Dead Funny

by Robin Ince

  ‘Well what?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Mistakes may occur . . .’ said Taylor, with an arch of the eyebrow.

  It was at that moment Steve decided that he would see to it personally within the year that he would have this man’s job. This relic. This dinosaur. Thirty-four fucking years old. It made Steve almost feel physically sick to imagine this waste of air rampaging around the Orient throwing cash at anybody who’d suck his cock. And that arch of the eyebrow said that he’d let a bloke do it. Steve nodded assent at this golden nugget of wisdom and turned back to his terminal while thinking, ‘I will fucking end you, you piece of shit.’

  But despite his slowly unfolding career plan Steve still had to play his cards right. Schmoozing colleagues at the weekend was all part of the game. You had to hold your own on a Friday night with the lads. Surprise them with generosity when it’s your round – ‘Jack Daniel’s chasers, Webby, you fucking diamond!’ But the dark currency of the Friday night bender was coke. The real wheeling and dealing of the social whirl of the Square Mile was conducted in the gents all clustered around a cistern top and a rolled-up twenty. There was a bloke on the Tokyo desk who always used a rolled-up 100 military yen note which was basically an antique from the Second World War. As he came up pinching his nostrils and squeezing his eyes closed he would usually make some quip like, ‘And THAT is how we did it at Pearl Harbor!’ before barging his way back to the bar.

  Steve was aware that he had been dependent on others for his cocaine. He was unfamiliar with the etiquette. Can you just ask someone where they got it? Do you offer to buy it? Do you offer them a fiver if you have a line? It was not a world he was familiar with. After a few clumsily indiscreet enquiries he eventually discovered that there was a girl in the post room who was the conduit for nearly eighty per cent of the drugs coming in to the building. He had to be introduced to her by Mike Taylor, which was another reminder to destroy Taylor’s life as swiftly as possible. He hated being beholden to him.

  ‘Katie, this is the geezer I told you about, this is Staples, I shall leave you two to it. Don’t hang about, Staples, we all need a bit of a livener before the karaoke . . .’

  She was a petite gothy looking girl, with clunky framed glasses, a plain black dress, thick tights and insanely expensive-looking leather boots.

  Steve was slightly flustered. ‘Nice boots,’ was his ludicrously ham-fisted opening gambit.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Um, well . . . I, er . . .’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Coke’s fifty, proper coke’s eighty, three Es are a fiver, I’ve got mandy, k, acid – but I do NOT recommend that unless you’ve got Monday and Tuesday off – resin, skunk and some nice mild Thai grass.’

  ‘Oh, right, could I have some coke please . . .’ He had not felt more like a child in years.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot, how much was it again?’

  ‘Not the money, how many grams?’

  ‘Oh, right, sorry!’ he mumbled. ‘Um . . . One?’ It was definitely a question. He was not acquitting himself at all well in this exchange.

  ‘Fifty or eighty?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right . . . Hang on . . .’ he fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet. He felt his cheeks gently warming. He would make Taylor fucking pay for this. He opened the wallet and did the mental arithmetic in his head. He had bought the last round and was somewhat less flush than he had remembered. ‘Just a fifty for now, please . . .’ He felt like a child going to the sweet shop on their own for the first time, such was the odd mix of fear and excitement.

  The woman rolled her eyes and reached inside the neck of her dress which afforded Steve the quickest glimpse of bright pink lace. She glanced up and caught him peeking and her eyes held his in their steely gaze.

  ‘Really?’ she said. And Steve’s face bloomed in florid embarrassment. She shook her head laughing to herself. ‘That’ll be fifty please, Mister Heffner.’ Steve didn’t get the reference but she hadn’t called him Staples so he thought he’d quit while he was ahead, thrust the money into her hand and in a smooth motion she passed him a tiny, breast-warmed sachet of white powder, and he made good his escape.

  So Mike calling him Staples in a toilet cubicle was something of a low point during this particular rite of passage – offering a ‘livener’ to work colleagues for the very first time. And there he was inhaling the beery breath of the two men who had the keys to the kingdom. As he leaned over and poured just over half of the packet onto the cistern he suddenly panicked. What if they wanted another one? Taylor was a greedy fuck, and he really only wanted to share with Jon, but Taylor had put him on to Katie so he owed him. He raked the powder into three clumsy slugs and proffered a rolled twenty to Taylor who, of course, took the biggest. Cunt. His head whipped back exuberantly. ‘This is the fucking fifty, Staples, you cheapskate cunt! I thought you wanted to get on in this fucking game, you muppet.’

  Steve’s face reddened and once again Jon stepped in. ‘Oh, fucking shut up, Mike, he’s on about a tenth as much money as you, so this is equivalent to you buying a hit at five hundred. I thought you worked in finance, you muppet . . .’

  They way Jon emphasised this final word was in a mocking tone. It was Taylor’s most commonly used insult in the office and this was him being told that everybody knew it and to wind in his fucking neck. Steve felt his cheeks cooling and a warm glow of satisfaction ran through him. And with a fake skip in his step, he wandered back into the insane cacophony of ‘High Notes Karaoke Lounge’.

  Karaoke is for many the chance to strut about onstage like they are rock stars. Karaoke in a room where ninety per cent of the participants are on coke is one of the grimmest things in the world. Unworkable dance moves vie with unreachable notes combined with an insufferable confidence. As Steve looked at the stage he thought to himself, ‘I’m gonna sing the fucking shit out of ‘Wonderwall’ . . .’ And he really did.

  As he leaned against the bar a procession of colleagues and strangers all came up to offer him drinks and slap him on the back. He looked over to a nearby cubicle to see his mentor Jon Phelps raising a champagne glass and winking. He really had sung the absolute shit out of ‘Wonderwall’; he was a good-looking lad and had a solid Thames Corridor baritone that he very much felt completely outdid the nasal Mancunian drone of the original. He grinned and took a massive gulp of cold lager and was delighted to see over the shoulders of the swarm of well-wishers, Mike Taylor sulkily pulling his coat on to his shoulders and stomping out into Leadenhall Market. The tide had finally turned. And the best fucking thing of all was that not one of the people who came up to him had called him Staples. This called for a celebration.

  There was just so much room in the cubicle with just him in it and he had plenty of elbow room to expertly carve the remaining crystals into one hefty, unbroken, glistening three-inch line. As he left the bathroom he felt like a king. The slaps still came down on to his shoulders. People offered to buy him drinks. That bird from the Dubai desk handed him her business card, on which in a smooth even hand was written ‘Give me a call sometime. Deb x’ He had quite simply never felt this good in his life.

  He soaked up the adoration for another two hours as a procession of eager young men tried to outdo his Oasis busting turn. But they all crashed and burned. Jon came up clamped an arm round his shoulders and whispered in his ear, ‘Unconventional play there, Stevie boy, but fucking classic.’ This was music to Steve’s buzzing ears . . .

  ‘Cheers, Jon . . .’

  ‘You play your cards right, in two months, you could be doing Taylor’s job.’ As Jon said this, he turned to face Steve. No trace of guile in his face. This was real, he was being told that he was being lined up for Taylor’s job. Part of him wanted to text Taylor right there and then. ‘Be smart, Webb. Don’t fuck it up.’ Steve wanted to kiss him.

  ‘Yeah, fucking A, Jon. I won’t let you down, mate.�
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  ‘Good.’

  ‘Er, where are you going?’

  ‘Somewhere I’m going to take you once you’ve got Taylor’s gig. Somewhere posh, classy and fucking expensive. Go home.’

  ‘Alright, will do, Jon, seeya tomorrow . . .’

  Most of the staff had left the bar to catch trains home, or snog or piss in City doorways. And the stragglers were still murdering the classics onstage. He turned to the bar and brandished a suspiciously curly twenty-pound note. ‘Barkeep! A large JD please . . .’ The surly Bulgarian barmaid bumped an optic twice, set the glass in front of Steve and took the money. Steve sipped the warming brown liquor, the usual burn of the spirits negated by the numbing alkaloid he had recently ingested.

  The first thing he noticed when he heard the sound was that the hairs stood up on his arms and his cock began to swell. He set the glass down immediately. Was that a noise in the room or was it one he was just hearing in his head? As he turned to see the source of the sound, he realised that the bar was nearly empty now. And onstage, two girls were sharing the microphone and making the most extraordinary sound he had ever heard.

  There weren’t any words. It was just a simple repeated melody, which swirled around him. The notes ebbed and flowed. It was almost as if he could feel the notes fluttering into his ears individually and in pairs whenever the harmony demanded it.

  He was sure he knew the song. It sounded like something from a long time ago. Maybe it was a Beatles album track, his dad was a huge Beatles fan and it was always on. Maybe he was remembering some distant once-heard melody from his childhood. He slowly walked towards the stage and the two women.

  They were insanely beautiful, dark almond eyes and rivers of cascading auburn hair. And they looked eerily similar. Sisters? They surely must be sisters and they must have been singing together forever. It was fucking extraordinary. He stood in front as more of these pure arrows of sound entered him. Maybe it was the coke and the booze and the good news from Jon. Maybe any old shit would sound like the greatest song in the fucking world to him in this mind state. But as he watched them and listened to their singing he knew in his heart that it wasn’t true. This was their doing. This pure, beautiful noise that was filling his ears and his soul was coming out of these two extraordinary women. He wandered closer to the stage, and noticed something about how they were singing. Their arms were always moving slowly about them, like sea grass in a current gently waving, but occasionally, they would touch each other and it was only when they were physically touching that they would sing together. As soon as the contact of skin on skin was broken one or other of them would continue the melody alone.

  As he drew closer to the stage they looked down at him, and then he saw that they must be sisters, twins even. As their eyes met his, they held hands and the singing grew in intensity and he felt his cock harden and shifted his weight in front of them stooping clumsily. He was becoming intoxicated by this sensation. He should offer to buy them a drink. Fuck it. Break into his overdraft and use the plastic to get a bottle of bubbly. He simultaneously cursed that he was now out of cocaine. Looking up at them he wondered which of them he should have a tilt at. Maybe both. This day was going so fucking well, why not ride the streak? He opted for the direct approach.

  ‘Buy you a drink, girls?’

  They looked at him, smiling and just carried on singing. He reiterated a little louder. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

  They still did not respond but smiled at him and continued the eerie harmony, their fingers intertwined with each other. Steve was becoming intoxicated with this, and briefly wondered if he might have been spiked at some point? Might Taylor in an act of indignation have slipped some Ketamine into his drink? But somehow he knew it wasn’t that. He absolutely knew that it was the music doing this. The voices of these two sisters.

  He retreated to the corner of the bar and they concluded their strange wordless melody with a crescendo of such soul scorching beauty that he found himself crying with pure joy. They were the only people in the bar. No bar staff. No colleagues. He looked at his watch. It was 5 o’clock in the morning. ‘Fuck sake, that’s a fucking Tissot, I only changed the battery a month ago and it’s fucked!’ He took his iPhone out and pressed the button, 05.01 it read. He had lost six hours somewhere. He looked up at the stage and the sisters were gone. In front of him on the table was a small silver plate with a credit card receipt for three bottles of champagne. When the fuck had he bought three bottles of champagne at £175 a pop? He looked around the deserted bar for any sign of life but there was none. No staff, but more troublingly, no sisters.

  He stepped out into Leadenhall Street and shouted, ‘Hello? Ladies?’ He looked left and right and just turning down an alley he saw the unmistakable figures of the two sisters and immediately broke into a sprint. Fuck, he was quite pissed, and was lurching from side to side, almost coming to grief over a kerb at one point. As he got to the corner they had turned down he felt he’d made good progress and now must have almost caught up. As he made the turn he could barely believe his eyes, they were a full two hundred metres further on. They had, if anything, stretched their lead on him. ‘oy! girls! wait! where the fuck y’going?’ They turned into Fenchurch Street itself and he started running again, even faster. The streets were deserted, no paper vans, no milk floats, no stragglers cabs, no night buses. Nothing. But Steve didn’t really notice this as he was too focused on catching up with the two women. As he leathered round the corner into Fenchurch Street again they were even further away, three hundred metres now, just about to turn into Fenchurch Street train station. His chest was burning with the effort and his feet hurt. He had to find these women. The pounding of his feet echoed down the concrete canyon of Fenchurch Street. His pace increased, he pushed his body harder and harder, these birds must be fucking athletes or something.

  As he ran onto the station concourse it was 05.08 and there was no sign of the girls. The 05.10 was due to leave any minute. He vaulted the barriers and was gratified to see that there were no staff on duty. The 05.10 was comprised of eight carriages and juddered quietly. Down at the far end of the train he saw the sisters boarding, ‘OY!’ he bellowed, as the hiss of the doors prompted him to leap onto the train. Now he had them. They wouldn’t get away now. Nowhere to run. As the train drew out of Fenchurch Street station he began to work his way along the carriage. The tannoy announcement made him jump: ‘This is the 05.10 direct service to Benfleet. The next stop will be Benfleet.’ What? He had been travelling on the c2c all his life. There’s no such service as a direct train to Benfleet. But he’s never travelled that early in the morning so maybe he was wrong. Perhaps it was a special.

  The train rumbled out of London through the low grey-green marshland of the Thames Estuary. Industry giving way to salty fields unsuitable for anything but the grazing of travellers’ horses and the hardiest of sheep. Steve dropped off just east of Barking and awoke with a start upon hearing, ‘The next stop is Benfleet. Passengers for Canvey Island please alight here.’ Finally he’d find them. They were probably foreign anyway, maybe that’s why they’d ignored him. Fucking mad athlete bitches. He’d get to the bottom of this. The waters of Benfleet Creek came into view and the train slowed down and he stood by the end door of the fourth carriage. As the train drew to a halt he pressed the door button and it hissed open; he left the train and turned right running for the front carriage where his mystery women awaited. But as he thundered up to the carriage he saw that it was empty. That was impossible. He had seen them board. The fucking thing hadn’t stopped. He looked all around and shouted, ‘hello!!!’ His shout echoed down the platform and then he heard it. The singing.

  He turned back down the train to see the two figures step out of the carriage he had been in. That was simply not possible. The realisation that Fucking Mike Phelps had almost definitely spiked him briefly surfaced in his mind before dissolving in the beauty of the sound. They walked slowly out
of the station and he followed. But he did not run. Every time he ran he ended up further away.

  He kept to their pace. It was counter intuitive, sure, but maybe if he didn’t run he might get closer. This thought sort of slowly dissolved in his mind as the pure soaring beauty of the sound of the women entered him once more. They were fifty yards away and it sounded utterly amazing. He didn’t believe that anything could sound so beautiful. The tears rolled down his face as the purity of sound began to unmake him from within.

  They turned off the Benfleet Road east towards the Creek and Leigh-on-Sea and the path to Two Tree Island. He slowly kept pace with their steps but was happy to be anywhere that he could hear them. Random notions swam through him. He’d quit his job and just follow these women. He knew that is all he would need. To live within the sound that had now completely enveloped him. He realised that the joy he had felt earlier at his successes, at his petty victories, was utterly meaningless. The only thing that was important was the sound. Was the singing. Was their voices. His life finally had a real purpose.

  At the end of the path he expected to emerge and see them just ahead along the sea wall. But again they had vanished. His heart began to ache with the thought of losing them. The most all-encompassing sorrow began to surge through him. But then . . . like a miracle he heard them once more. He looked all around. Where could they be? The sound was so pure and so clear. They must be close. He turned to his right and saw them standing hand in hand on the north edge of Canvey at the side of Benfleet Creek. How had they crossed the water? The bridge was a quarter of a mile back past the marina. It was impossible.

  But so what if it was impossible. They still sang so everything was alright. The sisters’ hands gripped each other and they extended their arms towards him. There would be no more running. No getting away. They were finally going to wait for him. The bridge was too far away and he didn’t want to lose them. He smiled at them, the tears now running down his face. The pure beauty of the moment owned him completely. He stepped towards the creek. His feet at first making shallow slimy prints in the slick grey mud. Then with each advancing step towards the unbelievable sound they sank a little deeper. His next step was into the chill Thames water of the creek. A second step into the creek and he was up to the middle of his thighs now. The water was icy cold but felt pure and clear to him, like the pure clarity of his thoughts. He must just get to the other side of this stretch of water and everything would be fine. He would be whole. He would have meaning. He would be loved.