Lady

by Melvin Burgess

  Then of course the shit hit the fan. Everyone was furious. Mum thought I’d gone mad. She got on to Dad so he could ring me up and go on some more at me. On and on and on and on and on, like I was some sort of mad bitch, as if I’d gone crazy. Mum acted as if it was me who had gone all aggressive, but actually it was her. I was as happy as I ever had been, or I would have been if people had let me. She was the one who was going mad. Basically, she was pissed off because I wasn’t living the life she wanted me to live. I’d stopped living her life; I was living my life, the life I wanted. And you know what? That’s the one thing you’re never allowed to do. I found that out dead quick.

  We had rows about everything. She started having nice cosy long conversations with my dad on the phone. I mean – they’d spent the past seven or eight years barely able to speak to one another and then they start getting on together in order to give me a hard time. What’s that all about? They went on and on and on, about my GCSEs, about my boyfriends, about staying out late without telling Mum where I was. Well, there was no point telling her. She said it was to stop her worrying, but that wasn’t true. I tried ringing her a few times just to keep her happy, but it never stopped the rows. She just yelled at me anyway.

  You should have seen it when my GCSE results came through the door last summer.

  ‘Oh, Sandra,’ she said. ‘Look at it! And we hoped you were going to do so well! A C in English. English used to be your best subject.’

  ‘It still is,’ I pointed out, and she said,

  ‘Yes, but all the others are Ds!’ which made me laugh like a drain, although I didn’t feel like it. I admit it, I was disappointed, but I still didn’t care! I’d made up my mind months before that I wasn’t going to put myself out over GCSEs. I was too busy having a good time!

  And why shouldn’t I? What’s so great about school? So you’ve got to get a job, have you? Well, look at those teachers. How happy are they with their precious jobs? They’re all stressed out of their minds. You talk to them – they don’t like it. They spend their whole lives teaching you to go and do what they’ve done and they hate every second of it. I remember Mr Wales, our maths teacher, when this kid said he wanted to be a teacher.

  ‘I can’t recommend it,’ he told him. ‘The job’s not like it used to be. It’s a huge amount of work, the rules keep changing. The money isn’t as good as it used to be when I started out. Most people find it exhausting. Honestly, I couldn’t recommend it any more.’

  And that’s teaching, which is a doddle. So what does he think the rest of the world’s like? I bet it’s the same everywhere. My dad used to moan about work. So does everyone else. The hours get longer, you get bossed around, you’ve got to do as you’re told from one end of your life to the other. Well, maybe that’s your idea of a life, but it’s not mine. I thought, Plenty of time for that when I have to. But right now I’m gonna have fun while I still can!

  ‘All those boys,’ my mum said, and she looked at me as if I was the Great Slut of Withington. For God’s sake – there weren’t that many of them. Eight or nine. Ten, if you count Soppy, which I don’t. I was too drunk.

  Annie told me that I was going off the rails because I came from a broken home. ‘All those boys,’ she sniffed. Can you believe she said that to me? Just the same thing as my bloody mum. All those boys. The thing that really annoyed me was, it wasn’t allowed for me to like doing it. It wasn’t allowed for me to have decided I wanted to stay out late and try out a few drugs and sleep with a few boys. It had to be because I was upset, or going crazy or something. People like Annie think that people only do bad things because they’ve got problems, but who wants to be good anyway? Dad left years ago, for God’s sake. I was only nine. I hadn’t even started High School. It wasn’t anything to do with that. I just suddenly started thinking, Here I am, young and beautiful – well, pretty, anyhow – and all I do is stay in and work and worry about things when I should be out doing them. That’s how I am. I just want a good time. I mean, OK, I’m seventeen and I’ve slept with a few boys. Who cares?

  People think less of a girl if she sleeps around a bit, and of course I don’t want people to think of me as a slut, or a bit of a bike. But I’ll tell you this – I’m glad I did it. I’m happy I did it. I don’t regret one second – even the bits that were horrible.

  I had a horrible argument with Annie the day she said that. She made me really cross with that snotty, ‘All those boys.’

  All those boys, neh neh neh. I said, ‘I happen to like it.’

  ‘So do I,’ she says, ‘but I don’t have to go around doing it with anyone who asks. If you find someone you like, that’s enough for me.’

  And I said, ‘What, with Little-Willie? What do you know, if that’s your idea of sex?’

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ she snapped. It was really wrong of me, actually. She’d told me not so long ago that she thought that her boyfriend had a little willy, but she didn’t know if it was true, and she wanted me to tell her because I’d seen more than she had. We nearly wet ourselves laughing, trying to work out how big it was. I mean, what do you do? You can’t whip out a ruler at the vital time and say, ‘Just checking.’ I asked her how much of it stuck out above her hand if she held it and she blushed like a little mouse. It was so funny. I teased her when she showed me.

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked, and we laughed and laughed at the time. But still, that was then, and me calling him Little-Willie this time really drove her mad. She shouldn’t have said that sniffy thing about All Those Boys.

  ‘Little-Willie, Little-Willie,’ I hissed, and that was it, we fell out and we’ve not been friends since. I miss her, Annie, although she was a sniffy cow who always thought she knew best.

  Looking back, I can’t think of one single person who was on my side. Even Julie thought I was a big blob of scum, same as the rest of them. It happened with her at Swingler’s. It was about two in the morning. I was right out of it, dancing and drinking, and loving every second of it and feeling that I could go on for ever. Then Julie turned up with her bloke Angelo. I always called him Angela as a joke – he didn’t mind. I hadn’t seen her for ages, she moved out to her own flat in Hulme a few months ago and I don’t see her half so often any more. We flung our arms round each other and hugged and danced around and screeched, it was great to start with. But then she dragged me off to have a talk.

  I hate Julie when she starts on her auntie thing. I could see it all coming, I could have written the script for her, I’d heard it all so many times. She began by going on about how worried Mum was about me, and that got me off on the wrong foot for a start. Whose side was she on? We were supposed to be friends!

  ‘Friends can worry about you. That’s what they do if they’re good friends,’ she bawled over the music. Which was true of course, but that wasn’t the sort of friends I was interested in at the time. ‘You just seem to be all over the place at the moment,’ she yelled.

  ‘I’m having a good time,’ I bawled back. ‘I’m enjoying myself, that’s all.’

  ‘What happened to Simon, then? I thought you were getting on really well,’ she bellowed.

  ‘We were,’ I howled back. ‘We were, that’s just the problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s just the problem. We were getting on too well. It was getting comfortable. Look, I’m only seventeen. I don’t want to get bloody married, you know what I mean?’ It was a real pain, explaining all this at about six thousand decibels. Julie grinned and nodded like she understood what I was talking about, but her words were different.

  ‘You be careful.’

  ‘I am careful!’

  She just pulled a face and turned away to swig her drink. Angela came up, and I was hoping she’d finished, but then he left again and she went straight back to it.

  ‘Mum’s worried you might be on drugs,’ she yelled. Straight on to the next nag, see?

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘You’re on drugs now, I can tell,’ she shouted.
<
br />   ‘So’s everyone else.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I bet you’re about the only one,’ I said. That’s the only thing about Julie. She’s so prim!

  ‘You don’t need that sort of shit to enjoy yourself.’

  ‘No, but it helps,’ I told her. She was really getting on my tits. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I told her. ‘I’m doing fine, you worry about yourself.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about your GCSEs? You don’t want to blow your re-sits.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time for them later on. You worry about yourself,’ I told her, and she rolled her eyes and said that we weren’t talking about her, we were talking about me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you’re talking about me.’

  ‘What about these boys, then?’

  I said, ‘Which one?’ and she grinned again, as if we were being wicked, but it wasn’t like that.

  ‘You need to slow down, Sandra. You’re gonna catch something. You’re gonna get pregnant.’

  ‘I’m not stupid. I’m looking after myself. I’m taking care. Stop treating me like a kid.’

  ‘I’m not treating you like a kid.’

  ‘Then stop telling me what to do!’

  ‘I’m allowed to worry about you, aren’t I? You’re my sister.’

  ‘Just because I’m enjoying myself everyone wants to be my mum.’

  ‘You’re only seventeen,’ she yelled at me – as if nineteen was the height of maturity. And then it turned into a real row, a real whopper. We both got furious with one another. It went on for ages, us there in all that noise shouting our heads off. Maybe it was because we didn’t want it to happen and – you know how it is – you keep expecting the other person to see sense. If only they’d listen, if only they’d see it your way! Then I suddenly got sick of it. What had any of it to do with her? I didn’t nag her about things. I thought, I’ll shag about if I want to. And you know what I did? I swung round and grabbed hold of this bloke who was going past. I’d seen him about with his mates earlier. He was all right, but I didn’t particularly fancy him, it was just because he was on his own. I grabbed hold of him and I said,

  ‘Snog me.’ He did, right there in front of Julie. She couldn’t do anything except stand and stare. When he came up for air I said,

  ‘Get your coat, you’re pulled.’ And he said,

  ‘What, are you up for it, then?’ And I said yes. Just like that. Just to get at Julie. And you know what? Me and this bloke, we went to get our coats and I went back with him and I did it. I actually went through with it, I went home with him and slept with him, just like that. And you know what? It was the horriblest thing I ever did. I didn’t even like him, I found that out on the way to his place in the taxi. He lived in this horrible smelly room in a shared house. He must have thought it was Christmas, getting someone like me to go home with someone like him. His breath smelled, he was stupid and rough. I felt dirty and used and horrible even though I’d done it myself. Horrible! I was furious with Julie because she was the one who’d made me do it, she was the one who’d nagged me when I was off my head, and if she hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have gone and shagged the first bloke who came along.

  God, when I look back, I was so far gone! No wonder I ended up as a dog. And yet – all the time I couldn’t help thinking about the things Fella had said, and how exactly it all fitted in with what I’d been feeling for so long. What sort of a life had I got lined up anyway? All stress and work and doing things because you’re supposed to and because you have to have a good job and neh neh neh neh neh. And the way everyone had fought so hard to stop me doing the things I wanted to! At least a dog can do what she wants.

  Terry lay next to me, a stinking heap under the blanket, stunned with alcohol. Was I wasting my time? Maybe I should stop groaning away about what I’d lost, and enjoy what I had instead, like Fella said. But that thought made me despair – to give up my family, my friends, my life. Everything I’d used to think was such a pain now seemed like the only things worth having. I wanted them back so much, I felt I would burst. I knew then that I’d do anything to get back on the human track again.

  I whimpered and cried, and tried to utter some phrases, but my mouth was all wrong. The hours passed, crawling by like a procession of beetles off into the night. Then, when the sky was just beginning to turn pale, I heard a bark nearby. I jumped to my feet to greet Fella and Mitch.

  I was so happy to have some company, even the company of dogs. At least they understood me. I lowered my head and licked my lips as we said hello with our eager noses. One thing about dogs – they know how to greet someone. It’s not so much scratch and sniff as sniff and lick – as soon as you see someone, you just gotta know what they taste like!

  When we were done we licked our lips around our sweet dog-scent and lay all together in a heap in the dirt next to Terry, stinking in his blanket.

  ‘I used to lie there by his side, watching over him, just like you,’ said Mitch. He saw me looking and nodded. ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve all done it – even Fella.’

  ‘He’s good with a dog, Terry, I’ll say that,’ panted Fella. ‘It won’t get you anywhere though, doll. He’s done all the good to you he can.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Mitch. ‘He didn’t turn me back, and he didn’t turn you back, but there’ve been others.’

  ‘What others?’ I asked. ‘Who got turned? Tell me!’

  ‘Well, there was Joby. He used to sell the Big Issue in Withington for a while. Brown hair, going grey. He wore big blue glasses all taped up.’

  ‘I know him, yes,’ I barked excitedly. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He stole some beer,’ said Mitch, and shrugged.

  ‘Same as me! I knocked it out of his hand.’

  ‘Mess with ma beer, you’re a dog,’ hissed Fella.

  ‘He lived with Terry for weeks after he got turned, wouldn’t talk to us, barked like a maniac when we went anywhere near him,’ Mitch went on. ‘In denial, see. Couldn’t take it. You never saw him more than three feet away from Terry, staring pathetically up at him for weeks, if not months. Then, one day, he got turned back.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Fella. ‘You never saw him.’

  ‘I did better than see him, I smelled him.’

  Fella snorted irritably. ‘Maybe, but so what? Do you think it made him happier? Better off? What did he have? A handful of Big Issues, a place in the refuge if he was lucky. He could have licked his way to heaven! Yeah – he was never gonna be a dog, he lacked the courage of his own convictions.’ Fella was watching me as he spoke, but I didn’t have the heart for any more debate about dog versus person and I looked away. He tossed his head slightly – a strangely human gesture – and sat down again. ‘It’s your choice,’ he said. He yawned widely and snapped his jaws shut. ‘But you don’t have to be a pet all the time. Get Terry to stay in the refuge when you can and then you can have a night out with the pack. I bet you used to like nights out, eh?’

  I coughed and looked away. I used to live for nights out, but that was behind me now. If I ever got back among my own kind, I was going to work hard, settle down, do the right thing. If that’s what it took, that’s what I was going to do. Whether I liked it or not.

  ‘Yeah, he’s right about that, you really should,’ barked Mitch. ‘A night out with the dogs – that’s worth dying for. And it’s good for Terry, too,’ he added. ‘He needs to sleep indoors, on a bed, but he won’t go in the refuge when he has a dog with him. They don’t allow dogs. You’ll see in the morning what a night on the streets does to a man.’

  There was a pause as we all three looked at the heap of Terry. Was this a magician? He stank of beer and piss. When I was a girl, I wouldn’t have even imagined spending the night curled up with such a creature. Now, all I wanted was to feel his hand upon my back.

  Fella was going into one of his acts. He stood up on his hind legs, put his paw on his hip and leered down at Terry.

  ‘Hey, sweetheart, have you got
any time for me,’ he said in a high-pitched whine, like a cartoon film star making a come on. ‘Y’know, you’re just so sexy. Ooooh, so sexy, ah kin hardly hold myself back. Are you listening to me? I say, are you listening to me?’ But of course Terry just lay in his blanket, grunting and snoring like an alcoholic pig. Fella looked down at him in disgust and then went into his giant rat act. It was the first time I saw it, and I never made up my mind whether it was funny or scary. He drew up his lip so his front teeth stood out, doubled his legs underneath so they looked really short, stretched his thin, whippy tail out behind him and went sniffing and creeping across the ground. He did already look a bit like a rat, with his long nose and bulgy eyes. He went sniffing and licking his lips all round Terry’s face, as if he was going to eat bits off him. It was so realistic it made me screech.

  ‘Jesus, that’s horrible – ugh, that’s really horrible!’ I yelped.

  ‘He did it once to this couple who caught us kipping in a house they were thinking of buying. No sale that day, I can tell you! They had Rentokil round there for weeks afterwards,’ spluttered Mitch.

  Fella made me laugh, but he scared me too. I didn’t want to listen to him going on any more. I’d been on the wild side long enough – see where it’d got me! I turned to Mitch.

  ‘What about you? Tell me your story. How did you get turned?’ I begged.

  Mitch looked at Fella to see what he was up to, but Fella stood back up and stretched.

  ‘Go ahead, tell her. We’ve got time,’ he said. He yawned, lay down on his side and closed his eyes as if he was about to go to sleep. Mitch sat down and scratched, like he always did when he had a story to tell. Then he stopped and gazed out towards the road, as if he was listening to the cars and lorries and buses going past, while he gathered his thoughts.

  ‘You know, I can hardly remember it,’ he said at last. ‘Trauma, I suppose.’