Aran could only defend himself rather lamely while Elfish berated him. “Can I count on no help at all from anyone? Are you all completely useless?”
Eventually Aran was obliged to promise faithfully to find a new Queen Mab poem for his sister.
“No matter how strenuous an exercise it proves to be.”
Elfish was placated, more or less.
“So did you make any progress with the speech?” asked Aran.
“Of course I didn’t!” yelled Elfish, exploding again. “How am I meant to learn a speech when every time I turn round Mo and Cody annoy me by sending me another poem? Soon I’ll be able to paper the walls with them. They are mocking me. Well, they won’t get away with it.”
Aran tried to make things up to his sister by helping her with the speech but their joint endeavours met with no success. Elfish in her state of tension could not remember a single line. Her best mental efforts were entirely in vain. Faced with impending disaster Elfish cursed and raged against the world. It was in fact so hopeless that Aran wondered if he should program Elfish into his computer game as she seemed to be fast becoming another person whose life had subsided into failure.
thirty
WALKING HOME FROM Aran’s, Elfish was gloomy. She had a disturbingly clear picture in her mind. It was a vision of hundreds of Mo’s friends and hundreds more of her enemies standing in front of the stage next Saturday, laughing at her.
It was time for resolute action but her experiences that day had left her too drained to take any kind of action at all.
I am defeated, she thought, struggling in through the front door.
I am never defeated, she thought, as she climbed the stairs. She picked up her Shakespeare once more. She read for several minutes before abandoning it.
I am still not defeated, Elfish told herself. But I’ll do it tomorrow. She went to bed with her whisky bottle.
Her sleep was interrupted by the arrival of Aran around two A.M. He appeared to be badly shaken.
“What’s happening?” mumbled Elfish.
“A terrible experience,” said Aran, mopping his forehead. “I came with an idea for the backdrop you want.”
Elfish blinked. Befuddled as she was by drink and sleep she was conscious enough to be surprised at her brother’s unwarranted activity. Something about her band must be registering powerfully within him to bring him out of his home at this time of night. Unless of course he was just feeling guilty about his lack of research on her behalf.
“What idea?”
“But when I reached your house there were these two young people outside, holding hands—”
“Cary and Lilac,” snorted Elfish. “They’re always doing it.”
“But that wasn’t all. They had a handful of daisies and they were putting them in each other’s hair.”
Aran shook with painful emotion. Such a wanton display of love was even more ruinous to his fragile state of mind than it had been to Elfish’s. Unable to say any more, he grabbed for Elfish’s bottle of whisky and slid into bed beside her.
“It was awful,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t be allowed.”
“There, there,” said Elfish. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”
“Don’t they realise the harm they might do, hanging around in public putting daisies in each other’s hair?”
Aran drank deeply, and rambled on for a while about how Cary and Lilac should be severely punished.
“Run them out of town, I say.”
Elfish leaned forward to switch on the TV. Night-time programmes had begun and American Gladiators, one of her favourites, was on the screen.
With the alcohol, the TV and his sister’s presence Aran began to make a slow recovery.
“What was that about a backdrop?” asked Elfish, during the adverts.
“The backdrop. I forget.”
Aran searched his memory.
“Right. The backdrop. I know someone who can paint you one. Aisha. When I was round her house she was painting something on canvas. She’s a good artist. She’d do it.”
Elfish considered this.
“She might. But Aisha is renowned for her personal problems. In an area full of sick people, she stands out. How do you know her?”
“I went to bed with her.”
Elfish was reasonably impressed by this because Aisha had a regular boyfriend and was very beautiful. She asked her brother how it had happened.
“We were with some friends at a gay men’s nightclub. I can’t remember why we’d gone there. After dancing for a while she started kissing me. None of the gay men seemed to mind.”
“I expect they’d seen worse.”
“No doubt. The club had a fur-lined toilet.”
“So what was it like in bed with her?”
Aran said he could not remember very well except Aisha had made a lot of noise.
“I mean really a lot, an abnormal amount of noise, practically screaming. I was slightly concerned in case the neighbours complained. Also she seemed to be having more fun than me. But I don’t remember much more than that till I woke up the next morning. Aisha was still extremely beautiful, which quite impressed me, after a late and drunken night. No doubt I looked dreadful. When I went out the room to the toilet I noticed a postcard sticking through the letterbox. I read it. It was from her boyfriend Mory in Canada. I hid it under the rug in case she saw it and felt too guilty to fuck again. Then I made some tea and Aisha woke up and we had sex again. It would have been fine except in the morning, after fucking, Aisha had a severe panic attack and I had to get dressed quickly and leave. I know from experience that if someone asks you to leave because they are having a panic attack it is no good hanging around trying to make yourself useful, they just want you to go. I don’t know why it happened. Still, apart from that, it was fun.”
“Will you see her again?”
“I don’t expect so. The postcard said her boyfriend is coming back soon so she’ll be busy. I like Mory, he’s a painter as well.”
Elfish reached for the whisky bottle. “So did this make you feel any better about splitting up with your girlfriend?”
Aran shook his head and said no, it had made him feel worse. Elfish mused on Aran’s suggestion.
“You might be right. Aisha might paint me a backdrop for Queen Mab, and that would be a good thing to have.”
They settled down to watch the rest of American Gladiators with interest, making comments about their favourite gladiators and the games they liked best. Their mutual favourite was the assault course where each contestant had to flee through a barrage of tennis balls fired by a gladiator from a huge gun, stopping off at various places to fire back with weapons of their own.
“I wish I could do that,” said Aran.
“Me too,” said Elfish.
“I have eight different cigarette cards now.”
“Really. Eight already? Well done.”
As American Gladiators came to an end they drifted off to sleep in a loose embrace.
Outside, Cary and Lilac were mildly disgruntled at their failure to earn money washing windscreens. On arrival at their first prospective site they had found it already occupied by six people, all of whom were larger than them and all of whom indicated a strong desire for Cary and Lilac to disappear quickly. They had then walked all the way down to the next major road junction at Vauxhall, usually a fertile site for windscreen cleaners, and were pleased to find no one there. Unfortunately they soon discovered that this was because the police had moved them all on and they were forced to leave when a police van drew up and a constable gave them a warning.
What else could they do for money?
They had phoned up the agency for the Bronte School of English but they did not need any more people to hand out leaflets and after that they were stuck. Although they had no more ideas they were not disheartened.
“Something will turn up,” said Lilac. “Tomorrow we should just walk around Brixton for a while. Probably we’ll meet someone who’ll off
er us some work.”
Cary and Lilac both shared some sort of optimistic new-age philosophy, the general gist of which was that things usually turned out all right if you just expected them to.
Their problems therefore settled, they carried on placing daisies in each other’s hair.
thirty-one
[ STAGE DIVING WITH ELFISH ]
Elfish had now entered the transcendental state of the dedicated stage diver and was immune to the effects of pain, fear or exhaustion. Repeated journeys through the air gave her the hallucinatory feeling that she could fly, and was touching the ground only when she felt like it. Her feet felt light as she climbed and her body was weightless as she floated through space.
Particularly extraordinary for Elfish was the general feeling of benevolence towards the world she now felt. A whole swaying array of young people in front of the stage whom Elfish would normally have held in absolute disesteem now seemed to her like a pleasant, even worthy gathering. It was with a sense of goodwill that she pounded down on to their heads.
When next on the stage she noticed someone waving and screaming at her. It was Amnesia. After diving she had worked her way slightly to the side of the crowd and now stood in the middle of a little space on her own. Elfish understood the message. She ran the whole width of the stage to build up momentum then took a powerful leap towards her companion. She soared through space in a great arc, headfirst towards the concrete around Amnesia’s feet. Her friend caught her safely, as Elfish knew she would. They sprawled on to the hard floor together, laughing. Scrambling quickly to their feet, they looked around for anyone holding a drink, demanded some of the contents, then began to push and elbow their way back to the front.
thirty-two
ELFISH EXPLAINED HER frustrations to Shonen.
“I went round to visit May on the Tulse Hill estate and she didn’t live there anymore because all the squatters on the estate have just been evicted. The council used PIOs to get them out quickly.”
Shonen understood what this meant. PIO stood for “Prospective Intended Occupant” and was a legal order the council could obtain from a magistrate to save the time of preparing a court case for a normal eviction, which could take some months. With a PIO, no notice or formalities were necessary and the squatters could be evicted immediately.
For the council to be able to do this they were actually supposed to have tenants waiting to move into these flats but the council were not too bothered by legal technicalities like this. They had no hesitation in using PIOs and then boarding up the flats and leaving them vacant.
This was what had happened on the Tulse Hill estate and the flats now stood empty, barricaded behind bolted-on metal shutters.
“It’s disgusting,” said Elfish.
“Yes,” agreed Shonen. “Now more people are homeless and there are even more empty flats.”
What Elfish had actually meant was that it was disgusting that she could not find May when she wanted her, but she let it pass.
Shonen was genuinely troubled, though. In Brixton, as in all parts of London, the number of homeless people had been growing at an alarming rate; hopeless defeated people sitting in doorways, apparently without hopes or dreams. The sight of this was very distressing to her.
“What happened to May?”
“I tracked her down to Camberwell. She is living in the bus with four New Zealanders and three other Irish people till she finds another place to stay. I asked her about joining my band but she wasn’t keen. She said she had too many things on her mind to play music. I would have just forgotten about it but I don’t have time to hunt around for more people so I asked if she wanted to call round for a cup of tea. A cup of tea is quite an attractive prospect when you’re living in an old bus.
“When she came I let her play my guitar and she’s really good. She was hitting it like a madwoman. You’d have sworn there was a motorway pile-up going on in the corner of the room. So I must have her in the band.”
This was not going to be easy because May was, as reported by Aran, severely depressed by her experiences in prison and was having great difficulty in managing her life. The sudden eviction had not helped and May had told Elfish that her continual inability to find anywhere secure to live in London had completely drained her spirit.
“Well, that’s easily solved,” Elfish had told her. “Chevon is moving out of here next week and you can have her room. You will be secure here.”
At this, May’s spirit had revived, and she had agreed to play guitar with Elfish.
“I didn’t know Chevon was moving out,” remarked Shonen.
“She isn’t,” said Elfish. “But May is not to know that. And I told May that the reason Chevon is having to move is because we found out she’d been stealing money from the telephone box so she mustn’t mention it to her as it’s a very touchy subject.”
“What’ll happen when May finds out it’s not true?”
Elfish shrugged. By that time the gig would be over. Elfish would have the name Queen Mab and May could live in a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge as far as she was concerned.
In the meantime there was the problem of finding a guitar for May. She had lost hers some time ago during an eviction. Elfish, indefatigable, was now determined to get one for her.
“I saw one in the little secondhand music shop and it was good but I couldn’t afford it. But I’ll get it, I’ll think of something. I will have a band by Saturday. Now, about this speech.”
Elfish noticed that Shonen had left the room, and waited impatiently.
“Have a good vomit?” said Elfish as Shonen returned. Shonen lowered her eyes, unable to joke about it.
“The speech.”
“Right. The speech.”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I’m not very good at teaching people things,” said Shonen. “Excuse me.”
She hurried out of the room. Elfish dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands and wished desperately that she knew anyone else in the whole world capable of teaching her how to learn forty-three lines of Shakespeare, because if she did she swore she would never pay a visit to this bundle of neuroses again.
thirty-three
ARAN HAD FINISHED reading Herodotus. Having already read Thucydides and Xenophon he was now a knowledgeable man when it came to Ancient Greek historians and he was armed with many long anecdotes about Athenians, Spartans and Persians. This was not necessarily good news for the rest of the world but Aran was always willing to try. When Elfish arrived he started right in with an account of the overthrow of Croesus, King of Lydia. Elfish immediately put up a strong defence, telling him that she had no time to listen to a tale about the overthrow of Croesus, King of Lydia, as she was visiting with the express purpose of learning her speech.
“It’s a very good story.”
“No doubt, but some other time. The gig is in five days. Even now Mo’s band is practising and I must make some progress. Help me learn.”
Aran was not enthralled with the prospect. He had not yet given up all hope of relating the story of Croesus, King of Lydia, and tried to reintroduce the subject, but his sister judiciously disengaged his attention from the ancient world by asking him about his cigarette card collection.
“How many do you have now?”
“Twelve. Well, I’ve got more than twelve, but lots of them are doubles. I have twelve different ones. I estimate that I will be able to claim my five pounds reward very soon. Do you want to see them?”
“Later. Now I want to learn the speech.”
“Well, all right. Shakespeare it is. What is that smell?”
“Probably me,” admitted Elfish. “After drinking all that whisky last night I wet myself. I’ll have a bath later. Well, maybe. If I have time.”
Elfish found it hard to focus her attention because she was currently working on another problem, that of Aisha. She had contacted the painter, confidently expecting to find her in her usual nervous and distressed stat
e, in which she should be easily manipulable. Unfortunately for Elfish, Aisha seemed quite happy. Her boyfriend Mory had returned.
This was bad news for Elfish because not only was Aisha too happy to be easily manipulated, she was too busy working on a joint project with Mory to paint a backdrop. Unfortunately for Aisha, Elfish had now determined to have the backdrop and was already making plans.
thirty-four
AS A PASSENGER on the raft, Bomber Harris was no more cheerful than anyone else. He was depressed because so many people criticised him for destroying Dresden in an enormous bombing raid during the Second World War.
Opinion on the raft was divided. Pericles and Cleopatra thought that destroying an enemy city in wartime was an entirely sensible thing to do but Botticelli and Mick Ronson were unhappy about all the civilians who had been killed.
Here Aran intended to move his game into intellectual spheres by making the players become involved in a moral argument, but when he actually tried to do it it did not seem so easy. He sat grappling with the concept but after a few moments he found his attention wandering. Typing moral arguments into his terminal was frankly boring.
To hell with it, he thought, abandoning the idea, and sending in another squadron of screaming gryphons to harass the raft.
In the midst of the battle a new character appeared.
“I demand to know what I am doing on this raft,” said Shonen, and vomited over the side, watched by an unsympathetic Pericles.
“How’s the theatre group going?” asked Mick Ronson.
“Terribly,” replied Shonen.
“Well, I guess that’s what you’re doing here.”
Shonen thought for a moment.
“But Elfish is going to help me to be successful.”
“That’s what you think,” muttered Aran, and laughed along with his scratchy tape of the Fall’s “League Moon Monkey Mix.”
This amused Aran for a while, programing in Shonen and Aisha as unwitting victims, but later he removed them in case Elfish found out and was annoyed. Elfish’s short temper was always liable to be touched off by any small thing she did not like. She was not one of those people who could lightly laugh at themselves. In fact, thought Aran, growing slightly annoyed, Elfish takes herself entirely too seriously.
Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving Page 8
