Ten Storey Love Song

Ten Storey Love Song Page 1

by Milward, Richard

  Ten Storey Love Song

  Richard Milward

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Ten Storey Love Song

  Acknowledgements

  Author biography

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  You must always be intoxicated. On wine, poetry or

  virtue, as you wish. But you must get drunk.

  Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), poet and randy dandy

  ‘Hello,’ says the wallpaper. Bobby the Artist scratches his eyeballs. He can’t sleep. He sits on the sofa arm, argyle sweater pulled hunchback over the top of his head, having a conversation with his living room. ‘Go to fucking sleep,’ he replies to the wallpaper. He sighs. It’s that tail-end of the acid – he’s no longer seeing the cat from Dr Seuss in place of the lamp-stand, but there’s still loads of annoying thinking to be done. Being an artist, Bobby the Artist’s only really in it for the visuals – earlier on him and Georgie danced round the flat to Bardo Pond (‘Tantric Porno’ and ‘The High Frequency’ are two groovy numbers off an album full of noise), Bobby watching the knobbly skirting-board gradually form a zoetrope involving all these obscure froggy and bunny characters, and it even had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Usually Bobby the Artist would jump up and paint all this madness, but tonight he couldn’t be bothered. There’s nothing better than Georgie in a dancy happy mood, the only downside being she never joins in any of the drug-taking. Back on the sofa arm, Bobby breathes into his jumper sleeve, glancing at his girlfriend sleeping peacefully on the fuchsia cushions. He rests his head against the wall – two hours earlier it was soft as marshmallows, now it’s a pain in the neck – and there’s no chance him joining Georgie in the land of Nod. You just cannot seem to switch off. He stares wide-eyed at dawn sneaking in through the window, wondering deeply deeply where him and Georgie are going, whether he’ll ever get famous, whether he’ll ever get to sleep, where the Cat in the Hat went. He yanks the green sweater down from his forehead, then strides about the room feeling irritated, kicking the empty sweety wrappers round and round the carpet. The flat’s a mess, and being on LSD it’s quite hard to remember how it happened to get like that. All Bobby clearly remembers is twirling round with Georgie, her drunk on cheapo vodka, him tripping his numbskull off. Twirling twirling twirling. Whirling curtains. At one point they’d been dancing so much Bobby’s hunger came back unexpectedly and he had to make pills-on-toast for himself in the kitchen. Here’s the recipe for pills-on-toast: 2 crushed ecstasy pills, 1 slice of toast (butter optional). Yawn! Smoke-rings loop-the-loop past like dreamy spectacles. Where did that whole twenty-deck disappear to? Bobby considers going across the road for more fags, but the prospect of being taunted by scallywags while still slightly tripping feels daunting, and in any case he hasn’t got any money. His last pound coin went on a paintbrush yesterday from Jarreds, and Johnnie from upstairs sorted him two blotters and two ecstasies on tick, and the idea was this: get wrecked and paint one two three four (or more) masterpieces. Hallucinogens are perfect for that nutty, colourful art no one can explain, but now Bobby feels a bit distraught for not doing anything, and now the acid’s starting to wear off. He looks at Georgie breathing louder and louder on the settee, her eyelashes pressed shut like wee Venus flytraps, and with maximum effort he starts gathering his acrylics together. Georgie’s his Muse, and there’s tons of Georgie canvases strewn around the flat in various poses and multi-colours – the best ones, like ‘Stripy Socks’ (45x35cm) and ‘Georgie Girl’ (50x50cm), are hung above the telly in lime green and pastelly blue. Bobby the Artist crawls about the floor for a scrap of A1, then wallops bright pink across it with a six-inch DIY brush, slopping it everywhere. He ruins the carpet. Then he goes through to the bedroom to huff some Lynx Africa, spraying it into one of the dirtier argyle sweaters: the red one hasn’t been washed for a bit. Smothering his face in the deodorant and sucking it all cold into his lungs, after three seconds Bobby feels a bit spacey again and floats back through to the living space, the colours in his head nice and bright again for a short while. He cross-legs himself in front of Georgie, suddenly spewing up eyelashes and blue hair-bands and fuchsia blocks all across the paper. Georgie’s dressed in a blue and white sailor’s outfit – often she plays up to her Muse status, her and Bobby the Artist flouncing around town in stupid attire and usually only to buy a new oil pastel or a jam-jar from Lidl. Now and then they get abusive comments from nobodies with buzzcuts, but they’re well loved in Peach House and on the estate – Bobby’s a bit like a doggy, quite dozy and partial to falling in love with everybody; Georgie’s more like an apprehensive kitten: she loves to have fun, but it’s got to be with the right person. She’s often seen gawping at the sweety counter in the newsagent across Longlands Road, with her disco-ball eyes. Bobby the Artist chucks a jelly-babies bag out from under his bum, adding a bit of wacky detail to Georgie’s face – spiky mascara, chewy lips, and a thought-bubble coming out of her head with a mermaid in it. There was quite an oceanic feel to the trip tonight – swimming in the carpet, imagining the doorbells were seagulls, etc. etc. – and he blames it on Georgie’s sailor gear. He continues doing the Lynx while he paints, but after a while you get immune to it and Bobby finally feels the tiredness slip over him. He’s so shattered. It seems like such an effort just to mix a decent phthalo turquoise, and his hand doesn’t have that usual fluidity or purposefulness – in fact Georgie looks more like a blob with eyes. Bobby the Artist screams inside – coming down off acid is such a disappointing feeling. How awful it is to float back to a grey, drab world when you’ve just seen happy rainbow Munchkin land. It’s frustrating, and Bobby tosses ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm) to one side, his head hurting from all the annoyance and wretched thinking. Georgie pipes up now and then with the odd snore, and Bobby wonders what they get out of each other anyway – all Georgie does is go to work, come home moody, nibble a few sweets and fall to sleep, though she does look good in a ballerina costume. All Bobby does is splash a bit of paint around in an argyle sweater getting mortalled. But all that negative thinking is a killer – Bobby doesn’t believe in being sad, he wants everyone to get on with each other (and off their heads), and the temptation’s miles too strong to phone up Johnnie and score more white doves. Some of Bobby’s best work comes from an MDMA-fuelled binge, all colourful and smiley and demented, although he does sometimes end up making love to the canvases. Bobby the Artist stands by the window, gazing at occasional shiny toy cars whizzing past way down there, dialling up Johnnie’s mobile, but he stands there for a whole two minutes and Johnnie doesn’t answer. Johnnie feels it go off in his Admiral bottoms, but he reckons it’s probably his girlfriend Ellen and in any case he’s got his eye on some youths over there with quite a flashy mobile and all. It’s freezing out in the morning light, and Johnnie whacks up his collar as he darts across Kedward Avenue and squares up to the lads. ‘Give us that, you daft cunts,’ he woofs, nodding at the fancy Siemens. After Johnnie got kicked off the dole five months back, he got self-employed as a full-time thief and professional let-down. In his younger years Johnnie used to march around the estate slapping anyone who looked at him and, like a lot of the lads in his year, he was the Hardest Lad in His Year. But he’s not especially macho or psychotic or unstable – in fact since he met Ellen he’s calmed down slightly, and for example he loves painting pap paintings with Bobby or fixing Alan Blunt the Cunt’s creaky door or helping his Nanna do the shop every Thursday. It’s just a shitty state of affairs that everyone needs money. The lads look at him with their best don’t-fuck-with-me (please) faces, but they can both tell they might be in for a pasting. ‘Do youse wanna get battered or what?’ he enquires. The l
ads don’t, really. Johnnie roughs them up anyhow, pushing the two kids round the block, giving them little kiddy-slaps now and then for his own entertainment. Strangely, Johnnie hopes they turn on him – giving him an excuse to pull out all his best moves – but the boys are sort of fannies and they just stand around looking a bit gutted. After a while Johnnie takes the flashy phone and £7.18 off the lads, then sprints off back down Kedward. At four in the morning there’s hardly going to be a copper about, but now and then they do patrol Cargo Fleet Lane so Johnnie makes a beeline straight for Peach House. He’s buzzing – thievery still gives him that burst of satisfaction, plus the sevenish quid should keep Ellen happy for sevenish minutes, say if they get a pizza or something later on. Johnnie grins, glancing up at the tower – it used to be dog muck and Sugar Puff colour but in the 2000s the council tarted up all five of the blocks, and in this particular instant Peach House looks very gorgeous, like pink and yellow ice cream on top of a raspberry ripple sunrise. Instead of stalling for the lift, Johnnie darts up the stairway past 2C’s knackered fridge waiting to go to the fridge graveyard, and he dodges a binbag here, there and everywhere. There’s an odd sock on floor three. There’s half-eaten chips on floor three and a half. When Johnnie gets to floor four he’s greeted by a crazy person hurling a crazy painting down the stairwell in total disgust. ‘Now then, Bobby,’ he smiles, ‘what you up to?’ Bobby the Artist blinks quite wildish at Johnnie, all dishevelled in his green/red-trim jumper and gurning. ‘Ha ha, oh how’s it going? I’m pissed off like, can’t fucking paint again, can I …’ Scratching his veiny neck, Johnnie slants his head at the crumpled ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm) landing halfway down the staircase. Still wet, Georgie lies there on the sofa on the ocean on the paper on the step. ‘As if!’ Johnnie says with his eyebrows, ‘it’s fucking mint. God, is that Georgie? She looks dead relaxed. I like it, me.’ One thing Johnnie misses in his life is relaxation. Having a hundred pills tucked in the vitamin tin and various other Class As playing hide-and-seek about the flat makes for an unsettled young man. Plus having no income means he’s constantly thinking about the next steal and the next one and the next one – Johnnie gave up robbing his parents three weeks back after he nabbed £30 for the teddy-bear acid, and all the profits had to go on rent and even then it didn’t stop the bailiffs coming round but Johnnie didn’t open the door to them and eventually paid them off a week later after kneecapping a youngster who owed £70 ticky. On top of that, he’s stressed about Ellen – they’ve been together about seven months, and he loves her to death, but he’s completely plagued with jealousy. If she hasn’t phoned for a day or two he instantly conjures up an image of her fucking one of the scummy rats she hangs around with. If they’re at a party, Ellen can’t talk to another boy without Johnnie getting the hump. He trusts her, but part of what attracted him to Ellen in the first place was the nymphomania and her general brassy, come-hither attitude. If he ever caught her shagging someone else, that cunt on the other side of her cunt would be absolutely fucked. That’s why when Johnnie sees a portrait of Georgie all sleepy and content on a pink background, his heart expands into a big juicy strawberry. ‘Can I get a picture of it?’ he asks, leaning the painting upright, getting a bit of sticky acrylic on his fingers. ‘I just twocked this mobile,’ he goes on, unleashing the Siemens. ‘It’s got a camera and that.’ Bobby the Artist smiles while Johnnie figures how to work it, but even so the painting’s totally dead to him. He believes in spontaneity, madness, pure psychic automatism, childish colours and sloppy brushstrokes, but this one’s just a mess. He sighs while Johnnie snaps the disaster, although it is always nice to receive a compliment. There were these people in the 1940s who called themselves CoBrA and they believed in painting with that total abandon like a little child, but of course you do run the risk of making a massive boo-boo. ‘You don’t need a new phone, by any chance?’ Johnnie asks, scarpering the rest of the way up the stairs. Bobby the Artist shakes his mad brown mop-top. He stands silently for a bit weighing up the prospect of forcing sleep or saying fuck it and carrying on working, and in the fuzzy dawn he figures the most rock-and-roll option would be, ‘Johnnie, you couldn’t sort me another couple doves on tick, could you?’ Johnnie feigns a look of you-fucking-bastard, but he loves Bobby the Artist and it’s been a pretty fruitful night in terms of wheeling and dealing, and he just smiles and tosses over a few left-over halves and crumby bits from his tracky-top pocket. Bobby grins and stuffs his face with the doves, although he soon realises his mouth’s like sandpaper and the pills won’t actually go down the chute, so he fumbles into the flat and into the kitchen and has to tapwater them down a few goes. But it’s worth it – almost straight away the placebo effect of putting ecstasy between your lips perks him up, and despite the clock saying 5.31 Bobby decides he might go wake Georgie up and try to paint her properly. Georgie’s not happy. She’s been working all day behind the sweety counter at Bhs, and the vodka and sheer shatteredness of it all had her in one of those black-holey bottomless sleeps. She was dreaming of fairgrounds and carousels, not mermaids, imagining her and Bobby riding plastic horses high above the housing estate like a scruffier Mary Poppins. Bobby the Artist grabs her by the shoulders and gives her a little shake, but it’s like being dragged from dream into reality through a mile of gravel or a thornbush. Her massive eyelashes part, and she glares up at Bobby with gigantic throbbing peepers. ‘What?’ she snaps. Bobby the Artist smiles blissfully, the love-doves already sending a sparkle in one or two veins, and he answers, ‘Sorry, pet, it’s just I scored more pills off Johnnie and, like … do you wanna do some poses for me? Painting and that?’ If there’s one thing that annoys Georgie, it’s her boyfriend getting over-excited about a teeny-weeny tablet. She hates them – what does it say about your life if you keep having to gloss it in druggy lovey-doveyness? Georgie’s perfectly happy with her life as it is, even though it was murder at work that afternoon. Mr Hawkson, her boss, keeps scolding her just because she’s easy-going and cheerful on the counter. These kids of about age eleven came in around dinner-break and, even though they were clearly pilfering the milk-bottles and fizzy cherries and scoffing them on the sly, Georgie thought it was nice to see them enjoying themselves. The cherries were a fine choice. Hawkson could see it all unfolding from his hands-on-hips stance over by Womenswear, and he marched over and gave Georgie a bollocking. He’s a prick – he’s in his forties and apparently he’s got a ‘partner’, but he still enjoys perving on Georgie in the terrible stripey blouse. He’ll never fire her – Hawkson’s never seen anyone over twenty so enthusiastic about sweets before in his life. For Georgie sweets are her only vice – she’s grown out of listing her top ten confectionery each month (the last instalment had rhubarb and custards knock white jazzies off the top spot), but much of the mess around 4E looks like a U-bomb hit a Haribo factory. She flings a few empty wrappers out from her bum-crack and elbows, although it sounds like the Smarties packet has something left in it so she munches those fellows for a bit. ‘Bobby, I’m knackered,’ she moans, her brain pulsing and threatening to run out of her nose, ears and mouth, like something from those manky manga films Bobby used to watch. It was his cousin from Eston who made him watch all the video nasties, and Bobby remembers vividly screaming and squeezing his face down the back of the sofa and bad-dreaming after seeing Driller Killer and Hellraiser aged nine and three-quarters. That bit where the man’s face gets stretched and ripped off by hooks had him in tears for two weeks. Funny, though, how Un Chien Andalou doesn’t have the same aaargh-factor (that insane Buñuel/Dalí film with split eyeballs and severed hands, and nuns), since it’s really a horror film too, but Salvador Dalí’s an artist, you see, and Clive Barker’s just a sicko. Shivering, Bobby the Artist props one of his ready-stretched canvases against the coffee table (not that they drink coffee any more – Bobby had a horrible experience necking loads of espressos while on the Billy Whizz, finding himself fidgeting and spasming for approximately forty-eight hours), and gives Georgie the pupp
y-dog eyes. Or the ecstasy eyes. Whenever Bobby needs canvases making, he snorts an amphetamine mountain over the course of a day, coming down in the evening surrounded by perfectly stretched frames and with blisters on his fingers. Such a hard-working drug! Bobby leaps and puts Galaxie 500 on moderately high volume, the guitars feeling particularly swoopy-loopy this daybreak. He starts to feel the smudgy rush of ecstasy spread through him; the perfect feeling for painting your girlfriend, he thinks. Sometimes he doesn’t even realise he’s irritating her. Georgie just sits there, not really fussed about posing, but the Smarties are a bonus. Lots of blue ones and all. She watches her boyfriend through slitted eyes, all those tell-tale signs of a man coming up such as manic eyeballs, can’t-keep-stillness, and his jowls getting more and more demented. Bobby’s feeling brilliant – he washes a brush, then sketches Georgie really large and cute and sailorish in a tiny fuchsia boat. He blocks her in with fleshy pink and navy blue, putting love-hearts in her eyes, then he rolls around the carpet laughing at it. ‘Voilà!’ he slobbers. Georgie’s not impressed – all she got woken up for was a five-minute splasharound, not some highly considered jaw-dropping coup de grâce. Speaking of jaws, by seven o’clock Bobby’s is all over the place. And Georgie’s still knackered. At least she hasn’t got work today – she thinks about slithering next door to go to bed, but Bobby the Artist keeps jabbering on in the swing of his druggy buzz. ‘Aww, Georgie, you’re gorgeous. I don’t want to be a dickhead and that, you know, like all sloppy and that, but God you were made for painting. You know Modigliani? Well I feel like that, you know; getting wrecked and just painting all these birds and that … not that I knock around with other girls like, don’t worry … I just mean you’re mint … like …’ he blabs, frothing a bit at the mouth. At the moment he feels utter wonder and contentment sitting with Georgie, like nothing else matters to him in the big wide world, but as it always does when he finally comes down around ten o’clock (and Georgie’s long gone, a sailor-sized lump in the bed next-door), he wishes she was more outgoing and would swallow drugs with him instead of just sweeties. It’s totally depressing falling back to earth for the umpteenth time. Bump. Bobby the Artist sits on his own on the pink couch, still wired, but now the white morning outside just makes him queasy. He scours the carpet for any sort of intoxicant (Nescafé would do), but there’s not even any Smarties left. ‘Grrrr!’ he says in his head. Unfortunately it’s time to call it a day. Sniffing, Bobby pops through to the cool bedroom and changes into his kangaroo pyjamas, as is tradition after every long-haul inner flight. Speaking of which, he dribbles himself onto the edge of the bed and puts on Primal Scream’s own beautiful ‘Inner Flight’, and the comfort’s exhausting. Georgie makes a little gurgle as the song kicks in, and it’s actually in the same key. She rolls over but doesn’t wake up, and for five minutes Bobby just enjoys being there with her and the song, and he strokes her stray pinky shoulder poking out from the bronze bedcover. An eensy-weensy part of him wants to rouse Georgie again and have ravenous sex with her, but he doesn’t want to push it. In any case, she looks so holy and adorable all wrapped up, it’s nice enough just to be sat in her presence. But sleep’s still off the cards for Bobby for at least a couple more hours, and he just concretes himself to the duvet and stares at morning stretching until then. Georgie, unaware he’s there, has sprawled herself across seventy-nine per cent of the bed but Bobby still feels happy perched precariously on the frame edge. He lets his mind wander, eyes closed, where quite a few trippy pictures still hang on the backs of his eyelids. Faint multicolour boxes unfold and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, and it keeps him entertained for a bit before bedtime. Little spirographs rise and fall, easing Bobby the Artist into slumber with their soft swirly twirls. For a second he thinks he sees his face on the Haribo kid’s body, and all of a sudden he wonders what it’d be like to be famous – he’d rather see his face on Frieze magazine, mind you. Imagine going to all those posh parties and sniffing all the free drugs! He dreams of getting a £1,000-a-day coke habit. But the opportunity seems so far away when you’re holed up on the fourth floor of some tower block no one’s even heard of, overlooking bumpy tarmac and unhappy little shops, though if Jean-Michel Basquiat could come out of a garbage can with rubbish paintings and still get famous then so could he. Basquiat’s his big influence, just like smack was for Jean-Michel. There’s this painting, ‘Bombero’, of Jean’s girlfriend giving him a thump and, although Georgie would never lay a finger on him, Bobby can kind of relate to it. Georgie kicks Bobby in the face every time she goes to bed early in a strop. Every time she scolds Bobby for having too much of a good time. Every time she goes to work. Every time she frowns. From day one they’ve been perfectly happy together, though Bobby sort of thought she could be weaned onto drugs or at least have her arm twisted once or twice. Georgie’s dad’s been clocking-on at BASF for twenty-five years (they gave him a stereo to celebrate), and it’s his daft influence making her think you have to work so you can survive so you can die sometime later on. Bobby the Artist’s ethic is: do what you want and enjoy it or else! But saying that, it’s not really that much fun sitting next to a corpse at noon o’clock with nothing to do. With the teeniest dots of energy still left in his system there’s the teeniest window of opportunity to carry on painting, but Bobby’s head’s got a rock in it instead of a brain and soon sleep takes over. He ends up squashed on the remainder of the mattress like a broken Sticklebrick. The instant relief of deep slumbers drops him straight into the same hole as Georgie, but just as he begins to snore the front door goes blam-blam-BLAM and he’s spatten back out again. Poor Bobby the Artist. He rolls off the edge of the double bed, rubs his mop-top to and fro for a bit, then staggers sadly to the door as the next blam-blam-BLAM begins. Although he was only asleep for a millisecond it feels as if he’s been brought out of a coma, and he can only offer extreme hostility to the Express Pizza boy standing there in the corridor. ‘What?’ Bobby the Artist snaps. The pizza boy wobbles a bit, dressed in his dingy olive-green company T-shirt and holding out the 12” box like a riot shield. ‘Americano,’ he mumbles, offering it. ‘What?’ Bobby the Artist snaps. ‘Americano,’ the pizza boy repeats, feeling all shitty. Bobby doesn’t mean to be a dickhead, but after a night gurning his chops off the last thing he wants is a fucking pizza crust to chew on. Bobby’s about to slam the door in the pizza boy’s mush, but then he remembers all those parties and sit-ins round Johnnie and Ellen’s and the two of them always munching Americano pizzas, and he goes, ‘You want 5E not 4E. See you later then.’ As the door slaps shut, the Express boy pushes his bottom lip out then pushes on up the stairs. He hates his crap delivery job, especially when you get sent to weird tower blocks in the centre of dodgy estates, and people can be so rude sometimes. He passed his driving test first-go at age seventeen and got the job at Express at eighteen, and at first it was quite fun hurtling round town scoffing free Hawaiians, but the novelty wore off when he started getting lots of abuse, and when he started getting the spare-tyre belly. It’s heart-wrenching trying to get money off stubborn cunts, usually hard-case lads at a party who grab the pizza then tell you to fuck off in various ways. Then you get back to the kitchens and Mr Ashram clips you round the head and grumbles and you feel like dog poo-poo. The Express boy sighs, stepping gingerly down the vinyl corridor as he searches for 5E. What he really wants to be is a fighter-plane pilot. Squinting in the fluorescent white light, he knocks three times on the correct door then holds out the pizza, bracing himself for more abuse. And he couldn’t have knocked at a worse time – Johnnie and Ellen are in the bedroom having completely awful sex. As a rule their sex is typically shite with neither of them reaching orgasm, but this particular session reaches an all-time low. After getting in from pilfering phones and suchlike, Johnnie slept next to Ellen till midday then drank some flat White Ace and ordered the Americano on the promise of a quickie with his girlfriend. But it’s a longie – Ellen managed to get him hard, stripping down to da
ndelion knickers and stroking her nails down his balls, but she was unable to get any sort of wetness going herself what with Johnnie’s pathetic attempts at stabbing his fingers into her fanny, and when he swapped fingers for knob he might as well have been shagging a hole in the road. And thirty-seven minutes later it’s not any more enjoyable for either of them. The front door suddenly goes blam-blam-BLAM, and Johnnie and Ellen prise themselves apart with equal parts relief and exasperation. Ellen drops back on the covers with an all-red minge while Johnnie yanks on his Boro FC dressing-gown and stamps through the flat like the Incredible Sulk. ‘What?’ he snaps, opening the door to the Express boy. He’d forgotten all about the Americano. The ‘quickie’ should’ve been over ages ago, leaving Johnnie and Ellen in a warmish trance ready to gobble down some dinner. The pizza boy winces, then sucks in a little breath and mumbles, ‘Americano?’ Johnnie just yanks the 12” box off him, tosses the door shut and leaves the Express boy with a good old-fashioned, ‘Fuck off.’ He stomps his bare feet across the dog-eared carpet, growling to himself as he hops back into bed, then him and Ellen eat the pizza in painful silence. Ellen’s tucked under the duvet again with a few undergarments back on, and she crunches her teeth softly with a face like sour cream. Useless prick. The most annoying part is she loves Johnnie as a person (he looks after her, he’s funny, he lets her live at the flat, he owns drugs …), but sex to her is the most wonderful part of a relationship and it feels like getting raped every time he’s with her. With other lads it used to be lovely after a good fuck just to lie all tangled up chatting nonsense, but after a session with Johnnie she just wants to die. Often Ellen sucks him off in the beginning in the hope of him coming quickly and then not being in the mood for full-on sex. It kills him. Johnnie’s sexual prowess is based largely on hardcore pornography, where butch men gang-bang vulnerable ladies, and where foreplay means sticking your hand up the cunt or getting a skull-fuck, and every episode ends in the man gobbing hot white filth in the girl’s mush. It’s strange how any hetero man’s worst nightmare would be having a hard cock shoved up his arse, and yet their ultimate fantasy would be shoving theirs up a lady’s. Admittedly, Johnnie has been able to make past girlfriends orgasm but those were the dominant types, riding his cock into all the right places. On one occasion, with this girl Sharon, he accidentally found the clitoris. Johnnie wonders if Ellen’s just fucked so many lads she’s become picky and pernickety about how she likes it, but there go them jealous thoughts again. Johnnie screws his face up, finishing the chewy Americano, feeling absolutely tortured. He wonders what it is about sex with Ellen that just doesn’t hit the spot – the girls in the pornos all scream like cheery monsters! Maybe their bits don’t fit together properly, or maybe they’re just unlucky. The sex did get off to a crap start: Johnnie and Ellen first shagged each other on a Saturday back in January, and Johnnie remembers waking up that morning with the shits after a bad Hot Shot Parmo. Him and his boys had been on a bit of a binge the night before, hammering the ecstasy and cheapo Cassini, oh and a Parmesan. Today Johnnie doesn’t really take pills after suffering a wee bit of depression, but back in January he could nail ten in a night and still drive the Nissan Sunny home without much bother, and buzz off his tits. So anyway, the day after this binge he had severe diarrhoea, and spent most of the morning sat on the lav in his family home somewhere down Ormesby. It was definitely the Parmo – his matey Bello warned him it was a bit on the old side, but Johnnie was pissed and he hadn’t come up yet and he hadn’t eaten owt. You could smell the sloppy chicken in the bottom of the toilet bowl. It was disgusting, but once he flushed it away the bathroom didn’t stink so much and Johnnie started feeling better right away. He first noticed Ellen at the Jobcentre in a miniskirt and amber Puma top: she signed on at 10.33, Johnnie signed on at 10.36. After a few fortnights of shyness, they got talking and now and then Johnnie would bump into her wandering around town with her mates and a load of shopping bags. One night at the Purple Onion they had a kiss and a grope, and the week after that at the dole she got his number and, just as Johnnie was cleaning his bottom, she vibrated in his trousers. ‘Beep-beep!’ said the phone. Ellen was wanting to meet him at Aruba that night, not so much a date but just checking he’d be out and whether or not his dole came through on time. There’d been problems with the payments going through over Christmas, what with staff shortages and p-p-p-paperwork, but that morning checking her balance at Halifax Ellen had a crisp £176.14 and she wanted to go out and get pissed and perhaps shag that charming, pale boy she’d found at the Jobcentre Plus. Ellen’s attractive according to most men and despicable according to most girls (dripping toffee hair, too skinny, cream foundation acne, and a good arse even in her jogging bottoms), the type of girl who fucks a lad until she gets fucked about then fucks off to the next one, but she always seems happy. Johnnie hadn’t had sex for four months so he said yes he’d meet up with her, and he rallied up a few of his less-favourite mates, and they all got pissed and supercharged in Spensley’s before heading under the flyover to Aruba. The club had the bluey glitzy look of an aquarium but instead of fishies was full of skinhead lads in horizontal-stripe sweatshirts trying to pull, and noodle-haired girls looking sour in minimum clothes. Johnnie was pretty embarrassed meeting Ellen in a place like that – he used to go a lot when he was sixteen or seventeen, except back then it was the Royal Exchange and he used to exchange spit with girls without much hassle. His loudmouth patter gets him most things he wants out of life, despite him being rather ugly. And sure enough, by eleven o’clock he’d hooked up with Ellen and the two of them were bantering happily about each other and taking the mickey out of strangers while they sat together on the space-age settees. Johnnie liked to think of himself as a perceptive person, and he could clock all the signs of a prospective shag on the cards: Ellen’s leg crossed in his direction, occasional stroking of the knee, over-the-top laughter at anything he said, snogs with more and more tongue. Oh and her asking him, ‘Fancy a shag then tonight?’ The exhilaration knocked out Johnnie’s ribcage, heart beating the bass-drum at beats-per-minute, and the temptation was quite high to start nailing her there and then but luckily he refrained. Instead, Johnnie just kept a tight hold on her, and when Ellen went off to powder her nose or maybe have a piss he surreptitiously hid his rock-hard knob up his jean waistband and wandered off to Bello to perhaps get a pill. Bello was in charge of the ecstasy that night, and Johnnie found him dancing like a red windmill in the middle of the sunken dancefloor, occasionally fondling girlies’ hips and bums and getting slapped but not giving a shit, just carrying on in a mad Hackett world of his own. Bello was more than happy to give Johnnie a SmileyFace. ‘Yes mate, there you go,’ he said. It wasn’t really like Johnnie to go gurning a few nights on the trot (after all, the problem with being a pillhead while trying to punt hundreds of the fellows is you can eat all your profits), but he felt so wiped-out from the night before and wanted so much to have stamina for Ellen in bed, it seemed like the thing to do. But in the end it wasn’t stamina that let him down. The pill started to glow inside him like a pearl, the modest happy rush stacking on top of the five or six pills still vaguely rolling around his system from Friday, and the kisses with Ellen began to get more rampant if a bit drier what with his craggy ecstasy-mouth. Ellen didn’t seem to notice – she was getting more and more pissed, and in any case there was a chance she’d dropped a pill and all and just not let on to Johnnie. It was round about 1.09am things started to get dodgy. In some people pills create awful farts and you can get a sort of laxative effect, and what with all the sex excitement Johnnie had forgotten completely about the Hot Shot Parmo and the severe diarrhoea. Ellen was getting randy and she pulled Johnnie onto the dancefloor for a bit of a grind, and occasionally while shoobeedooing Johnnie let off a string of terrible pumps but the club was so packed the blame could easily be brushed off onto someone else. Ellen continued kissing him and smiling and jutting her hips out at dreamy angles, all the while Johnnie feeling bubbles up his bum an
d a sloppy turtlehead waking up from hibernation in his undies. With every fart he had to simultaneously clamp down his pelvic-floor muscles, resulting in the poo-poo travelling uncontrollably up and down his rectum like he was bumming himself. It was sort of obvious that at one point something had to give. In between the eleventh and twelfth bar of DJ Alligator’s ‘Lollipop’, there was another rumble in Johnnie’s sphincter then a big fart and suddenly he began to notice his boxer shorts caking together. His bum-hairs felt all claggy and the hole stung slightly. For a bit Johnnie tried to keep dancing and following Ellen’s footsteps, but even in the ecstasy joyousness he felt all the colour dribble from his face when he realised he’d soiled himself. He panicked, still gurning but with all his little pink dots of pleasure turning brown with paranoia, and quickly went to Ellen, ‘Just going to the bog. Don’t talk to anyone else.’ He fluttered to the bathroom with his trainers in cement, all nervous as he pushed himself into a cubicle and checked his M&S boxers for disaster. The whole crotch was plastered with thick furry brown crap. His cubicle didn’t have a lock and, wedging the flimsy door shut with a bony elbow, Johnnie realised there wasn’t much he could do to salvage them. He tried to give his arse a little wipe, but the paper just came away light brown flaky and smelly, and it’d probably take half an hour and some industrial-strength detergent to get himself completely clean. The time was already 1.28 and he didn’t want to lose Ellen. So Johnnie pulled up the crusty EmAndEsses and went strolling back into the nightclub with his head held high and his bum-crack in tatters. The crystally little light-fixtures were spotlamps in his eyes and he found Ellen quite easily in the cold, emptying-out club. She was smoking a long dirty Marlboro in the corner with a bunch of strangers. She was still pleased to see him, and the two of them bounced back onto the dance-floor to the beat of the last few drums. Johnnie felt a bit self-conscious with the pill fading off and his knickers in a twist, but he didn’t want to appear a killjoy so he kept throwing the Travolta moves and the big-fish-little-fishes with quite a bit of conviction. It was painful. Eventually it got to quarter to two and the club was all dead inside, bevvy carcasses and smashed glass snoring on the flooring, and Ellen took Johnnie by the hand and dragged him into the rushing gales of the street outside. She could tell he wasn’t quite himself, but there was no way he was going home without her. In terms of men, Ellen also always got what she wanted – she didn’t consider herself to be particularly stunning or highly sexed, but boys did tend to circle around her like swarms of bees. Perhaps she gave off a scent (was it CK Be that night?), or perhaps it was the miniskirts. Her and Johnnie jumped in the back of a black taxi, her pulling the skirt down to cover her botty, then they yelled the name of Johnnie’s estate and the taxi shot off. They snogged each other rushing past the faulty CNE sign and the cubist Workers’ Union, and the town was a spider’s web of streaky lamp-posts what with the taxi going so fast. Roads scooped under flyovers and dead shopping arcades like spoons through ice cream. The taxi got to Peach House within fifteen minutes and the fare cost £4.50. Though Johnnie hadn’t been selling any pills that night he still had money to pay the driver – on ecstasy you tend not to need that many alcoholic drinks, instead guzzling tapwater and passing the time dawdling around hugging everyone. Johnnie and Ellen were still quite lovey-wuvvy as they stepped between the pillars with the two boulders on top, but occasionally Johnnie flinched when her hand went to grab his bum-cheek. He had to make excuses when they got into 5E and nip to the toilet, straight away ripping off his Lee’s and unpeeling the boxer shorts. It was quite obvious Ellen was going to shag him, which left Johnnie in a bit of a conundrum. The M&Ss were fairly suave, and it seemed worth running the shower and trying to squeeze the shit out of them while undressing and feeling like a daft cunt. He didn’t want to leave Ellen waiting too long, especially since he lived in the flat alone and the floor was exploded with Super Tennents and ashtrays and porny pictures and vomity plates and cheese trainers and pillbags and shit CDs and torched carpet. He pulled a gigantic sad face in the mirror then got on with the wash. Naked, he popped his arse under the shower-flow, all the while checking out his knob-size and giving that a rinse and all. His dick was looking particularly shrivelled, poking around in the nightmarish bathroom light, but he expected that was due to the complete shittiness of the situation. His bum-fluff was totally matted, and to get most of the crap off he had to dig in with his nails. It was disgusting. The bottom of the bath looked like a muddy worm had crawled across it and died. Aaaaaaaaargh! His fingers smelt like fishy poo-poo, and the boxers were stained rusty orange. Johnnie sighed, then had a tiny gurn to himself and decided to cut his losses – the M&S pants went flying out the window like a beautiful brown kite. There was no more time to mess about. Johnnie dried his arsehole on the towel turning beige and beiger, and he frowned bushy caterpillars putting back on his clothes. It was getting on for half-past two as he strolled into the living room looking quite bedraggled and he wondered if Ellen would really wish to shag such a tragic person. But sure enough she smiled and took his hand, and Johnnie led her out of the bombsite and into his boudoir. Johnnie’s bedroom was red and white stripes with posters of Juninho and John Hendrie and Ravanelli on top, and although his sheets were a crumply mountain the room wasn’t particularly mucky. Ellen was feisty and sat straight on top of the peak, and when she started unzipping Johnnie she didn’t think it was strange he had no pants on. Johnnie felt a bit awkward (and maybe a wee bit paranoid off the pills), and he worried Ellen might be able to smell shit when she started sucking him off. Fortunately he stiffened up with such a nice mouth round his willy, and Ellen slobbered away minding her own business. She enjoyed giving head – having a boy shiver and spasm in time with her waggly tongue – and it was possible she was getting more pleasure off it than Johnnie. His brain was a cracked egg, half scrambled with poo-poo and half fried with sexstasy. He didn’t attempt to bring Ellen off with his shitty fingers, and when she eventually boinged on top of him all Johnnie could think about was brown goo. His arsehole still felt sticky and awful and he imagined the hot aroma of faeces filling the small bedroom, and it terrified him. Ellen was horny and couldn’t smell a thing, but just as she was reaching the sexy sunrise of an orgasm she started to feel Johnnie’s stiffy subside and his cock slipped out from inside her. She was devastated, and overall it did get the sex off to the shittiest possible start. And if anything it’s only gotten worse – now all Johnnie can do is give Ellen sore bits, no petit mort in sight unless you count Ellen wanting to kill her boyfriend. Nowadays she dreads going to bed, what with Johnnie always trying to put his leg over or trying to get her flaps going when she’s dry as newspaper. Most porn gives boys the impression girls like to suffer during sex, and when Johnnie first bashed Ellen’s delicate cervix he showed off to all the guys at the Linthorpe he’d ‘reached the top’. Wowee! Fifty-four bad shags later, Ellen’s seriously considering splashing out on a Rampant Rabbit or employing some sort of male escort, and she tries to think back to all these wonderful one-night stands she’s had with handsome, very competent strangers. Not only has she forgotten how to orgasm, she’s forgotten how to fake one. It’s now eight-and-a-bit months since her last cock-in-fanny climax (a boy named Smithy who could draw circles and figure-8s with the end of his penis), summer’s here, and Ellen wonders how much longer she can last without another fruity encounter. One particular balmy evening, she sits alone in Johnnie’s bed, bored out of her skull. She peers out the window at little kids playing ball games on the grassy verges five storeys below. She thinks bad thoughts. Johnnie’s out terrorising the neighbourhood (or so he said – he’s actually having a pint in the Central with his mates and they’re talking about Bello’s new Lacoste shellsuit, shiny red it is), and there’s nothing much to do but watch the world slowly turn. The kids outside are adorable – Ellen watches the girls steal the boys’ football, the boys chase the girls, they all fall over in the clover, and they all laugh their heads off with funny terrapin expressions. The
kids don’t care that the playing field’s all dusty and grubby and pooey, or that they’re not getting orgasms. Seven-year-olds don’t even know what an orgasm is, and they seem to be having a pretty fun time without one. Ellen wishes she was that age again, rolling around getting muddy in a flowery dress and hating boys and making fun out of dollies and twigs and old tyres, not drugs or booze or boys’ limbs. Ellen sighs, all cosy in her jammies but her head hurts from all the weird thinking, or is it just a hangover? Last night was another shitty shag with Johnnie (really drunk, Johnnie spurted his load while Ellen was trying to insert him up her mousetrap twat), and she smothers her head in the sweaty pillows to the sound of cackling little lasses. Her brain’s a puddle of piss, slightly wishing she hated Johnnie so they could go their separate ways but she doesn’t. It’s the fact that she otherwise gets on so well with Johnnie she doesn’t have the heart to keep telling him he’s a failure in bed. She doesn’t want to split up with him just because he’s a bad lay, but then again she doesn’t want a split up her cunt every time she goes to bed with him. It’s quite sad because obviously Johnnie knows he gives her very little pleasure, but his only frame of reference is pornography and over time he’s learnt to shag exactly like the clueless misogynistic bastards in those films. And yet somehow they always make the girls squirt! Johnnie’s confused, and more often than not he can be seen with a very sad head. He’s a lot less talkative nowadays, so Ellen’s glad she’s got Pamela and Mandy and the rest of the gang upstairs to knock around with and have a laugh with. There’s a party tonight in 6D, and Johnnie gave her a tenner in consolation for the bad sex. Bless him. She starts getting ready, co-ordinating her outfit with the pink sunset outside and feeling a bit less negative. She sniffs and slides on a rosy Umbro T-shirt with tights and denim miniskirt, and she goes overboard with the make-up because she thinks some boys might be there tonight. She gets a weird kick out of boys drooling over her, like it confirms her good-lookingness or something. She doesn’t think she’s insecure; she just loves to be loved. She imagines herself as a free spirit, always swanning around the halls and walls of Peach House like it’s the Chelsea Hotel in the sixties and she’s Nico and she knows where all the parties are. Sometimes she goes to Mandy’s, the stick-thin speed-freak who’s always got something crap to tell you. Sometimes she goes to Angelo’s, the hunky Sardinian who welcomes anyone as long as they’ve got booze or big boobs. Sometimes she goes to Pamela’s if her mam and dad’s away, the nursery worker with a permanently glazed expression on her face. Sometimes she goes to Bobby the Artist’s, if he’s not too fucked to open the door or talking to the wallpaper. It feels like a great place to be, and Ellen draws herself a smile out of pink lip-gloss. She runs the straighteners through her creamy waterfall hair, then whacks on a bit of CK Be and gazes at herself in the mirror plastered with grubby photos of friends and exes. Ellen’s been living at Johnnie’s for about three months, and nowadays the footy posters have been replaced with girly items such as stretch mirror, cuddly bunnies, photographs of people she used to snog and shag. She stays there rent free and she loves getting waited on hand and foot – Johnnie gives her anything she wants, from Americano pizzas to MDMA tablets, plus she’s guaranteed £88.10 in her Halifax every fortnight. It’s so class being on the dole, Ellen just loves drifting through her life like a princess on a throne carried about by court jesters or whoever. She laughs at that image in her head, then puts on her shoes and clomps out of the flat. She wibbles her bottom as she goes up the stairs, even though no one’s watching, and she feels a million dollars or maybe a million pound depending on the exchange rate. When she lets herself into 6D everyone’s sat around doing laughing gas, jibbering about like mental patients at a kids’ birthday party. Whoosh laugh whoosh laugh whoosh laugh. Ellen says her hellos then sits on a pile of floppy deflated balloons, all multicoloured and pretty amongst the Super Skols and the ashtrays getting passed around with reefers on top of them. She takes a toot or two, and a can of lager magically walks into her hand from across the carpet. Angelo’s there on the sofa arm (the boy who rents the flat), happily handing out drinks and whizzing the whip-cream cartridges into life in his dirty paws. Everyone’s faces turn alabaster as they take up lungfuls of the stuff, some of them giggling like wet nellies and others tripping off a cliff into hippy heaven as the gas roly-polys round their system. Mandy perches cross-legged next to Dave Morton (the professional footballer brought up on Premier Road), completely chewing his ear off with her tales of owning a racehorse and riding it to victory in the Grand National. She seems to have lost her marbles over the years – perhaps it’s down to nailing speed every day, although she always was a random cunt when she was at secondary school with Pamela and Ellen. Pamela looks on at Mandy with glazed disgust because she wants to get into Dave herself, but apart from that she’s enjoying blowing balloon after balloon into her air-pipes. Angelo likes to impress the girls and he sets them up with doublers, passing Ellen a big juicy watermelon-size one. After a count of one-two-three, they start sucking blowing sucking blowing sucking blowing with their cheeks going big and red like trumpet players, and for twenty seconds the happy happy hardcore core’s all repetititititive like a stuck stuck rec rec ord ord the squeaks squeaks of the balloooooooons are all birds all birds flying ing over over head head with Ellellellellellellellellellen riding a fire fire engine ing a fire engine through pink pink pine forest pink fire engine and then then there’s monkeys monkeys top top hats top hats top hats evil cackling cackle-cackle and and then then the cackle hissssing of ssssnakes no the hissing of balloons deflating and then she’s back in the flat again. ‘Fuck,’ she says. Funny how laughing gas doesn’t really make you laugh – it sends you to an altogether much weirder place. Ellen feels all shaken up and sober, and she curls up on the sofa cradling her knees. She makes a full-blown attempt next to get drunk, pilfering more lagers and big shots of vodka from people too busy dreaming to notice. Soon everyone’s monged – some of them start acting horny, retreating back to their quarters to shag their knobs and fannies off with each other; others are just dead bodies. Mandy slurps Dave’s lips off like a cream bun. Dave hasn’t played a professional match for about a month (he got tackled from behind by a butch cunt from Carlisle), and he’s quite enjoying all the time off getting wrecked on the sly. He’s the sort of boy who thinks one sniff of NO2 would send him insane for the rest of his life, but he’s known Angelo since they played for Marton as youngsters and he still likes coming round for a can or two. Dave actually looks quite fucked, nodding off to the smurf-voice hardcore stuff, but Mandy’s full of beans and drags him down the hall to fuck the hell out of him in her bare crusty bedroom. Pamela watches them leave over her sparkly blue bottle of Spectra, and she starts getting depressed and falls in a heap on Angelo’s burgundy settee, with a full balloon of NO2 clamped between her fingers. Suddenly the balloon flies from her hand, farting a trail of laughing gas that makes all the dust particles giggle, and it lands with a plip on Ellen’s lap. Ellen grins. By about two or three most people have wandered off or passed out in strange places round the flat (Kev in a cupboard in the kitchen, Stacey soaking in the shower), but Ellen’s feeling lovely and merry and she’s got Pamela’s Spectra to get through now. When the whip-cream things run out, Angelo slides up to Ellen and sits with her for a bit in front of the fuzzy television. ‘How’s it going?’ he asks through the static. Angelo’s been in Peach House about four months, and although he’s shagged his way through many of the residents (an over-forty-year-old included), he’s yet to snake-charm Ellen. Sex is his kick, and to be honest he’s not bad looking – yummy hot-chocolate head, Pacific Ocean eyeballs, and black and white vests with massive muscles underneath. Girls have a hard time resisting him, what with his silkworm touch and his persistence – he claims to have bedded over five hundred lovers, and he’s only twenty-four. Angelo preys on anything with a nice face or figure or just a fanny-hole and, even though he knows about Johnnie the big bad boyfriend, he can’t stop himself pl
acing a hand on Ellen’s lap. He submerges the little girl in his whirlypool pupils and says to her, ‘Ellen, you look a bit down.’ Ellen says she’s alright – in fact she’s pretty mortalled now she’s started on the cider, and she sees two or maybe even three Angelos towering over her. But she likes the look of them, and she lies back having a wee drunken smile to herself. She can be a flirt as well, and mainly just to amuse herself she does an awful pout and slaps Angelo on the left biceps. ‘In fact, I’m quite alright,’ she grins, thinking she’s hilarious. Angelo feels his knob and balls starting to expand. He touches her on the thigh, totally in awe of Ellen the same way he was totally in awe of the other five hundred. ‘I’ve got a pill if you want it,’ Angelo ventures, ‘it’s up to you, like; just thought you needed cheering up or something.’ Ellen’s eyes flap open, suddenly all alert for about one and a halfish seconds. ‘Well I don’t need cheering up like but I wouldn’t say no though, would I,’ Ellen grins. So they take the ecstasy together (Angelo having ninety-eight of them locked away in his Buddha pot in the bedroom, recently acquired from this boy on Kesteven Road, you know, down near the Total garage), and after about fifty minutes and a bit more leg-rubbing they can both feel it kicking in. Ellen probably less so than Angelo, what with her being so smashed and still drinking, but it adds nicely to the madness already sitting in her brain-box. They crouch together in the flicky sizzle of the television set, the only other people around lying comatose beneath the navy blue window blowing clouds from one edge of wallpaper to the other. It’s a delightful feeling, and for a while Ellen and Angelo talk manically about how good the party was and how good the laughing gas was and how good the random shags were and how good the patches of vomit were, and Johnnie. The flat’s a mess and so are their heads – Angelo’s in rapture and he so desperately wants to slide his cock in the lady, and weirdly he seems to be getting better looking the more Ellen glances at him. Skimming a finger over her anklebone, Angelo raises an eyebrow and asks softly, in his dulcet Rudolph Valentino accent, ‘So everything’s perfect with Johnnie, then?’ Angelo’s quite cunning (after all, no relationship’s perfect, is it?), and it’s like a clarion call when Ellen replies, ‘Ah, I dunno, well see I dunno if I should say like … it’s just the sex … at the minute … isn’t that great … oh I dunno, I think I just need a good shag ha ha ha ha.’ And Ellen sits there sheepish for a second, then Angelo moves a bit closer and her lips accidentally fall on his and they keep falling for about a minute and falling and falling. For a second she regrets it, but then Angelo’s hands are all over her neck and hips and tits and arse, and suddenly she’s enjoying it. Perhaps Ellen’s a selfish bitch, but surely if you’re desperate for an orgasm you’re entitled to have one even if it’s not from your boyfriend. Even the feel of Angelo’s big fat tongue in her mouth gets her all flustered – Johnnie’s got a bit of a pointy one. ‘Let’s go in the bedroom,’ Angelo whispers, all his hot breath giving Ellen a heat-wave. She feels jittery and pissed and lurved-up, and she nods and practically drags the boy herself to the double bed. They strip each other off, Ellen stroking his knob through the straight trousers while she gets her Umbro shirt ripped off. She kneels topless on the covers then gives Angelo a blow-job, biting him through his Y-fronts then slipping them off and slurping up his big red-ender. Angelo’s got a much larger cock than Johnnie, and she tugs it with two hands, tasting all the clear stuff coming out. It’s brilliant just to treat each other like animals for one night, but when Ellen’s knickers get whipped off and Angelo frigs her beautifully with two fingers she turns to glass and melts. On top of the pill she’s also on the Pill, and she kisses Angelo’s buffalo skin and mouth as she crawls into the girl-on-top position. Usually it’s uncomfortable starting sex with Johnnie in this formation, but as Ellen squeezes Angelo’s dick and slowly lowers herself round it she’s absolutely dripping wet. Speaking of drips, two floors down Bobby the Artist still can’t sleep. He sits upright in bed next to silent Georgie, thinking much too deeply about a strange dripping in the kitchen. Drip! All the money’s run out now for drugs and food and booze, but that still hasn’t stopped his mind acting strange. As he sits with his back up against the bronze headrest, Bobby glares at the opposite wall, hearing an excruciating weeny plop about every four or five seconds. Each drip feels like a depth charge going off in his skull. Drip! Is he imagining it? Outside the weather’s humid, and even though he’s boiling Bobby the Artist slips on his yellow and blue argyle to go and sort out the kitchen. He leaves Georgie dozing with no covers on and just her cerulean-with-pink-trim knickers, softly banging his sweaty painty feet onto carpet then Drip! onto linoleum. Bobby looks a mess (raggy hair, skinny legs under the argyle and his knob out), and perhaps the insomnia’s down to drug withdrawal rather than innocent drips, but when it’s 4.14am no one likes to get Chinese water tortured. Drip! Dawn’s breaking, and for a bit Bobby gets distracted by the beautiful purple steamy sunrise stretching its rays under the drawn net curtains. He gets mesmerised by a lovely little laser beam, striking through a wee gap in the window, but then Drip! the drips are back, and louder. Louder! Bobby the Artist rubs his sore bonce. Drip!! Where to start? The taps: Bobby and Georgie made a huge spag bol this evening with cheesy bread and Parmesan on top and all that gourmet shite, and the Artist knocks down all the dirty dishes to check the hot and cold taps but the sink’s silent except for the big annoying crash he just made. The freezer: They defrosted the freezer the other week, and on the off-chance they messed it up Bobby checks whether it’s leaking, but there’s just rock-hard pizzas and mince and ice cubes and icicles hanging down like they’ve been growing a mini North Pole in the kitchen. For a bit he crouches and stares at the gritty frost and smoke in case it does something, but it doesn’t. The kettle: Georgie likes cups of tea (with four sugars in them). She boils the kettle at least three times a day, and Bobby examines the adjacent wall and ceiling in case there’s been a build-up of condensation and now it’s decided to start dripping. But no. Antagonised, Bobby stands all huffy-and-puffy with his hands on his hips (a classic pissed-off pose). Holding his breath, Bobby listens really closely to the next four or five Drip!! Drip!! Drip!! Drip!!s, but it’s not that obvious which direction they’re coming from. His ears are ringing after listening to Metal Machine Music all night, and the drips seem to gain a more arrogant Splish! the more he can’t find them. The boiler: Getting desperate, Bobby starts to dismantle the Baxi, uncovering all the fancy copper pipes and investigating each one and each one’s little fittings for leakage, but unfortunately the plumbing’s faultless. Splish! The tinned goods: Losing it, Bobby scrabbles through the various tins of tomatoes and tats and Heinzes in the lone cupboard, as if they could seep enough drippy liquid to keep a grown man out of bed. They’re fine, of course. The floor: Bobby the Artist breaks down on the lino floor in a heap of argyle sweater and ball sac. His brain absolutely kills, and the wee droplets are now giant’s feet stomping all round the kitchen. Boom!! Bobby’s insane. He curls up in a ball, leaving snail-trails of sweat-marks along the plastic ground, totally exhausted but unable to drop off. It’s as if he’s forgotten how to fall asleep, and Bobby just sprawls there in a frustrating sleepy no-man’s-land. Boom!! He tries to count sheep but the drips come at such strange intervals his mind becomes a knot of numbers and splishes and he wonders if it’ll Boom!! ever unravel. The only consolation is that lovely colourful shard of daybreak squeezing under the curtain, and Bobby the Artist flicks his fingers through it smiling moronically. It’s such a beautiful spectacle that Bobby pulls himself from the ground and tugs open the curtain completely, and that’s when he sees the gorgeous bright rainbow arcing all the way from Berwick Hills to South Bank, and that’s when he sees the slight rainfall dripping every three or four seconds on the metal window ledge. Drip! The following night Bobby the Artist can’t sleep thanks to an obscure banging upstairs. Bang! It’s actually Johnnie beating the shit out of Angelo, throwing him against the four walls and battering his kneecaps and almost breaking his ow
n wrist thumping him round the face. He bishes him and bashes him and boshes him. He doesn’t know for sure Ellen’s cheated on him, but the walls of this tower block are incredibly thin, which blesses (or curses) the inhabitants with a strange sort of psychic sixth sense – or rather a sort of uncontrollable nosy awareness of what everybody’s up to. Johnnie knows Ellen slept round Angelo’s last night – he heard her voice coming out of his ceiling. And he knows what red-blooded bloodhounds like Angelo try to do to girls when they’re in their pyjamas. Ellen came back this afternoon with her miniskirt on the wrong way and teethmarks on her Umbro top and pupils like coat buttons. Without even thinking, she told Johnnie Angelo was knocking out brilliant ecstasy, and maybe he should get hold of some of these ‘sharks’ himself. Just when she thought it was safe to go back in the water, splashing herself down on the sofa and putting an arm round Johnnie, her boyfriend leapt up, kicked an Americano box the length of the flat, then bounded upstairs to sort the cunt out for good. It’s bad enough Ellen being round the Sardinian’s all the time, but even worse is some prick like him stealing his pill business. Johnnie has a hard time as it is trying to pay the rent, but he credits himself with a good few volleys to Angelo’s forehead and a scream of, ‘You bastard!!’ He wants to kill him, or at least kill his good looks, throwing precision toe-punts into his great cheekbones and thick greasy locks. Angelo begins spewing up blood, nervously spasming to and fro in his apartment, convinced Johnnie knows about him and Ellen (a great shag; one hour and thirty-three minutes of missionary, doggy, legs in the sky, blow-job, cunnilingus, three orgasms for Ellen and two for Angelo, the only disappointment being the 500 million hyperactive sperms he deposited in Ellen’s womb, surfing wildly through her hot pipes desperately searching and barging into each other and racing round the fallopians, only to find she’s on the Pill and there’s no Mrs Egg and two hours later they all got knackered and they frizzled and fried in her belly and died, all the little sperms screaming, ‘Nooo! And it was such a promising shag and all …’), and he keeps whining, ‘I’m sorry … sorry … sorry sorry sorry.’ He sort of resigns himself to the fact he’s going to get murdered. Johnnie’s not that barbaric though – he just enjoys roughing up/disciplining people he doesn’t like. He sees it as a form of education. It killed him the other evening to hear Ellen describe Angelo as ‘sweet’, ‘really funny’ and ‘a bit hunky’ to Pamela outside his own front door, and sometimes he thinks Ellen doesn’t appreciate him at all. Last night Johnnie gave her a tenner to get drunk and hopefully come back for a cuddle in bed or a roll in the hay (Ellen pretty much has to be drunk for him to see any action at all), but she had to go and spoil it all by getting pilled-up, not even phoning Johnnie, and ending up possibly sleeping in the bed of a man renowned for being seedy and fucking the shit out of anything with tits. Johnnie can’t even handle the thought of one finger being placed on her, let alone in her. He has a habit of weaving sick tapestries in his head, and as he batters Angelo senseless all he can see is a Mediterranean man’s penis sliding in and out of Ellen’s vagina. Johnnie grits his teeth into tiny white treestumps. An odd tear clouds his vision as he kicks through Angelo’s skull, splatters of crimson Jackson Pollocking round the room. Angelo’s eyes are bruised and so podgy he can’t really see anything, and he just lies there as Johnnie continues laying into him. It’s not one of his better comedowns. Angelo curls up into a snail shape, but that only spurs Johnnie on to boot him up the arse, catching a stray bollock squashed between his elephanty thighs. Angelo screams. Johnnie’s expertise in the field of fighting dates back to him shattering Jamie Morris’s shin after getting snowballed in the face when he was eight. Johnnie quickly realised he could get anything he wanted with a few threats and well-executed punches to the sides of the head: for instance money for the 65A, Astrobangers, cigarettes off lads in Day-Glo trackies, and once he even got a tramp to give up his can of Special Brew when he was in year seven. Back then Johnnie had total confidence in himself and total respect from everyone else, back when there were no adult troubles such as mediocre sex, spongers, piss-takers, no income, drug deals, monogamy. The worst thing that ever happened to Johnnie was growing up, although he does still feel slightly childish walloping Angelo’s head once, twice, thrice, four times against the TV cabinet. Initially during a beating the body releases some sort of natural anaesthetic or force-field, and you don’t get all that hurt, but by now it’s completely worn off and Angelo writhes round the carpet, trailing blood like a red cape. His eye-slits are full of raspberry tears, making him blind and dazed and worried. At first he thought Johnnie would run out of steam after a handful of punches and bright kicks to Angelo’s forehead, but it’s quickly become clear he’s in for twelve rounds of torture. Even Johnnie’s arms are muddied with throbs and hot aches, his mind absolutely barmy with hatred. It’s like there’s a black voodoo monkey crawling round his brainwaves, tormenting him with a constant string of pictures: sperm spurting up his girlfriend’s cervix, her lips slurping up slippy stiff dicks. Johnnie explodes with new-found fury, stamping rock-hard on Angelo’s vested chest then flinging fists here and there at the jumble of fishy features that now make up the boy’s face. ‘Stop stop stop!’ Angelo yelps in a desperate five-year-old’s plea for help. Today he knows what it feels like to be dying, though in situations like this it’s possible to conjure up some weird sort of superhuman strength, and Angelo spins over and manages to rattle one elbow into Johnnie’s side. Johnnie doesn’t like this. He gets his claws out, scrabbling and ripping at Angelo’s swollen lumps and bumps, and in the process his black vest tears open revealing big defined pecs and shaved chest, Hulk Hogan style. You’d think Angelo had enough power to put up a decent fight, or at least a half-decent barrier, but in actual fact the muscles come from a diet of weight-gain milkshakes and steroids and they’re more pleasing to the eye than really powerful. That fucking chest disgusts Johnnie (all hunky, rigid and brown like a leather sofa), but maybe there’s a bit of envy too – Johnnie once considered taking steroids, but he’s scared of needles, and needle-sized willies. As a result, he’s a bit like Skeletor to Angelo’s He-Man, and he doesn’t see any reason why Ellen wouldn’t go off gallivanting with this sexy cunt. He’d like to cut his throat. It’s almost not enough for Angelo just to lie there with a few swellings and purple skin; Johnnie really wants to degrade him. He leaves Angelo soaking through the living room carpet, waltzing into the bathroom to find some sort of razor or cutting device. He scrambles through endless moisturisers, hair products, deodorants, creams, face-washes, dental hygiene stuff and handcare on the mouldy windowsill, until he finds Angelo’s shaving bits. There’s no old-school cutthroat flick-knife thing like gentlemen used in days of yore, but Johnnie uncovers some of those Wilkinson Sword double-edge numbers and staggers back into the lounge with one pressed in his palm. Alright, he might not be able to dissect the hairy animal with it, but he’s sure he’ll think of something. Johnnie catches his face in the mirror on the way out, all haggard and scary, and he does feel a bit of a sick cunt. He could probably do with a shave and all. Johnnie coughs, then laughs at Angelo – he looks like a wrestling figure with his arms and legs on the wrong way. Johnnie kneels down. ‘Swallow one, you cunt,’ he spits, unwrapping a dull silver blade from the paper, ‘or I’ll fucking kill you …’ Angelo’s totally shitting himself and delusional, pain spreading down every limb from the tips of his fingers to his toes and nose, and he genuinely believes Johnnie’s insane enough to take his lovely life. After all, he’s feeding him fucking razor blades, isn’t he. It’s a weird situation – Angelo feels strangely deserving of these horrors (to be honest, having shagged about sixty women already in relationships, Angelo always thought himself lucky not to have yet received a hiding, but always knew one was round the corner), but surely no one should have to stand for this. Johnnie just doesn’t know when to stop – he loves Ellen so much but can’t cope with all the pain she causes, and all he can do is take it out on other people and not her. A boy brough
t up on beating people up, Johnnie just doesn’t know how to react any differently to such shitty affairs. Oh yeah, and those pills! Those fucking ‘sharks’, or whatever they’re called. What a bastard. Johnnie pins Angelo’s head down on the itchy carpet, clamps his nose shut, then pushes a razor blade between his lips and urges the cunt to swallow. Angelo screams but Johnnie wants to scream as well, getting convinced Angelo knows all about his inadequacy in bed, and his small knob, and his oddly minuscule balls, and that time he shit himself in Aruba. So, he sees no reason not to make Angelo eat a razor, and he prods the steel blade right down the Sardinian’s tongue, being careful not to nick himself on it. Angelo squirms, panicking a sweaty diluted trail of blood around the apartment – he tries one more time to punch Johnnie’s kneecap, but it’s pretty futile and Johnnie just mutters, ‘Fucking prick.’ Then he gets a bit firmer and informs him, ‘You swallow that fucking razor now or you’re going out the window.’ He points to the sky outside, all square and blue and delightful, but dropping six storeys isn’t really the way Angelo would like to enjoy it. Angelo used to love taking girls out for dates at beer gardens and restaurants in the yummy summertime before bringing them home and banging them expertly in his bed or giving head up on the rooftop, and all these sorts of merry memories lightning-strike through his head as he lies there with a razor blade in his gob. So, your life does flash before your eyes before you die, after all! Johnnie restrains him, kneeling hard on his bulky shoulders, and Angelo supposes he’s had an alright time on earth (if all it means is working five days a week so you can enjoy yourself at the weekends and sleep with lots of people). He shuts his eyes, sort of accepting it might be the end for him thanks to this horrible psycho/ psychic cunt crouched on top of him. He’s crying a bit because he doesn’t want to swallow a Wilko Sword, but something inside him thinks he should do it because he’s been such a naughty boy – and after all it’d be better to eat a razor than plummet to a mushy death (and he’s been beaten to such a pulp already he doubts it’ll feel much worse than a sore throat) – so Angelo crunches his face and lets the blade slide down his gullet, lashing his legs out in mid-air as it starts gashing up the roof of his mouth. He screeches a banshee wail as the thing gets stuck halfway, latching onto the back of his throat, and he coughs out water-pistolly blood, gurgling and yelling obscenities that shake the tower block out of the concrete. It’s more the choking sensation that gets to him – to be honest it hardly feels like his mouth’s getting sliced up; it’s all in his head. He gasps and retches for air, coughs battling peristalsis and the blade stammering up and down his food-pipe, and Angelo keeps screaming for a bit of sympathy. Johnnie’s bored now anyway, and slowly rises from the floor, deciding to leave Angelo alone and get back down to his girlfriend – who he loves – and he takes probably one or two steps across the carpet when suddenly the door whams open and Alan Blunt the Cunt’s standing there brandishing a candlestick holder. ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Alan growls in his gravelly baritone, almost swinging at Johnnie without any sort of explanation. Alan Blunt’s one of the stranger characters in the building, and his flat’s the equivalent of the spooky mansion at the end of your street with the black cats roaming outside and the bats in the attic and dead bodies in the closet. There’s rumours that Alan might have killed his wife (though it’s more likely she just left him, Alan being a bit of a twisted fucker), or that he’s a paedo (Alan’s favourite hangout of an afternoon is peering over the fence at Corpus Christi primary school), but Johnnie’s not the sort of person to hold a grudge really and often he goes round to Alan’s to help with DIY or have a nice cup of tea. Johnnie stops where he is on Angelo’s stained floor, the dizzy light spreading his lanky shadow across the wall, and he holds his hands up to Alan and says, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all sound, mate.’ Alan Blunt the Cunt squints through his thick brown kiddy-fiddling glasses, his curly hair all matted with lack of sleep, and he smiles when he recognises Johnnie there in his lime shellsuit. ‘What’s going on? Youse are fucking keeping me up! I’ve got to drive the container tonight, you know,’ Alan says, relaxing slightly. Although he’s a nutty bastard, Alan does enjoy living in Peach House – it makes him feel less lonely, living in a big pink Tower of Babel, and in particular Johnnie’s someone he gets on well with, often bumping into him and chatting about the football and the betting shop and the 4.45 at Doncaster. Johnnie wafts his hand at Angelo, writhing about like a worm stuck on tarmac, and he says to Alan, ‘See this cunt there, he’s been dealing drugs to little kids. Just thought he needed a ticking-off like.’ Alan Blunt the Cunt hates drugs, hates the idea of youngsters becoming vegetables shooting shite up their veins and noses and, being a racist twat, he’s also pleased to see a foreign person lying there in a jumble. Tears flooding his eyelids, Angelo coughs a couple of times and regurgitates the razor blade into his mouth again, keeping it clenched between his teeth though so as not to draw attention to himself. He hopes to God Alan doesn’t pounce on him as well. Being a foreigner living next-door to a racist was always going to cause frictions, and rumour has it in his youth (the 1970s) Alan used to go around in a gang terrorising Paki shops and Paki houses and pizzerias and Turkish kebab inns. Today, though, Alan just stands in the threshold, his fluffy hand flexing on the candlestick, and he goes, ‘Well, good lad, Johnnie. Just keep it down, alright?’ Johnnie nods, feeling a bit softer in the head now it’s all off his chest and Alan’s here. He knows Alan’s alright even though he’s a bit of a cunt, and they walk out of Angelo’s together laughing at the state of that silly Sardine. They actually high-five each other on the way down the corridor. Alan Blunt the Cunt offers Johnnie a cup of tea or Pot Noodle back at his but, even though he’s pretty starving, Johnnie wants to get back downstairs with Ellen and he shakes Alan’s hand and they say their cheerios on the grubby carpet outside 6E. Johnnie hopes Ellen hasn’t run away during all this violence, and he hopes she hasn’t really made the beast with two backsides with Angelo. What a mental evening. In the flat underneath Alan the Cunt’s (5E), while Johnnie and Al say their goodbyes Ellen stands shaking in the silvery bathroom holding their Gary Rhodes frying pan aloft. Although she does love Johnnie sometimes he scares the hell out of her, and she stands around all guilty and paranoid about that amazing amazing fuck with Angelo. All she said to Johnnie was Angelo’s got some incredible pills on the go, and suddenly Johnnie cracked and stormed upstairs, and you could hear him cracking Angelo’s head off the walls and the furniture and especially the paper-thin floor. She’s past herself with worry that Angelo might spurt something out about them shagging, and she fucking hates herself even though the fuck was great. She can hear the fighting subsiding upstairs, but now every little creak and voice and slamming door around Peach House gives Ellen the willies as she waits for Johnnie to return. Paranoia! If Johnnie knows she’s been a slag, is he going to give her the same treatment? To Ellen it sounded like Johnnie was gouging Angelo’s eyeballs out or slicing his Jap’s eye open or something like that. She dithers round the bathroom like a nervous little lamb, dressed in a white Ellesse tracksuit Johnnie bought her last month from the FirstSport catalogue she gets through the door. She can’t understand how she could be such a bitch to Johnnie because he’s so caring and sweet and protective, but then again she can understand because she got the ride of her life last night. Sex with Johnnie is devastating – often she’s too dry to even bother attempting to put his penis inside her, or Ellen’s too tired but Johnnie pushes her and pushes her until they have awful depressing zombie sex, or Ellen’s on her period and – although she doesn’t mind having sex on the blob – when they change positions Johnnie sees big globs of gooey cummy blood on his dick and it goes instantly limp, or occasionally Johnnie’s so drunk he comes after two or three thrusts and Ellen feels shitty cleaning all his gunk out of herself for nothing. Alright, so Johnnie knows he’s a bad shag, but surely that’s no reason to go around cheating on the boy. But she did, and maybe in her head she expects to get murdered. That’s why
her and Gary Rhodes are hiding in the bathroom together. She hears Johnnie come through the front door, and she shudders, clutching the pan a bit higher. She can imagine the mad temper on his face – upside-down V eyebrows, eyes with the skinny red veins popping out, grit teeth, and those unusual twitches he gets when in the presence of bouncers, police, and other people he hates. Ellen’s arms are too tiny for the great weight of the frying pan, and really she doesn’t want to hurt Johnnie, but if these are her last few moments on earth she does want to go out with a bang. She glances at herself in the runny water-splashed bathroom mirror, and she thinks if she does happen to die this afternoon at least she’s looking good for the paramedics – perhaps the sex yesterday has given her that bit of extra radiance. She strokes her hair. Ellen’s not sure where to position herself in the tiny cube to surprise-attack Johnnie the best, but after a bit of scuttling around and climbing on things she decides to stop knocking things over and stands silently behind the door again. She practises a few swings of the pan, Ellen imagining in great detail the door handle getting depressed and the door slowly slowly squeaking open and Johnnie’s bleedy trainer coming in then his evil scowling face and him saying, ‘Here’s Johnnie!’ then Ellen swinging the pan 180 degrees and the metal connecting with Johnnie’s head and clunking against his skull and Johnnie tumbling to the ground with a ‘bump aargh’ and the non-stick surface of the pan ending up very sticky and red. In the end, though, Johnnie just steps into the bathroom and disarms her very easily. He takes Gary Rhodes by the handle and yogs him casually onto the lino floor. Ellen bursts into tears (plan B) then hugs/suppresses Johnnie and whimpers, ‘Did you kill him did you kill him?’ Suddenly Ellen’s a sopping tracksuit wrapped around Johnnie’s, and she does an incredible puppy-dog-saved-from-drowning expression and almost tells Johnnie she’s sorry and she loves him but she doesn’t want to go overboard. Johnnie’s natural instinct is to feel anxious (is she worried Angelo’s dead because it means she can’t shag him again?), but there’s a teensy pink lever in his heart which gets triggered whenever Ellen’s looking sad and vulnerable, and he smiles and strokes her platinum hair and says, ‘Don’t be daft. I just taught him a lesson, didn’t I. He’s a prick.’ Ellen lands on her knees, shaking the bathtub and the sink and the stinky shower curtain, and she asks, ‘Are you cross at me?’ Johnnie goes, ‘Naw, of course I’m not.’ He’s still got suspicions about her and Angelo, but he knows deep down taking them out on Ellen will only result in him or her getting dumped and more sadness for Johnnie and cold beds and the shitty rat-race of chasing girls again and the possibility of not getting shagged himself again for maybe three or four-plus months. That’s not the life for him. He’d rather keep all the wonderful incredible things about Ellen and all the sickening dreadful things about her than not have anything of her at all. So, slightly grudgingly (but knowing in the back of his mind it’s the right thing to do), Johnnie takes a breath, takes up Ellen in both of his arms and says, ‘Don’t worry, Ellen, I love you. That cunt Angelo, ah he should know better not to go around punting pills. I’m struggling enough, aren’t I. He’s a cunt, he’s a cunt.’ Ellen can’t really believe Johnnie could beat Angelo to a pulp just because of ecstasy, but she’s happy with the result and cuddles him back and swears in her head she’ll never do anything to hurt him ever again, if she can. For Johnnie it feels instantly heavenly to have her back in his arms – just the feel of Ellen and her little heartbeat makes him feel happy again. The two of them are pretty knackered now and they retreat back into the lounge, holding hands, and they flop onto the settee like grandma and granddad. Johnnie’s right arm stings from the wrist to the tip of his shoulder, but for the time being he doesn’t mind Ellen lying on top of it. He feels a bit bad for making such a mess of Angelo’s carpet and for disturbing the neighbours, but soon tiredness takes over with his head on Ellen’s breast and he forgets all his worries, and slowly he begins to wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink. Johnnie dreams about the tower block, imagining himself as the Don (all black slick-back hair and crisp suits and fishes in newspapers and tommy guns in violin cases), calling all the shots in the creaky crappy corridors of the building. Peach House isn’t perfect, but it’s not hell on earth either – the council tarted up the outside with double-glazing and pinky/yellowy/creamy-square pattern about five years back. It stands like a candy castle over the busy Cargo Fleet crossroad, lined with skinny brown chip-shops and newsagents and Lidl and the two other blocks Plum and Pear. Inside, Peach House is all beigey colour schemes turned fluorescent by striplights, the corridors all claustrophobic garden paths leading you round the lodgings. The landings are either too hot or too cold depending on the season or where the sun sits in the sky, and you have to watch for dead furniture and kiddies knock-a-door-running when traversing the gangways. Floor seven is a mirage of exotic smells and spices, floor two has a poster up encouraging you to KNOW YOUR LIMIT when it comes to drinking booze, and floor ten leads up to the roof where all the satellite dishes hang out and where Alan Blunt the Cunt may or may not have tried to commit suicide the year before. Tower blocks tend to house a really strange collection of people, ranging from skint young families to slightly frightening hermits, rowdy little drug-taking bastards who keep everyone up all night, depressed single middle-aged people and immigrants, and last week the lift broke and now from outside you can see them all charging up and down and up and down the stairways like ants. It’s a pain in the arse one morning when Mrs Fletcher (a secretary at a solicitor’s in town, who lives way up on floor eight) is late for work and has to battle about a million steps just to get to the bus stop outside. It’s partly her own fault – there was an interesting article this morning in her Observer about Van Gogh being a nutcase and chopping his ear off and not being appreciated in his own time, and she sat in bed reading with her husband while the clock ticked way past 9am. It’s so difficult getting out of bed since Mr Fletcher got laid off at the post office – nowadays he just sits in the floral armchair, checking Teletext for jobs, sipping cups of coffee getting colder and colder, spring-cleans the apartment, stays in bed till afternoon. It was incredibly tempting to stay under the covers with him this morning, enjoying the paper and pasties he purchased that morning from Premier, but now Mrs Fletcher’s cursing herself because she’ll never make it to the office for 9.30 and it’s not fair Jennifer covering for her when the poor girl’s got loads of filing and phone calls to answer herself. Mrs Fletcher grimaces, bobbing and weaving past carriers of rubbish as she charges down down down round round round. Her Elizabeth Duke watch tells her she’s missed the 9.23 bus already, and she mutters something shitty under her breath and wonders if it’s worth running down the stairs at all. Those new heels from Priceless still aren’t worn in, and it’d probably be Mrs Fletcher’s luck to snag one on a binbag and collapse all the way down to ground floor. If only the lift was working, there’d be none of this hassle. Apparently the men from the council have been informed about the faulty cable mechanism, but Mrs Fletcher’s experience with authorities and councillors and workmen in general leads her to thinking it’ll be weeks before it’s even looked at/diagnosed. The world of work is very disappointing. She can’t help but think Mr Fletcher was so hard done by losing his job at the post depot – he was a solid worker, never had a day off in eleven years, and he found pleasure inventing magical stories about the people on all the envelopes he sorted. When Mr Fletcher was at the PO he was as happy and radiant as the stallion she met twenty years ago in the George public house in Normanby, but as the mail became more automated, more and more workers lost their jobs and Mr Fletcher was one of the first to go in September. The Fletchers had to downsize from their cosy semi into Peach House, and her husband blames himself and spites all technology and machinery, and he doesn’t even like boiling the kettle any more. He has nightmares about a sort of Terminatorish
world where all the robots and machines and tin cans wage war against the humans, and all the Luddites would have to go hide in some kind of underground Butlins holiday camp, awaiting death or batteries running out. He mopes around the house with nothing much to do. The Fletchers don’t even have a garden he can potter about in, and living on floor eight makes him feel particularly housebound and lonely, cut off from the trees and the flowers and the streets and the human faces. Mrs Fletcher herself doesn’t mind living in the sky – they’ve made the flat quite homely, kitted out with chintzy furniture, and the view’s incredible – but this morning it’s a nuisance and all she can do is just grumble, tumbling down the spirals and landings. She’s reduced to a walking pace by the time she reaches floor four (and desperate for one of the ten Sterlings she limits herself to each day), and she’s in an awful mood. She can’t be bothered explaining why she’s late to Mr Gosling when she’s got no proper excuse, and he’ll probably be on her back all day, and it’s nowhere near the weekend. Mrs Fletcher’s almost tempted to scuttle back upstairs and phone in sick, when suddenly she trips and stops and gazes at that ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm) Bobby the Artist discarded on the landing. Except to her it’s not a blob with eyes; it’s a dazzling masterpiece, a wacky celebration of colour and seaside, and the most beautiful sleeping beauty since Sleeping Beauty. Mrs Fletcher blinks, picks up the picture, and suddenly she doesn’t give a shit about being late for work any more. She loves art, you know. She touches the surface, tracing the lumpy bumpy brushstrokes over the top of Georgie’s over-the-top mascara. Mrs Fletcher wonders how such a gorgeous artwork could be chucked so brutally down the corridors of her block, and she’s about to slip it in her briefcase when suddenly the door of 4E creaks open and the real Georgie staggers out of her Hansel and Gretel flat made of sweets, bleary-eyed. Georgie’s got work at ten at Bhs, and she steps down the steps all grumpy and knackered. She’s still a bit dazed after a great dream about a gigantic piñata, candy raining down on her as she bats the hell out of her boss Mr Hawkson strung way up high from a tree. She can’t be fucked going to work either. Georgie scratches under her unflattering nylon uniform, hardly noticing Mrs Fletcher standing there with the painting halfway in her briefcase. Fletcher smiles sheepishly, suddenly recognising Georgie as the girl from the picture, and she asks her, ‘Excuse me, is this your painting?’ Georgie snaps out of her sickly trance, glances at Mrs Fletcher and the bit of paper in the quarter-light of the corridor, then croaks, ‘Erm, naw, it’s Bobby’s, my boyfriend.’ Georgie’s pretty desperate to avoid all contact with human beings and just get to work, so shattered she is, and she tries to creep down the stairway but Mrs Fletcher pulls her up and carries on, ‘I love it. It’s so … raw. Yet, like, delicate.’ Georgie says, ‘Cheers,’ wishing she hadn’t stepped out the door at that very moment. She can’t even stand eye contact with anyone when she’s in this mood, although it’s worse when someone you hate sits next to you on the bus and you’re forced to make small talk with them for twenty minutes. She picks out a bit of sleepy mascara, yawning a big O to herself while Mrs Fletcher persists, ‘Can I speak to the artist?’ Georgie shuts her mouth, then opens it again and says, ‘I wouldn’t if I was you. He’s in bed, and like he hasn’t been sleeping very well the last few days and he’ll be really off with you. Nothing against you, by the way …’ Mrs Fletcher nods, glances again at ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm), then asks, ‘Well, can I take his number? Sorry to be a nuisance, it’s just my cousin Lewis is actually a dealer in art in London, and I’m sure he’d love to see some of Robert’s work. It’s really interesting stuff; I’d like to see more!’ Georgie stares. ‘It’s Bobby, not Robert,’ she says, ‘but erm yeah, here you go then.’ Giving Mrs Fletcher his number, Georgie urges her to phone ‘at least after tea. He’ll be in a bad mood with you otherwise.’ Mrs Fletcher nods and grins, returning the painting to the grubby vinyl so as not to seem like a dodgy thieving cow. For a bit Georgie and Mrs Fletcher carry on down the stairs together, but on reaching floor two Georgie stops and pretends to tie her shoelace so she doesn’t have to talk to that weirdo any more. Mrs Fletcher takes the hint and walks by herself to the hot magnifying-glass bus shelter, satisfied in her head that she might’ve discovered the New Van Gogh. If only she could get him to cut his ear off! Mrs Fletcher gets on the 65 pulling a smug grin, and while the bus starts and stops and stops and starts down Cargo Fleet Lane she pulls out her Mitsubishi ‘brick’ and dials her cousin’s office. Bent Lewis sits on his grey spinning-chair in his gallery in Clerkenwell (that’s in London), half flicking through slides of nude males and half daydreaming out the brushed aluminium windows. It’s a lovely day in London as well, and Bent Lewis rolls up his salmon sleeves, answering the phone placed with brilliant feng shui between art books (Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, Hockney’s Pictures, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the one with all the men’s willies in it) and press releases with the names of artists and the names of artworks and the names of prices on them. ‘Hello?’ he ding-dongs, sweat collecting in the fat grooves of his neck. ‘Hi, Lewis, it’s Mary,’ Mrs Fletcher says, the 65 turning up King’s Road (that’s not in London), where the Buccaneer is and the Majestic Bingo. She scrunches her eyes at the sunshine like a seashell shutting and says, ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve seen today. The New Van Gogh! There’s this incredible young artist living in my block – God, I don’t know how to describe it … sort of, imagine the love-child of Keith Haring and Basquiat, if they ever had sex that is … haw haw haw …’ Back in Clerkenwell, Bent Lewis wakes up slightly in the groggy Cadmium Yellow heat – recently London’s been getting him down, what with the trains beginning to smell and the gallery opening looming faster and faster and the lack of cheap young talent to hang in his white cube. Back in June he sent a few feelers out to the college degree shows, but found all the work to be trash. Fucking trash! Lewis’s list is fairly uninspiring – he represents a couple of photographers (mostly nude portraits/commercial plop), an abstract painter he fucked at the Frieze art fair last year, a multimedia artist whose videos bore you to tears (his work ‘Watching Paint Dry, 2001–2’ is a particular no-no) but he’s got a pretty face, and Lewis’s ex-boyfriend Michael – a painter of still-lifes he’s still on good terms with, and always tries to get back with when he’s pissed on free champers. Bent Lewis watches a pigeon or two lingering on the warehouse roof across the road, chewing his nails, feeling an odd tear of hay fever or loneliness in his left eye. He swaps the telephone to his other ear, then tells Mrs Fletcher, ‘Tell me more.’ Fletcher shuffles on the bus seat, explaining, ‘Well, I was coming down the stairs this morning, and there it was – this amazing little painting amongst the binbags and all that … even the paintings Bobby throws out are amazing!’ Bent Lewis begins bouncing on his spinny chair, and he takes the Artist’s number and takes a walk round the office beaming to himself. He loves Northerners. He spends the rest of the day obsessing over the New Van Gogh, imagining all the luscious paintings but also imagining the rusty stink of pennies and boys’ bottoms on his fingers. On his way home (he gets the overland from Farringdon to Tulse Hill; it’s always fucking busy) he squashes on a three-seater with two office workers doing crossword puzzles, and phones Bobby the Artist staring out the glass at the sun going down. The sun’s going down up North as well, and Bobby throws down his paintbrushes in disgust at the shitty falling light. He’s still on a mighty old comedown, slurping china tea feeling all Buddhist in his kangaroo PJs. He feels quite sad today for no particular reason. Bobby gazes at the large canvas perched against the pink couch, all these beautiful girls staring out of the slop like les Demoiselles d’Avignon but not as triangular and whor-ish. The new piece is called ‘The Angels’ (244x233cm) – sort of a celebration of all the lovely ladies living in the tower block. The thing with Bobby is – although he’s attached to Georgie – he’ll always feel some sort of attraction or affection towards other girls. He enjoys following a strange sixties idealism, which involves taking many psychedelic
s, listening to far-out music and spreading lots of love. He wants to be Jack Kerouac – or the more hardcore one, Neal Cassady. He doesn’t think he’ll ever cheat on Georgie, but often he gets that sensation walking down a busy street that all the girls are better looking than his own, or that they’d do more drugs, or that they’d do much dirtier things in bed. He thinks it’s natural to want sex every single day, but it seems an eight-hour shift at Bhs kills a girl’s libido. He loves so many things about Georgie (her kitten face, her dressing-up box, her passion for sweets), but those are things he’s gotten used to over the months and the napalm-ish excitement he felt for her when they first started going out has gradually dampened. Why is it that, as soon as you start living with a girl, you hardly seem to have sex with her any more? Breathing out a hot puff, Bobby the Artist leans into the canvas and applies a thick splurge of cream across Georgie’s breasts. Georgie stands with a big flashing halo in the centre of all the others: Pamela from upstairs with a glazed expression in raunchy nurse gear (a perverted vision of her doing her shift at the kid’s playschool), Ellen in miniskirt with fluorescent thighs, Mandy all skinny brushstrokes on speed babbling nonsense. Oh, drugs. All the money’s gone now, hasn’t it, and Bobby feels generally very depressed like he’s carting a ton weight around with him. He owes £200 ticky to Johnnie and about £100 rent to Georgie, but fuck money – Bobby doesn’t think you’ve been put on this world to worry about paper and coins, you’ve been put here to enjoy every one of your breaths like a drowned sailor finally pulled back up to the surface. He sighs. Bobby’s destructive drug-taking stems from a terrible incident in his childhood: he discovered rock and roll. Ever since he saw the video for ‘I Am the Walrus’ on Top of the Pops 2 aged eight and a half, Little Bobby knew he wanted to dedicate his life to drugs. But it didn’t take long to spiral out of control, sending him into a horrible, vicious world of technicolour, sunshine, and fun. Now he reads Baudelaire’s ‘Intoxication’ every morning when he gets out of bed. He wants it tattooed across his forehead. Sighing again, Bobby’s incredibly tempted to go upstairs for more ticky off Johnnie but stops himself, suddenly put off by his screaming siren mobile phone. His ringtone is a garbled spaghetti of sounds he inputted high on mushrooms one evening, thinking he could hear exotic birds and rainforest animals every playback. He ceases the horridness, answering the phone to Bent Lewis with a paintbrush in his mouth and the word, ‘Eh?’ Bent Lewis: ‘Hello, is that Bobby? This is Lewis from the +! Gallery’ (pronounced with a big camp yelp – ‘PPLLUUSS!’ – which makes Bobby shit himself) ‘in London. How do you do? I think my cousin has been in touch with you, no? She saw a wonderful painting of yours this morning, and I was wondering if you’ve ever thought about representation, or if you’d be interested in showing me some work perhaps? Your stuff sounds ideal for my opening exhibition …’ Bobby the Artist blinks once or twice, not sure if they’ve got the right number. Cousin? Paintings? Wiping his schnozzle, Bobby stares blankly at the wall and says again, ‘Eh?’ Bent Lewis: ‘Oh yes, sorry, well obviously I need to see some paintings! Let’s not jump the gun … Are you busy next week? I’d love to come up and see your studio – your work sounds so fantastic. I could make you a lot of money!’ Bobby the Artist sniffs. ‘Well, the flat’s a bit of a state, like,’ he mumbles, glancing at all the candy wrappers and all the druggy wrappers and splodges of acrylic and paintings and the ballerina/sailor/brownie outfits and the sleepy shoes and wormy fag butts. Bent Lewis: ‘Oh, don’t worry, you should’ve seen Francis Bacon’s studio!’ Suddenly becoming more animated, Bobby leap-frogs off the carpet and asks, ‘You knew Francis Bacon?’ Bent Lewis says, ‘Yes,’ although he actually means no. Back in Clerkenwell, Lewis nudges that book 7 Reece Mews along his desk, the one with all the grimy oil-painty photos of Bacon’s hideout. Through the telephone he hears lots of muffled bumping, which is Bobby jumping about the flat with glee. The Artist thinks he’s speaking to some sort of hero or guardian angel. They arrange a date to meet up, Bobby scribing NEXT SATURDAY on the skirting-board with Georgie’s Love That Pink lipstick, just as the girl herself trundles through the door in her Bhs stuff. She squirts her stinky work shoes onto the carpet, finding a space on a sofa arm until Bobby’s off the phone, then she gives him a big hello hug. Bobby the Artist gives her a welcome-back snog on the lips, then bounces on the balls of his feet telling Georgie about the weird man on the phone and the exhibition and the Bacon. He’s got the football-size eyes of a five-year-old, and Georgie starts bouncing too with the excitement of it all and the fact the creaky floorboards are quite fun. She’d forgotten all about Mrs Fletcher harassing her this morning, and she grins two pink crescents all proud of her boyfriend. In a way Bobby feels weird getting so over-the-top about ‘fame’ and ‘money’, but the way the world works you do need pennies in your back pocket, and there’s no way he wants to die with this stupid world not knowing his name. In a torrent of inspiration, Bobby claws for his sable brush and whips jiggedy-jaggedy lemon yellow bits into each of the Angels’ hair, getting put off for a split-second when his tummy has a wee rumble. Bobby the Artist hasn’t eaten for days, his appetite suppressed so much by drugs a bite of sausage roll yesterday afternoon had to be spitten out, but now every little squeeze from Georgie reminds him just how empty he is. His cheeks look like black triangles as he kisses Georgie so up close – usually the mop-top hides all signs of malnutrition, and bad skin. Georgie, mirrorballs hidden by eyelids, spins Bobby onto the floor and gives him a big fat smackeroony anyway. She loves her boyfriend and she loves him getting back on his arty farty feet again, and the two of them roll around in the sweeties and the paint and they knock over Bobby’s water pot, and the two of them are a mess and all. On an ordinary comedown this sort of behaviour would annoy Bobby, but today he’s got London drooling at his feet, and he gives Georgie another huge huggle. She laughs, spinning him into the new painting, and suddenly he does get a bit tetchy and says, ‘Actually, that’s enough. I’m fucking starving. Howay.’ Georgie doesn’t really notice her boyfriend’s topsy-turvy emotions, she just keeps beaming and does a little squeal and says, ‘Ooh, I know what you can have! It’s a special occasion, after all!’ She scampers through to the kitchen and empties her work-bag onto the breakfast bar, cascading cut-price pick-’n’-mix and stolen bags of crisps like a crunchy waterfall. She tears open bags of Haribo and paper barber-shop bags of candy, chomping and smiling all the time like Minnie Mouse or Miss Piggy on Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Her face is the sun breaking through her two cloudy cheeks. To celebrate Bobby’s success, she ‘cooks up’ a sweety full-English breakfast for them both, which consists of: Starmix fried eggs, cola jelly-beans for sausages, pink shrimps for bacon, red Skittle tomatoes, two tiny toffee hash-browns, a fingerful of pink Nerds for baked beans, yucky Blackjack black pudding, two ready-salted KP Squares for toast, served with a Starmix milk bottle on a paper plate. Georgie’s forehead twitches with hilarity as she brings Bobby the Artist his meal, with a dishcloth folded over her forearm like a proper waitress. Bobby gets the hystericals and loves her all over again, clearing a space on the shitty carpet for the plates. You have to eat the sweety full-English with your fingers, and it gets scoffed in an instant, Georgie being really adventurous and combining tastes, for example Nerds on Squares (beans on toast), shrimp squashed on jelly-bean (pigs in blankets), or a Skittle either side of the Blackjack (just gets rid of the taste of a Blackjack). Bobby picks at his food piece by piece, hands all shaky and white. Afterwards he gives Georgie another smooch, and for ten seconds his life is perfect and if he were to die right now (for example his heart bursting, so full it is with glittering red bloooood) he’d be in too much rapture to notice. But then ten seconds later he’s hungry again – the sweety full-English isn’t known for being very filling – but there’s fuck-all in the cupboards, unless you like eating bread sandwiches. Bobby’s not the sort of house-husband to go pushing a trolley round Lidl very often; in fact, at times he can be quite a bad boyfriend, since living the b
ohemian dream involves not cleaning the apartment or washing the dishes or buying more milk when they run out of milk. He just wants to paint and be merry! Bobby the Artist sits there in the middle of a Stonehenge of canvases, feeling his belly grumble, and he wonders if Georgie would mind him eating her instead. Randy bastard. Eyes beaming, Georgie giggles as he creeps his hands up her legs like pervy spiders, and in all his light-headed derangement Bobby starts cackling too. He tugs down her Sooty and Sweep knickers. Georgie’s a bit shy to open her legs dead wide because she’s got a few in-grown hairs and all that, but she smiles serenely as Bobby’s fingers slither up her cellulite. He slips his tongue into her sweaty cinnamon fanny, and all those feelings of starvation disappear down her minge-hole. Georgie aahs. It’s a bit annoying getting shagged straight after a gruelling shift at work, and it’s a shame the sex organs have to be so close to the poo organs – they can really stink sometimes. And the same goes for Bobby – he hasn’t showered his mouldy sausage for a while, and she decides not to suck him off. She kisses his whiffy-fanny lips instead. And now for a cameo appearance from Mr Condom! He comes leaping out of his packaging, then Bobby and Georgie jump around gleefully on top of each other for about half an hour. It’s intense! Bobby finds Mr Condom annoying though – he’s a bit like an over-attentive waiter on your first date, but Georgie’s scared of STDs and small children and she insists on him being there. Georgie’s incredibly cautious about everything – she just wants a lovely comfortable life with no big shocks or scares, whereas Bobby favours a mad look-Mam-no-hands! sort of life. But whatever, the sex is still great. Bobby gets his own back on Mr Condom by suffocating him with white custard, then he screws him up in the bin with all the other gritty Mr Condoms. He goes for a wee in the bathroom – a foamy spunky one – then frog-jumps next to Georgie and swings his arms round her four or five times like Stretch Armstrong or just someone really really in love with their girlfriend. Over in the bin, Mr Condom sighs. Georgie’s feeling a bit cold now all in the nude, and she gets changed into an old fairy costume and guzzles down a few jelly-beans. Her favourites from the Jelly Belly range are Peach, Plum and Juicy Pear – it makes her feel like she’s eating up the tower blocks. ‘Dessert?’ she enquires, throwing Bobby one. Bobby nods, then he nuzzles her neck and says he loves her and Georgie grins and says it too. ‘I’m so proud of you, hun!’ she squeals. Bobby the Artist scours the carpet for a post-fuck fag, but all the packs are empty, and he hasn’t got the guts to ask Georgie for a borrow. Money, you’re such a pain! On top of selling canvases, occasionally Bobby gets commissions to paint murals for libraries or hospitals or kids’ homes, but it’s such a chore having to do it sober – the one time he dropped acid painting the Accident & Emergency, Bobby’s brush spewed a load of porno doctors and nurses with syringes in their heads and patients racing naked on medicine cabinets. A day later it was covered sick Infirmary Green again. Bobby blinks, bingeing up a rollie out the stinky ashtray. He hopes to God this Lewis magics him some money soon. The last ‘real job’ Bobby ever had was working the fork-lift trucks at the B&Q Warehouse on the Portrack Lane Ind. Est., stacking bits of wood and garden furniture, drinking cups of tea and listening to the Fall’s ‘Industrial Estate’ on his dinner-break. Surely to fuck he can get by without fags and drugs for just a little bit. He’s got paintings to paint! Wheezing on the old rollie, Bobby the Artist pulls on his boxers again then washes his one-inch DIY brush and mixes up peach-pink on the pocked palette. To get peachy pink, you need three parts Cadmium Red to two parts Titanium White to one part Yellow Ochre. Then comes the tricky bit: applying it to the Angels’ lips and cheeks without making them look like absolute harlots. Watching him work, Georgie straightens the white tutu, wondering who the hell all the girls are but she’s not jealous. She has a few more Jelly Bellies, then plops through to the bathroom to give her minge a good old clean-out and sort her hair. She likes Mr Condom, but she hates his latex aftershave. In the front room she hears Bob put on My Bloody Valentine – lots of fuzzy-wuzzy songs perfect after a shag or during a painting. ‘Loveless’ actually reminds Bobby of his ex-girlfriend Gabrielle – the sex between them was great too but without much emotional content (to be honest, he found her pretentious and boring), and he used to enjoy putting on records after they’d shagged more than doing the deed itself. The song ‘Loomer’ oozes out the square speakers like pink lava, and Georgie comes back in the lounge all sleepy with just fake candy energy bubbling in her tummy. Surprisingly she’s not absolutely obese, although she’s always moaning to Bobby about her love-handles and big bum and shimmery cellulite – perhaps it’s all the running around at work and all the running around after Bobby that keeps her somewhere in shape. However, Bobby glares at her gobbling more and more jelly-beans, and in his gobbledygook imagination he thinks Georgie looks a bit like a piglet. The fact she goes on about her weight so much only fuels the image in his head even brighter. He adds a bit extra paint to Georgie’s cheeks then wipes it out with a paper towel, knowing she’ll only kick off if she’s immortalised chubby in one of his paintings. Bobby the Artist chews his brush. Two weeks ago he read Dear Deidre in the Sun (Alan Blunt the Cunt donates his newspapers sometimes for Bobby to paint on) and she said boys often expect their girlfriends to look slim and perfect, but in fact curves are the natural shape for rearing children and whatnot. But then again on Page 3 you’ve got skinny ninnies with their knockers out. Bobby the Artist has a bit of a cough, and he’s just about to thin Georgie down with some white spirit when the front door goes rat-a-tat-tat and he staggers over to it, mop-top flopping this way and that. It’s Ellen from upstairs, and she stands there in the hallway wearing a clingfilm shellsuit and a sad expression. ‘What’s up?’ Bobby the Artist asks, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Oh nowt,’ Ellen goes, but you can tell she’s holding back and she dips her eyelashes and says, ‘Well, actually it’s Johnnie. He’s been weird. You know he put Angelo Bashini in hospital the other night? Well he just seems dead uptight, like, I was wondering – if it’s not too much trouble – could I stay here tonight? He’s not at home and I’m worried he’s gone mad, and I think Mandy’s out with Dave, and Pamela’s mam and dad are back, and I don’t want to be alone …’ Despite the comedown, Bobby reacts a bit too ecstatically and bangs the door wide open and smiles just as wide and says, ‘Sound, Ellen, howay in! Make yourself at home.’ Bobby leads Ellen through to the lounge and, although Ellen’s been round loads of times for happenings and drugs and borrowing sugar, he says to her, ‘Keep your shoes on if you want, this is the living room, soz it’s messy, I’m painting and that, bathroom’s over there, kitchen’s through there, have what you want, you can sleep on the sofa if you like, I’ll move this.’ Bobby the Artist drags ‘The Angels’ (244x233cm) off the pink couch and into the bedroom, then he plumps the fuchsia cushions and points where Ellen should park her bum. Ellen sits down, rustling skinny clingfilm fabric, grinning at Bobby being so weird and welcoming. On the floor, Georgie stares up with tired gobstopper eyes. A big orgasm on top of an eight-hour shift always knocks the poor girl for six, and she can hardly stay awake while Ellen retells the story of Johnnie going round Angelo’s, knocking him round the flat, feeding him a razor blade, the shenanigans with Gary Rhodes, but missing out the bit about her shagging Angelo of course. Bobby the Artist gazes, listening intently, thinking a razor blade through the eyeball might’ve been a more lasting punishment but perhaps he’s been watching too much Chien Andalou again. Ellen tells them Johnnie’s been alright to her but he’s clearly in a fiery mood and today he’s gone missing from Peach House and he won’t answer his phone and she doesn’t know what to do, but thanks a lot for letting her stay. Bobby the Artist looks at her from his standing-up position in the doorframe, nodding in random places, thinking about her Golden Ratio face and the prospect of her possibly posing naked for ‘The Angels’ (244x233cm). Ellen oozes more sex than a sloppy de Kooning, and at times Bobby wishes he was single again and free to feel the completely different caresses and crevi
ces of a completely different girl. It worries him that he’ll never kiss another pair of lips ever again. Ellen feels a bit uncomfortable what with him staring at her so much and Georgie dying on the carpet, and after a bit of creaky silence she shuffles on the sofa and asks, ‘Oi, what time do youse usually get up, cos I’ve got to sign on at half ten tomorrow.’ Bobby the Artist clicks out of his trance, slightly paranoid in case Ellen’s telepathic, but then he smiles and says, ‘Oh, I dunno, I’ll probably still be awake by then, I dunno … my sleeping’s a bit fucked.’ Ellen blows out a little laugh, then looks at Georgie at the bottom of the carpet and the worker bee says, ‘Well, I’ve got the dentist at ten tomorrow, so I’ll leave with you, if you want.’ Georgie’s rabid sweety-eating has resulted in her having a mouth full of silver and white fillings, big lumpy fissure seals and the odd rotten hole or brown crack in her molars, and tomorrow she’s in for another two drillings. She hates the dentist – in total, since she was ten years old, she’s had twenty-seven fillings, five teeth pulled out, plus a horrid old brace when she was fourteen. Nowadays her smile’s pretty straight and you wouldn’t know all her teeth are riddled with mercury and whatnot, but it’s her mouth that causes her most grief in life. Bobby does all that bloody gurning and he’s never even had a filling, lucky old so-and-so! Georgie’s dentist tells her she’s got soft gnashers and the deepness of the molars make for more crap getting stuck in than normal, but she’ll never give up eating sweets for a man whose breath always smells of onion. Laid all crumply in her fairy outfit, Georgie pops another peach jelly-bean down her neck, enjoying the flavour, but the thought of getting her teeth buzzed tomorrow makes her all shaky and sad and her tummy feels fizzy with nerves. ‘I didn’t know you had the dentist, pet,’ Bobby the Artist says, although it’s typical of him to forget everything, and Georgie guesses it’s the drugs killing off all his brain cells and generally turning him into a stupid person. She’s too shattered to argue, though, and eventually she heads off to bed feeling depressed about the dentist and depressed that Bobby forgot and depressed that Bobby’ll be up all night talking to Ellen, and she depresses the mattress and the bronzey pillow when she finally flops naked into bed. Bobby doesn’t mean to be a dozy cunt. He’s just excited to have a guest in the house, and he tries to run around the flat offering Ellen cups of tea or mouldy toast or Georgie’s sweets or half a binge, but Ellen’s just happy to be safe four storeys high in the sky.

 

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