Kizz

I know her via text messages and snatches of conversation.

I know her when she leaves her flat. When she comes to the front door.

I know the way her fingers brush mine when she hands over the cash and takes her stuff.

I know she does too much.

I know she says she sometimes buys for Valerie.

I know she’s lying. And I know why.

Because she’s a nice girl.

This is how it happens, when nice girls get addicted. When something happens and they turn to weed to cope. I don’t know what happened to Ruby exactly, but I can guess. Hands where they’re not supposed to be, a no turned by force into a whimpered yes, whatever. She isn’t the first one. She won’t be the last.

Way I see it, I’m an unofficial part of the National Health. A public servant. There are waiting lists for counselling, and docs will only prescribe benzos for so long. So who fills the gap between the referral and the first appointment? Me. My stuff’s medicinal. The way I see it.

That’s why I mainly deal to women. Men, boys, I’m not saying always but often enough it’s just fun for them. Dude let’s get high, dude let’s watch a fucking Kevin Smith movie, dude let’s spend a whole night talking in catchphrases…They’re not the ones who need it.

Half the time they’re the reason my girls need it.

Fucking men. 

P O E M

Almost

‘Jesus, this thing goes through weed fast, doesn’t it?’ Emma peers into the ash-flecked bowl of the Bud Bomb, screws it back on, then hands it back to me.

‘Worst thing about it,’ I say, returning it to the pocket of my jeans. We’re walking past the Civic Centre, through the garden by the war memorial. It feels a little good to be smoking dope so close to the seat of local civic power. A little good, and, on a day like today, a little scary. A little like Weimar.

We’re relaxing, our guard is down. We’re heading for Jesmond Metro station, which will take us past the Robinson Library. The only fascists we’re likely to find up here are grammar Nazis.

‘Jesus,’ Emma says, ‘that fucking woman.’

'The blonde in the white shirt? I know, right?’

‘Better teeth than I thought she’d have.’

‘Well, y’know, they say kebabs…no actually, that’s not fair.’

Emma looks at me. ‘Are you worried about being mean to a racist?’

‘Well, no, but…I don’t think we should mock them for class reasons, that’s all. Y’know, all that stuff about them being dregs and from slums and stuff. That girl at the end had a point.’

‘What? Little Miss Male Aggression?’

‘Well yeah, that’s bollocks. But like…’

‘Especially given what that woman did! Bloody male aggression, that was the most aggressive act of the protest and it was a bloody cis woman doing it! Male aggression.’

‘Well yeah, yeah, obviously she…whoa.’

I come to a halt by the cool bridge/tunnel thing that connects the Robinson to the rest of the Newcastle campus.

‘You okay, sweets?’

I nod. ‘Yeah, I’m fine, I just…female aggression…’

‘Easy tiger, society hasn’t broken down to the extent that you can fap openly in public yet.’

I punch her on the shoulder.

‘It’s not that! It’s just…think about it. There were a bunch of them, guys and a girl…’

‘So…?’

‘So it was the girl who tried to fight us.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. Oh.’

We stand in silence by the mostly-empty library. For want of anything better to do I get into the lee of the bridge and start refilling the Bomb.

‘Damn,’ says Emma, looking off into the distance. ‘Damn. I feel almost complimented.’

Moments in Calamity

Valerie Bathing

Ruby messages me and asks if I want to hang out later. Of course I wanna hang out with her, duh. That’s Ruby. Slow on the uptake. Paranoid about all the wrong things. Paranoid about people leaving her, people trying to fuck her, people wanting to do any damn thing to her. I’ve seen the way she walks in the street, in Metro stations. It doesn’t take much to make her miss a step, to make her shift her hands in front of her body. I guess she thinks she’s protecting herself. She makes herself more vulnerable, not less.

Like at the parties her old flatmates used to throw, when she would take ecstasy, before they put her on SSRIs and she had to stop rolling, there would always be a point where she would stand up, leave the room, and go to bed. I would follow after a while, go in and sit on the end of her bed and talk to her. It helps that we’re both comic book geeks. I would sit there and talk to her about She-Hulk or Squirrel Girl and she’d listen, sip water, and laugh.

When Ruby laughs, it’s the best thing in the world. She has a big, high laugh, like what you’ve just said to her is the funniest thing that she’s heard. Which, in that moment, just might be true. I’ve watched really bad comedies with that bitch.

I’ve watched films that aren’t comedies with her. That bitch will laugh at the weirdest shit. Like that Nic Cage movie about the end of the world? Not the one based on those Bible books, the one where the sun explodes at the end or whatever. Nic Cage  discovers this is going to happen because he notices people keep writing shit with patterns of numbers in which predict how many people are going to die in various disasters. For some reason, I can’t remember why, he goes to some fuckin shack in the middle of nowhere and he finds some more of these fuckin calculations, like who knows what this shit actually says, it’s probably the chemical formula for the McRib or something, but he finds a bunch of these calculations carved into the back of a door because that’s how I show my working, I don’t know about you, and at the end of the calculations it just says EVERYONE.

Ruby laughed her head off at that bit. She saw it in the cinema, before I came over here. She says she laughed her head off and then she realised she was the only one laughing.

Ruby thinks that she looks ugly when she smiles. In her selfies she does a little half-smile, something to make her lips look good, to widen her eyes, but she thinks when she actually breaks out into a big goofy grin she looks ugly.

Ruby’s as stupid as fuck. I love making her laugh. I love making her smile.
I love scaring her. Does that sound mean? Just jump-scares, you know. Leaping out from behind a door and saying boo. Pretending to kick her, or punch her. That does sound kind of mean, I guess, but it’s hard to explain. She laughs afterward. She smiles, she looks relieved. It’s our thing. We flirt by fighting.

One time, I was sitting on the mattress with Jean and Ruby was eating a cake or something, she had a small plate she was eating it off. She put it down on the desk and I told her to put it in the kitchen. She said make me. So I stood up and I grabbed her hair and I marched her to the kitchen and I said listen, wench, when I tell you to do something you fucking do it when I say. She was glowing for the rest of the night. Hardly said a word. But you could tell she liked it by how much she was smiling. She was smiling from the inside. She looked beautiful.

She’s not over until five. That gives me time to shower.

I have a waterproof case for my phone, so I always take it with me. Ruby thinks this is weird. She says it shows that for all the fact there’s only six years between us, we’re like different generations. I say that’s bullshit, I just spent my teens figuring out how to do shit with computers instead of listening to fucking Elgar and writing bad poetry but she insists it’s ‘cause she’s older. I think she has a thing about that. She’s haunted by the fact that she’s the same age now as her first girlfriend was, back when she was still pretending to be a dude. She keeps talking about people wanting her to be their Mrs Robinson, and how she’s not sure how she feels about that. I say go with it. MILFs are hot.

I pick up my phone and I’m about to hit the shower when I remember we bought new poppers yesterday, the strong ones from the sex shop in the village. I get them out of the fridge, grab a towel and get into the shower.

Yeah, I’m naked. It’s my flat. I like to stay unclothed for as much of the day as I can.
Ruby does not get this. The only place that bitch is ever naked is the shower. She’s a minimiser, a dick-ignorer. She told me once she will go to a lot of trouble to make sure she doesn’t see her dick, even when she jerks off, because if she sees it, instant shrinkage. She mimed the way she jerks off for me once: she lies on her back and she treats it as much like a clit as she can.

If Ruby wasn’t so fat she would have had her bits done already, I think. I don’t care about mine. If anything it’s a selling point. Guys like it. You know how many dudes are secretly praying for a woman who can blast them in the ass. But then I like dick in general. Ruby’s more particular. She’ll suck flesh but she much prefers plastic.

We went to a hotel in town once and I offered to let her use my glass piece in the shower. I don’t think she did. It probably felt weird to her, sharing a dildo when we’re not exactly girlfriends. I don’t mind, really. She invited me.

I stand outside the shower while I turn the water on. I hate being under it at first, when it’s still cold. I hold my hand under the stream ‘til it starts turning hot and I get in. God it feels so good, the water on my naked skin.

 I’m high right now. I didn’t say, but you should assume I’m high at all times unless otherwise informed. Not massively so – just a bit of a buzz – but I’m maybe a little higher than normal right now because I like to be high in the shower. I like to be blazed while I get wet. It feels so good, the stream, the pressure, the air and steam around me. I pull up Spotify on my phone and then look at my tumblr. Captain Marvel. She-Hulk. Girls’ butts, girls twerking, cocks, guys fucking. The music is some kind of dance track, a nice groove, good squashy bass and oh God I am so high right now and this

This
Feels
So
Good

and  I slide down and sit cross-legged on the floor, my right knee nudging the door to the shower ajar. The lino will get wet but hey, we’re on the ground floor, nothing’s dripping through. It’s fine.

This woman doing bodypainting cosplay keeps showing up in my tumblr. She looks amazing and she does it so well and she has such. A. Cute. Butt it’s fantastic. I want to paint her, like the girl in The Pillow Book. Naked Ewan McGregor, naked Vivian Wu, naked Chinese and Japanese men, that fat naked American, that creepy old dude, the feel of my pen drawing lines on Jean and Ruby’s skin, your skin is not good paper, and I’m hard right now, feeling the warmth of my dick in my hand and oh, oh, oh the water feels so good and I reach for the poppers and I open them and breathe them in, first one nostril then the other, take a big hit and ah, ah, oh here it





comes and my stomach falls through the basement while my frontal lobes take to the sky and oh it’s like an explosion and I feel so relaxed, so high, and I do it again and

then I reach for the glass piece, decide which way to put it round, the end with the spirals I think and I lap at the edge of my butt with it, tickling myself, teasing myself, before I push up and my ass swallows it, puckers around the glass, still a little bit cold now but warming up, wet, and I pump it in and out with one hand while rubbing my left tit with the other, my tits, Jean’s tits, Ruby’s tits, this girl on tumblr’s tits and oh God I want to suck somebody’s tits, I want to lick somebody’s pussy, want to suck somebody’s cock, I want to take someone inside of me, I want to be inside, I want to be both, get you a man, get you a tran who can do both HA yes a tran who can do both both both both both and ah, and my right hand moving down now, both hands down, one pumping, one pulling, and I’m hard, still hard, and I think I’ll stay hard even if I move my hand away and

reach
for the poppers
again and

AAAAAAAAH yes so good and both my hands go back, pumping, pulling, pushing oh God I can feel it
coming and oh God I’m going to
going to
going to
oh God his butt her cock her tits her costume painted on his tits her cock her smile
her laugh
fucking wench aaaaaaah
oh
my
God

So good. So good. So good.

And it fades and oh the water on my skin and I’m so fucking high and yes. Yes. Yes. So good. So good.

I take a moment. For myself.

My phone says it’s three forty-three. She’ll be over at five.

Moscow Rules

Not War Exactly

I feel like choosing to self-medicate my personal trauma with weed might have been a poor decision, because now that the country’s falling apart I’ll be forced to upgrade to heroin as a reality-dampening agent. The results came in yesterday morning: turkeys voted, Christmas won. By a hair. And in a way that’s more scary because now nothing’s certain. A clear vote one way or the other, even if we lost…I don’t want to think about that.  I can’t. I don’t have time. I have to be at Monument before eleven.

Valerie left for work fifteen minutes ago, but I still need to get my make-up on before I can deal with this. This isn’t a trip to the Sainsbury’s, this is, not war exactly. Something close though. The racists have been planning a march for three months, and after yesterday’s result they’ll feel emboldened. It’s vital people get down to the Monument and stop them plotting up there with their horrible Rapefugees Welcome posters and their flags. Newcastle went the opposite way to the country, by a similarly narrow margin, but with the national vote skewing the other way almost everywhere else, the racists will call this a victory. It’s tactically vital to stop them.

And personally, I just want to wipe the smug smiles off their evil whitebread faces. I want to batter them and send them home with their tails between their legs. I’m not exactly a shrinking violet, but I’m no streetfighter. But right now all I want to do is hit someone. All I want is someone hitting me. All I want’s a fight.

I draw my brows on thin and low. The glasses usually conceal them anyway. I shove a waterproof in my backpack and then head out the door for the first time since Friday morning. It feels like it did after Orlando, only worse. That reminded us that people hate us enough to kill us en masse, that we weren’t safe even in our own clubs anymore, but even after Orlando we could tell ourselves those people were in a minority. Now…

You’re walking down the street. A white, cis, straight-looking person is approaching. How does it feel to look at them knowing that your chances of them not secretly wanting to put you in a fucking camp are on a 48-52 split? What’s the most you’ve ever bet on a coin toss?

I get to the Monument a little while before the counter-protest starts. People are assembling with banners and stuff, but I recognise no-one I know. I grab a quick coffee and wander around, checking out the blokes who are obviously spotting this for the EDL, and the RedWatch types taking photos. The fascists are taking a while. Maybe they couldn’t get enough people to come and they’ll sack it off in favour of the pub. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I wander up Northumberland Street, which the fascists plan to walk down, to see if there’s any sign of them. The street heaves from side to side with the usual Saturday crowd: I see a thicket of England flags outside the JD Sports shop and think for a moment that I’ve spotted the enemy camp, but it turns out to be the guy with the gazebo who sells tat. I walk further up, to Haymarket. At the Junction, a pub sandwiched between Haymarket Metro and Bus Stations, which started out as a branch of the tacky Old Orleans chain and went downhill from there, I find the fascists plotted up outside. Maybe two dozen of them, if that. A few big flags. They see me and jeer. I take a photograph. Stare back.

On Friday I had to go to town and see Heather. I’d arranged to meet her in the café at the end of Pink Lane, the one where I met the German wrestling guy. This was a rather poor choice of venue, being right next to Gotham Town and Rafferty’s, two of the favourite hangouts for Newcastle fash. I was already angry when I was walking towards the place: when I heard the sound of four white boys cackling and slinging slurs I just got angrier. I turned the corner and found Heather sat outside, on a bench, with these four goons in overalls giving her shit. I hugged her, said hi, then turned and stared back at the bastards. Stared and stared, until the last of them stopped smiling and slinked off.

When I was a teenager I thought being able to do that was a fucking superpower. I’ve always had trouble with eye contact anyway, so the idea of having eyes that were almost a weapon appealed to me. Clint Eastwood, Amanda Waller, Batman. Young Bruce Wayne, staring up into the eyes of Joe Chill, his parents’ killer. ‘Stop lookin’ at me that way, kid!’ The evil eye.

The thousand yard stare exists, it turns out. All you have to do to unlock it is have the shit kicked out of you so bad that you don’t fear it anymore. And I am there.

By the time I get back to the Monument four fash have turned up as an advance party. I get behind them, snap a few photographs, then climb up onto the Monument with the rest of the counter-protestors. I’m glad we’ll still outnumber the fash, even when their reinforcements arrive. Glad, and a little disappointed. Fash are bullies, and outnumbered like this they’ll posture and get lairy but be too scared to really go for it.

A shouting battle then.

‘Hello!’
A soft Glasgow accent. Emma.
‘It’s so good to see you here!’ she smiles. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Well…’ I shrug. Emma knows about the suicide attempt. ‘Things have been, y’know. And this…’ I gesture at the scene around us.
She nods. ‘I know what you mean. If I’m honest I came here out of spite, almost. They’ll all be thinking they’ve won. I want to tell them all to fuck right off.’
‘Same.’

The fascist vanguard is refreshed with the bald, the badly dressed, the beer-bellied, as we speak. A rotating team of rabble-rousers get the chants going, ours drowning theirs out. Emma and I join in with the chants, occasionally picking particular fascists out of the opposing line and directing a string of ad-libbed jeers and gestures at them. We soon find targets we can troll. An old man with a beard, a ponytail, a white t-shirt two sizes too tight and the sort of baseball cap white men only resort to when they’re in denial about their hair is trying to lead the EDL in their haranguing. We can’t hear him, and tell him as much, theatrically holding our hands to our ears, Hulk Hogan-style. He glares at me. I hold the stare. He fumbles with a megaphone. We still can’t hear. Emma and I start stage-laughing at him, actually laughing but exaggerating it so he can see. He gets more and more wound up. Someone turns up with an amp and a mic and he tries using that but he still can’t make himself heard. If I wrote for the Guardian I could weave an article from that – blah blah blah white working class blah blah Metropolitan consensus blah blah overlooked and ignored herp derp sack Jeremy Corbyn. But I don’t so, fuck that. You don’t beat fash by hearing their concerns, you beat them in the streets by smashing their morale. A riot’s not a safe space. Don’t behave. You gave up being good when you declared a state of war.

Ponytail walks off to another end of the line, and one of the guys on our mic starts giving him shit. Emma and I find new targets: a thin, rigid boy, an Elliott Rogers in utero, trying to look tough in a pea-coat and a skull bandana; a horse-faced racist wearing a Union Flag like a hijab against the rain; a man who loses his shit and tries to charge our line when I reapply my lipstick, blow him a kiss, then start a who are ya chant. A blonde woman with tattoos who keeps pointing and mouthing stuff at Emma.

This reminds me of Pride. It reminds me of performing. I like an antagonistic audience. I love walking rooms. It gives me licence to be wild. To be aggressive. I’m making up disses on the fly, almost freestyling at times, singing, clowning – this is the best I’ve felt in ages. There are twenty of them and maybe a hundred or more of us and people with shopping are standing beside us while the fascists are strung along a ragged line kept apart from us by police. We may have lost the referendum and these guys may have felt like they could act the cock this morning but now they’re just a bunch of piss-wet racists in the rain. And all the while the chants go on around us:

BLACK AND WHITE UNITE AND FIGHT
SMASH THE EDL
NAZI SCUM OFF OUR STREETS
YOUR ENGLAND FLAG IS MADE IN CHINA
EDL, BRUSH YOUR TEETH
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS

‘Let’s show them these are our streets!’ Shouts the guy on the mic. ‘Everyone, step off the Monument! Show them theses streets are ours!’

We step down dutifully, and I’m a little disappointed now because I don’t get to see any of their faces,  all I can see is the backs of the people in front of me, the helmets of the police, the England flags. Down here I feel more vulnerable. Should have stuck to higher ground.

A riot is a living thing; panic in a crowd is not spontaneous to those within, as much as it may be to those without. The first sign that things are going wrong is confusion. People shift, people glance, people move through the line, you hear whispers.
I turn around and see the blonde woman heading for Emma. Her hair is bleached and her tattoos are shonky but her EDL polo shirt is prison white. She dressed for the occasion. She goes for Emma’s dreads, tries to get her hair, to ragdoll her around. I shove back, try to get myself between the two of them. This woman is angry, she has eyes like a Doberman, she’s screaming, so, yeah, I’m scared, but fuck her, fuck this bitch if she thinks she can start some shit with my friends…

A Chinese guy with a camera pushes in alongside us, the woman in front turns around, there’s a flash of a yellow jacket; between us and the police we bundle her back behind her line.

‘One of theirs!’
‘She’s trying to sneak through!
‘Divven’t kick me! How! Divven’t ye kick me!’
‘What? I didn’t!’
‘Like fuck did she kick you you bitch, you’re just making shit up and acting the victim like you fuckers always do, fuck off!’

Yeah, that was me. I’m fuming. For the rest of the protest, whenever I catch sight of the blonde woman I lock eyes with her. I hold her gaze. She pretends to laugh, she smiles, she tries to get a rise. I just keep looking.

Eventually the fascists pack their flags up and fuck off. The student activists turn up toward the end with the Refugee March and start an open mic. I think about getting on it and spitting my anti-EDL number at their repeating backs, but my throat is hoarse from shouting for three hours. I find Emma again, and ask if she’s alright. A student girl gets on the mic and condemns what she calls the male aggression on both sides.

‘Come on,’ I say to Emma, flashing her a glimpse of the Bud Bomb in the pocket of my jeans. ‘Let’s go find somewhere to sit and get stoned.’
‘Good idea,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’ll calm our male aggression.’