Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel

Author:Soula Emmanuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Footnote Press Ltd

Andra delen

2016 started, as they all do, in January. I came to live in boxy student halls in Norra Fäladen, on the curling outskirts of the city of Lund – science labs on one side, fields of rapeseed on the other. The halls were built in the nineties and the common area was a time capsule, encrusted with posters of Jim Carrey as The Mask and Bart Simpson’s impertinent speech bubbles.

Those who lived there were usual by usual standards – badminton hobbyists and bawdy limerick enthusiasts, people with places to go and Tupperware to fill.

When I moved in, amid the first real snow I had encountered in Sweden, my room was empty but for a desk, a dusty swivel chair and a stripped bed. The midwinter sun was amplified by the disaffected white outside. The place was full of echoes.

I never bothered to decorate, because it seemed frivolous to spend money on what was clearly a holding area. Still lacking a concept of home, I knew any definition developed too soon would quickly outgrow itself. I appreciated the underwhelm of life in white space.

I longed to be an explosion of light and colour, finely tuned. I would decorate the walls with myself. Or maybe I just wanted to blow up, and had convinced myself through careful self-delusion that beams and splashes would follow.

What I really needed was to take a risk. To get out there, and meet people, out there.

A few dates occurred. With women. Halting conversations that lurched from the app into real life. They were fine. They were nice. They swayed to and fro like efficient doctor’s appointments, the sort where no one has to take any clothes off. The women were usually expats, because the locals intimidated me. They and I were so much alike – shy and self-conscious, unsure of ourselves.

They asked me about my family and I asked them how much the caramel slices were.

Slowly, I realised I wasn’t attracted to any of them. I would go on nutritious lunchtime nibble-offs and emerge in a state of self-loathing clarity that was post-orgasmic and essentially masturbatory.

And so the vodka drank me in the spring of 2016. I had a need for something, and every interaction I had with the fresh faces around me only served to remind me that I could not find what I was so fervently looking for. Freedom from, freedom to. Half-thoughts with no pay-off. Clear liquid on white space, which in time fades back to nothing; a litmus test in want of a procedure.

Sitting on the bed, I talked to the furniture. I concluded straight off that the chair was unfit for human habitation, its doddering cushion covered as it was in a splodge of dried mud. It looked like it had been recovered from a landfill, a loot-me-down proffered by the housing agency.

For one reason or another, or a combination of reasons, the patch of dirt seemed to have a shape. For a time, I looked on it as a tree, tilting towards the ground as if investigating its origins, like an American in a small Irish town.

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