Sterling Karat Gold
"Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart."
“Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.”
Throughout the Orwell Festival we’re sharing new writing and exclusive extracts from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.
Today, we’re delighted to share the opening of Isabel Waidner’s new novel Sterling Karat Gold, which is currently shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022. Isabel Waidner and Yara Rodrigues Fowler, both finalists for this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, will be in conversation with Sana Goyal, one of this year’s judges, at the London Review Bookshop this Thursday 30th June talking about their novels Sterling Karat Gold and there are more things – books which not only take political issues as subject-matter but enact radical politics through their form.
I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart.
Today, I’m in a white football shirt wrapped round my waist like a skirt. Red velvet bullfighter jacket on, and black montera, traditional bullfighter hat. Yellow football socks, black leather loafers. Outside my flat on Delancey Street, Camden Town, six, seven actual bullfighters walk up, hustling me. ‘Huh,’ they say. I keep my head down. Focus on loafers, familiar tarmac. Again, ‘Huh!’ Guttural call bullfighters use to get the fighting bull’s attention. Still, head down, I keep walking. They follow.
One torero waves a pink-gold capote, a bullfighting cape. Pinkgold. Pink. Gold. Pinkpinkgoldpinkgold. I lose my bearings. The bullfighters push me, via Arlington Road, into Mary Terrace, off the main road. Feel kicked around like a football.
My father Franz Beckenbauer played for Birth-Town FC. He used to carry my sister in one arm, myself in the other, practising kick-ups. I lost him to penalty shootouts and my sister to international migration. I lost my mother to bankruptcy. Lost the ball. Won it back.
Three Fields Estate surrounds Mary Terrace, windows like the eyes of so many emotional children. On the sixth floor of Fairfield House, one window is open. Distinct blue and white Karlsruher SC poster on the wall, 2. Bundesliga. Down here, pink and gold. I charge wildly. The bullfighters flick their capotes away, gaining critical insights into my defensive behaviour.
Picador on horseback comes at me with a bullfighting lance. Picador is one of a pair of horsemen in a traditional bullfight who jabs the bull with a lance, and also a British publishing house. The cute horse wears no peto, a mattress-like protective padding, standard since the late 1920s at least. Instinctively, I flex my horns. I attack, hitting the horse’s flank. Horse goes down. The dismounted picador retreats quickly. Out of action, he goes to perch on the manual barrier that closes the estate to through traffic. A second picador, on another, equally unprotected horse, comes at me. He lances me just behind the morrillo, the complex of muscle at the fighting bull’s neck and shoulders. Draws blood. The purpose of tercio de varas, the first of three stages of a traditional bullfight, is to weaken the bull’s neck muscles, and to impose the rules of the fight on him.
Is it my fault? Did I elicit the violence, or did I just fail to prevent it from happening? My jacket, too much? Not enough? The football socks? I knew a gay who looked straight like a Gap advert. Got hassle still. Big girl’s blouse written all over his unisex T-shirt.
Second stage, tercio de banderillas. Three banderilleros, so-called, stab English banderillas, barbed sticks wrapped in the colours of the St George’s Cross, into my shoulders. Three, four hanging off of me already, like garlands, like patriotic hair pins. Banderillero walks up, banderillas raised, aiming. He brings them down, and scurries away.
‘Foul play!’ I call. Bullfighters are picking on me, literally. ‘Referee, did you see? Yellow card?!’ But ah, no referee.
No free kick, tercio de muerte—the killing third. The matador, top bully, in his traditional suit of lights, named for its glossy embellishments, waves a muleta, a wooden stick with a smaller red cloth hanging off it. I charge, I have recourse to only the most basic defences. Concave body, the matador flicks the muleta away. I turn round, charge again. Again, the matador disappears the muleta as soon as I get to it. We continue like this until I’m spent. I stand still, tongue hanging out. The matador manoeuvres me into position. Point down, he raises his bullfighting sword over my head—.
A person in trackie bottoms and a jumper, with short hair, sharp side parting, walks down Delancey Street carrying a football. They see me, my predicament. ‘Hey,’ they shout, ‘hey!’ Trackie starts running towards us, blowing a referee whistle ferociously. When they get here, they pull a red card out of their back pocket. They show it, not the matador, but to me.
‘Really, referee?! You’re sending me off?’ I say. ‘Unfair!’ Trackie looks at me urgently, insisting I play along. The penny drops, I’m handed an exit strategy. I hold up my hands—guilty as charged—and make as though to leave the playing field as per the rules of association football.
My father Franz Beckenbauer was hugely concerned with keeping the ball in the air. My mother spent Franz’s football millions, and once they were spent, she spent millions Franz didn’t have. I lost my mother to compulsive spending behaviour, and my father to keepie-uppies. This was before I lost him to HIV/AIDS.
Not so fast, the banderilleros are blocking my exit. Who said I could go? Their side demands a penalty. The matador will take it.
Trackie says fine. But first, they request the matador’s bullfighting sword in exchange for the football.
The request is met with hesitation.
‘Want to take the penalty, or not,’ Trackie asks.
Reluctantly, the matador relinquishes his sword, accepting the football. He places it on the penalty spot, eleven metres exactly from the traffic barrier, our designated goal.
‘There’s no goalkeeper,’ the matador points out.
Trackie asks around for volunteers.
‘Don’t look at me,’ I say, ‘I got midfielder genes.’
‘There’s no one else on your team though,’ Trackie says. It’s either me, or an open goal.
I pull up my yellow football socks, no shin guards. Head held high, I walk past the bullfighters, and position myself in front of the goal. Standing stock-still, I lock eyes with the matador. I don’t blink, don’t reveal which direction I’ll throw myself in. I don’t give anything away, I freeze like goalposts didn’t shift. The matador walks backwards, away from the ball. Trackie blows the whistle, a short trill. The kicker starts running. I stand absolutely still, and he shoots the ball directly into my hands.
Phweet! Final whistle, phweet-phweet! Game over, call it a draw?! 0:0?
I put down the ball, and straighten my bullfighter jacket with measured movements. I re-adjust my montera, the bulges on either side representing the horns of a bull. Trackie and I communicate with a look. We don’t wait for the opposing team to gather their wits and dispute the result, we split. We just split, in different directions. We both know that this wasn’t a draw, and it certainly isn’t over. The whole of Camden Town is one big, unsung bullfight.
Isabel Waidner is the author of three novels: Sterling Karat Gold (2021), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Gaudy Bauble (2017). They were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize (twice), and won the Internationale Literaturpreis. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the programmer and presenter of This Isn’t a Dream, a fortnightly literary talk show, also hosted by the ICA via Instagram live. Waidner is an academic at Queen Mary University of London.