Tank Girl

by Alan C. Martin

  So then, something for everyone in The Bushel, I’m sure you’ll agree, and if you don’t like it you can always have an apple instead.

  Yours, pushing the comic book envelope until it’s, well, a much longer, browner envelope,

  Alan C. Martin

  upstairs

  The Double Decker Bus Café

  Chain Bridge Honey Farm

  Berwick upon Tweed

  Spring 2007

  THE HANDLEBARS OF MY RACING BIKE

  A BOOGA POEM

  I’ve turned up the handlebars of my racing bike

  It makes perfect sense to me

  Now I don’t have to lean forwards so much

  I can lean back, upright and free

  I’ve turned up the collar of my sheepskin jacket

  To protect me from the breeze

  I’ve got a Police album tucked up under one arm

  And my sandwich today is cheese

  I cycle no-hands with a fag in my mouth

  I’ve already had a small can of beer

  A pretty girl smiles as I cruise on past

  But I pretend that I just didn’t see her

  I’ve adjusted my seat and adjusted my bell

  And I can see much better from here

  I can recline and talk on my C.B. radio

  Whilst using my feet to steer

  I’ve turned up the handlebars of my racing bike

  And I recommend that you do the same

  Then one day if we happen to crash into each other

  We’ll both know that no one’s to blame

  ‘THE ORGAN GRINDER’

  A TANK GIRL INTERVIEW BY ROSIE MILLWALL

  First published in the December 2006 edition of Headache Magazine

  The world of interviewing can sometimes be as dull as it is interesting. For every top-notch celebrity I’ve interviewed, there are a dozen nobodies, pumped-up on their thirty milliseconds of fame and eager to inflict their weak personalities upon an uninterested and unsuspecting public.

  Thankfully Tank Girl cannot be lumped into that category. Although she could be described as a self-important egomaniac, she still manages to harbour qualities that make for entertaining company by projecting the lighter, fun-loving side of her personality.

  Today, however, she is pushing the dullness-envelope by making me wait in my hotel room for nearly seventeen hours for her to appear. My frustration is compounded by the “I’ll only be another five minutes” notes that she’s been sending me via the hotel porter at regular halfhour intervals.

  I’m running room service ragged with my orders for toast and fresh pots of coffee.

  I’m subduing the impulse to bail.

  Finally she arrives.

  I must say, she’s well worth the wait.

  She looks incredible.

  It’s not just her tartan kilt and sporran, knee-length brown suede boots, tight turtleneck sweater and badly dyed, normal-person’s hairstyle that impact upon me. She has a glow about her – a larger than life, power-of-the-whole-universe-streaming-through-her-eyes magic.

  I’m spellbound by her brilliance.

  Thankfully I’ve had plenty of time to prepare an extensive and indepth questionnaire. Perhaps that will serve to mask the fact that I’m drooling after her like a retard with a bowl of sweet porridge.

  She falls backwards onto the sofa and helps herself to tea and cake.

  TG: Hello?

  RM: Uh? Oh sorry. Yes. Hello. I am sorry, I’m just a bit taken aback.

  You’re very... erm... striking.

  TG: I’ll strike you in a minute if you don’t fuckin’ get on with it. I haven’t got all fucking day you know.

  RM: But I’ve waited seventeen hours.

  TG: What do you want, a medal? First question.

  RM: Yes. Right. First question... er... Is it true that you’ve split with your long-term partner and lover, Booga?

  TG: What? Where the hell did you get a question like that from? Hello Magazine? Of course it’s not fuckin’ true. I may have been beating him up quite a lot lately and I’ve probably been seen snogging lots of ugly blokes in pubs. But no, me and Booga definitely haven’t split.

  RM: That’s funny, because we had a very strange phone call from a shifty sounding woman, she said that you and Booga had parted company for good and that you were ‘irreconcilable’. She had a man’s name, Bert or Barry or something.

  TG: Fuckin’ Barney?! That bitch! I knew she’d always fancied Booga and this proves it. She’s trying to drive a wedge between us.

  RM: I had no idea that your boyfriend was such a hot property.

  TG: He’s not. He’s a fucking shit-wick. Barney only wants him because he’s mine. If I hadn’t seen him first, Booga would still be playing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with the kids from up-doors and Barney would still be hankering after David Hasselhoff.

  RM: Are you saying that the only reason anyone would find Booga attractive is because he is with you?

  TG: Yeah.

  RM: Don’t you think that’s a trifle conceited?

  TG: Yeah. So? Who are you? The fucking love police? This is supposed to be an interview, not a trial by jury. You’re here to observe and report, lady, so get on with your fucking job and stop titting me around. Next question.

  RM: Tell me about your boyfriends before Booga.

  TG: Well let me see now... there was Kenny Chew, he was the fat guy in charge of the pick ’n’ mix at my local Woolworths. He was shit in the sack, but he did let me go on a spree one time – as much as I could pick ’n’ mix in three minutes... and that’s a lot of milky teeth and chocolate footballs, I can tell you.

  Then there was Derek Weltz. He’s been credited with writing the folk song ‘My Uncle Billy’s Got a Ten-Foot Willy’. But Derek, in actual fact, had a very small willy. I dumped him and started hanging around with his uncle.

  RM: Hmm. Nice.

  TG: Quit it with the Frank Spencer impersonations and finish up will you? I’ve got a big ol’ log lined up.

  RM: Where have you been?

  TG: Where have I been? Well fuck... I had to get out of the way, you know? There was a trainload of shit comin’ and I was standing right in the middle of the track.

  RM: What sort of “shit” are you talking about?

  TG: For a start there was “lad culture”, I fuckin’ despised all that shit. Fuckin’ reading Loaded and going to parties dressed as Reservoir Dogs and drinking fuckin’ orange Tango and shit. Then there was “girl power” and fuckin’ “riot grrrls” and all those wankers. Jesus, can you blame me for keeping my head down? There was no way I wanted to be lumped in with all of that crap. And fuckin’ “Britpop”. Sniff my hairy crack, the lot of you.

  RM: Right... okay then... right... okay... So what have you been doing?

  TG: I’ve been lying on the beach reading one of those ten-million-pagelong David Icke books. He’s a crazy bastard, I can tell ya, but you’ve gotta love him. I don’t know how long it took him to write that fuckin’ thing, but it took me nearly a decade to read it.

  RM: What can you tell me about your relationship with your mother? I hear that you’ve not seen...

  TG: I’ve got to go for a shit.

  At this point she jumps up and disappears into the corridor.

  And that’s it, she’s gone.

  Nothing left but a brown stain on the hotel sofa and a scar on my heart.

  I wonder, will I ever see her again?

  My Uncle Billy

  My Uncle Billy’s got a ten-foot willy

  He showed it to the girl next door

  She thought it was a snake

  And hit it with a rake

  And now it’s only four-foot four

  By D. Weltz (apparently)

  WORTHING

  ONE

  MARINE PARADE LOOKING EAST

  Booga parked our cream-white Ford Consul hard against the lower promenade path. I could hear the chromium hubcaps grinding against the curb stone. I clenched
my teeth and squinted.

  Booga killed the engine and we both donned our sunglasses with synchronistic precision. The sky was really fucking blue.

  “Wait here while I stick a tanner in the meter-maid,” said Booga, as he fought with his stiff driver’s-side door.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I replied, pulling down the vanity mirror on the back of the sun-visor. I produced a blood-red lipstick from my pocket book and set about making a piss-poor job of tarting up my face.

  “Okay. We good,” chirped Booga, leaning in the open window with his head tilted ninety degrees sideways.

  “Good,” I nodded, “I’ll pop the boot open, you start getting the stuff out.”

  Round at the back of the car, Booga was struggling to lift out a large, high calibre machine gun. “These fucking things aren’t meant to be carried around, you know,” he grunted, “they’re for putting on tripods and shit. One guy pulling the trigger with two fingers, another feeding in the ammo. This... uh... is not... hup! ...a fucking hand gun.” And with that, he let the shoulder-strap take the weight of the gun, with one hand on the grip, the other on the barrel.

  I imagined the heavy lump of metal machinery pulling him forward, landing him flat on his stupid kangaroo face on the Tarmac. I smirked.

  “It looks great,” I said, staring off up the road. The horizon rippled with the summer heat. I spotted a blur of pale-blue and white coming through it. “Shit... cops... quick!”

  Booga shuffled hurriedly round to the pavement side of the car, shielding his gun from their sight.

  Instinctively I took a tartan Thermos flask from our wicker picnic basket and started to pour myself a steaming cup of tea.

  The police cruised past, smiling and waving merrily. I waved back and raised my teacup to them. Booga forced a sheepish grin and crouched lower to hide his weapon, inadvertently looking like he was taking a shit behind the car.

  The moment passed, but the adrenaline was up. I swigged back the hot tea and swapped my empty cup for two Mills Bombs and a Glock. I checked the ammo in the Glock; it was full.

  I looked Booga sharp in the eye. “Ready?” I asked.

  “Ready,” he replied.

  I slammed down the lid on the trunk. “Let’s fucking do it then.”

  TWO

  THE DENTON GARDENS

  Barney lifted her head up from the grass; some of the blades were still stuck to the side of her face and some had left a lasting imprint on the skin of her temple and cheek. Her sleeping bag was damp underneath from the morning dew, but the noonday sun had baked the top part like a puff pastry sausage roll, and Barney had started to sweat. She tried to open her eyes, but they were virtually glued shut from the dehydration brought on by the previous night’s bottle of bourbon. Fumbling blindly for her water bottle, she knew that if she didn’t get out at that precise moment then she would perish, or at the very least, fall back asleep, be discovered by the park warden, get reported to the police, and give away the entire game before it had even started.

  Even though it was a beautifully sunny day, Denton Gardens was deserted, apart from an old man who was sitting on one of the benches reading a copy of Brideshead Revisited, and a young couple – dressed in slacks and ski pants and looking like extras from Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday – who were playing a rather sloppy game of golf on the putting green. No one had really paid much attention to Barney’s semi-vagrant camp-out on the small patch of grass by the sunken Italian ornamental fish pond.

  Barney splashed lukewarm water from her bottle across her face and prised her eyes open. The sunlight blasted into her head and scorched its name across her pounding frontal lobes. She wriggled her way out of the sleeping bag like a moth crawling from its cocoon, her hands stuck by her sides, unable to unfasten the zipper that she had drunkenly jammed in the night in her rush to get to sleep before she passed out.

  Finally she collapsed onto the shortly mowed lawn, exhausted and beaten. But the day had just begun and there were important things to be doing. Barney was a kingpin in my master-plan for that day; she could not let herself cock up again – the repercussions would be devastating.

  THREE

  MARINE PARADE WEST

  Jet Girl strolled breezily along the promenade. The Regency town of Brighton could just about be made out behind her in the hazy distance. She was looking well foxy in her two-sizes-too-big cat suit and flat soled leather boots with their buckles undone. Her long, tangled brunette locks shimmered in the air like a fucked-up hairspray commercial. She walked upright and cool, brazenly smoking a long, thin joint that she had expertly rolled in a king-sized stars-and-stripes cigarette paper. The old women at the bus stop checked her out from the corners of their eyes; they couldn’t bring themselves to look directly at her, she was too cool. No one uttered a word as she swanned past; she was beyond comment.

  The sights of Worthing seafront scrolled past her – to her right: Nina’s Gift Shop, Warnes Hotel, Steyne Gardens (she’d heard that The Small Faces had once played a daytime gig there in the late ’60s), the mighty Dome Cinema, Macari’s Ice Cream Parlour and The Marine Hotel; and, to her left, Splash Point, the salvaged sea-mine that was now a charity collection box, the rows of fishermen’s stalls loaded with fresh seafood, and the Pavilion at the end of the pier (where Oscar Wilde had apparently once had a bit of a “thing” with one of the boys that worked in the newspaper kiosk).

  She took her purple-tinted Chanel sunglasses out of their case and perched them on the end of her slender, pale nose. Taking one last deep draw on her spliff, she flicked the still smouldering roach with perfect precision straight into the opening of a rubbish bin.

  After she had passed the pier end, she took a sharp left onto the pebble-covered beach. And there it was, right in front of her: our Prime Objective.

  FOUR

  THE BEACH

  Me and Booga were already there, sat in the back row with our legs crossed, sucking Mr. Fruitti ice-lollies. Booga had a large mound of pebbles in front of him, like he’d just buried his uncle or someone.

  Jet Girl sat down beside us, produced another joint from her cleavage, and sparked it up with her Zippo, taking several long tokes. She silently held her breath, smiling serenely and looking straight ahead, letting the smoke work its way slowly around her brain and do its thing. Ha, she thought.

  I turned to her, talking awkwardly with a lump of bitten-off orange lolly clattering around in my mouth. “You seen Barney yet?” I mumbled.

  Jet Girl spluttered her smoke out as she tried to reply. She eventually pulled it back together, wiping saliva from around her mouth with the back of her hand. “No, afraid not. Haven’t seen her since last night. We drank a bottle of pop on the end of the pier, then she went off to camp out in a park someplace... you know what she’s like... any chance to sleep under the stars. Jack Kerouac, Baden-Powell and all that.”

  “Well,” I said urgently, looking at my watch and throwing a glance back over my shoulder, “she’s got precisely one minute and seventeen seconds. If she doesn’t make it here by then, then we’ll have all come here for nothing and our plan will be for shit.”

  We all turned our attention to the proceedings before us. We were sat directly behind an assembly of at least fifty children, none of them over ten years of age. It was the height of the school summer holiday, so it was a pretty common sight to find scores of kids roaming Worthing seafront in search of entertainment. They were kitted out in gay summer attire, and lots of them had on those old-school party hats that look like they’re made out of the same cardboard mâché that they use for moulding egg boxes, some with motifs such as “Kiss Me Quick” and “Hello Sailor” written on the front.

  I checked my watch again – less than thirty seconds to go and still no sign of Barney. Suddenly I saw her, staggering this-way-and-that as she tried her best to stay stable on the stony, sloping beach, with her clearly still-pissed brain trying its best to guide her towards us. Her last few steps got faster and faster until she was
leaning forward so far that there was no way she wasn’t going to fall over. She spun herself around as she dropped down beside me, causing a loud crunch from the pebbles, and cracked open an ice-cold can of Top Deck Lager and Lime, taking an almighty, re-hydrating swig before nestling it down in the stones.

  “Ta-da!” she exclaimed, gesturing with open arms, as if to say, “Hey everybody, I’m here, by some complete fucking miracle, isn’t it amazing?!”

  “Seriously Barney,” I said with a mock-stern look, “do you think that next time you might try and cut it a bit finer? If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you weren’t taking this mission at all seriously.”

  “Oh no, love,” she replied with addled sincerity, “don’t go thinking that kind of thing. I’m with you one hundred and two percent. Look,” she opened the front of her denim jacket and flashed us the butt of her revolver, which she had stuffed down the front of her pants with the safety catch off, “check it out. I’m fuckin’ dangerous, me. I’m a freakin’ wildcat.”

  I shook my head in a “my brains are jangling around inside my skull like a pea in a drum” kind of way. “Jesus,” I muttered.

  Jet Girl leant in and killed our conversation dead. “Hey, people. It’s time. This is it guys. Now it begins.”

  We all sat to attention, backs straight and eyes front. There it was, just beyond the sea of kids – our Prime Objective – the Punch and Judy tent: a one-man-only sized, oblong theatre, in red and white candystriped canvas with a small opening at the top where the puppets appeared.

  The little curtain rose on the tiny stage and Mr. Punch popped up, waving his clobbering stick violently and squawking his unintelligible dialogue at the eager audience. We were instantly hooked in to the nonsensical story and dragged further down by the undertow of repetitive dialogue. It was totally mesmerising.