Sweet

by Julie Burchill

  14

  Well, if Shugs couldn’t go to the ball – the rave in Ibiza, rather – then the ball would have to come to Shugs. Face it, there were worse places to be than Brighton, whatever the weather, and I had my love to keep me warm. Well, my teenage lust.

  So I decided to give young Asif Sugar’s Sensational Shagtastic Seaside Tour of Brighton. Like I said, Susie used to drive me mad saying there was no point in going away on holiday when you live in a holiday town, but now I had to admit, maybe she had a point. Let’s not delude ourselves here – if I could choose between caipirinhas at the Café del Mar or coffee at the Western Road Starbucks, I’d be blissed out on that beach before you can say bikini wax. But that was the whole sodding point, wunnit? – I didn’t have that choice so I might as well make the most of what I did have. Which was a home-town that was always whoring itself to rich Londoners any chance it got, but which I still had a soft spot for, and a big-eyed boy to share it with. Sweet.

  Organized tours of this place are usually one of two things – totally straight, like the Pavilion and stuff, or totally twisted. Like on the main bus tour, right, there’s no warning or anything; one minute this posh bird’s voice is coming through this speaker banging on about that fat royal git that had the Pav built for his married piece or something, and the next minute she’s going into all the gory details about this dude, Tony Mancini, that killed this girl and cut her up and stuffed her in a trunk! I had to talk nineteen to the dozen to keep She-Ra and Evil-Lyn from hearing that stuff when we went on it one day – one of Mum’s cost-cutting day trips – though to be fair it does come in useful whenever I want to make ’em do something they’re not keen on. Like, ‘Go on, Evil, nip down the shop for me, or Tony Mancini’ll come tonight when you’re asleep and cut you up into little bits and stuff you into my new pink Topshop handbag!’ It’s good for people to know their local history, so I’m doing good by doing good, as it were.

  ‘So. What’s your favourite things?’ I asked Asif when we were changing to go home.

  He smiled at me, all soppy like. ‘You. My faith. Though not necessarily in that order . . .’

  ‘Oi!’ I thumped him. ‘Try getting your Bible to give you a blow job!’

  He laughed and caught me by the wrists. I’ve noticed that about proper religious people; they can laugh about their God-bothering, they don’t want to cut your head or hands off like the Muslims always seem to want to. ‘Why are you so interested in my favourite things, anyway?’

  ‘Wanna take you out, don’t I? On your own unique Shugs-shaped tour. Not the usual tourist stuff and not just a bar-crawl like the hens and slags.’ I laughed appreciatively here, nudging Asif sharply when he didn’t immediately do so as well.

  He gave a few swift sniggers in self-defence, then thought about what I’d said. ‘Well . . . I should like to go to a museum. I have never been to English museum, and everybody talks about them.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ I eyed him suspiciously. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ What a bunch of sad bastards he must hang out with!

  ‘So, we could start with a museum . . . ?’

  ‘And amp it up from there? – OK!’ Face it, if we started with a museum, it could only get better, coun’it!

  But which museum? There was the main one down by the Old Steine but I’d been dragged round that one so many times by school that the thought made me want to heave, frankly – even the cute smiling giant pottery cat by the entrance, who purred and said stuff like MMM . . . PUT SOME MONEY IN THE KITTY when you fed him a few coins couldn’t lure me there. Another museum, think, think . . . I laughed at myself racking my brains over one, cos of course if it had been a crack dealer or an after-hours hooch-den, I’d have had a dozen right on speed dial. Museums, though, that was a different kettle of endangered cod.

  ‘Look, meet me tomorrow morning at ten, the sea end of Ship Street, and we’ll take it from there. And come prepared!’ I jumped up, slapped his bum and gathered my things together.

  ‘You mean with umbrella?’

  ‘No, with condoms, of course!’

  Even on a breezy winter’s day Brighton seafront sparkled in the sun, and as I leaned against the seafront railings having a quick fag and waiting for Asif to creep in from Crawley, I thought that despite all the crap that had happened to me in my home-town, there was just something magical about it that kept you coming back for more, or in my case never getting around to leaving in the first place. When I was little I used to think that that old hymn actually said ‘All things Brighton beautiful’, and even though I’d felt a right teat when I found out what it really was, the words still rang in my mind whenever I went to the seafront on a sunny day. That old saying ‘Hope springs eternal’, which we used to snigger at at school cos it had ‘breast’ in the rest of it could have been written about Brighton – it may have been the accidental OD capital of Britain, but no way could it ever have won in the suicide stakes. There was just something about this place, no matter what the weather was like, which made you feel that life was worth living.

  Brighton’s notorious as the place that Londoners come to for uni, or a dirty weekend, or a club night, and never go home from again. And if it looked that good to Londoners, how must it look to Asif, after the heat and dust and hatred of Islamabad?

  I was trying to get my head around seeing it from his point of view when he came up behind me and said in my ear, ‘1p for them . . .’

  ‘Don’t be kinky,’ I cackled. ‘And anyway, you couldn’t afford ’em.’ I took his hand and dragged him across the road to the pier. I needed some decent thrills inside me before I braved a museum.

  We went to the gypsy caravan, where a man with the bluest eyes and the fastest talking and the greatest name – Ivor Fireman! – told our fortunes; we did the temporary henna-tattoo shop, which, to be blunt, makes it look like someone’s scrawled on your arm with excrement – ASIF on my arm, SUGER on his – and didn’t see the misspelling till it was too late. Then we ate crêpes and waffles all the way up to the far end, where we went on the Super Booster. We were lifted to thirty-eight metres with only the sea beneath us and then dropped, going all the way from nothing to sixty miles an hour in less than three seconds! Unfortunately, so did all those crêpes and waffles and that Knickerbocker Glory Asif had put away.

  ‘Respect! – I’ve never seen spewing quite like that,’ I complimented him as I wiped the sick from his chin.

  ‘Never again!’ he moaned. ‘My stomach is still up there somewhere, I feel!’

  ‘You need a drink,’ I decided – Sexy Nurse Sugar! – and before he could register what I was doing I was pulling him through the door of Horatio’s Bar and lining up the Aftershocks.

  Looking back, this was where it started, in the somewhat shabby, though convivial, surroundings of Horatio’s karaoke bar – the feeling that I was being watched; paradoxically, by someone who wasn’t there. That is, one Kim Lewis, late of this parish, disappeared thief of my heart. (Ish.) And I know that this makes me sound like some sort of screaming nutter but it felt like that – like in the film where the kid can see dead people. Course Kim wasn’t hiding under my bed and vomiting up poison, fingers crossed, and she wasn’t dead neither, hopefully, just packed off out of my evil reach. But maybe just like the girl in the film she was trying to give me a message – only in her case, the message was more of an accusation.

  I swear, as I stood there at the bar, smiling at my boy who sat expectantly in a sea-view booth smiling right back at me, I could actually hear Kizza’s voice, all high-pitched and high-horse like it went when she was about to start blubbing about some imagined slight or other. ‘How could you take him to the pier, Maria? It was one of our special places! It was where I fell in with you! Surely even to you that’s got to mean something!’ . . . and on, and on, and on.

  ‘Well, we never went on the Super Booster and spewed up our rings, cos it’s only been there since 2006, so swivel!’ I muttered under my breath as I carried the Aftershocks over to Asif.r />
  But she just wouldn’t quit. And the more the ghost of Kiz followed me around the pier, the more pissed off I started to get. Partly because no matter how sweet and sexy Asif was, everything we did felt sort of faded, finished before it was over – we were like a xerox of a xerox, and she was like my missing limb that still had a pain in it. But also, I couldn’t believe her nerve. The hypocrisy!

  OK, so I might not have been dead keen on doing that whole three-legged race ‘couple’ thing with Kim – or with anyone, come to that, it wasn’t nothing personal! And if you wanna get picky about it, I s’pose me getting married and having a baby might have given her the impression I didn’t want to live lezzily ever after with her, but still, if she’d been that into me she could at least have bothered to write me the odd letter when I was banged up. For all she knew some big scary dyke-features could have turned me into her own personal PlayStation and I could have been crying into my pillow every night waiting for just one SWALK from her to put everything right.

  Course, as it turned out, it only took ten minutes till I owned the place and had all the big scary dyke-featureses within those walls running round waiting on me simply for the pleasure of it – natch – but the point I’m trying to make is that she didn’t KNOW that and, clearly, she couldn’t be arsed to find out. It’s like I always used to say to her when we argued: why should I give her one hundred per cent when it was so obvious that she was gonna go to university, spend her freakin’ ‘gap year’ travelling, graduate, travel again, meet a rich lesbian and live abroad – New York probably, a penthouse with a view of the Statue of Liberty. Whereas the furthest I was going, obviously, was the end of the pier.

  OK, so as far as she knew I was still playing happy families, but it wouldn’t have hurt her, I mean it wouldn’t exactly have drawn blood for her to make sure, just on the off-chance I might be back on the meat market. And I realize I keep using the words ‘knew’, ‘know’ and that about her, but that’s the point in a way, and that’s why doing fun stuff with Asif wasn’t coming up to how it used to be with Kim. Because, at the end of the day, she knew me, from the outside in, from my head to my toes – and she still loved me. Whereas Asif, frankly, ain’t got a clue; I mean, I know he thinks I’m sexy and ‘naughty’ and whatever, not exactly the girl next door to the Pakistani Christian church – but that’s not the half of it, is it! I mean, try hot girl-on-girl action, aggravated assault, teenage divorce and as yet undetected criminal damage – for starters. What I’m saying is – if he didn’t know my previous, how could he know me? And if he didn’t know me, how could he really love me?

  It’s not that I was nostalgic about me and Kim – I’m close enough to the scene of the sex-crime to remember that a lot of the time she irritated the hell out of me. And I’ve never been the sort of person to get all gooey eyed about the past – once you’ve done something, or someone for the last time, it’s done – stick a fork in me, see ya anon, move on and keep moving. I mean, I’m so hot on closure I don’t even use revolving doors if I can help it. Which was exactly why I was now so teed off about being stalked by the Ghost Of Kizza Past. Well, if she really wanted a front-row seat to see what I was up to in her absence, I’d give her a show to remember!

  I sat there sipping my Aftershock, looking at the sea without seeing it, thinking Kim’s favourite place/Asif’s tour/Sugar’s shag and how I could kill three birds with one stone, when suddenly it came to me. It was the ‘three birds’ idea that sparked it off, too!

  The Booth Museum of Natural History! – yeah, I know, the excitement’ll give us an epi! But this really creepy place – right up by the abortion clinic, as fate would have it; you were never far from a memory-mugging in a city this small – had been Kimbo’s totally favourite place in the whole of B&H, the mentalist. It was the place she always ran to whenever we had a row – which, totally due to her clingy nature and unreasonably un-fun demands, was about every other day for the entire time we were together! – and the place she was always, when we were on speaksies, trying to get me to go to with her. ‘Because it’s the saddest place in town, Shugs!’ Well, dude, don’t go there then! ‘But the most beautiful too!’ Like, d’oh! – make up your tiny mind! Mind you, Kim was the kind that liked wallowing – ‘feeling good feeling bad’ and all that. Her favourite word was ‘bittersweet’ – I mean, what’s that about!

  Hmm, we’d see about bittersweet. I tipped Asif a slow wink, closing my hand over his. I wanted a shag; he wanted a museum; Ghost-features wanted bittersweet; everybody works! ‘You ready to make a move then?’ I was going to lay that ghost once and for all – at the same time as laying young Asif. BOGOF, in fact!

  ‘Oh! – where are we going?’

  ‘A museum, like you wanted to. Whatever my boy wants, my boy gets.’ And to drive the message home I slipped my foot out of my shoe and ran it all the way up to his thigh, winking again as I did so. He choked on his Aftershock, bless him! And as we left the bar arm in arm, it was like I could see Kezzer-the-lezzer’s holier-than-thou little pout of disapproval lurking in the corner near the karaoke stage. So I slipped her a sly wink all to herself over my boy’s shoulder and threw in a little Sugar-smirk too.

  Funny – part of me was flicking her the finger and thinking ‘Screw you, Lewis!’ but the even naughtier bit of my brain, which of course is my favourite bit, was thinking, ‘Go on, girl, get a good eyeful – wish you were here? I do . . .’

  ‘See the thing is,’ I tipsily taught Asif as we stumbled up Ship Street on our way to the bus that would take us to sex-bliss via the Booth Museum of Natural History, ‘that most of Brighton isn’t very old, not compared with places like Lewes and Chichester. The original medieval town was mostly worn away by the sea and burned by the French, the bastards. But this bit, the Lanes, is one of very few surviving examples left in Britain of a Tudor fishing town. Good, innit!’

  ‘So beautiful . . . so ancient!’ Asif woozed, looking up and falling down.

  ‘Steady on! – yeah, so the Lanes were due to be demolished in the 1960s because the council said they were like dirty, but there was this big fuss among the public and now everyone’s dead proud of ’em. Great shops too! This one, Ship Street, is like probably the oldest.’ I towed him on. ‘See that there –’ as I pointed into a well-posey window – ‘that’s Christopher Gull, Brighton’s biggest dentist!’

  For some reason he laughed loudly and nudged me when I said this, which bugged the fuck out of me because Kim had done exactly the same thing when I’d pointed that out to her as well. Will someone PLEASE explain to me what’s so funny about that? I nudged him back, far less playfully, and he yelped as he fell into the gutter outside Jeremy Hoye the jewellers. ‘And there’s where Norman bought Zoe’s engagement ring – mind that lorry, it almost missed you!’

  Only took us ten minutes on the bus from Churchill Square, though to be honest, as we got off I looked at the gloomy old place and wished we’d stayed there, cruising the mall. Didn’t help that the place was in Dyke Road either; in the seat behind me, I could hear Ghost-Kiz snigger. Free entry too, which I always think is dodgy – I mean, who wants to do something which doesn’t cost anything. Surely that means it’s worthless?

  I don’t know what the phrase ‘Natural History’ had conjured up for me, but it was only full of poor stuffed bastards – birds, bears, you name it, in glass cases that ranged from the size of a telly to a few the size of a small car!

  I gazed around me in awestruck horror. No wonder Kizza had been such a mis little madam if this was where she got her kicks – the Addams Family Petting Zoo! I peered at the big brown bear in the case by the entrance, and to my horror saw that a smaller bear was clutching at it. I read the label:

  A MOTHER AND CUB SHOT BY JOHN BADDELY IN MARCH 1881

  ‘LOOK! – he’s even gone and put his name on this monstrosity!’ I hissed. ‘What a right bunch of sinister pricks people were in the olden days!’ I examined a large, shocked-looking bird in a case nearby, called the Great Bustard.
‘And this poor bastard – Bustard, rather – he’s got this look on his face, like, “Sod it, I’ve been stuffed!”’

  Asif nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think there was not the same respect for the animal kingdom in the past. People always say that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature, and that we do not, but I think it is probably the other way around.’

  It was like being back at school! – dead things and lectures, NOT the ideal aphrodisiacs. I took him firmly by the arm and steered him deeper into the silent building. That was the one good thing about the place – apart from the poor dead buggers in the cases and the blokey on the front desk, it was deserted. ‘Whateva! Come on, let’s get educated!’

  It was sad seeing the poor dead creatures, but they did have funny names some of ’em. ‘Look!’ I pointed at a moth ‘That one’s called the “Snout”, and his mate’s called the “White-line Snout” – bet we all know what he’s been up to, eh? – doing the hokey-cokey!’ There was a bird called the Buff-breasted Sandpiper, which reminded me of myself, and a Little Bustard to go with the big one.

  And there, right in a little room at the back, there was a proper old ‘skellington’, as She and Evil call ’em. We leaned in to read the description:

  NAME:

  HUMAN BEING (HOMO SAPIENS)

  RANGE:

  WORLDWIDE

  STATUS:

  WIDESPREAD AND DANGEROUS

  ‘Bit judgemental, innit!’ I commented. ‘Speak for yourself! And it’s a bit hypocritical, them having that poor baby bear and his mum shot, and then going “Ooh, we’re all so dangerous!” I wouldn’t kill no animal!’