If you’re not some up-yourself London gaylord with the world of computers at your fingertips, or else some yummy mummy with a tubby hubby who’s got the flashy cashy, it can be pretty hard living down here, despite the candy-stripes and the carousels and the big blue to console you. ‘London prices, Brighton wages,’ goes the old saying – tell me about it! Basically, at my end of the barrel – which is the bottom, let’s not mess about – you can either do seasonal work – on the pier or in the souvenir shops – or you can do domestic stuff – brats, cleaning, cleaning brats – or you can wait on some fat-arsed snobs in restaurants; not even bars at my age, which might’ve been OK, considering all the buckshee booze you’d get to pour down your neck. Or perhaps – oh, joy! – I could bury my youth and beauty in a call centre. Jeez, talk about spoilt for choice!
And of course they all pay shit wages. It’s messed up, this. You think of a job that’s cushy or enjoyable – actor, singer, model, whatever – and they all pay like a fortune. But you think of a job that’s really demanding, or crap, and they pay peanuts. What’s that all about! Should be the other way round by rights. No wonder girls go on the game.
So it was with a heavy heart that I trudged down to the jobcentre next day. Mind you, I say ‘trudged’, but it was more like ‘sashayed’. ‘Shimmied’, even! One thing I’ve learned in this life so far: the less you’ve got the more front you’ve got to show – it’s all very well for posh girls to grab a crumpled old shawl and just dab a touch of blusher on their mugs and flit out the door without even brushing their hair, but I don’t feel dressed without a faceful of slap. And of course, That Walk; the Sugar Strut, like four stoned puppies fighting in slo-mo in a partitioned sack – two in front, two behind! It’s hard for me to tone down my walk – it’s my trademark – but I didn’t want to overdo the glamour and piss off the pen-pushers at the jobcentre. So I settled for pale pink pedal pushers, a shocking-pink bomber jacket and puce wedges. Only two earrings – two in each ear, that is – two shades of eyeshadow and one coat of Marvelash. And for the rest I went ‘au naturel’, as they say – nude lipgloss rather than lipstick, cheek stain rather than blusher and crimped hair instead of proper straightened. I must’ve looked like one of those demented milkmaid bints you see pictures of, prancing around with buckets on a stick across their shoulders, I was that undone-up.
Didn’t do no use though – I knew this old dyke didn’t like me the minute I set eyes on her. Shame, ’cos I could have done with a bit of a hand up from the Muffia. So I start outlining the sort of thing I see myself being suited to – actress, model, whatever you call those sluts who go around dressed like cowboys shooting tequila out of guns. Then SHE comes back with all this stuff I’m SO not feeling: waitress, cleaner, CALL CENTRE! Like, NOT!
‘Look,’ I said quietly. I figured it was time to play my trump card. ‘I might look like a flashy, gorgeous piece of aye-uss –’ I always pronounce it like that, American-like – ‘but I’m, YOU KNOW, one of your lot.’
The old bird looked at me blankly.
‘A rug muncher,’ I said helpfully, a bit louder this time. ‘I’ve got my LIQUOR LICENCE! Geddit? I’M A DYKE, LIKE YOU!’
You know, Kizza always said I didn’t know how loud I was, and I guess the little know-all was right on this one occasion. Whatever, the room had fallen silent and everyone was looking.
‘Miss Sweet,’ she says, all uptight like, ‘I am a mother of three children and grandmother to four. I am not, and have never been, as you so delicately put it, a dyke. Let alone the other things.’
The silence had stopped now, that was the good news – but the sniggering had started, that was the bad. So that being the case, I thought I might as well be hung for a sheep as a creep, and went for the big laugh.
‘Well, lady, if that’s the case, why are you wearing prison shoes and a moustache I could hang my thong on?’
She looked at me dead nasty for a moment – and then she smiled. And I knew that smile weren’t sweet, not one bit. She reached into her little box of tricks and handed me a pink bit of paper. And that’s how I started my tour of Hell.
2
As I slogged up Clifton Hill in the pissing rain I knew I was in for a crap time. I’ve got this thing about going up hills – too much like hard work, like having phone sex. Trust me, nothing good ever waits at the top of them – not even Clifton, with its lush white houses and swank blue plaques. So I was expecting something bad. But not QUITE as bad as Baggy and Aggy.
Of course, I didn’t recognize their names on the paper. ‘Messrs Agnew & Bagshawe require a household help, live out. Must be a size 10, to double as pattern model.’
But we’d all read in the
Argus
about the pair of loaded old rag-trade queens who’d decamped down from London a while back and were tucked up well tidy in their big house, polishing their gewgaws and wearing out their jim-jams. The minute I got inside the place I recognized it from a photo spread in
Hello!
– all dark and plush and hello sailor. For a minute I thought I’d fallen on my feet – I mean, household help no, but model YESSS! And they were gaylords, so no wandering mitts, obvo.
Then I clocked the mush on old Baggy – or was it Aggy. About as tall as an oversized toast soldier, head appropriately like a boiled egg with a face drawn on, mouth like a little cat’s butt, looking at me like something the cat had pissed on, then dragged in. A real casing-the-joint look, from my head to my toes and back again – and he wasn’t interested in the bod, I can tell you. I just KNEW that he was pricing every last thing I was wearing to the nearest 50p. And let’s face it, most of it didn’t cost much more than 50p.
‘I’ve come about the job,’ I said helpfully. ‘The modelling and that—’
‘The – OH, the CLEANING,’ he snickered. ‘Well . . . you’re hardly a size ten, are you, dear?’ He looked at my tits, and I swear he was the first man in my life to look at them with something like disgust. Though it could have been envy, the old tart. ‘Not with that pair of cantaloupes!’
‘That’s funny – most people compare them to melons!’
‘Are you for real . . . my word, you are, aren’t you? The perfect real, synthetic thing.’ He stood back and looked me up and down again, not so nastily this time. ‘You’ve got nice small hips, I’ll give you that. Not so much childbearing as Caesarean-demanding.’
‘Size ten hips, size sixteen tits. Good, innit!’
‘Hmm . . . the hips of a boy, the tits of a blow-up toy . . . I think I’m starting to . . . FEEL something . . .’
‘So long as it’s not my tits!’ I leered.
The little cat’s butthole in the middle of his face grew even tighter. ‘Hardly, dear. AGGY!’ he yelled. ‘Get your worthless BTM down here and have a look at what the cat dragged in for us to play with!’
Then Aggy walks in – rolls in, rather. Boy, what a pair – one’s bald as a coot, the other’s fat as a pig. And, believe it, these people make a well lush living telling women how they should look! So Aggy treats himself to a good eyeful too, and immediately I can tell that though Baggy might diss him in front of strange – very strange! – girls, Aggy’s the boss. That’s cos he’s the brains – though that don’t make Baggy the beauty, no way! See, whereas old Baggy was just sort of toying with me when he sized me up, it’s like Aggy is calculating my worth, and not just that of my clothes, down to the nearest 50p. More, what I’m worth to HIM.
‘Turn around, dear.’ I did as I was told, surely a first for me. ‘Well, there’s certainly quite a lot going on there, isn’t there? “Everybody works!” as they used to say in vaudeville.’
‘In what-ville?’
‘Never mind – before your time.’ He narrowed his eyes at me, all calculating like. ‘Hmm – so you came about the cleaning job, did you?’
Well – that and the modelling—’
‘Love-bucket, I specified a size ten to cut my patterns on. Not a full-on Miss Tits to hire out by the hour.’ He sighed. ‘Still, they say that burlesque is back. And no one could deny that you could easily pass for a hoochy-coochy dancer from a Tijuana pony show.’ He turned to Baggy. ‘Well, I suppose I can stand to look at her if you can. At least she doesn’t smell. Hire her!’
Tragically, I was well pleased; hey, they may have been freaks, but they were freaks with a good address and, let’s face it, I’d had precious little of that. Remember, I grew up on the thirteenth floor – unlucky for some! – of ASBO Towers, give or take the odd stay at Her Maj’s Pleasure, if not mine. The big white houses on the seafront, in the squares and up Clifton Hill – up which I now trudged again in the pissing rain on my first day working for Baggy and Aggy – were so foreign to ordinary Brighton kids that they might as well have been made of icing sugar and located on the moon. The only time kids from the Ravendene Estate saw the inside of a Regency house was when they were robbing it!
‘What’s the point in going on holiday if you live in a holiday town?’ my mum used to say every summer when I’d moan at her about taking us abroad. That time me and Kizza legged it was the first time I’d ever stayed in a hotel even!
So despite the rain and the hill, I was well happy to be on my way to somewhere clean and quiet, and trying to keep a lid on my excitement at what lay in store for me. You could say I was in a holiday mood even! And as their lush house came into view, I even started dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if things went well and we got along, I might even become their – what’s the word – muse, yeah, their ‘muse’, and they might ask me to move in with them. Peace and quiet and cleanliness – and, more importantly, a well central shag palace where I could drag fit French-language students back to instead of doing it on the beach, because Ravendene was way far out and they always lived in manky lodgings with some uptight landlady.
Quiet . . . I’ve always been a loud cow, but the older I got – all of seventeen – the more the non-stop racket at mine got totally on my tits. It had been even worse since my minging twin sisters had formed a rap group called ‘Swearers Three’, of all the dumb-ass things, with the little girl from the corner shop, Rajinder. Before school in the morning, after school in the afternoon, on weekend nights when Raj slept over, I had heard their cretinous intro/theme song so often that I was actually hearing it in my dreams, even when they too were asleep.
‘Swearers One! – let’s have some fun!
Swearers Two! – I’ll swear with you!
Swearers Three! – come swear with me!
One – two – THREE!’
Followed by a right mouthful, of course. I ask you, how much practising does that take. ’Sides, Ravendene kids are cursing before they can walk – rehearsing shouldn’t come into it, they’re naturals.
So with this ringing in my ears 24/7, can you really blame me for my uncharacteristically naive dreams as I rang the Baggy-Aggy bell that day? Well, I had just finally got clean from my drug habit, and therefore wasn’t in my right mind. I saw myself being sat down for elevenses that very morning, my dainty feather-duster being gently extracted from my delicate fingers by Baggy as Aggy poured me a double gin from a piss-elegant Regency porcelain teapot and told me that to make an exquisite creature like myself sweat and strain over squalid domestic drudgery was quite like . . . I dunno, sticking a peacock down an S-bend. Making Bambi live in a bucket. You know – just WRONG. And that all I needed to do to earn my daily pay – say, fifteen pound an hour, because it was like CREATIVE now – was just stand there staring into space, all enigmatic like, while they draped lush material on me and consulted each other in low, awed voices. Sweet . . .
I was still queening it over my tragic kingdom when the door lurched open and Baggy was standing there shooting evils up at me. ‘The courtesy of kings?’ he spat, barring my way with his dinky foot.
‘The . . . queen of . . . clubs?’ I answered weakly, thinking it was some sort of gay game.
‘No, Marie!’
‘Maria,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘Ave-Maria Sweet, on the dotted line, but you can call me Sugar.’
‘Really? Well, TARDY is what I call you.’
‘Steady on!’ I protested. He didn’t know nothing about my sex life!
‘Yes, tardy! That means LATE, in case you’re not familiar with the word!’ He held out his wrist to me, showing me a crap Barbie watch that even the Teat Twins would have chucked in the bin. ‘What time do you call THIS!’
I peered at it. ‘Um . . . three minutes past nine?’
‘EXACTLY! And those three minutes are minutes I will never, ever be able to get back again. And THAT, Marie, is why punctuality is the courtesy of kings! Because to a CREATIVE person, every minute is a monarch! A monarch which you have seen fit to behead, three times over, with the casual weapon of your tardiness!’ I must’ve looked the way I felt, totally amazed and confused, because he then threw in, ‘
Comprendez
?’
Oh, I GOT that. ‘“Understand” – right?’
You’d have thought I’d accused him of intercourse, the way he reacted – drew himself up to his full four foot nothing and stamped his stunted flipper like a crazy thing. ‘YES! – UNDERSTAND!’ He grabbed me by my arm but it wasn’t in a loving caring way like I’d planned, taking the duster from my hand and making me the official Baggy-Aggy muse. Instead, with a brute force worthy of any Ravendene wife-beating bully, he seized my wrist and dragged me into the house, slamming the door behind me. ‘Understand, Marie, that you are here to facilitate OUR creation! And that we are NOT here to facilitate your recreation, or your PROCREATION, or any of the other AYSHUNS that YOUR PEOPLE use as an excuse to waste OTHER PEOPLE’S time and spoil OTHER PEOPLE’S lives!’
You could have knocked me down with a Fetherlite; what did THREE FUCKING MINUTES matter in the grand scheme of things, or even in the skanky schedule of a couple of woofters? ‘Hang about, mate – chill out—’
‘I AM “chilled”, “mate”!’ Baggy hissed. ‘I am so chilled, you could shake a perfect Martini in my skull!’ He held out one of those dirty great checked plastic laundry bags – and somehow I just knew it wasn’t packed with sumptuous swatches of velvets and satins, and rough-cut patterns just itching to be fitted on my nubile young body, and accessories which I’d be allowed to take home if I really, REALLY liked at the end of long day’s musing. Nope – because they didn’t smell of ammonia, disinfectant and beeswax, to my knowledge. ‘And this, love-bucket – this is all yours. Why don’t you give it a twirl? And when you’ve got every surface in the place so shiny that you can see your pretty face in it, then YOU can chill too. It should only take, ooh, six hours! Ciao!’