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4

‘THE SPEED OF LIFE’

July 1978

She didn’t dance. She shimmered. She almost stood still, quaking ever so slightly to the same song that DJ Derek put on for her every Tuesday evening after the band had put away their instruments and the punks had stopped pogoing. She quivered as if some force was coursing through her alabaster skin. She always wore the same tight white silk dress with Chinese script curling over it, over her body. She never slipped or slid on her spiked high heels and fishnets. Her dyed, jet-black hair was crimped and shaped in a Cleopatra cut, and her eyeliner swept out in a dramatic cat-eye. She was a moving hieroglyphic.

She was the mystery of The Pound: she sat on her own, with one can of Coke at her table all night, and spurned forever the advances of all the young punks. She never got up for any songs belted out by the three-chord wonders roaring 1-2-3-4 at the top of every tune, or for any other tunes the DJ played before and after the live act. Her interest was singular: she only got up and onto that sticky, treacherous floor when the DJ played the opening instrumental track to Bowie’s Low. She was addicted to ‘The Speed of Life’.

I had only ever seen her once before in ‘real life’. It was one grim winter morning a few months earlier on the number 33 bus as it made its way over from East Belfast. I guessed that she came from ‘the other side’ but knew instantly that she didn’t belong to them or to anybody. This is what drew me to her in the first place and why I felt compelled to summon the courage to talk to her that night. I won’t deny being helped along the way by the bottle of Merrydown I had knocked back in the Baby Subway before the gig. That night, even the risk of humiliation did not deter me. I waited until Bowie’s instrumental opener to Low was over to tell her that she had good taste in music, unlike most of them inside here or over in The Harp. I even found the balls to tell her that Bowie was producing his best ever material since he ran away from the sins of America to hide from them all right up against the Wall.

She said nothing at first, just as I had feared, and then I added, ‘Should you really be wearing them high heels when you’ve all that walking to do on Saturday?’

When she finally replied, it was as if she was measuring every word, carefully and cruelly weighing up her riposte. ‘Did I ask you to speak to me? Are you retarded or something?’

‘No, don’t be offended like. I was just thinking you will have sore feet on Saturday if you wear them heels!’

‘And what is so special about Saturday?’ she asked.

‘It’s the 12th! The 12th of July. Won’t you be out with Orange Lil and all the girls marching to the Field and then coming back pregnant?’

I noticed that she repressed a laugh and was relieved that she hadn’t taken offence.

‘Either you are being sarcastic or else you are simply a moron. Now which is it?’

‘Well, I can confirm that I am not a moron. I’m just asking if you will be OK for the big day.’

‘I won’t be going anywhere with that lot next Saturday. I don’t like crowds, let alone big processions. Are you going?’

‘I wouldn’t think I would be welcome. I might be the invited guest on top of one of their eleventh-night bonfires, but I wouldn’t qualify to be marching the next morning.’

She snatched up her leather handbag with fringes dangling from it and tried to make a quick exit.

‘I’m only slagging ya,’ I said, standing up with her. ‘I’ve no time for any of that shit, green or orange. I’m not one of them. And by the way, my name’s Robbie, but my friends call me Ruin, and I’m dead on.’

She stopped in her tracks and fixed her eyes upon me. They were still loaded with contempt. ‘You’re a cheeky wee shite. Does your mother know you’re out?’

‘I bet you’re a secret ABBA fan. You can’t admit that in here or you will be tried and convicted for being a secret spide. Truth be told, my ma’s dead but don’t feel bad about it.’

‘Snap!’ She smiled back at me. ‘Snap! Mine’s dead too.’

‘Excellent. So we really have got something in common as well as Bowie and liking, ahem, ABBA. So, as I said, I’m Robbie. What’s your name?’

She gave me a long scrutinising look and said, ‘Well at least you’re not afraid of the punk thought-police. If you wanna like ABBA, go ahead, but I don’t think I’ve any of their albums up in my place and—’

I butted in to accept what I assumed was an invitation. ‘Don’t worry. As long you don’t play fucking Pink Floyd or Yes, or for that matter Bob Dylan.’

She nodded in approval towards my home-made T-shirt. ‘Well, I can see you’ve got some taste. I’m Sabine. Let’s go!’

Outside The Pound, we skirted past my home area then around the closed-off security zone in the city centre. The streets and roads were deserted, except for one army mobile patrol breaking through the traffic lights. The soldiers cooped up in the back of their jeep wolf-whistled at her while flapping their hands towards me, indicating that they thought I was queer, probably because of all the zips and studs. In the distance, I could make out the burning orange lights illuminating the back of the bakery, where only a few weeks earlier I had joined my friends playing midnight football, acting out all the World Cup games we had just watched on TV. We pretended that we were Kempes, Ardiles, Luque and Passarella. Now, just a few short weeks after the World Cup final, here I am, arm in arm with Sabine as we make our way to the black taxi stand at the City Hall. It hit me that all those last blasts of a football-obsessed childhood were fading, corroding faster than I had ever anticipated in this short burst of summer towards something entirely new and out of time altogether.

Even before Sabine, I had concocted a strategy to spend as much time at The Pound as possible. I had told my father I was sleeping over in Padre Pio’s house, where I had spent much of June watching the World Cup matches on his colour TV and heading out afterwards to our free floodlit ‘pitch’ at the back of Inglis’s bakery to play five-a-side into the early hours of the morning. PP was always in foul humour when we were going back to his house to bed. He was a shite player and was always picked last. I’d wait for him to fall asleep before creeping back downstairs to the front parlour, where his mother would be waiting for me on the floral sofa – legs open and propped up on the table, just like that first night a few days after we buried my own mother. Her feet in slippers, the half-empty bottle of vodka, a three-quarters smoked cigarette burning in the ashtray and then her slobbering, her urgings, her orders. On my knees eventually and my head in-between her thighs, spearing her moist pubis with the tip of my tongue while she moaned and groaned in a voice rubbed with smoke and Smirnoff: ‘It’s just a bit of sex, Robert. It’s just a wee bit of sex.’

Truth be told, that’s why I was confident on that first night with Sabine. I wasn’t afraid of this standoffish snob with the crimped hair, the white dress and the fishnets that I longed to rip off with my teeth when we finally got to be alone. Padre Pio’s mum had once whispered into my ear when she finally allowed me to bolt inside her that she was giving me ‘an education’.

In the taxi up to the Holy Lands, we snogged for the first time and I tasted a sharp clean laboratorial sensation in her mouth.

‘I thought you only drank Coke,’ I murmured as I tried to slip my hand up her dress.

‘At them there prices, no way,’ she said. ‘They don’t have civilian searchers on the door to check what’s in your bag. I could get a bomb into The Pound if I wanted to. A half bottle of Smirnoff is easy to smuggle inside,’ she continued, while placing her hand on my swelling crotch. ‘I wonder why you,’ she said.

‘Why me what?’ I answered.

‘I never bother with anyone in The Pound. You’re my first. I’m just wondering why you.’

‘Cos I’m special?’ I ventured helpfully, as I slide my hand further up her dress.

‘Maybe,’ she whispered and, gliding the tip of her tongue inside my ear, added, ‘It’s more likely that I’m just feeling particularly horny tonight and I like your T-shirt.’

We must have fucked all night inside 66 Jerusalem Street because when I woke up early the next day my cock was raw and my head was pounding thanks to a half bottle of vodka. Sabine had provided us with a soundtrack for our sex; not Bowie, as I had expected, not even ABBA. Instead we rolled about, she lay astride me, and I took her from behind to the sound of 1950s rock ’n’ roll blaring from a C-60 tape she had put on. I recalled too the way she liked to writhe around when she was on top, like the lithe, sinister dancer at the start of Tales of the Unexpected. The look on her face told you that she was elsewhere, and wherever that was, she was in charge.

Sabine stirred beside me. ‘You’ve obviously done this before, young man, and there was me hoping you’d be a virgin,’ she said with a smirk.

‘Sorry about that, love. Damned inconvenient of me all the same,’ I replied.

‘Where did you learn to screw like that?’ she asked.

‘I could ask you the same question. You are one fine mount.’

‘Oh, I think I was the one doing the mounting, Mr Ruin! But hey, I forgot to ask you something important: what age are you?’

‘Fourteen, mam,’ I joked and got an elbow in the ribs from her. ‘Nah, I’m nineteen. I’m just having a year off before I go to uni,’ I lied. ‘What about you?’

She had wrapped her legs over mine and started to caress my face with her fingers.

‘I am at the art college. It’s only the foundation year but I’m thinking of starting first year proper over in London. Maybe St Martin’s if I can get in. Where have you applied for?’

‘Maybe I’ll head to London too. Perhaps the LSE. My dad thinks I should go there and study economics.’

‘Didn’t Mick Jagger go to the LSE?’

‘I’m not applying there because that wanker went to it!’ I protested.

Sabine put two fingers across my lips and giggled. ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t be applying to the LSE just to follow me to London then.’

As my eyes got used to the milky morning light, I could make out a whitewashed walled room, pine floorboards and piles upon piles of splashes of paint on rectangular field-grey boards. When Sabine got up to go to the bathroom, I went over to examine a mini-tower of her work propped up beside the record player. Low was on the turntable alongside a couple of photos. The most striking image was a side profile of a man, which was blurred by slashes of white, pink and grey streaks shooting off his visage and merging into what seemed to be a kind of gathering storm in the background. I held it up to the window to see it in the morning sunlight.

‘I see you’re admiring my dad,’ Sabine said, as she walked towards me. ‘I took those pics shortly after my mum died. Then I based a painting on them too. We were walking along the beach at Holywood talking about her when I got him to stop and pose.’

‘They’re amazing. I’m jealous,’ was all I could say.

‘I’d never tell him I based a painting on those pictures.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he thinks that the pics I took caught him when he was weak. My dad doesn’t like to look weak.’

‘So what happened to your mum, Sabine?’ I asked, suddenly fearing that she might have been killed in the Troubles and Sabine would hold it against the likes of me.

‘She got ovarian cancer. She went very quickly, Robert.’

I liked the way she said ‘Robert’ for the first time. I nearly forgot to answer when she went on to ask about my own mother.

‘Well that’s a half-snap!’ I replied eventually. ‘I was told it was liver cancer. Sabine, I … I was afraid your mum may have been killed in the Troubles. I was afraid you’d—’

‘I’d what? Blame you? Well, she didn’t and if she had, it would have had nothing to do with you. You are not of them the way I am not one of them, Mr Ruin. We are not like any of them. Our so-called sides. I could tell that about you almost right away.’

‘Most people are sick of all this Troubles shite, Sabine.’

‘Yeah, but most don’t say that loud enough.’

‘You’d get on well with me da,’ I say, as I place the painting back against the record player.

Before it all got too serious, Sabine held out her hand like a debutante at a ball. I nodded formally and kissed her middle knuckle. Then she went rummaging around the side of the bed for her handbag. She plucked out a blister pack of tiny white pills and swallowed one. It was only then that I remembered I never wore a johnny the night before.

She picked up my T-shirt that I had flung onto the floor when we first leapt into bed. It was one of my home-made ones with a message marked out in black block capitals.

‘It was mostly this, you know. Why I took you home,’ she said, holding the T-shirt out to me.

‘My T-shirt?’

‘Yep. I liked the message and that you made it yourself. I hate them punk posers who send their cheques to companies that advertise for ‘Boy’ bondage trousers and fart-flaps in the back pages of the NME. You really hate Bob Dylan? That’s acceptable! Now if you had written ‘I hate Bowie’ on that shirt I would have ignored you. We’d have been finished before we even got started. And you hate Pink Floyd too – that’s an added bonus!’