plastic helmets, the small rulers of our hearts. In honour of them, and many other boys before and after them who were the object of collective adoration for a brief flash of youth, on that patch the Valley of the First Menstruation was formed, it was where secondary schoolgirls used to hang out – although the term is inaccurate and behind the times and generally gave rise to disapproval, it imposed itself tacitly. After the schoolgirls came guys, they put gel in their hair and their hands in their pockets. When Marko and Bert and their Vespas change their patch in a year’s time, the whole Valley will move after them to a new place, first the girls, and then the boys with them.
Great care is taken not to cross the border between the Valley of the FM and the Outland, where the yokels are, although no one strives for a different status here, on the Quay. The yokels don’t give a damn about being yokels, they are in the majority and they have a good time. Besides, soon, as soon as they mature, even the little fashionable girls will leave the little phonies Marko and Bert and their bikes and climb into the yokels’ well-groomed cars. They will like their little gold chains, their loud yokel music, thin tank-tops on body-built torsos, sneakers and minimalist trainers, their marble and brass interiors. There were days when I regretted that I wasn’t a real pure-bred yokel, that their whole culture didn’t bore me, that I genuinely enjoyed folk-songs, rave and techno, that I liked everything associated with that: clubs where you party till dawn, they were the only ones who felt truly good in this country, they were the only ones who enjoyed themselves, while everyone else lazed about, they had somewhere to go where there was always some dosh around, there was whisky, cola, macchiato, free entry to the club, coke snorted from new big banknotes. It’s more or less the same now. At times I wanted to live in a bare plastered house with three floors, with no plumbing, unencumbered, with a crazy car in the yard and a t-shirt with Versace emblazoned on it, not to worry about anything other than my false nails falling off, but here’s the problem: I’m a girl and along with that story goes a guy who would have sometimes given me a punch with his fist or at least a slap, who would make me kids and imprison me at home between two masses, and I would no longer enjoy being a pure-bred yokel. There’s no country where life’s good for a yokel girl, only for yokel lads.
Today (twenty years ago) everyone is on the Quay and the Quay is everything. This is the first sun after the winter and everyone avoids staying inside the town walls – the best cafés inside the walls are run by dykes, they hang together and get each other jobs – that’s the theory. They’ve found some way of coping with the half-people involved in protection rackets round the cafés. They are the only ones who can do that, survive, and they are probably used to everything in order to subsist, so thought Helanka, my friend who knew everything. (Everyone was a bit crazy for her and her freedom, and she also had an appearance that opened the doors of the marginalised and marginal groups to her.)
The folk who go to the dykes in bad weather, are today (twenty years ago) sitting north-east of Outland, because that’s the Valley of the Geeks, that’s where coffee is drunk by the nonchalant intelligentsia, with a few young alternatives tagging along, every town has its snobs, but here they are probably the best people the town has, at least that’s what they believe; only you have to observe them individually, yes, individually, never together, if you don’t want your heart to shrink to extra small. It’s not too much, it’s not even a lot, but everything is prettified on that postcard. No one is going to stumble into the wrong valley or sit on the wrong chair, if he does not wish to sit alone.
Only the mega-yokel Nightingale in camouflage pants imposes himself on everyone, the moron, but he gets on my nerves particularly when he sits beside us secondary schoolgirls. ‘You go to Matejuško’s, to the drunks, you acid head, to the Little Boss and co., you’ll fit in,’ says a girl yesterday (twenty years ago), but some people laugh at him, he’s funny, he has nice eyes. Nothing offends him, nothing.
The war is over, the war is near its end, that’s already clear. Someone ought to tell him that the war is nearly over and that he shouldn’t wear those camouflage pants any more. It’s Saturday, there’s no school, there’s not even any war. Let him first have a wash and a haircut, and then let him come among us, we’re young and attractive, who cares if we have only one pair of denims, our pocket money stretches to Hay deodorant and a toasted sandwich and the occasional fruit smoothie with cream: we want Marko and Bert, their haircuts and helmets, hairless faces, foreign goods on slender bodies and their little Vespas which whisk us off to the turquoise part of town.
Did you know that our folk in the Lora harbour district killed Boba’s dad? That’s the kind of story the south wind brought to us in the Valley of the First Menstruation from the Valley of the Geeks.
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