Kimberly's Capital Punishment Read online

  To keep the demonic depression at bay, I got myself a job as a part-time self-harmer. I substituted the radial artery for the more fleshy, child-safe biceps, slicing thin lines with the cucumber knife, playing noughts-and-crosses with myself. It became a morbid, sickly-sweet treat to slash my arms open like clockwork every day at sunrise and again at sunset, resulting in aaaaaaahh two minutes of relief, then straight back to the sadness. It felt like a more sensible punishment for killing Stevie than taking my own life as well. After all, I thought, two suicides in one week was going a bit overboard.

  Cutting yourself is suicide for fannies.

  Luckily, no one called round the flat during this horrendous period. I was worried about the landlord turning up and demanding rent, only to find his tenant dead and his tenant’s girlfriend in bed, looking like death, with a piss-pot between her legs. I was eating only tuna and cucumber at this point, and wasn’t passing solids very often, thank God. The telly cable was still fried, so I just watched the changing of light and weather through the single-glazed window.

  I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. By the end of that week, I’d gone so long without speaking, I thought my mouth might scab over. My arms were tiger-printed with scabs, too – and my legs. To illustrate just how much I was cutting myself up, I decided to cut up the following bit of text for you (in any case, it was far too depressing in its original format):

  *

  Oh, woe! Do you ever get that f, I decided to focus on the smash your own face in? For sombad bloated blue face. After absolutely obsessed with suffercrosses on my weedy biceps, things, humans love to suffer asures of cutting oneself. Of crisis, instead of just gettoff whole sections of my smiling, they prefer to sit arothe notice-board and imagining the sweet feeling of feel that lovely lovely through their skulls. Oh, if onny darts. Or a notice-board. Of my brain that was making me tions across the gingham bed, strength power-tool! Living aloumber knife, and did twelve more intense, like painting ovet to work on demolishing my thick sloppy indigo. Of all theeeling you just want to about on the whole planet Earthe reason, humans are most depressing – Stevie’s big ing. Along with destroying fifty-odd games of noughts-and-t least once a day. In times my arms became dead to the pleaing on with their lives and for a bit I considered cutting und with wet eyeballs, arms and legs, pinning them to thrusting sharpened pencils throwing darts at them, just toly I could hack out the part pain again. But I didn’t have asad, with an industrial-instead, I just did twelve rotane makes sadness so much picked up the trusty crusty cucr sun-bleached sky blue with rotations back again. Then I se possible things to think scabs.

  CUT TO:

  INT. KIMBERLY’S BEDROOM – UPSTAIRS AT THE HALAL BUTCHER’S – DAY/NIGHT

  EXTREME CLOSE-UP of KIMBERLY’s sleeping head. Her eyelids are shut, dancing to REM. As if by magic, her dead, tiny father, BARRY CLARK, falls from the ceiling, into her earhole. He wears wings and a stainless-steel halo.

  BARRY CLARK

  (in her ear)

  And now for some comic relief: What’s twelve inches long, stiff, has a purple head, and makes a woman scream at night?

  (beat)

  A cot death!

  Kimberly wakes up with a start.

  On the seventh day of depression, I woke up to find the flat full of water again. I couldn’t remember crying in my sleep. I turned over in the bed to find all my tuna and cucumber plates, socks, dirty tissues, and the full piss-pot floating in murky one-inch-deep water. I groaned.

  I hadn’t cried in a couple of days, I hadn’t showered, and I hadn’t done the washing-up, or turned on any taps either. I wriggled my way up the headboard, staring at the grey water with eyes like rusty marbles. It took about ten minutes to realise it was the ceiling that was crying. Or, rather, a water pipe had decided to burst upstairs, springing a leak in my dingy lair.

  I supposed it was time to get in touch with the landlord. I levered myself out of bed, cringing as I felt the leakage splash up my ankles. I grabbed the disgusting piss-pot, plodded through to the bathroom and poured it down the toilet. Despite washing out the saucepan three times in the sink, there was still some yellow residue left behind. I slammed it in the cupboard, and figured I’d never make sauce again. I never made it anyway.

  I looked a state. My flesh was the colour of a tuna and cucumber sandwich, cut into thousands of triangles. Back in the bedroom, I found a knee-length jumper which covered my sins, though the frolicking bunnies on the front didn’t match my emotions.

  I tried to avoid getting dripped on the head as I searched for the Post-it note with the landlord’s number on it. I realised it hadn’t been a dark cloud above my head all this time – it was a leaking ceiling. I felt ever-so-slightly better, making the bed for the first time in a week. I knew I had to make a good impression on the landlord, since I didn’t fancy being kicked out of the flat. I plumped up the pillows and cleared my throat, preparing to speak for the first time in a week. Then, I dialled his number.

  Once I got off the phone, I went and sluiced round a white blob of toothpaste. I massaged talcum powder into my well-oiled platinum hair and put on new trousers. I let Lucifer the hamster set sail underneath the bed, out of sight. I blew him a warm south-westerly with my hairdryer.

  The landlord arrived half an hour later. He seemed pleasant enough. He couldn’t speak brilliant English, but he understood I was Stevie’s girlfriend, and he nodded kindly and compassionately when I explained what had happened to my boy. I had to do the impression of being hung, mind you, with tears frosting my eyelids.

  I asked politely if I was allowed to stay in the flat, and he nodded again and said he’d suspend the rent a week or so, to help me get my feet back on the ground. Wherever he came from, the landlord believed in mourning the dead properly. However, rather than letting me stew, he couldn’t resist sharing his views on ghosts with me, despite my pained expression and unenthusiastic grumbles. Mr Henry was brought up believing in ghosts – and he knew everything there was to know about different cultures’ attitudes towards them.

  Despite his bad English, Mr Henry was a talker. With no hint of irony – and no tact, as it seemed at the time – Mr Henry filled the silence with a tale about this temple in Rajasthan which was occupied by around 20,000 sacred black rats. The rats were treated like royalty – for instance, offered gifts of coconut milk, sweets and garlands – because the local Hindus believed they were their reincarnated ancestors. Mr Henry concluded, straight-faced, ‘So, you know, your boyfriend he is probably still here with you. But not that there is any rats in this flat …’

  After his speech, Mr Henry made it clear the rent would be £515 a month, and my guts tightened. The landlord wanted me to give details of a guarantor, but I explained to him my parents were dead as well, and I got more sympathy and nodding of the head. Luckily, I didn’t have to do the impressions of a car crash and a cardiac arrest. I picked crumbs off my jumper while the landlord fished some papers out of his briefcase-cum-toolbox. I drew the logo of Kimberly-Clark for him on the bottom of our old tenancy agreement. Then I flopped back down onto the sofa arm and stared into my lap.

  Once the contractual formalities were out of the way, Mr Henry said his goodbyes and scuttled up to the boiler room. He bashed around with the pipes for five or ten minutes until the ceiling agreed to stop crying. And then, as if by magic, the sun popped its head into the flat, to try and dry my carpet. I spent the rest of the afternoon with weary shoulders, tipping bucket after bucket of grey water down the plughole. By the end of it, the bath had a crab-coloured scumline round the sides and, potentially, I had cholera. My flat smelled of a sweaty octopus’s eight armpits. I went downstairs to the Turkish-Polish-English supermarket to buy knock-off Glade air-freshener, and some fresh fruit and veg.

  While it was tempting to go back to bed and start the gloom all over again, I soon remembered the £515 I had to conjure up by the beginning of March. There was also Stevie’s funeral to think about, and my ticket up to Middlesb
rough, to pay my last respects to the boy I loved and killed.

  It was time not to be lazing about in bed all day, wasting away. It was time to resign my post as a part-time self-harmer, and get myself a proper job.

  First things first: prospective employers will not recruit anyone with a greasy, rusty hairdo. It felt weird jumping in the bath after a week of wall-to-wall waterworks, and I left my own crab-coloured scumline behind in the tub. I often wonder how baths manage to get so filthy – I always presumed they were self-cleaning. After pulling the plug out, I massaged some Schwarzkopf Absolute Platinum into my roots, and sharpened the Guillotine with my nail scissors.

  Swanning about in a plastic bonnet, I felt noticeably happier being clean again. Next came spring-cleaning the flat. Once the floors had dried out completely, I gave the carpet a once-over with Shake n’ Vac, turning the living space into a snowy, citrus-scented wonderland before sucking it all away into the hoover.

  Before long, I felt more positive about running the flat independently. To keep my mind off Stevie (and keep the cucumber knife away from my flesh), I tried to surround myself with living things, like lilies and more flowering cacti, and I kept Lucifer’s cage well stocked with food. He’d put on a bit of weight after I’d given him four days’ worth in one go, but over the weeks he ran off the calories on his blue wheel. Lucifer was now officially the best sprinter in the flat.

  I didn’t feel as lonely that week. Being stuck indoors quickly made me tire of my own company, but it was nice having the plants and pets to tend to. The only difficult part was I wished I still had a man around to tend to as well. Despite me desperately wanting to get rid of him, I missed Stevie unbearably. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all, and being dead is about as absent as you can get.

  So, I tried to rebuild him. I went back down to the Turkish-Polish-English supermarket and bought four bananas, one pear, one apple, some glacé cherries and a punnet of raspberries. Loitering around the cold meats section, I gathered up a couple of chicken legs, sausages, some Danish back bacon, chipolatas, then went next door to buy liver and minced beef from the halal butcher’s. I took the bags upstairs and spread out all the ingredients for reanimation on the crummy breakfast bar. I laid a metre-long sheet of clingfilm across the work surface, then set to work, arranging the foodstuffs into two small effigies of Stevie. Fruity Stevie had bananas for arms and legs; a pear torso; blushing raspberry genitalia; a Golden Delicious head; and two glazed cherry eyeballs, pinned on with cocktail sticks. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. For realism, I plucked out his right eye, and gave it a chew. Then, I got on with Meaty Stevie, making him a body of back bacon; sausage arms; chicken legs; chipolata genitalia; a head of liver, with frizzy minced-beef hair; and mini-meatball eyes. This time, I decided not to eat his raw eyeball. I chucked it in the bin instead.

  After washing my hands thoroughly with Carex, I stood for a good ten minutes, nattering away to the Stevies. The good thing was I didn’t have to speak to the effigies like babies. I felt I could get to the bottom of matters with them – they were very good listeners. However, when I asked if they knew of any job vacancies in the borough of Haringey, they were stumped. Meaty Stevie appeared to yawn, a small crack in the liver drooping open.

  I slumped back through to the living space, feeling wrong in the head. I think, more than anything, I wanted to see the Stevies decomposing, as a gruesome reminder never to be nasty to any more boyfriends. I imagined the real Stevie in the morgue fridge, trying his best not to perish before his big send-off.

  Thankfully, the North Capital Coroner ruled that Stevie had taken his own life under non-suspicious circumstances so, from a legal point of view at least, my guilty conscience was off the hook. Still, I felt sick. It was time to get out and raise some capital. I blew hundreds more gluey tears into my sixteenth Kleenex of the day, and changed into something more formal than the bunny jumper. I strengthened the Guillotine with hairspray, then picked up my handbag, my Medicine Bag, and my scarlet raincoat, and made another sad dash out of the flat.

  I never want to die. I don’t smoke, because it makes you die. I don’t do drugs either, because they make you die as well. I do, however, carry round a bag filled with pills, cough mixture, throat lozenges, antiseptic wipes, and a flask of Lemsip Max Strength. It makes me feel immortal.

  One of the main attractions of the Capital was its abundance of jobs, but it’s the Capital’s overabundance of competitive parasites that makes finding those jobs near enough impossible. It was frustrating when we first moved down, spending a week crawling round the pubs in exasperation, me asking, ‘Vacancies?’ and them answering, ‘No no nein naw no non nay.’ I spent the first two months on the dole, but it made me feel degraded; then one day me and Stevie were having a ‘romantic’ dinner down Pizza Express (actually, we weren’t talking – Stevie was upset about some tennis match or other, and I had the flu), when I spotted the magic words WAITRESS WANTED. It was a good job. I only quit because Stevie grew rich off his Lottery funding six months later, but then for some reason I started being nasty to him, and he stopped winning races, and his funding was cut, and it all backfired on me.

  I didn’t want to go crawling back to Pizza Express, though. In any case, that branch was all the way down in Hammersmith, and it involved travelling on the infamous Subterranean Love Train twice a day. If you fancy a huge, sweaty orgy with your clothes on, take a trip on the Subterranean Love Train. It’s a bit like the Ghost Train, except at rush-hour. The other week, I had an erotic encounter on the train with an elderly gent – both of us breathing hot passion into each other’s necks, rocking rampantly back and forth, brushing wet flesh, his groin pushed up against my backside – but then the bastard didn’t even say goodbye to me afterwards, let alone ask for my number. The chauvinist!*

  So, instead of subjecting myself to the dirty gyrations of the Love Train, I decided to stay local in my search for employment. I buttoned up my scarlet raincoat, then did the trick with the door and wandered out onto the wide, wonky pavements of Tottenham.

  Apparently, South Tottenham is the most multicultural place in Britain, like a whole world map folded into a paper aeroplane and flown down the High Road at high speed. That afternoon, the place looked mostly African. I paced swiftly down the slope to the internet caff, which isn’t a caff at all, unless you like nibbling wires and hard drives. I put my elbows down on the counter and asked the man behind it if he’d photocopy my CV for me. He poked his printer angrily with his finger until it coughed out ten copies, and he charged me a pound for the privilege. I frowned at him instead of saying ‘Thank you’, then stormed back out onto the High Road and decided to head for the pubs …

  The Swan is a pub famous for appearing on the front of Capital buses – for example the 149, which goes to Tottenham Swan. It’s an old, rickety affair, and all the Afro-Caribbean patrons turned to stare at me when I entered, like a Blaxploitation OK Corral. I felt like a swan – calm on the surface, but quivering down below. I decided to swan off, before the barman spotted me and demanded a CV.

  The Dutch Pub doesn’t have anything noticeably Dutch about it, except for all the red, white and blue outside, although that’s this nation’s colours as well. You might expect some Edam cheese, or windmills, or tulips, but all the Dutch Pub has to offer is loud pop music, and odd people boozing away on their tods. The barman at the Dutch Pub wasn’t Dutch but he was amicable, so I stayed for a Smirnoff Ice, to be sociable. Once I’d mustered enough Dutch courage, I caught his eye for the umpteenth time and asked him about a job. He just shook his head and said, ‘Sorry,’ in plain English.

  The Golden Stool used to be called the Mitre, but for some reason the new owners renamed it after 24-carat faeces. The place is more a hall of mirrors than a normal public house, which can make it disorientating after a few drinks and a nibble of their spicy Ghanaian grub. I watched five thousand reflected Kimberlys get rejected by five thousand reflected barmaids, and left the Stool feeling like shit
.

  Further into Tottenham, the Lord Parmo has the feel of a lucky-horseshoe-shaped living room but, as it turned out, I didn’t have any luck in there, either.

  I refused to try the kebab shops.

  It’d started to rain by the time I got to the Fountain. I took shelter with another Smirnoff Ice for half an hour, feeling more like a mermaid than a barmaid, drenched through. And, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seduce the manager into giving me a job. I slithered sheepishly back out onto West Green Road, like a fish out of fucking water.

  The Ristorante di Fantasia is an Italian establishment, situated on Philip Lane between the church and the AUND ETT, where you get your clothes washed. Inside, the décor looks like the place belongs in 1920s Little Italy, but the signage outside reckons it was opened in 2005. The place is awash with clichés and falsities: an inept violinist serenades the diners; plastic roses wilt in vases; and they’ve even drilled bullet holes into the wall behind table 13. The Ristorante has an impressive five Food Hygiene Stars but, if you look closely, three can be peeled off the certificate with a sharp fingernail.

  ‘What can I do you for?’ asked the round man by the cash desk. I explained I had CVs and I wanted a job. I shuffled on the tiles, underneath a water-spoiled photograph of a leaning tower of pizza.

  ‘You are very looking-good lady,’ remarked the round man, but I wasn’t sure what that had to do with it. He tugged a MENU out of the MENU-holder, passed it to me, and explained that, if I could memorise all the dishes by Friday and wear ‘more better clothes’, the job was mine. He didn’t even want a CV. I felt like I’d wasted a pound now, but from somewhere deep in my dark soul I managed to smile at him.