Roland I

A series of wonderful adventures.

The night I met Roland he was huddled up underneath a ventilation fan down some no-named street frequented by London taxis and a few men and women in suits who looked with disdain at the Tesco vodka under my arm. They were theater goers. They paced the streets under the arcades of concrete and the stars masked with that yellow smog. They had no eyes for Roland, they had no eyes for anyone.

“I had this jeep once, I loved it, damn! Did I love it? Then they came and took it away and I told them I never even bit her.”

Roland spoke like that a lot. It was the first thing he said when he saw the vodka and tackled me down to the wet ground with his hands and black eyes. He had six bottles of deodorant laid out before him and one had rolled into the road. He stank. I offered him some vodka, the language of the lost, but he offered me his own bottle of wine.

“Come, have a drink of this. I don’t drink vodka. Not since I lost my teeth, it stings my gums. I can feel it sloshing around in my jaw.”

I did it and it was rich. It felt wrong to drink it, but it was like communion with a cannibal warlord in a shack on the other side of the world. He looked like he’d eat me alive given half the reason to. A fat man with a grey face and grey hair but a black suit walked past and Roland shouted out “Penny for the poor, penny for the poor?” The man laughed like a Victorian.

“Did you know a taxi came past and stopped and a famous footballer got out �" the black guy, Ade-, Abe-, oh you know the one? He got out and gave me fifty pounds on the spot. I said to myself I was gonna go get my jeep back and get those guys that took it. All with that fifty, I was gonna do it.”

Roland slipped in and out of consciousness, slumped on my arm, snoring slightly before jumping straight and shouting: “My girlfriend! My girlfriend!” She was from up somewhere in the North, he garbled where and I made out Castle but whether it was Castle, or Cattle, or Prattle, or anything else, I couldn't be sure. You just have to nod along sometimes. I asked him questions about her but all he could say was that she had a nice “Hood.” Before long I couldn't make out whether he was talking about his jeep or his girlfriend. When he slipped out of consciousness for the last time I left him a blanket and a note scratched on the wall behind him. It had been warm where he was sitting but the rain had started to fall.