Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (13 page)

And then I have nothing to do. I rummage through some papers in my cupboard. I find a homemade ticket for one of our gigs, and a love poem. Ha Ha.

‘Stop, Ruby,’ I say. ‘Don’t make Cynthia eat the tramp with one foot. I get depressed just thinking about him.’

Ruby looks up from her story.

‘Yes,’ she reflects. ‘So do I.’

We saw him last week in New Cross. He was lying on the pavement with an empty can of Special Brew cradled in his arms. His crutch was leaned up against a shop-front and his ankle stump stuck naked out of his filthy trousers.

‘Another one slipped through the welfare safety net,’ said Ruby, hunting in her bag for a little change.

‘OK,’ she says, looking back at her story. ‘How about this? “Cynthia, moved by sympathy for the one-footed tramp, immediately bursts into an elegant wine bar just round the corner. She savages the rich customers to death
and steals their wallets. Stopping only to eat a spare plate of soup, she gives all the money to the tramp, and also a few bottles of wine.” How’s that?’

‘Fine. I like it.’

‘Right. But don’t expect any more social conscience. Cynthia is crazed in love, and is not responsible for her actions.’

‘Sit down comfortably,’ says Ruby, opening her book of myths and fables, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’

‘Does it have a happy ending?’

‘Yes.’

I sit down comfortably.

With all the standing around sorting mail and loading up trucks in the warehouse my knee starts to hurt continually and I begin to hate business magazines.

There is nothing interesting to read in the magazines, nothing interesting to look at in the warehouse, nothing to do but look forward to the next tea break or the end of the shift.

Where the truck comes in there is a metal door that opens by hydraulics, but at some time in the past a truck has run into it and ripped one side of it open so the warehouse is always cold.

One night a fox ran past the entrance and I found
something funny in a magazine. Even businessmen need cartoons.

I show it round but it turns out that three of the other four people on ‘E’ shift can’t read. This is embarrassing and the embarrassment seems to be my fault. When there is a radio quiz on and I say some of the answers out loud I am generally mocked for being an intellectual. I am also mocked for my Scottish accent. In factories and building sites I am always mocked for my Scottish accent although it is usually friendly, people calling me Haggis and Hamish and saying ‘Och aye the noo.’

‘Abeline,’ begins Ruby, ‘a minor music deity who once used to play the harp to amuse Zeus on Mount Olympus, came to Earth looking for some adventure. He was bored after centuries of bliss on Mount Olympus and also annoyed because Zeus kept on doing terrible things to women he was attracted to, like pretending he was a swan and forcing them to have sex. Also he had a big argument with Apollo after telling him his harp playing was out of date.

‘Abeline strolled around for thousands of years, playing music and having adventures until, some time in the late nineteen-seventies, he realised that there were no adventures to be had anymore and also music had become rather boring.

‘Still unwilling to return to Olympus, he decided to
create an adventure of his own, so he gathered up four musicians and started up a band to make radical music. Abeline played mighty guitar chords that deeply impressed all who listened to them.

‘Apollo came to visit Earth.

‘“Abeline,” he said. “I need you. An upstart young Tree Goddess from Vietnam has been telling everyone that her music is the most divinely beautiful in the Universe. She claims that it drove the Americans from her country. I disapprove of such presumption. We are going to have a contest and I want you to judge it.”

‘“I’m too busy with my band,” protests Abeline. “And I’m not very interested in your sort of music anymore.”’

Apollo tells Abeline that he’d better judge the contest if he knows what’s good for him. Abeline, not wishing to bring divine punishment down on his head, is forced to agree.

‘The contest is attended by all the world’s major deities, except the Buddha, who is beyond competition, and Jasmine, who is too busy trying to comfort all the people with broken hearts.

‘Apollo plays his divine music and the audience applauds rapturously. But when Daita, the Vietnamese Tree Goddess, sings there is no comparison. Her singing is the most beautiful sound ever heard in the Cosmos.

‘“Well?” says Apollo, ominously.

‘“Daita from Vietnam was the best,” says Abeline, honestly.

‘Apollo storms off in a fury but not before taking his revenge. He alters the sales figures so Abeline’s band never make it into the charts and he maliciously influences the critics so they never receive any good reviews.

‘What’s more, Apollo curses Abeline so that no one will ever listen to his ideas about music ever again, so after a brief career as a music journalist Abeline fades into obscurity. And the enraged Apollo also inflicts all of Daita’s descendants with a toxic fever so that, despite their best efforts, the trees will never grow in her country again.

‘Daita, with no trees in her homeland, is unable to sing anymore, but wanders the planet giving help to the poor and oppressed, particularly labourers who have to work all day for low wages.’

Sitting round the table in the restroom with the other labourers on my shift, I listen to them talking about football and women and I try and join in, but I am not good at it and my contributions never ring true. When I make some comment about football there is usually a brief awkward silence, and if someone shows me a pinup in the paper I can never manage to say the right thing. One time Mark looks at a pinup and says, ‘Imagine fucking that, be like throwing peas down the Blackwall Tunnel,’ and everyone laughs but I am completely at a loss as to how to react and it must show because Dave says, ‘What’s the matter, you queer or something?’

I do not know why I can never join in the conversations between groups of men.

I tell my shift that my band has at last recruited a drummer but they are not really the sort of people who are interested in music.

It is the Sunday shift, our last. We finish all our work about two hours before the shift ends. I slump down exhausted on a pile of orange plastic sacks that scratch me through my clothes. A gang of robbers looks in briefly, but they leave almost immediately because we have nothing worth stealing.

The rest of the shift play with the mini forklift and shoot elastic bands at each other. Next week I don’t go back because I can’t stand it anymore so now I have the problem of signing on again. My knee hurts for weeks and I can’t find a PA for the gig.

‘Where is the happy ending?’ I ask Ruby.

‘I lied about it,’ she says.

Ruby’s benefit claim is sorted out but mine is not. Ruby shares her money with me which gives us fourteen pounds a week each to live on, plus the six pounds I make as an artist’s model. I scour the music papers for cheap PAs but all the cheap ones are booked up in advance and the only ones available cost eighty pounds. Eighty pounds is more
than me and Nigel can afford. Perhaps John our new drummer can borrow it.

Nigel phones and says that John is leaving the band.

‘He can’t leave the band. He’s only just joined. We have a gig in two weeks.’

‘He’s been offered a job drumming for someone else. He’s going on tour.’

I tell Nigel about not having a PA either. Things look bleak for our gig.

Helena, Goddess of Electric Guitarists, is sympathetic and shows me how to play a difficult new chord but tells me again that she has no influence over drummers. And she is still sad because her girlfriend has left her. She has run off with Ezekial, God of Acoustic Guitarists, and I find this shocking because acoustic guitars are very boring.

‘Who was that on the phone?’ asks Ruby, who has a big yellow towel round her hair to dry it.

‘Nigel.’

‘Oh. I thought it might have been one of our contacts.’

‘You sent off the postcards?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

When Ruby’s hair is dry I help her tie the thin ribbons into it.

‘What day is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

We look at the television to see what day it is but it won’t tell us so I go round to the shops to buy a paper. The
flower stall doesn’t seem to be there anymore, perhaps without me to buy flowers for Cis it is no longer viable.

Cis is buying some sausages in the butcher’s and I am wondering if I should have a word with her and maybe borrow a few sausages when I am suddenly kidnapped by four gangsters in a huge American car. I think it might be a Chevrolet but I do not really know much about cars.

‘Is this a Chevrolet?’ I ask, gun at my throat, but the gangsters are desperate men and don’t reply, except one of them asks me briefly what part of Scotland I’m from as his parents came from Falkirk.