“Were you engaged?” I asked Jess, and then wished I hadn’t.
“Engaged?” Jess said. “Engaged? What is this? Pride and f—ing Prejudice? «Oooh, Mr Arsey Darcy. May I plight my truth?» «Oh yes, Miss Snooty Knobhead, I’d be charmed I’m sure.» “ She said this last part in a silly voice, but you could probably have guessed that.
“People do still get engaged,” Martin said. “It’s not a stupid question.”
“Which people get engaged?”
“I did,” I said. But I said it too quietly, because I was scared of her, and so she made me say it again.
“You did? Really? OK, but what living people get engaged? I’m not interested in people out of the Ark. I’m not interested in people with, with like shoes and raincoats and whatever.” I wanted to ask what she thought we should wear instead of shoes, but I was learning my lesson.
“Anyway, who the f— did you get engaged to?”
I didn’t want any of this. It didn’t seem fair that this is what happened when you tried to help.
“Did you shag him? I’ll bet you did. How did he like it? Doggy style? So he didn’t have to look at you?”
And then Martin grabbed her and dragged her into the street.
Jess
When Martin pulled me outside, I did that thing where you decide to become a different person. It’s something I could do whenever I felt like it. Doesn’t everybody, when they feel themselves getting out of control? You know: you say to yourself, OK, I’m a booky person, so then you go and get some books from the library and carry them around for a while. Or, OK, I’m a druggy person, and smoke a lot of weed. Whatever. And it makes you feel different. If you borrow someone else’s clothes or their interests or their words, what they say, then it can give you a bit of a rest from yourself, I find.
It was time to feel different. I don’t know why I said that stuff to Maureen; I don’t know why I say half the things I say. I knew I’d overstepped the mark, but I couldn’t stop myself. I get angry, and when it starts it’s like being sick. I puke and puke over someone and I can’t stop until I’m empty. I’m glad Martin pulled me outside. I needed stopping. I need stopping a lot. So I told myself that from that point on I was going to be more a person out of the olden days kind of thing. I swore not to swear, ha ha, or to spit; I swore not to ask harmless old ladies who are clearly more or less virgins whether they shagged doggy style.
Martin went spare at me, told me I was a bitch, and an idiot, and asked me what Maureen had ever done to me. And I just said, Yes, sir, and, No, sir, and, Very sorry, sir, and I looked at the pavement, not at him, just to show him I really was sorry. And then I curtsied, which I thought was a nice touch. And he said, What the fuck’s this, now? What’s the yes sir no sir business? So I told him that I was going to stop being me, and that no one would ever see the old me again, and he didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t want them to get sick of me. People do get sick of me, I’ve noticed. Chas got sick of me, for example. And I really need that not to happen any more, otherwise I’ll be left with nobody. With Chas, I think everything was just too much; I came on too strong too quickly, and he got scared. Like that thing in the Tate Modern? That was definitely a mistake. Because the vibe in there… OK, some of the stuff is all weird and intense and so on, but just because the stuff is all weird and intense, that shouldn’t have meant that I went all weird and intense. That was inappropriate behaviour, as Jen would have said. I should have waited until we’d got outside and finished looking at the pictures and installations before I went off on one. I think Jen got sick of me, too.
Also, the business in the cinema, which looking back on it might have been the final straw. That was inappropriate behaviour, too. Or maybe the behaviour wasn’t inappropriate, because we had to have that conversation some time, but the place (the Holloway Odeon) wasn’t right, and nor was the time (halfway through the film) or the volume (loud). One of the points Chas made that night was that I wasn’t really mature enough to be a mother, and I can see now that by yelling my head off about having a baby halfway through Moulin Rouge I sort of proved it for him.
So anyway. Martin went mental at me for a while, and then he just seemed to shrink, as if he was a balloon and he’d been punctured. “What’s wrong, kind sir?” I said, but he just shook his head, and I could understand enough from that. What I understood was that it was the middle of the night and he was standing outside a party full of people he didn’t know, shouting at someone else he didn’t know, a couple of hours after sitting on a roof thinking about killing himself. Oh yeah, and his wife and children hated him. In any other situation I would have said that he’d suddenly lost the will to live. I went over and put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me as if I were a person rather than an irritation and we almost had a Moment of some description—not a romantic Ross-and-Rachel-type moment (as if), but a Moment of Shared Understanding. But then we were interrupted, and the Moment passed.
JJ
I want to tell you about my old band—I guess because I’d started to think about these guys as my new one. There were four of us, and we were called Big Yellow. We started out being called Big Pink, as a tribute to the Band album, but then everyone thought we were a gay band, so we changed colors. Me and Eddie started the band in high school, and we wrote together, and we were like brothers, right up until the day that we weren’t like that any more. And Billy was the drummer, and Jesse was the bassist, and… shit, you could care less, right? All you need to know is this: we had something that no one else ever had. Maybe some people used to have it, before my time—the Stones, the Clash, the Who. But no one I’ve ever seen had it. I wish you’d come to one of our shows, because then you’d know that I’m not bullshitting you, but you’ll have to take my word for it: on our good nights we could suck people up and spit “em out twenty miles away. I still like our albums, but it was the shows that people remember; some bands just go out and play their songs a little louder and faster, but we found a way of doing something else; we used to speed “em up and slow “em down, and we used to play covers of things we loved, and that we knew the people who came to hear us would love too, and our shows came to mean something to people, in a way that shows don’t any more. When Big Yellow played live, it was like some kind of Pentecostal service; instead of applause and whistles and hoots, there’d be tears and teeth-grinding and speaking in tongues. We saved souls. If you love rock’n’roll, all of it, from, I don’t know, Elvis right through James Brown and up to the White Stripes, then you’d have wanted to quit your job and come and live inside our amps until your ears fell off. Those shows were my reason for living, and I now know that this is not a figure of speech.
I wish I was deluding myself. Really. It would help. But we used to have these message boards up on our website, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’t have the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it, and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.
Maureen felt faint after Jess cut loose on her, and who could blame her? Jesus. I would have needed to sit down too if Jess ever cut loose on me, and I’ve been around the block a few times. I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at any time of the day or year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they’ve come to represent the triumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. There were a couple of people sitting at the picnic table, but when they saw that Maureen wasn’t feeling too good they got up and went back inside, and we sat down. I offered to get her a glass of water, but she didn’t want anything, so we just sat there for a while. And then we both heard like this hissing noise, coming from the shadows next to the grill in the far corner, and eventually we figured out that there was a guy back there. He was young, with long hair and a sorry-ass moustache, hunkered down in the dark, trying to attract our attention.