Sweet (3 page)

And with that the front door slammed and I was alone in my tragic kingdom, with my mop sceptre and scrunchy crown. So of course I did what anyone would have done faced with such indignity – I sat down on the sofa, turned on the telly, found
Trisha
and lit up a spliff. Worker’s playtime!

3

‘One day I was walking to Asda, just chillin’ in the sun

When suddenly it struck me, swearing big-time would be fun!

In the underpass, I shouted, “Ass!” and who should I see

But a slick little chick giving it a go, shouting, “Ho!” right back at me!

Then a third girl, called Rajinder, from the Paki shop—’

I’d had enough. It was only eight in the morning, Saturday, and being woken up by the little bastards after two weeks of toil and torment at the hands of Aggy and Baggy was bad enough, but now they were being racist too – well, Kimmy had told me how bad that was, judging by appearances, and I could see it now, the vile ginger twats. I dragged myself out of my pit, opened my bedroom door and opened my gat-trap to give them a right bosting.

‘SHUT THE SWINE UP, YOU EVIL LITTLE—’

I found the big brown eyes of little Raj, bless, looking up at me. ‘Sorry, Ria. Did I wake you up?’

I pulled my Topshop negligee tight around me.‘It’s not you, sweetheart. It’s those effing brat sisters of mine. Singing a song like that – and making you sing it too!’ I looked around. ‘Where are they?’

‘They’re at a Brownie boot sale for the elderly. Your mum said it was OK if I came round here and practised cos my dad don’t know I’m in Swearers Three. MY song, innit!’ she smirked.

Frankly, I was scandalized. ‘Oh really, mademoiselle! Your parents – I don’t know ’em, but I know the type, because I bullied their younger brothers and sisters at school, regretfully – are gonna be SO PLEASED that you’re boasting about being a swearer. And a Paki – and the word is Pakistani, by the way!’

She had the grace to look ashamed. ‘Actually we’re Punjabi. But if I said “Punji shop”, no one would know what I mean.’

‘Well, whatever. I need to get my beauty sleep, so keep it down.’ Then something occurred to me. ‘Here. Your parents don’t want any help at the Paki – sorry, Punji – shop, do they?’

‘Not from round here,’ she said straight back, the cheeky little mare. ‘My mum says, “Raver behind the till, your profits get ill.” Good, innit! She’s going to write a song for Swearers Three too, but without the swearing.’

‘I’ll be listening out for it on the radio,’ I said sarkily. ‘Well, good luck, but practise somewhere else, OK? I’ve had a pig of a week and I need a good zizz.’

‘Right, Ria,’ she whispered, putting her finger to her lips and tiptoeing off. I couldn’t help smiling – she was a lovely little thing. Shame she couldn’t have been my sister instead of the ginger mingers; if Susie REALLY wanted to have another baby, I wondered if I could get her to do it with a Punjabi guy.

I staggered back to bed, groaning. When I’d settled on to the Baggy-Aggy chaise longue that first day, spliff in hand, I never dreamed how hard my working week was going to turn out to be. I only watched
Trisha
and had a little nap, and when I woke up it was the afternoon and there was a message on the phone from Baggy saying they’d be back at three – I darted round that place with a broom up my arse, literally, before finding a second message saying that they’d be back at eight instead! And by the smile in Baggy’s voice, I knew he’d planned it that way.

And then I came in at nine sharp the next morning, and the house which I’d left looking like something gone over by Kim and Aggie now looked like something done over by the inmates of Battersea Dogs Home. And it had been that way ever since; leave it immaculate three nights a week, find it a tip next time. By the second Friday night, I felt like I had housemaid’s knee, athlete’s foot and, for all I knew, water on the brain. I felt like zero. And I was just £110.60 the richer a week. Before tax.

I lay there in bed, thinking about my alleged ‘job’. What a tragic farce! My mum used to have a friend, Natalia, who was a cleaner for this woman in Hove – you wouldn’t believe the perks! Ten quid an hour basic, two weeks in the Canaries every year and a few little extras that weren’t exactly legal. This broad was always creeping up on Nat and unplugging the vacuum cleaner and making her go out on the piss with her because she was ‘blocked’, whatever that is, and ‘seeking inspiration’ – she was a writer or something. Natalia told my mum they were like sisters, but in the end they fell out over a packet of wine gums, of all the weird things.

As I lay there in my bed of pain, my scullery-maid’s elbow give me gyp, I reflected sourly that I’d be lucky to get even a lick of an empty wine gum wrapper from B&A. I’d taken a Jammie Dodger from their ‘retro-trash’ cupboard on my second day there – and found the cost of the entire packet subtracted from my wages. This, from a pair of ponces that spent fifty pounds a day on flowers from Florian the Florist!

Get this. Yesterday, while having a bit of a poke about – sorry, ‘a thorough clean’ – I found all these leather albums at the bottom of one of them long things that looks like a sort of padded bench but isn’t – the seat opens up, like a box. Inside there was loads of sheets and linen, dead innocent, but I had this sort of instinct that there was something worth seeing underneath it all.

Well, there were half a dozen of these big red books at the bottom of the bed stuff, and soon as I opened up the first one I realized it was Baggy and Aggy’s scrapbooks, bless ’em! You could see why they kept ’em hidden – a) because they photographed like such a pair of freaks and b) because, well, it hardly fitted their image, did it, to be saving their old yellow clippings like a pair of soft schoolgirls! Not with them so cool and cutting edge and techno; the idea of them sitting down with scissors and paste – Aggy constantly criticizing Baggy’s cutting and pasting techniques! – made me feel all warm and gurgly inside, a bit like foreplay. Well, by that time I could have done with a good laugh, so I turned on
Jeremy Kyle
, sat down with a bottle of Sunny V – Sunny D with a splash of vodka – and I treated myself.

It weirded me out at first, seeing them posing and poncing around the very house – the very room! – I was now slurping my Sunny V in: haughty in
Hello!
, impish in
Interiors
, wussy in
Wallpaper
. I skimmed through the interviews and couldn’t help laughing; in every single one, there was some reference to how much they loved women, respected women, worshipped women, designed their clothes to make women feel good. Oh, come ON! Yeah,
right
. I’d heard Baggy on the phone once to one of his mucky-minded mockers: ‘Yep, the minute I popped out of my dear mama, I knew right away that I never wanted to go back into one of those hellholes again,’ he’d sniggered. Of course, doing his bum-chum up the wrong ’un must be
so
much more hygienic!

And it struck me as I read this drivel that you can say what you like about lezzies – bad shoes, rubbish tits, scary voices; only kidding! – but you have to hand it to them, they don’t do this bogus gay man equivalent of going around telling the world how much they love, respect and worship men while doing everything in their power to avoid having any contact more intimate than an air kiss with them. And this made me think of Kizza, and all the sweet times we’d had, and before I knew it I was lying face down on the floor crying like a baby.

Which is probably why I didn’t hear Baggy and Aggy come in.

Well, I thought fast and said that I’d found the albums while I was ‘doing a linen inventory’ and that I couldn’t resist looking at them because I was ‘such a fan’. Believe me, a man’s a man, gay or straight, and nothing wipes their memories or soothes their tempers faster than a bit of flattery. Baggy gets sent to the kitchen to make me what Aggy calls a
‘tasse de Twinings’
– a mouldy old cup of tea to you and me – and Ag himself actually goes so far as to sit his fat ass down with me on the sofa and pat me rather cautiously on the back!

‘Now, love-bucket,’ he goes, ‘what’s all THIS about?’

‘All what?’ I snivel, reluctant to admit some sucker has actually caught me crying.

He gives this little shudder of disgust, which let me tell you is REALLY comforting. ‘The red eyes, the streaming nose, the puffy face – uck!’ Cheers, mate! But I felt a bit better when he went on, ‘Pretty girls should never cry, they ruin themselves. Every pretty girl should have a plain girl to do all her crying for her. Like a whipping boy.’

‘Saucy!’ I said, nudging him. It’s amazing how any sort of flattery cheers me up – uh-oh, so it’s not just men then! – even from a snobby old woofter.

‘Easy, tiger lily!’ he winced. Baggy was sort of hovering in the doorway, and Aggy clicked his fingers at him. ‘Begone, Bag-features! – I must seek the soul of our pikey princess!’

Well, I didn’t much like the sound of that, but it turned out to be well sweet. Like my sixth shoplifting sense, I sort of knew what he wanted to hear. And so I told him about Kimmy, and her being in love with me, and me being in love with her when it was too late. And his eyes got bigger and bigger, and his face got closer and closer and then his arms opened up and he grabbed me and held me and cried, ‘My poor baby! So you’re NOT a breeder after all! What a horrid time you’ve had – we must do something lovely for you . . .’

And then he’d pulled away, and I’d pulled myself together and gone home. And so here I was, two weeks into my career as a cleaner to the Brighton flitterati, wondering if anything new truly lurked around the corner, or whether it was just a load of camp cobblers. Whatever, I wouldn’t know until Monday morning, so I might as well get my kip while I could.

I felt myself finally drifting off into sleep . . .

‘Then a third girl, called Rajinder, from the Paki shop,

Joined our cussing crew, and the dissing didn’t stop!

The lesson art, when swearing starts, colour doesn’t count –

Black, white, brown or yellow, come and curse in large amounts!’

4

Well, do me three different ways if on Monday morning B&A didn’t have a nice surprise for me. I let myself in and there in the kitchen, instead of a can of Cif, a used-up old Brillo pad and a note telling me to keep my mitts off their Party Rings, there were the boy-toyers themselves with scissors, tape measures and rough paper laid out on the table in front of them.

Baggy gave me a sickly grin, like Santa the morning after a night down the the K-hole. ‘Surprise!’

Aggy stood up and waddled towards me, taking my hand. ‘Sit down, my dear.’ Well, my philosophy is never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie, so I was well up for this unexpected development. But what came next really floored me.

‘Maria, we feel we have misjudged you,’ he said solemnly. I put on this marge-wouldn’t-melt expression, all the time wondering furiously what the snooty swines had been judging me as – and the CHEEK that this pair of freaks had been judging anybody fair rendered me speechless too, which was lucky. ‘Until last Friday, we thought you were – well, I won’t mince words –’ About the only thing you wouldn’t mince, mate! – ‘we thought you were a typical chavette. An under-educated, over-made-up breeder, to be blunt. Just one of those Ravendene drones that’s pregnant at fifteen, a grandma by thirty and quite frankly fit only for cat meat by forty –’ He shuddered, then brightened up. ‘But you’re not – you’re a baby dyke! You’re one of us!’

Well, this was what you called a backhanded compliment and being damned with faint praise rolled into one, I figured as I smiled sweetly back at Aggy. On one hand it was a change not to be written off as a pikey pillock for once – but on the other hand, did I really want to join Aggy and Baggy’s gang? I mean, look at the pair of ’em! – walking wounded when it came to looks, for sure. Came off the wrong end of a scrap with the ugly stick, and then some. I’ve noticed this quite a lot during my short life, as a matter of fact – that those who put others down for being ugly, thick, having no style and all that are often complete mingers themselves; it’s like they’ve got a magic mirror stashed somewhere telling them they’re the fairest of them all, whereas in reality they haven’t got a – short, fat, hairy – leg to stand on. ’Cept me, natch – I insult mingers from the solid ground of supreme beauty!

But the main thing that really made me swear behind my smile and want to bite the hand that was now trying to force-feed me compliments was that he was more or less describing my mum with that nasty little number about Ravendene breeders. OK, so Susie had had me at eighteen rather than fifteen – she’d wanted to see a bit of life first, remember! – but I could see her daft sweet smiling face as clearly as if she was standing in front of me when Aggy shuddered at the idea of breeders. And then course there was me and Ren – unknown to them their little dyke was also a dirty horrid breeder after all. And you know, there’s lots of good things about gayers – they always know where to get good E, and their club nights are banging – but there is this horrible way a lot of them, down here in Brighton at least, seem to see straight people, particularly working-class women, as these dumb cows just chewing cud and churning out kids whose hungry little mouths are eating up their disposable income that might better be spent on handjobs and man-bags. They’re always writing narky letters to the papers complaining that their taxes have to pay for schools and that – but if the breeders didn’t breed where would the hairdressers come from that save their lives when they’ve given themselves a bad fringe while off their nuts on Special K? Be real, they couldn’t clone ’em off a big old gay conveyor belt – they want to thank the breeders for breeding their servants for them! No, the way I look at it, we’re all in it together; it’s not meant to be like the Warlocks and the e-boys or whatever in that mental film about the time machine that Samantha Mumba was in.

But I didn’t say none of this – just grinned and nodded like a loved-up toy doggy in the back window of some sad car.