Sixteen Shades of Crazy. Rachel Trezise

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ interview with The Boobs. She met them in a greasy spoon off Womanby Street where a horde of workmen were slowly demolishing the Arms Park. She’d ordered tea and death-by-chocolate and was about to devour the first forkful when the band filed into the café; valley bumpkins hiding behind swear words and ripped jeans. She was a ballsy self-assured über-feminist who scowled at monogamous relationships and housewifery, and then she’d looked up from her fat wad of cake and seen Andy, his cerulean eyes already trying to thaw her thick wall of resistance. Death by calculated erosion was how it had turned out.

      She looked up at Viggers. ‘How come you’re still here?’

      ‘I’m the editor now,’ he said, his tiny eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘I’m here till gone seven most nights.’

      She hadn’t really been referring to the late afternoon, but wondering how, in two years, Viggers hadn’t moved to London, or at least on to the Western Mail, like all Cardiff University graduates eventually did. ‘Can I lighten the load?’ she said. ‘I can take the books that nobody else wants. Or write some art previews.’ Ellie loved art as much as music. At university she often snuck into other people’s art history lectures, just to listen to the erudite lecturers gushing about the tortured lives of Kandinsky and Munch. Pop art was her favourite, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg. ‘Is there anything on at the museum?’

      Viggers slapped her leg. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of The Needles, haven’t you? We’re doing this thing, paying tribute to the big Welsh bands. We’re doing one every month until we run out. It’s perfect for you because Gareth’s gone back to college to do his MA. It’s the January cover feature. What do you think?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Ellie said. She only wanted something trivial to keep her mind off Johnny-Come-Lately. Thirteen days and counting since he’d turned up. They were the longest thirteen days of her life. Like a frantic disciple in search of the great redeemer, she saw the shape of his face amidst the floral patterns in the front curtains, then she’d lose ten minutes staring out of the bay window, wondering where he was, heart brooding, pulse thumping. She needed to see him again, to look into his sooty eyes. Saucepans boiled over. The bath overfilled. She tripped over her own toes. Andy had caught her once, his father’s binoculars pressed against her face. She was looking at the beer garden on the square. She said she was looking at an eagle.

      ‘It’s probably a kestrel,’ Andy’d said.

      Eventually the frenzy thawed into embarrassment. It was ridiculous, she’d only met him once, shared five, maybe ten words. But the hysteria always returned, sporadic, but inevitable, as though he himself was the drug, and she was already dependent. ‘Have you got anything smaller, a gig review or something?’

      ‘It’s only two thousand words, El. What’s that, a half-hour interview? I’ve got a press pack somewhere. The deadline isn’t until December. That’s four months away.’ He pushed himself out of the chair and walked to the other side of the room, stood in front of a giant-sized poster of Rhys Ifans. He rummaged through a pile of paperwork on a desk. ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he said, squatting to open a drawer. He held a pack of CDs bound together with a rubber band. ‘Will you do it, yes or no?’

      Ellie shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said.

      Viggers approached her, dropped the bundle of CDs into her hands. He pinched her chin and then swivelled back to his workspace, his fountain pen waltzing across a page of foolscap.

      On the landing the heat had relented. The cafés were closed, the arcade doused with disinfectant. She walked back to Central Square, the city around her empty and expectant, some of the club doormen clocking on for their twilight shift, leaning in the doorways wearing dinner jackets and bow-ties. Platform Six was unmusically quiet. Ellie stood amongst the pigeons waiting for the Ystradyfodwg train. Going back to the valley always made her feel jaded, an hour journey feeling like a mammoth shift backwards in time. Aberalaw was full of resentment. The whole village disapproved of anyone it collectively deemed atypical. All the columnists in the broadsheets ever talked about was how community was dying, and what a detrimental effect its death was having on Great Britain. But in Aberalaw it wasn’t dead, and Ellie wished that it was. Community was a tyrant when your face didn’t happen to fit. Ellie was impatient now for escape, her belly like a wishing well, heavy with copper pennies, every coin representing some unfulfilled dream.

      She sighed and opened her purse, took her train ticket out. Behind it was a clipped photograph of Siân and Rhiannon, herself in the middle; their arms weaved chaotically around one another. She’d forgotten that it was there; almost a year old, taken on a rare night out in the capital. Ellie and Siân had wanted to go to a roller disco in Bute Park. Rhiannon insisted on some strip club she knew of, a dank basement bar hidden under a Queen Street department store. She’d spent the whole night acting the big I Am, stuffing five-pound notes into the dancers’ thongs. The flash from the camera had penetrated their lipstick and glitter. Or it had already worn off. They looked like three little girls, the little girls they must have been before they grew up, before they discovered plastic surgery, sarcasm and narcotics, all the stuff that numbed the pain. Round faces and bug eyes. Rhiannon’s fat purple tongue was poking out. God knows she must have been through some crazy shit to turn into such a psychotic bitch. She seemed to think the world revolved around her, that she was playing the lead role in some elaborate stage play. Most people grew out of that when they were thirteen. Siân’s alcoholic father had beaten her mother senseless; kicked her, pregnant, down the stairs, cut her hair, burned her with cigarettes, and when she was in hospital, Siân bore the brunt. Siân had told Ellie all about it when she was blotto on cheap champagne, the whole three bottles that were left after Niall’s christening. Ellie hadn’t had it easy, but nothing like that.

      Funny how those three faces should end up in the same club, in the same photograph, all damaged and searching for some kind of affirmation. But then nobody from the valley was a model citizen. Even Andy with his idyllic nuclear family was plagued with insecurities. They were branded into him, something he could never escape, like the ridges in his fingertips. He couldn’t have a shit without consulting his father about what brand of toilet paper to use. He was the sanest person Ellie knew and he floundered through life, waiting for the next instruction, unable to utilize his own mind.

       10

      At the same time, in Aberalaw, Siân was trying to apply foundation, squinting at her reflection in the mirror nailed under the open stairs. It was the only mirror in the house, something James had made at nursery. He’d painted pasta shells gold and silver and glued them messily around the oval frame. Siân cherished everything the kids made, but between the three of them it amounted to fifteen crayon drawings a day. One time she’d tried to slip a stack into the transparent recycling bag, hiding them between two cereal boxes. Immediately she was overwhelmed with guilt. She’d pulled them out again, filing them neatly on the shelf under the coffee table by subject: cats, Daddy, guns and houses.

      She squeezed a splodge of the gooey, honey-coloured make-up on to her palm and tilted her head towards the light. She almost didn’t recognize her reflection, had always imagined herself as the blurred, worried-looking image she saw in Niall’s pupils; a doting, fretting mother, clammy red cheeks, a band of sweat at her hairline. But in the mirror she looked close to human. She brushed mascara on her lashes with brisk strokes, stabbing herself in the eyeball when she heard her daughter shriek.

      ‘Angharad!’ she bellowed, flinging the kitchen door open, the mascara wand still clenched in her fist. Her adrenal glands opened, her heartbeat hopping. ‘Angharad? What’s wrong?’

      James was sitting at СКАЧАТЬ