Kimberly's Capital Punishment Read online

  Stevie was tetchy that week. He kept stalking round the flat like a starving wildcat. I humoured him, blaming the onslaught of blood on ‘breakthrough bleeding’ or ‘spotting’, or the moon’s position in the sky, or the bad feng shui of the flat. Meanwhile, my womb would be gently cackling inside me, with a bloody nose. I cackled too, curled up on the sofa with two hot-water bottles pressed to my front and back. Poor Kimberly. Poor Stevie. I could’ve carried on forcing periods for the rest of the year as well but, sadly, after the fifth week running, I ran out of sanitary towels.

  Kimberly Clark and … the Hamster from Hell!

  Meet my hamster. Be careful, though – he might bite your hand off.

  I bought Lucifer to keep me company on the lonely, lasagne-flavoured evenings in that flat. At the shop, JG Thomas & Sons, he seemed like a good-natured fellow, cowering in the sawdust before doing a sprint for me and Stevie on his blue wheel (which Stevie appreciated) but, once we got him back to Tottenham, he soon turned out to be a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. I think he’s got psychological problems. By the time we got Lucifer off the 41 and into the flat, he’d already chewed through both ends of his cardboard lodgings, and got started on the palms of Stevie’s hands.

  Like Stevie, Lucifer’s got very little melanin in his irises. In fact, he’s albino. Lucifer got the name partly because of the red eyes, and partly because he leaves a Habitrail of destruction everywhere he goes. Once we got him into his cage – kitted out with swings and roundabouts, a so-called ‘Mush-Room’ to sleep in and a brand-new blue wheel – all Lucifer wanted to do was vandalise it. Me and Stevie tried our best to calm him down, gently lowering our hands into Hell to give him a stroke, but Lucifer was hell-bent on decapitating us. We spent the first week or so with our fingers in plasters.

  By the time Lucifer was eight months old, he’d almost chewed an escape route out of the cage. In a way, I could see parallels between myself and the hamster – while Lucifer had a nice roof over his head and all the love and attention he needed, he must’ve felt suffocated by the same old scenery, and the ultimate lack of freedom. At times I’d sit in front of his cage, as if looking into a strange mirror, wishing I could let him roam the flat, although he definitely couldn’t be trusted around Stevie’s scratchable medallions. He was the only hamster I’d heard growl in my life, but I loved him. Sometimes I felt I had more in common with that hamster than I did with my own boyfriend.

  I like hamsters. Stevie liked football. His only gripe with footy was our television not showing many of the games due to its lack of Sky, and season tickets being so expensive (and Middlesbrough being so far away, and so hopeless). This meant Stevie spent a lot of time down the local pubs – like the Dutch Pub, the Fountain, the Lord Parmo – despite not being a big drinker. Usually, he’d just sit in the corner with a poncey fruit juice, eyes fixed on Sky Sports or Setanta, avoiding the glances of all the hard-looking black and Polish patrons. Sometimes I’d join him, if I fancied being bored in slightly different environs to the flat. Otherwise, I’d just stay at home, contemplating taking up knitting, or stamp collecting, or murder.

  One of the best days of Stevie’s life was when they announced Middlesbrough were to play Sheffield United on terrestrial telly, in the FA Cup fifth round. It was my idea of Hell.

  The day before the big match, Stevie had to go running in his pink outfit at the Data Connection Open, and he demanded I go to Tesco for some supplies: cheese footballs, chicken legs, Doritos, fizzy pop, fresh orange, one can of Carlsberg lager, and a four-pack of Smirnoff Ice for me. I ambled aimlessly round the aisles. I hate supermarkets. Not only do you have to manoeuvre round annoying kids, mams, and sociopathic males in the white glare of twelve or so aisles, but you also have to carry your shopping all the way home, with only two feeble arms. I had to wait fifteen minutes for a bus, with the shopping getting heavier and heavier as the bags filled up with rain. Then, the bus was absolutely rammed and steamy, and I felt flu-ridden and homicidal by the time I squelched back up the stairs to Flat D.

  I splashed down on the sofa, then slowly evaporated once I’d pulled my shoes and socks off and turned up the heating. Round about four, Stevie came back from his Open in good spirits; or, at least, his footsteps sounded chirpy as he bounded across the carpet. Not that I was listening. Twiddling my thumbs, I was tucked up in bed next-door, in the dark, dreaming up revenge for my soaking. My first idea was to leave the shopping bags on the breakfast bar, instead of unpacking them. Yes! Imagine Stevie’s face, waking up to a lukewarm can of Carlsberg! I groaned. I decided to mull it over a bit longer.

  At about sundown, Stevie joined me in bed. He said he was shattered after such a s-s-successful spot of sprinting, but I think he was just looking for an excuse to put his naked body next to mine, in a socially acceptable place to harass me.

  It was my first week in a while without a period, and Stevie ‘Mmmmm’ed, as he clamped his clammy arms around me. He tried to kiss my ears, neck and back, but I stiffened and said, ‘Naw, Stevie. I’m too tired. I’m in bed, aren’t I?’

  Stevie grunted sadly. We turned out the lights. It was only about seven but, since Stevie was apparently so shattered after such a s-s-successful spot of sprinting, he had to force himself to sleep, so as not to lose face. I revelled in his twisting and turning.

  By eleven, Stevie had managed to black himself out. I put on the dotty cardigan and crept out of the bedroom, quietly moving my tiptoes in time with Stevie’s bellowing breaths, so as not to rouse him. He’d gone and left the curtains open in the living space – the whole place was doused in this lovely, fake blue moonlight. I felt shy when the double-decker 243 rumbled past, but none of the stony passengers caught my eye as I stood there in semi-nakedness. I whizzed the curtains shut. Then, I shuffled towards the TV, which was sleeping soundly on standby, next to the flowering cactus and Lucifer’s cage. Lucifer had been condemned to live in the living space by Stevie, who complained about strange noises and insomnia after Lucifer’s trial run in our bedroom.

  I turned on the lamp, which had a shade patterned with diamonds and what looked like Hula Hoops. My shadow jumped across to the opposite side of the room, from where it watched as I switched the TV off at the wall and uncoiled the power cable. I dangled the cable into Lucifer’s cage, then flick-flicked on the bars, to get him interested. Lucifer was in his favourite spot under the Mush-Room, and he smiled when he saw the telly cable. He knew what to do. I switched the lamp off again and left him to it, creeping back into bed with even lighter footsteps.

  The next morning, Stevie awoke – very groggy – at 10.30 a.m. He’d managed to oversleep twice his usual amount (fourteen hours, as opposed to his usually strict seven), and he looked grotesque as he got dressed in his worst clothes. My intestines were squirming about with excitement, knitting themselves into gooey, gruesome plaits. Stevie kept rabbiting on about how much he was looking forward to the football. I had to suppress the giggles, sticking my head into the pillow.

  I didn’t want to miss his reaction to the cable having magically found its way into Lucifer’s cage, so I hopped out of bed fast, and whipped on my worst clothes as well. We wandered into the living space with very bad fashion sense and grey mannequin faces. Stevie wanted to put the telly on early for an hour of pre-match babble, and I chewed my gums ecstatically as he pressed the POWER button, and frowned. For a second we saw the BBC host, then the power cable fizzed unspectacularly, and the picture sputtered out. Lucifer squeaked, panicking, thinking his house was being struck by a tiny shard of lightning. Fortunately, he survived. But, even better than that, Stevie’s silver eyeballs turned scarlet, and they didn’t get to watch the football, and they cast venomous glances through Lucifer’s bars, while he worked his way through his one horrible, lukewarm can of Carlsberg.

  As punishment, I foolishly agreed to go to the Lord Parmo to watch the highlights on Sky. Stevie didn’t speak. I kept shouting, ‘Come on, England!’ at the top of my voice, just to make it worse. Stevie carried on su
lking, staring straight ahead with a soft drink in one hand, as Boro and Sheffield United treated us to a fine display of footballing prowess. It ended up 0–0.

  Stevie was devastated and, as the days went on, I watched with glee as he became more and more detached and unhappy. For some reason, he still didn’t dump me, though. I felt like a wicked witch, but Stevie continued to spend most nights trying to get his hairy broom between that witch’s legs. But those legs weren’t interested. Those legs were beginning to drift elsewhere.

  Kimberly Clark in … the Adventure of One Man’s Tongue Going Where It Shouldn’t Go

  Every day, people see actors on TV pretending to be human – acquiring lovers through scripted seduction techniques; getting hitched; then being unfaithful; having a jolly good, inconsequential shag, and a great old laugh together – and it makes you want to be unfaithful too.

  In the Capital Zoo, there’s a plaque celebrating the fact female Patagonian maras are monogamous. Beavers are monogamous too, as well as penguins, gibbons, black vultures, shingleback skinks, and dik-diks. I think this is because they don’t watch the soaps.

  After months of cruelty towards Stevie, it turned out I was the one suffering the most. The more Stevie put up with my relentless nastiness, the more pathetic he seemed to me. Any normal man would’ve called off the relationship by now, although there was always the chance I wasn’t being obvious enough. Or, there was always the chance Stevie was being far too good a boyfriend, sticking by me through thick and thin, regardless of my idiocy. He was a tricky bastard.

  For the next few weeks, I pulled out all the stops: borrowing his depressive CDs and not putting them back in the right cases; taping over the video where Middlesbrough FC win the Carling Cup; masticating violently at teatime; smashing his favourite mug accidentally against the kitchen wall. But still he kept stressing: ‘I l-l-love you, I want want want to be with you for e-e-e-ever.’

  It’s always surprised me how much aggravation one person can tolerate. Just for fun, I tried to go a whole week in the flat without speaking – feigning laryngitis again – but, instead of annoyance, I got nothing but sympathy from Stevie, and many Lemsips. Perhaps he could see our love affair dangling precariously off a cliff-edge, and he was trying with all his might to reel us back in. We tug-of-warred through winter.

  Although I hated Stevie bringing me to the Capital, it did make cheating on him anonymously very easy. During the early days of being horrid to him, I thought I could refrain from kissing someone else until we’d officially broken up, but I hadn’t counted on Stevie being so hard to shake off. Perhaps every year we’d been together was like an iron claw stuck into our hearts, and it was proving very difficult to prise all four claws out without leaving behind a lot of rust and tetanus.

  On the twenty-second of February, Stevie had a plus-one for this swanky dinner do at his old athletics club in Teesside but, conveniently, I’d already agreed to go out with my Promiscuous Pal Polly from Southampton (I wish she was from Portsmouth for the sake of alliteration, but unfortunately she’s not). I used to work with Polly down Pizza Express when I first moved to the Capital, and before I left the job to become a professional parasite we’d agreed to meet at least once a month for wine and a whinge. Stevie was usually alright about his girlfriend going out without him, but he was desperate not to go to the swanky dinner thing on his own, and I forced him into having an argument with me.

  Me and Polly left the flat in an exaggerated huff, stealing Stevie’s jade green parka so he’d be freezing cold in the North East. The parka swamped me as we swaggered down the High Road, caked in make-up. It was typical of Polly to be near-naked on a Friday night, but this particular evening I gave her a run for her money, in my tightest tights and turquoise bustier. I was like a tiny, rude Russian doll underneath all the furry Siberian apparel. We tapped out a lozhki-like rhythm in our heels, laughing at the night.

  One thing I’ve always hated about the Capital is the tarmac has the audacity to tell you what to do, so we had to LOOK LEFT as we came to the Ghost Train station. Luckily, though, it meant we didn’t get run over by the grey Ford Mondeo blasting over the junction. We clattered down the steps into Seven Sisters, underneath the barely discernible Seven Sisters constellation, and I straightened the Guillotine with my fingertips in one of the circular mirrors.

  We drank Smirnoff Ices on the Subterranean Ghost Train. It’s called the Ghost Train because it transports silent, ghostly lost souls round and round the city. Me and Polly were the only ones making a bit of noise. The train itself was making a hell of a racket, so we had no choice but to scream at each other, and you could tell we were annoying the ghosts.

  I explained to Polly all my troubles with Stevie. She didn’t understand commitment, though – my Promiscuous Pal Polly was a semi-famous maneater in the Capital. She was the type of lady who uses her sexuality as a weapon, mesmerising men with her bottomless cleavage before dragging them helplessly into the nearest available bed or bin alley. In fact, for the whole of spring 2006, Polly used her sexuality as a gonorrhoea dispenser, swallowing up and crippling poor men and boys in its fiery wake.

  In 2007, Polly had a microchip installed in her left arm, to stop her from getting pregnant, and she’s also double-jointed. She’s a bionic shagging machine. Enter at your peril.

  At Piccadilly Circus we jumped off the Ghost Train with mouths overflowing with fizz, swaying along to the honking city rhythms. Our club of choice in those days was somewhere called China White – the swankiest club ever named after smack, I think – where overpaid men buy overpriced drinks for underdressed girls like me and Polly. It was about half nine by the time we got through the lavish entrance, hobbling past the water feature and the pretentious pebbles and all that. Suddenly, I was roasting in the jade green parka. I checked it into the cloakroom, imagining Stevie shivering at his athletics do, with a big blue face. I looked forward to the massive row the morning after.

  My Promiscuous Pal Polly received a Polaroid camera from one of her male slaves for Christmas. She had to buy a new handbag to accommodate it, and now she never goes anywhere without it. For posterity, Polly took a picture of me and her redoing our make-up in the lasses’ bogs, prior to us getting mortalled and disgusting. Then, we tottered onto the dancefloor, trying to be the most over-the-top ones in there. Straight away, Polly had two eligible bachelors closing in on her, like sperms round a scrambled egg. One of them had a square face; the other’s was more triangular. Polly made them buy us some drinks, then we all danced together in an awkward, perfumed circle.

  In the past, I spent the nights in China White watching Polly swap saliva with suited blokes, from a vantage point in amongst the palm trees. I used to pride myself on being faithful to Stevie. The fact that loads of men pestered me made me feel happy to have Stevie, since he wasn’t the type of man who pestered strange girls in nightclubs for sex. However, he was the type of man who preferred to single out one strange girl in a flat above a halal butcher’s and pester her for sex incessantly instead.

  The drinks made me whip one hand round the Square-Faced Bachelor’s waist, and the other one round the top of his bottom. Oh, evil evil temptation. The drinks made me stare at his square face like a goon, until he kissed me. Then, all of a sudden, I felt a chemical reaction in my stomach, like when the teacher lights magnesium and it gives off this incredible snowball-white blast, and you have to look at it through bluey-purple glass so as not to go blind. I looked at the Square-Faced Bachelor through bluey-purple disco lights. My Promiscuous Pal Polly was already licking the Triangle-Faced Bachelor’s mush, right up his hypotenuse, when she spotted me getting off with Square-Face. She squeaked with delight, and couldn’t resist firing the Polaroid at us. Me and my new male friend laughed. Surprisingly, he had a laugh like a stellated dodecahedron: spiky and painful.

  Me and Square-Face only spoke to each other in the names of drinks for the rest of the night, but we kept trying to accidentally bump into each other again and again, and h
ave lots more passionate, hush-hush snogs. It felt incredible to kiss someone new; our lips like four pink slugs sumo-wrestling. Suddenly there was regret, and suddenly there was absolute joy. The one time Stevie joined us at China White, he grumbled about money and ended up drinking tap water. I chuckled in every tooth and carried on kissing the stranger.

  At the end of the night, the bachelors wanted to come home with us, but that was simply out of the question. In the bitter lemon streetlights, the boys were beginning to look ugly. Me and Polly sucked their tongues goodbye, then marched off to an out-of-the-way bus stop. We jumped on the 73, which is shaped like a gigantic eel on wheels, chomping its way through the centre of the Capital.

  We wobbled in our seats, wanting more alcohol. At first we were hardly talking (so depressing it was, travelling on public transport after midnight), but then Polly whipped out the fifteen square photos she’d taken, and we laughed at them, one by one. In some of them I looked good-looking, and in some of them Square-Face looked good-looking, and in some of the later ones neither of us looked good-looking at all. We were like Siamese twins, joined at the tongue. I took the most raunchy example (the one with the four slugs playing skip-rope with our saliva), and slid it into the parka’s secret inside pocket. In that drunken state, I had the queer idea of posting Stevie the photo, should he dump me particularly heavy-handedly – if he dumped me at all, that is. ‘REVENGE’, I would scribble on it, and cackle hysterically.