Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving

by Martin Millar

  “You’re disgusting,” he said, wiping his face with one of Elfish’s T-shirts, a poor choice as far as cleanliness was concerned. He threw on his clothes. At the door he turned and looked contemptuously at the semi-conscious Elfish.

  “I never slept with Mo. But Mo told me you’d fuck me if I said I had. He asked me to sleep with you tonight to prevent you getting on with your speech. I guess I’ve succeeded in that anyway, though I wouldn’t even have tried if I’d known how filthy your body was.”

  Joseph walked out of the room. Elfish lay still for a few moments. Using all her reserves of willpower she opened her eyes. She dragged herself on to her hands and knees and crawled downstairs. In the toilet she was sick again. Drink, tension and lack of sleep had severely weakened her constitution and she struggled to control her trembling limbs. She splashed water on to her face and tried to drive away her nausea by sheer willpower.

  “Very clever, Mo,” muttered Elfish with venom. “Enough to defeat a lesser woman. Fortunately I am not a lesser woman.”

  Furious and appalled at the dark treachery of his plotting she began to haul herself back up the stairs. Inside her small body her dreams and ambitions were welling up with renewed vigour.

  sixty-one

  THE RAFT CAME thundering out of the underground cavern and plunged over the huge roaring waterfall at the edge of the world. This was surely the end. Even Red Sonja, bravest of Barbarian warriors, screamed in fear. The ocean, slipping off the edge of the planet, cast a vast, violent spray of water far out into space. Each of the doomed souls clung on in terror as the huge volume of cascading water carried them down into the limitless void.

  This is the end, thought Mick Ronson, miserably, his guitar now waterlogged and unplayable. And I still think I should have been more successful.

  This is the end, thought Cleopatra, her fine Egyptian clothes and make-up ragged and smeared. And I should not have lost my kingdom.

  This is the end, thought Bomber Harris. But I refuse to admit I was wrong to destroy an enemy city in wartime.

  This is the end, thought Pericles, and was angry again with the Athenians who had exiled him.

  This is the end, thought Ben Jonson, and prepared to meet his death in a very bad humour.

  “Look!”

  Botticelli, who would never paint again, was pointing through the thundering waters at a shadowy figure who flew alongside. As the figure approached they recognised her as the mysterious black-clad woman who had shared the last part of their journey.

  Pericles and Red Sonja wearily unsheathed their swords, readying themselves to fight off a fresh attack.

  “Prepare to repel boarders,” howled Cleopatra.

  “Who are you?” demanded Pericles.

  “I am Queen Mab,” said the stranger. “I have come to rescue you.”

  sixty-two

  O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you.

  She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

  In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

  On the fore-finger of an alderman,

  Drawn with a team of little atomies

  Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep:

  Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;

  The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;

  The traces, of the smallest spider’s web;

  The collars, of the moonshine’s watery beams;

  Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film;

  Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,

  Not half so big as a round little worm

  Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;

  Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,

  Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

  Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coach-makers.

  And in this state she gallops night by night

  Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;

  O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;

  O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees;

  O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream;

  Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,

  Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.

  Sometimes she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,

  And then he dreams of smelling out a suit;

  And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail,

  Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,

  Then dreams he of another benefice;

  Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,

  And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,

  Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,

  Of healths five fathoms deep; and then anon

  Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes;

  And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,

  And sleeps again. This is that very Mab

  That plats the manes of horses in the night:

  And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,

  Which once untangled much misfortune bodes;

  This is the hag, when maids be on their backs,

  That presses them and learns them first to bear,

  Making them women of good carriage:

  This is she.

  Elfish had learned the speech. She dropped the book and fell asleep on the floor.

  sixty-three

  ON THE MORNING of the gig Aran got up early for the first time in four years. After some serious research he was now heavily armed with Queen Mab poems. He planned to put one through Mo’s door and keep the rest in reserve for emergencies.

  Queen Mab and her light maydes the while,

  Amongst themselves doe closely smile,

  To see the King caught with this wile,

  With one another jesting:

  And to the Fayrie Court they went,

  With mickle joy and merriment,

  Which thing was done with good intent,

  And thus I left them feasting.

  —DRAYTON

  That’ll show him, thought Aran, and hurried home to sleep off the effects of his strenuous early morning.

  He was woken by Elfish some time in the late afternoon. It was time to get ready for the gig. She had borrowed a van and Casaubon was driving round picking everyone up.

  Elfish was pleased when Aran told her about the poem.

  “Reports have reached me that Mo and Cody are looking uneasy, which is good. They know I’ve got them on the run.”

  Later Aran related some more news at which his sister professed to be amazed.

  “I can’t believe it. You ended your video game with an easy level where Queen Mab comes and rescues everyone? So anyone playing it can actually win?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  Aran explained that he had suffered a surprise attack of positive thinking.

  “Because of you, I suppose, Elfish. Since you’ve been on this Queen Mab mania I haven’t felt so bad about things. It seems difficult to be completely depressed when you’re going around getting things done all the time.”

  Aran sounded just a little reproachful at this, as he had set his mind quite firmly on being completely depressed. Elfish had dragged him out of it, though, and he was now sitting beside her in the borrowed van with the rest of the musicians travelling the short distance to the gig.

  Elfish was exhausted but the mood in the van was lighthearted. The band took Elfish’s learning the speech as an excellent omen and in the few spare moments they had had today they had informed as many people as they could, encouraging them to come along and witness Elfish’s triumph. As Mo had been doing the same for precisely the opposite reasons, tonight’s event had every prospect of being much busier than would normally be expected for an unknown pair of bands playing in a pub in Brixton.

  Aisha sat beside Casaubon in the front with the black sheet on which she had painted the backdrop resting on her knees. It was a beautiful backdrop, a pai
nting of Queen Mab in her regal fairy glory travelling down from the moon to bring dreams to the earth. Around her were rainbow-hued fairy attendants, golden cosmic dust and silver shooting stars.

  The lingering remnants of Aisha’s agoraphobia made her slightly uncomfortable to be this far away from home but she had insisted on coming because she believed that Mory would be there. As well as this she said that it was important to her to hang the backdrop personally and see Elfish play in front of it.

  Elfish herself was slightly cleaner, at least around the parts that were visible. Marion had produced a damp cloth before she left and wiped her face and hands.

  “And you can’t get much more friendly than that,” said Shonen, who was with them in the van as an encouragement to Elfish. “Are you sure you remember every line?”

  Elfish nodded confidently.

  “She was driven by extreme fury beyond the effects of tension into a state of transcendental self-belief,” said Aran.

  “What?”

  “I was so annoyed I learned the speech,” said Elfish.

  “Right.”

  Elfish had been yawning during the journey but as the van pulled up outside the venue she pushed aside the remnants of her stress and exhaustion and leapt out, guitar in hand. She strode inside as rock star and conquering hero.

  Although the venue was only the side room of a bar, it was a place where regular gigs were held which meant that they had their own PA. Mo’s band had not yet arrived so Elfish and her companions immediately started to set up their equipment for a soundcheck. This had to be done quickly because when the main band did arrive they would take precedence and the support act would quite possibly be granted no more time at all to check things out before going on stage.

  “Two fingers,” said Elfish as Aran laid a microphone over the small speaker cabinet she would be playing through. This microphone picked up the sound and took it via the mixing desk to the larger amplifiers and speakers of the sound system. She showed him how to measure the gap between the microphone and the speaker by placing two fingers between them. In this way she would know how to position it exactly correctly before they played because all the positioning of mikes they made just now would of course be changed when Mo sound-checked and there would be no opportunity to test the volume levels and balance again.

  By the time Mo and his companions arrived Elfish had got things more or less how she wanted them, although this had caused a fair amount of animosity between herself and the woman who was doing the sound. Elfish naturally took it as a personal insult if her guitar did not sound just right.

  She laid her instrument down in its case next to May’s on a small shelf beside the stage. There was no dressing room.

  “Where will we tune up?” asked May. Elfish shrugged. Tuning up carefully together before going on stage had never been one of her strongest concerns.

  The room was already filling up. Unusually, people were arriving early and this was no doubt due to the now well publicised confrontation that was to take place.

  Mo and Elfish made no contact and their respective entourages hung around on opposite sides of the bar avoiding each other. Elfish had been expecting some adverse reaction when Aisha and Aran pinned up the Queen Mab backdrop but there was none.

  “Perhaps he knows he’s beaten already,” said Elfish.

  “Look at all these people,” said Shonen, anxiously drinking a pint. “It makes me nervous.”

  “Everything makes you nervous.”

  “Mory isn’t here yet,” said Aisha, looking round.

  “He will be,” said Elfish, and walked away before anyone else bothered her with their problems. She went to stand alone outside the door to prepare herself. This turned out to be a bad move because as she stood there Joseph arrived. He grinned at her. Elfish glared furiously back at him but swallowed the abuse she was about to deliver because she knew it was vital that she remain calm. Any undue stress might drive the speech out of her head. Slightly shaken, she hurried back for another pint and a word with Shonen.

  Fortunately, she found that seeing Joseph had not banished her lines from her memory, but it had been close.

  “Stay calm,” whispered Shonen, which brought a retort from Elfish so stinging that Shonen was obliged to hurry away to the toilet and be sick. Aran was relieved to see that his sister’s need for help had not actually made her decide to be unnecessarily pleasant to anyone.

  sixty-four

  THE ROOM WAS now full. People queued eight deep at the bar. Some waited patiently while others brandished money and shouted their orders to the harassed-looking bar staff. Across from here was the stage, a fairly high stage for a small room, and the rough concrete in front of this was the only unoccupied area in the whole venue. As there was no dressing room, both bands’ equipment was piled up beside the stage while the bands themselves struggled at the bar along with everyone else.

  Tula and Lizzy, the last of Elfish’s former friends to desert her, were in the audience, but they did not speak to Elfish or wish her well.

  At the bar Aran found himself next to Cody.

  “Well, I guess we won when it came to the Queen Mab poems,” said Aran, smugly.

  “Nonsense,” retorted Cody. “A few well-known poems count for nothing.”

  “What do you mean ‘well-known?’” demanded Aran. “Drayton’s ‘Nimphidia’ is not a well-known poem.”

  “It is to me. Much better known than Jonson’s ‘Entertainment.’ Now that’s what I call an obscure work.”

  “Preposterous,” snorted Aran. “I read it when I was in primary school. And The Alchemist. Queen Mab’s in that as well.”

  “So? Everyone knows that. You didn’t know Blake painted a picture of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro,’ did you?”

  “Of course I did. I have a copy hanging on my wall.”

  “How about this?” demanded Cody. “‘A dwarf to thrust aside, a wicked mage to stab, and, Lo ye, I had kissed Queen Mab.’”

  “Browning’s ‘Easter Day,’” said Aran. “Not one of my favourites, unlike ‘Oh fairy, come attend our royal grace, Let’s go and share our fruit with our Queen Mab.’ No doubt you are unfamiliar with that?”

  “Randolph’s ‘Amyntas,’” replied Cody immediately, to Aran’s great annoyance, and suddenly the air was full of verse as the pair tried to prove which one of them was the most knowledgeable. Lines from Porlis’s “Parnassus,” Brown’s “Britannia’s Pastorals” and the anonymous “History of Jacob and Esau” rent the air with increasing vehemence.

  “I refuse to believe you have actually read ‘Brittania’s Pastorals,’” shouted Aran, and they began to jostle each other.

  The affair was brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Mo who pulled Cody away. He gave him a withering look.

  “Stop this stupidity,” he ordered.

  Elfish”s time had arrived.

  “Well?” said Mo.

  “Well, what?”

  “Are you going to back out of it?”

  “No,” said Elfish. “I’m not. And you are still stupid.”

  Elfish began elbowing her way towards the front, followed by her band. It was time for the fulfilment of her dream.

  No one else present had Elfish’s tenacity in pursuing their dreams but that did not mean they had none of their own. Following Elfish closely, cheap guitar in hand, was May, who dreamed of having no more nightmares about her time in prison in Ireland and a secure place to live in London. Behind May was Casaubon the drummer who dreamed of his girlfriend moving back in with him and forgiving him for his terrible behaviour. Behind Casaubon was Gail with her borrowed bass guitar. She dreamed of her magazine being successful, or even existing, and she carried along with her the dreams of Marion, Chevon and Perlita, who were standing in the crowd, wishing her well.

  At the front of the audience stood Aisha, studying with pleasure the backdrop she had painted and hung, and dreaming of her agoraphobia disappearing and Mory reappearing. She glanced anxiously around her, wo
ndering why he had not shown up yet. Beside her was Shonen, pointing out proudly to the rest of her theatre group the small figure of Elfish, who was going to rescue them, and her companions said what a striking and impressive figure Elfish was, and commented that Shonen herself seemed much healthier these days.

  Next to them was Aran, dreaming of selling his video game to a large company, and collecting all twenty cigarette cards. It occurred to him that all of his recent experiences with Elfish would be good to write about and he wondered if he should actually start another book instead of lying around his house being depressed all the time.

  Cary and Lilac arrived. Their heads were always full of dreams but now, having been paid by John Mackie for their first day’s work, their current longing for a holiday in the country seemed to be well within their reach. So they carried that dream quite brightly and they also carried with them the sincere best wishes of John Mackie towards Elfish, which they transmitted as she passed them by.

  Right at the front of the crowd were Mo and Cody. Their heads being full of marijuana, their dreams were somewhat confused, but Cody had pleasant visions of playing his guitar on stage and being generally admired. Mo shared Cody’s rock and roll fantasies but a more pressing concern was to humiliate Elfish.

  “Have you met my friend?” he said loudly, grabbing Elfish’s arm as she passed. Elfish halted. She glanced at the woman beside Mo who wore sunglasses as black as her own and a floppy hat which concealed all her hair. As Elfish watched she took off her hat and her bright blonde tresses tumbled down over her shoulders.

  “Hello, Elfish,” said Amnesia. “You don’t imitate my voice very well but we both enjoyed your phone calls. Especially when we were fucking.”

  Amnesia laughed, and so did Mo and Cody. The rest of Mo’s band joined in, and then their friends. Elfish suddenly found herself surrounded by a circle of mocking and jeering faces, all of whom had known all along about her attempts at deception.