Outsider (3 page)

“
I don’t know about you but my hay fever
is suddenly feeling so much better!”

“
Mine is on vacation!” Jan replied
impulsively.

“
Wanna have a taste?” Billie offered, good
and charismatic performer, closing the distance between
them.

“
Why not, sounds like a good idea!” But a
bit weary inside.

“
Shut up and open your mouth!” Brash and
sometimes macho, Billie was.

Jan obeyed. Billie poured the content of the
small plastic glass onto the pierced tongue exposed in the process.
Jan closed her mouth on the alcohol, a satisfied look on her face,
savoring the surprisingly-not-so-burning taste. She bit into the
lemon crescent offered by Billie.

Tequila was the trigger. Jan didn’t know,
but the Dragon knew. It would now take about two hours.

* * * * * * *

When the gig ended –too soon- Sid’s friends
started to make a move toward home. But Sid sat down in the chair
recently vacated by Nat and told Judy:

“Hold on, I’m not ready, I need to
unwind.”

Sid actually wanted to see Red Head
off-stage, she wanted to scan the singer’s aura, and she needed to
know. It was not that she could read auras, but she could sense a
few things, a few shifts, and a few differences. She absolutely
needed to know something about Terri Harley.

The room was seriously clearing, punters
slowly shooed away by the Blue Moon’s bouncers, when Terri Harley
eventually reached the green-mohicaned woman, whose Native American
tattoos shined with sweat. She smiled and Sid forgot to protect
herself. For the second time that night, a smile pierced her
fragile heart. Terri’s friendly voice inquired:

“What’s your name?”

“Sid.”

“Sid, good to meet you!”

Terri’s handshake was firm, the kind Sid
relished in. She replied:

“It’s good to hear another powerful voice. I
was getting to feel lonely. And you know, about the bottle of
mescal, I mean it.”

“You don’t have to!”

Looking at Second Look’s gig list:

“Where is ……. The Black Crow?”

“It’s easy! Just across the street from the
Gunnersberry station!”

Two men nearby were standing at attention.
Terri squeezed Sid’s hand again and planted a kiss on Sid’s right
cheek:

“Thanx for coming, Sid! Spread the word!”

“I will!” She literally meant it.

Regretfully she followed the bouncers’
directions and left the building. But she felt good, oh so good
inside. She was unwillingly carrying the surrounding people’s
contentment along with her own satisfaction. She had made contact
and she knew. Terri’s aura was different off-stage. Friendship was
a possibility. Life was opening up; the future was hers to collect.
She was flying on the wings of wishful thinking.

(Tequila After Dark)

During the next two hours everything and
everyone went wilder. The crowd, the singer, the drumbeats, Jan’s
dancing. Her eyes darkened, her elbows sharpened, the crowd gave
her respectful space for her increasing foot stomping.

And when the band left the stage, after more
of Billie’s antics and a few encores, Jan was nowhere to be seen.
Neither Billie nor the other Leos cared to even mentally comment
about it. More fans to greet, more smiles to distribute and thanks
to attribute, posters and t-shirts to sign, CD sales to watch over
from very faraway. Everyone still so buzzed-out that unwinding
couldn’t be considered yet. Too good a gig to readily obey the
security men of the pub urging to now leave the premises. It was
some time past midnight and no one could really care about it.

When later on The Leos crew managed to
eventually load their van, there was no warning. Barely a jet of
fire, usual artifice, vague sideshow of a dragon’s activity. Before
Mel’s and Jo’s unbelieving eyes, the fantastic creature’s claws
grabbed an unsuspecting Billie by her jacketed shoulders and the
creature flew off with her in their grasp.

Billie was no pitiful babe, she tried to
fight back, kicking and screaming. But the claws were strong and
uncompromising. High in the dark sky of London, the creature
flipped her over, allowing her to face her kidnapper. Humanoid
shape with the wings of a Dragon. The singer plunged her gaze into
the dark eyes. Something unmistakably familiar. The challenging
look. The line of a scar. It dawned on her as surely as the many
sunrises she had contemplated. If the snout had been a human nose
and a mouth, the nostrils would have shown a hint of tension and
the lips would have been delicately chiseled.

*..*..*..*..*..*..*

A few days later, Jan, barely aware of
another lapse in her memory, incidentally picked up a free local
weekly rag. Vaguely leafing through it, her eyes caught a title:
MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF A ROCK SINGER. The item started skeptically
with an unknown winged creature breathing fire, claimed to have
kidnapped the singer of rock band The Leos, and the latter
discovery at dawn by some night worker, of her blooded and
dislocated body. Wounds and breaks in the bones were consistent
with a fall from great height, the police had said.

Jan first thought she would have liked to
see the creature with her own eyes. Where was she at the time? She
became aware of a blank. Then she felt a hint of sadness shoot
through her heart. And suddenly, she moved on to intrigued, the odd
fact that she couldn’t remember anything after the tequila
administered by the rock singer.

The
artwork spread over the door of Sid’s bedroom was reminiscent of
Klimt’s work with its wealth and tightness of colours, but the
reminiscence stopped there. Like her tattoo sleeves, the
inspiration was indebted to the Haida nation from the northwest
coast of America. She had made the debt indelible by choosing the
traditional colours: black, red, white and blue. Deciphered, it
depicted a thunderbird, a wolf, a killerwhale and a human being.
The door of her front room sported a life-size portrait of
Shi-tsukia, the bringer of the New Year, one of the Zuni White
Kachinas. She had painted them herself, with fascination, respect,
admiration and a remarkable precision. Even so, she would have
never labeled herself an artist out loud.

Today, Sid Wasgo had no time to just stand
and admire her fancy work. The 31-year-old had another boring
psychiatrist appointment to attend and she was barely short of
being late. Psychiatrists not working on Navajo time, she had
better stop spinning all over and make a move. The hospital
squatting only a few blocks away, she decided to ignore her black
shiny helmet negligently crashed on the carpet and only grabbed her
leather jacket and opaque sunglasses. Her state of mind was a
mixture of sleepy and manic, as every morning, thanx to her
medication. She had spent the night writing controversial pieces to
entertain her faithful insomnia and caught only two hours of dense
sleep and foggy dreams around dawn. Bloody anti-depressants. The
current guilty party was labeled seroxat and was, she guessed, as
addictive as any of its street relatives. It always worked on her
as such. But the psychiatrist was adamant; she needed it to keep
her manic episodes under control. Sure, they were under control:
she was manic all the time.

She kicked a hardback book with her left DM
boot (14 eyelets were the minimum she would settle for), but the
bestseller persisted in her path. She had never thought that she’d
ever, in her entire life, pick up a book penned by Stephen King,
but the title had been promising, a powerful and unavoidable
magnet: “Dreamcatcher”. She had felt a strong need to know why this
writer would want to use the Native American device meant to
protect people, and more especially babies, from bad dreams. One
hundred stubborn pages on, and she hadn’t found her answer, but she
was sure as hell she couldn’t abide by his style. She kicked it
again, and it gave up after hitting the wall.

“
KEYS
”, a sign violently colourful
clamored on her front door. She stopped, stood still ten seconds,
frozen in her thinking, then scrambled through the pockets of her
clean black combat trousers. Clean. So clean and fresh from this
morning that the keys were not chained to the belt loop yet. She
sighed with frustration. She couldn’t afford the luxury of
destroying a second lock.

The mood stabilizers had been to blame. Can
you imagine filling up your bag pack with all the essential items
for the day (two crime novels for the library, one horror novel and
one heavy metal CD for the friend you’re gonna have lunch with, one
sci-fi novel to read on the train, one black pen and one barely
started notebook in case you feel inspired), then you walk out of
your building, take a left, arrive at the next corner, and suddenly
it hits you; where is the backpack filled with all the essentials
for the day? Home…

Well, that day, Sid had walked out of her
flat with the mountain bicycle she had been looking after for a
friend traveling abroad. She kept this light two-wheels in the
roomy closet gracing her flat and used it as a lazy mean of
transportation for the immediate area: the psychiatric hospital
qualified for the ride. She had pulled the door closed, and frozen.
Damn: she had just locked the keys inside. She considered breaking
into her home straightaway and retrieved the blasted things, but
thought getting rid of the stuffy psychiatrist first would be a
better idea. One problem at a time. Once at the hospital Sid faced
the next one head on: she kept every key within a same cluster.

“
I never had a bicycle in my office
before!” The puzzled psychiatrist scratched his head.

“
There is a first time for everything,”
She countered, thinking the saying didn’t apply to her in many
situations.

Anyway, the mood stabilizers were history
now. After three weeks, her chemical networks still in chaos with
moods swinging from high to down, frustrated to happy, relaxed to
angry, every five minutes or so, Sid chose; the psychiatrist
disagreed.

*..*..*..*..*..*..*

Refusing to repeat history, Sid turned around
and walked the few steps to the bathroom. There she scrounged
amidst the pile of yesterday’s clothes, dug out a forgotten, but
welcome ten-pound-note, and grasped the bunch of keys she
definitely needed to let herself back into her home, sweet home,
colourful home, after another fruitless encounter with the man who
didn’t like her wearing sunglasses, the man who couldn’t or
wouldn’t understand that, from one day to the next, every month,
thanx to the wonderful drugs swallowed every morning for breakfast,
Sid would switch from cranberry juice drowned in soda water with a
few ice cubes desultorily floating, to gallons of alcohol, the
harder the liquor the better, with a humongous and uncontrollable
urge to drink herself not just under the table but deeper than
underground, at any cost and at any price. An inescapable fate. And
the next morning, her period would clock on. Blast, she was always
out of sanitary pads. She never liked this reminder of the
femalehood of her body. Nor any other reminders.

And this was only one of the few side effects
she had isolated. Sid wanted out and it was not as simple as
leaving a family behind. The man wouldn’t hear her repeated
statement. She felt like a guinea pig. Great, society was having a
go at her again; trying to change her, turn her into someone else.
She was turning into a monster. Good job she liked monsters! Or
maybe she was a monster and they wanted to make her “normal”. How
did her song use to go? He wouldn’t have known the lines:
When I
don’t wanna be myself / I don’t wanna be someone else.

If burning the bridges with her family and
forfeit possible inheritance was part of her behavioural
characteristics, harassing performers on stage was definitely not.
Challenging them to slamming matches she was bound to lose? That
was beyond her cautious nature. She was as good a singer as Terri
Harley? So what. Terri Harley had been the one on stage and it had
been her show. Sid generally respected that. Generally. Yes,
“generally” was the operative word there. Because, generally, Sid
was a respectful person, this was how she used to know herself. And
now, who was she? She had named herself Wasgo, after a Haida
mythical creature, because at times, she felt so intensely half
wolf and half whale. And now, now she didn’t even care about the
rumour she would unavoidably start at the next Second Look gig
she’d attend. She knew people would whisper about her having a
crush on the red-haired singer, regardless of her personal
explanations; it had been so her whole life, but right now she
didn’t care! What was happening to acting cautiously? What was
happening to her pathological need for secrecy? She wanted to
delight in creating and starting a rumour?! Sid was gonna give
Terri Harley a bottle of mescal and she didn’t care what the entire
shallow world was gonna think, say and claim. They could talk all
they wanted; she didn’t give a bloody monkey! Drug-free, Sid would
have analyzed and peeled off the shell to get at the kernel of
truth: she couldn’t have a crush on the singer because she and
Terri, being both performers, were equals. She was gonna give the
Second Look singer a bottle of mescal because… Because in her
demented mania she had promised to do so, and Sid, drugged-up or
not, always stuck to her word. Because, maybe, even if the singer
had dealt with her with mighty wits, even if Sid knew she didn’t
have to, she felt she owed Terri Harley an apology. But was it for
harassing her on stage or for ignoring the band eons after eons? Or
was it, Sid’s favorite theory, because she would have owed Terri a
bottle of mescal from a previous life?! Drugs. Sid was now thinking
faster than she could process sentences and organize her speech,
her brain buzzing at mach three, or five, or at the speed of light.
She reluctantly promised herself to slow down for the young
psychiatrist. Maybe she’d spell out the few difficult words for
him, and she’d avoid mentioning the fresher trace of razor blade
somewhere on the vast expense of her skin, the new bandage
camouflaged under the left leg of her combat trousers. Not much
space left actually with all her tattoos. But she always found
enough virginity to slash a wound wide, from knee down to ankle.
She had smiled blissfully at the dark-red blood suddenly gushing
forth. She had dipped an index finger in the thickness and licked
it, vibrating with a feeling akin to ecstasy. She hadn’t bothered
with A & E more than previously despite the probable need for
stitches. She kept everything she needed in her bathroom to avoid
the frequently contemptuous attitude of the A & E people. Drugs
controlling her manic episodes? Oh yes, they did control the razor
blade, too, no probs. With a vengeance.