a twenty fourth story...'portrait of a simple young man'

Marat was simple, and everyone liked him for that.  He never said anything untoward or did anything especially out of the ordinary.  His friends found him pleasant and always well-intentioned, his smile was gentle, his round, blue eyes, kind and innocent; he was clean shaven, he dressed in proportion to his slender physique, he never had body odour, and so on.

Whenever there was a party - someone’s birthday, a going away celebration - Marat was invited.  His name was never at the top of the guest list, equally it was never left off.  He appeared in the middle, and he would always bring a gesture of his appreciation. 

At work in the founder branch of the Bartle, Boggle and Hegarty advertising agency he sat quietly at his desk and beavered away conscientiously.  He would only leave his desk to make tea for the members of his team which he did so each morning at eleven o’clock.  The tea he made was just right, he memorised everyone’s preference - no sugar, no milk; milk, no sugar; two sugars, white; white, one sugar. 

His social life was largely carried out on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, office drinks, dinners being the greater part, and in summer, picnics on the common the way young adults should.  Marat and his friends would have been as consistent with a mobile phone advertisement as a Waitrose commercial.

In his new build flat Marat felt comfortable.  The furnishings were modern, the carpets were clean, the varnish on the laminate wooden floor in the open kitchen was shiny.  From his balcony he could see a good deal of the London skyline and he valued the urban panorama as much if not more than the estate agent who sold him the place.  Marat’s father, a second generation Croatian immigrant, made a small fortune from the manufacture of yoghurt pots, and helped his son with the mortgage.

Living in the flat with Marat was Duncan.  Duncan was a friend of a friend.  He was a Glaswegian.  It took Marat a few days to come to terms with the fact every other sentence Duncan uttered sounded like a thinly veiled threat, but come to terms he did.  Marat had never been in a fight in his life, save the time his younger brother had broken his Lego cement mixer – Duncan had. 

Duncan was around five feet ten, broad and swarthy.  His hair was cropped short and he grew stubble easily.  Duncan shaved with a blunted disposable razor and his face was pock marked with little nicks where the blade had caught him.  Duncan worked in the ‘citeh’.  Marat held him in some kind of awe, although they never associated together beyond their living arrangements.

In spite of Marat’s contentment with his day to day existence, he still was eager to travel.  With his friends he often discussed the many countries in the world he would like to visit when conversation had run out.  Marat would then save up his money, fantasising about a trip to the Kingdom of Genghis Kahn or UNESCO listed Hong Kong and Macau.  Travel was his escape, his way of making himself feel as if he were fulfilling his youth, free from responsibility and family ties.  Travel, for the time being, was the life pursuit.

Following the dislocation in Europe after the Second World War, Marat’s grandfather arrived in England.  Whether Marat’s grandfather was fleeing Nazi aggression or the advancing Communist hoards, he was never sure.  However, he loved England, he wanted to stay and above all he wanted to fit in.  Marat’s grandfather wanted to be able to wave ‘good morning’ to his English neighbour over the garden hedge and discuss the vagaries of the fabled English weather; he wanted to have his English neighbour around for high tea, sip vintage lemonade and discuss English literature and the labour movement.   Marat’s grandfather had a son with his wife and tried to impress English values upon him, but his son – Marat’s father who made a small fortune manufacturing yoghurt pots – was already too English and resisted successive attempts by Marat’s grandfather to educate him in English culture.

By the time Marat was born, Marat’s father was on the brink of financial success.  Once Marat’s father had negotiated the last of five lucrative contracts with the five largest dairy enterprises in the United Kingdom, he moved the family to the idyllic suburban confines of Royal Surrey.

Marat grew up in a big mock-tudor house, with a garage large enough to hold all three of his father’s sports cars.  As soon as he was deemed ready, he was sent away to a private school where he played sports and sang songs.  After school he went onto university and studied business and economics, the first in his family.  Marat’s grandfather would have exploded with pride, had he not succumbed to liver poisoning before Marat happened. 

Nevertheless, minus a pair of doting of grandparents, there was always plenty in Marat’s life, or so it seemed to him.  He felt satiated.  Seldom did he marvel at how his father’s fortune from the manufacture of something as small and disposable as yoghurt pots had come to be, seldom did he worry about money.  He had gone to private school because his father wanted him to, he had gone on to university because his friends did, and his father wanted him to.  He now had a secure if unspectacular job in London and a nice flat because his friends had the same, and his father was happy for him to be somewhat less successful then he had been, yet secure and free of trouble.

There were few upheavals in Marat’s life, and he was wary never to care too much for something or someone that the world in which he lived would be ripped asunder or turned upside down by.  In short he was philosophical, although he might not have considered himself so.

Then again Marat did consider himself lucky.  When someone asked Marat for a summation of his life up until a given point, Marat would always conclude it saying: ‘I’ve been lucky, I guess’.  And a guess was about all Marat was capable of when it came to understanding luck.  He had, after all, little, if any experience of bad luck.  He was familiar with the saying: ‘fortune favours the brave’, but was unassuming enough to recognise it did not apply to him, or indeed many others for that matter, except perhaps his father and his success with yoghurt pots.

As far as luck goes, Marat’s grandfather was unlucky.  If he wasn’t being harassed by the communist members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, the indifference of his English neighbours preyed on him.  If he wasn’t falling foul of his wife, he was falling foul of the police.  The lock up became a guest bedroom for him on the nights he became too sozzled to walk back to his home.  He drank rum, or reconstituted motor oil.  To cap it all off, Marat’s grandfather must have known his luck had run out altogether when surgeons at the Royal London Hospital bungled a routine liver transplant leaving him days to live.  He died of chronic hypertension and blood poisoning less than four hours after leaving the operating theatre.  He was sixty eight.

Marat was born a year after his grandfather’s demise, and in the very same hospital.  Marat’s brother, Macan, was born three years later still, and in the very same ward.  When Macan came out of his mother’s birth canal, Marat was given an Adidas rucksack as a welcome gift from his new sibling.  The name Macan means ‘tomcat’ in Croatian, and indeed Macan spent the first four years of his life moving around on all fours before he eventually learned to walk.  Macan had a form of cerebral palsy that affected both his arms and legs.  He grew up wanting to be a bus driver.

Marat and Macan’s mother was a silent woman, with an air of eastern bloc stoicism.  She in fact hailed from the Home Counties.  Her brother had been killed in the Hatfield train crash. It turned out he had skipped the ticket barriers and not paid his fare.  The crash investigators did not find a travel pass on him when they turned out his pockets.  Fortune favours the brave!

It would be too straightforward to imagine the prolonged silences of Marat and Macan’s mother were as a result of her brother’s premature death, because they were not.  Shortly after she got back from honeymoon in the Maldives with her husband, the yoghurt pot millionaire, she realised she had married the wrong man.  Once she discovered she was pregnant with Marat, she knew her life was over.  Marat’s father remained oblivious, or indeed impervious to all this. 

Nevertheless, as a family they were about as close as any, thanks in no small part to Macan.  Although his brain sent bad signals to his limbs, he could count to potato, and did very well at school.  He conquered his disability with courage and vigour, and earned the love of all the members of his family.  His father thought he recognised in Macan the qualities best present in himself, his mother had someone around the house to keep her from topping herself, and Marat adored him forever and on from the time Macan conferred on him an Adidas rucksack – broken Lego cement mixers aside.

Having a disabled brother also proved something of a boon for Marat in his relationships with women.  Macan was living proof Marat had a caring side, and would make sacrifices for the people he loved.  Marat’s girlfriend was pretty and blonde, she worked as a secretary in a Law firm, played hockey and knew all the best cocktail bars in town.  It was after five or six Rum Swizzles that they first got together.  Travel was also something Marat’s girlfriend was interested in, and when they had finished whispering sweet nothings to each other, they would plan holidays abroad.  Their favourite one to date had been a trip on the Trans Siberian Railway.

Were Marat more inquisitive he might have been interested in his ancestry and the international roots of his family tree:  from yoghurt pot millionaires, to well intentioned, but misguided drunks, sheep herders and gypsies, there was plenty to be interested about.  Moreover, one of Marat’s forebears had been a Slavic Wrestling Champion, another had been tried and accused of witchcraft and summarily tortured to death.  Meanwhile, Marat’s great, great grandfather was a friend and colleague of Nikola Tesla, best known for his contributions to modern alternating current, or AC.  AC made radio possible.

Upon his arrival in England from war ravaged Europe after the Second World War, Marat’s grandfather had spent his first pay check on a Roberts radio.  The first broadcast he listened to was in May 1948, a month into the Marshall Plan.  The broadcast was from the centre of Berlin, divided four ways between the Victorious Allies.  Marat’s grandfather was listening to the same Roberts radio in the same chair in his kitchen a year later when the city and then the whole country was split down the middle, leaving sixteen million Germans stranded in the new German Democratic Republic.  When the German Democratic Republic finally collapsed and the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Marat’s grandfather was lying unconscious in the operating theatre in the Royal London Hospital about to have his life ended by bungling surgeons on the cusp of messing up a routine liver transplant.

When Marat’s father heard news of Marat’s grandfather’s demise, he was carrying out an inspection at his new yoghurt pot manufacturing facility.  He told all the staff to go home at once and then locked himself in his office.  He emerged the next morning, red eyed and weary but even more determined than ever to be a success.  In the months that followed he would outmanoeuvre his business partner in such a way that his position as de facto Chief Executive Director became impregnable.  His business partner tried to sue him in court and lost, before spiralling into depression, eventually jumping to his death off a fifty-six metre high bridge over looking Los Angeles harbour at the beginning of a family holiday – unintentionally, he landed on the deck of a Japanese container ship transporting lumber into the US, and turned into strawberry jam.

Marat learned of the apparent suicide of his father’s former business partner one night on a mini-break in Portugal, when he was fifteen.  Marat’s father let slip the ugly details when the two of them were relaxing on the balcony of the hotel complex where they were staying, after a four course gourmet dinner.  The dinner had been in recognition of Marat’s GCSE results.

The school that helped Marat achieve his splendid exam results was considered one of the best in Royal Surrey.  Marat scored most highly in French, German and Art.  He also received the highest grade for a Business and IT certificate in his school year.  The teacher Marat was most fond of was Frau Fiedler.  Frau Fiedler was in her early thirties, with a large Bravarian bosom and an ample, soft, round body.  She was voluptuous.  Before coming to teach at Marat’s school she had been jilted at the altar by her Hungarian fiancé, who then disappeared without trace into the depths of the Black Forest.  Frau Fiedler chose England as the place to consolidate her life and start over.  Fiedler means ‘fiddler’ in German.  Marat had been up to Frau Fiedler’s apartment after classes on a couple of occasions for extra curricular time.  It was understandable on the part of Frau Fiedler, and Marat was a willing pupil.

Marat’s first experience of sexual practice outside of extra curricular time came courtesy of his third cousin, Maria.  Maria was tall and leggy.  In fact, Marat thought she had very nice legs.  She also had smoky green eyes and a mischievous smile.  Marat fell head over heels in love with here right away.  It was at the funeral of a distant family relative that they sneaked out behind the marquee and became properly acquainted.  However, as pleasurable as the occasion was for Marat, for months afterwards he felt an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.  This lasted into his second term of university until he discovered his thing did work properly, and five pints of Guinness didn’t do much for his libido.

Marat’s grandfather was famous for his libido, and his wife certainly wasn’t the only woman who received it with delirious pleasure.  Marat’s father won over women with his ambition and money, which compensated for his rather mechanical approach to sexual intercourse.  Marat, in his favour, had both a sweet disposition and a disabled brother whom he loved.

Whether Marat was aware of his mother’s unstable mental condition - and the possibility of her one day deciding to end her relationship with everyone and everything in this small wet world - he never let on.  However, if Marat had any ambition beyond travelling the globe with his girlfriend, it was to support his disabled brother, Macan, and help him become as independent as physically possible.  Macan’s cerebral palsy meant he had trouble doing normal things safely and efficiently without assistance.  In spite of Macan’s unswerving bravery, the following was essentially beyond him, and more likely than not, would remain beyond him for the rest of whatever time allowance New Testament God granted him on earth: walking long distances, riding a bicycle, driving a car, driving a bus, using everyday kitchen utensils to prepare food, eating and drinking with everyday eating and drinking tools, and so on.  Ironically, Marat’s desire to foster Macan’s independence was probably the very thing that would drive his mother into an early grave.  The care and wellbeing of Macan was Marat’s mother’s only purpose in life.  Still, Marat’s love, ambition and desire for his brother’s happiness and independence at least got him laid. 

The best sex of Marat’s life was, conveniently enough, with his girlfriend.  Playing hockey strengthened her control of her vaginal muscles.  The best day of Marat’s life had also been spent with his girlfriend.  They took Macan to the movies and then to dinner at TGI Fridays.  It was a small, good thing, but it made Marat feel like a kind and useful human being as never before.  Marat’s girlfriend rewarded him with a five hour romp.

Perhaps the best day of Marat’s father’s life had been when he signed the fifth contract with the last of the five biggest dairy enterprises in the United Kingdom.  This came three days after the apparent suicide of his former business partner on the fateful family holiday in Los Angeles.  The best day of Marat’s grandfather’s life had surely been the day the reclaimed German Merchant Navy boat, the S.S. Stubnitz, docked at Dover - the day marked the beginning of Marat’s grandfather’s English Odyssey.  The best days of Marat’s mother’s life were certifiably over.  The best days of Marat’s brother’s life were dependent on the patience and acceptance of everyone else, in spite of his courage.

At twenty three, Marat had somehow come out of everything a balanced and content member of the human race, and best out of his family.  And the reason: because he was simple.