I get a job cleaning in a huge industrial garage in Gunnersbury. The floor is black with oil and I have to clean it till it is white. It takes me around a day to clean a space the size of a car, grinding away at years of grease and filth with a scrubbing brush and a mop and a bucket. Also I have to clean the toilets.
The first day I make the mistake of cleaning the toilets too early and at the end of the shift all the workers come in and make everything dirty again. So after that I leave cleaning the toilets till last.
The company tells the agency that I am a good worker and the man in the agency is pleased and says that it is very rare for one of their clients to pay a compliment to one of their workers.
At lunchtime I sit on my own in the canteen and listen to everyone talking about what they saw on television the night before.
One day a white worker calls out, ‘Hey, Mandela!’ to a black worker and there is a big argument because the black worker says he is not called Mandela, he has a name of his own.
I do not mind this cleaning work as everybody just leaves me alone to get on with it because I am obviously a good cleaner, but after about a month I don’t go in one day because I wake up with the sure knowledge that Cis will call round and visit me.
‘Not working today?’ asks Ruby.
‘No. Cis is going to visit.’
I spend the day thinking what I will say to Cis when she calls and rushing to the window at the slightest sound outside. I make up all sorts of speeches in my head, but eventually I decide that I will just tell her how pleased I am to see her again.
Ruby appears at around two in the morning with wet feet and sunglasses.
‘She didn’t call?’
I shake my head.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Ruby. ‘She might call tomorrow.’
I don’t feel like cleaning any more floors or toilets so I don’t go back to the garage and afterwards I have trouble even remembering where Gunnersbury is, although I miss the meals in the canteen because they had good pies and I used to enjoy sitting there eating them.
*
Marilyn and Izzy live in a housing co-op flat with three tiny rooms and red curtains. I wonder about visiting them. This is always a slight problem because I am friends with Izzy but I don’t know Marilyn so well and if I visit and only Marilyn is in then I feel awkward. I decide to go anyway.
They are on the first floor with no bell so I have to throw stones at the window and I am careful not to throw anything too big because Marilyn gets really fucked off if she’s watching TV and a big rock crashes into the window.
She gives me a friendly smile at the door. Upstairs Izzy smiles at me as well, and this is not so bad, two smiles in one day.
There is an advert for pensions lying on the floor. It shows a happy couple on a yacht, drinking wine.
I have no idea why people pay for pensions when you don’t get the money back for more years than you can think about. I have no idea how people get enough money to buy yachts. I have no idea why yachts cost so much money. I have no idea why I spend even a second thinking about yachts.
‘What are you thinking about?’ says Marilyn.
‘Pensions and yachts.’
‘So you are still feeling bad about Cis leaving you?’
‘Yes.’
Izzy has put up a poster in the hallway of a female bodybuilder. She is wearing a purple leotard that shows off most of her body. Her back is V-shaped, muscular and strong.
Marilyn and Izzy both play in a band and so do I so we talk about how difficult it is to get gigs and how appalling all other bands are and how much we detest all the other bands in the area.
‘How is the weightlifting going?’
‘Very well,’ says Izzy. ‘I am twice as strong as I was two months ago. I’m on a special healthy diet and I’m thinking of joining a club. Except I can’t find a good club. There was a women-only bodybuilding class at the local institute but they closed it down. And I don’t want to go somewhere where men will laugh at me.’
‘They wouldn’t laugh if you were serious about it.’
‘Yes they would. Dean thinks it’s hilarious.’
‘How is Dean?’
‘I haven’t seen him for a week. Do you think I’m looking stronger?’
‘Yes,’ I lie.
‘Say hello to Ruby for us,’ they say, as I head off home.
Cynthia thinks about her love, and suffers at the hands of the weather
I love the boy whose lips I brushed, thinks Cynthia, lying alone on her rubbish tip. I have only seen him for three seconds, but my love is more powerful than any love that has ever been.
She writes him a love poem on the outside of her sleeve.
One time Cynthia ate a boyfriend because he brought her a love poem and it was really bad.
Feeling sentimental, she now regrets this.
I will never eat another human, she vows. Or rather, I’ll never eat another nice human being. I may chew on a few nasty ones, but only if they really deserve it.
She wonders how she can get to see Paris. The werewolf detectives are bound to be watching the old vicarage.
Rain starts falling in large slow drops and the wind carries some of the moisture under the railway arch that overhangs the rubbish tip. Cynthia shivers and seeks refuge under some sheets of cardboard. She dislikes the rain, especially when she is living rough.
A few yards along from her more bodies shiver in their temporary cardboard shelters, tramps and derelicts who live with her on the rubbish tip under the arches.
In friendship they sometimes offer her some of their methylated spirits to warm her up, but Cynthia is not a big drinker.
Back at my flat I ask Ruby if she thinks I should invest in a pension plan but she doesn’t think it is a good idea at my stage of life, even though I specifically remember the advert said it was never too early to start. And I’m worried about forgetting to sign on because now we will have been thrown off the Social Security register. It will take weeks to get our claim sorted out and we will have no money for anything and we’ll have to sit around for hours in the DHSS.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I have a good idea for making money.’
‘How come you got back with Domino?’
She shrugs.
Ruby tells me to read good books, although why she wants me to do this I am never quite clear.
She is always reading good books and she is a writer. She never shows me any of her writing except for the ongoing werewolf story, but I know she will be good.
Now she is busy plucking her eyebrows, so I give her artistic advice and make us some tea.
‘How was the rehearsal?’
‘It was good except we don’t have a drummer anymore and I can’t play my guitar so well now my soul is missing.’
‘Maybe you left it in your guitar case.’
I hurry through to my room and look.
‘No. It isn’t there.’
‘Well, don’t worry, it is bound to turn up somewhere, probably when you least expect it.’
‘I could ask the Goddess of Electric Guitar Players if she’s seen it.’
Ruby frowns.
‘There is no such thing as the Goddess of Electric Guitar Players.’
Later on Domino arrives and criticises Ruby’s eyebrows even though they are looking terrific. After a while they start fucking in the living room so I can’t go in and watch television, but the picture isn’t very good anyway since Ruby battered it with a brick when she couldn’t find a good programme.
I sit in my bedroom and play my guitar some more, trying to remember the new things I worked out with Nigel.
The Goddess of Electric Guitar Players is called Helena. She looks after you when you are trying to learn a new song and if anyone throws a bottle at you when you are going onstage she reaches out a graceful hand and diverts it onto an amplifier. Also, if you have been assiduous in paying tribute to her, she will prevent your guitar strings from breaking and give you a gentle nud
ge if your solo is starting to bore everyone. She brings comfort to everyone whose fingers are sore from trying to learn a new chord and, if the occasion merits it, she will personally get inside your fuzzbox and make it scream and shriek.
A lovely goddess, Helena.
After a few minutes the people upstairs bang on the ceiling because I am disturbing them.
I sit and feel lonely. Sitting and feeling lonely is something I am a spectacular success at. I can do it for hours. Everyone is good at something.
There is a knock on the door. It is Izzy. I make her some tea and show her my cactus.
‘Ruby says it is a sacred Aphrodite Cactus. Once it flowers Cis will fall in love with me. It is a wonderful coincidence that she picked it as a present for me.’
Izzy says that love is not necessarily all that good a thing and asks if I can lend her two hundred pounds because she needs an abortion.
Through in the living room there is a furious argument with screaming and shouting and banging. The front door slams.
Ruby storms into my bedroom. Her face is streaked with anger and tears and she screams about what a bastard Domino is and how she had better not see him again or she will kill him, then she sits on the edge of my bed and complains that I don’t have any comfy seats in my room. I wonder where Cis is. Cis had a comfy seat in her bedroom. But probably she is not in the comfy seat, probably she is in bed with someone nice, wrapped around him. Probably she is in bed with someone who is secure with a lucrative pension plan.
Izzy looks depressed and Ruby looks furious and I think about Cis and how difficult everything is but, lacking anything sensible to say, I keep quiet and let Ruby rage.
There is a tiny spot on the side of my cactus. It looks like it might be the start of a flower. There is nothing on Ruby’s and I feel sorry for her, although really if Domino were to fall permanently in love with her it would be a very bad thing.
Cynthia hungrily thinks of home, but manages to find a meal in the end
Next morning Cynthia is dreadfully hungry. Remembering her promise not to eat reasonable humans, and not having any money at all, she wonders what to do about breakfast. She still has a few friends from her days at the vicarage, but she does not want to go begging food off them, though she would like to see Paris again.
She looks around for a stray cat or two, but nothing moves save for the homeless inhabitants of the railway arches folding up their cardboard beds and storing them carefully for the following night.
Back home on the croft her mother fed her regular meals. Today is Thursday. Every Thursday her mother made lamb stew and baked a cake. Cynthia craves for some lamb stew and a piece of homemade cake.
Three young men walk past and one of them wolf-whistles at her. Cynthia can see immediately that they are not very pleasant. She decides that it will be all right to eat them, and probably every bit as good as her mother’s lamb stew.
So she does. Afterwards she vomits for three days till the lining of her stomach is dribbling through her nose.
My next contact is with a man who describes himself as fortyish and looking for a younger lover. He doesn’t show. Probably this is just as well as I do not feel like a younger lover. I feel like a washed-out old person.
I feel bad when I wake up, so on the way to the toilet I kick the door and I almost break my foot and this is such a ludicrous thing to do that it cheers me up.
I limp through to Ruby’s room with some tea. Ruby is in bed with a robot made out of metal boxes. Unprepared for this, I wonder if I should stay. I hover around for a few minutes, resolving finally to go out for a while and come back later with another cup of tea.
How did the robot get in? Usually I would hear anyone knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Of course, if it is a flying robot it could have come in the window.
I pour another cup of tea and look round at the mess in the kitchen. Neither me nor Ruby is very good at tidying up.
Back in Ruby’s room the robot has gone and Ruby is talking to Izzy. Ruby holds the sheet over her, although I have seen her naked body many times. For some reason this must not be permissible when Izzy is in the room.
Izzy wants some breakfast, but Ruby refuses because she says she cannot bear to eat in the morning, or any other time really.
‘How is your knee?’ she says.
‘What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with my knee.’
‘I thought it was sore,’ says Ruby, and drinks her tea.
I walk down to Brixton. My knee starts to hurt.
Marilyn is out buying apples and she asks me if I’ve seen Izzy but I say no.
I go to buy some apples.
Cis is serving behind the counter.
I am stunned by her beauty and memories of good times.
‘Hello, Cis. Four apples please.’
I point to the kind of apples I want.
Cis puts four of them in a scale and weighs them, then puts them in a brown paper bag.
‘How long have you been working here, Cis?’ I ask, heart pounding.
‘What are you talking about?’ says the assistant who, on close observation, looks nothing at all like Cis.
‘Nothing,’ I mutter.
The assistant classifies me as a harmless crazy person and gives me a fairly sympathetic smile. I hurry away.
This cactus is sacred to Aphrodite because on one occasion she was pursued through the southern desert by Ares, God of War and unwanted suitor.
Unsuited to such a rigorous chase and unable to fight him off (Aphrodite is no coward, but Zeus refused to give her proper fighting skills, leading to her being pursued from the field of combat at Troy) Aphrodite falls to the ground.
A brave shepherdess, seeing her plight, rushes up, rips a nearby cactus out of the ground and rams it between Ares’s legs. He is forced to retire from the scene, badly hurt.
‘Thank you,’ says Aphrodite. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘My lover left me by this cactus,’ wails the shepherdess. ‘It reminded me of him. I used to sit and watch it grow. Now it is dead.’
Aphrodite, graciously sympathetic, replants the cactus and it comes back to life.
‘When it flowers your lover will return,’ she says. ‘And now and forever, in memory of my rescue, this cactus will be sacred to me, and will bring good fortune to all lovers who are gentle and kind.’
‘We will make money from writing,’ announces Ruby.
‘What writing? Is your book ready?’
‘No. Magazine writing.’
I wait for her to explain. Ruby is very smart and I know that her idea will be good.
‘I have been down to the library and stolen all their magazines. And I have stolen some more from the news-agents. I got sex magazines, karate magazines, football magazines and romance magazines. And photo-love stories.’
‘So? Are we going to sell them? It won’t get us much money. Couldn’t you steal something more valuable?’
‘No. What I mean is, we will write stories for them and they’ll pay us.’
I am dubious. But Ruby insists it will be easy, in fact what she has in mind is copying stories practically word for word and just changing a few names here and there and then sending them off.
‘The stories are all crap,’ she tells me, ‘so there is no reason for them to reject ours.’
Cynthia falls ill, seeks help, and learns she is still pursued
Cynthia werewolf has only one friend in the world of werewolves, her kindly Uncle Bartholomew.
An eccentric professor, Uncle Bartholomew lives alone with his experiments. He never got over his wife leaving him for a movie star.
‘Let me in, Uncle Bartholomew, I’m sick.’
‘Cynthia, what are you doing here? It’s not safe. Only the other day the detectives were here looking for you. Lupus the Werewolf King wants you dead.’
‘I’ll be dead soon enough, Uncle. I can’t eat.’
Uncle Bartholomew makes her some tea and wraps her up in a warm blanke
t. He can see she is not well. This makes him sad. He always liked Cynthia and her rebellious ways.
‘Tell me your problems.’
‘I can’t eat. I vowed only to eat bad people but they make me vomit. For some reason the only people that taste nice are my friends. Now I don’t have any friends left. I’m so lonely I could die. And I’m in love, but I can’t go and see him because I know I’ll eat him. Help me before I eat all the nice people in London, and die of loneliness.’
Uncle Bartholomew offers her some vegetables but Cynthia has never been keen on vegetables. Anything green makes her want to scream.
My foot still hurts from kicking the door, in fact it hurts worse than before. My knee seems to be better. Ruby’s idea about writing stories seems quite good to me.
It is March. My cactus shows no sign of flowering. The spot on the side has disappeared. Ruby’s is barren as well. Perhaps they only flower in the summer. Although if they come from a desert in the southern hemisphere this might be their summer. I don’t know if this matters. Do the months change round for a cactus when it is transported to another hemisphere?
Months later we are still flying through space.
The Captain comes to see me.
‘Why are you not doing any scientific experiments?’ he demands.
‘I am busy writing a new song.’
‘You are meant to be doing experiments.’
‘I’m bored with them. Anyway, when we reach a new planet it will probably be full of primitives. They will not care at all that we have discovered new scientific data. But if I play them a few songs it is bound to get us off to a good start.’
The Captain leaves in disgust. I can tell he hates me.
When my fingers are sore from playing the guitar I ask the computer to give me something to read. It puts a file on the screen called ancient myths.
Ascanazl, I read. The ancient Inca Spirit Friend of Lonely People. He would appear to anyone who was lonely and talk to them.
That would be nice.
Another crew member comes into my cabin and I play her my new song. She says she likes it because the guitar notes remind her of rain on Earth, and she misses the rain. She forgives me for almost getting us all killed in the meteor storm.