me: if you know a word it can’t hurt you – which was strange because I was pretty sure that he’d known the word cancer.
A slag was carny slang for a punter who looks at the free attractions but avoids the paying shows. In Australia it meant to spit. A slagger was a brothel-keeper; a slaggering was a row – but was that a great commotion, a trip on a lake, or a line? It meant unwashed, useless, a petty criminal, a third-rate grifter. It was a slack-mettled fellow, one not ready to resist an affront…the word seemed to encompass everything. I myself was a slag, living in a city of slags – in a country, a world, a universe of slags, in an infinity of pej.
On the way down to Park Road for milk and bread I decided to stop for a quick pint which meant of course that I never made it: beer was a food anyway. Having been gutted to create one huge circular bar, the place had recently reopened, now designated a Fun Pub, renamed The Puck after its randomly chosen ice-hockey theme, with netting and sticks depending from the frosted ceiling and rows of goalminders’ masks staring down like Jason Vorhees in Friday the Thirteenth. But now the regulars were gradually drifting back like wraiths, smothering any Fun in its cradle. The new green-on-red carpet was metamorphosing into its predecessor – ash-grey and polka-dotted with brown and black burns – and the gleaming bar already had a layer of dust that wouldn’t brush off. I wondered if the extirpated partitioned snugs and games-rooms would just grow back, like branches of a lopped tree.
Without my even asking, Eleanor the barmaid slammed a plateful of clingfilm-wrapped egg sandwiches in front of me. ‘Leftovers from yesterday,’ she said, but they tasted far too fresh for that, with fine-chopped onions and home-made lemon-based mayonnaise. Her eyes, perhaps distorted by the thick lenses of her glasses, always looked to be full of tears. Everybody seemed to think that I was starving but all I ever did was eat and drink.
All around me, people began to just materialize out of their chairs. The usual conversation began: football, always football. I tried to convince myself that I found this familiarity comfortable. They were still picking over the Barnet game: I’d been there and couldn’t remember a thing about it. Only triumphs and disasters registered with me, which meant that the whole season had been a virtual blank. I couldn’t bring to mind the names of any of the current City players: they were all the same, with no first touch, donkey haircuts and unfocused eyes. The old ones – Rackstraw, Corner, Swallow – I used to dream about them, even though they were crap.
‘This club’s got no ambition, taking that Tolson off Oldham in part-exchange for McCarthorse. They should have held out for Sharp, or Beckford, or Palmer.’ Dave could tell you any football fact: his bed-sit was piled to the ceiling with red Silvine exercise books full of statistics. He knew more about the game than any player, manager or journalist ever could: they had distractions – wives, children, food, sleep – but with him it was his entire life.
Whenever a woman came in silence fell, followed by a hubbub of fevered speculation. Which one was the slag? Naturally, the three best-looking were the favourites. Was it the grey-haired one? There was something sinister about her: although she had four kids – two in the army – her face was still unlined and her body remained as tight as a sixteen year old’s. Or the crop-haired one? She was never seen with a man so she could only be a lesbian, the wrong kind of slag. Or the little blonde? Her husband’s legs had been shattered at Forgemasters’ and she had to help him along like a third crutch while he cursed her: it was said that she took home three different men every night but no names were ever mentioned. Huddling together, even going to the ladies’ in pairs, all the candidates looked too hesitant and frightened to me. The Slag should have remained unconcerned or, at least, defiant – peroxided, mad-eyed, meanmouthed under a scarlet lipstick bow, with the names of her victims tattooed from shoulder to wrist…Finally Dave broke off his unheeded monologue on City’s left backs of the last two decades. ‘It could be any of ‘em,’ he growled. ‘All women are slags.’
‘What, every last woman in the world?’
He thought hard for a few moments: ‘Nay, round here. I only know round here.’
I noticed that all the men were looking at each other with furtive, complicitous expressions that tried to say at once ‘It was me’ and ‘I know it was you’. The women were doing the same. It was as if war had been declared but The Puck was still – just – a neutral Zone.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
If there was any way out of this entire mess I’d always felt that it must have been something to do with women – although in my life they’d invariably only made everything worse. I wondered if The Slag didn’t even know she was The Slag and was getting on with her life unawares. Maybe she’d hurt Him by not noticing Him, by remaining entirely unaware of His existence?
If you really put your mind to it you could be hurt by anything. I’d spent all the previous summer watching from my window the arrivals and departures – at 8.10 and 5.05, Monday to Friday – of a girl who, to avoid the NCP toll, used to park her blue Volvo on the slip road below the garages. Tall and dark with a long pony tail, she was always dressed the same: black soft leather jacket zipped right up with tight moleskin trousers tucked into high-heeled green half-boots – I always liked people who settled on a look and then stayed with it. When it rained she held an umbrella with her arm fully extended and a dead straight line of neck and back, like Mary Poppins. Her car gave no clues as to which district she came from or where she worked: no dealer’s flash in the window, no clothes or books on the back seat, no cigarettes or sweets in the dashboard, no mascots or fuzzy dice, not even a radio so I could see what station she listened to. Its windows and bodywork, though, were always scrupulously clean.
Although I must have been invisible to her as I stood far above in the darkness behind nearly closed curtains, she often paused and, shading her eyes, looked up in my direction. Although her figure far below was tiny I could discern the colour of her eyes – somewhere between blue and green – read ‘AERO’ on the catch of her jacket’s zip and pick out on her back pockets the strainings of every single white stitch. I sometimes considered waiting around down there – to smile, strike up a conversation or follow her – but I never did: I liked things just the way they were.
Then, one lunchtime, as I lurched, refocusing, out of The Ram’s Revenge, I literally bumped into her. Laughing, she steadied herself with one hand on my shoulder. My mind raced, trying to adjust to how she’d suddenly blown herself up from half an inch high to – in those heels – slightly taller than me. Although she didn’t need it, she was heavily made up. It couldn’t conceal a cold sore at the side of her nose – my fingers automatically scratched the same place on my own face. Our eyes met and then her smile twisted into an expression of horror or disgust. She turned white, then beetroot-red, then ducked her head, clutched her boxy handbag as if it had been a threatened baby and went clattering and stumbling down the steep cobbles of Ivegate.
I stood there frozen. It was as if with that one look she’d taken in everything about me. How could she believe any more in her guardian angel on the seventh floor now that she knew that he was waiting for her every morning and evening, unzipped and ready, with a wad of Kleenex in his hand? On the way back to the block, without premeditation, I kicked-in her car’s passenger door. At five past five she stood with hands on hips and stared straight up at my window for a full two minutes before getting in and driving away. She never parked there again. It felt far worse than when my wife went, as if I’d destroyed the most important relationship of my life – but I didn’t think of her as a slag, just as I hadn’t blamed my wife for liking or not liking being hit. Probably I was no kind of man at all.
As soon as the quiz started I left The Puck: The only question that interested me was ‘What are you drinking?’ The craze would soon pass – like striptease, karaoke or stripkaraoke. Even on a Friday evening the city centre was deserted and silent, except for the starlings screaming from the roof