Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (18 page)

‘I’ll shut the door and you see if you can see a light through the crack.’

But when she shuts the door there doesn’t seem to be any crack to see through. We spend about twenty minutes trying to work a knife through the plastic seal around the door to see if there is any light inside.

‘Maybe you could sit inside while I close it,’ suggests Ruby, but the fridge is too small to sit inside. It looks like we will never know.

I notice something strange about the fridge. It is completely empty.

‘What happened to our food?’

‘I felt disgusted by the act of eating,’ Ruby tells me. ‘So I threw it all away.’

‘You seriously expect divine help in a reconciliation with your old girlfriend when you are so wasteful as to throw away food?’ says the Archangel Gamiel, hovering outside the window.

I try to explain that it wasn’t me, but he doesn’t seem interested.

There is a knock on the door. It is a neighbour asking us if we would like to open some cans of cat food for her. She acts like we should be pleased.

We lend them our can-opener but we are still a little puzzled as to why they should come to us.

‘Maybe their can-opener broke.’

Broke again, I ask Ruby to phone up the industrial agency for me and she finds me a job as a temporary labourer in Kennington.

Before leaving for work I make Ruby promise to take
good care of our cacti. Ruby says she will but she also says she no longer thinks that her relationship with Domino will turn out well, no matter what the cactus does. But I still have faith. When I am in the flat I check every half hour for the start of a flower.

As soon as I walk onto the site in Kennington they give me a pneumatic drill and tell me to help level out the rocky earth.

I have never used a drill before and it keeps jumping around and threatening to cut off my toes. I do the best I can and no one seems to mind that my progress is very slow. In the earth I am levelling there are a few small yellow flowers. I hate killing them. If all plants are friends then my cactus will be annoyed at me.

It starts to rain and I keep on drilling. After a few minutes I notice that everyone else has taken shelter under the roof of the labourers’ hut.

At lunchtime I try and make conversation by asking if anyone knows any good drummers looking for a band, but no one does. I am so obviously ignorant of what to do on a building site that no one takes much notice of me.

When we have levelled out the site we have to clear everything away in wheelbarrows. The rubbish tip is across a deep ditch and to get there I have to struggle my wheelbarrow uphill across a sloping and shaky plank of wood. Each time I do this I almost fall in the ditch and if I fall in the ditch the wheelbarrow full of rubble will come down on top of me.

I’m scared of this, Cis
, I say in my head.

No one else has any problems doing this and, struggling over, I feel increasingly stupid and incompetent. At the end of the day the foreman tells me that tomorrow there is not so much work on so I need not come back.

‘I am a poor labourer,’ I tell Ruby.

‘At least you got one day’s wages,’ she says, comfortingly, and afterwards she runs me a bath and washes the buildingsite filth out of my hair and massages my shoulders. When I go down to the agency’s offices to pick up my money they give me two days’ wages by mistake.

Ruby tells me that Daita the Vietnamese Tree Goddess is also the Friend of Poor Labourers everywhere and probably she is responsible for my extra day’s wage so I buy some incense and light a stick for her. I also buy Ruby some more new sunglasses and some nail-varnish. She is very pleased at this and brings home a boy to fuck who is not Domino. This is unusual but not unheard of.

I wonder if she is managing with her diaphragm.

Lying in bed I can hear them fucking.

Bandits enter through my open window. Bad advice from the police. They kidnap me and try to carry me off but I escape and hide on a council estate till they have gone. I hide in a stairwell along with a lonely cat and a ripped plastic bag full of flowers and beer cans.

When I am safe from the bandits I wander over to Cis’s sister’s flat. It is on the third floor. I stare through the window.

‘Help me with my diaphragm,’ says Ruby. ‘It keeps coming out.’

‘Are you sure it’s the right size?’

‘The doctor measured me.’

I put it in for her. On her vagina I can smell the breath of her lover.

Cis is visiting her sister. With her is her new boyfriend. I notice that he is not all that good-looking. But he is good company and they are having fun discussing an old wreck of a motorbike that they’re going to try fixing up together.

Moans come from Ruby’s room. Sometimes she makes a lot of noise when she is fucking. I am glad she is not with Domino. I hate Domino.

Next morning I make them some tea.

‘Last night I dreamed I was kidnapped by bandits,’ says Ruby. ‘But I escaped and hid on a council estate.’

‘How is your orgasmic response?’

‘Much better. I am going to write it an appreciative letter.’

Her new lover plays drums and I ask him to play in my band.

All Autumn I carried on being mainly unemployed with a few days’ work here and there, looking forward to finally getting my gig organised, and thinking about Cis. I wondered what she was doing. I had no doubt that whatever Cis was doing she was particularly happy doing it, although it was raining all the time, and I remembered that Cis did not like the rain.

Trudging around on the blackened plain, the robot gives me a print-out saying it has an important piece of news for me. However, I am at that moment late for work and I can’t wait around to hear it.

I am working in a carpet warehouse in Hackney, loading rolls of carpet onto trucks. This job lasts for three days and during it one of the other people employed there seriously hurts his back lifting a heavy carpet and has to go home in a taxi.

Izzy, expert on weights, has told me to be careful with my back when lifting things. I manage not to hurt myself, but it is no fun loading all the trucks.

The other workers are slightly jealous of the men who
drive these trucks. We imagine that driving a truck must be easier and more lucrative than loading them. I expect it has its problems as well.

When the warehouse is emptied the job comes to an end.

‘OK robot,’ I ask, ‘what was this important piece of news?’

But the robot has disappeared. It is nowhere in sight. I hunt over the blackened plains of three continents but I never find it again. I miss the robot. It was not much of a companion but there is no one else for me to talk to.

Ruby is in a slightly bad mood because Domino has been being particularly unfriendly, claiming that he is too busy to see her this week.

She tells me that she has utterly given up on him. She is lying of course, and when we go to a party and she meets someone who she thinks might possibly be having some sort of relationship with him she is very displeased.

Depressed, she lies around doing not very much. The contact article seems to have been forgotten about. Occasionally she gets drunk and plans out more werewolf stories, although she is actually in a bad mood with her werewolf story as well, because Domino asked her if there was something Freudian in all this talk of werewolves eating their lovers. Ruby was outraged at this, telling me crossly
that Freud was a notorious moron with ridiculous theories about female sexuality, quite apart from the fact that Domino couldn’t tell Freud from a carrot cake if his life depended on it, in fact Domino couldn’t do anything whatsoever if his life depended on it, except drink beer and talk loudly all the time and make sure his hair was looking good.

‘I’m depressed in here,’ says Ruby. ‘Let’s go visit Izzy and Marilyn.’

I’m surprised at Ruby wanting to leave the house.

‘It’s raining.’

‘Well, we’ll take an umbrella,’ she says.

Ruby sees that I am not enthusiastic.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We might meet Cis in the street. You know she used to like being out in the rain.’

Izzy and Marilyn are not home so we sit in a café instead and drink cups of tea and have a good bout of self-pity, with Ruby telling me what a terrible life it is when you are constantly messed around by your lover and me telling her much the same thing. Ruby is frustrated because she knows someone who will buy chequebooks and cheque cards from us at ten pounds a cheque which would be a hundred and fifty pounds if the chequebook was full, but we do not know anyone with a chequebook and cheque card. Even petty fraud can be difficult to make a good start in. I am distracted during this conversation because Cis walks past the window of the café at least fifteen times while we are sitting there, but no matter how hard I try to catch her eye, she never looks in.