Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  More bare torsos pile in, seemingly swept through the door by the blast of a swooping bass line. Ellie’s number one rave buddy is in the thick of them. Cal. His broad grin widens on seeing her. He springs over and envelops her in a bearhug. ‘Where’d you go, Ellie babe? Been looking all over for you.’

  Ellie just grins, unable to speak. The massage has taken the edge off her funk and at long last she can feel herself slotting into the easy rhythmic waves of the tablet. Her thoughts are lean and beatific, her arms light and agile as the music from outside takes her away with it, prompting her limbs to impulsive arcs and dives.

  ‘You on one, babe?’

  Ellie widens her grin a couple of inches.

  ‘Come on, you. Me new girl’s dying to meet you. Been talking about you long enough.’

  As they push through the delirious heat of the club, Ellie, the tablet and the bass line meld into one. She stops stock-still, pulling Cal back. There is a warm surge of pleasure pumping out from some inner coil deep behind her lungs. She can feel her neurotransmitters at work, shooting little darts of glee around her body, zipping in and around her heart and her fanny like fireflies around a fire. But she doesn’t dance. She just stands there, letting the bass thrum right through her. Cal makes a fist around her hand, squeezing so tightly that tomorrow when she wakes up, her skin will bear the bruise-tattoo of his nails. He pulls her along behind him, weaving a path through the dance floor chug. Ellie revels in it. It’s magical, every beat, every step. Everyone nods and grins and raises thumbs at her as she passes. She pauses to hug waxy old bodies and kiss liquid young faces. The music lifts her, levels her, then lifts her again. Her head rolls back and her eyes hit the shimmering apex, a glimmering collage of strobes and glitterballs spinning dream-like reflections of faces she’s seen in the toilets, in the queue, in the car park before the doors even opened, and the night doubles back on itself and comes full circle as she catches a snatched fragment of the bush-baby boy with the huge eyes from the car that gave her a lift there.

  Ellie can feel the place rocking under the weight of pure delirium. She looks out across the rapt sea of bodies and shakes her head, incredulous. ‘Look!’ she shouts. ‘Cal! Just look at it.’

  The pair of them stand and stare from the fringe of the dance floor. Cal is older than Ellie and not so easily seduced, but he too is blown away by the sheer spectacle of the crowd bouncing as one to the bang of piano and bass. And they both know it – this is one of those moments when the congregation touches something bigger, purer, more astounding than anything they’ve known before. It goes beyond friendship or love. Only those there at that precise second where the sound drops out to silence and the piano kicks back in and their souls hit the roofs of their skulls will recognise the starblaze, that awesome, fleeting glimpse of something magnificent and profound. Ellie feels it deeply, and she knows that Cal is feeling it too. She draws him in close, digging her fingers into the small of his back and running her palm over the muscular jut of his arse. She can feel his cock hardening. His dick is stabbing into her hip and then they’re kissing – their tongues probing, lapping, seeking out the wrinkled roofs of each other’s mouths.

  The music changes tack and hardens. They both pull away at exactly the same moment, laughing, recoiling at the sheer absurdity of what just happened. Cal shoots a nervous glance over her shoulder towards the back of the room. ‘’Kin’ ’ell, El! Where’d that come from?’

  She grins and shrugs. He’s beautiful, Cal, he’d more than do for most girls, but he’s too … nice for Ellie. He’s Cal. It’s that little crew up by the speakers that lights Ellie’s fires. Gary Miller. She’s just riding out the wilder waves of her tablet, then she’ll make her move. Cal, awkward now, asks Ellie if she wants a bottle of water. She scans around for Miller and his boys while he’s gone. Their nut-hard, shaven heads stand out next to the bobbing mop of hair on the dance floor. Miller himself has a rock-hard stomach, his tattooed chest packed and muscular. Ellie can feel her fanny spasm as she watches him, dancing minimally, eyes never leaving the crowd. He dances without joy – if dancing it is. He has his hands behind his back, barely swaying from side to side, perfectly on the beat and yet perversely removed from the ritual. Ellie takes in the taut, simian sneer of his face – the high-cut cheekbones, the corners of his eyes stretching upwards, almost oriental. He’s beautiful. This is the boy she’s going to give it to.

  She’s right in the hub of the dance floor now, writhing in front of Miller. He’s raking his eyes all over her, doesn’t even seem to mind the brace. She winks at him then turns away, swaying her bum gently to the slow build of the piano refrain then slams it as the bass kicks in, working it like a piston. She flips her chin over her shoulder, and she’s got him. He’s transfixed, staring at her arse. She drags his eyeline up to hers. ‘I. Want. To. Fuck. You,’ she mouths.

  He’s too stunned to move for a second, then he steps towards her. He’s coming for her. She smiles to herself and turns back to the speakers as though she couldn’t care, either way. She feels Miller’s arms lock around her from behind, feels his cock gouge into her backside. They stay entwined like that for a while, swaying under the dominion of one, shared subconscious.

  Miller lights up a ciggie, pulls hard on it, looks at the glowing ember and plants it between her lips. He strokes her flat stomach with one hand and she groans – it’s too gorgeous. She feels his fingers prise beneath the elastic hem of her shorts. Ellie is on fire. ‘Come on.’ She grins. ‘Take me back to yours. I’ll take them off. I’ll take everything off …’

  *

  Ellie steps out of the taxi and her face widens at the great hulk of concrete looming over her. She squints into the tiny bars of prison windows zigzagging the stairway. One forlorn light is humming on-off, on-off, giving the impression of a giant insect flickering around its bulb. Even to those loyal to the Grasmere Estate, this low-rise is an eyesore, but to Ellie Fitzgerald, it’s gut-wrenchingly beautiful. It’s the real thing. She clings to Miller’s arm, a yearning, saturating kinship with him taking her over. ‘I was born here, me,’ she beams.

  ‘Shithole,’ he mutters.

  She mock-kicks him. ‘Don’t say that about my birthplace!’

  He grins back at her, without soul. ‘Used to be all right. Before the smackheads come.’ He grinds the key in the lock, pushes the door. ‘And the Pakis.’ He sniffs the air. ‘Dirty twats.’

  Miller’s flat smells of stale, cloying chip fat. What Ellie can see of the tiny kitchen as they pass is a maelstrom – every surface littered by open tins and grime and pile upon pile of unwashed dishes, ready to collapse at any moment. It’s filthy in there and she has to steel her stomach against the lurch of vomit as her fingers trail something viscous on the wall. He snaps on a light. The living room is just as bad – worse. A dozen dirty mugs clutter the floor and the arms of a tatty sofa. Ellie clears a couple to make room to sit. Cigarette butts float in the dregs of fungal, days-old tea. Miller boots up a big black hi-fi system. It spurts stripped-down drumbeats around the room.

  Ellie shrugs off her puffa jacket, folds it into a cushion and perches frigidly on it, trying to shut her mind off to the squalor. She reaches for a cigarette, hoping it might override the stench in here. Miller, rooting through his record collection, has his back to the proceedings. She tries to fight down a growing sense of unease.

  ‘And the Pakis …’

  He said that. All the lads round Orford said it – she wasn’t green. Yet since house music, since Legends, since tablets … and it wasn’t that, even. It was something in the way he said it. She looks up. He’s just standing there, staring at her. No feeling, just looking right through her, like he hasn’t quite decided what to do with her. He makes her shudder.

  ‘Get some knives on the go, ay?’

  He steps out of the room. She reaches for her jacket, slips it back on, ready. She can hear him firing up with that dirty old gas cooker in the kitchen. A stifled curse, a muttered something she can’t m
ake out, then he’s back holding two blackened butter knives. He nods at her, trying to be conversational, exuding menace.

  ‘Cold?’

  She mugs a timid grin. ‘Little bit.’

  He shows no concern, no reaction at all. He balances the hot knives, crumbles the pot and sets to working the blades together, releasing the thick pungent smoke. He doesn’t offer Ellie any, sucking the first yield down himself, holding the smoke inside and, eventually, leaning his head back and blasting the fumes out at the ceiling.

  ‘Here.’ He’s a bit squiffy as he offers the works. ‘Get on it.’ He flops back down onto the sofa. That cold, expressionless gaze has been melted away by a sleepy, heavy-eyed demeanour. Ellie just sits there. She looks into his face – the boy who just said those things. She takes a deep breath and she can’t stop herself. She wants to go for him.

  ‘Do you not like blacks, then?’

  He thinks on it, makes a pained, knit-brow expression as he thinks. ‘Don’t mind niggers. Least they’ll stand and fight …’

  OK. That’ll do. Ellie shifts position, coiled, looking for her out. Miller raises his head, finds it too heavy, drops it back down onto the arm of the couch again.

  ‘What about yourself, like? Look like you gorra bit o’summat in yoh …’

  She can feel her heart thumping hard. She stands up. ‘Need a piss,’ she offers.

  ‘I’ll come wiv yoh.’ He drags himself up, all stoned and soppy, and starts to lurch towards her. For one sliver of a second she’s going to ram her boot into his balls. Sense overrides fury.

  ‘Er, don’t think you’re gonna like it – if you know what I’m telling you.’ She gives Miller her best sultry look, promising there’s more to come, and takes herself out of the room, down the little hallway, past the bathroom and straight outside down the stairwell. She doubts he’ll come after her but she takes the stairs three and four at a time, eager to get right out of there. She stumbles out of the low-rise and heads towards town, numb to time and temperature.

  Streaks of burnt copper rage out across the fading grey sky, drawing back the new day. There are still a few lights burning on through the low wash of dawn as nightcrawlers make their way home. By the time she reaches town the sky is the colour of a love bite, casting strobe lights across the filthy river. She’s drained and exhausted and her mind is lurching – yet there’s still a flake of her that wants to stay up, stay out. She knows that if she waits here, soon enough a car will pass by, crammed full of whey-faced revellers squashed up against the windows, out of it. But no, sack it. Eyes mesmerised by her own feet she trudges on, each step taking her further away from yesterday, closer to tomorrow. These are the hours she fears most, when her subconscious sets up tripwires for her, throwing her back and forward from the hub of the dance floor, so she has no real notion of what’s memory and what’s happening now. The bus station is right ahead of her, and she hears the engines cranking up. Her thoughts burn themselves out, stop playing games with her. The realisation that it’s Sunday leaves her shuddering – from the eerie chill of cold first light, and from the deathly whisper of the comedown blues. Once she’s allowed the thought, she’s floored by it. That’s it. It’s over. The shutters have been pulled down for another week. Tomorrow, school. How she longs for yesterday, but the night’s already locked up and sealed away for another six days. In flats and forests and on the forecourts of a hundred service stations out there, snatches of it still throb on. But for Ellie, spotlit in the rising fireball of a winter sun, that’s all gone now. The night is already dead.

  She crosses the empty road to the bus station. From here she will take a bus to the launderette in Latchford village where she will wash the chemical stink from her clothes. In the toilets of the café next door she will hunch over a sink and scrub the smoke and sweat from her hair, then she’ll squat under the hand-dryer and blow herself back to some semblance of girlhood. Again, the butterflies in her stomach, the flirting deception of the pill kicking itself back to life, instantly vanquished; the usual Ecstasy depression.

  As she crosses round the corner, the green single-decker is pulling away. It’s another hour until the next one. The lights are changing to red. If she runs she might just catch it at the next stop. Nerves blunted by fatigue, and the drugs and the countless fags, she can’t get much of a pace up and, just as she’s getting close enough to touch the bus, it lurches forward and swings a corner. There’s a boy huddled up on the back seat. She knows she knows him before she sees who it is. The dangling black fringe, the defensive hunch of the shoulders, the famous blue raincoat – she’d know her brother a mile off, anywhere. For that stilled moment there’s an unbidden delight at seeing him as the bus picks up speed and eases away. She watches him go, wonders where he’s been. How she’d love to just snuggle up with her own brother on the back seat of that bus, spending the journey home in meandering confessions about their Saturday nights. As the tail lights disappear out of sight, Ellie feels herself starting to fall. She heads back to the town centre. She’s exhausted and disorientated and she badly needs to get her head down, but she can’t go home. Not just yet.

  She holds the postcard gingerly between finger and thumb, unsure now whether she’ll post it. It started out as a line, a thought – just a nice little spontaneous thing, saying: ‘How are you? Thinking of you. Miss you.’ But as she sat down in the shadow of the neglected cricket pavilion, hand shaking as she wrote, she found the need pouring out with the words. The postcard is ancient and dog-eared, but it’s one of the old types that folds out to give you more writing space and the woman wanted twenty pence for it – so Ellie zapped a biro from the box by the stationery, right from under her nose. Feelings of confusion and loss and a dull, listless statelessness dragged down on her as she crossed over to the deserted cricket ground and sat down and wrote to her dad.

  Standing here now, she’s slotted fifty pence in the stamp machine and stuck them all on, just to make sure. She’s still not sure she should post it.

  Seven

  The intrusive clang of the letter box jolts him from his sleep. Robbie tries to sink back down beneath the bed covers, shut himself off from the coronary throb of light banging at his temples, but his thirst won’t let it lie. He reaches out across the bulk of a slumbering body. He can recall with pellucid clarity the full pint tankard of water he perched by the bed last night – yet he can’t quite place the companion he’s landed. He quails at her face, twisted into a drunken, snoring leer. Who is she? How did she get here? He pulls back a sheet to see bloated, freckled white breasts and he knows it’s all his own doing. He can picture her clothed now – deep, inviting cleavage clad in a tight red dress. The oldest, most effective of honey traps, the plumped-up bosom – and one he’s powerless to resist. He manages to retrieve the pint glass without waking the heaving walrus. He doesn’t care how stale the water may be. His windpipe is choked and dry and gluey with mucus. He gobbles into the glass, already gulping on it before the water comes – but it doesn’t. He tilts the glass right back, slowly computing its weightlessness with the stupefying fact that it’s empty, but insistent nonetheless on finishing what he’s started and upending the glass completely. His busty companion has drained the tankard in the night. She hasn’t even saved him one tepid bastard drop.

  He’s fully awake now, recoiling from the rinsed-out metallic sour of whiskey and fags that clogs his palate. He clambers over the white chump of thigh that’s had him pinned to the wall all night, cursing her as she rolls over, wafting up a stale dairy odour. He steals through to the kitchen, aggravated further at having to sneak around in his own flat – but there’s no way he can face her. He’ll leave a note, and do one. He slakes himself in bellowing gulps, straight from the tap, then relieves himself in the sink, powerful jets of browny-orange piss making whirlpools round the plughole. He stands there in the kitchen, sleep-starved and wretched, plotting his next move. He can’t go back to the stinking pit of the bedroom, no matter how weary he’s feeling. He ro
lls a fag and falls back on his old dependable. He’ll wrap up and walk off his hangover; a good, long walk too, depending on the gust out there. He’ll set himself Bispham as a target, then catch the tram back and pray she’s gone.

  He plucks out last night’s clothes from the laundry basket in the bathroom and slides the latch out from its groove, careful not to wake her. He catches sight of the morning’s post splayed between his feet like a spilt deck of cards and remembers what it was that pulled him from his sleep. There’s mail and bills and reminders from everyone, but as he scoops it all up and sets it on the ledge, one card snags his attention and holds him transfixed. His heart races away from him on sight of the ragged scrawl. He grins to himself. That’s our Ellie, that writing. Who else could it be? Who else knows he even lives there? It’s got to be our Ellie! He tucks it in his inside pocket, zips the windcheater right up to his neck – wincing at the noise it makes – pulls up his hood and tiptoes out of the door, grinning to himself.

  He heads straight down to the prom. Even on a mild day it’s windy down here, but he wears his hood up whatever the weather, to deter smitten pensioners or punters who’ve seen him on stage. The water is choppy, the wind bitterly cold. It feels good, the raw elements on his face, nipping and spraying and sloughing off the grime from last night. He sits on a bench, watching the seething white roil slam full force into the pier’s stanchions, inhaling deep and hard on the salty diesel stink of the Irish Sea. It’s beautiful. He prolongs the moment before he fishes out Ellie’s card, runs his hand across the urgent hunch of capitals, smudging them with the sea-sprayed damp of his fingers. It’s a huge moment, for Robbie, this. A letter from his little girl; the first he’ll be able to read by himself. His guts are swooping as he fingers it. He opens it up and squints to take it all in.