We’ve got gigs in Newcastle and Plymouth…it’s the John Travolta tour.
— Ruth Owen, Mama Shamone
Like a dose of scabies/ I’ve got you under my skin/ You make life like a fairytale/…Grimm
— from
TWAT by John Cooper Clarke
The first part of what (I hope) might turn into my first proper novel. Please read and comment or reblog.
Sam has a habit of reading aspirational magazines and taking a black marker to the models’ eyes. I tell him this is the sort of thing Ed Gein would’ve done. He disagrees and keeps on doing it. The other day I found Anna staring at her copy of Vogue - Kate Moss had been blinded and Agyness Deyn had cocks scrawled all over her face. I’m certain this is a sign of some acute psychosis. Sam says it’s just a endearing coping strategy.
I work at one of those bibles for the beautiful - Fold magazine, a lifestyle rag for edgy young things. I’m a staff writer, sat right in the heart of the fuckwittery. I spend my days hoping that I’m not one of them but I’ve learnt their language and observed their behaviour so much that I’ve taken to aping their mating rituals. On Saturday nights I skulk around the fringes of various East London dives like a limping leopard trying to pick off the weaker antelopes. It seems the trick is to find someone with lower self-esteem than you. Some days this is harder than others.
One jumble of limbs in the sweaty mass of a Friday night dancefloor, I catch the eye of a girl in a vintage blue and white polkadot dress. She smiles at me or maybe just vaguely in the same direction and I feel a blush spreading across the white tundra of my cheeks. My hair is out of control, a sweeping mass of mess among the legions of sharply cut assymetrical sculptured heads. I feel like I’m wearing a wig loosely based on Michael Douglas’s pompadour in Wall Street and much against my better judgement I have shrugged into tight black Levis that refuse to give, making my hips ache.
I don’t return Retro Girl’s look and let my gaze drop to the dirty floor, fixed on a crushed plastic pint pot and a river of lager swimming with refuge scraps from a bar mat. When I look up again, she’s gone and Sam is at my side complaining about the music, the people and the lack of ‘hot chicks’. A lifetime of long afternoons grazing the Internet’s pornographic hinterlands have blunted him to the way real girls look - he wants blowjob machine Barbies who orgasm instantly at the touch of his sausagy fingers.
I refuse to have the same argument that we’ve had a thousand nights before about his unreasonable expectations. I start to leave making vague mention of the kebab shop and the fact that I might owe him a Donner. I wonder at the ease with which his happiness returns. Some depression.
