Sheena, page 1
Sheena
Brian Stableford
BRIAN STABLEFORD is a prolific writer living in Reading, England. His fiftieth novel (and seventy-fifth book), Year Zero , appeared in June 2000, close on the heels of The Fountains of Youth , which is the third volume in a future-history science-fiction series that began in 1998 with Inherit the Earth. Earlier novels include The Empire of Fear, Young Blood, and The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship. His other awards include the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987), and the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987). His recent nonfiction includes Yesteryear’s Bestsellers and Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence. “Sheena” is a story that I privately consider third-stage romanticism; when you’ve lost faith in love and still have to live and live and live, you might as well believe in the nonbelievable…
IF I’D HAD a quid for every time I heard the old joke beginning, “What do you say to a sociology graduate?,” I wouldn’t have had to get a stopgap job at all, but nobody pays you a wage to listen to put-downs. Anyway, it’s not true-not any more. Ever since the minimum wage came in, fast-food outlets are deeply reluctant to hire anyone who qualifies for it. The sacred right to be on the wrong end of orders for a Big Mac and fries is now reserved to seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds. Because I was twenty-one when I left university, I had no alternative but to raise my sights.
Fortunately, the introduction of the minimum wage coincided with the wildfire spread of call centres, which allowed me to cash in on the only asset I had-apart, of course, from my sociology degree. Although I was born and bred just off Easterly Road and never had an elocution lesson in my life, my accent isn’t nearly as thick as it might have been. I’d learned to suppress it even further while I was doing my three years at the uni; paradoxical as it may seem, the only way for a Leeds lad to fit in at the local wastepaper factory is to ape the manners and mores of the southern majority.
When I left home I got a flat in Harehills Lane, not to be just a bus ride away from Mum and the sibs-although that’s what I told them-but because it allowed me to tell my new friends that I lived in Dorset. It was a waste of irony, of course. None of them ever thought for an instant that I might mean the posh southern county, and some of them even knew where its humbler namesake was. “Oh, yeah,” they’d say smugly. “Out past St James’s and the Corporation Cemetery.” I might have done better simply to tell the smartarses that I’d been to school in Dorset, saving the revelation that I meant Thorn Walk Secondary for a punch line.
The people at the call centre weren’t, of course, allowed to say that one of the qualifications for the job was a posher voice than most people who’d go for that kind of a job possessed. Their ads only specified a “good telephone manner”-but I could do politeness and patience, too, even though I wasn’t female. Ninety percent of the front liners were lasses, perhaps because a “good telephone manner” is one of those things that most females develop naturally in their teenage years, like bulimia, PMT, and deodorant addiction. Lads don’t usually develop a “good telephone manner” because boys take an essentially utilitarian view of the phone, making short and functional calls, whereas lasses find a perverse kind of intimacy in the form and touch of a plastic receiver which delivers gossip as if by magic.
Not that I was a common or garden male chauvinist, of course, even before I changed-we northern scum don’t always conform to stereotype.
All call centres are pretty much alike, although the one on Scott Hall Road where I went to work seemed distinctly incestuous, by virtue of the fact that we were fielding queries on behalf of a firm that made, installed, and customized all kinds of telephone equipment, up to and including call centres. Although there was only one other graduate in my intake and two already on the strength it was stopgap work for practically everyone who manned the phones, because people can take only so much of a job which involves dealing sensitively with boorish clients who are confused or angry before they’re put on HOLD and twice as bad afterwards. We got calls from customers who were resentful because they were too stupid to follow the instructions telling them how to work their kit, customers who were livid because the kit couldn’t do what they wanted it to, and customers who were incandescent because they thought they’d been overcharged-that was about it. Although I did two weeks’ basic training in the kinds of products the company sold, the only advice I was allowed to give was script-based stuff that didn’t get much more sophisticated than “have you checked that the unit’s plugged in?” My job was to take down details of problems so that I could refer them to the appropriate technical staff or accounts department, with profuse assurances that somebody would phone back shortly with real help.
I didn’t expect the work to be difficult, and it wasn’t, but it was peculiarly taxing to have to maintain a polite front in the face of such relentless incompetence and hostility. Apart from the fact that the money was enough to feed me, pay the rent, and nibble away at my overdraft, the job’s main advantage was the flexible shift system. This allowed me to vary my hours-taking time out to attend interviews for real jobs whenever they came up-and made overtime easily available if I wanted it. There was a period when I thought there was an even greater advantage-the fact that females were in such a large majority that no shift ever had more than three blokes working alongside twenty nubile females-but I soon learned better. In a competitive environment like that, I thought at first, even a sweeper with lead boots could score at regular intervals, but it didn’t take long to encounter the downside of the situation.
It wasn’t that the lasses weren’t up for it. Quite the reverse, in fact. I doubt that there was one among them who hadn’t lost her virginity at thirteen and taken to the sport like a duck to water, but they certainly didn’t play by the rules I’d got used to at the uni. Maybe it was a side effect of the working environment and maybe it was just a sign of the times, but the great majority didn’t bother with “dating” or “relationships” at all. What they did were “girls’ nights out,” on which they’d go out in gaggles of eight or ten, drinking like fish and laughing like lunatics with one another, until the time came to go home-at which time, if they happened to fancy a shag, they’d just pick some bloke at random and drag him off. It was easy to arrange to be one of the blokes-the slags weren’t at all shy about inviting their male colleagues to join them on their riotous nights off, and if you stuck with them all night you were absolutely guaranteed to cop off with someone-but there was a price to be paid. I tagged along only once before I realised exactly why the other lads at work were so reluctant to accept any invitations from their female workmates.
The problem with being a male hanger-on on a girls’ night out in Leeds is that it’s rather like being a male stripper at a hen party-in fact, you have to be bloody careful that it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You’re the butt of all the banter, and the talk gets filthier with every unit of alcohol that’s sunk-and we’re talking double figures by eight o’clock-so the suggestive remarks, the lewd questions, and the probing fingers become increasingly intrusive and increasingly aggressive. It’s not just that they’re mimicking what they see as the essential features of lad culture-which would be more than bad enough, believe me-but that while they’re doing it they feel that they’re getting their own back for thousands of years of indignity heaped upon their mothers, grandmothers, and so on, all the way back to Eve. Because of that aspect, lasses don’t go over the top in the kind of relaxed, natural way that their male counterparts do; in over-the-top terms, every girls’ night out is the second day of the Somme, and the troops sure as hell aren’t in any mood for taking prisoners. I suppose it isn’t so bad if you can just grit your teeth and wait for the payoff at the end, even though you don’t get to choose which of the witches will eventually take you home, but for anyone with an ounce of sensibility the path to that consummation is way too thorny. Even for blokes, pull-a-pig contests are pretty tacky, but when lasses start, it gets positively disgusting. After two hours of listening to those kinds of reminiscences and hypotheticals, no man alive can get any kind of kick out of scoring, even if it happens to be the one he actually fancies who eventually drags him off. No matter what she whispers in his ear when they’re finally alone, he always feels like a prize porker ripe for the Polaroid laugh track.
All of which is beside the point, really-except that it’s the context that explains exactly how and why I became fascinated by Sheena Howell. She seemed to be the only lass on the various shifts who never went on girls’ nights out and never indulged in any of the ritual humiliations that gave the others such insane delight.
You might think that as an obvious singleton Sheena would be the prime target of all the lads who’d ever been battered and bruised by a night out with one or other of the gaggles, but she wasn’t. The others thought she was “too weird.”
When I asked one of the old hands, Jez, how Sheena had come to have this reputation, when she seemed so inoffensive, he filled me in readily enough,
“She’s dressed for work right now,” he said, “but those are her civvies. She’s a Goth-nights out she wears nothing but black, hair in spikes, eyes made up like fireworks. Wouldn’t be so bad if it were only the outfit, but she’s a vampire Goth-not just an Anne Rice fan, though that’d be bad enough, but a full-blown pretender. Says she learned to hypnotise herself so she could access her past lives,
You couldn’t tell any of that by watching Sheena at work.
She was small and thin, and couldn’t possibly have weighed more than seven stone, but she seemed more ethereal than feeble to me. The fact that her hair was black with mousy roots was only exceptional because the regular harpies mostly had hair that was blonde with mousy roots. She was usually clad in worn black jeans and grey T-shirts implausibly declaring that she was a member of the Royal Redondan Naval Reserve or the Israeli Defense Forces, which qualified as dressing down even by the relaxed standards of Phoneland. She did seem as if she wasn’t quite there, but not because she looked as if she were mad, in spite of Jez’s slanders. To me, it seemed that she was slightly faded, like a photocopy of a photocopy. Her telephone manner was exquisite, though. She spoke softly, with perfect, almost musical clarity. Unlike the members of the slag legion, she didn’t give the impression of having momentarily switched off a natural and otherwise-everpresent coarseness. She seemed-to me, at least-to be naturally gentle of tone and manner. She never got pissed off by the callers, which spoke of incredible fortitude, and had a happy knack of calming them down, no matter how irate they were when they finally got past the Chopin prelude that we tortured them with while they were on HOLD.
“I don’t think she’s crazy at all,” I told Jez forthrightly, after making my own preliminary observations. “All that Goth stuff is just posing, anyway. It’s an affectation-a lifestyle fantasy way past its sell-by date. She must be about ready to get over it.”
“Fucking sociology graduate,” was Jez’s immediate response, although he had two A levels himself.
“Has she got a boyfriend?” I wanted to know.
“Used to live with some guy almost as weird as she is. They were in a shitty band, but they broke up-the band as well as the living-together bit. She moved back with her mum. She’ll probably go out with you if you ask, but she won’t let you fuck her, and you’ll have to wear black-to go out, that is. Don’t know what you’d have to do in bed-never got that far. Watch your jugular.”
The next time Sheena and I were on the same two-to-ten shift, I came to work in black Levis and a black T-shirt, whose Gothic qualifications were only slightly compromised by the luminous green X-Files logo on the back. When the shift was about to finish, I logged off five minutes early, having already taken my quota of calls, and went over to her cubbyhole.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Tony Weever, with a double e. Started a couple of weeks back. Wondered if you’d like to go for a drink with me before we go home. We’ve got an hour before closing time.”
I was steeled for some kind of scornful put-off, but all she said was, “Okay.”
“You’re Sheena, right?” I prompted.
“That’s right,” she said, turning away so that she could take one more call, although I was certain that she’d already made her score. I waited patiently for her to finish, then guided her to the recently redecorated Cock and Crown in Sholebrooke Avenue, which was safely distant from any watering hole that the harpy patrol might be nipping into for a quick one. She asked for a half of Dry Blackthorn, showing commendable restraint.
“Never been in here,” she observed. “The maroon plastic upholstery’s seriously revolting.”
“You should have seen it before,” I told her. “Bad case of Oscar Wilde wallpaper-three pints and you wanted to fight it to the death.”
She didn’t laugh, but she contrived to give the impression that it wasn’t because she didn’t understand the joke.
“Jez told me you used to be in a band,” I said when we sat down.
“Yes,” she said. “It split. Davy and I are hoping to do something else.”
“Davy?”
“We used to live together, but we don’t now. It’s just a music thing now.”
“You sing?”
“And write lyrics. He does the music. We’ll record a CD when we’re ready.”
“A DIY job?”
“That’s right. It’s normal, with our kind of thing.”
“I was at the university for three years-did your band ever play there?”
“No. What did you do?”
“Sociology.”
“So why aren’t you a social worker?”
“That’s social admin. If I wanted to do something like that, I’d have to do a vocational qualification. I considered the probation service, but only for a minute. Much safer to deal with the criminal classes over the phone, and I’m too deeply in debt to do another year’s training right away. I’m hoping to get a job in the media, but so’s everybody else in the world. Where do you live?”
“With my mum, in Cross Gates. You?”
“Out past St James’s and the Corporation Cemetery. No dad?”
“No. Mum was married, but I was too young to notice when it broke up. He died soon afterwards. Mum took Libby-that’s my older sister-to the funeral, because she remembered him, but I didn’t go.”
“I don’t know my dad either,” I admitted, “although he’s still alive. Mum and he were never married. My two brothers and I all have different fathers, so it all got a bit complicated.”
“Lib’s my full sister,” she said, “but my little brother’s only a half.”
The conversation was flowing more easily now that we’d established things in common, but it was way too downbeat.
“So why’d you change your name to Sheena?” I asked, in a blatant attempt to lighten it up.
“Libby went to see the Cramps on their last British tour, shortly after I joined the scene. They had a song called
‘Sheena’s in a Goth Gang.’ Lib started calling me Sheena because she thought it was funny, in a contemptuous sort of way. The best way to deal with put-downs is to accept them and take them one step further, don’t you think? Now I’m Sheena to everybody.”
“While the real you remains secret. Why not? Does the fact that you sometimes wear an Israeli Defense Forces T-shirt mean that you’re Jewish?”
“No. Davy brought it back for me from Jerusalem. He bought it in an Arab shop on the Via Dolorosa. He thought it was funny that the Arab shops were making money out of them. Maybe the Arabs did, too. The Redondan Naval Reserve one was from him, too. He gets the Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter. You’d probably like him.”
I had my own ideas about the likelihood of that, but I wasn’t about to spoil things by saying so. Nor was I about to a sk her opinion of past-life regression or vampires unless and until she introduced the topic first. A changed name is one thing; esoteric interests that she might be taking a shade too seriously were another.
“I don’t know much about Goths,” I confessed, thinking that it was probably safe to go that far. “I’ve seen them around, of course, ever since the good old days when the Sisters of Mercy were the local heroes.”
“That’s retro-Goth now,” she said. “Things have moved on.”
‘To Marilyn Manson?”
“That’s flash metal-bastard son of Alice Cooper.”
“Nick Cave?” I queried, getting slightly desperate.
“He’s still okay, but basically mainstream. The whole point is not to like the things that other people like, not to think the things that other people think, not to want the things that other people want, and not to do the things that other people do. Every time an idol becomes generally popular, the insiders lose interest. If you’d ever heard of any of the bands that I’d pick as favourites, I’d probably be disappointed.”
‘Try me,” I said bravely.
“I like to dance to Inkubus Sukkubus and the Horatii. I also listen to Ataraxia, Mantra, and Sopor Aeternus, and dark ambient stuff like Endura.”
The bright side was that I didn’t have to disappoint her.
“Even an oppositional subculture has to have norms of its own,” I pointed out, letting my sociology degree show.
“You still have to think the things that certain other people think, etcetera, etcetera. Want another?”
