Sweet

by Julie Burchill

  ‘Turn around, dear.’ I did as I was told, surely a first for me. ‘Well, there’s certainly quite a lot going on there, isn’t there? “Everybody works!” as they used to say in vaudeville.’

  ‘In what-ville?’

  ‘Never mind – before your time.’ He narrowed his eyes at me, all calculating like. ‘Hmm – so you came about the cleaning job, did you?’

  Well – that and the modelling—’

  ‘Love-bucket, I specified a size ten to cut my patterns on. Not a full-on Miss Tits to hire out by the hour.’ He sighed. ‘Still, they say that burlesque is back. And no one could deny that you could easily pass for a hoochy-coochy dancer from a Tijuana pony show.’ He turned to Baggy. ‘Well, I suppose I can stand to look at her if you can. At least she doesn’t smell. Hire her!’

  Tragically, I was well pleased; hey, they may have been freaks, but they were freaks with a good address and, let’s face it, I’d had precious little of that. Remember, I grew up on the thirteenth floor – unlucky for some! – of ASBO Towers, give or take the odd stay at Her Maj’s Pleasure, if not mine. The big white houses on the seafront, in the squares and up Clifton Hill – up which I now trudged again in the pissing rain on my first day working for Baggy and Aggy – were so foreign to ordinary Brighton kids that they might as well have been made of icing sugar and located on the moon. The only time kids from the Ravendene Estate saw the inside of a Regency house was when they were robbing it!

  ‘What’s the point in going on holiday if you live in a holiday town?’ my mum used to say every summer when I’d moan at her about taking us abroad. That time me and Kizza legged it was the first time I’d ever stayed in a hotel even!

  So despite the rain and the hill, I was well happy to be on my way to somewhere clean and quiet, and trying to keep a lid on my excitement at what lay in store for me. You could say I was in a holiday mood even! And as their lush house came into view, I even started dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if things went well and we got along, I might even become their – what’s the word – muse, yeah, their ‘muse’, and they might ask me to move in with them. Peace and quiet and cleanliness – and, more importantly, a well central shag palace where I could drag fit French-language students back to instead of doing it on the beach, because Ravendene was way far out and they always lived in manky lodgings with some uptight landlady.

  Quiet . . . I’ve always been a loud cow, but the older I got – all of seventeen – the more the non-stop racket at mine got totally on my tits. It had been even worse since my minging twin sisters had formed a rap group called ‘Swearers Three’, of all the dumb-ass things, with the little girl from the corner shop, Rajinder. Before school in the morning, after school in the afternoon, on weekend nights when Raj slept over, I had heard their cretinous intro/theme song so often that I was actually hearing it in my dreams, even when they too were asleep.

  ‘Swearers One! – let’s have some fun!

  Swearers Two! – I’ll swear with you!

  Swearers Three! – come swear with me!

  One – two – THREE!’

  Followed by a right mouthful, of course. I ask you, how much practising does that take. ’Sides, Ravendene kids are cursing before they can walk – rehearsing shouldn’t come into it, they’re naturals.

  So with this ringing in my ears 24/7, can you really blame me for my uncharacteristically naive dreams as I rang the Baggy-Aggy bell that day? Well, I had just finally got clean from my drug habit, and therefore wasn’t in my right mind. I saw myself being sat down for elevenses that very morning, my dainty feather-duster being gently extracted from my delicate fingers by Baggy as Aggy poured me a double gin from a piss-elegant Regency porcelain teapot and told me that to make an exquisite creature like myself sweat and strain over squalid domestic drudgery was quite like . . . I dunno, sticking a peacock down an S-bend. Making Bambi live in a bucket. You know – just WRONG. And that all I needed to do to earn my daily pay – say, fifteen pound an hour, because it was like CREATIVE now – was just stand there staring into space, all enigmatic like, while they draped lush material on me and consulted each other in low, awed voices. Sweet . . .

  I was still queening it over my tragic kingdom when the door lurched open and Baggy was standing there shooting evils up at me. ‘The courtesy of kings?’ he spat, barring my way with his dinky foot.

  ‘The . . . queen of . . . clubs?’ I answered weakly, thinking it was some sort of gay game.

  ‘No, Marie!’

  ‘Maria,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘Ave-Maria Sweet, on the dotted line, but you can call me Sugar.’

  ‘Really? Well, TARDY is what I call you.’

  ‘Steady on!’ I protested. He didn’t know nothing about my sex life!

  ‘Yes, tardy! That means LATE, in case you’re not familiar with the word!’ He held out his wrist to me, showing me a crap Barbie watch that even the Teat Twins would have chucked in the bin. ‘What time do you call THIS!’

  I peered at it. ‘Um . . . three minutes past nine?’

  ‘EXACTLY! And those three minutes are minutes I will never, ever be able to get back again. And THAT, Marie, is why punctuality is the courtesy of kings! Because to a CREATIVE person, every minute is a monarch! A monarch which you have seen fit to behead, three times over, with the casual weapon of your tardiness!’ I must’ve looked the way I felt, totally amazed and confused, because he then threw in, ‘Comprendez?’

  Oh, I GOT that. ‘“Understand” – right?’

  You’d have thought I’d accused him of intercourse, the way he reacted – drew himself up to his full four foot nothing and stamped his stunted flipper like a crazy thing. ‘YES! – UNDERSTAND!’ He grabbed me by my arm but it wasn’t in a loving caring way like I’d planned, taking the duster from my hand and making me the official Baggy-Aggy muse. Instead, with a brute force worthy of any Ravendene wife-beating bully, he seized my wrist and dragged me into the house, slamming the door behind me. ‘Understand, Marie, that you are here to facilitate OUR creation! And that we are NOT here to facilitate your recreation, or your PROCREATION, or any of the other AYSHUNS that YOUR PEOPLE use as an excuse to waste OTHER PEOPLE’S time and spoil OTHER PEOPLE’S lives!’

  You could have knocked me down with a Fetherlite; what did THREE FUCKING MINUTES matter in the grand scheme of things, or even in the skanky schedule of a couple of woofters? ‘Hang about, mate – chill out—’

  ‘I AM “chilled”, “mate”!’ Baggy hissed. ‘I am so chilled, you could shake a perfect Martini in my skull!’ He held out one of those dirty great checked plastic laundry bags – and somehow I just knew it wasn’t packed with sumptuous swatches of velvets and satins, and rough-cut patterns just itching to be fitted on my nubile young body, and accessories which I’d be allowed to take home if I really, REALLY liked at the end of long day’s musing. Nope – because they didn’t smell of ammonia, disinfectant and beeswax, to my knowledge. ‘And this, love-bucket – this is all yours. Why don’t you give it a twirl? And when you’ve got every surface in the place so shiny that you can see your pretty face in it, then YOU can chill too. It should only take, ooh, six hours! Ciao!’

  And with that the front door slammed and I was alone in my tragic kingdom, with my mop sceptre and scrunchy crown. So of course I did what anyone would have done faced with such indignity – I sat down on the sofa, turned on the telly, found Trisha and lit up a spliff. Worker’s playtime!

  3

  ‘One day I was walking to Asda, just chillin’ in the sun

  When suddenly it struck me, swearing big-time would be fun!

  In the underpass, I shouted, “Ass!” and who should I see

  But a slick little chick giving it a go, shouting, “Ho!” right back at me!

  Then a third girl, called Rajinder, from the Paki shop—’

  I’d had enough. It was only eight in the morning, Saturday, and being woken up by the little bastards after two weeks of toil and torment at the hands of Aggy and Baggy was bad enough, bu
t now they were being racist too – well, Kimmy had told me how bad that was, judging by appearances, and I could see it now, the vile ginger twats. I dragged myself out of my pit, opened my bedroom door and opened my gat-trap to give them a right bosting.

  ‘SHUT THE SWINE UP, YOU EVIL LITTLE—’

  I found the big brown eyes of little Raj, bless, looking up at me. ‘Sorry, Ria. Did I wake you up?’

  I pulled my Topshop negligee tight around me.‘It’s not you, sweetheart. It’s those effing brat sisters of mine. Singing a song like that – and making you sing it too!’ I looked around. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They’re at a Brownie boot sale for the elderly. Your mum said it was OK if I came round here and practised cos my dad don’t know I’m in Swearers Three. MY song, innit!’ she smirked.

  Frankly, I was scandalized. ‘Oh really, mademoiselle! Your parents – I don’t know ’em, but I know the type, because I bullied their younger brothers and sisters at school, regretfully – are gonna be SO PLEASED that you’re boasting about being a swearer. And a Paki – and the word is Pakistani, by the way!’

  She had the grace to look ashamed. ‘Actually we’re Punjabi. But if I said “Punji shop”, no one would know what I mean.’

  ‘Well, whatever. I need to get my beauty sleep, so keep it down.’ Then something occurred to me. ‘Here. Your parents don’t want any help at the Paki – sorry, Punji – shop, do they?’

  ‘Not from round here,’ she said straight back, the cheeky little mare. ‘My mum says, “Raver behind the till, your profits get ill.” Good, innit! She’s going to write a song for Swearers Three too, but without the swearing.’

  ‘I’ll be listening out for it on the radio,’ I said sarkily. ‘Well, good luck, but practise somewhere else, OK? I’ve had a pig of a week and I need a good zizz.’

  ‘Right, Ria,’ she whispered, putting her finger to her lips and tiptoeing off. I couldn’t help smiling – she was a lovely little thing. Shame she couldn’t have been my sister instead of the ginger mingers; if Susie REALLY wanted to have another baby, I wondered if I could get her to do it with a Punjabi guy.

  I staggered back to bed, groaning. When I’d settled on to the Baggy-Aggy chaise longue that first day, spliff in hand, I never dreamed how hard my working week was going to turn out to be. I only watched Trisha and had a little nap, and when I woke up it was the afternoon and there was a message on the phone from Baggy saying they’d be back at three – I darted round that place with a broom up my arse, literally, before finding a second message saying that they’d be back at eight instead! And by the smile in Baggy’s voice, I knew he’d planned it that way.

  And then I came in at nine sharp the next morning, and the house which I’d left looking like something gone over by Kim and Aggie now looked like something done over by the inmates of Battersea Dogs Home. And it had been that way ever since; leave it immaculate three nights a week, find it a tip next time. By the second Friday night, I felt like I had housemaid’s knee, athlete’s foot and, for all I knew, water on the brain. I felt like zero. And I was just £110.60 the richer a week. Before tax.

  I lay there in bed, thinking about my alleged ‘job’. What a tragic farce! My mum used to have a friend, Natalia, who was a cleaner for this woman in Hove – you wouldn’t believe the perks! Ten quid an hour basic, two weeks in the Canaries every year and a few little extras that weren’t exactly legal. This broad was always creeping up on Nat and unplugging the vacuum cleaner and making her go out on the piss with her because she was ‘blocked’, whatever that is, and ‘seeking inspiration’ – she was a writer or something. Natalia told my mum they were like sisters, but in the end they fell out over a packet of wine gums, of all the weird things.

  As I lay there in my bed of pain, my scullery-maid’s elbow give me gyp, I reflected sourly that I’d be lucky to get even a lick of an empty wine gum wrapper from B&A. I’d taken a Jammie Dodger from their ‘retro-trash’ cupboard on my second day there – and found the cost of the entire packet subtracted from my wages. This, from a pair of ponces that spent fifty pounds a day on flowers from Florian the Florist!

  Get this. Yesterday, while having a bit of a poke about – sorry, ‘a thorough clean’ – I found all these leather albums at the bottom of one of them long things that looks like a sort of padded bench but isn’t – the seat opens up, like a box. Inside there was loads of sheets and linen, dead innocent, but I had this sort of instinct that there was something worth seeing underneath it all.

  Well, there were half a dozen of these big red books at the bottom of the bed stuff, and soon as I opened up the first one I realized it was Baggy and Aggy’s scrapbooks, bless ’em! You could see why they kept ’em hidden – a) because they photographed like such a pair of freaks and b) because, well, it hardly fitted their image, did it, to be saving their old yellow clippings like a pair of soft schoolgirls! Not with them so cool and cutting edge and techno; the idea of them sitting down with scissors and paste – Aggy constantly criticizing Baggy’s cutting and pasting techniques! – made me feel all warm and gurgly inside, a bit like foreplay. Well, by that time I could have done with a good laugh, so I turned on Jeremy Kyle, sat down with a bottle of Sunny V – Sunny D with a splash of vodka – and I treated myself.

  It weirded me out at first, seeing them posing and poncing around the very house – the very room! – I was now slurping my Sunny V in: haughty in Hello!, impish in Interiors, wussy in Wallpaper. I skimmed through the interviews and couldn’t help laughing; in every single one, there was some reference to how much they loved women, respected women, worshipped women, designed their clothes to make women feel good. Oh, come ON! Yeah, right. I’d heard Baggy on the phone once to one of his mucky-minded mockers: ‘Yep, the minute I popped out of my dear mama, I knew right away that I never wanted to go back into one of those hellholes again,’ he’d sniggered. Of course, doing his bum-chum up the wrong ’un must be so much more hygienic!

  And it struck me as I read this drivel that you can say what you like about lezzies – bad shoes, rubbish tits, scary voices; only kidding! – but you have to hand it to them, they don’t do this bogus gay man equivalent of going around telling the world how much they love, respect and worship men while doing everything in their power to avoid having any contact more intimate than an air kiss with them. And this made me think of Kizza, and all the sweet times we’d had, and before I knew it I was lying face down on the floor crying like a baby.

  Which is probably why I didn’t hear Baggy and Aggy come in.

  Well, I thought fast and said that I’d found the albums while I was ‘doing a linen inventory’ and that I couldn’t resist looking at them because I was ‘such a fan’. Believe me, a man’s a man, gay or straight, and nothing wipes their memories or soothes their tempers faster than a bit of flattery. Baggy gets sent to the kitchen to make me what Aggy calls a ‘tasse de Twinings’ – a mouldy old cup of tea to you and me – and Ag himself actually goes so far as to sit his fat ass down with me on the sofa and pat me rather cautiously on the back!

  ‘Now, love-bucket,’ he goes, ‘what’s all THIS about?’

  ‘All what?’ I snivel, reluctant to admit some sucker has actually caught me crying.

  He gives this little shudder of disgust, which let me tell you is REALLY comforting. ‘The red eyes, the streaming nose, the puffy face – uck!’ Cheers, mate! But I felt a bit better when he went on, ‘Pretty girls should never cry, they ruin themselves. Every pretty girl should have a plain girl to do all her crying for her. Like a whipping boy.’

  ‘Saucy!’ I said, nudging him. It’s amazing how any sort of flattery cheers me up – uh-oh, so it’s not just men then! – even from a snobby old woofter.

  ‘Easy, tiger lily!’ he winced. Baggy was sort of hovering in the doorway, and Aggy clicked his fingers at him. ‘Begone, Bag-features! – I must seek the soul of our pikey princess!’

  Well, I didn’t much like the sound of that, but it turned out to be well sweet. Like my s
ixth shoplifting sense, I sort of knew what he wanted to hear. And so I told him about Kimmy, and her being in love with me, and me being in love with her when it was too late. And his eyes got bigger and bigger, and his face got closer and closer and then his arms opened up and he grabbed me and held me and cried, ‘My poor baby! So you’re NOT a breeder after all! What a horrid time you’ve had – we must do something lovely for you . . .’

  And then he’d pulled away, and I’d pulled myself together and gone home. And so here I was, two weeks into my career as a cleaner to the Brighton flitterati, wondering if anything new truly lurked around the corner, or whether it was just a load of camp cobblers. Whatever, I wouldn’t know until Monday morning, so I might as well get my kip while I could.

  I felt myself finally drifting off into sleep . . .

  ‘Then a third girl, called Rajinder, from the Paki shop,

  Joined our cussing crew, and the dissing didn’t stop!

  The lesson art, when swearing starts, colour doesn’t count –

  Black, white, brown or yellow, come and curse in large amounts!’

  4

  Well, do me three different ways if on Monday morning B&A didn’t have a nice surprise for me. I let myself in and there in the kitchen, instead of a can of Cif, a used-up old Brillo pad and a note telling me to keep my mitts off their Party Rings, there were the boy-toyers themselves with scissors, tape measures and rough paper laid out on the table in front of them.

  Baggy gave me a sickly grin, like Santa the morning after a night down the the K-hole. ‘Surprise!’