Sweet Read online

  Aggy stood up and waddled towards me, taking my hand. ‘Sit down, my dear.’ Well, my philosophy is never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie, so I was well up for this unexpected development. But what came next really floored me.

  ‘Maria, we feel we have misjudged you,’ he said solemnly. I put on this marge-wouldn’t-melt expression, all the time wondering furiously what the snooty swines had been judging me as – and the CHEEK that this pair of freaks had been judging anybody fair rendered me speechless too, which was lucky. ‘Until last Friday, we thought you were – well, I won’t mince words –’ About the only thing you wouldn’t mince, mate! – ‘we thought you were a typical chavette. An under-educated, over-made-up breeder, to be blunt. Just one of those Ravendene drones that’s pregnant at fifteen, a grandma by thirty and quite frankly fit only for cat meat by forty –’ He shuddered, then brightened up. ‘But you’re not – you’re a baby dyke! You’re one of us!’

  Well, this was what you called a backhanded compliment and being damned with faint praise rolled into one, I figured as I smiled sweetly back at Aggy. On one hand it was a change not to be written off as a pikey pillock for once – but on the other hand, did I really want to join Aggy and Baggy’s gang? I mean, look at the pair of ’em! – walking wounded when it came to looks, for sure. Came off the wrong end of a scrap with the ugly stick, and then some. I’ve noticed this quite a lot during my short life, as a matter of fact – that those who put others down for being ugly, thick, having no style and all that are often complete mingers themselves; it’s like they’ve got a magic mirror stashed somewhere telling them they’re the fairest of them all, whereas in reality they haven’t got a – short, fat, hairy – leg to stand on. ’Cept me, natch – I insult mingers from the solid ground of supreme beauty!

  But the main thing that really made me swear behind my smile and want to bite the hand that was now trying to force-feed me compliments was that he was more or less describing my mum with that nasty little number about Ravendene breeders. OK, so Susie had had me at eighteen rather than fifteen – she’d wanted to see a bit of life first, remember! – but I could see her daft sweet smiling face as clearly as if she was standing in front of me when Aggy shuddered at the idea of breeders. And then course there was me and Ren – unknown to them their little dyke was also a dirty horrid breeder after all. And you know, there’s lots of good things about gayers – they always know where to get good E, and their club nights are banging – but there is this horrible way a lot of them, down here in Brighton at least, seem to see straight people, particularly working-class women, as these dumb cows just chewing cud and churning out kids whose hungry little mouths are eating up their disposable income that might better be spent on handjobs and man-bags. They’re always writing narky letters to the papers complaining that their taxes have to pay for schools and that – but if the breeders didn’t breed where would the hairdressers come from that save their lives when they’ve given themselves a bad fringe while off their nuts on Special K? Be real, they couldn’t clone ’em off a big old gay conveyor belt – they want to thank the breeders for breeding their servants for them! No, the way I look at it, we’re all in it together; it’s not meant to be like the Warlocks and the e-boys or whatever in that mental film about the time machine that Samantha Mumba was in.

  But I didn’t say none of this – just grinned and nodded like a loved-up toy doggy in the back window of some sad car.

  ‘And so,’ Aggy continued, ‘we’ve been thinking that we might proffer ourselves as guardian angels, of a kind. Mentors, without the mauling which usually characterizes raw young girl/sophisticated gent relationships. Patrons, without the poking—’

  ‘Sugar daddies without the wandering hands,’ butted in Baggy eagerly.

  ‘Oh, that’s well weird! Everybody calls me Sugar anyway!’

  Aggy closed his eyes. ‘Then the matter seems to be settled. Mmm . . . sugar, sweet, decay, rot . . . the immediate gratification and inevitable comedown of modern life, the eternal limbo of the morning after . . .’ His eyes snapped open. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Strip!’

  Why is it that I bring out the beast in the most unlikely people? Even Kim Lewis, the last virgin in captivity. And now Baggy and Aggy were set on grooming me for a right old menagerie – even gaylords wanted a bit of Sugar-shoving! I was sick of it frankly. I stood up.

  ‘Thanks for the offer, Mr Agnew. But I’m gay, as I’ve just explained to you. And I really don’t think I can change my sexuality on demand like that, just so you and Mr Bagshawe can get a bit of girl-booty for a change.’

  I realized I’d made a mistake when B&A’s eyes grew huge with amazement and then disgust. I was edging towards the door, aiming to cut and run, when they erupted in twin explosions of laughter. They doubled up, they held on to each other, they pointed at me with shaky fingers while wiping tears from their eyes. I stopped in my tracks and stared at them.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, Maria . . .’ gasped Baggy, ‘the idea that we’d ever want to . . . HAVE SEX . . . with . . . with YOU, of all people!’ And their hilarity resumed.

  ‘Thanks a lot!’ I snorted. I’m not used to getting a kickback, even from benders. Many’s the time I’ve scored with a buff batty in the Ladies’ at Revenge when it’s chucking out time and he don’t want to go home empty-handed.

  Aggy pulled himself together, breaking away from Baggy and coming up to me. ‘Maria, sweet. Sweet Maria. It’s nothing personal. It’s not that we don’t like you – it’s just that we don’t like what you’ve got going on in your thong. But everything else about you we love, from the top of your fierce scrunchied head to the tip of your dance-calloused toes. Even your name – Maria Sweet! – well, say it loud and there’s music playing. In short, everything about you screams ‘Muse!’. And it’s something we can use.’ He took my face in his hands. ‘“To double as a pattern model” – you saw the card. Except you won’t just be some random arrangement of flesh we use as target practice before we show our clothes on some stuck-up coked-out size-six super.’ He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear ever so tenderly. ‘You’ll be our top girl. Our first lady. What do you say, Sugar?’

  I blinked. And the blink of an eye was all it took for me to make up my mind. I wrenched myself out of his grasp and stared at him, sneering like Elvis in a Wonderbra. I pulled open my shirt, buttons flying amok.

  ‘Do you want me just topless, or everything off?’

  Aggy gaped, then grinned. ‘You can leave your thong on. Lest we run screaming in terror. But everything else should come off.’

  Everything else came off in a flash. And the weirdest thing was, naked in front of them I felt for the first time invulnerable. As though I was wearing armour, even.

  When I let myself into Sweet Towers that night, I was tingling all over; it was a bit like having pleasurable pins and needles, which was appropriate because I’d spent the day having paper patterns pinned on me, and watching Baggy and Aggy give each other the needle something rotten. You read a lot about ‘the creative process’ when fashion designers give interviews to the magazines, and now at last I’d had the chance to experience it at first hand, as Creatives put their hands all over me. And as far as I could tell, the creative process was a lot like PMT, but as if an opera singer was suffering from it – everything amped up to the max. Or in this case, two opera singers, who wanted to take each other’s nuts off with pinking shears.

  It was a right weird one to be a girl, standing there in all my naked glory, and have two gaylords fighting over me – especially two gaylords who’d previously believed I was only good for pumping out puppies and sponging off same-sex citizens! Yet suddenly I’d morphed from slapper to goddess and they were pulling each other’s extensions out to get first go at my arse. In a purely artistic way, of course.

  ‘NOOOO!’ Aggy had yelled at Baggy, wrenching a tape measure from his hand and flinging it across the room. ‘We’re not making drip-dry crimp
lene frocks for the mother of the bride somewhere in Surrey, here! We’re walking on the edge, wearing a blindfold, without a safety net! So why are you trying to dress her like a woman called . . . I don’t know, HILARY!’

  ‘AGS! It was only three fingers beneath no-man’s-land!’

  ‘Three fingers be damned! Two fingers’ modesty is all a girl needs before the cellulite kicks in. You take your three fingers, Bag-features, and stick them where the sun don’t shine!’

  ‘What, Manchester?!’

  It goes on like this for six hours solid, and all the time they’re bickering and bitching and swooning and crooning and groaning and grinning, but the point is, THEY’RE DOING IT BECAUSE OF ME! I’m no longer the skivvy that clears up after them, but the focus of the thing that matters to them most in the world – their creativity. OK, so it was a bit weird how suddenly I was the perfect model – I mean I might have been a dyke but I was still a gorgeously curvy one. Yet I’ve always had a funny effect on people, got their juices flowing, just that in Ags and Bags’ case it was creative ones, not the sort you have to clean up after. Plus – only a total fruit-loop would look a job this cushy in the eye and start asking questions. By the time I emerged from Chez Bag-Ag, I was walking on air.

  ‘Mum! MUM! SUUUZE!’ I called as I slammed the door behind me. I had an extra fifty quid in my pocket ‘for keeping so still and smelling so nice – for a girl!’ as Baggy had charmingly put it, and I was going to take her straight down to Pizza Express in the Lanes for a proper meal out. Gnocchi, dough-balls, tonno e fagioli on the side – the works! Even a Ravello Bombe and half a bottle of house white so long as she didn’t annoy me too much. No more Domino’s for us, now I was a model – it was gonna be Sloppy Giuseppes all the way, and I don’t just mean the drooling waiters. Who knows, I might even get a doggy bag for the gruesome twosome to scrap over!

  I looked for Susie in the kitchen and the sitting room and when I couldn’t find her I headed for the bedroom, thinking she’d be up to her old praying-for-a-baby tricks. I walked right in – and stone me if she wasn’t sobbing her heart out, swigging from a bottle of gin, for all the world like a sailor about to be sent for a month in the Priory!

  I crouched down beside her. ‘Whassup, Suze?’ She kept on sobbing, louder now. ‘Mum?’

  She looked up at me, her big blue eyes all red-rimmed in a dead white face. Sort of like a Union Jack somebody had done in a too-hot wash and it had come out a right runny old mess. ‘Oh, Ave!’

  I knew it was bad then; she only calls me Ave, as in Ave-Maria, when things are well dire. ‘Come on, Suze – spit it out!’

  ‘I wish I had!’ She did that hard, mirthless laugh that I was so good at, but which I heard so rarely from her. ‘Oh, Ave – I’m PREGNANT!’

  ‘But I thought you—’

  ‘I MADE A MISTAKE! I DON’T WANT IT! I CAN BARELY GET BY AS IT IS!’ And she started up with the sobbing again.

  It’s a funny thing – I always thought I was quite cold. I’ve never gone in for a lot of hugging and kissing – ’cept with men, when they’re fit, and I’m pissed, heh heh! In fact, I remember making Susie cry when I was only ten by exclaiming one night, ‘Leave me alone, you lezzer!’ when she tried to give me her usual kiss goodnight – I guess I was pretty scary even as a ten-year-old, because she never tried that move again. Ironic, really, in the light of what happened with old Kizza Lewis!

  But now it was instinctive, like a lioness with its cub – the fierce protection I felt towards her. Poor old Suze, always picking the manky old Montélimar in the chocolate box of life. I took her dumb, precious body in my arms and noticed that she smelt of defeat.

  And I whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t worry, Mum – I’ll fix it.’

  5

  And this is a thing I’ve noticed about life – no sooner has Lady Luck laid down her cape to see you across that puddle of mud than Lord Muck swings by in his ride and splashes it all over you. That is, just when you’re riding high is when something happens to bring you down. Happened with me and Kim, happened with me and Mark and Ren. And now here I was, taking my first faltering steps as a model, and I’d walked slap bang into some sort of freaking Channel 5 soap opera, with a pregnant mum I’d promised to fix up an abortion for!

  ‘And not an NHS abortion, mind!’ Susie added over a Domino’s Dominator that night – somehow the idea of Pizza Express had lost its gloss. ‘They treat you like a right slag, Natalia says.’

  ‘So –’ I pushed my box away, pizza only half eaten. ‘What’s the story? All that hoping and moping and banging on about wanting to hold a little body in your empty old arms again – what made you change your mind?’

  ‘I just suddenly realized I was being irresponsible,’ she said humbly. ‘And that I didn’t want to . . . waste my life – bringing up kids any more . . .’

  This didn’t sound one bit like Susie, and I looked at her suspiciously. ‘That’s something I thought I’d never hear you say – you sure?’

  She pushed her pizza away too. ‘Well – I didn’t want to say this, in case it made you feel bad. But I realized that all the time I thought I wanted another baby to be a mum to, I was kidding myself. What I really want, Ave, is to be a grandma. To little Ren.’ She caught hold of my hand. ‘I want you to find Ren, Ave. And bring her home.’

  My times! – it was like being with Baggy and Aggy all over again. Find this, clear up that! ‘You don’t want much, Mum, do you!’

  ‘We could hire a private detective—’

  ‘With what? Fresh air?’

  ‘I can do extra shifts—’

  ‘Oh right – we’ll get one from Toon-Town, and we’ll pay them with the tiddlywinks that you call wages! Private abortions, private detectives – why don’t you just pawn your silver spoon and use the cash from that!’

  She looked right downcast at that, and I knew then that there was no way out of it – I’d have to use my modelling money, the money I’d been going to save to get the hell out of Dodge. ‘OK – don’t worry. I’ll see to it.’ I squeezed her hand and stood up. As I got to the door I turned. ‘Here – you sure you don’t just want to let me push you down the stairs and save us a wedge? Only joking!’ I protested as her face got ready to crumple.

  I went to bed with a heavy heart, though that could have been the Dominator. Whatever, it was like I was carrying a big weight in a moneybelt round my stomach. It was called responsibility, it was called being a grown-up – whatever, it sucked. I wished I could go down the beach and get blind on cheap vodka and pick up some random bloke and stab him after sex, like in the old, innocent days of my girlhood – but heck, I had a baby to abort and a baby to find.

  I went to sleep and dreamed I had a baby who came out looking like the fifteen-year-old Kim Lewis, who then turned into a pizza with double pepperoni, which I gorged right down without it touching the sides. When I woke up, I was sick. I exited the bathroom to find Susie throwing up in the kitchen sink and the twins hurling on to the kitchen floor, obviously having raided the abandoned pizza boxes during the night. I fled the sickly scene as though the store detectives from hell itself were on my trail, desperate to return to the perfumed pincers of Baggy and Aggy.

  ‘Pew-eee! – someone’s had sausage for breakfast!’ Bags complained as he leaned close to my face to pin a rough snood around my hair.

  ‘Yes, and someone else hasn’t,’ Ags rebuked him. He was definitely the boss of the outfit, and though he wasn’t averse to insulting me himself, he didn’t like Baggy to overstep the mark. ‘You feeling up to it, sugar-shovel? You can always go home if you’re a bit punk.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I assured him – the last thing I needed to lift my spirits was a return to the House of Barf. He was on his knees in front of me pinning a hem up on the shortest skirt imaginable, but with knickers attached. ‘So what’s the idea behind this one then?’

  ‘Um – White Boots. Ever read that?’

  ‘No. But it sounds well pervy.’

  ‘Skating-star
let look – ice queen! It will be made of the finest red velvet, with matching muff!’

  Baggy and I sniggered as one and Aggy gave us A Look; we giggled like kids and he tutted good-naturedly. It struck me then that I was really starting to value my time with them. And if that was so, maybe they were right about where I came from – not snobs, just knowledgeable. Maybe I’d been the one who was ignorant, not them. If they could have seen the vomit-fest I’d left that morning . . . I shuddered.

  ‘You cold, pet?’ Baggy asked through a mouthful of pins. ‘Because we’re going to have to take your skating suit off soon and try your princess number on. And goodness knows, that one fits where it touches. The finest black silk. Very minimalist. Very Audrey H.’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, holding my head up high. A princess, eh? If that’s what they thought of me, that’s what I could be. And if that’s what they thought of me, I could trust them. ‘Listen . . . I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’ve got to get my mum an abortion. A proper one, in a private clinic – she’s too scared to take that pill that brings it on, she wants to be unconscious, and she’s heard nasty stuff about NHS ones. Can you advance me my wages?’

  There was a silence, and then Aggy said, in a voice so soft and sincere it made me want to cry, ‘Of course we can give you the money. But not as an advance – as a “quid pro quo”. Do you know what that means, Maria?’

  I thought about it logically. ‘Is it something to do with money?’

  ‘Even better than that, my sweet. It’s something to do with friendship. And inspiration. And asking not what you can do for me, but what I can do for you . . .’ He stood up, walked across the room, scrabbled in a man-bag, leaned on a table writing something and came back with a cheque. He handed it to me; I read it and almost wept.

  I almost wept partly because of how big it was and how generous these people were, and how I’d misjudged them. But also because I didn’t have a bank account and I was going to look like a right townie teat now. ‘Um – any chance of cash, is there? Sorry to ask, but—’