Kitabı oku: «Sixteen Shades of Crazy»
Sixteen Shades of Crazy
Rachel Trezise
For Gwyn Thomas (1913–1981)
‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’
Sylvia Plath
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Acknowledgements
Also by Rachel Trezise
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
They looked like any other group of twenty- and thirty-somethings, living the salad days of their lives, organs plump and red and juicy like the insides of ripe tomatoes, minds crisp like iceberg lettuce, sex powerful and biting like onion. Just another Saturday night at the Pump House, laughing big belly laughs, torsos bowed against the edge of the table as they concealed their illicit activities from the bar-staff, treasure moving around as if they were playing pass-the-parcel, the smell of perfume and alcohol shrouding their bodies like vinaigrette.
Ellie held the baggie in her fingers, fiddling with the knot, the plastic slippery with perspiration. Nowadays, street dealers were only concerned with their fleeting profits. There was no time for presentation. Nobody used paper wraps any more. She pushed her fingertip into the powder, kept it there for as long as it was polite, maybe longer, then smeared it over her taste buds, absorbing the sweet, glucosic tang.
‘What do they call this in America?’ she said, cheeks already tingling with anticipation. The south Wales valleys had been empty of soft drugs for eighteen months, no amphetamine, no MDMA. The new police chief had declared war on the B and C classes. Zero-tolerance policies sent all of the Drug Squad’s manpower to intercept shipments of party-starters in Bristol, while savvy London traffickers cruised the M4, Mercedes loaded with kilo packages of Afghan opiates. The skeletons of mining towns were populated by zombies, kids so thin and hopeless the wind would blow them over. Smackheads congregated in the gulleys, needles poised; the way women used to meet for chapel with their leather-bound bibles, honest-to-goodness recreational users left with nothing.
Ellie felt like an adolescent again, doing drugs for the very first time, a glorious thrill in her blood. ‘Is it crystal meth?’ she said, ‘or is that something totally different?’
Rhiannon snatched the baggie and balanced it in her lap. ‘Ooh cares?’ she said. She sprinkled a pinch of the powder into her wineglass. It was Rhiannon’s special wineglass, an unusual, egg-cup-shaped goblet that she demanded on every visit. She reached for another thumbful of the powder, her enthusiasm forcing the bag into the dip between her bare legs, an inch away from the hem of her new miniskirt. She was closer to forty than thirty; too old to wear that skirt, a shadow of a moustache on her top lip. Her hair was black, short and spiky, her eyes a soft, bovine brown. She had a huge laugh, like a drag artist’s. One of the stories about Rhiannon was that she’d been walking through Cardiff at three in the morning when some Grangetown wide-boy tried to drag her into an alley. She’d pulled a knife out of her handbag and slashed the tip of his nose clean off, left him for dead. It gave her a precarious allure that attracted weak men – men like Marc, who wanted to be neglected. There were lots of stories about Rhiannon, every one of them involving the opposite sex. Andy reckoned she’d married an octogenarian at eighteen, given him a heart attack in the bedroom; something he’d heard on a building site in Bridgend. The locals on the Dinham Estate said she’d made a pornographic video with Tommy Chippy for thirty quid, some of them swore they’d seen it; Rhiannon lying naked across the counter, eyes blacked out with tape, deep-fat fryers sizzling away in the background. All Ellie knew for sure was that she was a manipulative bitch; she hated women and women hated her.
‘Billy Whizz we call it in Wales,’ she said, hooting. ‘That’s where ewe live, El. Wales.’ She never overlooked an opportunity to remind Ellie where she was, because she knew Ellie wanted to be elsewhere, beneath the skyscrapers of New York. Rhiannon had resigned herself to a monotonous existence in the Welsh gutter, and no one else was allowed to look up at the stars.
The pub door opened. Rhiannon quickly balled the plastic into her fist. Big Barry the Disco came in and heaved his amplifier towards the squat stage, sweat stains forming under his yellow trouser braces. ‘The bloody prodigals’ return again, is it?’ he said as he shuffled past the boys.
Marc took the parcel from Rhiannon and hurriedly opened it on the table. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, a grin from ear to ear. He was wearing the same Liverpool football jersey he always wore, his chocolate-colour hair clipped close to his skull, receding quickly at the forehead. He was a genial man, the bassist and lead singer of a punk band called The Boobs. They’d been on a toilet circuit tour of Scotland, sleeping on the hard floor of their Transit van for six weeks, fighting for space amongst their beaten up guitars and drum-kit. They did this every five months or so, despite the lack of a record company, a tour agent, or even a cult fan base. They tossed every pound they made into the venture, as though their lives depended on it, and in Aberalaw their absence gave them the illusion of success. The stupid hacks at the local newspaper seemed to think they spent half of the year in their Malibu beach homes. Old women approached Ellie in the post office and asked her, ‘How are your Boobs doing?’
The band had got home earlier that day to the news that John Peel had listened to a demo they’d thrown at him through a backstage fence at last year’s Glastonbury Festival. He’d invited them to record a live session for the radio. Marc was happy as hell. He scoffed a whole gram of the powder, chasing it around his mouth with his roving tongue.
‘Sweetheart!’ Rhiannon barked, seizing the baggie from his hand and pushing it along the table. ‘Take it easy, will ewe? Ewe’re tiling the downstairs toilet tomorrow, remember?’
‘There’s hardly any left now,’ Griff said. Griff was the drummer, a fat, proud man with neon-orange hair; the bumptious disposition of a spoiled 12-year-old. His mother still made him corned-beef pie and salmon sandwiches to take-out on the road. He sullenly rubbed a small rock into his gum and then wiped his fingers on his check shirt, keeping the baggie in his hand, ensuring he had an audience for what he was about to say. Like a schoolboy carrying clecks to the dictatorial teacher, he looked sideways at Rhiannon. ‘He’s been a total arsehole all fucking tour,’ he said. ‘He stole a tray of muffins from Glasgow Services and kept them all to himself. He ate every bastard one and there were forty-eight of the fuckers. The only reason I’m staying in the band is because of this Peel session.’ He was always threatening to quit, and never did. ‘Should have seen the women in Scotland though,’ he said. ‘Lapped it up, they did.’
‘What women?’ Siân said. She whipped the baggie from him, turning it over in her hands. Siân was Griff’s wife. She hadn’t taken a narcotic since her first child was born. Three babies in as many years and she was down to a size twelve one week after each. No Caesareans, no stitches, no maternity leave. She worked at the video shop on a Tuesday and Wednesday and the Chinese takeaway on a Thursday and Friday – anything to keep the kids in shoes, since Griff wouldn’t lift a finger. Her glossy black hair reached down to the small of her back, framing her almond-coloured face. She had an enormous pink mouth. In any other place she would have grown up to be a catwalk model: long, sleek legs sauntering down a runway, an impossible pair of platforms on her flawless feet. But this was Aberalaw, and life wasn’t fair. She always looked like an advert for designer cosmetics, as though someone followed her around with a soft, pink light, no matter what kind of dive she was drinking in, no matter how drunk she got. In Ellie she never inspired envy as much as awe, the way people look at leopards roaming the Serengeti in David Attenborough documentaries; another species altogether.
‘I’m only joking,’ Griff said.
Siân passed the bag to Andy. ‘You’d better be,’ she said, staring at Griff, play-acting reproachful. ‘Six weeks you’ve been gone, and Niall started calling Bob the Builder Dad.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Andy said, whispering into Ellie’s ear. ‘There weren’t any girls.’ But Ellie already knew that. She’d been to too many gigs, carried too many microphone stands in and out of clubs. She’d danced on too many empty dance-floors; pretended not to know the band. Andy was no Keith Richards. But Siân was paranoid about groupies. Her days slipped away between school runs and fish fingers, and Griff was convinced he was God’s gift to starved pussy. Andy put his arm around Ellie, surreptitiously cupping one of her breasts. Ellie used her elbow to lock his hand in place. She enjoyed the warmth of his broad fingers; had missed him more this time than ever before. At night she’d woken up on the hour, every hour, waving her arm over the bedside table, searching for a pint of water that wasn’t there. He used to take one to her last thing at night, turning the lights out with his little finger. Without him around her, food was tasteless. Her sense of smell was defunct. But now she could smell the sweet fug of the rushed sex they’d had before leaving the house less than an hour ago. She imagined the ringlets of his protein swimming around inside her, life seeming once more like its happy, Technicolor self.
‘Are ewe takin’ any of that?’ Rhiannon said, pointing at the baggie in Andy’s lap.
Andy looked down at it, blond eyebrows scrunched to a frown. ‘Don’t you think we’re getting too old for it, Rhi? It’s full of toxins, you know.’
Rhiannon leaned over Ellie’s lap and grabbed it. She licked the inside of the bag, purple tongue thrashing against the cellophane. When it was clean she threw it in the ashtray. Everyone watched, eyes hopeless, as it slowly mingled in with the dust and dog-tabs, their first taste of phet for over a year.
Rhiannon lifted her wineglass. ‘Well, don’t look so bloody worried,’ she said. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’
2
It was a little after ten when the speed kicked in, dopamine rising to greet it; the time of night when life seemed full of possibility. Ellie was beginning to believe she was some sort of chemical Cinderella, blessed with wit and mystique. Big Barry was three-quarters of the way through the set-list Sellotaped to his sound desk. He’d been using the same one since he’d started the job in the late Eighties, only ever deviating to play the current number one. Rhiannon sprang to her feet when the piano intro to ‘I Will Survive’ began, drink splashing out of her glass. She headed for the walkway in front of the stage, extended chest bouncing against her ribcage. She stood facing the DJ, tight skirt preventing any real dancing, go-go boots slipping on the carpet, the other customers glaring at her. Generally, people either tolerated or detested Rhiannon. Any friends she’d ever had, she’d pissed off years ago.
‘Come on, girls,’ she said, shouting back at the table. She clapped her hands, the brass wall plates behind her shaking. This was the way Rhiannon moved; eyes screwed closed in devotion, hands held an inch away from her face, fatty palms smacking together, the slapping noise reverberating around the room. She stole Big Barry’s microphone and held it in her clenched fist. ‘Come on, girls,’ she said. ‘I wanna fuckin’ dance.’
Siân lowered her eyes and sipped from her half-glass. ‘It’s your turn,’ she said, hissing across the table at Ellie.
Ellie shook her head; she didn’t want to dance, not with Rhiannon. A gust of energy had just detonated in the small of her back, driving tiny particles of euphoria around her throbbing bloodstream. She was having a lovely time just sitting down; she didn’t want to waste a minute of it.
Siân pushed herself out of her seat. ‘I come out at night to get away from the kids, not look after her. Why has it always got to be me?’ She flicked her long hair, folded her arms, walked slowly towards Rhiannon.
A small blonde woman came in carrying a chair from the games area. She placed it at the edge of the table, struggling not to hit anyone with any of its stocky legs. Ellie didn’t recognize her. She’d never seen her before. But Marc obviously had. He was beckoning her with his waving hand, smiling and shouting into her ear, using a folded beer-mat to wipe Rhiannon’s wine spills from the table. Soon, a man followed, a tall, skinny man with a mop of dark, tangled hair. He sat next to the woman and nodded perfunctorily, eyes the colour of coal. It was hard to tell how old he was; mid-thirties – older than Andy, younger than Rhiannon; a scattering of black stubble around a pouting, mauve mouth. There was a thick silver belcher chain resting on his collarbone and dark circles under his eyes, the colour of smudged kohl. Ellie gawped at him until he opened his cigarette packet and counted what he needed for a flash, running a clean fingernail along the top of the corks. He threw some on the soggy surface of the table and balanced a further two in the V of his fore and middle finger.
‘Anyone?’ he said – an accent, not Welsh, but familiar. He looked quickly at each of the faces around the table, but if he thought anything at all about them, his stoic face hid it. Ellie waited until all of the loose cigarettes were taken and then clipped one from his hand. She thanked him, but he ignored her, tossing the last one into his mouth, holding it between alabaster teeth while he lit it with the ferocious flame of his chrome Zippo. Ellie suddenly felt conscious of her appearance. She was no Cinderella. She had a round, plain, pale-skinned face, framed by dull brown hair, not platinum-blonde like her siblings or even golden-blonde like the woman he was with.
Rhiannon reappeared, jostling against the table, tipping more drinks. ‘What’s the matter with ewe, ewe fuckin’ sourpuss?’ she said. She slammed her body into the space next to Ellie. ‘That’s what speed is for, mun, dancing.’ She pointed at Andy. ‘Cheer up,’ she said. ‘E’s home now. Ewe can get ewer oats tonight.’ She lifted the egg cup to her moustachioed mouth and downed the modicum of wine left inside. ‘Next time he goes away, ewe wanna tell ’im to leave ewe a dildo. Marc bought me iss massive pink rampant rabbit, din’t ewe, love? Wouldn’t fit in ewer ’andbag, El.’
Ellie blushed, embarrassed not by Rhiannon’s crudeness, but by her memory of her quickie with Andy, the pair of them scrambling around the bedroom, tripping over one another’s clothes. The thought had seemed heady a few moments earlier, but now it felt like a burden.
Rhiannon turned to the new faces at the table, looked the strange man square in the eyes, said, ‘Where’s my fag ’en, mush?’ He took another cigarette out of his packet and passed it across the table. Rhiannon grabbed it and popped it into her mouth, leaned forward and waited for him to light it for her. She dived headlong into conversation, her screechy monotone blaring over the music, her twisted body preventing Ellie’s joining in. It was useless to try to talk over Rhiannon, so she sat back on the bench, stole intermittent glimpses of him as he answered Rhiannon’s relentless questions, his lips swiftly fastening and unfastening. Rhiannon was still leaning towards him, head inclined, steadily pushing her cleavage into his view. After a while she started touching, smoothing her hand along his forearm, slowly at first, and then faster, squeezing at his skin. Siân was staring at him too, her forefinger hooked in her mouth, stupefied by his beauty or his oddness or his audacity, it was hard to tell what. Nobody new had turned up at the Pump House since the last Millennium.
After a while Ellie became impatient, hungry for the man’s attention. She thought up jokes to tell him. Something her friend Safia had said at work the day before had amused her, not for its content but for Safia having repeated it; something about Jeremy Beadle measuring the size of his penis. ‘He decided it wasn’t very big,’ Safia’d said, ‘small in fact; although on the other hand it was effing massive.’ Ellie’d almost pissed herself. It was obviously something Safia had heard the print boys say, and without fully grasping its meaning had memorized, intending to impress Ellie. But was it good enough? Maybe if she thought of an alternative character – she didn’t want to admit to ever having watched someone as naff as Jeremy Beadle. Ordinarily she wouldn’t admit to owning a television, but she couldn’t think of anyone who was cool and had a shrunken hand. Suddenly Andy coiled his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her close to him. They stared at one another, the balls of their noses touching. His eyes were lovely: irises a cocktail of blue gemstones, sapphire and topaz intertwining. But Ellie quickly wrestled away from Andy, looked back at the ebony eyes of the outlandish foreigner.
He was still busy with Rhiannon, head cocked towards her unintelligible banter. Ellie gave up on the joke idea, thinking he’d laugh at her, not at it. The anxiety was creeping in. The amphetamine high was over. She could feel the comedown lying in wait, bad blood pumping through her veins, and she submitted to it, began to contemplate the overflowing ashtray.
Before the bell rang for stop-tap, the blonde woman leaned over the table and said something to Rhiannon, the white strobe light revealing a crater-shaped patch of pockmarks on her cheekbones. Ellie hoped she was issuing some kind of reprimand, but she knew she wasn’t when Rhiannon put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and pointed at the door on the other side of the room. ‘Down there, love,’ she said, ‘turn left.’ The woman walked timidly, head bowed. When she’d disappeared behind Big Barry, Rhiannon turned to Ellie. ‘Fuckin’ English!’ she said. ‘Ey’re like bloody rats. Ewe’re never a mile away from one an’ ’ey just keep on breeding. With a bit of luck she’ll be in the men’s now.’
There was a queue in the lounge so Ellie went into the bar to buy drinks. Two old men sitting on the ripped benches amidst the shabby flock wallpaper. The barman was hiding behind a tabloid newspaper, crude headline about the death of Saddam Hussein’s sons splashed across the front page. She ordered four house vodkas and two cans of Red Bull. It was a ritual Rhiannon had started when the band was in Poland. She’d come back from an impromptu visit to the bar with three trebles, and placed them on the table in front of Siân and Ellie with a rebellious wink. She’d only been with Marc for a few weeks and Ellie knew now the drink buying had been an attempt to procure the girls’ friendship. Rhiannon put too much faith in money and thought she could buy relationships; gift giving was a staple in her control-freakery. But back then she seemed charming and, when the boys had returned, the vodka custom had prevailed; a peculiar proclamation of their union, like a Freemason’s handshake.
Ellie balanced the cans in the crooks of her arms, the glasses hooked in her fingers. As she turned to walk away, she stepped into somebody, her stiletto heel stabbing the rubber toecap of a basketball boot. Instinctively, she knew it was the stranger. She jolted backwards, the weight of a glass falling from her grip. Then, in her bewildered attempt to catch it before guessing which direction it was going to take, she jumped back at him, stepping again on his foot.
‘Whoa!’ he said, catching her, his arms stretched out like Jesus, as though trying to counter all eventualities. He smelled of musk and petrol and faintly of smoke. The glass landed on a beer towel, the liquid trickling out, forming a small dark patch on the Terylene. The barman caught the glass before it rolled off the edge.
‘Sorry,’ Ellie said, cheeks beginning to burn.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Want another one?’ He let go of her body and stepped backwards, the sudden absence of his touch sending an amphetamine rush through Ellie’s spine. It smashed against her cranium like a pinball he had triggered. Something about him activated a weird animalism in Ellie, an acute hunger in her abdominal walls. Immediately, she wanted to touch him again, to feel the sensation one more time. She stepped away. ‘Where are you from?’ she said. She wasn’t from Aberalaw either. She knew what a difficult time he’d have settling in.
He picked the empty glass up, gripping it with his bony, icicle-like fingers. ‘Cornwall,’ he said, sniffing it. He put it back on the towel. ‘Did you want another?’
Ellie thought about the West Country accents that had surrounded her throughout her three-year stint at Plymouth University. She was homesick suddenly for nights out at the Pavilions, for morning strolls along the Barbican, for lunchtime editorial meetings at the student magazine. When she had lived in Plymouth, she had never been homesick for Wales. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, remembering herself. ‘That one was for your girlfriend anyway.’
The man smiled affectionately at her. ‘She is not allowed to drink vodka,’ he said.
Andy daren’t tell Ellie what she wasn’t allowed to drink. Around here, the women wore the trousers, not because Welsh women were in any manner advanced in feminist thinking, but because Welsh men were so indolent; too dozy for domestic altercations. She couldn’t decide if the man’s dominance over his girlfriend’s choice of beverage was sexist, or exotic. She smiled weakly, shrugged her shoulders. She walked back to the lounge, her arms scrunched around herself like wings, the cold glasses clutched against her prickly skin. She is not allowed to drink vodka. ‘What a wanker,’ she thought as she kicked the lounge door open, knowing even as she thought it that what she was experiencing was not abhorrence. It was allure. This was girl meets boy, big style; the token of acceptance she’d been about to present to his girlfriend was bankrupt, common sense pirouetting into the middle distance, vanishing like the spilt liquor.
The rest of the night slipped away between a long, drawn-out stomach-ache and ephemeral spasms of jealousy. The amphetamine high dulled to a dreary pain, winding leisurely around her stomach, like a washing machine on a wool cycle. All night Rhiannon wouldn’t stop talking to the man. She jabbered perpetually, head bobbing like a buoy on choppy water. Every time she touched his emaciated wrist, accidentally, but more often intentionally, Ellie felt envy solidifying like a lethal tumour, deep inside her. Occasionally, the man caught Ellie’s stare, his onyx eyes glassy now from the smoke. They rested on her for a few seconds, alert and apologetic, but then quickly moved on to his drink, or, unbearably, on to Rhiannon. But Ellie didn’t stop looking at him, not even when Andy tried to kiss or speak to her. And what she noticed, just before the couple unexpectedly stood up, waved and left, was that everyone else in the pub was staring at them too, craning their necks and gawking, because this was a south Wales valley village, and nobody ever left, and nobody new ever arrived. They were like aliens, that couple, swanning in with their accents and their pockmarks. They might as well have arrived in a silvery saucer-shaped spaceship. Nobody outside of their own table attempted to speak to them, to ask where they were from or what their business here was, again because this was Aberalaw, a south Wales valley town. Instead, the other customers peered, and peered, like a mob of meerkats standing on hind legs. Then, when the couple had gone, they all turned to one another and made up their own stories.
3
On Monday, Ellie boarded her 7 a.m. train with the usual commuters: a middle-aged administrator at Ponty College and a bricky working down the Bay. They were the only three people awake in Aberalaw at that time in the morning. At 7.55 she alighted at Cardiff Central Station, the nearby Brains Brewery coming to life for another sun-soaked shift, the pungent stench of the hops saturating her twenty-minute speed-walk to Atlas Road. There she sat in a stifling workshop, sticking stickers on mugs while the rush hours whizzed past the yellow bricks of the city.
There was a crisis going on with the Alton Towers batch. They needed another five hundred by the end of summer but the Ceramics department couldn’t get the colour right. Ellie was bored of the stupid picture: a navy turreted castle with red fireworks in the background. The mugs were orange and the castle kept coming out purple. It was because the kiln was set at the wrong temperature. Everybody on the floor knew it. But the management were adamant it was Safia and Ellie’s fault. Jane was trying to stop them using hand cream, stop them eating crisps in case they got gunk on their fingers; all sorts of screwed-up rules it was illegal to instate. The desks were stacked with tray upon tray of orange mugs, all waiting for quality control. They even had a mini-skip in which to throw the rejects, smashing each one first in an attempt to prevent light fingers. Ellie had jokingly offered Jane a majority percentage in a spot of bent trade but Jane had threatened to report her. Jane, who was Ellie’s sister, had been the Ceramics manager for seven years. She was obnoxious to start with, but the job had pushed her to the edge. The factory floor was a breeding ground for paranoia. You had to keep watching your back because everyone around you would do almost anything to defend their own menial position, bereft of the courage to go and try something new. It was like a prison cell; the guy next to you initially appearing to be another hapless fool, then twelve months later turning into a loathsome psychopath whose face you dreamt about mutilating with a craft knife you stole from the art studio.
Safia threw a chewing gum at Ellie. It hit her on the cheekbone then landed at the bottom of her glue trough with last week’s tacky scraps of paper. Ellie fished it out and threw it back at Safia, a new layer of gloop staining the sleeve of her crisp white blouse.
Safia laughed. ‘Yous have a good weekend?’ she said. She was a tall Pakistani girl with clumpy mascara. She’d ambled into the factory and sat at Belinda’s desk, a week after Belinda had walked out. For the first five days she’d complained that the transfers sent in from the cover-coaters were too thin, or too thick, that the mugs were chipped and discoloured. Ellie’d liked Belinda because Belinda danced incessantly to the music in her headphones, ignoring everything Jane said. She’d had the words Fuck Work inscribed across the bust of her tabard. But Safia was pedantic.
One stormy Tuesday morning following a bank holiday, Safia and Ellie were the only daft cows who’d turned up for work. Forced to sit in the workshop together at lunch, chewing oily tuna sandwiches from the newsagent on the corner, Ellie reluctantly warmed to Safia’s worrisome and naive nature; the way she thought she’d never get over her first love, a U2 fan from Caerphilly. She was born and raised in Cardiff, the essence of the city audible in her nasal words. Her family had sent her to Manchester for two months during a perplexing adolescence and her mother had taken her to Pakistan once to meet her grandmother. Safia had cried to come home long before the four weeks were spent; screamed on the first day, scared shitless by lizards climbing up the living-room walls. She was struggling to balance her life between her Muslim family and extended Western social circle. A difficult situation arose every time someone mentioned going to McDonald’s for lunch or offered her a glass of white wine, endless bickering at home about trouser suits, uncomfortable conversations elsewhere about engagement rings and suntans.
Ellie shrugged now. ‘Fine,’ she said.
Safia copied the gesture contemptuously, unsatisfied with the answer.
‘Fine,’ Ellie said, again. ‘Went out, got pissed. Same shit, different day.’ She didn’t have the energy for a discussion about it. Her head was still fuzzy with the phet comedown. She hadn’t done powder for years, wasn’t used to the dizzying after-effects.
She picked a new mug from the pile and gently ran her fingertips along the circumference, feeling for imperfections. She peeled a decal from its backing and wound it around the mug, squinting at it as she ironed the air bubbles out with her tongue-shaped smoother. Gavin dropped a mug on the floor and Ellie looked up to see if it had smashed. It had, but he continued to work regardless, struggling with the direct print machine. He was a solid man with a girlfriend he didn’t like and twins on the way. He made mistakes and stuck by them, held his head high, took the bacon home. He was wearing a Cardiff City football T-shirt, the season fixtures printed on its back. It was a reject from the T-shirt department. Nobody wore their own stuff to work unless the only seconds out were England sweatshirts. She knew the fixtures now by heart. They’d both worked overtime fourteen days in a row. Gavin was saving for a double buggy and Ellie had to make-up Andy’s half of last month’s rent.
In the beginning, Ellie had been impressed by The Boobs. Andy was adamant that they were going to make it and Ellie had no reason to doubt him. Ambition was written through her own bones like a stick of Porthcawl rock. She knew what it was to want rabbling cities and hectic skylines, to have dreams about seeing the back of the valleys. So when she moved in with Andy, only to discover their joint income didn’t stretch to the lease, not even on a crumbling two-bedroom in Aberalaw, Ellie was happy to quit freelancing in favour of a steady income. She figured that when the hard work was done, she’d be one half of an über-couple, renowned for throwing vegetarian dinner parties at their chic Greenwich Village brownstone. That was over a year ago, and she felt as though she’d stuck enough stickers on mugs to last four lifetimes.
‘Bastard!’ Gavin said as another mug spun out of his grip. It shattered on the concrete floor. He bent down to retrieve the fragments, throwing each one into the mini-skip with an expletive.
‘Are you going to tell me about your weekend?’ Safia said, eyes narrowing to slits. ‘I thought Andy was coming home on Saturday.’ Safia didn’t have a social life. She spent most of her leisure time cooking pasanday for her family. She watched Coronation Street. She meticulously clung to the details of Ellie’s existence like a tabloid journalist unearthing the secrets of an A-list celebrity.
Every day, Ellie ran through an inventory of the things she’d done since she’d last seen Safia: what time she’d got home; what she’d eaten for dinner. Safia’s favourite subject was Andy. If he and Ellie had had sex, Safia needed to know the position, the point of orgasm, the colour of the sheets. Over time Ellie had begun to embellish these little narratives, so that she’d eaten scallops instead of battered cod, worn negligees instead of fleece pyjamas, got twenty minutes of cunnilingus instead of nothing. It was inevitable: Safia’s appetite for romance was insatiable, but Ellie had lived with Andy for a long time – they sometimes couldn’t be bothered to have sex. And today she wasn’t thinking about Andy at all; her mind’s eye was busy with the stranger’s image: his chaotic hair, his treacle-black eyes, his lily-white teeth.
It made something in her tummy swell, like a fist of dough in an oven. She was wondering why his girlfriend wasn’t allowed to drink vodka, wondering what his name was, wondering what the hell he was doing in Aberalaw. These little mysteries were far more compelling than anything to do with Andy, more compelling even than the idyllic fantasy life she had created for herself and conveyed on a daily basis to Safia. The stranger arrived seamlessly in her consciousness. One minute she’d been missing Andy; the next, there was some long-haired extraterrestrial who had materialized from thin air.
‘El?’ Safia said, as if from some distance.
Ellie sighed, annoyed by the interruption. She considered telling Safia about the stranger, but then quickly dismissed the idea. Safia was as chaste and delicate as the foil on a new coffee jar. She was religious. She’d been conditioned to ignore temptation, neglect her own feelings, banish any rebellious thoughts that accidentally found their way into her head. She wouldn’t understand Ellie’s predicament.
‘Yeah, Andy’s home,’ Ellie said. ‘And the band had some good news. A Radio 1 DJ liked one of their demos. He wants them to go on his show.’
‘Wow,’ Safia said. ‘They’re going to be famous!’
Behind her the fire exit opened. Jane appeared, heels clicking on the concrete. She stood next to their adjoining desks; hand on hip, counted the trays of mugs piled up from the floor. She noted the total down on her clipboard, her glasses slipping down her nose. ‘You know we need a whole new batch of these packed and shipped by the end of August, don’t you? Save your chitchat for your coffee break.’
4
At six on Wednesday night, Ellie was on her way home from the factory. The sun was reflecting on the bronze statue in the middle of Aberalaw Square. It was a Dai-capped miner, one arm clutching his Davy lamp, the other curved protectively around his wife and babe-in-arms. It was hard to distinguish one limb from another, especially if Ellie had been drinking in the Pump House. As Ellie got close to the pub she saw Rhiannon standing on the doorstep, talking into her mobile phone, a pair of pinstripe bell-bottom under her white hairdressing tunic. Ellie began to walk faster, trying to dodge her, scurrying past the statue towards the safety of Woodland Terrace. But a metre away from the pine end, Rhiannon’s voice rang through the village like a marauding police siren. ‘Oi, mush, come back by yere a minute.’
Ellie reluctantly turned around and walked back to the pub, her duffel bag jerking on her shoulder. She stood in front of Rhiannon while Rhiannon finished her conversation and flipped her phone shut. ‘Kelly’s gone to the dentist to get her rotten teeth out,’ she said. ‘Too many fuckin’ sweets or somethin’. Fancy comin’ in yere with me for a drink or what?’
Rhiannon was bordering on alcoholism, carried half-litre bottles of spirits around in her handbag. But she always needed someone to drink with. Misery loves company. Kelly was her teenage assistant at the salon; usually they went out together every night after work. Ellie picked at a glue stain on the thigh of her khaki cammos. Andy didn’t like her drinking on week nights; he didn’t like her drinking without him.
‘Well?’ Rhiannon yapped.
Ellie jumped.
‘Ewe ’avin a bloody drink or not?’
Ellie followed Rhiannon through the pub and into the games area. Rhiannon sat at her table, the surface of it obscured with wineglasses full of Liebfraumilch, the house white. She picked one of the glasses up and gave it to Ellie, then took a sip of her own. ‘I’ve got a game of pool on the go,’ she said, pulling a worn cue out of the umbrella stand. ‘I’ll break if ewe don’ mind.’
Dai Davies looked up from his newspaper. ‘Go on, bach,’ he said, shouting across the pub, holding his beer stein up in the air. He was a fixture at the Pump House bar, a retired cat burglar who delighted in malicious hearsay. He was also Rhiannon’s uncle.
Rhiannon held the cue against herself, the tip burrowed between her double-D breasts. She squinted at it and puffed on the chalk then ducked at the edge of the table, one leg kicking out at the rear, her cropped bell-bottom revealing a thick band of brown skin. ‘Italian coloured,’ she called herself. But she wasn’t Italian. Her parents were as Welsh as they came; career criminals from the Dinham Estate. The man who Rhiannon swore was her father, despite his being white and her clearly being mixed race, had been murdered in his prison cell when she was a kid. But not before giving her some cock-and-bull history lesson about south Walians originally being naturally dark-skinned, a story she still used to defend herself whenever someone from the estate called her a nigger.
The white ball rolled into the pocket without hitting any of the colours. Rhiannon passed the cue to Ellie. ‘What d’yew reckon about this radio show?’ she said. ‘Ewe know about stuff like that, El. Am I gonna be rich next week or what? Cause I’ve had it with that bloody salon, I ’ave. Ewe can catch all sorts of shit messing with people’s ’air. Nits, skin diseases, ’alf of those inbreds from the estate got AIDS. I should get danger money for what I do.’
Ellie shattered the virgin balls, exposing a purple stain on the green felt where Siân had tipped a pint of cider & black a few months earlier.
‘I tell ewe,’ Rhiannon said, ‘when ’ey make it I’m gonna have a big bloody mansion built on Pengoes Mountain, a big bloody electrocuted gate to keep the scum from the estate out.’ She clapped her hands, like a seal doing tricks for a piece of fish. Pool games with Rhiannon were not meant to be won. They played by loitering around the table for three-quarters of an hour, talking about whatever Rhiannon wanted to talk about, taking it in turns with slow, aimless strikes. Ellie daren’t put any effort into it. She was afraid of beating Rhiannon, afraid of what Rhiannon’s reaction might entail. If Rhiannon was anything she was a sore loser, so Ellie saved her concentration for pool games with Griff. Nothing annoyed Griff like losing a pub game to a girl.
‘Bloody tired I am,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Marc’s fault it is. Came home wanting six weeks’ worth of nooky in two days.’ Ellie cringed at the mention of nooky. Rhiannon was always fraught to portray herself as a hip, 20-year-old fashion aficionado. She read articles in Kelly’s magazines about John Galliano and Stella McCartney, was always dripping in fake haute couture. But her vocabulary perpetually belied her disguise. Words like nooky and mush and Billy Whizz. Her voice came straight from the estate.
‘Three times in one fuckin’ night,’ she said. ‘That run in the family or wha’?’
Andy and Marc were brothers, Andy the elder by a year, which meant that Ellie and Rhiannon were very nearly sisters: sisters by common law. There was a time when Ellie could stand Rhiannon, when she didn’t cross the street to avoid her, when she thought she was a suave and quick-witted femme fatale. Marc had met her eight months ago at a gig in Penmaes Welfare Hall, one of those ones where The Boobs stood in for the resident cabaret act, a glam-rock cover band called The Poseurs. As soon as the locals worked out that Andy didn’t know any T-Rex riffs, The Boobs got bottled off. One dour Sunday afternoon, a black woman had appeared on the dance-floor, strutting around on her own, a miniature bottle of Moët in her fist, a luminous pink straw, shaped like a treble clef, sticking out of the top. She was wearing a tiny yellow A-line dress and a pair of fishnet stockings, the black lace bands at the top of them exposed. Her accent was so Welsh, so cordial and melodic, it would have seemed foolish to interpret it as anything other than endearing.
Ellie clearly remembered thinking that she could do with a friend like Rhiannon. It gave her hope to think that such a sophisticated specimen of being existed in a place so overcrowded with rednecks. Of course that was all positive prejudice. Rhiannon turned out to be the most bigoted person Ellie’d ever met: a brainless, reckless tart. There was no champagne in that bottle. It was just something she used to carry around in her counterfeit Prada handbag, one of her good-time-girl props. But she’d given Marc a lift home in her red sports car and he’d never been the same since. Ellie always joked that she must do something really special in bed.
‘I mean,’ Rhiannon said, swallowing a big gulp of wine, ‘does Andy have to shag ewe every night?’
‘He would if he could,’ Ellie said. For the most part, Andy and Ellie’s libidos worked on different time zones. His was on Greenwich Mean Time; hers was on Central Daylight. They hardly ever converged. ‘Every night I hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom with his electric toothbrush. That means he wants it. He told me once that it is a family trait; that it comes from his mother. Gwynnie. Can you imagine? Apparently she’s a real goer.’
Ellie expected Rhiannon to laugh but she had already lost interest in the subject. She was standing in front of the mirrored beer advert, arranging her hair so it stuck up like the head feathers of an exotic bird, her wineglass held in the air as though she expected an attendant to come and fill it. She hadn’t expected an answer. She thought she was the only person in the village who had sex, and was therefore the only one qualified to speak of it.
They left the game half finished when Rhiannon decided she was too tired to play. She propped the cue against the wall and it immediately fell and crashed on the parquet floor. She rolled her eyes as she plonked herself down on the stool. ‘It’s that powder as well, see,’ she said. She curled her hand around her jaw, hiding her mouth from Dai Davies’s eye-line. ‘A couple of dabs on a Saturday and I’m not right till Wednesday.’
‘You took quite a lot of it,’ Ellie said, safe in the knowledge that sarcasm went right over Rhiannon’s head.
‘Bloody good stuff it was,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I’d like to know where ’e got it from, El. Eighteen bloody months I’ve been trying to get hold of some whizz like that. Nothing!’
‘Scotland,’ Ellie said. She knew Rhiannon wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it was obvious. ‘Marc brought it back from Glasgow.’
‘No,’ Rhiannon said. She shook her head, sprigs of her carefully placed hair falling flat. ‘Marc din’t have enough money to get home. Griff’s asked ’is mammy to put a loan in his account for petrol. They’d still be on a fuckin’ motorway somewhere otherwise. I bought the speed, from that English bloke, with the long ’air. ’E was in yere on Saturday with ’is missus. Just moved yere, ’e ’as, sold ’is farm in Devon or somethin’. Bloody good stuff it was, El. I don’t wanna be lining some English twat’s pocket, do I? Whass ’appenin’ in Cardiff? Anything about?’
Rhiannon was talking about the stranger. ‘He’s not from Devon,’ Ellie said. ‘He’s from Cornwall. There’s a difference.’ She looked Rhiannon straight in the eyes, something she didn’t do very often. ‘Are you sure you got it from him?’
‘Yes!’ Rhiannon said. ‘I saw ’im on the square on Saturday morning. ’E was doing a deal with a kid from the estate. I went right bloody up to ’im, asked ’im what ’e ’ad. He’s got disco pills too, he told me.’
That’s how Rhiannon knew him. That’s why she kept touching him on Saturday, as if he was her pet dog. He didn’t look like someone who sold drugs. Street pushers wore baggy, food-stained jogging-bottoms. They lived in unfurnished flats on the Dinham Estate. Ellie quickly imagined what kind of job her ideal man would have. He would be a painter or an architect, someone with a pencil in his hand. But this was Aberalaw and drug dealing was as good a job as anyone could hope to get. ‘What’s his name?’ she said.
Rhiannon snuck a glimpse at Dai. He was reading the local newspaper, studying the ‘Look Who’s Been in Court’ column, looking for stories he could exaggerate. Jenny Two-Books, the assistant from the betting shop on the High Street, had just arrived to collect her extra takings. She ran her own service for the alkies who were too drunk to walk to the shop. ‘Johnny,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Johnny somethin’.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t bloody know, El. What’s it to ewe anyway?’
Ellie felt her cheeks redden. She looked down at the assortment of wineglasses on the table, trying to hide her face from Rhiannon, but Rhiannon had already detected something in her enquiry. ‘Ewe don’t fancy ’im or somethin’, do ewe, El?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ellie said, not looking up from her drink. ‘I love Andy.’
Rhiannon lifted the egg-cup-shaped glass to her mouth, peering intently at Ellie over the rim. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I love Marc an’ all. I love Marc as much as ewe love Andy, don’t think that I don’t. An’ if I ’ear anyone saying I don’t love Marc, I’ll fuckin’ batter ’em.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean. Ellie shrugged and reached for her glass.
Rhiannon beat her to it. ‘I’ll get ewe a fresh one,’ she said, giggling, the angry smirk on her face fading from the bottom up. ‘But ewe’ll ’ave to remember ’ow many ewe owe me. I can’t afford to keep us both in wine. Things ain’t that good at the salon.’
Dai Davies folded the newspaper down on the bar. Accidentally, Ellie caught his eye. He grinned at her lecherously, made a creepy clicking noise with his slick tongue. Ellie shivered. They were psychopaths, the whole family.
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