Ten Storey Love Song (2 page)

Driller Killer
and
Hellraiser
aged nine and three-quarters. That bit where the man’s face gets stretched and ripped off by hooks had him in tears for two weeks. Funny, though, how
Un Chien Andalou
doesn’t have the same aaargh-factor (that insane Buñuel/Dalí film with split eyeballs and severed hands, and nuns), since it’s really a horror film too, but Salvador Dalí’s an artist, you see, and Clive Barker’s just a sicko. Shivering, Bobby the Artist props one of his ready-stretched canvases against the coffee table (not that they drink coffee any more – Bobby had a horrible experience necking loads of espressos while on the Billy Whizz, finding himself fidgeting and spasming for approximately forty-eight hours), and gives Georgie the puppy-dog eyes. Or the ecstasy eyes. Whenever Bobby needs canvases making, he snorts an amphetamine mountain over the course of a day, coming down in the evening surrounded by perfectly stretched frames and with blisters on his fingers. Such a hard-working drug! Bobby leaps and puts Galaxie 500 on moderately high volume, the guitars feeling particularly swoopy-loopy this daybreak. He starts to feel the smudgy rush of ecstasy spread through him; the perfect feeling for painting your girlfriend, he thinks. Sometimes he doesn’t even realise he’s irritating her. Georgie just sits there, not really fussed about posing, but the Smarties are a bonus. Lots of blue ones and all. She watches her boyfriend through slitted eyes, all those tell-tale signs of a man coming up such as manic eyeballs, can’t-keep-stillness, and his jowls getting more and more demented. Bobby’s feeling brilliant – he washes a brush, then sketches Georgie really large and cute and sailorish in a tiny fuchsia boat. He blocks her in with fleshy pink and navy blue, putting love-hearts in her eyes, then he rolls around the carpet laughing at it. ‘
Voilà!
’ he slobbers. Georgie’s not impressed – all she got woken up for was a five-minute splasharound, not some highly considered jaw-dropping
coup de grâce
. Speaking of jaws, by seven o’clock Bobby’s is all over the place. And Georgie’s still knackered. At least she hasn’t got work today – she thinks about slithering next door to go to bed, but Bobby the Artist keeps jabbering on in the swing of his druggy buzz. ‘Aww, Georgie, you’re gorgeous. I don’t want to be a dickhead and that, you know, like all sloppy and that, but God you were made for painting. You know Modigliani? Well I feel like that, you know; getting wrecked and just painting all these birds and that … not that I knock around with other girls like, don’t worry … I just mean you’re mint … like …’ he blabs, frothing a bit at the mouth. At the moment he feels utter wonder and contentment sitting with Georgie, like nothing else matters to him in the big wide world, but as it always does when he finally comes down around ten o’clock (and Georgie’s long gone, a sailor-sized lump in the bed next-door), he wishes she was more outgoing and would swallow drugs with him instead of just sweeties. It’s totally depressing falling back to earth for the umpteenth time. Bump. Bobby the Artist sits on his own on the pink couch, still wired, but now the white morning outside just makes him queasy. He scours the carpet for any sort of intoxicant (Nescafé would do), but there’s not even any Smarties left. ‘Grrrr!’ he says in his head. Unfortunately it’s time to call it a day. Sniffing, Bobby pops through to the cool bedroom and changes into his kangaroo pyjamas, as is tradition after every long-haul inner flight. Speaking of which, he dribbles himself onto the edge of the bed and puts on Primal Scream’s own beautiful ‘Inner Flight’, and the comfort’s exhausting. Georgie makes a little gurgle as the song kicks in, and it’s actually in the same key. She rolls over but doesn’t wake up, and for five minutes Bobby just enjoys being there with her and the song, and he strokes her stray pinky shoulder poking out from the bronze bedcover. An eensy-weensy part of him wants to rouse Georgie again and have ravenous sex with her, but he doesn’t want to push it. In any case, she looks so holy and adorable all wrapped up, it’s nice enough just to be sat in her presence. But sleep’s still off the cards for Bobby for at least a couple more hours, and he just concretes himself to the duvet and stares at morning stretching until then. Georgie, unaware he’s there, has sprawled herself across seventy-nine per cent of the bed but Bobby still feels happy perched precariously on the frame edge. He lets his mind wander, eyes closed, where quite a few trippy pictures still hang on the backs of his eyelids. Faint multicolour boxes unfold and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, and it keeps him entertained for a bit before bedtime. Little spirographs rise and fall, easing Bobby the Artist into slumber with their soft swirly twirls. For a second he thinks he sees his face on the Haribo kid’s body, and all of a sudden he wonders what it’d be like to be famous – he’d rather see his face on
Frieze
magazine, mind you. Imagine going to all those posh parties and sniffing all the free drugs! He dreams of getting a
£
1,000-a-day coke habit. But the opportunity seems so far away when you’re holed up on the fourth floor of some tower block no one’s even heard of, overlooking bumpy tarmac and unhappy little shops, though if Jean-Michel Basquiat could come out of a garbage can with rubbish paintings and still get famous then so could he. Basquiat’s his big influence, just like smack was for Jean-Michel. There’s this painting, ‘Bombero’, of Jean’s girlfriend giving him a thump and, although Georgie would never lay a finger on him, Bobby can kind of relate to it. Georgie kicks Bobby in the face every time she goes to bed early in a strop. Every time she scolds Bobby for having too much of a good time. Every time she goes to work. Every time she frowns. From day one they’ve been perfectly happy together, though Bobby sort of thought she could be weaned onto drugs or at least have her arm twisted once or twice. Georgie’s dad’s been clocking-on at BASF for twenty-five years (they gave him a stereo to celebrate), and it’s his daft influence making her think you have to work so you can survive so you can die sometime later on. Bobby the Artist’s ethic is: do what you want and enjoy it or else! But saying that, it’s not really that much fun sitting next to a corpse at noon o’clock with nothing to do. With the teeniest dots of energy still left in his system there’s the teeniest window of opportunity to carry on painting, but Bobby’s head’s got a rock in it instead of a brain and soon sleep takes over. He ends up squashed on the remainder of the mattress like a broken Sticklebrick. The instant relief of deep slumbers drops him straight into the same hole as Georgie, but just as he begins to snore the front door goes blam-blam-BLAM and he’s spatten back out again. Poor Bobby the Artist. He rolls off the edge of the double bed, rubs his mop-top to and fro for a bit, then staggers sadly to the door as the next blam-blam-BLAM begins. Although he was only asleep for a millisecond it feels as if he’s been brought out of a coma, and he can only offer extreme hostility to the Express Pizza boy standing there in the corridor. ‘What?’ Bobby the Artist snaps. The pizza boy wobbles a bit, dressed in his dingy olive-green company T-shirt and holding out the 12” box like a riot shield. ‘Americano,’ he mumbles, offering it. ‘What?’ Bobby the Artist snaps. ‘Americano,’ the pizza boy repeats, feeling all shitty. Bobby doesn’t mean to be a dickhead, but after a night gurning his chops off the last thing he wants is a fucking pizza crust to chew on. Bobby’s about to slam the door in the pizza boy’s mush, but then he remembers all those parties and sit-ins round Johnnie and Ellen’s and the two of them always munching Americano pizzas, and he goes, ‘You want 5E not 4E. See you later then.’ As the door slaps shut, the Express boy pushes his bottom lip out then pushes on up the stairs. He hates his crap delivery job, especially when you get sent to weird tower blocks in the centre of dodgy estates, and people can be so rude sometimes. He passed his driving test first-go at age seventeen and got the job at Express at eighteen, and at first it was quite fun hurtling round town scoffing free Hawaiians, but the novelty wore off when he started getting lots of abuse, and when he started getting the spare-tyre belly. It’s heart-wrenching trying to get money off stubborn cunts, usually hard-case lads at a party who grab the pizza then tell you to fuck off in various ways. Then you get back to the kitchens and Mr Ashram clips you round the head and grumbles and you feel like dog poo-poo. The Express boy sighs, stepping gingerly down the vinyl corridor as he searches for 5E. What he really wants to be is a fighter-plane pilot. Squinting in the fluorescent white light, he knocks three times on the correct door then holds out the pizza, bracing himself for more abuse. And he couldn’t have knocked at a worse time – Johnnie and Ellen are in the bedroom having completely awful sex. As a rule their sex is typically shite with neither of them reaching orgasm, but this particular session reaches an all-time low. After getting in from pilfering phones and suchlike, Johnnie slept next to Ellen till midday then drank some flat White Ace and ordered the Americano on the promise of a quickie with his girlfriend. But it’s a longie – Ellen managed to get him hard, stripping down to dandelion knickers and stroking her nails down his balls, but she was unable to get any sort of wetness going herself what with Johnnie’s pathetic attempts at stabbing his fingers into her fanny, and when he swapped fingers for knob he might as well have been shagging a hole in the road. And thirty-seven minutes later it’s not any more enjoyable for either of them. The front door suddenly goes blam-blam-BLAM, and Johnnie and Ellen prise themselves apart with equal parts relief and exasperation. Ellen drops back on the covers with an all-red minge while Johnnie yanks on his Boro FC dressing-gown and stamps through the flat like the Incredible Sulk. ‘What?’ he snaps, opening the door to the Express boy. He’d forgotten all about the Americano. The ‘quickie’ should’ve been over ages ago, leaving Johnnie and Ellen in a warmish trance ready to gobble down some dinner. The pizza boy winces, then sucks in a little breath and mumbles, ‘Americano?’ Johnnie just yanks the 12” box off him, tosses the door shut and leaves the Express boy with a good old-fashioned, ‘Fuck off.’ He stomps his bare feet across the dog-eared carpet, growling to himself as he hops back into bed, then him and Ellen eat the pizza in painful silence. Ellen’s tucked under the duvet again with a few undergarments back on, and she crunches her teeth softly with a face like sour cream. Useless prick. The most annoying part is she loves Johnnie as a person (he looks after her, he’s funny, he lets her live at the flat, he owns drugs …), but sex to her is the most wonderful part of a relationship and it feels like getting raped every time he’s with her. With other lads it used to be lovely after a good fuck just to lie all tangled up chatting nonsense, but after a session with Johnnie she just wants to die. Often Ellen sucks him off in the beginning in the hope of him coming quickly and then not being in the mood for full-on sex. It kills him. Johnnie’s sexual prowess is based largely on hardcore pornography, where butch men gang-bang vulnerable ladies, and where foreplay means sticking your hand up the cunt or getting a skull-fuck, and every episode ends in the man gobbing hot white filth in the girl’s mush. It’s strange how any hetero man’s worst nightmare would be having a hard cock shoved up his arse, and yet their ultimate fantasy would be shoving theirs up a lady’s. Admittedly, Johnnie has been able to make past girlfriends orgasm but those were the dominant types, riding his cock into all the right places. On one occasion, with this girl Sharon, he accidentally found the clitoris. Johnnie wonders if Ellen’s just fucked so many lads she’s become picky and pernickety about how she likes it, but there go them jealous thoughts again. Johnnie screws his face up, finishing the chewy Americano, feeling absolutely tortured. He wonders what it is about sex with Ellen that just doesn’t hit the spot – the girls in the pornos all scream like cheery monsters! Maybe their bits don’t fit together properly, or maybe they’re just unlucky. The sex did get off to a crap start: Johnnie and Ellen first shagged each other on a Saturday back in January, and Johnnie remembers waking up that morning with the shits after a bad Hot Shot Parmo. Him and his boys had been on a bit of a binge the night before, hammering the ecstasy and cheapo Cassini, oh and a Parmesan. Today Johnnie doesn’t really take pills after suffering a wee bit of depression, but back in January he could nail ten in a night and still drive the Nissan Sunny home without much bother, and buzz off his tits. So anyway, the day after this binge he had severe diarrhoea, and spent most of the morning sat on the lav in his family home somewhere down Ormesby. It was definitely the Parmo – his matey Bello warned him it was a bit on the old side, but Johnnie was pissed and he hadn’t come up yet and he hadn’t eaten owt. You could smell the sloppy chicken in the bottom of the toilet bowl. It was disgusting, but once he flushed it away the bathroom didn’t stink so much and Johnnie started feeling better right away. He first noticed Ellen at the Jobcentre in a miniskirt and amber Puma top: she signed on at 10.33, Johnnie signed on at 10.36. After a few fortnights of shyness, they got talking and now and then Johnnie would bump into her wandering around town with her mates and a load of shopping bags. One night at the Purple Onion they had a kiss and a grope, and the week after that at the dole she got his number and, just as Johnnie was cleaning his bottom, she vibrated in his trousers. ‘Beep-beep!’ said the phone. Ellen was wanting to meet him at Aruba that night, not so much a date but just checking he’d be out and whether or not his dole came through on time. There’d been problems with the payments going through over Christmas, what with staff shortages and p-p-p-paperwork, but that morning checking her balance at Halifax Ellen had a crisp
£
176.14 and she wanted to go out and get pissed and perhaps shag that charming, pale boy she’d found at the Jobcentre Plus. Ellen’s attractive according to most men and despicable according to most girls (dripping toffee hair, too skinny, cream foundation acne, and a good arse even in her jogging bottoms), the type of girl who fucks a lad until she gets fucked about then fucks off to the next one, but she always seems happy. Johnnie hadn’t had sex for four months so he said yes he’d meet up with her, and he rallied up a few of his less-favourite mates, and they all got pissed and supercharged in Spensley’s before heading under the flyover to Aruba. The club had the bluey glitzy look of an aquarium but instead of fishies was full of skinhead lads in horizontal-stripe sweatshirts trying to pull, and noodle-haired girls looking sour in minimum clothes. Johnnie was pretty embarrassed meeting Ellen in a place like that – he used to go a lot when he was sixteen or seventeen, except back then it was the Royal Exchange and he used to exchange spit with girls without much hassle. His loudmouth patter gets him most things he wants out of life, despite him being rather ugly. And sure enough, by eleven o’clock he’d hooked up with Ellen and the two of them were bantering happily about each other and taking the mickey out of strangers while they sat together on the space-age settees. Johnnie liked to think of himself as a perceptive person, and he could clock all the signs of a prospective shag on the cards: Ellen’s leg crossed in his direction, occasional stroking of the knee, over-the-top laughter at anything he said, snogs with more and more tongue. Oh and her asking him, ‘Fancy a shag then tonight?’ The exhilaration knocked out Johnnie’s ribcage, heart beating the bass-drum at beats-per-minute, and the temptation was quite high to start nailing her there and then but luckily he refrained. Instead, Johnnie just kept a tight hold on her, and when Ellen went off to powder her nose or maybe have a piss he surreptitiously hid his rock-hard knob up his jean waistband and wandered off to Bello to perhaps get a pill. Bello was in charge of the ecstasy that night, and Johnnie found him dancing like a red windmill in the middle of the sunken dancefloor, occasionally fondling girlies’ hips and bums and getting slapped but not giving a shit, just carrying on in a mad Hackett world of his own. Bello was more than happy to give Johnnie a SmileyFace. ‘Yes mate, there you go,’ he said. It wasn’t really like Johnnie to go gurning a few nights on the trot (after all, the problem with being a pillhead while trying to punt hundreds of the fellows is you can eat all your profits), but he felt so wiped-out from the night before and wanted so much to have stamina for Ellen in bed, it seemed like the thing to do. But in the end it wasn’t stamina that let him down. The pill started to glow inside him like a pearl, the modest happy rush stacking on top of the five or six pills still vaguely rolling around his system from Friday, and the kisses with Ellen began to get more rampant if a bit drier what with his craggy ecstasy-mouth. Ellen didn’t seem to notice – she was getting more and more pissed, and in any case there was a chance she’d dropped a pill and all and just not let on to Johnnie. It was round about 1.09am things started to get dodgy. In some people pills create awful farts and you can get a sort of laxative effect, and what with all the sex excitement Johnnie had forgotten completely about the Hot Shot Parmo and the severe diarrhoea. Ellen was getting randy and she pulled Johnnie onto the dancefloor for a bit of a grind, and occasionally while shoobeedooing Johnnie let off a string of terrible pumps but the club was so packed the blame could easily be brushed off onto someone else. Ellen continued kissing him and smiling and jutting her hips out at dreamy angles, all the while Johnnie feeling bubbles up his bum and a sloppy turtlehead waking up from hibernation in his undies. With every fart he had to simultaneously clamp down his pelvic-floor muscles, resulting in the poo-poo travelling uncontrollably up and down his rectum like he was bumming himself. It was sort of obvious that at one point something had to give. In between the eleventh and twelfth bar of DJ Alligator’s ‘Lollipop’, there was another rumble in Johnnie’s sphincter then a big fart and suddenly he began to notice his boxer shorts caking together. His bum-hairs felt all claggy and the hole stung slightly. For a bit Johnnie tried to keep dancing and following Ellen’s footsteps, but even in the ecstasy joyousness he felt all the colour dribble from his face when he realised he’d soiled himself. He panicked, still gurning but with all his little pink dots of pleasure turning brown with paranoia, and quickly went to Ellen, ‘Just going to the bog. Don’t talk to anyone else.’ He fluttered to the bathroom with his trainers in cement, all nervous as he pushed himself into a cubicle and checked his M&S boxers for disaster. The whole crotch was plastered with thick furry brown crap. His cubicle didn’t have a lock and, wedging the flimsy door shut with a bony elbow, Johnnie realised there wasn’t much he could do to salvage them. He tried to give his arse a little wipe, but the paper just came away light brown flaky and smelly, and it’d probably take half an hour and some industrial-strength detergent to get himself completely clean. The time was already 1.28 and he didn’t want to lose Ellen. So Johnnie pulled up the crusty EmAndEsses and went strolling back into the nightclub with his head held high and his bum-crack in tatters. The crystally little light-fixtures were spotlamps in his eyes and he found Ellen quite easily in the cold, emptying-out club. She was smoking a long dirty Marlboro in the corner with a bunch of strangers. She was still pleased to see him, and the two of them bounced back onto the dance-floor to the beat of the last few drums. Johnnie felt a bit self-conscious with the pill fading off and his knickers in a twist, but he didn’t want to appear a killjoy so he kept throwing the Travolta moves and the big-fish-little-fishes with quite a bit of conviction. It was painful. Eventually it got to quarter to two and the club was all dead inside, bevvy carcasses and smashed glass snoring on the flooring, and Ellen took Johnnie by the hand and dragged him into the rushing gales of the street outside. She could tell he wasn’t quite himself, but there was no way he was going home without her. In terms of men, Ellen also always got what she wanted – she didn’t consider herself to be particularly stunning or highly sexed, but boys did tend to circle around her like swarms of bees. Perhaps she gave off a scent (was it CK Be that night?), or perhaps it was the miniskirts. Her and Johnnie jumped in the back of a black taxi, her pulling the skirt down to cover her botty, then they yelled the name of Johnnie’s estate and the taxi shot off. They snogged each other rushing past the faulty CNE sign and the cubist Workers’ Union, and the town was a spider’s web of streaky lamp-posts what with the taxi going so fast. Roads scooped under flyovers and dead shopping arcades like spoons through ice cream. The taxi got to Peach House within fifteen minutes and the fare cost