Sheena, page 2
“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 seem 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.
I already had a black silk shirt, which I’d bought under the mistaken impression that the creases wouldn’t be so obvious if it didn’t get ironed in an emergency, and a decent pair of black trousers. My gingery hair did let the ensemble down somewhat, but I wasn’t ready to start dyeing it yet.
I half expected Sheena to have gone the whole hog, but she hadn’t. Her boots had only two-inch heels and her leggings only had a slight sheen. Her velvety jacket was cut like a Tudor doublet with a drawstring at the waist, but she hadn’t done anything extravagant with her hair except for renewing the dye. Her mascara was almost conservative.
“You’re not quite ready for the real me,” she told me when I told her she looked beautiful.
“I’m working on it,” I assured her.
I figured that I’d have no difficulty at all beating her on the lane. Even if she’d played before, I reasoned, she couldn’t have had much practice recently, and she was bound to feel bad about having to check her boots in favour of style-disaster flatties. It turned out, however, that she was every bit as neat and meticulous with a bowling ball as she was with a phone and keyboard, and I made the mistake of starting with a heavy ball. It wasn’t until I put the black one aside and accepted that I was one of nature’s reds that I got into a groove. Sheena won the first game by 120-113, and I had to sweat to get the best out of three; I needed 160 to outscore her on the third and I only just managed it.
“I knew you could do it,” she said when I collected the necessary eight on a final-frame spare. “You’re the sort who raises his game under pressure. Not many of those about in this town. Wasted in Phoneland.”
“It’s just a stopgap.” I said, revelling in the compliment as we reclaimed our footwear and gravitated towards the bar.
“Course it is,” she said. “According to the techies, it’ll only be a couple of years before the whole place disappears up its own arse. The next-generation software will let them farm the work out to people’s homes. I’ll have to jack it in then, mind-no way I’m spending all day with Mum and Marty the brat. Lib says she can get me a job at Gap, but I wouldn’t want to work in a mall, and I certainly wouldn’t want a job where I was somebody’s crazy little sister.”
“Maybe your singing career will take off,” I suggested as I ordered a pint and a half of Dry Blackthorn.
“I’ll get these,” she said. I let her; in a bowling alley, anything goes. “Davy’s not ready yet,” she added, as we made our way to a cubicle. “He gave me a tape last week, but he says it’s only half cooked. I’ll find the words, but I’ll probably have to change them later. He says he’s a perfectionist, but he’s really just a ditherer.”
I wondered whether it had been a mistake to turn the conversation in that direction, but it seemed better to follow it through and kill it off rather than backtrack. “That’s how you work, is it?” I said. “He does the tunes, then you fit words to them?”
“I find the words,” she repeated. “Davy finds the music; I find the words.”
“Why put it like that?” I asked. “Why pretend that it’s not your own effort?” It had always seemed to me to be a peculiar form of false modesty when writers talked about their work having a life and logic of its own which they had no alternative but to follow-as if they were merely passive agents of fate, puppets in the hands of their own creations.
“Because it’s what happens,” she said. “Don’t you believe in muses?”
I was more than ready for any sentence beginning “Don’t you believe in… ?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I’m intimately acquainted with the muse of sociology. She wasn’t one of the original nine, of course, but they had to make concessions after the publication of the Communist Manifesto or there’d have been a revolution on Olympus. Which one’s yours?” I hadn’t been expecting muses, so I didn’t have any names to drop; I was sufficiently grateful to have remembered that there were nine.
“In seventeenth-century France,” she said with a half smile that seemed to be a polite acknowledgement of my ready grasp of the game, “poets thought that their muses were vampiric-that they had to pay in blood for artistic inspiration.
Geniuses paid so high a price that they wasted away.”
I figured that it was a test-maybe the crucial test that would decide whether she was willing to let me get closer. “In nineteenth-century France,” I countered, “they thought the same about the clap-that because genius was close to madness, tertiary syphilis was the Ml to enlightenment.” I said it lightly, so that she would know that it was the kind of put-down that was laid on to be picked up and run to healthy absurdity.
“By that time,” she said, “the art of dreaming had gone to pot, ruined by laudanum. If you know how to let yourself go when you fall asleep, you don’t need dope. You only have to attract the right kinds of night visitors to make the connections you need.”
“Must be why I got only a two-two,” I said. “The muse of sociology didn’t come through when I needed her most. My mistake-I should have fed her better.”
“It’s not just blood, of course,” she said. “There are other bodily fluids that will do as well-and some which definitely won’t.”
I got the joke immediately. “Muses never take the piss,” I said.
“Neither should you,” she riposted immediately, in her very best telephone manner.
I could take a hint. Sheena was telling me that if we were to devote ourselves to the game in earnest, I had to be careful to stay within the field of play-even if, like Elland Road dog track, it was too narrow to accommodate the sixth stall that the normal rules demanded.
“So how do you find the words,” I asked earnestly, “if you can’t just make them up the way other lyricists do?”
“You lose yourself in the music,” she said, with equal seriousness. “You shut your eyes and you let it take over. It’s like self-hypnosis-it’s not really a trance, but it is an altered state of consciousness. Music’s a natural language, with its own meanings built in. It speaks to the emotions. It’s the purest magic of all, and the greatest mystery. And if you listen-really listen-you know what it’s about. A piece of music doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, of course, because our emotional profiles are so different. Music resonates in different ways in different souls. If you want to understand your own meanings-the nature of your true self-you have to find your own music, and then you have to find the words that fit it. Otherwise, you might as well be taking calls at work, reciting crap from somebody else’s script.”
It was a test, and I knew that it was a crucial one. If I couldn’t take what she was saying seriously, it would all be off-but she didn’t want it to be off. She liked me, at least enough not to prefer loneliness, so she’d warned me as gently as she could about the dangers of taking the piss. All I had to do was play ball.
I nodded sagely and resisted the pseudo-intellectual temptation to quote Walter Pater about all art aspiring to the condition of music. “I see what you mean,” I said. “Our moods have musical reflections, and it goes much deeper than the ratio of backbeat to heartbeat. To produce the right lyrics, you have to find words that have the same emotional quality as the music. It makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said quietly. “It goes way beyond sense, in either meaning of the term. It’s supernatural.”
“And it costs,” I added, trying not to sound too tentative. “In blood, sweat, and tears. It takes something out of you.”
“It takes everything out of you,” she said. “Everything that isn’t just waste.”
Jez’s comments about the band she and her boyfriend had been in-and their living-together thing having broken up at the same time-took on new significance then. The one topic you should normally steer clear of when you’re trying to charm a lass into bed is her ex-boyfriend, but I already knew that Sheena wasn’t subject to the normal rules of engagement.
“It must be difficult,” I observed delicately, “to find the right words to fit the music of a guy you used to live with.”
‘The sex was always a mistake,” she said. “That wasn’t the way we gelled.”
Under normal circumstances I’d have deduced from that remark that wee Davy must be queer, but in this particular instance I was prepared to believe that he might really be wedded to his vampire muse. In any case, that wasn’t the important issue. “We all make mistakes,” I said. “I never thought it was possible for sex to be among them, but that was before I met the Phoneland harpies. One night with them was enough to teach me that it really does matter whether or not you gel.”
“You could probably get used to it,” Sheena informed me coolly. “After the third or fourth time they’d go easier on you. One or other of them would probably develop a soft spot for you and let you separate her from the pack. They don’t really go in for pull-a-pig contests-what’s the point of playing a game it’s impossible to lose? They just resent the fact that lads do, and they know it puts the fear of God into lads to think that they might be victims of that kind of contempt.”
“Actually,” I said, “I think the whole pull-a-pig thing’s an urban legend.”
“No it’s not,” she said quietly.
She was right; I’d never done it myself, but I’d seen the Polaroids. I’d even laughed at them, because that was what was expected, even though they weren’t at all funny.
“I wouldn’t want to get used to it,” I said. “And it’s definitely my round. The next one, too.”
“In that case,” she said, “let’s go somewhere a little less naff. We’ve both made our points, haven’t we?”
We had. The only places within easy walking distance where the oak beams weren’t plastic and there wasn’t a trace of maroon were the downmarket Upin Arms and the upmarket Countess of Cromartie. I took her to the Countess, even though the harpies sometimes used it for girls’ nights out. I figured that the risk was worth it.
Afterwards, I saw her home. Sheena lived on what passes for the wrong side of the tracks in Cross Gates, north of the railway and east of the ring road, but the terraced street she lived in was neatly kept-what gran would have called respectable poor. It was obvious that Sheena wasn’t about to introduce me to her mum or her big sister right away, so I left her on the doorstep-but that was okay, because we’d already fixed up another date. She had agreed to bring some of her tapes over to my place and let me cook her a meal. Nobody said anything about bringing an overnight bag, but it was tacitly understood that we liked one another well enough to find out whether or not we gelled.
I don’t claim to be much of a cook, but I’d felt the pinch of student poverty sharply enough in the previous three years to appreciate how much money you can save by peeling your own potatoes and sticking your own toppings on a pizza base. For Sheena I splashed out on steaks-from the butcher’s, not Tesco-and a bottle of French red. I draw the line at attempted baking, though, so I bought a couple of slices of cheesecake from the Harehills Delicatessen to serve as dessert. I’d managed to acquire three more black shirts by scouring the local charity shops, and I took the best one up to Roundhay so Mum could pass the iron over it.
“Not going into the church, I hope,” Mum said wearily.
” ‘Fraid so,” I told her. “I get my dog collar next week, but I’m not allowed to hear confessions until I’ve done the moral obstacle course.”
Mum only humphed, but I was proud enough of the quip to save it up to tell Sheena later.
