“Yes I can.” Aran frowned.
“But it is not a very nice memory apparently. Why not?”
Aran drummed his fingers on the armchair he occupied, raising a small cloud of dust.
“She’s in a bad way. We went to bed after a party and when I was undressing her she burst into tears.”
“So the rumours about you are true,” sniggered Elfish.
“I was entirely free from blame. The problem was she couldn’t bear to let anyone undress her because it reminded her too much of being strip-searched in jail in Northern Ireland. She was on remand in prison for joyriding and in that month she was strip-searched five times before they found her not guilty and let her go.
“The last time was a big search involving women officers in riot gear and the prisoners tried to protest. May was thrown on the floor and got her head banged and her clothes ripped off. Male officers were walking up and down the corridor outside looking in and making comments. May ended up with bruises on her back, and a swollen face. She says she came to England to get over it but from the way she started crying at the memory I’d say she has some way to go.”
Another sicko, thought Elfish, with some disgust.
“Well, that’s fine,” she said. “Playing guitar with me is just the thing to bring her out of it. Or not, as the case may be. Just so long as she can play, I don’t care.”
Elfish left Aran’s intending to have another attempt at memorising Shakespeare before visiting May but was sidetracked after meeting Tula for a lunchtime game of pool and finding that she had just been paid for four days’ work delivering telephone directories.
“I must go,” said Elfish. “I have important things to do this afternoon.”
“Have another pint,” said Tula. “You’re so busy these days we never see you. Play some pool.”
Elfish was a fine pool player with a gentle touch, capable of imparting backspin or sidespin to the cue ball to bring it back into position, a feat beyond the abilities of most part-time bar room players. With her leather jacket and motorbike boots she looked good at the table, which she knew.
Playing pool and drinking was fine but afterwards she fell asleep at home and did not wake up until three in the morning. She cursed herself. She had meant to visit May. Now another day had slipped by and she had not made the progress she should. How was it that a person with her iron determination could be so easily distracted? She was engulfed by the overwhelmingly gloomy thought that she might turn out like everyone else and let her dreams evaporate into nothing. Even now they might be flying up to land on the moon.
She walked up and down her room reading Shakespeare and found that she was unable to take in a single line. She cursed Romeo and Juliet for being a remarkably stupid play written in remarkably stupid language. Depression set in. In the middle of the night her prospects of success seemed remote. There was too much for her to do. Unable to get back to sleep Elfish lay on her bed and felt bleak.
twenty-six
AS FAR AS John Mackie could remember, he had lit a candle in church for his sister every day for the past fifty years. These candles lay next to an altar in his local Catholic church. They were small and white, encased in thin metal. Beside them there was a box to put money in. Each candle cost fifteen pence.
He was now sixty. He had been ten and his sister eight when they were evacuated from wartime Britain as passengers on a ship to Canada.
The ship was torpedoed and sank quickly. Many people died, including his sister. John Mackie’s last memory of her was the sight of her long dark hair drifting away from him in the water while he clawed his way frantically towards her. A wave had separated them and he never saw her again. He had been dragged aboard a lifeboat, semi-conscious, but his sister was never found. This had spoiled his life.
He now ran a secondhand music store in Brixton and was doing badly. For the past ten years he had been fighting a losing battle with the large and modern secondhand store up the road. Their window was packed full of guitars and amplifiers, synthesisers, samplers, sequencers and modern recording equipment, while his was a fairly sorry mix of guitars, banjos, cheap effects boxes and secondhand cassettes that no one wanted.
Anyone with money requiring good equipment would go uptown to buy it new in Denmark Street and anyone short of cash who wanted to choose from a wide variety of goods would go to the other secondhand store. This left John Mackie with few customers.
Standing quietly behind the counter, he started slightly as Elfish entered. He was used to the strangely clad youth of Brixton entering his shop, these being some of the people with very little money who were likely to be his customers, but the sight of Elfish’s small figure swamped by her vast, metal-decorated leather jacket still took him by surprise, particularly as her face was almost entirely hidden behind her beaded hair. When she stood at the counter her beads rested on the stud and ring which pierced her nose. She brushed her hair back, revealing her face, which was very dirty. John Mackie felt uncomfortable.
Elfish asked if she could see a guitar that was hanging in the window. There was very little room in the shop, and bringing out the guitar, plugging it into an amplifier and getting it round Elfish’s neck was something of a struggle.
Elfish strummed it to see if it was in tune, and then picked out the rhythm of “Green River Blues,” a very old tune. John Mackie recognised this tune and was surprised to find someone like Elfish capable of finger-picking it. He almost warmed to her till she abandoned it abruptly, turned up the volume to produce dreadful distortion through the small amp, and played a few savage bar chords.
John Mackie winced. He would never entirely get used to this sort of thing. Elfish liked the guitar but, as was no surprise at all to the shopkeeper, she could not afford it.
“Let me take it now. I’ll pay it up.”
“No,” said John Mackie.
“It is of immense importance to me to have this guitar now,” said Elfish, seriously.
John Mackie shook his head. His demeanour was not friendly. He desired that Elfish should leave the shop as quickly as possible because he now realised that his discomfort at her presence was due to the fact that when she brushed her hair back her face bore an uncomfortable resemblance to that of his long-dead sister.
Elfish could not persuade him to part with the guitar. He would not let it out of the shop until it was fully paid for and Elfish could not afford it. Back in her house Elfish was angry. She needed the guitar for May but could see no way of obtaining it.
With no prospect of solving this problem, Elfish hunted around for someone on whom she could take out her bad feelings. She went downstairs intending to pick an argument with Marion, Chevon, Gail or Perlita, either separately or all at once, but no one was around. Chevon’s cat wandered in. Elfish was quite prepared to take her bad feelings out on the cat, figuring that any cat that was prepared to stay with Chevon deserved a fair amount of abuse. She prepared to swing her boot at it but the cat was wise by now to Elfish and departed swiftly.
Elfish peered hopefully out the back, wishing that Lilac and Cary were around so she could upset them by swearing at them, but they were nowhere to be seen.
She was now completely frustrated. She felt that she simply had to be unpleasant to someone.
Bad thoughts of Mo invaded her mind, and with them came an excellent idea. She dived to the phone and dialled his number.
“Hi, Mo, this is Amnesia. Elfish has just been on the phone to me. She obviously doesn’t realise how much I hate her. Is it true what she told me, that she’s all ready to go with her band, and she’s going to collect the name of Queen Mab for herself? Pretty silly of you to make that agreement and let her get away with it, Mo.”
Mo said that Elfish would do no such thing but Amnesia made light of his protests.
“I’m starting to think that Elfish may be too much for you, Mo. Is it true she’s slept with all your lovers and they all say it was better than you?”
“Certainly not,” said Mo,
with feeling.
“She says you used to drink so much you could never really do it properly. I do remember you drank a lot, Mo. You’d better watch it, you have a few failures and word gets around. And a reputation for impotence is a hard one to get rid of. Oh well, I expect Elfish was lying. Bye.”
After this Elfish felt somewhat better. These were deadly insults to Mo and he would now be seething.
This small triumph made Elfish feel like playing a game of pool. It struck her suddenly that she had no one to play with. She seemed to have misplaced all of her friends apart from Tula and she would be working just now.
Though Elfish did not like to face it too consciously, she had in reality very few friends. She had never been a member of a wide social circle. She never went off drinking or dancing with a crowd of people as did the other women she lived with. What acquaintances she had she tended to drive away either through gradually wearing out their charity with her persistent melancholy or banishing their goodwill in a flash of bad temper.
This relative solitude was something she shared with Aran although it was not something they ever discussed. It would indeed be a difficult thing to discuss, even with her brother, but since her terminal disagreement with Amnesia, Elfish had been close to no one except Aran. As Aran was generally too wrapped up in his own depressions and anxieties to be much of a friend, Elfish’s life tended to be lacking in light relief.
twenty-seven
MO LOUNGED IN a pub in Brixton, pint in hand, satisfied after a successful rehearsal. He and the rest of his band were discussing management. After several semi-successful forays into music, Mo now felt he had enough experience to find some management, someone who might be willing to pay a company to do some publicity for them. It would be nothing extravagant but might well be enough to get them on their way.
“I’ll do some phoning round next week,” said Mo.
“Why not now?”
“Because of the name.”
The drummer was puzzled.
“I thought you’d settled on Queen Mab.”
“I have,” said Mo. “But it will take another week to be finalised. There is the matter of Elfish.”
None of the rest of the band understood this. They could not see why he did not just adopt the name immediately. If Mo liked it there was no hindrance to him using it.
“Who cares if it upsets Elfish? Elfish is a total fuck-up.”
Mo took off his leather jacket and slung it over his chair. It fell on the ground and he let it lie. Over his torso a ragged blue T-shirt strained against the width of his shoulders.
“I want to make her feel even worse than she does already,” said Mo, and the others took this as a reasonable explanation. Mo’s dislike for Elfish was well known, and if it seemed to have grown in the past few days there was nothing remarkable in that. Everyone at the table had at one time or another felt their hatred and disgust for former lovers grow without warning.
“Is she really going to stand up before our gig and recite a speech?”
“Yes, she is.”
Everyone laughed.
“What if she succeeds?”
Mo assured them that she would not. He had experience of Elfish and was confident of her inability to learn lines under pressure.
A thin, black-clad woman with long blonde hair and tattooed shoulders walked into the pub, causing the heads of all the band to swivel.
“I know her,” said Cody. “That’s Amnesia. I thought she’d left London.”
twenty-eight
ELFISH WAVERED BETWEEN going out and getting on with things or spending the whole day in bed. It was vital to her endeavours that she kept busy. Unfortunately she did not feel like keeping busy.
She had a new bottle of whisky, cheap from the supermarket. To bring the television up to her room, stay under the blankets, drink whisky and pretend to learn the speech was a powerful temptation.
Eventually, late in the day, she dragged herself up. She was wearing several T-shirts and many pairs of socks. Both the T-shirts and the socks were ragged, dirty and caked in ages-old sweat. She pulled on her leggings, stuffed her feet in her boots and manoeuvred her arms through the ripped lining of her leather jacket.
Outside the sun shone and Elfish squinted in disapproval. She hated it when the sun shone brightly. It hurt her eyes, even when they were covered by her hair.
“Hello, Elfish,” came one cheerful voice, followed by another.
Cary and Lilac were standing outside, holding hands.
Elfish came to a halt, glowering. She could not be sure but she had the distinct impression that the young lovers were gently squeezing each other’s hands in a secret message of devotion.
This was too much for Elfish. She glared evilly at them, stormed back into her house, grabbed the television from the living room and marched upstairs.
She brought out her bottle of whisky and, without removing her leggings, boots or jacket, switched off the light and got into bed. She passed the afternoon watching game shows and soap operas, drinking whisky and smoking joints, all the time sinking into a grimmer and grimmer mood till eventually she drank and smoked enough to lose herself in unconsciousness and bad dreams.
Outside, unaware of the dire effects their embraces had wrought, Cary and Lilac were about to embark on a mission to earn money. Even now they were gathering up buckets of water and clean cloths in preparation for standing at crossroads and harassing motorists into having their windscreens cleaned whether they liked it or not.
twenty-nine
“THIS IS HOPELESS,” complained Cleopatra, and it was. One might have thought that with the occupants of the raft being who they were, they would have done better against the adversaries who continually battered them. Pericles and Red Sonja were both notable warriors. Cleopatra had received military training and had commanded a fleet at the Battle of Actium. Even Ben Jonson had been a handy man in a tavern brawl. However, their efforts at fighting back were completely futile.
The problem was that their enemies were just too strong for them. Every effort to steer the raft back towards the shore was thwarted. Every time Botticelli rigged up a rudder a sea monster would emerge to destroy it or a winged gryphon would plummet from the sky to rip it to shreds. Red Sonja slashed this way and that with her broad-sword but for each gryphon she killed two more would appear.
Mick Ronson had by this time more or less given up and sat in the middle of the raft playing his guitar, which did not really please anyone else.
“I can see it!” screamed Botticelli.
“What? What?”
“The edge of the world!”
Mick Ronson laid down his guitar and gazed at the horizon with amazement. As an inhabitant of the twentieth century he had been convinced that the world was round and had no edge but sure enough, some way off, there was a mighty foaming waterfall which could only be the place where the ocean disappeared into the endless void.
“Get busy on that steering device,” commanded Cleopatra, and leapt to lend her weight to Red Sonja who was busy trying to hold off the squadron of gryphons which harassed Botticelli as he laboured. But as two more appeared for each one killed the sky was soon full of the terrible creatures. Botticelli was forced to retreat and the rudder was once more smashed. The raft swept inexorably on towards the edge of the world.
“This is ridiculous,” said Elfish, grimly working the controls in front of Aran’s terminal. “How do you beat these gryphons?”
“You can’t,” said Aran. “They’re too powerful.”
“Well, that’s no fucking use, is it?” complained Elfish, standing up in disgust.
“I think it makes for an excellent game,” said her brother.
“I think it’s stupid. And what am I doing playing your dumb video game? I’m meant to be learning a speech. Today I got to line five and then it all went out of my mind again. I’ve only got six days left.”
Elfish departed, guilty and angry at herself for wasting time. Aran was sorry a
t her distress but was quite pleased to be left alone to get on with his computer game.
He was just programming in a new character, Bomber Harris, who appeared from the sky after being kidnapped by a pterodactyl, when his labours were interrupted once more.
It was Elfish again.
“Look at this!” she wailed, practically knocking Aran down in her haste to get from his front door through to his kitchen. Aran took the piece of paper she had thrust at him and followed her to the fridge where he found her desperately emptying beer into her mouth. Elfish finished one can and moved on to another while Aran read the note.
I am the Fairy Mab: to me ’tis given
The wonders of the human world to keep:
The secrets of the immeasurable past,
In the unfailing consciences of men,
These stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find.
—SHELLEY
“Well?” demanded Elfish.
“Lousy poem,” said Aran. “Sounds like a crossword clue.”
“Never mind what it sounds like!” raged Elfish. “What about all those hours of research you said you did? You told me you couldn’t find any more Mab poems apart from another one by Herrick and now Mo has replied to my Herrick with this poem by Shelley. Even I have heard of Shelley. It can’t be that obscure. Did you do any research for me at all?”
“Hours of research,” protested Aran. “Laborious, backbreaking, meticulous—”
Elfish cut him off, marching across the living room to take Aran’s Children’s Wonderful Encyclopaedia from the bookshelf. She practically ripped it open at “S” and scanned through it for Shelley.
“Aha!” she said with triumph. “What about this then? Queen Mab. Listed here as an early work by Shelley. In nine cantos, whatever that means. Well?”
“Even the most careful researcher can occasionally miss some obscure reference,” said Aran.
“It’s in your Children’s Encyclopaedia for God’s sake!” bawled Elfish. “For all I know it might be one of the best-known poems in the English language! Exactly how long did you spend in the library?”
Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving Page 7