5.
Last night I saw Vinko go to the bathroom but didn't hear the toilet
flushing. In the morning I went in and saw a puddle of urine in the toilet
bowl. The colour was too yellow like that swamp in Dagobah. He should have
drunk more water, or maybe he was taking vitamin C? That could be the cause,
but that's not the point. Vinko deliberately didn't flush it to assert his
dominance in the dynamics of our relationship. To prove to me that he was the
alpha and that he was spraying to mark his territory. I didn’t fucking care
about him being the alpha or beta, for all he knew I was a pure omega, omegalomaniac to
be precise. But I didn’t want to take his insult lightly. So I confronted him
about the piss, and when I did that, he said that he was just saving water and
that I was going overboard with it. He didn't want to make a noise in the
middle of the night knowing that I was a light sleeper. He said that all
casually and that he didn’t give a shit about alpha-omega stuff. I said it was
all bull. I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to smell his pee. Wanted me to
see how deep yellow it was.
"If you have a problem with that, you can just flush it," he
said. He was still in bed and I was standing with hands-on-hips.
"No, no. That way you’re gonna achieve your real goal,” I said with
a mad head gesture.
“What’s my real goal?” he asked.
“To make me a subordinate who cleans your dirt,” I said coldly.
He let out a brief but vicious chuckle and buried himself back in the
blanket.
*
6.
I didn't go to school the day after I tore my knee. I couldn’t move my
feet. Good that mum was not the type of a parent to force her child to do
something. She kissed my head then said that’s okay if I didn't want to go to
school, going to school wasn't the most important thing unless I thought so,
but I shouldn't be roaming around outside the house. I asked her how could I
run wild with this limp? She said she knew that I could. And then she left for
work. She was right, though.
There came a knock on the door at midday. I found Vinko with my backpack
in his hand. The bag that I had left in class yesterday. I snatched it and
thanked him without smiling but he entered the house without permission then
sat down on the couch and started watching television with me. He was such a
bully.
After a while, he asked me if I wanted to play house again? I nodded.
And since I couldn’t walk, I told him to be the mum and today it would be her
job to cook. Just like yesterday. He didn't protest much and went into the
kitchen right away. My real mum rarely cooked lunch, or breakfast. She gave me
some money to eat out most of the time when she remembered. Mum didn’t really
like to cook because she knew her cooking wasn’t very good. But she always
shopped for the things she found in the supermarket or the travelling
greengrocer with the idea that she would cook them someday. Within days
vegetables usually wilted and rotted beyond help and mum would resignedly sigh
and complain how fragile these vegetables were. Then she would end up buying
some ready to eat food from the nearby stall.
Vinko cooked the spinach that my mum bought yesterday. I didn’t know how
he did it. He was also busy frying some eggs, and not long after he called me
to come. Lunch was ready. I didn't want to go to the kitchen because my leg
hurt too much, so he brought it in front of the television. His cooking was
never bad.
Vinko told me to wash the dishes when we were done eating. Wanting to do
my share, even though my knee hurt, I went to the sink and started doing it.
Sometime later while drying the cutlery, I dropped a plate. I couldn’t
bend my knee, so Vinko cleaned it up. The rest of the day we spent watching
television.
It was when I checked my bag to see if anything was missing that my mum
came home. Her eyes widened with pleasure again when she found Vinko.
“Oh good, you came to see Theo?” asked mum.
Vinko shook his head.
"He just came to hand back my bag," I said.
“That's also very generous of you." Mum sat on the sofa with us and
took off her shoes. "Vinko, you can come here every day.”
Vinko shook his head. What did mum think? Vinko has a gang member. He
would rather spend his time with those gangsters than with me.
“You can teach Theo maths or help him with his homework for example.
He's not as smart as you."
"Mum!" I yelled.
She threw that “What?-It’s-true”-look, at me.
“Think of it as private lessons. Would you like to help? Then I can pay
you,” she added.
"Mum..." I groaned. I didn’t like studying.
Mum shushed me she wasn't done yet. "How about it?" she asked
Vinko.
Vinko nodded. Odd. Maybe because he was going to be paid.
*
I got to know Vinko better after that. Even though he wasn't a stranger
to me even before that day.
A few days later I could finally have gone back to school but those days
were filled with Vinko’s presence. He learned what was taught in my class, then
taught it back to me. I really didn't care about that. It was obvious he was
smart, and it was annoying because he didn’t try to shove it down my throat. He
was just silently clever without being a smartarse. But I didn’t really care
about someone else’s braininess. I was not jealous of that kind of gift.
It's just that he was bugging me now that I had to study. Studying makes me
sick. Once, when I got really stressed, I chucked my notebook across the room.
This was because Vinko was forcing me to solve a knotty math problem. The book
flew over the TV and Vinko pinched my ear and it made me throw an even bigger
tantrum.
"Your mother paid me, so you have to study, don't waste her
money," he said flatly.
I didn’t want to look at him. I called him a vicious snake because he
used my mum to whip me. In the end, I did as he said though. I mean, he was
actually right, he was smart enough to know how to guilt trip me. He must have
known I liked my mum.
7.
One of the reasons why Vinko allowed me to stay in his room was - apart
from the past that I have told you a bit about and will tell you more later -
his interest in my personality. Or so I thought. I knew he was impressed with
me. This sounds over-confident, but it seems to be true. I mean, like, right?
this is me we are talking about. I have Dorus as a nickname and that’s unusual.
Vinko must thought I was a freak and a gonzo. For sure he wanted to know me,
right? Maybe he had his reasons. Though I honestly wasn’t really interested to
entertain his desire. I mean, I wanted to just keep him curious and let him
find out about me piecemeal, over time. I wanted to get to know this new him as
well, but not get too close. It was best to get not too close, because we
didn’t know when we would be apart from each other again.
"Vinko, I'm hungry," I said.
For a while he didn’t say anything. I had accused him of marking his
territory with his urine in the morning, and now he just stared at his computer
screens. One screen showed moving candle-like graphs, other was lines. So many
lines, and ever-changing numbers, and in neon colours. On his tablet were
several group chats, at which he typed furiously now and then. We hadn't talked
about each other's work yet. I couldn’t pretend that I was interested in
knowing what he was doing because I thought it was quite complicated, analytical
and looked boring. But as for me, if you want to know, I started off being an
online motorcycle taxi driver right after I graduated from high school. I used
the motorbike mum bought me for school. I did it for a while, the job I mean,
maybe a year. It was the trend back then. Easy job, everyone was doing it, and
the pay was good. Only I wasn’t comfortable with the people I was transporting
and finally I switched to choosing to be a food courier for the same company.
It was easier to take orders and deliver food than picking up and delivering
humans. Humans were heavy. I spent three years grilling the back of my neck,
waiting in line at restaurants during lunch and dinner hours, sometimes in the
rain when orders came in and before the thunderstorm hit. But what sucked was
that sometimes impatient customers gave me bad ratings. These people didn’t
understand that some parts of the city were always clogged. I worked in that
field until my mum got sick and I had to sell my motorbike.
“Vinko, you ever had a really deep sleep, it’s good that you thought
you’d slept for hours and when you looked at your cheap wristwatch it was only
fifteen minutes since last you looked at it. And then you would take a
melatonin gummy and a caffeinated paracetamol and wash it down with a shot of
vodka, and instead of sleeping you got angry, and you weren’t sure if that was
your true self or something else that was going round in your mind as you
thought about certain times, and how boring it all was so you wanted to make
other people’s lives more interesting, so you said, "Open your mouth for a
surprise and I will give you a taste that you've never known before,” but there
was no one else there so perhaps you thought about ending it all or was the
whole thing just imagination? So, it's two a.m. and you take your motorbike and
drive round the neighbourhood in silence, hoping someone would mug you so at
least it would get your heart going, but the city is asleep. You say
woo-wee-woo-wee while listening to Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now through
your earphones. She's wrong, because there are many sides to everything, not
only two. And it’s started to rain so hard you swear your motorbike took off
and you took shelter under a tree, thinking that you're not really a bad person
though not a very good one either, but at least you're always honest. But the
rain stops suddenly and took the melancholy with it, so you continue
motorbiking but now you're crying, thinking about something that's very wrong
about you, and you’ve got no a clue but you just know it’s true. And the
sky gets light and finally you're back at your room and you say to the mirror,
“You're fluorescent but very ugly.”
“What? What did you just say?” Vinko looked up from his screens.
“What? Nothing.” I said.
I checked the cabinets in the kitchenette but found nothing. I was
still hungry.
"I have no money," I said miserably. I waited for him to pick
up the wallet, but he was still watching his goddamn screen as if he didn’t
want to miss a beat. I waited patiently. Sure enough, after five minutes had
passed, he clicked and clicked and he looked a bit relieved. “Needed to take
some profit first,” he said. He got up from his seat and led me out of the
room.
“Are we eating now?” I asked.
“Whatever you want.”
"Let's go to the American embassy," I said.
“What?”
Then I explained that many people in Germany called McDonald's the
‘American embassy’. To make fun of the Americans who flew all the way from
their home to Germany just to eat at that fast food restaurant instead trying
the local cuisine. What was actually funny was the fact that McDonald's
in Austria does work with the American embassy, and people can actually go to the restaurant to
contact the embassy.
"Nonsense," said Vincent.
"Why don’t you believe me?" I asked back. I am not a liar.
"You've never been to Germany," he said.
"And now you're skinny," I said.
"I've never been fat," he said.
“That's what you think.”
“You just want to piss me off.”
“That's because I'm hungry.”
There was a Mc Donald’s outlet nearby, and Vinko let me order anything I
wanted. I gobbled down three large french fries because that’s the best part of
a Mc Donald’s. I mean, you go to a McD, all you need is to get its french fries
and some chicken nuggets, some tomato ketchup, and forget about everything
else. It was the best. Your life’s complete. Perhaps Vinko could tell that I’d
never had that much food before and he just watched me and offered me his own
food.
*
notes: here's an excerpt of a novel that I worked on last year. I haven't finished the translation. I would love to hear feedback, or getting some help or anything, or if you're interested in reading more, that'd be awesome. Oh, and one more thing, my email is nuril.basri@yahoo.com, it's also my PayPal in case you want to buy me some chicken noodle for lunch. thanks xx
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Say it