The Kings of Manuel

2003 we lived in Manuel. 'Christmas is cancelled' they said. Anyone who wanted to celebrate had to get out. You had until midnight on 11th December. Anyone who remained within Manuel after that, well, you were stuck. This included us mind. We were too stoned to pay the right amount of attention of course.

Instead of worrying about what was really going on, we panicked over a walk to the shops. Sure walks to the shops were about to be outlawed and people were forming gangs to fight back against what they saw as government interference. But we were sweating over the prospect of running out of rizlas. If we had to go out for supplies then we'd be climbing the walls, and getting ready to go and buy some milk: it was like we were going on an intergalactic expedition. Never mind astronaut suits, we had our hats on and backpacks strapped up ready for carrying coke and coco pops back to the flat so we wouldn't have to leave again (at least not for a few days).

The news transformed us. We carried on smoking pot of course but we got active in defiance of the orders to stay indoors. These days I would be more responsible but this was no pandemic. This was economic collapse and governmental liquidation. Christmas was excessive. Manuel as a city couldn't both have it and keep order, hence the ban. 

The surprise was how quiet everything went. As of the eve of the announcement there was total compliance. This in itself was terrifying. As teenagers, albeit ones who were supposed to be studying and earning money and becoming adults (according to what our parents expected of us), we disregarded the rules and we went out but let's start at the start:

First we heard of the new orders was our neighbour pounding on the door. We had one anaemic plant growing under a lamp in an incongruous cupboard in Johnny's bedroom. When the pounding on the door began we just looked at each other with that look that said 'it's the police'. With a joint in hand and no more than half a braincell between us, we seemed unprepared for storm troops.

'What are we going to do?' I asked Johnny (whispering obviously).

Johnny just looked at me blankly, his mouth slack, his eyes shifting slightly towards the door.

'Do you want me to answer it?' he said.

'Hold on. Hold on,' I said. 'Think about Ted'. (I was still whispering, don't worry - oh, and Ted was the plant).

'Ah. Well.' Finally he stopped and turned his face away as if in thought. Almost immediately, though, he stood up. He was about to move for the door, so I reached out for his hand.

'Hold on. What if it's the police?'

'I've thought about that,' he said in his most grown-up voice. 'If it were the police then they would have said so. They have to.'

I wasn't so sure about this but then, as the pounding on the door started up again, I noticed that it wasn't the most para-military pounding. It didn't sound official. Wouldn't fascist door poundings be more meaty and menacing? 

Still the two of us were standing in silence and looking at the door.

'Johnny! Are you in there?' - came the voice of our neighbour, Beryl.

Another, quieter voice could be heard just then: 'Of course he's in. Where would he be?' This was her husband, Bill. She could be heard shooing him away.

'Have you heard?' she was saying.

We opened the door.

She walked straight in. She had never set foot in the place before but apparently nothing, not even two skinny boys stinking of weed, fazed her: she waked in and turned around and while we were adjusting to the fact that she was standing the other side of us and wasn't the police, she said:

'You wont have seen the news right?'

Before laughing as if at the idea that we would even answer her from beyond the marajuana mist-curtain that was settled at head height between us. She may as well have gestured at the no TV in the room. This was 2003. We used LimeWire. That was about as high tech as we got. Six or seven months earlier coalition forces had invaded Iraq. There were marches against it but otherwise it was business as usual. 

Quickly she said: 'They've said that Christmas is cancelled, okay? Do you need to go home or, well, what are you  doing?' We had chatted casually once or twice on the stairs or in the bit by the bins outside. Now she seemed like an impatient older sister but clearly she cared.

In any case, before giving us time to answer she said impatiently, as if suffering from cigarette cravings:

'If you're staying here then you should look at what they're doing. Put the radio on at least.'

She walked around looking here and there and by and by we passively led her to Johnny's bedroom where there was an alarm clock radio on the floor. We switched it on and there was the crackle of Radio 5 where football commentary had been heard the night before. An exotic European tie.

On came radio 5 and an authoritative, no-messing kind of voice could be heard saying:

'... you must abide by these regulations. This is for the good of everyone and it is not the time to think of oneself above and beyond the greater good ...'

Beryl explained that she was going out for a big shop with Bill and then they were going to celebrate alone the two of them and didn't want to be bothered really. They would help us before the deadline of the 11th but not after that. It wasn't worth the risk, she said. Having done what she came to do and seeing now that we at least were aware of what was happening in the outside world, she left

-

We stayed in Manuel. There was a curfew of 5:45 each evening. It got dark and people cleared off the streets. Even during the day people were only out if they had to be. People filed to and from work. We watched some of the quiet from our windows.

These were, though, the best two weeks of our lives despite the fact that we were fearing for our lives constantly. Fearing for our lives as we broke out and broke back in an again to our flat. Everyone else seemed to be safe indoors. The streets were being watched but somehow we were free. We managed to get to a lot of places and meet some people.

First of all we found that we were able to tunnel out. This did not take long. We were out through our tunnel within three days of our arriving in this new situation.  It turns out the land around there was not so hard. 

By the time the 11th came round we had not only prepared our escape tunnel but also stocked up on pot and bought some cans of soup, and bread obviously: these large, sweet loaves you could get there - even eating toast every day they were enough to keep both of us going for a while and of course noodles. Nothing much. Tea. Biscuits. We stocked up and we were set.

Then we left the building through our tunnel. The first day we didn't know what we were doing really. We took some minimal supplies, just things we could have fresh: water and snacks and that.

We were out and into the car park garage of a building a hundred yards or so away. This was a stroke of luck as none of the other places for a good stretch around had a basement or anything like that. We came up into it and wandered between the cars.

There were some serious cars there as well: shiny and in good condition, some with only a minimal amount of miles on the clock. They wouldn't be moving for a while.

We made our way to the stairs and, without a care in the world, started to make our way upwards. I guess we sensed that no one would care. We simply carried on up silently to the top and went out onto the roof - unusual enough to get out onto a flat roof like that at the best of times, especially in that part of Manuel.

There was nothing out on the street, no movement and no cars driving and not a one person walking around.

It was night and the lights were on automatically along the empty roads.

The last thing we needed, I would think now, was to draw attention to ourselves. Yet we started shouting. Off that concrete rooftop and out into the concrete void. Beyond the galvanised railings. Over the divide from this lonely structure to the next tower and the one beyond: we drove our reedy screams. Into a flat calf strapless night we sang out of tune and without finding a key at all:

'We are not banned'. And afterwards once the impact of words on silence had flowed around for seconds of impossible nothingness:

'Come on' and 'We're here and we are going to have stuffing and Yorkshire puddings and mince pies'.

We laughed. As it happened neither of us liked mince pies back then.

'Merry Christmas' Johnny shouted at one point and then the silence grew around us and the words seemed to reach out for a mile into the void and weirdly, and this was the only response we had apart from unidentified clattering and the meowing of an unseen cat, there came a plaintive yet assertive call:

'Happy Christmas, you twats'.

And we grinned from ear to ear.

There had been some kind of maintenance work going on and just inside the door at the top of the building we had seen buckets and other gear. We took some lengths of rope that were inexplicably left there too and we abseiled down the side of the building. For a moment we were hung there off the side of this massive structure with the silence of the sleepified city ringing round. Buzzings and hums all the same in the lit- up night time but none of the hubbub of life. Not even the annoyance of an 8-bit Christmas carol peeping along. 

We hung there at the end of our ropes for a few seconds before dropping together the final six feet or so down onto our feet and away with our backpacks and our grins.

Almost immediately we could see uniformed people moving between the buildings fifty yards ahead or so. We made ourselves quiet: stopped in our tracks and hunched down.

We didn't look at each other but for a few moments we were watchful and then we could hear them speaking, these uniformed types:

There were three voices. As far as we knew these were three officers of the law. There were two female voices and a male one. Before this story could become anything like a tale of romance, it is worth saying that we had spent so much time getting stoned, Johnny and me, that the prospect of company of any kind just filled us with dread. We did not imagine ourselves to be Casanovas. We were not on the prowl in any sense. Actually, without meaning to, we had lucked upon a kind of grey celibacy. The two of us watched cheap DVDs (even Blockbuster existed then and you could buy the ex-rental copies for the cost of renting one new release). We were happy in our haze of drowsiness. Long sleeps and afternoon wakes and bake. It was bliss. Sex taken out of life. But here you are, two women and a man were having a conversation. As far as we knew they were the law.

'If we take Mongrove towards George Street then we are bound to. Hold on.' This was a bold female voice.

'Have you seen that as well?' asked another woman. 

'Yeah, look Robbie.'

And Robbie could be heard now: 'Jesus. Who do you think that is then?'

'Definitely not one of ours' came the first females voice again.

By this point, and emboldened by our shouting off the rooftops and not so fuzzy headed as usual, the two of us stepped forward and we walked - even with Johnny saying to me 'Hold on,' and again 'Hold on' - towards this group of what we had thought was the law. They didn't sound like the law and now, as we got closer, they didn't even look anything like the law, their uniforms were nothing but similar looking dark clothes, only enough to fool a very stoned person or someone at a distance.

They saw us, our law-looking stranger friends, and they moved round slightly and back. We were still a ways away from each other, perhaps fifty metres at least and there were bike sheds and railings and the corners of two buildings around. At once we all moved into a nothing courtyard that happened between two buildings there.

Johnny trailed behind slighlty.

One non-uniform uniformed girl stepped forward and we spoke to each other then

'Merry Christmas,' I said, wanting for anything better thing to say, though it was a mild evening and I was exhilarated and greeting anyone like that felt fine anyway.

'Well, season's fucking greetings,' she said.

We had binged, Johnny and I, on just about every trash American release that you could buy cheaply on DVD around Woolham and Hackneath. Anywhere else in Manuel, say somewhere you had to take a bus to, we wouldn't be buying DVDs but the selection was probably not too dissimilar unless you went into the centre.

She had probably seen the same DVDs. Or we just assumed everyone who was roughly our age had the same references. We were basically quoting factories, bouncing about lines from John Hughes and Eddie Murphy and Dan O'Bannon.

As his own greeting Johnny said: 'Yippie kay yay!' belatedly and a little over the top. Bear in mind we never saw anyone usually and we were all breaking the law just then. A normally nervous Johnny was excitable to say the least.

'Were you the idiots shouting just now?' she asked us

'We were, we were' Johnny said proudly. He seemed to be flush with pride. The abseiling down a building and general lawlesness and now this apparent brush with danger: he seemed to have woken up and be wider eyed than I'd seen him before.

Being young and being told to not go out: it had worked like magic and, albeit with enough weed that we didn't have to worry about running out any time soon, we would have taken a train to St Peter's or anywhere (if any trains were running).

'You do need to be careful you know' This was the other woman now. She had a pair of red braids and was stepping forward to stand alongside the one who had spoken to us first. They were a similar height but otherwise as different as could be.

The man with them stayed quiet, brooding behind. As for us: We were excited to see other people but old habits die hard and once you have been sat indoors for months trying to avoid any responsibility and planning your day around sleeping until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, well, you don't become a pair of chatty Cathys.

We were virtually ready to go our separate ways. It was like being on pause in a video game. The Final Fantasy music playing perhaps, all synth relaxation and expansive harmonies. Maybe some faux glockenspiel and of course reverby drums pounding away.

The world was empty but for us and our adventures.

'I'm Jimmy,' I said.

'Verne' said the first woman. I saw now that she had green eyes. Beside her the other woman said: 'Sure, I'm Jules. It's good to meet you'.

At this moment the man behind them, who had been leaning against the side of the building there, he stepped forward and reached out slightly and contorted as if he were going to offer his hand and say hello but instead twisted a bit like in Alien and then - instead of writhing around while a miniature extra-terrestrial burst out of this chest - he let our a jet of yellow vomit. It was all fairly controlled, like he had done this several times before that evening.

On cue and with an apologetic look on her face, Verne swung her bag off her back and said to us:

'We found a load of noodles. We have more than we could need' - she opened up the bag and we could see in there a whole mess of yellow packages of noodles with Vietnamese and Chinese writing on them.

'Thank you very much' said Johnny - I didn't know where this new boldness had come from with him. He took his bag off of his back and pulled out a bar of Cadbury's fruit and nut. A pretty treasured thing. Verne accepted this and thanked him.

We had a little chat with Jules and Verne and we found out that the man's name was Robbie and that they had been running through the streets trying to make it all the way to the other side of Manuel and back before sunrise and we stood there chatting for a few moments in the concrete void, with the orange sky above us starless and grim but comforting somehow in its grimness. We had the city to ourselves. They warned us to be more careful and, before we went off with four or five of their noodles packets and they went off with one of our chocolate bars, Jules wanted to tell us something. It didn't make a lot of sense then either:

'Do you know the house of David? The Syrian confederacy by Epharim? If you watch the trees there they are moved by the wind. The lord has said to me that I should take heed and be quiet but that we should not feel fear. Nor should we be fainthearted'.

Admittedly, in the context of what had been a casual chat and with all the ban on Christmas stuff in the air, Jules was speaking in total non-sequiturs here but we enjoyed it. I guess we had our minds open to all sorts of quasi-prophetic stuff. She went on anyway:

'... for there are two tails like smoking irons. You know the name of the city, right? Manuel. It says in Isaiah 7:14 - "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virginshall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel" - and Immanuel means God with us. And here we are and Christmas is cancelled. But it's all tinsel and baubles anyway right? Listen, peace.'

With that they were gone, leaving the small puddle of yellow vomit behind.

-

Over the next several nights we had our own twelves days of Christmas.

The next night, the first day of Christmas you could say, we went out with paints and Johnny drew a bird flying on the side of the empty community centre - I daubed a message that I thought was hopeful. Now I just regret ever doing graffiti. I'm not sure why, it can look gorgeous.

I wrote: 'chin up and be happy' - I'm not sure it would have made me feel good to see that and anyway we never saw anyone at night and we slept in the da, so I never saw a reaction from anyone but Johnny and he was mostly so stoned that he limited himself to two or three word sentences - anyone going to work might have clocked it but they may as well have hated us and our daubings.

On the second night of Christmas we found piles of chestnuts.

On the third night of Christmas we tunnelled in to a shop that sold costumes and we pratted about for hours dressing up as soldiers and gangsters. We tried not to make a mess of everything but I think we always got carried away. I spilled cup a soup everywhere and we decided it was time to call it a night.

On the fourth night we danced in the streets, just the two of us and the hum of the city.

The fifth night we just sort of called it in and once we had reached the top of the building next door into which he had tunnelled that first night, well, we just kind of sat there on the roof and looked out over the empty buildings and smoked a  few joints. We saw in the distance a person stood on top of another building. We waved and them and they waved back, it was quite solemn but comforting all the same to reach out to someone. 

The sixth night we went scaling trees in the park. We wanted to get a better view in a different direction - we were going to have to go further, we realised - our ambitions had been small and so we had not found too much.

Johnny was growing in confidence all the time, it was great to see. He got this fixation on the phrase 'kings of Manuel' and it wasn't just the encounter with Jules and her religious babblings.

'We're the kings of Manuel, don't you see?' he would say to me. Admittedly we said all sorts of weird stuff to each other all the time and he had been supposed to be studying theology so he often had this phrases about king of this and kingdom of that, but the phrase kings of Manuel he said so many times that it stuck between us - after a few days, if we were going to shout something from the rooftops again then it would most likely be 'we're the kings of Manuel'.

The seventh night of Christmas we went out with our bags empty, planning to steal some stuff. The shops were shuttered and the businesses had been put on ice. We had no idea about economic forces. We couldn't tell our fiscal year from our elbows and we thought that somehow there was money somewhere and it was being kept from us and other people like us (not stoners, you understand, we would have identified as normal people). Perhaps we were closer to the truth then even if we were brash.

We thought it meant nothing to steal. We did not go to small corner shops or whatever, I would say that in our defence. We tunnelled our way into one of the larger shopping centres in Woolham, though not some grand expensive all flashing lights and stainless steel place, just the centre where you could buy some foodstuffs and cards and a few gifts. 

We loaded up on sweets and crisps and treats of all different kinds.

We then went wandering through the streets and found our way into buildings and left a few chocolate bars here and a bag of crisps there. It must have looked pathetic really, as people who had been told that Christmas was cancelled came out of their doors in the morning to find that some pair of idiots had left a Starbar on the welcome mat, but it was fun doing it and it put us in a festive mood.

We repeated the feat on the eighth night of Christmas - this time we focused on getting bottles and cans of drink to people and again we went round giving to people indiscriminately. It was amazing how people obeyed the curfew, we almost never saw anyone.

Then on the ninth night of Christmas we met Fin.

Fin had long fingernails and a habit of ripping up things in his hands - like empty fag packets. His hair was fairly long too and it was grey and bedraggled. He smoked a lot and he had a good sense of humour.

He was simply sat in the hallway of one the buildings that we came to - he had brought a chair out for the occasion.

'This isn't my place' he said 'but you boys don't live here either, do you?'

'Panic, they say' Fin was telling us. we pretty much just listened like a pair of children at his stinky feet. He let us have a couple of his B&H and it all felt very much like an enjoyable December evening, which it was. 

'We are told that if we think there is a plot against us then we're paranoid. The trick is to make it so you don't know when you are being paranoid and when you have a genuine grievance. I mean, what could a real argument be with the authorities. The powers that be? What could you have to complain about? Well, just about everything under the sun. But to complain about any one thing would be foolish.'

We were kind of unsure of what to say anyway, every now and again I would try to show that I knew what he was talking about - 'You can't trust the police' or 'People want to put you in boxes, man', I would say.

Meanwhile Johnny, thanks to his new found confidence, was able to speak fluently and make sense as far as I could tell. But he was too eager to tell Fin how much he knew. 'The kingdom of god is not a place separate from here, heaven really is a place on earth - this sounds stupid but it's not a Madonna lyric, well it is but ...'.

Len would go on, he could go on ad infinitum as far as I could tell, even being interrupted didn't break his flow. He got on to Daoism and other things we knew nothing about whatsoever. Our education in matters Chinese came from those little packets of noodles and we couldn't understand the script on the side of them anyway. If you poured out boiling eater into a bowl and put the noodles in there and covered it all with a plate for a few minutes then you could have a snack, otherwise we knew nothing about noodles instructions or Daosim. 

Fin enlightened us somewhat while we smoked his B&H in that stairwell. We had offered him some of our ill-gotten fizzy drinks and chocolate but he wasn't interested. Nor did he want to smoke pot.

'Kings of Manuel indeed,' Fin said. 'What would it be being a king anyway - forget the actual royal family, they are worth nothing as far as I can see, but who would want to be a king?' Fin was dirty and a little smelly: not very king-like but very intelligent. Still, I thought, I would have taken a shot at the fine robes and the silver bathtub with attendants.

'You put your feet in the river right now and you wander off again and come back and put your feet in the river again - it's not the same river any more. Anyway - the best story from that kind of thing for my money is from when that Zhuang Zhou was asked by some courtly officials what kind of position he would like to have in the ministry of whatever province or imperial jurisdiction they represented, I don't know - point is they offered him the moon on a stick. 

'"What do you want, Zhuang Zhou?" - they said - "You can have any job, even above and beyond what we've got. What do you want?" Zhuang Zhou says to them: "There's a tortoise shell, from a tortoise that's been dead for 3,000 years, this is in the province way beyond" wherever, some far off place that he mentions. "This tortoise shell", he says - "It has been dressed up in silk and put on display as some kind of special prize in a gorgeous house. But which tortoise is better off? The one that has been dead all that time and is displayed in silk or the one that is dragging its tail through the mud here by the riverside? Well, I'm better off dragging my tail in the mud anyway so leave me alone". And I imagine he told them to bugger off in no uncertain terms.'.

Fin was good to listen to and we were glad to have met him: one of the very few people we saw on our nightly excursions.

The tenth night of Christmas we stole ourselves a tiny tree. These had been bought in and displayed in shops prior to the ban - we smuggled home this tiny thing with no decorations and ate our noodles and admired our spoils.

The eleventh night of Christmas we saw Jules and Verne again. We chatted and wandered the silent streets. Robbie and his vomit were nowhere to be seen.

'You've survived this long' Verne said to us.

'Yippie kay yay' said Johnny as if he knew no other lines from films.

'It's peaceful, isn't it?' she said. 'This is better than Christmas anyway. Long nights full of peace and quiet. Oh, and petty theft.'

The twelfth night of Christmas we danced - the four of us in the streets. Robbie even joined us. Fin watched on. We sang songs and Johnny was shouting 'We're the kings of Manuel' and we all joined in. We even shouted 'Merry Christmas' at the tops of ours voices and had people shouting things back at us.

taken from knowingscripture.com

credit: Morgan Weistling