Warpdrive, a short dtory
Robert Sullivan
I've got a story here which could qualify as postmodern, because it highlights the pessimism
and despair of the fragmented 1990s. Then again, this story might qualify as post-postmodernism,
because out of the chaos of the times it suggests a new synthesis, a more optimistic way of being.
I'll give you the story first and then, if you're interested, offer an author's analysis of the piece.
Warpdrive
Margaret Buchanan owned a wallpaper store in Lambeth North, south London.
Mayantara Sahgal made some of her paper in Ghatkopar, east Bombay. She also sold
slipmats and windchimes. There used to be money in it, sometime.
"It's a glorious design," she was showing a leaf of marigolds to a customer one
morning, "sans pareil, yeah. It's imported."
"Yeah," said the customer, who was as well, "I've never been keen on floral." He
skimmed through the display book passing every conceivable shade of magnolia, more
abstract flowers like diamonds and rippling spheres. He shut the book. "Have you got
anything in an African style?"
The shop was empty for a long time after that. In the middle of all that,
misguided as a race riot, in stepped the grey overcoat and bowler hat figurehead of Mr
Jones.
He shook out his Kensington West umbrella over her Lambeth North floor and
said as if he meant it, "Disgusting weather."
"You should have been here Monday," Margaret tried. "Glorious sunshine then."
Mr Jones stopped to look at a Rousseau wallprint which was incidentally still
hanging there on his last visit. "Let's get straight down to business, shall we," he said.
"You've fallen behind rent twice now in six weeks. I can't support you forever you
know."
Margaret did what she always did in periods of high anxiety: she polished the
nearest surface space. "Oh Mr Jones, I'm so sorry, I've been trying dreadfully hard. It's
been so slow. It's doing my head in, believe me."
"It hasn't been that easy for me either," Mr Jones said. The Rousseau print caught
his eye again; steady, old boy, he thought, principle... "Can't you cut back or
something?" he said.
"The takings have been down 30 per cent all year. I've tried everything to stop it."
Mr Jones passed the buck. "All right, I'll give you another week. But this is the
last time, I've got my creditors too. I can't be dealing with it." He stole one last look at
the print, tilted his hat and left.
Sometime later someone haggled for the print. "Oh go on," Margaret sighed, "20
pounds."
* * *
Margaret Buchanan lived on the sixth floor of the Caddoway apartment tower, Elephant
and Castle. Leeroy Robinson lived directly below her on the fourth. He liked drugs,
Jungle hardcore and the fortnightly girocheque which made it all possible. He was
having a party one night flaunting all three components, Leeroy aping about on the
turntables and dribbling a joint, Jasmin Caracas eyeing him off from the corner. Easing
panAfrica's Eye of the Tiger into Dark Sol's Event Horizon gently, then crunching them
together to make a joke of it, "This is a ruff toon, geezer," he said. "Man, this is ruff-kut
bizness!"
Jasmin tabled a pouch full of speed. The night developed a similar texture:
bittersweet and vast. Leeroy's hands blurred clockfast over the turntables, retrieving
occasionally into his record box or Jasmin's ticking lap. He did some berserk MCing in
the bedroom, "Petal," plucking them one by one, "the narcissus has strewn silver in the
way of the bridal rose."
Just before dawn he came down on a joint and brushed his teeth. He caught his
face in the mirror, something he best avoided on nights like these, was trapped for a time
in his own reflection... all five and a half of them. He punched a crack in the glass and
asked the DJ to put something happier on.
* * *
Margaret polished a coffee stain on the counter. A customer was studying a petunia
pattische hanging on the wall. Outside there was a typically Lambeth North pattische of
rain and raggamuffin.
"Do you need a hand there?" Margaret asked.
"I'm just looking," the woman said. This time, unfortunately, she meant it.
Three hours later Margaret peeled the Super Sale: Up to 25% Off sign from the
front window and rubbed out the 25. She textered a sunnier 30 and hoped.
Margaret has spent much of her life chasing promotions. When she was 14 she
dated Dwight McIntyre because he was Californian and liked Deep Purple. She married
an entrepreneur in 1985. Nowadays he invested most of his earnings in the card
machines at the local Hog and Sundry. Dwight McIntyre was fashionably unfaithful and
lost all street cred anyhow when the Sex Pistols stormed in.
"I'm sorry it's out of a Tesco can and all," shoving a jacket potatoful of baked
beans into his face. "Since you've cut another 30 per cent off the budget."
Jim was already drunk. "Let me run the shop tomorrow, love," he said. "I'll have
us back in black by dole day."
"Oh that's a laugh, that is. I wouldn't trust you with the bleeding till."
"You know what your problem is," him opening a can of Kestrel super strength
with his teeth, "you've got no initiative. Discount sales! Christ, everyone has discount
sales."
"What do you want me to do? Give away a set of steak knives with every
purchase? A bottle of wine or something?"
"It might help in these parts." He shovelled the beans into his mouth. "But for
Christ's sake don't moan tonight. We'll run a promotion. We'll get that rent dosh."
He was one quarter Jamaican and a quarter Irish. It used to be a good mix,
sometime.
* * *
On Saturday nights Leeroy went to Club Troppo at the Embankment. Mayantara Sahgal
usually spent hers making wallpaper. Leeroy sat in the darkest corner spare and smoked
crack and nodded to the DJ when he was impressed. He spoke to women who wore
lycra and occasionally dealt drugs.
He even found himself dancing one dawn, that coke/speed mix being his most
delirious yet. He trod on someone's toe, another black bloke, who shook him up by the
jacket until he saw his eyes in full strobe. He apologised. "Safe, man. Hey man, do you
want a stone?"
"This is a ruff kut," Leeroy said in the toilets. "How do you make a crust, mate?
This is ruff-kut bizness!"
The other bloke unfurled a sheet of acid tabs, neat row on row of smily faces,
dahlias and steaming bullets. He smiled as well.
"Oh yeah," Leeroy said. "I do a bit myself, sometimes. The trade's well tight
these days, but."
The other bloke inhaled, swirled an acrid haze into his lungs and beyond. "I don't
just deal it, see," he said. "I mix it."
Leeroy felt like one of those geezers you hear about who wake up spontaneously
combusting in the middle of the night, and the beat was sociopathic. "Give us a kut in the
bizness man. I'm flat out skint."
The other bloke refereed his trainers, considered a booyakka examination. "Hey
man, what was your favourite lesson at school?" he said instead.
"Chemistry," Leeroy said.
The other bloke laughed and gave him a safe, man fist. "What's wrong with
economics?"
* * *
"I tell you what," Margaret forced a smile, "I don't normally do this sort of thing. Buy the
100 square feet of Oleander 21, yeah, and I'll throw in, free of charge, an extra 30 feet.
You could do your bathroom with it. And it's a glorious design..."
A second potential customer, whom Margaret had been surveying with all the
apprehension of an air traffic controller, grabbed a wind chime from display and dangled
it out the door. "You rotten sod," Margaret said, chasing him on to the street. He was
white, under 16 and wearing a Fila jacket and cap. He weaved into a crowd and the
dangling of his chimes lost her in the rain and the loitering car soundsystems.
The first customer was gone. Margaret kicked the whole 100 feet roll on to the
floor and sobbed. She locked up, caught the Tube home with barely enough rationality to
consider a bath.
"Oh sweety," Jim peered up from the bathroom sink. He was in a variation of that
marital strainer when all you can do is say, "Darling, I can explain..." except his involved
a straw up his nose.
"Get out," Margaret said.
She cooked a vindaloo for tea and wept the whole way through a Channel Four
documentary on milk pasteurisation. She wept for 12 years of discount sales. She wept
for the demise of Deep Purple.
Brushing her teeth she saw Jim's last line of speed and was about to flush it down
the sink when, remembering her first trip with Dwight at a Led Zeppelin show, the
textures and the colours and the... insights. She licked it up and finished brushing her
teeth.
She was up all night after that. She mopped the floor raw four times and
scrubbed every window. When the alarm rang at six she had an idea.
* * *
Like his music, Leeroy's women lurked well underground of style. They boomed in
blackmarket cycles too makeshift for Keynes, circulated word of mouth, carried to the air
in pirate radio broadcasts faster than most viruses. Sometimes they leapt too far to
commerciability and Leeroy hastily withdrew, always turning back to the roots, to Africa.
Jungle was the vibe now and Jasmin was the epitome. She had dreads, safari suits and a
permanent lollypop grin. Wasn't that enough?
"I'm not chuffed about stacking Boots' shelves all my days," she told Leeroy once.
"I'm going to make somet'ing of this life, brother. I'm getting me some culcha, see."
Which entailed a visit to the National Gallery. Jasmin spent 23 minutes studying
an early Rubens. "Come on love, it's shit," Leeroy said. "Gawking at these dead ponces
ain't going to get you no office job you know."
He was ready to ditch her in the art nouveau section when they came upon a
Henry Rousseau painting of a tiger in a jungle. "Well, this is more like it," Leeroy said.
"Something I can relate to." He was vaguely stoned but there was something else
transporting in that painting, maybe the clarity of the brushstrokes... Leeroy was
entranced. "Fuck's sake," he managed. "It's right colourful, in'it?"
He split up with Jasmin that night. He dropped in at the plant and dowsed 30
square feet of acid wysteria with the partner. They mixed records after that and talked
about politics.
"Jungle is the new riddim of the black man," the other bloke said. "To its frenetic
beat the African Nation marches to its birthright."
* * *
Margaret's idea was well successful. She paid off her debts in no time. When word got
round she was clearing 5000 square feet a month. At the end of the year she opened a
new store in Kensington West and went on a cruise to Sri Lanka.
Even Leeroy got some benefit out of it. He wallpapered his bathroom with her
now legendary Frangipani 5 one day and threw a party to celebrate it. He fused into a
corner under the toilet bowl, high on orchid fumes and the crackling heat of the canopy.
"Onward march de Afrrrrican Naaaation!" he cried. Four of five junglists were there with
him licking their way to Kingstown or wherever. "Brudders and sistas come tagedder!"
A frangipani flower sprouted creepers which slowly wrapped around his chest.
Ants thundered over the walls. Leeroy lapped another petal and sighed, "Brrrritain is the
larrrrgest island of the Carrrrrribbean. Brudders and sistas come tagedder!"
(C) 1995 Robert Sullivan
Analysis: I know the clues were really vague, but at the end of the story all of the major players -
Margaret Buchanan, Mayantara Sahgal, Mr Jones, Leeroy, Margaret's husband Jim and the black
bloke Leeroy meets at the nightclub - join up to form a drug manufacturing and distribution ring.
(Well, the clues are pretty vague, but that's meant to highlight the ambivalence of the modern
times.) So anyway, the story is all about a new synthesis, a new way of being emerging from the
detritus of the old. Let me elaborate.
In the early parts of the story, the various characters are depicted in various states of decay.
Margaret's business is going bankrupt, Mayantara Sahgal is slaving her life away over there in
India, Leeroy is floundering in a haze of boredom and drugs. Even the entrepreneurial Mr Jones is
struggling to hold his head up. They are victims of the postmodern condition, beset by
multiculturalism, urban decline, poverty, illicit drug use and a general lack of meaning. Through
the course of the story, in their own way, the various characters unite and turn their negatives into
positives. They use the very things that imprison them - crime, drugs, multiculturalism - as
avenues of escape. They combine their disparate talents to form a drug syndicate - Leeroy
(accustomed as he is to mixing) becomes the chemist, applying his LSD tabs to patches of
Margaret's wallpaper. Mayantara supplies the wallpaper, Margaret supplies the shop-front, Jim
handles the financial side of the business and Mr Jones acts as a kind of manager. Or maybe a
debt collector. Nevertheless, the story is about mixing (as can be seen in the final lines, "Brudders
and sistas come taggeder". It is, however, a warped (marketing) drive in more than its reliance on
mind-bending drugs.
-Robert Sullivan, Australia, December 1996.
If you want to see more stories in this type of vein, check out my short story collection at http://www.cooee.com.au/subscrib/ral/subb.html