Ruby and the Stone Age Diet Read online

  ‘Amiss? That’s a funny word.’ Ruby pushes Domino away and sits up, quite interested.

  ‘I’ve never heard you say amiss before.’

  ‘I must have picked it up somewhere. Perhaps Cis said it. Do you think Cis—’

  ‘Will you get the fuck out of here!’ screams Domino, who is probably wanting to get back to fucking, although as he doesn’t live here and I do he has no right to shout at me. But I leave anyway and spend some time looking after Cis’s cactus. I have a book called How to Take Care of Your House Plants that came free with six bottles of bleach and I am following its advice assiduously. If Cis was to walk in the door right this minute she would be proud of the way I have looked after her plant, although there is no sign of a flower.

  Then I give some care and attention to Ruby’s cactus, although she is at this moment fucking Domino there doesn’t seem much need to help their relationship along.

  I wonder if I killed her plant would Domino go away? I would like that. But I would not like to hurt Ruby.

  I decide to make a sign.

  I get some paper and write on it ‘Cis’s potted plant,’ but I don’t know where the apostrophe should go in Cis’s because it is always a little confusing when the word ends with an s.

  Back in Ruby’s bedroom Domino has his head between Ruby’s legs and she is looking like she is quite enjoying herself, but when I ask her where the apostrophe should go in the word Cis’s she edges away from him a little to give the matter some consideration.

  ‘C-I-S apostrophe S,’ she spells out for me, hand on Domino’s head. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Do you know where the Sellotape is?’

  ‘I think it’s in the kitchen drawer.’

  ‘Thank you. While I’m in the kitchen, do you want me to make you some tea?’

  ‘Not this minute. In a little while.’

  Domino has a terrible scowl on his face and seems to be shaking. I get back to making my sign. I do not really like Domino. I letter the sign with infinite care and Sellotape it onto the pot and I am very pleased with the result. When I give it some water and three carefully-measured drops of plant food I am sure I can hear it saying thank you.

  ‘Grow me a little flower,’ I say to it. ‘I am fed up with not being able to eat and thinking that every person I see is Cis and being sad all the time. And it’s all your fault.’

  And then I have nothing to do. I rummage through some papers in my cupboard. I find a homemade ticket for one of our gigs, and a love poem. Ha Ha.

  Cynthia, still sad, exhibits a social conscience and kills everyone in a wine bar

  Cynthia calls in to visit her Uncle Bartholomew. He is having some trouble with his plumbing. Cynthia, fresh from eating some plumbers, knows all about pipes and drains, and fixes it.

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ she says, wiping her tools. ‘My true love doesn’t want me anymore. I’m either going to kill myself or become a pirate. I haven’t made up my mind which.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ says her Uncle, unable to help her decide.

  Down the road Cynthia develops a powerful hunger. She changes into wolf-form and sniffs around.

  There on the pavement is a shabby tramp. He only has one foot.

  I know I shouldn’t eat humans, thinks Cynthia. But no one will miss him.

  ‘Stop, Ruby,’ I say. ‘Don’t make Cynthia eat the tramp with one foot. I get depressed just thinking about him.’

  Ruby looks up from her story.

  ‘Yes,’ she reflects. ‘So do I.’

  We saw him last week in New Cross. He was lying on the pavement with an empty can of Special Brew cradled in his arms. His crutch was leaned up against a shop-front and his ankle stump stuck naked out of his filthy trousers.

  ‘Another one slipped through the welfare safety net,’ said Ruby, hunting in her bag for a little change.

  ‘OK,’ she says, looking back at her story. ‘How about this? “Cynthia, moved by sympathy for the one-footed tramp, immediately bursts into an elegant wine bar just round the corner. She savages the rich customers to death and steals their wallets. Stopping only to eat a spare plate of soup, she gives all the money to the tramp, and also a few bottles of wine.” How’s that?’

  ‘Fine. I like it.’

  ‘Right. But don’t expect any more social conscience. Cynthia is crazed in love, and is not responsible for her actions.’

  ‘Sit down comfortably,’ says Ruby, opening her book of myths and fables, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’

  ‘Does it have a happy ending?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I sit down comfortably.

  With all the standing around sorting mail and loading up trucks in the warehouse my knee starts to hurt continually and I begin to hate business magazines.

  There is nothing interesting to read in the magazines, nothing interesting to look at in the warehouse, nothing to do but look forward to the next tea break or the end of the shift.

  Where the truck comes in there is a metal door that opens by hydraulics, but at some time in the past a truck has run into it and ripped one side of it open so the warehouse is always cold.

  One night a fox ran past the entrance and I found something funny in a magazine. Even businessmen need cartoons.

  I show it round but it turns out that three of the other four people on ‘E’ shift can’t read. This is embarrassing and the embarrassment seems to be my fault. When there is a radio quiz on and I say some of the answers out loud I am generally mocked for being an intellectual. I am also mocked for my Scottish accent. In factories and building sites I am always mocked for my Scottish accent although it is usually friendly, people calling me Haggis and Hamish and saying ‘Och aye the noo.’

  ‘Abeline,’ begins Ruby, ‘a minor music deity who once used to play the harp to amuse Zeus on Mount Olympus, came to Earth looking for some adventure. He was bored after centuries of bliss on Mount Olympus and also annoyed because Zeus kept on doing terrible things to women he was attracted to, like pretending he was a swan and forcing them to have sex. Also he had a big argument with Apollo after telling him his harp playing was out of date.

  ‘Abeline strolled around for thousands of years, playing music and having adventures until, some time in the late nineteen-seventies, he realised that there were no adventures to be had anymore and also music had become rather boring.

  ‘Still unwilling to return to Olympus, he decided to create an adventure of his own, so he gathered up four musicians and started up a band to make radical music. Abeline played mighty guitar chords that deeply impressed all who listened to them.

  ‘Apollo came to visit Earth.

  ‘“Abeline,” he said. “I need you. An upstart young Tree Goddess from Vietnam has been telling everyone that her music is the most divinely beautiful in the Universe. She claims that it drove the Americans from her country. I disapprove of such presumption. We are going to have a contest and I want you to judge it.”

  ‘“I’m too busy with my band,” protests Abeline. “And I’m not very interested in your sort of music anymore.”’

  Apollo tells Abeline that he’d better judge the contest if he knows what’s good for him. Abeline, not wishing to bring divine punishment down on his head, is forced to agree.

  ‘The contest is attended by all the world’s major deities, except the Buddha, who is beyond competition, and Jasmine, who is too busy trying to comfort all the people with broken hearts.

  ‘Apollo plays his divine music and the audience applauds rapturously. But when Daita, the Vietnamese Tree Goddess, sings there is no comparison. Her singing is the most beautiful sound ever heard in the Cosmos.

  ‘“Well?” says Apollo, ominously.

  ‘“Daita from Vietnam was the best,” says Abeline, honestly.

  ‘Apollo storms off in a fury but not before taking his revenge. He alters the sales figures so Abeline’s band never make it into the charts and he maliciously influences the critics so they never receive any good reviews.
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br />   ‘What’s more, Apollo curses Abeline so that no one will ever listen to his ideas about music ever again, so after a brief career as a music journalist Abeline fades into obscurity. And the enraged Apollo also inflicts all of Daita’s descendants with a toxic fever so that, despite their best efforts, the trees will never grow in her country again.

  ‘Daita, with no trees in her homeland, is unable to sing anymore, but wanders the planet giving help to the poor and oppressed, particularly labourers who have to work all day for low wages.’

  Sitting round the table in the restroom with the other labourers on my shift, I listen to them talking about football and women and I try and join in, but I am not good at it and my contributions never ring true. When I make some comment about football there is usually a brief awkward silence, and if someone shows me a pinup in the paper I can never manage to say the right thing. One time Mark looks at a pinup and says, ‘Imagine fucking that, be like throwing peas down the Blackwall Tunnel,’ and everyone laughs but I am completely at a loss as to how to react and it must show because Dave says, ‘What’s the matter, you queer or something?’

  I do not know why I can never join in the conversations between groups of men.

  I tell my shift that my band has at last recruited a drummer but they are not really the sort of people who are interested in music.

  It is the Sunday shift, our last. We finish all our work about two hours before the shift ends. I slump down exhausted on a pile of orange plastic sacks that scratch me through my clothes. A gang of robbers looks in briefly, but they leave almost immediately because we have nothing worth stealing.

  The rest of the shift play with the mini forklift and shoot elastic bands at each other. Next week I don’t go back because I can’t stand it anymore so now I have the problem of signing on again. My knee hurts for weeks and I can’t find a PA for the gig.

  ‘Where is the happy ending?’ I ask Ruby.

  ‘I lied about it,’ she says.

  Cynthia becomes a highway robber, but suffers unfortunate consequences

  Cynthia, lacking a ship, decides against becoming a pirate but does embark on a life of crime.

  Hunted through the streets by the ever-vigilant werewolf detectives, she tries to forget her love for Paris by holding up cars and robbing the occupants.

  She is wearing a purple shirt and green trousers. Ever since eating a man who designed book jackets, the young werewolf has been exhibiting terrible taste.

  Reports of her crimes reach the ears of Lupus. The Werewolf King loses patience. He wants Cynthia brought to Justice. He instructs his detectives to bring her to him, or else.

  Now these detectives are very wary of Cynthia. They have already lost several of their number to her ferocious fangs. They would rather just leave her alone. Lupus, however, is not to be defied, particularly when he is angry, so they formulate a plan.

  Cynthia lies down on a lonely road. A car approaches, drawing to a halt at the sight of her apparently injured body.

  ‘Stand and deliver,’ she cries, leaping to her feet. ‘Your money or your life.’

  Cynthia can be quite theatrical when she wants.

  Werewolf detectives pile out of the car. It is a trap. She is surrounded and captured, bound immediately in magical silver chains and thrown in the cellars of the Werewolf King to await trial.

  Ruby’s benefit claim is sorted out but mine is not. Ruby shares her money with me which gives us fourteen pounds a week each to live on, plus the six pounds I make as an artist’s model. I scour the music papers for cheap PAs but all the cheap ones are booked up in advance and the only ones available cost eighty pounds. Eighty pounds is more than me and Nigel can afford. Perhaps John our new drummer can borrow it.

  Nigel phones and says that John is leaving the band.

  ‘He can’t leave the band. He’s only just joined. We have a gig in two weeks.’

  ‘He’s been offered a job drumming for someone else. He’s going on tour.’

  I tell Nigel about not having a PA either. Things look bleak for our gig.

  Helena, Goddess of Electric Guitarists, is sympathetic and shows me how to play a difficult new chord but tells me again that she has no influence over drummers. And she is still sad because her girlfriend has left her. She has run off with Ezekial, God of Acoustic Guitarists, and I find this shocking because acoustic guitars are very boring.

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ asks Ruby, who has a big yellow towel round her hair to dry it.

  ‘Nigel.’

  ‘Oh. I thought it might have been one of our contacts.’

  ‘You sent off the postcards?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  When Ruby’s hair is dry I help her tie the thin ribbons into it.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We look at the television to see what day it is but it won’t tell us so I go round to the shops to buy a paper. The flower stall doesn’t seem to be there anymore, perhaps without me to buy flowers for Cis it is no longer viable.

  Cis is buying some sausages in the butcher’s and I am wondering if I should have a word with her and maybe borrow a few sausages when I am suddenly kidnapped by four gangsters in a huge American car. I think it might be a Chevrolet but I do not really know much about cars.

  ‘Is this a Chevrolet?’ I ask, gun at my throat, but the gangsters are desperate men and don’t reply, except one of them asks me briefly what part of Scotland I’m from as his parents came from Falkirk.

  ‘Give us the rights to the new oil well or you’ll never see your friends again,’ says the leader, a small man of Italian extraction with an Uzi sub-machine-gun and a suit of violet that is brilliantly coloured although not as attractive as Ruby’s dress.

  ‘I don’t have any rights to oil wells,’ I protest. ‘All I have is fourteen pounds a week and six pounds from the art class. Also, I don’t have any friends.’

  ‘You’re lying. We’ll cut your ear off and send it to your mother.’

  The car is thundering down through Brixton. Too wide for the narrow streets we crash into the Ritzy Cinema, where this week they are showing a series of Marlon Brando films.

  I am catapulted out just before the car explodes. Uzi machine-gun bullets hail in every direction as the survivors battle it out with riot police. Bystanders everywhere are mown down in puddles of blood.

  I scramble for safety into the Ritzy.

  ‘The film has already started,’ says the woman in the kiosk.

  ‘Damn. And I really wanted to see The Wild One.’

  I decide to catch it later and shamble down into the market to see if anyone will buy me a pizza.

  Izzy is there at the pizza stall. Although she has no money to buy me one, she tears me off a good chunk and I sit beside her and chew away at it. She tells me about a party tonight.

  ‘I am feeling a little sad about Cis leaving me,’ I tell her. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Dean is mad at me because I’m having an abortion.’

  ‘I thought he had left you anyway?’

  ‘He had. But he’s decided it’s his business if I have an abortion or not. Well he can go fuck himself.’

  She pulls up her jacket a little way.

  ‘Can you see an improvement in my trunk rotators?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, although I do not know what a trunk rotator is. ‘They are looking much better.’

  ‘Marilyn borrowed me two hundred pounds off her parents to get me an abortion. Have you got everything ready for your gig?’

  Immediately I am gloomy and can’t finish my pizza fragments. Izzy reclaims them, saying she has to eat to develop muscles, although really it should be steaks and not pizzas. But she supposes every little helps.

  Next to the pizza stall a few people hang around the door of a reggae shack and slightly shake to the music.

  The robot and I trudge on across the blackened plain. I am fed up trudging. We have stopped communicating and
the robot is entirely concerned with completing its life’s work, a huge encyclopaedia of mythological mechanical deities.

  Suddenly there is a total eclipse of the sun and the robot falls to its knees.

  ‘Come on, make some light so we can keep trudging.’

  There is a small whirring noise and a print-out appears from its side.

  Silence, it says. It is time for me to pray to the deity.

  It brings out a picture of Marlon Brando on a motorbike.

  ‘You like Marlon Brando too?’

  Who is Marlon Brando? it prints. I am praying to the Harley-Davidson.

  The party Izzy told me about is in a squat in Kennington. The street, full of licensed squats, is buzzing with three parties, two black and one white.

  At the kerb there are a few old cars and three majestic-looking motorbikes. Underneath the motorbikes a few shards of glass glisten in a small pool of oil.

  Downstairs in the white party it is too full to move. There is a smoke-machine and beer on sale for a pound a can and one light shining horizontally across the ceiling. I stand around and talk for a while and I meet my friend James and his girlfriend Maz, who have a plastic bag full of drink which they share with me.

  ‘Every time I meet Izzy she is always going on about her muscles,’ says James. ‘But they don’t look any different to me.’ I have a good conversation with Maz about caring for cacti.

  It is bitterly cold on this planet. While the robot prays I shake and shiver and wonder how you go about building a new spacecraft. Suddenly I come across a small cactus, the only green thing I have seen on this world. It is small and beautiful and I stare at it for a long time.

  Next morning I wake up in bed with Maz. This is a surprise. These days my life is full of surprises.

  I hunt for my clothes, Maz gives me a nice smile.

  ‘Don’t worry about last night,’ she says. ‘It happens to everyone sometimes.’

  ‘What,’ I say. ‘Having sex with your friends’ girlfriends?’

  ‘No. Getting drunk, being unable to have sex with your friends’ girlfriends because the drink has made you impotent, being sick over the bedclothes and screaming out that the cat is a demon out to drag you to hell.’