You couldn't tell any of that by watching Sheena at work.
She was small and thin, and couldn't possibly have weighed more than seven stone, but she seemed more ethereal than feeble to me. The fact that her hair was black with mousy roots was only exceptional because the regular harpies mostly had hair that was blonde with mousy roots. She was usually clad in worn black jeans and grey T-shirts implausibly declaring that she was a member of the Royal Redondan Naval Reserve or the Israeli Defence Forces, which qualified as dressing down even by the relaxed standards of Phoneland. She did seem as if she wasn't quite there, but not because she looked as if she were mad, in spite of Jez's slanders. To me, it seemed that she was slightly faded, like a photocopy of a photocopy. Her telephone manner was exquisite, though. She spoke softly, with perfect, almost musical clarity. Unlike the members of the slag legion, she didn't give the impression of having momentarily switched off a natural and otherwise-everpresent coarseness. She seemed—to me, at least—to be naturally gentle of tone and manner. She never got pissed off by the callers, which spoke of incredible fortitude, and had a happy knack of calming them down, no matter how irate they were when they finally got past the Chopin prelude that we tortured them with while they were on hold.
"I don't think she's crazy at all," I told Jez forthrightly, after making my own preliminary observations. "All that Goth stuff is just posing, anyway. It's an affectation—a lifestyle fantasy way past its sell-by date. She must be about ready to get over it."
"Fucking sociology graduate," was Jez's immediate response, although he had two A levels himself.
"Has she got a boyfriend?" I wanted to know.
"Used to live with some guy almost as weird as she is. They were in a shitty band, but they broke up—the band as well as the living-together bit. She moved back with her mum. She'll probably go out with you if you ask, but she won't let you fuck her, and you'll have to wear black—to go out, that is. Don't know what you'd have to do in bed—never got that far. Watch your jugular."
The next time Sheena and I were on the same two-to-ten shift, I came to work in black Levis and a black T-shirt, whose Gothic qualifications were only slightly compromised by the luminous green X-Files logo on the back. When the shift was about to finish, I logged off five minutes early, having already taken my quota of calls, and went over to her cubbyhole.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Tony Weever, with a double e. Started a couple of weeks back. Wondered if you'd like to go for a drink with me before we go home. We've got an hour before closing time."
I was steeled for some kind of scornful put-off, but all she said was, "Okay."
"You're Sheena, right?" I prompted.
"That's right," she said, turning away so that she could take one more call, although I was certain that she'd already made her score. I waited patiently for her to finish, then guided her to the recently redecorated Cock and Crown in Sholebrooke Avenue, which was safely distant from any watering hole that the harpy patrol might be nipping into for a quick one. She asked for a half of Dry Blackthorn, showing commendable restraint.
"Never been in here," she observed. "The maroon plastic upholstery's seriously revolting."
"You should have seen it before," I told her. "Bad case of Oscar Wilde wallpaper—three pints and you wanted to fight it to the death."
She didn't laugh, but she contrived to give the impression that it wasn't because she didn't understand the joke.
"Jez told me you used to be in a band," I said when we sat down.
"Yes," she said. "It split. Davy and I are hoping to do something else."
"Davy?"
"We used to live together, but we don't now. It's just a music thing now."
"You sing?"
"And write lyrics. He does the music. We'll record a CD when we're ready."
"A DIY job?"
"That's right. It's normal, with our kind of thing."
"I was at the university for three years—did your band ever play there?"
"No. What did you do?"
"Sociology."
"So why aren't you a social worker?"
"That's social admin. If I wanted to do something like that, I'd have to do a vocational qualification. I considered the probation service, but only for a minute. Much safer to deal with the criminal classes over the phone, and I'm too deeply in debt to do another year's training right away. I'm hoping to get a job in the media, but so's everybody else in the world. Where do you live?"
"With my mum, in Cross Gates. You?"
"Out past St James's and the Corporation Cemetery. No dad?"
"No. Mum was married, but I was too young to notice when it broke up. He died soon afterwards. Mum took Libby—that's my older sister—to the funeral, because she remembered him, but I didn't go."
"I don't know my dad either," I admitted, "although he's still alive. Mum and he were never married. My two brothers and I all have different fathers, so it all got a bit complicated."
"Lib's my full sister," she said, "but my little brother's only a half."
The conversation was flowing more easily now that we'd established things in common, but it was way too downbeat. "So why'd you change your name to Sheena?" I asked, in a blatant attempt to lighten it up.
"Libby went to see the Cramps on their last British tour, shortly after I joined the scene. They had a song called 'Sheena's in a Goth Gang.' Lib started calling me Sheena because she thought it was funny, in a contemptuous sort of way. The best way to deal with put-downs is to accept them and take them one step further, don't you think? Now I'm Sheena to everybody."
"While the real you remains secret. Why not? Does the fact that you sometimes wear an Israeli Defence Forces T-shirt mean that you're Jewish?"
"No. Davy brought it back for me from Jerusalem. He bought it in an Arab shop on the Via Dolorosa. He thought it was funny that the Arab shops were making money out of them. Maybe the Arabs did, too. The Redondan Naval Reserve one was from him, too. He gets the Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter. You'd probably like him."
I had my own ideas about the likelihood of that, but I wasn't about to spoil things by saying so. Nor was I about to ask her opinion of past-life regression or vampires unless and until she introduced the topic first. A changed name is one thing; esoteric interests that she might be taking a shade too seriously were another.
"I don't know much about Goths," I confessed, thinking that it was probably safe to go that far. "I've seen them around, of course, ever since the good old days when the Sisters of Mercy were the local heroes."
"That's retro-Goth now," she said. "Things have moved on."
"To Marilyn Manson?"
"That's flash metal—bastard son of Alice Cooper."
"Nick Cave?" I queried, getting slightly desperate.
"He's still okay, but basically mainstream. The whole point is not to like the things that other people like, not to think the things that other people think, not to want the things that other people want, and not to do the things that other people do. Every time an idol becomes generally popular, the insiders lose interest. If you'd ever heard of any of the bands that I'd pick as favourites, I'd probably be disappointed."
"Try me," I said bravely.
"I like to dance to Inkubus Sukkubus and the Horatii. I also listen to Ataraxia, Mantra, and Sopor Aeternus, and dark ambient stuff like Endura."
The bright side was that I didn't have to disappoint her.
"Even an oppositional subculture has to have norms of its own," I pointed out, letting my sociology degree show. "You still have to think the things that certain other people think, etcetera, etcetera. Want another?"
"I can afford to buy a round."
"Yes, but I'm drinking pints and you're on halves, so it's only fair if I buy two before you buy one."
"Okay. But it's not true about the conformist nonconformity thing. There's a dress code of sorts, and shared tastes in music, but that doesn't mean that we all think the same things or want the same things, etcetera
. We can be as weird as we like, but we don't have to be similarly weird. No such thing as too weird, of course." She was obviously familiar with Jez's opinion of her fuckability.
I fetched the drinks before I said: "And exactly how weird are you?"
"Didn't the little bird tell you?"
"Only bullshit. I didn't take him seriously."
"That's because you didn't want to. You were going to ask me out, so you didn't want to believe anything too silly."
"No, honestly," I said valiantly. "It was bullshit, but I wouldn't have minded. Be a pity if we were all the same, as Gran used to say."
" 'There's nowt so queer as folk,' " she quoted. "But Jez doesn't know the half of it. Do you believe in reincarnation?"
"No. Do you?"
"Yes. And how. How about vampires?" She was being deliberately provocative.
"Well," I said carefully, "that would depend what you meant by vampire."
"Oh, right," she said. "The 'anyone can drink blood if they want to' routine. That's not what I mean."
"If you mean the undead rising from their graves by night, perennially in danger of crumbling to dust in sunlight, invisible in mirrors, then no," I said. "It doesn't make any sense. Anyway, blood is just blood, not some magical elixir."
"We die every night," she said, in her scrupulous telephone voice. "We surrender our hold on consciousness, and we rise from the grave every time we dream, hungry as well as invulnerable. We all wake up different—even those of us who never meet an incubus or succubus. Our true selves are invisible to us, especially when we look in mirrors. Blood is just blood if you cut yourself, or while it's sloshing around your veins, but to a vampire, blood is life—and when your blood's been drunk by a vampire, you wake up very different. If it happens often enough, you can never go back to what you were before. All that stuff about shrivelling up in the sunlight is complete crap, though—the movies invented that."
I burst out laughing, because I thought it was a punch line—and when she kept a studiously straight face I still thought it was a punch line.
"You're cheating," I pointed out. "You're changing the supernatural into the merely metaphorical."
"No I'm not," she said. "That's your interpretation, not mine. Most people don't realise how supernatural even the everyday things are. Not just all dreaming but all feeling. Life itself, even reason. It's all supernatural. Vampires are ordinary because they're supernatural, not in spite of it."
"Ah, I get it," I said, figuring that I'd cottoned on to what she was doing and why. "It's more Sheena, isn't it? You take the put-downs and you run with them, taking them so much further that all the mockery's discharged. If people accuse you of being crazy, you take the bullshit on and double it, until it becomes surreal. Cool. I like it. I really do."
"That's your interpretation," she repeated, "not mine"—but I thought I had the measure of her, and I thought I understood the way she played the game. I wasn't lying to her. I really did like it.
"It's getting late," I said. "Maybe I should take you home."
"I knew you wouldn't let me get a round," she said. 'Too macho. Not exactly convincing, is it, from a sociology graduate? You should go out with the girls a few more times. That'd toughen you up."
"I'm not in the least macho," I assured her, figuring that I might as well get in on the game. "I always wanted to be—even took masculinity A level. I was okay on the theory, but I failed the practical. I only became a sociologist so I could learn to understand my own dismal failings as a mere male. I would have done psychology, but in psychology you have to blame everything on your parents, and it didn't seem fair to Mum. In sociology, it's the entire society's fault. Share the wealth and share the blame, I say. So much more PC than blaming bad karma left over from Atlantis. Not that I don't believe in Atlantis, of course. I believe United are going to win the league and that New Labour still intend to cut hospital waiting lists and help the pensioners, so why would I have any difficulty believing in Atlantis?"
"Which United?" she asked.
"Darling," I said, "there is, by definition, only one United, whatever fools may think in Manchester, Sheffield, or bloody Dundee. Did you know that Elland Road has the only five-stall dog track in the country?"
"No."
"Well then, it's obviously true what they say. You do learn something new every day. Tell you what—I'll get them in and you can slip me the money under the table when nobody's looking."
"Somebody would see us out of the corner of his eye and get the wrong idea," she said. "Anyway, it's nearly last orders.
I think I'll owe you one and get the last bus. You don't have to see me home. We creatures of the night can look after ourselves."
All in all, it was a perfectly satisfactory predate. Even after the intensity of the vampire discussion, I didn't think Jez could be taken seriously. I didn't think Sheena was crazy—and even if she was, I figured, I should still be able to worm my way into her knickers, given time and a little native wit.
"You want to take me ten-pin bowling at the Merrion Centre?" she asked when I laid out my proposition for a first real date.
"Why not?" I said. "Bright lights and polished lanes—the pastel pullovers are optional. Wouldn't want to go somewhere dark and gloomy where we'd fade into the background, would we?" I figured that the blind-side approach was best, although I'd already done what any university man would do when faced with a tactical problem—I'd visited the Central Library and Miles's secondhand bookshop in search of research materials.
"Oh, all right," she said. "Anything's better than television—and if it's good enough for Homer Simpson, it's good enough for me."
We were on eight-to-four, so we had time to go home and make ourselves beautiful before meeting up at the Merrion. I'd decided that too safe a compromise would look wimpy, so I'd borrowed a black leather jacket from half-brother Jack. I already had a black silk shirt, which I'd bought under the mistaken impression that the creases wouldn't be so obvious if it didn't get ironed in an emergency, and a decent pair of black trousers. My gingery hair did let the ensemble down somewhat, but I wasn't ready to start dyeing it yet.
I half expected Sheena to have gone the whole hog, but she hadn't. Her boots had only two-inch heels and her leggings only had a slight sheen. Her velvety jacket was cut like a Tudor doublet with a drawstring at the waist, but she hadn't done anything extravagant with her hair except for renewing the dye. Her mascara was almost conservative.
"You're not quite ready for the real me," she told me when I told her she looked beautiful.
"I'm working on it," I assured her.
I figured that I'd have no difficulty at all beating her on the lane. Even if she'd played before, I reasoned, she couldn't have had much practice recently, and she was bound to feel bad about having to check her boots in favour of style-disaster flatties. It turned out, however, that she was every bit as neat and meticulous with a bowling ball as she was with a phone and keyboard, and I made the mistake of starting with a heavy ball. It wasn't until I put the black one aside and accepted that I was one of nature's reds that I got into a groove. Sheena won the first game by 120-113, and I had to sweat to get the best out of three; I needed 160 to outscore her on the third and I only just managed it.
"I knew you could do it," she said when I collected the necessary eight on a final-frame spare. "You're the sort who raises his game under pressure. Not many of those about in this town. Wasted in Phoneland."
"It's just a stopgap." I said, revelling in the compliment as we reclaimed our footwear and gravitated towards the bar.
"Course it is," she said. "According to the techies, it'll only be a couple of years before the whole place disappears up its own arse. The next-generation software will let them farm the work out to people's homes. I'll have to jack it in then, mind—no way I'm spending all day with Mum and Marty the brat. Lib says she can get me a job at Gap, but I wouldn't want to work in a mall, and I certainly wouldn't want a job where I was somebody's crazy litt
le sister."
"Maybe your singing career will take off," I suggested as I ordered a pint and a half of Dry Blackthorn.
"I'll get these," she said. I let her; in a bowling alley, anything goes. "Davy's not ready yet," she added, as we made our way to a cubicle. "He gave me a tape last week, but he says it's only half cooked. I'll find the words, but I'll probably have to change them later. He says he's a perfectionist, but he's really just a ditherer."
I wondered whether it had been a mistake to turn the conversation in that direction, but it seemed better to follow it through and kill it off rather than backtrack. "That's how you work, is it?" I said. "He does the tunes, then you fit words to them?"
"I find the words," she repeated. "Davy finds the music; I find the words."
"Why put it like that?" I asked. "Why pretend that it's not your own effort?" It had always seemed to me to be a peculiar form of false modesty when writers talked about their work having a life and logic of its own which they had no alternative but to follow—as if they were merely passive agents of fate, puppets in the hands of their own creations.
"Because it's what happens," she said. "Don't you believe in muses?"
I was more than ready for any sentence beginning "Don't you believe in… ?"
"Of course I do," I said. "I'm intimately acquainted with the muse of sociology. She wasn't one of the original nine, of course, but they had to make concessions after the publication of the Communist Manifesto or there'd have been a revolution on Olympus. Which one's yours?" I hadn't been expecting muses, so I didn't have any names to drop; I was sufficiently grateful to have remembered that there were nine.
"In seventeenth-century France," she said with a half smile that seemed to be a polite acknowledgement of my ready grasp of the game, "poets thought that their muses were vampiric—that they had to pay in blood for artistic inspiration. Geniuses paid so high a price that they wasted away."
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