Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  Next time she felt like picking a fight with Tex she went to the gym instead. It was a tarty little women-only place, hidden inside the hollowed-out shell of an eighteenth century town house in Knightsbridge. Not many clients spoke English (which was a plus), and it could get extremely crowded on a Monday evening, when everyone was sweating and pumping away the excesses of the weekend. Ramone had secured herself a spot in front of the floor-length mirror to finish with some yoga, a skill-relic of her long-gone friendship with Anna Senoz. She took her eye off it for a moment; instantly a big beefy dyke with Popeye the Sailorman biceps plonked hirself right in Ramone’s body space. “Arsehole,” muttered Ramone, with a covertly virulent grimace—forgetting the properties of a mirror.

  “What did you say?” asked the dyke, pugnaciously.

  “Arseholes,” explained Ramone, “I said, arse holes, sss: kind of a general remark because I’d just picked a space and now it’s gone. Nothing personal.”

  The woman had a jaunty bristle cut and wide, flat cheekbones. Her skin was rosy brown like Anna’s, but she was very Central Asia-looking. It was Ramone’s bad luck that she understood English. Or good luck. By the end of this brief exchange it was clear that they liked the look of each other.

  “I like your tattoos.” She touched one of them, a thorny rose bandeau around Popeye’s massive upper arm. “I’ve got one like that on my fanny, but you can’t see it because I let the hair grow back. I didn’t like having no pubes, it causes chafing.”

  “Are you doing anything after this?” asked the dyke, looking unaffectedly pleased and interested, so that Ramone felt guilty, because she already knew what she was planning.

  She had never picked anyone up from the gym before, but it worked fine. Popeye, whose name was Freda, which comes from Guinevere, the White-maned (as she was charmed to be told), didn’t waste much time on pre-sex bonding. They went back to her place and only started chatting after the first fuck. Later she bought Ramone a meal and they went to a club where Popeye insisted on buying the drinks. Obviously she had no idea she was on a date with the writer of Mère Noire, tv chat-show guest and soon-to-be-famous post-feminist intellectual. Ramone was touched. She became this other Ramone, unemployed young lesbian single on the media fringe. She talked about the film-extra work in Paris as if it was the only work she’d ever had, and Freda was impressed.

  It was the next evening before they got back to the flat. Ramone knew Tex would be in because his car was there next to the Porsche, and he always stayed in, lying in wait, if Ramone had disappeared for a night on the tiles. She did the same to him. She rang their bell aggressively (it was a biggish house in Ladbroke Grove, they had the “penthouse” floor, the flats were expensive, but it was shabby in the stairwell). Just as she’d hoped, Tex came right out of the door to see who had rung, to observe her and the other woman on the landing in a heavy sexual embrace: Ramone riding Popeye’s thigh and Popeye, a little shy but not at all reluctant, getting into it. She knew how he would react. He’d be turned on, he’d be furious, and he wasn’t the type to exercise self-control in front of the visitor. And so it came about. Tex grabbed Ramone by the hair, which she had recently grown out into a ponytail at the back, and started punching. Ramone kicked him until he let go, and they began screaming at each other. She had a glimpse of Popeye splatted up against the wall looking, there was no other word for it, looking prim. Like some nice person who’s been the victim of a crude practical joke, which was the truth, sad to say: like, my God, I have been eating dogdirt! Prim, repelled, disgusted, frightened, Guinivere the White-maned vanished forever as Tex dragged Ramone into the flat and slammed the door.

  They shared some more honesty and candor. It didn’t turn into sex this time, that rambunctious scratching scrambling full energy sex, which was the only kind Ramone enjoyed, though his pvc trousers were tight enough that she could see he had a huge erection. She didn’t mind. This was better than sex. She screamed at him, feeling immense quivers of fuckme, fuckme around her hole and up and down her inner thighs, but when he smacked her a blow across the face instead that was better. She smashed him back, using her nails and her full weight, oh god the release. We were born to hate each other. Your reproductive success is my destruction, same goes the other way round so let’s duke it out, no more of that mealy-mouthed mom-and-pop complementarity shit, we know the truth now let’s DO IT… RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN. Better still, she now knew that Tex was not with her on the higher plane. He wasn’t observing or reflecting or deducing or entering into the discourse, he was simply thumping her because she was a girl, she’d insulted him, and he could get away with it.

  Meanwhile Bill the parrot (Sambo had died of pneumonia the previous winter, and Ramone didn’t want another monkey because that would be disloyal) unfortunately happened not to be in his cage and he couldn’t get back into his cage because of all the honesty and candor flailing around in his flight path. He was screaming too at the top of his voice, but he wasn’t reveling in orgiastic fury, he was terrified. Ramone started wishing she knew how to call a brief parley, for the bird’s sake. Tex started going after Bill and fell headlong, having caught a glancing blow in the groin from the corner of his drawing table, which had crashed over on its side during the start of the bout. “I’m gonna get that bird,” he shrieked, goaded by the affectless pain, so different from pain deliberately sought, slathered over with the tasty sauce of arousal. He started flicking at Bill with a damp towel that had been lying by the bathroom door, festering, for a few days.

  “STOP THAT! LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

  Tex flicked the towel again and hit Bill, who was clambering frantically among the hangings on the living room walls, on the side of the head. The parrot seemed to get dizzy. He struggled on, his cries now pathetically confused, almost timid, still making for his cage and safety. Then he fell, wings half open, and was blundering on the floor.

  “LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

  Tex gave her an evil look. He dropped the towel on Bill and picked up the bundle. Ramone felt all the sex drain out of her. She knew she must not show weakness but she was frightened. “Put him back in his cage.”

  They were standing opposite each other, the width of the big room between them strewn with wreckage. Tex let the towel drop and held the bird between his hands. Bill’s grey ruffled head circled around, his china blue eye blearily resting on Ramone without recognition. Tex took hold of his head with one hand, and moved the other down to grasp Bill’s knobbly old bunioned sailor’s feet. He tugged. Bill struggled, flapping his wings. Tex pulled hard and dropped the corpse on the carpet.

  “I’m leaving,” said Ramone.

  “Fucking-A you are. I’m throwing you out, you talentless stupid ugly cunt.”

  Ramone marched around trying to pack, tears streaming, while Tex grabbed armfuls of her stuff and threw it out the front door. Between them, it didn’t take long. They didn’t say another word to each other. Some relationships are like that: no lingering doubts, no loose ends, when it’s over it’s over.

  She made an inventory, sitting on the stairs, while the slammed door fumed its silent rage at her, and discovered he had not thrown out her gear. Ramone was not addicted to heroin. She was an occasional user, who liked the doom-laden image. She decided that she would take this opportunity to go cold turkey. She would kick the habit (employing, needless to say, the injectable drug as a symbol for the regime of sexual violence that had gone shit on her). She left most of her stuff where it lay and took a taxi with her two best-looking bags. She chose a hotel that was small, smart, and central, determined to hole up until she was clean. She had no trouble getting in. She was wearing an expensive black quilted leather jacket Daz had given her and a metallic gold beanie hat that she had stolen from another model, and she’d made up her face. She looked, she thought, when she checked herself before facing the reception desk, like a delinquent rock star: which was exactly what she wanted to be.

  She didn’t suffer withdrawal symptoms, but the twenty-four-hou
r room service was seductive. By the time she decided to leave she’d run up a sizeable bill on her Visa card. The desk got it authorized all right but she knew she was in trouble now, until she paid something off on one card or another. Money was a problem, because she didn’t think she was going to be working on Mère Noire anymore, and she’d made fuck-all out of Praise Song. More pressingly, she was running out of cash. She shouldered the good-looking bags and went to find an ATM. She had the feeling of something coming up on her… Then a weird unlucky thing happened. Her mind was preoccupied, she couldn’t remember her number. The machine gave her a few tries, then it ate her card. She took a taxi back to the flat, which nearly finished her cash, and cased the joint. When she was convinced that Tex was out, she went up the stairs. Of course, he had changed the locks.

  A few letters addressed to Ramone were lying in a damp corner of the ground floor lobby, where Tex had thrown them. The one that wasn’t a circular was a rude reply from her agent to a perfectly civil letter Ramone had written, asking why the publishers hadn’t done a fucking thing to promote the Praise Song paperback. Ramone was disgusted at the unprofessionalism of these people. You expected to be dealing with rational capitalists, making businesslike decisions. Instead you found nothing but spite and idiocy, pathetic little personal grudges, and of course have the boys had enough? Then we have some little scraps here for the girls… She wondered if her situation was different from any literary female in London’s history, say Aphra Benn: decided not. It’s the same old story. Live on your wits, get paid less if at all, and if you’re trying to sell anything that doesn’t grovel to their idea of your sex, forget it.

  She had so many options she didn’t know what to do. She could go round to Wol and Rosey’s, they’d give her a bed. While she was checking her pockets—jacket, jeans, both bags—for undiscovered cash, she found a tab of e. It looked a bit manky but she thought it would be okay and swallowed it dry, because it was raining and she needed to think. She carried her bags to Ladbroke Grove and sat in a doorway. Time to re-invent myself. Ah, but it had been such a strain, that middle-class educated aspirational phase, she was glad it was over. The drug was coming up on her in a tingling effervescence through her nerves and her gut. She smiled, chin on her paw, looking down a lonesome road and knowing it was her own.

  Some weeks later, when she had sold most of the contents of the good-looking bags, the bags themselves, and her useless credit cards, when she had slept on couches and floors, avoiding old friends, until she ran out of acquaintances who didn’t take Tex’s side, she found herself where she would have been years ago, if it hadn’t been for her scholarship money: a northern girl with delusions of grandeur, at large on the streets of London. It was fine. She made friends, she found romance, and she wasn’t above doing sex for money, if she liked the person. If anyone asked, she excised the university aberration and told them she’d run away from home because her Dad was abusing her. It wasn’t true. But her Dad would never have hesitated at telling a dirty lie about Ramone, if it was going to get him a free drink, so she felt no guilt.

  She spent her days walking around, sitting on benches, begging, staring into the river. The nights were more difficult. That was when the problem of sex resolved itself clearly into one of physical size and strength. There were pros and cons on both sides. Female, or male if you were small, you were less likely to attract the gangs of violent lads, who were the serious threat. But you were in continual danger of being mauled, and it meant you never got any sleep. Ramone thought of herself as the Cat; she walked by herself, and no one got the better of her. One night she was wandering in the dark near Piccadilly (stupid place to roam, but she was looking for a friend who was supposed to have some drugs) and a man drew up. She didn’t like the look of him. I only do girls, she said, walked on, and thought no more of it. She heard a car stop and a door slam, and still thought no more of it until suddenly something grabbed her from behind. It was like being picked up by a dinosaur. He grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her against a wall. Don’t talk to me like that! he yelled.

  What’s up with you? she demanded, ears ringing. I just said I only do girls. Ask someone else, I’m not the only tart in London.

  You cheeky little bitch. You cheeky, little, bitch.

  He forced her to her knees, grabbling at his trousers. What made her sick was that he was not hard. When she’d screamed no, no, fuck off bastard and he’d hit her and she’d been frightened enough to submit, she had to take something into her mouth that was like a dead slug that had been dipped in stale piss and left to dry. She had to work on it, for years it seemed, until he finally managed to get there. Backed off, fastening himself, muttered something unintelligible, not that Ramone was paying attention.

  It was the first absolutely forced sex she’d ever had.

  She knew she’d got off lightly: but it isn’t what happens, it’s how you feel, and the dead slug had broken through her defenses. He’d really told her where she was in the world, and no money either. She stumbled back to her hostel bed and cried herself to sleep.

  Later in the same descent, Ramone was living in the Embankment Gardens. Her home was a cardboard bivvy in a laurel thicket, with a plastic-bag damp course and a lining of layered newspaper. She loved this gaff, and had to remind herself fifty times a day that everything passes. She had no security. She paid her taxes to the dominant male of the area, but that only guaranteed her against his aggression, if anything. The chances of his defending Ramone’s property or person from anyone else were slim. But he was around, and that would keep other aspiring tax collectors at bay. Hopefully.

  She was living a healthy life. She changed her newspaper bedding regularly, like a badger; she showered and took her clothes to the laundromat at intervals. She was off Class A. She knew there are no secrets under those mountains, and she didn’t particularly want to feel like Jesus’s son. She ate very little, which was good for the budget and promised her an extended lifespan, and also meant she got far more of a hit from one can of strong lager. She did not eat out of bins. She was only rooting in the skip in that alley behind the Pizzaland because she was collecting crusts to feed the baby hedgehogs. She’d never seen a hedgehog on the Embankment, but they could be living there in secret, like Ramone. She had heard that global warming was affecting the chances of baby hedgehogs surviving through the winters: an idea that preyed on her mind.

  So she was rooting in the bin, with enough money for a whole pizza in her pocket, except that she meant to spend it on wine—and suddenly knew someone was staring at her. She whipped round. Someone there, at the end of the alley, a flash of a face. A woman, she thought, in a long pale brown coat. She would swear she could trace this woman’s crisp footsteps hurrying away, among all the rest of the noises out there in the street. Ramone hated incidents like this. People say you ought to trust your intuition, but life on the streets was so physically insecure you could spend your whole existence feeling spooked, and then where’s your escape-from-the-rat-race primeval freedom?

  It was the end of November, wet but mild. At dusk she spent a good hour laying little caches of hedgehog food under the bushes. Then she sat on a bench by the river, looking at the lights, drinking her second bottle and taking stock. The last time she’d walked away from something that was over, with no money, had been when she went to France with Daz and Marnie. Fine things had happened then. Fine things had happened this time too. She was living in a state of nature, and it was wonderful. It was wonderful to accept, the way Ramone could not possibly accept the fucking shit in any so-called civilized context. She was like an animal now, and content.

  And you could still fantasize the downfall of your enemies, which was as near as she’d ever been going to get to victory anyway. She often snuggled herself to sleep in her cozy burrow, Pele the soft toy rabbit in her arms, dreaming of global economic meltdown… You’ll get what you deserve all you bastards, you’ll join us, we are the future. The lights on the dark water were so pretty and s
o romantic she thought she had never felt so happy in her life. If only there were a way of filling the vacant daylight hours, besides begging—which bored her so much she hardly pan-handled enough for her food and taxes. For other people on this level, the routine chore of asking for money was a reasonable substitute for some other kind of mindless work: Ramone missed studying and writing.

  It was embarrassing, but those were secretly her drugs of choice.

  She stayed out late because of the spooky Pizzaland incident, today or yesterday or the day before: she couldn’t remember. She got home drunk and sleepy, dreaming as she stumbled along in the rain about finding a baby hedgehog with a wet whiffly black nose and little feet and tiny little peepy eyes. Not drunk enough, however, to forget her nightly routine. Her bivvy was protected by an arrangement (patent applied for, someday) of trip wires attached to firecrackers, the crackers in plastic food cartons to keep them dry, and the whole thing fixed so that if anyone tripped one of her wires it would cause a weight to smack onto a percussion cap, and the sparks from that would set off a nest of bangers. It had never actually worked, but put it another way, she had never been attacked in her bed. At last she crawled indoors, pulled down the waterproof apron, and snuggled under her covers with Pele in her arms.

  Goodnight!

  She didn’t know where she had put the baby hedgehog. She finally struck a match and lit her candle, though she tried to make it a rule never to show a light at night. Heggy? she whispered. Heggy? This was awful, she must have drunkenly left her baby at that bench. She stuck Pele inside her jacket for moral support and crawled out into the rain, calling Heggy, Heggy! But Heggy was so little she didn’t even know she had a name yet. Ramone searched in growing panic. She dropped her candle, tripped on something in the leaf litter, fell on her face; and then all hell broke loose. She did not remember the firecrackers. She thought it was someone with a machine gun. She scrambled to her feet and ran, out of the bushes onto the pavement of the river walk.