Sweet Read Free

that burlesque is back. And no one could deny that you could easily pass for a hoochy-coochy dancer from a Tijuana pony show.’ He turned to Baggy. ‘Well, I suppose I can stand to look at her if you can. At least she doesn’t smell. Hire her!’
    Tragically, I was well pleased; hey, they may have been freaks, but they were freaks with a good address and, let’s face it, I’d had precious little of that. Remember, I grew up on the thirteenth floor – unlucky for some! – of ASBO Towers, give or take the odd stay at Her Maj’s Pleasure, if not mine. The big white houses on the seafront, in the squares and up Clifton Hill – up which I now trudged again in the pissing rain on my first day working for Baggy and Aggy – were so foreign to ordinary Brighton kids that they might as well have been made of icing sugar and located on the moon. The only time kids from the Ravendene Estate saw the inside of a Regency house was when they were robbing it!
    ‘What’s the point in going on holiday if you live in a holiday town?’ my mum used to say every summer when I’d moan at her about taking us abroad. That time me and Kizza legged it was the first time I’d ever stayed in a hotel even!
    So despite the rain and the hill, I was well happy to be on my way to somewhere clean and quiet, and trying to keep a lid on my excitement at what lay in store for me. You could say I was in a holiday mood even! And as their lush house came into view, I even started dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if things went well and we got along, I might even become their – what’s the word – muse, yeah, their ‘muse’, and they might ask me to move in with them. Peace and quiet and cleanliness – and, more importantly, a well central shag palace where I could drag fit French-language students back to instead of doing it on the beach, because Ravendene was way far out and they always lived in manky lodgings with some uptight landlady.
    Quiet . . . I’ve always been a loud cow, but the older I got – all of seventeen – the more the non-stop racket at mine got totally on my tits. It had been even worse since my minging twin sisters had formed a rap group called ‘Swearers Three’, of all the dumb-ass things, with the little girl from the corner shop, Rajinder. Before school in the morning, after school in the afternoon, on weekend nights when Raj slept over, I had heard their cretinous intro/theme song so often that I was actually hearing it in my dreams, even when they too were asleep.
    ‘Swearers One! – let’s have some fun!
    Swearers Two! – I’ll swear with you!
    Swearers Three! – come swear with me!
    One – two – THREE!’
    Followed by a right mouthful, of course. I ask you, how much practising does that take. ’Sides, Ravendene kids are cursing before they can walk – rehearsing shouldn’t come into it, they’re naturals.
    So with this ringing in my ears 24/7, can you really blame me for my uncharacteristically naive dreams as I rang the Baggy-Aggy bell that day? Well, I had just finally got clean from my drug habit, and therefore wasn’t in my right mind. I saw myself being sat down for elevenses that very morning, my dainty feather-duster being gently extracted from my delicate fingers by Baggy as Aggy poured me a double gin from a piss-elegant Regency porcelain teapot and told me that to make an exquisite creature like myself sweat and strain over squalid domestic drudgery was quite like . . . I dunno, sticking a peacock down an S-bend. Making Bambi live in a bucket. You know – just WRONG. And that all I needed to do to earn my daily pay – say, fifteen pound an hour, because it was like CREATIVE now – was just stand there staring into space, all enigmatic like, while they draped lush material on me and consulted each other in low, awed voices. Sweet . . .
    I was still queening it over my tragic kingdom when the door lurched open and Baggy was standing there shooting evils up at me. ‘The courtesy of