His father worked in the auto inspection as a deputy assistant. His mother labored in the radio factory, a solution manager. They named the boy Rod. 

Rod’s father never had time for his children. It was left to Rod’s mother to buy him  books and writing pads, in an effort to occupy the boy whilst she toiled away. When he grew up, Rod studied at the city’s arts' academy, before finding work on the collective farms. There, he  painted political placards and crafted pieces from white clay. Soon, he started to get commissions from wealthy households, and used the money to purchase a little studio where he would design and paint vast murals and canvases. He was reliant on his few friends to hang these pieces. Because Rod had begun to drink. And drink a lot. Such simple tasks as hanging a canvas was beyond him in his inebriation. 

The best of these friends, who had been so since childhood, was painter Ed. Ed lived in a house on the Green Hill that had famously belonged to a renowned composer. Both of Ed’s parents died of continued consumption of alcohol. Illegally diluted spirits they said. Ed had found them both, in the kitchen of the house on the Green Hill. Ed himself was found on a bench near the central City Project Building outside a shop called ‘Little Boat’ where he had bought the liquor that killed him. 

Far away from the house on the Green Hill. On the way to his studio, Rod had seen Ed lying on the bench. On the trolley bus home he saw the body loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher. He later discovered that Ed had fallen asleep and frozen to death. 

By the time of Ed’s death Rod had married and divorced. The marriage, another victim of the bottle, had produced a son and a daughter, who in adulthood held little respect for their father. Few did at that point.

Whilst Rod’s sculptural achievements went unrecognized by his children, they were commended by strangers and passers-by, who would admire his work of fountain edges and gravestones.  

For a brief time Rod worked in the ceramic factory. The director’s wife had burnt the archive of employee records, Rod’s among them. Twenty years later the director by accident received a gift, an angel in clay, covered in white glaze and copper oxide.

Rod was back to living with his elderly mother in her cramped, untidy flat. When he drunkenly sang in the kitchen she would call the police. It became routine. They would take Rod to the station where he would scrape around for a bribe in his threadbare pockets, usually a remnant of clay-work or, more often than not, coinage given in charity by the few friends he had left. Once paid, he would return to his mother’s house by foot, where, with Rod drunk and his mother succumbing to dementia, neither would remember the reason she had called the police in the first instance. 

On top of her mental deterioration, Rod’s mother had long suffered from arteriosclerosis. Her arteries thickened and clogged along with her mind. For all his drunkenness, Rod took good care of her. He bought her medicine and called the ambulance for her. Between the ambulance and the police cars, sirens were a regular fixture of their lives. As repayment of sorts, his mother eventually sold the house, and used the money to buy him an apartment of his own. The building was so dilapidated it must have hailed from the time of the Tsars, but nevertheless, Rod eventually managed to forge a two floor studio out of the space. 

He would arrange his crafts on the ladder that dangled from the balcony. I never bought anything Rod made when he was drunk, works that he knew as well as I were empty of worth. Which didn’t stop him acting offended and asking me to leave when I told him so. 

I used to load Rod's sculptures in ceramic stoves and burn them as a favor at work. He would call me at home, asking why I always returned his sculptures broken. It was hard to explain that in his stupor while being drunk, he destroyed them on the way home.

Rod’s sister was a nurse in the local hospital. She’d bring him food twice a week, wrapped in a plastic bag at the same agreed place near the supermarket. She would never give him cash, so he could not squander it on liquor. 

Lack of cash became a problem. Rod had no social benefits, nor did he earn enough anymore from his sculptures. Many men of his generation worked in England as builders and contractors, where they enjoyed decent wages and the benefit of hospital treatment. When Rod was invited to England he seized the chance. You just need a passport, they said. The promise of work. A fresh start. One week and the men who invited him would bath him, feed him, and supply him with liquor. It sounded too good to be true. It was. Upon his arrival, the men brought him to the bank, took a loan out in his name, and dropped him back on the street. The drunk and the homeless were indistinguishable for them. The scheme was efficient. After some weeks or months back on the street their victims were likely to die anyway. No one would miss them. 

The priest placed Rod's urn to rest in the Romy cemetery. His sister could not stop crying. His children surely weren’t. It was hard to tell without them there. His mother, then ninety, was also absent. She lived in a care home by then, with no idea that she had outlived her son. Rod’s sister never told her. She wouldn’t have remembered anyway. The angels hummed in copper oxide brass and would knock around the red brick walls of Rod's studio, that his children would inherit.