA Silent on Uruguay Revelation of Terrorist Plot, November 2, 1976

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Statement by a足nonymous U.S. citizen on being s足ubjected to a足trocious torture, October 4, 1976

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Subject [excised] more on PST d足isappearances, May 14, 1980

The Parkies by Stuart Braun

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‘They won’t ever move us on,’ says Uncle Eugene matter-of-factly, standing on crutches with cigarette in hand as ten or so of the mob gather around on the benches, a few drinking beer or cheap cask wine in the mid-afternoon autumn sun. It’s been nearly three years since I last saw Eugene. He’s just lost his foot after it got infected, hence the crutches.

He must be pushing sixty, but is back with the Parkies making sure everything’s ok, no doubt ready to ‘arc up’ if the cops come around. About two years earlier, Eugene lost his sister, Aunty Denise, who died suddenly of a stroke. She was barely fifty. Hundreds turned up to the church up the road to pay respects to an Aboriginal woman, a Parkie, who did a lot for her people.

The Parkies take their name from the time when groups of mostly Aboriginal people congregated in the parks and laneways around

this former ‘slum’—now highly gentrified—area of inner-city Melbourne. More than a decade ago, the police forced them out of the Atherton Gardens, a legendary meeting place set in the shadow of the nearby council estate towers.

They’ve been gathering here on Smith Street, a bustling shop strip dividing the once working class suburbs of Collingwood and Fitzroy, ever since.

I was a little surprised to see Eugene or any of ­the Parkies on Smith Street. Just after I left Melbourne, the local government passed a law banning public drinking on Smith Street. If the Parkies couldn’t drink, they’d likely stop con­gregating here. That was the idea.

I first met Eugene, Denise and the mob b­ ack in 2008, a journalist whom Eugene regarded with some sus­picion when I suggested I might tell the Parkies’ story, a­ story too often exploited

by the tabloids and talk­back shock jocks who demanded this public nuisance be excised once and for all—just more Aboriginal people drinking their dole money.

I’ll admit, I was a little fearful entering the Parkies’ realm; I’d watched from afar and felt slight intimidation—or was it inner racism? But soon I was a brother, had to be, because everyone who drops by to say hello to the Parkies—whether on the corner at the benches, or out front of the Woolworths bottle shop—is called aunty, uncle, cuz, sister, brother, is part of the family.

In the end I made the radio documentary and covered both sides of the story. Why couldn’t black fellas drink outside when the colonisers sit quaffing fine wine in alfresco cafes and bars up and down the street?

Why do the police harass the Parkies—I saw the pepper spray come out a few times for the most minor disturbances—when most assaults happen late at night among the pissed idiots who pour out of the clubs and pubs on Smith Street? The shopkeepers said the Parkies scare off potential customers and make the street look bad. Both sides admitted there was an alcohol problem. If the law was to be passed, Eugene and Denise demanded a community centre be built, somewhere for the Parkies to go and dry out or get a feed. The Parkies had nowhere to go, and they’d be worse off if forced to hide in the back lanes where health workers or family wouldn’t be able to find them.

After the law banning drinking on the street was passed in 2009, giving police authority to arrest anyone carrying alcohol, the Parkies never did get their community centre. No matter.

They always planned to stay on.

‘We’re still here,’ says Jo Boy as he rolls a cigarette on the bench on the corner, sans guitar, which he usually plays for coins to get by.

‘They’ll never get rid of us.’

Aunty Francis, tiny, toothless, drunk, sweet —‘how are ya love? I remember you, it’s been a while’—pushing 75, or is it 60, is here too. She still sips wine on the bench from lunchtime until she catches the tram home to the outer suburbs in the early evening. She doesn’t much like it in her housing commission flat, says the neighbours aren’t friendly. On Smith Street she’s a respected elder.

For the Parkies, Smith Street is a community hub and not only a place to drink. Sure, it sometimes it gets rowdy; but Eugene, Francis, Jo Boy and their families have been coming to meet up in this area for generations. That’s the problem.

Few really know the Parkies’ story, understand why they’re here: not the hipsters that have taken over the street, the shop traders, the police, or the journalists.

Like tens of thousands of Aboriginal kids in Australia, Eugene and Denise Lovett were taken from their parents in the late 1950s under the guise of ‘child protection’. A lot of Parkies were part of this so-called stolen generation, victims of the period from the 1890s to 1970s when Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and put in white foster families, or into boys’ and girls’ homes to have the blackness beaten out of them. It was all part of a policy of racial and cultural assimilation that continues to this day.

After finally escaping from institutions and foster parents as young teens, Eugene and Denise both found their way to the parks and

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streets of Fitzroy looking for their family, and their identity. Fitzroy had long been a gathering place for Aboriginal people. In the nineteenth century the local Aboriginals were kicked out of Melbourne and rounded up on Church-run missions or settlements outside the city (prisonlike reserves often compared to concentration camps), but they started coming back to the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Many had simply escaped from these missions due to mistreatment and deplorable living conditions, finding refuge in this rough, working class part of Melbourne where accommodation was cheap and jobs in breweries and factories plentiful.

Soon Fitzroy became Melbourne’s Aboriginal heartland, black fellas dominating the streets and pubs off Smith Street, even though, without full citizen or voting rights, they remained outcasts in their own land. In the 1970s, as young Aboriginal people poured out of the foster homes and institutions, Fitzroy became a place to link up, to heal.

Come to the park, unwind, talk to the elders, listen to stories, forget your frustrations, and yes—sometimes get pissed. But that wasn’t all.

An Aboriginal political revolution was hatched from these streets and Fitzroy helped birth the movements for indigenous civil rights (they finally got the vote in 1967) and land rights (still pending) in Australia.

Eugene was living at the nearby boys’ home (after ‘fighting back’ against constant beatings from his foster parents) when fellow Aboriginal boys told ­ him that his family was in Fitzroy. He soon escaped with his brother, and was lucky to spy his parents in the hamburger joint where locals hung out after the pubs closed. They were shocked to see him. During that first night

in Fitzroy in 1967, Eugene couldn’t believe the scenes: the alcohol, the gang fights and masses of police in an area likened to the Chicago

ghettoes. Soon he was back in the home, his parents left fearing recriminations from the welfare authorities. Eugene escaped again, however, stole cars, ran around in Fitzroy, was thrown back in the home and finally in jail, where he spent most of his time until the age of twenty-seven—nearly three decades of his life were spent in institutions.

His sister Denise, a few years younger, was only thirteen when she ran away from the girls’ home and found her dad in the Champion Hotel, a legendary black pub a couple of blocks back from Smith Street.

This was the 1970s, when the Fitzroy Aboriginal community was peaking. She started sleeping in the parks, learnt from the elders how to sur­­vive, how to fight, how to avoid trouble from the police. In the parks of Fitzroy, Koori Aboriginals from across the state of Victoria created a common identity with the locals. Diverse tribes now banded together to resist assimilation into white culture.

Fitzroy saw the first indigenous-run legal, housing, health and sporting organisations in

the country. Koori boxer Lionel Rose, Australia’s first world champion, trained in the Fitzroy Aboriginal gym. There were community drop-in centres for the men and women coming out of prison.

Fitzroy was a magnet for Aboriginals across the country—and when they came, they had to pay their respects to the Parkies. Today, some of the indigenous institutions in Fitzroy remain —but the Aboriginal people on the street have mostly gone.

The yuppies took over, say the older Parkies. ‘All I see now is ghosts’, singersongwriter Archie Roach—­ a Parkie, also stolen, whose song ‘Took the Children Away’ helped bring the stolen generation to national attention— told me as we strolled the gardens of the council flats where the Parkies were based from the 1970s.

Archie says it would take an hour to walk 100 metres down the street in those days, so rich was the precinct with community, with brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles. When Muhammad Ali turned up at the Aboriginal Health Centre in 1979 to show solidarity,

hundreds of mostly black fellas crammed the streets within minutes. Today, Fitzroy is dominated by boutiques and gourmet cafés but the Parkies are still there, standing as the last custodians, despite all the attempts to kick them out.

Aboriginal people come from the country, from other states, and they can still go to Smith Street and find family. ‘You looking for Uncle, yeah he was just here yesterday,’ one of the boys replied when I recently asked after Eugene. Five minutes later, Eugene turned up, barely a day out of hospital.

I was relieved to see him, to see them all. I’d learnt a lot from the Parkies, strangely felt a part of the mob, as Eugene promised I would. I suppose it’s the solidarity, despite the fights, the disputes when people are pissed and a little desperate, depressed, all day in each other’s faces. But through it all an undying respect rules. All defer to their elders; all will share their last dollar, the last bite of their sandwich. They are the survivors of a culture the white man tried to break. Though today the police could arrest the whole mob at any time, the Parkies still have something that can never be moved on.

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Wandertage

by Chiara Dazi 67

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German Wandergesellen are journeyman craftsmen who have been undertaking the same rite of passage for the last 800 years.

Having completed an apprenticeship, young men and women 足set out on foot with just a couple of coins in their pocket

and a few bundled belongings. They travel as far 足as their craft might take them but cannot come within 50 kilometres of home, until their Walz of three years and a day is over and they return as guildsmen and women.

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The Man With the Golden Arm

By Nikesh Shukla For Kunal Illustration by Lewis Heriz

Sunny places his camera on an adjacent table, lines up the shot, presses the button and runs back to where I’m sat. I sip my pint and he looks at me and laughs. The camera clicks and flashes and he runs back to collect it. He shows me the photo of us talking in the dark pub, with the Nirvana Unplugged video projected on to the wall behind us, and I nod appreciatively.

‘I’ve just stolen our souls,’ he says, staring intently at the LCD screen, his glasses settling into the brushstrokes of his eyebrows.

‘This conversation will live forever,’ I reply.

He looks up at me quizzically and I shake my head. It sounded much weirder out loud. My head pounds with dehydration. Sunny scratches at the itch of his post-stubble, pre-beard facial hair with the stubs where his fingers used to be.

He shrugs. The photograph has captured our conversation. Our conversation has petered out.

I look at my watch and note the time to Sunny. Sabha, my girlfriend, will be annoyed if I’m much later. It’s already way past dinner. The trick is to either go home at 11.30pm when she’s hit deep sleep or just in time to eat. The lesson I’m yet to learn is always to assume a quick pint will turn into an all-nighter. Especially with Sunny. We don’t see each other so much any more. But when we do, the nights go on and on and on.

Tonight feels different though. Like a bookmark, a crucial juncture.

We finish our drinks and leave the pub. The night outside lurches with commuters and drizzle. Sunny sits on the step of the office next door and pulls out his tools. I watch him hold a large Rizla between thumb and little finger, balanced on the stubs in between, and he builds himself a spliff. He grates tobacco out of the top of a cigarette, dropping the stub naked into his pocket. He pulls out a small block of hash, places the Rizla in his lap, lights up the hash with two flares from his lighter, and crumbles a corner off into his lap. His hands free, he picks the Rizla back up and rubs the ends together to even out and disassemble and integrate the packed contents. He licks along the paper and folds it. He makes it look so easy. I look at my

fingers, my chubby fist of sausage digits and wonder why I can’t ever be that delicate. He has honed his limited dexterity into a new flow. He lights the spliff, inhales and places the tip between his thumb and forefinger, offering it up to me. I shake my head. I don’t partake anymore. Not since I realised I was more fun drunk than stoned and all I have is my social persona. Sunny shrugs and looks out at the street. He then looks at his fingers, the stubs, what’s left of them, and rubs them on his coat.

‘They’re itching today,’ he says by way of muted explanation.

‘How do you mean?’ I ask blandly, because what I want to ask is ‘what does it feel like?’, something I’ve never dared ask this man I plan to ask to be my best man one day. This man who, five years ago when I was younger and cuter, I would refer to as my best mate, like we were children. Best friends forever.

‘I dunno,’ he says, smiling and squinting into the marijuana easiness settling around him.

‘Like they’re trying to grow back or something.

That’s not possible right?’

‘You did always strike me as a medical miracle, Sunny,’ I say, and he laughs. A gut laugh that makes me retrace my words. I’m not quite sure what he finds so funny but I’ll take all the laughs I can get.

He finishes his spliff and we walk to the station. As we part, he goes for the hug and I clasp him tightly. He’s younger than me and I’m caught between being his dad, his older brother and his closest friend, and as I watch him disappear through the barriers, his arms straight, hands clasping the depths of his pockets, he lolls from side to side, goofily. I want to run after him, sweep him up and take him home with me. He looks back once and nods. I nod back, smile to myself and walk the 200 metres of high street that light the way to my flat. Sabha meets me at the door with a passiveaggressive shrug. She informs me of my nowcold dinner options and goes to bed to read. I’m left with lukewarm pasta and an hour to kill before something decent’s on television. Once I know the coast’s clear—and she won’t be sighing

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so I’ll ask what’s wrong and she’ll say ‘nothing’, loaded with everything—I go to bed.

I doze off, dreaming about India. I was only there a few months ago and I can still feel its speed overloading my synapses. My dreams leave me breathless. I wake up panting.

Tonight, I’m sat in the ricketiest taxi I have ever sat in. I am sat on my hands, my body is all tensed up, each muscle tightened to form a maximum protective shell. The taxi is shaking and clattering all over the road. The loose bolts are rattling maniacally against the chrome chassis inducing clangs louder than the rumble of the ancient cantankerous engine. The radio is on full blast in a failed attempt to drown out the car’s noise. Lata Mangeshkar sings chaotically.

The driver, dressed all in starched crisp bleached khaki, with a long twirly moustache that he keeps playing with, is trying to go as fast as he can through the overcrowded city streets, shouting for kids and cows to jump out of the way, stopping for ladies to cross the road, but not looking too happy about it. He’s been asked to go a really short distance for a beautifully haggled cheap price and he wants to get me there as quickly as he can. It’s late at night, and I’m probably either his last fare or he wants to go and look for the taxi driver’s holy grail: an airport fare with excess baggage.

As I fly through the Bombay night, I can feel the taxi’s wheels lift off the ground, its axle separate from the frame and I’m clutching on for dear life as the seats wobble with the pressure of speed. I hear the chassis crash to the ground and I look around. I’m suspended in nothing. We are flying through the air, plummeting towards high-rise buildings with abandon. The driver looks at me through the rear view mirror and I see his eyes squint in a smile. He turns round to face me. It’s Sunny. He shouts, ‘Look ma! No hands!’ and lifts his fists off the steering wheel. He’s smiling and panting like a dog. He shoves his injured hand in my face. It glows golden. He clenches it in a fist and it gets brighter, more powerful, full of light and power and I can feel something pinching me and pushing me and pinching me and pushing

me and I realise I have my eyes closed, even though the shine of gold is still imprinted on my retinas. I open them.

It’s dark.

I’m lying on my back staring at the darkened ceiling of a darkened room in our flat.

‘You were snoring,’ Sabha scolds and pushes me again. I wrench my heavy body on to its side and close my eyes.

Sunny calls me the next day. He’s upset and wants to meet. I tell him to come over for dinner, thinking this a happy medium between seeing my friend, who sounds distracted and low on the phone, and my girlfriend who probably won’t appreciate me doing another ‘two-pintnight’ that ends after she is ‘too tired to do quality time’ in the evening. That day, I work from home, answering emails, taking too long to make coffees, gchatting with friends and watching daytime television over the top of my screen. I make sure I’m prompt with any email reply I need to send, just to prove that working from home means actually working. I email Sabha to tell her we have a dinner guest and at four o’clock head out to the supermarket to buy chicken pieces and tins of chopped tomatoes.

Sunny doesn’t get home-cooked food much anymore. His parents are in India and he leans towards toast or fast food, unless I take care of him. I find a packet of frozen chapatis in the supermarket freezer, buy a jar of mango chutney and head home to marinate. Sabha arrives back at 5.30pm, sighing with fatigue as she plumps herself down at the kitchen table, while I fry up onions and garlic. She asks what all this is in aid of.

‘Sunny’s coming for dinner. Didn’t you see my email?’

‘No,’ she says, annoyed. She gets up and starts straightening up around her, tidying newspapers and magazine clippings, creating piles of hers and piles of mine. ‘You should have texted me. I didn’t know we had guests. The flat is a mess!’

‘It’s fine,’ I say, not looking up from the correct measurements of turmeric, garam masala, chilli powder and dhana jeera. ‘It’s only Sunny.’

‘Jeez-us,’ Sabha says. ‘It’s been a shitting day at work. Now I have to clean too? What time’s he coming?’

‘Seven,’ I say, knowing he’ll be late for his six o’clock allotted arrival time. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

She sighs like I don’t understand. I don’t.

Sunny’s been here countless times, slept on our sofa, come over to use the wi-fi, had dinner, dropped off books, picked up tupperware containers of food. He is no stranger to our communal mess of socks, discarded mugs and clothes drying on every surface.

Sabha shoos me out of the way and grabs some surface cleaner, rubber gloves and a sponge.

At 6.05, the buzzer goes. I shout for Sabha to get it. She shouts back that Sunny’s early. I shout that I don’t want to leave the cooking. I hear her thumping her way over, pulling off the rubber gloves. She grabs the wooden spoon out of my hand.

‘Go open it then,’ she says and pokes at the chicken unnecessarily.

‘Watch the rice,’ I tell her.

Sunny’s student visa has finally expired and he has to go back to India.

He picks at his chicken curry and stares at the table. Sabha looks at me sadly. She can feel my heart quicken from across the table. My cheeks burn flush.

‘What are you talking about, man?’ I ask uselessly.

‘I’ve been here six years. I can’t keep doing the odd graphic design class. My passport’s expiring. My visa expired last week. I dunno.’

‘Your passport’s expiring. When?’ Sabha says sternly. If I’m the cool dad, she’s the overbearing mother.

‘A month ago.’

‘A month ago?’ she says loudly, banging the table with her bracelet. ‘Jeez-us, Sunny. What have you been doing?’

‘I thought if I could find some work, they could sponsor me to stay. Then I could leave the country, sort my passport out and come back with the proper paperwork.’

‘Sunny, you’re a freelance graphic designer. You don’t get work-sponsorship.’

‘I know,’ he says sadly.

‘I need a drink,’ I say. Sunny nods that he wants one too. Sabha looks at me. I shrug.

‘It’s Tuesday,’ she says. ‘We’re dry on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.’

‘I need a drink,’ I say.

I grab Sunny’s and my unused water tumblers and pour us whiskies while he and Sabha sit in oppressive silence. She flicks rice pellets from one side of the plate to the other.

He rubs at where his fingers should be. She looks at him. She smiles.

‘Look, Sunny, we can sort this. It’s not the end of the world. I don’t think you can just go through life expecting everything to be ok though. This is your wake-up call. This is your time. Time to sort your life out. Maybe you should get married, stay and we’ll show you the basics... you know, how to be an adult.’

Sunny doesn’t reply. His mouth flickers between grimace and smile. Somewhere in there is sound advice meant well but neither he nor I want to hear it. I knock my whisky back and hand Sunny his. He grabs it with the fingerless hand and stares at it.

‘Wanna go to the pub?’ I ask him. Sabha glares at me and starts stacking our plates up. I hiss at her. ‘I think he needs a talk, man-toman.’

‘Of course he does,’ she says in a tone bulging between sarcasm and concern.

With a quiz in full force, the pub directs Sunny and me towards the beer garden where we sit, with two rounds between us, bought on my card. Sunny doesn’t know what to say. Neither do I. I know this is it. There’s no option. Sunny won’t marry anyone just to stay. No one we know would subject themselves to that bureaucratic trip. Instead we’re dumbfounded. I make various noises about visiting him, about how his parents will love him to be around, how we had a good run. I’m not helping and part of me is hurrying this whole thing along so I can get back to the inevitable showdown with

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Sabha, who prefers the hard-nosed approach with Sunny, the buck-up, can-do attitude that might propel him into the league of exemplary humans. Sunny is distracted. His phone is on the table between us, next to a packet of cigarettes I will dip into despite my protestations, and Jeffrey Lewis is playing tinnily out of its small speaker. I feel like I’m sat at the back of the bus.

They warned me They said he had a golden arm They lied to me I said I was not worried.

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Sunny is rubbing furiously at the stubs on his hand. Again those questions I refrain from asking...

Can you feel phantom digits?

How does it feel when you grip your dick?

‘What’s wrong with your fingers?’ I ask.

‘I dunno, they’re... it’s like they’re on fire tonight.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, I dunno. Maybe they are trying to grow back.’

He shivers and puts on his jacket and a pair of specially stitched gloves.

We’d met through friends in London, discovered a mutual love of comics, of girls we could never have—in particular, Sabha—and raving. We’d become firm friends in a plethora of acquaintances bound by recreational drugs, loud music and hiding from responsibility. We were in the early days of our twenties and our latent debauchery had finally manifested itself, post-university for me and mid-art-school for him. He and I were the guys who would extract themselves from the nucleus of the party to sit outside, smoke cigarettes and discuss comics, girls we could never have—in particular, Sabha —and post-rave etiquette. I made him laugh and he made me feel like he really needed me in his life. We told each other everything that mattered. Which, in those early days of our twenties, wasn’t much. Except girls we could never have.

Sunny went back to India after that first year at art school in London. It had set him up well for a few quirky freelance jobs and one arose in Bombay that coincided with his trip home anyway. That was where everything changed for him.

By this point, Sabha and I had started dating and I had been worried at how he’d react. He had told me that he was glad that at least one of us got to be with her, because it was better than some douchebag and I was glad of his blessing.

We’d seen less of each other before he left but he phoned on his way to the airport and asked if I needed him to bring me anything back. ‘Just books,’ I replied. All I ever needed, he always joked, was more books.

Four weeks later I got a phone call from his mum. Five minutes after I put the phone down, I was online looking for flights to Bombay.

In the end I couldn’t afford the airfare, but I was there with my dad and his car when Sunny landed in Heathrow two months after that phone call. We brought him back to my parents’ house where my mum fed him sandwiches, something he’d missed in the heavy food capital of the east, and then I took him on the train back to my place, where he’d left all his stuff in the loft. He was going to move into his new student accommodation the following day. On that train from the suburbs into the city, into what made sense, he told me the full story.

He shouldn’t have accepted that ride.

‘But Bombay’s nuts,’ he said. ‘It’s a city of bad decisions.’

He was out drinking with other graphic designers, having finished a big project for a global company with a ubiquitous but cool brand identity. His project manager, Ashish, was piling on the whisky and cokes and beers and shots of ill-advised tequila and because it was all free and Sunny had barely left the office he’d been sleeping and working and eating and skyping in for four weeks, he took whatever he was offered. Plus he hadn’t been paid yet.

Plus, whatever, it was fun.

When he and Ashish were the only two left in the bar, a reappropriated warehouse behind

a world-famous hotel, they decided to head home. Ashish told Sunny to come to his and sleep off the drinks, have breakfast together and maybe take a trip the next day to Elephanta Island to celebrate the end of the project and of Sunny’s trip. Unable to make any decisions for himself or argue with a man who was barely standing, barely opening his eyes, Sunny followed Ashish to his car, sat down, his head fizzing and his veins throbbing and the car started and the air conditioner came on, searing hot at first and this made Sunny feel dizzy so he opened a window. A gentle sea breeze caressed his nose as he poked it out of the car and Ashish jerked them forward then back then forward again into a sudden acceleration that was part foot-slip and part lack of spatial awareness.

And on to the road.

And a wrong turn then a right turn then a second guess and then right again, on the ten minute drive through Bombay. But Bombay doesn’t match up in terms of distance to your destination and the time it takes to get there.

Traffic, uneven roads, unmarked roads, cows in the road—anything can upset the delicate balance of a short journey. So when the roads were clear, Ashish sped up, relishing the novelty of being able to drive unimpeded in his own city. Sunny sat with his head against his arm and his fingers gripping the roof through the open window.

Maybe it would have happened in slow motion if he’d been less drunk but with his eyes closed and his head lolling, the only time he noticed something wasn’t right was when his stomach lurched with weightlessness, and he opened his eyes to see the car for the briefest shard of a fragment of a second fly through the air and crash, the bonnet tumbling around and around like it was in a spin cycle and the car smacking hard into the pavement and up in the air and hard into the pavement and up in the air and hard into the pavement. Upside down.

Sunny remembers this bit. He remembers looking at Ashish. Ashish stared at him and asked if he was dead. Sunny shook his head.

Ashish tentatively opened his door and fell out

on to the road. They were at the top of an overpass that dips and ducks and dives through the lowlands of Bombay’s slums and up amongst the gods and shakers. He ran around to Sunny’s side and opened the door. Sunny slumped out and let himself fall as gently as he could. Ashish took one look at the damage and then another at the quiet stillness around him, whispers of Bollywood and sizzling pots on the air, and he ran. He ran down the overpass back the way they’d come, as fast as he could.

Using both hands to push his winded body up off the ground, Sunny felt the sear of pain.

He tried to raise the offending hand up to his face to see what was wrong. His glasses had disappeared in the wreckage and he was having trouble focusing his eyes. His hand felt heavy, like it was made of brass. He tried to wrench it up and it wouldn’t respond. He pulled up and he pulled up and eventually managed to bend to meet it halfway. It was then he noticed the blood dripping on to the floor.

It was then he noticed he was missing three of his fingers.

A black wing shivered over him and he fell to the floor.

Maybe we should revisit the whole get you married option.’

‘Who’s going to go for me? A fingerless immigrant.’

‘Worse, a fingerless immigrant artist.’

‘I’m fucked man.’

Yeah, you are, I think. But I don’t say it. I have the burden of pragmatism and advicebestowing on my shoulders. I have neither in me right now. Just a flatness of tone and heart.

Sunny scratches at his ghost digits again, this time removing a glove to really get into the fabric of the skin, which seems lighter than before. Maybe it’s the glow of the floodlight in the beer garden but it does seem to be radiating.

It’s just in my head, I think.

‘You know,’ Sunny says. ‘If we were in a comic book, I’d have a power. I wish I had a power.’

‘Of course you have a power. We just haven’t found it yet,’ I say and smile.

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I finish my pint and place the glass in front of him.

‘Move it,’ I say. ‘With your mind.’

Sunny laughs and screws up his brow and closes his eyes to show me he’s really concentrating. After twenty seconds, he opens one eye and shrugs at me.

‘Concentrate...’ I say. ‘Ok, maybe it’s not telekenesis. Maybe you can melt it. Touch it.’

Sunny reaches forward and traces around the brim of the glass with his hand. He laughs and traces it with his thumb, then his little finger and then with the stubs of his ghost digits. Maybe he can will himself into having a power through sheer plucky persistence. As he traces the pint glass, we hear a pop and some light disappears. We turn to see that a cheap glass candle holder in the middle of the table has cracked and burst. Just…pop.

Hot wax oozes out on to the table. I laugh.

Sunny is caught in a surprised grin and reaches forward, knocking the pint glass over, plunging his hand in to the oozing hot wax. He looks up at me, his eyebrows raised.

‘Did I do that?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, definitely,’ I say, laughing.

‘I know. I did that.’

He gets up from the table. I assume he’s going to the toilet.

Minutes later, after I’ve looked at my phone and checked in with Sabha, not so much smoothing things over as making them worse, I start looking inside the pub, wondering where he’s got to.

After a lengthy time to give him space for a number two, for time at the bar, for a phone call, for a cash run (unlikely given that I always pay for everything—the rule in our family was that the youngest should never put their hand in their pocket for anything), I get up from the table, picking up his bag and head inside to find him. The pub quiz has ended now and people are enjoying their drinks in the peace of their own groups. I don’t find Sunny at the bar. He’s not in the toilet. He’s not by the cigarette machine. I’m worried. Where has he got to?

This isn’t like him. He always lets me know

where he is. Why has he run off like this? Is he ok? He doesn’t really believe he can make things explode. Does he? Who knows? I don’t know. I walk around the pub twice and each time double back to where he left me, just in case he’s found his way home, but a group of girls have swooped in on our vacated tables and are smoking cigarettes and waving their arms about.

I walk outside the pub. I take out my phone and call him. The phone rings. It rings twice. As in, I can hear the ring in both my ears. In the phone and outside the pub. He’s here, he’s outside. I follow the sound across the road to the bus stop.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Hey, Sunny. What are you doing, man? Why did you leave?’

I round the bus stop and find him sat there, staring at his hands and breathing heavily.

‘Something’s different,’ he says.

‘Sunny, dude. You didn’t break that candle holder. It’s just a coincidence. A weird coincidence. Weird,’ I say, like I’m his dad, trying to calm him down after a sugar rush.

‘Look at my hands,’ Sunny says and holds them up for me to see.

I squint in the dark. They look like the same hands he’s had for four years. Exactly the same.

My phone starts ringing. It’s Sabha. I cancel the call. I pull his hands towards my eyes and look as closely as I can at their familiar form.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘You don’t see it?’ he says. He peers over the tops of the stumps. ‘You really don’t see it?’

My phone rings again. Sunny looks at me hesitate over whether to cancel it or not. ‘Go home, man. I’ll be fine.’

I answer the call.

I don’t hear from Sunny for another week. I email him. I phone him. I text him. I leave messages on various social networking sites for him but I get no response. For someone usually so present on a variety of online channels, he’s worryingly absent. Radio silence on every stream and wave.

I finish work early the following Tuesday and swing by his house, which is out of my way.

Sunny lives in a flat his brother bought before

moving back to India. As with anyone who owns property in London, the flat is located in the twilight fringe between urban and suburban, on a long road, in the middle of nowhere, and by nowhere­—south-east London.

I walk down the steps to his basement front door and ring the doorbell. When no one answers, not even his lodger, a loud spotty girl called Eva, I call his mobile. It goes straight to voicemail.

Sunny told me that when he was in the hospital, high on drugs, his hand wrapped tightly in gauze that would redden over the course of the day, and the doctors had informed him they hadn’t been able to retrieve his fingers from the overpass, that they were most likely in the stomachs of wild dogs, or crushed in the wreckage or burnt, he would close his eyes and try to recreate that moment in his head. He could retrieve that feeling of flying. He couldn’t quite recreate the particular fug of drunkenness.

He’d had his eyes closed the whole time. Apart from the weightlessness between his stomach and groin and the intense burst of air on his nose, he couldn’t remember it all. He wanted to recall the moment of separation. But it wouldn’t come.

He left the hospital in his mother’s care and nearly relented to her demands that he quit his studies abroad and come home to her. She’d need to work hard to find him a suitable wife, especially now he was fingerless as well as artistic. Once Sunny had been able to master typing and had sent out a few desperate emails about the jail of teenage familiarity he was locked in, we convinced him to return to the UK. Even Sabha.

He relearned smoking first. He said it was the most practical skill he could master.

Smoking, then typing, then wiping himself with the opposite hand. It was all strange at first, but mostly because he was still in gauze, bandage and plaster when he returned. Overwriting old muscle memory with new dexterity was a constant difficulty, he told me.

We all piled on to him emotionally and waited till the day the bandages came off. We’d

been drinking off a hangover in my local and he arrived late, smiling. He had been to the hospital that morning and pulled off his glove to reveal his new hand. I took it in mine and inspected it. Apart from light scarring and the missing digits, it still felt like his hand and holding it still felt normal.

I arrive home after failing to locate Sunny.

Sabha’s quiet, flicking through the television channels. She never bothers looking through the Sky channels, only ever the terrestrial ones, even if there’s something she wants to watch to remind me of the folly and expense of paying for it, something she expressly told me she had no interest in. I’m in no mood for a fight. I take my shoes and socks off, put my bag down, then my coat and I put the kettle on.

‘Yes please,’ she calls from the other room.

After a silence she asks, ‘So? How is he?’

‘Dunno,’ I reply, quietly, because I hate shouting between rooms.

‘What?’ she shouts back.

‘Hold on!’ I shout back.

After making us both tea, I sit down next to her and she snuggles her feet under my knee.

‘I didn’t find him,’ I say.

‘That’s so weird.’

Days pass and we forget about Sunny as our routine takes us to dizzying heights of zombification. I go to work. Sabha goes to work.

We come home. We watch television. We eat dinner in front of the television. Recaps of our days are reduced to ‘boring.’ We sleep with our backs to each other.

Almost a week later, almost two weeks after last seeing Sunny, I get a phone call in the middle of the night. I don’t hear it at first, but Sabha, a light sleeper, shakes me awake. The number is blocked. It’s too late for this, I think.

But something in me can’t ignore a ringing phone. I answer it.

Sabha and I reach the hospital in twenty minutes. She goes to park the car and I jump out at the main entrance in my tracksuit bottoms, sockless trainers and coat. My heart is racing. My scalp is burning. I worry that every

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second counts. It’s all fine. It’s not all fine.

Inside the hospital, I ask for Sunny’s room. I’m pointed down the corridor and told his bed number.

Everything in the hospital is still at this hour. It’s a quiet night. Everyone is silent or asleep. No one is talking. No televisions, no drama, not much. Nothing. Except me, I feel like I’m bringing chaos as I walk down the corridor with my hurried bustle and thin film of panic.

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I reach Sunny’s bed and he’s lying there in his clothes. His t-shirt­—one I’d given him, a print of one of his own designs I’d got made—is sodden with blood. He has stitches above his eyebrow. His glasses are nowhere to be seen but he has bruises circling his right eye and an eyepatch over his left.

‘Sunny, what the fuck happened?’

He shakes his head, slowly, on painkillers. A nurse, hovering in the room, walks over and stands next to me.

‘He’s a bit of a hero, actually. A foolhardy hero.’

‘What happened? I’m his best friend. His family lives abroad.’

‘Well, according to the police, he saw a guy being beaten up, attacked by some football thugs for being black in the wrong pub. He stepped in and broke the fight up. Took some hits himself. His glasses have lacerated his eyeball. He’ll be ok.’

I can’t breathe. It occurs to me at this moment that there’s no way I can lose this brother of mine to another country. I start at him and shudder, my eyes wide open, that usually stops the tears. I go to grab his hand but notice his arm... he’s painted it gold. From below the t-shirt mark down to the ghost digits. His golden arm, with frostings of dried blood on the knuckles. Looks like he got some blows in too. I trace his fingers, and in his stoned state, he wrinkles his face, trying to recognise me.

I think I hear him whisper my name. I clutch his hand tighter. He does feel different.

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But this will stay the same

by Chris Floyd

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These photographs were taken a dozen years and two lifetimes ago. In America, through different time zones, coast to coast.

I am 44 now and married with two children, but not to the woman in these pictures. It doesn’t matter what her name is. This is how I wanted love to be. This is love for the first time, shellshocked, stunned wonder that this thing, this person, has been put here, on Earth, in front of me, in my lifetime and has the power to make my days go quicker, slower or nowhere at all.

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en d

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Imprint Teller—A magazine of stories. www.tellermagazine.com tellus@tellermagazine.com distribution@tellermagazine.com submissions@tellermagazine.com Published in the UK by Teller, 2013 All contributions © the authors All other material © Teller Magazine Cover image © Chiara Dazi The Gilderbook (page 31–39) © images courtesy of the artist and Julian Page Fine Art

Tatyana Palyga was born in Cherepovets in Russia and now lives and works in Saint Petersburg. Her photography has appeared in two self-published books, as well as international exhibitions, magazines and blogs. www.cargocollective.com/tatyana_palyga ➞

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has written books on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, and air, as well as, most recently, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (2011). ➞

Editors: Katherine Hunt and Ruby Russell Graphic design: Anna Bühler, Peter Stenkhoff, Simone Schöler, Neue Gestaltung, Berlin www.neuegestaltung.de Illustrations: Page 41 Susann Massute, page 82–83 Lewis Heriz ISSN 2047-1998

Printed in Germany by Brandenburgische Universitätsdruckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft Potsdam mbH, on Munken Polar 100g/m² and 200g/m² from Arctic Paper. www.arcticpaper.com

Contributors Chloe Dewe Mathews has been awarded the BJP International Photography Award, the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award, PDN’s 30, and the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in The New York Times, The Telegraph, Le Monde and The Sunday Times. www.chloedewemathews.com ➞

Page 4–13

Oliver Harris is a writer based in London.

His crime novel, The Hollow Man, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011.

Deep Shelter will be published later this year.

He recently completed a PhD about psychoanalysis and antiquity. www.oliverharris.co.uk ➞

Page 14–17

Page 31– 39

David Gray is a graphic designer and photographer; Paul Summers is a writer. They have been creating paper movies since 2003.

Union is part of the Dreams that Days Break series, in which Gray’s photographs and poetic fragments by Summers explore the relationship between image and text. www.76dc.co.uk ➞

Großhandelspartner/paper supplied by Papyrus www.papyrus.com

Page 28 – 30

Alexander Massouras is a painter, printmaker, and author of Three Moderately Cautionary Tales. He has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Gilchrist Fisher award, and in 2011 he won the Pulse Prize. His work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the London School of Economics. www.massouras.co.uk ➞

All rights reserved. Reproduction of material is strictly prohibited without prior permission from Teller.

Page 18 – 27

Page 40 – 45

Susann Massute studies communication design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. Her work varies from creating books to illustrating advertising columns. susannmassute.tumblr.com ➞

Page 41

Iphgenia Baal is an author whose first two titles, The Hardy Tree and Gentle Art were published

by Trolley Books. Her work has also appeared in Dazed & Confused, Smoke: A London Peculiar, International Times, Monika, Litro, Strike! and The Milan Review. iphgeniabaal.wordpress.com ➞

Page 46 – 49

Seba Kurtis was born and raised in Buenos Aires, where he studied journalism. After the political and economic crisis of 2001 he spent several years as an illegal immigrant in Spain, an experience that informed his first two books, Drowned and Kif, both published by Here Press. www.sebakurtis.com ➞

Page 50 – 61

Stuart Braun is currently penning a book about his adopted city, Berlin: City of Refuge. His journalism has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. He has produced several documentaries for ABC Radio in Australia on Aboriginal communities, including the Parkies: www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/360/ parkie-days/3132182 ➞

Page 62– 65

Chiara Dazi was born in Italy, where she studied languages and wrote a degree thesis on German Ostalgie. She developed her photography while working at the Agence VU archive in Paris, and in 2012 graduated from Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Her work focuses on collective memory and the popular imagination of places. www.dazic.com ➞

Page 66–77

Nikesh Shukla is a writer of books and television. His debut novel, Coconut Unlimited was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010. He has been writer in residence for BBC Asian Network and the Royal Festival Hall. His Channel 4 Comedy Lab Kabadasses aired on E4 and Channel 4 in 2011. He likes Spider-man comics. A lot. nikeshshukla.wordpress.com ➞

Page 78 – 88

Lewis Heriz is an illustrator and graphic artist working in London. Most frequently he produces record sleeve artwork for releases related to music from hotter parts of the world than Hackney, but when not doing that, he likes to draw people and the things related to their lives. lewisheriz.com ➞

Page 82– 83

Chris Floyd is a photographer and filmmaker based in London. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar, GQ, Interview and The New York Times Magazine.

He has been featured in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and in American Photography. www.chrisfloyd.com ➞

Page 89 – 98

Teller’s back, at work and at play.

Chiara Dazi goes wandering with woodworking travellers, Tatyana Palyga spends a day at the office and Chloe Dewe Mathews ends up in call centre central by mistake. David Gray and Paul Summers investigate labour and its remnants in England’s idea of north and Steven Connor buys a new USB stick.

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We join Stuart Braun to hang out with the Parkies and hear the stories of Melbourne’s Aboriginal community, and Iphgenia Baal as she waits around for the council. Oliver Harris tells the story of a young soldier whiling away time in rural France on the way to war and Seba Kurtis pieces together fragments of Argentina’s bloody history.

Chris Floyd lets us in on golden days with the love of his former life, Nikesh Shukla introduces his giltarmed best friend and Alexander Massouras tells the moderately cautionary tale of a craftsman with the Midas touch.