Palmer Pleasure Beach

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-913513-43-6
Verlag: Prototype Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 316 Seiten

Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West's saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened last night with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.

Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach is her first novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Palmer, Helen

Leseproben

We are all allowed to drink Vimto on shift but nothing else. No postmix fizzy stuff, no booze, just as much Vimto as we want so long as we don’t stop working. But Vimto is pretty bloody good to be fair. Especially when you tip in a bit of vodka to top up the system on the quiet morning shift. Which we have obviously never done and definitely have not done on this morning shift right now. That would be obscene. Carlotta comes in at 10:36. Carlotta has dark hair a bit like ours but definitely dyed. Reach up for the Cinzano bottle pre-emptively. A creature of habit, our Carlotta. What the fuck is Cinzano anyway. Today she is wearing a short black furry jacket – a bomber? a puffa? Who knows what’s under the fur, which looks like half a child’s gorilla suit. On her legs, shiny black PVC trousers, and clear, glittery platformed jelly shoes on her feet. The bomber jacket makes her upper half a perfectly round shape, and her skinny legs stick out underneath her, making her look like a lethal black poppy tottering on double stems. Her eyes are always rimmed with electric blue eyeliner, her eyelashes with blue mascara. Carlotta could be anything between forty-five and eighty. She’s sitting at her usual table near the window. The Cinzano and lemonade, resplendent with orange cocktail umbrella, is placed delicately in front of her. –Thanks, love. How are you today? –Oh, y’know. Can’t complain. I’d rather be on a beach in Ibiza but wouldn’t we all? –No thank you. I’ve had enough of that part of the world to last a lifetime. What d’you need Ibiza for when you’ve got all this? She gestures outside, a skinny string with painted claws. The sun is shining right enough. For a second we try to superimpose San Antonio Bay on top of what we can see through the window: a chunk of the prom with a few cars crawling past; the sea, which is doing a fairly good job of blueing its blueness; and the knowledge of the Tower to the left, doing its towering. –You’re right. Who needs the Med? Superimposition. Who needs the Med? Carlotta is paused while we indulge internally in some alternative thoughtpatternings. Where are we? Not Blackpool, that’s for sure. Ibiza of course. Never been to Ibiza, but as a defiant psychonoaut I can go wherever the fuck I want and there’s nothing you can do about it. In San Antonio a few faint strains of Binary Finary’s ‘1998’ can be heard across the bay. It gives me some serious goosebumps, deliberately thinking about the frenzy of that tune at the same time as the panpipes’ soft rendition of ‘Heaven Can Wait’ here in the restaurant. The way the tune comes from outer space and emerges through the middle of the synthetic sound, spiritual, evanescent, frenzied, while here in the restaurant the panpipes labour their way through Jim Steinman’s melody. And a band of angels wrapped up in my heart. The band of angels is here too, in this imaginary song sandwich, imagining euphoric arms raised and feel goosebumps raised, because there is also, in that cheesy-as-fuck trance tune, a song, a vocal without vocals, just as right here Meat Loaf’s voice inheres behind the panpipes, singing-not-singing. A band of angels. Boys in clubs, T-shirts drenched, arms aloft. –You look a million miles away, love. Where are ye? Good question. Splattered and spliced across soundwaves and timewaves to a sweaty podium, Heaven & Hell two nights ago, a gaggle of gurning, grinning lads. And me still in my work uniform. Sweaty T-shirts. Sweaty hugs. Blackpool Balearic. But at the same time in the San Antonio in my head I can see a group of girls in tiny denim shorts and bikini tops straggling across the sand, barefoot, flowers painted on their faces. A hen party on holiday from Liverpool. Across this bay that same hen party could well be straggling across these same sands. Is it really that different? Common levels of toxicity. Strings of leaked and shared bodily fluids. What else? Letting go. A collective letting-go. The vomit and the stumble. Thinking of Lee Dunton. Fit. Sweet, too. Works on the rides at the Pleasure Beach. Thick muscles in his arms and legs. Shaved head and stubbly face. Quiet ways; quiet face; the gentle type. Doesn’t say a lot, but get him on the podium in Heaven & Hell and something entirely different escapes him in wisps. Wisps of blue Aladdin’s Genie escaping him. His face opens up. An easy grin. His big hands make curlicues in the smoky air. Graceful fingers and smooth moves. He doesn’t know where they come from. These tunes are full-blown cheesy trance. Trance isn’t utopian. It’s nihilistic. Or maybe it’s both. It’s the sound of rave being commodified, oversweetened, extracted of meaning. Rich dudes with vans. These tunes are rave’s entrails. We’re not in a field and the party isn’t free. The more commercial the better. But the lasers, man. The lasers. Carlotta is one Cinzano down. She proffers her empty glass delicately. –Top us up, will you love. Andy is singing along to Meat Loaf in the kitchen, adding an extra layer to the cake of sounds: a mulchy falsetto interspersed with the ‘booyakasha’ and ‘ere me now’. Potato peelings clump around the sound. He’s on his first WKD of the day. Orange flavour is his favourite. For the Scots, of course, the rust of the Irn-Bru with the ice-clear vodka liquor. Never been to Ibiza, but with a couple of grand to spare it would be ace to go and have a proper high-end type holiday there. Stay in a posh white villa castle high on a hill with a turret bedroom and maybe a host of tanned Ibizan men serving grapes and tapas and tinto de verano and sangria and beer and pills and lines of pure snow-white cocaine all laid out on silver platters. But then the portal slightly creaks open again and Rachel pokes her head out, all wide, sorrowful eyes like a bunny, and the Ibizan men fizzle out. Fuck’s sake. Pull self together. Carlotta lights a fag, takes out her book of crosswords, her pencil and her purple-framed glasses. She is humming along to the slow part of ‘Bat Out of Hell’ on the panpipes. The creak of her voice fires off some strange hungover neurons in the brain. Then I’m down in the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun. The crossword book is one of those free ones from Hello! or OK! magazine, and she is halfway through it. Torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike. So in this song, the guy dies, right, or he’s about to die, and his heart breaks out of his body and flies away before his very eyes. And wham, smack, thump, just like that we are back to Rachel and last night. Hearts and bodies and things about dying or at least wanting to die. Fuckssake. This is harsher than the average doom-regret-comedown-hangover combo. Did she. Did we. Ugh. The brain cannot. Not right now. And yet it starts playing, in short bursts – Olga and Rachel, us two, together, as if it’s a thing, crawling round the flat pretending to be cats – Rachel blurts out a sudden monologue about depression and suicide then looks really embarrassed and folds up so small on the living room carpet that she almost succeeds in making herself invisible, except her striped fire-tiger eyes, orange, green, black, eyeliner smudged and dark, are still shooting their beams at us. Did we? But what did we? What did I. How can it be that I want to punch her in the face. Extinguish those two tiger lamps, searchlights, stripelights, punch those lights out. And then cradle her afterwards until they are burning again. The kind of desire that feels so shameful you can’t ever tell anyone about it except if you disguise it as a joke. I disgust myself at the best of times but right now feels like an entirely new level of self-loathing, hitherto undiscovered. Enough. Snap back to the present, standing behind the counter. Gulp down the whole pint glass of Vimto. Heart racing. Head throbbing. Did I punch her in the face? We look down at our right hand. The knuckles are bruised and grazed from something. Who knows what, though. Nothing new there. The sight of the bruising sets off another reaction. An electrical imprint on the upper arm. You don’t feel it, it feels you. Touching it gently – ouch – already know without needing to check that there is another bruise there, burning through our work shirt, and that it has been decorated in felt-tip pens by the hand of the tiger-striped lampgirl into a fantastical symbol of meteorology. Four seasons in one day. The cloud-bruise will change its weather signalling day by day, she said, commanding the storm, powerful, godlike, leonine, stoppit now Olga, ferfucksake. Today the storms shall be purple and red. Tomorrow, blue and green. Next week, yellow. Until the storm is over, you see. Right. Yep. Clear as day. Eric jangles the bell at the door. Lamplights vanish. Can feel our cheeks are slightly flushed. But a hangover will do that. It’s not because of last night’s memories crowding in suddenly, millions and millions of hot ghosts pressing at us, inside and out, bodies and brains and fires and desires, a sudden focusing of intensity. Aflame. No. Not that. Just a boozy flush. We see his moustache before we see anything else. Large, chevron-style, fagstained, off-white. With a moustache like that you don’t need a personality, but Eric does in fact have one, and sometimes it feels quite at odds with the melancholy walrus-droop of his nosebeard. –Morning, sunshine! What time did you roll into bed then? Eric is winking as he shuffles over to Carlotta’s table. Time to roll the eyes dramatically and then flutter the eyelashes. An expert transition from sarcasm to coquettishness in one...