Ten Storey Love Song

Ten Storey Love Song

Richard Milward

 

 

 

‘Hello,’ says the wallpaper. Bobby the Artist scratches his eyeballs. He can’t sleep. He sits on the sofa arm, argyle sweater pulled hunchback over the top of his head, having a conversation with his living room. ‘Go to fucking sleep,’ he replies to the wallpaper. He sighs. It’s that tail-end of the acid – he’s no longer seeing the cat from Dr Seuss in place of the lamp-stand, but there’s still loads of annoying thinking to be done. Being an artist, Bobby the Artist’s only really in it for the visuals – earlier on him and Georgie danced round the flat to Bardo Pond (‘Tantric Porno’ and ‘The High Frequency’ are two groovy numbers off an album full of noise), Bobby watching the knobbly skirting-board gradually form a zoetrope involving all these obscure froggy and bunny characters, and it even had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Usually Bobby the Artist would jump up and paint all this madness, but tonight he couldn’t be bothered. There’s nothing better than Georgie in a dancy happy mood, the only downside being she never joins in any of the drug-taking. Back on the sofa arm, Bobby breathes into his jumper sleeve, glancing at his girlfriend sleeping peacefully on the fuchsia cushions. He rests his head against the wall – two hours earlier it was soft as marshmallows, now it’s a pain in the neck – and there’s no chance him joining Georgie in the land of Nod. You just cannot seem to switch off. He stares wide-eyed at dawn sneaking in through the window, wondering deeply deeply where him and Georgie are going, whether he’ll ever get famous, whether he’ll ever get to sleep, where the Cat in the Hat went. He yanks the green sweater down from his forehead, then strides about the room feeling irritated, kicking the empty sweety wrappers round and round the carpet. The flat’s a mess, and being on LSD it’s quite hard to remember how it happened to get like that. All Bobby clearly remembers is twirling round with Georgie, her drunk on cheapo vodka, him tripping his numbskull off. Twirling twirling twirling. Whirling curtains. At one point they’d been dancing so much Bobby’s hunger came back unexpectedly and he had to make pills-on-toast for himself in the kitchen. Here’s the recipe for pills-on-toast:
2 crushed ecstasy pills,
1 slice of toast (butter optional)
. Yawn! Smoke-rings loop-the-loop past like dreamy spectacles. Where did that whole twenty-deck disappear to? Bobby considers going across the road for more fags, but the prospect of being taunted by scallywags while still slightly tripping feels daunting, and in any case he hasn’t got any money. His last pound coin went on a paintbrush yesterday from Jarreds, and Johnnie from upstairs sorted him two blotters and two ecstasies on tick, and the idea was this: get wrecked and paint one two three four (or more) masterpieces. Hallucinogens are perfect for that nutty, colourful art no one can explain, but now Bobby feels a bit distraught for not doing anything, and now the acid’s starting to wear off. He looks at Georgie breathing louder and louder on the settee, her eyelashes pressed shut like wee Venus flytraps, and with maximum effort he starts gathering his acrylics together. Georgie’s his Muse, and there’s tons of Georgie canvases strewn around the flat in various poses and multi-colours – the best ones, like ‘Stripy Socks’ (45x35cm) and ‘Georgie Girl’ (50x50cm), are hung above the telly in lime green and pastelly blue. Bobby the Artist crawls about the floor for a scrap of A1, then wallops bright pink across it with a six-inch DIY brush, slopping it everywhere. He ruins the carpet. Then he goes through to the bedroom to huff some Lynx Africa, spraying it into one of the dirtier argyle sweaters: the red one hasn’t been washed for a bit. Smothering his face in the deodorant and sucking it all cold into his lungs, after three seconds Bobby feels a bit spacey again and floats back through to the living space, the colours in his head nice and bright again for a short while. He cross-legs himself in front of Georgie, suddenly spewing up eyelashes and blue hair-bands and fuchsia blocks all across the paper. Georgie’s dressed in a blue and white sailor’s outfit – often she plays up to her Muse status, her and Bobby the Artist flouncing around town in stupid attire and usually only to buy a new oil pastel or a jam-jar from Lidl. Now and then they get abusive comments from nobodies with buzzcuts, but they’re well loved in Peach House and on the estate – Bobby’s a bit like a doggy, quite dozy and partial to falling in love with everybody; Georgie’s more like an apprehensive kitten: she loves to have fun, but it’s got to be with the right person. She’s often seen gawping at the sweety counter in the newsagent across Longlands Road, with her disco-ball eyes. Bobby the Artist chucks a jelly-babies bag out from under his bum, adding a bit of wacky detail to Georgie’s face – spiky mascara, chewy lips, and a thought-bubble coming out of her head with a mermaid in it. There was quite an oceanic feel to the trip tonight – swimming in the carpet, imagining the doorbells were seagulls, etc. etc. – and he blames it on Georgie’s sailor gear. He continues doing the Lynx while he paints, but after a while you get immune to it and Bobby finally feels the tiredness slip over him. He’s so shattered. It seems like such an effort just to mix a decent phthalo turquoise, and his hand doesn’t have that usual fluidity or purposefulness – in fact Georgie looks more like a blob with eyes. Bobby the Artist screams inside – coming down off acid is such a disappointing feeling. How awful it is to float back to a grey, drab world when you’ve just seen happy rainbow Munchkin land. It’s frustrating, and Bobby tosses ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm) to one side, his head hurting from all the annoyance and wretched thinking. Georgie pipes up now and then with the odd snore, and Bobby wonders what they get out of each other anyway – all Georgie does is go to work, come home moody, nibble a few sweets and fall to sleep, though she does look good in a ballerina costume. All Bobby does is splash a bit of paint around in an argyle sweater getting mortalled. But all that negative thinking is a killer – Bobby doesn’t believe in being sad, he wants everyone to get on with each other (and off their heads), and the temptation’s miles too strong to phone up Johnnie and score more white doves. Some of Bobby’s best work comes from an MDMA-fuelled binge, all colourful and smiley and demented, although he does sometimes end up making love to the canvases. Bobby the Artist stands by the window, gazing at occasional shiny toy cars whizzing past way down there, dialling up Johnnie’s mobile, but he stands there for a whole two minutes and Johnnie doesn’t answer. Johnnie feels it go off in his Admiral bottoms, but he reckons it’s probably his girlfriend Ellen and in any case he’s got his eye on some youths over there with quite a flashy mobile and all. It’s freezing out in the morning light, and Johnnie whacks up his collar as he darts across Kedward Avenue and squares up to the lads. ‘Give us that, you daft cunts,’ he woofs, nodding at the fancy Siemens. After Johnnie got kicked off the dole five months back, he got self-employed as a full-time thief and professional let-down. In his younger years Johnnie used to march around the estate slapping anyone who looked at him and, like a lot of the lads in his year, he was the Hardest Lad in His Year. But he’s not especially macho or psychotic or unstable – in fact since he met Ellen he’s calmed down slightly, and for example he loves painting pap paintings with Bobby or fixing Alan Blunt the Cunt’s creaky door or helping his Nanna do the shop every Thursday. It’s just a shitty state of affairs that everyone needs money. The lads look at him with their best don’t-fuck-with-me (please) faces, but they can both tell they might be in for a pasting. ‘Do youse wanna get battered or what?’ he enquires. The lads don’t, really. Johnnie roughs them up anyhow, pushing the two kids round the block, giving them little kiddy-slaps now and then for his own entertainment. Strangely, Johnnie hopes they turn on him – giving him an excuse to pull out all his best moves – but the boys are sort of fannies and they just stand around looking a bit gutted. After a while Johnnie takes the flashy phone and
£
7.18 off the lads, then sprints off back down Kedward. At four in the morning there’s hardly going to be a copper about, but now and then they do patrol Cargo Fleet Lane so Johnnie makes a beeline straight for Peach House. He’s buzzing – thievery still gives him that burst of satisfaction, plus the sevenish quid should keep Ellen happy for sevenish minutes, say if they get a pizza or something later on. Johnnie grins, glancing up at the tower – it used to be dog muck and Sugar Puff colour but in the 2000s the council tarted up all five of the blocks, and in this particular instant Peach House looks very gorgeous, like pink and yellow ice cream on top of a raspberry ripple sunrise. Instead of stalling for the lift, Johnnie darts up the stairway past 2C’s knackered fridge waiting to go to the fridge graveyard, and he dodges a binbag here, there and everywhere. There’s an odd sock on floor three. There’s half-eaten chips on floor three and a half. When Johnnie gets to floor four he’s greeted by a crazy person hurling a crazy painting down the stairwell in total disgust. ‘Now then, Bobby,’ he smiles, ‘what you up to?’ Bobby the Artist blinks quite wildish at Johnnie, all dishevelled in his green/red-trim jumper and gurning. ‘Ha ha, oh how’s it going? I’m pissed off like, can’t fucking paint again, can I …’ Scratching his veiny neck, Johnnie slants his head at the crumpled ‘Blob with Eyes’ (58x81cm) landing halfway down the staircase. Still wet, Georgie lies there on the sofa on the ocean on the paper on the step. ‘As if!’ Johnnie says with his eyebrows, ‘it’s fucking mint. God, is that Georgie? She looks dead relaxed. I like it, me.’ One thing Johnnie misses in his life is relaxation. Having a hundred pills tucked in the vitamin tin and various other Class As playing hide-and-seek about the flat makes for an unsettled young man. Plus having no income means he’s constantly thinking about the next steal and the next one and the next one – Johnnie gave up robbing his parents three weeks back after he nabbed
£
30 for the teddy-bear acid, and all the profits had to go on rent and even then it didn’t stop the bailiffs coming round but Johnnie didn’t open the door to them and eventually paid them off a week later after kneecapping a youngster who owed
£
70 ticky. On top of that, he’s stressed about Ellen – they’ve been together about seven months, and he loves her to death, but he’s completely plagued with jealousy. If she hasn’t phoned for a day or two he instantly conjures up an image of her fucking one of the scummy rats she hangs around with. If they’re at a party, Ellen can’t talk to another boy without Johnnie getting the hump. He trusts her, but part of what attracted him to Ellen in the first place was the nymphomania and her general brassy, come-hither attitude. If he ever caught her shagging someone else, that cunt on the other side of her cunt would be absolutely fucked. That’s why when Johnnie sees a portrait of Georgie all sleepy and content on a pink background, his heart expands into a big juicy strawberry. ‘Can I get a picture of it?’ he asks, leaning the painting upright, getting a bit of sticky acrylic on his fingers. ‘I just twocked this mobile,’ he goes on, unleashing the Siemens. ‘It’s got a camera and that.’ Bobby the Artist smiles while Johnnie figures how to work it, but even so the painting’s totally dead to him. He believes in spontaneity, madness, pure psychic automatism, childish colours and sloppy brushstrokes, but this one’s just a mess. He sighs while Johnnie snaps the disaster, although it is always nice to receive a compliment. There were these people in the 1940s who called themselves CoBrA and they believed in painting with that total abandon like a little child, but of course you do run the risk of making a massive boo-boo. ‘You don’t need a new phone, by any chance?’ Johnnie asks, scarpering the rest of the way up the stairs. Bobby the Artist shakes his mad brown mop-top. He stands silently for a bit weighing up the prospect of forcing sleep or saying fuck it and carrying on working, and in the fuzzy dawn he figures the most rock-and-roll option would be, ‘Johnnie, you couldn’t sort me another couple doves on tick, could you?’ Johnnie feigns a look of you-fucking-bastard, but he loves Bobby the Artist and it’s been a pretty fruitful night in terms of wheeling and dealing, and he just smiles and tosses over a few left-over halves and crumby bits from his tracky-top pocket. Bobby grins and stuffs his face with the doves, although he soon realises his mouth’s like sandpaper and the pills won’t actually go down the chute, so he fumbles into the flat and into the kitchen and has to tapwater them down a few goes. But it’s worth it – almost straight away the placebo effect of putting ecstasy between your lips perks him up, and despite the clock saying 5.31 Bobby decides he might go wake Georgie up and try to paint her properly. Georgie’s not happy. She’s been working all day behind the sweety counter at Bhs, and the vodka and sheer shatteredness of it all had her in one of those black-holey bottomless sleeps. She was dreaming of fairgrounds and carousels, not mermaids, imagining her and Bobby riding plastic horses high above the housing estate like a scruffier Mary Poppins. Bobby the Artist grabs her by the shoulders and gives her a little shake, but it’s like being dragged from dream into reality through a mile of gravel or a thornbush. Her massive eyelashes part, and she glares up at Bobby with gigantic throbbing peepers. ‘What?’ she snaps. Bobby the Artist smiles blissfully, the love-doves already sending a sparkle in one or two veins, and he answers, ‘Sorry, pet, it’s just I scored more pills off Johnnie and, like … do you wanna do some poses for me? Painting and that?’ If there’s one thing that annoys Georgie, it’s her boyfriend getting over-excited about a teeny-weeny tablet. She hates them – what does it say about your life if you keep having to gloss it in druggy lovey-doveyness? Georgie’s perfectly happy with her life as it is, even though it was murder at work that afternoon. Mr Hawkson, her boss, keeps scolding her just because she’s easy-going and cheerful on the counter. These kids of about age eleven came in around dinner-break and, even though they were clearly pilfering the milk-bottles and fizzy cherries and scoffing them on the sly, Georgie thought it was nice to see them enjoying themselves. The cherries were a fine choice. Hawkson could see it all unfolding from his hands-on-hips stance over by Womenswear, and he marched over and gave Georgie a bollocking. He’s a prick – he’s in his forties and apparently he’s got a ‘partner’, but he still enjoys perving on Georgie in the terrible stripey blouse. He’ll never fire her – Hawkson’s never seen anyone over twenty so enthusiastic about sweets before in his life. For Georgie sweets are her only vice – she’s grown out of listing her top ten confectionery each month (the last instalment had rhubarb and custards knock white jazzies off the top spot), but much of the mess around 4E looks like a U-bomb hit a Haribo factory. She flings a few empty wrappers out from her bum-crack and elbows, although it sounds like the Smarties packet has something left in it so she munches those fellows for a bit. ‘Bobby, I’m knackered,’ she moans, her brain pulsing and threatening to run out of her nose, ears and mouth, like something from those manky manga films Bobby used to watch. It was his cousin from Eston who made him watch all the video nasties, and Bobby remembers vividly screaming and squeezing his face down the back of the sofa and bad-dreaming after seeing