They Have What We Want

  At 6.43 am, Mirek enters through the door of his shared house in Mile End, London. Kicking his Dr. Martin’s off while raffling through his wet curls from the rain, he crosses through the narrow corridor into the small kitchen. A singular golden string shines across the room, exposing little specks of dust twirling in the air. White walls are washed in shadow. Wooden floor lays cold beneath his feet, waiting to be heated by the furnace. He opens the fridge and squints from the bright light. A bottle of Corona stands on the fridge door, waiting for him and as his takes it out, a soft pitter-patter of feet against wooden floor sounds above him.   

…

Moose ambles down the cold corridor into the bathroom and opens the lid of the toilet. Waiting for his bladder to give, his mind travels to the dull atmosphere of his office, the Golden Bricks Lettings; dead walls holding rows of desks like tombstones decorated with computers and land lines. Waiting in line are the calls and emails of people looking to rent or buy. Moose flashes the toilet and turns left to the small sink. A singular, long, dark curl lays on the edge. In the large mirror above the sink, floats his gaunt face. Carmel skin stretches over bone, exposing beady brown eyes and thin lips. His nose is the only surviving feature, strong and long like his mother’s. The only woman to ever love him. He brushes his teeth and walks out of the bathroom to start his descend out of the house. As he opens the wardrobe, bitterness settles on his tongue. Just like yesterday and all the days before and quite possibly just like the days ahead of him, he puts on a white dress shirt, knots a tie over his neck and slips into his slacks. The trousers hang loosely over his slender hips. He ventures downstairs for breakfast and meets Mirek standing by the fridge, a beer bottle in his hand.

“Morning.” He grunts.

“Good Morning.” Mirek says with a smile, his ‘r’ rolling with a heavy Polish accent, ending the word with a heavy ‘g’. It is only when the sun rises and falls that he sees the DJ in his house. And oh, the jealousy that pricks at his chest; to live in a world of music.  

As a child, Moose stumbled upon his love for violin. The melancholically sweet sound of bow against strings flowed towards him like solvation during a music class in secondary school. He was 11. God, he remembers the urge to learn, to hold its fragile body, to create melody only she can produce. He swore to his little self that he will do just that. He will be the next Yehudi Menuhin! And like a prayer answered by angels, during his 12th Christmas, laying underneath a grotesquely large tree in his Hampstead Heath childhood home, there she was. A dark mahogany violin his mother bought. Oh the joy of seeing her dark body shining under the red and yellow lights. Oh how shortly lived. It died under his father’s stern words; words that haunt Moose still, 10 years past his death. 

“What the bloody hell is the boy going to do with that thing?”

Like a cast out lam, little Moose begged for the love his father denied him, sacrificing him instead for a faint relief from agony of his own miserable life. 

And do as he does upon thee. 

Moose remembers his grandfather. A cold sack of skin wrapped tightly around hard skeleton. 

Despite that, the grotesque melody entwining with the old man’s ridicule rang each and every day. At a tender age of 13, he swore that the hate given by his father will be revenged. He will become the greatest violin player, creating better symphonies than Yehudi Menuhin himself! 

That revenge, however, has yet to come.

“How was the show?” He asks.

“Oh, it was great, man!” Mirek says after a big swing of the bottle. “I was working on a new piece with some fragments from Polish folks song, you know, mixing it with contemporary techno, got some 4 by 2 beats in there. It was, ah…” He snaps his fingers, trying to remember a word but waves it off. “… It was great.”

“That’s great…” 

“Yeah. You have a good day.” Mirek says, leaving the kitchen. The empty bottle stays behind on the counter. 

Moose throws it away and after reluctantly eating a bowl of cheerios with oat milk, he leaves the house and walks into the cold, wet morning. The silent melody of Menuhin’s violin concert, the four seasons in F Minor “Winter” plays in his mind. Whispering its sweet nothings. Covering his body with shame and longing. Who is he to still believe that he will play. At 32, killing his days with scavenging homes for people he neither knows nor cares for, who is he to still believe? He remembers the day of his childish misery.

At 15, he stands on a stage in front of his classmates, proud and straight, holding the violin in his hand like an extension of his own flesh and blood. Bow to strings. But instead of the sweet melody he so longs for, a screeching scream slithers through. And he is drawing in their ridicule. Fingers pointing and mouth cruelly curving in laughter, they are his audience. And oh how much he despises each and every one of them. 

He enters the central line; he’s back on the stage, lights die all around him; curtain is drawn up: he’s lit with the stage light. He’s here to be gawked at, to be pointed at. 

He passed through the bodies and finds a corner to occupy. Eyes shift from their resting place to him. The failed violist that wishes to be like Menuhin. Better! You here that? He thinks he will be better! Yes, yes, we heard. Oh, what a fool. A fool, indeed. The train opens its doors at Liverpool Street and more people get on. 

He gets to the office by 8, dropping his tiny body onto the black chair as it moans in protest. No eyes are on him here. They are all glued to the flashing screen of their computers. Like ghosts stuck to their gravestones, they sit still. Moose takes his blazer off, hangs it on the second chair and turns the computer on. The screen flashes. Eyes glued. He sits still.

At 19.01 he leaves his office. Baker Street station with central line that will take him home is on his left. He turns right. He walks under the sign that reads The Barley Mow and walks through the pub’s heavy front doors into the dimly lit floor and drinks until his tongue is fat from alcohol. He gets back home at 1.15 am, to find Mirek in the kitchen with a bottle of beer. His wild curly hair sits like a black halo. 

“Good morning.” The DJ says politely.

“Morning.” Moose replies, before escaping upstairs to the sanctuary of his bed. A violin sits in the shadowed corner. Dust covers her delicately curved body. 

…

Mirek opens the front door into the night air and walks out. His laptop and mixing board sit in his black backpack. The neatly arranged rows of London’s houses guide him to Mile End station where he will wait for the Hammersmith line, the last train of the night and ride it quietly to Wood Lane. 

The sky is empty tonight. The residue of the warmth from the day before still hangs in the July’s night air. He breaths in the quietness, the serenity, the absence of interlacing perfumes of the people long tucked inside their homes. It would a very honest thing to say that Mirek enjoys what he does. During the day, when the world goes by loudly and chaotically, he is tucked away safely in his room, creating music on his computer for the outside world, only to venture out at night to play live at a night club tucked in an industrial area of Wood Lane. Mirek enters the station, touches his oyster card to the reader, walks through the gate and down the stairs to a quiet platform.

‘4 minutes’ the timetable reads. 

He came to London as a boy of 17 from a small Polish countryside Jabramowo, leaving behind his family of 5 brothers and 3 sisters. His father, Tomek, died of cancer when Mirek was just 6, leaving his wife to fend off the hunger and the bitter cold of Polish winter. 3 of her sons and 2 daughters however succumbed to both over the space of 4 years. The rest of the 2 sons turned their eyes towards crime, falling into cells of Kalish and Kielce. The last living daughter married a milkman, who whisked her away to Gdansk. And the remaining son, the youngest of them all, was send to England, London for a bachelor’s degree in business only to drop out at the age of 20 to pursue his desire for music. And so there he is, sitting on the Hammersmith line, as it rolls him towards Wood Lane with his mother worrying her wrinkly face over his safety, his future. Her only remaining son. 

The doors of the train opens its doors to the crowd of King’s Cross St Pancras, flooding the quiet carriage with night life seekers. Girls in black little dresses and glitter faces, boys in ripped jeans and colorful shirts. People laugh and mingle their bejeweled bodies, excited for a night they will most likely not remember once the sun returns. 

Mirek steps out into the Wood Lane underground station, leaving the chaos behind. The yellow tiled walls are stained with dirt and age, ringing with the announcement of the last train departing. Metallic escalator sends him upwards towards the exit and after a 20 minute walk through the quiet residential street, the dead industrial road, the fenced area of a former sugar factory comes into view. 

“Hey, Mirek!” Anton, one of the bouncers shouts from behind a line of people waiting to get in.

“Hey, Anton.” With a bald head and broad shoulders, the Romanian descendant stands above most people he comes across. 

Mirek turns the corner and enters through the side doors. Bass from a recorded music vibrates through the midnight blue walls. On the stage behind the black curtain, he settles in, plugging the wires and testing his system. And as the loud voice of the MC echoes from the curtain, followed by the screams and cheers of the people on the floor, Mirek breathes in, waiting for the curtain to lift, for the stage light to turn on

At 5.25 am, he leaves for Wood Lane station towards his home, to see Moose swinging his bedroom door open, grunting his usual greeting, wearing his pressed, clean suit and for a moment Mirek thinks of his mother. Oh how she would have loved for him to have Moose’s career.