Ten Storey Love Song (3 page)

£
4.50. Though Johnnie hadn’t been selling any pills that night he still had money to pay the driver – on ecstasy you tend not to need that many alcoholic drinks, instead guzzling tapwater and passing the time dawdling around hugging everyone. Johnnie and Ellen were still quite lovey-wuvvy as they stepped between the pillars with the two boulders on top, but occasionally Johnnie flinched when her hand went to grab his bum-cheek. He had to make excuses when they got into 5E and nip to the toilet, straight away ripping off his Lee’s and unpeeling the boxer shorts. It was quite obvious Ellen was going to shag him, which left Johnnie in a bit of a conundrum. The M&Ss were fairly suave, and it seemed worth running the shower and trying to squeeze the shit out of them while undressing and feeling like a daft cunt. He didn’t want to leave Ellen waiting too long, especially since he lived in the flat alone and the floor was exploded with Super Tennents and ashtrays and porny pictures and vomity plates and cheese trainers and pillbags and shit CDs and torched carpet. He pulled a gigantic sad face in the mirror then got on with the wash. Naked, he popped his arse under the shower-flow, all the while checking out his knob-size and giving that a rinse and all. His dick was looking particularly shrivelled, poking around in the nightmarish bathroom light, but he expected that was due to the complete shittiness of the situation. His bum-fluff was totally matted, and to get most of the crap off he had to dig in with his nails. It was disgusting. The bottom of the bath looked like a muddy worm had crawled across it and died. Aaaaaaaaargh! His fingers smelt like fishy poo-poo, and the boxers were stained rusty orange. Johnnie sighed, then had a tiny gurn to himself and decided to cut his losses – the M&S pants went flying out the window like a beautiful brown kite. There was no more time to mess about. Johnnie dried his arsehole on the towel turning beige and beiger, and he frowned bushy caterpillars putting back on his clothes. It was getting on for half-past two as he strolled into the living room looking quite bedraggled and he wondered if Ellen would really wish to shag such a tragic person. But sure enough she smiled and took his hand, and Johnnie led her out of the bombsite and into his boudoir. Johnnie’s bedroom was red and white stripes with posters of Juninho and John Hendrie and Ravanelli on top, and although his sheets were a crumply mountain the room wasn’t particularly mucky. Ellen was feisty and sat straight on top of the peak, and when she started unzipping Johnnie she didn’t think it was strange he had no pants on. Johnnie felt a bit awkward (and maybe a wee bit paranoid off the pills), and he worried Ellen might be able to smell shit when she started sucking him off. Fortunately he stiffened up with such a nice mouth round his willy, and Ellen slobbered away minding her own business. She enjoyed giving head – having a boy shiver and spasm in time with her waggly tongue – and it was possible she was getting more pleasure off it than Johnnie. His brain was a cracked egg, half scrambled with poo-poo and half fried with sexstasy. He didn’t attempt to bring Ellen off with his shitty fingers, and when she eventually boinged on top of him all Johnnie could think about was brown goo. His arsehole still felt sticky and awful and he imagined the hot aroma of faeces filling the small bedroom, and it terrified him. Ellen was horny and couldn’t smell a thing, but just as she was reaching the sexy sunrise of an orgasm she started to feel Johnnie’s stiffy subside and his cock slipped out from inside her. She was devastated, and overall it did get the sex off to the shittiest possible start. And if anything it’s only gotten worse – now all Johnnie can do is give Ellen sore bits, no
petit mort
in sight unless you count Ellen wanting to kill her boyfriend. Nowadays she dreads going to bed, what with Johnnie always trying to put his leg over or trying to get her flaps going when she’s dry as newspaper. Most porn gives boys the impression girls like to suffer during sex, and when Johnnie first bashed Ellen’s delicate cervix he showed off to all the guys at the Linthorpe he’d ‘reached the top’. Wowee! Fifty-four bad shags later, Ellen’s seriously considering splashing out on a Rampant Rabbit or employing some sort of male escort, and she tries to think back to all these wonderful one-night stands she’s had with handsome, very competent strangers. Not only has she forgotten how to orgasm, she’s forgotten how to fake one. It’s now eight-and-a-bit months since her last cock-in-fanny climax (a boy named Smithy who could draw circles and figure-8s with the end of his penis), summer’s here, and Ellen wonders how much longer she can last without another fruity encounter. One particular balmy evening, she sits alone in Johnnie’s bed, bored out of her skull. She peers out the window at little kids playing ball games on the grassy verges five storeys below. She thinks bad thoughts. Johnnie’s out terrorising the neighbourhood (or so he said – he’s actually having a pint in the Central with his mates and they’re talking about Bello’s new Lacoste shellsuit, shiny red it is), and there’s nothing much to do but watch the world slowly turn. The kids outside are adorable – Ellen watches the girls steal the boys’ football, the boys chase the girls, they all fall over in the clover, and they all laugh their heads off with funny terrapin expressions. The kids don’t care that the playing field’s all dusty and grubby and pooey, or that they’re not getting orgasms. Seven-year-olds don’t even know what an orgasm is, and they seem to be having a pretty fun time without one. Ellen wishes she was that age again, rolling around getting muddy in a flowery dress and hating boys and making fun out of dollies and twigs and old tyres, not drugs or booze or boys’ limbs. Ellen sighs, all cosy in her jammies but her head hurts from all the weird thinking, or is it just a hangover? Last night was another shitty shag with Johnnie (really drunk, Johnnie spurted his load while Ellen was trying to insert him up her mousetrap twat), and she smothers her head in the sweaty pillows to the sound of cackling little lasses. Her brain’s a puddle of piss, slightly wishing she hated Johnnie so they could go their separate ways but she doesn’t. It’s the fact that she otherwise gets on so well with Johnnie she doesn’t have the heart to keep telling him he’s a failure in bed. She doesn’t want to split up with him just because he’s a bad lay, but then again she doesn’t want a split up her cunt every time she goes to bed with him. It’s quite sad because obviously Johnnie knows he gives her very little pleasure, but his only frame of reference is pornography and over time he’s learnt to shag exactly like the clueless misogynistic bastards in those films. And yet somehow they always make the girls squirt! Johnnie’s confused, and more often than not he can be seen with a very sad head. He’s a lot less talkative nowadays, so Ellen’s glad she’s got Pamela and Mandy and the rest of the gang upstairs to knock around with and have a laugh with. There’s a party tonight in 6D, and Johnnie gave her a tenner in consolation for the bad sex. Bless him. She starts getting ready, co-ordinating her outfit with the pink sunset outside and feeling a bit less negative. She sniffs and slides on a rosy Umbro T-shirt with tights and denim miniskirt, and she goes overboard with the make-up because she thinks some boys might be there tonight. She gets a weird kick out of boys drooling over her, like it confirms her good-lookingness or something. She doesn’t think she’s insecure; she just loves to be loved. She imagines herself as a free spirit, always swanning around the halls and walls of Peach House like it’s the Chelsea Hotel in the sixties and she’s Nico and she knows where all the parties are. Sometimes she goes to Mandy’s, the stick-thin speed-freak who’s always got something crap to tell you. Sometimes she goes to Angelo’s, the hunky Sardinian who welcomes anyone as long as they’ve got booze or big boobs. Sometimes she goes to Pamela’s if her mam and dad’s away, the nursery worker with a permanently glazed expression on her face. Sometimes she goes to Bobby the Artist’s, if he’s not too fucked to open the door or talking to the wallpaper. It feels like a great place to be, and Ellen draws herself a smile out of pink lip-gloss. She runs the straighteners through her creamy waterfall hair, then whacks on a bit of CK Be and gazes at herself in the mirror plastered with grubby photos of friends and exes. Ellen’s been living at Johnnie’s for about three months, and nowadays the footy posters have been replaced with girly items such as stretch mirror, cuddly bunnies, photographs of people she used to snog and shag. She stays there rent free and she loves getting waited on hand and foot – Johnnie gives her anything she wants, from Americano pizzas to MDMA tablets, plus she’s guaranteed
£
88.10 in her Halifax every fortnight. It’s so class being on the dole, Ellen just loves drifting through her life like a princess on a throne carried about by court jesters or whoever. She laughs at that image in her head, then puts on her shoes and clomps out of the flat. She wibbles her bottom as she goes up the stairs, even though no one’s watching, and she feels a million dollars or maybe a million pound depending on the exchange rate. When she lets herself into 6D everyone’s sat around doing laughing gas, jibbering about like mental patients at a kids’ birthday party. Whoosh laugh whoosh laugh whoosh laugh. Ellen says her hellos then sits on a pile of floppy deflated balloons, all multicoloured and pretty amongst the Super Skols and the ashtrays getting passed around with reefers on top of them. She takes a toot or two, and a can of lager magically walks into her hand from across the carpet. Angelo’s there on the sofa arm (the boy who rents the flat), happily handing out drinks and whizzing the whip-cream cartridges into life in his dirty paws. Everyone’s faces turn alabaster as they take up lungfuls of the stuff, some of them giggling like wet nellies and others tripping off a cliff into hippy heaven as the gas roly-polys round their system. Mandy perches cross-legged next to Dave Morton (the professional footballer brought up on Premier Road), completely chewing his ear off with her tales of owning a racehorse and riding it to victory in the Grand National. She seems to have lost her marbles over the years – perhaps it’s down to nailing speed every day, although she always was a random cunt when she was at secondary school with Pamela and Ellen. Pamela looks on at Mandy with glazed disgust because she wants to get into Dave herself, but apart from that she’s enjoying blowing balloon after balloon into her air-pipes. Angelo likes to impress the girls and he sets them up with doublers, passing Ellen a big juicy watermelon-size one. After a count of one-two-three, they start sucking blowing sucking blowing sucking blowing with their cheeks going big and red like trumpet players, and for twenty seconds the happy happy hardcore core’s all repetititititive like a stuck stuck rec rec ord ord the squeaks squeaks of the balloooooooons are all birds all birds flying ing over over head head with Ellellellellellellellellellen riding a fire fire engine ing a fire engine through pink pink pine forest pink fire engine and then then there’s monkeys monkeys top top hats top hats top hats evil cackling cackle-cackle and and then then the cackle hissssing of ssssnakes no the hissing of balloons deflating and then she’s back in the flat again. ‘Fuck,’ she says. Funny how laughing gas doesn’t really make you laugh – it sends you to an altogether much weirder place. Ellen feels all shaken up and sober, and she curls up on the sofa cradling her knees. She makes a full-blown attempt next to get drunk, pilfering more lagers and big shots of vodka from people too busy dreaming to notice. Soon everyone’s monged – some of them start acting horny, retreating back to their quarters to shag their knobs and fannies off with each other; others are just dead bodies. Mandy slurps Dave’s lips off like a cream bun. Dave hasn’t played a professional match for about a month (he got tackled from behind by a butch cunt from Carlisle), and he’s quite enjoying all the time off getting wrecked on the sly. He’s the sort of boy who thinks one sniff of NO
₂
would send him insane for the rest of his life, but he’s known Angelo since they played for Marton as youngsters and he still likes coming round for a can or two. Dave actually looks quite fucked, nodding off to the smurf-voice hardcore stuff, but Mandy’s full of beans and drags him down the hall to fuck the hell out of him in her bare crusty bedroom. Pamela watches them leave over her sparkly blue bottle of Spectra, and she starts getting depressed and falls in a heap on Angelo’s burgundy settee, with a full balloon of NO
₂
clamped between her fingers. Suddenly the balloon flies from her hand, farting a trail of laughing gas that makes all the dust particles giggle, and it lands with a plip on Ellen’s lap. Ellen grins. By about two or three most people have wandered off or passed out in strange places round the flat (Kev in a cupboard in the kitchen, Stacey soaking in the shower), but Ellen’s feeling lovely and merry and she’s got Pamela’s Spectra to get through now. When the whip-cream things run out, Angelo slides up to Ellen and sits with her for a bit in front of the fuzzy television. ‘How’s it going?’ he asks through the static. Angelo’s been in Peach House about four months, and although he’s shagged his way through many of the residents (an over-forty-year-old included), he’s yet to snake-charm Ellen. Sex is his kick, and to be honest he’s not bad looking – yummy hot-chocolate head, Pacific Ocean eyeballs, and black and white vests with massive muscles underneath. Girls have a hard time resisting him, what with his silkworm touch and his persistence – he claims to have bedded over five hundred lovers, and he’s only twenty-four. Angelo preys on anything with a nice face or figure or just a fanny-hole and, even though he knows about Johnnie the big bad boyfriend, he can’t stop himself placing a hand on Ellen’s lap. He submerges the little girl in his whirlypool pupils and says to her, ‘Ellen, you look a bit down.’ Ellen says she’s alright – in fact she’s pretty mortalled now she’s started on the cider, and she sees two or maybe even three Angelos towering over her. But she likes the look of them, and she lies back having a wee drunken smile to herself. She can be a flirt as well, and mainly just to amuse herself she does an awful pout and slaps Angelo on the left biceps. ‘In fact, I’m
quite
alright,’ she grins, thinking she’s hilarious. Angelo feels his knob and balls starting to expand. He touches her on the thigh, totally in awe of Ellen the same way he was totally in awe of the other five hundred. ‘I’ve got a pill if you want it,’ Angelo ventures, ‘it’s up to you, like; just thought you needed cheering up or something.’ Ellen’s eyes flap open, suddenly all alert for about one and a halfish seconds. ‘Well I don’t need cheering up like but I wouldn’t say no though, would I,’ Ellen grins. So they take the ecstasy together (Angelo having ninety-eight of them locked away in his Buddha pot in the bedroom, recently acquired from this boy on Kesteven Road, you know, down near the Total garage), and after about fifty minutes and a bit more leg-rubbing they can both feel it kicking in. Ellen probably less so than Angelo, what with her being so smashed and still drinking, but it adds nicely to the madness already sitting in her brain-box. They crouch together in the flicky sizzle of the television set, the only other people around lying comatose beneath the navy blue window blowing clouds from one edge of wallpaper to the other. It’s a delightful feeling, and for a while Ellen and Angelo talk manically about how good the party was and how good the laughing gas was and how good the random shags were and how good the patches of vomit were, and Johnnie. The flat’s a mess and so are their heads – Angelo’s in rapture and he so desperately wants to slide his cock in the lady, and weirdly he seems to be getting better looking the more Ellen glances at him. Skimming a finger over her anklebone, Angelo raises an eyebrow and asks softly, in his dulcet Rudolph Valentino accent, ‘So everything’s perfect with Johnnie, then?’ Angelo’s quite cunning (after all, no relationship’s perfect, is it?), and it’s like a clarion call when Ellen replies, ‘Ah, I dunno, well see I dunno if I should say like … it’s just the sex … at the minute … isn’t that great … oh I dunno, I think I just need a good shag ha ha ha ha.’ And Ellen sits there sheepish for a second, then Angelo moves a bit closer and her lips accidentally fall on his and they keep falling for about a minute and falling and falling. For a second she regrets it, but then Angelo’s hands are all over her neck and hips and tits and arse, and suddenly she’s enjoying it. Perhaps Ellen’s a selfish bitch, but surely if you’re desperate for an orgasm you’re entitled to have one even if it’s not from your boyfriend. Even the feel of Angelo’s big fat tongue in her mouth gets her all flustered – Johnnie’s got a bit of a pointy one. ‘Let’s go in the bedroom,’ Angelo whispers, all his hot breath giving Ellen a heat-wave. She feels jittery and pissed and lurved-up, and she nods and practically drags the boy herself to the double bed. They strip each other off, Ellen stroking his knob through the straight trousers while she gets her Umbro shirt ripped off. She kneels topless on the covers then gives Angelo a blow-job, biting him through his Y-fronts then slipping them off and slurping up his big red-ender. Angelo’s got a much larger cock than Johnnie, and she tugs it with two hands, tasting all the clear stuff coming out. It’s brilliant just to treat each other like animals for one night, but when Ellen’s knickers get whipped off and Angelo frigs her beautifully with two fingers she turns to glass and melts. On top of the pill she’s also on the Pill, and she kisses Angelo’s buffalo skin and mouth as she crawls into the girl-on-top position. Usually it’s uncomfortable starting sex with Johnnie in this formation, but as Ellen squeezes Angelo’s dick and slowly lowers herself round it she’s absolutely dripping wet. Speaking of drips, two floors down Bobby the Artist still can’t sleep. He sits upright in bed next to silent Georgie, thinking much too deeply about a strange dripping in the kitchen. Drip! All the money’s run out now for drugs and food and booze, but that still hasn’t stopped his mind acting strange. As he sits with his back up against the bronze headrest, Bobby glares at the opposite wall, hearing an excruciating weeny plop about every four or five seconds. Each drip feels like a depth charge going off in his skull. Drip! Is he imagining it? Outside the weather’s humid, and even though he’s boiling Bobby the Artist slips on his yellow and blue argyle to go and sort out the kitchen. He leaves Georgie dozing with no covers on and just her cerulean-with-pink-trim knickers, softly banging his sweaty painty feet onto carpet then Drip! onto linoleum. Bobby looks a mess (raggy hair, skinny legs under the argyle and his knob out), and perhaps the insomnia’s down to drug withdrawal rather than innocent drips, but when it’s 4.14am no one likes to get Chinese water tortured. Drip! Dawn’s breaking, and for a bit Bobby gets distracted by the beautiful purple steamy sunrise stretching its rays under the drawn net curtains. He gets mesmerised by a lovely little laser beam, striking through a wee gap in the window, but then Drip! the drips are back, and louder. Louder! Bobby the Artist rubs his sore bonce. Drip!! Where to start? The taps: Bobby and Georgie made a huge spag bol this evening with cheesy bread and Parmesan on top and all that gourmet shite, and the Artist knocks down all the dirty dishes to check the hot and cold taps but the sink’s silent except for the big annoying crash he just made. The freezer: They defrosted the freezer the other week, and on the off-chance they messed it up Bobby checks whether it’s leaking, but there’s just rock-hard pizzas and mince and ice cubes and icicles hanging down like they’ve been growing a mini North Pole in the kitchen. For a bit he crouches and stares at the gritty frost and smoke in case it does something, but it doesn’t. The kettle: Georgie likes cups of tea (with four sugars in them). She boils the kettle at least three times a day, and Bobby examines the adjacent wall and ceiling in case there’s been a build-up of condensation and now it’s decided to start dripping. But no. Antagonised, Bobby stands all huffy-and-puffy with his hands on his hips (a classic pissed-off pose). Holding his breath, Bobby listens really closely to the next four or five Drip!! Drip!! Drip!! Drip!!s, but it’s not that obvious which direction they’re coming from. His ears are ringing after listening to