Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving (9 page)

“AFTER COUNTLESS HOURS of difficult and laborious research I have managed to unearth another Queen Mab poem,” said Aran, proudly handing a sheet of paper to Elfish. “It was published in 1648,” he added, superfluously.

Elfish examined the poem.

If ye will with
Mab
find grace,
Set each Platter in his place:
Rake the Fier up, and get
Water in, ere Sun be set.
Wash your Pailes, and dense your Dairies;
Sluts are loathsome to the Fairies:
Sweep your house: Who doth not so,
Mab will pinch her by the toe.

—HERRICK

 

Elfish was slightly suspicious of this, feeling that possibly all this talk of sluts and uncleanliness might be aimed at her, but Aran assured her it was not.

“It just so happened that the only Mab poem I could find was
about being clean and tidy. What's wrong? You don't seem very pleased.”

Elfish admitted that she was a little disappointed because the poem was by the same person who had written the verse Mo sent to her.

“I was hoping for something even more obscure than Herrick so that Mo would know I could not be intimidated by Cody's learning.”

“I'm sorry, Elfish, it was the best I could do. I spent hours searching and of course I'm an expert at this sort of thing. I don't think there are any more poems about Mab.”

What Aran had actually done was walk reluctantly to the library and flick through a volume of Herrick's collected works. It had taken him no more than fifteen minutes but he knew that Elfish was not going to realise this. He figured that this counted as quite a lot of work anyway, particularly as he should have been at home watching daytime television.

Elfish shrugged.

“Well, it will do anyway. No doubt when Mo sees this he will be filled with terror and remorse, and realise that I am well on the way to another success. Not that there was ever any doubt about me succeeding anyway.”

“So have you learned the rest of the speech?”

“Well, no,” admitted Elfish.

“Have you remembered the bit you forgot?”

“Only up to line two. But I'm sure I'll do better tonight. Before that though I have to go and see May who lives on the Tulse Hill estate. I've heard she's a good guitarist so I'm going to recruit her. What's her address?”

Aran frowned. May was not a good memory for him. She had been one of his attempts to seek physical comfort after his breakup with his girlfriend.

“What's the matter? Can't you remember the address?”

“Yes I can.” Aran frowned.

“But it is not a very nice memory apparently. Why not?”

Aran drummed his fingers on the armchair he occupied, raising a small cloud of dust.

“She's in a bad way. We went to bed after a party and when I was undressing her she burst into tears.”

“So the rumours about you are true,” sniggered Elfish.

“I was entirely free from blame. The problem was she couldn't bear to let anyone undress her because it reminded her too much of being strip-searched in jail in Northern Ireland. She was on remand in prison for joyriding and in that month she was strip-searched five times before they found her not guilty and let her go.

“The last time was a big search involving women officers in riot gear and the prisoners tried to protest. May was thrown on the floor and got her head banged and her clothes ripped off. Male officers were walking up and down the corridor outside looking in and making comments. May ended up with bruises on her back, and a swollen face. She says she came to England to get over it but from the way she started crying at the memory I'd say she has some way to go.”

Another sicko, thought Elfish, with some disgust.

“Well, that's fine,” she said. “Playing guitar with me is just the thing to bring her out of it. Or not, as the case may be. Just so long as she can play, I don't care.”

Elfish left Aran's intending to have another attempt at memorising Shakespeare before visiting May but was sidetracked after meeting Tula for a lunchtime game of pool and finding that she had just been paid for four days' work delivering telephone directories.

“I must go,” said Elfish. “I have important things to do this afternoon.”

“Have another pint,” said Tula. “You're so busy these days we never see you. Play some pool.”

Elfish was a fine pool player with a gentle touch, capable of imparting backspin or sidespin to the cue ball to bring it back into position, a feat beyond the abilities of most part-time bar room players. With her leather jacket and motorbike boots she looked good at the table, which she knew.

Playing pool and drinking was fine but afterwards she fell asleep at home and did not wake up until three in the morning. She cursed herself. She had meant to visit May. Now another day had slipped by and she had not made the progress she should. How was it that a person with her iron determination could be so easily distracted? She was engulfed by the overwhelmingly gloomy thought that she might turn out like everyone else and let her dreams evaporate into nothing. Even now they might be flying up to land on the moon.

She walked up and down her room reading Shakespeare and found that she was unable to take in a single line. She cursed
Romeo and Juliet
for being a remarkably stupid play written in remarkably stupid language. Depression set in. In the middle of the night her prospects of success seemed remote. There was too much for her to do. Unable to get back to sleep Elfish lay on her bed and felt bleak.

AS FAR AS John Mackie could remember, he had lit a candle in church for his sister every day for the past fifty years. These candles lay next to an altar in his local Catholic church. They were small and white, encased in thin metal. Beside them there was a box to put money in. Each candle cost fifteen pence.

He was now sixty. He had been ten and his sister eight when they were evacuated from wartime Britain as passengers on a ship to Canada.

The ship was torpedoed and sank quickly. Many people died, including his sister. John Mackie's last memory of her was the sight of her long dark hair drifting away from him in the water while he clawed his way frantically towards her. A wave had separated them and he never saw her again. He had been dragged aboard a lifeboat, semi-conscious, but his sister was never found. This had spoiled his life.

He now ran a secondhand music store in Brixton and was doing badly. For the past ten years he had been fighting a losing battle with the large and modern secondhand store up the road. Their window was packed full of guitars and amplifiers, synthesisers, samplers, sequencers and modern recording equipment, while his was a fairly sorry mix of guitars, banjos, cheap effects boxes and secondhand cassettes that no one wanted.

Anyone with money requiring good equipment would go uptown to buy it new in Denmark Street and anyone short of cash who wanted to choose from a wide variety of goods would go to the other secondhand store. This left John Mackie with few customers.

Standing quietly behind the counter, he started slightly as Elfish entered. He was used to the strangely clad youth of Brixton entering his shop, these being some of the people with very little money who were likely to be his customers, but the sight of Elfish's small figure swamped by her vast, metal-decorated leather jacket still took him by surprise, particularly as her face was almost entirely hidden behind her beaded hair. When she stood at the counter her beads rested on the stud and ring which pierced her nose. She brushed her hair back, revealing her face, which was very dirty. John Mackie felt uncomfortable.

Elfish asked if she could see a guitar that was hanging in the window. There was very little room in the shop, and bringing out the guitar, plugging it into an amplifier and getting it round Elfish's neck was something of a struggle.

Elfish strummed it to see if it was in tune, and then picked out the rhythm of “Green River Blues,” a very old tune. John Mackie recognised this tune and was surprised to find someone like Elfish capable of finger-picking it. He almost warmed to her till she abandoned it abruptly, turned up the volume to produce dreadful distortion through the small amp, and played a few savage bar chords.

John Mackie winced. He would never entirely get used to this sort of thing. Elfish liked the guitar but, as was no surprise at all to the shopkeeper, she could not afford it.

“Let me take it now. I'll pay it up.”

“No,” said John Mackie.

“It is of immense importance to me to have this guitar now,” said Elfish, seriously.

John Mackie shook his head. His demeanour was not friendly. He desired that Elfish should leave the shop as quickly as possible because he now realised that his discomfort at her presence was due to the fact that when she brushed her hair back her face bore an uncomfortable resemblance to that of his long-dead sister.

Elfish could not persuade him to part with the guitar. He would not let it out of the shop until it was fully paid for and Elfish could not afford it. Back in her house Elfish was angry. She needed the guitar for May but could see no way of obtaining it.

With no prospect of solving this problem, Elfish hunted around for someone on whom she could take out her bad feelings. She went downstairs intending to pick an argument with Marion, Chevon, Gail or Perlita, either separately or all at once, but no one was around. Chevon's cat wandered in. Elfish was quite prepared to take her bad feelings out on the cat, figuring that any cat that was prepared to stay with Chevon deserved a fair amount of abuse. She prepared to swing her boot at it but the cat was wise by now to Elfish and departed swiftly.

Elfish peered hopefully out the back, wishing that Lilac and Cary were around so she could upset them by swearing at them, but they were nowhere to be seen.

She was now completely frustrated. She felt that she simply had to be unpleasant to someone.

Bad thoughts of Mo invaded her mind, and with them came an excellent idea. She dived to the phone and dialled his number.

“Hi, Mo, this is Amnesia. Elfish has just been on the phone to me. She obviously doesn't realise how much I hate her. Is it true what she told me, that she's all ready to go with her band, and she's going to collect the name of Queen Mab for herself? Pretty silly of you to make that agreement and let her get away with it, Mo.”

Mo said that Elfish would do no such thing but Amnesia made light of his protests.

“I'm starting to think that Elfish may be too much for you, Mo. Is it true she's slept with all your lovers and they all say it was better than you?”

“Certainly not,” said Mo, with feeling.

“She says you used to drink so much you could never really do it properly. I do remember you drank a lot, Mo. You'd better watch it, you have a few failures and word gets around. And a reputation for impotence is a hard one to get rid of. Oh well, I expect Elfish was lying. Bye.”

After this Elfish felt somewhat better. These were deadly insults to Mo and he would now be seething.

This small triumph made Elfish feel like playing a game of pool. It struck her suddenly that she had no one to play with. She seemed to have misplaced all of her friends apart from Tula and she would be working just now.

Though Elfish did not like to face it too consciously, she had in reality very few friends. She had never been a member of a wide social circle. She never went off drinking or dancing with a crowd of people as did the other women she lived with. What acquaintances she had she tended to drive away either through gradually wearing out their charity with her persistent melancholy or banishing their goodwill in a flash of bad temper.

This relative solitude was something she shared with Aran although it was not something they ever discussed. It would indeed be a difficult thing to discuss, even with her brother, but since her terminal disagreement with Amnesia, Elfish had been close to no one except Aran. As Aran was generally too wrapped up in his own depressions and anxieties to be much of a friend, Elfish's life tended to be lacking in light relief.

MO LOUNGED IN a pub in Brixton, pint in hand, satisfied after a successful rehearsal. He and the rest of his band were discussing management. After several semi-successful forays into music, Mo now felt he had enough experience to find some management, someone who might be willing to pay a company to do some publicity for them. It would be nothing extravagant but might well be enough to get them on their way.

“I'll do some phoning round next week,” said Mo.

“Why not now?”

“Because of the name.”

The drummer was puzzled.

“I thought you'd settled on Queen Mab.”

“I have,” said Mo. “But it will take another week to be finalised. There is the matter of Elfish.”

None of the rest of the band understood this. They could not see why he did not just adopt the name immediately. If Mo liked it there was no hindrance to him using it.

“Who cares if it upsets Elfish? Elfish is a total fuck-up.”

Mo took off his leather jacket and slung it over his chair. It fell
on the ground and he let it lie. Over his torso a ragged blue T-shirt strained against the width of his shoulders.

“I want to make her feel even worse than she does already,” said Mo, and the others took this as a reasonable explanation. Mo's dislike for Elfish was well known, and if it seemed to have grown in the past few days there was nothing remarkable in that. Everyone at the table had at one time or another felt their hatred and disgust for former lovers grow without warning.

“Is she really going to stand up before our gig and recite a speech?”