Joseph Sykes - Issue 35

Joseph Sykes is a writer from Huddersfield and based in Manchester, UK. His short story “Lost in Zektoria” was longlisted in The Phare’s WriteWords competition in 2021, and he has had short stories published in Templeman Review and Leon Literary Review. He has also authored language-learning works for the German publishing house Circon Verlag. He is currently working on his first novel, set in 1989 East Germany and 2010 Yorkshire. He is a former translator and subtitler and is now a teacher of German and French in a secondary school.

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What Elephant?

It was all Poor Chloë – ‘Poor, poor, poor Chloë’ – over breakfast, and it made me sick to the back teeth – literally, they’d have said. 

It was all about the ‘sentimental value’ one minute and ‘How well you wore ‘em, Chlo’ the next, as they fell over themselves in a bid to out-sorrow each other. Sunglasses, sentimental? I wanted to scream. And why is no one addressing the fact that…

As if I ever would. I chewed at my Cumberland.

‘What a night!’ said Graham.

‘What a night!’ they all agreed. (‘I love these hash browns.’ – ‘Red sauce wi’ bacon? You heathen!’ – ‘It’s called ketchup, Mum.’ – ‘I’ll call it what I like, thank you.’)

And then back to Chloë’s oversized, overpriced pair of Versaces. You’d have thought she’d lost a kidney.

‘Poor thing.’

I clung to the bright side: the mini-break was reaching its finale, Acts 1 and 2 of Graham Greenwood’s Big Birthday Bender now behind us. My current irritation and impatience were preferable to the dread I’d endured as the weekend I neither chose to attend nor could do anything to get out of approached. And yet: no. This erring on the sanguine wouldn’t do. My fears had been nothing – nothing – compared to last night’s car crash.

‘We’ll go back to the bar,’ Graham promised.

Please, God, no.

‘What if they don’t have them?’

‘Then, Biggi, we’ll take a Harvey Nick’s detour and buy my angel another pair.’

‘Oh, GG, I won’t let you!’ (Chloë protested.) ‘But there’s no time!’ (Biggi wailed.)

They to-ed and fro-ed until Teddy belched and they all howled, because What is he like?!

‘As you were saying, Gs: What. A. Night.’ Lewis patted Graham on the back. ‘What a weekend.’ A mouth full of fried bread. ‘Thank you so much for inviting us.’

What gaslighting! There wasn’t – never had been – an invitation. Lewis seemingly considered the room and meal a gift. (‘Hotel plus Michelin makes seven stars by my maths,’ Graham had winked.) The West End show, the rooftop cocktails: a present. The 400-mile round trip in what they incessantly referred to as the ‘Martini-mobile’ – a minibus Graham had booked because my mother-in-law wouldn’t travel by train until ‘this thing wi’ the Muslims is over’ (What’s that, Biggi? Ramadan? I itched to ask. Eid?) – that, too, was mere generosity in Lewis’ – in all of their – eyes. Blinded by wilful naïveté, they were. The extravagance was not a gift. It was a currency. Graham had bought our compliance.

‘You’re very welcome, son. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to part wi’ my money doin’ stuff like this. People sometimes ask what’d be the first to go if we fell on hard times – and I’ve been there before, Lewis, son, and believe you me, people I know’ve ended up back there by lettin’ cash-splashin’ outdo their finances. What’d be the first thing to go? The Jag? House? Our Biggi’s rocks?’ (‘Stop it, Gs. You’re givin’ me palpitations!’) ‘And it’s a tough ‘un. Seriously. I dunno what the first thing to go’d be. But there’s no doubt,’ (Here he met each of our gazes in turn, as if to hammer home the sincerity with which he spoke) ‘that the last to go’d be family time. Because what’s a man without his family? Nowt.’

We – they – let the profoundness percolate. Chloë clasped Lewis’s hand. Teddy mouthed something which might have been What a man.

Only Biggi spoke: ‘My GG. We love you.’

Sarah had been fairly quiet throughout: she had Poor Chloë-ed with the rest of them, but had held off What a Night-ing. She knew, even agreed with, my appraisal of the wretched affair.

‘What must the bar staff have thought?’ I’d asked, watching her put the Greenwood-sponsored bling in her ears via the bathroom mirror. ‘Never mind the other clientele. Do none of your family have an ounce of–’

‘I know, I know. Just don’t bring it up at breakfast.’

I threw her a glance now. She was lending her father a sympathetic smile. Fine. Rather that than a thumbs and forefingers heart.

‘What a night,’ said Chloë. ‘We must, must do it again sometime. I promise I’ll take better care of my shades.’ (‘Don’t blame yourself, sweetheart’ – ‘It’s easy done. Them negronis were strong stuff.’ – ‘What are you like?’ – ‘It woudn’t surprise me if some light-fingered so-and-so’d had off wi’ them.’)

‘Definitely.’ It was Sarah, this time. I shifted in my seat. She’d promised me GGBBB was a one-off.

‘Though,’ she continued, mopping up her brown sauce, ‘We can’t expect Dad to foot the however-many-grand bill next time.’ (‘No way.’ – ‘Wouldn’t have it.’ – ‘Far too generous.’)

‘No, I woudn’t have it.’ Graham clattered his cup into its saucer. Black coffee sloshed over the side. ‘I’m offended at that suggestion. ‘Haven’t I just said how much pleasure I get from spendin’ my hard-earnt cash on my two gorgeous girls? Oh, ‘n your ugly mug, ‘n all, Teddy.’ (‘Don’t be mean, GG.’ – ‘Cheeky git.’)

‘I might go up for seconds,’ said Lewis.

Chloë performed a jaw drop: ‘Don’t be greedy!’

‘He’s a growin’ lad, Chloë.’ Biggi creamed her hands. ‘Aren’t you, Lewis? Go on, you go up for more. And be a lamb ‘n get us one of them Danishes while you’re up.’

‘Won’t matter if you can’t fit into your jeans after a few too many bangers, son.’ Graham was already smirking at his own punchline. ‘It’s our Chloë who wears the trousers anyway!’

Cue the hysterics. I sipped my orange juice.

‘What a night,’ said Biggi (‘Such a dad joke’ – ‘Legend, isn’t he?’ – ‘How bloody rude!’) ‘I know I’m biased, but I do think we’ve got summat other families haven’t. You don’t get this’ – she clasped her palms, shook them in front of her heart – ‘in most families.’

Chloë, Sarah, even Teddy nodded solemnly in gratitude while Graham tickled the back of his wife’s neck. And on they went, drinking their refills and nibbling at their leftovers. For a time, they even let the dining room murmurings and kitchen clatter fill the sporadic silences instead of clambering over each other’s inane utterances to be heard. I placed my cutlery together, folded my linen napkin and noticed that the elephant, which had so far lingered at the continental spread, was trundling in our direction.

Chloë sighed. ‘I went and spoke too soon, didn’t I? I told Lewis I’d dodged a hangover. Felt pretty sprightly back in the room. But…’ she put her hand to her stomach and, as she did, the elephant lowered its trunk over her shoulder and sniffed at her untouched buttery toast. The chandelier jingled as its head brushed the lower crystals. ‘Seems I might have had one too many after all.’

‘I think we all did, love.’ The mammal toyed with Biggi’s bob.

 ‘We’re entitled to.’ Lewis, back from the buffet, reached beneath its tusk and passed Biggi her pastry.

Graham sifted through his wallet, repeating the word ‘Amex’ under his breath. Sarah swilled her dregs.

‘But what a night!’ said Teddy. ‘I’ll be telling them all at the club house tomorrow. It’ll proper crack them up.’ (‘Gus’ll be jealous’ – ‘Already liked my post on the Gram’ – ‘This Danish is a bit stale’ – ‘I do reckon your sunnies were stolen, you know?’)

Sarah’s hand squeezed my thigh: Stop jittering.

And then she spoke.

‘What a night.’

I jumped as the elephant flipped the table with ease. Artifacts went flying – cutlery and crockery, for sure, but also Biggi’s hand cream and all five Greenwoods’ iPhone five-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-fives. The creature danced on the wreckage, then sat down on the soiled tablecloth, perhaps in protest, perhaps resignation, for if this pièce de résistance couldn’t get them to take notice…

‘What could?’

I felt my face flush for a second, but no one saw. Biggi was dabbing at Chloë’s top (‘Bloody red sauce.’ – ‘Ketchup!’); Teddy and Lewis, play-sparring.

‘What could what?’ Sarah asked me.

‘I–’

‘What could beat it?’ said Graham. ‘Nothing.’

He sold cigarettes on the underground.

No top-up cards, no beers-to-go. Just cigarettes

He strapped on multipacks like a bulletproof vest, a semi-circle of cellophane blocks beneath his baggy jacket. The whiff of cops and they disappeared. David Copperfield, eat your heart out.

Who?

It doesn’t matter. Russians, mostly – the cigarettes, not the cops; know-it-alls from Hamburg and Cologne had replaced Moscow’s lackeys by then. The market started broad enough: bobos – bourgeois bohemians, before you ask – yes, but also men in overalls and women in tabards whose earlier isms long lay abandoned beneath the rubble of the fallen Wall. Never mind a new decade, it was a new country, and if they bought their pizza from Turks and their schnapps from Poles, why not buy their illicit cigarettes from the chiselled Vietnamese of few words.

Anyway, his heyday didn’t last long. The size of the sans serif CIGARETTE MAFIA WARS on tabloid front covers increased in line with the size of the Cyrillic characters in SMOKING KILLS, and regulars began to fear a fate worse than cancer-caused death: appearing complicit, or nefarious, or stingy.

Anomalies kept him afloat: exchange students, punks, EasyJetset Spaniards who thought he was cute. Still, by the end he was rotating between piss-putrid platforms and insisting to Hartz-IV casualties – bums fishing eight-cent-deposit beer bottles from bins – that he wouldn’t barter. Apart from he did, eventually, once, and the currency wasn’t green glass.

And so, yeah. I never met the guy. Enzo, apparently. Second generation Sicilian; family made the pope look agnostic. I don’t appreciate humour, I told Hien, despite his tone being nothing but sincere. Aged fifteen, this Enzo came home to find a line of Netto bags beneath the apartment block buzzers: the contents of his room. A single IKEA sack: his hamster cage. And frozen hamster.

He left bum-fuck Brandenburg for Berlin, Hien told me.

Do you have to use that phrase? I said. I can hear myself now. So petulant.

The capital’s failed him, he said. No school, job, nothing.

And so? I said.

And so–

“I’m so, so sorry,” the American shakes his head. “If I’d known it was so, well, traumatic to talk about, I wouldn’t have asked.”

He wants me to say, Don’t worry, it’s fine. But I leave him hanging.

“Did you forgive him?” he asks.

It wasn’t Hien’s fault, I say, mirroring the American’s furrowed brow. Now I’m the one hamming it up.

“But wasn’t it because of him that you’re–?”

Yes. Yeah. But everything was always on my terms. I wouldn’t leave Angelika for him. Or rather: I wouldn’t sacrifice comfortable domesticity. Do you think he’d have been selling counterfeit goods in U-Bahn stations if I’d given a centimetre?

His fingers drum on my knee’s skin. “That’s gnarly, man.”

He’s dead, Kyle. It’s not gnarly, it’s fucking devastating.

I’ve been harsh, but I’m in no mood to apologise. Twinks coming onto losers in ripped jeans twice their age have hard life lessons to learn.

His hand sneaks up my thigh regardless, his pinkie toying with a loose thread at my fly.

“You’re the lucky one,” he says.

But not in the way you think. It wasn’t lucky genes. It was residency, the right to work, healthcare.

I pull his hand from my groin, feel its softness, smoothness. Banal, I think. His hand is banal.

This is your train, I say. Change at Zoo: U2 to Nollendorfplatz.

He gives a cheated sigh. “I guess it’s good night, then. I’m around till Thursday… if you change your mind.”

Good night, Kyle.

He’s sobered up too much to try and kiss me again. I relented the first time, my back against the bar. For a moment, my tongue sought Hien’s smoky spit. But it found nothing of the sort – never did. Beyond the taste of vodka just flawless spearminty enamel.

“Good night.”

I stand alone on the platform.

Kyle’s number is in my recent calls. I block it, as I do. My battery is almost dead. I press menu and * to lock the keypad.

Twenty minutes till the next train. I claimed home was in the opposite direction. He’d only have been clingy. I light an Unlucky Strike.

The wall tiles taunt me with their quixotic quotes:

Every man has the right to life, freedom and security.

All men are born free and equal.

I shouldn’t let it irk me. But Hien dedicated his life to Germany in the ‘80s. Free and equal were but ashes by ‘92, when his brothers and sisters fled the flames of fascism via their residence’s roof. If I ever return to Frankie’s Den, I’ll avoid Westhafen just to bypass this bullshit. Amrumer Straße, too: Angelika gets off there for salsa. I imagine her seeing me, hunched over, chain-smoking. I wouldn’t fool her into thinking my jeans are ripped for fashion’s sake.

I’m grinding my teeth between inhales. It was opening up to Kyle that did it.

Oh, Hien. Oh.

I’m wringing my hands, or rather someone else is, and I’m down, now, crossed-legged on the damp tiles. My Hien. My sobs are ugly and dry.

Hien laughs. Soft white guy, I hear him say. I laugh too, or am I still sobbing? He doesn’t say much these days. One day, I fear, he might not speak at all.

I steady my hands and peel the cellophane from yet more stock. Gone is the Cyrillic. You need a keener eye to spot counterfeits these days: Made in Swizerland. I just pray my arresting officer is dyslexic.

I was nothing without him, you know. For all the hurt I’d caused, Angelika was my rock at first. My determination to self-destruct helped nobody, she liked to say. When I started this business she gave up. I’m too tired for this, Kevin, she said.

But it brought me closer to Hien, gave me something we shared; and nothing plus something is something.

The flame of my lighter quivers as I drag.

No top-up cards, I hear from afar. No beers-to-go.

Just cigarettes.