out is the second day of the Somme, and the troops sure as hell aren't in any
mood for taking prisoners. I suppose it isn't so bad if you can just grit your teeth
and wait for the payoff at the end, even though you don't get to choose which of
the witches will eventually take you home, but for anyone with an ounce of
sensibility the path to that consummation is way too thorny. Even for blokes, pulla-pig contests are pretty tacky, but when lasses start, it gets positively disgusting.
After two hours of listening to those kinds of reminiscences and hypotheticals, no
man alive can get any kind of kick out of scoring, even if it happens to be the one
he actually fancies who eventually drags him off. No matter what she whispers in
his ear when they're finally alone, he always feels like a prize porker ripe for the
Polaroid laugh track.
All of which is beside the point, really —except that it's the context that
explains exactly how and why I became fascinated by Sheena Howell. She seemed
to be the only lass on the various shifts who never went on girls' nights out and
never indulged in any of the ritual humiliations that gave the others such insane
delight.
You might think that as an obvious singleton Sheena would be the prime target
of all the lads who'd ever been battered and bruised by a night out with one or
other of the gaggles, but she wasn't. The others thought she was "too weird."
When I asked one of the old hands, Jez, how Sheena had come to have this
reputation, when she seemed so inoffensive, he filled me in readily enough.
"She's dressed for work right now," he said, "but those are her civvies. She's a
Goth—nights out she wears nothing but black, hair in spikes, eyes made up like
fireworks. Wouldn't be so bad if it were only the outfit, but she's a vampire
Goth—not just an Anne Rice fan, though that'd be bad enough, but a full-blown
pretender. Says she learned to hypnotise herself so she could access her past
lives, and maybe she did, because she surely doesn't seem to be living in the
present. A mate of mine who knew her years ago told me her name's really
Susan—they all make up names, although they usually pick something classier
than Sheena. She's seriously crazy, and a bit feeble to boot—takes more time off
than the others. Bad legs, apparently."
You couldn't tell any of that by watching Sheena at work.
She was small and thin, and couldn't possibly have weighed more than seven
stone, but she seemed more ethereal than feeble to me. The fact that her hair was
black with mousy roots was only exceptional because the regular harpies mostly
had hair that was blonde with mousy roots. She was usually clad in worn black
jeans and grey T-shirts implausibly declaring that she was a member of the Royal
Redondan Naval Reserve or the Israeli Defence Forces, which qualified as
dressing down even by the relaxed standards of Phoneland. She did seem as if she
wasn't quite there, but not because she looked as if she were mad, in spite of Jez's
slanders. To me, it seemed that she was slightly faded, like a photocopy of a
photocopy. Her telephone manner was exquisite, though. She spoke softly, with
perfect, almost musical clarity. Unlike the members of the slag legion, she didn't
give the impression of having momentarily switched off a natural and otherwiseeverpresent coarseness. She seemed—to me, at least—to be naturally gentle of
tone and manner. She never got pissed off by the callers, which spoke of
incredible fortitude, and had a happy knack of calming them down, no matter how
irate they were when they finally got past the Chopin prelude that we tortured them
with while they were on hold.
"I don't think she's crazy at all," I told Jez forthrightly, after making my own
preliminary observations. "All that Goth stuff is just posing, anyway. It's an
affectation—a lifestyle fantasy way past its sell-by date. She must be about ready
to get over it."
"Fucking sociology graduate," was Jez's immediate response, although he had
two A levels himself.
"Has she got a boyfriend?" I wanted to know.
"Used to live with some guy almost as weird as she is. They were in a shitty
band, but they broke up—the band as well as the living-together bit. She moved
back with her mum. She'll probably go out with you if you ask, but she won't let
you fuck her, and you'll have to wear black—to go out, that is. Don't know what
you'd have to do in bed—never got that far. Watch your jugular."
The next time Sheena and I were on the same two-to-ten shift, I came to work
in black Levis and a black T-shirt, whose Gothic qualifications were only slightly
about to finish, I logged off five minutes early, having already taken my quota of
calls, and went over to her cubbyhole.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Tony Weever, with a double e. Started a couple of weeks
back. Wondered if you'd like to go for a drink with me before we go home. We've
got an hour before closing time."
I was steeled for some kind of scornful put-off, but all she said was, "Okay."
"You're Sheena, right?" I prompted.
"That's right," she said, turning away so that she could take one more call,
although I was certain that she'd already made her score. I waited patiently for her
to finish, then guided her to the recently redecorated Cock and Crown in
Sholebrooke Avenue, which was safely distant from any watering hole that the
harpy patrol might be nipping into for a quick one. She asked for a half of Dry
Blackthorn, showing commendable restraint.
"Never been in here," she observed. "The maroon plastic upholstery's
seriously revolting."
"You should have seen it before," I told her. "Bad case of Oscar Wilde
wallpaper—three pints and you wanted to fight it to the death."
She didn't laugh, but she contrived to give the impression that it wasn't because
she didn't understand the joke.
"Jez told me you used to be in a band," I said when we sat down.
"Yes," she said. "It split. Davy and I are hoping to do something else."
"Davy?"
"We used to live together, but we don't now. It's just a music thing now."
"You sing?"
"And write lyrics. He does the music. We'll record a CD when we're ready."
"A DIY job?"
"That's right. It's normal, with our kind of thing."
"I was at the university for three years—did your band ever play there?"
"No. What did you do?"
"Sociology."
"So why aren't you a social worker?"
"That's social admin. If I wanted to do something like that, I'd have to do a
vocational qualification. I considered the probation service, but only for a minute.
Much safer to deal with the criminal classes over the phone, and I'm too deeply in
debt to do another year's training right away. I'm hoping to get a job in the media,
but so's everybody else in the world. Where do you live?"
"With my mum, in Cross Gates. You?"
"Out past St James's and the Corporation Cemetery. No dad?"
"No. Mum was married, but I was too young to notice when it broke up. He
died soon afterwards. Mum took Libby—that's my older sister—to the funeral,
because she remembered him, but I didn't go."
"I don't know my dad either," I admitted, "although he's still alive. Mum and he
were never married. My two brothers and I all have different fathers, so it all got a
bit complicated."
"Lib's my full sister," she said, "but my little brother's only a half."
The conversation was flowing more easily now that we'd established things in
common, but it was way too downbeat. "So why'd you change your name to
Sheena?" I asked, in a blatant attempt to lighten it up.
"Libby went to see the Cramps on their last British tour, shortly after I joined
the scene. They had a song called 'Sheena's in a Goth Gang.' Lib started calling
me Sheena because she thought it was funny, in a contemptuous sort of way. The
best way to deal with put-downs is to accept them and take them one step further,
don't you think? Now I'm Sheena to everybody."
"While the real you remains secret. Why not? Does the fact that you sometimes
wear an Israeli Defence Forces T-shirt mean that you're Jewish?"
"No. Davy brought it back for me from Jerusalem. He bought it in an Arab
shop on the Via Dolorosa. He thought it was funny that the Arab shops were
making money out of them. Maybe the Arabs did, too. The Redondan Naval
Reserve one was from him, too. He gets the Redondan Cultural Foundation
Newsletter. You'd probably like him."
I had my own ideas about the likelihood of that, but I wasn't about to spoil
things by saying so. Nor was I about to ask her opinion of past-life regression or
vampires unless and until she introduced the topic first. A changed name is one
thing; esoteric interests that she might be taking a shade too seriously were
another.
"I don't know much about Goths," I confessed, thinking that it was probably
safe to go that far. "I've seen them around, of course, ever since the good old
days when the Sisters of Mercy were the local heroes."
"That's retro-Goth now," she said. "Things have moved on."
"To Marilyn Manson?"
"That's flash metal—bastard son of Alice Cooper."
"Nick Cave?" I queried, getting slightly desperate.
"He's still okay, but basically mainstream. The whole point is not to like the
things that other people like, not to think the things that other people think, not to
want the things that other people want, and not to do the things that other people
do. Every time an idol becomes generally popular, the insiders lose interest. If
you'd ever heard of any of the bands that I'd pick as favourites, I'd probably be
disappointed."
"Try me," I said bravely.
"I like to dance to Inkubus Sukkubus and the Horatii. I also listen to Ataraxia,
Mantra, and Sopor Aeternus, and dark ambient stuff like Endura."
The bright side was that I didn't have to disappoint her.
"Even an oppositional subculture has to have norms of its own," I pointed out,
letting my sociology degree show. "You still have to think the things that certain
other people think, etcetera, etcetera. Want another?"
"I can afford to buy a round."
"Yes, but I'm drinking pints and you're on halves, so it's only fair if I buy two
before you buy one."
"Okay. But it's not true about the conformist nonconformity thing. There's a
dress code of sorts, and shared tastes in music, but that doesn't mean that we all
think the same things or want the same things, etcetera. We can be as weird as we
like, but we don't have to be similarly weird. No such thing as too weird, of
course." She was obviously familiar with Jez's opinion of her fuckability.
I fetched the drinks before I said: "And exactly how weird are you?"
"Didn't the little bird tell you?"
"Only bullshit. I didn't take him seriously."
"That's because you didn't want to. You were going to ask me out, so you
didn't want to believe anything too silly."
"No, honestly," I said valiantly. "It was bullshit, but I wouldn't have minded.
Be a pity if we were all the same, as Gran used to say."
" 'There's nowt so queer as folk,' " she quoted. "But Jez doesn't know the half
of it. Do you believe in reincarnation?"
"No. Do you?"
"Yes. And how. How about vampires?" She was being deliberately
provocative.
"Well," I said carefully, "that would depend what you meant by vampire."
"Oh, right," she said. "The 'anyone can drink blood if they want to' routine.
That's not what I mean."
"If you mean the undead rising from their graves by night, perennially in danger
of crumbling to dust in sunlight, invisible in mirrors, then no," I said. "It doesn't
make any sense. Anyway, blood is just blood, not some magical elixir."
"We die every night," she said, in her scrupulous telephone voice. "We
surrender our hold on consciousness, and we rise from the grave every time we
dream, hungry as well as invulnerable. We all wake up different—even those of us
who never meet an incubus or succubus. Our true selves are invisible to us,
especially when we look in mirrors. Blood is just blood if you cut yourself, or
while it's sloshing around your veins, but to a vampire, blood is life—and when
your blood's been drunk by a vampire, you wake up very different. If it happens
often enough, you can never go back to what you were before. All that stuff about
shrivelling up in the sunlight is complete crap, though—the movies invented that."
I burst out laughing, because I thought it was a punch line—and when she kept
a studiously straight face I still thought it was a punch line.
"You're cheating," I pointed out. "You're changing the supernatural into the
merely metaphorical."
"No I'm not," she said. "That's your interpretation, not mine. Most people
don't realise how supernatural even the everyday things are. Not just all dreaming
but all feeling. Life itself, even reason. It's all supernatural. Vampires are ordinary
because they're supernatural, not in spite of it."
"Ah, I get it," I said, figuring that I'd cottoned on to what she was doing and
why. "It's more Sheena, isn't it? You take the put-downs and you run with them,
taking them so much further that all the mockery's discharged. If people accuse
you of being crazy, you take the bullshit on and double it, until it becomes surreal.
Cool. I like it. I really do."
"That's your interpretation," she repeated, "not mine"—but I thought I had the
measure of her, and I thought I understood the way she played the game. I wasn't
lying to her. I really did like it.
"It's getting late," I said. "Maybe I should take you home."
"I knew you wouldn't let me get a round," she said. 'Too macho. Not exactly
convincing, is it, from a sociology graduate? You should go out with the girls a
few more times. That'd toughen you up."
"I'm not in the least macho," I assured her, figuring that I might as well get in
on the game. "I always wanted to be—even took masculinity A level. I was okay
on the theory, but I failed the practical. I only became a sociologist so I could
learn to understand my own dismal failings as a mere male. I would have done
psychology, but in psychology you have to blame everything on your parents, and
it didn't se
em fair to Mum. In sociology, it's the entire society's fault. Share the
wealth and share the blame, I say. So much more PC than blaming bad karma left
over from Atlantis. Not that I don't believe in Atlantis, of course. I believe United
are going to win the league and that New Labour still intend to cut hospital waiting
lists and help the pensioners, so why would I have any difficulty believing in
Atlantis?"
"Which United?" she asked.
"Darling," I said, "there is, by definition, only one United, whatever fools may
think in Manchester, Sheffield, or bloody Dundee. Did you know that Elland Road
has the only five-stall dog track in the country?"
"No."
"Well then, it's obviously true what they say. You do learn something new
every day. Tell you what—I'll get them in and you can slip me the money under
the table when nobody's looking."
"Somebody would see us out of the corner of his eye and get the wrong idea,"
she said. "Anyway, it's nearly last orders.
I think I'll owe you one and get the last bus. You don't have to see me home.
We creatures of the night can look after ourselves."
All in all, it was a perfectly satisfactory predate. Even after the intensity of the
vampire discussion, I didn't think Jez could be taken seriously. I didn't think
Sheena was crazy—and even if she was, I figured, I should still be able to worm
my way into her knickers, given time and a little native wit.
"You want to take me ten-pin bowling at the Merrion Centre?" she asked when
I laid out my proposition for a first real date.
"Why not?" I said. "Bright lights and polished lanes—the pastel pullovers are
optional. Wouldn't want to go somewhere dark and gloomy where we'd fade into
the background, would we?" I figured that the blind-side approach was best,
although I'd already done what any university man would do when faced with a
tactical problem—I'd visited the Central Library and Miles's secondhand
bookshop in search of research materials.
"Oh, all right," she said. "Anything's better than television—and if it's good
enough for Homer Simpson, it's good enough for me."
We were on eight-to-four, so we had time to go home and make ourselves
beautiful before meeting up at the Merrion. I'd decided that too safe a compromise
would look wimpy, so I'd borrowed a black leather jacket from half-brother Jack.