Outsider (6 page)

The two friends would often go for long walks
at night, favouring dark backstreets. Pat, long blonde-haired, was,
and had always been, the sensible one, the wise one, and the great
listener. Gill, wild character with freckles and thick curly hair
falling disorderly down her shoulders, was, and had never tried to
be otherwise, the big mouth, the troublemaker, and an
all-over-the-place kind of person. And they both liked the dark
backstreets for their quietness and the possible dangers that
always made their days and nights. Then, and only then, Pat would
let her composure go, becoming as wild as Gill, and even more
lethal.

They would walk and talk. Well, Gill would do
most of the talking. Pat would make all the appreciative noises
expected from her, occasionally pointing out the points Gill would
miss almost deliberately, almost checking if Pat was still with her
and not gone on a mind trip to a different planet. But Pat was
always there, attentive and cunning.

They loved the full moon, even if they didn’t
really need it. The rounder the satellite, the more manic their
behavior. Gill, increasingly bouncier. Pat, more tightly in control
of herself.

It was such a night. Full moon, huge and
round, filling up the whole sky with the sheerness of its size and
its rings of light. So bright, so mad. They just loved bathing in
its intense light. They felt almighty.

Cobbles running under the heavy soles of
their New Rock boots. Lampposts hardly lighting the streets. Sounds
resonating fantastically in the silence surrounding their
conversation, Gill’s constantly manufactured diatribes. Tonight she
was on and on about the town policies on parks and playgrounds,
locked up at night, from what? The subject was as good as any.
Especially when walls and fences couldn’t stop them.

Most of their nocturnal debates were as
pointless as they were enjoyable. They would only stop when Pat
would eventually point out their total pointlessness. Usually
around dawn. She was, and had always been, extremely patient with
her best mate. She knew better anyway than interrupting Gill.

A flask of whisky passed between them would
add to the sharing and the specialness of the night.

Gill was rather bouncy, regularly shifting
shapes. Which one was the real one? They didn’t even know
themselves. Pat was more contained. Her eyes were the only things
she could never control. They had gone a dark and shiny black,
intensity and brightness spilling out.

Gill croaked deliberately loudly before
shifting back to her human shape. She loved this kind of acting
out. She went back to her subject of the night, switching suddenly
to the increasing daily presence of ravens in the aforementioned
town parks and playgrounds. Pat grunted appreciatively. And both
went silent. Their acute sense of hearing had isolated the still
distant sound of a footstep. Like heavy boots. They looked at each
other, Gill with a new, amused smile slowly raising the corners of
her mouth, Pat with an eyebrow rising interestedly. She playfully
made her shoulder joints click. The clicking was not human, even if
she kept her shape. Gill swiftly turned into a majestic red-spotted
green frog the size of a pony and leapt delightedly. Entertainment
was on its way.

Entertainment? Certainly not the middle name
of the human being approaching them. The frog leapt forward once.
The human being kept approaching. Not taller than Pat. A blue
mohican proudly erect, skulls and daggers bleedingly tattooed down
the right arm, the left arm exhibiting scars, white straight lines
from shoulder to elbow like notches on the handle of a cowboy gun,
and then, two ugly jagged scars down to the wrist. Combat trousers,
as dark as the night, two hunter knifes hanging from a studded
leather belt. A confident pace. A female human with a crossbow in
her hands. The sure shot caught the throat of the magnificent
red-spotted green frog in the middle of the next leap.

Bewildered, the frog fell to the ground,
croaking lamely. Fatally wounded. It slowly changed back, body
swapping its heaviness for female hips. Blood came out of the no
longer smiling mouth, life gone out of Gill’s eyes. Pat was on her
knees, a hand holding Gill’s right hand, an arm under the
motionless head. She looked at the stranger, shaking her head:

“You killed her!”

“It’s my job, sweetheart. I’m a bounty
hunter. Werefrogs are dangerous monsters. She was about to attack
you. You should be grateful!”

“She was my mate!”

The smirking bounty hunter, still bouncing
with satisfaction on the balls of her feet, was now at touching
distance. She never read the danger in Pat’s eyes. The tail of the
giant scorpion struck her between the eyes, lethal and
unforgiving.

Riding the bus had never been Sid’s favorite
idea of getting from point A to point B. She discarded public
transports as unreliable and uncomfortable. It was an observation
based on personal experience. Cycling would have been more of her
taste, in a small town. She vaguely remembered being 9 or 10 and
riding a vaguely green bicycle round and round her neighborough,
hours on end. And then she stopped, stung by the absurdity and
uselessness of the wistful activity: in her solitary world, she had
imagined she was training for cycling championships around the
world, but in the real world she was never gonna do that.
Consequently the bicycle forgot itself in a desolated corner of the
parental garage and its vague green turned into a definite
rusty.

Motorbike was her favored means of
transport.

(She had actually been riding the top deck
of a bus, hating it for all its lack of worth at rush hour, when it
had trundled past a plethora of two-wheels sporting big engines.
One of them had winked at her with purple and yellow stripes, and
Sid’s heart had jumped back at it with painful longing within its
ribcage. Mercilessly the bus had taken her away, but the exile
could only be temporary; Sid Wasgo had returned to the scene of the
crime the very next day. She didn’t touch, she stared intensely.
She had no money, she had no license. At the time, in between
monthly gigs and rehearsals, she hated herself as a temp worker and
her co-workers disliked her green mohican. So the hate lessened.
What had been a survival mode transmuted into a means to an end.
Within a year or so, she had the license, the insurance, the purple
and yellow winker had been sold, and Sid was riding her dream bike:
a shiny black and bright red version of the purple and yellow
Kawasaki Eliminator.)

But on that day of reminiscing, the misfit
with the freshly greened mohican was traveling by bus. Let’s face
it: riding a motorbike, even a Kawasaki Eliminator 250, was not
ideal with a freshly tattooed and thus sore leg tightly covered
with thick leather. Otherwise, she would have timed the route to
perfection instead of arriving early, but early enough to be
ushered by Pam the receptionist-cum-piercer into the cubicle where
Jessie, her friend and tattooist, was applying the finishing touch
to another masterpiece on the back of Elizabeth Ashtead, an
acquaintance and colleague of Sid, from the acoustic scene.

Sid was always afraid of intruding, getting
tattooed was such an intimate experience for her, something so
special. She hadn’t undressed for anyone else in the last few
years. There was a touch of absurdity to her reasoning: after all,
she wasn’t the only one undressing for Jessie. Even so, the
relationship with her tattooist felt as special as a relationship
with a lover. This said, Sid had never felt intruded upon whenever
Pam had ushered any of Jessie’s friends into the cubicle while Sid
was getting inked. Sid loved living with contradictions.

“What do you think?” Elizabeth’s excited
voice enquired.

“Brilliant!” Sid replied
enthusiastically.

Jessie had added two playful dolphins on an
already abundant collection of sea animals, closing the last blank
on the left shoulder blade. Now, done with whales and octopuses,
Elizabeth was free to design an armful of sea stars, in between
songs with blues and jazz tinges.

“Time for coffee!” Jessie exclaimed after
taping a cling film over the dolphins. “Then we’ll get started on
your leg!”

Yes, this was Sid’s plan: coffee and another
totem pole.

* * * * * * *

Sid, when not plagued by the pain of the
needles, enjoyed chatting with Jessie, picking her brain for
descriptions, definitions and philosophical quotations. She would
generally distinctively articulate the first question crossing her
mind. This particular day for this particular tattoo, it turned out
to be:

“How do you define a Goth?”

Jessie, always the chatty kind, never minded
Sid’s queries, never really wondered where her friend and client’s
curiosity stemmed from. She would cheerfully answered, basing her
observations on her personal experience of squats and pubs,
anarchist camps and other alternatives scenes that Sid would never
tread upon.

“They always wear black.”

“Sounds like me.”

“No, you’re not Goth. You’re too cheerful. A
friend of mine used to go out with a Goth and she dumped him
because he was too cheerful.”

Cheerful, me? Sid thought. Am I really that
good at hiding my depression? A lifetime of practice, so
ironic.

“Stacee is a Goth,” Jessie added.

Stacee had long, black hair, striking black
eyeliner and a taste for skulls. Sid always felt impressed and
small in her presence, and never really knew what to say, afraid of
coming up with the most boring subjects of conversation.

Ok, Sid kept up with her cogitations, not
voicing them out loud,
damn, I cannot be Goth; I’ll never use
make-up in a million years.
She came up with her next
enquiry:

“Ok, how do you define a punk?”

“You’re a punk! There is a political side to
punk that you don’t find with the Goths. Gothic is more like a
fashion.”

Sid had never thought about this detail. The
drilling sound of the tattoo machine carving and inking the skin of
her right leg with various animals piled up in Haida style,
prevented her from expressing her every thought for Jessie’s
benefit. Was Jessie a punk? Maybe: she sported a multicolored
mohican and her make-up was a colourful version of the gothic one.
She had tattoos and piercings aplenty. But Sid, a punk? She felt
like laughing, but the buzzing tattoo machine was somewhat
restraining her laughing muscles, remembering men coming on to her
with the choicy line: “I’m interested in the punk philosophy, too!”
Yeah, sure, no future. But politics? Maybe some punks had turned
anarchists. Nowadays, she couldn’t view herself as such anymore.
She had tried, and failed finding affinities and creating
connections with squatters and anarchists. She had seen punks
staring at her from afar with a look of wonderment plastered all
over their face. Despite her green mohican, Sid was no punk and had
never said so, never enlightened anyone about this detail of
identity, or non-identity. She wasn’t working-class. She was from a
middle-class background. Sure, many punks could identify, but Sid
couldn’t. A rush of tension provoked a snake of sharp pain through
her attended leg, and she went silent, watching Jessie, focused and
precise, cutting through the outer layer of the skin, inking
miracles.

“How are you doing?”

Sid’s bubble burst with sudden relief. She
exhaled a long sigh. The tattoo machine was poised in mid-air.

“Care for a break?” Sid grimaced. She was
brave, but she also liked coffee.

Dreams were the stuff Sid’s life was made of.
Every morning she would wake up and before getting up, would
ritually record the leftover memories in her diary. To wake up and
remember three dreams was a usual occurrence. Or used to be, in the
times before she got on anti-depressants. Now she felt fortunate
when she could remember various snatches of various dreams or even,
luck of luck, glory of glory, a whole dream in Technicolor. She
treasured them. The Dreamworld was more real to her than the
so-called Reality. It was the source and inspiration of her songs,
her strength, her creativity, her life.

She loved it when friends visited her dreams.
It was the one sure sign that they were really her friends, no
matter the geographical distances, the background differences, the
life style circumstances.

Entries of her diary would often read as
follow:

“
Terri visited me in my dream. We talked
music.

Second Look were also in my dreams last
night and the night before last.”

“
Dreamed I was at the Second Look gig but
the Black Crow was a huge venue. They had finished performing and I
was looking for everyone I knew, especially the Second Look virgins
I had convinced to come along. I was finding people and losing them
in the crowd. First, the woman with the gothic looks [?] then
Olivia [who lives in Devon]. I still had to find Angie and Dani.
The dream turned into another dream. The dream was partly about
confusion. I was flying and I saw Terri standing near-by a
building. I waved at her and she waved back. She was there with
another woman, maybe Dawn, but I’m not sure, I couldn’t see the
woman’s features. They walked into the building.”

“
Loneliness biting deep into my heart any
time of the day or night. With all the sharpness of its
fangs.”

“
I feel like a bomb, ticking, ready to
explode.”

“
I am a tortured artist, an arrogant
singer, a writer without scruples.”

“
Dawn was in my dream last night. We were
looking out of the doorway of the Blue Moon, looking out. Looking
out at my motorbike. She asked: “Is it your bike?” I answered:
“Yes.” With pride."