Eminem's Girl

Here's the first 20 pages from Eminem's Girl - written in 2005:



Eminem's Girl

- Chapter One -

It is a truth nationally left unacknowledged that a disaffected inner-city council estate resident, in possession of nothing, must be in want of something more.
It was an apt statement for Marcia Reed’s predicament, and there existed a mountain that had to be climbed. There were two questions: When? and How?
‘The goal of mankind is to reach a higher idea of freedom. Who said that? Hegel?’ Marcia asked herself, and turned to face the upturned second-hand cloth bound History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. She hesitated, sighed then turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling of her small bedroom. She wouldn’t get one, she knew that much. She had turned to Russell the night before, when, like most sleepless nights she had opened it at random and had been somewhat comforted, even if it had been for all of five minutes – a short sweet balm nonetheless – held, not in a delivered certainty but in the seeking itself, and the potential it seemed to offer. She had read of Antisthenes, which, although it sounded like an anti-inflammatory medication, was in fact a philosopher who had been a disciple of Socrates, the first of the trio she conveniently remembered as S-P-A, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Antisthenes had turned his back on his aristocratic background and sought a brotherhood with working men, even took to dressing like one, and preached his philosophies in the language of the uneducated, so they too could relieve a thirst they hadn’t even been aware of, at the fountain of knowledge. Marcia wanted to be a disciple. No modern day equivalent was going to be found in Moss-Side though, unless she searched the nearby psychiatric unit, full to brimming with shuffling, bewildered pyjama wearers. Or the central benches adjacent to Kwik-Save in Moss-Side Precinct where many of them rocked back and forth, springing up like a too long unopened jack-in-the-box at the sight of a kind face, asking for a fag or the price of a cup of coffee with all the fervour of the panic-stricken, which would, however, only be spent at Booze Heaven. An inspirational mentor was never going to just ‘happen’, at least, not in the flesh. And besides, Marcia thought, even in films it seemed that it was only the boys that got the mentors – Karate Kid had one. The most Marcia felt she could ever hope for were the words that conveyed the rousing and revolutionary ideals of Marx. Karl, not Groucho.
The mountain then - could she ever change her life enough so that she could leave all traces of her existing one behind?
It was a hard question, one whose answer she had to believe was ‘yes’. But even that belief, once so strong, had steadily slipped away in tiny increments, each and every day, into the dark abyss of Reality.
It was one of those situations where the answer resided not in her head, but in her actions, and so, the problem Marcia faced was how to get from head to heart to action that would lead to the change she had so long craved. It was, she realised, the reason why most people didn’t, couldn’t change.
But Marcia Reed had to change, for she had more than most that needed changing.
She had reasoned, many a time since she had left the children’s home six years earlier that of course she could get the life she wanted, not just for herself, but for her mum also. She just needed to… what?
‘Six years, six whole years’, Marcia reminded herself, ‘and still no further forward’. She wondered what her fellow ‘inmates’, as she always referred to them, were doing now, a regular thought. No, she told herself, there was no need to worry on that count, she certainly wouldn’t be trailing behind a long line of high achievers, of that she was certain. ‘Anyway, I can enrol on a course in September,’ she tried to reassure herself, ‘a trade’, as her mum would say, as if she had ever had one. ‘A trade’ meant something like secretary, hairdresser, nursery nurse, nurse… and yet Marcia felt no compulsion to enter any of those trades, or wait the next eleven months to do anything about her situation, or spend four years training to do something that would pay little more than what she was currently earning, and failing, to live off.
She was also aware, though had no direct experience of, that freedom could come from within - ‘stoicism, or something,’ but that, even when the external landscape was friendly, was a long and arduous journey; but when it was hostile, like it was in Moss-Side, Manchester 14, it was another matter altogether. It wasn’t as if she could ever enjoy the scenery of such a journey either, literally or metaphorically, for green areas were non-existent. It was only ever black. And white. Only, to the black, it was all white. And, to the white, especially the police, all black. All trash, anyway.
Marcia both loved Moss-Side, and hated it. She loved its rebellious outcast status, and the irony of that status having grown organically within a city that was itself supposed to be an outcast, for it had once been proud of a solid working class revolutionary tradition. The Chartists. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Marx and Engels. Shelley. The Irish. Tony Wilson and Factory Records. Happy Mondays. Joy Division. The Charlatans. Morrissey. Oasis. Even Manchester United, once known as the Manchester Celtic, had all formed and built upon the foundation of what Manchester had once been, a city of fighters; fighters against systems, against oppression; any system would do - industrial capitalists, Manchester City FC, fascists, even, and especially, Soft Southerners. But the action never quite followed through as far as it should have done.
But now, almost its entire body soaked, nay – withered – like a prune even, in the rubbish strewn canal of faded glory, save for that glorious period in which Tony Wilson, Factory Records The Happy Mondays and indie music gave birth to flares and re-labelled the city, more appropriately Madchester. It was an image the city still tried desperately to retain, just like its neighbour, Liverpool, which was determined to hold onto a faded glory of The Beatles and the belief that its self-named football club would once again be champions. And European cities of culture meant little.
The attempted revolutions and its history were subjects Marcia remembered from her ‘normal’ school, inner city normal that is, the high school she had sporadically attended before being put into ‘care’. ‘Care’. That had been a privately run care home in the middle of that old county of Salop. It had been owned by a Scouse self-made man, an accountant, who tried to hide his accent and his money-grabbing priorities. Its remote location conveniently gave the kids ample space in which to sniff glue and lighter fuel whilst telling each other to fuck off in a variety of accents, representing as they did every major city of the country. Scouse was a good one, the way the ckkks dictated the smaller partner, fuckkkkkoff. And the London one, faccckkorf, which almost sounded Scottish. The home had whole-heartedly embraced the commodification of vulnerable children and charged Madchester Social Services over a thousand pounds a week for her ‘upkeep’. Marcia had often thought, and now rethought, with liberal doses of resentment, that the money could easily have been spent on the best private school education instead. Education at the ‘home’ had certainly not been centred on books, but on making sure there were enough cigarettes to last the week, even at the age of thirteen. Even at that age they knew they were kids who couldn’t even claim to be of working class stock, just the lumpenproletariat - aka the ASBO sub-culture. It was a subject never absent from the social worker’s weekly trade titles that bore names like Care, Young Voice, and Cared For but which only spoke in a jargon unrelated to anything the real world was about.
Marcia had been pouring over this state of play as she both saw, and had experienced it, for many years. There was always a plethora of frustration making questions that arose as a result, questions that were like invisible itches. She was sure the fact that she read, avidly, in spite of and not despite the lack of expectation displayed by all adults she had ever known, didn’t really help, but did it anyway. The point was this – Marcia couldn’t help reading books that only served to ask more questions, and in turn, more still – for which no-one seemed to have any answers.
And now, she couldn’t help but remind herself, she was older than a post-graduate.
She knew she would have to stop doing that - comparing her age to that of a university educated ‘normal’ person. But, for Marcia, it was hard when you lived in the heart of a city that had the highest student population, for they were like police riot vans, burnt-out cars, and cockroaches on the Graeme Estate - everywhere.
When she was sixteen she had told herself that ‘it’ would be ok, that she still had two years before the usual undergraduate age. Then, when she was nineteen it all felt a bit more panic-laden, for she was one year older than the average undergraduate, and so it went on in free-fall.
And now, here she was, four years older than an undergrad, one year older than a grad, beginning her day in the usual way, tearing the arse out of the impending drudgery that was her minimum wage chambermaid’s job, or room attendant as it was now called, otherwise known as contemplation.
Most of Marcia’s wages went towards the upkeep of the small council flat she shared with Jackie, her alcoholic mother, whose own money consisted of ‘benefits’. It was just another word in Marcia’s self constructed dictionary of dodgy meanings. Such words were plenty in the Reed household, ‘house’ and ‘hold’ being another two, for it wasn’t a house, and it certainly couldn’t be said to ‘hold’ anything, except dysfunction.
Jacqueline meant ‘to protect’ - Marcia knew that because whenever she entered a bookshop she would head straight for the names dictionary and look it up, as if expecting the researchers to have finally realised their mistake, and changed it to what it meant to her, ‘constant intoxication; to damage - both oneself and one’s only daughter’.
The meaning of her own name was also a source of confusion, for Marcia, she was informed, meant ‘brave’. Reed, her mother’s surname that she had had no choice but to receive, meant ‘red-haired’ or ‘red-faced’ and that, Marcia thought, could never be contested. Marcia had dark auburn hair shot through with flame coloured strands against a pale complexion, pre-Raphaelite, but her mother was of both red hair and red face. Jackie’s hair, though, was red because she had been dying it disastrously for years and had long since settled upon it being a mish-mash of reds. Her face was red because she drank from morning till night - and not, as Marcia thought it should be, because she suffered any embarrassment or shame from her antics on the estate with the other alchies - of which there were many.
‘ENOUGH!’
Marcia threw back her cheap, thin duvet and tried to convince herself that embracing the cold was always a good way to start the day - wasn’t it some sort of Japanese philosophy, or was that taking cold showers? No, it was probably a Shetland Isle philosophy or something, she thought, before reminding her constant inner dialogue to shut the fuck up. She opened the cardboard thin bedroom door, the insides of which consisted of nothing more than extra long egg cartons. She could hear her mother pottering around in the kitchen, a sound so many daughters would be usually comforted by.
“Here, open that for me, me hands are all wet,” Jackie said, appearing at the kitchen door. She pushed a bottle of bright red alco-pop into Marcia’s hands.
“What’s this you’re drinking now? I thought you were gonna try and stick to lager?” Marcia asked, and examined the label that claimed its contents were ‘berry crush’ flavoured, which also featured what was supposed to be a seductive photograph of red berries - a pornographisation of exotic fruit crushed in a sea of park-bench strength alcohol. She still obliged though, and wrapped a section of her tee-shirt around the bottle lid and twisted, her face contorted with effort.
“Oh don’t start, it’s my only pleasure,” Jackie said, anticipating what she had long considered to be just plain cheek from her disrespectful daughter.
“Yeah but, first it was Guinness, then lager, and now… I don’t know what the fuck this is, crushberry… looks like it’s just come from Chernobyl,” Marcia said, and handed back the opened drink.
“Oh ha ha, very bloody funny, I’ve told you before, mind your own business, aren’t you s’posed to be at work? Well get going then, go on,” Jackie said, and returned to the kitchen, taking a quick swig of her crushed berry alco-pop. Marcia loitered in the doorway and watched as her mother placed the bottle on the work surface beside the cooker, take out a super long, super cheap cigarette from a packet that were forever stood to attention, then dangle the cigarette from her mouth, stoop her face over the cooker and light it from an almost constantly lit stove, her cheeks hollow as she sucked in whilst the tip glared dim, then bright, dim, then bright, dim, then bright. A gust of dark grey smoke defiantly entered the atmosphere until, like a moth, floated chiffon like around the naked light bulb before resting against the walls forever.
“GOD! Give me a chance, I’ve just woke up, it’s only quarter to seven, oh, I forgot, it’s still the middle of the night for some,” Marcia said and left her mother to herself.
Marcia entered the bathroom, a small space just large enough to house the Armitage Shanks standard council issued, not quite full-length bath, hand-basin and toilet. As usual it was adorned with obstinate cigarette butts that refused to be flushed away. Both the rims of the bath and hand-basin were stained from burning cigarettes. Marcia wondered if there was possibly anywhere her mother’s booze and cigs hadn’t left their irremovable marks. They had done far more than stain inanimate objects. The living room was no different. The cheap mail order self-assembly cabinets and TV stand had all received the burning cigarette treatment, as had the exhausted carpet that had once enjoyed the hope of being forever summer sky blue, but had which long since matched the reality of Mancunian skies - dark grey and loaded with the wrath of an omnipotent figure.
“The way you speak to your mother, it’s terrible, you know, I would never have dared speak to my mother the way you do to me,” Jackie shouted, shooing away the truth that, where her own mother had been concerned, she had been much worse than she would ever admit.
Marcia doubted that very much anyway and turned on the cold water at full blast.
*
Marcia left the small council block that housed three other flats, down the thin path that ran alongside a two metre length of a small sorry square of grass, abused relentlessly by dog shite and yet more cigarette butts as well as the burnt down roaches from spliffs that offered another slice of the fourth dimension. She turned and looked up at their kitchen window. Jackie waved. Marcia reciprocated. It was their only routine.
Marcia walked through the Graeme Estate. It was the only time of the day when it could be trusted to be deserted. It would come to life at around 8.45am, when groups of hoodie wearing children would go to school, or plan on going somewhere other than school, whilst comparing the newest mobile phone ring tones. Hordes of bare-legged or denim-clad groups of mothers would stroll down to Wilmslow Road to join the long queue outside the area’s main post office, at the head of which were the army of scared or bitter looking pensioners of all nationalities. They eyed each other up with confusion and an endless internal narrative, which, if it were audible, may have resembled nothing more than the sounds of Finnegans’ Wake, but which nonetheless housed an entire world of poignancies.
Marcia waited at the Happy Hopper bus stop, her arms folded and her weight resting first on her right hip for a few minutes, before loading onto the left, and back again. It was the same waiting pose adopted by all women on the estate, and it wasn’t restricted only to the bus stop, but every queue, especially the post office, Kwik-Save, and the DHSS’ personal issue/crisis loan giro counter. She looked back towards the estate and recalled the same thought she had woken up with - that noble thought of freedom.
‘Hegel’, she reminded herself, ‘strong influence on Marx’. Dialectic. Her mind wandered along many lines that included the image of Marx’s old bearded face. She tried to imagine what he would think of the Graeme Estate. She tried to defamiliarise the sight now before her, the view of the estate seen from the bus-stop, what would she think of it if she was an alien, just landed on a mission from Mars? No, she corrected herself, apparently it would have to be Venus. She narrowed her eyes and tried to clear her mind and look at it as objectively as she could. Along with the rows of back to back terraced houses in the distance, and the Graeme Estate sprawled out, crisp, chip and kebab wrappers blew around. The distinctive thin blue, or red and white striped carriers bags were lifted higher off the ground until they danced around the tops of broken lamp posts, as if mocking the heavier chip wrappers, and looking down at the motionless bicycle tyres wedded to the ground around the lampposts forever, until the bags continued their dance until they landed on a tree branch, where they would remain at the weather’s discretion. Despite this attempt at defamiliarisation, the only two images of her home patch that kept cropping up in Marcia’s mind was a version of a Bronx project, but plonked in the middle of Coronation Street. Despite all this, Marcia knew she would defend this area from any stuck-up yet stale suburbanite any day of the week, but that still did not detract from the need to escape it all. Soon. ‘Yeah but when?’ she asked herself, but the arrival of the Happy Hopper meant that, for the moment, no answer was needed.
*
Having parked her chambermaid’s trolley outside room fifteen of the Charterhouse Hotel, ‘Manchester’s Premier Five-Star Hotel, and only minutes from the major arena favoured by stars, the G-MEX, Marcia craned her ear to the door.
‘No, nothing’. She knocked, two short raps just underneath the number plate, followed by the quick insertion of card key into slot, hearing the beep, opening the door and shouting, “hello housekeeping?” just like Liz, the housekeeping supervisor, had trained her.
Her eyes darted across all clear surfaces, but no, as usual the only tip she’d been left was the room itself.
She eyed the room service tray, not from breakfast, but the night before, displaying now solidified gravy, or was it sauce, or even jus? She didn’t know, didn’t care. She lifted up the tray, not bothering to adhere to the correct squat down and lift procedure shown in the ten minute health and safety instruction three months earlier, also expertly, and rather comically, demonstrated by Liz.
Liz didn’t give two fucks - not really, about her own back, or any other fucker’s. Liz just had a job to do, she did it well, went home, watched Corrie, and like everyone else, got blind drunk at weekends and tried to forget about work. She had given Marcia that little overview of who she was on day one - and day two, three, four, and every day since. That’s why Marcia liked her.
She pushed the tray up against the corridor wall for a waiter to remove it on his periodic rounds of the corridors. Wasting no more time, Marcia took everything she needed off her trolley - double duvet cover, double sheet, four pillowcases, bathmat, set of towels, one face cloth, two miniature soaps, shampoo, conditioner, shower cap, and then items for the tea tray, (only just including the herbal option), and her red cleaning bucket. Then, putting the essentials down on the floor, she shut the heavy white door behind her, which probably consisted of a thick slab of oak, and switched on MTV.
It wasn’t as if Marcia minded working in silence, in theory, but then her head became noisier. It revelled in pointing out how estranged her labour was to her, its implementer. It also seemed bent on trying to figure out how much profit the hotel owners, who lived in London, were actually making. No, she was happier with the music, Eminem said all she wanted to say and so, as she listened to his words, connected to his rhythm, felt his anger wake up her own, a surge of energy shot through her and she threw the thick, heavy duvet off the bed and stripped the sheets. ‘Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside…’ Marcia felt like she was a trailer park girl, or England’s equivalent. But his words, they were nothing like those of Eliot, that strain, ‘Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not say still.’
A couple of hours, or four rooms later, Liz burst into room eleven.
“Dinner time!” It’s dinner time! You comin’ or what?” she shouted, and strode over to the television and turned it off. Liz, hands on hips, scanned the state of the room.
“Already? I’ve only done four so far,” Marcia replied, feeling a surge of stress in her solar plexus for being less than a third of the way through her list. But that’s the way it was, guests hardly ever checked out on time, the DND sign was God, that and an extra charge for late check-out.
“Fuck it! I’ve done seven o’my lot, so I can always give y’an ‘and ‘bout three or so,” Liz said.
“Great, thanks.”
“Well, it’s all fuckin’ work innit, if I don’t ‘elp you after I’ve done me own, then The Bitch’ll only ‘ave us cleanin’ bleedin’ public areas till ‘ome time,” she explained.
The ‘Bitch’ was Viv, aka the housekeeper. Unlike the chambermaids, and Liz the supervisor, who had to wear striped blue overalls, Viv wore a navy blue suit with a gold name badge - only plastic though. Her title was stated with pride, ‘HOUSEKEEPER’, as though it was something that should be aspired to by everyone.
It was clear that Viv thought it was something everyone in housekeeping did aspire to, just as she once had. Viv, Marcia had observed from day one, had an annoying habit of telling ‘her’ chambermaids, ‘her’ girls, how she had worked her way up from chambermaid, ten years earlier, when she’d been a single mother with two kids to feed, and look at her now, arms folded across her buttoned up blue blazer, her chin raised so that her eyes looked down her nose as though she wore a sergeant major’s cap whilst retaining a very large pole between her ample buttocks, more ample since she had become housekeeper. ‘Yes’, Marcia thought whenever she launched into ‘look at me now’ mode, ‘look at you’.
There was another question that Marcia, more often that not, knew the answer to - is it worth spending half, or most of your life, working in a pointless and low paid job just to get onto the next rung of a very long ladder?
Marcia and Liz walked through the non-descript door, where the hotel’s rich red carpet ended and the stark paint splattered, dust laden concrete floor began. It was the door that led the way downstairs – the laundry room, the trolley room and the supplies room, and the dirty staircase that ran down to all the other staff only sections of the hotel.
Four flights later they were in the basement where the clash of pans and crockery mingled with the distinctive voices of angry chefs, submissive but resentful kitchen porters and an army of waiting staff.
They entered the kitchen and found, on the corner stainless steel surface, the industrial sized stainless steel containers of staff food.
“What’s for dinner t’day then?” Liz shouted, to no-one in particular.
“Oh, you again is it? How many times do I have to tell you, it’s LUNCH, DINNER’S what we have at six,” one of the white uniformed chefs shouted from a vegetable prep area.
“Oh kiss me arse, it’s bin called dinner a lot fuckin’ longer than LUNCH!” Liz replied, and spooned what looked like Bolognese onto a nest of damp, unmanageable spaghetti. Liz banged the metal spoon on the edge of the container a few times whilst glaring at the veg prepping chef then slammed it down.
“Bitch,” the chef said without interrupting the rhythm of chopping a large squash.
“Twat!” Liz replied.
Marcia and Liz dragged their feet into the canteen, a windowless room containing four white plastic tables that belonged to a cheap garden, and an array of mismatched chairs ‘donated’ by one banqueting hall or another over the years, three of which had wonky legs, two had no backs, and the remainder so tatty that they would never even have looked good enough in the DHSS waiting room. The door was held back against the wall by a tall, dented and rust patched bin, and the only item on the wall was a handwritten sign, ‘kindley requesting’ that all members of staff should ‘please refraine from scareping any food whatsoever into this bin’ and that they were instead to use the ‘main bins in the kitchen, please’ and finished by thanking them ‘for their cooperation in advance’, signed by P.J. Flannagan, the kitchen porter, on behalf of Mr. J.S. Symmonds, the FACILITIES MANAGER.