Her groin was damp. Elfish couldn't believe it. She had wet herself. The classroom, one of many in the old school, was devastated. Everywhere were empty and broken bottles, crushed cans and cigarette packets and piles of unidentifiable debris. Some chairs in the corner had been burned and the large classroom window had been smashed. A slight rain trickled through the hole making the broken glass sparkle and the filth on the floor turn to mud.
Good party, thought Elfish, but did not manage to raise a smile. Needing liquid, she began to crawl. As she crawled the fresh sick on her clothes rubbed off on the floor leaving a trail behind her like a snail. Her hand came into contact with a can. Shaking it, she found
that it was half full, and drank from it. A cigarette butt flowed from the can into her mouth and she was sick again, followed this time by long shuddering convulsions.
“Elfish,” came a voice. “You are completely disgusting.”
It was Aba. She stared at Elfish for a while, then leant down to kiss her. Elfish unfortunately could not prevent herself from being sick again. Aba shrieked and spat furiously.
“You ignorant bitch,” she screamed.
Elfish laughed, and Aba laughed too. She poured stale beer from the can over Elfish's face and hair and used her sleeve to wipe her mouth clean. She put her hand on the collar of Elfish's T-shirt and pulled. The soaked and rotten material gave way, exposing Elfish's small breasts, over which Aba poured more beer, and rubbed them clean.
“Go away,” said Elfish.
Aba grabbed Elfish and kissed her fiercely, lying on top of her so that her thigh pushed into the smaller woman's groin and the studs on her leather jacket dug into Elfish's skin.
Elfish pulled at Aba's clothes but was too weak to remove them, but Aba, who was strong, had no difficulty in removing the rest of Elfish's. Still dressed, Aba poured the last of the beer on to Elfish's pubic hair and began to lick it off.
In the doorway, another party victim, newly awakened, looked on briefly before the pain in his head and limbs forced him to face the daylight and head for home.
Elfish writhed, and wrapped her legs round Aba's head. Aba looked up briefly.
“You stink, Elfish. You stink of beer and whisky and vomit and piss. You are disgusting.” She slid her tongue back into Elfish's vagina.
Elfish, still fighting her headache and nausea, managed to unzip
Aba's jeans and slide her small hand as far in as it would go. She could not reach Aba's clitoris but entwined her fingers in her pubic hair. They lay in this manner for some time in the ruined classroom, having sex among the debris with the rain now pouring in through the broken window, turning the mud under Elfish's naked body into slime.
Aba turned Elfish over, wiped her with her sleeve, and licked her anus. Elfish wriggled. Aba slid three fingers up her vagina, gripped her clitoris with her other hand and licked Elfish's anus till Elfish came in a violent spasm that sent fluid spilling out to mix with the sludge on the floor.
Aba stood up, spat, zipped up her jeans, and left. Elfish lay naked and unconscious on the floor, the rain now coming down on her body in a torrent. When she awoke it was midday. She was freezing and stiff, and could not move.
There were many things that Elfish should be doing in the world outside.
I will just lie here and die instead, she thought.
Moments later she began to crawl into her sodden clothes, having remembered that she was Elfish, and the main thing about Elfish was that she did not just lie down and die.
three
IN 1959 AN archaeological dig unearthed the complete text of Menander's comedy, the
Dyskolos,
written about 340 B.C. This is the only complete text of Menander's work that survives.
From Menander, a line can be drawn connecting him with the Roman dramatists, and then to Molière and Shakespeare. So it said in the introduction to Aran's copy anyway. He was interested in this, and wondered who he could relate it to.
His sister Elfish arrived, looking terrible.
“Did you know that a line can be drawn connecting Menander to Shakespeare, through the Roman dramatists and Molière?”
“No,” said Elfish. “And I don't care. I've come to use your phone. I'm going to call Mo again and pretend to be Amnesia.”
Elfish spat. Her hatred for Mo was intense. Aran produced two beers and they sat and drank.
Amnesia was not around anymore. Consequently there was no chance of Mo meeting her and realising he was being fooled. So Elfish hoped, anyway.
Elfish was as usual both comforted and depressed by her brother's presence. They were good friends, but her brother had entered a clinical depression and seemed to have no intention of
leaving it. Elfish, herself melancholic by nature, found this hard to take.
She told him about her experiences the night before, at the party in the old school building.
“I fucked Aba this morning,” she added. “Which is good as I know she slept with Mo and I like to fuck Mo's lovers.”
Elfish dialled Mo's number, concentrating because the gloom in Aran's room was such that visibility was very limited.
“Hey, Mo. It's Amnesia again. How you doing? I've just spoken to Elfish on the phone. You know she had sex with Aba last night? You see Aba sometimes, don't you? Has Elfish slept with many of your women?”
“So how did Mo take that?” asked Aran, after the call.
“Badly.”
Elfish explained to her brother that she was softening up Mo before moving on to the main thrust of her attack and asked him if he would also phone Mo, and drop into the conversation that he had recently seen Amnesia, and she had grown into the most beautiful girl in the world.
This was confusing and troubling for Aran.
“Make her sound like Jayne Mansfield. Blonde hair and huge tits. Mo is so dumb he won't remember she wasn't like that and he'll go for it. He'll go for her as well.”
Aran did not think he was capable of doing this.
“Of course you are,” said Elfish encouragingly. “And you know how important it is to me. I need the name of Queen Mab.”
The thought of actually doing anything at all was almost too much for Aran and he went to his fridge for more beers before relating to his sister yet again how much he missed his girlfriend and how sad he was about it all. Elfish made sympathetic noises for a while till she got bored and left.
Four
QUEEN MAB IS the deliverer of dreams. Elfish and Mo used to play in a band called Queen Mab. They argued and the band split up before playing a gig. Now both of them laid claim to the name.
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.