Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving Read online

  “Well, that’s a great help, Aran.”

  Elfish was now in a bad mood and was obliged to drink Aran’s last beer to calm herself. When Aran made another attempt to give her a brief commentary on Menander’s Dyskolos her reply was extremely cutting.

  twelve

  AS FAR AS Elfish could see, everyone around her had either given up hope or had none to begin with. Although all of them were young, Elfish’s flatmates, fellow musicians and drinking companions seemed already to have abandoned whatever ambitions they might once have had. For this, Elfish despised them.

  With enormous self-belief she made a start on forming her band. The fact that she had as yet no prospect of finding herself in a situation where a band would be of any use to her did not put her off. There were still nine days left until Mo played the gig. If something were to happen which enabled her to claim the name of Queen Mab for a band, she did not intend to be without one. This dream was not going to disappear to the moon.

  As there was no time to place adverts or carry out an extensive search for personnel, Elfish knew that the band would have to be composed of people she already knew. This was not an ideal way to go about things, particularly as in her experience Brixton musicians were failures from the day they first picked up their instruments to the day they sold them to raise money for drugs, but she had no choice.

  She phoned Casaubon, a drummer she had played with some time ago. She knew that he was always keen to play and asked if he would like the job.

  To her great surprise Casaubon said that he would not. He was too depressed even to look at his drum kit any more.

  “Why?”

  “Marcia left me last week.”

  “Well, that’s the ideal time to play music. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Unfortunately Casaubon was resolute in his depression. Even Elfish, a woman with little sympathy for the world’s problems, could hear that he was in deepest misery.

  “This is stupid,” she said. “I know Marcia. You’re always splitting up and then getting back together again. If I fix things up between you, will you play?”

  Casaubon clutched at this straw with alacrity. His voice became animated with gratitude as he told Elfish that yes, if she fixed things up between him and Marcia, he would certainly play.

  Elfish hung up and rang Marcia.

  “Hey, Marcia. I heard you had another minor disagreement with Casaubon. He is a nice guy, however, and he loves you. Why don’t you get back together?”

  Marcia informed Elfish that they would not get back together because last week Casaubon stole her girocheque, got a female friend to cash it, used the money to get drunk then pushed Marcia down a flight of stairs.

  “Is this really so bad?” said Elfish. “Surely you could talk things over?”

  “Don’t phone me up about him again unless it’s to tell me he’s dead.”

  “Right,” said Elfish.

  She waited a decent interval, strumming her guitar beside the phone, then called Casaubon back.

  “Marcia is wavering,” she told him. “She thinks she’d like to get back together with you but needs a little more time to think about it. She says she’ll come and see us if we play on Saturday and discuss it with you then. How about it?”

  Casaubon, his crushed spirit rekindled, agreed happily. As soon as Elfish rang off he went immediately to reconstitute his drum kit out of the pile of junk he had reduced it to by kicking it furiously around the hallway after Marcia departed.

  Elfish hurried over to Aran’s flat, just round the corner. There was no answer when she rang the buzzer but she was used to this, and kept on ringing it till her brother appeared, looking gloomy.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Have you thought of anything?”

  “Yes. I have. You must lure Mo into a trap. Use sex as the bait. Mo will be unable to resist.”

  “What sex? You want me to fuck him?”

  Elfish spat on Aran’s rug. Aran said no, or at least not right now. He told Elfish of his idea, which involved Elfish pretending to be Amnesia, who had once been her friend.

  “A very attractive young woman, Amnesia, I remember. Mo would like her. And she has not been around for a long time.”

  Elfish drank some beer and listened to Aran’s scheme. At the end, she was satisfied. Her brother’s plan seemed not unreasonable.

  “Would you like to hear about my video game?” said Aran, and Elfish nodded.

  “Well, Botticelli the painter, Cleopatra the Egyptian queen, Ben Jonson the dramatist and Mick Ronson the guitarist are adrift on a raft, heading towards the edge of the world. They want to get back to the shore but all these things get in their way and they never make it. Meanwhile, their dreams, hopes and ambitions fly up to the moon.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re avoiding easy symbolism,” said Elfish.

  “Do not mock,” said Aran. “After all, it was you who told me to get on with it. Look, I’m just doing level two where they are joined on the raft by Pericles, the great Athenian statesman. He gets washed overboard from a passing trireme. He saved Athens in the first war against the Persians but then things went badly for him and he had to flee the country.”

  “What happens next?”

  “They’re still trying to get back to land but they can’t because a huge sea monster keeps knocking them off course. Meanwhile they drift closer and closer to the edge of the world and if they reach the edge they’ll fall off and be killed. Or possibly just set adrift to wander hopelessly forever in endless space. I haven’t decided yet.”

  Elfish tried level two, struggling to avoid the huge sea monster, but it was too difficult. The puny weapons possessed by the voyagers seemed to have no effect on it at all.

  “How do you beat it?” she demanded.

  “You can’t,” said Aran. “It inevitably pushes you further towards your doom.”

  “Well, what use is that? You can’t have a video game that you can’t win.”

  Aran did not see why not. To him it seemed entirely appropriate.

  thirteen

  SO ELFIS H, PRETENDING to be Amnesia, took to calling Mo. Mo was usually surly and untalkative but Elfish would move the conversation along by criticising Elfish. Mo went along with this for a while but eventually asked Amnesia why she kept phoning him. After all, they had only met on one brief occasion, some time ago. It was not beyond Mo’s egotism to imagine that since then Amnesia had dreamed of him constantly and now wished to bring her dreams to fruition, but if this was the case he supposed that she might as well come out and say it.

  Now Elfish was indeed trying to give this impression to Mo but she prevaricated, intending that his desire for Amnesia should make him amenable to her plan. So she did not come right out and say yes, she did want Mo’s body, but let the question lie unanswered without refuting it in any way.

  As a help, she had already induced Aran to phone Cody, who lived with Mo, and work Amnesia into the conversation. This had taken some persuasion as Aran claimed to be too depressed to do anything at all but he had eventually cooperated to oblige his sister.

  During the conversation he mentioned to Cody, without any skill or subtlety, that he had last week run into Elfish’s old friend Amnesia and it struck him as remarkable how much she resembled Jayne Mansfield, and by coincidence she had told him how much she admired musicians, and by further coincidence she was planning to visit Brixton very soon.

  Provided that Cody had been sufficiently stoned at the time of the conversation not to realise that Aran was making it all up, which was likely, this tale should now have got back to Mo.

  Aran was grumpy after this conversation. This was partly because he had been forced into actually doing something, which he always tried to avoid, and partly because Elfish had absolutely insisted that he stress to Cody the dazzling blondeness of Amnesia’s hair and the impressive size of her breasts.

  “I can’t go around saying things like that,” he complained to Elfish. “It will be terrible for my image.
If word got out, left-wing publications would stop giving my books good reviews.”

  “Left-wing publications would send round lynching parties if they actually heard some of the things you say in private about the woman who lives next door,” replied Elfish.

  She was satisfied with her progress. As a consequence of the phone call from Aran, Elfish now expected that Mo would be prepared to do a little work on Amnesia’s behalf because Mo’s sexuality, despite having many outlets, was always on the lookout for more. Or, as she put it to Aran, Mo was ruled by his dick.

  Elfish continued with her own telephone conversation. “I’ll come right out with it, Mo. I want your help in revenging myself on Elfish. You know what she did to me and I plan to pay her back.”

  Speaking to Mo enraged Elfish and only the knowledge that it was necessary for her cause enabled her to cope with her fury. No degradation was too severe in her quest for the name of Queen Mab.

  “Why is it so important to her?” Cody had asked Aran during their conversation, but beyond saying that Queen Mab was the deliverer of dreams, which might mean something to Elfish, and maybe even to Mo, Aran was unable to answer this satisfactorily.

  fourteen

  CARY AND LILAC decided to save for their visit to the country although the concept of saving was tedious, difficult and completely unknown in their social circles. Realising that it would be a poor holiday with only sufficient money for fares, they determined to save enough to travel, to eat bread and drink cider and exist in comfort for a few days.

  “We can find a tree, eat some bread, feed ducks in the stream, drink our cider then fuck on the grass.”

  This seemed like a perfect arrangement. There was unfortunately the problem of saving money. Not only was this a difficult prospect in itself, but there was the additional problem of Dennis. Dennis was the sole other occupant of their house. He was too objectionable for anyone but Cary and Lilac to share four walls with him, and he had long ago collapsed into alcoholism. When he could afford it Dennis drank Special Brew for breakfast and cider for lunch before finishing off his day by sharing whatever drink was available with the equally far gone alcoholics who sat around in groups on the benches in Brixton Road. Dennis was rather younger than most of them but with his ever-reddening face and lack of control of his spittle he was beginning to fit in well.

  It was not possible to save money in a house where Dennis lived. He would not stop to think before taking it to buy drink. And though he was normally to be found with his head on the kitchen floor, dribbling, Cary and Lilac had already found to their cost that in his rare moments of sobriety Dennis was remarkably adept at finding money.

  Consequently they decided to hide their savings in their back garden, in a tin, buried in the one small space that was uncovered by concrete. While Dennis was well out of the way, entertaining the shoppers in Brixton Road with his amusing begging, they dug a small hole, placed a tin under the ground and began to hoard their pennies.

  fifteen

  Shoot an elephant

  Fell a tree

  Make it into a brooch for me

  Of shiny wood and i-vor-y

  Shoot an elephant

  Fell a tree

  This was one of Elfish’s songs, though not one that had ever gone down particularly well with the women she lived with. She hummed it as she strolled into the pub and bought a pint of lager.

  “How’s your brother?” asked Tula, one of Elfish’s few friends, as they sat waiting their turn on the pool table.

  “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.

  sixteen

  [ STAGE DIVING WITH ELFISH ]

  Elfish and Amnesia had been close friends for some years. Their friendship ended about a year ago after a gig at the Marquee in Charing Cross Road. They had gone there with high hopes of some serious stage diving because although the stage at the Marquee was not high enough to present any sort of real challenge it was generally easily accessible. While the stage diving might be a little lacking in thrills and audience amazement, it could at least be performed a great many times.

  As it was too expensive in the Marquee for them to drink very much they bought a quarter bottle of cheap whisky from a supermarket. They drank it on the underground then headed into a nearby pub before going into the gig. Many people in the audience nodded or spoke to them as they passed because they were a well-known duo. As they stood at the bar, bored with the support act, young boys came to talk to them and offer them drinks. Elfish was in those days clean and was looking good. She drew attention, though not nearly as much as Amnesia, whose long blonde hair, tight black clothes and tattooed shoulders always brought young men flocking round.

  Mo was in the audience with some friends. Elfish was at that time having a relationship with Mo but tonight they paid each other little attention, staying instead with their own companions. They could do this without it seeming strange, or hostile.

  The band came on more quickly than they expected. As the first notes were sounding Elfish and Amnesia were still elbowing their way through the dense crowd. Amnesia arrived at the front first and was on stage before the singer reached his first chorus. Elfish joined her and together they launched themselves on to the upraised hands of the crowd. The band were popular at the time, and very loud, and before they appeared on stage there had been an excited atmosphere in the hall. Immediately their set began, Elfish and Amnesia’s activity ignited the crowd and there was a mass rush for the stage.

  The security men were completely overrun and soon there were stage divers everywhere, plunging through the air, arms and legs in all directions, thumping into the crowd, picking themselves up, struggling back to the front and repeating the process.

  Elfish and Amnesia were in their element. They were set up for yet another night of glee, and this feeling was shared by many of the people there. The singer’s vocals, lost in the badly mixed roar of screaming guitars, were full of disdain for the world and all its problems. He was a man who wished merely to g
et drunk, stoned, make a noise and have a good time. Elfish was not particularly interested in his lyrics but had she been able to make them out as she plummeted from stage to audience, drink-addled and immune to pain, she would have found herself, for that moment at least, in complete agreement with him.

  seventeen

  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.