Lady Bag

by Liza Cody

  ‘I didn’t. They dumped me out of the car when they’d finished.’

  ‘You should go back to bed,’ I said. ‘You heal better when you’re asleep.’ I was only just beginning to notice how still he was sitting, how blue the shadows under his eyes were, how pale his lips. I’d thought it was because he wasn’t wearing any make up, but in reality he was injured and unwell. I never notice the crucial stuff till too late.

  Smister lay on his side with his eyes closed. I covered him with an extra blanket. After a while he said, ‘I’m not gay. Really I’m not. People like… well, no one understands. I’m not gay, I’m a girl.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, thinking I should stay till he went to sleep. But if he was going to talk about it I’d have to leave.

  He said, ‘No, you don’t understand either.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, standing up, ‘you’re right. I don’t understand a bleeding word. Why would you want to be a girl? There’s more to it than wearing pretty frocks.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a girl,’ he said in a choking voice. ‘I am one.’

  ‘You think I’m barmy? Why do you have to be a girl? Why can’t you do the difficult thing and be a woman?’

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, trying to sit up but wincing in pain.

  ‘Then shut up.’ I sat down again, next to him, and waited till he fell asleep.

  Chapter 22

  Jerry-cop And

  The Mouse Momster

  I wish I could protect Smister.

  Why doesn’t God spray-paint cruel people with tiger stripes so that we can all see them coming and take evasive action? And if the meek actually were blessed, nothing frightening or painful would ever happen to Electra or Smister. And when Jesuits say, ‘You are the responsible author of your own actions,’ are they talking about us suffering mortals who are always broken and battered by those with power, or are they commenting sarcastically on God’s little actions? Like earthquakes in built-up areas, floods, cancers and cops called Jerry? If you’d told me that Gram Satan Attwood created all that, I’d believe you. But when you tell me that God the father was the responsible author I have to inform you that he really must hate some of his offspring. Usually he hates the sweet ones and lets the Jerry-cops off scot-free. This is why I believe in the corporeality and power of Satan. If God exists, either he has no executive influence at all or he doesn’t give a shit about suffering mortals.

  This was what I was thinking at the chemist while buying one of those post-natal rubber rings so that Smister could sit up without pain.

  In the mini-mart I thought about making a healing chicken soup that all three of us could eat. But I couldn’t remember how, so I bought a few cans and a can opener instead. I brought bread and eggs as well because I could probably do something with those. It’d been so long since I had a kitchen that I didn’t know how to think about food except as something I could cadge or find in a bin. You lose skills like cooking and carpet-laying when you haven’t got a home.

  Also, if I stocked up the kitchen with things Smister could prepare for himself, I could slip away with a good conscience. You see, Smister might have ratted me out. Plus he was a wounded fawn, and Satan had given Jerry-cop the power of a predator to smell him from afar, to pick him out of a crowd, pull him to the ground and tear pieces of still living flesh from his poor confused little body. He could smell Smister’s friendlessness and poverty. There would be no retribution from Smister’s solicitors, parents or influential mates.

  Smister is not one of God’s children because God doesn’t exist and therefore has no children. But Jerry-cop is definitely a favoured son of Satan.

  I know for a fact that Satan can smell defencelessness because he could smell mine. He picked me out of a crowd and was the responsible author of my actions. He has passed his gift on to his son Jerry-cop. So I don’t want to be anywhere in the neighbourhood when he comes calling on Smister. For Jerry-cop is like his dad, Ashmodai, the Lord of Lust and Wrath who rules his circle of hell with whips woven from scorpion tails that he uses to flay you, body and soul. Gram Satan Ashmodai.

  I wished I could protect Smister. But I didn’t seem able even to protect Electra. And no one could protect me except me—if I was lucky enough to find a gossip mag to roll into a deadly weapon—an insufficient instrument to use against the son of Lord Ashmodai Attwood.

  My head was in a plumber’s grip, my teeth were loose, sweat dribbled down my ribs, my clumsy hands trembled, my lumbering feet stumbled and my stomach lurched like a ship in a storm. Even so, I made it back to Cadmus Road without taking a single snort of the wine I’d bought for Smister.

  I’d had the shakes, and the rattles, now I think I’ve got the DTs. But still I have to feed everyone, and heal everyone and give them good clean water and red wine. I have to wash and bandage their wounds and then wash and fill their bowls. For am I not the great mother in the sky? The enemy of the Lord Ashmodai and all his minions?

  No. I’m the lowliest of all creatures—the humble mouse, feeding on crumbs and scurrying away at the first sign of trouble.

  The Mouse Momster—that’s me. My children are derelict, drunk, addicted, mad and suffer with arthritic paws. They’re outsiders, inadequates, homeless and abused. They are young and confused. They are old and confused. They are dogs with no family ties. They sleep at the bottom of the barrel.

  Chapter 23

  Torpedoed By A Shock Encounter

  After a few years, I mean days, spent like that—only going out briefly for food, always picking a different shop, sleeping a lot, I found that my now sticky plum-coloured leisure suit hung on me like old man’s skin. I’d fed everyone except myself because I’d been too queasy to eat.

  ‘It’s not that, dafty,’ Smister said, sitting up in bed and looking perky for a change. ‘It’s all the wine you’re not drinking. You’d be amazed how many empty calories there are in cheap wine. What does it feel like to be sober after all this time?’

  ‘Having the DTs does not make me sober.’ I could feel the aching spot in the middle of my chest; if I could stick a knife in it gallons of darkness and liquid, writhing insects would come spewing out.

  ‘Well at least you’re not babbling about God and Satan.’

  ‘Well excuse me,’ I said, making for the door. ‘I’m going to let Electra back in. At least someone appreciates me.’

  Electra came in from the yard. Her limp was barely visible, her eyes were bright, her nose was wet, her sides were sleek, but she didn’t talk to me anymore. Instead of saying hello she waved her tail and seemed to smile. Then she went back to bed. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them how lazy greyhounds are.

  I took one of Natalie’s zopiclones and lay down too. It was a good thing she’d been addicted to sleepers and painkillers—I don’t know how I’d have lived through the tormented days otherwise. I wondered if her pain and insomnia had been caused by Gram Attwood too. DTs or no, it wasn’t too fanciful to call him Lord Ashmodai. Soon he would appear as an angry landlord and throw us back into the street.

  We’d been careful about showing light or being seen, but one day, inevitably, he’d come.

  It was a schizophrenic street; the north-east end was posher—they had proper curtains and cars with tax discs. The other end, our end, was for the dirt poor and immigrants. Broken down vans arrived in the night and were unloaded into other vans which vanished by morning. There were flats full of single men. There were women who only came out at night and were whisked away in minicabs. There were women who only came out in the day, swathed from top to toe in shadows. There were old, encrusted Londoners who complained they never heard English spoken anymore.

  Sometimes there were fights. Sometimes the cops came and removed, for instance, all the Somalis. But by nightfall their house would be full again, whether with the same Somalis or different ones I couldn’t tell. As far as I could see, we were all dispensabl
e.

  I came and went when I thought I wouldn’t be seen. But I got as wet as everyone else and I realised that there were a lot of folk nearby who didn’t want to be seen either. The rain poured down on saint and sinner alike, and everyone complained in a thousand languages.

  Smister never went out. I put the kitchen telly in the bedroom. It only received two channels. And I brought home a portable radio I ‘found’. Sometimes he watched the telly and listened to the radio at the same time, as if the combined broadcasts could drown his own thoughts.

  Sometimes Electra lay across his lap like an elegant fur rug. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company. It was a wordless, restful friendship, and every now and then I got the impression that I was too noisy and clumsy for them. I thought they blamed me for all their hurts and troubles; and I was to blame, especially for Electra’s.

  Smister went through all of the anti-depressant pills, and the only way I could tell that he wasn’t suicidally blue was because he hadn’t been neglecting his beauty regime. He cleansed, toned and moisturised religiously, and asked me to bring some honey-coloured hair dye so that he could get rid of the pink and violet streaks. He said they didn’t look classy. He said he didn’t want anyone ever to call him a cheap tart again.

  I can confirm that, tart or not, he wasn’t cheap. If I hadn’t had a big man’s raincoat with deep pockets and ten busy fingers to fill them he’d have beggared me. Except, of course, I was a beggar already. I wasn’t a good one anymore—not without Electra—but I managed to hustle a few quid as I shuffled down the road muttering, ‘Could you spare a little change, please, for the bus to the hospital, for a bed at the hostel, for a bowl of soup.’

  Most people like a reason to give you money, but sometimes someone will say, ‘I’ll spare you some change if you spare me the story,’ and they pay me to shut up. On the other hand one amazing old bird gave me a fiver because she said I was the first person who’d talked to her all week. I tried to find her again every day after that, but I never did.

  Money came hard without Electra. For one thing, money was tight for everyone that drenching summer and no one wants to stop in the rain especially when they’re feeling broke themselves. For another most people don’t see why they should give a grown-up person who’s well enough to walk anything at all—which is why a lot of us sit down to make ourselves took small and vulnerable. You don’t want to be taller than the person you’re asking for money from.

  Smister said, ‘You never buy us anything green to eat.’ We were chomping on the egg dish he called Momster’s Mess. I’d even stolen salt and pepper shakers from a nearby caff to make it more palatable, but he was an ungrateful little sod.

  ‘Electra doesn’t like vegetables,’ I said.

  ‘What’re we going to do?’ he asked in exactly the same tone of voice.

  ‘I’ll buy you a fucking cabbage,’ I said because I’d never actually told him that I pinched everything.

  ‘We can’t just wait to be evicted,’ he said. ‘We need another plan.’

  I don’t do plans. Planning is like admitting you have a future.

  ‘Have you got a driving licence?’ he went on, with the persistence of the truly stupid.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me take the test. They said I didn’t fill in the form properly. You know that bit where they ask if you’re a man or a woman—M or F? Well, I couldn’t write M. I just couldn’t.’

  Electra gave him a look that said, ‘You shouldn’t have to.’ I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: she really is a nicer bitch than I am.

  He went on, ‘What I mean is, can you drive? You do know all sorts of stuff your average bag lady doesn’t.’

  ‘Hey! What’s an average bag lady?’

  ‘If I find us a car can you remember how to drive it?’

  ‘Why do we need a car?’

  ‘We got to get around.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re going to get tossed. You said so yourself. I can’t show my face. I can’t find us a roof. But if we had a car… ’

  ‘Where’m I gonna get a car, poop for brains? It isn’t exactly a pair of tweezers and a magnifying mirror.’ That had been his latest lady-fying requirement. Didn’t he know that there’s a kind of nobility if you’re caught nicking food to feed your family, but none at all if you’re nabbed while stealing tweezers?

  ‘You haven’t answered. Can you drive?’

  Once I’d had a blue five-door Vauxhall Astra and I used to take Mother to the shopping centre every weekend. We went to Falmouth for two weeks in August to be near my brother. Gram Attwood wanted a sexy little vintage Austin Healey Sprite but I couldn’t afford it.

  ‘I had a car once,’ I said, ‘a long time ago in another life.’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘So you’ll be legal even if the wheels aren’t. You didn’t lose your licence, did you? Drunk in charge? Anything like that?’

  ‘What does it matter? We aren’t getting a car.’

  ‘And I want you to find me a phone, Momster—something disposable. But black and silver would be nice.’

  ‘See what I’m dealing with?’ I said to Electra. But she just smiled at me indulgently.

  ‘Don’t talk to her,’ Smister said. ‘She’s only a dog. Besides, if she could talk back she’d beg us to get wheels—to save her poor paws and her arthritis.’

  ‘Electra doesn’t beg; she’s too dignified.’

  ‘Well I’m not. Momster, please. Find me a phone and I’ll find us wheels.’

  So I shuffled off to Chelsea where I was a long way from Cadmus Road. I took a phone from an obnoxious young man who was so busy boasting to his mates about how much his new flat cost his father that he didn’t notice me sliding his phone out of his pocket. He was too stupid to realise how many people with nothing there are on the street these days, and that it’s both insensitive and risky to advertise wealth.

  Smister said, ‘That’s way cool. Pity I can’t keep it.’ He was still traumatised by what Jerry-cop did to him, but he was losing the sour, sickly smell. Youth and chocolate were beginning to reclaim him.

  ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’ll be phoning my friend and I don’t want you listening in.’

  ‘Well if he’s a total loser like… ’

  ‘You promised you’d never talk about Kev or Too-Tall… ’ He gave me his hurt kitten look. Then he relented. ‘I met Pierre in the clubs. He’s on the Diana Ross circuit but he works in a garage by day. He knows I’m saving for the operation, so he’s bound to want to talk about it, and if you were listening you’d go all righteous.’

  ‘I do not go all righteous.’

  ‘Well mopey then. Or weepy. And I really wish you wouldn’t. It’s my body and my decision.’

  In a huff, I put Electra’s coat on her, tied a salmon pink scarf round her neck and we went out.

  It was a long time since she and I had been out together but we fell into step with each other as if we’d never been apart and I realised how lonely it was on the street without her. In spite of the rain she was enjoying herself too—sniffing at walls and lamp-posts, shaking herself so that water drops flew off her ears like a halo.

  People hurried home from work without noticing us. I avoided the chemist shop where we’d first seen the mean guy in the cowboy hat, and Fulham Broadway Station where he’d attacked us. But we asked for change from people waiting for busses because they couldn’t walk away without losing their places in the queue. With Electra by my side I earned more money than abuse.

  I was just about to accost a new bus queue when Electra stiffened, tugging at the salmon pink scarf. I looked down. Her tail was tight between her legs and the hair on the back of her neck lifted in a stubbly ruff. I spun round.

  ‘Thought it was you,’ Georgie said, stepping up so close I could smell the burgers he’d had for tea, while Jo
ss crowded us on the other side.

  Chapter 24

  Threats, Thieves And Pierre

  Joss twisted my arm behind my back.

  ‘Don’t yell,’ Georgie said. ‘We don’t want to hurt you—we only want to talk.’

  ‘Then tell Joss to let go. I haven’t got over the last time you didn’t want to hurt me.’

  ‘That was a mistake,’ Georgie said. ‘Joss was freaked out.’

  ‘There was a fucking dead fucking body in there,’ Joss said. ‘I knew you’d fucking think I topped her. I figured you wouldn’t say nothing if you was dead too.’

  ‘Ow-ow-ow,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t yell!’

  ‘Then stop hurting me.’

  ‘That’s logical, I suppose,’ Georgie said, and Joss let go of my arm.

  I crouched down beside Electra and smoothed the panicking hair on the back of her head.

  ‘And then,’ Joss said, as if he’d never been interrupted, ‘Georgie here said maybe you fucking did it.’

  ‘Did what?’ I straightened up and we moved into a shop doorway.

  ‘Killed the dead body—aren’t you fucking listening, cloth ears?’

  A wave of rage started at my ankles and rolled up my legs till it hit me in the guts. ‘I’m not the violent one here. I don’t kick dogs or friends in the ribs and break their teeth and give them concussion and amnesia. I don’t beat up business rivals and stuff them down manholes. And I don’t have the brass neck to track you down and accuse you of… ’ But the sentence was never going to end well, so I said, lamely, ‘How did you find me anyway?’

  ‘The Lone Ranger said he seen you round here.’ Georgie had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘What’s the matter with you? Yorking on telly, making a freak show of yourself when everyone including the law’s looking for you.’