Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving (6 page)

“Catastrophically depressed.”

“Still? His girlfriend left him months ago.”

“That's nothing for my brother. I'd give him two years or so before he comes out of this one. Aran stays depressed about things for a long time. He still feels very bad that they changed the name of his favourite chocolate from Marathon to Snickers, and that was years ago. Every time he reads some Ancient Greek history about the battle of Marathon he starts complaining about it again. Says
he had no problem at all asking for a Marathon in a sweetshop but he's completely unable to say the word ‘Snickers'. It was a very severe blow, chocolate-wise.”

Tula nodded in sympathy.

“Well, I guess it will take him a long time to get over his girlfriend.”

“He won't ever really get over it,” said Elfish. “But eventually the bad feelings will be superseded by some new disaster. My brother is a real mess. But then, so is everyone I know. Apart from Cary and Lilac, who always seem happy. No doubt they will come to a bad end. I hope they come to a bad end. If they don't come to a bad end I will kill them.”

A long row of coins lay on the side of the pool table, reserving the next game for whoever had placed them there. In this pub the winner stayed on the table, so that when Elfish's coin came up she had to beat the winner of the last game before she could play with her friend. This she duly did, potting the black while her opponent still had five balls left on the table. He moved to shake her hand but Elfish ignored him.

As Elfish broke in the next game Tula could not help noticing how dirty Elfish's hands were.

“Have you given up washing?”

“Yes. I've no time to go around other people's houses looking for a bath. I'm too busy with everything. After this game I have to find a guitarist who will play everything I tell them to, and that's never easy. They always have stupid ideas of their own.”

Elfish was delayed a little, though, because after beating Tula she stayed on the table. She defeated her next four opponents, which gave her intense satisfaction.

[ STAGE DIVING WITH ELFISH ]

MARION, ONE OF
Elfish's flatmates, asked Elfish if she could return the money she had borrowed last week. Elfish brushed aside this request, having no intention of ever paying Marion back. Elfish owed small sums all around Brixton, none of which would ever be repaid.

“I really need it,” said Marion, but Elfish merely shrugged and said she was broke, and would try to find the money next week. Faced with this brazen lie, Marion was forced to give up.

Elfish's squat was a large old three-storey house, one of the many large properties to be found in the side streets of Brixton dating from the long-gone time when it had been a fashionable area. The house was crumbling away. The rain leaked through the roof and the wind came in through the gaps round the window frames. Plaster was missing from the walls and the meagre supply of cold water they had made its way slowly from the tank to the tap via a string of rubber hoses held together by metal clips.

None of the five women who lived there felt particularly hard done by, however. Years of living in the area had given them some sort of immunity to bad housing conditions. They rather liked the house and would be sorry when they were evicted, as they inevitably would be.

Elfish wished to phone Mo. She would normally prefer to do this from the privacy of Aran's house but today she was suffering from a hangover and a bout of melancholy and did not feel like leaving the house. Gail was using the phone and Elfish fretted while she waited.

“Are you going to be all day?” she snapped eventually. Gail pretended to ignore Elfish but in reality she was distracted by her rudeness and brought her conversation to an end, as Elfish knew she would. She glowered at Elfish.

“Don't interrupt me when I'm on the phone,” she said.

“It's no wonder we get such huge phone bills when you're talking all the time,” countered Elfish. Realising that this had given Gail an opening for criticising her for never actually paying her share of the phone bill, Elfish turned quickly and headed upstairs to the extension phone.

A long wire ran from the living room up the stairs to the other telephone. These stairs were a dangerous obstacle course, littered with empty paint tins, cardboard boxes and an old fridge. They creaked ominously at Elfish's footsteps. Elfish manoeuvred her way carefully past the various obstructions but before she could lift the phone some more creaking on the stairs warned her of an enemy approach. As none of the other women in the house liked Elfish she felt quite justified in regarding them as enemies.

“What is it now?” she snapped.

“I need my guitar strings back,” said Gail, and her voice was heavy with the implication that Elfish had no right to take them in the first place.

“No,” said Elfish. “I need them.”

“So do I.”

“You never play your guitar.”

“Well, that doesn't mean you can just walk into my room and take the strings off it.”

Gail marched past and on up to Elfish's room to claim back her guitar strings. Elfish cursed, and wished that the stairs might collapse and bury Gail in a pile of rubble. It struck her that the next time the house was empty she would take Gail's guitar and sell it. This thought cheered her as she waited till Gail had finished removing the strings and walked stiffly back downstairs. It was now time to phone Mo.

SHONEN WAS MUCH more pleased to receive a visit from Elfish than Elfish was to be making it. They used to be good friends but these days Elfish generally tried to stay out of Shonen's way because Shonen suffered seriously from bulimia. Elfish found it hard to muster much sympathy for this.

Shonen would eat food and throw it up again at an incredible rate. A visit to her house meant a long series of waits while Shonen made feeble excuses to leave the room and vomit up whatever junk food she had just consumed. Elfish found the whole process most frustrating and could barely resist the temptation to shout at Shonen, “Don't eat it if you don't want it!” although this of course is not the recommended way to speak to anyone with bulimia.

Leaving the room to be sick could happen anything up to ten times in a two-hour visit. While Shonen's bulimia made her feel so guilty about eating that she would be obliged to stick her fingers down her throat and make herself sick after bingeing, she would also vomit spontaneously at times of serious anxiety. This, thought Elfish, added up to an incredible daily rate, unless being in company made Shonen more upset than usual. Possibly she controlled it better on her own.

Elfish explained the purpose of her visit while Shonen sat nervously on the edge of her chair, eating crisps.

“I am obliged to learn the entire Queen Mab speech, as spoken by Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet,
which amounts to forty-three lines. I need help. I have come to see you because you are an actress and must know how to learn lines.”

Shonen was doubtful. Her chosen speciality was physical theatre, in which herself and the five other members of the company would move the story along by pretending to be tables, chairs, cats, dogs and whatever else was necessary. They made up all their own scripts. She did not act in Shakespeare or anything like it, and had not done so since leaving drama school two years ago.

She explained her doubts to Elfish, casually placed her crisp packet on the floor, and excused herself. Elfish waited with pursed lips while Shonen emptied herself of the demon food in the toilet.

While out together at gigs, raves or parties, Elfish had often been obliged to help Shonen out of some incredible situations where old and fragile toilet bowls had seized up completely after relentless visits from the bulimic actress, leaving outraged fellow partiers looking on in horror as a hideous mess of vomit and sludge-like water oozed up over the bowl to cover the floor, making the bathroom totally off-limits for the rest of the night, and possibly forever.

“I know it is not your sort of thing,” continued Elfish, on Shonen's return. “And you are generally more at home whilst pretending to be a field of wheat, or the spirit of freedom, but you must have learned speeches from Shakespeare at one time. And it is not nearly as difficult for me as it sounds because I have already learned thirty-three lines of the speech and have a rough idea of how the rest goes. I just need you to do a little final coaching.”

Shonen could not understand why this had suddenly become so important to Elfish.

“I have to learn the speech in order to claim the name of Queen Mab for my band.”

Shonen looked blank. Elfish explained that she had made an arrangement with Mo, this arrangement being that if Elfish could stand up on stage in front of the audience before Mo's gig and recite the forty-three line speech she could have the name of Queen Mab, provided she had a band to go with it.

“Why did Mo agree to that?”

“Because he is keen to make me look foolish and he thinks that I will look very foolish indeed trying to quote a speech from Shakespeare to his audience, particularly as he is completely certain that I will not be able to learn it in the first place. Already he has spread the word and much of Brixton will be there to see me make an idiot of myself. Unfortunately for them they will all be disappointed because they are unaware that I know most of it already.”

Elfish did not further explain that her brother had brokered this agreement through the imaginary agency of Amnesia and that Mo had gone along with it not merely to humiliate Elfish but to gain favour with Amnesia.

“When I am successful Mo will be obliged to cede the name to me.”

Shonen looked troubled and opened a packet of biscuits.

“What happens if you fail?”

“Then Mo may demand from me anything he desires. Mo stipulated this condition, saying that otherwise he would just carry on and use the name when he was ready. This is an unpleasant aspect of the agreement but it was necessary to entice Mo into it.”