Ten Storey Love Song (9 page)

After a bit, Johnnie starts getting sweaty too and he stops kicking his legs, gliding back down to earth like a feather. The sky and the land slowly become flat again – not big arcs of rainbow whoosh – and Johnnie eases himself into a more sedate swinging style. Squinting through burnt blue retinas, Johnnie sees the playground has emptied slightly, possibly due to his menacing presence or it could be the ice-cream van round the corner. Sparking up another Richmond, Johnnie yawns, eyeballing two big pigeons waddling about the coloured tarmac. One’s a man bird and the other’s a woman bird, and they look so downtrodden and scratty it seems out of place on such a happy day. The bloke pigeon has his neck feathers all puffed out, chasing the lady like Benny Hill on birdseed. The lady clearly wants nothing to do with him, scrabbling away on the hot ground or flying onto the climbing frame only to get followed a second later, the gadge pigeon pushing his neck out fatter and fatter and it’s pure comedy watching the two of them. Johnnie laughs in his head but then he feels sad, thinking of all the human ladies in the same position in all the clubs and pubs in Britain or the whole universe. But then it’s just Mother Nature’s fault boys are always randy – after all it’s a scientific fact the human race would disappear if no one wanted to have sex any more. Just as long as they don’t want to have sex with your bird, that’s all. Johnnie sighs then dismounts the swing, and him and Ellen walk off hand in hand through the smell of the playground. Ellen likes to take funny little penguin steps, while Johnnie prefers walking at ten-to-two, which means – if you happened to be standing on a clock-face – left foot would point at ten, right foot at two. It’s a walk generally favoured by frogs and ruffians. Trundling towards Corpus Christi primary with their bodies pushed together, Johnnie tries his best to smile but he feels funny. He can’t wait for the little things again, like nibbling Americano pizzas and stroking Ellen in bed and getting stroked back. He has to learn how to calm down. Fucking tissues! He clings her a bit closer, then the both of them laugh when they spot Alan Blunt the Cunt lurking by the primary school fence in his deer-hide jacket, perving over the pre-teens on their afternoon break. Alan’s a weirdo but he’s also rather friendly, and Johnnie blurts out ‘Hello’ as they amble past. Alan waves back, looking a bit grim in such heavy clothes and bags under his eyes, one hand still attached to the metal rungs. ‘Now then, Johnnie,’ he says stiffly. Alan gets on with most (white) people in Peach House, despite Johnnie piping monotonous earth-quaky trance through his pillow every night. It drives Alan to very murderous thoughts, but on the flipside Johnnie does help him put shelves up and he did bring a Sardinian to an inch of his life the other day. As well as hating foreigners, Alan also hates to see people in love, and he gazes at Johnnie and Ellen with a bit of disgust as they pace off into the shadows. Alan’s wife disappeared four years back, and since then no one’s succumbed to Racist Cunt Alan’s racy racist charms. He adjusts his thick-rim gegs then turns back to the school playground, suddenly disappointed when the bell goes and all the kids scamper back indoors for their music lesson (yes, it’s 1.30pm on a Thursday). Some weeks he likes to stay and listen to the recorders getting sucked and blown, but this afternoon he’s promised Bobby the Artist he’ll sit for a portrait and a piss-up, so he slowly detaches himself from the green gates and follows the lovebirds’ footsteps up wide wonderful Cargo Fleet Lane. Alan Blunt the Cunt’s not a big fan of the sun – on scorching days like this he tends to stay indoors watching the Toshiba telly, stepping out only to drive the containers at ICI and sit in dismal ferry terminals, or stare at the kids in the playground. He likes the children at Corpus Christi, since it’s a Catholic school and they’re mostly pale faces. Alan’s always been a Cunt and he’s always been Racist – he was a copper in the seventies and eighties, renowned for using his truncheon on anything with off-white skin at any opportunity. His wife came back from holiday having shagged an Italian stallion, and rumour has it he used his truncheon on her as well. Alan Blunt is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Union in town, but he’s also under the Hitlerish impression that Niggers, Nips, Pakis and Chinks are all out to get white people’s jobs, out to terrorise white people’s neighbourhoods, and out to shag white people’s wives. He’s the sort of person who says ‘Fuck off back to Arabia, you fucking Paki’ to people from India when he’s had a bit too much to drink. He thinks the Chinese have suspicious eyes. He believes all Mediterranean men are big greasy STD carriers. Alan’s father Larry used to show him books about lynchings in the Southern states of the US and Vietnam and race riots, making up joke captions and spazzy accents for all the poor victims. It’s a wonder he didn’t read Alan
Mein Kampf
at bedtime. Alan’s father died years back after refusing a flu jab from a Bangladeshi nurse and, as Alan plods past the Thorntree cemetery where the daft bastard’s buried, he feels glad that Larry Blunt the Cunt can’t see what a lonely situation his son’s in now. Alan steps across the hot-plate car park then bashes the code into the side of the tower block, yawning as he steps into the cool dark of the foyer. He hangs silently in the lift for about a minute, pressing buttons with chipolata fingers, but it’s still fucking broke. The letting agency keep telling him it’ll be fixed within a fortnight; every day you can see Alan lingering in there with the same tense expression. Hissing, he gives the lift panel a bit of a slap then proceeds up the six staircases like a grumpy tortoise. Alan’s face is a crumpled crisp packet from too many years frowning. At his door (6E, but the E’s fallen off) he finds Bobby the Artist sitting cross-legged supping a bubbly bottle of White Ace. Bobby’s feeling half-cut already after just a litre of the stuff, but he’s been huffing Lynx again all morning and his brain feels like mushy peas. Alan Blunt the Cunt stops for a sec on the mottled vinyl, then pushes his specs up and goes, ‘What you drinking that shite for? Howay in and I’ll get us a can of Special.’ Bobby smiles and claps his hands, following Alan into the flat with his biggest argyle all sweaty and floppy round his skinny frame. In all those argyle sweaters, Bobby looks a bit like a sixties Mark E Smith, except Mark’s a little city hobgoblin and Bobby’s a six-foot elastic man. Yawning again, Alan Blunt the Cunt gets some Carlsberg Special out the fridge, then puts on Sinatra’s ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and tells Bobby to sit down and start drinking. Bobby the Artist dives into the brown knackered sofa. From that viewpoint, Alan’s flat looks like the mad headquarters of a stalker or serial killer or other strange person, and yet it’s also sort of homely. The walls are Blu Tacked with sun-dried pages of the
Sun
and
Mirror
singing out BOY KILLED BY RACIST THUGS and ASIAN GIRL, 18, RAPED and RAPPER KILLED IN GANGLAND SHOOTOUT, like black white and nicotine retro wallpaper. Frank Sinatra sits with other Franks on the mantelpiece instead of family photos, and the gramophone skips all his records. Mosquitoes lounge around the walls in piles of human blood. The Toshiba telly sits in the corner with its arms crossed, switched off. The floors are all bare, with only cans of Special Brew and shoes and dusty binoculars and cutted-out newspapers scattered about the underlay. It’s one of those homes with so much character it practically talks to you. ‘Hello,’ says the wallpaper. Bobby the Artist pushes the frothy White Ace back in his Premier carrier and takes out a rolled sheet of cartridge paper, along with his crayons and watercolours. He sets everything out on the crusty floor, pinning the A1 paper flat with four more Carlsbergs they’re going to drink. ‘So you’re doing a portrait then?’ Alan Blunt asks, quickly taking Bobby’s place on the sofa and going ‘aahh’ with his can in his mouth. ‘Yeah, just a sketch like,’ Bobby replies, ‘I dunno, I might make it into a big canvas later like, but you never know.’ Bobby the Artist starts out by crayoning Alan’s head and glasses quite large and cartoony, with the suggestion of wavy b+w tabloids behind him and the grumpy Toshiba telly. Blur your eyes and the walls go into a kind of Bridget Riley, or is that just the Special Brew? Bobby the Artist burps then does a squiggle for Alan’s sickly hair, the sun bursting in through the window like a magic yellow filter. ‘So what you been up to today, Al?’ Bobby asks, lifting one of the Carlsbergs to scribble a fag packet with centipede legs in the bottom left corner. ‘Ah, not much; this and that, you know how it is,’ Alan replies, too ashamed to talk about the Corpus Christi kiddies, even though everyone on the estate must’ve seen him gawping through the railings at one time or another. Alan doesn’t think of himself as a pervert or a paedo, but he knows what people say about him behind shut doors. It’s becoming a bit of an obsession for him. One of the kids in particular, Tiny Tina, plagues his beery dreams every night, so perfect she is in her dining-cloth dress with her piggytails and rosy legs. ‘Aaahh,’ Alan says again, thinking about the girl but pretending it’s the grog. ‘How’s the picture going?’ he asks next, reddening, shuffling on the settee. The problem with drawing Alan Blunt the Cunt is he can’t keep still at all, but Bobby uses it to his advantage and throws rapid marks across the paper, telling him, ‘Er, it’s going to be sort of abstract.’ Alan Blunt nods, but he doesn’t know a great deal about art except for the Constable print his father used to have above the Toshiba telly when it lived with his folks in Thorntree. However, Alan did once see some of Bobby’s work at his degree show in college – these groovy, childish pictures of sunshines and flowers and body parts. They could’ve been done by a five-year-old, but that’s not a bad thing in Alan’s book. Slurping, Bobby mixes up some luminous pinky-red for all the
Sun
logos behind the Cunt, like the poppies in that very famous painting someone painted about poppies in the olden days. Without drugs, it’s been a tricky week for the Artist – the boredom’s the worst and the ever-so-slight downcast can’t-be-bothered-to-talk-to-you feeling but, saying that, there’s no drug in the world better than painting. Oh and the Special Brew’s starting to kick in, and Bobby’s brushstrokes start to flow much looser and stranger, and he ends up drawing an elephant trunk coming out of Alan’s face. ‘So, you up to owt later on?’ Bobby asks, much happier to make small-talk now he’s getting sloshed. ‘Ah, well I’ve gotta drive the fucking truck tonight like, but God knows if I’m gonna be sober in time,’ Alan replies, then takes a big guzzle and asks, ‘Are you working nowadays, Bob?’ Bobby the Artist glances up from the paper, then sort of stammers, ‘No, er, it’s shite like cos I haven’t had any commissions for ages. But, er, well this weekend this dealer’s coming up here to look at some paintings and maybe do something together, or something.’ Perhaps the only bad thing about drinking is Bobby can feel himself getting slower and stupider the more drunk he gets, and he shifts uneasily on the floorboards. He sees photos scattered on the floor of Alan and his ex-wife with all her heads cut out, and he wonders if Alan pasted them on voodoo dolls or set them on fire or just threw them out the window. On the cartridge paper, Bobby draws lots of women’s heads floating around in the background. ‘Well good luck with it all,’ Alan suddenly spouts, his chin on the Special Brew. He takes another sip, then changes his position again – hunched forward with goggly eyes. ‘Cheers, Al,’ Bobby replies. ‘Hopefully I’ll get some money for it; I’ll have to take you out for a bevvy or summat.’ With Alan Blunt the Cunt moving about so much, Bobby the Artist tries to bring the drawing to a close with one last curl on Alan’s head and a few extra broken blood vessels, then he takes it out from under the Carlsbergs and hands it over. Bobby’s satisfied with it – he always tries to show the good in people, but he does feel a little nervous while Alan glares at it. Eventually he burps and laughs and goes, ‘Cheers, mate, that’s lovely … Look, there’s Sinatra in the background! Ho ho ho. Not sure about the elephant trunk, like …’ Bobby the Artist pukes up a smile, then sups more Brew and goes, ‘Soz yeah, it’s a bit avant garde eh. You can have it though, if you want?’ Alan Blunt claps his hands, then gets up off the sofa and replaces Frank’s
The Man with the
Golden Arm
with Bobby’s ‘The Man with the Golden Can’ (59.4x84.1cm) on the mantelpiece. He ruffles the Artist’s shabby hair then goes, ‘That means a lot to me, Bob,’ and for the first time in a while he feels a connection and real joy and admiration for another human person. Bobby grins more gooey teeth and feels like his work here is done. What a beautiful day on floor six. Bobby swallows a load more Carlsberg then lazily packs his paints and crayons back in the Premier bag, not really wanting to leave Alan on his own but also not wanting Georgie to come home to an empty flat after she’s been at work and had her teeth filled and all that. It’s five o’clock already – doesn’t time fly when you’re getting pissed! Bobby watches Alan crush a can with his eyes all sad and soggy, and he can tell Alan wants him to stay and he can’t help but kneel back down when Alan murmurs, ‘Actually, Bobby, if you’re not in a rush or owt, I’ve got something to show you. Something I’ve drawn – my own bit of art, I suppose. I’d be keen to know what you think.’ Then Alan Blunt the Cunt goes rushing out to his bedroom and comes back brandishing an A3 tabloid mock-up he’s devised with a headline reading HORRIBLE DRUG DEALER TAUGHT A LESSON BY THE BOY DOWNSTAIRS and a smaller sub-heading ANGELO BASHINI WAS MADE TO EAT RAZOR BLADES AFTER BEING CAUGHT SELLING FIVE-YEAR-OLDS SMACK – JOHNNIE HYDE SAYS ‘NEXT TIME YOU’RE DEAD’. Even though it’s a mental spin on the razor episode, the paper’s been beautifully illustrated in ink with made-up images of Johnnie hitting Angelo and Angelo’s head in bandages in hospital, as well as delicate hand-drawn courier text and red tempera logo. ‘I had to make me own headline up cos the prick never pressed charges. There wasn’t even a peep from the
Gazette
,’ Alan explains, ‘but what do you think? It’s quite funny, isn’t it …’ Bobby the Artist scans a bit of the racist text (for example the ‘reporter’ ends the article with ‘but at the end of the day, the daft cunt had it coming’) and cringes, but as for craftsmanship it’s a wonderful piece of bonkers Pop Art and he replies, ‘It’s lovely, mate.’ Bobby the Artist feels uneasy when Racist Cunt Alan starts being a total Racist Cunt rather than just a Cunt or just plain Alan, but he holds the A3 drawing in both hands and keeps smiling. To be honest Bobby’s going to miss Angelo. It’s a real shame he’s not in Peach House any more (rumour has it he’s going to move back to his mam’s in Sardinia once he’s out of hospital), since Bobby used to have some right wild times up at Angelo’s, for instance that time they threw Roman candles off the top of Peach House off their heads, thinking they could spell NOW THEN in firework – and it wasn’t even Guy Fawkes night! Crazy days. Wistfully looking up at the Artexed ceiling, Bobby the Artist grins then hands the bit of A3 carefully back to Alan, who swallows down a burp. ‘Cheers, Bob, I mean I don’t think it’s in your league or owt, but I do love having a little scribble now and then … it keeps me occupied. It gets quite lonely up here, you know, being so high up off the ground.’ Totally charmed by the old bastard, Bobby pats Alan Blunt on the shoulder. He reminds Bobby a bit of that artist Henry Darger, the one who did all his work on his lonesome in some Chicago apartment and it only got discovered once he’d popped his clogs. Henry left behind these great big fairytale panoramas, tracing little girls (and giving them little willies) and Disney animals and beautiful flowers. He could’ve been seen as some kind of paedo (like Alan), but some people reckon Henry was such an outsider he might’ve been unaware females don’t have cocks. But anyhow, the paintings are absolutely delightful – each one of them depicts a scene from the epic million-page fairy story Henry made up, and the colours are all luminous and the Vivian Girls are all cute and morbid, and the composition’s so natural and vibrant it almost makes Bobby cry just to see them in shitty reproductions. Bobby often wonders what it’d be like for Henry to have done all this wonderful art but never have found any recognition in his lifetime, and in a way it makes him sad because he’s on the cusp of fame himself and he doesn’t even feel that excited about it. All he feels is bored bored bored because he hasn’t got any drugs to eat any more. But looking at Alan Blunt the Cunt, lumbered in a stinky flat with just his Toshiba telly and