The Misadventures of Flea McGready part 14
Flea just had to win this one. He’d lost all the other ones, but this was the big one. This one was for a blowjob.
‘You don’t talk much’ she said to him.
Flea often thought it would be good to have a cool answer to this question, which he was asked a lot, but as with other things in his life he couldn’t. No, it was then.
It was now that Flea looked up for the first time and through the haze in his eyes he saw her beauty. She was a beautiful English rose. But she sounded Scottish or Irish or maybe Polish. Flea was never very good at accents and had very little grasp of geography, despite the fact that he had actually wound up in all the corners of the Earth during his years on it.
‘You should say something cooler than that when people ask you. You should say ‘Yeah, but pictures speak a thousand words’ or something enigmatic and weird like that’.
Flea thought it was brilliant, she was brilliant and he fell instantly in love. Flea did fall in love quite easily and this was actually the fourteenth such occasion. His life always seemed to take a strange twist when he fell in love. He was not a f rational man, or a particularly straight thinker at the best of times but this all went out the window as soon as he fell in love.
‘Shit’ He had been staring at her for quite a while, saying nothing and idly playing with the food in his hand.
‘I know but I’m eating a Twix’ he stuttered through a mouthful of chocolate
She laughed at him, but not in a mean way, more in a pitying way and this was a step up for Flea.
‘Dunno really, just an ol’ nickname that stuck I guess’
Nickname makes it sound too nice, it was really a term people had used to bully him when he was growing up, they thought it worked on all sorts of levels. It had only really stuck; however, because he had let it, it had never really occurred to him that in situations like this he could tell people his real name.
‘I don’t know Flea. A girl comes over to you to find out more about you and you have no answers, no repartee’
She was flirting with him, and although he didn’t know what that last word she used was (maybe she was French) even he recognised it.
‘You should have a funny story about your ability to jump over 14 double decker buses or something. You must av been asked the question plenty a times.’
Flea was smiling at her inanely and desperately trying to clear the fog of the last 9 months from his mind and remember how to talk to women. He wasn’t much of a talker at the best of times and this was getting awkward. All he could hear through the mist was the advice his Dad had given him about women.
‘Women don’t fuckin know what they want, so don’t give em fuck all until you’ve asked them a thousand fucking questions about fuckin everyfing’. Sage words from a man with 3 failed marriages, 8 kids and as far as Flea knew was currently living with an 18 year old Thai girl in Vietnam pretending he used to be in Slade. He was using his last big job to finance his lifestyle but that had probably run out by now. Maybe he was dead.
‘Shit, need to say something’ he thought
‘Wos your name?’ he spat out.
Stillanna was a weird name, maybe she was Scandinavian.
‘I never met anyone called that. I’m Flea, well Ad…’ he trailed off as she had walked away from him shaking her head.
Anna never would find out Flea’s real name. Most people never did.
He just couldn’t think of anything to say. This was a common feeling for Flea; it would be fair to say that he was not one of life’s achievers. He almost always tried his best, yet things always had a way of catching up with him. He was 32, probably looked more like 38. Underweight and carrying the stoop of a man who had spent a lot of time lurking in corners. He blamed it on shyness, and while it was true that he had often stooped in corners at parties too embarrassed to talk to girls, it was also true that he stooped in corners as he had a habit of taking things off people or breaking into things, he generally didn’t want people to look at him. He was one of those men who spent most of his waking time in the hours most people slept. He had worked as a barman, a burglar, a nghtwatchman, a squatter (he thought it was a profession), mugger, doorman, milkman (fired after 4 days for stealing milk). He’d only been in prison once and didn’t like it. Shoplifting, but now he was trying to go straight. Trying being the most important word there.
Thankfully next time they spoke things went much better. Flea had laid off the weed for a few days and regained his ability to interact with people, some of his balance and a lot of his libido, more than he realised he had. Amsterdam was a city that got you very hot under the collar when you actually went outdoors and raised your head from shoe-gazing level. The scantly clad businesswomen in the red windows now all seemed to entice him into thoughts of Anna. It seemed everywhere he turned there was an image of naked female flesh. Since he lived, worked and rarely left the red light district this was, in fact, the case.
Both Flea and Anna were working at a ‘coffeeshop’ in Amsterdam. Flea didn’t really work there like Anna did, he got no salary, he was tolerated to smoke (within limits he often forgot) and sleep as long he tried to keep things as tidy as possible. He’d spend his days sweeping floors, cleaning glasses, changing beds, making drinks, selling weed and being as stoned as possible whilst still operating. Flea had done this kind of thing before, in many cities, but this was the third time he had wound up in Amsterdam and that, he thought, was a record. Apart, of course, from London but that was where he was born.
Flea liked Amsterdam, he felt like people didn’t look down on him there (this is actually not the case, people always looked down on Flea wherever he went) and he felt liked he fitted in a bit more (this is, in a way, closer to the mark).
His time in Amsterdam had been short, he reckoned only two seasons, because it was sunny when he got there and it was raining now. So he reckoned it was either a shit summer or an alright autumn. It didn’t matter really. People, most people anyway, thought months, or the date, or to some extent time at all, were important. To people like Flea it made very little difference at all.
Life was good in Amsterdam, but then again he was under sedation. Four of them worked at Hill hostel, sometimes more. Bob was the manager. He basically ran the place single handedly by walking around and shouting at things that needed to be done until somebody did them, including, quite often, the guests habiting his fine establishment. Bob liked Flea (he wouldn’t forever, in fact he wouldn’t for much longer) because Flea did what he was told and never really asked why he was supposed to do things, he just did them and seemed to be genuinely happy just to be fed for working 13 hour days as long as he could get stoned. Perfect, the one thing Bob did have a lot of was weed.
Flea knew other people had worked there, he thought more had than really did but this was often because he was working stoned, and with guests Bob had harangued into helping.
Flea had seen Anna round a bit before they spoke but he was never really sure if she worked there. She had looked like she might be pretty from afar but she wasn’t particularly, at least most people thought this, of course this was only one of the few ways in which Flea differed from most people. She held her own amongst groups of mildly unattractive people. Anna had a hard face and a smile that looked like she was forcing it, even when she wasn’t. Flea had started to see her around what he considered was a couple of times when she had actually been working there for 3 months. They’d often slept in the same room but they didn’t actually exchange pleasantries until, what Flea would never learn was actually May 26th 2008.
Flea had actually now been in Amsterdam for 9 months, and therefore 3 seasons. He would leave in a ‘bit’ or 3 months and 2 days later.
It was late. Flea popped to the street for a quick spliff, just to help him sleep, when he saw her out there. Since their first awkward encounter he had smiled and waved at her a few times and even elicited similar responses from her. He sidled up to her and asked her questions. This continued until six in the morning and she answered them all and even asked him and even listened to his answers.
She’d had a hard life undoubtedly. Eight years younger than Flea. He finally noticed the hardness in her as she spoke of growing up in Belfast. Most people instantly recognised this toughness in Anna, but most people Flea spent large amounts of time with had the same hard exterior, trying hard to survive had done it to her, him and all the rest of them.
But she was funny and not repulsed by Flea. There were even moments of fleeting body contact between them which still resonates today with him. She grabbed his knee whilst she laughed at his story of the time he had set up a fake dog walking business to steal high class mutts but no-one would trust him with their dogs so he had just nicked some. Most people thought this story was appalling. Then there was the electric moment when she ran her surprisingly soft left hand across the scar on his left temple. Flea wanted to reach out, touch her, kiss her, fuck her but he couldn’t. He just laughed nervously.
With all the laughing and listening and story exchanging he was a nervous wreck when she finally pecked him on the cheek as the sunrise signalled their departure.
He went back to the nearly full dorm room they no longer shared and collapsed on his bed, smile on his face, stirring in his trousers. He was happy. She had laughed at a good percentage of his jokes, he hadn’t revealed too many of his bad sides, and she was an absolute firecracker. An explosive laugh that was triggered only by the most inappropriate things. Her green eyes shone brightly as she spoke of her travels and turned a more demure blue as she talked through the ‘bastards who fucked me over’. Mainly men, she didn’t have much time for many women either. ‘Back stabbing whoors’. But she seemed to like Flea; she even paid him a compliment of sorts.
‘You know Flea you ain’t a wanker like most men. Ain’t tried to get in me pants yet. I don’t fink Flea suits ya either’
So although he did want to get in her underwear and beyond, he wasn’t coming across as a wanker, and most people who met him thought his name suited him perfectly still.
Everyone Flea had ever known had always moved away from him, or vice versa, stolen from him, or vice versa, tried to kill him, or vice versa, taken out restraining orders against him, run away with someone or vice versa, died, got lost or vice versa, sacked him, got bored of him, or vice versa.
He lived in the peripheries of people’s lives; they knew him during a really weird six month period of their lives. Yet for him life was those weird six month periods tacked onto each other. There was usually someone else about; he met some in bars during good times but others in cardboard boxes, one on an airplane but 3 in toilets, 3 in hospital and 2 in police stations. 5 women and 1 man had been met, to the limits of his memory, in his bed the morning after. They weren’t all women although most were and it has to be said that quite a lot of the problems he had put himself through in his lifetime had been because of his dick and to a lesser extent his heart.
He started to take an interest in his appearance. He shaved his hair off; it was naturally dark and greasy and had grown into a matted mass on his shoulders. He looked slightly less like he belonged in a corner, but not thuggish, he simply didn’t have the physical stature for that. Anna didn’t recognise him when she first saw the new him. But her loudest laugh yet was followed by an evening of pure heaven where she couldn’t stop running her hand over his newly spiky head.
He even thought that she was flirting with him more than usual, and although she wasn’t doing it self-consciously, she was. It was that night that they formed their new plan, which started really as an elaborate joke, and placed their first bet.
In fairness it wasn’t much of a plan or a joke really but they had laughed and decided to follow it through. Flea done something similar before and had often taken big decisions based on this kind of conversation. It basically involved stealing a lot of weed from the coffeeshop, but no money, and doing a runner. The coffeeshops were unlikely to get much sympathy from the police, and wouldn’t want them sniffing around the business anyway. Flea and Anna certainly hadn’t been registered to pay taxes so Bob wouldn’t do anything unless he found them himself. Then they would simply have to sell it and live off the profits. Flea didn’t really want to get back into drug dealing but if it meant going into business with Anna then he was in. More interesting, to him at least, was the bet. Simple really, who could charm the most money from passers by in an hour. Although Anna seemingly had a distinct advantage over Flea, as people generally wanted to avoid him, this could work in his favour. Flea had spent time begging before and had soon found out he was the type people would pay to go away.
It wasn’t that which interested Flea though, it was the pay-off; the loser would have to walk, not run, down one of Amsterdam’s busy canal side streets naked. All Flea could think was what Anna’s slim figure would look like without the baggy clothes she used to hide it with, and she knew this. It had been her suggestion and her laughing about how funny it would be coupled with her description of herself losing had given Flea an erection which wouldn’t subside for so long it held up their leaving the pub as he hid his shame from the rest of the pub they had spent a most memorable evening in.
He lost the bet of course. His approach hadn’t worked in Amsterdam. Tourists couldn’t understand him and most of the locals wanted to talk to him about his problems. Anna had played the sweet and innocent girl, lost in Amsterdam, needing money to get home and she had collected 5 times what Flea had. They had never bothered to assign a time for the walk to take place so Flea tried to think of the day’s least busy time. However, the street they had chosen was one of those places that never slept.
It was 4.37am when Flea and Anna made their way to Oudezjids Voorurgwaal. Anna stood, arms folded watching as Flea gingerly undressed. It was cold and most men would have worried about this affecting their manhood but this was something that Flea, to the surprise of many, had never had to worry about. The cold had taken some effect but now he just came across as the average man, something he didn’t often pull off often. He stood, hands covering himself as best they could, naked in front of her as she held his clothes and held his eye as well with a half smile creeping across her lips.
Without saying a word Flea started to walk, not run, down the street. Anna tucked his clothes under one arm and caught up with him. A few drunks on the other side of the street saw him and started to laugh and shout. The ladies banged on their windows and they just slowly walked through the commotion that they were causing. Halfway down the street, when they passed by the second bridge she slipped her arm around his at the elbow and they walked the rest of the way arm in arm, heads held high. They stopped at a tree, the groups of lads had continued to follow them and there being ignored had led to the calls getting louder and more aggressive.
‘Come on, lets get out o here,’ Anna urged as she pulled away from Flea to face the lads. She stared aggressively at them, cocking her to the side, she thought of shouting some abuse at them about them not being real men but decided better of it.
‘But I ain’t walked all the way down yet’ insisted Flea. He was quite enjoying walking with Anna.
‘Forget it, you dun enuff honey’
Flea was thinking of arguing but it had been many years since anyone had called him anything as nice as honey.
‘Alright but let me av me pants first’
She threw his jeans at him, which he hastily pulled on as they ducked down an alley and ran round the corner laughing.
They had three more bets in the next few months and Flea lost them all and had variously lost body hair, had a tattoo and had an uncomfortably arousing night in Anna’s underwear. Flea didn’t mind, he positively loved the attention from her and the slightly sexual nature of a lot of the forfeits had led to the tension between them rising.
Flea and Anna did steal a lot of weed from Bob the night after a big delivery when they were locking up the downstairs together. They didn’t really have any stuff so they just took it and the clothes on their back and got on a tram. They avoided busy areas. It was Amsterdam but the polis would only tolerate so much and judging by the size of the bag they were carrying this was beyond that. On the other side of town they hired a car they had no intention of returning. Flea had tried this as a method of getting away before but Anna had much more luck convincing people, she even put make-up on to charm the salesman. Instead of risking the precarious run through British customs or the gamble of posting it back, they headed south into the Germany through an unguarded road border near Dusseldorf. Anna had talked of an acquaintance from Belfast who lived in Berlin who she described as ‘the sort of guy who might be able to get rid of it for them’. It turned out she was right and as there had been quite a few busts recently in Germany it was really hard to get hold of, and they’d only been at his flat for half an hour when he bought the whole lot off of them. The pair stayed a week in Berlin before heading to London, neither, though would be able to tell you much about their trip except the insides of various bars and techno clubs. Soon they were holed up in a bedsit in Peckham living of the four grand they had, largely still in Euros, stuffed in a cupboard.
To start with they spent a lot of their time just sat in the pub, or on the common, good days, drinking and thinking of the next way to make money. It was just really away of dreaming away the time until it came to the inevitable, they would have to get jobs again, probably at night. They were not the kind of people who would think of using the money they had to do anything more productive than getting wasted.
They were sharing a bed but nothing more intimate, bar heart-space. Only once had Flea tried to kiss her but he had got badly full of wine first, and she had shied away. It had not been mentioned since, though it was often thought of by them. Both wondered if the other ever thought of it. It was a particularly fine day beneath the large Beech tree on Peckham Rye Common when Anna suggested her latest bet. Anna was always the one who suggested their bets and this one was simple. All they had to do was ‘cause a scene’ she said.
‘I’m gunna give ya a chance this time’ she muttered as she blew out the smoke she had just inhaled and fixed Flea with her mischievous stare.
‘I’ll do mine next week in a venue of your choosing at a time of your choosing’, she was trying to entice him.
Flea made a face to indicate he didn’t want to play even though he loved their bets, despite losing, but she saw through his, as always, and soon they were both grinning inanely at each other.
‘Good’, she continued. ‘We’ll need it to be to be for sumfing good, it’s got to be really worth it this time.
Flea, for once, could think of lots of things but would never say them.
‘I know, she said, beaming at him with her green eyes. How bout… Anything’
Anything. Anything. The big one. Surely that had to mean a blowjob. He wasn’t really sure what she would ask of him, Flea didn’t really understand women. She thought he would ask for sex. Anna wasn’t sure what she would ask for, maybe oral sex. It was about time they started doing something in that bed, she thought. She knew she could trust him, she knew he was in love with her. It made things easier for her. Maybe she should have kissed him back when he tried but he was so pissed that he had gone at her at such a velocity she had backed away as a natural reaction. She had seen how hurt he was and hadn’t been able to mention it since, and she could never make the first move, too much power at stake.
Flea had picked a drizzly Tuesday afternoon on Peckham high street for Anna to make her scene. As he walked down to meet her outside the Nags Head, streams of police cars and fire trucks hurtled past him. This wasn’t fair there was obviously some major disturbance in Peckham already. Flea wondered if he should have thought of a different location, but then again maybe this would hinder her. When he arrived he couldn’t set within 50 metres of the pub, it was cordoned off and the area was packed with cops and fire fighters, locals, pushers, commuters, drunks, mothers with prams, shop owners, hairdressers, teenagers, truants, old women and her.
It made the London news and a couple of the national papers. It was going to be hard to beat. She said that it has been easy but he didn’t believe her. She said all she had done was leave a bag and call it in as a bomb threat but he knew for it to have worked that well she must have planned it well. This worried Flea and from then on all his ideas would seem like good ones for increasingly shortened periods of time.
Maybe he could pretend to hijack a plane, but that wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t easy to disrupt the public that badly, it needed to be for something bad, people just wouldn’t stop for anything else. But he didn’t want to do anything bad, well at least not that bad. So… Pretend to do something. He could pretend to rob a bank. No, that wouldn’t work. He needed to do something bad, but not really bad, and get away scot free for his reward.
The constant ideas of doing bad things got him nowhere but probably affected his mental health. He would walk around looking at things and thinking of the worst thing he could do, but not really do and not really be there so he could get away with it, ken? Something stupid, really stupid, that would work. He could climb Nelson’s Column. Well, actually there was no way that he could climb Nelson’s Column. Maybe he could go to the Houses of Parliament. That was definitely a place you could create a scene. But the rozzers would just nick you as soon as you put a toe out of line. Maybe he could lie in the middle of Oxford St and hold up the traffic. Nah, they’d just run him over. This, of course, would never have worked, none of them would, but in Flea’s humble opinion this was one of his better ideas and he considered it for a good two days.
It was down to the penultimate day and he was beginning to panic. Ideas now lasted but a few minutes. Steal an animal from the zoo? Pretend to drown in the Thames? Naked exercising outside Buckingham palace? Outrageous blasphemy in Westminster Cathedral? Mime in Covent Garden scaring children? Bomb threat at Bank? Light a fire on Hampstead Heath?
‘No. No. No. No. No. Already done. Probably kill myself’
He was banging his head against a brick wall and quite rightly people were staring at him.
Defame some art? Take over TV? Ruin all tourists’ photos?
Anna wound him up about it all evening. She had stuck the newspaper excerpts up on the wall of their room, and read them aloud in her best posh accent.
‘The package was discovered by passers by who alerted the authorities. Police blocked off the streets and local stations which left thousands on their way home severely DISRUPTED. But wait, wait, wait, this is my favourite bit, Mayor Boris Johnson spoke of the seriousness in which he views such incidences and he is determined to bring the perpetrators to justice. Yeah, good luck. She let out a mighty laugh.
Flea was not responding the way she wanted him to. He was busy thinking. Anna thought he might be sulking but it was just too much fun to leave alone, or at least, it should have been.
‘Reckon you’ll av to do sumfing pretty special to beat it Flea… Got to get inta a couple a papers at least or I get me some anything she cooed.
Still nothing from Flea. Set off a load of fireworks on the Strand?
She had been hoping to raise the sexual tension another notch. Anna was fairly sure that she was gonna ask for sex but she wanted Flea drooling over the prospect. He had, of course, been thinking about winning, a lot. He tried not to, to focus, but that was never one of his limited strong points. He had imagined a hundred times her lips on his cock, and all the other things he could ask for. Just ask for them! Flea usually had to work very hard to get anything off women, sex or not. Most of them, often correctly, didn’t trust him. No, he had to concentrate. She was talking away in the corner about something or other, she had stuck up some old newspaper or something. Maybe it was covering a stain on the wall or a hole. Dig a hole in Parliament Sq? What?
And so it came to Saturday. He had guessed this would be the best day for it. More people around, more days to ruin. Flea and Anna boarded the number 12 bus which ran through sahf east London, past Big Ben and around Parliament Sq, up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Sq, round Piccadilly Circus, up Regent Street. It was bound to go past a lot of the busiest parts of London and Flea was hoping he’d find some inspiration gazing out of its windows. It was, certainly by his standards, a good idea. So although he considered the day and route were good, he had nothing else, nothing.
Peckham and Camberwell flew past as he silently pondered his fate. He was nervous and she could tell. Her attempts to wind him up had lasted all night, and had even turned very suggestive when they lay in bed together. Most men would think she was trying it on, which she was, but Flea was lost. He still was. Sahf London definitely wasn’t the place to try most of them, he would probably get shanked. They approached the river and the light seemed to shine brighter as it always did, bouncing off the murk of the Thames on it’s way back to grey skies.
The bus edged around Parliament Sq and Flea gazed at the protest there. He couldn’t do anything here and risk fucking it up for those guys. Two fingers up at the establishment right in front of them, every day.
The traffic was getting heavier and Flea was beginning to sweat and shift on the bus. People taking too long to get on or off raised his blood pressure to the point of screaming obscenities at them, tearing through the bus and pushing them off. The old man who just wanted some directions from the bus driver nearly caused him a coronary. Flea just wanted it all over so he could just lose and do what she wanted him to. For the first time he wondered what this might be, probably get him to move out. But no, no, no, he couldn’t lose, not this one, it was surely the only chance he had with someone as perfect as her
The bus crept up Whitehall past the Cenotaph, not here either. His head was spinning; pretend he had a bomb; steal the bus and crash it into Nelson’s Column; spray paint a giant cock on the side of the lions in Trafalgar Sq? Then there they were. The lions and thousands of other people filling the square. Shit, shit, shit, this was it; he was running out of time. He grabbed Anna harder than he realised and dragged her off the bus into the thronged masses. He was staring around maniacally, like a man possessed. Maybe he should just give up, but the sexual images always vetoed that idea. Fuck, he was horny, it might be a year since he had sex, or maybe it was 9 or 6 months. Heart and cock pushed him on.
Anna was worrying about him now. He was taking it too seriously; it should have been just a bit of fun, part of the chase. Not this, she could see the sweat pouring off him and it wasn’t even a particularly hot day. Passers by and tourists were pushing too close to her and she didn’t like the sensation. Flea just strode through pushing everyone out of his way as he forced his way into the square. She was 6 inches shorter than him so the crowd blocked her view of the live television performance that was taking place at the foot of Nelson’s Column. Flea, still trying to cause as much trouble as possible was inextricably drawn to the TV cameras. Pull the plug on the performance? Jump on scream and shout something outrageous about himself and the Queen? Run naked across the screen and molest one of the hosts? A lot of Flea’s ideas involved shouting things about himself and the Queen or being naked.
People jostled and pushed him back as he tried to get as close as possible through the thickening crowd. He could start a riot? Nah, no-one would go for it any more. The crowd was also made up of largely kids and old duffers. He stood out a mile. Flea pushed through a group of teenage girls and nearly knocked a pregnant woman over as he approached the small clearing where, for some reason, they were filming a couple of people doing chin ups.
Anna broke free from him. Her pleas for him to stop had fallen on deaf ears. So had her pleas for him to let go of her but she had managed to wrestle herself free from his grip as she had done from many men in the past. She recognised the look in his eyes on the bus; she had seen it in her father. He had lost control and wasn’t thinking anywhere close to straight. She was frightened as she pushed her way slightly out of the crowd, without managing to take her eyes off the glimpses she caught of the car crash unfurling before her eyes.
Thoughts in his head were flashing by as blinks do, as he wildly searched into the faces which turned on his arrival for inspiration. He didn’t realise it but the police were already zoning in on him, the presenters on the Olympic countdown show had clocked him as had most but not all of the crowd. Faces, sounds, ideas and actions were a blur to him.
He caught his arm on something and his momentum spun him round to the face of his enemy, an 83 year old grandmother of four. The thought entered his head and he dismissed it but his fist didn’t. So, just as the television cameras broadcasting the event live across the planet focussed on him he unleashed a right hook to devastating effect. The crowd rocked back in shock and awe and he realised what he had done for the second that he saw her on the floor, bloodied, before two cops tackled him to the floor and he was knocked out cold as he hit the hard concrete of Trafalgar Sq. What would Nelson have made of it all?
And while the scene it caused on that fateful day was minimal and instantly quelled by the mass of arriving police. London is the most surveilled city on earth and the people behind the lenses had certainly seen Flea coming. The shocking pictures caught from every conceivable angle had been quickly broadcast around the globe. A diplomatic incident ensued. What had happened to Britain and the British public, were they fit to hold the Olympics?
Flea was stuck in jail. He knew there had been some fuss but certainly wasn’t aware of the extent. He felt bad about hitting the old lady and had that he was probably going to go back to jail and bad because Anna hadn’t been to see him.
They had pretty much left him all alone. He’d been interviewed by them a few times and he had spoken to a doctor a couple of times too. The first time he spoke to the police he was still reeling from the knock to the head and he had just told them the truth. They didn’t really believe him but then again no one could really figure out any other reason why he might have done it, so why not? They still couldn’t find that fucking Anna bird and the doctor said he was fine, slow but fine.
He dominated the headlines for over a week, especially in the tabloid press but not exclusively. Questions were asked in Parliament and Anna had to admit that he had caused a bigger disturbance, especially in national psyche, and had won but she wasn’t about to hand her self in to the cops. Technically, she wasn’t involved and she didn’t like cops and certainly didn’t want them sniffin around her. They had video footage of the two of them walking through Peckham, getting on the bus, going in to Trafalgar Sq where the TV took over. It was widely known that the police wanted to see her; they already knew her name and were pressing her previously known associates. Luckily the only people she knew in Peckham didn’t want the police round either.
But eventually, she did hand herself in, to the jaws of Fleet St. She walked through the doors of the nation’s favourite rag and sold her story for a hundred large. And what a story it was, she had been perfecting it for a fortnight as she lay low. She told of bizarre mood swings and bouts of violence, she told of a softer, loving side, she told of a man she equally loved and hated. The reporters and editors lapped it up, as did the public. Weeks of extra papers were sold as they serialised her. They could sell books and with the right work they could make this girl famous for fifteen minutes and themselves richer for good. The police went mad and had her arrested but she was released after a newspaper campaign to save her.
Flea didn’t get it, why would she say those things. He tried to deny it but the police wound him up and he ended up shouting and screaming and punching and biting like the mad man everyone wanted him to be. So while America demanded an apology from an unusually unobliging Britain, and Anna cashed her cheque and tourism fell in London dropped amid fears, Flea McGready was committed to a mental asylum.
He wouldn’t be able to tell you much about the first 8 months, 2 weeks and 3 days but after that another cloud of sedation lifted from his eyes. He came to agree with them, he probably was mad, why else would he have hit that old lady, and the more his mindset agreed with them the sedation continued to fall away. Flea suffered one of the true moments of clarity on a Tuesday afternoon in August when he was sat in Dr Connor’s office. As usual they were joined by Bill, only a few yards from his shoulder in case he turned violent. God, he hated that Bill. He was the only thing that made Flea feel violent at all, always watching him. Flea, as usual, was not really listening to her but every once in a while words had the habit of seeping through and he would usually challenge them. On this particular day he was absentmindedly gazing towards Bill, Flea followed his gaze to where Dr Connor’s shapely thigh was crossed by her other shapely thigh.
‘Are you listening to me at all Adam?’
‘No’ he was just being honest.
‘I said’, she sighed, ‘don’t you think that the reason you got involved in crime and drugs are to do with the voices you heard in your head’
Flea didn’t really know what voices she was talking about but this Dr Connor was always saying he had said things that he really couldn’t remember saying. He just shrugged but as she looked away annoyed he was minded of that film Anna had shown him just before he hit that woman. Had that bloke who was the Joker, but he was in a place like this and he eventually just played along. Yeah, he could do that, couldn’t he?
‘Yeah, it probably was the voices.’
And he continued, and it started to work. People just kept telling him how pleased they were with him and this had never really happened to Flea before. He really wanted to get out of this place and just maybe this might work. Flea rather enjoyed getting praised for agreeing with people, it was easy. He said he was no longer angry and he wasn’t. He said he didn’t hear voices and this was true too. It was now actually sweeter than a lot of places he had been, 3 meals a day, fresh air, no job, free drugs but there was a distinct lack of women and a proliferation of public masturbators.
Talk started to appear of daytrips and downgrading. Bill no longer followed him around constantly, a pleasure which was passed to Larry who was convinced he may spontaneously combust at any second.
At his request his first day trip was to the beach. An abandoned beach it seemed. The public had lost interest in him and just assumed that after all this time, that he had just been locked away in a padded cell with the key thrown away. It had become old news quickly after Anna had finished her story and disappeared before the book could be written. A gang shooting and a cabinet minister’s affair with his secretary removed them from the public spectacle but their place in the foot notes was secured.
He spent a few hours with Bill and some other bloke from the hospital on a North West beach on a murky day in April. It was perfect; he just watched the waves crashing into the beach, the seagulls diving and the wind rushing through the grass. They even lent him a little CD player and he whiled away the hours refamiliarising himself with music, he hadn’t heard any for quite a while, at least not anything good.
When they asked him where he wanted to go on his next trip he replied quite simply with ‘same place’. They bought him more music and the sun shone. Perfect. He even saw a few people around the beach. Bill tensed up a bit but Flea just wanted to watch normal people for a few minutes. His sense of time had evaporated again so he never knew it but his trips actually occurred every second and fourth Wednesday of the month. He looked forward to them, as did Bill and Pat who would ply him with a double his dose of sedatives, leave him with that music, wander a safe distance from him and get stoned.
Anna also looked forward to news of these trips. As soon as she had sold her story and got the cops off her back she had got straight out of the country. She always hoped that her plan would work, there really had been no other option. She had hated selling that story but had figured he was going to jail anyway. This way at least she could make some money, which she now fully intended to share with Flea. She had tried to get word to him so many times, bribed so many people, but she never got through. She had hoped he would get out soon; it was just luck they had seen the film a few nights before it happened. Flea had raved about how much he loved it. She just hoped Flea would remember it but not get lobotomised. Before leaving London she had paid a private detective to watch him and send her as much information as possible. 6 weeks ago he had rung for the first time since he let her know where Flea was being held. He was getting day release and returning to the same place like clockwork. After she had watched him and his companions on two occasions she decided to add breaking a dangerous and psychotic inmate out of captivity to the list of her crimes against the state.
It wasn’t difficult either. A few hundred quid to some local heavies who had no idea what they were getting involved in and she was alone with him on that beach. It took him quite a while to realise that it was her walking towards him and although he should have been mad he couldn’t be.
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