Ruby and the Stone Age Diet Read online

  I was wondering what the bad smell was. It reminds me of the bad smell in the biology class where me and Cis first met, dissecting frogs.

  She defied the teacher and refused to dissect a frog. She said that dissecting frogs was a wicked thing to do. Naturally I went along with this and both of us refusing to dissect frogs in the face of strong opposition brought us together.

  The local paper wrote a story about us, underneath a small article on flower arranging.

  Ruby says that she would like some more sleep now, so I go and strum my guitar and walk around the room looking at the damp patches on the walls. The damp patches will be bad for my sore knee. I wish Ruby hadn’t chosen last night to carry on her crusade against food. I feel better for talking to her.

  Suddenly I have a good idea. I will look at Ruby’s book.

  If your sacred Aphrodite Cactus will not flower it may be being held back by the Archangel Gamrien. As a prime mover of patriarchal Judaic religion, he has little sympathy for Aphrodite, and none at all for sex.

  Depressed, I put down Ruby’s book of myths and fables. It is hopeless. I always wondered why everything went wrong all the time but now I realise it is because of all the powerful spirits ranged against me.

  Before I go to bed I make sure the window is open.

  Cynthia fights an epic battle

  Cynthia silently eliminates all of Lupus’s guards and creeps down to his bedroom.

  There she finds him mournfully contemplating a photograph of his wife who left him.

  She pads up to his shoulder and lets out a low growl. Lupus spins round. A moment’s concern shows in his eyes but he composes himself regally.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come for a little talk. Don’t bother ringing for your guards. There aren’t any left. You were right. I am the bloodiest werewolf in the history of our race.’

  Lupus transforms into wolf-form, something he rarely does these days. As a wolf he is huge and malevolent. They fight.

  They fight for three hours till the whole building is a tangle of blood- and fur-stained wreckage. They fight through every room and hallway till nothing is left whole and they fall to the ground, battered and exhausted.

  Lupus is unable to move. Cynthia drags her body across to his. Slowly and painfully, she puts her jaws to his throat.

  ‘Swear now to leave me alone in future,’ she hisses. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’

  Lupus knows when he is defeated. He doesn’t want to die. So he whispers out a Royal Pardon. The Werewolf King will never break his word.

  Cynthia grins, and starts to crawl away in triumph.

  ‘Your mother died last week,’ calls Lupus after her. ‘She didn’t leave you any farewell message.’

  Cynthia leaves, her triumph spoiled by the death of her mother.

  My next job is as a temporary clerk for Securicor in an office with a coffee machine on the wall and a sign in the bathroom: IF YOU ARE LONELY THEN GOD WILL HELP YOU.

  Will he? Good. Please send me Cis.

  I wait all day but she doesn’t appear.

  There are pages and pages of numbers in fractions. I have to convert them to decimals in the morning and file my results in the afternoon.

  Every minute I am expecting bank robbers to arrive but they never do. I only stay there two days and later the agency tells me that I was not well enough dressed to work in the Securicor office.

  Watching television with Ruby a man comes on and makes a joke about not being able to tell if the light in the fridge really goes out when you shut the door.

  Ruby is outraged.

  ‘What a boring tedious thing to say. I must have heard a hundred people say that.’

  I am busy putting a patch on some jeans and do not pay much attention till some time later Ruby shouts at me from the kitchen.

  ‘Come here a minute.’

  She is staring at the fridge.

  ‘I’ll shut the door and you see if you can see a light through the crack.’

  But when she shuts the door there doesn’t seem to be any crack to see through. We spend about twenty minutes trying to work a knife through the plastic seal around the door to see if there is any light inside.

  ‘Maybe you could sit inside while I close it,’ suggests Ruby, but the fridge is too small to sit inside. It looks like we will never know.

  I notice something strange about the fridge. It is completely empty.

  ‘What happened to our food?’

  ‘I felt disgusted by the act of eating,’ Ruby tells me. ‘So I threw it all away.’

  ‘You seriously expect divine help in a reconciliation with your old girlfriend when you are so wasteful as to throw away food?’ says the Archangel Gamiel, hovering outside the window.

  I try to explain that it wasn’t me, but he doesn’t seem interested.

  There is a knock on the door. It is a neighbour asking us if we would like to open some cans of cat food for her. She acts like we should be pleased.

  We lend them our can-opener but we are still a little puzzled as to why they should come to us.

  ‘Maybe their can-opener broke.’

  Broke again, I ask Ruby to phone up the industrial agency for me and she finds me a job as a temporary labourer in Kennington.

  Before leaving for work I make Ruby promise to take good care of our cacti. Ruby says she will but she also says she no longer thinks that her relationship with Domino will turn out well, no matter what the cactus does. But I still have faith. When I am in the flat I check every half hour for the start of a flower.

  As soon as I walk onto the site in Kennington they give me a pneumatic drill and tell me to help level out the rocky earth.

  I have never used a drill before and it keeps jumping around and threatening to cut off my toes. I do the best I can and no one seems to mind that my progress is very slow. In the earth I am levelling there are a few small yellow flowers. I hate killing them. If all plants are friends then my cactus will be annoyed at me.

  It starts to rain and I keep on drilling. After a few minutes I notice that everyone else has taken shelter under the roof of the labourers’ hut.

  At lunchtime I try and make conversation by asking if anyone knows any good drummers looking for a band, but no one does. I am so obviously ignorant of what to do on a building site that no one takes much notice of me.

  When we have levelled out the site we have to clear everything away in wheelbarrows. The rubbish tip is across a deep ditch and to get there I have to struggle my wheelbarrow uphill across a sloping and shaky plank of wood. Each time I do this I almost fall in the ditch and if I fall in the ditch the wheelbarrow full of rubble will come down on top of me.

  I’m scared of this, Cis, I say in my head.

  No one else has any problems doing this and, struggling over, I feel increasingly stupid and incompetent. At the end of the day the foreman tells me that tomorrow there is not so much work on so I need not come back.

  ‘I am a poor labourer,’ I tell Ruby.

  ‘At least you got one day’s wages,’ she says, comfortingly, and afterwards she runs me a bath and washes the buildingsite filth out of my hair and massages my shoulders. When I go down to the agency’s offices to pick up my money they give me two days’ wages by mistake.

  Ruby tells me that Daita the Vietnamese Tree Goddess is also the Friend of Poor Labourers everywhere and probably she is responsible for my extra day’s wage so I buy some incense and light a stick for her. I also buy Ruby some more new sunglasses and some nail-varnish. She is very pleased at this and brings home a boy to fuck who is not Domino. This is unusual but not unheard of.

  I wonder if she is managing with her diaphragm.

  Lying in bed I can hear them fucking.

  Bandits enter through my open window. Bad advice from the police. They kidnap me and try to carry me off but I escape and hide on a council estate till they have gone. I hide in a stairwell along with a lonely cat and a ripped plastic bag full of flowers and bee
r cans.

  When I am safe from the bandits I wander over to Cis’s sister’s flat. It is on the third floor. I stare through the window.

  ‘Help me with my diaphragm,’ says Ruby. ‘It keeps coming out.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the right size?’

  ‘The doctor measured me.’

  I put it in for her. On her vagina I can smell the breath of her lover.

  Cis is visiting her sister. With her is her new boyfriend. I notice that he is not all that good-looking. But he is good company and they are having fun discussing an old wreck of a motorbike that they’re going to try fixing up together.

  Moans come from Ruby’s room. Sometimes she makes a lot of noise when she is fucking. I am glad she is not with Domino. I hate Domino.

  Next morning I make them some tea.

  ‘Last night I dreamed I was kidnapped by bandits,’ says Ruby. ‘But I escaped and hid on a council estate.’

  ‘How is your orgasmic response?’

  ‘Much better. I am going to write it an appreciative letter.’

  Her new lover plays drums and I ask him to play in my band.

  Cynthia, sick, howls at the moon again

  Cynthia, weak from loss of blood after her battle with Lupus, limps along in the freezing rain through a miserable south London street where all the shops are boarded up and all the boards are covered with cheap posters advertising last month’s meetings and last week’s gigs. Fevered, she hallucinates that Paris is selling fruit from a market stall. He is with another girl, holding her hand and smiling into her eyes.

  Behind the next block is her rubbish tip. She lies down on it and contemplates her life: no friends, no family and her mother dead; betrayed by Uncle Bartholomew; worst of all, her soul still trapped by a man who doesn’t love her. And she’s lost her guitar again.

  Unable to think of anything better to do, she starts to howl at the moon.

  ‘What is that terrible noise?’ asks a young woman, picking her way over the rubbish tip.

  ‘It is me, Cynthia Werewolf, howling at the moon. Go away or I’ll eat you.’

  ‘You’re too weak to eat anyone.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Ruby Werewolf – pirate, slayer, thief, reaver, painter, poet, writer, artist and uncontrollable adventurer.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Cynthia, impressed.

  A necklace glints at the throat of the stranger. It is Cynthia’s werewolf soul necklace.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she demands.

  ‘A man gave it to me,’ replies Ruby. ‘He said he loved me but most days he doesn’t seem too sure about it. I’ve been at home all week but he hasn’t called round.’

  ‘You don’t really sound like much of an adventurer,’ comments Cynthia.

  ‘I’m having a short holiday.’

  Cynthia passes out and Ruby helps her home and bathes her wounds.

  All Autumn I carried on being mainly unemployed with a few days’ work here and there, looking forward to finally getting my gig organised, and thinking about Cis. I wondered what she was doing. I had no doubt that whatever Cis was doing she was particularly happy doing it, although it was raining all the time, and I remembered that Cis did not like the rain.

  Trudging around on the blackened plain, the robot gives me a print-out saying it has an important piece of news for me. However, I am at that moment late for work and I can’t wait around to hear it.

  I am working in a carpet warehouse in Hackney, loading rolls of carpet onto trucks. This job lasts for three days and during it one of the other people employed there seriously hurts his back lifting a heavy carpet and has to go home in a taxi.

  Izzy, expert on weights, has told me to be careful with my back when lifting things. I manage not to hurt myself, but it is no fun loading all the trucks.

  The other workers are slightly jealous of the men who drive these trucks. We imagine that driving a truck must be easier and more lucrative than loading them. I expect it has its problems as well.

  When the warehouse is emptied the job comes to an end.

  ‘OK robot,’ I ask, ‘what was this important piece of news?’

  But the robot has disappeared. It is nowhere in sight. I hunt over the blackened plains of three continents but I never find it again. I miss the robot. It was not much of a companion but there is no one else for me to talk to.

  Ruby is in a slightly bad mood because Domino has been being particularly unfriendly, claiming that he is too busy to see her this week.

  She tells me that she has utterly given up on him. She is lying of course, and when we go to a party and she meets someone who she thinks might possibly be having some sort of relationship with him she is very displeased.

  Depressed, she lies around doing not very much. The contact article seems to have been forgotten about. Occasionally she gets drunk and plans out more werewolf stories, although she is actually in a bad mood with her werewolf story as well, because Domino asked her if there was something Freudian in all this talk of werewolves eating their lovers. Ruby was outraged at this, telling me crossly that Freud was a notorious moron with ridiculous theories about female sexuality, quite apart from the fact that Domino couldn’t tell Freud from a carrot cake if his life depended on it, in fact Domino couldn’t do anything whatsoever if his life depended on it, except drink beer and talk loudly all the time and make sure his hair was looking good.

  ‘I’m depressed in here,’ says Ruby. ‘Let’s go visit Izzy and Marilyn.’

  I’m surprised at Ruby wanting to leave the house.

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Well, we’ll take an umbrella,’ she says.

  Ruby sees that I am not enthusiastic.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We might meet Cis in the street. You know she used to like being out in the rain.’

  Izzy and Marilyn are not home so we sit in a café instead and drink cups of tea and have a good bout of self-pity, with Ruby telling me what a terrible life it is when you are constantly messed around by your lover and me telling her much the same thing. Ruby is frustrated because she knows someone who will buy chequebooks and cheque cards from us at ten pounds a cheque which would be a hundred and fifty pounds if the chequebook was full, but we do not know anyone with a chequebook and cheque card. Even petty fraud can be difficult to make a good start in. I am distracted during this conversation because Cis walks past the window of the café at least fifteen times while we are sitting there, but no matter how hard I try to catch her eye, she never looks in.

  Cynthia regains her health and leads a quiet life for a while

  Ruby makes Cynthia nourishing soup and nurses her back to health. They become friends immediately, neither of them ever having met a werewolf before who they really liked – apart from Uncle Bartholomew, and even he turned out badly in the end.

  A strange coincidence, muses Cynthia, that we should both be sad over the same man.

  ‘I’ve brought you some new clothes,’ says Ruby. ‘And a few newspapers in case you get bored while I’m pirating and adventuring.’

  ‘Thank you. But I don’t need the shoes. I never wear any shoes.’

  ‘Neither do I. What are you going to do when you are better?’

  Cynthia shrugs.

  ‘I have no idea. My life is empty and meaningless.’

  As Ruby Werewolf, despite her claims, is not really doing much adventuring right now, they spend the evenings together decorating Ruby’s room with black walls and bright pictures.

  After a while, Cynthia decides she should move on. She doesn’t have to, now that she is safe from the detectives, but being in any one place for too long depresses her.

  Before she leaves, Ruby gives her back the necklace, because Ruby has utterly given up on Paris.

  On the day my cactus flowers I am offered a job in Brixton dole office. If there is a connection here I can’t see it. The cactus grows a wonderful flower, radiant yellow, a little desert oasis in my damp bedroom. />
  In the dole office I have to take fresh claims, people signing on for the first time or people signing on after finishing work.

  I do not want to work here but as one of the criteria for signing on is that I am available for employment, I cannot refuse the offer. At least it is only temporary. Another of the clerks in my section knows Cis and sometimes he tells me news about her.

  Izzy and Marilyn have to move house when their short-life tenancy comes to an end. They move into a new squat with three other people because they cannot find anywhere decent otherwise.

  Ruby visits them and later she tells me that it is a nice place and Izzy is still lifting her weights, without any visible results.

  ‘But it keeps her happy. I told her they should ask Tilka the Goddess of Squatters to look after them, but they didn’t seem to think it was necessary.’

  John, Ruby’s new lover, is a good drummer and easy to get on with. He joins the band and we organise our gig.

  ‘My cactus has bloomed. When will Cis knock at the door?’

  ‘Any day,’ says Ruby. ‘Of course she might just wait till your gig. Probably she will want to see you onstage. Make us some tea.’

  ‘Do you want to eat? I bought a bag full of healthy Stone Age things.’

  Ruby shakes her head.

  ‘Eating disgusts me.’

  She must feel bad about Domino. She is still sleeping with John the drummer.

  We are evicted and move to a squat in Bengeworth Road. There is no electricity and we find out after we’ve moved that it is disconnected in a way that means we cannot put it back on. By coincidence Bengeworth Road is the site of the main electricity offices in Brixton.

  ‘Strange,’ says Ruby, in the gloom. ‘They have plenty of electricity up there but they won’t give us any. I’d better find us somewhere else to live.’

  I meet Jane who is selling socialist newspapers outside the tube station.

  ‘We can’t find anywhere to live.’

  ‘Of course not. The government won’t provide houses for poor people. They don’t give local councils any money to build council houses. They are only interested in rich people buying property.’