There's a mynah bird on the verandah, singing sad songs while its owner, in black leather, sits on her boyfriend's lap with a glass of red wine in one hand and the remains of the bottle in the other. The boyfriend's arms are round her waist like he's saving her from drowning, or from running after Kylie Mulligrew in the High Street on a Saturday night with a handbag and intent. Alison – her name, the girl in black leathers – shows no signs of resisting his restraint tonight, unlike on Saturday nights. She turns and kisses him on the mouth – lips don't come into it, this is mouth to mouth, manic, urgent. Mannie – the mynah – sings "Where do you go to my lovely?" Alison is in the driving seat. This is how babies are made.
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
She breaks off all of a sudden, sits back, surveys Spider – the owner of the lap she is inhabiting – as though he might be a stranger. Mannie interrupts his song and there is silence. Mannie looks at Alison, Alison looks at Spider and Spider looks at his soul. His mother wants it to soar like Christ the redeemer, but Spider knows it is more of a Vauxhall Vectra that could do with a service. He looks to Mannie for support but Mannie loops the loop on his perch and ignores him. Alison is wearing her "I might only have a week to live, humour me" expression and Spider senses a crisis. This is also how babies are made.
"How long we been together?" she says. Her speech is wine-slowed but her brain isn't, not yet. In this state she is too intelligent for Spider, who once had a trial for Preston North End and can do complex calculations while playing darts but has few other successful traits. He shrugs his shoulders.
"Year?" he says. Mannie sings "I'm a prima donna" until Alison knocks the bottom of his cage and sends him swinging. His next rendition – of "Stop in the name of love" – is curiously affecting, his voice appearing sharper and with a more impressive tremolo. Spider is aware that the bird has greater presence than him and imagines locking it in the glass cabinet in Alison's spare room and sealing up the joints and keyhole until it won't sing no more. He regrets this thought immediately but it is too late: it exists, it helps to define his character – as all of us, from the moments of our births, are defined by our every thought as much as every action. This, too, is how babies are made.
Alison looks at the moon which seems, to her, closer than Piccadilly Central. There is barbed wire, double-height and double width, extra sharp, surrounding that spot in the frontal lobe of her brain where the insane thoughts lie, those ones about love and romance and happy-ever-after, those ones that girls like her, girls in black leather and hard expressions refuse to acknowledge. She knows Spider will never make her anything other than temporarily amused. She knows he has limited intelligence and even more limited aspirations. She knows these things but, as Mannie begins to sing "Begin the beguine," she wonders how he will be with children. She imagines he will be patient, that, being little more than a child himself, he will have fun and be fun and make fun. She imagines noise and untidiness in their little house and thinks it would be different, appealing even. She notices she is thinking 'will' not 'would' and feels the barbed wire melt into impotence.
"Tell me something nice," she says. She has finished the red wine but the empty bottle and glass are still in her hands because she doesn't want to move from Spider's lap. As soon as she does he will stand up and make a break for it into the kitchen and leave her alone with Mannie. Mannie sings in his cage, "Hotel California." Alison wants to cry and thinks she used to punch slags who cried. Spider looks at the moon and wonders, again, how far away Preston is. He winces as Alison's elbow digs into his rib.
"You're gorgeous," he says.
"I know that," she replies. "Something nice."
Spider may not be clever but he knows what Alison wants him to say. He almost wants to say it, too. She's fit, after all, and smart too, and doesn't take shit from no-one. He knows he doesn't deserve her, really, but she seems to stick with him and he doesn't know why. He reaches up to kiss her and she pecks him back but immediately recoils. She won't give up, not yet. She wants to hear nice.
In his cage, Mannie's head is in the air as though he, too, is looking at the sky. As he sings he steps round and round on his perch, bending his body low and rising up, again and again, as though oblivious of everything but himself and his song. His voice is crystal, almost human and he begins to sing a song that neither Alison nor Spider recognise. "These are the reasons I love you," he sings, "the reasons that pour from my heart. Though I live in a cage, though my life's but a stage, I know that we never can part."
He begins to whistle, a slow, melodious air, repeating it over and over until it seeps into Alison's and Spider's minds and, without realising it, they, too, begin to whistle. Cloud falls across the moon and in the darkness they sit, Alison resting lightly on Spider's lap, her arms around him and his around her. They can feel each other's chests rise and fall, feel the whiff of air from their whistling. Alison is cold, Spider is shaking. He knows he is about to speak. He can feel it rising from deep inside him. He knows, his mother told him, that this is how babies should be made.
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