Ten Storey Love Song (16 page)

Hola!
Salvador laughs – he can’t even tell if his eyes are open or shut or not. Freaking out, Salvador puts his head in his hands, serving another gust of Chanel into his sleeve. Watch out Sal, here comes the automatic writing! Holistic chicken made tea don’t you hedgerow all oil trousers ink sprayed salmon on its chest possibly a frog leopard print snout man looking grumpy boulevard legs eleven prostitute hamsters won fifty pounds at a masquerade after leaving four cups of juicy lemon spiked a nut on the dame of Duke York post-natal dream dismay and a forehead keeps singing on the phone to conker forest of evil and wormy stretch ouch bastard gondolier tra la la Cornetto Tonga hand grenade hooray hippo snarling under grasp only showing remorse for the budgie that sung sweetly so sweetly but died after having injection to the neck holy water tomato onion banana ketchup see-saw then Ellen Ellen Ellen. ‘Bobby, what are you doing?’ Ellen asks, stepping into the bathroom and it’s really her, not a mirage. ‘I let myself in, door was open,’ she continues, fluffing her gold hair. She looks at Bobby the Artist laid upside-down in the bath, arms and legs flailing. He rubs his eyes. He mumbles something quite bonkers like, ‘I’m fishing,’ then he sits up really straight and says, ‘Fuck. What are you doing here?’ Ellen smiles, strokes her hair again, then replies, ‘Well, you said you were going to paint me, remember?’ Ellen, like the other girls in the block, has started taking a real shine to Bobby – in fact, she’s always thought he’s very attractive and different and lovely, and the past few days she’s enjoyed coming round and watching him draw and smoking draw with him. Bobby doesn’t remember saying he’d paint her, but then again he doesn’t even remember the clownfish now, and he starts to stand up and get his head together like a thousand puzzle pieces chucked across the floor. The acid’s still going strong and real-life objects keep turning to dreams and dreams keep turning to objects, and to be honest the idea of painting in such a psychotic state excites him very much. Bobby the Artist slides into the living room with his back against the wall, avoiding the white water rapids in the closet, then finds any old bit of canvas and pins it to his brand-new multipurpose easel. He squirts fresh acrylic onto a fresh palette, watching in awe the multicoloured dog turds squirting out of the tubes. ‘So, how do you want me?’ Ellen asks, biting her tongue. She can tell Bobby’s off his rocker, but she’s had a litre of vodka and all, and she tries to stand there all provocative in her Lycra top and blue miniskirt. Bobby, distracted for a second by the VCR smiling at him, blinks once or twice then says to Ellen, ‘Aw, however you want … do what you want.’ Ellen turns her lips into a sort of red heart-shape, still twizzling that lemon hair of hers. ‘Shall we take this into the bedroom?’ she asks with eyebrows like archways, and Bobby’s a bit too fucked to really understand the proposition. ‘Sound, well er, well the easel’s a bit bulky like but … alright then,’ he mumbles. He drags the easel leg by leg into the boudoir, Ellen licking her lips and getting all randy and excited. ‘Horny little cunts,’ says the VCR, behind their backs. In the bronze bedroom, Ellen stands perfectly still by the window, adopting a languid pose while Bobby takes ages setting up the canvas again. He thinks he sees a winking hippo in his pile of argyle sweaters, the whole room pulsing with joy. He starts laughing hysterically. Sniffing, Ellen does a dramatic yawn then suggests, ‘I can take all my clothes off, if you want?’ She knows there’s a couple of hours before Georgie gets home, and she’s sure Georgie wouldn’t feed her raw razor blades even if they did get up to something naughty. Suddenly waking up, Bobby the Artist gulps then grins and says, ‘Oh aye, sound. I’ll give you some coin, like …’ Ellen’s eyes fl-flicker like light-bulbs as Bobby delves into one of his argyle socks, removing a few twenty pound notes and handing them to Ellen in super slow-motion. She finds it quite arousing being treated like a sort of harlot and, as she posts the money into her fake Prada handbag, she wonders just how she’ll get Bobby’s clothes off as well. ‘You’re dead sweet,’ she breathes. Blinking casually, Ellen pulls off her tight Lycra top like a peeled banana, but instead of yellow flesh she’s got tanning underneath and her best bra from H&M. Her heart’s pumping. She thinks she prefers shagging random lads rather than despairing all the time over regular, monotonous sex.
Ah, if
only Johnnie was a stallion in bed
, she thinks to herself, unsnapping her bra and flinging it all choreographed over Bobby’s easel. Her and the lasses from upstairs once went to lap-dancing classes at a workshop in Newcastle – to impress their fellas as well as getting a bit in shape – and Ellen swivels her hips like a sultry cobra while Bobby the Artist gets his brushes together. He’s intrigued at how soft and malleable the wood feels in his fingers. They almost seem to droop in his hands like Dalí’s floppy clocks, and he sings a few bars of laughter in his head. It’s only when Ellen shimmies her blue skirt down her legs and pulls down her pants that Bobby snaps out of it. Sometimes seeing beautiful girls naked can be a slight disappointment (after all, clothes were invented to hide all your shameful bits), but Ellen standing there all perfect and naked and with shaved doo-dah and pyramid tits makes Bobby’s hands tremble, and all the brushes plop out of his fingers like a pile of slimy snakes. Ellen lets out a little embarrassed giggle for him, and she thinks Bobby looks even cuter as he bends over like Mr Stretchy to pick them up again, and she says to him, ‘Don’t worry about them.
Leave
them
.’ She does a little cough, waiting for Bobby to pounce on her, but he just stands up again all flustered and says, ‘Aw right, yeah, good idea; I’ll get the palette knives out.’ Ellen chortles. She’s a bit confused about Bobby’s playing-hard-to-get behaviour, but he’s definitely worth the effort. A little birdy (Georgie) once told her he’s a brilliant shag and, although it does feel weird being stark naked in Georgie’s bedroom, Ellen manages to keep focused. She strikes the ultimate slutty pose, hands on hips with tits aiming skyward and a face like a dribbling orgasmic puppy. ‘Get on the bed then,’ Bobby says, and she shudders with pleasure. She crawls pussycatty onto the bronze covers, all the springs underneath squeaking and giggling. Bobby’s eyes are turning windmills. ‘Fucking hell,’ he drools, Ellen knelt in the doggy position with her holes exposed, opening and closing. She does wonder for a second if Bobby’s going to take her there and then without any foreplay or even touching or kissing, but in the braincell next door to that one she thinks that might be rather spectacular too. But Bobby’s got other things on his mind and, as he starts furiously slapping paint onto the raggy old bit of canvas, it quickly dawns on Ellen she’s going to be crouched in that uncomfy position for at least half an hour, with not one whiff of sex. There’s only that faint whiff of fresh acrylic paint, which is sort of chemicals mixed with fish piss. Bobby smiles to himself, blissfully unaware that he could’ve slotted his penis in her and she wouldn’t care, instead feverishly painting with lots of pinks and creams and bubblegums. On the canvas, Ellen’s skinny legs start to grow really stick-thin and exaggerated like a lanky Modigliani – it’s a nice change not to be painting Georgie’s chubby thighs for once. Oh, how many sweets that woman eats! He finds it strange how Georgie keeps complaining about getting fat but she still keeps nailing the Haribo, and it seems the more she talks about it, the bigger she gets. If only she could keep her mouth shut … Sighing a sizeable siren, Bobby the Artist carries on painting, adding spunky white where the light catches Ellen’s thigh, creamy pink wiggly bits round her tits, and a squirt of blood-orange up her fanny hole. To be honest it’s a bit of a shambles, all the colours flowing into each other and getting muddy, but it was Ellen’s idea to paint it with a fucking palette knife, wasn’t it. He’s not sure what to do – everything looks so different on LSD (and so disappointing in the morning), and it’s hard to tell what changes to make when the shapes keep changing themselves. After a bit, Ellen (still spread-eagled on the duvet cover) starts getting deep-vein thrombosis in her arms and legs – and she starts feeling silly being so exposed like that on Georgie’s bed – and she asks Bobby, ‘Are you nearly done yet?’ Bobby steps back, blinking at the blob with fanny and bum on the canvas. ‘
Voilá
,’ he says, adding one last splurge of pinky green yellow. Bobby’s got a humdinger of a headache now the acid’s beginning to wear off, like a beautiful tide going out leaving behind lots of rusty ships and rotting fish, and he flops onto the bed with a groan and a wail. Ellen blows out a scream of relief, then she quickly pulls on her fluorescent clothes again. She has a little shiver, then steps round the easel to inspect the ‘Blob with Fanny and Bum’ (?x?cm). Ellen smiles, feeling strangely aroused at Bobby having given her precious bits such close scrutiny. ‘Nice arse, eh?’ Ellen says to Bobby, trying one last time to get him turned on, but Bobby’s just a broken toy on the bedcovers. He’s so exhausted – it really takes it out of you, painting naked lasses. Ellen scrunches her face up, a bit drained herself and annoyed for not having gotten a shag, but to be fair Bobby looks completely dead – it’s not worth raping him. Ellen has one last glance at herself on the canvas, then at Bobby facedown on the bed, then tugs another twenty or forty quid out of his argyle sock and leaves the flat. Bobby the Artist snores a little ‘See you later’ when the door slams, emotionally knackered but unable to sleep, like he’s plugged into the a/c mains and he can’t reach the switch to turn himself off. He lies there for five minutes with his eyes open but pushed pitch-black into the pillow, then he grumbles and gets up and puts on his kangaroo pyjamas, and tries again. But it’s still no use – the tower block’s too noisy, and his brain’s too much of an open encyclopaedia with all the pages torn out and thrown about. When Georgie gets home from Bhs he can’t really be bothered to talk to her, instead playing dead on the bedcovers while his head fizzes and pops and splutters. Georgie sniffs. She looks at him, then looks at the porny portrait of Ellen with sad glittery eyes, and retires to the living room to make soup and eat Cherry Drops on her own in silence. She doesn’t see or speak to her boyfriend for the rest of the night, and in the morning when he wakes up and she’s back in the Bhs, Bobby’s skull still wrecks but with a little more clarity or reality in there, like someone’s opened a few windows in his brain and let the day in. He wakes up to very aggressive knocking on the front door. Sitting bolt upright in bed, Bobby rubs his matted sweaty hair, mouth full of shaving foam. ‘Bobby?! Bobby?!’ the front door yells, with a real tenseness in its voice. ‘It’s Johnnie – open up!’ Bobby the Artist sniffs, wondering what Johnnie wants and why he sounds so irate. He thuds out of bed in his undercrackers, pulling on a pink argyle then sipping some old Soave and searching about for relevant trousers. Suddenly it dawns on Bobby he’s got a naked picture of Johnnie’s girlfriend standing there for all the world to see. Panicking, he quickly tugs on some corduroy drainpipes, then scrabbles through the overturned rubbish for more paints and a paintbrush not completely caked in acrylic. ‘Bobby!! Open the fucking door,’ Johnnie stresses, sounding quite impatient. Bobby trembles. The portrait of Ellen towers over him all randy and delicious, bearing all the horrible sins of Bobby’s pervy mind, like Dorian Gray doing a centrefold for
Men
Only
. He’s got no idea how he got Ellen in such an uncompromising position last night, and it’s certainly not something he wants her boyfriend – the notorious jealous headcase – to lay his peepers on. So Bobby scoops big blobs of fluorescent green onto the horsehair brush, and rapidly covers over Ellen’s naked toosh with one thick stroke, then her left tit, then the whole of ‘Blob with Fanny and Bum’ (?x?cm). Breathing sharply, Bobby the Artist feels like such a cunt and falls cross-legged to the ground with a thud. All censored like that, the painting makes him think of this famous Gustav Klimt piece, which he learnt about at art college down the Roman Road. ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer’ is this wonderful gold thing, with Adele peeping out all serene from these huge pretty patterns covering the canvas. Well it turned out Gustav Klimt was shagging this bird Adele (who was the wife of a sugar baron, who’d paid him to do the portrait), and the crazy ornate patterns were just there to cover up the saucy naked sketches underneath. Gustav told the sugar baron the gold represented his wealth, and the poor unfortunate fellow was over the moon with it. ‘Bobby!! Bobby!!’ the front door screams again. ‘Two seconds!’ Bobby replies, trying to sound chirpy. He sways cautiously towards the shrieking door, then undoes the catch and gently swings it open. In storms Johnnie, face all red and sweaty, and armed with a hammer. It’s an Estwing curved claw hammer, weighing in at 0.57kg, with a 2.5cm diameter polished steel head at one end, razor-sharp claw at the other, a 9cm long solid-forged neck, black rubber shock reduction grip with the Estwing logo printed on both sides, and Johnnie’s right hand wrapped around it. It could easily pummel an artist’s head in. ‘Er, how’s it going, friend?’ Bobby asks softly, telling himself in his head he’s a friend he’s a friend he’s a friend. Johnnie raises the hammer. ‘What’s going on with you and Ellen?!’ he squeals, purple veins popping out of his forehead like strangled worms. ‘Er,’ Bobby mumbles, feeling a bit dumb. ‘I know all them lasses from upstairs are coming down and getting their tits out for you,’ Johnnie snaps, throwing his left hand at all the softcore canvases perched behind the fluorescent green abstract expressionist one, ‘Katey’s obsessed with you now, lucky cunt. I know Ellen’s been down here, and all. And she came back with loads of money last night … Have you fucking shagged her or something? Are you shagging all of them?’ Johnnie starts to speak really panicky, and it’s typical of him to wind himself up all the time to the point of frenzy, and he ends up clutching the walls and frothing at the mouth. His heart feels like a wrecking-ball, and it pounds his insides. Bobby the Artist puts his hands up in mercy, then tries to pat Johnnie on the side and say, ‘I couldn’t cheat on Georgie, don’t worry, mate.’ Johnnie’s hand slackens on the hammer grip, and his eyes dip like flying saucers as he speaks. ‘You’ve got it so fucking good though, Bobby. I mean, as if all the birds are all over you now … bastard … God, if you’ve fucking laid a finger on Ellen …’ Johnnie’s fist tightens again. He’s so desperate to put that hammerhead through somebody’s skull, and out the other side. Sniffling, Bobby explains, ‘Johnnie, I know I’m getting popular and that, but there’s no need to go mad … Erm, I’m going to be in demand, know what I mean? It’s natural,’ though he definitely feels like a wanker standing amongst all the porny pictures of ladies in their underduds. ‘All these lasses mean nowt to me,’ he continues, ‘they’re just models. You know, like, mannequins. I’ve just been getting wrecked, you know, painting them in a daze and that. Half the time I don’t even know they’re naked. You’re not missing much.’ As if to prove his point, Bobby the Artist starts scrabbling through the litter round the TV, searching for something. He chucks video cases and acrylic tubes and old sweets out from underneath him, like an ostrich burying its head in the carpet. Johnnie raises an eyebrow. Half a minute later Bobby comes up trumps, handing Johnnie a scuffed VCR tape with ‘Un Hommage de Monsieur Condom, 2005’ emblazoned on the sleeve. ‘Look, Johnnie, here, have this video. I don’t know if it’s any consolation like, but it’s got me and Georgie shagging on it. I might’ve seen the girls upstairs with their tits out and that, but this is proper off it … Georgie’s fanny and that … go on, take it, I don’t mind.’ At first Johnnie feels sickened by such a weird gesture, but then again he is an avid fan of pornography, and he clutches the video in a sweaty claw. Now he’s not sure if he wants to punch a wall down or pull his pants down. ‘You dirty bastard,’ Johnnie scoffs. Bobby the Artist puts his hands in the surrender position again. He knows that – when faced with madheads of Johnnie’s nature – it’s best just to smile and nod and agree with them. Bobby sniffs up a few wet bogies, then strokes his own hair nervously and says, ‘Howay, Johnnie, we’re mates, me and you. Look, here, have this as well …’ And Bobby rifles through his pockets for another fifty or sixty quid, and handshakes it into Johnnie’s palm. Johnnie’s eyes brighten, then he slowly starts to grin again and hugs Bobby round the neck. The hammer goes plonk to the ground. ‘Cheers, man,’ he says, feeling daft now for going so schizo. Bobby the Artist feels like a bit of a knob and all. The two of them stand silently in the faint glow of white clouds, not sure what else to say, and Bobby puts on one of the jangly Stone Roses best ofs to try and lighten the mood. ‘Fools Gold’ twangs out of the rusty speakers – that song about how people who come into a bit of money can turn into complete dicks. Shuddering, Bobby the Artist looks to the ground. He’s starting to hate himself. It’s all very well bribing Johnnie to avoid a hammer through the face, but somehow Bobby feels his personality’s getting taken over completely by money. The other day Georgie caught him constructing a house out of money, the pound coins all elegant pillars and stairways, and the notes all lovely balconies and mezzanine floors. Soon all his paintings will be about arrogance and greed and backstabbing. Sighing, Bobby the Artist watches a bird flop past the window. Johnnie clutches the money in his Henri Lloyd jacket, feeling a lot calmer, and with Bambi-ish eyes he tells Bobby, ‘Soz, you know, for having a go at you. I, I know you wouldn’t fuck about with Ellen …’ Bobby the Artist tries to interject and say all those typical things like no-no-it’s-alright and don’t-be-daft, but Johnnie stops him mid-breath and continues, ‘You’re a good mate of mine … it’s just I’ve been fucking frustrated recently like …’ Bobby picks a bit of fluorescent green out of his fingernail, looking at the carpet, then he glances at Johnnie and asks, ‘How come?’ Johnnie flaps his eyelids like big Chinese fans, then he sighs the word ‘Urrgh!’ and explains, ‘I feel daft for saying it like, but I’m going through a shit patch with Ellen. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a mint shag and that, it’s just I’m having a bit of trouble pleasing her, you know, in the sack and that. It’s driving me mad. I dunno what’s wrong with me.’ Bobby the Artist continues staring at the carpet while Johnnie speaks, feeling a bit guilty and embarrassed listening to a hardcase speaking so candidly about his shit sex-life. Bobby rubs his neck nervously, then offers, ‘Erm, I’m sure you’ll be alright. She loves you.’ Johnnie’s eyebrows do a Mexican wave, then his face drops again and he says, ‘But it’s not alright, mate. I’m serious. It’s like, I keep blowing my load dead early, or I can’t get it up, or she’s dry as owt …’ Bobby suppresses a snigger in his belly. Johnnie almost starts gyrating in the doorway, all the stress and panic getting to him again, but Bobby pats his tense shoulder and looks him in the eye and suggests, ‘Look, Johnnie, maybe you’ve just got to relax a bit. I mean, take her out for a romantic meal or something – girls go mad for that. Take things slow, treat her nice and all that … just