S.O.S.

by Joseph Connolly

  Jilly raised her eyebrows, and over the brassy plinky-bonk of It’s Not Unusual, smiled her concurrence with that one. They were two cocktails down (some long things with straws called Hawaiian Some-Things, can’t be sure: plenty of pineapple sorted out and kept in line by generous jiggers of pure and evil vodka – and still they turned out bright pink).

  Maybe an hour back, Rollo and Jilly had grinned like witches from the one coven as the distorted opening of Dancing Queen was mixed into the fag-end of Viva España; Jilly just practically dissolved when Mambo Number Five had first insinuated its jerky-shouldered and infectious self into the spotlit hubbub (Rollo had been round-eyed, at the time – braying to her about raves, the pimples of sweat on his upper lip shuddering with each enthusiasm; he was saying that if Stravinsky were alive today, right? Then he would be writing for Prodigy – and Jilly just nodded thinking Prodigy, OK, yeah, cool: the other band I don’t know). But when the bloody song came round for the third time, it just wasn’t so funny.

  ‘Jesus – this mambo thing. You see,’ explained Jilly, during a lull in the mush, ‘this ship’s so weird because in London, or somewhere, we’d stick our heads into a club like this and we’d be out of here in no time, right? But this is it: this ship, it’s like a massive five-star hotel that nobody actually ever leaves, day and night, and this is like the manky little ‘nite-spot’ they shove in the basement. There’s nothing else. And you can’t check out. Why are you and your people actually here, Rollo?’

  And so Rollo had sighed very large and loudly – theatrically, oh yes, but also so as to be sure that the big gurgle of resignation and heavily laboured rolling of the eyes were at once both clocked and caught despite the twin impedimenta of flickering, now sort of blue-ish strobes and the belted out and strutted invitation to come and stay at the Wye-Em-Cee-Ay (when everyone here just had to flap their arms above their heads a good beat out of time, while roaring out quite the wrong letter). Rollo explained about Nicole always going in for all these competitions: buys stuff we don’t even use so she can get all the coupons and labels and ringpulls and things. Even gets this magazine – believe it? It tells you about all these other comps, and then she goes out and gets all the gear. Your mother like that? And Jilly said No, as Rollo had known she would (he’d asked all his mates and anyone else he met: your mum like that, he’d go. And they all just stared at him and said No). Yeah well – mine is, he miserably concluded. So the kitchen, right? You open cupboards and there are these, like, dozens of tins and things and no one knows what in Christ’s name is in them because all the labels are gone: bits clipped out and stapled together and long ago sent off to some P.O. Box in Oldham, together with Mum’s list of holiday essentials in order of precedence, or why her thru-diner richly deserved a Universe of Leather Village makeover – or her suggestion of a name for some cute little sad-faced kitten (once she had actually won fifty cases of Rabbit and Chicken in Jelly Whiskas for christening just such an animal Dimples – which just has to be about as fucking stupid as you can actually get, right? Seeing as the moggy in question had more copious moustaches than a bloody cavalier: Jesus – we didn’t even have a bloody cat). And all accompanied, of course, by her no-more-than-seventeen-word tiebreakers: ‘I think This Crap Load Of Absolute Fuck-All Product Is The Very Best Thing Under God’s Pure Sun Because …’ And off she’d go. Dad always went, How come you never win a car? Hey? Most of these bloody things you go in for, top prize always seems to be a car, so how come – how is it – we never ever get the bloody car? Mum just said Huh – if you’re so very clever, David, why don’t you try going in for one of these sometime? Mm? It’s not actually so easy as all of you seem to think. Of course if your wonderful father here was to do it, oh well yes – cars galore, I shouldn’t wonder. Ferraris, Rolls-Royces – they’d be coming out of our bloody ears, wouldn’t they David? Why can’t you just be grateful for all the stuff I do win? (Yeh right: a million tins of cat food). Anyway … finally Mum did hit the big one, first prize: this trip (second prize was a car). But surely, Jilly protested, you didn’t have to go on it if you didn’t want to, did you? I mean – you would’ve had the house all to yourself …? Rollo shook his head quite mournfully, as the refrain from Doo-Wah-Diddy-Diddy again clanged all around it.

  ‘You think I didn’t think of that? Mum wasn’t having it. No way. Said I’d burn the place down. Why do mothers always think that? I mean, I’d be like – great: Mum and Dad and Mar are off to America! Cool – where’s the matches? First thing I’m going to do is fucking torch the place …’

  ‘Hm. What about your dad?’

  ‘Dad? Oh, Dad … It’s not really up to Dad. No.’

  Jilly groaned as another set of warped but nonetheless horribly familiar chords was segued into the mutated but mercifully fading cadence of the last load of pap. And then she said:

  ‘My Dad’s not like that. Anything he says at our house is, oh God – just law, you know? Don’t know how Mum stands it. It’s a bit why I’m here, actually, think. I used to work in a bar at home, yeh? And all the time he was, like, really on my case? You don’t want to be coming home late on your own, he’d go – but if I went with some guy, he’d go totally ballistic. And then he was always on at me to, you know – save, and stuff, and I said Look, Dad – it’s my money, right? OK? So I can do what I bloody well want with it. Yeh. Sammy – Sammy’s a lot like that. Really gets to me. I mean Christ – I don’t want to, do I – hook up with some guy who’s’ like my Dad …!’

  Rollo smiled – touched her hand. She didn’t flinch – wasn’t sick. Slid it up her arm – and still she wasn’t screaming the place down and lashing out wildly with the table between them. She seemed to be OK – her eyes were gleaming – and so when Rollo transferred his featherlike touch (poised, it was, and ready to flee at an instant’s notice) to the cool sheen and heavy bounce of the weight of her hair just there, at her neck, where it touched, which was warm, and so very … so very soft, he now discovered with pleasure that appalled him – he finally felt he could stick his neck out and meet that look in her eye and say to her straight:

  ‘Well – I’m not like your dad, am I?’

  Jilly lowered her eyelids, and a lopsided smile was on her face in no time.

  ‘God …’ she not much more than whispered. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this …’

  And Rollo missed that completely and so roared at her:

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jilly assured him. ‘How about another drink?’

  ‘But I’m not, am I?’ pursued Rollo. ‘Like your dad? Am I? Or Sammy.’

  Jilly looked right at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Let’s get another drink. You got the time?’

  ‘I just said that!’ shouted Jilly – mostly in order to make her point, the slack taken up by the need to be heard, this time (Sugar Sugar or no Sugar Sugar).

  ‘What? You said what? You do have time?’

  ‘No – not that I’ve – ! I mean I haven’t got time – shouldn’t even be doing this. Got to be up at – ! And Christ – it’s nearly – ! It’s OK for you first class passengers …’

  Rollo was standing. ‘Let’s have one more. At the bar, maybe. Bit quieter … we’re right under a speaker, here.’

  Jilly nodded and rose up to meet him quickly – just like a little yellow plastic duck popping delightedly to the surface of the bathwater, unfazed and blue-eyed, once some plump-fisted kid had packed in trying to crush and drown it. As they wove their way through tables and chairs, mostly jammed with red-faced folk, all damn well pleased with themselves, the clunk and then mega-beat of Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi was (Ce Soir) all around them. Rollo wasn’t going to look at her, no no no, wasn’t – not even a rapidly nicked and sideways glance: it would be tacky, it would be naff. They got to the bar and Rollo only knew his eyes were upon her when he found himself thinking that her quickly tugged on, flat-lipped smile was looking just like his was feeling.

  ‘I’
ve maybe got time,’ Jilly was giggling, ‘for just maybe one.’

  Rollo nodded as he hoisted himself up on to the bar stool, hooked his heels around the rung, and set to coping with the barman’s seemingly eager but still evasive eye.

  ‘Right,’ he agreed, staring dead ahead. ‘We’ll make it quick, then. If you like.’

  *

  ‘Hey Suki,’ Earl is going at her; the Coke bottle he’s put down on the bar, and his eyebrows are jerking over to the couple who just up and sat alongside of them. ‘You think this week’s slogan is, what? Drink Pink?’

  Suki idled over dull and heavy eyes to this really, like, annoying brother, you know?

  ‘What talking about, Earl? I reckon I’m gonna split. Men here are just, like, duh and faggots. Else really, you know – old?’

  ‘Those guys with the, like, real pink drinks is what I’m saying, Suki. What’re you – blind? It’s like it’s lit up.’

  ‘Jesus, Earl – I just so don’t care, you know? What some buncha half-asses are about to drink, OK? I mean, like – get a life?’

  Just to the left of Suki, a sleekly cool, New York-groomed and polished woman was smilingly letting in some redly flustered and half-cut London housewife on the truth about the source of her very evident money (something she maybe divined they all longed to know, and could be later would drive them wild).

  ‘My friend, yes? Back in the States? He’s really verrry good to me. Generous isn’t the word.’ And then the disclosure: ‘Furrier.’

  And the Englishwoman is nodding and trying to concentrate and now she rams four fingers back through and across her crazy hair and stutters out:

  ‘Really? Than what, exactly? Or than whom, I should say.’ And then when all that confronts her is a startled blank: ‘Oh – or maybe just more generally, do you mean?’

  Suki closes her eyes. ‘Tell you, Earl – everyone here, we’re talking, like, totally nuts. Jeez, I’m so sick of it. We been on this tub how many munce, now? You gotta tab, or what?’

  ‘Shit, Suki – you know I ain’t carrying. The last we did in the Harrods store – and Mom and Dad, they were like in my face all of the time, yeah? How could I score?’

  ‘Yeah? Well hell, I sure do need something, like, real fast, you know? Else I’m outta here.’

  ‘Hey, you two,’ said a new loud voice that had Suki turning: what else kinda nut is this here, now, is what she was thinking – but hey! These two guys, they look maybe OK, you know?

  ‘Hi,’ said Suki. ‘How you guys rinsing it?’

  Jennifer looked at Stacy for some kind of help, here – but none, she knew, was coming; so sod – let’s go for it:

  ‘Great,’ she rejoined, with all of her mustered bravado. ‘We’re rinsing it extremely well. Thought you were looking as bored as we were feeling. Am I right? I’m Jennifer – this is Stacy. Hi. Bloody noisy in here.’

  And yeah, OK – Suki was perking up, some: could be a cuppla cats she could maybe get down with. Earl was – jeez, will you look at him – kinda, what? Stunned, sure looked like. And Wow yeah, is how he was thinking: cool or what? Two, like, foxy-looking gals – how great is this? Last chick I meet in this joint, I’m going: Hey babe – how’s it cookin’, yeh? And she looks at me like I’m just some piece of shit, you know (with this stoopid English accent?), and what I get is How is what cooking, exactly? And maybe you think we got here some kinda goofy gag, or sump’n? Well forget it. So I’m going Well fuck you, asshole, and she says to me Just fuck off, man, the dumb fuck. So here is maybe better.

  ‘Hi,’ says Earl. ‘I’m Earl – and this here’s my little sis, Suki, yeah?’

  So she hates it big time when I innerdooce her that way; yeah and so what? What am I? My sister’s keeper? Hell with that.

  ‘Suki!’ screamed Jennifer – and the sudden shrillness made even Stacy jerk with surprise: as for Suki, she was nearly off her stool. ‘Sorry – sorry to be so – it’s just: Suki. Such a cool name. So sexy. Hi, Earl – you OK?’

  Earl nodded, and tried to look at her roguishly as the eyebrows came right into kinda quizzical, like maybe Jimmy Dean (hey look – what can I tell you?).

  ‘Good. Doing good. Now I am, leastways.’

  And that, so far as Stacy could see, was that: Jennifer had bonded – effortlessly captured two more willing victims (just look at Suki preening, now she knew her name was sexy). It was always like that. The two of them had, Stacy thought, been perfectly happy sitting over there – over to the back a bit, close by the big windows with maybe some sort of open deck outside, it looked like (too dark to see), and Jennifer had already and in no time sweet-talked some drunk old creep into buying them a bottle of champagne (though sweet-talk soon curdled into greengage sour when the poor old sod exhibited genuine signs of appearing to imagine that such largesse on his part in some way entitled him to actually sit down with them and maybe even share it). At least over there they could hear each other talk over the barrage of actually pretty good pop (Jennifer adored it – you could easily tell: lips pouting into a pantomime kiss and head swaying eagerly to the pound of the beat – well, her era mostly, after all) and in between sipping the champagne (it’s the bubbles, really, I suppose, I like: could be sweeter, though) and laughing out loud at Jennifer’s more outrageous avowals as to the ways in which she would happily dispose of the thing they call Nobby, if ever again she clapped eyes on the fucker (getting hold of a vat of that gravy he seemed so intent on mopping up every last vestige of, with the crudely crushed and bunched-up lumps of roll – how and why, Jennifer had demanded, does he get his bread to look like tampons? – and sticking right into it his bloody stupid head, and maybe, why not, Aggie’s too). During the lulls in all that, Stacy had been quite content simply to sit back and let her eyes rove over the scene.

  Jennifer had been sneering from the moment she entered (and it was she who walked me miles to get here!) but Stacy had been thinking it was actually pretty OK. It looked like a film set, maybe – a safe and brightly clean disco from a Mom, Dad and the Kids PG movie, where all ages and races were encouraged to (Yee-Hah!) let their hair down and mingle, guys, and strut your stuff, why don’t ya – all in a very rehearsed and modulated manner. The sunken and central area was well filled with little round tables and quite good tub chairs that hugged tight the small of your back and made you feel both a part of it, and wanted. There was a smallish circular dance floor at one end, this made groovy by the eternally prowling coloured strobes, agitatedly painting the few intrepid dancers green and pink to the point of luminous, the brown arms and shoulders of the girls picked out and caressed by fat blobs of hot orange, big hair dappled and streaked by zigzags of lemon. There was a raised mini gallery running right around the room (where Jennifer and Stacy had been sitting for a bit – until the champagne was finished and Jennifer announced that this is dull: let’s check out whoever’s at the bar) and it was the long and broad windows all down that curvaceous flank that now and suddenly grabbed hold of Stacy’s whole attention (Jennifer’s still yapping to her two new American friends: I don’t actually think I’ll stay here much longer). It was really the strangest sight because, well – I don’t know, I suppose you always assume, do you, that all that possibly can be beyond the windows of a ship, and even more so at night, is the encircling weight of daunting darkness, and then the sheer black plummet to the deep, lasciviously lapping and maybe luring-you sea. But beyond these windows stood a mournful and lonely man in a dripping sou’wester and whale-slick oilskins, and in both his hands he held a hose. Where Stacy stood was so hot and bright – suntanned girls are scooping up their hair in handfuls and then letting it go as they flaunt their chain-belted hips at the helplessly flailing men before them – tossing their heads, the silly sods, and shaking their arms from the elbow downwards, flicking their stiffened fingers, as if they have just scrambled to shore following an unexpected ducking. And beyond this diorama, stroked by colour and fuelled by the backbeat of the Vida Loca, stood this silent vision, rendering opaque wi
th a mist of water each weeping window, like some slow-motion mime, glimpsed in a dream. Then his big sad face was lost to sight for just a moment or two before re-emerging again, framed exactly by the next big window, which he set to slungeing, with melancholy and deliberation.

  ‘He comes,’ quavered a tremulous but still twangy voice at Stacy’s side, ‘every goddam night. We don’t rightly know who he is. But we call him the Fireman. Hi. My name is Debbie. Ain’t seen you about before, right? Disco Debbie.’

  Stacy beheld the almost literally inconceivably old and tiny woman beside her. How could so spare, blue and practically transparent a carcass actually be vertical and making sounds – and with such clear green eyes so alive in its skull?

  ‘Disco Debbie …?’ is all Stacy felt fit for.

  The very old lady grinned and looked away, her tautened and glossy face betraying a blend of knowingness and abashed delight – as if she were an incognito superstar caught while trying to slum it, her elaborate disguise so easily penetrated by a persistent and adoring fan.

  ‘Is what they call me,’ she elucidated. ‘I’m here every night. Yes sir. Every night. I bop till I drop, y’know? Stay here till the lights go down, mostly. Disco Debbie. Yup – that’s what they call me.’

  Her arms were bare and pitiably vulnerable: beneath the silk camisole, no form at all was discernible. Purple plastic veins seemed to have been appliqueéd to her limbs some time lately, maybe by way of some misguided attempt at joky decoration; the bony wrists and surprisingly large hands beyond them hardly seemed up to bearing the weight of all those clanking bangles. Stacy really should have left maybe earlier – she didn’t at all feel up to this, whatever might be coming; I think, she thought, I want to sleep – but if I do that now, then Mum will come barging in, oh, Christ knows when, and she’ll be going Sorry Sorry Sorry as she crashes about, giggling and stupid – and then I’ll be ruined for the night. But it was looking as if the old lady had done with Stacy, now: she simply slid into her hand some sort of card, was it? Smiled quite fondly and strolled away, really quite steadily, in the direction of the dance floor. Where she didn’t so much bop as simply stand there, her two lazy, embalmed and ropelike arms high up in the air – and then she began to slowly revolve, her eyes yearning upwards in a face now touched by the ecstasy of some veiled and orgasmic religious icon.