Luck

Prologue

The first time we touched down in Prague, it was raining. I remember peering earnestly out of the aeroplane window to little more than a surly grey landscape and the disarray of angled rooftops. It was dark. I was four years old and tired. My Mother marched me through the airport with my little pink fingers crushed between hers, and there was the swish of her patterned bohemian skirts, the spice of her perfume and the clatter of bangles as they danced on her wrist. I’d never seen her move so fast as on that day we arrived: almost lost between the human stampede, suitcases and buggies, her hand pulled me through amidst the clamour of foreign chatter and sharp, unmusical announcements. I found it hard to believe this was going to be my new home.

         The best part about the move was the house. It was in the centre of the New Town, tall, old and bursting with character: even I, as a child, knew the place was special. It was neat and painted pale pink, with ornate window frames and sprawling window boxes. It was a fairytale, and I woke up the day following our arrival desperate to look around the place. My first two weeks I spent trawling after my parents as they welcomed in teams after teams of men to bring our old house to our new; there was lots of tea, lots of boxes, and lots of excitement. I knew something good had happened, which was why we had moved, but now I felt the change; it altered the way my mother stood, modified the way in which my father’s smile arranged itself upon his face. I used to follow my mother when she took me into town and we would look around the markets which would inevitably be bustling with tourists and filled out with camera flashes and video camera. It didn’t change the place, though, it was still as beautiful, and although my fresh mind drank in everything my eyes saw, I’m aware now it was all magnified, more beautiful. There was always the traffic and the noise and the crime somewhere underneath.

         I was told that I picked up Czech quickly. Within two months, I could communicate in most situations and within six I was almost fluent. My parents, my Mother being German and my Father English, struggled with the language, though oddly, my Mother more so; I think she felt that she was giving up her mother tongue to its neighbor, the second best. The first two years were the best, when I had my mother to myself and I saw my father most days (when he wasn’t at the Embassy). We fell into a routine, somehow, with market trips on Wednesday and Fridays, the park on a Saturday afternoon, Church on a Sunday. That was the part I disliked most- Church- although I was always fascinated by the tradition that went with mass, the reverence on the faces of the congregation, and most of all, the gentle hands of the priest when he used to lay them on my forehead, like cleansing myself under a cool flow.

         By the time I started school, I could speak fluently, and had little initial problem making friends; it was when it came to consolidating the friendship that I always failed at. I would go over to my friend’s houses and spend the afternoon with them, but my parents were always very reticent when it came to allowing others in our house. I think my Father thought that the children would talk, perhaps, about the size and expanse of the building and alienate themselves from me- kids can be very funny, he always used to say from me. I didn’t understand. I wanted to show off the house, run through the corridors and play hide and seek; I wanted to show them the loose floorboard on the third floor that squeaked if you jumped on it the right way and the secret door in my parent’s bedroom. I remember a friend, Anya (one of the select few allowed into the house because her father worked with mine) was amazed at the attic in particular, and I felt real pride- that I was now accepted, that I had something with which to impress the other children. I liked her, really; she was petite and blonde with an abundance of plaited hair and brown freckles splashed across her face. Her parents were Australian, I think, but like me, she’d been her since she was a child and although, thinking now, we could have both spoken English, we never did. It would have felt wrong, I think, not to speak the language of the country we were in. I stayed friends with Anya for a long time, actually, through to Elementary, until she was eleven and her parents moved away again. I think her father went to work for the Embassy in Poland, and we hugged and hugged on the day she left, promised to remain friends, and consequently didn’t send another letter once a month had passed. She probably stunned many more children with her prettiness and giggles, but equally I latched onto a few more kids; making friends is always so easy when you’re a child. A shared interest or connection are not needed- just two children looking for a companion that they can find in each other. I could even say that back then I was popular, at least in the sense that all my classmates knew my name, and their parents knew my parents. And I was suitable in every other way, too, because I always had matching stationary sets and spotless, fashionable clothes; I played nicely with my classmates and was always revered for my fluency in German and English; the teachers even liked me, so my mother used to say, with proud glittering eyes.

         When I turned twelve, our situation changed, and I closed the book on the last page of my fairytale. Overnight, it seemed, my existence went from being the most content to the least. Again, I saw my house being emptied, but this time, it was worse; the pink home in the New Town was no longer mine in which to roam. I didn’t know it but by this time my parents were considering separation; years later, in fact, I was told about the complexity of our situation, and how our living in the house depended not only on my father’s income but his career, and that his pressures had been my mother’s, and that they had tried so hard to keep it all from me. And the country was just shivering free from the last grips of Communism, though I don’t remember much about the demonstrations that must have marched past the house often. All the traumas of the country and of my family during that part of my life seems to have been lost on me: the pink house and Prague marked an ideal for me which I would struggle after during the next few years. I didn’t appreciate being moved but excepted it as a matter of fact; we were moving to another city, and it was near, only sixty kilometers or so, and my mother would still take me into town for Friday markets (though we couldn’t manage Wednesdays now) and that our house would be just as nice as the old one. Well, the house we moved into was not nearly as nice as the pink one- in fact, it was grey and concrete and suburban, and I hated it. My mother didn’t even bother taking me to the local markets and I began to see less and less of my father. And about the same time that I went into the local school, I discovered punk rock, and it probably saved me.

         The local Grammar school was about as appetizing as our house. It was sprawling and monotone and its students looked very much the same. It was arranged for me to start beginning in September along with the other students, but on the morning I was due to start, my parents had an argument. Through no real fault of her own (except being aggravated by my father), my mother had cut off the end of her finger whilst preparing my lunch. I was terrified. There was lots of blood, crying and arguing, and, more or less forgotten, I’d taken the decision to try and make the walk to school myself. I’d traced it the previous day alone after being sent into town, and I’d wandered the whole distance in a vague sort of mood, not sure what direction my life was about to take but knowing that it was about to change again. Around the same sort of time, I stumbled upon adolescence, which only added to the awkwardness of the relationship with my mother, who I’d once been so close to. As it happened, I didn’t attend school on that first day- or rather I did, yet attended no lessons. I can remember now, with the clarity one can only acquire from a genuinely stressful situation, how it happened. I’d navigated my way to area of the school, my bag hung high on my back and my fists clutched earnestly in my pockets, but by some fortunate mistake had somehow managed to forget the final three hundred metres of my journey and I was effectively lost. It was late 1993, mobile phones were still confined to the ownership of businessmen and I didn’t have the change to use a box (and wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway). So I did what any twelve-year-old girl would and carried on walking. Mostly I wandered along pavements and passed mothers and children and a few businessmen and checked  my watch casually as time wandered on. I knew that I was expected and I knew that my parents would be disgraced, yet I felt wicked, and toted by school bag around, pretending I was homeless, that all I had was in that bag and that I didn’t know what was happening from one day to the next. Within the hour, I must have performed a circuit, and came dangerously close to the school again by wandering along a narrow neighboring street. I slunk along beside the wall, grinned under my mop of brunette hair as I crept along, and then suddenly, I fell,  and not because I tripped myself up, but because I was pushed. It took me seconds to recover myself and scramble onto my knees until I was hauled up again and thrust close to the face of a boy my own age. I implored him with my speedy babble of Czech and as soon as I had spoken, he had released me and said earnestly,

“We thought you were a boy.” Then he was marching off again, and I recovered quickly and scampered after him. He was amongst a gang of other boys, all of a similar age, all with the same type of floppy greasy hair and ridiculously large trousers with various strips of material swinging from their belt loops. A few sported skateboards or caps, some wore t-shirts of black and white and grey and they all had various dirty coloured bands stacked up their wrists. They were disgusting, really, but I was instantly fascinated and I trawled behind the one who had pushed me and demanded his name. Twice he ignored me and twice he told me to go away, but I persisted; were they at my school, I asked, and they agreed that they were; where they supposed to be in class, I questioned, and they were, they told me. The bustled along through the streets, neither chiding me allowing me to follow, just accepting my presence and forcing me to make the effort. After my popularity at my previous schools it was a shock- their rudeness, their brusqueness and most of all, their adolescence. Somehow I felt that they, like me, were all changing and struggling with it. They had cracking trembling voices and black and white moods and they were adjusting to it by making themselves self-important. Because they were. They began to sing as I followed them, crude, loud songs with dirty lyrics but an undeniable catchiness, and they cared only about their own misery and not about anyone else’s. I loved it.

         After twenty minutes or so, they finally congregated in a local park in which had recently been dumped a large block of concrete which I soon learned was what they used as a skate ramp. They clustered in the centre of the upside-down arch of the thing, crossed their legs or lay across their skateboards, and I sat next to my former attacker, looking to him fervently. He turned to me slowly, studied me closely, took in my neat, fashionable clothes, my practical school bag, my confusion and my assertiveness, and then looked away again. I waited, and my breath was held; I wanted acceptance, and I wanted it to be shown to me, now, now. He denied me any by resuming his conversation with another friend, and again, I was recognized yet not entirely spurned and I grew frustrated. I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon with the boys, hunched mostly on the half pipe, watching a few of them rush up and down it on their wheels, silently aching for recognition with my eyes and my hands which clenched, angry fists in my jeans, solid rocks of envy and emotion and hormones. I laughed to think of the pretty girlishness of Anya and my old friends, the soft tinkle of their laughter, their doll-like delicacy, cute shell-pink fingernails. The boys were so much more real, touchable. They could be pushed and pulled, knocked and kicked. They were angst and frustration, teenage dreams and horrors, alcohol and cigarettes and concrete solidity. I no longer wanted my fairytale because I had stumbled into reality and found it much more appealing.

         It was mid-afternoon when they began to disperse; I’d learnt many of their names through listening- some lived close, some at the other side of the city. Some had brothers who were coming to pick them up in their cars, some had girlfriends, some had parents and others had guardians and some just lived with older siblings. They came from everywhere, every background than a traditional one, every background other than the traditional Czech family structure. With the falling apart of my own family foundations, I found it easy to imagine myself in a set-up like any of theirs, with freedom, with liberty, with opportunity. I hadn’t been spoken to directly all day but hadn’t felt excluded, and I cultivated my frustration into an alarming mess of confidence and stupidity as I approached the last of them, that boy; I caught him on the shoulder and pulled him around and he shook me off like I was some sort of poisonous snake. He glared at me a moment before he shook his hair off his forehead and pinned it to the side with his hand a second. I looked at his fingers, the nails with dirt wedged beneath. As I returned his fierce gaze, something inside me seemed to give, and I found myself smiling instead, a reversal of everything I thought I should be feeling. In the next moment, he was smiling too, awkwardly, with his mouth stretched over his braces. He rumbled in his throat and I thought it was probably a laugh.

“Mates,” he said, holding out his hand with a nonchalant shrug.

“Eva,” I returned, taking his hand warily as he eyed me. I yelped as he seized my wrist and twisted it around awkwardly, and then he ran off, his skateboard tucked neatly underneath his arm until he threw it onto the ground and jumped on it. I could do little more than stare, and after a while, I trudged on home, awaiting the inevitability of angry parents and grounding and cuts in my allowance. The next day, I went straight into town and bought a skateboard.

         



When I was thirteen and a half, my parents finally separated. It was a relief, their split, and the house seemed to sigh and breathe again with the exit of my father and entrance of a new mother. Although she’d distanced herself from me when I was still a little girl, on the night my father left, she sat me down and tried to cuddle me and tell me it would be okay. It took me hours to convince her that I wasn’t upset, that I felt nothing for the event that I knew had been coming for years; I’m sure she thought my obvious rebellion was being cultivated from the stinking heap of angst produced by her and my father. Of course it factored in, but it wasn’t it, it wasn’t what made me heap on wristbands and eyeliner to show my obvious disdain for the useless premise of normality. My rebellion came from deep within myself, and it was with my very being; I tried to escape from every ideal I’d shaped in my mind in my youth and create the opposite, something infinitely more dirty and exciting. Of course I knew I wasn’t the only teenager to go through such a phase- this being the word my mother continuously used to refer to my changed attitudes and style- but I felt like I was different, and it was stupid, but it felt as if pushing myself away from the conformities of society was the intelligent thing to do. Around that time, too, I began to realise that I wasn’t half-stupid, that I could do a maths equation with relative ease and string a few words together and make them sound good. I started to try to figure out a way to release my emotion and need to do and discovered music: I used my itchy fingers to pen a few lyrics and my swollen heart converted feeling into chords that I would strum along on my guitar. I was terrible, and both my mother and my friends never hesitated to tell me so, so I wrote for only a few months and subsequently burnt the guitar that I’d bought from a garage sale.

         My arrangement of friends was constantly changing, but my inner circle was forever the same line-up; Mates I was the closest to, but his closest friends, Lukas and Dal, were mine too. I had various girl friends, too; a few which I kept only for parties and shopping (which were, during this period, my least favourite of things to do); a few which I hung out in lessons with and a few who I simply liked to chat with, all of which were sliding through the same phases of rebellion and I, many of which played the role of love interest to Mates of his friends periodically. Anya was one of my closest and was desperately adoring of Lukas, although she never had found the strength to tell him. When I was fourteen, Mates took me to a party and we dated for all of two weeks; we kissed a lot and he felt me up a couple of times, but we soon moved on, broke wordlessly, drifted above that awkward level on which couples perch. We were too close and we enjoyed play fighting too much, we liked to tease each other mercilessly and all of our friends thought it odd if he was calling me ‘girlfriend’.  Nothing changed, not really, and we all scrambled through our lower school years with eagerness to reach the next level, to grow up and achieve real independence.

         It was my fifteenth birthday when I heard Mates sing for the first time. My mother had decided to show some interest and had vacated the house, leaving it empty for a weekend which I was too fill, if I was any sort of self-respecting teenager, with mess and noise and alcohol. She’d given up a couple of years before on bringing me up in an entirely respectable way; perhaps she presumed she’d done all she could, which of course she hadn’t, but she wasn’t to know that. I was hell-bent on being my own person, being an individual (or at least what I thought one was) and she had enough sense (or not quite enough) to let me get on with it. I think she saw the spark on intelligence within me, the same spark that was in herself, and hoped that I’d somehow fall upon a way to make use if that innate glow- and I did, eventually.

         On that birthday, there was more than my turning fifteen which was to be celebrated; Dal’s older brother, who was revered amongst his friends as being the coolest punk rocker in the city, was moving to America to chase a career as a professional skate-boarder; Lukas had lost his virginity the previous evening to a friend of his sister’s and Mates had decided he was forming a band. We were all busy doing everything that went against the culture of the country- breaking family ties, behaving like brats, disgracing the remains of what broken families we came from. We barely associated with anyone outside of our group, not just because we didn’t feel they could be accepted, but because they didn’t want to know us. We convinced ourselves that if we could get to America, our behavior, which we believed to be Westernized, would be acceptable, and people would like us much more. Such was the ferocity with which we held this belief that it was on my birthday Mates took his first step towards America and formed a band. He performed covers of Blink-182, The Police and Blur. Each was terrible in its own right but it was the cover of Carousel that shocked us all, because it was that song with which he tried the hardest and failed most miserably. His only saving grace was his voice, which very much did save it all; his guitar playing was less than perfect, Dal’s drumming roamed in and out of cyclic rhythms and Lukas tried hard to make his bass playing sound credible. And although the music could have ruined my birthday, it didn’t, because at the end of it all- after the boys had been disgraced by their friends about their abhorrent lack of talent- three boys emerged a little wiser than they had been when they started playing. And this was when my life turned again. Each error I made I learnt from, as every person does, and I allowed each shape my life not in the way a potter moulds clay but in the way that the tide changes sand, slowly and gently. And in amongst these changes,  some things were constant, and they were the friendships I’d made one day through a little rebellion.