Waving Not Drowning Part II

If you climb up the big dirty grey pipe that runs up the side of the building you can see me. You’d have to climb about ninety feet but I’m imagining you’re a pretty good climber and of light to moderate body weight. I couldn’t do it because I’m scared of heights for a start. Anyway usually on Monday through to Thursday you can see me lying on the sofa and abusing my free time. Instead of baking bread, planting a herb garden, socialising at a burlesque bar, writing an award winning compendium of poetry, having sex, meditating, making a cake I’d be watching someone else do it on TV.

Then most nights I’d usually climb into a bed at about nine o’ clock, maybe put the radio on and sometimes they’d have one of those shows where sad people who were also sitting in their beds alone at nine o’ clock would call up and maybe cry because they’d split up with their partner, or wanted to split up with their partner or their partner had split up with them.

I’d listen for about three quarters of an hour and then just when you’d realised that your arms were going to drop off because you’d been clinging to the grey pipe for so long and that actually you were getting very hungry now, just at that moment, you’d hear the kids. The noise would be coming from down at ground level. Noise which would make your imagination run riot; cackling, whooping, shrieking, crashing.

I put it down to the glue that they sniffed most nights or perhaps it was something more high-tech like mobile phone battery juice. In my day it had been Pritt stick, I’d tried it just like every other kid. But it couldn't be glue alone that was making them shriek like that. This was something that was making their brains disintegrate, making them hate people, making them want to give Grannies's black eyes for no reason. But that’s probably enough about them, they’ll be more of them in a bit.

What about me? How to describe me? My head is unusually large yes and I have the kind of hair that would make great rope, would be really useful in tying down a tent in a force ten gale and has a lot of substance to it. Tough hair. I could probably drag a train behind me with nothing but my ponytail if I wanted. And I wouldn’t describe me as conventionally attractive, from some angles I look a bit witchy (it’s the long nose) but there are moments, when the moon is in cancer and the light is just right when I’m not bad.

I have times when everything works relatively effectively.

But for now you’ll have to leave me and my tough hair as I try to fall asleep with them making all the terrible din.

It’s a Wednesday in January and three months before I embraced the sand.

‘Two extra hot latte, one brownie, one cappuccino.’
I am chief barista. I am the chief of the baristas and tell all the other baristas what to do. I open the store in the morning, clean all the equipment, ensure all the cardboard cups are out ready, then I pick up the milk delivery from round the back, look at the store rota to see which of the part- timers is going to grace the café with their presence that day. Already by then my neck has begun to ache and gain it’s hard toffee like structure. Then I open the doors and almost get flattened by a tidal wave of workers desperate to wake up with as much caffeine as possible and drawn to the soft, lilting jazz melodies echoing from the compilation CD which is on rotation all day long.

My job doesn’t form a large part of this story because it doesn’t form a large part of my life overall. It is Café Jingo after all, not the U.N. The only bits of my brain that have to function every day at work are the ones that give me the ability to froth milk and smile insincerely. My brain chugs along, it takes in small details like neck tightness and other such stuff and whirrs them around for a while. The only time things get more complicated is when I drink, and I haven’t drunk in two years now.

‘Frankie, could you get some more skimmed from the back?’
Usually a barista’s life span is six months max. Come the new year, Frankie will have left to go home, or moved onto retail or something. For me being a Barista is permanent, it’s not that I haven’t tried other avenues, I have, to date I’ve worked at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and two days at Jigsaw (I was fired because I couldn’t fold clothes). Café Jingo is the end of the line, once I turned thirty I became reconciled to the fact that I would never wake up one morning with a strong conviction of what my career should be and I might as well just stay somewhere and work my way up to the top of the Café Jingo food chain.

Needless to say that day, much like any other day passed without event. Muffins were sold, froth bubbled on regardless of the world, no treaties were signed, there weren’t any important trade agreements set up. And by the end of the day the workers of Hammersmith had consumed over forty five litres of milk and caffeine and were on their way home again.

I managed to grab a seat on the Hammersmith and City line and scanned through the free paper to see what was going on in the world. Apparently tulip shaped skirts would be fashionable in late- Spring, beetroot was proven to halt the effects of ageing and a woman had been stabbed the previous day whilst out jogging in Kensal Rise. As I stared at my black regulation work shoes I had the sudden urge to pull them off and throw them onto the platform, then jump off and go somewhere that wasn’t entirely predictable. Perhaps to one of those private members club that always seemed to be in the paper, not an old dullard one with lots of old soaks lying about but one where you had to have a password to go in and once inside there’d be a heated pool with a bar round it and lots of glamorous yet also staggeringly intelligent people who would all look magnificently elegant and would do nothing but laugh at my jokes and flirt with me.

I would not get so drunk that I would wake up in Hyde Park with one side of my face burning in the midday sun. Or so drunk that I slapped my best friend around the face and tried to strangle her on the night bus.

I got off at Latimer Road and marched towards the corner shop to search for dinner.

The usual gang were standing around outside my block; their hoods obscured their hair and foreheads and only the small square of eyes and nose were properly visible. I kept myself as straight as physically possible which was easy with my neck already tensed up like an ironing board and tried to look like someone who was a mean and also slightly psychopathic and unpredictable. At the same time I wanted to look nonchalant so I distracted myself with what I would have for dinner (A fish finger sandwich and salad).

Then I noticed the small boy who’d flipped me the finger not many weeks before and it unnerved me. Even from two hundred yards I could see his skin had an unnaturally unhealthy hue to it, as grey as a dolphin with small wrinkles round his mouth and eyes. Here was a boy who didn’t eat his Ready Brek in the morning.

Next to Grey was one I hadn’t seen before. What I noticed first about him was his eyes; they were almond shaped and quite lovely for a boy that sniffed mobile phone batteries. All seemed to be proceeding according to plan but then as I put my key in the lock one of them shouted something which wasn’t 'Hope you enjoy Holby City'. I quickly swung the door closed and ran up the stairs two at a time. Once outside my door I relaxed.
They were just kids after all.

Once inside my flat I assumed the same pose that you yourself observed when you climbed up the pipe but this time the TV programme was about a woman who swapped places with another woman and lives with her family for two weeks. Then they have to meet up and have a fight in front of their husbands. I was finding it difficult to switch off completely and felt oddly restless, was thinking about food and then whether I’d switched the light off in the kitchen when I’d left Café Jingo and then about beetroot and whether it was really anti-ageing and then I was thinking about the woman who had been stabbed and then finally I was thinking about appearing on this TV show and whether single women were allowed to do it and if so what would the other wife do. Would she live here on her own for two weeks?

Then my phone went.
‘Are you watching this horrible hag?’
It was Ruth. I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say she was my only friend.
‘I don’t understand why she’s so upset. Was it because he made her clean up the dog crap?’
‘People like that shouldn’t be allowed pets,’ I replied without missing a beat.
‘ I know! It’s mad.’
‘That’ll be you two in a couple of years time,’ I said.
‘Why do we watch this crap?’ Ruth said, ‘Oh dear, Jim’s sulking, he hates this show’
‘But it’s really entertaining watching people fight and have arguments.’
We were quiet for a couple of moments. The programme was coming to a conclusion. One wife was apoplectic with rage, had poured a pint glass over the other one and getting up from the table to leave. Their husbands looked vaguely embaressed about the whole thing.
‘What did you have for tea?’ Ruth asked.
‘Haven’t had it yet, I’m saving it so I have something to look forward to.’
Ruth laughed ruefully.
‘We had those little fish cakes that you get in M&S, you know the ones that come with a soya sauce. I’m hungry again now.’
‘Those horrible kids were outside the flat,’ I said.
‘It’s not just your flat, they’re everywhere. One of Jim’s colleagues got mugged on his way home a couple of nights ago. They broke his arm.’
The notion of a broken arm sounded quaint compared to most of the monster teenager stories I’d read. Lucky not to have been stabbed I thought.
‘I saw that kid,’ I continued, ‘ You know the one.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one that gave me the finger.’
‘The sooner you get a flatmate the better. Some kid gives you the finger months ago and you’re still thinking about it. Don’t you remember us at school? We gave everyone the finger. We loved giving the finger.’
‘I know but it’s different, now they really mean it, they really hate me.’
‘You’re imagining it.’
I heard Jim turn the TV over in the background and felt a pang knowing that I had nothing but a sandwich and a hot bath in store.
‘Jim, turn it over to Channel Five, it’s that Tranny bloke who does the makeovers,’ Ruth shouted at him.

If Ruth had been tall, dark haired and more importantly a man I’d have married her. The first day we’d met at secondary school I was wearing jelly bean sandals and had an unfortunate skin condition which meant the space between my eyes and the arc just above my mouth was covered in tiny red spots. Ruth had been wearing big dangly earrings that were in the shape of two aeroplanes, mauve frosted lipstick and was impossibly grown up and glamorous. She had one of the first Walkmans and listened to Johnny Hates Jazz and Brother Beyond whenever the teachers’ back was turned.

I don’t quite know why she chose me to be her best friend, I think I made her laugh, usually unintentionally. If I wasn’t worrying about my strange skin and rope like hair, I was worrying about how I would survive a nuclear attack and whether I would rather die immediately or walk around the streets with my skin hanging off and slowly starve because everything would be contaminated. By contrast Ruth was laidback and cheerful, she didn’t worry about anything even serious stuff like her sister being practically a drug addict and living in Norwich with a highly unsuitable bloke, or that her father had left when she’d been a baby.
‘I won’t worry about things I can’t change,’ she said and I secretly hoped her personality would rub off on me. But it didn’t, the worries remained but now they were about ageing and children with hood tops.

Ruth and I had gone our separate ways when we’d both finished sixth form. To my parent’s disappointment I went to an ex-polytechnic in Harrow. I wanted to do media because I thought it meant I could live in Los Angeles, wear a basket ball cap and shout into a mobile phone a lot. Once Dad realised that I was never going to be the lawyer/academic/very clever person that he’d hoped he started to distance himself. By the time I dropped out of the ex-poly six months later and went to live on a houseboat in Amsterdam with a man who was twice my age my parents had given up. But Ruth and I were solid. We’d only fallen out once, predictably it had been over a boy. Bobby Kinnear had got off with Ruth at the Capital Radio Junior Best Disco and then followed it up ten minutes later by getting off with me(he then got off with three other girls, he was really on a roll that night).

In order to fully bring to life Bobbie’s sexual magnitism I should tell you that he danced like MC Hammer and wore proper baggy fanny trousers accompanied by a pin stripe shirt that went down to his knees. He sweated a lot which was oddly sexy as the rest of the boys still didn’t have any hair on their bodies and usually had strange high pitched penguin-like voices. Poor Ruth had been devastated when she’d found the two of us snogging, Bobby dripping nose sweat all over my black Lycra Next dress. But she didn’t stay mad for long, we’d made up on the long walk to the bus stop and spent the rest of that night, propped up on pillows discussing Bobby’s slobbery kissing technique. Now Ruth was engaged to Jim and Jim was lovely, they were perfectly suited and the only thing that worried me (selfishly) was that I didn’t see her as much and once they were married and probably had a baby, then I’d see her even less.

Later that night I lay awake in bed, listening to the strange noises rising up from the courtyard below. Whispers, then shouts, then maniacal laughter. I crouched by the window and looked down but all I could see were four or five shadowy figures hunched over a cigarette lighter. Had they moved on from mobile battery juice and were now sniffing lighter fluid or was the lighter just so they could see the crack cocaine that they probably smoked on a slow night? I tried to go back to sleep but the shouting was getting louder and louder. I couldn’t make out the words.

Why didn’t someone tell them to shut up? I got out of bed and stared across at the windows of the flats opposite. No lights on. No one was even bothered to get up and check to see what all the noise was about. This was the way of the world now, no one cared what other people did anymore. They could have been torturing kittens anything. Then just when the shouting had subsided a bit, the horrible high pitched drone of a moped began. I went back to bed and put my head under the pillow. The back of my neck felt clammy and I got up again, went to the bathroom and dabbed some cold water on it. As I stood up again, I caught my reflection, my pupils were huge and black, the skin underneath my eyes purple and almost completely translucent. If I wasn’t standing with my eyes open I would have had to pinch myself to check I hadn’t died.

The noise didn’t stop. The moped circled mindlessly below, its drone slowly ebbing away and then the sound steadily building again.

It hurts to try and remember the order of things now. Some of the water must have leaked into my ears and diluted my memory. I wonder what’s happening at home and where Stephen is.
But he is Grey not Stephen.
Stephen came later.