Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (11 page)

I feel ill. I want to phone up Cis and ask her to pick me up in her mother’s car. If Cis did that all the other workers would be impressed by her beauty and would not mind so much that I am weaker than them.

She would take me home in her car. Then she would talk and talk like she liked to do, and we could cook some terrible food.

I can see her in front of me. Here, Cis, have some business mail.

Ruby has many friends but she usually only sees them when her and Domino are not speaking. When they are together she mainly just sees him. I find this hard to understand because all of her friends are nicer than Domino. Everyone else in the world is nicer than Domino.

I practise my new song but I can’t get it right so I go and make some tea for Ruby and she tells me about the contact article.

‘But why a contact article?’

She looks at me patiently.

‘I explained it all already. What’s wrong with your memory these days?’

I shrug. I don’t know. It seems to have disappeared.

‘You remember that guy who used to live next to you in the Army Careers Office? The one whose door you
ripped to shreds the night you arrived home with Anastasia?’

‘The one who used to overdose all the time and lie around shivering? Of course I remember him, I could never get a bowl of cornflakes in the morning without stumbling all over him. Isn’t he dead by now?’

‘No, he is the editor of
Triple X Adult Fantasy Magazine
. And he told me he would pay us good for articles about meeting lots of bizarre contact people and fucking them. Or not fucking them, depending on what they want.’

‘What else would they want?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe they might want to piss on us and stuff like that.’

I look at Ruby.

‘Do we really have to let strangers piss on us to earn some money?’

‘Well, maybe not. I figure maybe we could make some of it up. But anyway, we’ll answer some ads and post a few ourselves and see what kind of replies we get.’

‘Can I put an advert in for Cis?’

‘No.’

I think maybe I will anyway. She might be lonely. She might be desperate to start going out with me again but too shy to ask, frightened that I will not want anything to do with her.

‘Go and steal some more magazines after you’ve helped me practise with my diaphragm. And see if you can find some nice flowers, these ones are dead.’

Walking round to the shops I can’t find the flower stall but I do meet Helena, benevolent Goddess of Electric Guitarists. She is resplendent and beautiful in a rubycoloured dress.

I pay her proper respect, then I ask her if she could maybe help me with the chord changes in my new song.

‘I’ll try,’ she says. ‘But I am finding it difficult to concentrate. My girlfriend has left me.’

‘You too?’

‘I’m afraid so. This morning she kicked down my door and told me she never wanted to see me again. Take these daffodils for your flatmate. I don’t need them anymore.’

I buy a romantic fiction magazine and steal a sex magazine and take them back to Ruby. I feel sorry about Helena losing her girlfriend. Obviously it is a universal problem.

Ruby is pleased with the daffodils. I put most of them in the living room but I save two for my room, where I put them next to the cacti. ‘Look at these nice flowers. Why don’t you grow some nice flowers too?’

It is now May. Although it is pouring rain outside we are well into spring and I am sure it must be the flowering season for cacti.

‘Look at that tree,’ says Ruby, pointing out the window. ‘It is covered with lilac buds. Just like my dress. What do you think it is like being a tree?’

‘I don’t know. Peaceful, I suppose. But you would get wet all the time.’

Next day Ruby says she will take me for a day out. I ask her if I have to bring a bucket and spade but she says no, we’re going to the British Museum.

At first I am not enthusiastic, but when we arrive I start to enjoy myself. Ruby holds my hand and we walk round roomfuls of exhibits: ancient Egyptian mummies, Greek armour, Persian carpets, all sorts of things. Groups of schoolchildren hurry about them from this glass case to that and serious tourists look at their guidebooks.

Some of the children point at Ruby’s bare feet and she smiles at them before their teachers drag them off to look at more exhibits. The teachers are looking after large groups of children, but they do not seem to be harassed by it. I suppose they are specially trained.

After a while Ruby hunts out the information desk.

‘Can we get a cup of tea anywhere?’ she asks. ‘And where is the armour that Hector stripped from the body of Patroclus at the siege of Troy?’

‘The restaurant is at the far end of the ground floor,’ the assistant tells us, pointing the way. ‘And Patroclus’s armour is in the room immediately above.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ruby.

We have to queue a long time for our tea but it comes in a good silver pot. Ruby tells me the story of Hector and Patroclus at the siege of Troy and right after we go to look at the armour. It is still stained with ancient blood.

Next we look at huge carved lions that used to guard the gates of Babylon and in the ancient Syrian jewellery section
we spend a long time staring at the earrings and deciding which ones we like best and which ones we’d like to wear if we could take them away.

When the museum shuts we buy a drink in the pub along the road. Ruby is happy, though I expect she wishes Domino was here.

‘Who is the guardian spirit of museums?’

Ruby doesn’t know. ‘But whoever it is is doing a good job.’

It was a good visit. If Cis was still talking to me I’d ask if she wanted to come here and if she did she would like it a lot. She’d like to be at the seaside too, with a bucket and spade.

‘If I’m stuck for some conversation with these contact people I can tell them all about the museum,’ I say to Ruby, being practical.

Ruby has disappeared. I have not seen her for three days. She is not at Domino’s. None of her friends have seen her. I am frantic with worry. I trudge from place to place and after the first place it starts to rain. My clothes are soaked through and no one knows where she is. Dead images of Ruby in a torn lilac dress dance in front of me.

I meet Cis carrying some parts of a drum-kit but she won’t talk to me. I meet a man with a terrible birthmark down one side of his face and bad acne on the other side and he trembles and tells me that nothing I suffer is as bad as the staring and avoidance of staring that he endures every day. I meet a former flatmate of mine with a suitcase who is walking down to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital for a brief stay as an inpatient. I meet Gerry who plays bass guitar and doesn’t like me because he thinks I tried to steal his girlfriend years ago. I denied it to everyone although it was true. I meet Mary who has had a baby and produces so much breast milk that she is on her way to the children’s home with a spare bottle for the motherless babies alone in their cots. I meet all of the Dead City Dykes who claim to be the only lesbian speed metal band in the country and they tell me they will shake the nation when they find a new guitarist, but they haven’t seen Cis and they haven’t seen Ruby. I meet Izzy who is on her way to see a doctor to start abortion proceedings after calling into the sports shop for some heavier weights, and she hasn’t seen Ruby either. I meet Alice who works in a travel agency, and Maggie who is being evicted, and Jane who is selling communist newspapers and Barry, who has nowhere to stay, but none of them know where Ruby is and I become wetter and wetter and colder and colder and I end up in the centre of London looking in alleyways and other than this I don’t know what to do.

*

A few years ago I walked round the centre of London with nowhere to stay the night, not knowing what to do. It was raining heavily and my clothes were soaked through. I wanted to be somewhere warm. Just being somewhere warm would make me very happy. I meet a person at the edge of Soho who is friendly and we get talking and share a cigarette. His name is Phil and he is a drummer. He shows me a comic he is carrying and he says I can read it if I want. It is a tale about some spacemen lost after a meteor storm. I read it in a café he takes me to where we can sit all night.

The café is full of hopeless degenerates and I feel quite at home. One of them is called Spider because of the spider’s-web tattoo across his neck. His long hair is filthy and even sitting in his seat he manages to give the impression of someone shambling about in an alleyway. As the night passes he starts to shake slightly and tap his foot to an imaginary rhythm.

I feel all right in the café, at least I have somewhere to sit for the night. On each table there is a vase with one yellowed plastic flower drooping over the edge and I find these quite pleasant.

Another person walks past and offers Spider a cup of tea and nods to me and I get bought a cup of tea as well. Pretty soon the tea buyer sits next to us.

He is about forty with a small tough face and thin hair tied in a little ponytail.

‘Call me Jocko,’ he says, ‘although it’s not my real name. No one in London knows my real name.’

He seems pleased that no one in London knows his real name and regales us with stories of his time as a security guard at the local amusement arcades.

‘I used to carry a chopper. I found that better than a knife. I’ve had people come up and point shooters at my head.’

About three o’clock he invites me and Spider home. Spider tells me that normally Jocko would not give him house-room, so it seems that I am the attraction.

Jocko’s door is bright green and battered. The original lock has been torn off and a new one has been fitted underneath with some metal panelling to strengthen it. Jocko has lots of pornography. A magazine called
Bits of Boys
sticks in my mind. When I was eight I wouldn’t have known how to give a blow job. Jocko is pleased that he has a nice room to stay in close to Soho, and very cheap, and pleased that he is at home with violence.

I sleep with Spider, although Jocko says I am welcome to stay in his bed if I will be more comfortable there.

Probably I will be more comfortable with Spider. He is very dirty but I am not very clean myself.

‘Will I toss you off before you go to sleep?’ says Spider, trying to be friendly, but I decline his offer.

Next day Jocko tries to make me stay in the flat but I say I have to leave. Seeing his small axe lying next to the knives and forks on the sink, I am very polite about it and promise I’ll come back.

*

I desperately want Ruby to come back.

The nightmare in the mailing firm continues. After two weeks of thirteen-hour nightshifts I have turned into a zombie. During the day I seem to have no time to sleep because I am busy trying to organise our gig, and rehearse my new song about Cis, and look for Ruby. I struggle up the ramp, loading the truck. The DJ is playing records.

‘Get a fucking move on,’ says Mark, the shift foreman, as I start to wilt.

Mark knows all about being a shift foreman. He told me he learned it quickly because he doesn’t just want to be a shift foreman all his life. And when he worked cleaning cars he learnt everything about cleaning cars in one day as well.

I pound down the last sack and collapse onto the floor. It is three o’clock, time for a fifteen-minute break. By the third shift of the week all five of us are so exhausted that we curl up on empty sacks and sleep during these fifteen minutes, although sleeping for fifteen minutes only makes you feel worse when you have to get up for the next lorry.

I think about Cis. I have never felt so lonely and hopeless as when lying on these mailsacks.

I want to go and tell Ruby about it. Ruby has disappeared.

‘She’s visiting her mother,’ says Ascanazl, Spirit Friend of Lonely People, making a brief appearance. I know he is lying.

Here’s a record for you
, says the DJ.
It’s from Cis, and the message is, come back, I love you
.

When I arrive back at the flat Ruby is home. I hug her and tell her how worried I was. She says she was visiting her mother and didn’t I see the note she left in my room?

‘No.’

‘Or the one in the kitchen?’

‘No.’

‘Next time I’ll spray-paint a message on the wall.’

She tells me it was a pleasant visit except her mother moaned about her not wearing any shoes.

She has brought back some fishfingers as a present from her mother so we cook them into sandwiches.

The sacred Aphrodite Cactus was first brought to Britain by Brutus. Britain is in fact named after Brutus. He was a refugee from Troy.

Aphrodite, sympathetic to the defeated Trojans but unable to help militarily, gave the refugees food and supplies for their journey, and a few cactuses to help them with their love affairs.

Geoffrey of Monmouth won his true love, the daughter of a local noble, in this way. As soon as the cactus he presented her with flowered, she fell powerfully in love with him.

Mine will not flower. Neither will Ruby’s. It is almost June. June must be a good flowering time for cacti.

I ask Aphrodite if there is any problem but she is too busy to talk to me because there are broken hearts everywhere. She refers me to Jasmine, Divine Protectress of Broken Hearts. Jasmine says she will see what she can do but she is also very busy. The number of broken hearts there are is increasing all the time.

‘I know,’ says Ruby. ‘And there is not much to do about a broken heart. But don’t worry. I heard that Cis is missing you.’

I finish the fishfinger sandwiches and bring them through on our metal tray, green with a tobacco advert.

‘I think it is a little banal,’ says Ruby.

‘You told me you were keen on fishfinger sandwiches,’ I protest.

‘Not the fishfinger sandwiches. I love fishfinger sandwiches, as long as there is plenty of mayonnaise. I think your story is banal.’

‘What story?’

She looks a little impatient.

‘The one you told me last week. About your spaceship crashing and you walking around on the planet with a robot.’

I have no idea what she is talking about. I never told her any story like that. I have never been in a spaceship that crashed onto another planet. But I go along with it while we’re eating our sandwiches.