I halted my descent. A solid gentleman, facing away from me and swaying woozily, was urinating at the bottom of the stairwell. Judging by his choice of location and the apparent carelessness of his aim, it was clear he had invested no effort whatsoever in the enterprise. I surveyed my options. I could circle back and follow the cars into the parking lot, but that seemed like an absurd detour—possibly even a dangerous one. Short of foregoing dinner, the only viable course of action was to wait. And so I did, retreating to the footpath and doing my best to appear as if I were doing anything other than waiting for a drunk man to finish urinating. Returning to the head of the stairs, I watched as the man wiped his hand on the side of his jeans, knocked back a dreg from a can of lager and stumbled off in a direction that—mercifully—took him off my course. But he had left me quite the obstacle. It was true that I needed food, and that the discount supermarket that lay beyond the urine-soaked stairwell contained food—but did I need food this badly? I had almost not ventured out at all. Relaxing on my bed at the onset of evening, I had considered just sleeping through my hunger and making up for it with a big breakfast the following day. What had finally convinced me to make the journey was the prospect of securing some cheap whisky along with my groceries. I had a romantic, if self-destructive notion of nursing a tumbler into the wee hours and bashing out some words. Or nursing a tumbler into the wee hours and listening to some podcasts. Or nursing a tumbler into the wee hours. Maybe this wretch had been a sign—a warning. Sampling Word’s Best Bars was one thing; sampling supermarket whisky alone in my room was, well, something else. But I had walked all the way down here—I should still get something to eat. So I descended, stepping nimbly between pieces of broken glass and discarded waste, and, from the bottom step, leaping over the spreading puddle. The interior of the supermarket was desolate and cold, with an air of quiet desperation. It was as if it had been designed with the express purpose of reminding its customers which part of Edinburgh they were in.
Standing barefoot on the threshold of his room, the Hungarian man presented as anxious yet determined. He had caught me on my way back from the kitchen and, not having introduced myself previously, I had said hello. He wasn’t especially tall, maybe a shade below average, but his stocky, muscular physique, accentuated by a tight-fitting white T-shirt, gave him physical presence, especially set against the cramped confines of the apartment. He was in his late 30s and he had a neat beard and cropped, slightly receding hair. And with eyes nearly, but not quite, twinkling into tears, he relayed his tale.
He was born in Budapest, the beating heart of Europe. (‘The beating heart of Europe’ is, I’ve discovered, a rather liberally employed term. Sometimes, as in this instance, it refers to a specific location. The German author Fanny Lewald awarded the honour to Paris after an 1848 trip, to cite an early example. Other times it refers to less tangible things, such as social concepts and economic conditions. You might say Europe is lousy with beating hearts.) He was the son of undescribed parents. His childhood was unremarkable—or so I assumed, considering he made no remarks about it—and there was no reason to suspect his adolescence would be any different. But everything changed in his fourteenth year, the year of his parents’ divorce. Their sudden disunion had left him confused and angry. He felt as if he had no one to outline the path of his life and he began to slide into delinquency. He fell in with bad crowds. He became a drug addict. Then he became a drug mule. Attempting to ferry in dope from Egypt, he finally got busted in an elaborate police operation.
Sometime after his release from prison, one of his brothers invited him to attend a church. He told me it was a ‘modern' Christian church, comparing it to Hillsong, the international megachurch that had been established in Sydney in 1983. Founded by a child-molester-sired window-cleaner from New Zealand and patronised by Justin Bieber, Bono and variation iterations of Kardashian, Hillsong directs much of its Pentecostal fervour into worship music, releasing numerous branded records and staging its sermons like rock concerts. When the founder, Brian Houston, learned of his father’s history of sexual abuse, he responded by arranging a discreet retirement (his father was a pastor at the time) and, at a hastily organised meet-up, offering one of the victims $10,000 in exchange for their signature on a McDonald’s napkin. The victim followed up a couple of months later regarding the money they had been promised and an enraged Houston reportedly told them: “You know it’s your fault all of this happened—you tempted my father.” Houston did not inform the police of any of his father’s crimes. The Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ultimately censured him for his conduct in the affair, though this appears to be the extent of his punishment. Speaking on a light entertainment show in the year of the commission hearings, Houston made his stance clear: “…I hate paedophilia. I mean, I do. And I hate it more now—I always did hate it anyway, but I hate it even more now.”
The Hungarian man described his attendance of this analogous church as the defining moment in his recovery. And it happened on the very day his friend, who had been busted in the same operation, was released from jail—as if it were fated to be. Instead of being chastised for his actions, as he had been in the eyes of the law, he was told that he was here, and this is where he could be, and Jesus would come with him. And a verse sang out to him, that Jesus always was and always will be, and he realised that Jesus was the one who would save him. His heart was emptied of its broken contents and filled anew with love. He repented. He got clean. He became a dentist.
Now in Edinburgh, having chucked in dentistry, he was looking to build a new life. But in Edinburgh he would not stay. Edinburgh had become too liberal. He could see wayward youths, just like him, who were allowed to roam free and do as they please. This was not the place to start a family. No matter; he had been saved and he would go where he was destined to go.
“You’re not saying anything,” he observed.
“Uh—I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
I was hoping to blame some of my collection of wine and beer bottles on this other occupant, should it ever come up, but now he had been revealed as abstemious, that was off the table.
And I returned to my room and I climbed into bed and the spirit moved through me and I fell asleep.
When I woke up seven hours later, the spirit was gone.