by Helen Walsh
Sheila swallows a sad smile. At least this is just a sleepover tonight. In the run-up to Christmas the girls have gone on sorties to Pizza Hut, the ice-skating rink, the cinema – sometimes all three in one day, and it is starting to wear her out. She dearly wants Ellie to have all this – lovely friends from good families – but the overtime she has to work to keep it all going is gruelling. Only yesterday Ellie reminded her about the first down payment for the school trip to Rome – no way is her little girl missing out on that, thank you! And then there are the clothes she needs to keep up: Fila boots, Kickers, black lycra shorts, a royal-blue Michiko Koshino fleece and that awful stripy Adidas beanie hat. It was all very well and good for the Cartwrights of this world; they could indulge their little princess with an entire new wardrobe on Friday and she’d discard it on Sunday, from what Ellie was saying, but for Sheila, well … it’s January and she’s stone broke. Still, the little frisson of pride she experiences each time she sees her beautiful girl leave the house in her regal blue school uniform more than compensates for all the juggling and scraping and sleepless nights. That is her clever girl, there. Her beautiful, clever girl.
Ellie comes charging back down the lane without her bag, her eyes dancing with happiness. Sheila struggles with the window. She tries to wind it down quickly and smoothly to give the impression of it being electronic, but the handle is stiff and she’s breathless from all the fruitless effort. Ellie sticks her snout in through the inch of space she’s cleared and grins. ‘Sara’s dad’ll drop me off tomorrow. Might even soft-soap him into taking us to Mackies for our breakfast.’
Sheila laughs, curbing the impulse to poke her fingers out and touch her daughter’s face. ‘OK, darling. You girls have fun – d’you hear?’
‘Dunno ’bout fun, Mum. Babs is entertaining, darling, which means we’ll all get shunted upstairs. That’s if she doesn’t rope us into carrying around salvers of duck’s bowels or whatever it is these people eat …’
Feeling her eyes start to smart, Sheila throws her a wave and cranks the window back up. Ellie stands at the foot of the dirt track and watches her mum turn the car round. She finger-waves one last time, turns and heads for Sara’s house.
Sheila tracks her daughter in the car’s wing mirror, her heart thumping with love and pride as she watches till she’s out of sight. She swallows down a huge lump in her throat, but there’s nothing she can do about the tears that steadily fall.
Five
Vinnie moves quickly through the queer twists and alleys of clubland, limbs burning at the treat that lies ahead. As he peels hard onto Canal Street, he has that eerie sensation of being followed. He bobs his head over his shoulder, slats his eyes against the tight jam of bodies. Nobody. Everybody, but nobody. Outside the Rembrandt there’s the usual greasy knot of leather-clad octogenarians, feasting their vulture’s glare on the tide of nubile flesh. Their prey are willing performers in the dance. Vinnie takes it all in through the drape of his fringe – the hamster wheel of skin and sex and drugs and boys and endless possibility. It intoxicates him. It disgusts him. He hates the queer bar clones. He hates the shameless uniformity – the handlebar moustaches, the tacky checked shirts, each one a slightly more ridiculous parody of the last.
A long line coils back from the door of one of the booming dungeons. He has no choice but to cut through and as he jostles past, face set, he feels himself being drawn into the spotlight of a dozen conversations. They can’t work him out. The tall skinny indie kid in his long blue raincoat and his girl’s fringe and his big, pretty brown eyes – they see him down there every Saturday. They know where he’s heading and it breaks their hearts. Such a waste. Such a tragedy. Everyone on Queer Street knows that the only people paying for sex are the priests and queer-bashers. But a pretty young thing like the boy in the raincoat? A crying shame.
Vinnie tries not to smile as he passes within earshot.
‘Aaah, just look at him! Don’t you just want to take him home and feed him up?’
‘Oh my God, wouldn’t you just!’
Much hilarity among the preening queens. Vinnie rolls his eyes, picks up his pace. A couple of chubby transvestites mince past. One of them’s wired, doesn’t see him, but her friend stops dead in the middle of the street, eyeing Vinnie hungrily as he passes. Hands on ample hips, she shakes her head in thwarted lust. ‘D’you see him? Did you see the lips!’ she shrieks. Her voice is loud and hysterical, playing to the crowd. ‘Get those gums around my plums, lovie!’
‘Ooh no!’ Her mate grimaces. She, too, stops in the road and fans herself down. ‘I don’t do brown.’ She pauses just a beat, then delivers her pay-off. ‘I’ve got an addictive personality.’
Harsh, drug-addled laughter ripples its way down the queue. Vinnie slows his pace, waits for the sniggering to abate, turns to the crowd and delivers the Parthian shot. ‘And I don’t do fat, darling. I’m anorexic.’
The laughter rings out louder than ever, accompanied by miaowing and applause.
Vinnie exits the drag and follows Sackville Street away from clubland. Within seconds, all is silence. The bawdy vulgarity of Queer Street is a distant murmur over the other side of the canal. One of the huge billboards up ahead by the flyover has been given over to a big Don’t Inject campaign. It’s been targeted at the burgeoning gay scene round there, a standard government AIDS scare long after the horse has bolted. But the irony never fails to draw a little chuckle from Vinnie. While gay Manchester parties into the night a few blocks away, this demi-monde of empty warehouses has long been the haunt of bagheads. The money would be better spent taking the message out to future captains of industry in Didsbury or Wilmslow where the brown menace hasn’t quite dug its tramlines yet.
Vinnie waits for his boy. Every now and then the breeze parts his hair, bringing with it a drift of laughter or the ardent thump of a bass line, rippling the moon-flecked puddles. Time passes. That slow-burning desire in his loins is cranked right up now – urgent, voracious, itching under his skin. But he waits. He knows the boy will turn up. His need is even greater than Vinnie’s – he needs to get paid. He squints over at the billboard, amused all over again at how hopelessly wide of the mark the agency had got it. The hollow-eyed actor they’d rigged up as a baghead looks more embarrassed than wretched. His shamed, badly made-up face is that of an adolescent caught in the bathroom wearing his sister’s bra. And the way they’ve backlit the syringe, making it glint like an instrument of torture, is just laughable. As for the cheesy, scaremongering ‘One Shot and You’re Dead’ strapline – it was simply not true. He’s been jamming for months now, and he can take it or leave it.
For Vinnie, honey is the ultimate decadence. His record collection is a shrine to the great, eternal heroin ballads, his bookshelves a monument to Algren, Burroughs, Selby. But for him it’s a weekend indulgence, nothing more. It has never been about escaping from pain or inner torment. For Vinnie, it’s all about beauty. He cares little these days for the debates and dogged causes of his friends. He’s found the purest resin of beauty and it fills his world with wonder. With heroin, his dreams are possibilities. And there’s nothing he loves more than lying flat on the roof of a multi-storey car park with a dauntless ink-blue vault above and the honey swooning through his veins and the white, drifting moon and the sounds of the city spinning him the sweetest lullaby. ‘One Shot and You’re Dead’? No. One shot and you’re alive. It’s fucking beautiful.
Car headlights approach. Even the car has a regretful, stuttering slouch now it’s all done. Vinnie can make out the silhouette of his boy in the passenger seat – the tragic peak of his baseball cap. It always makes Vinnie sad, clapping eyes on that cap. He never takes it off. Somehow, and today Vinnie can sense this better than he’s ever made sense of it before, his baseball cap is a thing of pride to the boy. He cuts a forlorn figure, the kid, lent more pathos by his eternally jaunty outlook. His rapid-fire delivery is always accompanied by a big, leery grin and back-to-front handshakes and shouts of ‘sorted’
and ‘wicked’ and ‘let’s ’ave it!’ It’s too sad. The driver, a shortish man with a large head, half mounts the pavement and barely stops as his vehicle spits the boy out. Vinnie can’t risk losing him to another punter. Straight away he steps out from the shadows and wolf-whistles the lad over. He ducks and squints against the darkness and crosses the road, his movements jerky and exaggerated. He hesitates. For this boy, each and every transaction is a judgement call. One wrong shot and he’s dead. Vinnie whistles again. Surely he knows the call by now? One low note, one high. One low, one high. There’s a delayed reaction as the sound registers in his drug-dazed skull and then he’s bouncing over, all jerky skaghead shuffle, leaning forward on the balls of his feet.
He bounces under the yellow street light and Vinnie winces. While the eyes are alive and burning, the soul has gone. His skin is scabbed and scaly and that face – the pleading expression, the denial. How could anybody make a sex act with this creature? He can smell the fresh paste of semen on the lad’s breath. He wishes he could do this without him.
They cross the road without saying a word and head towards the multi-storey. Vinnie struggles to keep up with him. They hover in the stairwell. The jaundiced pall of a broken light picks out the deathly grey of the lad’s complexion. His skin is so thin it looks like you could blow it away. Yet he can see it now – lurking behind the junky cast is a face that would have been pretty, once. He drops the fiver bag in Vinnie’s hand. ‘Careful yeah if yoh crankin’ up. It’s proper lethal, this, man.’ Lee-fol, he says it.
Vinnie hands over the money. Almost on autopilot, the lad holds it up to the murky light, seems to forget what he’s looking for and stashes the note in his sock.
‘Be good, yeah?’ he mumbles and then he’s off, that madly syncopated, forward-leaning lurch. Vinnie’s glad he’s gone. He goes to the roof of the car park and scans it quickly, satisifed there’s no one there. He likes the lonely ritual almost as much as the nirvana of the thing itself. He unpacks his kit, the syringe and the little ampoule of sterile water straight from his mum’s car boot. He feels bad about taking from her like that, but what could he do? Make himself known at the needle exchange? He binds the tourniquet tight and finds a line.
The rush smashes up against the top of his skull, swelling, crashing, and soaring then fading to a smouldering coal. He screws his eyes shut, humbled by this bliss, and lies back flat, then opens them up to a sky that is suddenly spattered with stars moving closer and closer towards him. He reaches up to pluck one but it burns away, reducing him to a tingling cord dangling in the heavenly breeze.
Six
Ellie squats in the scratchy undergrowth where she’s stashed her rucksack. Teeth chattering madly, she strips down to her panties and pulls out her Saturday night uniform: rib-crushing yellow vest and black lycra shorts worn beneath a black, all-in-one skintight catsuit. She puts her fleece and red puffa jacket back on, and stuffs her jeans and hoody into the rucksack. She fishes out ciggies from her side pocket, where she stashed them while Mum was making tea.
Ellie feels bad, putting her through all this – lying to her, blatantly having her off for money that she absolutely needs but which she knows her mother doesn’t have. But if she truly didn’t have it, how come she always manages to come up with it? She’d know if she was pushing her mum too hard. She’d know. And in the meantime, it’s not as though she doesn’t get a kick out of all this – dropping her daughter off outside one of the grandest residences in Stockton Heath, home of Sara ‘My Little Pony’ Cartwright. It’s sick, but her mother loves all this. She holds out hope that Ellie’s going to start stepping out with Sara’s bovine brother, or one of his square-jawed mates. Hah! As if. But still she feels badly about her mum. She can’t help herself.
The chicanery of this ritual leaves her dizzy sometimes – the lies, the lies – but the end more than justifies the means. The weekend has just started. Within an hour she’ll be in there, up there, having the time of her fucking life. And after that? Who cares! This is it, here and now.
She sparks up and casts a backwards glance at the Cartwrights’ mansion. She loves the buzz of smoking right here in the undergrowth, right in the eye of their safe, chaste lives. She can see the silhouettes of girls’ heads in one of the bedroom windows, hear their affected shrieks as they pillow fight and bounce on the beds. Most of them are older than Ellie, but they sound so girlish. So very young. Not too long ago, she would have given anything to be up there herself, play-fighting and comparing breasts with the golden ones. Every one of them was beautiful, in that flawless, burnished-blonde way. Every one of them devoted to their horses. Ellie cringes as she recalls her own eagerness to penetrate Sara’s inner sanctum, her first few weeks at Culcheth. Everyone flocked around Goldilocks, everyone fought for her affection. The truth of it was that Sara Cartwright – and she had to hand it to her – had real style. She had a Mulberry satchel where others had workaday school bags; she wore Red or Dead brogues and Boy underwear; and she got her hair done at Toni and Guy. It was a whole new exotic world to a single-parent alms case like Ellie Fitzgerald – and didn’t they make damn sure she knew it. Not so much Sara herself, but the others’ barbs about her market shoes, her North Warrington accent, her boyish cropped hair and her inability to distinguish ‘of’ from ‘off’ – it had all been part of the ongoing process that made Ellie the girl she was.
She sucks hard and deep on her ciggie, holding the smoke down as though it’s a joint and as she exhales hard, she blows away the memories. She smiles to herself as she pads away down the lane. Those awful first two years at Culcheth are almost forgotten now, overgrown by the new skin of a new life. Those giggling little girls back there – they don’t know anything. They haven’t even a sense of what lies beyond their electronic gates. They haven’t lived. Perhaps they never will.
She tosses the smouldering coal into the undergrowth. She hits the main road and turns and throws one last lingering look at the silhouette of Goldilocks’ castle. She pictures the teenage mulch that litters her floor – chocolate wrappers, Just 17 and Smash Hits magazines, a DIY ouija board and maybe even a bottle of Cinzano. She finds herself laughing out loud now as she flashes forward to an image of herself, up on her regular speaker, arms in the air with a big Ecstasy grin, lapping up the carnival of the dance floor.
Ellie huddles up at the bus stop. In the near distance, the rumble-thump of a bass line gets louder as distant headlights weave closer and closer. The muffled throb of the bass beat breaks her out in goosebumps. These are kindred spirits and that car can only be going one place. It swings into view. Ellie steps out in front of the car’s shrill glare, balls her hands into fists and punches out her own syncopated rhythm, arms in the air. The silver Fiesta blares right past, doesn’t see her, its windows steamed up from the party within. Ellie’s stomach is doing backflips – she’s almost throwing up with excitement. She’s always like this, from the moment she drags her eyelids open and her mind catches up and realises it’s Saturday, she’s a landslide of nervous, impatient nausea.
Ellie becomes aware of the car’s engine rumbling up ahead in neutral. She squints up the road. The red eyes of the brake lights wink back at her, then there are two white lights, two bright white shooting stars streaking towards her as the car reverses, veering madly from side to side, a scaling nasal whine as it picks up speed. She jumps back onto the pavement. The screech of rubber against concrete as the back tyre hits the kerb. A lad jumps out of the passenger seat. The music bangs out into the cold, suburban air. ‘You going Legends?’ The lad is small and skinny and decked out in clubbers’ garb – beanie hat, puffa jacket, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Ellie grins and gives him the thumbs-up, nodding her head to the pulverising beat. He grins – already on one. ‘Come on then!’
‘Ta, mate!’
The car’s tiny shell is crammed full. There are five bodies in the back and three in the front. Ellie hops in, slams the door. She’s become a dab hand at folding her lissome frame into
tiny spaces. Many a night she’s moulded herself into the footwell or lain flat in the dark confines of a boot while the car ploughed on in hot pursuit of the flimsiest rumour of a comedown party or a post-club rave. She wedges herself between the legs of a pretty boy and hooks her legs up over the seat in front. The boy looks like some strange cute bush creature, all hunched up inside his fleece with his cricket hat tugged right down. He locks his fingers around her, clips her in tight as the car lurches out and speeds off. Ellie can feel the lad’s knees trembling. He’s waited all week for this, all of them have. They’ve been hauling the secret of their wondrous universe around with them for days and now they’re teetering on the brink of explosion. Ellie has been wanting to spit it out – holler it from the rooftops. How she is dying to tell the world about the small pocket of magic she’s stumbled upon! One accidental, magical night has changed her life, changed her for ever. Legends has turned her life, her everything upside down and in the space of six weeks the little club has become the tide and the lunar cycle by which she sets her clock, her calendar, the very beat of her life.
Ellie sits in one of the wash basins of Legends’ toilets, her body limp and leaden as she struggles to push herself back up against the crackling shortwaves of pleasure that have strafed and stroked her nerves to riot. It’s heaven, and she doesn’t want to move. Gradually, she regains consciousness and becomes aware of a boy and girl standing in front of her, each one of them straddling either knee. Their faces are rapt, intent with the utmost concentration and love they’re transmitting through their subtle fingers. They’re scratching Ellie’s arms up and down, massaging and stroking and gently scraping her skin from shoulder to fingers. All around, bodies are flitting in and out of the toilet cubicles, vague smears of slow-motion colour, slowly blinking the night back to life.