Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving (3 page)

This activity takes up a surprising amount of Elfish's time and, along with her guitar playing, is an effective remedy for her melancholy. Her brother thinks she is simply mad and if they are at the same gig he stands safely at the back and gets ready to call an ambulance.

Elfish likes her brother but her disposition makes it hard for her to bring him any cheer. He always tells her how depressed he is and often she feels that she does not care whether he is depressed or not. Sometimes when he seems overly sad she will make an attempt.

Aran, a writer, had split up with his girlfriend. The fact that he told anybody who would listen that this was too painful an occurrence for him to put into words did not prevent him from trying. He had spent many an unhappy hour telling Elfish all about it, leading them both to such extremes of depression that, when he would finally say that his life was at an end, Elfish could only agree.

“I have no money and many debts,” Aran would continue, moving freely on to more general topics. “And even so I am harassed by tax inspectors. I live in a flat which I should not be in, and will be evicted from should the council discover that I am there, which they will when I am unable to meet the rent.

“My best endeavours in the world of literature have led to very little, and I am now being superseded by younger authors with more enthusiasm and better ideas. I suffer from mental troubles of varying kinds, and I have no idea what to do with my life and if I did, I doubt it would make any difference.

“My girlfriend departed largely due to appalling behaviour on my part. I feel old, my face is becoming increasingly wrinkled and my hair is distressingly thin. I make futile attempts to hide this, which makes it look worse. The ragged clothes I started wearing when I was a young punk rocker now make me look like an aged down-and-out. I have become disenchanted with sex, finding it no longer particularly pleasurable, which is just as well, as I am becoming less and less capable of doing it.

“Naturally, being a man of taste, I do not draw attention to these facts in order to generate pity—perish the thought—I merely state them to give you an idea of how I am feeling.”

Listening to this grim diatribe, Elfish was by this time thoroughly depressed herself. The thought crossed her mind that if it were not for the fact that he was a regular provider of beer she would never visit her brother at all. Bravely resisting an almost overwhelming urge to flee, Elfish made an effort to divert him from his gloom by asking about his computer game.

This computer game was Aran's new project, or was supposed to be. Roundly proclaiming that books were a total waste of time in the modern world, he had announced that from now on he was going to concentrate on video games. Subsequently he had been trying to program his own game, using his Apple Macintosh computer, in the hope that he could both earn himself a living and educate the masses.

“All games currently on the market are rubbish, fit only for morons,” he would say, brandishing his own collection of Sega and Nintendo cartridges and ignoring the fact that he himself spent almost all his spare time slumped in front of his video machine playing them.

“Mere infantile pursuits. I will program a computer game which will be both entertaining and meaningful. My game will elevate
video playing from trashy escapism into a genuine and thought-provoking art.”

In reality Aran had neither the skill nor the equipment to program a game for either Sega or Nintendo but he did not let this discourage him. He presumed that once he had the thing working on his Apple Macintosh it would soon be snapped up by all the major companies, sold round the world, and possibly made into a film as well.

This was the theory anyway, as he had propounded it at great length to Elfish. Unfortunately in the past few months he had been too depressed about his girlfriend actually to make any progress with it.

“You should carry on,” said Elfish. “The idea sounded good. What was it again?”

“The world's main cultural icons from all eras, except the twentieth century, which has very little culture, fall off the edge of the world on a raft and their dreams float up to the moon,” said Aran.

“Right,” said Elfish. “It's bound to be a winner with young people everywhere. Get to work.”

ELFISH HIT MO full in the mouth with her fist. He yelled in pain. “For God's sake, Elfish,” he shouted. “What are you doing?”

“That's for sleeping with Angela,” said Elfish, and made to hit him again. Mo squirmed as if to leave the bed but Elfish grabbed his balls and held them tightly.

“I'll rip them off,” she said, and kissed Mo violently, biting his lip.

“I swear I will kill you one day,” said Mo, tearing himself away and rubbing his bruised cheeks.

“I'll kill you first,” said Elfish, and they kissed again. Elfish sat up, straddled Mo and crammed herself on to him, forcing his penis inside her so quickly and roughly that they both grimaced in discomfort.

“I've fucked every one of your lovers,” said Elfish. “And I gave them all a better time than you did.”

“You're a liar, Elfish.”

At this Elfish slapped Mo again because she hated it when he called her a liar.

“You are stupid, Mo. Really, genuinely stupid. If I didn't enjoy fucking you so much I wouldn't even bother to talk to you.”

“And you're disgusting. When did you last wash?”

“Never,” said Elfish. “I stay filthy so I can rub dirt over you.”

Elfish and Mo used to fuck so loud and long that the neighbours would bang on the wall in futile complaint. Elfish and Mo would reply with screamed abuse before drinking themselves into insensibility, and waking up ill, but happy.

Elfish's statement that she never washed was not far from the truth. She was genuinely filthy. This was not entirely her fault as the squat in which she lived had neither hot water nor a bath, but the other four women who lived there made efforts to wash at friends' houses. Elfish did this only rarely. Since the crisis about the name Queen Mab had arisen she had not washed at all, deeming dried sweat and caked-on grime to be matters of little importance when there was work to be done.

She sat now, musing on her memories of sex with Mo, playing her guitar on her bed with the TV on, trying to write a song.

THERE IS A legend that everything wasted on the earth is stored and treasured on the moon: unfulfilled dreams, broken vows, unanswered prayers, wasted time. Thus Pope wrote in
The Rape of the Lock:

Elfish was aware of this legend. It was one of the many random and useless pieces of information her brother insisted on telling her when she visited. No visit to Aran was complete without a long, detailed, cross-referenced and fully annotated telling of some ancient story, lie or legend, whether it was requested or not.

This could be a distressing experience. There can be few things worse to a habitual sufferer of powerful hangovers than to call in on someone simply to beg a beer and a sandwich and suddenly find oneself on the receiving end of a long analysis of the war between Athens and Sparta in 411 B.C. For the unwary it could be a disturbing, even frightening occurrence. Many a shocked young person had stumbled weakly out of Aran's house, white-faced with terror, hunting for the nearest bar in order to obliterate with beer and whisky the memory of Aran's insufferably long description of where exactly the Athenians had gone wrong at the siege of Syracuse, and what he would have done if he had been there to advise the military commanders at the time.

On Shakespeare he was even worse. Elfish still shuddered at the memory of the time she had gone round to borrow some money for a drink and Aran, totally oblivious to her obviously fragile state—post-amphetamine, post-acid and post-alcohol—had declared himself particularly upset by a radio programme he had heard in which Shakespeare's sole authorship of many of his plays had been called into question.

“I refuse to countenance the idea that Shakespeare did not write all of the plays attributed to him,” he announced sternly, and proceeded to contradict in meticulous detail every one of the claims made by the programme, leaving Elfish, already in a bad way, more or less a broken woman by the end of it. In a community where the currency of conversation was, entirely sensibly, made up of music, gossip, and a little radical politics, Aran was an intolerable menace.

Nonetheless, Elfish remembered the legend of broken dreams being stored on the moon. It struck a chord in her and she began to think of it almost literally. Each time something went wrong she imagined some wasted effort of hers flying up to land on the moon,
and the desire to prevent this from happening again was now very strong inside her. This feeling was heightened by her observation that all around her were people who dreamed of doing all manner of things but never earned their dreams through. Those people who talked endlessly of their plans but did nothing to bring them into reality were particularly scorned by Elfish. She felt that there was nothing she would not do to avoid being classed among them.

She could see the moon from her bedroom through a tear in the piece of dark embroidered cloth that served as a curtain. It disappeared behind a grubby cloud. A movement below caught her eye and she saw that Cary and Lilac were sitting on the grass outside the house next door.

Cary and Lilac were seventeen or so and went around Brixton holding hands and being in love. If they were not going around holding hands they were sitting on their little piece of grass under the moon. This of course was distressing to many folk whose days of innocent love were long since over, and it was particularly upsetting for Elfish. She detested them and regarded them as a menace to her sanity. If there was one thing guaranteed to turn Elfish's general melancholy into a full-scale hatred of the human race, it was a pair of happy young lovers wandering around holding hands or spending their nights sitting in next door's backyard exuding contentment.

Cary and Lilac were making plans. It was their ambition to visit the countryside; in their combined existence of thirty-three years, neither of them had ever stood in a field.

“A field with a cow in it,” said Cary. “And some trees.”

“And a badger,” said Lilac. “And a stream.”

They sat in silence, contemplating the pleasant prospect of field with a cow, a badger, some trees and a stream.

Living in the city with a backyard consisting of a few square yards of concrete and an assortment of weeds, where the parks were full of dogs, car fumes and homeless people, this visit to the country was something of a fantasy to them both, though one which they were intent on bringing to reality.

As they had no money, it was not proving to be easy. They were not sure how much it would cost them to reach the countryside but however much it was it would be more than they had.

They were not even sure where the countryside was. Lacking any sort of map of Britain they could only look at their
A-Z
of London, scanning the edges of the outermost squares in search of areas free from habitation. There were in fact no pages of the
A-Z
totally free of roads and dwellings but some of the farthest away ones seemed quite hopeful. Pages ten and eleven for instance, whilst containing a section of the M1 motorway and several other major road junctions, also contained relatively large areas of what appeared to be countryside. Lilac and Cary spent a great deal of time looking at pages ten and eleven, studying with interest bordering on wonder the names dotted over the countryside, names like Levels Wood, Stony Wood and Grimsdyke Open Space.

“Look,” said Lilac, pointing his finger. “There's even a farm. Lower Priory Farm.”

Cary was excited by this.

“Do you think we could go and look at it?”

Lilac was doubtful, imagining sadly that nowadays farms would be protected by sturdy farmhands clutching shotguns, and possibly even by a busload of policemen waving truncheons. These days this was not so far from the truth. Any movement of people who looked like Cary and Lilac, that is with long, grubby white dreadlocks, ragged hippie clothes and numerous parts of their faces pierced with rings
and studs, seemed to induce total panic on the part of the police in country areas. This very day on the news Cary and Lilac had seen travellers who were trying to attend a free festival being hauled away into vans by policemen, and the following interview with the local Chief Constable seemed to them to border on hysteria.

This hysteria was shared by the politicians interviewed later. After watching pictures of young travellers being beaten, kicked and bludgeoned before being dragged away to face charges of assaulting officers in the conduct of their duty, a Member of Parliament assured the interviewer that they were even now formulating strong new laws to deal with this serious threat to society. At the grim prospect of young people going on to uninhabited common land and actually enjoying themselves, the Government was moved to take the firmest action.

Cary and Lilac had been rather bemused as to what all the fuss was about.

“They seemed especially mad that some of the travellers might be claiming benefit,” said Cary. “Especially if they were travelling. If you're claiming benefit you're meant to stay home and look for a job.”