Phone An Artist

I remember - in the foothills of our relationship - being in a medieval town surrounded from the land and sea by formerly friendly neighbours who were now enemy forces, and though this town was not your traditional frontline there was an armoury of dispiritedness – bloody hatreds, wretched breakdowns, twisted animosity, and the like. I’d spent the day touring a tortuous sequence of large and deserted buildings, hotels mostly, shells, which smelt of human excrement, anger, and in the corners of some rooms urine-doused fires. The people who let me speak to them would look fearfully over their shoulders the whole time and chain-smoke non-filtered cigarettes from nervously crumpled packs. Fear was everywhere and was contagious. The faintest of unfamiliar sounds were met with frozen looks and mass-migratory thoughts. It was hot, too, and I remember tugging my shirt between my thumb and index finger from my sweating chest. In the distance was a bombed-out radio tower, broken like a toy, and on the floor were spent cartridges, and on the broken tables were lavish and unused dinner menus printed in several languages. By one desultory wall close to where I was staying, I remember a hospital doctor waiting in the sun to hand a list of desperately needed medical supplies, and when I walked the cobbled streets, sinister figures appeared from nowhere, offering to take me back to their flats where the flickering darkness had me convinced I would be murdered. And the dogs, the dogs. I had never seen so many strays before, some of them pedigrees, whose wealthy owners had fled across the sea with cash and gold on high-powered speed boats. Conscripted soldiers were everywhere, too, bruised and back from the real frontline, and I will always remember, always, one young man in a large trench coat despite the heat with this look in his eyes – the look – which said he was a good man but had done some butchery and could not live with himself anymore. I could not take it, either, and went to a public phone exchange where I waited in a queue to phone out. Eventually I made my call. It was to the artist. I burst into tears.