Good News From Riga

The Author

Jonathan Falla is an English writer, born in Jamaica but now living with his family in Scotland. His writing has included several published novels, prize-winning drama for stage and film, and works on ethnography, international affairs, and music. As a paediatric nurse, he has worked for disaster and aid agencies in Indonesia, Uganda, Burma, Sudan and Nepal, this experience colouring much of his writing. He has held a scholarship at Cambridge, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship at the University of Southern California, and a fellowship of the Royal Literary Fund. In 2007 he was a Creative Scotland Award winner, and in the same year was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize. He now lectures in Arts for the University of St Andrews and the Open University, and is Director of the Creative Writing summer school at St Andrews. He performed for some years with a professional early music quartet, and is a serving member of the Scottish Children’s Panel.

Please visit: www.jonathanfalla.co.uk

Also by Jonathan Falla

Fiction

Blue Poppies

Poor Mercy

Glenfarron

The Physician of Sanlúcar

The White Porcupine

The Morena & other stories

Terraferma & other stories

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Non-Fiction

True Love & Bartholomew

The Craft of Fiction

Saama: Innocents in Asia

Luck of the Devil: memoirs of R B Le Page

Ramón Lopéz Velarde: 21 poems

Hall in the Heart

Beyond the Roadblocks

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Drama

Topokana Martyrs Day

The Hummingbird Tree

Free Rope

River of Dreams

From reviews of Jonathan Falla’s work

Compelling and tragically relevant.

Mark Lawson, BBC4 Front Row (Poor Mercy)

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Falla’s harsh, precise and constantly sensual portrayal of a cruel world is partly offset by his evocative descriptions of its extreme climate and landscape, and still more by his sensitive handling of the characters. Poor Mercy is an outstanding novel and it is no surprise to learn that it took many years to write. 

John Spurling, Sunday Times (Poor Mercy)

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An intensely personal account of a human landscape in considerable jeopardy. Refreshing, unapologetically subjective and original. He’s a writer who has a natural ability to capture the essence of an individual in a few brief lines.

Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman (True Love & Bartholomew)

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Delightfully stinging, double-edged comic jab at your typical famine relief team. The tension brooding beneath the surface gloss of wonderfully incongruous humour keeps one’s nerves constantly a-jangle before exploding.

Sheila Fox, City Limits (Topokana Martyrs Day)

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An original, unflinching piece of work on a subject of desperate importance... [The] recurrent pleas for individual justice in an unjust world become pathetically funny... The strength of the writing and the subject carry all before them.

Walter Goodman,  New York Times (Topokana)

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Falla’s play is exceptionally mature and multilayered and walks a fine line between reality and nightmare, naturalism and satire.  Steve Grant, Time Out (Topokana)

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In what is at times a very dark and harrowing tale, Falla manages to enchant with his characters. Falla makes a bewitching read which stirs up a multitude of emotions from love and longing to anger and disgust.

Jane Hamilton, The List (Blue Poppies)

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Strongly plotted and electric with personality, Poor Mercy, which takes its title from The Pilgrim’s Progress, shows Jonathan Falla to be a mature storyteller in full command of his craft. Provocative and moving, it is an altogether memorable piece of writing. 

Jennie Renton, Scottish Review of Books (Poor Mercy)

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An intelligent, ambitious and well-written book. Falla is no longer to be described as a promising novelist, but as an accomplished one. Glenfarron is a real achievement.

Alan Massie, The Scotsman (Glenfarron)

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Charged with compelling drama and moral edge... carried out with poetic subtlety, hard to spot because the writing itself is so joyously accomplished, light, almost airborne, and witty too.

Tom Adair, The Scotsman (The Physician of Sanlúcar)

Good News From Riga

Flow my teares, fall from your springes

Exilde forever let me mourne

One: Streets of our Town

By the freeways of our town there are girls selling roses. They stand at the off-ramps where cars pause for the lights, and they hold out their blooms before the windscreens hoping that the driver is an executive who in the morning freshness is excited at the thought of his secretary and feels impelled to place flowers on her desk. Or, at day’s end, that he feels remorse for the liaison he has contracted with his secretary; hurrying home from her bed, he will remember his wife, feel bad, and buy a fat red rose for one crown. The formula is simple and reliable: one wife, one mistress, one dirty hour, one rose, one crown. Each girl’s price is the same.

Indeed, each girl is much the same. They are foreigners, refugees from distant parts who have been with us for many years. We do not dignify them with a nationality; neither our government, our press, nor our broadcasters name their homeland; to us, they are just ‘the Exiles’.

They do not look like us. Their skin is fair, but with a pastiness that is not attractive. They do not appear healthy, and the general suspicion is that their diet is poor, consisting of oatmeal and cheap fish with no fresh vegetables. They have none of the bloom of our young women. Their hair is worn imprisoned under dark red head scarves; if occasionally it escapes, it hangs lifeless. Their clothes are tired; even the home-weave sash in their national colours – blue and white – which our authorities oblige them to wear, even this seems lacklustre. We are used to them now, the Exile girls by twos and threes at every freeway exit, with their plastic buckets of fleshy red roses on the kerb.

Sometimes they are pestered by the homeless, the sour-smelling alcoholic vagrants, the flotsam and jetsam of the city who see defenceless young women earning money and need no more incentive to close in and annoy them. The girls are caught by malodorous, unpredictable and often aggressive men who breathe stale cider into their faces, pushing between them and the executives in cars. If one was taking any notice, one might see the girl twisting and turning, saying little, avoiding eye contact, trying to manoeuvre her tormentor out of the way without getting into a quarrel or worse, trying to keep his hands off the bucket of flowers and away from the purse tucked in her skirts. The police are nowhere to be seen, and nobody gets out of a car to assist (which would be difficult, on a freeway off-ramp).

Prior to that day, I had never bought their roses; I had no cause. I do not have a mistress, and besides, I am more interested in whatever music I am listening to. My car is large and solidly Swedish, and makes a fine auditorium for opera and the later romantic symphonies; the sound is contained all about me, rich and laser clean. Normally I would hardly have noticed this particular girl; I would have gazed straight through her. But on that morning I looked more closely.

Why? Why should one young woman stand out for me? Possibly because I had just reached the (somewhat overblown) conclusion of a particular cello concerto; there was silence in the car as I descended the off-ramp. As she watched me through the screen of the Volvo, I noted that she was not wearing the sash our laws require; some drivers would have informed the police. The girl and I regarded each other without emotion; if she thought I might report her for the dress infringement, she showed no anxiety. The lights took an eternity and I found that, under the girl’s stare, I was growing embarrassed. This is unlike me; I seldom feel embarrassment, and I am more than capable of returning a stare. But the girl studied me in a way that was disconcerting because it was non-judgemental, and I am not used to that; on the whole, people who look at me closely are either medical regulators or my patients, who are scared. She was not scared. In fact, she probably saw me more clearly than I saw her, because her position by the off-ramp placed her to the east of me; behind her, the winter morning sun was dragging itself up, sullen, orange and polluted. I glanced over her shoulder at the sun – and then of course I was dazzled, so the girl was now little more than a silhouette. But she could see into the car with no obstruction other than the grime on the windscreen.

So I was wrong-footed, and in consequence I made a foolish mistake. On an impulse, I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet. I flicked this open, laying it on the passenger seat and extracting a five crown note. I pressed the window down-button, but I did not press for long enough. The window opened just three or four inches so that passing the note outside was awkward (and I’d not have been able to take the rose it bought into the car). I dithered with the note in my fingers; as the girl reached out, the money was tweaked free by the air turbulence and flittered away across the road. I saw one of the homeless wasters darting across the tarmac to retrieve it, straight into the path of another car. The driver braked hard but the man banged and sprawled across the bonnet, rolled onto the tarmac, picked himself up and ran, looking back to shake a fist and shout obscenities at everyone. What became of my five crowns I never knew; horns behind me were blaring, and I started the Volvo forward, swept on into the High Street by the traffic.

I had lost sight of the young woman. I was not happy she had seen my driving in a poor light. Such things can happen to anyone, but they seldom happen to me.

As I drove away, I found myself analysing the mishap. I concluded that what had made me uncomfortable was the dusty condition of my car. It is normally clean but I had not had it washed for three days, and there was a mortifying coat of city filth. I now drove straight to the nearest car-wash and valet, where middle-aged Lebanese in foam-flecked blousons tooth-brushed my hubcaps.

So I proceeded to my clinic, knowing that my secretary when she arrived would be thrown not to find me already at my desk, as was usual. Then the weekend intervened, and I put the rose girl out of mind.

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The freeway trade in roses is one of those aspects of the marginal economy – unregulated, vulnerable, seemingly expendable – that the authorities pick on whenever they need to be ostentatiously proactive about the state of our town; a high-visibility crack-down on street traders often signals an international summit meeting and a new world order. Or they clean up the verges because unemployment is creating resentment against illegal migrants, and unrest. Punitive measures have been tried. They once experimented with a tax which would have trebled the price of a single rose to three crowns, but as the Exile women were never going to be filling out tax returns, and as the Revenue & Finance Authority was never going to deploy inspectors on the freeway off-ramps, the tax was ignored and died an unsung death. Next came an absurd ruling that no vendor of any commodity should stand closer than thirty metres from any other vendor. The intention was to reduce the girls to one or two at most per slip-road, although no one would admit to such mean-spiritedness; they claimed it was a Public Hygiene measure to prevent cross-contamination between food hawkers. The rose girls decided this ruling could not possibly apply to them, and they ignored it. In exasperation, the City Council ordered the Police Department to arrest ‘female vagrants’, and for a couple of weeks the girls lay low, fearful of deportation. But, as with any economic equation, there was a supply-side and a demand-side; when the supply-side (girls with roses) was removed, the demand-side (adulterers in cars) was furious. Now the executives and senior civil servants hurrying home from their fuck-hutches had no ready source of guilt offerings for their wives. Deprived of these convenient drive-thru florists, our elite reacted with unaccustomed unanimity and, behind the scenes, urgent pressure was brought to bear on the politicians. The upper crust gets things done quickly when it’s personal; it was announced that the police would view vagrancy ‘with all the compassion for which our nation is renowned.’ Within a few days, the rose girls were back on the slip-roads and off-ramps.

Still, they were vulnerable.

The Monday after the mishap with my five crown note, I saw my girl again – but I made a point of not showing interest. On the Tuesday I had a passenger, an anaesthetist colleague and friend. We were discussing the various merits and drawbacks of certain drugs used in local and general anaesthesia for intimate procedures on women who do not altogether trust their surgeon; certain of these compounds have a useful amnesiac effect. I was ignoring the rose girls when my guest, looking past me, said sharply:

‘Oh, she has a problem.’

There was my rose girl – ‘my’ rose girl – on the corner of the off-ramp and the main street, with two men standing close to her. The girl did not move, though she kept a tight grip on her bucket of flowers, staring down at her feet and saying nothing. But the men were undeterred. One of them was speaking harshly, I could see; he was jabbing a finger at her in emphasis. The other reached out a hand and lifted her chin to make her look him in the eye. In that instant I saw she was frightened but not panicked, alarmed but not craven; indeed, it was on this occasion I first noted her remarkable stubborn pride. She regarded the men so disdainfully that she appeared taller than them, though she was not in fact.

‘Protection racket,’ said my colleague. ‘That’s too bad. Don’t suppose the police are in any hurry to help those people.’

The car behind me hooted; the lights had changed.

Protection: it had not crossed my mind that these girls were vulnerable not only to casual molesters but to more systematic exploitation by criminals. I felt a small flush of outrage on their behalf, and for an absurd moment I thought of stopping the car and calling my lawyer... to do what? Those young women were undocumented migrants, refugees, Exiles, nothing more. They were unwanted and unremarked, though it dawned on me that their situation was more complex than I’d appreciated.

Yet they were just girls with red roses.

‘You seem upset,’ said my guest.

I had parked outside the office complex in which my clinic was located. Without realising, I had turned off the motor but remained sitting behind the wheel, staring at the rich red brick of the Barrington Building just in front of us, without speaking or moving.

‘Erik? You with us?’

I snapped out of it.

‘Yes, Ben, hello. I’m sorry. Let’s go in.’

‘Hold on. What’s on your mind? Girls at the freeway?’

I huffed and shrugged, suitably dismissive, but Ben persisted.

‘So, what?

I didn’t know how to put it. I merely shrugged and huffed.

‘Is Alice not so well?’ he probed.

For this question I was grateful. Bizarre to regard my wife’s inexorable last illness as a welcome relief, but there it was: something straightforward to speak about. I sighed a tad rhetorically.

‘It’s never going to be good news,’ I said. ‘Alice will get steadily worse. It may take months if not years, but it will get worse day by day. She will become more unsteady, more prone to convulsions, incontinence, incoherence, depression, spasms, falls... Heavens, the thought of more of this.’

Benedict is a nice man. He has a cheerful, enquiring face, and he does not obsess about himself. He gases people safely, trains other staff thoroughly, and (by law) he visits my clinic on a quarterly basis to ensure my assistant is administering the narcotics as per protocol. He is someone whom I trust, and who does not gush false reassurance.

He said, ‘Would you like us to take Alice out for the day one weekend? Denise could cope, no problem.’

I gave a small grim laugh.

‘That’s sweet of you, but you really don’t know what you’d be letting yourself in for. Look, we must get to work, then send you off to the airport. Forgive me if I don’t take you myself, but Alice expects me...’

‘Erik, forget it.’

‘We’ll get a taxi ordered.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ll take the metro, it goes direct.’

‘That’s not safe. Really, we’ll get you a taxi, a reliable firm. I’ve an account.’

We got out of the car, retrieved our attaché cases and headed for the portico. As I held the door open for Benedict, I looked back – and saw a bird launch itself from the twelve-storey building of the Revenue & Finance Authority just across the car park. The barbed arrowhead shape was unmistakeable: a peregrine falcon, one of those moving into our city in steadily increasing numbers, and sometimes to be seen killing pigeons in 80 mph swoops.

I felt grounded.

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It was not just my imagination that the metro or indeed the streets of our town were unsafe; few would have questioned my insisting on a taxi for Benedict. There had been disturbing reports of assaults, beatings, and deaths. Rumour had been hinting at turf wars among gangs, but no one knew of any gangs, and the newspapers assured us that our authorities did not tolerate gangs, and would stamp on them if they appeared. The violence often seemed to be associated with public transport: one young man’s body had been found on a commuter train heading out of town; another had been discovered by a cleaner in the toilets at the bus terminus. The gang war theory remained common currency until two more victims – young people, a romantic couple by the look of them – turned up in the metro late one evening. This couple fitted no one’s notion of gang members. They were sitting in a half-empty carriage, side by side, leaning against each other with a holdall at their feet, and they looked to be charmingly asleep until another passenger noticed that the plaid fabric of the seat was black with spreading blood. They had been stabbed while standing, skewered with a long spike inserted into the lower abdomen and thrust vertically up into the heart. Then they had been carefully lowered, without any fuss, onto the seat. They had not been robbed. Indeed, the young man was carrying a significant amount of money, while the holdall was stuffed with sufficient clothing and toiletries for an extended trip out of town. They carried no papers, and to this day have not been identified. A rumour that they were Exiles was never substantiated but was widespread, and perhaps explained the authorities’ lacklustre investigation.

The rise in killings remained a mystery, and one could not be indifferent to it. When, later that same day, I again recognised my rose girl, it was in a different setting: no longer by the freeway, but on the margins of the old jute quarter – and in the current climate, anyone would have agreed she was at risk.

What is this ‘jute quarter’, where much of my story takes place?

Jute was once our town’s prosperity. Our capitalists bought in shiploads of coarse fibre from South Asia, and they sold the cheap, tough, and fragrant fabric around the world. It made the canvas covers for pioneer wagons, tents for colonial armies and gold prospectors, and billowing sails for barques and clippers, but it was done for by synthetics and low eastern wages. We are left with dereliction.

To our city authorities, the old jute mills are a civic disgrace, but attempts to repopulate them with modern businesses have largely failed. The abandoned mills are packed into a grid of lanes. They are like Crusader castles in Palestine: magnificent, poignant, obsolete, and helpless. Their walls are blackened with soot from their now silent engines; their windows and skylights are smashed; their chimneys are strapped with iron bands but some have fallen. Ragged, rotten stumps.

Through these deserted, poorly lit lanes, I sometimes choose to pick my way homeward. I do this when I wish to forget the worries of office and home. I drive there of an evening and the district is always quite empty, although even on a sunny day there would be little life. Actually, I find rain on the cobbles appealing. I daydream of shadow lives, of ghostly machinery; I stop the car, get out and walk, and my walk drifts to a halt as I stare at a hundred-year-old light railway half buried in the cobbles, or at the iron bars on windows high above – bars coated with a lumpy, grimy green