The air was so blue the sky took a day off. I was sat with my ereader on the balcony when the uproar broke over the traffic's usual drone - a squeal of brakes, the crump of metal slamming into something hard… Blaring horns made me peer over the railing - and right there on the street below, just outside the wine bar, some idiot in a pink mini had smashed into the side of a taxi. The driver was already out of his cab, roaring. Oh, it was the usual stuff about women drivers and stoners. Not very imaginative, but aggressive. No wonder the other driver didn't get out; the man was yelling, fists clenched, face purple.
Quite a crowd was gathering. It doesn't take much to draw gawkers; they're like gannets flocking around an easy meal.
Anyway, then a client phoned, on the verge of hysterics, and I had to talk him through the process of reconfiguring his laptop. "Oh, you've saved my life, Donna," he gushed. If he'd bother to read the manual he'd have saved himself my fee, too, but these technophobes keep me in this lifestyle so who's complaining?
By the time I got back to the balcony, the police had arrived and were shooing the crowd away. One was on horseback - a marvellous creature like some medieval charger - and he towered over everything, taking control of the situation just by being there. Waiters from the wine bar were talking to another officer. Too bad I can't lip read. I couldn't see clearly enough anyway, not from up here on the fifth floor.
So one police officer got the taxi driver onto the pavement, and another officer was resting a hand on the mini's roof as one towering, stack-heeled, red shoe slowly emerged, followed by another, followed by model-thin limbs under a nest of backcombed black hair crowned with a big red bow. She was wearing bold stripy tights and one of those little-girl dresses with more ruffles and ribbons than a cutie-pie doll. Spot the girl into Japanese cosplay.
The crash was her fault, surely; she had been pulling out from the curb, into the flow of traffic. But she was shaken and crying, or so it seemed to me, and the snarl of vehicles was already backlogged along the one-way street, so the police got the taxi driver to move his cab from the middle of the road. Then the horse spied a croissant on the café's outdoor tables and it did a nifty sidestep to filch it before its rider regained control. So much for his lord-and-master routine.
Still, the waiters liked it. The staff from the café now stood with the wine bar's waiters. Same job, different liquids.
I wouldn't have wasted one more brain cell on the incident, but for June. We were in the deli on Bold Street, buying exotic herbs and spices as props for one of June's photography commissions, when the same girl came in with another - both in cosplay outfits, with bushy net underskirts so the dress flares out like a doll's; big buttons; baby bows in their hair; clumpy shoes with over-sized buckles. One or two people gave them bemused glances but most did the typical English thing and ignored them completely.
June and I worked a route along the deli's aisle, a wire basket swinging from June's elbow as we selected little plastic packages stuffed with colourful and interestingly-shaped bits and bobs, when one of the cosplay girls managed to knock a stack of rice cakes flying. The two of them were tottering around on thick-soled, blocky shoes, picking cartons off the floor, their backcombed heads knocking together, giggling like ten year-olds and imitating the Japanese habit of covering a laughing mouth with a hand, when into the shop swept a tall, skinny lad in a retro satin bomber-jacket. He had purple and red hair and biker-boots weighed-down with complicated silver fastenings.
He craned his neck to peer over customers as he called out, "Bev, Pam! Spring Snow's filming dances in St John's Gardens. You coming?"
The cosplay girls dumped the remaining cartons of rice cakes into the arms of a professionally-patient shop assistant whose smile didn't reach her eyes, before skittering towards the cash desk with their solitary purchase. They were soon outside, hugging and chattering and squealing, "Oh my god!", as they hurried away, while June and I were still fingering packets of star anis.
Again, I'd have thought no more of it except that the route to June's apartment took us through St John's Gardens. And there they were, in the midst of a group of teenagers sporting fake-fur pussycat ears and stylised sailor dresses. Some had rainbow-coloured horsetails attached to their backsides somehow - and more ribbons and bows than the bridal cabinet in a haberdashery store. They were watching a twenty-something girl stomp rhythmically, elbows thrashing, to a fast-paced, hyper-happy pop song which sounded like something off Japanese pre-school kiddies TV. Her dance was being filmed by two companions - not a professional crew, just two people with mobile phones, but they were behaving as if it was terribly serious.
Some of the crowd were filming it on their phones, too. Not that this means much; these-days, a pigeon eats a chip and someone will film it and upload it to FaceBook.
"Isn't she rather old for plaited pig-tails?" said June, watching the dancer tug straight her flouncy yellow and white spotty Lolita dress between takes. The plastic buttons on its bodice were almost as big as the raspberry-red lollypop she clutched in one white-gloved hand.
A girl wearing a tiny top hat as a fascinator half-turned to us and said, "That's Spring Snow. She's, like, well-famous for her dances. She's covered all the best songs and she has, like, six thousand two hundred followers on YouTube." Her attention snapped back to the dancer. "Oh my god, she's, like, gonna do another!"
June and I exchanged shrugs and strolled away. Then a mischievous smirk crossed June's face and she said, "I can't picture our old RPG characters wearing rainbow-coloured horse tails, can you?"
I laughed, as we walked towards the pale stone steps leading from the gardens, and replied, "Such gaucherie would never have been embraced by our elegant immortals."
That's how we had met, June and I. We had been members of the same online message board, both of us enthusiastic role-players who could easily spend four hours or more using Yahoo! Instant Messenger to create our own improvised stories. When we posted our tales on the board, they proved popular with other members. But then the message board owners received a letter from a solicitor representing the author whose beautiful killers we had borrowed. The author was angry about copyright violations. Our activities had been non-profit making, purely for our own entertainment, but it was still illegal. So the board closed rather than face proceedings - but June and I had met in the flesh by then, and our games steadily evolved as each dared the other onwards, taking our stories away from mere word-play and out onto the real-world stage.
We saw the cosplay girl again, as June and I glided through the clubs and bars selected as our theatre. And there she was, in the centre of a tightly-flocking flutter of others dressed similarly, all sucking lollypops and paying far more attention to their mobile phones than they were to each other.
June raised an eyebrow and said, "Shall we play?"
Who could resist?
And so we waited for her to separate from her buddies. We homed in, June from the left, I from the right, so she stood between us as we began a friendly conversation about her lovely outfit. And we drew her to the bar and bought her the brilliant-blue alcopop she loved, while we sipped quality wine and cast our spell of glamour with tales of cult bands and underground parties, secretive all-night raves and the adventures of amazingly cool people who were mostly our own inventions.
Bev was her name; Beverley. She had her own YouTube site where she uploaded videos of her dancing to other people's pop songs. She recorded most of them in her bedroom, and she hated her parents because they hated her hair, and she worked in a factory making pies. But she loved raspberry lollipops and anything Japanese, and she wanted to be admired like Spring Snow.
Trust June not to miss a hook. "Why not have some great photos for your website?" she said.
And with a flourish of flattery, the trap was set.
We're a team, June and I. From our early days of role-playing, when we gave flight to morbid-romantic fantasies through on-the-wing stories created in IM then shared
with our message board audience, we have been dedicated to our own exclusive brand of entertainment, each encouraging the other, researching techniques and honing skills to prolong our game until we are as we now are, two halves of a killer team - June's photography cataloguing our dark theatrical artistry as we create exquisite corpses.
I saw Bev again, of course, later. Her face stared out at me in grainy monochrome from Google's headline news. Her parents were quoted as saying she was a wonderful girl and her loss was a great loss to the world. They're all portrayed as angels once they're dead. But she was just another city girl, hungrily consuming other people's creations be it clothes or culture or music; a mimic, a follower, an aspirant. June and I gave her the fame she craved, at least for a little while. The news grows old so soon.
*******
About the Authors
City Stories Page 8
