I was trying to fix my watch, like I knew the first thing about watches. The pub where we were sitting was dimly lit, the table was sticky, and if I’m being honest, after two beers my sight was already blurry, but my confidence was peaking. It didn’t faze me for a second that the clip wasn’t working, but looking back it was strange. Meanwhile, it was fucking difficult to balance the cigarette on my lip, or rather, the ash at the end of it.

I was a rare vision of femininity.

My nail kept slipping on the pin that held the strap, and Kristóf was convinced that professionals didn’t do it by nail or by hand, but with a teeny-weeny screwdriver. Teeny-weeny, he said. It was strange to hear such a word from such a hairy face, his two lips forming these words, mouthing the sounds, surrounded by a forest of facial hair. Fucking teeny-weeny.

‘How was your month?’ I tried to defuse the situation, or at least it agitated me that he was more captivated by what I was doing, than the attention I was devoting to my movements. Not to mention that I had probably already fucked up the watch.

‘I didn’t want to bring it up, but I was put away. I got out a week ago.’

‘A week ago? From where?’

‘From the closed ward,’ he said, laughing, and took a sip of his apple and soda. It was suspicious that he wasn’t drinking, but naturally I thought he just wanted to drink me under the table. He had tried before.

‘There’s a closed ward in Budapest?’

‘Of course there is! There’s mad people everywhere.’

‘Bullshit. Okay, I get what you mean, but when I cross the underpass at Blaha I wouldn’t guess someone took care of those people. Closed wards are for hopeless fucks in America. Not even. For tacky American horror films. Not in Hungary, not fucking here.’

‘Well you’re wrong.’

‘How’d you wind up there? You woke up one day with nothing better to do?’ I’m still tinkering with the watch when he produces something of his own to fiddle with. A green tobacco pouch, all the crap for rolling cigarettes. I might be wrong but somehow I find people who roll their own ridiculous. Can you not trust the factory workers or the anonymous robots to roll you a proper fucking cigarette? And I don’t buy that it’s cheaper, but anyway, can you not spare a couple of measly forints to honor their work? Basic economics. That’s how we move the fuck forward, that’s how we move forward, not backward, if that means paying robots and child laborers, fair enough. ‘Let’s hear it, tell me what a random morning is like for the cream of contemporary Hungarian literature!’ I can feel I’ve crossed a line. The waiter arrives, says nothing, reaches for the glasses, and looks at me enquiringly. I nod. The problem with cynical grins is the ash ends up in your lap.

‘You’re fucking hilarious,’ he said calmly, and I calmly take the rebuke. ‘So, anyway. I hadn’t slept for days when my little brother came to the flat and saw I was a bit all over the place.’ He spoke slowly, stammering. Meanwhile, as he rolled the paper his hands shook. I tried to elegantly flick my cigarette box towards him but he didn’t notice. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, the stress, the anxiety, everything. You know dad’s a dick too, last time I went home he came at me, then Dóri blocks me and doesn’t speak to me for months. Since Easter to be precise. So I take a couple of sleeping pills, and next thing I’m being pushed out of casualty to somewhere else, I get an IV drip in my arm for dehydration, and then a nurse with a nice rack explains, I can either go home at my own risk, or up the hill to the closed ward, you know where I mean?’

‘Of course.’

I didn’t tell him that two months ago my dad died there.

Let him complain a bit more. We both lit new cigarettes. Me, mostly to cover the smell of his shitty tobacco. A twenty-year-old waitress brought my beer. A dribble of foam ran down the pint glass and made a small stain on the table. I looked the girl up and down like I slept with her the night before. Kristóf watched me the whole time. I pretended not to notice him and he pretended not to notice I was more interested in the girl.

‘So in the end, I decided to go. Or got them to take me. They took me. In an ambulance. The two paramedics were all right, and then inside there was nothing unbearable.’

‘And what happened there? You said you weren’t sleeping, did that improve? And the anxiety? Were you sedated? Were you in a long time?’ I asked too many questions at the same time and interrupted him but at moments like these you have to. These Kristóf types have one big fucking problem: they have no problems. They get the paramedics to chuck them in with the lunatics so afterward, down the pub, they can spin a good yarn for a bunch of benevolent dipshits, of which I’m one. While us open-ward patients smile and listen, we’re goddamn understanding, empathy, fuck’s sake, em-pa-thy. And when it’s really working, we let someone screw us. That’s life, that’s what moves us forward, like I said. And of course, while they’re talking about their petty little problems, they can perform, they can seem deep, like someone who’s really seen it all. Who doesn’t ask in return how you’ve been and what you’ve been doing the last month. Or ever. And later he goes home, on the train, to the hills near Pécs, to some craphole village, where his parents hear a completely fucking different story, if anything, and then they ask routinely, okay, okay, but any little ladies in your life, at which point he’ll start talking about me. He says this one’s a nice girl, she puts up with me swearing like a trooper. He says there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s surprisingly normal, life all in order, she has a proper job. Kristóf’s mum will ask then, all right, and what’s her family life? To which Kristóf can’t really answer, he says they’re good people too, salt of the earth, he says for want of anything better. He doesn’t know that during the spring when I was born there was a horrible flood, and my mum wanted to call me Ophelia.

My mum cried so much during the summer, that later when I was told this story as a child, I thought she had caused the flood.

My mum never corrected me. But she barely looked at me anyway. I was also told that back then, my dad had spent more time stacking sandbags than at home. Even before then, he’d spent more time at work than at home. Nobody understood how he’d had time to make a child with so much work. In any case he didn’t deserve my mum’s behavior. And though I didn’t become Ophelia, I have sunk like a deadweight ever since.

Kristóf just talks and talks. His hands are still shaking and don’t stop as he lifts the cigarette to his mouth. He really is falling apart, but I say nothing. When I sense he needs some encouragement, I nod my head, shake my head, or sigh a fuckinghell. He dives into some irrelevant story about screwing one of the inpatient girls, with whom he wasn’t supposed to have any connection whatsoever, but at night he and this girl escaped somehow, and shagged at the end of the corridor between a medical closet and some pot plants. He doesn’t know the inpatient girl’s full name and I hear different women’s names every sentence. First the inpatient girl is Fanni, then Eszter, and later Zsófi. But the inpatient girl’s face is the faces of women I was in love with or who I was cheated on with. Inpatient. Inpatient, namely, a girl receiving long-term care who lives in the psychiatric hospital. How the fuck can I compete with that? The perfect woman. Whatever happens, you give her a pill, then leave her to cry without so much as looking at her situation. Even I’m turned on by that. Or at least, once I’d like to be an inpatient girl too.

The time passes slowly. The beer gets warm. For a long time I watch Kristóf, examining his face, I don’t want to forget it. He’s rolling his millionth cigarette, which is starting to piss me off because I can see he’s not even inhaling properly.

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