Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (6 page)

Back at my flat I ask Ruby if she thinks I should invest in a pension plan but she doesn’t think it is a good idea at my stage of life, even though I specifically remember the advert said it was never too early to start. And I’m worried about forgetting to sign on because now we will have been thrown off the Social Security register. It will take weeks to get our claim sorted out and we will have no money for anything and we’ll have to sit around for hours in the DHSS.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I have a good idea for making money.’

‘How come you got back with Domino?’

She shrugs.

Ruby tells me to read good books, although why she wants me to do this I am never quite clear.

She is always reading good books and she is a writer. She never shows me any of her writing except for the ongoing werewolf story, but I know she will be good.

Now she is busy plucking her eyebrows, so I give her artistic advice and make us some tea.

‘How was the rehearsal?’

‘It was good except we don’t have a drummer anymore and I can’t play my guitar so well now my soul is missing.’

‘Maybe you left it in your guitar case.’

I hurry through to my room and look.

‘No. It isn’t there.’

‘Well, don’t worry, it is bound to turn up somewhere, probably when you least expect it.’

‘I could ask the Goddess of Electric Guitar Players if she’s seen it.’

Ruby frowns.

‘There is no such thing as the Goddess of Electric Guitar Players.’

Later on Domino arrives and criticises Ruby’s eyebrows even though they are looking terrific. After a while they start fucking in the living room so I can’t go in and watch television, but the picture isn’t very good anyway since Ruby battered it with a brick when she couldn’t find a good programme.

I sit in my bedroom and play my guitar some more, trying to remember the new things I worked out with Nigel.

The Goddess of Electric Guitar Players is called Helena. She looks after you when you are trying to learn a new song and if anyone throws a bottle at you when you are going onstage she reaches out a graceful hand and diverts it onto an amplifier. Also, if you have been assiduous in paying tribute to her, she will prevent your guitar strings from breaking and give you a gentle nudge if your solo is starting to bore everyone. She brings comfort to everyone whose fingers are sore from trying to learn a new chord and, if the occasion merits it, she will personally get inside your fuzzbox and make it scream and shriek.

A lovely goddess, Helena.

After a few minutes the people upstairs bang on the ceiling because I am disturbing them.

I sit and feel lonely. Sitting and feeling lonely is something I am a spectacular success at. I can do it for hours. Everyone is good at something.

There is a knock on the door. It is Izzy. I make her some tea and show her my cactus.

‘Ruby says it is a sacred Aphrodite Cactus. Once it flowers Cis will fall in love with me. It is a wonderful coincidence that she picked it as a present for me.’

Izzy says that love is not necessarily all that good a thing and asks if I can lend her two hundred pounds because she needs an abortion.

Through in the living room there is a furious argument with screaming and shouting and banging. The front door slams.

Ruby storms into my bedroom. Her face is streaked with anger and tears and she screams about what a bastard Domino is and how she had better not see him again or she will kill him, then she sits on the edge of my bed and complains that I don’t have any comfy seats in my room. I wonder where Cis is. Cis had a comfy seat in her bedroom. But probably she is not in the comfy seat, probably she is in bed with someone nice, wrapped around him. Probably she is in bed with someone who is secure with a lucrative pension plan.

Izzy looks depressed and Ruby looks furious and I think about Cis and how difficult everything is but, lacking anything sensible to say, I keep quiet and let Ruby rage.

There is a tiny spot on the side of my cactus. It looks like it might be the start of a flower. There is nothing on Ruby’s and I feel sorry for her, although really if Domino were to fall permanently in love with her it would be a very bad thing.

My next contact is with a man who describes himself as fortyish and looking for a younger lover. He doesn’t show. Probably this is just as well as I do not feel like a younger lover. I feel like a washed-out old person.

I feel bad when I wake up, so on the way to the toilet I kick the door and I almost break my foot and this is such a ludicrous thing to do that it cheers me up.

I limp through to Ruby’s room with some tea. Ruby is in bed with a robot made out of metal boxes. Unprepared
for this, I wonder if I should stay. I hover around for a few minutes, resolving finally to go out for a while and come back later with another cup of tea.

How did the robot get in? Usually I would hear anyone knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Of course, if it is a flying robot it could have come in the window.

I pour another cup of tea and look round at the mess in the kitchen. Neither me nor Ruby is very good at tidying up.

Back in Ruby’s room the robot has gone and Ruby is talking to Izzy. Ruby holds the sheet over her, although I have seen her naked body many times. For some reason this must not be permissible when Izzy is in the room.

Izzy wants some breakfast, but Ruby refuses because she says she cannot bear to eat in the morning, or any other time really.

‘How is your knee?’ she says.

‘What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with my knee.’

‘I thought it was sore,’ says Ruby, and drinks her tea.

I walk down to Brixton. My knee starts to hurt.

Marilyn is out buying apples and she asks me if I’ve seen Izzy but I say no.

I go to buy some apples.

Cis is serving behind the counter.

I am stunned by her beauty and memories of good times.

‘Hello, Cis. Four apples please.’

I point to the kind of apples I want.

Cis puts four of them in a scale and weighs them, then puts them in a brown paper bag.

‘How long have you been working here, Cis?’ I ask, heart pounding.

‘What are you talking about?’ says the assistant who, on close observation, looks nothing at all like Cis.

‘Nothing,’ I mutter.

The assistant classifies me as a harmless crazy person and gives me a fairly sympathetic smile. I hurry away.

This cactus is sacred to Aphrodite because on one occasion she was pursued through the southern desert by Ares, God of War and unwanted suitor.

Unsuited to such a rigorous chase and unable to fight him off (Aphrodite is no coward, but Zeus refused to give her proper fighting skills, leading to her being pursued from the field of combat at Troy) Aphrodite falls to the ground.

A brave shepherdess, seeing her plight, rushes up, rips a nearby cactus out of the ground and rams it between Ares’s legs. He is forced to retire from the scene, badly hurt.

‘Thank you,’ says Aphrodite. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘My lover left me by this cactus,’ wails the shepherdess. ‘It reminded me of him. I used to sit and watch it grow. Now it is dead.’

Aphrodite, graciously sympathetic, replants the cactus and it comes back to life.

‘When it flowers your lover will return,’ she says. ‘And now and forever, in memory of my rescue, this cactus will be sacred to me, and will bring good fortune to all lovers who are gentle and kind.’

‘We will make money from writing,’ announces Ruby.

‘What writing? Is your book ready?’

‘No. Magazine writing.’

I wait for her to explain. Ruby is very smart and I know that her idea will be good.

‘I have been down to the library and stolen all their magazines. And I have stolen some more from the news-agents. I got sex magazines, karate magazines, football magazines and romance magazines. And photo-love stories.’

‘So? Are we going to sell them? It won’t get us much money. Couldn’t you steal something more valuable?’

‘No. What I mean is, we will write stories for them and they’ll pay us.’

I am dubious. But Ruby insists it will be easy, in fact what she has in mind is copying stories practically word for word and just changing a few names here and there and then sending them off.

‘The stories are all crap,’ she tells me, ‘so there is no reason for them to reject ours.’