This time he was going on about some painting exhibition that this artist woman what he knew was doing, in the little nursery up on Castle Hill five minutes’ walk away. She wasn’t really listening much while he explained, but it was all to do with how this artist was supporting one of his political campaigns that he was doing in the Boroughs, and how she’d come from that area herself, like that meant anything. The Boroughs was a shit-heap that was full of rotten cunts like them next door who’d had the ASBO put on her, and if it weren’t that it was where they’d given her a flat and where she worked, for all she cared they could tear the whole fucking place down and then bury it. The Thompson bloke was telling her this exhibition thing was in the afternoon on the next day, the Saturday, and Marla said she’d definitely go though they both knew she wouldn’t, just so she could shut the door without offending him. Tomorrow afternoon, Marla would either be all right, in which case she’d be round here in her flat and getting out of it, or else she wouldn’t be all right, and either way she wasn’t going to want to look at paintings. They were all a fucking con and people just said they could see all deep things in them when they wanted to look clever.
Shutting her front door on the old guy, Marla was hoping that come the next afternoon she’d definitely be all right, rather than not all right, whatever that might mean. Probably nothing worse that slogging round by Grafton Street and Sheep Street like she had today, in hope of lunchtime trade. That was as bad off as she’d be, she told herself. She knew she definitely wasn’t going out down Scarletwell tonight, no matter how bad it might get, no way, so that was one alternative she didn’t have to worry over.
After she’d got rid of Thompson or he’d gone on to the next house or whatever, she went back into the living room and sat back down where she’d been sitting, but she found she couldn’t now imagine the two people fucking by the fireplace like she had before. They’d gone. She checked again beside the sofa and beneath it, then sat down again and thought about how it was all her fucking mum, Rose, was to blame for this. A little skinny white slag always chasing after niggers with her hair in dreadlocks, doing all the talk like Ali G and fucking giving it Bob Marley this, Bob Marley that. She’d even named her brown kid fucking Marla with Roberta as a middle name. Marla Roberta Stiles, and Stiles was just what Marla’s mum’s last name was, and not Marla’s dad’s. He’d been long gone and Marla didn’t blame him, not one fucking bit. No fucking woman, no cry.
All the time while Marla had been growing up, her mum had been there making fucking curry with her headphones on and bellowing to lively up yourself or one of them. Or she was sitting by the telly spliffing up from little deals of ropey weed and saying it was fucking ganja. Then there was her boyfriends, every one some fucking nigger who’d be gone in six weeks or six minutes when they found out that she’d got a kid. When Marla was fifteen she’d fucked one of them, one of Rose’s boyfriends, Carlton with the funny eye, just to get back at Rose for all the … just for everything. Just all of it. Marla still didn’t know whether her mum had ever found out about her and Carlton, but he’d been kicked out the Maidencastle house within the month and there was such an atmosphere that Marla hadn’t stuck it for much longer and fucked off herself soon as she turned sixteen. It was around then that she’d met Samantha and all Gemma Clark and them, and Keith.
Her mum had only been round once since Marla had got fixed up with the flat. She’d sat on the settee there with a skinny little spliff, Marla could see her now, and told her daughter what, in Rose’s own opinion, she was doing wrong, how she was messing up her life. “It’s all these drugs. It’s not just like a lickle bit of ’erb. You’ll end up like a slave to it.” Yeah, like you’re not a slave to cider and black cock, you fucking hypocrite. But Rose would have just said something like “At least I’m not out and selling it down Grafton Street.” You couldn’t, mum. You couldn’t fucking sell it and you couldn’t fucking give it away free, you just, you fucking couldn’t. “There’s no love in what you do.” Oh, fucking hell. You stupid fucking … what, you think there’s any in what you do? In what anybody does? It’s all just FUCKING SONGS and FUCKING BIRTHDAY CARDS, you cunt, you old cunt. DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME, RIGHT, don’t you fucking tell me because YOU, you’ve got NO fucking right, no fucking right. You sit there with your fucking SPLIFF, your fucking GAN-JAH, fucking smiling ’cause you’re monged and saying to chill out. YOU WHAT? You fucking WHAT? I’ll fucking chill YOU out, you old cunt. Fucking leave YOU with your face in stitches and your ribs all kicked in, see how YOU like it, you fucking, FUCKING …
There was no one there. She was all on her own. I tell you, man, you’ve seriously got to watch that. Seriously. She’d been shouting, not just in her head but out loud. It was getting a bit regular with Marla, that was, shouting. Shouting at Miss Pierce, her form teacher from Lings. Shouting at Sharon Mawsley when they were in first year, shouting at her mum, shouting at Keith. Yeah, right. As if. At least it was all people what were real and what she knew, or at least mostly. At least so far. There’d been only once, no, twice, when Marla had been shouting at the Devil, and a lot of people got that all the time. Samantha used to get that. She’d said that for her he was a red cartoon one with a pitchfork, but that’s not the way that Marla saw him.
It had been the middle of the night about three months back, after what had happened to Samantha. She’d not had a proper smoke, ’cause there’d been none about but somebody — who was it? — somebody had given her some pills, fuck knows what, just to get her through. She’d been here in the flat, the same place where she always was, sat up in bed there in the dark having a fag just so that she’d be smoking something. She was staring at her fag end, like you do, and in the dark there it looked like a little face, a little old man’s face with pink cheeks and pink mouth and two black flecks for eyes. The bits of grey and white ash were his hair and eyebrows and his beard. There were two glowing sparks up at the top, bright red so that they looked like horns, a little devil man there on her fag end and it looked like he was grinning. Where the hot coal at the end was burning through the paper from the other side to make his mouth it sort of went up at one side, and Marla had been all, like, Yeah? What are you laughing at, you ugly cunt? And he was like, Who do you think I’m laughing at? I’m laughing at you, ain’t I? Because when you die you’re going to go to hell if you’re not careful.
That had been when Marla laughed at him instead, or snorted at him anyway. Well, what the fuck is hell supposed to be, you ash-faced twat? I’ll tell you, hell for me would just be being stuck in Bath Street here forever, and he’d said, Precisely, and that really fucking freaked her out. Where had she got a word like that? When she was talking to her people in her head they talked like she did, and she’d never said “Precisely” in her life. She’d stubbed him out, she’d squashed his little burning brains out in the ashtray by the bed and then she lay there until morning with it running round her head, the thing he’d said. She didn’t understand it and she didn’t understand why she was letting it get to her like it had. For fuck’s sake, what did he know? He was just a fucking fag end.