Burning Roses

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

We left ye trusty tavern as night fell. We being me and Morag, who had turned up about half an hour earlier, claiming to be grabbing a quick drink on her way to the concert. I should have known better.

Morag was a sweet girl. Amongst her more endearing qualities were a habit of starting fights purely for her own amusement, and a reputation for shagging anything that moved. As a test, I’d tried remaining motionless on the floor under a bar one night, but it hadn’t worked. I’d been roused from my stupor by a raucous clapping and shouting, to find her busy on top of me and half the bar cheering her on. Who said romance was dead?

We left with some guy she’d just met in Mike’s, who appeared to be even more monumentally wasted than the usual run of the mill barfly. This guy had long, curly hair, but that was where any resemblance to yours truly stopped. He wore a white shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest, exposing a huge golden crucifix. Gold chains encircled his wrists, and a pair of Raybans dangled from a cord around his neck. Pure Mediterranean. I wouldn’t have thought he would have been Morag’s type, but it seemed as if she had moved upmarket since our last encounter.

“I need to hit the bank,” she said, and turned into an alley between two blocks of flats. Her companion staggered along, arm in arm with his new date, with me bringing up the rear. They made a cute couple – white shirt and black leather; Italian shoes and Doc Martens; long wavy hair and spiked green mohawk. I almost felt sorry for the guy, imagining his expression when he woke up next to her tomorrow morning. Morag was a good looking girl, but this was an acquired taste.

My commiserations were premature. Halfway along the alley, Morag swung the guy against a wall. Hard. I could practically feel the back of his head bounce against the bricks. She grabbed a handful of his shirt, and a knife appeared in her free hand.

“Your wallet – now!”

His glazed eyes struggled to grasp this new concept in dating. In slow motion, he reached for the knife.

Morag slashed his palm, smacked him in the face with her elbow and backhanded him so that his head bounced off the bricks again, all in one smooth movement. I was quite impressed.

“Money – now! Don’t try that again, or my boyfriend here will rip you apart.”

This was pure exaggeration. We might have had something once upon a time, but as usual I’d f****d that up. The man looked slowly in my direction, tears starting to cloud his vision, and all I could do was shrug and smile encouragingly. What choice did I have? Walk away, and leave him to the tender mercies of the queen of the night? Try to get him out of the jam, and risk getting gutted myself? At least if I played along, we might all live to tell the tale.

He reached in his back pocket and handed over his wallet with trembling hands. The typical bulging macho-type wallet. Morag dropped it somewhere inside her leather jacket, then grabbed the chain from around his neck.

“Your watch! And the chains!”

I think he was starting to catch on at last, as these were removed more quickly. They disappeared into the depths of the jacket, then Morag slammed another elbow into his face. His head cracked one last time against the wall before he started to slide into the piss-stained gutter.

Morag took off down the alley like a winged mammal escaping from the netherworld, looking back over her shoulder.

“Come on, for f**k’s sake!”

I decided to tag along.

*

A FEW TWISTS AND TURNS later, we stopped to get our breath back. By this time, I was starting to sober up. All that time and effort spent tossing back beers, destroyed by a surge of adrenaline.

“You’re still f*****g insane, you know that?” I managed to get this out while propping myself against a wall, drawing great gulps of air into my lungs. Morag just smiled sweetly and winked.

She’d lost one of her earrings in the dash to safety. Which was just as well, as they had been a beautifully matched pair of dried, used tampons, dangling from silver sleepers. A Polish mate of mine had started selling these as novelty jewellery at one of the flea markets on Saturday mornings, and they seemed to be catching on. His other innovations included necklaces made from cats’ ears, and some genuinely interesting looking top hats. On demand, he could supply a fully-fledged catskin. The cats’ ears had made him rather unpopular in most circles, so he tended to keep to himself a lot these days.

“You should have seen your face!” She had obviously recovered enough breath to enable her to laugh. “Getting soft, are we?”

I pushed myself upright and started off down the alley. My life was interesting enough without hanging around with f*****g lunatics.

“Hey! Stick around and I’ll buy you a drink at the Irish.”

Which goes to show that she wasn’t completely beyond redemption.

*

“I THOUGHT YOU’D GOT yourself a job?” We were on our way to the club, using the back alleys in case her latest conquest had regained consciousness.

“I’m dancing at the Summit again, yeah. They’ve got me listed as Darling Honey. But old habits die hard.”

Morag had had a handful of jobs since she’d run away from her adopted parents’ home at the tender age of 16, on the back of her boyfriend’s Harley. Waitress, barmaid, photographic model, and her latest attempt – exotic dancer. None of them seemed to last very long.

She was bright enough, and passionate enough, to make a success of anything she chose to do. But it was that same passion that brought most of these career paths to a spectacular end. Her huge overflowing cosmic passion, the same passion that made her a blazing comet, burning everything around her. She struggled with the mundane, the small, day to day things that everyone else took for granted. She knew that she was meant for bigger things, and that she just needed to find the right path, to get that initial break, then she’d be on her way. Blame it on her astrological sign. Blame it on her adopted parents, who she never mentioned. Blame it on the music, the drugs, the people around her. If every man and every woman is a star, constantly changing with each fresh event which affects him or her consciously or subconsciously, then Morag was a perfect example of this concept.

I’d first met her one lazy Saturday afternoon in Rockey Street, stoned out of my head while playing pool with a couple of Hell Rats. I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her. She’d been doing a Tarot reading for some friends, using the Tantric deck, which had impressed me no end. And when she noticed me watching and blew me a kiss, I felt the arrow plunge deep into my chest. Then she’d left with her friends, and it had taken me at least a week to track her down again, on the roof of Zeplins. That had been a good time in both our lives. It had had its ups and downs (in more ways than one), and like all things, it had come to its inevitable end.

“Anyway, he deserved it.” Her eyes were hard as she shrugged her shoulders.

“What the f**k are you talking about?”

“Did you see the way he was looking at me?” She shivered. “And he had that look about him.”

I’d heard this theory before, so I concentrated on keeping an eye open up and down the alley.

“Some of us are meant to be predators, and the rest are born to be prey. If guys like that want to step into my world, they have to play by my rules.”

She was getting a gleam in her eye that meant this could turn into a sermon at any moment. I stepped up the pace.

“Society thinks it can just turn its back on us.”

I dug my hands into the side pockets of my colours and tried to widen the gap.

“But we’ll show... hey! Where the f**k are you running to?”