Warpdrive (Ruff Kut Bizness Edit) MARGARET BUCHANAN OWNED A WALLPAPER STORE IN LAMBETH NORTH, SOUTH LONDON. Sahgal Bhosale produced some of her paper in Ghatkopar, east Bombay. She also sold slipmats and windchimes. There used to be money in it, sometime or another. <<It's a glorious design>> she was showing a leaf of marigolds to a customer one morning <<sans pareil, yeah - without parall'l. It's imported, you know.>> <<Yeah>> said the customer, who was imported 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 rippled spheres. He closed the album. <<Have you got anything in an African style?>> The shop was empty for a long time after that. In the middle of all that, malicious 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 countered. <<Glorious sunshine then.>> Mr Jones stopped to look at a Rousseau wallprint which had been hanging there the last time he dropped in. <<Let's get straight down to business, shall we>> he said. <<You've fallen behind rent twice now in the past six months. 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?>> <<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. A little while later someone haggled for the print. <<Oh go on>> Margaret sighed <<20 pounds.>> MARGARET BUCHANAN LIVED ON THE SIXTH floor of the monumental Heygate Estate, 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 an idle 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 ruffkut bizness!>> Leeroy tabled a pouchful of speed. The night developed a similar texture: granular and vast. His 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.19>> 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 RECALCITRANT tea stain on the counter. A customer was studying a petunia pastische hanging on the wall. Outside there was a typically Lambeth North pastiche of rain and raggamuffin. <<Do you need a hand there?>> Margaret asked. <<I'm just looking>> the woman said. 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 had 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 fruit 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 suggested. <<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 USUALLY went to Club Troppo in Hackney. Sahgal Bhosale normally 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 masala being his most potent 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 apologized. <<Safe, man. Hey man, do you want a stone?>> <<This is a ruff kut>> Leeroy said in the comfort of thetoilets. <<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>> Croon said. <<I deal 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 favorite 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?>> <<TELL YOU WHAT>> MARGARET FORCED a smile <<I don't normally do this sort of thing. Buy the double-roll set of Oleander #26, yeah, and I'll throw in, free of charge, an extra roll. You could do your bathroom with it. And it's a glorious design...>> A second potential buyer, whom Margaret had been tracking 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. The offender 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. Back at the store, the original customer was nowhere to be seen. Margaret kicked the double-roll set 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 pasteurization. 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 lapped it up hurriedly and rinsed her toothbrush. 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 Adam Smith, circulated word of mouth, carried to the air in pirate radio broadcasts faster than most viruses. Sometimes they leapt too far to commerciality 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 Cassius 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 26 minutes studying an early Rubens. <<Come on love, it's shit>> Leeroy complained. <<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 Henri Rousseau painting of a tiger in a jungle. <<Well, this is more like it>> he 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 colorful, 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 riddim of the new world>> the other bloke explained. <<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 Robinson got some benefit out of it. He wallpapered his bathroom with her now legendary Frangipani #18 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 Ethiopia and beyond. <<Brudders and sistas come tagedder!>> A frangipani stalk sprouted creepers which emerged from the walls and slowly wrapped around his chest. Ants thundered over the tiles. Leeroy lapped another petal and sighed <<Brrrritain is the larrrrgest island of the Carrrrrribbean. Brudders and sistas come tagedder!>> timple command. An uncom alternative to a distress signal. Wof limn," Kirk said sullenly. he hosts of o are we to start making demands?" "In any case," Spock said, "what demands can we make, when this facility "What do you mean 100 kilomet beyond the limits of attraction; it might well have been an abundant paradise in its youth, but it had since overheated into a saun After draining the landscape of knowledge, and finding beauty "Great gods!" x muttered. "ppens every 25 hours, so it's as close to a day as you get here. A Terran day, that is.o take you on a flight to Mount Esvalva, a volcano about 5000 kilomet "Our stay here must be short," Kirk intete the e "Terran Reckoning, that is."  FIRST CONTACT (c)opyright Rob Sullivan 1988-2024. Contact the author for all your criticisms and feedbacks. A mirror site of this anthology exists on WattPad.