Free Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward Page A

drugs a bite of sausage roll yesterday afternoon had to be spitten out, but now every little squeeze from Georgie reminds him just how empty he is. His cheeks look like black triangles as he kisses Georgie so up close – usually the mop-top hides all signs of malnutrition, and bad skin. Georgie, mirrorballs hidden by eyelids, spins Bobby onto the floor and gives him a big fat smackeroony anyway. She loves her boyfriend and she loves him getting back on his arty farty feet again, and the two of them roll around in the sweeties and the paint and they knock over Bobby’s water pot, and the two of them are a mess and all. On an ordinary comedown this sort of behaviour would annoy Bobby, but today he’s got London drooling at his feet, and he gives Georgie another huge huggle. She laughs, spinning him into the new painting, and suddenly he does get a bit tetchy and says, ‘Actually, that’s enough. I’m fucking starving. Howay.’ Georgie doesn’t really notice her boyfriend’s topsy-turvy emotions, she just keeps beaming and does a little squeal and says, ‘Ooh, I know what you can have! It’s a special occasion, after all!’ She scampers through to the kitchen and empties her work-bag onto the breakfast bar, cascading cut-price pick-’n’-mix and stolen bags of crisps like a crunchy waterfall. She tears open bags of Haribo and paper barber-shop bags of candy, chomping and smiling all the time like Minnie Mouse or Miss Piggy on Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Her face is the sun breaking through her two cloudy cheeks. To celebrate Bobby’s success, she ‘cooks up’ a sweety full-English breakfast for them both, which consists of: Starmix fried eggs, cola jelly-beans for sausages, pink shrimps for bacon, red Skittle tomatoes, two tiny toffee hash-browns, a fingerful of pink Nerds for baked beans, yucky Blackjack black pudding, two ready-salted KP Squares for toast, served with a Starmix milk bottle on a paper plate. Georgie’s forehead twitches with hilarity as she brings Bobby the Artist his meal, with a dishcloth folded over her forearm like a proper waitress. Bobby gets the hystericals and loves her all over again, clearing a space on the shitty carpet for the plates. You have to eat the sweety full-English with your fingers, and it gets scoffed in an instant, Georgie being really adventurous and combining tastes, for example Nerds on Squares (beans on toast), shrimp squashed on jelly-bean (pigs in blankets), or a Skittle either side of the Blackjack (just gets rid of the taste of a Blackjack). Bobby picks at his food piece by piece, hands all shaky and white. Afterwards he gives Georgie another smooch, and for ten seconds his life is perfect and if he were to die right now (for example his heart bursting, so full it is with glittering red bloooood) he’d be in too much rapture to notice. But then ten seconds later he’s hungry again – the sweety full-English isn’t known for being very filling – but there’s fuck-all in the cupboards, unless you like eating bread sandwiches. Bobby’s not the sort of house-husband to go pushing a trolley round Lidl very often; in fact, at times he can be quite a bad boyfriend, since living the bohemian dream involves not cleaning the apartment or washing the dishes or buying more milk when they run out of milk. He just wants to paint and be merry! Bobby the Artist sits there in the middle of a Stonehenge of canvases, feeling his belly grumble, and he wonders if Georgie would mind him eating her instead. Randy bastard. Eyes beaming, Georgie giggles as he creeps his hands up her legs like pervy spiders, and in all his light-headed derangement Bobby starts cackling too. He tugs down her Sooty and Sweep knickers. Georgie’s a bit shy to open her legs dead wide because she’s got a few in-grown hairs and all that, but she smiles serenely as Bobby’s fingers slither up her cellulite. He slips his tongue into her sweaty cinnamon fanny, and all those feelings of starvation