Читать книгу What Rhymes with Bastard? - Linda Robertson - Страница 7
Оглавление‘There are a lot of idiots in this world.’
Mum
‘Hi, Linda …’s Jack! ’S OK… I’ve prob’ly godda place …’s OK, m’Bun. Carn talkboudit now …’s OK, luv you!’
Jack had been in San Francisco for three months when he found a place. It was a depressing shit-hole full of annoying clowns, but it was his. That filthy den was to be the perfect backdrop to our decaying love.
When, after a long and increasingly desperate search, he got a job, I was legally able to join him. I had to have three vaccinations, an AIDS test and a TB X-ray; I got the all-clear. I got on the plane, off the plane, on another plane, and seventeen hours later, stumbled into San Francisco airport, laden with musical instruments and ready for my new life in the sun.
As I rolled my luggage cart through the double doors, I saw my long-lost husband leaning against a pillar, wearing a familiar brown shirt and a gentle smile. ‘Hello!’ he said. We shared a hug and lots of little kisses, and he steered us to the taxi rank, one arm round me, the other on my luggage mountain.
I’d played out this moment endlessly in my mind, complete with trumpet fanfare and fireworks, but now that it was real, it felt strangely normal to see him. I checked, and he felt the same way. How could it be so prosaic? I plumped for an answer that felt good: ‘I think we’re back where we belong, Chief, so why should it be exciting to come home?’
He tightened his grip on my shoulders. ‘That’s right, Bun.’
I was in our bedroom, unpacking my accordion. ‘Listen to this!’ I launched into a halting rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.
‘That’s great, Bun! Can we have sex now?’
‘Don’t you want to hear “Over the Waves”? I can almost do it without stopping.’
‘I’ve got vodka in the freezer!’ He ran off to get me a shot, then proffered it across my heaving bellows. I stopped playing, unstrapped myself and drank up. It felt good to be held again. Oh, yes! I thought. Sex is nice, isn’t it? Why did I always forget?
‘Oh, my Bun,’ sighed Jack afterwards, drifting into a sleepy miasma. ‘It’s so great to have you back. I can’t wait to show you off to everyone tomorrow.’
I lay beside him in the dark, wide awake. Fuck. I was here. I’d made it all happen. The car engine had stopped, but this time the melancholy of arrival was tinged with wicked relief, as if I’d avoided cleaning up after a wild party by running away at dawn. Now I couldn’t look after Mum.
The next morning I began to meet my new housemates. Let’s start at the front of the house and work our way back.
Main bedroom
In the bed
Name: Kyle
Age: 25
Appearance: pulled-up knee socks with shorts
Philosophy: evangelical Christian
Source: Texas
Occupation: art student
Manner: silent but creepy
Liked:
picking up short women and throwing them on to soft surfaces.
lube samples.
painting dark splodges evocative of unbearable suffering.
tinned pears.
sniggering about boobs after dark
On the floor
Name: Mike
Age: 42
Appearance: short, fat and hairy
Philosophy: evangelical Christian (same church)
Source: Texas (same town)
Occupation: sound engineer for touring production of Les Misérables
Manner: jovial
Liked:
curry.
snoring.
large boobs
Back bedroom (back half of the double parlour. In auditory terms, the same room)
Name: Jack
Age: 25
Appearance: tall, handsome, etc.
Philosophy: BA/it rains for a reason
Source: Wales and America
Occupation: copywriter/misanthropic poet
Manner: plodding, well-intentioned
Liked:
dogs
British punk music 1978–83.
anal sex (aspirationally).
vodka (liberally).
cigarettes (nostalgically).
me (emphatically)
Bathroom
Well-established conurbations of four billion-plus, devastated by surprise attack of UK origin
Hallway
Name: Tova
Age: 24
Appearance: travelling girl
Philosophy: I want therefore I get
Source: Canada
Occupation: boat-hand/self-promoter
Manner: upfront and annoying
Liked:
sex.
travelling.
talking about sex and travelling.
rice.
yoga.
shouting in Spanish to her boyfriend, (who emerged, cockroach-style, as soon as she’d secured the ‘room’)
Name: Chico
Age: 34
Appearance: small, brown, hardened
Philosophy: Tova wants, therefore I get it for her
Source: Chile
Occupation: boat-hand and burger-flipper
Manner: benign or confused, maybe both
Liked:
sex.
travelling.
rice.
yoga.
his sister (they’d recently ended a long-term, live-in relationship)
Kitchen
Name: The miserable boy who lives in the kitchen
Age: c. 20
Appearance: lank
Philosophy: why?
Source: America
Occupation: lying on the couch reading academic books about torture, death, prostitution
Manner: limp
Liked:
fraternizing with the landlord’s arch enemy, which led to him being punched in the face, thrown out of the kitchen and chased up the street by the landlord, who was driving a truck
Utility nook
Name: Richard
Age: 28
Appearance: fuzz-headed loon with too many teeth
Philosophy: whatever, dude!
Source: Oregon
Occupation: skateboarder, thief
Manner: insane
Liked:
skateboarding
TV
pizza.
a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had to return – drunk, unconscious and splattered with her own vomit – to her grandmother.
yelling inanities
Our ‘landlord’ was also an official resident, and the most interesting of the lot. He was one of many parasitical entrepreneurs shot to power by the dot-com boom. As people fought for space and rents tripled, he moved in with his girlfriend and illegally sublet his dingy flat to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:
Small hallway available No Christians
The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.
‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’
I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’
‘That bastard kid!’
‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’
‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’
The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur, he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:
1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.
2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.
3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.
But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.
A card had already arrived from home.
Dear Linda, just your old mum writing to say hello. I found
this postcard from when we were in the Isle of Wight – Dadtripped up in the mud, remember? Look after yourself, mydarling; I’ve got to run to catch the post, lots of love,Mum XXX
Back in the present, things weren’t so sweet. Jack would leave for work every morning, and I’d have a lonely day to fill. By late afternoon, I might have visited the ironmonger’s three times – it’s amazing how many things you don’t realize you need until you’re really bored. I was becoming a familiar face to the strange man behind the counter. ‘Your total is sixteen-oh-nine!’ He beamed. ‘I love your accent. Australia, right?’
I reached for my rubber-footed cheese-grater. ‘England.’
‘Well, close, eh?’
‘Not really.’
‘English, eh? There are some great Irish bars around here. We should go out for a drink some time.’
‘Mm … yeah.’ I looked down into my purse. I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. I’d never been on a date.
‘Yeah,’ he pressed on, ‘like Jimmy Foley’s and the Green Giant. You know them?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, see you!’
As soon as I was out of the door, I broke into a run. This meant I couldn’t go into the hardware shop any more. Damn it. I was so bored it seemed like a loss. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the Golden State. The laws of gravity still applied: it was just plain old reality, minus my friends. Admittedly, the weather was better, and I found all kinds of reasons to go outside. I walked up and down perilously tilted pavements, each block affording me another fabulous sea-andsky-filled view, buildings tumbling together, nestling in valleys and skimming hilltops as though they were on the crest of a wave. The air was warm and breezy, rich with ions, and its touch on my skin was a pleasure. On cloudy days the locals moaned, while I gasped at the mist – chunks of cloud suspended in the air like scenery in a divine school play. But however beautiful my surroundings, I didn’t belong there.
I confided in Jack: ‘It makes me so angry, Chief. I have you, and that’s just the most amazing thing, and I’m still sad. Why can’t I just be happy?’
‘That’s what you always say, and you never are. To be honest, I don’t think you ever will be.’
So I went to the doctor and told her I’d been feeling a bit blue. Without blinking, she wrote me repeat prescriptions for a thousand Prozac capsules. ‘You should be feeling better in about three weeks.’ I read that the side-effects included lower libido and increased homicidal urges.
As I made dinner, Tova would sidle in and tell me about her amazing life – the places she’d been, the people she’d met and the wild things she’d done. She could make anything dull, but next to this vigorously sprouting shrub, I felt like a limp, etiolated stem. To protect myself, I responded only to direct probes, such as ‘You’re from England, right?’
‘Yup.’
‘Hmm. Where else have you lived?’
‘Here.’
‘Just here? Well, where have you been, like long trips?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Oh … Really?’
‘Really.’
She was all about the where, not the what. I couldn’t stand her, and boycotted the kitchen when she was around. Jack would come home from work to find me sitting on the bed with an open can of tuna and a bag of crisps.
‘Here’s dinner, Chief.’
‘Lins, can’t you at least make some pasta?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to talk to Tova while it boils.’
‘Well, you turn on the water, then I’ll go in a bit and sort it out.’
I agreed, but she caught me in the hall and pointed at my pink socks. ‘Look, Chico!’ she cried, laughing. ‘They match her sweater!’ I was a pink moth, writhing on a pin. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘I used to do that – match stuff. When I was much younger, of course.’
I reversed back into our room. ‘Jack,’ I hissed, ‘we have to get out of this place! I can’t stay indoors in the daytime because it’s like a dungeon and it makes me feel really sad and I can’t go outdoors because there’s nothing left to buy and I’m getting sunburned and I can’t stay indoors at night because I’m going to kill Tova and I can’t go out at night because there’s nowhere to go because I don’t have any friends.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Jack. ‘We can get some food, too.’
We clambered to the top of Lombard Street, a giant game of crazy-golf, twisting and turning down towards the mass of the city. Beyond the clustered lights lay the black expanse of the bay, and beyond that more land, more lights, more people, doing more interesting things than I was. It was time to confront the truth: I was not a writer, because writers write stuff.
‘Chief,’ I wailed, sitting down, ‘I’m just, like – nothing! And my face is all bumpy.’
It was true: I’d got a weird sort of rash. He patted my head. ‘It’s OK, you’re still the best rabbit in the world!’
My tears blurred the city into a twinkling puddle. ‘I’ll never write anything except recruitment ads!’
Jack held me close. ‘That’s OK, Bun. I’ll still love you more than anything in the world and I’d love you if you couldn’t even write your own name.’ He cradled my head in his lap and wiped my tears on his shirtsleeve. ‘Poor Bun. You’ve got mascara all over your face.’
Comforted, I grew calmer. We had a few minutes of silence while he stroked my hair. ‘It’s OK.’ I sniffed. ‘You know, I feel kind of a sense of relief. Denying it all this time, when it’s fine not to write stuff. Who cares?’
‘Well, maybe you don’t need it to be my lovely Bun, but you might need it to be a happy, fulfilled rabbit.’
How annoying. Not just the herbivore references – he wouldn’t let me off the hook. All of a sudden I had an idea. I sat up, still sniffing. ‘I know! I could write about all the freaks I meet here!’
He squeezed my hand. ‘That’s a great idea. You’ve got all this time, Bun, and you’ve not had it for years. You deserve to put it to good use. If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better. You can write short stories.’
‘Can’t do anything that long.’
‘Poems, then.’
‘Nobody reads poems except other poets.’
‘Hmm.’
‘What if I stuck a tune on top? Then they’d be songs. And maybe a few people will listen.’ I’d written a song once, to promote the use of dustbins on school premises. I was back on track, so we got some dinner, and then returned to the house, where Jack immediately conducted a bottom inspection. It was a new habit of his, and it got on my nerves.
‘Hmm, let’s see. Turn round.’ He put his hands inside my knickers and started feeling around. ‘Oh, it’s been trimmer – it’s been trimmer! You’ll have to keep hopping up those hills, Bun!’ Soon his hands were round my waist, then inside my shirt, and he seemed to have forgotten about my below-par backside. ‘I love you, Bun.’
‘I love you too, Chief.’
Lips met and tongues coiled together as he began to unpeel my skirt; my clothes always seemed to be falling off when Jack was around. Suddenly he disengaged. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s do it standing up.’
‘What? No.’
‘Well, how about the other way, then? It feels nice, you know. I stuck that corn-on-the-cob up my arse and it was … you know … It felt good.’
I was sick of hearing about that damned thing, a plastic corn-onthe-cob vibrator we’d been given as a wedding present. I’d thrown it out after he’d claimed repeatedly to have stuck it up his butt. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘I still don’t believe you did it. Or with the wine bottle.’
‘I did it! It was just the spout. Why don’t you believe me? Why would I lie?’
‘Look, Jack, I’m not having anal sex with you.’
‘So let’s do it standing up, then. Go on!’
‘No.’
‘Christ, Lins, you’re so boring.’ He went to bed in a huff, his face turned towards the wall. What was going on? He’d never asked for stuff like that when we were in London.
I spent much of the next day working out a song on my accordion. When Jack got home from work, he hugged me and the accordion, and asked if we could have sex standing up.
‘No.’
‘You can take the accordion off.’
‘No.’
‘Please, Lins. We always do it lying down.’
‘I like lying down. Why do something standing up when you can do it lying down?’
‘Go on.’
‘I want to play you my song.’
He stepped back and crossed his arms. ‘Go on, then.’
