Lacan leaps into the scene in a navy tracksuit.
The tracksuit is cheap, slightly shiny at the knees, the sort of thing an Eastern European coach might have worn in 1975 while smoking furiously on the touchline. He has also found a whistle. It hangs round his neck with ludicrous authority, a kind of ‘Kes moment,’ the Bobby Charlton scene reenacted.
The Man, who had been half-hoping he was dead, or at least delayed, looks irritated.
“You’re back,” he says.
“I was never gone,” Lacan replies.
The Editor sighs. “This is going to be insufferable.”
Lacan shrugs. “Only if you continue speaking.”
They are standing, or seem to be, standing in a station. A timetable board flickers. The Boy is looking at the departures board as if it might, at any moment, tell him the truth.
The Man begins, because he always does.
“It wasn’t like that,” he says. “There was work. Conferences. Archives. Trains. Border roads. Hotel breakfasts. The usual European stuff.”
“The usual European stuff?” says Lacan, delighted. “Excellent. We are already lying.”
The Man ignores him. “It was real. It wasn’t just escape.”
“No,” says the Boy. “It was both.”
Lacan points the whistle at him, approvingly. “Good. At last.”
The Man presses on. He wants, as ever, to dignify the movement: curiosity, vocation, historical interest, the long route eastward as professional seriousness rather than what it was, substitution.
“When persons cease to hold,” says Lacan, “places are recruited.”
The Man winces. “You don’t have to sound so pleased with yourself.”
“I am French,” says Lacan, spreading his arms. “It is not optional.”
The Boy is no longer looking at the board. He is looking at the Man.
“France first?” he asks.
The Man nods, reluctantly.
“Yes. France first.”
Lacan starts pacing, tracksuit bottoms swishing faintly. “Good. Let us begin with the father and his little republic of exemption.”
For the father, France is permission. Wine at lunch. Anecdotes. The Man wants to complicate this, but the Boy gets there first.
“He goes there so he doesn’t have to be English,” the Boy says.
Lacan beams. “Precisely. A place one goes in order not to answer in one’s own language.”
The Man objects. “That’s too neat.”
“It is neat because it is true,” says Lacan. “You confuse complication with depth. A common English vice.”
“And Poland?” says the Boy.
At this, the Man straightens slightly, because Poland is his good object, his serious one, the place he would still like, if permitted, to defend against caricature.
But Lacan is ahead of him.
There is a woman. There is a husband nearby, asleep or not asleep in the next room. Money moves. Trams move. Stories are told at Gatwick with duty-free vodka.
Poland allows transgression to pass as burden, appetite as engagement. Lacan is off.
“That’s cruel,” says the Man.
“Yes, but it’s accurate,” says Lacan.
The Boy says nothing for a moment, then: “He liked places that made him look deeper than he was.”
No one improves on this.
The Man’s Poland comes later, and he would like it to count differently. Europe, career, borders, history. These claims are not false. He did go. He did work. He did walk those stairwells that smelled of smoke and boiled cabbage and damp. He did ask archives for files that may not have existed concerning relations that may never have formalised themselves enough to become searchable. He did stand in government offices and train stations and border villages and think, with some sincerity, that seriousness was happening.
“The search,” says the Editor, unable to resist, “was both absurd and entirely serious.”
Lacan turns to him. “That is the first useful thing you have said in several pages.”
The Boy looks at the Man again.
“This isn’t home,” he says.
The Man, hearing the old sentence return, asks the old question because he cannot help himself.
“What is it then?”
“A hiding place,” says the Boy.
Politics enters, naturally. Borderlands, memory wars, Eastern gravity. All the usual acquisitions. None of it is fake. None of enough either.
He stands near the border, close, but not close enough to cross it fully.
He observes, takes notes, leaves.
“You do like a good border,” says Lacan.
“When love will not stabilise, one turns to countries. When countries fail, one turns to history. When history wobbles, one turns to archives. Each move feels like expansion. Structurally, it is often lateral,” he adds.
“You’ll tell us the centre cannot hold soon,” the Editor butts in.
The departures board flickers again. Brussels. Bonn. Warszawa. The Boy stares at the names as if one of them might still contain an answer.
“And Germany?” he says.
The Man looks away.
“Ah,” says Lacan. “Work.”
Germany enters differently.
There are offices. Screens. Calm voices. Deutsche Welle. Everyone knows what they are doing. Meetings begin on time. The children go to the British school nearby and seem, how to put it, happy.
For a while, the Man loves it.
Not Germany exactly. The feeling of Germany. The feeling that perhaps somewhere there exists a country in which one might finally be equal to oneself.
“You worked too much,” says the Boy.
“Yes,” says the Man.
He had wanted it for too long. The fantasy of competence, of adulthood, of a life in which the structures held. He worked. Harder, longer, more anxiously than before.
Lacan nods approvingly.
“A common symptom. One finally reaches the promised land and immediately begins trying to deserve it.”
The Man objects.
“That’s unfair.”
“Of course it’s unfair,” says Lacan. “We are talking about Germany.”
The Boy laughs.
The truth is simpler and less flattering. Germany was the dream that work might finally protect him from himself.
The children at school. The house and garden. The underground train to and from Bad Godesburg. The newsroom. A proper salary. A proper life.
And then, naturally, it ended.
Contracts end and countries close.
Poland again. Covid. The old flat. The old marriage. The old grievances waiting patiently.
“That,” says the Boy quietly, “was when it started getting bad.”
The departures board flickers once more.
The Boy is watching the board again.
“And England?” says the Boy.
Lacan stops pacing.
“Ah,” he says. “The difficult file.”
“England is the hardest nut because it does not arrive as desire. It arrives as baseline. England does not proclaim itself. Its exclusions come in rhythm, its violence in register. It rarely shouts because it has no need to,” Lacan says.
“And the women all look like men,” he adds, through a nervous giggle.
The Man would prefer resentment here.
Hold on a minute, the Editor says, splicing footage into the video clip.
An evening at 17 Grange Road, 1995.
“You will be treated like a nigger in this country.” Sylvette arrives as another hatchet his father picks up whenever he needs to escape something.
Washing up, Joanna stands at the sink, Sylvette by her side. Coiling and slithering, looking for a hole to slip into the 23-year Polish girl’s soul. Perhaps the N word will work. It does.
The father shrugs, which is consistent with his broader method. The Man punches him in the face. Mike Tyson would have been proud. The Boy immediately apologises. The Editor is preparing a press statement, damage limitation. The Man and Joanna leave the house.
There is no return. Ever. And no adequate explanation. England remains what it was: not a destination, not an object of longing, but the original medium.
The Boy is watching the departures board again. Trains keep leaving for elsewhere. His train does not arrive. Or perhaps it does, but he’s not on it.
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