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Erika's Place
It’s still dark. A foggy morning out of the back door of Erika's place, over a gully filled with grass and all kinds of wildlife. Some of it illegally imported from Germany, spiders native to the Northern Hemisphere and so forth. Some of them have prospered. The rickety wooden flooring which bridges the sides of the gully feels soft as old cheese to my heels. The cold winter mountain wind whistles through the dead thorny vines that choke the trellises on both sides of the bridge. Peeling white painted frames are lightly furred with old cobwebs, spider homes long abandoned, anonymous black specks held in them evidence of past feasts. The back rooms had been built slightly crooked, floorboards placed askew with grass growing through the gaps. Some gaps are almost an inch wide in places, large enough for all kinds of tiny wildlife to come and go. The building has the air of a draughty abandoned boarding school gymnasium; occasional random winds (or ghost-cats) playing with the stray autumn leaves. We barricade ourselves in the innermost of the back rooms in the hope that the surrounding halls and bedrooms might insulate us from the cold. It seems to work. Another good reason for choosing this room is that it is one of the few with even one working power point. Erika plugs in a double adaptor, a tiny fan heater and a portable MP3 player which begins warbling quietly as soon as we turn it on. We arrange old rugs over worn fragments of faded carpet, retrieve antique embroidered cushions from crooked cupboards, light candles and shiver together under thick dark grey blankets on the sagging black leather couch. When she first sits down on this venerable relic it exhales, dry breath whooshing out of cracks in the upholstery, breath with a dusty scent reminiscent of churches and libraries. Then there is silence broken only by the distant gnawing of mice at the foundations. "Die Mäuse sind Terror mit Büchern, die Bücher nicht hier gespeichert werden können, weil die Mäuse sie essen." ("The mice are terrors with books. Books can't be stored here, because the mice eat them.") One of the creaky old dark brown varnished doors with baseball-sized wooden doorknobs opens on a primitive shower facility. An unusually large example of the stereotypical institutional facility, footsteps echo off cold pale blue tiles, a space big enough to wash an entire cricket team at once (Perhaps Lewis had trained his first "acolytes" here). Erika leads me into this area to show off her new trick. She turns a squeaky tap and ice-cold water drips from a rusty shower-head. She lifts her loose khaki tank-top (suddenly sharp mental image of American war films, tank crews, dog-tags flying as they leaped into action), exposes one pale breast. As she drips cold water on her recently pierced nipple, it becomes erect and the silver ring stands up. She smiles proudly. |
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All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated. |