Ten Storey Love Song (21 page)

Emmerdale
on. He gets a phone call around 7.23pm from David H. Stephenson telling him he’s getting the sack and that his HGV and dangerous substances licence could be under threat and never to come back to the power plant ever again, and Alan Blunt sits down on the knackered sofa and changes the channels a few times. He sees a cloud out of the window. The wind seems to be blowing quite fiercely. After a couple sips of tea, Alan leaves his cup on the side then goes downstairs for a litre bottle of Bell’s, remembering first to wrap himself up. He tucks his red SACRE BLEU FRANCK QUEDRUE scarf into his deerhide jacket, then walks sadly across the road, not bothering really to look both ways but there’s nothing coming anyway. He buys the whisky, staring dumbly at the two Pakistani boys serving. He tumbles back up the stairs of Peach House. He swallows the whole bottle of Bell’s, blacks out on the sunken settee, then goes back down to the shop in the crystally misty morning for another one. In the same clothes as last night, Alan looks like the gruesome ghost of a football manager, and the boys at the shop make jokes to each other in a foreign language and Alan considers bashing them over the head with the bottle but the booze is too precious to lose. He doesn’t bother saying thank you or goodbye to them. Back on the autumnal estate, Alan gazes up at the three towers shivering like fat icepops, then glances at his watch under the deerhide sleeve. It’s 10.15am – the kids at Corpus Christi will be on morning break – and, huddling the bottle of Bell’s in his mitts, Alan smiles and breathes circles of steam and marches sharply towards the school gates. Oh Tiny Tina, there you are skipping around in a great oversized parka! And bare legs! How naughty! Tiny Tina, pulling her own pigtails as she darts amongst the boys and girls, smiles jubilantly to be out in the fresh air. Her class have just been learning about the Egyptians, and she prances around dreaming of Pharaohs and pyramids. ‘I’m Cleopatra I’m Cleopatra!’ Little Tracy yelps, over by the hop-scotch. ‘No I’m Cleopatra I’m Cleopatra!’ her friend Little Nicole screams, going down the slide. Tomorrow they’ll be Florence Nightingales or Joans of Arc. Skipping past, Tiny Tina giggles to herself, skidding on the slippy tarmac. She thinks the Egyptians are great. Her teacher Carol can be quite disgusting though, telling the kids how the mummies get their brains scooped out of their noses with a long hook. Tina hopes her own mummy won’t get her brains scooped out. Sniffling, Tiny Tina keeps dashing round the playground, trying her best not to think about the gory bits. She runs to the opposite side of the playground, following the painted yellow lines of the netball court. She plays trains for a bit, but she’s the only carriage. Over by the frosty gate, she spots Mr Spooks staring at her, but she carries on charging round the playground regardless. Mr Spooks is her name for the scary old man who stands at the fence every other day, staring at the kiddies. He’s frightening! Mr Spooks coughs, then takes a swig from a bright gold bottle. Zipping up mummy’s coat, Tiny Tina jumps around on the spot getting chilly, wondering if the boys over by the compost heap will let her join in their cops and robbers game. Just as she’s about to sprint off over there, Mr Spooks coughs again and, for the first time ever, shouts something at her. ‘Come here, darling!’ Alan Blunt the Cunt spurts, clutching the Bell’s and one bar of the sticky, frosty fence. His face is full of remorse and booze and bogies. ‘Aaargh!’ Tiny Tina yelps, almost bursting into tears to hear such a horrible voice. She’s worried he wants to hook her brains out. ‘Aaargh!’ she screams again, rushing over to her teacher Carol, who stands every breaktime by the cloakroom door making sure none of the kids get in. Tiny Tina throws her little plasticine arms round Corpus Christi Carol’s legs, not yet crying but it’s brewing inside her like a storm big enough to capsize several boats. ‘What is it what is it?’ Carol asks, stroking Tina’s piggytails, then all of a sudden she sees Alan standing over by the gates in his musty deerhide jacket and she storms over to confront him. Alan has been a nuisance to Corpus Christi for a good seven months – the amount of time Tina has been at the school, incidentally. A day seldom goes by when he’s not standing there at the gates ogling the schoolgirls, but whenever she tries to have eye contact with him Alan just wanders off sadly without causing a fuss. Today though, Alan’s hammered, and he stares viciously at the lanky woman striding across the yard. Corpus Christi Carol spits through the bars, ‘What do you want?’ Alan, slightly taken aback, points at Tiny Tina (who instantly jumps behind Carol like she’s been zapped by lightning) then slurs, ‘Look, just let me talk to her. L-let me play with her.’ Disgusted, Corpus Christi Carol screws all her wrinkles up then, spotting the Bell’s bottle vibrating in Alan’s fist, snarls, ‘Look, I think you’d better leave.’ Sobs welling up in Tina’s and Mr Spooks’s eyes, Alan brings his face closer to the bars of the primary school and calls to the little girl, ‘Come here! Come here! Come here!’ Bursting into full-blown tears, Tiny Tina bursts off across the playground and hides herself safely in the girls’ toilets. She trembles on the shut seat, crying for her mummy. Back in the yard, absolutely distraught, Alan takes a long desperate slug of whisky. Then he has a splutter, still clutching the metal fence. ‘Look, if you don’t leave, I’m calling the police!’ Corpus Christi Carol yells. Alan Blunt’s head drops, and he mumbles to himself, ‘I
am
the fucking police.’ But his police days are long gone of course, and he nods gravely at Carol then turns and staggers off across the road. There’s still not enough cars on Cargo Fleet Lane to run him over. The walk back to Peach House seems to take forever. Every four or five steps, Alan stops to drink from the Bell’s. He hears the primary school bell go off in the distance. So much for Tina’s Big Kidnap. A tear drops out of his eye, then tears start dropping out of the sky as well, and Alan quickens his pace before the deerhide jacket gets absolutely drenched. What a terrible day. He ducks into Ladbrokes before heading up the tower, which is like a wee garden shed glued to the side of the Brambles Farm Hotel. Slumping on the desk, he puts a fiver E/W on all the horses with the saddest names at Cheltenham and Musselburgh, and none of them wins him any money. Sniffing, Alan slurps more drink then makes the gloomy ascent back up Peach House. In the safety of the tower block, Alan shakes off a few drips and drops, sparking up his last Regal. He takes alternate sucks on the fag and the glass bottle, feeling really fucked again and not totally sure what’s going on. All the bad news of a shitty grey day seems like a dull unspecific kick to the head. Sniffing and snortling, Alan Blunt the Cunt unlocks the door to his flat. He’s dismayed to find Johnnie and Ellen pounding the
Cream
Anthems Vol. 6
at full volume through his bedroom wall. They’ve just come home from some twenty-four-hour bender round town, but that’s no fucking excuse. Alan has a good long stare out of his bedroom window, the tiny toy-town houses spinning round down below and the primary school only just out of view. He slams the curtains shut. The clocks went back the other day; now even the afternoons feel really dark and miserable. He wonders if he’s getting the SAD disorder. Finishing the fag, Alan sits down on his unmade beige bed, immersing himself in booze and moody spiralling thoughts, until suddenly he’s disturbed by his fat mobile phone going off in the deerhide jacket. ‘Who the fuck could that be?’ he asks himself. Corpus Christi Carol phoning to apologise? David H. Stephenson offering him his job back? Tiny Tina? Alan lifts himself from the bed and lifts the heavy walkie-talkie to his ear. ‘Yeah?’ he says. Surprise surprise, it’s more bad news. Alan Blunt crumples in a heap again on the sweaty bed. It’s the Loan Company, demanding two months’ missed payments, and reminding him politely that he may face legal action or bailiffs should he fail to pay up. The persuasive cunt on the other end gets Alan to promise he’ll ‘definitely have the cash by Thursday’, then he wishes Alan good day and hangs up. All red-faced and panicky, Alan slams the phone down, then turns it off at the OFF button. He puts it down the toilet and has a shit on top of it. Two minutes later, two floors down, Bobby the Artist sees a phone-shaped turd fly past the window. It refused to flush. Blinking curly eyelashes, Bobby can’t tell if he’s hallucinating or not. He’s defrosting a sheet of acid in the kitchen, trying to weigh up the pros and cons of swallowing it. The Scary Incident with the Cannabis put the fear of God in him, but without drugs it’s been a miserable boring day, and the three cans of Kronenbourg he devoured earlier have only worsened his mood. Johnnie dropped off another load of Class As last night, and he hopes to God he doesn’t see evil things again. He figures Pamela must’ve gotten a bad batch of resin and it’s not really his mind falling apart, and his drug days aren’t over and he won’t die from psychological devastation. Plus, it’s lovely and orange and autumny today and Bobby wants to go down the park to attempt some sketches and kick-start his career as an artist again, and he couldn’t possibly do it sober. Packing up a few HB and 2B pencils and putty rubber and sharpener, Bobby reassures himself again and again he’ll be okay, then he rips off five of the strawberry blotters and casually pokes them down the chute with the last two sips of warm Kronenbourg. He plods through to the living room. This morning Bobby was pleased to find the skulls had disappeared from the carpet; however, they now seem to have been replaced by loads of swastikas on the wallpaper. Bobby shakes his head, pulling on a second argyle sweater, then he scampers down the staircase two or three steps at a time. Maybe it’s just the living room that’s going mental, not him. Bobby the Artist steps out onto the leafy car park, drawing pad clutched firmly under his turquoise sleeve. The sun’s in and out of clouds as he wanders through the estate; it’s chilly willy. He coughs into the sky. It’s funny how different you feel walking on your own than with a group of friends – you become so aware and paranoid about how you look, how many steps to take before mounting that kerb there, and Bobby finds himself getting in people’s way a lot more. He’s like a sleepwalker. Gazing straight ahead, Bobby successfully dodges a banana skin on the edge of Cargo Fleet Lane, and he hopes no one put it there on purpose to trip him up. He sighs into his chest, looking forward to getting to the safety of the park. Picking up the pace down Cranmore Road, Bobby whistles ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, waiting for the acid to kick in. Every so often he thinks the trees might be getting a bit greener, or the sky might be getting a bit faster, but it’s all just in his head. Wandering onwards, he wishes he’d brought some gloves – his fingers are like frozen chips. He shoves his mitts in his corduroy pockets then carries on down the street, his mind drifting slightly like a kite getting caught on the breeze. Down past the bungalows at Addington Drive, Bobby the Artist feels his pupils gently dilate and, lo and behold, the pavements start to get swirly and he smiles into the collar of his top. So far so good. The sun comes out at 3.33pm and suddenly the estate’s all beautiful and Bobby starts to skip between the lovely letter-boxes and wheelie bins and drain covers. He admires the black and white spots of that bright Dalmatian over there. It doesn’t even seem that cold any more – weather just seems a figment of imagination; if Bobby wants to be warm, he’s warm. Look! The beck’s all full of diamonds and crystals! Grinning away, Bobby enjoys just
derive
-ing about the estate, everything seeming new and exciting – especially the red of that red pool of blood up Chertsey Avenue! He’s in a brilliant mood. Bobby’s so pleased he’s not a paranoid wreck, and he continues pacing along Cranmore getting deeper and deeper into the trip. At 4.44pm it all goes horribly wrong. The sun creeps behind a cumulonimbus, and suddenly the street seems a bit more sinister and daunting, and Bobby’s heart stammers at the darkness closing in. He feels cold again. He shivers in his two jumpers, and then he makes a fatal mistake – he wonders what it’d be like if he started getting paranoid again. The thought of it makes his ribcage clatter, and he catches a glimpse of his reflection in a car windscreen and he thinks he sees Dracula again. ‘Shit,’ Dracula mumbles, in the darkened glass. Trembling, Bobby nearly falls off the kerb, wishing he was back in the flat. He has a bit of an internal monologue with himself, repeating, ‘It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright,’ but he knows it’s not going to be alright. Nevertheless, he reckons things might be better in the park, and he tries to walk very cool and nonchalant down the rest of Cranmore Road. He avoids eye contact with his own reflection in the passing cars. All wobbly, Bobby the Artist keeps a tight grip of his sketchpad and pencils, trying his best to think light, happy thoughts like stroking kittens and playing beach volleyball and picking dandelions and sawing young children’s arms and legs off. Whoops! Spluttering, Bobby the Artist continues down the rock-hard pavement, keeping his eyes fixed on that patch of green field up ahead but it seems fucking miles away now. He cringes. There seem to be people in the bushes laughing at him. Is Halloween a bit earlier this year, or is it just the acid? The more Bobby tells himself to relax and remember it’s just a drug it’s just a drug it’s just a drug, the worse the whole ordeal gets, as if his brain’s got a huge revolting grin and it’s sniggering at him. It’s like throwing a pack of cards in the air and all of them landing face-up jokers. Carrying on down the street, Bobby watches wide-eyed as trees start to take on the appearance of witches’ claws, erupting from people’s front gardens. Birds on rooftops that started out as pigeons fly off as black bloodthirsty crows and ravens, circling overhead and chanting ‘Bobby Bobby Bobby’. This is completely uncharted territory for him – previously, the worst trips Bobby ever had were when he thought people were talking about him behind his back, or those few occasions the liberty caps didn’t work. Head down, Bobby tries to jog the rest of the way to the park, but his feet keep turning to brittle skeletons again and the concrete keeps getting harder and harder. ‘Why me? Why me?’ he whines to himself. After one last surge of energy – and a hop-skip-and-a-jump over some mangled entrails – Bobby the Artist finally reaches the gate of Pallister Park. The sun’s still sitting firmly behind closed cloudy curtains, but things feel a bit safer being in an open area with lots of people milling about. There’s a few lads playing football over by the muddy goalposts, and Bobby sits for a bit watching the ball plop this way and that. The bench he’s sitting on feels like a giant ice cube. Squinting, Bobby the Artist flips open the sketchbook on his lap, then sharpens his pencils one by one onto the blustery grass. He thinks the best tonic is to concentrate on drawing something pretty for a while, rather than thinking all the time about death and executions and mutilated babies and all that. Keeping one eye on the football and one eye on the 220gsm cartridge paper from Jarreds, Bobby the Artist sketches a flurry of legs and Lotto boots and skidmarks and two-footed challenges. It’s a pretty raucous kickabout! Scribbling furiously, Bobby gets engrossed in the action, following the lads’ movements round the page in a muddle, like Mark Tobey or Cy Twombly drawing out team tactics on a chalkboard. He starts to cheer up, the sun winking now and then through the little transparent bits in clouds. He keeps focused on the boys’ charging boots, like a lovely eight-legged horse kicking the hell out of the moon. Bobby nearly dribbles, he’s enjoying himself so much. It’s only when he glances up at the boys’ faces that the pencil freezes in his grip. The lead breaks, and Bobby throws a load of stomach mush into his mouth. As the lads continue kicking, lunging and yelling, Bobby realises with terror they’re a team of hideous gangly gargoyles. The boys’ noses grow massive and hooked with hairs sprouting out, and their teeth are piranhas’, and their hair starts falling out in mouldy clumps, and their ears are all pointed, and their eyes are like the eyes that spy on you behind medieval portraits in haunted castles. Bobby the Artist retches, flinging his sketchbook twenty-four yards down the path. He tries to avert his eyes, but all the other kids and grown-ups in the park are the same disgusting, bug-eyed ghouls. Some lovers over there by the playground are actually feeding off each other, ripping off strips of flesh with maggots and flies pouring out. Petrified, Bobby the Artist swallows his own tongue, then darts out of the park with legs getting all tangled up together. The walk home is horribly unfamiliar. More piranha-toothed hook-noses are staggering about the opposite side of the street in Ellesse sportswear, all of them staring at Bobby and licking their lips. He strides the rest of the way with his head to the ground – at least the tarmac’s not turning into anything spooky. He’s so shaky! Up the stairs of the flat, he hopes to God he doesn’t bump into anyone. There’s only one thing for it now – his head’s so fucked, all he can do is put himself to bed and hope no gremlins jump in with him. He’s still quivering as he slots the key into the slit, and he tries to ignore the bug-eyed goblin on the sofa as he kicks off his shoes and runs to bed. ‘Not even a hello?’ Georgie asks, chewing Chewits sadly on the pink couch. Bobby the Artist throws himself under the covers. Georgie sighs orange flavour. She rubs her glitterball eyes with her Bhs sleeve. She scratches her slightly less brutal bob. The weather’s still quite overcast, and Georgie feels her chin begin to shake in all the sadness and shadows. She’s not sure what to do – Bobby the Artist doesn’t seem to like her any more. She’s worried this might be the end for them. She’s very paranoid herself, and incredibly grouchy after another poop day at Bhs. She thinks he might be cheating on her, but then again Ellen or Pamela or anyone don’t seem to have been over recently. She can usually smell their over-the-top perfumes in the flat or, more obviously, see Bobby’s filthy paintings of them in her bedroom. It’s heartbreaking enough that Bobby’s seen those girls in the nude, never mind whether he’s done anything rude with them or not. It makes her sick to think those dole bitches might know what Bobby’s knob looks, feels or tastes like, flaunting round her flat while she’s out earning a living in sweety hell. She can feel herself getting fatter and fatter, and she doesn’t even like sweets any more. She just comfort eats, gradually turning into a massive cushion. Georgie holds back the tears, holds back the urge to burst into Bobby’s bedroom and scream at him. She feels neglected. It’s never been like Bobby to not talk to her – one thing she loved most in the past was chatting to him for hours about the surrealists or space rock or paranoiac-critical method; ever since he got famous, he hasn’t spoken about any of it at all. She used to love dressing up for him, lying round the living room in sailor suits and netball skirts and ballerina cozzies with Bobby feverishly swiping at a canvas –nowadays, she just comes home and sits in the tight Bhs uniform all night. And it’s getting tighter. Bobby sleeps in his clothes now, so she does too. It’s a sad old life. And horrible to think Bobby seemed so much happier before he went down to London! Georgie feels shitty about all his skinny groupies, but worse than all that is Bobby’s love affair with drugs. She read on the internet this week that you can really lose your sense of reality on psychedelics (she read a great analogy about reality being like a beautiful flowerbed and how every time you do drugs it’s like trampling on the flowers, and the more and more times you do it the less likely those beautiful flowers will ever grow back), and his general attitude is certainly starting to resemble that of a paranoid, detached zombie. She wants the old Bobby back. Sighing, Georgie glances at the scraps of empty canvas and ripped paper strewn around the lounge. He hardly seems to have painted anything decent for months – just boring busty birds, but at least they’ve flown off now. Fucking filth. Shoving one more fizzy Chewit down her throat, Georgie cringes, sitting in a pile of uncashed cheques and mountainous sweets. She used to be creative herself once, back when she first met Bobby at the art college, sculpting pirate ships and double-decker buses out of cardboard boxes from Tesco. She could even be a good painter herself – after all, she paints her own self-portrait every morning; in Max Factor. But she never wanted to become famous though – after all, her dad said artists just have their heads in the clouds and they won’t ever amount to anything, and she wonders if that’s true of Bobby. She sighs. She so dearly wants to help him get better. Reminiscing raspberry-eyed about their daft days at school, Georgie tips out her bags of sweets onto the carpet and makes a little portrait of Bobby, using fried eggs for eyes, Parma Violets for teeth, and a big sour cherry for his nose. She kisses Bobby’s lips, then she can’t help gobbling him up. ‘Mm-mm!’ she yums. She understands a little how people could get addicted to drugs, since she can’t even kick her own bloody candy habit. Bobby’s left a few ecstasy pills knocking about on the carpet, and Georgie’s almost tempted to sample one, just to see what all the fuss is about. She’s aware she won’t be able to cure him without understanding exactly what happens to you on pills, but then again she’s seen how much damage drugs have caused him and she doesn’t want all that pain for herself thank you very much. Instead, she just looks at the pretty patterns on the ecstasy (Mitsubishis, Shreks, Lovehearts), and copies them down with a nail scissor onto a few of her Parma Violets. Concentrating, she carefully engraves the sharp Mitsi logo into the first one, cracking the edge a bit, but you can still tell what it’s meant to be. Blowing off the dust, Georgie admires her handiwork, then swallows the Mitsi Violet with a swig of fizzy pop. For five minutes Georgie pretends to be off her head – waving her arms in the air, faux-gurning, rolling her eyes like pool balls – but after a bit she just feels bloated. For the next couple of hours – instead of guzzling sweeties and feeling sorry for herself – Georgie carves fifty Mitsubishi and Loveheart logos into her Parma Violets, crushes two packets of Trebor XXX mints into six grams of brain-freeze ‘cocaine’, and sticks together twenty-five Looney Tunes sugar-papers (from a box of fairy-cake mix) to make a sheet of blotter acid. She feels good to be occupied in something creative again. Chewing her lips, Georgie gathers up her little array of medicines onto a sheet of plain A4, then tiptoes through to the bedroom, where Bobby’s snoring under a cave of bronze bedcover. His face, peeking out of an air gap, looks so delicate and bewildering, like a fragile puppet-head. Georgie’s desperate to wake him up and show him her Class A candy, but he doesn’t half look peaceful for the first time in ages, and he’d probably get in a grump with her. Lingering there in the dusty light, Georgie wants to just drop the silly sweets and jump into bed with him, but then all of a sudden a really brilliant idea strikes her. Twitching her nose, Georgie creeps across the lumpy carpet, A4 paper aloft like a floppy old dinner tray. She knows exactly where Bobby the Artist keeps all his drugs and drug paraphernalia, and she holds her breath as she slides open his Fourth Drawer Down. Georgie pokes her hand into the sock where the drugs live, digging out a couple of baggys containing fifty-six ecstasy pills, half a gram of speed, and two grams-ish of cocaine. Fingers steady, Georgie replaces the pills with her Mitsi Parma Violets, then she pours the speed and coke into the wastepaper basket and fills up the baggys with crushed Trebor. Feeling quite dastardly but overall the Saint of Peach House, Georgie skips through to the kitchen and swaps Bobby’s acid with cake papers in the freezer. She has an ecstatic shiver, then slams the freezer door shut and flexes her toes on the lino. Georgie chucks the real acid and the fifty-six ecstasy pills out the front-room window, and she imagines the pills each planting an ecstasy tree in the car park gardens. Big pink trees, probably! Before she gets too excited, though, Georgie decides to put something sedate on the stereo (she likes the Crimea) and puts on the kettle, and she refuses to have any sugars in her tea. In between bitter sips from the Power Rangers mug, Georgie smiles to the music and gives the flat a huge spring-clean, even if it’s autumn. She washes and wipes and hoovers up everything related to bad memories (crusty bongs, pillbags, Rizla, etc.), and once she’s finished the flat feels peculiarly empty. She arranges Bobby’s painting materials in a neat pile next to the sofa, folds up his argyle sweaters, then hops into bed with him all shattered and giddy. Undressing, Georgie feels so much happier – she strips naked, stretching, rubbing the restrictive bra marks off her boobies. She yaaaaawwns. Slipping underneath the cover, she touches Bobby’s side but he’s absolutely paralysed, and they both just lie there silent like marble Roman statues. Up close, Georgie sniffs Bobby’s dirty candlewax hair, and she snuggles into him like he’s an unwashed comfort blanket. She doesn’t want anyone – or any drugs – to take her Bobby away. Yawning again, she spoons him and starts dropping off, just as the Artist starts stirring and mumbling loudly, ‘Don’t hurt me.’ Georgie’s eyes ping open with horror. ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,’ Bobby repeats, slightly writhing around in his sleep. Georgie lets go of him and turns over. She sighs. She wishes she could just click her fingers and everything be alright for him. Squelching her head deep into the pillow, half an hour later Georgie’s fast asleep, dreaming of miniature elephants, and half an hour after that Bobby the Artist