Our Ladies, page 5
Aye, right enough. Some folk nodded. Ana-Bessie and Kay didn’t.
And the single Mum’s allowance! What a joke. Another thing, the government going on about us girls up at pre-natal. Well it was a member of the fucking Her Majesty’s fucking Navy that got me in this state in the first place!
A huge cheer of laughs went up.
Aye, do they fucking think of that!? Michelle shouted.
See the sub in the bay, eh? Manda got straight in there.
Aye. Good in the Mantrap the night, girls!
AYE!!!! a big call went out.
Well yous watch yourselves.
Do you still hear from him. The one? … wee Maria sputtered.
He wrote a letter, aye, but ah cannie go way to the South, it was just a wee night of fun, now ma mum won’t let me anywhere. I’m goan end up having the baby in ma fucking bedroom at this rate.
There was a pause, then Michelle added, I’ll have to tear down ma Take That posters, or they’ll scare the Baaby!!
Another big laugh went up …
Ah, can’t believe how little you show, you just look great, Fionnula (the Cooler) was still stood with her hand in under the top, waiting for baby to kick.
Have you no felt it yet? Manda sort of snapped.
Aye, loads.
Feel it there? Michelle looked into Fionnula face.
Yup.
Michelle smiled, Ah really wish ah could come with yous the night. Fionnula slowly removed her hand and blazer-pocketed it.
Cmon then, Fionnula spoke, almost a whisper and so only-to-Michelle, you almost jumped when Kay Clarke spoke, so sudden her voice squeaked a wee bit on the ‘I’.
I’ll pay you in, Michelle.
Virtually all turned to stare at Kay Clarke, with her yellow Librarian badge and her green Prefect button on her blazer lapels. She had a real Tennis Club brooch too.
Michelle was quick getting off the mark, Oh, ah couldn’t do that. Thanks anyways, Kay. Ah’ve got to get going, see yous right.
A lot, See ya’s and Byeee’s chorused out.
Michelle had taken two steps back and held up a half arm with the fingers splayed out in a star-fishy wave. Fionnula stepped with her.
Come’n come on with us. Just the one night?
Ach, ’ll see Fionnula, ’ll ask the Old Dear right?
Fionnula stopped following and the pregnant young girl walked on, smiling.
Eleven at the door to Barrels, right?
Michelle laughed, no looking back. Maybee!
Fionnula turned and walked to the choir. She gave Kay a strange look but Kay was staring up at something.
LOOK! Kay Clarke pointed up, her cheek to the mournful clouds so half her face seemed blue, the other invisible and the ground level world slowed … stopped as, wings wide, Lord Bolivia’s red head, pink-yellow and green wings, moved over the choir, like a happiness that wasn’t allowed below such skies, against these curt roof angles of slate and granite.
Everyone’s head turned back towards the New Chapel door which swung shut with a glint of copper.
Simultaneously Sister Fagan screamed, ran down from the main entrance to the school, followed by Sister Condron, her bucket swinging madly.
Lord Bolivia made it onto the flat roof of the amusement arcade before the first seagull dipped a wing and curved in from above Wilson’s Garage, landed and ran at the parrot and stabbed it with its beak. Bolivia shrieked, took off and fell, then pulled up, powering off over the tennis court, chased by two other gulls, the rising and falling wing strokes moving into the morning.
‘The sense of gigantic transition, of going Southward, downward’ MALCOLM LOWRY
The bus moved along loch sides, swurled like a compass needle at their bridged-heads and travelled down opposite banks, so’s you could look, cross water and see where you’d come from.
If the road was ever straight it was only to travel up Glen floors then turn the leftwards or rightness yet again into other glens or up round ridge roads.
The bus moved between mountains, along the routes and byways the Port people must use to visit cities, through the rosary of villages and outlying settlements.
Summer, like a furious rash, was upon this land. Fresh bracken, upright and astute, the stalks’ growth waverings, visible close to the road as they creamed up the brae runs. The emerald of the land made the mountain gushings of froth all the more white, as they fell and shuffled from the rain days of summits into the concrete channels that narrowed their force, drove them beneath the road where cyclists would halt in bright weatherproofs, to watch the burns curl on downhills.
The Old Military roads from before the Clearances, the lifted railway, its abandoned viaducts overrun by rockfalls, birch clusters and grazing sheep; the Old Road, before the Widenings, the Cut Corners, the pulling out of Z bends, Bridge Improvements; the Old Road sometimes showing a wisp of its faded centre lines on the surviving tarmac: all these shadowed the bus’s route.
Inside the girls were divided as to the differing timbres of their voices. The two nuns (Fagan still in tears) sat behind Jerry, the driver.
For some of the girls, among the swayings this way, then that, it seemed strange to be sat with Port girls on a bus journey through their village. When they had moved beyond all villages of Our Lady’s Catholic catchment area, true novelty and excitement began.
Above, the sky grew clear into a conventional summer’s day: overtaking cars had their sunroofs open so’s you could see the thighs of the passengers. The Sopranos, sat along the back seat, had given up kneeling, looking down or across at the cars and lorries pursuing close behind them, before the overtaking.
The Sopranos had wearied with holding up the felt tip scrawled signs and pressing them against the rear window glass:
and
and
Each of the Sopranos drank alcoholic lemonade from the bottles they’d syphoned into the night before. Each flavour of alco-pop had been funnelled to an appropriate litre bottle: lemon flavoured Hooch in a plastic Natural Lemonade bottle from the Superstore. Fionnula’s Garvie’s American Cream Soda bottle held Shott’s Vanilla Seltzer flavour. Orla had two disguised bottles of blackcurrant Hooch. She’d stood and put the empties up on the ridged luggage rack above so’s at every corner or brake application, the bottles were rolling and clinking thegether or sliding forward only to roll back into vicinities and clink again further on down the road.
Kylah was closest to the bottles but she made no move to retrieve them; their sound signalled the Sopranos nascent and flagrant right to drink, signalled their dismissal of any value winning the Final might stand for.
Kylah had her own values and in music it was simply that there was the Cocteau Twins and their girl singer’s voice and so much else was total shite. Though she wouldn’t be able to remember the girl singer’s name, Kylah had what she believed to be all of the Cocteau’s CDs, (ordered from the counter at Woolies).
On the bus as it set off from the Port, there’d been the usual rows and ructions of any bus trip – like the geography one – about what musical cassettes were going to be played en route on the bus system (after Sister Condron had exposed them to the last rehearsal and announced from the aisle, ‘So much work needs doing this afternoon.’)
Kylah had got her way with her cassette cause the whole bus knew she would give the real impression that anything other than music she approved of made her physically ill. If tickity-tick rave music was clicking along, Kylah would put her knees up to her chin and restlessly look one way then the other, saying nothing, her complete exasperation unbearable. She’d specially taken The Cream’s Wheels of Fire with her, cause its therapeutic length would prevent too much shite else going on and despite its baroque self indulgences, the Sisters couldn’t really disapprove.
Maybe ah should get silicon implants, goes Orla.
Ah don’t see what’s wrong wi implants, cause, like, right, they’re just bags of water, aye, like Pamela Anderson, right … goes Kylah, thinking Ah was goan mention she’s married to Motley Crue’s drummer but ah’d best not after the way Orla was snapping when ah says that about Bon Jovi.
Aye. So? went Fionnula, swigging on her bottle.
Well seventy-five per cent of human bodies are water, it’s like a soft contact lens.
Aye? What’s the other twenty-five per cent made of? says Fionnula.
Kylah paused for thought then went, Meat.
No. I meant the contact lens, not Pamela Anderson.
Everyone laughed.
I like Kate Moss’s tits, but can’t stand all that Calvin Klein shite that comes with her, says Orla.
The Sopranos had started playing strip poker up back the bus and Orla was refusing to join in cause of her tit size. It was the same strip poker rules they would play up the back in Cyclops’s Maths class. They knew they’d stop playing, out often – feined boredom, fore it got at all interesting. Anyway, no ways would it equal the Strip Twister game Fionnula initiated at her Seventeenth, in her bedroom, when they’d all been lagered up and Fionnula had got down to just knickers.
Kylah was in a band and on Saturdays she’d take the bus out Silvermines where they practised in Scout Hall. They were called Lemonfinger and had played one high school dance, a dance at the High School Hostel for island pupils and at a youth club disco. They were good, but Kylah kept Dab Hand and Low Lights and what she thought were her best songs, to herself; still Kylah cringes to think she played the boys Time Will Tell. They recorded that on the new sixteen track up the amateur radio station.
Reason Kylah keeps the songs to herself is, she fair reckons she’ll be needing those songs when Lemonfinger split up, or chuck her out. Reasons Kylah feels relatively secure about the band splitting up is that she’d had it off with Guitar, Bass and Drums and none of the three know she’s been with the other two.
Kylah loves to be in Lemonfinger, putting her lipstick near to the microphone on each of their originals and three cover versions (The Snake by The Pink Fairies, Grimly Forming, by The Great Society and Help Me, Mary by Liz Phair, which makes Kylah, sound like a nubile Old Testament prophet. Drummer does some brill double beats, two fantastic vocal breaks).
Lately, Kylah has got to turning and looking at the guys when she sings Grimly Forming, the guitar sound climbing over everything …
I looked out my window
the cloud was grimly forming.
Waiting for the rain I saw
the one dark cloud forming.
The soldiers paid no heed,
I could hear their hollow laughter.
Down the hills in pairs and threes
the Red Cross girls came after.
And Kylah would move away, towards the hypothetical audience.
Kylah didn’t like that song they’d wrote, Homage to Catatonia, its stupid lyrics went, and Kylah knew fine they were just about the three of them getting spluttering on stupid loco weed in one of their narrow wee bedrooms up each of the councils. Not that hers was bigger, she just had less records all over the shop … and she’d been in EACH of their bedrooms in the afternoons, checking out the differences in their penises.
There was just nowhere to sing on Homage, the way keeps changing; it just sounds laboured, like the fucking acoustic guitar ‘prelude’ they called it (which he probably got from NME or something) – that they went and tagged on Time Will Tell, after Kylah had a night out with the Sopranos and left them three on the sixteen track.
These chords that turn inside out were hers, they didn’t have the right to go adding poncey, twangy bits. Kylah had sussed that a lot of cool, cool songs are just three movements of the hand, a powerful melody singing bit over, chorus, variation, chorus and that’s it. Turn the chords inside out on the middle eight, discourage, Spimmy from his effects pedal, talk him into changing two fingers on the chord pattern, or just bend the strings on the chord. It was simple as that ‘less just naturally brilliant like Superstar, doing Life is Elsewhere.
One thing Kylah knows and learned from listening to Sinatra, and that Superstar guy, whose voice makes her want to hug him: the coolest singers lead the band … play AGAINST the music but never spoiling. They don’t just sing along with the chords, sorty, ‘yah yah na na guitar-and-the-singer-does-the-same’. That’s just gormless, perpetual crap. You be brave enough to sing against.
Like on Kylah’s CD player, a Sanyo bottom of the range that her Mum got her last Christmas – most shiny button with use is the ‘next track’ as she calls it, button.
Kylah has adolescent ears; impatient ears. Some might call this, in young people, narrow taste, or lack of experience, but it’s exactly cause she tolerates so little that she still sings with her ears, no her head. You could call it brilliant taste.
The boys in the band might as well buy her roses, but cause they’re trying outcool each other, they all bring her two or three CDs each, to Scout Hall every Saturday.
Kylah doesn’t know the names of most of these bands that she takes home with her. She clicks them in beside the shiny button and listens as she puts her make-up on about to go out Saturday night. She doesn’t look at the covers and often returns the discs in the wrong cases, with moisturiser or foundation thumbprints. She’s over, Next-Tracking the CDs every thirty seconds, cept the odd voice she falls for, who can sing. Some famous stuff might be good but it’s no use to her. Jimi Hendrix, couldn’t sing – if he’s so clever why didn’t he write a book, stead trying to sing? Grace Slick – now she can sing, Conspicuous Mainly By Its Absence, better than that coughy thingy Joplin. Best of all, Jack Bruce and Frank Sinatra and that guy in the Grateful Dead – Kylah’d never seen a photo, but she couldn’t listen to the guy without seeing a big Adam’s apple shake when he did those vibrato stuff things – he just sounds so emotional ALL the time, and Liz Phair!
That’s the way Kylah sings on the recording of Time Will Tell. She doesn’t like writing words for songs. The way the Cocteau’s girl and the Jap in the German band (who could sing!) made up their own words … own strange language, so it had no meaning but still felt so emotional … so that just goes to show! It’s not meaning.
The boys in the band usually wrote the words and Kylah would take words home and laugh. They were hardly-disguised Love Songs to her. Kylah would find words near the sound and change them. The boys would be upset to find a line
When I see you come out the green
With your blue dress on
by next Saturday, changed to:
The I see blue come out the dream
The Long Island Iced Tea Strong
During practice, if she didn’t wear tracky bottoms, the boys would gawp terrible at arse and tops of thighs and tits. Even if she turned to the cymbals of the kit, so close she could feel the air swish, when he down-smashed them, the drummer would be gloating at her pelvis.
Kylah wrote all the words for Time Will Tell, bout when Orla got took down to the hospital for the radiation treatment they couldn’t give up in the Port, and all thought she’d die.
Fair,
Fair-haired girl
Why do you still go on?
You know the things we’ve done
though the summer’s just young.
And I know seasons,
Time passing is rough
Chorus Cos I’ve heard
Time will tell
Where we’re all going
Kylah loves the tight camaraderie of practice. Loves the wet morning smell, the insects she dodges on the single tracker up to Scout Hall, Saturday mornings, her sleepiness evaporated on the bus – she adores the smell of the hall, its wee, cobwebby windows, the sound of rain on its tin roof, with her squatting and pissing in the toilet, the same one the boys use, its massive downward cascade as you tug the chain and approach the really loud sound of the boys jamming, which they always do while she pees. She loves Marlboro and cherryade as they relax, listening to a playback on the two-mike tape machine.
Loves the way the boys have stopped scrabbling to accompany her down the garage for cigarettes and the special cherryade you can’t seem to get anywhere else, then at the end of a good day, they’ll really go hysterical, swapping instruments, her on drums and one of the boys singing, Smoke On The Water.
It’s sweet too, the way, two of them with guitar cases, walk her to the bus and wait till it comes, always wishing she would go to Silvermines Hotel for a drink but knowing she won’t and if any of them have got a lift into town, saying they might see her the night and her knowing they will but she’ll be in the cocoon of the Sopranos; or the night she got off with a guy just cause guitarist was hanging round in the Mantrap. She was feeling bad cause she heard the next Saturday, he’d thumbed it the nine mile home without a lift, mortal as a newt.
Kylah loved the band, the little something it gave her. So little, she secretly knew all she ever needed were the practices. She senses they were The Best Days. She felt the ‘gigs’ as the boys kept repeating, a strain. She got a feeling of ridiculousness. It was nerve-racking and she never knew what to wear.
There was once a fight. She’d said they needed a PA for the drums so he could play softer cause his hammering was impossible to sing above. When it got huffy, Kylah says, Mind, it was yous asked me to join this fucking band. It was true. The Sopranos were in the Mantrap, a Saturday night; a grunger from the proddy High walked up to Kylah and knelt at her leg to shout in her ear.
The other Sopranos were stunned, cause they were sitting at table and no guy was ever permitted to make a move then. The guy shouted something in Kylah’s ear, she shouted something back, this was repeated, the boy rose and left.
In response to the stares, Kylah let out a burst of laugh then yelled, He asked me to join his band, says they heard me singing.
