NOW

When I was about ten, they began to leave me alone in the evenings. They would kiss me goodnight and go off to visit somebody. I would lie in bed, looking into the darkness. The shelves with the boxes, the suitcase on top of the wardrobe and the dressing gown on its hook seemed bigger in the dim light. Quietly expectant. But I wasn’t afraid. I waited until the garden gate clicked shut and the voices from the street grew faint. The barking from the neighbours’ gardens accompanying my parents’ steps died down. I sat up. I listened to the ticking alarm clock and the roar of blood in my head and I felt the seconds passing until the time when my parents would return home.

I was looking forward to it, and yet at the same time I wanted to hold onto this moment. Not that it was more important than other ones. But I had it all to myself. And so I tried to engrave it into my memory in as much detail as possible. Today – though slightly blurred – it is still there: a child’s bed in a dark room, a car occasionally passing by the window and projecting moving strips of light onto the wardrobe. They would appear, expand, freeze for a moment, abruptly slide at an angle onto the walls, and the room would once more be plunged into darkness. Outside a solitary bark could be heard, soon joined by others from the southern part of the village, and then barking began to sound from the east, the north…all the dogs loudly demarcating the borders of their village territory at once. And I made up my mind: “I must remember this moment all my life.”

Time. I think about it, but not like other people who only complain about the lack of it. It fascinates me. I move my fingers through the gloom, as if it were possible to catch hold of the present disappearing into the past. Even now I still try to do it through my memory or I use a camera to help me. But no matter how hard I try, the next second NOW is gone.

Mind you, I could happily have done without the NOW of this Saturday morning. The floor was swaying and in the half-blind mirror of the chipped bathroom cabinet I saw a familiar, somewhat weary face. I shuffled back from the bathroom to the bedroom. In the next bed a pair of socks were sticking out from the duvet; I used to enjoy making fun of the holes in them, which revealed the toes, but now I was keenly aware of their festering odour. The three bare toes of Stinker, a maths/phys student, protruded from the holes like a monument to our grubby coexistence.

Three years in a shared room in a hall of residence. It was just as well he was away a lot. Resigned, I breathed in. I’d already given up on speeches calling for hygiene to be maintained. The female visitors who we never ceased to hope would come round might have thought he was no longer alive and had begun to decompose, especially as he spent so much time lying around in bed. No, don’t think about how much worse he would smell if…

I lay down. A waterfall of images tumbled beneath my closed eyelids:

A girl’s pale neck in the flickering light of street lamps. A heavily made-up Frog describing the details of a love triangle. The clumsy movements of a drunken Martin. The plait of a girl’s legs on a seat.

The deep rumble of the bar.

“So tell me about the party!” Stinker sat up in bed and put on his glasses. “Dish the dirt!”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)