Too Weird for Ziggy Read online

  And she just stood there watching him, small and hard and self-contained, as he went through all the cabinets, one by one, putting all the bags carefully back where he found them. She didn’t say a word; he didn’t either. He could hear an argument going on in the apartment upstair—banging, a child crying. It was the only sound in this small, stagnant room except for the whirring of the giant refrigerator.

  “Where the fuck is that waitress?” the freelance suddenly demanded. “All this talking is making me thirsty.”

  A slender man in a smart black suit slipped out from behind his desk and walked briskly over. “Please keep it down,” he said, “or I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to wait elsewhere. I’ll send someone over to take your order.”

  “The manager turned to go,” the freelance said, more quietly. “However much he’d needed to see Pussy before, what he needed now was to get out. Get some air. His legs felt unsteady. This was something he didn’t know how to manage. But then he noticed the fridge. She was standing with her back to it, like a guard on sentry duty. The thing was bigger than she was. He knew he’d have to look in it before he left. As he approached, Pussy slid to one side. He ignored her and went straight for the chrome handle. Grabbing them, he tugged open the double doors.”

  A light came on, shining through the frozen fog like it does on the stage, fuzzy at the edges but sharp enough to pick out the cold sweat on Mackie’s face. The right side of the fridge was almost empty—a carton of milk, some Coke cans, something unidentifiable wrapped up in a take-away bag. The freezer side, though, was almost full—with what looked like ice creams, neat rows of red-tipped Raspberry Ripples, steaming cold. And more Ziploc bags, puffed solid with frozen juice. He glanced over at Pussy, who was leaning against the bathroom door, arms crossed, hips thrust forward, one leg crossed over the other, swaying on the spot like a little girl.

  “Mackie reached into the icy air and pulled one of the drawers out into the light. It was stacked with all her old used tampons and frozen bags of piss.”

  A couple of the male journalists started to look queasy. “Jesus,” said one, “what a fucking nut.” He stood up. “I’m gonna take a slash. If the waitress comes, mine’s a Newcastle Brown.” He went to the bathroom.

  Mackie pushed open the bathroom door.

  It was tiny, barely bigger than a mouse-mat; you had to walk sideways to squeeze inside. There was a sink and a big old tub, white and gleaming but for the crap-brown rust stain running down from the tap, and over in the corner there was a toilet. It had a two-drawer filing cabinet on top of it. In front, in this minuscule space, she’d jammed a chemical toilet, one of those things you use in caravans that desiccate your shit. The drawers were full of bags of gray-brown powder. She’d hung on to everything. There was not one single bit of her that was going to get away.”

  And that’s all I heard. I was called up to do my interview. I suppose he’ll get around to writing it up one day. What happened to her? All I know is the manager took her back with him to England. I hear she’s making a comeback.

  GREETINGS FROM FINSBURY PARK

  A man in a baggy blue suit custom-made not to fit stands by the carousel watching a lone unclaimed suitcase circle slowly around and around and around. He is thirty-eight, maybe forty years old, boy-thin and beautiful. His jacket, which would be loose on Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been pulled off one slim shoulder by the weight of a travel bag. His eyes are large and blue like his suit. His hair, straw-colored, is hacked off in a battered-child haircut you know cost the earth. A large leather suitcase appears at the top of the slide and one of the ground staff hurries over, as fast as her airline bondage skirt and stilettos will allow, and drags it off the carousel, deposits it with a flushed smile at his bashed-up Reeboked feet. He thanks her distractedly, hoists the shoulder bag back into place, turns the suitcase on its side, and wheels it toward the green channel.

  Heathrow Customs. Thin wooden partitions, generically drab like a VD clinic, jerry-built into an alley where grim-faced men in uniform loiter on either side. Their eyes bore into you like they know the secrets of your soul as you walk past, trying to look normal, looking straight ahead to the open door where people are waiting, waving. But Spike can’t look normal. Spike is a Star. He’s used to being looked at. He’s used to running the gauntlet while people gawk and scrutinize. But now he feels uncomfortable, his body feels tight and prickly under his loose clothes as Her Majesty’s representatives stare at him with the familiar Englishman’s challenge in their eyes, the reminder to a returning Brit of his original, unforgivable sin of ever having dared to leave.

  One of the men gives the other the nod and he strolls up casually with that policeman’s roll, the arrogant humility, the questions that are orders: “Excuse me sir? Could I ask you to step over here with your bags? If you’d like to put them up here? Right, sir, if I could take a look at your passport?”

  And of course they know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. The postman, the bank manager, the cleaning lady, everybody knows everything about him, from the size of his pool to the size of his plonker. His last girlfriend, sweet young thing, sold her story to the papers. Over last Sunday morning’s eggs and bacon, fifteen million of his fellow former countrymen learned that he’s “hung like a horse,” “rogers like a rabbit,” and, completing the ménagerie à trois, “when he pulls his pants down, people throw buns at it.”

  It makes him smile; he’s almost aroused for a second himself until a shiver shrivels his balls. They’re going to want to take him in the back room and get his pants off so they can tell their mates in the pub tonight that they’ve seen Spike’s tackle and the papers were lying well-they-do-don’t-they. He’d had the rubber glove and flashlight enema so many times his arse was getting stretch marks—but that was a long time ago, back in the days when rockstars were open season for customs men, and you’d pull down your trousers with a flourish, like Malcolm McDowell in If …, and you’d bend over with a smirk of a man who knows that however unpleasant it is to have your rear end rummaged by a stranger it’s a far far better thing than having to do the rummaging. But times have changed. Rockstar butts are clean now. Colonically irrigated. He feigns an unruffled nonchalance, a sublimely bored look on his face.

  “Could I ask you where you’ve traveled from today, sir? Los Angeles? What was the purpose of your visit?” all the while looking down, thumbing through the well-worn pages tattooed with stamps and visas, stopping at the U.S green card. “Oh, of course. You live there.” Spike can sense the menace behind the politeness. Very English. Predatory, but apologetically so. “Don’t blame you. They did a survey. Over half the people living in England said they’d rather be living somewhere else. Anywhere else. You’re well out of it, mate.” Closing the passport up, handing it back to him. “Thank you, Mr. Mattock. Now if you wouldn’t mind unlocking your suitcase?” He smells of dispenser soap and stale polyester. Spike casually turns the combination lock, lifts the leather lid. Hands pink from frequent washing shuffle, lift, and rummage.

  “Well, well.” The customs man has fished out a large pack of condoms and is brandishing it to the discreet amusement of the first-class passengers walking past. “Playing it safe then, Buttock?” Spike isn’t listening; he stands there still as a photograph, gazing at nothing. The customs man raises his voice. “Haven’t changed then, Buttock. Every time we landed in the shit, you’d be the one in the rubber suit.” Buttock. His old school nickname. A flock of startled birds take off from his stomach. He focuses in on the customs man with a jolt.

  A small man, thin but flabby. Crumbly white-gray complexion like a piece of old unchewed gum you find in your coat pocket a year later. Sparse hair—field mouse–colored once maybe, now house mouse-gray. Gray and dry like an ash sculpture but for the red hands and the two dots of red high on the cheeks. An old teacher, a friend of his father’s? “You don’t know who I am, do you, Buttock?”

  Spike turns his full clear gaze on him. “I’m sorry—”
>
  “John Dawes. Finsbury Park Grammar School for Boys.” An edge to his voice. “Remember?”

  And he tries. He really does. The name ricochets around inside his head like a pinball, shoots down alleyways and bounces off walls before dropping through the reject gap in the middle. It’s hard when your past is just a press file of airbrushed photographs and quotable memories of memories. Spike mentally scans his record company biography and recent interviews for help. Nothing.

  “Knocker Dawes. You borrowed my guitar. You touched up my sister. You fucked my fucking wife!” A laugh. Impossible to tell if he’s inflicting humiliation or receiving it.

  And suddenly Spike remembers. And a cold wave of guilt washes over him—a generic, all-purpose guilt encompassing everything, from failing to recognize an old friend to failing to be with his mother when she died and the last thing she hears about him being an eighteen-year-old girl’s description of his dick. But no, he’s jet-lagged, disoriented. Yesterday he was in Los Angeles in a recording studio, today he’s in England, tomorrow’s the funeral. Of course! His old friend, Knocker! Weird that another slice of his past should resurface right at this time. He offers him a full, photogenic smile.

  “Thought I might run into you one of these days. I had Michael Caine through here a couple of weeks back. You meet a lot of people in this business, all walks of life. They don’t say much though. In and out like a whorehouse. You wouldn’t believe some of the scum we get through here, Buttock.” The customs man has pulled a puffy square from the condom packet and is circling the rubber rim through the wrapper distractedly with forefinger and thumb. “If I had a fiver for every fuckwit who walks through here with a bellyload of drug-filled Durex–not a pretty sight, I’ll tell you, when they burst. We had a bloke in the other day, swallowed a six-pack of heroin—two trainees in the back room spooning castor oil down his throat, waiting for it to come out the other end.”

  People walk by, recognize Spike, point him out. It embarrasses him suddenly, like he was caught showing off in front of a friend. The customs man watches them, eyebrows raised.

  “They all love you, don’t they? They all want to touch you, prostrate themselves in front of you. Look at that woman. It’s running down her legs, she wants you so much. You can tell the English from the Americans. That lot are English. They know exactly who you are but they just walk by, pretending not to look, making out they’re not impressed. This one, she’s American.”

  A large woman detaches herself from her companion and comes over lopsidedly, weighed down on one side by a huge bag she keeps hitching back up onto her shoulder. She hooks her arm in his, her mouth two inches from his face. She says: “I know you.”

  He can smell in-flight champagne, slept-in clothes, a cocktail of trapped gas, and all the duty-free perfumes she tried on eleven hours ago. Spike looks straight into her eyes, not saying a word.

  The customs man summons up the power of the entire British Government. “Madam. If you have something to declare, declare it somewhere else.”

  “No need to be rude.” She huffs back over to where her friend is waiting. “It was him, you know.”

  Spike feels a sinus headache kicking in. He always got them, flying. There was a curtain separating him from them but their bodies still intruded—the dust from their dead skin that circulated in the canned air for hours. The laundry smell of economy-section chicken mixed with the cheap burnt coffee kept the passages unblocked until he dis-embarked but then a swelling behind his eyes would try to force its way out of his nose and ears like balloons.

  The customs man is turning over a pile of neatly folded clothes. He peels off a silk shirt, floppy, soft as skin, while Spike stands, hands in pockets, watching.

  “Nice shirt. Expensive. You get to know these things in my line of work. I can tell straight off if something’s fake. I can tell a phony Lacoste alligator at fifty yards. They think they’ve got it but they always make these little mistakes. I can tell you what fucking street in Hong Kong they bought the fake Rolex on. I know when I’m dealing with a big man or not. This shirt cost serious money. ‘The Real Thing’—how much did you make on that song? Half a million? A million? A mate of mine’s brother works for a record company. He says popstars make a fucking fortune on royalties, and they’re mean as hell, the lot of them. Only time they put their hands in their pockets is to scratch their bollocks.” Spike tugs his hands out of his pocket automatically.

  “My daughter—she picked up your first album at a boot fair the other day. 50p. You had some good songs on that one, I’ll admit that. A lot more cheerful than the stuff you’re doing now. Getting a bit jazzy in your old age, aren’t you? Going for the cred market? Can’t whistle the new songs in the bath like the old ones. Do you ever stop and wonder what people are doing while they’re listening to your songs? Fixing the car? Taking a dump? Getting dressed for work? Shagging? Funny that, you in the background while complete strangers are getting their end off. My daughter says she ‘works out’ to your record. She’s sixteen now, Linda. Too old for you judging by that one in the papers last week. She seemed to think pretty highly of you though. ‘Hung like a horse’? Shetland pony, more like. Ha-ha! Seen it in the school showers often enough. Remember when I caught you and Jonesy at it in the showers? Went back to get my trunks and there you were, Jonesy on his knees, and he wasn’t playing the clarinet!

  “It’s all right, Buttock, your secret’s safe with me. I was always good at catching people out, seeing the things they want to keep hidden. Comes in handy for the job.” He lays the shirt back in the suitcase, softly singing—a pretty fair Elton John imitation, as it happens—“‘Don’t let your son go down on me …’”

  “I wasn’t a bad singer either, if I say so myself. Bloody sight better than you were anyway. I can’t believe your luck, really I can’t. I had a band for a while, you know? Of course you don’t know. Why would you? We played the pubs around North London for a couple of years, got quite a big following—only local, but there was talk at one point of making a record. ‘Greetings From Finsbury Park,’ we were going to call it—press up a few hundred copies and flog them around the hood. But it all took too much time—rehearsals, late nights, the wives and girlfriends giving us grief. When Dawn got pregnant I chucked it in. I’m still writing songs though. I’ll have to send you a tape of them, maybe you could do something with them—ha! I bet people say that to you all the time.”

  At the next table, a customs man is standing by an open suitcase—triumphantly, ridiculously, wielding a large salami. Its soon-to-be-ex-owner is red-faced, arguing loudly. The customs man throws his colleague a sympathetic glance.

  “First thing this morning I open this case and there, stuck in a bag of dirty underwear, is this huge hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth. And it’s crawling with maggots. And this woman nearly rips my eyes out when I say she can’t bring it into the country. The traveling public is so fucking stupid. Stupid. You wouldn’t believe what some of them try and smuggle through”—official face and matching voice—“‘I’m sorry, sir, this is a serious contravention of British law under section 45 paragraph 7a of the Importation Act, now if you’ll just hand it over.’ And you pick up your clipboard and you turn the page and you ask for their passport and you watch the sweat break out and freeze under their eyes and you wait a while and then slowly you turn the page back and you say, ‘Go on. I’ll let it go this time. But next time …,’ and they grab their case and fumble with the zip like a kid caught by his mum with his willy out, and the British public is saved from the scourge of smuggling and the offending article goes into your locker, perk of the job. Like all jobs—normal jobs, I mean, present company excepted. You do it for forty-odd years and at the end you’ve got a small house and a big wife and enough in the bank for the annual jaunt to the Costa Del Sol. You’ve got a nice house. Saw it in the wife’s Hello magazine—swimming pool, Jacuzzi. Ja-cooooo-zee. Big-boobed bimbos jiggling in the bubbles. Dawn keeps going on at me that she wants a Jacuzzi—one of th
ose indoor jobs, you know, bathtubs with dog nipples all over. Gave her a fiver and told her to go get a vindaloo and fart in the bathwater, same difference.

  “Yeah, I married Dawn Burchill—your old girlfriend Minerva’s mate. Small, big tits—you gave her one once, remember? She does. After a couple of drinks she tells everyone she’s had sex with the great and glorious Spike—her mouth on your mouth, her mouth on your prick—she says you went down on her. Did you? She says, ‘Why don’t you go down on me like Spike?’”

  A young woman has been led to the table opposite. She and the officer are both bent down over the open case, their hair almost touching. At the customs man’s raised voice, they turn simultaneously and look up at Spike like Siamese twins joined at the head.

  “Your parents, do they still live in Finsbury Park? Your dad, I mean—sorry about your mum, I read it in the papers. Over for the funeral I suppose. No, of course you’d have moved them to someplace more salubrious. Hah! that wouldn’t be hard to find. If you thought Finsbury Park was a pit back then—well, we moved away eventually, bought a house around here. I always said I could never live in the suburbs, but anyone can live anywhere, can’t they, when it comes down to it? We packed up when our youngest was born. Scarlett. Yeah, named after your song—the wife’s idea. She said she wrote to you asking you to be godfather—nothing to do with me, she only told me a short while back. She said she never heard back from you. I suppose you didn’t get the letter. Ha! Don’t worry about it. No, seriously, I’m sure you get asked that sort of thing all the time. Letters like that probably don’t even reach you. You pay people to make sure the great unwashed don’t intrude on your life, don’t ‘invade your space,’ don’t pollute your pure air. What’s the view like from up there, Buttock? I mean, how do we appear to you?”

  The people from economy class crowd by with cheap suitcases piled up on trolleys. Spike hears his name muttered and whispered as they pass. His head is throbbing. It feels like a washing machine stuffed with the contents of a thousand dirty laundry bags, churning.