Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (10 page)

We fall asleep for a while and when we wake Cis wants to lie on top of me while I suck her breasts and reach my hands between her legs. She trembles slightly when I do this and digs her nails into my skin. I can smell the stink of our sweat-covered bodies and it is the thickest smell of sex I have ever experienced. As Cis comes I again slide my finger up her anus. ‘Fuck me there,’ she says. Needing lubrication, I smear more of her menstrual blood onto me and mix it with saliva and she rubs some cream on my penis so that it slides easily into her. I fuck her like this from behind and then she turns over, telling me that we can fuck anally from in front as well, which we do, while she stretches her arm around me and inserts her finger in my anus and pushes it in and out fairly violently, and slightly painfully.

After I come Cis wants me to lick her cunt again. Good. It takes around an hour for her to orgasm and she makes enough noise to wake the whole street. We fall asleep for a long time.

Next morning our bodies are smeared with every human excretion. On our thighs and genitals, and on the sheets, is a hardening mixture of blood, sweat, semen, saliva, vaginal fluid, penis lubricant, shit, urine and the bright red lipstick Cis bought in the market last week.

We wash our bodies but the sheet seems beyond help, so after a few days we throw it out.

Fucking with Cis is wonderful fun.

‘Did you like it?’ asks Ruby.

‘I certainly did. It sounded terrific. No wonder I miss her.’

Our toilet is blocked because of all the food Ruby has emptied down it.

We discover that neither of us has ever cleaned a toilet. We are not keen to start now. Ruby suggests pouring bottles of bleach into the bowl and it so happens that we have lots of spare bleach because I had to buy six bottles to get a free booklet on looking after house plants.

After a day or so the toilet is clear again and Ruby promises to throw our food only in the bin in future.

Lovers never return. Stories about people who go out and win back their lovers are all lies.

Ruby and I move house.

We grind through the process of sorting out our benefit claims, visiting the Unemployment Office and the Social Security Office. Sitting waiting to be called I worry that some clerk has already shouted out my name and I’ve missed my appointment, even though I know that I haven’t.

Looking round vacantly at all the noisy and quiet
people sitting there, I wonder what it is that they all do. I am eager to get home in case my potted plant has flowered.

Our spaceship crashes on a sparsely populated world killing all the crew except me and the robot.

Outside the world is made up of bleak and empty plains split up by a few canyons where small groups of humanoids cluster amongst black vegetation, eking out their existence under a feeble blue sun.

The spaceship is beyond repair. I take the robot and go to the nearest community, looking for help.

At the edge of the canyon I am stopped by a force field. Scientifically primitive, the inhabitants have developed powerful mental abilities.

‘Go away,’ says an elder.

‘Where?’ I say.

‘Anywhere but here.’

I trudge on across the plain. The robot is able to synthesise a little food from the rubble but, insufficiently powered by the blue sun, the food it provides is thin and unsatisfying.

On the edge of the next canyon the same thing happens. The inhabitants will not let me in.

I walk on alone.

‘Make a radio,’ I instruct the robot. ‘So I can talk to Earth.’

The robot shakes its head. It cannot make a radio. It can’t talk either.

It is not much of a robot.

The house that we move to is a flat on the Loughborough Estate and it is the only squat that I ever actually open myself. I borrow a jemmy and jemmy the door, ripping off the security cage the council has fixed over the door. With the jemmy it is easy and gives me a feeling of power. Ruby has obtained some fuses from a friend and she fits them into the fusebox.

‘A brief prayer,’ she says, lowering her head.

‘Great and kind Tilka, Guardian Goddess of Squatters everywhere, please make our electricity work.’

Right away we have electricity. The whole thing has gone very smoothly, although being on the fourth floor and the lifts not working I have a lot of hard carrying to do.

Days later me and the robot reach the next community. There the elders also refuse me entry. They are dressed in yellow robes, with long silver earrings studded with opals.

‘Please let me in. I have been walking for days and I’m coming down with fever.’

They refuse. Sweating with an alien disease, I sit down on the edge of the canyon and watch them going about
their business, although under the poor light of the blue star I can’t really make out what their business is.

When I rest against some of the black vegetation it crumbles into ash and settles quickly on the windless plain.

‘OK robot,’ I say, resigning myself to a friendless existence. ‘It looks like I’ll have to teach you to play chess.’

But it never really gets the hang of it and after a day or so I abandon the attempt and we just sit and watch the humanoids scuttling about, doing whatever it is they do.

The robot synthesises some medicine to cure my fever. It is not completely useless.

Around this time Ruby is involved in a fight with Domino and he hits her on the side of the ear and bruises her. When she arrives back in the flat she is trembling with fury and she has a cut on her foot from storming across the concrete outside. I am outraged but Ruby doesn’t want to do anything about it, just not see him again. When any of her friends say that Domino deserves some violence himself, she brushes it off as an irrelevance.

She spends days writing in her room, and paints a little. Ruby is a good artist but generally doesn’t bother doing anything when things are going well with Domino.

Because it seems like we might starve to death, I think maybe I should find a job. Ruby, busy writing, agrees to phone up the agency for me.

‘How do thirteen-hour nightshifts in a private mailing
warehouse sound to you?’ she calls, covering the mouthpiece of the phone.

‘No, I don’t want it.’

‘Fine,’ says Ruby down the phone. ‘What’s the address?’

Later in the day Ruby helps me make some sandwiches. I am too gloomy about the prospect of a thirteen-hour nightshift to put much energy into sandwich-making.

‘Don’t worry, it’s well paid and you only have to do it for a few weeks.’

‘But thirteen hours? At night?’

‘It’s only four shifts a week. Anyway, it will take your mind off Cis.’

‘I will not have enough time left to look after our cactuses.’

‘Two cactuses are called cacti. And you’ll have plenty of time left. I think your one is starting to grow a flower bud.’

Waiting for the bus to take me to my new job I am harassed by werewolves. They are not sure whether to eat me or not because they have already had a few good meals today but they think they might anyway.

Izzy appears in the distance.

‘That’s my friend Izzy,’ I say to the werewolves. ‘She is a champion weightlifter. She has immense muscles. If you give me any trouble she will beat you to death.’

The werewolves run away.

‘Hi, where are you going?’ says Izzy.

‘I’m going to a new job doing nightshifts.’

‘I’m going to the gym,’ says Izzy. ‘Look at my forearm development. Pretty good eh?’

‘Yes.’

She is deluding herself. Her forearms just look the same to me. It is lucky the werewolves didn’t look very closely.

Working at the mailing firm is like a punishment from God. The workplace is a draughty warehouse near Waterloo, and outside there is nothing but other warehouses with no one around so it seems that I am working alone in a desolate city, although only a few streets away there are busy shops and restaurants.

At the start of my shift I have to stand in a big wooden frame with pigeon holes everywhere. I collect a pallet of mail from round the corner, then sort it out into all the countries it has to go to.

It is all business mail. The businesses save money sending it through the mailing firm instead of the Post Office
and the mailing firm makes a profit large enough for the owner to arrive in a Rolls-Royce, though I never understand exactly where this profit comes from.

Each job of sorting can take hours and the foreman is keen for the work to be done quickly because if it is not then he will suffer for it.

There is an hour for a meal and two fifteen-minute tea breaks, which makes eleven and a half hours’ work.

At my meal break I think about Izzy. She doesn’t want to have her baby. When I asked her if this was because she was getting on so badly with Dean she seemed slightly annoyed and said no, that had nothing to do with it, she just doesn’t want a baby.

After many hours sorting it is time to load the truck. When the truck pulls up to the goods entrance and opens its back door it seems as big as a football stadium.

The mailbags are so heavy I can only just lift one to shoulder height, but loading the truck means carrying hundreds of them up a shaky ramp and then piling them up as far as I can reach above my head.

I am on ‘E’ shift. The other four workers are stronger than me. They sweat but they can cope. Towards the end of loading the truck I can hardly lift a mailbag above my knees.

Back home Ruby is writing a letter to her genitals and arranging the flowers I brought in to brighten up our new flat. Cis has forgotten all about me and is having fun with a string of devoted boyfriends.

It is four in the morning, my muscles are shaking and the forklift is bringing up another huge metal cage of sacks to be loaded.

‘Mind your feet.’

The cage bangs down.

Here’s a gentle ballad for all you lovers out there
, croons the DJ from the radio on the wall. I pick up another sack and struggle into the truck, embarrassed that I am weaker than everyone else.