“Who were the Seven Sisters?” I asked.
“THEY WERE TREES!” he shouted over the rattling bolts and hinges.
It sounded plausible, but with Kevin, you never knew for sure.
The pace of the truck was alarming and the potholes were many. We clung on.
“Where are we going?” I shouted.
“North!” Kevin shouted back.
We were two foolish Paddies, dumber than Harpo, hanging onto the back of a bin lorry, and we had no idea where we were going.
“I’m in love,” I shouted at Kevin.
“With Amy?”
I shook my head and made a sweeping gesture that covered a ten-mile radius. I told him I was in love with the bin lorry and the dead flies stuck to its surface. I was in love with Persians and sandalwood polish; in love with the stars, the moon, and the night; in love with all seven Sisters and the Post Office tower that wobbled in the distant sky like a lanky kebab. I was in love with the Piccadilly Line and the 22 bus; in love with the chip shop in Harlesden where patties nestled under glass like greasy museum exhibits; in love with the reggae that dripped from windowsills in Brixton and puddled on Railton Road. I was in love with the warm chocolate bars dispensed from tube station vending machines; in love with the waxy smell that came from Madame Tussauds. I was in love with everybody and everything and every moment in this great steaming pile of city.
The bin lorry shifted into warp speed and everything blurred around us. Kevin closed his eyes and thought about it all.
“Yeah,” he said, his words half buried under a ton of noise. “Love!”
6
ART
SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 1979
I’m trying to figure out where it started to go wrong. Maybe it was the weekend we went to Winchester for the wedding of Kim Sutton’s brother, Billy.
When we arrived at the train station, it was dark and late and there was nobody there to meet us. We rambled around for about an hour looking into every pub with livestock in the title: The Three Ducks, The Pig and Otter, The Olde Bull and the Farmer Fucking a Sheep. There was no sign of Billy and Irene. Kim Sutton looked at me nervously because she could feel the anger getting ready to spill.
“You’re blaming me,” she said.
“He’s your brother.”
The framed picture under my arm was getting heavier by the minute. She’d bought it on Oxford Street, in one of those shops that specialize in raping foreigners. It was of a young couple in silhouette running on a beach. They were naked, but the boy didn’t appear to have any genitals.
“It’s not my fault.”
“If you just wanted me to haul something heavy through the streets,” I said, “you should have bought me a big wooden cross.”
“Now you’re being a martyr.”
Eventually we came to a place with a Watneys Red Barrel and through the leaded glass we could see Billy and Irene. They looked identical, with their long hippie hair and flat, dull expressions. Irene was from San Francisco and called everybody “guys”.
“When did you guys get in?”
I felt like saying, “About a week ago, thanks to your fucking vague instructions,” but Kim Sutton headed me off at the pass.
“We just got here. Here’s our wedding present.”
Irene pulled the brown paper from the picture and instantly started to sob. “It’s sooooo beautiful. You guys are too much,” she said. Then she hugged us both.
“Where did you get it?” Billy asked.
“Portobello Road,” Kim Sutton lied.
“Wow, man. It’s really authentic.”
They propped it up on the bar counter and everybody in the place was forced to look at it.
Bert and Frieda, two of Billy’s friends, dropped in and allowed me to buy them booze. They both drank cider. They both slurped. I hated their posture.
Nancy arrived a little before closing time. She was Kim Sutton’s older sister, but I hadn’t met her before. She spent her life drifting from commune to commune in Ireland and England, doing strange tribal stuff that she couldn’t remember. She was the other side of the Kim Sutton coin. Instead of bright, fresh, strawberry blonde and healthy, Nancy was dark, bleak, curly and dangerous. She looked like an oversexed gypsy, someone who would take your hand, read it, and then sit on it.
“Little sister is doing all right,” she said, taking me in from top to toe with great curiosity.
Kim Sutton looked away. She didn’t often blush.
“What are you doing in London?” asked Nancy.
“I work for Armitage Shanks,” I joked.
“Wow!” said Billy. “Don’t they make the urinals?”
“Hand basins too,” I said with wild enthusiasm. “Flush cisterns, bidets, vanity units…”
Nancy winked at me and said, “I think he’s taking the piss.”
When the pub closed, we headed back to the Billy-Abode, a two-bedroom flat that smelled of patchouli oil and damp dog. We sat around and smoked dope. Irene placed the wedding present on a mantle where it drew all conversation, its beauty expanding as the hours wore on.
“It’s so trippy,” said Billy.
“I think we know those guys,” Irene pitched in, “They look like that couple who shared our tent.”
“In Glastonbury?” asked Billy.
“Uh-huh. Remember we all got nude and danced in the rain?”
“I don’t think it’s the same couple,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Irene said, pulling back her hair like a woman opening curtains.
“Guy in the picture doesn’t have a cock,” I said. “Did the guy in Glastonbury have a cock?”
Kim Sutton looked at the floor to cover her embarrassment. Irene wasn’t happy. “What exactly are you?” she asked with a twist of sourness. “Some sort of cock expert?”
I leaned over very close to her face and replied, “Well, I do work for Armitage Shanks.”
“Naughty boy,” Nancy said, and then she laughed and slapped the back of my hand. She produced a ball of black gum and put it in a teapot lid. She struck four matches at once, and cooked it over a high flame. The smoke curled and twisted and we were lit up like tinkers around a campfire. We sucked in the fumes through a Biro tube until nothing mattered. Nothing mattered at all. Only smoke.
“You guys are sooo special,” Irene said, and she started to sob again.
Bert and Frieda appeared to live in the flat next door, and yet they asked if they could crash for the night. Billy said, “Sure, man, no problem,” and showed them to the second bedroom. I looked over at Kim Sutton and gave her my what the fuck is this and where is our bed? expression, but she was too stoned to notice.
Irene led their pet dog, a witless pooch called Sammy, out to a folded blanket in the kitchen. I was gob-smacked. “Even the fucking dog is getting his own room,” I said, loud enough that even the mutt got the message.
We were given some cushions and a blanket. Nancy lay down on the sofa base beside us and covered herself with a shawl. Kim Sutton, as stoned as I’d ever seen her, crawled under the blanket on the floor and shut her eyes tightly.
The streetlight outside seeped in around the edges of the tie-dyed curtain.
“The room is going round,” she said.
“That’s what rooms are supposed to do,” I replied.
She pressed herself against me in that state of demented horniness one gets at the apex of a buzz, when every part of the body becomes a sexual organ. I flipped open the top button on her jeans. “No,” she whispered. “We’re not alone.”
I looked over her shoulder and said, “Nancy passed out ages ago.”
Nancy smiled.
“Are you sure?” Kim Sutton asked, without opening her eyes.
“Certain,” I whispered.
Nancy hovered like a wet shadow in the dark as she watched us fuck. She had a front-row seat in a sexual circus. Her features doubled in size as she moved closer to us. Her face loomed up over Kim Sutton’s shoulders, and, for a brief
glorious moment, it was almost like fucking a two-headed woman in the vastness of outer space.
Sammy the dog shuffled around in the kitchen. Kim Sutton dug her fingers into my back and imploded in a series of tight muscular seizures. Nancy gritted her teeth and rolled her eyes like a satisfied shark. It wasn’t a three-way, but it was definitely a two-and-half-way.
I woke up a little before seven. Everyone was gone, except for the greasy neighbours. They were still in the second bedroom, fast asleep and wrapped around a pillow like snakes around a stick. They smelled as if they’d been sweating turpentine.
I woke up Kim Sutton.
“They’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“Billy and the blushing bride. What time is the ceremony?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t get an RSVP, dude! sort of thing”
Kim Sutton hated the hippie voice I used when imitating her brother. She dearly wanted to see her family as normal, but she was as close as they got to a straight arrow. She always had a job and never scrounged off the state. She believed that you could improve yourself, that you came into this world as raw material, to be shaped, formed and bettered.
About an hour passed, then the dog scratched on the door. Irene entered wearing a small crown made from twisted wild flowers and twigs. She looked especially fucking stupid. Billy followed close behind.
“So,” I said, “what time is this wedding?”
“That’s all taken care of, man,” Billy said.
“How do you mean taken care of?”
“We were up early, so we just got the sunrise ceremony out of the way.”
I threw a glance at Kim Sutton and saw her look of alarm.
“We were going to wake you, man, but you looked so comfortable.”
“Was it in a church?” I asked.
Billy laughed. “You couldn’t see a sunrise in a church, man. No, it was on the top of the hill.”
He got down and scrubbed Sammy’s chin with his knuckles.
“Sammy had a great time, he woofed it up. You woofed it up, didn’t you Sammy? You really woofed it up.”
“It must have been good,” I said. “If Sammy woofed it up.”
“You really woofed it up, boy.”
“What about Nancy?” I asked.
“Nancy went back to Brighton.”
“Was she at the sunrise ceremony?”
“No man, she caught it last month.”
“You did it last month as well?”
“We do it every month, man. You have to keep it fresh, you know?”
I didn’t turn around and look at Kim Sutton, but I knew she was mortified. The whole journey had been nothing but a dumb waste of time.
On the Intercity back to London, I teased her relentlessly. “The bride said a few words, the groom said a few words and then Sammy woofed it up!”
Kim Sutton turned away and buried her head between the seat and the window.
“And then a passing sparrow made a speech, and a badger threw confetti…”
Kim Sutton twisted her head further away from me and began to shake. I was glad she was upset. I had lost a day’s wages and we had made fools of ourselves. Never mind the forty quid we’d spent on the dickless boy on the beach.
“And then Sammy woofed it up again,” I said.
The more her shoulders heaved, the better I felt. It was only right that she should pay with tears.
“Yeah, man, you gotta keep it fresh,” I said.
Two weeks earlier, I had seen her face glow when she told me that Billy was getting married. It was a triumph of normalcy, the first step on the road to regularity. If Billy got married and Nancy gave up her gypsy wanderings and her sister Rosie stopped sleeping with men twenty years her senior… then all would be right with the world and Kim Sutton would be just like everybody else. I despised the aspiration for all its ordinary hope.
“The sunrise ceremony!” I spat.
When she tried to stifle her sobs, I knew it was mission accomplished. My hands were clean and now I could offer her comfort. I reached out and touched her shoulder.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, it’s okay.”
She turned to face me and I could see that she was laughing. Really laughing!
“Sammy woofed it up,” she said, a smile bursting across her face.
In five seconds I went from stunned, to confused, to outraged, to angry, to almost happy. I never made her laugh. Never.
All the way back to London we took turns saying, “Sammy woofed it up,” and the people around us picked up on it. An elderly man close by made a low bark and said, “Woof!” A woman with a purple umbrella said, “Woof, woof!” Another woman in a frayed anorak was even more adventurous: “Woof, woof, woofoooo!” she went.
I saw my reflection in the window. It didn’t look as mean as it usually does, and though I knew it wouldn’t last, I too allowed myself an ordinary dream. In it, I wasn’t a monster. I didn’t want to hurt people and bend them over until they snapped. I didn’t have strange desires and wicked fantasies. With the right training, I could learn to be a proper boyfriend. Flowers, hugs and moonlit walks, that sort of shit – and once my spirit was broken, I might even pass as a husband.
Kim Sutton laughed and I laughed too, but we were laughing at different things. Four days later, she was in bed with another man.
7
FRANCE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1979
I used to live in this house, so I still have a right to be here. I never returned the key, and if you keep the key, it’s not breaking in.
Dermot MacMurrough stands in the hall, and he is totally freaking out. He has the look of a chicken on the chopping block, and yours truly is the farmer with the cleaver behind his back. He was talking merrily on the phone until I entered. “What are you doing here? You don’t live here anymore!” he says. Clearly he is not familiar with the status conferred by key possession. “I’ll call you back,” he says into the receiver.
I walk to the end of the hall and put my key in the door of number two. I twist and twiddle, but it does not turn
“They changed the lock when your ex-girlfriend moved out.”
“What do you mean, ‘moved out’?”
“Two weeks ago.”
Dermot MacMurrough does not like me. I once loaned him ten pounds, which he never refunded, so I bought a chain and locked his bicycle to the front fence, where it remains, deflated and rusting. Now it’s payback time. Irish people will happily wait six or seven hundred years for a moment of revenge. Treachery is a national pastime, and when an Irishman offers you the hand of friendship, watch out for the kick in the bollocks.
“Where did she go?”
“I’m sure if she wanted you to know that, she would have told you.”
Here you see in action Ireland’s chief export to England: the cunt. We coddle and corn-feed them; we give them warmth, water and shelter; and then we put them on a boat and push them out into the Irish Sea.
“WHERE DID SHE GO?”
The heat of my question drives him back into a corner. “She went to France,” he says.
I can’t believe it. Why would she go to France? Who in their right mind goes to France?
“She took a job as an au pair, or a nanny. I don’t know… Is there a difference?” He looks scared.
“Why, yes,” I say, with two fingers touching a pensive chin. “The nanny is a childcare professional, not necessarily interested in cultural exchange. The au pair, on the other hand, is expected to fuck the kid’s father.” Then I turn and kick open the door.
“Hey! You can’t do that.”
“It’s difficult, I admit, but not impossible.”
I look around at a bedsit now cleaned beyond all recognition. Some powerful force has expunged the grime and the streaks of mildew, the cobwebs and the coal dust, the cigarette ash and the spider legs. This is no longer just a room; it is now a “room for rent”, a place where the past h
as been erased with a mop and a bucket, where the future awaits its moment.
“You’ve got no right,” Dermot MacMurrough says from beyond the door. “You have no right at all.”
I had come halfway across London to demand and accept Kim Sutton’s apologies. I’d expected raised voices and whimpers. Maybe a little sex. But France?
Fucking France.
Five years ago I’d been to Paris on a school tour.
“Oh wow! Look at the Eiffel Tower.”
(Same as it looks on the biscuit tin.)
“Oh wow! The Mona Lisa.”
(Same as the biscuit tin.)
Arc de Triomphe?
(Biscuit tin.)
It’s an entire fucking city designed by McVitie’s.
I look out the window we once looked out together, and I remember how our observations never matched. She saw a man with a dog; I saw a man with a hungry nuisance on the end of a lead. She saw teenagers kissing; I saw a blighted pregnancy and years of misery. She saw an elderly couple with the weekly shopping; I saw a pair of cadavers, tied together by nothing but groceries.
I once found her diary and read it. She kept mentioning someone called “Grump”. It took me a while to get the reference.
“What are you doing in there?” asks MacMurrough.
I sit on the edge of the bed and calculate. It is only seven weeks since we lay upon this mattress together.
Sept semaines.
Quarante-neuf jours.
I turn face down, like a bather resting on a lilo, and I inhale the perfume and sweat of strangers. I dive down to a reef of lost aromas, a subterranean pool filled with transients darting in and out through the waving kelp of time. I paddle with my fingertips and tread with my feet. I search for her, but she is gone.
To fucking France.
Outside, in the hallway, MacMurrough talks on the phone. I can’t make out the words, but I can hear the occasional whistling syllable. He’s from the wesht of Ireland where a shtick isn’t a comedy routine, but a weapon for beating your cows. He hangs up and runs up the stairs.
Six months ago, I fixed a headboard onto the bed. She painted a watercolour of a ballerina and pinned it to the wall. We bought eggs and made omelettes. We smoked hash oil and drank Cinzano. She read The Hobbit and other weird stuff about big-eared pixies. I read Motorcycle News and a book about Aleister Crowley, the bow-tied Cambridge bisexual and doppelganger of Curly, from the Three Stooges.
A Ton of Malice Page 4
