Paradise

The handwritten sign attached to the door of the barbershop with masking tape reads:

Getting the beers in. Back at 2. Half-price haircuts all afternoon.

The sun beats down not like a fist but a flat palm, wilting the packets of prawn cocktail crisps in the gutter and making the metal rails by the steps of the civic hall warm to the touch.

Flesh is everywhere, bulging from string vests, propped up and wobbling in pink bras, coagulated under arms, hanging out of denim shorts, cross-hatched from sitting on the grass. It is brown and brown red and red red and dusty from the sun; it is stretched tight and tattooed over stringy muscles. A man stands topless smoking a cigarette by his back garden gate, watching his dog piss. A man stands topless smoking a cigarette outside the William Hill. A girl says I love men’s backs; I love watching the muscles move. Flesh is a currency that will never go out of circulation.

When they move away, people say that it is a melting pot, that it is a bubbling stew of hard working immigrants and working class oppression and the Left Behind, a place where dry humour and wet humanity run through the streets like kids in the fifties. They deliberately drop slang words and inflections into their speech which aren’t used any more but signify where they came from. When they don’t move away, people say that it is a shithole. Only got the one pub now, and Marina is an iron maiden. When you’re barred, you’re barred.

A short walk away, a woman sits at a computer, looking through data visualisations of problem drinker demographics on her screen. She feels the cool damp of sweat in her armpits and says The thing is, and I’m not being funny, but there are always going to be people who want to drink themselves to death, aren’t there? Like, are we actually making them happier with all this shit? Look at this ward. Just round the corner. No reach. Drink sales have gone up since we did the campaign.

The police monitor a brothel on the corner, next to the new builds that came in with the Commonwealth Games. Romanian women smoking from the upstairs windows rotate as cars pull up on a bald spot of disused land nearby. The girls were kicked out of their last place. The cops came and made them move to safe accommodation; by the time the grey haired social worker in the kaftan showed up they had seeped back into the badly pointed brickwork of the estate. Between turning tricks they drink homemade rakija from mugs and do impressions of their pimp.

Two boys kick a football between themselves and argue about Tupac. The goth kid from their school comes out of his house and they stare at him. Paedo they say. One of them pretends to kick the ball at him as he walks past and he flinches so much he drops his satchel. They laugh.

The students, who everyone hates, sit in their garden making loud jokes about Plato that none of them quite understand. At the beginning of the summer, someone climbed in their first floor window whilst one of them was in the shower and nicked all their laptops. The three boys walk about the estate a little bit scared of the men and a little bit aroused by the women and a little bit proud of themselves for living there. They discuss as an abstract problem whether or not they should call the council on their neighbour who slaps her smallest boy and shouts that she’s going to strangle him if he doesn’t behave.

The pub is dark and cool, lit up by Sky Sports and the yellow flashing squares of the fruit machine. Marina reminds herself not to look too much at the polaroid picture that is pinned above the gin bottles; the one from the nineties in her slim blue jeans, smiling for the camera, teeth like lightning, leaning against the pool table that still struggles on in the corner. She pours a lager and black and then goes downstairs to change the post-mix.

A woman from the news in shiny heels and skin that glows from wealth comes and stands with a coffee in a takeaway cup looking this way and that like she has never stood on a street before, then points and leads her small caravan of wires and camera equipment to a corner where she talks seriously into a big microphone. In the background, some lads arrive to wave and dare each other to take off items of clothing. The reporter is there because a dealer got stabbed the night before. His hand was mutilated as he tried to stop the blows and the finger will be missing for months until a kid brings it in to school because his mates didn’t believe he really had it.

An artist spends the day walking from terrible sculpture to terrible sculpture, noting their locations on the map. She intends to organise an Art Walk from the local library to mark International Women’s Day, but most of the sculptures are by men. They were put there in the nineties to rejuvenate the area and bring culture to people’s doorsteps. There is brass one in the shape of a mausoleum; locals call it The Bellend and kids climb up on summer nights, drinking cheap cider and throwing the cans at the bin from the top.

Two young teenagers kiss and squeeze each other in the stairwell of a block of flats, giggling bashfully and burying their faces when people come to be buzzed in. Her parents assume they are sleeping together, and tell her to be careful; she is thirteen. He is fourteen and frigid, scared even to touch her breasts. She tries to lead him, running her hand across his crotch, but he is learning what it means to be a man, to be expected to know, to not ask questions, learning also the emotional response to his own ignorance; he grabs her hand and pushes it away in irritation. When he does have sex for the first time, four years later, another girl will steer him, coax him, fill the air with sounds she thinks will make him feel better, and when it is over he will cry.

Children of different ages gather at the junction by the playpark to throw stones at the cars. They wear clothes that ten years from now will be sold as urban couture for hundreds of pounds, ordered online by preppy girls in home county suburbs who meet in gangs for artificially flavoured coffee and compliment each other’s everything. Occasionally a car stops when it gets hit and the kids hover anxiously, ready to run down the alley if the driver gets out. The smallest kid, whose throw is so bad some of his stones go backwards, runs every time, even when the car doesn’t stop. His brother calls him a fucking pussy, annoyed that he’s always hanging around.

Two women meet in the street pushing prams. Wow, says one, oh my God babe they look great. I heard you was getting them done. Is that you now then? The other woman smiles and subconsciously pivots slightly from right to left. Still can’t lie on my front, she says, Which is a pain in the arse, but apart from that I’m good to go. I’ve got his name if you want a recommendation, the little shits just suck the life out of them and it’s such a straightforward thing these days. The first women smiles but inside she burns with the worst kind of jealousy: animal and unsanctioned.

Upstairs in one of the nicer houses, bought off in the eighties and done up, a girl lies on her bed reading poetry whilst her brother sits on the floor trying to learn the flags of the world. Botswana is my favourite, he says, Because it looks like a motorway crossing an ocean. Be quiet, she says, I’m trying to study. Later, as a young adult, she will have the uncomfortable realisation that on some deep level she wished her childhood was harder, her parents not so earnest and hardworking and fundamentally loving, so that she might feel a more genuine connection to the suffering and social indignation she displays for others as a performance of her identity.

A man counts out cash on a plastic, fold out kitchen table, arranging it in stacks of a hundred, going back to the beginning and counting it again. Two children hang around awkwardly, waiting for some signal to interrupt. The man hands over a twenty and says Go get some chips and chicken, bring me the spicy wings. Upstairs, a teenage boy does endless situps, looking in the mirror and tensing, turning side on, putting his hand in his boxers. After a while, he checks his phone to see if he has any messages, locks the door and watches pornography of sisters being choked and ejaculated on by their step-father.

In a flat above the main road, the curtains are drawn and little daggers of light escape from their edges, illuminating the dust motes and twirling rivulets of smoke emerging from his blunt. The small, baby blue TV murmurs softly, wearing beer cans as a headdress. El Salvador, he says. Love Is The Drug. Virginia Woo- The Ouse. Nineteen forty… Nineteen forty four? Shit. He reaches forward, cranks open a cardboard box and detaches a cold slice of pizza from its greasy interior. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t have a headache.

Outside, a bus brakes suddenly. On the top deck two teenagers in skinny jeans sit drinking Polish lager from cans. On the street below they can see the bus has stopped because a man wearing only underwear has stood in front of it. I have fathered fourteen children, he shouts, arms outstretched, All from whores, all of them. The lads look at each other and laugh. Paradise is a council estate, says one, in a way that he thinks makes him sound clever. The man stands on the pavement, watching the faces of the people through the window of the bus as it judders forward.

Some look up, some don’t.