Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  Letitia’s sister, my mother, got a Royal Doulton tea-set after doing the toilets at Brixton for ten years, and then there is my dad himself. He met my mother on the day his Curly Wurly got stuck in the chocolate machine on platform two. They gave him a refund, of course. London Underground has been very good to my family.

  They even gave me a job yesterday. Not as Naomi Campbell, and not even as the tube’s resident Lord Byron expert which, let’s face it, is all my B A equipped me for. I am, however, about to become a Busker Buster. You get paid five quid an hour and they give you a free fluorescent green waistcoat.

  The proper name for Busker Busters is Special Security Unit Four but it took about five minutes for this guy called Paul to rename it.

  I quite fancy Paul. In a red-haired, computer-nerdy, weird-suede Hush Puppies kind of way. He’s like me – he did a degree (his was in sociology, though, not Lord Byron) and then he lost the plot. We compared notes and found out that we’d both worked in The Body Shop, both gone travelling and been rejected as McDonald’s managers – it was incredible. Paul also seems very appreciative of the family lard arse. Well I caught him looking at it, anyway, when we were supposed to be filing into a room for a slide show presentation.

  The slide show was very interesting. It showed us the right way to arrest buskers (‘Show sympathy and understanding for their point of view, then lightly touch them on the elbow and guide them on to the escalator.’). They didn’t show the wrong way, though. Paul seemed to think this might be smashing their acoustic guitar over their head and telling them how much you hate ‘Wonderwall’.

  The other Busker Busters are a mixed bunch. Paul says he got the job because he speaks French and German, and half the buskers at Tottenham Court Road these days are tourists anyway. He thinks I might have been hired because of racial and gender sensitive issues among buskers. It’s sad what sociology degrees do to some people. I think I might have been hired because my dad knows the guy who knows the guy in charge of Busker Busters. Plus if I need to immobilize someone with a guitar I can sit on them with my Letitia buttocks.

  To prepare us for the job, they took us on a mini-tour of Oxford Circus tube, incognito. In Paul’s sociology degree favour, I suppose I did notice they were giving all the Rasta musician guys to me. Well – I think they were Rasta guys. They were playing Bob Marley. But one of them was wearing a giant Tweety bird head and furry yellow suit, and the other one was dressed up as Sylvester the cat so for all I know it could have been the Spice Girls under there.

  ‘And what would you do there, Angela?’ the training officer said under his breath, as Tweety and Sylvester swung their hips in time to the tape on their sound system.

  ‘Well I’d probably get someone dressed up as a giant dog to tackle the cat and then throw a blanket over the other one,’ I said. ‘Look. I don’t know. Tell them to pick another song, everyone’s heard “No Woman No Cry”.’

  Anyway. Then we all trooped off to look at one of those women who squat on the floor, begging with a baby. It wasn’t exactly busking, but we all wanted to arrest her anyway.

  And now it’s Day One of my new job. A very emotional day for the family. Dad gave me his old London Underground red badge from the seventies for luck, and then Mum burst into tears all over her muesli. I guess she can see the slippery slope to Brixton toilets for me now, and after all the money she spent on course textbooks about Lord Byron, not to mention all the Lord Byron fridge magnets from the National Portrait Gallery, she can’t stand it.

  ‘It breaks my heart, Angela,’ she said, as I went out the door in my brand new Busker Buster green fluorescent vest. But she did give me some jerk chicken to take in a little Tupperware container for my lunch. I have to say, I’m not into all the old Jamaican stuff. My brother is – he goes back to Kingston whenever he can afford it, and he’s got every Lee Perry album since Time Boom X De Devil Dead. However, I make an exception for jerk chicken – Colonel Sanders, eat your heart out.

  And now I’m here. New job. And new life too – for a while. And I get the feeling Paul might be part of it – but also for a while. Somehow, guys who wear glasses like the ones Paul’s got on – you know what I mean, sort of pointy and like Brains from Thunderbirds – well, they never stick around for long, do they?

  I wonder if Paul bought the glasses because he’s trying to pull me? I don’t remember him wearing them on the first day we met. We did ask each other what we did on the weekend, though, which is a fairly reasonable indicator of pullability – eligibility by both parties. He went clubbing he said. I watched The Bill on the couch with a blue Clarins face-mask on, but I didn’t tell him that.

  ‘Angela!’

  What?

  I mean, one minute you’re thinking about date potential and what someone might look like naked, without their weird new Brainsy glasses, and the next minute someone actually wants you to do some work …

  ‘Angela, if you and Paul take Tottenham Court Road, can you be back at Covent Garden for 11 a.m.?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Oh, this is good. It’s just like school, except Paul and I aren’t being asked to do back-to-back push and pull exercises in our vests, we’re actually … well. It’s almost like The Bill. All he and I need are big black lace-up shoes and a special theme song to clump along the street with.

  ‘Come on then, Paul,’ I say in a Billesque kind of way.

  We’ve got special passes with our photos on to get us around all the zones. If you actually enjoyed tube travel it would probably be your wildest fantasy come true. As it happens, though, both Paul and I discover we hate train travel.

  ‘It’s all the businessmen farting from South Ken to Sloane Square,’ he says, as we sit side by side under the strip lighting on the train. ‘They just sit there eating pork pies out of their wrappers reading Loaded and farting.’

  ‘It’s the wandering accordion players who get me,’ I tell him. ‘It’s like being in some old episode of ’Alio ’Allo. I hate people who give them money. Why do they give them money? They should be killed if they give them money.’

  ‘I’ve got a new Toyota,’ Paul says. ‘You’ll have to come out for a test drive one night.’

  ‘Have some of my jerk chicken before it goes off,’ I hear myself saying, handing him Mum’s Tupperware container. God, it’s like we’re married already.

  I think something is sinking in with Paul, too, because for a while he just sits there saying nothing, in an embarrassed yet slightly lustful way, while we watch a whole lot of Japanese tourists with Smythsons bags get on at Bond Street.

  ‘What kind of music are you into?’ he says, at last.

  ‘Oh, you know. Morrissey.’

  He tries not to look too gob-smacked by this but I can tell he’s not coping because his Evansy glasses are fogging up.

  ‘Wot?’ I say. ‘Wot? Wot?’

  ‘I’M SHOCKED!’ he shouts, over the noise of the ker-chang, ker-chang of the train running over a few tube mice.

  ‘WHY?’ I shout back, but he’s already shouting back the other way so he can’t hear me.

  ‘THE LIQUIDATOR!’ he yells, ‘THE ISRAELITES! YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK! RIVERS OF BABYLON!’ And I gather he’s telling me his own taste in music here. Except I gather it’s the cred version of ‘Rivers of Babylon’ he likes, not the Boney M one where they’re wearing Bacofoil suits. Before we can go into it, though, we’re at Tottenham Court Road already, so we have to get off, and shut up. Unless we shut up, we’re not going to hear any buskers, after all.

  ‘I can hear something already,’ Paul says, lifting his head up as we climb the stairs. And I can too. A distant thwacking sound.

  ‘It’s reggae, mon,’ I say, taking the piss. ‘Your favourite. Could even be “Rivers of Babylon”.’

  But no, it isn’t. It’s Sylvester the cat and Tweety Pie, swinging from side to side with their bongo drums and guitars, and their little sound system in a box. They’re playing something that sounds like ‘Superfly’ by Curtis Mayfield
mixed through a cement mixer, then gargled by cows, but the tune is, Paul informs me, ‘Hitter’ by Garfeel Ruff (‘Look out for the hitter, he’s big and bad and sho’nuff black, he’s gonna knock you down’). I don’t know. All those blaxploitation soundtracks. They all sound the same to me.

  We watch and listen for a while, trying to pretend to each other that we’re sizing the situation up, when we’re really just too paralysed with fear to do anything.

  Then, at last, Paul, pushes his glasses up his nose and makes a move.

  ‘Excuse me, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop,’ he says to Tweety. But the bird doesn’t move. In fact, he hasn’t even put his bongo drums down. After that, I touch Sylvester the cat lightly on the elbow and ask him to move up the escalator. He’s not moving either. Then, both Paul and I become aware of something that is moving behind us. It’s a small crowd. I don’t know who starts it first, but soon there’s a slow hand-clap going on. And a few people are hissing.

  Paul touches both Sylvester and Tweety lightly on the elbow simultaneously. Nothing doing.

  ‘Boo!’ says a guy in overalls. ‘Boo! Hiss!’

  ‘Come on now!’ Paul addresses the crowd.

  ‘Leave the cat in the hat alone!’ says a strange woman.

  ‘It isn’t the Cat in the bloody Hat, it’s Sylvester,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well leave them alone, what harm are they doing?’ says an outspoken, possibly drunk, old guy. Is there some agency where they hire outspoken, possibly drunk, old guys to appear around London on a regular basis? I mean, is there?

  And then, quick as a flash, Tweety is bending down again, pushing the start button on the sound system. He’s fast-forwarding it too. Maybe to some old Stevie Wonder thing – something to get the crowd on side anyway, I’ll bet my life on it. It’s just something in Tweety’s eyes that’s got me thinking that way – he looks manipulative.

  ‘Move on sister,’ Tweety says, taking his head off. He’s got dreads and he looks like the drummer in my brother Viv’s old band.

  ‘No, you move on, or I’m fining you fifty quid,’ I say.

  ‘Fifty quid!’ Sylvester shouts through his furry cat face. I’m not sure where his mouth actually is, either – behind one of the flared pink nostrils?

  ‘Get the notebook,’ Paul whispers to me.

  What? Why me?

  So I get it out.

  ‘You do it,’ he says, ‘I’ll get on the radio for local security.’

  And I book them – to the sound of Tweety defiantly beating his bongos, and a crowd slow hand-clapping me. Then, in protest, Sylvester also takes his head off. He’s a big guy, with a big, mean stare too – like one of those guys with ten-foot wide shoulders they hire to bounce people out of nightclubs in Dalston, Kingsland.

  My heart is pounding. I can’t believe it. I’m booking two guys in furry animal costumes, and I feel like I’ve just shot ten people in cold blood in an armed hold-up.

  And time squeezes in weird ways after that – you know how unusual situations seem to make everything happen in a blurry kind of way? Well anyway. Suddenly it seems to be after lunch, and Paul and I are sitting in Tottenham Court Road staff HQ (you’d never know it’s there, it’s well hidden behind the stairwell) eating what’s left of my mum’s jerk chicken.

  ‘You were great, Angela,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take you out to dinner.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I say. But inside my underwear, I’m blushing.

  ‘No really, I want to. Come on. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘You decide.’

  ‘African? Indian?’

  ‘Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor Restaurant,’ I say in the end. I knew someone who knew someone who thought she saw Morrissey eating salad there once.

  We make it 8 p.m., to give both of us time to get home, get out of our fluorescent green waistcoats, and for me to have a bath and get rid of the sweat that seems to have taken over my body since the terrible Sylvester and Tweety crowd psychosis episode.

  When I get home, Mum and Dad can’t wait to hear about my day, but enough is enough, and I head straight for the bathroom, taking off Dad’s London Underground badge and putting it in the fruit bowl on the table. Dad decides he’s going to talk to me through the door anyway.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he yells over the sound of the bathwater running.

  ‘Fine!’ I yell back.

  ‘You look stressed!’ he shouts again.

  ‘I’M NOT STRESSED!’

  After that, he goes away. And even though I don’t have time for any blue face-mask, half an hour later I at least feel vaguely human again.

  I use my free tube pass to get to South Kensington, then I walk it to get some exercise and calm down. I know life isn’t supposed to be like this when you’ve spent half your twenties having dating practice, but I still get nervous paralysis of the pantyhose. And as I walk, I keep thinking – Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor Restaurant with a guy. Not bad, Angela. Better than The Bill on the couch on Saturday night with a cushion.

  He’s already at the table when I sit down, and a waitress flaps around us until we order some wine (well he does, anyway) and then she goes away again.

  ‘So,’ he says.

  I smile. I hate it when people do the ‘So’ thing. I always feel like I should say ‘So’ back, but then it all becomes like some kind of James Bond villain meeting.

  ‘I was stressed out today,’ I say.

  ‘I thought we handled it fine!’ he says. And I kind of let that one go.

  ‘I just thought, when they started hand-clapping and all that, I’d better let you take over,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well they were obviously doing the hand-clapping because I was – you know – a white guy arresting a couple of black guys.’

  The waitress arrives with some wine at last, and I gulp the whole glass back as I try to sort this one out.

  ‘Actually, Paul, the crowd was slow hand-clapping – though I don’t know why that keeps on bothering us so much, kids do it at Sooty concerts when Sooty doesn’t turn up on time – well they were slow hand clapping because they liked the music. Though god knows why, of course.’

  He laughs.

  ‘Yeah. You know, I love that music. Isaac Hayes. Sweet Sweetback. Curtis. They were murdering it.’

  I shrug. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Oh yeah, you like the miserable white guy music. Have you seen Morrissey here by the way?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I think someone made it up.’

  We both order the pasta, which costs the same as two hours’ salary for both of us at Tottenham Court Road today. And I suppose I should be nicer to Paul, because he’s paying. But then he ruins everything.

  ‘I scored some wicked ganja on the way here,’ he says suddenly, just as I’m about to rip open a bread roll.

  I smile. Along with people who say ‘So’ there’s something about people telling me about their boring marijuana shopping that just makes my eyes glaze over.

  ‘Do you like pot?’ I use the word deliberately. To hell with ganja. He’s white, for god’s sake. He was born in Weston-super-Mare.

  ‘You don’t get high?’

  ‘Why do you look so shocked at that?’ I find myself saying.

  He shrugs. ‘Well, I don’t know. I just thought –’

  ‘Well unthink yourself.’

  He goes to the loo after that, and I watch him head off the wrong way around the escalators, then back again, then I watch him get it wrong a third time as he traipses off towards the lift.

  He’s left his wallet on the table. And I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. Will I be paying my own half of the bill tonight, or is this a man who has come prepared? Because if I’m paying my own half of the bill, then forget it, I’m out of here as soon as the bread rolls have disappeared.

  Instead, though, I find two fifty-pound notes. So that’s okay. I guess. But hidden behind them I see something that isn’t quite okay. It’s a photograph of a g
irl – maybe in her mid-twenties,. It looks like it was taken on a beach in Jamaica, and she’s had her hair ironed so it isn’t frizzy any more, and – yeah, she isn’t wearing a bra. And she’s signed it. ‘To Paul with love, Lucy.’ She’s like Naomi Campbell’s sister. Maybe her slightly uglier older sister, but still.

  When he gets back, I get up.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The main course hasn’t arrived, I’ll just fix you up for the rest.’ And I throw him two ten-pound notes and get to the lift as fast I can. And although I have a horrible feeling he’s going to chase me, he doesn’t. Thank God. And as soon as I’m down on the Brompton Road, I find a taxi and jump in.

  The best thing about taxis – and what you pay for, in my opinion – is the thinking time. And on the way back home, I do a lot of thinking. About the guy I used to date at university (the one who said Bachelor of Arts stood for Bugger All) who also specialized in serial black girlfriends. And I think about my brother Viv, and what ganja – god I hate that word – did to his brain, and why he started work on the Hammersmith and City line when he should have gone to university. Like me.

  If I add up the taxi bill and the Harvey Nichols bill, it’s about what I’ll get paid for two more days’ work as Busker Buster. So, even though it kills me the next morning, I drag myself out of bed at 6 a.m., and on to the tube, and over to Tottenham Court Road again.

  I’m ready for Paul. That kind of thing doesn’t scare me. Hey, I’m the woman who arrested Tweety and Sylvester the cat, all right?

  But Paul’s not there. Someone tells me he hasn’t turned up, and they’re putting on some guy called Rob in his place. Rob’s nice. The first thing he tells me is that I’ve becoming a living legend in Busker Buster circles, and the second thing he tells me is that he’s got tickets for Morrissey if I’m interested.

  I tell him I’ll stick the job out for another week after this, and I do – right up until the following Friday, when they send me to Oxford Circus, the hardest gig a Busker Buster can get – because my triumph at Tottenham Court Road has won me some kind of reputation, it seems.