Good luck.
Play to win
Friday’s midnight turned into Saturday’s first breath, and Jaz Malik spent the time in the Golden Samosa’s kitchen, letting his father hold a raw garlic bulb to the wound on his forehead. The two younger sons were all smug smiles, as their brother suffered, immensely.
‘Father, it’s killing me!’ Jazir cried out.
‘Nonsense, my first son,’ Saeed the father replied, ‘the heat will draw out the poison. You did good this night, my child. Didn’t we show those purity ninnies the door? If only the burgercops hadn’t turned up to save them! I would’ve fried that Zuzeman to cinders, believe me. Now stop you this crying, please.’
‘Sorry, Father. Dreadfully sorry.’
Meanwhile…
Joe Crocus and Sweet Benny lived in the attic flat of Professor Hackle’s house in West Didsbury. They had argued for a while, because Benny wasn’t too keen on Joe getting into fights, especially with roughneck medical students who might dent his masterly good looks. Joe told him to go fuck himself. Benny said he had other ideas.
The two of them made it up in the usual way, bedwards, joined at the hips with love and wounds and blood, all of them spilt in the war against purity and rugby players and bladder- brained medical students and the death of the nation’s soul. This kind of speech was Joe’s idea of foreplay, covered with a condom. Good enough to bring some deep sleep to the partaker, and a restless mind to Benny the sweet receiver. He couldn’t stop thinking about how things were between them, this constant knife-edge. Exciting, sure, but…
Meanwhile, DJ Dopejack was working in his flat in Fallowfield, studying his collection for what he would play that Saturday night at the Snake Lounge club, alongside and behind the great and coolish Frank Scenario. Such an honour it was, to have the sacred Frank come visit. He chose Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, and also Lady Day singing ‘Loverman’. Lady Night and Lady Day, Dopejack mixed them both to a wild drum and bass, and then into his twin-decked memory.
Dopejack’s room was a small lab of home-made equipment, gadgets stolen from the computer rooms at the university, all mixed together into new ways of being. Flickerings of the beat, in numbers dancing upon his computers. Stealing samples as he may, feeding them direct to the groove, his green hair sticking up in fever.
Nobody knew his first name (Donald) or his last (Jacoby) and nobody ever would. Nobody would ever know that the green hair was completely au naturel, a crazy outcome of the genes, the Mama Dope and the Papa Jack of stupid genes. Too much of the drugs in his mummy’s belly, too much of the games from his father’s brain, making the lonely Dopejack what he was.
Ugly as a bad dream. Too lonely. Lost in music.
The mix brought home.
The rain stopped at two in the morning. As Daisy Love lay awake in her bed, unable to sleep now that the constant downpour had turned into mist upon her window. Oh Father, oh Father…
Daisy got up from her bed, put on her clothes and went down the outside stairs. The Wilmslow Road. All along the curryfare the neon signs were dimmed, and the spicy smells were just a wisp of forgotten adverts. A few sad and wet blurbflies still fluttered here and there, singing their messages of desire and loss to only the lonely. Daisy kicked her way through all the discarded dominoes that were littering the streets, all creamy and still and frozen in their losingness.
Dead bones.
Why had her father called? And after all these years?
As Little Miss Celia lay within her abandoned shop on Swan Street. A former hardware store that had closed down years ago; Celia had made this place her secret own, finding it and breaking in. It was the ruling you see, that no vagabond could claim a legit begging hole unless they were ‘officially homeless’. Celia’s dead bone lay on the pillow beside her head. Another losing session, after all that she had wished for. Pretty soon, Celia was sure that Big Eddie would grow tired of supporting her illegal play.
So she really did have to win, one of these days.
As Jazir Malik, back in his parents’ house, worked late into the morning. Locked tight in his bedroom, he had a half-dozen orders to fill before next Friday. The room was lined with feedbeds and workbenches; feedbeds in which his crop of ultragarlic sprouted; workbenches on which his pseudoblurbs lay scattered in pieces, awaiting his flight path.
Because Jazir was so good at making things happen, he had built a replica out of bits and pieces, stolen from here and there; cellophane for the wings, wire for the structure, papier-mâché for the thorax, a small electric motor to move the wings and make it fly, a disemboweled Walkman to play the message, a couple of batteries, a little chip and motherboard to work the streets.