CRUSHED MEXICAN SPIDERS - PART 1
Illustration by Milano Chow |
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Vice: When did you start writing?
Tibor: I was always writing bits and pieces, even when I was a teenager. I suppose I started doing it seriously when I was 28.
Why so late?
I worked as a journalist out in Hungary from 1988 to ’90 for all the big changes at that time. After all that was over, I sort of came back to London expecting to find a job. For various reasons, I couldn’t. I was sort of sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, but I was lucky because I had some money saved up. It occurred to me that if I didn’t really settle down and make a serious attempt to write a novel... Well, you know.
No, what?
Well, I’d done journalism but that wasn’t what interested me. So that’s when I sat down and wrote my first novel, Under the Frog. |
 head of her, struggling up the stairs strugglingly was a mother and pushchair, laden with bags and a screaming kid. Homebound workers salmoned past without offering a hand, blinkered by visions of supper or respite.
The comatose staff of London Underground didn’t think of helping the mother. She wouldn’t be helping either. Ten years ago when she had moved to London, she would have. Imperceptibly but perceptibly the city toxified you. Parking across strangers’ driveways, not saying thank you when a door was held open for you, murder. Somehow it got you.
London informed you that you got nothing for a lifetime of decency; not a free glass of water. Not that behaving badly necessarily got you anywhere, but it was generally easier and more fun; and finally any career criminal from Albania or genocidist from Rwanda passing through London got the same medical treatment as you and better housing rights.
You didn’t want to become the sort of person who didn’t help an entoiled mother, but you became one. No one had helped her when she had needed it. And now her help muscles had withered away. Single mothers were especially annoying because of their dishonesty. Very few of them could hack it. They either leeched off friends and family, sucking in services and cash, or they botched it up, while maintaining how coping they were.
Outside, on the pavement, a Portuguese junkie was kneeling while a buxom exorcist wielding a Bible intoned with two backup entreaters and sprinkled him with holy water.
Sidestepping the adjuration she threaded her way through the clumps of beggars, drug dealers, thugs, and seething commuters that made up Brixton. She ran walking. To get home was all she wanted. The strength of the desire was almost alarming.
She had thought about getting out. She had been thinking about little else. And she hadn’t just thought about it. Job applications. She was convinced she had sent more job applications than any other human being. They had failed. She had written more. They had failed.
Then, while she would have been happy leaving London, her boyfriend couldn’t. Harun worked as a junior information officer at the Turkish Embassy, and just as he was coming to the end of his tour of duty, after three years, when she had been counting on escape, teaching English and getting a tan and a family, they had split up. She knew you couldn’t have everything. Harun farted a lot and always had to be infallible on international affairs, but had a sense of humor and was punctual. Now she was again at the mercy of London’s nightlife.
What was a night out in London? Pleading your way into a club, past an earpiece which had grown a moron. Once inside you had to fight to get served, and then your money went as if you were surrendering it to bandits. She had only managed to get the deposit on her flat because of her inheritance from her grandmother. Her grandmother hadn’t been well off, but she hadn’t been one for drinking, smoking, eating much, buying much, going to the cinema or indeed anywhere. She played bridge with old friends and was of a generation that worked or starved.
Everywhere she went, on holiday or on business, was better. Dublin, Copenhagen, Istanbul, St. Ives, St. Petersburg, Palermo. You name it, it was an improvement. You’d walk into a shop and the proprietor would say hello instead of assessing how much you would be attempting to steal. Everyone she knew talked of leaving London. Somewhere calmer. Somewhere greener. Somewhere sunnier. Somewhere else.
As she approached her house, she could see the lights on in the ground-floor flat that belonged to Gloria. Gloria, who had a doctorate on the subject of slums in poor countries, and whose flat reflected that. Her parents paid the bills, and Gloria had sex, noisily, with embarrassed men who were never seen more than twice.
In the basement flat were the Cooks. An elderly couple who had been living there for forty years; they effortlessly annihilated all the myths about the nobility of the white working class. They were sullen, smelly, fans of any manifestation of ugliness. Living in shit was evidently no problem for them, since they did nothing about the rubbish amassed, shin-high, in front of their door. For the first year she had greeted them, and been ignored. Twice, clandestinely, disgusted by the filth, she had gathered up the debris around their door. But then she gave up. Londoned.
The first floor was Rolf. An old, failed actor who lived on his own, he never had friends dropping by, because he was a bedridden inconsiderate miserabilist: A bedridden inconsiderate miserabilist, however, who had been an inconsiderate miserabilist long before he was bedridden. Yet he would never be one of those pensioners discovered long after the arrival of decomposition, because he was too unpleasant. A file of social workers shambled up to his flat, grimacing but reliable.
When she had moved in she had listened politely to Rolf’s stories of being stranded in Ethiopia, playing third lackey in a film that had run out of finance, and explaining why he had to keep a pool table in the hallway, a full-size one that made it difficult for the other residents to get past.
In his favor Rolf was at least under her flat. His bathroom regularly flooded Gloria’s flat, but he wouldn’t do anything effective about it. It was fascinating how you could not care at all about others and still be cared for. One summer when she had worked at a giant campsite in Normandy she had noticed how the decent customers got the nightmarish reps and how the decent reps got the nightmarish customers. Invariably the nightmarish reps never got the nightmarish customers any more than the decent reps got the decent customers.
Then, up on the second floor, she saw traces of light in her flat. Even though she assumed she must have left a light on in the morning when she left, she couldn’t suppress a creep of anxiety. This was a city where everything was done to guarantee the liberty of burglars.
Although no one was watching her, or would be able to make her out in the dark, she felt ridiculous as she fumbled with the key in the top lock. The lock had never given her grief before, but no matter how many times she slipped the key in, it refused to turn. After several minutes of failure, it occurred to her that the locks must have been changed, so persistent was the lack of turning. Had there been a burglary during the day? If the locks had been changed why wasn’t there a note? She chose to ring Gloria’s bell to see what was going on.
Over the intercom, a male voice answered.
“Good evening,” she asked. “Is Gloria there, please?”
“No Gloria here.”
Had Gloria moved out? Gloria had been in the house when she moved in, but they had never got on. She had first met Gloria 15 minutes after she had magazined one unbelievably large hairy spider and given another unbelievably large hairy spider a taste of the 966 pages of the telephone directory. She had been agitated, because they were too big to be London spiders.
CONTINUED:
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