Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving (13 page)

“Cody is painting us. A scene from Jonson's
Queen Mab,
he says.”

Elfish reeled as if assaulted, and turned on her heel abruptly, heading for Aran's.

“Mo and Cody have grossly insulted me again by picking Cary and Lilac as models for a new Queen Mab painting.”

Elfish was completely, totally, overwhelmingly outraged by this. The picture had been meant to be of her and now it was to feature these two appalling youths who tormented her night and day by kissing in public and whispering secrets to each other.

“I should have attacked them,” she raged, and made to leave. She stopped only when her brother waved a beer can at her.

“I don't suppose it matters really,” he said.

“Of course it matters. Queen Mab is
my
name. It's not for all and sundry. Everyone can't go around being Queen Mab. It defeats the whole object. What's more, Mo is trying to show he knows more than me about Queen Mab again. He has countered my putting the Dekker poem through his door by this new action of finding a Ben Jonson play. Who is Ben Jonson incidentally?”

“He's on the raft in my video game,” said Aran. “Haven't you noticed?”

“Well, who was he really?”

“A contemporary of Shakespeare. He was buried with the inscription ‘Rare Ben Jonson,' so people at the time thought he was a good playwright, but really he was nothing like as good as Shakespeare. Entirely two-dimensional.”

Here Aran was quoting the standard and rather old-fashioned view of Ben Jonson which he had read in a book. Along with the rest of his views on literature, it contained no original thought or insight.

Nonetheless, Aran was secretly impressed that Cary and Lilac were to be featured in a painting of Ben Jonson's “Entertainment,” featuring Queen Mab, because this was a rather forgotten work, much more obscure than
Romeo and Juliet
, on which Elfish's Queen Mab portrait was to have been based.

“If you know enough about this person to program him into your video game, how come you didn't know he had written about Queen Mab as well?” said Elfish, with some justification. “Have you actually read anything he wrote?”

“Of course,” replied Aran. “His entire works. Well, most of them anyway. There may be a few gaps here and there.”

“Ha!” snorted Elfish. “I don't expect you ever read a play of his in your life. You probably just looked him up one time in your
Children's Encyclopaedia.
”

Aran changed the subject. Elfish departed. Again upset and pressurised she found herself unable to learn any lines, and the gig crept ever closer.

ELFISH STOLE A black sheet from Chevon's bedroom to make a backdrop with, but a thorough search of the house revealed neither a paintbrush nor any paint. She needed several pounds to buy these for Aisha, so she borrowed a little money from Aran and begged for the rest in front of Brixton tube station.

Elfish was not humiliated by begging but she resented the time wasted, and it was hot. Summer seemed to be approaching fast and this always discomfited her. She disliked hot weather and regarded the sun as an enemy, particularly if it became so hot that she was obliged to discard her leather jacket. Without her jacket she never felt entirely secure.

Commuters flocked past her as the trains arrived but they generally ignored her, as they ignored the men selling cheap socks and handkerchiefs from upturned crates who kept a close watch for policemen, hastily packing up and moving if any came into view.

Across the pavement from Elfish was another man selling a tray of rings and beside him were three young men around a stall selling pamphlets about an organisation called the Nubian Nation. Beside them a young man and woman had laid out posters for sale on the pavement and beyond them was another beggar
sitting cross-legged with a hat in front of him in which there were two small coins.

“Can you spare ten pence, please?” asked Elfish to all who passed. Few people wished to spare ten pence and it was slow progress.

She clutched her locket that contained the moonlight and mused on Aisha's tale of sex, her last adventure before her agoraphobia came on fully and her boyfriend Mory left her.

“I met two young Frenchmen at a modern motorbike circus,” Aisha had told her. “They rode their bikes around the arena through fire hoops and stuff and they had leather jackets with metal bits sewn on, like yours, though not as good. In the arena they juggled and tossed fire clubs around, you know the sort of thing. I didn't really like it but I liked them when I met them in the bar afterwards.

“I went back with them to the place they were staying, a room in someone's house somewhere in Peckham. I was quite drunk and so were they and though I had imagined I might end up sleeping with one of them it hadn't occurred to me that I might end up sleeping with both of them together until they asked. Quite charmingly, I remember. I agreed because they both looked so cute in their leather and metal jackets. They were both about three years younger than me which seemed to make them cuter.”

Aisha paused, and drew on her cigarette. She was a compulsive smoker.

“What happened when you went to bed?” asked Elfish.

“The place caught fire.”

Elfish was impressed.

“Really? It was that good?”

“No, I mean the house actually did catch fire. I dropped a cigarette into some of the fuel they put on their fire clubs and it went up in a flash and we had to run out into the street. A terrible shame,
though not as bad as it might have been because this was after we had finished having sex.

“You know, when we started I remember thinking that it might possibly be difficult working out which body to pay attention to but they made it easy for me by both licking me between my legs at the same time, which was an excellent sensation. I can't remember ever being more turned on. They both had these lithe acrobatic bodies with tight muscles and messy black hair and really a lot of earrings and they were licking my cunt practically inside out and licking my thighs and it was just great.

“After that I can't remember the precise sequence of events. I did straddle one of them and fuck him whilst sucking the other one. He came in my mouth and after that I sucked the other one's cock and I was fucking the other one at the same time or rather he was fucking me which was energetic, I thought, him fucking again so soon after coming. No doubt all these acrobatics kept him fit.

“All this activity in a warm bedroom made us sweat a lot and by this time we were practically sliding off each other's bodies. I remember having the distinct impression that there was a penis in every direction. Wishful thinking, I suppose. But the drink made me tired after coming myself and I needed a rest for a cigarette and that's when I set the house on fire. I just grabbed my clothes and fled. I never actually knew whose place it was I destroyed.”

Aisha smiled.

“Excellent fuck. But when I arrived home without my shoes Mory was there unexpectedly and although I lied about where I'd been he knew that something had happened and he left me. I don't understand that bit of it. He'd never been suspicious of me before. I wonder if someone told him stories about what I'd been up to when he was away in Canada.

“Anyway, after that my agoraphobia came on worse and now I never go out if I can help it. Also I don't have any paint or even a brush and I don't think I could paint anymore even if I had. These days I spend most of my time being sad and missing Mory or having panic attacks.”

Aisha slumped in deep depression. Elfish went out to beg.

“Can you spare ten pence, please?” said Elfish, and smiled in fake gratitude as a young man dropped some coins into her hand. Counting, she found that she now had enough and headed off to the cheap home-decorating shop down the road to buy materials.

Is everyone depressed? wondered Elfish, and decided that yes, they probably were. She did not care about everyone being depressed but resented the way it kept getting in the way of her plans. She wished that just one time she could ask someone to do something and they would rise enthusiastically, agree immediately, then go and do it. She did not really expect this ever to happen.

On the other hand, if Aisha had not been depressed it would have been because she was still with Mory, and in that case she would have been too busy working on their joint project to do anything for Elfish. So Elfish could only feel that she had been justified in privately informing Mory about Aisha's night in bed with Aran. The suspicion thus created had no doubt led to Mory not believing Aisha's cover story after she arrived home without any shoes from her night with the two acrobats and had therefore led to the collapse of their relationship. Very depressing for Aisha of course, but at least she was doing something useful now, that is, working for Elfish.

IT TOOK ELFISH no thought or effort to lie to Aisha, telling her that she had been in contact with Mory by telephone.

“And he misses you dreadfully,” Elfish informed her. “So you don't have anything to worry about. He's coming to the gig and he more or less told me he is going to ask you back.”

Aisha was ecstatic at this, indeed she was about to phone Mory right away but Elfish hastily persuaded her that this would be a bad idea.

“You mustn't appear too eager. Make him wait a few days. After all, it was him that finished with you so he deserves to suffer a little. By the weekend he'll be desperate. Probably at the gig he'll march in and sweep you off your feet. Meanwhile, get on with painting the backdrop.”

This was a cheering start to the day for Elfish but her mood quickly deteriorated. She tried learning some more lines of the speech but made no progress and a familiar melancholy settled in. When she found that not only could she learn no more, but that the few lines she had remembered had now entirely vanished from her mind, her mood deepened from melancholy to depression. After thinking about it for long enough, anxiety set in. She wondered if
she might have caught this off Aisha, or Shonen. Perhaps anxiety was contagious, like measles.

Today she was meant to be visiting Shonen for more help with the speech but Elfish feared that whatever Shonen did it would not help her to get beyond line three. She found herself wondering why she had ever become involved in anything as ridiculous as this contest. Mo merely wished to humiliate her by showing her to his friends as a woman so desperate for something she was prepared to try and learn an impossible speech from Shakespeare, and so hopeless that she could not do it. She cursed her brother for suggesting it, and cursed Mo for everything.

Elfish's mouth was rank and foul from cigarettes and alcohol. The taste was sickeningly bad. She had a great resistance towards brushing her teeth, possibly connected to dim memories of her parents instructing her to do it regularly. At this moment she would not have been able to say when she had last cleaned them.

Elfish's circumstances were actually worse than she thought they were, because at that moment Mo was waking up contentedly with Amnesia.

“Do you think Amnesia will phone today?” he asked, and they both laughed.

When Elfish had phoned up yesterday, pretending to be Amnesia, Amnesia had sat next to Mo at the phone and it was all she could do to stop herself from screaming with laughter. She thanked the good fortune which had brought her back into Brixton and into the path of Mo at this very moment. Ever since her last day's stage diving with her ex-friend, Amnesia had waited and wondered how she could repay Elfish for her badness.

Mo was now aware that Elfish was plotting against him. He could not work out the precise nature of her machinations but it seemed
clear that she must believe herself to have an advantage. Thinking back to his conversations with her when she had been pretending to be Amnesia he could recall how she had carefully manoeuvred him into a position whereby he agreed to give up the name of Queen Mab if Elfish learned the speech and produced a band. He still found it hard to believe that Elfish could do either of these things in so short a time but Elfish must at least be confident that she could. Mo did not intend to be defeated by Elfish. Nor did he intend to cede the name to her. With a view to frustrating Elfish he asked his friends and contacts to talk to people and find out exactly what she was up to.

[ STAGE DIVING WITH ELFISH ]