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‘So we fuckin’ sightseeing, Bel, or what?’ Damien demands. ‘Top of a bus job. On your right, the industry. Damp old guest-houses full of smelly old people.’

  ‘On your left,’ JJ adds softly, ‘the edge of the world.’

  For a brief moment Damien and I are united as we turn to look at him with the same quelling, contemptuous expression.

  My heartbeat has slowed. It sounds quiet all around.

  ‘All right,’ I say to them. ‘The beach.’

  *

  So I’m taking the car at about forty, right, on the cool and empty beach, on the edge of the water, shredding the sea.

  And we kick along with the moonlight sparkling. We’re carving our mark in the sand, when Marcie sits bolt upright and chooses that moment to do it.

  She opens her mouth wide, as if in complete astonishment, and vomits a steaming, pungent trail of beer into her lap.

  *

  So we’ve got the Nova with its doors open full like it’s about to fly or something, the air’s sharp with sea salt, old beer and Dettol, and Damien’s lighting a fire with the car manual.

  JJ, amazing as usual, got this bottle of Dettol from a twenty-four-hour chemist. He just disappeared into the night when we stopped the car down by the water’s edge, and I was cursing him, but he came back ten minutes later, coat flapping, carrying this fucking massive plastic bottle. I thought for a minute he’d found some miracle all-night off-licence in the town, and then Damien snatches it and glowers at the label and says disappointedly that he thought it might be meths. He’s got the cap off and he’s given it a sniff before JJ snatches it back without another word. Then he’s pouring it neat all over the seat and the floor, and he says to Marcie, who’s lying in a stinking heap on the sand, ‘Get your dress off, Marce.’

  That’s JJ, you see, thinking about the after-effects and the side-effects again. Me, I just live for the moment, but he likes to have things tidy. Like that time in the church when he wanted to clean up. He can take control when he wants to. He’s like me in that sense, except my way of taking control would be to kick stupid Marcie out of sight behind some rocks and let her wake up, sandy-mouthed and reeking, in the morning sun.

  Marcie’s sitting up, looking a right state, and JJ squats beside her and says, ‘Marce, you’ve already looked stupid. So getting undressed in front of us isn’t going to make it worse, is it?’

  Damien stifles a giggle, and turns away, biting on his cigarette.

  I’m watching JJ – his voice is still soft, and he’s got his big eyes open wide, beseeching, like he was before I half undressed him in the church. He’s fascinating, sometimes.

  And so Marcie’s sitting up, breathing heavily. She pulls off her stockings and dumps them in a pile of netting on the sand. Now her dress comes off over her head, peeling, a lemon-skin, and underneath she’s got scarlet knickers, wet with beer and mud.

  ‘Them, too,’ says JJ languidly, tossing the soiled dress over his arm like a waiter’s cloth. Marcie, forgoing all dignity, pulls them down and chucks them on the sand, then she hugs herself and curls up against the rocks and seaweed.

  She belches loudly, and I turn and give her a hard stare. For a minute I think she’s going to let it all out again, but she’s puffing her cheeks and she must have swallowed it back. She’s wrapped her arms tight around herself, squashing her tennis-ball tits. Her eyes – a victim’s eyes, coaly, thumped-looking with black mascara – beg me from a face thick with crunchy layers of foundation. She’s suddenly made me angry with that casual, animal noise, as if she hasn’t even got the decency to behave now she’s sobered up a bit.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I snarl, leaning over her and poking my finger at the air five inches from her wafery, waif-thin face. ‘JJ’s fucking well putting himself out for you, bitch, so you just fucking stay there and shut the fuck up, all right?’

  ‘It’s OK, Bel,’ JJ murmurs. ‘It’s OK, leave her.’

  I swing round and face him. ‘No, it’s not OK! She’s ruined my evening.’ I’m conscious of my voice being louder than I’d want, and there’s a buzzing in my ears that I don’t like very much. I can feel the air and the sea in a white-noise rush in and around my head, and for a moment I almost fall over. But then, I recover myself, and I shrug, flap my arms and go over to Damien’s fire. JJ heads off to wash the clothes in the sea.

  Damien wanders – or staggers – over to me. He stands there nodding at some private joke for a moment. He has an annoying habit of doing that, as if you’ve just said something that he agrees fervently with, and you’re trying to recall what it was. He drinks from his cigarette, too, as usual. He always tips them right back, makes the end glow firework-bright and puckers his lips as if he’s sucking as much badness as he can get out of them.

  We watch JJ, disappearing towards the water’s edge with a filmy yellow dress and the scarlet pants of a scarlet woman flapping soggily in his left hand.

  ‘Good lad,’ Damien offers. ‘Eh?’

  I nod, watching JJ rubbing furiously at the cloth as the foamy water washes over his arms. ‘Yeah. He’s all right.’

  I’ve known Damien since school, and never especially liked him much, but most people I know have moved away from this shit-hole – good for them – and so we seem to end up going out. Marcie is more his friend than mine, and she’s a recent addition. She’s really got no fucking excuse, ’cos she wasn’t even born here, she moved here. I couldn’t get my head round that when I first heard it. Someone actually came here from somewhere else.

  *

  I’ve heard bits and pieces from Damien about the whole sorry tale, and I’ve put together the rest of Marcie’s story from other bits of gossip, sewn in a quilt of many colours and held together by threads of truth.

  Marcie’s mum used to have a little enterprise going in Southampton, employing foreign students to fulfil a local demand. (I report Damien’s phrase without comment: the Bettinas and Conchitas were short of cash, and the sailors and engineering students were short of gash.) This had been going on since Marcie herself was mewling and puking in Mummy’s arms. As opposed to in our stolen cars, then.

  Then, Madam Hales found out that a few of the girls, miffed at the cut she was taking, had decided to miss out the middlewoman. They pooled some earnings and bought a flat to use just for business purposes, taking clients there on an individual basis without Madam needing to know at all. This sliced a third off the selling price and bumped up the girls’ wages by about as much again. It didn’t make them popular. Old Mother Hales, who was a formidable character, planned her revenge over five years. When Marce was fifteen, she got her tarted up and pretending to be on the game, just to infiltrate the girls – they didn’t know her, you see, or rather they didn’t know what she had become. Last time they’d seen little Marcella, she’d been a dimply thing with a chocolate mouth and a flowery dress. Now, she was a woman with cheekbones and ‘attitude’, whatever that was. From what I’ve seen of ‘attitude’, it seems to mean poncing about as if you own the world and treating people like shit.

  Marce got their trust over time, and one day in August she acted on Mummy’s paid instructions, did the business in the flat. She fed the dog its favourite meal, mashed up with a bar or two of laxative chocolate. She tipped all the girls’ perfumes down the sink and poured in the sardine oil she’d brought with her in tablet-bottles. And to top it all, she called up the phone-sex lines all through the night when the girls were out. Next day, Marcie legged it back to Mum – leaving the girls to a distressed dog treading its turds into the carpet, to their putrid scent bottles and, a month later, to a phone bill from hell.

  I say Marcie went back to Mum – that was the idea. She went back to a house which had been pretty much cleared out, top to bottom. Marcie’s own stuff was packed into two tea chests, sitting on their own on the bare kitchen tiles, under the empty light socket. She found out later – months later, I think – that her mum had gone up North with Derek the Haulage Management Executive, telling him and all his mat
es that her daughter had gone off the rails, and she didn’t want to be associated with her any more.

  So Marcie took out all the money she had. She got the train to the end of the network, to the edge of the world. To this town looking out on the cold, cold sea, the spattered window on the glittering North. And when she got here, after two nights in a B&B, she realized that her mum had always done the shopping, and that now she had to do it herself. She went on down to Safeway and piled a trolley high with stuff. Ridiculous stuff. Family packets of frozen sausages and pink surgical slabs of chicken and great froths of broccoli, because that was what she’d always seen her mum buy, and it made sense. When she got to the checkout, she did what her mum had always done: she handed over a card. Marcie had her own card, but it did a funny bleep when it was put through the first time, and the second time. And the checkout girl asked her if she had any cash, and Marcie looked at her like she was stupid.

  So she had to leave it all there, all those economy packs harvested from the ice. She stood on the other side of the glass door and watched a spiky-haired boy, who had a blue overall and red scurvy, trundle it all away to be dealt with. Shame it wasn’t all empty boxes like those videos.

  Then what did she do? Stories differ. I think she went to the bank, at least tried to get some cash out of the hole in the wall, ’cos I don’t think Marcie’s thick or anything. No joy at the bank, so I think it was then she nicked the chocolate from Mr Pounj and got away with it. That was the worst thing that could happen, because it put the idea into Marcie’s head that it was easy to get things and not pay. If Mr P had caught her – well, I know him, he’d have given her a hell of a bollocking, but he’d have wanted to know why, he’d have found out she didn’t have anywhere to live or any money, he’d have tried to help. As it was, she got caught by the professional store detective in Woolworths that afternoon. I know her, too. She’s a bitch.

  And Marcie ended up with a criminal record. Eventually, she rented a room the only way she knew how. She let a sweaty businessman pork her for thirty quid in the Seaview Hotel.

  And Marcie became meat. Steak to be pummelled with a hammer, until it was red and soft. Bacon, crunchy to bite. Mince. Some days, she would come out furtively to the newsagent’s in dark, wrap-around shades to hide a black eye from an over-enthusiastic punter. And there were the times she got raped, when she didn’t report it, because she had decided what the police attitude would be. (So you didn’t get paid. So what? You had a punter who nicked it rather than paying for it. Shoplifted his meat.)

  She was one of the lucky ones, eventually, one of those who got out in time before she became part of the whole process. Before the alien sperm crusted on her for good and made her one of them, perpetually smelling of lubricated rubber, carbolic soap and cheap scent. Something, I don’t know what, grabbed her by the neck and told her there could be more. She got a job at the leisure centre, cleaning the bogs. And after a few months, they put her on the more salubrious task of cleaning the offices, which led to the better-paid cleaning job at the insurance building. There, she met Babs, who’d just signed on for a WEA course and got Marcie to come along as well.

  Just one year after arriving at the end of the line, Marcie’s points had changed and she was leaving the old goods behind her. Except for the men who recognized her in the street and in the pubs, who took the fact that she was out and about, being seen, as an indication that she now did it all for free and willingly. You don’t lose an image overnight.

  And that’s pretty much where we are. Marce, who now has her Office Skills, does drudge work where she can get it, and keeps her shagging to the status of a committed hobby. Her other hobbies – shared with mine – are drink and spliffs, although she doesn’t read books the way I do. The best of my non-sexual fantasies is to be locked deep in the library vaults with a year’s supply of food and booze. And, you know, a bed and a bath and all that. Goes without saying.

  *

  ‘Here. Wear it.’

  With a sea-salty slap, Marcie’s dress hits her in the face, and JJ folds his arms and exchanges satisfied looks with the pair of us. He’s done his good deed for the day, I think, giving him a sulky look, but at the same time I don’t begrudge him it, ’cos I know he means it, which is more than I would. He doesn’t want Marcie to be uncomfortable, he’d just rather she went home with a sea-wet dress than a puke-soaked one. And that’s JJ all over.

  I start to feel a bit guilty, as it’s not really Marcie’s fault, and it’s not as if she was sick over any of us or anything. It’s almost as if JJ’s highlighting my callousness.

  Damien sighs, kicks over the fire. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

  JJ’s moving back to the car as well. He doesn’t seem to want to talk to me tonight.

  Marcie’s head pops through the hole, and her mermaid’s dress is on. She still looks sullen and dazed. She pulls at it around her cleavage without much enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s bloody wet,’ she points out, opening her victim-black eyes wide at me as if to accuse me.

  ‘Not much gets past you, does it?’ Bugger it, I feel sorry for her now, don’t I? Bitch. I give her my hand. She hesitates for a moment, then she reaches up, grasps it.

  Her wrist and hand feel cold and spindly as I pull her up, and the way she slops in the dress, together with her big eyes, makes me think I’m hauling in some fish-woman from the depths of the ocean. Her gaze meets mine and she gives me a wobbly smile, which makes me go cold. I don’t know why – maybe a chilly flux, mushy and seaweedy from her aqua-world, has pumped down her arm and into my blood.

  I let go of her, suddenly overwhelmed by it, and wanting to distance myself with surliness again. ‘You can fucking walk, come on. Fucking walk.’

  *

  The Nova bucks and swivels, getting started in the sand. I crunch the gears and try to ignore the smell of Dettol.

  ‘When did you pass your test, Bel?’ Damien snarls.

  I glare at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sometime soon, I expect. All right?’

  The car growls in anger, and we’re off, kicking along the beach, leaving it behind us and heading for the bank. I tell them all to hold on tight, ’cos the concrete slope’s studded with raised squares designed to prevent people from doing exactly this. For a few seconds, we’re the lentils in one of those jars Mrs Beck would use to show us Brownian Motion. Then I’ve made the accelerator sing and scream and I’ve hauled us back on to the road, with a thump. Great suspension, these Novas.

  It’s two-thirty and the roads are dead empty. They’re all up for a bit of a laugh, now – sloppy wet Marcie, Mr Ironic-distance JJ, and Mr Who-gives-a-toss Damien. We rush the lights at Western Promenade – they’re ghost lights anyway, red and green phantoms in the night. No one to see what we do or where we go.

  ‘Red for dead, green for a queen!’ It’s Damien, with an old one from school days. The boys used to have to put these bands over their T-shirts at primary school to make themselves into two teams. Someone coined that stupid phrase and from that day on they’d tear each other’s flesh scrabbling for the red bands. Red for dead, green for a queen.

  ‘What’s amber, then?’ I force the wheel and we thump over a traffic island, doing a U-turn fit for a politician.

  ‘Uh?’ Damien responds. It’s just me and him – Marcie’s still too dazed and JJ’s too cool.

  ‘Amber? What’s it rhyme with?’

  ‘Fuck-all. Hang on. Bamber.’

  ‘Yeah!’ I shriek with delight. ‘Amber for Bamber. Starter for ten!’

  I drive the car up Alexandra Avenue, round the back sides of the hotels with their choking bins. The sound booms round the whole town – I want the hovercraft to hear it. I’m suddenly consumed with the desire to be heard, to be seen, to be felt, just so as to escape from the stupidity of watching Marcie spew her guts and of being down on the beach and pouring Dettol into a car. Let’s be felt.

  ‘I hate this town!’ I shout, stepping on the pedal.

  ‘Easy, Bel.’<
br />
  It’s JJ. Being proper and fussy again! My God, I’ve got him worried, have I? Well, then.

  At the end of the street is the still twenties tableau of Goodmans’ Clothes, stiff human parodies adorned with bobs and monocles and necklaces.

  Closer. It’s total fantasy, Great Gatsby stuff, like it’s laughing at us for being stuck in the Town at the End of the World, where there’s no British dream, let alone the American one. Useless.

  So I don’t slow down. I take us right through it.

  Good place to cut.

  Chapter Five – Blame Game

  Kate says: ‘I thought we might all go out together.’

  I realize I’ve got to say something. My toast is poised halfway to my mouth, and the bit I’m chewing on suddenly goes all flavourless and hard to swallow. A globule of marmalade drips from the edge of my toast, down on to the paper, where it gives John Prescott a runny and magnified nose.

  Kate’s face, round and red and powdery. My father’s, hawklike, with sharp-looking glasses. I think he wears them because they look like filters of truth.

  *

  This morning, the police were busy picking a Vauxhall Nova (slightly damaged) out of a town-centre shop-window (wrecked). Bodies lay all over the place. There were severed heads, arms, legs, fragments of hair. One torso was right under the front of the car and took the full impact. The police were collecting the amputees and the bits and putting them into black plastic bin-liners. One of the younger ones laughed as he picked up one of the severed heads, a woman, and turned it around towards his mate, making like it was going to snog him. I was watching, and I thought, looks like all those dummies failed the crash test, then. And Goodmans will have to buy some more to model their obnoxious clothes.

  I lounged against a lamppost in the morning light, smoking quietly, listening to the sea breathing in and out, to the gulls whooping overhead, calling out my name to the cops who were too ignorant to hear.

  A guy with a manky, mangy dog went past just before. It was straining on its leash – well, string – barking my name at the clean-up squad, and they ignored that, too! Bellen, means to bark in German. I know that because I’m intelligent, and the police don’t because they’re stupid, that’s all there is to it. Anyway, it was hauled away, still barking, as I watched. Ugly, crazed-looking animal with tangled hair, coat ripped in three places, nails all in need of a good scrub. And his filthy mutt was almost as bad.