The Swamp: Part 1

Ab stopped to admire the view. City lights sprawled in front of him, filling up the valley, climbing the hills on the other side. Cars crawled by below; their noises seemed to reach him from too far away. It was hot and humid that night, and he had been walking uphill for the last half hour. Dark streaks had appeared in the back of his pale tee-shirt, touching him with clammy hands; and sweat mixed with hair wax trickled down his forehead. He wasn't tired though: his excitement was much too powerful for fatigue.

He had always imagined himself visiting this city. It was one of those distant and glamorous capitals that his fingers used to step between on the map of the world on his bedroom wall. And now that he had finished his studies, there was nothing to stop him coming here as often as he liked. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

When they film the movie of my life, he had told himself as he walked out of the examination hall for the last time, crumpling up the question paper on the way, This will be the first scene.

He had arrived at a bus station on the edge of the city, and set off on foot. It took him a long time to get out of the suburbs. He'd spent what felt like hours zig-zagging through a succession of dead residential streets, even deader in the streetlit gloom. He always wondered how people could bear to live in such places. He shuddered to think of how they must have corrupted their own ambitions, each compromise laboriously justified, each small defeat twisted into victory, until they finally convinced themselves that their lustreless existence was precisely the one they had always dreamed of.

Eventually he had stumbled across the road he was on now. It was a wide and dilapidated boulevard, unlike anything back home, with a strip of grass and trees separating the lanes. On either side of it commercial and industrial buildings hid behind big metal fences with rolls of razor wire, or walls topped with broken bottles. The few cars were driving very fast; or else they were driving very slow, watching him in their wing mirrors.

His new life had finally begun.

He had been hoping that the boulevard would take him all the way to the city. He was impatient to be down there, down by the famous river whose two lines of lights snaked across the valley, all cafés and foreign languages and sexy foreign women. But from where he was now he could see that the road finished just a few minutes further on, in a large and almost completely dark area. It was difficult to say what this area was, or even where it ended. Its shape was defined by absence rather than presence, by the viscous shadows that flowed down the sides of houses and alley walls, that clung to the half-lit trees spaced along the pavements, that shrank from the headlights of passing cars before closing up behind them.

He knew that the sensible thing to do was to double back and find another way down to the city. But he was far too restless to retrace his steps now.

He noticed a sound he couldn't place, squelching, rasping, formed of many voices. Frogs, he realised; and he tried to remember if he'd seen a canal on the illuminated map on the wall outside the bus station.

All he could remember was the taxi drivers shaking their heads when he said he wanted to walk.

He set off down the hill, moving as slowly as his excitement allowed him it. He felt more receptive when his pace was even and slow, as if the world was drifting into him, like plankton through the baleen of a whale. Besides, he didn't want to be too sweaty when he hit those cafés. As though noticing it for the first time, he was struck by the way his vision swayed as he walked, bobbing from step to step. Only the lights remained fixed, floating in the black valley like a field of stars. Lulled by the newfound shiplike motion, his mind drifted off and he began to imagine what was happening below, drawing constellations of urban sleaze around the scattered dots.

Among the millions of nights now taking place, behind the lit windows that flecked the sides of dark apartment blocks, in the seats of cars whose disembodied headlights swept along the streets, in hotels whose neon signs glared across the skyline, it seemed a shame to have to choose only one. If only it were possible, he reflected, before his thoughts broke off.

One of the whores who were stationed at surprisingly regular intervals along the road had looked his way. She was standing under a streetlight, not far from where the dark area began. Ab found it hard to believe she did much trade there—unless being on the edge of a lightless hole was good for business, like the last petrol station before a desert. He tried to picture the chain of events that had dumped her by the side of this insalubrious street. That had taken her round brown face with its wide and somehow toadlike mouth, and smothered it with lipstick and makeup; that had buried her straight black hair under a ludicrous blonde wig; that had crammed her squat brown legs into a white miniskirt and white stiletto heels.

¡Ay Miguel! We are so poor. We cannot feed them all. We will have to accept Señor Rodriguez' offer… I am going far away now Pepito—when I come back I will be driving a motor car… Slap! You're mine now, understand, mine…

A snort of laughter escaped him as the clichéd scenes lapsed into childish nonsense.

The prostitute's glance was swift and appraising; it took in his youth, his scruffy clothes, his lack of car.

"You want fuck?" she asked, in a surprisingly deep voice.

He didn't reply, just continued at his slow pace, buffeted now by self-consciousness, eyes unconvincingly fixed in front of him. It was probably more out of rancour at his high-handed indifference than an attempt at last ditch salesmanship that she lifted her skirt to reveal a large and thickly haired cock and balls, gleaming in the streetlight.

Wait till I tell them about that! he thought, though it wasn't entirely clear to him who they were. All he knew, as he passed the hooker and the crackle of confrontation faded, was that wonderful feeling of sound and vision flickering past him, of his life striding on, further into the night, towards more moments, more experiences, and if he closed his eyes he could almost see the movie playing, jitter fast, the whore and the streetlights ticking from flash quick still to still then receding into nothing, and leaving nothing but the ache of that unbearable longing, that soft mouthed, glitter eyed, cinema longing.

He stopped beneath the final streetlight; in the crown of the sodium glare he could make out the point where the pavement ended and a flat, tarmacked surface began. The oblique light threw the pitted texture of the tarmac into deep relief, and weeds cast long shadows.

Car park, he decided, though he couldn't see any cars.

There was a buzzy, unfinished sound. He looked up and saw the cone of light below the streetlamp so full of insects that it looked like a solid thing. It made him nervous, all those creatures, all that tiny life. His skin became amplified so that every prickle made him squirm and slap, every shiver knotted up in his spine.

He turned and looked back along the boulevard. The prostitute was still there, still facing the empty street. The streetlights and the dark buildings rose to the crest of the hill. He couldn't see anything over it, only the orange-brown sky, starless in the city glow.

He stepped off the pavement and noticed that the ground was soft underfoot. He was surprised: it was a hot night, but he didn't think it was hot enough to melt tarmac. And there was something else, something hidden under the surprise. This wasn't quite the sensation of melted tar, the hard smack of shoes sticking and unsticking. It was softer and vaguer than that.