WritersShowcase

Glyn Pope  Synopsis ‘The Living and the Dead’

Jonathan David

By

Saul Pope

Chapter 1:

So that was how it all happened. One hundred metres below St. Petersburg, stuck in a crowded metro train waiting to enter a station, suffering from claustrophobia and wondering when they would get moving again, his life turned upside down in an instant. But it was to be expected that such an important event would happen to him in such a way. Jonathan David was no ordinary man.

He was no ordinary man because he probably the only British person within a mile of this overcrowded, dirty little pocket of south-west St. Petersburg in December 1997. But he was also no ordinary man because he had a big secret no-one else knew about, not because he was a secretive person, but because he was sure that nobody would believe him if they told them. The secret was the reason why he was in that metro train in that tunnel. It had become a lonely life for Jonathan, but one that at that moment started to make some sense.

Originally from Leicester, and having graduated with second-class, second division honours from the University of Northern England (Goole Campus) a couple of years previously, he’d been forced into a non-traditional route in life for his type. He wasn’t interested in a graduate career, the chance to think outside the box, be high-calibre, ever exceed expectations and so on.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t ambitious, or didn’t have plans – a person stuck under St. Petersburg in 1997 must have had something about them to be there in the first place rather than being, say, stuck in a lift in a Kettering shopping centre. It was just that his plans didn’t involve making money for other people. There was some fire inside him, though, and when it ignited he knew the result would be something intelligent and beautiful. But right now he had other reasons for living, the main one being St. Petersburg and why he was there.

The main reason why Jonathan was no ordinary man was because he could see what other people were thinking. They came and told him. When he was asleep. This was why he had trouble confiding his secret in anyone - who’d believe such rubbish (until you told them what they’d been thinking about you the day before)? It wasn’t something he could turn on or off, and he couldn’t even choose whose thoughts to see (which would’ve been very interesting), it just seemed to happen at random. This ‘skill’ had first become apparent during his days as at Goole, the evenings of which had been spent half in drunken conformity in ‘The Asylum’ disco at Goole’s Student Union, and half tucked up in bed with a hot chocolate and a copy of When Saturday Comes.

It was on one of these second types of evening that he first saw what someone else was thinking. He’d turned the light off in his room in Nelson Mandela Hall at around 10.30 that Friday evening to ensure he’d be sound asleep by the time his fellow students decided to commence a food fight outside his door after a ‘mad’ night at The Asylum. It seemed to be a weekly event. However, what did eventually awaken him that night was not the sound of a potato being lobbed at the warden’s door, but Harry MacPherson, the manager of his favourite football team, Leicester City, being sat on the end of his bed. ‘I think we’ll try a 5-3-2 against Liverpool tomorrow’ was all Jonathan heard before Harry disappeared and he woke up for real to a sound not unlike the popping noise you get when you turn on a light and the bulb works for a split second before plunging you into blackness.

He put on the light, confused for the first time in many years, and tried to make sense of what had happened. It seemed as if Harry had really been there; Jonathan had been able to smell an expensive and tangy aftershave, the kind only worn by rich men in their fifties. He’d brought some kind of cryptic message with him that Jonathan couldn’t quite understand. There was no way that MacPherson would ever play a 5-3-2 formation against Liverpool, for in his three years as Leicester, and despite protestations from all quarters, he’d stuck with a losing 4-4-2 formation. 5-3-2 must refer to something else, Jonathan thought. He as still puzzling over this several hours later when his crazy hallmates returned with a group of drunken girls, who quickly left when the boys tried to impress them by throwing the block oven out of a window. The warden, a stern Frenchman in his early thirties called Herve, was awoken and stormed into every room in the block, where people were now pretending to be sound asleep. As he came crashing through Jonathan’s door to tell him there’d be a fifty-pound fine for his part in what had happened, Jonathan, now apparently the only person awake in the block, paid no attention. The Leicester v Liverpool match was live on television the following day. He was no great believer in dreams having relevance to everyday life, but the way that what he’d seen had been so overly vivid, as if MacPherson had been in the room with him, had got him thinking.

Despite the late night Jonathan David was up in time for the 12.00 kick off, which he watched in Goole University’s American-style diner, Union Square. He’d ordered a mega-size cola, which was flat, a mega-triple burger and curly fries, the latter being a new innovation that had been for some time the talk of the grey, windy campus. Once upon a time matches had generally kicked off at 3.00 on Saturdays, but since Cloud Sports had bought the rights for all Premier League matches kick-offs were all over the place as audiences across the globe had to be pleased. Other people complained, but Jonathan could see the funny side of this, figuring that one day in the not too distant future football would eat itself with its experiment in uber-consumerism and then things would get back to normal.

He could also see the funny side of three hour build-ups to games, which lasted longer than the matches themselves, with their studio guests and their furrowed brows as talk turned to ‘mind games’ and ‘penalty incidents’, the endless guessing at formations and starting elevens and the interviews with semi-literate (or non English speaking) star players. Today Liverpool’s new Argentine signing Balbo Zanagi had been introduced to viewers, on whose shoulders the club’s hope of a late-season push into the European places rested. In broken English he told of his delight at being in the Northwest, of how the club needed to score goals if it was to make it into Europe, and of his love for fish and chips. He was even filmed outside a Liverpool chip shop with a club scarf around his neck, Evita playing in the background, as if to prove the point.

In their endless permutations of how the Leicester might line up, the studio guests at Cloud Sports never once considered that the team’s manager might employ a 5-3-2 system. Jonathan began to think that his dream had been the result of a particularly good WSC article, and settled down to enjoy his fries and the match. But as the graphics showing the team chosen by MacPherson were flashed up on the screen, even the garrulous Cloud presenter shut up for a second – they showed a 5-3-2 formation.

Most of the rest of the match passed by without incident, apart from Liverpool scoring five goals without reply, but this barely registered with Jonathan. What he’d seen the night before had come true. He headed back to his room, the burger and curly fries long congealed on the Union Square plate, feeling on the brink of something important.

From that evening the dreams continued intermittently, with no way of controlling their subject, length or ferocity. Jonathan met with MacPherson one more time a couple of months later, and as a result was able to place a bet on him resigning from his job at Leicester the following day and win himself a large amount of money. But it hadn’t all been MacPherson and hadn’t all been ups – for some reason he’d been subjected to several hours of a man in his forties standing on his driveway and deliberating over which type of family saloon car to buy, and more upsettingly he’d seen an old man, alone at home and crying over the loss of his recently-deceased wife. He’d awoken in a cold sweat from that one, and drew much mockery from his less thoughtful coursemates when he started helping out at the local old people’s home.

After university Jonathan got a job in the university salaries office purely on the virtue of seeing the manager the night before his interview and learning that she was looking for someone with a nice smile and no ambition. Jonathan cleaned his teeth extra carefully and acted accordingly the next day, and soon found himself working as a wages clerk. In his final year he’d made it on to TV, on Blind Date, as a result of the way in his brain; he’d seen the kind of person they wanted a week before the Goole University casting and, thinking it’d be fun to be on TV, gave them what they wanted. He’d made a fool of himself and had been very nervous, but it had been worth it. And here we finally get to Jonathan David’s real reason for being in Russia.

Olesya had watched the film perhaps fifty times. Though she was a pretty girl with plenty of admirers, none of them came close to the boy she’d seen on the video of English TV in the British Council English Learning Centre. The staff at first thought she was just a keen student, visiting the centre almost every day to watch videos, but then momentarily wondered why she always wanted the same one. Ultimately, though, Olesya’s fascination went unchecked by the staff, for the mid nineties was not a time to be thinking of other people’s problems in Russia. It was a time when daily life could only guarantee that something unpleasant was waiting around the corner; a leaky radiator that bled brown water over your floor, the hot water being cut off with no word on when it would be turned back on, some shitting in the doorway of your block of flats or you losing all your savings due to a financial crisis. It was as if the country was experiencing a permanent bombscare, anxious faces scanning what was around them on trolleybuses or in metro carriages, waiting for something bad to happen.

Olesya’s English was not great, and her parents had never pushed her to learn it. She didn’t have much to do with her father, and, like many in her generation, her mother had learnt German at school. Now it seemed that English was the language of the future, and all over the city people were paying money to cram into dilapidated classrooms with no electricity and tiny chalkboards to listen to someone whose only qualification was that he or she spoke English as their native language. Olesya hadn’t been able to join them, classes were not cheap and she was still a student, but she hoped to.

From his accent she guessed that he was British, and he was on a show where a woman asked questions to three men and seemed to choose the one she liked the best. None of them seemed like stars – they were all so gauche, especially him, but that was part of his appeal. It seemed strange to her that people would make a television programme with ordinary people in it rather than professional actors – perhaps one day there’d be lots of programmes like this. Though none of them would match up to Jonathan’s show, she was sure of that. Jonathan. Jonathan. She knew his name, but she didn’t know if she’d ever meet him.

The way in his brain started up again about six months into his job, whilst he was at the Coventry Conference, the annual UWSD get-together. It seemed to be by and large an excuse for the managers to get away from their families for a few days, congratulate themselves on a good job done and have Chris Evans introduce them at the company dinner via corporate video. Jonathan actually quite enjoyed such events (as long as he felt that he wasn’t actually a part of them), and was enjoying life in general. He was being suitably unambitious and smiley at work and getting rather good at it, and although he didn’t have a girlfriend or many friends in Goole, the lack of stress involved in entering data into a computer and answering telephones for seven hours per day gave him plenty of time to follow his main passions – football and music.

On the final night of the conference it all happened. He’d just spent three hours in the bar with several colleagues from round the country, and though he’d tried in vain to turn the conversation to more interesting topics once the lager was flowing talk had turned to the migration to the Fresh Look TGR reports, which was set to ‘revolutionise’ the way business was done in offices like Jonathan’s. Though a couple of hours before the men he was seated with had barely been able to exchange a word with one another, save for talk of the weather and the latest score in the test match, they were now passionately and sweatily engaged in an argument about the advantages and disadvantages of Fresh Look, in between staring at the backsides of the teenage waitresses clearing up around them.

Jonathan decided to bid them farewell before they turned their ties into makeshift headbands and started wrestling one-another, or else had a running race in the car park; he went to his room in the conference hotel and fell asleep quickly. It had been a while since the first spurt of seeing people’s thoughts, and although he hadn’t forgotten about them they’d certainly been surpassed in his head by other important daily things like being deliberately unambitious. But one hour later, whilst his drunken colleagues were in the car park trying to find out who could throw their shoe the highest, Jonathan was sat bolt upright in bed, wondering what had just happened to him. ‘I want to meet you, but I don’t know how’ was all the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen had said. He’d felt her there next to him, he was sure he’d been able to smell her perfume, and the soft ends of her hair had almost touched his cheek. He wanted to meet her too, but had no idea how.

From that night on work totally lost its appeal to Jonathan David. Before he’d enjoyed the routine, filling in pointless reports and pretending to be interested in arguments about how far the window should be open during office hours (some people were constantly too hot, others too cold, and tempers had flared over the issue on more than one occasion). He suddenly became fed up of listening to his neighbour in the open-plan office belching his way through a ham sandwich, cherry tomatoes and supermarket own brand crisps every day (the menu never changed), and took to spending more and more of his breaks outside the office, sitting in solitude on a bench. His team leader, Bob Woodthorpe, noticed this drop in motivation and tried to help; he put Jonathan in charge of the water cooler task team. Jonathan’s job was to produce a report determining the amount of water the office should purchase every month by assessing how many cups of water people drank in an average day. When Jonathan pointed out that this may depend on whether the weather was hot or cold outside he was told to ‘factor that in’.

Following the production of a one-line report, which didn’t include any charts or graphs and merely suggested that the office should buy more water when the last cannister was about to run out, Bob spent a worried lunchtime not touching his crisps and wondering what had happened to someone who had once been a solid team player and his second favourite in the ‘virtual team’ he ran. He worked out it was probably something to do with a woman, but perhaps unsurprisingly got no closer than that.

Who was she and where was she from? How did she know who he was? How could he find her? These questions bothered Jonathan from the moment he woke up in his University of Northern England staff flat to the moment he turned the light off again in the six-by-six bedroom. All he did was work and think about them, no longer watching Cloud Sports in Union Square or heading to the town centre to look at new records. He wished the questions would bother him when he wasn’t awake, that the light bulb would pop once more and the girl would be in his room again as she had been in Coventry, but the night visits had stopped.

The first question was perhaps the easiest, but he still didn’t have any ideas. All he could say was, that from their few seconds of acquaintance, she didn’t look English – her cheekbones were high and eyes almond-shaped, which weren’t typical of English girls. Jonathan didn’t have much of an eye for the ladies – in fact, he’d hardly ever spoken to one – but he’d been thinking a lot, perhaps too much, about what she looked like.

With no answer to the first question he had little hope of getting an answer to either of the other two, and it was the final one that was the most difficult to deal with. At school and university girls had never seemed to like or even notice Jonathan David, and he’d been able to live with that. But this was a situation totally new to him; he’d seen someone he felt that he had a real connection to, and her was desperate to meet her. Maybe it was stupid and sometimes, very briefly, he decided that it was stupid and that he should get back to being unambitious and wait for the right girl to come along in Goole. But as just as he started to think of the fun pubs and turbo boozing, the 3-for-1 alcopops and the broken bottles of every Friday and Saturday night, a world he’d have to inhabit if he wanted to meet anyone there, the ghost of her face flickered back into his imagination and told him that she wanted to meet him.

He couldn’t confide in anyone as nobody would listen; everyone he knew seemed to be self-obsessed. These days it seemed you had to pay if you wanted to confide in anyone, or else phone a special helpline; in the former case the confidant would probably think him mad, and in the latter he would be logged as a prank caller. The only thought that saved him from complete insanity as he stared at the dirty yellow wallpaper of his 6 by 6 and made the bored holes of the ceiling tiles join together by unfocussing his eyes was the one about the phone book.

When he’d been a child he’d always been fascinated by phone books and maps, and would often stare at their remarkable lines for hours. He had poured over the pages of international dialing codes, reading the names of the different cities in Albania, Venezuela and Zambia that you could direct dial and imagining what life was like in Tirana or Caracas or Lusaka. He’d sometimes wished he could dial someone randomly, tap into their life for a moment and find out what they were doing, but apart from the language barrier he knew that his parents would not be happy with the phone bill. Jonathan had had to consolidate himself with the feeling that someone in that phonebook was always awake on the earth, as a unit it was never totally asleep.

Even in his mid twenties he was still fascinated him by such thoughts and as he lay in bed one night in late November, about to have the light bulb pop on him in a big way for a second time, he imagined her and tried to imagine what life was like where she was.

Olesya was still making trips to the British Council to watch the video, though they were becoming less and less frequent. She was a daydreamer, a bit like Jonathan, and she spent most of her lectures doodling his name in her exercise books and thinking about him. The Russia of the mid nineties was no place for daydreamers and romantics though, and there was a boy at the institute who stood out from the rest and who obviously liked her.

Jonathan was her prince, but that Russia was also a place she didn’t want to be alone – she needed the security of a relationship. Tomorrow she’d go to the British Council and during her lectures she would be thinking of him and doodling his name, but Ruslan would be paying her attention as well and she wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to ignore him for.

Jonathan awoke as usual with a start, but it wasn’t morning. He’d not long been asleep, and he could see that the lights from Union Square were still on through the dirty net curtains and the single-glazed window of his six-by-six. His first thought, having been well and truly brained, was that he was glad he’d taken military history as part of his combined honours degree, and more importantly he had paid attention to the pictures in the core textbook.

The Avrora was a Diana-class cruiser, built in St. Petersburg for a service in the Far East and it had served during the Russo-Japanese war. Having been damaged and deliberately sunk in World War II, a repaired version of the ship now stood permanently moored in St. Petersburg as a boat museum. She’d just come to him again, but this time he hadn’t heard anything. She’d been walking alone outside a large concrete building opposite that very same battleship, brown flecks of uncoloured hair brushing across her cheeks in the wind.

Jonathan came from a family for whom a one-hour trip to the next town was something of an ordeal (especially if the train was delayed) and for a few minutes, once he’d found the switch to his cumbersome bedside lamp, he wasn’t sure what he should do. But he was also a quick thinker (a characteristic which sometimes sat uncomfortably with his general inertia) and soon began to realise what was going to happen. It was too much of a coincidence for her to have been in St. Petersburg for a holiday, and she’d looked too comfortable and sad for a tourist. He had to get there somehow, and here a party he’d been to at his parents’ house the previous year helped out.

In between helping his mother fill up the bowls dotted around the house with Doritos and mopping up split drinks, he’d spent more than an hour stuck with a very drunk National Trust tour guide called Andy, who’d spent their entire conversation slurring his way through an explanation of how he spent half the year as a tour guide and the other half teaching English in St. Petersburg, of which he talked as if it were a non-stop sex tour. Jonathan had never thought that the tale of how Andy’s landlady had climbed into bed with him during his first week in the city, which had been described to him in lasciviously unpleasant detail, would ever come in useful to him, but it had made sure he had never forgotten Andy and currently Andy was the most important person in Jonathan’s life. Andy was going to help Jonathan get to St. Petersburg.

The following day he handed in his notice at work. He worked out his week’s notice, enduring with indifference the gossip about why he was leaving, which varied from him not being able to cope with the stress of the job to the suggestion that he’d got a girl in his native Leicester pregnant. They figuratively and literally couldn’t have been further from the truth.

A week later he was back at home with his shocked parents, who were upset by his plans, especially as he couldn’t tell them the truth. Perhaps if he’d tried they might have understood. But it was no time for worrying about details; St. Petersburg was calling, at the top of the dial, and there wasn’t much he could do about it…

It turned out that Andy was not such a good friend of the family as his invite to the party had first suggested, but his father assured him that he was easy enough to find – when he wasn’t showing people around local stately homes, he could generally be found in the Trap and Parrot, one of Leicester’s many new city centre ‘fun’ pubs. Jonathan found Andy exactly as his father had suggested, and was surprised when he recognised him straight away and even remembered Jonathan’s name. Andy had barely changed since that drunken but all-important monologue; his hair was just as greasy and it looked as if he was wearing the same misshapen and baggy green t-shirt as he had been then. Jonathan was also surprised that Andy was so pleased to see him, and when he explained what he wanted to do he was told that a semi-official business visa would not be a hard thing to come by.

Indeed, Andy proved to be better company than their first meeting had suggested, and Jonathan spent much of the month he had to wait for his visa at his bachelor pad. Andy wasn’t planning on visiting St. Petersburg in the near future, having got himself a girlfriend in Leicester, but nevertheless he had plenty of good advice to give which Jonathan listened to carefully, all the time wishing he could tell someone, especially this friendly but essentially innocuous individual, about why he was really going to St. Petersburg. But it was too much of a risk. Instead he listened with good humour to stories of western teachers who had turned up in St. Petersburg with suitcases full of Levis, convinced they’d be able to sell them for way more than their market value only to find the city swamped with shops selling decent jeans, or others who’d been convinced that they would need a hat and scarf year round, though St. Petersburg’s summers were as hot as Britain’s.

Andy had also recently invested in satellite television, his last trip to Russia having proved particularly lucrative, and Jonathan spent most of his days whilst Andy was at work watching Cloud Sports and flicking through the other 800 channels on offer. It was an amazing number that had expanded quickly, and Jonathan didn’t quite understand from where the plethora of extra TV presenters had been found. He could still remember when the appearance of a fourth channel in 1982 had been the basis of an entire school assembly. Nowadays the setting up of a sixth gardening channel wouldn’t even warrant a mention on page 15 of the local free newspaper.

Part of the reason for this was that most of the channels were crap. Jonathan couldn’t help but watch one morning as The Mind Channel showed a middle-aged ‘psychic’ moving his hands for fifteen minutes at the camera in such a way that it looked as if he was raving at quarter speed. He wasn’t, however, following this nineties dance craze (and looked an unlikely ecstasy consumer if truth be known) but instead was feeling the energy of someone who had phoned into the show with a relationship problem. The verdict for the unfortunate telephonee wasn’t good, and before flicking to the Getaway Channel Jonathan wondered how desperate someone had to be to telephone a television channel and rely on a man waving his hands before him to discover what the future held for you. At least his destiny was more firmly within his own grasp, even if he didn’t know where he’d be living, what he’d be doing and how he’d understand anyone around him in 2 weeks’ time.

As luck would have it, it was Russia week on the Getaway Channel, and his viewing of the Mind Channel was closely followed by for the next installment of ‘Behind the Iron Curtain: St. Petersburg’. Jonathan was glad of this, because, apart from knowing minute and precise details about the Avrora, he knew very little about St. Petersburg and did not have the power of concentration to digest a Rough Guide in such a short space of time.

He was quickly enlightened; 4.6 million people (and shrinking), the Northern Capital of Russia, good ballets and museums, dodgy-looking roads, lots of canals. The Getaway Channel liked to do it briefly with plenty of pretty pictures, and this suited Jonathan; he was too busy seeing if he could spot his mystery girl in the shots of the city to worry about finer details, and still as preoccupied as he had been in Goole about the big three questions. At least he knew where she was now, but how he’d be able to locate her in a sprawl of nearly five million people was another question that started to nag.

Of course, it was still nagging him as he sat in the Departures Lounge at Gatwick airport two weeks later, his parents bidden farewell and his lightweight case checked in. Though he was likely to be staying in Russia for a while, all he’d packed were some clothes and toiletries, a picture of his parents, a few cassettes (which we’ll come to later), a copy of Leicester City’s fixture list for the remainder of the season and the latest edition of Wisden (a going-away present from his father). Not much to remind him of home, and not much to help him with what he was coming to the city for.

Not long before boarding, the panic started. All alone, without even the feeble comfort of Andy and his satellite television, Jonathan began to wonder what he was doing. No-one else had been witness to his light bulb-popping, and suddenly he realised that it could all just be trick being played on him, caused by some illness in his brain. The departure lounge began to take on a new, super-real quality which he felt like he was looking at though a pane of glass. Every tiny noise intimidated him and everyone looked suspicious. As his breathing grew shallow he felt claustrophobic and as if he needed to get out of there, but there was no way; he was trapped by his cause. He bolted up, not really knowing what to do. Instinct guided him across the room to the coke machine.

As he sipped on the coke a minute later he began to feel like he was back in the room again, and the noises stopped being so frightening. Time to start playing it cool. The flight was due to board in fifteen minutes, and he was going. The cause was true, that amazing girl really was waiting for him, even if no one else would ever trust that she was. After a momentary lapse of reason, he began to believe in himself again.

Jonathan got on the plane, ate a decent meal and arrived in St. Petersburg at 7.20pm on 3^rd March 1997. It was minus eighteen outside.

Chapter 2

Not long after Jonathan was sat in the back seat of a taxi racing and weaving along and in between the potholes of Moscow Way on the way to the centre of St. Petersburg. He’d hardly noticed the airport and its seventies interior, the birds flying around inside and landing on the branches of fake plastic trees. He hadn’t really paid attention to the stony customs officer, and the little booth at passport control with its mirror placed above him and behind his head so the person checking his passport could see what was behind Jonathan. He had barely registered the taxi driver holding a sign with his name on it in the shabby airport arrivals lounge, even the wind biting at his face outside didn’t bring him to his senses. Ever since the plane had touched down he had felt something new inside him; he had actually done something to change the course of his life, and he felt excitement that he was in the same city as her. Of course, he still didn’t know her name, nor did he know how to find her, nor did he speak the same language as her.

In fact, as he began to come round and get over the slight disappointment that she hadn’t been at the airport waiting for him, the problem of the language barrier began to rankle. Andy had told him how hard Russian was, but he’d rather naively felt that it wouldn’t be that bad and that he’d be able to pick it up. Now he was on Moscow Way and realised that so far he hadn’t been able to read anything except for a Pepsi advert with the Spice Girls on it (‘GenerationNext’) and the sign with his name on it in the airport. He recognised a McDonald’s outlet on his left, but only because the golden arches were exactly the same as they were in Goole.

It also dawned on him how intimidating and grey the place looked. So far they’d only been along one road and it was already dark, but the city seemed so dimly lit. They’d been past what looked like a run-down department store, and every so often the crumbly entrance to a courtyard revealed sheltering men huddled together with bottles of beer and cigarettes. Everything seemed so big, tower-blocks left and right, and as if to prove the point a huge statue of Lenin loomed up on one side, hand outstretched to something. Further down Jonathan watched a drunk stagger and finally slump down into the snow, ignored by the dark-coated masses hurrying to get out of the cold, woollen hats pulled down to the tops of their eyes. St. Petersburg looked a tired city at first glance.

The taxi driver wasn’t much friendlier, but that might just have been because he didn’t know any English and Jonathan didn’t know any Russian. Jonathan realised that he hadn’t spoken to anyone for hours, having deliberately ignored the two over-enthusiastic retired teachers sitting next to him on the plane, and he suddenly felt very lonely and a long way from home. Things like that didn’t normally bother him, in Goole he’d sometimes gone days without a decent conversation, but right now he wished he’d shown a bit more interest in their raving about Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’, and the fact that they were looking forward to visiting the cafй of the same name. Perhaps he could have gone with them.

The taxi braked sharply and awoke Jonathan from his self-pity. The driver jumped out and headed into the middle lane of what seemed to be the same road, though it was getting a bit confusing as they seemed to have been on it for about half an hour and up in front was what looked like a replica of The Brandenberg Gate, albeit green. Jonathan figured that road-rage was just as popular in Russia as it had become in Britain, and that the driver was about to go and dish out the Russian equivalent of this new and unfortunate phenomenon to a fellow dodgy driver when he saw him return with a cat, which had seemingly got stuck in the middle of the road and was terrified of all the cars. The driver returned the cat to the side of the road, from where it scampered into an unlit courtyard, and Jonathan began to feel a little better about Russia.

He was still feeling better fifteen minutes later when he reached his hotel, located right opposite the Avrora.

The cranes swung and danced with one another at the seaport opposite the nine-storey block of flats where Olesya lived, despite it being minus eighteen. It was early morning and she was watching them from the window of the two-room flat she shared with her mother, who was snoring peacefully in the other room. Just past them the cars and minibuses groaned over the viaduct and beyond them there were just flats. Grey high-rises extended for as far as the eye could see in every direction from here, a faceless landscape of lives compacted into the sky.

She liked the cranes as they were a constant, always ready to work their pendular movements as they swung gracefully through the port, no matter what the day was like. And at the moment today felt like a bad day, one of those that would get even more lonely than usual, and one of those days which made her think of the thing she’d never told anyone about. She had no one who felt close enough to tell it to. Not even her mother, Nadya, was that person; she seemed to have half given up on life even in her late forties, and spent much of her time motionless and smiling sadly in front of the television. There was really nobody in Olesya’s life, and that made the interest of Ruslan even harder to brush off as just being that of a young man who wanted to have sex with her. She’d be in the group with him tomorrow morning at university, and he’d be flirting with her as cumbersomely as ever.

Olesya looked from the cranes and upwards to the sky. She lived close to the city airport, and on a clear day the fluffy lines of incoming and outbound aeroplanes were visible towering over the nine storeys. She often wondered about all the lives passing her by, their different stories and their reasons for coming to and going from St. Petersburg, their many loves and fears as just very briefly their paths crossed into the same space as hers, unlikely ever to cross again. She also wondered what it would be like to be on board, a runaway, perhaps with Jonathan. Jonathan. Perhaps she’d be able to tell him about the thing one day.

She had a free day, and now she knew what she was going to do with it. Once she’d woken her mother up in time for her serial she’d head to the British Council and watch that video once more. Then she’d wander along the frozen Fontanka river, by its faded residences and theatres, and try to think of something nice.

The reception area in Jonathan’s hotel contained a dimly-lit restaurant (in a non-sexy way) which had more waiters than customers, a tiny booth which contained a stern-looking lady offering expensive trips around the city, and a couple of glass stalls which were selling souvenirs and other things useful to the lazy tourist. The grey marble bar across the concourse was as empty as the restaurant, and the one bored-looking barman was occasionally exchanging the odd syllable with two prostitutes perched on the bar stools.

Having unpacked and feeling tired, Jonathan bought a map from the souvenir stall and headed for his room, which was, like the airport, unchanged since the early seventies. Before bed he poured over it, fascinated by its alleys, wide streets, parks and industrial estates. He traced routes along it with his fingers, imagining the routes he might walk over the following weeks, and he also began to learn his first bits of Russian: prospekt seemed to be some kind of big street, (perhaps an avenue), alleya was, he supposed, an alley which was easy enough, but ulitsa was the most commonly-used word, which must have meant street or road.

But he needed a strategy if he was going to find her; tracing her possible paths on the map wasn’t enough. The light bulb hadn’t popped for a while in his head, and couldn’t be relied upon. The reason he’d chosen the hotel opposite the Avrora from the list Andy had given him was because that was where he’d seen her, though he had known it was a long shot. Scanning the view from his third-floor window he could see none of the grey, intimidating high-rises he’d spotted on his way into the city, and as he’d learnt in geography at school, that was where pretty much everyone lived in Russia. He needed a strategy, but it wasn’t going to come to him in a day.

Jonathan daydreamed for an hour or two, having traced a particularly long and pleasurable route, right from his hotel and through the centre, down Moscow Prospekt and along to Prospekt Veteranov, Veteran’s Avenue, which sounded like a pleasant place and perhaps a good destination for a Mad Mission the following day. He needed to get out and see the city. Having phoned his parents from the hotel lobby, a short call which nevertheless took $36 from his credit card, Jonathan decided to go to the bar to get a midnight coke before bed, a little apprehensive of the language barrier. At the bar he found that he needn’t have worried - the transaction took place without use of any words, and the barman barely moved from his seat to serve Jonathan. The prostitutes were still sat in exactly the same places as before.

The Mad Mission could not take place the following morning as Jonathan had not yet received his passport back from the hotel reception, who were registering him with the local authorities. He’d been warned by Andy not to step outside without his passport as the local police force were always looking for opportunities to take money from people, especially non-Russians, many of whom were illegally registered in the city or else totally without registration. The copy of St. Petersburg’s ex-pat newspaper, Northern Venice, which Jonathan had picked up on his way back to the room the previous night seemed to back Andy up, with one article referring to the police as ‘uniformed beggars’ and a letter on the editor’s page talking of a ‘city of thieves’. Jonathan was sure that such commentary was partly down to the simplistic nature of journalism in free newspapers, staffed mainly by those drifting through their post-university blues, but all the same he decided to stay in the hotel for the time being. He had his map, and having ordered himself a coffee at the bar (this time using words), he sat tracing routes through the city. As he traced, he wondered whether his index finger was touching on the place where she was.

His lack of passport that morning also meant that he met The Man, and so started an unfortunate relationship that would cause Jonathan worry and even fear over the coming months. He’d been sat in the bar tracing when someone had come over to his table:

‘Excuse me, I’m very sorry to disturb you, I guess you’re a native speaker of English. Could I sit with you a while and practise my English, or do you have personal matters?’.

The Man was well-dressed compared to the few Russians Jonathan had so far seen, and it later transpired that this was the result of many business trips to Finland. His English sounded a little stilted to Jonathan, and a little too polite in a way that made it sound almost sarcastic, but Jonathan figured that perhaps he could help him find his way around the city. He nodded, noting as his new companion sat down that he was holding a vodka in one hand and a can of Red Bull in the other, which seemed an odd combination for a Russian somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, especially given that it was only eleven in the morning.

The Man got called The Man because Jonathan didn’t know his real name. He introduced himself in that first meeting as Vladimir, or Vlad, but somehow Jonathan felt from the start that this wasn’t his real name. It was hard to believe anything he said; he always looked away from you slightly as he talked, as if he didn’t believe what he was saying himself. So he stayed as The Man, at least in private. The Man explained away the vodka and Red Bull so early in the day as the result of him just having finished a night-shift, but again Jonathan didn’t believe him – his hands were too soft for someone who’d been in a factory or driving a taxi all night.

It seemed that ‘practising his English’ actually meant talking in length about himself, in particular how much he loved living in St. Petersburg, the greatest city in Russia, and how ill his mother was and how much time he spent caring for her as she struggled on a pension that barely covered her utility bills. When he’d finished The Man looked a little sweaty and confused and hurriedly asked Jonathan why he was in St. Petersburg, and in particular why he’d come at that time rather than in the summer. Taken aback a little, Jonathan explained that he was an adventure tourist. He was sure that he wasn’t, but it was a phrase that sounded good and it also gave him an excuse to get up and go – adventures to attend to. Despite his fairly calm and unassuming exterior, The Man seemed to be one of those people who was a bit of a mess inside, and Jonathan didn’t really want to find out why. He bade Vlad farewell, but knew that was probably not it. People who hung around in hotels looking for English speakers to make conversation with were the type who would no doubt pop up again and again.

It was time for his first Mad Mission into the suburbs of St. Petersburg now that his passport was ready. Though the centre of the city was beautiful, he knew that what he found beautiful would not be found there and would much more likely be located in the skulking suburbs. He was sure that Londoners never hung around Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square, and likewise the object of great wonder he’d seen would not be in the centre of her city. He was going to head to the end of the line, Veteran’s Avenue; he’d finger-traced the route a full eleven stops along the Red Line, starting from his local stop, the Finland Station. It was the same Finland Station from West End Girls, which had always sounded faintly glamorous next to Lake Geneva in that song, and now he was about to find out if it really was.

A Mad Mission needs an objective, and his was to get something decent to eat for the evening. Up until now the language barrier and the excitement of being where he was had left him subsiding on chocolate bars and caffeine, but that couldn’t last forever. He’d never been a particularly handsome boy, with a thin pale face, red cheeks and mousy brown hair that was neither fashionably long or short, and his mother said that his height and broad shoulders would be what would win him a wife. Whether she was right or not he didn’t know (his being fairly tall hadn’t done much for him so far), but he didn’t want to bump into his queen in St. Petersburg looking pasty and ill fed. He had to start looking after himself, and that included eating properly. Jonathan found his coat, got into the lift and started on his way to the Finland Station.

A little over twenty minutes later he was back in his hotel room, examining his reddened face in his bathroom mirror and feeling that he now knew what winter in Russia meant. He’d only made it about half way to the station when the wind started to eat at him through his jacket and the hard snow bit at his feet, freezing them through the thin trainers he was wearing. When he slipped over and found himself face-down in the snow, head thirty centimetres from a frozen dog turd, he knew it was time to turn back and re-think his plan. The receptionist had told him to put on a hat and scarf as well as a thicker coat if he was going out that morning, but he’d thought she was just being grandmotherly up until now. Looking at the sum total of his possessions, he realised that he hadn’t brought anything remotely appropriate for the climate he was in, unless he unbound all the pages of Wisden and stuck them to his body. At present he only knew one person in the city (not including her, but if he knew where she was coldness probably wouldn’t matter), whom he didn’t even trust, but somehow he needed to buy some warmer clothes. Either that or wait for the weather to get better before venturing out again. He picked up his Walkman, flipped the tape over and pressed play, laying on his bed an enjoying the music whilst he decided what to do.

We’ve mentioned Jonathan’s music before; now there’s finally time to talk about it. He’d only brought two tapes with him for the trip, with two very different types of music. The first contained drum ‘n’ bass from Moving Shadow Records, the best label of the genre. The best stuff he’d heard lately came from Foul Play; listening to the remix of ‘Open Your Mind’, with its howling samples of the wind, made it feel as if the devil itself were in the room with you, and the crickets, rhinos and swampy bass line in ‘Being With You’ belied the myth of drum ‘n’ bass being a sound with no sensitivity. It wasn’t a fashionable sound and so most of those around him were not interested in it, but that had never mattered and certainly didn’t now; he was in a hard city, and needed to be listening to something with a hard edge.

His other tape was also a tough one, only with guitars. The Jam were his particular favourites there, with Paul Weller’s aggressive but intelligent vocals leading the guitars, which somehow sounded like gunshots, into battle. Andy had described it to Jonathan as ‘Moscow music’, perfect for arrowing through the crowds of the metro and into the intimidating estates of that city, and the same was true of St. Petersburg. Jonathan had no friends or family here; the music would be what helped him to live until he found her.

He closed his eyes as the watery, metallic introduction of ‘Being With You’ flowed into his ears. One day soon, he hoped, he’d see her and be able to tell her about this song and how he’d listened to it when he was thinking of her. She’d probably laugh and not understand why he liked it so much, but as long as she was there with him it wouldn’t matter.

The Man was lucky that he was so good-looking, thought Jonathan, as they rode the metro together. It was a couple of days after he’d been listening to Foul Play, and a couple of days since the way in his brain had once again chain-sawed its way into his head. He’d awoken with his headphones still on but the music stopped, having been riding the metro with her. He’d been down at her waist looking up at her, as if he were some object in her bag, watching her noble frame as she gracefully put a token in the slot, walked gently through the barriers and down to the train. He had remained there at her waist for a full half an hour, or a least that was as long as it seemed, watching her as she adopted the typical underground pose of neutrality to all and everything around.

Having took off his headphones, he was filled with a happy aching. At least his decision had been made for him – he wouldn’t be waiting for the weather to get better before venturing out again. The following day, as Jonathan had known he would be, The Man was sat in the lifeless hotel bar with a beer and in a seat which enabled him scan the vestibule and lifts. Jonathan hadn’t been bothered that he was probably scanning for him and had instead gone over, greeting Vlad like an old friend and arranging a trip to a clothes market for the following day. Somehow Jonathan had known The Man would agree without too much hesitation, and he was right.

Glyn Pope  Synopsis ‘The Living and the Dead’