Remain Silent. Susie Steiner
Manon
Day 16: Manon
Before
Later
About the Author
Also by Susie Steiner
About the Publisher
His key in the door, he shoulders across the threshold, stumbles wildly up the stairs to the bathroom. He can’t risk being beaten for soiling the carpet. His stomach is coiling and despite it being empty, he vomits into the toilet: acid bile. In a strange way, the retching comforts him.
Dimitri is at the bathroom’s open doorway.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
Matis, kneeling by the toilet bowl, groans.
Dimitri approaches. ‘Too much to drink?’ he asks.
When Matis turns to look up at him, Dimitri says, ‘My God, what happened to you?’
‘Lukas is dead,’ Matis sobs. ‘I brought him here and now he’s dead. I never saw such hatred, Dimitri. Why do they hate us so much?’
Dimitri shrugs, sadly.
‘I hope he haunts them out of their beds at night,’ says Matis.
‘To be haunted, you must have a conscience,’ says Dimitri.
‘And they have none.’
Dimitri lifts him to his feet. ‘Come, you need a drink.’
In the kitchen, while Dimitri locates vodka, Matis starts shaking.
Dimitri says, ‘The police here, they will look into it properly. Not like back home.’ He hands Matis the bottle. Matis swigs. Winces. It burns his sore stomach.
‘It won’t bring him back. This is my fault.’
In the bedroom, which contains four men sleeping on mattresses on the floor, Dimitri takes the empty place beside Matis, to comfort him. The mattress where Lukas used to whimper in the dark, until one of the men shouted Užsičiaupk po velnių – shut the fuck up.
‘Do you need something to sleep?’ Dimitri asks. ‘That guy, the dealer who helped Saulius, he gave us pills.’
Matis shakes his head, rolls onto his back.
‘Sleep,’ Dimitri says. ‘We must work tomorrow.’
If life were a force of will, Matis could wish himself dead. No such luck. His body, tired and broken, keeps going. He keeps on waking on the stinking mattress, soaked in the sweat of other men who had been in the same situation before him. And what happened to them?
When they are in the van at 4 a.m., it is a moment of reprieve – a moment to exhale. They have survived an ordeal, have dragged themselves from too-little sleep, got to the BP garage, where migrants from across town are picked up for agricultural work, in time. They cannot be punished for missing the call, for being late. The next ordeal – catching enough chickens through the fog of their exhaustion, through the sting of the scratches on their hands reopening – would come later. Almost all the men fell straight to sleep in the van. Chin to chest. Forehead to window.
He was always asleep with this rag-tag of psychos, the weird intimacy of sharing a room. The snoring, someone talking in his sleep, the smells emitted by bodies at night, thick and human and perhaps repulsive, but also deeply, vulnerably personal. Lukas may have whimpered on his mattress at night, but Matis didn’t. This had been his idea, and he had had to make it work, had had to make it look like it was working. Up to now, he’d had to survive, even though he didn’t want to, to tell both himself and Lukas that their bind was temporary, a bump on the path to freedom. But with Lukas gone …
‘Wake me up now Mummy!’ Teddy yells from the next room.
Manon gives Mark a shove and he rolls obediently out of bed.
She squints at her watch. 6.20 a.m. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ she says, then turns over and descends back to delicious depths. The warmth of the duvet, the darkness of the room thanks to the blackout curtain lining, the numbness of her mind, broken by harsh winds of irritation: the feel of Mark and Teddy getting into the bed.
She would make all manner of pacts with Lucifer to be allowed fresh descent. Give me five minutes, three minutes, one minute. I will give you my soul.
There will be a moment of lovely cuddling, the velvety plush of Ted’s cheek pads, his squidge-able limbs – forearms, upper arms padded with gentle fat, still of a toddler. She cherishes this remnant of babyhood. She’s become a baby botherer in cafés, over-enunciating ‘hallo!’ into their cloudy eyes, while their mothers look on her with suspicion.
Ted pushes his fingers up her nose and says, ‘Hello Defective Mummy!’ because he doesn’t know the word is detective. Or perhaps he does.
She can feel the crescendo of fidgetry