Ten Storey Love Song (15 page)

£
100 he owes her for rent, then he kisses her a bit more, and a little bit more after that. Georgie’s ecstatic – she stares at the money in wonder for a moment, then gets back to stuffing her face in the sweet bag. Grinning, Bobby the Artist decides to leave her to it, sneaking off to the bathroom ‘for a wee’ then fumbling with that wrap of speed Lewis gave him and snorting a good healthy line up his left nostril. Since London Bobby’s been favouring the left nostril after the right one became a bit bloody and scabby round the edges, and it’s much too tempting to pick your scabs and now he’s made quite a mess of it. Being right-handed it seems most natural to snort your drugs up the right nostril, but Bobby’s worried he’ll lose his septum although it might mean he could do a headstand and tip powder right down his conk and never have to chop up lines again. Bobby used to love the ritual of lining up white powder like a giant snow-plough, but compared to just guzzling up a pill it is a bit of a rigmarole. But so what – Bobby’s got drugs in his system and he’s got his girlfriend back and he’s happy! He wraps up the wrap again and taps it into his Magic Pocket, and he strolls back into the lounge with a deadpan sort of expression. Georgie’s too busy polishing off the pick-’n’-mix to notice a speedy glint in her boy’s eye, and she smiles and tosses him a white chocolate mouse and says, ‘Squeak!’ Bobby the Artist munches down the rodent before his appetite completely disappears, then hops next to Georgie and throws his arms round her like a scarf. He nuzzles her neck a little bit, then tells her he loves her and Georgie goes ‘aah’, all drunk on sweets, and says back, ‘I love you too! I’m dead proud of you, darling …’ In a bit Georgie goes through to the bedroom and slips on her comfy netball uniform (her position was always GD), and Bobby slips into the bathroom again and sniffs another white slug off the toilet cover. A sparky silver thread spins up his nervous system, and for a bit Bobby just dithers in the bathroom gurning slightly and feeling excited about every toiletry and every fitting and every surface in the little white room. For a millisecond he wants to give the bathroom a good spring-clean and he almost gets the detergents out, but then he gets his bearings back and remembers Georgie and he bounces out the door knocking over the Toilet Duck. ‘Quack,’ says the duck, meaning ouch. Bobby tries to harness feeling so supercharged as he steps into the living room again, but when he sees Georgie in the pleated navy skirt and she hugs him all tight and lovely and kisses him first on the cheek then the lips then the neck, Bobby the Artist feels his heart speed up and his lungs turn to butterfly wings pumping glorious silver sequins round his airways.
Let’s have sex
, they think simultaneously, couples having strange mind-reading powers after months and months of trying to figure each other out. Panting, Georgie starts rubbing her hands round Bobby’s biological erogenous zones, turning his trousers into a tent with lots of rude organs camping underneath. Bobby sucks all the freckles and moles off her chest, pulling the GD bib wheeeeeeeeeee over her head and flicking Georgie’s turquoise bra off her shoulders then kissing her tits, and he’s got so much energy – plus he’s very impatient – Bobby tugs off his sweaty sweater himself and gives Georgie a helping hand with his zip. Then comes the enormous anticipation of someone putting their mitts on your cock and balls. Georgie smiles to herself and keeps him hanging on for a bit, which in a way is even better though it makes the Artist want to explode and after one or two tugs he moans ‘whoah’ then screams ‘
whoah!
’ and Georgie lets go giggling, then suddenly her face is all serious and Bobby pulls her polished pine legs apart and slithers a hand up her skirt where her fanny’s got a bit of five o’clock shadow like a pin cushion but her lips are nice and slippy, and he slides some lubricunt round and round, mixing clockwise with anti-clockwise with figure 8 until Georgie’s shagging the air with pleasure bashing her feet about. Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina. They shag at double-speed: InthekitchentheydospoonsonthebreakfastbaramongstallthecutlerytheninthebathroomtheyshowereachotherwithhotkissesandGe orgiekneelsonthepisserwhileBobbydoesheruptheshitter thenintheloungetheybounceupanddownonthesofatheninthebedroomtheysqueakthespringsofthemattress. Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom’s beginning to feel a bit iffy. He’s overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby’s stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie’s cervix at 180 beats per minute. ‘Help me!’ he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting. The sex only seems to be getting faster though, and Mr Condom squeezes his eyes shut as Bobby groans and the friction starts getting unbearable and Mr Condom thinks he’s going to be sick and the searing pain the searing pain and Bobby groans again and suddenly squirts a gallon of white molten lava from his Jap’s eye, exploding through Mr Condom’s heavy reservoir end and Mr Condom screams and screams and vomits ice cream into Georgie’s vagina. Shivering and spasming, Bobby suddenly feels the endorphins kick in and he falls onto the carpet with a happy bump. Georgie’s all smiley too, and for a minute the flat’s silent except for the delicate surround-sound of creaking footsteps, doors going open-shut, mumbling kids, and TV crackle. All pooped, Georgie shuts her peepers, looking forward to a post-coital cuddle and perhaps more sweets, but when she reopens them Bobby’s back in the bathroom doing another line of speed then he’s all hyper again and he jumps back into his clothes and jumps out the door in a sudden flash of yellow argyle. Fickle bastard. Panting heavily, Bobby charges up one flight of stairs with money falling out of his pockets. Before he forgets, he zips round Johnnie’s to pay back the
£
200 ticky, and rid himself of more stinky lucre. It’s one of the only wondrous feelings money can really give you – giving it to someone else. Bobby the Artist feels like some sort of Father Christmas figure as he stands outside 5E, oblivious now to how tight-arsed he felt this morning in London. Johnnie answers the door in his Boro dressing-gown, at first looking all unkempt and glum but then he clocks the Artist and a smile rises on his face like an upside-down rainbow, and he gives him a hug. ‘How do, Bobby! How was the what-do-you-call-it-again? The Smoke?’ Johnnie asks, teeth chattering.‘ Sound, sound,’ Bobby replies instinctively, but then he really thinks about it and adds, ‘Ah, it was crap. I’m glad to be back like.’ Johnnie nods, scratching his knackers under the flannely fabric. ‘Aye right, the South’s full of dickhead wankers, isn’t it,’ Johnnie states, not that he really knows or anything. Johnnie leans his shoulder against the doorframe, feeling a little bit exhausted with life but he’s happy to talk. Since Bobby left for London, Ellen’s been sleeping round Johnnie’s every night, but instead of sex they’ve just been having excruciating, boring cuddles and dry kisses. Despite Johnnie’s best efforts to suggest new things such as tying each other up, role-playing, sado-masochism, or giving each other foreplay, Ellen just doesn’t seem interested in shagging him any more. He’s frustrated. On Wednesday afternoon he bought a handful of men’s magazines, hoping to amass a ton of new sex techniques and try them out on Ellen, but all the lurid lusty girls in the photos just disheartened him because they all seem so up for sex and being right sordid little minxes, whereas Ellen (and all other real-life girls, for that matter) don’t want your willy twenty-four hours a day, and they don’t always want to suck it on demand. But it’s not like Johnnie really wants all that, he just wants to know she’s still into him. He feels like he’s losing her again, after that terrible, terrible performance on Indie Night. What a flop. When Bobby called by, him and Ellen were napping in the messy boudoir, or at least Her Majesty was – Johnnie can’t sleep nowadays, for the fear she’s dreaming of sleeping with someone else, or dreaming up ways to get rid of him. He’s frightened they’re just going to end up as ‘friends’. He’s been getting pissed on his own at the Brambles Farm Hotel and getting into fights with strangers and locals – on Tuesday evening he battered Joe Lucy because he might’ve accidentally looked at Ellen’s legs. Johnnie’s started stealing from his grandmother and stealing from the newsagent down the road (they’ve got a ‘no-run’ policy, so if you get out the door you’re home and dry), desperately trying to please Ellen with gifts such as fags and pizzas and pasties out of Greggs, and he feels like a bit of an arsehole. ‘You feeling alright?’ Bobby the Artist asks, snapping Johnnie out of the gloomy daze. Johnnie nods – he’s not the sort of person to whinge whinge whinge, like a fanny – he doesn’t want any attention, he just wants to ‘Go for a pint in a bit?’ Naturally Bob’s eyes sparkle over with bright Dulux varnish, and he grins and says, ‘Yeah, yeah, defo. But first, Johnnie, I’ve got something to give you. Here’s that ticky I owe you.’ His fingers are twitching with joy as he hands over the
£
200, and it’s worth every penny to see all Johnnie’s frown lines and crow’s feet melt away like he’s just put on Oil of Olay. Johnnie hugs Bobby again, and the first thing he does is hide it away in the empty
Anal Adventures
video where Ellen won’t find it, then he goes back in the bedroom to get changed and say goodbye to the mannequin. He feels brighter stepping down the steps with Bobby. The Artist feels lighter to have all that money out of his hands – he thinks the best days of your life are definitely those days with no pennies in your pocket where you still manage to get by and have a good time, you and your mates sacrificing food for booze and occasionally finding the money to buy each other a drink or two, all of you in the same bittersweet boat and all of you paddling the oars together. But now it feels weird to be rich and famous, money having that strange curse that makes you seem like a tight twat if you don’t automatically throw it at all your friends and neighbours. For now Bobby can smile and enjoy the peasant life again down the pub with Johnnie, but merely days later his phone’s overloaded with the squeals and whines of art collectors and magazines, and cheques for
£
2,000 and
£
3,000 and millions and trillions of pounds start dropping through the letterbox (or, rather, appearing in the post-racks, since they don’t have a letterbox). Bobby feels like a scared little girl under an acid rainfall of gold coins. His initial reaction is to run and hide behind the sofa (especially when getting hounded by pretentious journalists asking ‘the meaning’ of this and that, or the ‘context’ or the ‘blah blah blah’), but you can always turn your phone off or flush it down the toilet, and when Bobby does get a quiet moment in the flat to really think about his new stardom, it does actually seem pretty incredible. Okay, so it’s all a wild whirlwind Bobby’s got no control over, but at least he doesn’t have to work in an office and he doesn’t have a shitty boss to answer to and he’ll never have to make shitty conversation with anyone over a shitty water-cooler. So, instead of chucking the money out the window, Bobby decides to get on with it and enjoy the high life – he spends his pennies on one hundred ecstasy pills, fifty tabs of acid, twenty-five grams of coke and twenty-five grams of ket (to be mixed into the powerful concoction known as CK). He comes home from Lidl with a trolley full of exotic wines, spirits and beers (he doesn’t mind losing the quid he pushed in the trolley slot), and him and Georgie spend the whole of an evening arranging a bar in the kitchen then drinking it. One morning, high on the CK stuff and wandering around town like a circus clown scaring children, Bobby pops into Bhs and orders Georgie to make herself a
£
100 pick-’n’-mix, much to the amusement of the mams and nans passing through but much to the disgust of her boss Mr Hawkson, who hates to see Georgie going out with such a dreadful tramp, although he doesn’t realise it’s acceptable to look this way nowadays. Georgie doesn’t give a shite – she loves Bobby’s big heart and big old argyle sweaters, although the
£
100 pick-’n’-mix does subsequently fill her out quite a bit and it causes them both some dismay. However, by this time Bobby’s on a strict diet of pills-on-toast for breakfast, acid for dinner and CK for tea, and his attention begins wandering elsewhere. Oh, and his trousers start dropping off his hipbones. As soon as his picture’s printed on the front of the
Gazette
with the headline LOCAL ARTIST MAKES IT BIG! (with Bobby standing all gay and moody next to ‘The Angels’), lots of people from the tower block start drooling over him and sucking up to him and telling all their friends about him and then yelling at them to get their hands off him, he’s theirs. The girls Ellen, Mandy and Pamela start paying a lot more attention to him, popping down to his flat when Georgie’s at work, for a line of CK or a free ten-pound note, and soon they start adopting the role of groupies, or stalkers. Bobby begins to enjoy the power money gives him, and – on top of the heroic drug intake – the rickety fence between dream and reality starts to float away in the wind. In days of yore, artists used to pay prostitutes to lie about naked in front of canvases, pretending to be religious figures, and one afternoon Pamela comes down for a smoke and Bobby offers her
£
50 to pose topless for ‘Lady From Upstairs’ (41x123cm), which she accepts. And before you know it, word gets around and soon all the girls are sitting for Bobby, competing against each other to get their hands in the Artist’s pants, and pockets. They think he might be able to make them famous too. And it’s hard not to get swept up in all the commotion – Bobby starts acting strange, living up to his famous artist status, buying expensive argyles from the Scottish Highlands to paint in (not like those Pringle knock-offs Johnnie found round the back of Binns a year back), throwing money at girls, painting them in various shades and sizes, buying Johnnie and Ellen lots of Americanos. He even starts huffing Chanel instead of Lynx, and one psychedelic afternoon in September he accidentally swallows ten tabs of acid while sitting on the toilet. Bobby starts mumbling to himself, gurgling, the shapes of sinks becoming white elephants with beady winking eyes, and the clownfishes on the bath curtain darting about chattering to each other. For a minute he thinks he’s Salvador Dalí, growing a curly moustache in the mirror.