Culture Sucks Down Words

Here lies another `commisioned` piece intended for either `openwide` magazine or Transmission, whichever replies first. It is another 1000 word discipline (my discipline this time...how silly) Thoughts, criticisms, etc to the same bruised ego!
A knowledge of the Manic Street Preachers oeure is not essential. I`m afraid it is fiction (except for the bangles)



JOYS ARE COUNTERFEIT

I knew all the words to `Motorcycle Emptiness`, that`s how I won her heart. It was no big thing; the lyrics were on the inlay to the album. We`d sit in her darkened rented room and watch videos; `Rumblefish`, `Betty Blue`, `Streetcar Named Desire` or `One Flew Over The Cuckoo`s Nest` with the flickering screen bathing her in a half light. If the film was `Betty Blue`, we would be illuminating the room with our pale bodies by the midway point. I would look into her eyes at the final moments, until then it proved too much for my erogenous zones to bear. If ever I see bangles rattling on a woman`s wrists, I always think of her, or of Beatrice Dalle, and I have to sit down.

We were two seventeen year old Kohl eyed souls craving acceptance. As far as the Manics went, I was playing at it, but she was besotted. The reverse was true of our relationship. She was studying Humanities, her father had a prime position lined up for her, post-graduate, but she hung with the Philosophy crowd. They initially didn`t take her seriously, but when she, just the once, removed those omnipresent bangles to reveal thin, hard red lines on her lower arms which she scrubbed at in nervous sweeps, well that all changed. That it took this to make them respect her said a lot about the circles we moved in.

Once a week, on Darkside night at `C`est La Vie’, she`d grip her cider and black tightly and gaze up at me adoringly. I was tall and underfed, my graffitied shirt hung from my coat hanger frame and my pipe cleaner legs appeared from beneath in tight white Wranglers. She made me drink Brandy and Babycham. On our first date at C`est La Vie, I had requested a pint of bitter, not knowing what to order. “Bitter?” she scoffed, those hard `t``s never harder “Bitter? That`s the drink of a fat racist in the Conservative Club. Vodka?” But I hated the chemical taste and opted for her second choice.

I most fondly remember the day we traipsed up to the Tower for a picnic. I was on a strict ration of sliced Quorn sausage and tossed salad, but I feasted on her beauty. Her hair tossed, not unlike the salad although infinitely more palatable, in the brisk wind of altitude. All the time we were there the sky was as clear as an infant’s conscience. Just as we emerged from the long, mile long winding path, the sky turned battleship grey and the heavens opened just as we settled into the ramshackle bus shelter. The crash of the rain on the prefabricated roof and the streaming windows whispered `romance` and created a rudimentary heart in clean drops on my shoe. On the bus I wrote our names inside an ostentatiously large love heart in the window mist. She smiled indulgently and gazed, head slightly angled, as if on a child who had attempted a tricky maths problem and valiantly got it wrong.

The nights walking to, and from, her room were amongst the best of my life. The late night October rain gave the streets a look of black marble and my Walkman would seep words of endearment into my ears, words she never deigned to say. It wasn`t the Manics of course; they didn`t do love songs. I used to secrete a Motown tape in the stairwell before I climbed the four flights to her room.
I`d no more subscribed to the whole `Motown Junk` thing than I had temperamental lifts
In the doomy room, she`d read Situationist literature or Tennessee Williams under an angle poise lamp, whilst I focused hard on her studied look of concentration. Her face, in repose, made her look so self-possessed that it broke a thousand unwritten laws. The Pope would have whimpered longingly.

I knew I had only snagged her through my resemblance to a drainpipe and autistic perusal of sleeve notes. I was training to be an electrician. The prosaic nature of my calling gave her chance to vent `working class hero/ dignity of labour` diatribes at folk.

I met her mother only the once and I joined in the silence. She fixed her mother with a blank look. There seemed real defiance in her grip on my hand. I suspected she returned there on some nights for matters of hygiene and finance, but she seemed to resent her mother simply for being there and her father for his long absences.

I tried to keep it together, but I was forever walking on eggshells. I knew she was out of my league and I suppose my lack of confidence showed through in my gauche demeanour. I mean, I was so proud of her winning a bar room debate about the negative influence of the Americanization of the world, purely on a passionate defence of the VietCong that I showed my own passion by kissing her hungrily, post-debate. She thought this demeaned her stance by compromising her equality. I just thought her wonderful. We agreed to differ. She had proved she was more than adept at arguments.

One day, I told her a joke I had heard on the radio. She glared at me wordlessly. I still don`t know if it was the crass humour or the fact I had been listening to Radio One. In the uneasy silence her stencilled t-shirt said it all: Spectators of Suicide. I was watching love slowly loop a rope around its neck and slowly twist away on a hook. She had even loaned her `Betty Blue` video to Julia form C`est La Vie. I knew the consequences of that.

She left me the week later for a taller, thinner boy who knew the words to `Soul Contamination`. I couldn`t compete. It was a B-side and not on the album. I reacted badly. I did something profoundly stupid. I went home and listened to Lionel Richie. I guess I should have known all along we weren`t 4 Real.