Short Story: The Siberian Cottage

A short story by me, written for a tutorial.

The stone walls in the kitchen are unclad, and Josef has just cooked, so they sparkle with condensation. The stone floor is unbearably cold. At least in the bedroom there is a rug, so his feet don’t freeze when he gets out of bed. The cottage is small, sparse and underused. There is no memorabilia, no sentimental novelties; no personal effects. The solitary kitchen cupboard contains root vegetables, vodka, milk, cheese and some canned fish. He doesn’t need a fridge. Josef has neither the facility to get a wider range of produce, nor the inclination.

Josef is walking to the bedroom to get a blanket. He bends his withered, time-ravaged body to pick up an envelope that has been pushed under the front door. It is un-addressed. He carefully opens the envelope, and pulls out a piece of card, which bears the typewritten legend Я наблюдаю [I’m Watching].

Josef is sitting, shivering, at the kitchen table. A big slab of oak, in its heyday it seated eight comfortably. Josef doesn’t know this. He purchased this cottage unaware of its history, only aware of its geography. He’d taken the train from Moscow to Arkhangelsk in January 1992, bought a car, and drove east. A tip-off in a village led him to this cottage: he’d have never found it otherwise. Not only were there no estate agents, but the house wasn’t on anything that Josef recognised as a road. It is barely a track today, just six kilometres of icy rocks and grit. It certainly isn’t a special cottage: it’s barely distinguishable from any of the cottages that are sporadically scattered upon the barren Siberian tundra.

For the last seventeen years, the only person to have sat at the kitchen table has been Josef. It’s either sit in here or in the bedroom, and due to the old stove leaking heat, this is the warmer of the two rooms. The third room in the cottage is beyond repair, certainly for a man of Josef’s age and capabilities. Rot, mould, damp, broken windows, plants, insects, and the occasional bird inhabit the third room. Josef has done his best to seal it off from the rest of the house. He knows that opening the door to that room would be akin to Chernobyl or the Ice Age occurring within the cottage. He doesn’t know that the previous inhabitants of the house, all ten of them, died in that room, from tuberculosis, pneumonia and grief.

He can feel the cold wetness of the walls on his face, and thinks he can see things in the window that aren’t there. He closes the curtains in the kitchen, unlocks the front door, takes the bottle of vodka, and fills the mug in front of him. His hands are shaking as he puts the bottle back down. He drinks the vodka, and coughs. He knows why they are watching him. He has tried to make this self-imposed exile into both a respite and a punishment. But there is only so much self-flagellation a man can put himself through. He can’t run, can’t hide anymore: he doesn’t want to, deserve to, not after all the things he has done. He pours more vodka, and drinks to his fate.

Poem: The Upset Mariner...

The Upset Mariner Who Took Post-Relationship Advice From Rogers and / or Hammerstein (whichever of them wrote the lyrics)

In the old South Pacific,

They said a shampoo would fix it,

But that’s just some rime in a song;

‘Cos even prolonged amnesia,

Sustained in Micronesia,

Couldn’t cleanse me of all you’ve done wrong.

You said ‘I love you’,

On a beach in Tuvalu,

And you said that you’d never leave me;

But you ruined the party,

When, in Kiribati,

You confessed to sleeping with a girl from Fiji.

When I told you it was over,

In Western Samoa,

You got on the first plane out of there;

And now I’ve tried every shampoo,

From Bali to Nauru,

But I can’t get you out of my hair

ALT1977

This blog is a tribute to the best thing I've seen today. Bearing in mind I went to Plantasia and saw some monkeys and iguanas and pirahanas and snakes, that says a lot. I also went to Toys'r'Us and saw Star Wars toys too, and yet this wins. My kid spent most of his time wandering around with a turtle back-pack / reins, but still this is a bit better (maybe not, actually).

There is an artist called Alex Varanese. He has reinvented 2010 technology - the MP3 player, Laptop, mobile phone and portable games console - and resold them to a 1977 audience. As a massive fan of the Taschen collections of adverts, POP! art and 1977 in general, I can't get enough of the LCD displays and the wood panelling which encases each item.

Obviously (sadly) they aren't physical products, only seventies-styled redesigns and advertisements. But as someone who loves a bit of retro teak styling, I really wish they were actual purchasable consumer goods. Because of course, stuff made back then always lasted longer.

View Alex Varanese's ALT1977 series here: http://www.alexvaranese.com/work/alt1977

Jamie

The Girl From HMV

hmv, The Quadrant shopping centre, 9am, Monday morning: the optimal time for record-buying. All the new releases, all in a row, on the right shelves, in the right boxes, in plastic bags with my name on them behind the till. Limited editions in limited supplies, virgin vinyl waiting to be played, polythene begging to be unwrapped: teenage dreams and middle-aged regret aching to be caressed, absorbed, purchased, and heard. CD1 slips into digipak2 and there’s a coloured seven-inch and a 12-inch with entirely different b-sides. There’s always a re-mastered classic or a re-release with extra tracks or some back-catalogue gem that I absolutely need to buy. This is the most important part of my week.

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Flick-Flick-Inspect/Discard-Flick-Flick-BUY! I’ve got the art down beautifully, I know my timing, I know precisely how long I need to assess the sleeve of a record before I can look at the next one. It’s like Panini football stickers when I was a kid, got-got-got-NEED, whether it’s a Babes in Toyland LP or a head-and-shoulder shot of a mulletted centre-half. Heaven forbid it should be my Holy Grail: One Man Clapping on CD or ‘Suicide Alley’ on 7” or one of the shiny foil stickers with the Man United badge on it. It’s past collecting now, past an avid or keen interest. It’s an obsession, an addiction, a need to own. If I go to hmv and don’t buy anything, or at the very least place a special order to be collected in 2-4 weeks, then that’s inconceivable. That’s the opposite of commerce, of purchase power, laissez-faire economics, the opposite of me. That would be a failure.

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Luckily it’s impossible. There’s always a picture disc 7” or a new release CD single going for 99p. It’s like a slot-machine gambler pumping coins into the change machine. You win every time.

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This one time I take my girlfriend to town, so she can get her train back to where she lives. We’ve done nothing all weekend apart from watch some telly and argue. I’m claiming poverty, because I’m skint, and she’s nouveau riche. We get off the unibus, into hmv (it’s on the way to the station, and it’s Monday morning) and I just want to look and see if they’ve got the new Kenickie album, and no, I’m not going to buy it, because yes, I really do have no money, but I just want to see the price and the track-listing and your train isn’t for another half-an-hour... So I drag her in, new releases Kenickie At The Club and I pick up a copy and I want it so bad. And she doesn’t buy it for me, despite her new-found wealth and her previous dependence on my bank account for the previous year of gig-going and night-clubbing and record-buying that masqueraded as a relationship. I put it back on the shelf, and I put her on her train and I go back to hmv and buy it with the last £13.99 of my overdraft and I get the bus home and I’m happy. We break up soon after.

μ

Falling for the girl behind the till at hmv is a bad thing. She was always so happy to see me. She spoke to me. She didn’t judge my purchases. Cultivating this fantasy is worse. What started off as a cute naive crush on a record shop girl became a relationship of convenience. Imagine, not only would I be going out with a cute girl, but I’d be taking advantage of her staff discount. She must get at least 25%. It was meant to be.

μ

My bank manager was always asking to see me, writing me letters, phoning me up. He’d always ask about my finances and my overdraft. I’d tell him I get £25 a week for DJing. I don’t tell him I spend £150 a week on records. He might take my visa electron card away.

μ

Like a power-ballad or a Euro-dance-craze smash, I find myself constantly milling around the upper echelons of the singles chart. Not that I really care about the Spice Girls single (I’ve already got it), but the top 10 is right by the till. I can time my purchases so that she serves me, rather than any other member of staff. If this fails, there’s always a handy box of 7” singles on the checkout desk to serve as a time-killer.

μ

I read: NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits!, Q, Vox, Select, Time Out, Big Issue Cymru, Record Collector. I write about music for the Swansea student newspaper. I get free records. But they are all promos and do not have exclusive b-sides or sleeve notes or sometimes sleeves.

μ

I write her a song, called ‘The Girl From hmv’. The assistant manager of hmv Swansea really likes it. It goes to number 1 on the indie download chart thing, although this is before anyone really had the internet, myself included. I don’t know if she’s heard it. I don’t know if she knows it’s about her. And I don’t care, because it’s not really about her anymore. It’s about the soulless neon industrial vapid product-shifting enterprise that hmv probably always was, but now certainly is. Where they’ll happily sell you anything and everything, just as long as you buy something. There’s no condescending looks from older staff members when you buy the latest flash-in-the-pan nonsense. No knowledgeable chats about Northern Soul or lost punk vinyl or lo-fi synth-pop. Just DVDs and computer games, hipster books-of-youthful-rebellion-of-the-movie-of-the-novel-of-the-week, oh, and some CDs. That’s what happens when you move to a bigger outlet in the mall. Change. DVDs and computer games and change.

μ

I buy my records online now. Real records, not MP3s or iTunes. You can’t put an MP3 on a bespoke shelving unit, you can’t store a WMA in a cupboard, you can’t touch and smell an AAC file. Roughtrade.com and amazon and eBay, direct from the band or straight from the label. No girls behind tills to impress, no buying for the sake of buying (except occasionally to save on postage), no back catalogue impulse buys, no buying for the strange band name or the pretty artwork. No buying because the guy who works there just knows that you’ll love it and really thinks that you should buy it.

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My friend, Keith TOTP, tells me that there are no record shops in Camden, where he lives. Camden Town, home of Britpop and MTV and nightlife and gigs, has no record shops. There may as well be none in Swansea too. This makes me sad. Richer, but sadder.