I got up from my desk and walked across the office, and as I approached the figure looked up from speaking to Agnieszka and grinned at me. “Hey, Jarek,” he called when I was still only halfway across the office. “Want to go to a party tonight?”
At school, Marcin had been one of those big soft boys who seem designed by Nature for the express purpose of attracting bullies. The first time I ever saw him he was eleven years old and two thirteen-year-olds were beating him up in the playground for no other reason than it was fun. I was on my way to a history lesson and I was two days short of my fourteenth birthday and this unknown fat boy’s plight was nothing to do with me and I kept on walking.
And then I stopped. I stood listening for a few moments as the two boys slapped the fat boy and I have no idea why I did what I did next.
I turned and said, “Leave him alone.”
One of the bullies, a nascent football hooligan named Franek, looked me up and down and said, “Fuck off, Jarek.”
I turned to face them properly. Franek’s companion was a near-imbecile named Piotr who had only just been allowed back to school after being excluded for beating up another boy. I said, “Leave him alone,” again, and Piotr gave me a ghastly expectant grin.
I wish this little tale had a happy ending, but I spent the next three nights in hospital with broken ribs and a suspected concussion. On the other hand, Franek and Piotr were never seen at school again and the day I left hospital Marcin was waiting for me outside with a shopping bag for me full of CDs and DVDs he’d pirated from the internet.
“You work too hard,” Marcin told me.
“What?” I said.
“I said you work too hard!” he said in a loud voice that I could barely hear over the party’s sound system.
I shook my head. “It’s only for a little while.”
“What?” he said.
“Oh, for —” I grabbed him by the elbow and steered him through the people crammed into the flat. The flat wasn’t very large, but a surprising number of people seemed to be here. The sound system was pumping out death metal and someone had filled the bath with ice and bottles of beer and vodka and the party was full of people like… well, like me, actually. Young professionals, comfortably-off, letting off steam. Parties like this were called ‘hit-and-runs’; many of Gdansk’s elderly Soviet-era blocks were almost empty, the residents moved to other developments and the buildings awaiting demolition. A shell company took out a short-term lease on a flat, enormous amounts of alcohol and recreational drugs were moved in, and for one night only it was party, party, party. If anyone bothered to complain about the noise and the police bothered to turn up it would transpire that no one at the party actually lived at the flat, and further investigation would reveal that the shell company which had rented it had already been dissolved and its principals had never existed anyway.
I dragged Marcin through the mass of heaving bodies towards the front door, which was not easy to do for two reasons: firstly, there were a lot of heaving bodies, and secondly, he was a big man. He wasn’t fat any more, but he was tall and bulky, like an amiable bear. He was wearing designer jeans and a white shirt and a jerkin of butter-soft leather. After university, he’d gone to work for a little biotechnology company in Belgium, and from his clothes it looked as if they were doing well.
Finally, we reached the door and stepped out onto the landing, where we could finally hear each other.
“Do you know whose party this is?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“It was your idea to come here,” I said.
“You know how these things work,” he said. “Anonymized emails, posts on bulletin boards. Nobody ever knows whose parties they are.”
There was shrieking behind us. We looked round and two topless girls were standing side by side in the doorway. “Hey, Marcin!” shouted one. “Great party!”
Marcin grinned and waved hello and the girls turned and plunged back into the flat.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s my party. But don’t tell anybody.”
I was staring at the naked backs of the two girls as they half-walked, half-swam through the press of bodies. I was fairly certain that I had last seen one of them in the newspapers, receiving an award as Young Polish Entrepreneur of the Year.
“I’ve got something for you,” Marcin said.
I smiled. Marcin’s company developed what used to be called ‘designer drugs,’ and down the years he had been a fairly reliable source of pre-release medications. Most of them had been of limited use to me, but he had been responsible for several evenings of chemically-induced enjoyment. He didn’t come home all that often these days, but when he did he usually had a present for me, a successor to those CDs and DVDs he’d given me when I left the hospital.
He reached into a pocket of his jerkin and took out a little plastic envelope and handed it to me. “There you go,” he said. “A taste of the future.”
“What does it do?” I asked, turning the little envelope over in my fingers.
The sound system emitted a single huge chord that reverberated through the building as he said, “It’s paint medication,” he said.
“I’m not in pain,” I told him.
“No,” he said a little louder. “Not pain, paint. Paint medication.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He sighed. “Do you want it or not?”
I thought about it. He had never brought me anything harmful. I tore the edge off the envelope and tipped its contents into my palm. It was an odd-looking tablet. Round and thin, a couple of centimetres across, and made of some gelatine substance. It was floppy, which in my experience was an unusual attribute for a medication.
I put the floppy tablet in my mouth and it melted on my tongue. It tasted very faintly of kiwi fruit. I looked at Marcin and raised my eyebrows.
He grinned. “There you go,” he said and he put his arm around my shoulders and started to steer me back into the party. “Now, let’s see if there’s anything left in the bath…”
I regained consciousness the next morning and my phone was ringing. I lay where I was, eyes closed, for quite a while waiting for the ringing to stop, but it didn’t. Finally, without opening my eyes, I reached out to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and after some fumbling located the little button that turned it off. Then I lost consciousness again.
Some time later I became aware that the entryphone by the front door was buzzing. I didn’t know how long I’d been awake; it seemed, at the moment, that I had been listening to that buzzing noise all my life.
I waited for the buzzing noise to stop. I waited a long time. It stopped. Some time passed. The buzzing started again. I opened my eyes as far as they would go, which wasn’t very far at all. Down in the harbour, a speedboat went by and it felt as if the noise was scalping me. I became aware that something awful had happened in my mouth over the past few hours, and now all my taste-buds were misfiring. Meanwhile, the buzzing went on and on and on.
I closed one eye again, which made things a little more bearable, although not by much, and rolled off the futon onto the floor, where I briefly fell asleep again until the buzzing brought me round.
Slowly, I rolled over onto my stomach, and from there managed to lever myself up onto my hands and knees, and in that position it was a crawl of only a couple of light-years to the front door, where I slapped at the button to open the downstairs door.
A minute or so later, there was a knock on my door. From where I was sitting, I pawed at the lock until it clicked. “Open,” I managed to say, and then I was sick in my lap.
The door opened and Marcin stepped into the hallway. He saw me sitting slumped against the wall and he shook his head. “And you call yourself a Pole,” he said. He looked almost painfully bright and clean. He knelt down beside me. “Here,” he said, holding something out between his thumb and forefinger and pressing it to my lips. “Take this.”