His voice gets sharper. ‘Is there a problem, Flick?’
I shrug helplessly, hands tied. ‘I haven’t even fucking heard of it. You’re in deep, man.’
His hand moves up to my collar and grips the fabric. He pulls me close so I can smell the mix of kebab and pot on his breath and he spits at me. ‘You’ll do what I say, Flicker.’
‘Or what, Fez?’ I shake a little confidence back into myself and stand taller, staring him in the eye.
‘Or what? Fuck, that’s what! Do you know what happens to shits like you, thinkin’ they’re not part of the system? You’re either with me or you’re fucking against me, Flicker. And you don’t want to be against me. Don’t think you’re one of my mates already just ’cause Gav lets you twat about at his place. You’re still a little shit and you’ll do what I say or there’ll be no more treats for you, know what I mean COCKSNOZZ?’
Cocksnozz? No, I don’t know what you mean, you wanker … He’s hurting me. I’m looking down at the pavement and holding my jaw stiff as his fingers dig into the hollow just under my collarbone. I want to smack him, but there are people who piss you off and there are people who piss you off, and Fez was one of the latter. Fez was into some heavy stuff, he had a lot of friends. People got knifed, raped, jumped, bent out of shape when they got into trouble with Fez. And I didn’t want to risk anything happening to me even just for the sake of my mum’s nerves. I was brought home in a police van earlier in the year and I’ll never forget the look on her face. I hadn’t actually done anything, they thought I was breaking into cars when I was just leaning heavily on a Ford Capri, but I swore to avoid ever getting banged up when I saw the worry in her eyes and, later, heard her crying in the toilet. And worse, I didn’t want to risk anything happening to my family or friends. Something bad. It ain’t the movies, kids. I bite my lip. I think of Rainbow. I think of the other night. I think about what she would think of me, dealing coke.
‘OI! I’m talking to you, you little fuckfaced piece of junkie shit. Do you know what I mean? No treats, no cuts, and no girl either, that Ash, or Sunshine, or whoever the fuck you’ve got. I’ll fuck her so hard she’ll bleed for a month and then I’ll pass her round all my mates, you understand?’
Rainbow. No no no no no. I screw up my face, squeezing the image out my mind.
Fez spits at me. ‘DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN THEN?’
Yes.
Fez gives a soft laugh. ‘No need to be such a miserable cunt about it, Flicks. Right. You’ll get it for me then,’ and he hands me a grand in cash, and starts to talk amounts, business and money. Fez fucks me right off.
2
Fucked
It takes all of five seconds to realise it’s a bad idea to talk to Rainbow about Fez’s proposal so I go to Ashley’s the next Friday to sort out my moral dilemma – a mistake from the word go. The words ‘Ashley’ and ‘moral’ generally never collide.
The entrance to Ashley’s flat is down a tiny, cobbled alley, very Dickens, if you’re aware of who that is (and I doubt Ashley would be), all smoke-blackened Victorian brick walls on either side, cobblestones underfoot slick with rain and drain water and the piss of our drunk dads, and then her too-short door, built for smaller people of a more malnourished age, the damp old wood splintered and the paint cracked. It has all the hallmarks of an alley you’d get raped down, which might be why she can afford the rent. Ash works in the shop below her flat, a greasy spoon café that almost solely serves things you can put in buns. Think hot dogs, burgers, breakfast baps, chip butties etc. She started there last summer, when she moved, and since then every time I give her a hug, which, due to height reasons, ends up with my nose in her hair, I get a whiff of bacon. It’s not completely unpleasant. I love a bit of bacon.
I press her buzzer (so to speak), and hear the nasal sound faintly announcing my arrival upstairs. Someone unlocks the door without asking who it is, and I jog up the narrow, carpeted stairs and open a door into the living room. The flat is a closet, or like a series of closets, the living space just about big enough to swing a cat in. Ash doesn’t own a cat, but the neighbour’s tom does come by for his share of leftover burgers occasionally, so I might get a chance to test that theory.
I can hear them all pissing about in the bedroom, but no one calls out for me so I take the opportunity to snoop about. Ash has got fuck all stuff. In the living room, there is a tiny box of a telly she got from Woolworths, a couple of DVDs, a dirty couch and various half-eaten bags of jelly sweets. I help myself to a few gummy bears and some sour fizzy milk bottles and head through to the tiny, galley kitchen to find something to drink. There is only one square foot of surface that isn’t a cooker or a sink, and it’s covered in plain paper takeout bags from the café. In one I find some chips, but most of them are empty, the insides slimed with the brown stains of old ketchup. I open the fridge and find it sticky and well stocked, with the cheapest, shittiest alcohol you can find, basically liquefied sweets with vodka added to it, a couple of untouched burgers, and half a chocolate cake with a decapitated caterpillar iced on the top.
‘Why the fuck have you put cake in your fridge?’ I yell.
There is some chatting and laughter and Ash calls, ‘Flick, is that you or is that a murderer?’
‘It’s me. Why’s there cake in your fridge?’
She hollers from her room. ‘It was cut price in the Co-op. I didn’t want it going off.’
‘You can’t put it in the fridge, it’s cake. It’s like bread, you dickhead, it just moulds.’
There’s a pause and Ash shouts back, ‘I’m sorry, are you my fucking Mum?’
I help myself to a massive slice of the cake and dubiously select a bottle of peach-tainted vodka, stuffing the caterpillar’s tasty arse in my mouth as I walk through to Ash’s bedroom and kick the door open. The girls all scream and hold their hands over their chests, but it’s just for show and doesn’t last longer than a second. Ash thinks being demure means occasionally cleaning your toilet.
I throw myself onto the bed and watch Ash, Daisy and Ella wander about the room getting their tits out and comparing the push-up factor of Ash’s collection of Wonderbras and whore outfits. I know it’s because I’m there and I usually get great pleasure out of ignoring them. But today I’m distracted and pissed off by fucking Fez’s bastard request … or perhaps demand would be a better word. No, wait – threat. Fucking bastard.
‘D’you think Ella’s are bigger than mine?’ Daisy.
‘What does it matter? You’re both an A cup.’ Ash.
Daisy shoots a pissed-off look at Ashley and turns to me, lying on the bed in the midst of a pile of thongs that all seem to say Eat Me and about five black miniskirts, all clearly identical but ordered from best to worst in relation to how fat they make Ella feel. Ella is now anorexic. She asked me a question the other week about low-calorie poppers. The only reason she drinks is so she can throw up dinner.
‘What do you think, Flick?’ Daisy points her breasts at me with a round-mouthed look on her face that I can only guess is an attempt at coquettishness.
‘I think …’ My eyes roll from her nipples up to the ceiling. ‘That if I just get it over and done with, that’ll be my debt and bloody Gav’s debt sorted with Fez and I can stop taking all this shit and be happy and clean with Rainbow.’
Daisy makes a sound of disgust and turns back to the mirror with an ‘Ohh fuck-ing Rain-bow!’
‘You’ll get yourself in trouble hanging round with them, Flick.’ Ash, dressed as a nurse, with her arms crossed and a defiant but still determinedly alluring pout.
‘Don’t you think I know that? I wouldn’t be here discussing it if all was a-okay would I? I wouldn’t be doing it if Fez weren’t behind my back with a fucking knife, would I?’
‘All right! Fucking calm down, I was just saying!’ She moves off, waving her fag about, talking smoke and scorn in my direction. ‘Twat.’
Ella shouts from the bathroom. ‘Flick, we’re not just saying you could get, like, jumped or, like, really
sick from it or sumink.’ She walks in blowing at a smear of nail varnish on a rip in her tights. ‘I mean, you could get in real serious trouble with the police!’
‘I know …’ I say more softly. ‘I know …’
‘And you’re too soft to be hard.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Yes you are, yes he is, yes he is!’ They run at me, bras now on, talking in baby voices and tickling me through the pile of clothes. Ash hugs my head into her fake cleavage.
‘What will happen to you if you get banged up, Flick? You’ll lose your virginity with some massive bloke and you won’t ever fuck me, will you?’
‘Fuck off!’ I laugh, my voice muffled in her chest. I still haven’t let on me and Rainbow had sex. For some reason I don’t want to, I want to keep it between us, intimate, like. So I cover my tracks. ‘I’m gonna lose it with Rainbow anyway.’
‘WHAT?’ screams Daisy.
‘You haven’t lost it yet?’ Ella joins in with a gasp of interest.
‘Of course he hasn’t,’ shouts Ash over the din, never for one second presuming I might have. She gets up off the bed and pours another glass of vodka and lemonade from a bottle on the windowsill, going easy on the lemonade. ‘He’s too much of a pussy to ever have sex, he’d be afraid of hurting her.’
‘He should fuck you then, Ash, no dick’d be big enough to hurt you now,’ Daisy giggles into her Bacardi Breezer.
‘Fuck off, twatbag.’
‘Don’t worry, Ash,’ I say. ‘I’m tiny anyway. You’re not missing anything.’
‘Why haven’t you fucked her?’ Ella, leaning over me so I see the twin curves of her tits hanging over my crotch.
‘Rainbow’s waiting for Flick to grow a pair.’ Ash, at the mirror, applying blood-red lip gloss.
‘Sometimes it’s a good idea to wait ’til it’s right, thank you, Ash.’
‘It’s better when it’s wrong.’ She grins luridly at me in the mirror and licks her lips, bending over so I see her ass come out of the bottom of her skirt.
I pop a gummy bear from another random bag of sweets on her bed and retort, ‘Taking advice from you on making love would be like taking advice about making chocolate delicacies from a chef who mass-manufactures jelly sweets.’
‘MAKING LOVE!’ Ash shouts, and they burst into another round of pissed giggling through which I hear the downstairs buzzer.
‘All right, all right,’ I say, glad for the distraction. ‘You can all fucking shut up, the guys are here now and you’re not dressed, so fucking get ready.’ I hit the button to let them in. ‘I’m out for some air.’
‘Hey, Flick!’ Daisy stops me at the door. ‘So, what you gonna do about Fez?’
I take her cigarette out of her hand and turn down the stairs. ‘What he says, I guess. Got no choice, really. Fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t.’
‘Either way,’ Ash grins. ‘You can kiss goodbye to your innocence.’
3
Teenage Kicks
The next day I go round to Rainbow’s to try to take my mind off the deal. Whatever I decide, I think, best to sleep on it first. And since the night before I got to putting the world to rights with Jamie and Mike, and didn’t actually sleep, I haven’t technically done this yet, thus buying myself more time. Yeah! I’m a genius. I’ve also very cleverly found something else to rant about to get out my aggression and it doubles as something that will make me sound smart to Rainbow – one of my favourite topics in fact – politics! Yay! I’m so gay. Anyway, I saw in the paper wrapped around our chips last night something about immigration and terrorism and the same old shit from the Daily Mail about being overrun. The thing is, if they were calmer and not so insane about everything they’d be way more convincing. Besides, I like the fact that England is a safe haven for people in war-torn places with horrible lives; you’d have to be a bit of a bastard not to want to be a haven for people who really need it. But there are problems that need resolving, such as integration and certain beliefs people hold that they can’t be allowed to support here – the notion that women are worth less than men and are obscene if they show some skin, for instance – and until those right-wing cocks stop shouting at each other the real issues will never be solved, as I explain so articulately to Rainbow.
So I pace her yellow carpet, gesticulating, feeling like a professor. A hot professor. And she’s my student. Yeah … Anyway. Back in the room.
‘It feels like no one ever fucking thinks about the north or people that live in the country as opposed to big cities. That’s why I want to go into politics because I’d do it right. I’d be fucking fair. I’d represent everybody. Everything the news reports these days is about London and people in the south.’
‘Mmm,’ says Rainbow, drawing on her sketchbook, lain on the floor, smiling up at me.
‘And there’s so much in the news about religion these days, but most English people are atheists or agnostics, all this stuff is just the people in the cities. What about people who’ve paid their taxes all their lives and are ignored because they don’t have a massive religious group lobbying for them? My parents have worked solidly all their lives for shit pensions and then some woman can sit on her arse at home ’cause her religion deems her incapable of working and then my mam’s taxes pay for her benefits so she can have seven kids and wrap all the girls in black. The government concentrates on helping out minorities, but what about the majority? What about England outside London? Or are we so far north they think we’re Scottish? I don’t know anyone who isn’t an atheist or agnostic or just C of E and we don’t have an inner-city school we just have shit ones in villages. And they’re all getting rebuilt, yeah, but what’s the point of a new building with the same shit teachers and the same shit curriculum?’
‘They’re just throwing money at the problem without any real understanding,’ Rainbow agrees, colouring in a doodle. ‘You’re very enlightened, Will, I’m glad you’re a feminist.’
‘Yeah, baby!’
‘Holla!’ Rainbow makes a peace sign at me.
‘What we really need,’ I continue, ‘is a representative Member of Parliament for our area.’
‘Mmm, the government as it is can never be truly representative because the system is set up so politicians generally come from rich backgrounds, public schools and Oxford or Cambridge, and most people don’t. Right?’
‘Yeah. Probably better than I could have put it.’
She grins and I go off into a dream again, trying to remember exactly what she said and what I liked about it. Maybe I should write it down, but Rainbow writes everything down anyway so I’m sure she’ll remember. I stare around at her books and think about how small her head looks and how you’d expect her brain to be this vast chasm where all this knowledge and wisdom was stored and where tiny little midgets ran around working on manically productive processors, taking the information down spiral staircases to her mouth, where those beautiful swollen lips would impart their genius on the world. But it’s not a vast chasm, it’s a normal-sized head. Hmm.
‘I read a book from the point of view of someone like you the other day.’ A voice appears from the direction of Rainbow’s bum, which wiggles at me as she searches for something. ‘I was sure my trainers were under my bed. Now where …?’
‘Oh, yeah? What book was that then?’
‘Err, it’s by this really good middle-aged male author, I liked all his other books but … I read it in the library instead of going to art.’
‘I thought you liked art?’ Her gold and green bra is on the floor and I hook it with my foot, kick it up to my hands and rub my thumbs into the silky material.
‘I do. I’d just done all the work already and Mr Hull understands if I’m not in an arty mood I won’t get anything done anyway. Aha!’ She tugs a pair of pink Converse with printed orange flowers on them from underneath her wardrobe.
‘Oh, right. So how was the book?’
‘Shit. You’d have hated it. I could hardly finish it – I had to make myself. I
t was written in the first person and he didn’t sound fifteen at all, WAY too goody goody, even for a good guy, said words like “cuss” and he was white, the story was too structured for the character, who was supposed to not be great at English and he kept illustrating things by saying, “Oh, I’m finding it really difficult to tell a story,” which was so not subtle and obviously the author trying to make us believe this kid was fifteen. It was a LIE.’
I sit down on her bed and watch her pull her trainers on, her legs so much shorter than mine, and tiny like a child. Or a hot Asian chick, I grin to myself.
‘Plus he kept saying things like, “kids these days”, and I know we all take the piss out of our friends but this wasn’t taking the piss, it was done so the perspective was recognisably adult.’
‘Ad-ult?’ I grin at her. ‘Like porn?’
‘Yes, Flick, like porn,’ she sighs. ‘I’m trying to be serious here, you’re not even listening.’
‘I was listening!’ I put down her bra. ‘It was a joke.’
It occurs to me that there aren’t many books written from the point of view of normal people, by which I mean people like the people I know. Thinking about it, it’s very probably because no one I know can even spell, never mind write a book/short story/sentence. When would you find the time anyway? Everyone works or goes to school or gets pregnant or is far too muntered. We’re all very busy.
But even the books that are written for us we wouldn’t read, Rainbow points out, because most of them don’t get it. The authors, all much older, only refer to the naive mistakes and foolishness of youth. They don’t want to admit that the people they were when they were young were actually them and were, at that point in adolescence, just as important and profound, just as much people as grown-ups.
‘No teenager in a book is ever treated like a full human being,’ she says, kissing me on the nose. ‘We live an apologetic half-life, waiting to be redeemed by adulthood.’ I kiss her back. My wise little woman.
‘Rainbow …’ Oh my god, I think, surprising myself. I’m about to say it. And then I do: ‘I love you.’
Flick: A Novel Page 9