Ten Storey Love Song (4 page)

Metal Machine Music
all night, and the drips seem to gain a more arrogant Splish! the more he can’t find them. The boiler: Getting desperate, Bobby starts to dismantle the Baxi, uncovering all the fancy copper pipes and investigating each one and each one’s little fittings for leakage, but unfortunately the plumbing’s faultless. Splish! The tinned goods: Losing it, Bobby scrabbles through the various tins of tomatoes and tats and Heinzes in the lone cupboard, as if they could seep enough drippy liquid to keep a grown man out of bed. They’re fine, of course. The floor: Bobby the Artist breaks down on the lino floor in a heap of argyle sweater and ball sac. His brain absolutely kills, and the wee droplets are now giant’s feet stomping all round the kitchen. Boom!! Bobby’s insane. He curls up in a ball, leaving snail-trails of sweat-marks along the plastic ground, totally exhausted but unable to drop off. It’s as if he’s forgotten how to fall asleep, and Bobby just sprawls there in a frustrating sleepy no-man’s-land. Boom!! He tries to count sheep but the drips come at such strange intervals his mind becomes a knot of numbers and splishes and he wonders if it’ll Boom!! ever unravel. The only consolation is that lovely colourful shard of daybreak squeezing under the curtain, and Bobby the Artist flicks his fingers through it smiling moronically. It’s such a beautiful spectacle that Bobby pulls himself from the ground and tugs open the curtain completely, and that’s when he sees the gorgeous bright rainbow arcing all the way from Berwick Hills to South Bank, and that’s when he sees the slight rainfall dripping every three or four seconds on the metal window ledge. Drip! The following night Bobby the Artist can’t sleep thanks to an obscure banging upstairs. Bang! It’s actually Johnnie beating the shit out of Angelo, throwing him against the four walls and battering his kneecaps and almost breaking his own wrist thumping him round the face. He bishes him and bashes him and boshes him. He doesn’t know for sure Ellen’s cheated on him, but the walls of this tower block are incredibly thin, which blesses (or curses) the inhabitants with a strange sort of psychic sixth sense – or rather a sort of uncontrollable nosy awareness of what everybody’s up to. Johnnie knows Ellen slept round Angelo’s last night – he heard her voice coming out of his ceiling. And he knows what red-blooded bloodhounds like Angelo try to do to girls when they’re in their pyjamas. Ellen came back this afternoon with her miniskirt on the wrong way and teethmarks on her Umbro top and pupils like coat buttons. Without even thinking, she told Johnnie Angelo was knocking out brilliant ecstasy, and maybe he should get hold of some of these ‘sharks’ himself. Just when she thought it was safe to go back in the water, splashing herself down on the sofa and putting an arm round Johnnie, her boyfriend leapt up, kicked an Americano box the length of the flat, then bounded upstairs to sort the cunt out for good. It’s bad enough Ellen being round the Sardinian’s all the time, but even worse is some prick like him stealing his pill business. Johnnie has a hard time as it is trying to pay the rent, but he credits himself with a good few volleys to Angelo’s forehead and a scream of, ‘You bastard!!’ He wants to kill him, or at least kill his good looks, throwing precision toe-punts into his great cheekbones and thick greasy locks. Angelo begins spewing up blood, nervously spasming to and fro in his apartment, convinced Johnnie knows about him and Ellen (a great shag; one hour and thirty-three minutes of missionary, doggy, legs in the sky, blow-job, cunnilingus, three orgasms for Ellen and two for Angelo, the only disappointment being the 500 million hyperactive sperms he deposited in Ellen’s womb, surfing wildly through her hot pipes desperately searching and barging into each other and racing round the fallopians, only to find she’s on the Pill and there’s no Mrs Egg and two hours later they all got knackered and they frizzled and fried in her belly and died, all the little sperms screaming, ‘Nooo! And it was such a promising shag and all …’), and he keeps whining, ‘I’m sorry … sorry … sorry sorry sorry.’ He sort of resigns himself to the fact he’s going to get murdered. Johnnie’s not that barbaric though – he just enjoys roughing up/disciplining people he doesn’t like. He sees it as a form of education. It killed him the other evening to hear Ellen describe Angelo as ‘sweet’, ‘really funny’ and ‘a bit hunky’ to Pamela outside his own front door, and sometimes he thinks Ellen doesn’t appreciate him at all. Last night Johnnie gave her a tenner to get drunk and hopefully come back for a cuddle in bed or a roll in the hay (Ellen pretty much has to be drunk for him to see any action at all), but she had to go and spoil it all by getting pilled-up, not even phoning Johnnie, and ending up possibly sleeping in the bed of a man renowned for being seedy and fucking the shit out of anything with tits. Johnnie can’t even handle the thought of one finger being placed on her, let alone in her. He has a habit of weaving sick tapestries in his head, and as he batters Angelo senseless all he can see is a Mediterranean man’s penis sliding in and out of Ellen’s vagina. Johnnie grits his teeth into tiny white treestumps. An odd tear clouds his vision as he kicks through Angelo’s skull, splatters of crimson Jackson Pollocking round the room. Angelo’s eyes are bruised and so podgy he can’t really see anything, and he just lies there as Johnnie continues laying into him. It’s not one of his better comedowns. Angelo curls up into a snail shape, but that only spurs Johnnie on to boot him up the arse, catching a stray bollock squashed between his elephanty thighs. Angelo screams. Johnnie’s expertise in the field of fighting dates back to him shattering Jamie Morris’s shin after getting snowballed in the face when he was eight. Johnnie quickly realised he could get anything he wanted with a few threats and well-executed punches to the sides of the head: for instance money for the 65A, Astrobangers, cigarettes off lads in Day-Glo trackies, and once he even got a tramp to give up his can of Special Brew when he was in year seven. Back then Johnnie had total confidence in himself and total respect from everyone else, back when there were no adult troubles such as mediocre sex, spongers, piss-takers, no income, drug deals, monogamy. The worst thing that ever happened to Johnnie was growing up, although he does still feel slightly childish walloping Angelo’s head once, twice, thrice, four times against the TV cabinet. Initially during a beating the body releases some sort of natural anaesthetic or force-field, and you don’t get all that hurt, but by now it’s completely worn off and Angelo writhes round the carpet, trailing blood like a red cape. His eye-slits are full of raspberry tears, making him blind and dazed and worried. At first he thought Johnnie would run out of steam after a handful of punches and bright kicks to Angelo’s forehead, but it’s quickly become clear he’s in for twelve rounds of torture. Even Johnnie’s arms are muddied with throbs and hot aches, his mind absolutely barmy with hatred. It’s like there’s a black voodoo monkey crawling round his brainwaves, tormenting him with a constant string of pictures: sperm spurting up his girlfriend’s cervix, her lips slurping up slippy stiff dicks. Johnnie explodes with new-found fury, stamping rock-hard on Angelo’s vested chest then flinging fists here and there at the jumble of fishy features that now make up the boy’s face. ‘Stop stop stop!’ Angelo yelps in a desperate five-year-old’s plea for help. Today he knows what it feels like to be dying, though in situations like this it’s possible to conjure up some weird sort of superhuman strength, and Angelo spins over and manages to rattle one elbow into Johnnie’s side. Johnnie doesn’t like this. He gets his claws out, scrabbling and ripping at Angelo’s swollen lumps and bumps, and in the process his black vest tears open revealing big defined pecs and shaved chest, Hulk Hogan style. You’d think Angelo had enough power to put up a decent fight, or at least a half-decent barrier, but in actual fact the muscles come from a diet of weight-gain milkshakes and steroids and they’re more pleasing to the eye than really powerful. That fucking chest disgusts Johnnie (all hunky, rigid and brown like a leather sofa), but maybe there’s a bit of envy too – Johnnie once considered taking steroids, but he’s scared of needles, and needle-sized willies. As a result, he’s a bit like Skeletor to Angelo’s He-Man, and he doesn’t see any reason why Ellen wouldn’t go off gallivanting with this sexy cunt. He’d like to cut his throat. It’s almost not enough for Angelo just to lie there with a few swellings and purple skin; Johnnie really wants to degrade him. He leaves Angelo soaking through the living room carpet, waltzing into the bathroom to find some sort of razor or cutting device. He scrambles through endless moisturisers, hair products, deodorants, creams, face-washes, dental hygiene stuff and handcare on the mouldy windowsill, until he finds Angelo’s shaving bits. There’s no old-school cutthroat flick-knife thing like gentlemen used in days of yore, but Johnnie uncovers some of those Wilkinson Sword double-edge numbers and staggers back into the lounge with one pressed in his palm. Alright, he might not be able to dissect the hairy animal with it, but he’s sure he’ll think of something. Johnnie catches his face in the mirror on the way out, all haggard and scary, and he does feel a bit of a sick cunt. He could probably do with a shave and all. Johnnie coughs, then laughs at Angelo – he looks like a wrestling figure with his arms and legs on the wrong way. Johnnie kneels down. ‘Swallow one, you cunt,’ he spits, unwrapping a dull silver blade from the paper, ‘or I’ll fucking kill you …’ Angelo’s totally shitting himself and delusional, pain spreading down every limb from the tips of his fingers to his toes and nose, and he genuinely believes Johnnie’s insane enough to take his lovely life. After all, he’s feeding him fucking razor blades, isn’t he. It’s a weird situation – Angelo feels strangely deserving of these horrors (to be honest, having shagged about sixty women already in relationships, Angelo always thought himself lucky not to have yet received a hiding, but always knew one was round the corner), but surely no one should have to stand for this. Johnnie just doesn’t know when to stop – he loves Ellen so much but can’t cope with all the pain she causes, and all he can do is take it out on other people and not her. A boy brought up on beating people up, Johnnie just doesn’t know how to react any differently to such shitty affairs. Oh yeah, and those pills! Those fucking ‘sharks’, or whatever they’re called. What a bastard. Johnnie pins Angelo’s head down on the itchy carpet, clamps his nose shut, then pushes a razor blade between his lips and urges the cunt to swallow. Angelo screams but Johnnie wants to scream as well, getting convinced Angelo knows all about his inadequacy in bed, and his small knob, and his oddly minuscule balls, and that time he shit himself in Aruba. So, he sees no reason not to make Angelo eat a razor, and he prods the steel blade right down the Sardinian’s tongue, being careful not to nick himself on it. Angelo squirms, panicking a sweaty diluted trail of blood around the apartment – he tries one more time to punch Johnnie’s kneecap, but it’s pretty futile and Johnnie just mutters, ‘Fucking prick.’ Then he gets a bit firmer and informs him, ‘You swallow that fucking razor now or you’re going out the window.’ He points to the sky outside, all square and blue and delightful, but dropping six storeys isn’t really the way Angelo would like to enjoy it. Angelo used to love taking girls out for dates at beer gardens and restaurants in the yummy summertime before bringing them home and banging them expertly in his bed or giving head up on the rooftop, and all these sorts of merry memories lightning-strike through his head as he lies there with a razor blade in his gob. So, your life does flash before your eyes before you die, after all! Johnnie restrains him, kneeling hard on his bulky shoulders, and Angelo supposes he’s had an alright time on earth (if all it means is working five days a week so you can enjoy yourself at the weekends and sleep with lots of people). He shuts his eyes, sort of accepting it might be the end for him thanks to this horrible psycho/ psychic cunt crouched on top of him. He’s crying a bit because he doesn’t want to swallow a Wilko Sword, but something inside him thinks he should do it because he’s been such a naughty boy – and after all it’d be better to eat a razor than plummet to a mushy death (and he’s been beaten to such a pulp already he doubts it’ll feel much worse than a sore throat) – so Angelo crunches his face and lets the blade slide down his gullet, lashing his legs out in mid-air as it starts gashing up the roof of his mouth. He screeches a banshee wail as the thing gets stuck halfway, latching onto the back of his throat, and he coughs out water-pistolly blood, gurgling and yelling obscenities that shake the tower block out of the concrete. It’s more the choking sensation that gets to him – to be honest it hardly feels like his mouth’s getting sliced up; it’s all in his head. He gasps and retches for air, coughs battling peristalsis and the blade stammering up and down his food-pipe, and Angelo keeps screaming for a bit of sympathy. Johnnie’s bored now anyway, and slowly rises from the floor, deciding to leave Angelo alone and get back down to his girlfriend – who he loves – and he takes probably one or two steps across the carpet when suddenly the door whams open and Alan Blunt the Cunt’s standing there brandishing a candlestick holder. ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Alan growls in his gravelly baritone, almost swinging at Johnnie without any sort of explanation. Alan Blunt’s one of the stranger characters in the building, and his flat’s the equivalent of the spooky mansion at the end of your street with the black cats roaming outside and the bats in the attic and dead bodies in the closet. There’s rumours that Alan might have killed his wife (though it’s more likely she just left him, Alan being a bit of a twisted fucker), or that he’s a paedo (Alan’s favourite hangout of an afternoon is peering over the fence at Corpus Christi primary school), but Johnnie’s not the sort of person to hold a grudge really and often he goes round to Alan’s to help with DIY or have
a nice cup of tea. Johnnie stops where he is on Angelo’s stained floor, the dizzy light spreading his lanky shadow across the wall, and he holds his hands up to Alan and says, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all sound, mate.’ Alan Blunt the Cunt squints through his thick brown kiddy-fiddling glasses, his curly hair all matted with lack of sleep, and he smiles when he recognises Johnnie there in his lime shellsuit. ‘What’s going on? Youse are fucking keeping me up! I’ve got to drive the container tonight, you know,’ Alan says, relaxing slightly. Although he’s a nutty bastard, Alan does enjoy living in Peach House – it makes him feel less lonely, living in a big pink Tower of Babel, and in particular Johnnie’s someone he gets on well with, often bumping into him and chatting about the football and the betting shop and the 4.45 at Doncaster. Johnnie wafts his hand at Angelo, writhing about like a worm stuck on tarmac, and he says to Alan, ‘See this cunt there, he’s been dealing drugs to little kids. Just thought he needed a ticking-off like.’ Alan Blunt the Cunt hates drugs, hates the idea of youngsters becoming vegetables shooting shite up their veins and noses and, being a racist twat, he’s also pleased to see a foreign person lying there in a jumble. Tears flooding his eyelids, Angelo coughs a couple of times and regurgitates the razor blade into his mouth again, keeping it clenched between his teeth though so as not to draw attention to himself. He hopes to God Alan doesn’t pounce on him as well. Being a foreigner living next-door to a racist was always going to cause frictions, and rumour has it in his youth (the 1970s) Alan used to go around in a gang terrorising Paki shops and Paki houses and pizzerias and Turkish kebab inns. Today, though, Alan just stands in the threshold, his fluffy hand flexing on the candlestick, and he goes, ‘Well, good lad, Johnnie. Just keep it down, alright?’ Johnnie nods, feeling a bit softer in the head now it’s all off his chest and Alan’s here. He knows Alan’s alright even though he’s a bit of a cunt, and they walk out of Angelo’s together laughing at the state of that silly Sardine. They actually high-five each other on the way down the corridor. Alan Blunt the Cunt offers Johnnie a cup of tea or Pot Noodle back at his but, even though he’s pretty starving, Johnnie wants to get back downstairs with Ellen and he shakes Alan’s hand and they say their cheerios on the grubby carpet outside 6E. Johnnie hopes Ellen hasn’t run away during all this violence, and he hopes she hasn’t really made the beast with two backsides with Angelo. What a mental evening. In the flat underneath Alan the Cunt’s (5E), while Johnnie and Al say their goodbyes Ellen stands shaking in the silvery bathroom holding their Gary Rhodes frying pan aloft. Although she does love Johnnie sometimes he scares the hell out of her, and she stands around all guilty and paranoid about that amazing amazing fuck with Angelo. All she said to Johnnie was Angelo’s got some incredible pills on the go, and suddenly Johnnie cracked and stormed upstairs, and you could hear him cracking Angelo’s head off the walls and the furniture and especially the paper-thin floor. She’s past herself with worry that Angelo might spurt something out about them shagging, and she fucking hates herself even though the fuck was great. She can hear the fighting subsiding upstairs, but now every little creak and voice and slamming door around Peach House gives Ellen the willies as she waits for Johnnie to return. Paranoia! If Johnnie knows she’s been a slag, is he going to give her the same treatment? To Ellen it sounded like Johnnie was gouging Angelo’s eyeballs out or slicing his Jap’s eye open or something like that. She dithers round the bathroom like a nervous little lamb, dressed in a white Ellesse tracksuit Johnnie bought her last month from the FirstSport catalogue she gets through the door. She can’t understand how she could be such a bitch to Johnnie because he’s so caring and sweet and protective, but then again she can understand because she got the ride of her life last night. Sex with Johnnie is devastating – often she’s too dry to even bother attempting to put his penis inside her, or Ellen’s too tired but Johnnie pushes her and pushes her until they have awful depressing zombie sex, or Ellen’s on her period and – although she doesn’t mind having sex on the blob – when they change positions Johnnie sees big globs of gooey cummy blood on his dick and it goes instantly limp, or occasionally Johnnie’s so drunk he comes after two or three thrusts and Ellen feels shitty cleaning all his gunk out of herself for nothing. Alright, so Johnnie knows he’s a bad shag, but surely that’s no reason to go around cheating on the boy. But she did, and maybe in her head she expects to get murdered. That’s why her and Gary Rhodes are hiding in the bathroom together. She hears Johnnie come through the front door, and she shudders, clutching the pan a bit higher. She can imagine the mad temper on his face – upside-down V eyebrows, eyes with the skinny red veins popping out, grit teeth, and those unusual twitches he gets when in the presence of bouncers, police, and other people he hates. Ellen’s arms are too tiny for the great weight of the frying pan, and really she doesn’t want to hurt Johnnie, but if these are her last few moments on earth she does want to go out with a bang. She glances at herself in the runny water-splashed bathroom mirror, and she thinks if she does happen to die this afternoon at least she’s looking good for the paramedics – perhaps the sex yesterday has given her that bit of extra radiance. She strokes her hair. Ellen’s not sure where to position herself in the tiny cube to surprise-attack Johnnie the best, but after a bit of scuttling around and climbing on things she decides to stop knocking things over and stands silently behind the door again. She practises a few swings of the pan, Ellen imagining in great detail the door handle getting depressed and the door slowly slowly squeaking open and Johnnie’s bleedy trainer coming in then his evil scowling face and him saying, ‘Here’s Johnnie!’ then Ellen swinging the pan 180 degrees and the metal connecting with Johnnie’s head and clunking against his skull and Johnnie tumbling to the ground with a ‘bump aargh’ and the non-stick surface of the pan ending up very sticky and red. In the end, though, Johnnie just steps into the bathroom and disarms her very easily. He takes Gary Rhodes by the handle and yogs him casually onto the lino floor. Ellen bursts into tears (plan B) then hugs/suppresses Johnnie and whimpers, ‘Did you kill him did you kill him?’ Suddenly Ellen’s a sopping tracksuit wrapped around Johnnie’s, and she does an incredible puppy-dog-saved-from-drowning expression and almost tells Johnnie she’s sorry and she loves him but she doesn’t want to go overboard. Johnnie’s natural instinct is to feel anxious (is she worried Angelo’s dead because it means she can’t shag him again?), but there’s a teensy pink lever in his heart which gets triggered whenever Ellen’s looking sad and vulnerable, and he smiles and strokes her platinum hair and says, ‘Don’t be daft. I just taught him a lesson, didn’t I. He’s a prick.’ Ellen lands on her knees, shaking the bathtub and the sink and the stinky shower curtain, and she asks, ‘Are you cross at me?’ Johnnie goes, ‘Naw, of course I’m not.’ He’s still got suspicions about her and Angelo, but he knows deep down taking them out on Ellen will only result in him or her getting dumped and more sadness for Johnnie and cold beds and the shitty rat-race of chasing girls again and the possibility of not getting shagged himself again for maybe three or four-plus months. That’s not the life for him. He’d rather keep all the wonderful incredible things about Ellen and all the sickening dreadful things about her than not have anything of her at all. So, slightly grudgingly (but knowing in the back of his mind it’s the right thing to do), Johnnie takes a breath, takes up Ellen in both of his arms and says, ‘Don’t worry, Ellen, I love you. That cunt Angelo, ah he should know better not to go around punting pills. I’m struggling enough, aren’t I. He’s a cunt, he’s a cunt.’ Ellen can’t really believe Johnnie could beat Angelo to a pulp just because of ecstasy, but she’s happy with the result and cuddles him back and swears in her head she’ll never do anything to hurt him ever again, if she can. For Johnnie it feels instantly heavenly to have her back in his arms – just the feel of Ellen and her little heartbeat makes him feel happy again. The two of them are pretty knackered now and they retreat back into the lounge, holding hands, and they flop onto the settee like grandma and granddad. Johnnie’s right arm stings from the wrist to the tip of his shoulder, but for the time being he doesn’t mind Ellen lying on top of it. He feels a bit bad for making such a mess of Angelo’s carpet and for disturbing the neighbours, but soon tiredness takes over with his head on Ellen’s breast and he forgets all his worries, and slowly he begins to wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink. Johnnie dreams about the tower block, imagining himself as the Don (all black slick-back hair and crisp suits and fishes in newspapers and tommy guns in violin cases), calling all the shots in the creaky crappy corridors of the building. Peach House isn’t perfect, but it’s not hell on earth either – the council tarted up the outside with double-glazing and pinky/yellowy/creamy-square pattern about five years back. It stands like a candy castle over the busy Cargo Fleet crossroad, lined with skinny brown chip-shops and newsagents and Lidl and the two other blocks Plum and Pear. Inside, Peach House is all beigey colour schemes turned fluorescent by striplights, the corridors all claustrophobic garden paths leading you round the lodgings. The landings are either too hot or too cold depending on the season or where the sun sits in the sky, and you have to watch for dead furniture and kiddies knock-a-door-running when traversing the gangways. Floor seven is a mirage of exotic smells and spices, floor two has a poster up encouraging you to KNOW YOUR LIMIT when it comes to drinking booze, and floor ten leads up to the roof where all the satellite dishes hang out and where Alan Blunt the Cunt may or may not have tried to commit suicide the year before. Tower blocks tend to house a really strange collection of people, ranging from skint young families to slightly frightening hermits, rowdy little drug-taking bastards who keep everyone up all night, depressed single middle-aged people and immigrants, and last week the lift broke and now from outside you can see them all charging up and down and up and down the stairways like ants. It’s a pain in the arse one morning when Mrs Fletcher (a secretary at a solicitor’s in town, who lives way up on floor eight) is late for work and has to battle about a million steps just to get to the bus stop outside. It’s partly her own fault – there was an interesting article this morning in her