Elfish was resolute that the name would be hers. It was overwhelmingly important to her. Were her new band to be called Queen Mab, she would be content with the world.
She had no members for her band as yet and although she would undoubtedly find them, time was very limited. Mo had already formed his own new group. They were due to play their first gig in Brixton in ten days’ time. Once they started gigging under the name of Queen Mab it would be too late for Elfish. The name would be lost to her forever. Elfish did not intend to let this happen.
Elfish and Mo lived close to each other in a rundown street in Brixton. They were both good guitarists and they were now the bitterest of enemies.
There were various personal reasons behind this enmity, including Elfish’s continual assertion that she was a better guitarist than Mo, and their shared habit whilst going out with each other of having sex with other people and then lying unsuccessfully about it, but Mo’s main dislike of Elfish came from her repeatedly calling him stupid. Although in Elfish’s opinion she had insulted him far more severely than this, it was the label of stupidity which seemed most to upset him.
“No doubt because he knows it’s true,” she would claim. “Mo is an extremely stupid person.”
After ending their personal relationship they had argued violently about the name of Queen Mab.
It might have been thought strange that either of them had ever heard the name at all. It had not been much used since Elizabethan times, and both Mo and Elfish’s interest in Elizabethan times was extremely limited. It was Cody, Mo’s flatmate, who had brought it to their attention. Cody was a man with both a desire to paint and a degree in English. He had one day asked Elfish if he could use her as a model for a painting of Queen Mab, fairy deliverer of dreams, as she appeared in a long speech in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Elfish, feeling that she was a very suitable subject for anyone to paint, had readily agreed. Additionally, in a rare moment of mutual inspiration, she and Mo had adopted the name for their band; as a name it felt good.
Cody’s painting of Elfish as the Fairy Queen, in which she wore her normal attire of leather jacket and filthy rags to match, was coming along very well but had to be abandoned when Elfish and Mo severed their relationship. The resulting hostility meant that Elfish could no longer visit the flat.
Subsequently, however, Elfish stuck by her claim for the name. She had in truth now completely convinced herself that she had thought of it, though in reality it had been Cody. In arguing with Mo she even went so far as to say that the idea must have been hers because she had read the name in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet whilst visiting her friend Shonen, and Mo had never read a book or a play in his life.
“I know the entire speech off by heart,” said Elfish, who had several pints inside her and was thus prone to exaggeration.
“Well, let’s hear it then,” said Mo.
This scene took place in the pub in front of Mo’s friends, including Cody. Cody, from his superior position of actually having read Romeo and Juliet, looked at Elfish with particular amusement. Elfish, refusing to climb down, was forced to claim that even though she knew the speech she had no intention of quoting forty-three lines of Shakespeare when she had an important game of pool waiting for her in the next bar. It was an unimpressive lie. Mo and his friends laughed and Elfish was humiliated.
Later, at home, she fingered her moon locket and stared into space. She was angry at being made to look foolish in front of Mo and his friends.
Her moon locket, an old-fashioned silver heart, hung round her neck, lost among rows of beads, and it contained the moonlight. So Elfish pretended, anyway.
O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone . . .
Elfish muttered this to herself. These were the first three lines of the speech, as printed in the copy of Romeo and Juliet she had stolen that day from the library. On returning home she had learned thirty-three lines straight off without difficulty. She felt somehow that this reinforced her claim, which she would not give up.
five
ELFISH ONE DAY stepped into Aran’s motorbike boots while he was sleeping off some depression and has worn them ever since. He used to find this annoying but has now forgiven her.
These boots are twice the width of her legs and she holds them in place by wearing many pairs of socks. Elfish’s legs are therefore a distinctive sight, small and thin, with black leggings disappearing into huge boots.
These leggings tightly cover her bottom and above that hangs the leather jacket from hell. This incredible garment was first made for an enormously fat biker, ridden several times round the world, subjected to every stress a garment may possibly suffer, passed through a long string of careless owners, each more wantonly destructive of their clothing than the last, before finally coming to rest on Elfish; a huge, rotting mass of patched, stained, ripped, singed and tortured leather. To prevent its total collapse, various owners have pinned it together with badges, safety pins, kilt pins and sundry other bits of metal, the jacket now being in such a condition that a needle and thread are no longer enough. Elfish has carried on this tradition, adding patches of her own, and also several badges designed mainly to upset the four women she lives with. The right arm, for instance, is largely held on by a badge with the inscription “Nuke Iraq” while the area below the left shoulder carries a mock American military badge with the motto “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.”
Under this metal and leather monstrosity she wears as many T-shirts as is necessary to defeat the weather, the topmost T-shirt invariably being of psychedelic brightness, toned down by dirt, and above it her long forelock of hair falls down over her eyes in seven thick strands. These are dyed dark red and black, though rather halfheartedly, and end in clusters of green and blue beads. The rest of her hair is cut very short, and she has three earrings in her left ear and four in her right and one stud and one ring through her nose. For some time she has been considering the current fashion of pierced lips and eyebrows but has so far not made up her mind about doing it.
Elfish is twenty-four, plays the guitar very well, drinks much too much and is of a generally melancholic disposition. Rarely known to smile, she is frequently unpleasant and is occasionally totally hostile. As a friend of the human race, Elfish is a failure. As a stage diver she is a complete success.
At stage diving, which is the art of climbing on stage at a suitably frenetic gig then insanely flinging yourself head first into the audience, Elfish is renowned for her fearlessness. If the gig is good enough, the audience in the moshpit crazed enough, and the stage sufficiently high as to create a real threat to life and limb, Elfish has been known to spend the entire night dragging her small body time and time again past the bouncers up on to the front of the stage, gesticulating meaninglessly to the audience then swan diving blissfully into space, floating free for a brief few seconds before pounding down on the upraised hands of the crowd. If the crowd, generally packed in so tightly that they cannot get out of the way, fail to raise their hands, Elfish crashes on to their heads. If a space in the audience miraculously appears, Elfish crashes on to her own head. It is felt necessary by Elfish, as by all true stage divers, to jump head first, as going down on the audience with your boots would be unsporting, and liable to heavy criticism.
This activity takes up a surprising amount of Elfish’s time and, along with her guitar playing, is an effective remedy for her melancholy. Her brother thinks she is simply mad and if they are at the same gig he stands safely at the back and gets ready to call an ambulance.
Elfish likes her brother but her disposition makes it hard for her to bring him any cheer. He always tells her how depressed he is and often she feels that she does not care whether he is depressed or not. Sometimes when he seems overly sad she will make an attempt.
Aran, a writer, had split up with his girlfriend. The fact that he told anybody w
ho would listen that this was too painful an occurrence for him to put into words did not prevent him from trying. He had spent many an unhappy hour telling Elfish all about it, leading them both to such extremes of depression that, when he would finally say that his life was at an end, Elfish could only agree.
“I have no money and many debts,” Aran would continue, moving freely on to more general topics. “And even so I am harassed by tax inspectors. I live in a flat which I should not be in, and will be evicted from should the council discover that I am there, which they will when I am unable to meet the rent.
“My best endeavours in the world of literature have led to very little, and I am now being superseded by younger authors with more enthusiasm and better ideas. I suffer from mental troubles of varying kinds, and I have no idea what to do with my life and if I did, I doubt it would make any difference.
“My girlfriend departed largely due to appalling behaviour on my part. I feel old, my face is becoming increasingly wrinkled and my hair is distressingly thin. I make futile attempts to hide this, which makes it look worse. The ragged clothes I started wearing when I was a young punk rocker now make me look like an aged down-and-out. I have become disenchanted with sex, finding it no longer particularly pleasurable, which is just as well, as I am becoming less and less capable of doing it.
“Naturally, being a man of taste, I do not draw attention to these facts in order to generate pity—perish the thought—I merely state them to give you an idea of how I am feeling.”
Listening to this grim diatribe, Elfish was by this time thoroughly depressed herself. The thought crossed her mind that if it were not for the fact that he was a regular provider of beer she would never visit her brother at all. Bravely resisting an almost overwhelming urge to flee, Elfish made an effort to divert him from his gloom by asking about his computer game.
This computer game was Aran’s new project, or was supposed to be. Roundly proclaiming that books were a total waste of time in the modern world, he had announced that from now on he was going to concentrate on video games. Subsequently he had been trying to program his own game, using his Apple Macintosh computer, in the hope that he could both earn himself a living and educate the masses.
“All games currently on the market are rubbish, fit only for morons,” he would say, brandishing his own collection of Sega and Nintendo cartridges and ignoring the fact that he himself spent almost all his spare time slumped in front of his video machine playing them.
“Mere infantile pursuits. I will program a computer game which will be both entertaining and meaningful. My game will elevate video playing from trashy escapism into a genuine and thought-provoking art.”
In reality Aran had neither the skill nor the equipment to program a game for either Sega or Nintendo but he did not let this discourage him. He presumed that once he had the thing working on his Apple Macintosh it would soon be snapped up by all the major companies, sold round the world, and possibly made into a film as well.
This was the theory anyway, as he had propounded it at great length to Elfish. Unfortunately in the past few months he had been too depressed about his girlfriend actually to make any progress with it.
“You should carry on,” said Elfish. “The idea sounded good. What was it again?”
“The world’s main cultural icons from all eras, except the twentieth century, which has very little culture, fall off the edge of the world on a raft and their dreams float up to the moon,” said Aran.
“Right,” said Elfish. “It’s bound to be a winner with young people everywhere. Get to work.”
Six
ELFISH HIT MO full in the mouth with her fist. He yelled in pain. “For God’s sake, Elfish,” he shouted. “What are you doing?”
“That’s for sleeping with Angela,” said Elfish, and made to hit him again. Mo squirmed as if to leave the bed but Elfish grabbed his balls and held them tightly.
“I’ll rip them off,” she said, and kissed Mo violently, biting his lip.
“I swear I will kill you one day,” said Mo, tearing himself away and rubbing his bruised cheeks.
“I’ll kill you first,” said Elfish, and they kissed again. Elfish sat up, straddled Mo and crammed herself on to him, forcing his penis inside her so quickly and roughly that they both grimaced in discomfort.
“I’ve fucked every one of your lovers,” said Elfish. “And I gave them all a better time than you did.”
“You’re a liar, Elfish.”
At this Elfish slapped Mo again because she hated it when he called her a liar.
“You are stupid, Mo. Really, genuinely stupid. If I didn’t enjoy fucking you so much I wouldn’t even bother to talk to you.”
“And you’re disgusting. When did you last wash?”
“Never,” said Elfish. “I stay filthy so I can rub dirt over you.”
Elfish and Mo used to fuck so loud and long that the neighbours would bang on the wall in futile complaint. Elfish and Mo would reply with screamed abuse before drinking themselves into insensibility, and waking up ill, but happy.
Elfish’s statement that she never washed was not far from the truth. She was genuinely filthy. This was not entirely her fault as the squat in which she lived had neither hot water nor a bath, but the other four women who lived there made efforts to wash at friends’ houses. Elfish did this only rarely. Since the crisis about the name Queen Mab had arisen she had not washed at all, deeming dried sweat and caked-on grime to be matters of little importance when there was work to be done.
She sat now, musing on her memories of sex with Mo, playing her guitar on her bed with the TV on, trying to write a song.
seven
THERE IS A legend that everything wasted on the earth is stored and treasured on the moon: unfulfilled dreams, broken vows, unanswered prayers, wasted time. Thus Pope wrote in The Rape of the Lock: Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere,
Since all things lost on Earth are treasur’d there.
There Heroes’ Wits are kept in pond’rous Vases,
And Beaus’ in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-cases.
There broken Vows and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers’ Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtier’s Promises, and Sick Man’s Prayers,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs,
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry’d Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.
Elfish was aware of this legend. It was one of the many random and useless pieces of information her brother insisted on telling her when she visited. No visit to Aran was complete without a long, detailed, cross-referenced and fully annotated telling of some ancient story, lie or legend, whether it was requested or not.
This could be a distressing experience. There can be few things worse to a habitual sufferer of powerful hangovers than to call in on someone simply to beg a beer and a sandwich and suddenly find oneself on the receiving end of a long analysis of the war between Athens and Sparta in 411 B.C. For the unwary it could be a disturbing, even frightening occurrence. Many a shocked young person had stumbled weakly out of Aran’s house, white-faced with terror, hunting for the nearest bar in order to obliterate with beer and whisky the memory of Aran’s insufferably long description of where exactly the Athenians had gone wrong at the siege of Syracuse, and what he would have done if he had been there to advise the military commanders at the time.
On Shakespeare he was even worse. Elfish still shuddered at the memory of the time she had gone round to borrow some money for a drink and Aran, totally oblivious to her obviously fragile state—post-amphetamine, post-acid and post-alcohol—had declared himself particularly upset by a radio programme he had heard in which Shakespeare’s sole authorship of many of his plays had been called into question.
“I refuse to countenance the idea that Shakespeare did not write all of the plays attributed to him,” he announced sternly, and proceeded to contradict in meticulous detail every on
e of the claims made by the programme, leaving Elfish, already in a bad way, more or less a broken woman by the end of it. In a community where the currency of conversation was, entirely sensibly, made up of music, gossip, and a little radical politics, Aran was an intolerable menace.
Nonetheless, Elfish remembered the legend of broken dreams being stored on the moon. It struck a chord in her and she began to think of it almost literally. Each time something went wrong she imagined some wasted effort of hers flying up to land on the moon, and the desire to prevent this from happening again was now very strong inside her. This feeling was heightened by her observation that all around her were people who dreamed of doing all manner of things but never earned their dreams through. Those people who talked endlessly of their plans but did nothing to bring them into reality were particularly scorned by Elfish. She felt that there was nothing she would not do to avoid being classed among them.
She could see the moon from her bedroom through a tear in the piece of dark embroidered cloth that served as a curtain. It disappeared behind a grubby cloud. A movement below caught her eye and she saw that Cary and Lilac were sitting on the grass outside the house next door.
Cary and Lilac were seventeen or so and went around Brixton holding hands and being in love. If they were not going around holding hands they were sitting on their little piece of grass under the moon. This of course was distressing to many folk whose days of innocent love were long since over, and it was particularly upsetting for Elfish. She detested them and regarded them as a menace to her sanity. If there was one thing guaranteed to turn Elfish’s general melancholy into a full-scale hatred of the human race, it was a pair of happy young lovers wandering around holding hands or spending their nights sitting in next door’s backyard exuding contentment.
Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving Page 2
