Had this thought of Aran’s been generally known it might well have met with approval, but it would also have met with amusement because Aran himself was well known as a person who really did take himself too seriously: a blinding social affliction—no one can ever recognise it in themselves.
Elfish phoned, demanding to know if he had found a poem for her yet. Aran replied that he had not.
“I’ve been too depressed to visit the library.”
“You mean you won’t even visit a library to help your own sister when she is up against people so desperate as to shove poems by Shelley through her letterbox?”
Her brother gave in and agreed to go out and research although this was not something he wished to do. Whilst Aran might like to give the impression that he was quite at home in a library, surrounded by literature, he was really far happier at home playing video games and watching daytime television, and ogling the young female presenters.
Back onscreen Botticelli was struggling vainly with the rudder. Aran was not totally satisfied with his choice of Botticelli as an occupant of the raft.
“I don’t think he is tragic enough,” he had told Elfish. “Maybe I should have picked a painter that more bad things happened to.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“I don’t know much about any other painters.”
“What about Van Gogh?” suggested Elfish. “He was really tragic.”
Aran rejected this, claiming not to like Van Gogh because he was too modern and never painted the inside of a church. So he stuck with Botticelli. After all, game players were fairly dumb, as far as Aran could see. For all they knew, Botticelli might have been an immensely tragic figure.
thirty-five
JOHN MACKIE WONDERED if he should give up the struggle, close his shop and retire. He gazed without pleasure around the small confines of his premises. They were poorly lit, poorly stocked and bereft of customers.
Today as always he had attended ten o’clock Mass at St. Mary’s Church, staying behind briefly to light a candle for his long-dead sister. The pain of her loss, stretching over fifty years, felt worse today. It had felt worse since the young woman who resembled her had come into his shop.
A small bell on the door rang as someone entered. John Mackie was not particularly pleased to see that it was the same young woman.
Elfish had walked down the street forcing herself to be cheerful, trying to lift her mood by an effort of will. She had again been overtaken by the feeling that this was all too difficult and she was never going to recruit a band and learn a speech in the required time. She was now lying to herself, quite consciously.
“It’s easy,” she said. “No problem. May just needs a little encouragement. Once she has her own guitar in her hands she will be pleased to be in my band. I’ll just go and see that man in the music shop and make him a reasonable offer.”
“Yes?” said John Mackie, and winced slightly as Elfish brushed her hair from her face and looked again like his sister, although his sister would never have had a stud and a ring through her nose.
“I would like that guitar,” said Elfish. “And although I don’t have enough money I will trade you this guitar for it, and pay off the balance.”
Elfish held up a fairly mangy specimen of guitar. It was a cheap Gibson copy which was missing three strings. Two of its machine heads were badly bent and the controls and scratch plate were very much the worse for wear.
John Mackie shook his head. The guitar on offer was not worth as much as the one she wanted and although he would accept it as a deposit and allow Elfish to pay off the rest he would not allow her to take the new guitar away before the whole sum was paid.
“But I need it now. It is of great importance that my band get started right away. Otherwise I will not be able to use the name Queen Mab and you will naturally appreciate how important that is. It’s also of great importance to my friend May that she have a guitar. Otherwise she may sink into such a mental state as to be unrecoverable. Besides, this is only the start of much business I’ll put your way. So please give me the guitar and I promise to come in every week and pay it off.”
John Mackie stared at her. He had not remained in business for so long by accepting such ridiculous offers as this. He was about to tell her abruptly to leave his shop when Elfish again swept back her hair, this time tucking the beaded fringes behind her ears, and proceeded to look even more like his sister. Her lip trembled. A tear formed in her eye and threatened to trickle down her cheek. John Mackie had the confused thought that he was somehow making his own sister cry. Unable to bear this he abruptly surrendered. Bemused by his own actions, the owner of the shop let her have the guitar, on the promise to pay for it later.
Marching down the street, Elfish was triumphant. She had learned from Shonen the actress how to start crying and make herself look pathetic and it seemed to have worked very well. The guitar was hers and would serve well for May. Now she had another member of her band, with equipment, and felt that she was well on her way.
Of course it had meant stealing Gail’s guitar and trading it away and Gail was bound to be suspicious of Elfish but she would never be able to prove anything. Elfish had got up early that morning to remove the instrument and on leaving the house had cunningly left the door open. This would enable her to claim that they must have been burgled during the night. Possibly she could violently criticise Gail or Chevon for coming in from the pub drunk again and forgetting to shut the door. In reply to any enquiry as to her own movements she would use Aran as an alibi and claim to have spent the night at his flat. All in all it was an excellent morning’s work.
Passing a charity shop, Elfish went in for a look around, hunting for more T-shirts and socks. As she wandered round she practised her speech.
O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies . . .
Elfish could manage no more than five lines. How many lines did that leave? Being very poor at arithmetic she could not easily subtract five from forty-three in her head but it was definitely a lot. The pleasant glow from her good morning’s work vanished quickly and a familiar gloom set in.
Elfish found some socks. Her motorbike boots had been feeling a little loose lately. Either they had expanded or her feet had lost weight. She paid for them and put them on immediately, stretching them over her numerous other pairs and then cramming her boots back on, now satisfactorily tight.
She took the guitar to May, returned home, abused the cat and got on with her Shakespeare. Gail was in tears about the loss of her guitar, which brightened Elfish’s mood a little.
thirty-six
CARY AND LILAC were meanwhile continuing their career as Brixton’s most hated couple. They held hands, wandered around, and looked for some source of income. Unfortunately there did not seem to be much income to be had, and after a great deal of wandering they found themselves back at their own house, sitting on the front wall.
Chevon and Perlita appeared with their bicycles. Cary and Lilac greeted them and were greeted in turn, although not with much enthusiasm. Elfish’s four flatmates, though far less hostile to the world than her, still found Cary and Lilac hard to take now that their magazine had collapsed before even getting off the ground.
Along with Marion and Gail, Chevon and Perlita felt that they were now bereft of their main purpose in life and in these circumstances it is rarely pleasant to be unable to leave your house without meeting two people grinning inanely at you and telling you what a lovely day it is. Defeated by a lack of distribution, Chevon and Perlita felt that few days would qualify as lovely.
Distribution, they told each other, was a very effective manner of censorship. While there was no law to prevent them from writing or producing their magazine full of radical views, neither did there seem to be any way of
getting these views across to others. And while no one could deny that the country was in a far worse state after years of rule by the Conservative Party than it had been before they came to power, no one any longer seemed to have any desire to do anything about it. The whole nation languished instead in front of TV sets and video machines.
Young radical feminists in Brixton also languished in front of TVs and video machines, but not all of the time. Some of them still tried to make their views heard, but it was very difficult.
Cody and Mo appeared, wearing leather and carrying guitars in cases. They had been rehearsing for the gig at the weekend and were returning to their own home which was on the far side of Elfish’s.
Mo was reading a note with great displeasure.
An Almond parrat:
That’s my Mab’s voice,
I know by the sound.
—DEKKER
Cody had been fairly impressed when they received this, knowing that Dekker’s Westward Ho! was not widely read these days, but Mo was simply annoyed.
“What the hell is an almond parrat? And how did I get involved in this in the first place? It’s all your fault, Cody. You said Elfish would be dismayed when we gave her these obscure poems. Now she keeps giving us back even more obscure ones. I’m trying to run a rock band here, not judge a poetry contest.”
But Mo could not give up on the subject because if he let Elfish have the last word he knew that she would use it as evidence of his alleged stupidity.
“You better deal with it, Cody. You’ll have to find another one.”
“Don’t worry,” said Cody, spotting Cary and Lilac. “I already have a good idea.”
“Come inside,” said Cody to the young couple. “I have a business proposition for you. I want you to pose for a picture of Queen Mab.”
thirty-seven
ELFISH, WITH MUCH to do, had a late afternoon drink then felt too tired to carry on. Her drinking had been a problem for some time and now, when she most needed her wits and her energy, it was getting worse. She was becoming more and more frantic about her inability to learn the speech and this worsened every time someone stopped her in the street to ask her about it. Elfish had not bargained for Mo telling everyone and the scale of her impending humiliation left her terrified. It seemed that everyone in Brixton was going to be at the gig and they were all coming early to see Elfish recite Shakespeare.
Many of the people who asked Elfish how she was getting on pretended to be sympathetic to her cause but Elfish suspected that in reality they disliked her and were looking forward to her failing. In this supposition she was correct.
Depressed and unenthusiastic she found it hard indeed to summon up the energy to visit Aisha.
Only when a strong mental image of the hated Mo floated into her head did she manage to rouse herself and leave the house. She walked through the tiny part of Brixton which appeared to be thriving, with a new McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut and a cinema about to be refurbished, much against the will of its patrons, and on along the street till the shops became smaller and grubbier and the pavements were strewn with rubbish.
Her way took her through the Loughborough estate, the first part of which was a truly dreadful collection of grubby white tower blocks separated by windswept and unfriendly patches of grass and concrete. Scaffolding stood around the entire reaches of one huge block. They were being repainted at the rate of one every two years, and young thieves were the main benefactors of this endeavour, using the scaffolding to creep easily into eighth-floor dwellings and burgle the flats, week after week.
Past this came the old red-brick blocks. The concrete that surrounded them also showed signs of refurbishment. Some government grant or other had arrived to spruce up the estate with newly painted railings and a children’s playground, but vicious-looking dogs were the only occupants of the playground and behind every letterbox sat a council-tax demand that none of the occupants could pay.
Aisha lived here. Aisha was familiar to Elfish mainly from her brother’s description of her, although she was well known generally as a woman who suffered from agoraphobia and panic attacks on a regular basis.
Let this go simply, thought Elfish, ringing the bell. I do not want to cope with anybody else’s problems today.
“Go away,” shouted Aisha through the door. “I’m having a panic attack.”
Elfish scowled and bent down to the letterbox.
“Let me in, Aisha, I need your help.”
“I can’t see anybody, it’s too severe,” said Aisha.
“Well, it’s not as fucking severe as it’s going to be if I kick this door down!” screamed Elfish, losing all patience. She raised one large boot.
The door opened, revealing a shaking and trembling Aisha.
“Please go away,” she said.
Elfish barged her way in.
“Put your panic attack to one side for the moment, Aisha. More important matters are afoot.”
The guitarist strode confidently through to Aisha’s main room. It was conspicuously clean and tidy due to Aisha’s habit of doing housework to take her mind off her nerves. Elfish scanned the shelves and found what she was looking for, a bottle of vodka. She helped herself to a swig and shoved it into Aisha’s hand.
“Calm down with this.”
“I’m not meant to do that,” protested Aisha. “The doctors—”
“To hell with the doctors. Take a drink.”
She helped the shaky Aisha to drink some vodka. Aisha’s trembling diminished very slightly.
“Well, now you’re back to normal,” said Elfish. “How about painting me a nice backdrop? Something suitable for a screaming thrash band with the excellent name of Queen Mab, deliverer of dreams.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have any paint or materials. I don’t even have a brush anymore. Mory took them all when he left me.”
Elfish prepared herself to deal with another person’s problems.
thirty-eight
WHEN ELFISH SAW Cary and Lilac sitting on their front wall she began to feel that really this was too much. They had a tape player beside them and they were listening to a very old recording of Marc Bolan in his hippie days.
I could have danced,
with my princess
To the light of the magical moon.
They smiled at Elfish. She groaned. Returning home these days seemed like running a gauntlet, something on a par with smuggling guns to the Indians. Or, as her flatmates would undoubtedly inform her sharply, Native Americans.
“Hello, Elfish. Guess what?”
“I don’t care what,” rasped Elfish, beyond humour.
“We’ve got a job,” Cary beamed.
“Cody is painting us. A scene from Jonson’s Queen Mab, he says.”
Elfish reeled as if assaulted, and turned on her heel abruptly, heading for Aran’s.
“Mo and Cody have grossly insulted me again by picking Cary and Lilac as models for a new Queen Mab painting.”
Elfish was completely, totally, overwhelmingly outraged by this. The picture had been meant to be of her and now it was to feature these two appalling youths who tormented her night and day by kissing in public and whispering secrets to each other.
“I should have attacked them,” she raged, and made to leave. She stopped only when her brother waved a beer can at her.
“I don’t suppose it matters really,” he said.
“Of course it matters. Queen Mab is my name. It’s not for all and sundry. Everyone can’t go around being Queen Mab. It defeats the whole object. What’s more, Mo is trying to show he knows more than me about Queen Mab again. He has countered my putting the Dekker poem through his door by this new action of finding a Ben Jonson play. Who is Ben Jonson incidentally?”
“He’s on the raft in my video game,” said Aran. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“Well, who was he really?”
“A contemporary of Shakespeare. He was buried with the i
nscription ‘Rare Ben Jonson,’ so people at the time thought he was a good playwright, but really he was nothing like as good as Shakespeare. Entirely two-dimensional.”
Here Aran was quoting the standard and rather old-fashioned view of Ben Jonson which he had read in a book. Along with the rest of his views on literature, it contained no original thought or insight.
Nonetheless, Aran was secretly impressed that Cary and Lilac were to be featured in a painting of Ben Jonson’s “Entertainment,” featuring Queen Mab, because this was a rather forgotten work, much more obscure than Romeo and Juliet, on which Elfish’s Queen Mab portrait was to have been based.
“If you know enough about this person to program him into your video game, how come you didn’t know he had written about Queen Mab as well?” said Elfish, with some justification. “Have you actually read anything he wrote?”
“Of course,” replied Aran. “His entire works. Well, most of them anyway. There may be a few gaps here and there.”
“Ha!” snorted Elfish. “I don’t expect you ever read a play of his in your life. You probably just looked him up one time in your Children’s Encyclopaedia.”
Aran changed the subject. Elfish departed. Again upset and pressurised she found herself unable to learn any lines, and the gig crept ever closer.
thirty-nine
ELFISH STOLE A black sheet from Chevon’s bedroom to make a backdrop with, but a thorough search of the house revealed neither a paintbrush nor any paint. She needed several pounds to buy these for Aisha, so she borrowed a little money from Aran and begged for the rest in front of Brixton tube station.