The last time Sheena saw Chereena, she was by the pool with some topless guy who was looking for a shirt. He rummaged in the pile of girly clothes scattered in the grass and soon gave up. They were all too skimpy and impractical. Chereena invited him to sit down next to her, and he pulled up his trousers and together they dangled ankles in the pool. They turned to each other and smiled. They couldn’t stop smiling, it was that hilarious, until Sheena burst in on them as they were just about to kiss. She was in her Summer Medley blue kimono and yelled the place down, ordering him out, out, out! He went running barefoot and Chereena tottered after him. It’s my house, bitch, Sheena hollered behind them.
By Rob Plews.
The silence was ghastly: no rustle of leaves, no birdsong, no other traffic. Was he being watched by the Russians from across the divide? It was possible; but he was efficient, desperate, he always delivered, probably they’d uncoupled the container and driven across the border to the corrupt hotel they used as a staging post without looking back. Not a sound, apart from the noise made by Niko as he attached the sea container to his cab, applying the dog clips, connecting the air taps and electric cables. As he went round to the rear of the grey trailer and released the brake he thought he heard a low moan from within the corrugated box.
Amidst the throng of a south London high street, he was mouthing the ‘c’ word at a speeding, music-blasting white van in a silent form of Tourettes. He had so much anger. People congregated at bus stops appalled him. Old ladies and young women smoking disgusted, children running and shouting irritated, whilst men in white vans horrified and nauseated in equal measure. His mouthing of the obscenity was cartoonly graphic and had not gone unnoticed. Soon there was the sound of screeching brakes and the slamming of a door. He did not hear; he was admiring the waitress at the local café and her elegant way of scooping away the debris from a table while showing the subtlest hint of tanned Ukranian cleavage.
He had given up talking about things he liked because it began to feel like conversation was more of a competition. It seemed that she always knew of someone who had seen that film before, or heard that song before, or read that book before. Perhaps it limited her own experiences. At the time she had given him the book, though, he had not yet learned that lesson. He picked up a newspaper and looked at the local events. Somebody murdered in a square where they always went out to eat, local businesses swallowed up by chains, more new housing developments lying vacant. Nothing exciting really. He finished his coffee and ordered another.
He sounded angry now. LIke he’d half convinced himself. Like he’d been the unwilling witness, not me. Like it was someone else’s tragedy. He was looking at Kelly all pitiful. At her white legs all splayed out under her and her bare midriff and her breasts sticking out under her thin top. I could see now that one side of that top was red with blood and that Jonesy had blood on his hands and blood all over his clothes. He’d smeared blood all over me too when he grabbed me. He saw me seeing it and that calmed him right down.
He loses his shoe to a pair of groping hands as a tide of foul dejecta pipes down his trouser leg and erupts like a geyser in the face of his pursuer: the spurned duellist or his loyal second — the Bard can’t make out and couldn’t care less. He kicks off his other shoe and now he’s away, free, running — untouched! At his side, miraculously, runs Fettle, untouched too except for his bladder of wine which took a shot aimed hastily at the Bard and which continues to piss in a triumphant bloody arc as they run. “Oh! Thank heavens! Thank heavens you deloped!” Fettle rasps asthmatically, enjoying his vocabulary. “Of course I deloped. What did you expect. That I would kill him?”
I peek out from behind the embankment, waiting for her to show up, but she’s still not there. My palms are sweating and something lurches in my stomach, and I feel like shitting myself. I’m excited, like a guy who’s waiting for his date and he doesn’t know if she’ll show up or not. I’ve never once gone on a date, I mean really, not a single date. A few guys in my class have already been going on dates for a long time, Yurchenko for one. He doesn’t waste any time in class, either. He sat at the next table over from me with Khmelnitskaya, and when nobody was looking he’d grope her under the table, and she wouldn’t squeal, just smile, like she liked it.
If my accent sounds too refined for a pig-keeper, to say nothing of my vocabulary or, as you are pleased to say, my extraordinary insight, it is only because I once served in the house of a learned and benevolent master. I was a very impressionable youth for one of my station. My time there left indelible prints on the mudflat of my mind. The master is gone now, and an ill-fated chain of events brought me to this pigpen in the clanking irons of inevitability. Things could have been much different, sir. For instance, the master, who died childless, might have left me his fortune, which – forgive me for saying so, sir – would have left me even more fortunately circumstanced than yourself, if lacking in ancestral claims. Or I may have perished from the same dread disease that carried him off. Or anything in between. But what happened happened.
So horrid and bright to open his eyes. So much better to stay enshrouded in ruddy dark. But other signals were… penetrating too. His gullet came unfastened, pulsing and melting, and a sour bulge of liquid rose and – oh fuck, he sat up too late – popped and disgorged into his cupped hands. He cradled this liquid inch; it had weight and mass, and the gluey but slippery consistency of watered cornstarch. Sweet artificial scents of partially digested alcohol rose from its glistening surface. How much like an offering this was, with its bobbing rice grains and bilious yellow tint (he was bent on his knees in the sand). The smell intensified. A nostril twitched. Revulsion clenched him, and he flung his slop into the fire pit.
After all, why do you think I wear a crown — it’s not to keep the sodding rain off my old-lady perm! No, it’s because I’m the FUCKING Sun Queen, Sam. I embody celestial order, godly power. It might be the Emperor’s new clothes writ galactic…but it works! Has done for thousands of years, will do for thousands more. Countries can overthrow their Royal houses, but they soon replace them too. Just watch John Kennedy’s funeral and tell me with a straight face that that wasn’t a nation mourning its King. Because that’s all you really want, deep down: a King, a Queen, a celestial Daddy, someone to take the load of the universe off your own tired shoulders. Fuck freedom. Fuck responsibility. Order’s where it’s at. Orders, too. Someone telling you what to do, how to live, who to worship. Relieving you of the burden of thinking for yourself. You can fight it all you want, Sam, but you will lose.
