Mr Starlight

by Laurie Graham

  I said, ‘He’s getting older. We all are.’

  ‘Is that what it is?’ she said. ‘I suppose. You just don’t expect it with Sel. You expect him always to look boyish.’

  I said, ‘I’ll tell you something, if you promise not to let on.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  I said, ‘That’s not his real hair. It’s a wig he’s wearing.’

  ‘Well, I know that,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that.’

  Jennifer Jane arrived late that night with a person we’d never even heard of: Fraser. She said he was a cardiologist, same as her, although he didn’t look like one. He looked like a PE teacher.

  Hazel said, ‘You should have asked your Uncle Sel. You can’t just turn up with extras.’

  Sel said, ‘It’s all right, Hazel. There’s plenty of room. I’ll get Pearl to make up another bed.’

  Hazel said, ‘You will not. I’ll do it. Pearl’s got enough to do.’

  Jennifer said, ‘We don’t need another bed. We’ll bunk down together.’

  Sel said, ‘Not in my house, you won’t. Whatever would your grandma say?’

  ‘Jeeze,’ she said, ‘what’s the big problem? I am twenty-seven years old.’

  Fraser said, ‘Calm down, Jen. No sense upsetting the olds. We’ll get a hotel, no worries.’

  Betsan said, ‘I don’t see what the fuss is about. Everybody sleeps together these days. It’s been the trend for a long time.’

  Sel said, ‘Well, I don’t follow trends, as you well know. And as far as I’m concerned Jennifer Jane doesn’t get a double bed till I’ve sung at her wedding.’

  So off they went, looking for a hotel, and it was after midnight.

  ‘Bloody hypocrisy,’ Jennifer said to me, ‘considering the way everybody else in the family carries on.’ And she slammed the door of the taxi so hard it made my ears ring. Nice start to a birthday party.

  Hazel couldn’t sleep and if she couldn’t, I wasn’t allowed. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ she said. ‘Who is this Fraser anyway? And after everything Sel’s done for her.’

  I said, ‘Times have changed, though. Betsan’s right. Now they’ve got the Pill, everybody does it.’

  Lucky buggers.

  ‘I’m not talking about sex before marriage, Cled,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about manners. I don’t care how old she is. As soon as she steps through the door tomorrow you’re to make her apologise to Sel.’

  But I didn’t need to. Jennifer Jane ran straight to him and gave him a hug. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Jet-lagged. You know how it is?’

  We all dressed up, even Ricky, black tie, best frocks. Except for the cardiologist. Jennifer Jane said it was called ‘smart-casual’, but it was what I would call a sports shirt and slacks.

  The first thing was the unveiling of Mam’s portrait. It stood six feet high and it was hung facing the front door, so it would be the first thing you saw as you came in. She was posed on a high-backed Lucite chair, wearing a red evening gown and a corsage of gardenias. Exactly as she was wearing for her birthday dinner. Everybody agreed it was a very good likeness.

  Pearl brought in Mumm champagne and home-made cheese straws, and Sel proposed a toast. ‘Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, star of stage and screen,’ he started.

  Then Brett appeared, with a face like thunder. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Am I included or what?’ They’d been arguing earlier because Brett thought he should have been invited to the dinner. He said, ‘I thought I was family now?’

  ‘You are, baby,’ Sel said. ‘But if you come we’ll be thirteen round the table and I can’t have that.’

  Brett said, ‘What about the slopehead? She ain’t family.’ Ricky’s girlfriend was some kind of oriental. Very nice, though. Flat-chested, but always smiling.

  There we all stood, champagne at the ready.

  Sel said, ‘Brett, don’t make me mad now. Pearl’s not complaining and she’s not coming.’

  I heard Pearl say, ‘Pearl don’t want to.’

  Brett went off, scowling, and Sel picked up where he’d left off.

  ‘We’ve all been privileged to know an amazing woman,’ he said. ‘A little girl from the valleys who went up to the big city to better herself. A wife and mother who always put her family first. And a natural talent, even if she waited till an age when most ladies are in their rocking chair before she became a star. They broke the mould after they made Anne Roberts.’

  Hazel whispered to me, ‘We can only hope.’

  Sel said, ‘So, Mam, here’s to your next ten years!’ And we all raised our glasses.

  As soon as we went in Mam started rearranging the table. ‘You move further down, Cledwyn,’ she said. ‘Then Ricky can sit by me. I don’t see enough of him. And send Jennifer up to sit next to Ricky. That person she brought with her can sit with the Jap.’

  We had melon with ham, veal cutlets with a selection of veg, and a strawberry soufflé.

  Betsan said, ‘Tell us about the olden days, Grandma. Tell us about Grandad.’

  ‘Jennifer,’ Mam said, ‘have you got a ring?’

  Jennifer said, ‘Hunh?’

  Mam said, ‘Well, be sure you get one. You don’t want to end up the way Betsan did.’

  Sel said, ‘What about when you were a girl? We’d all like to hear about that.’

  ‘Best thing I ever did, leaving Pentrefoelas,’ she said. ‘It was all right for convalescents, but it didn’t have enough scope for me. I was a trained pianist, you see. That’s where you get your talent, Selwyn.’

  Sel said, ‘Well, Cled’s the pianist around here.’

  ‘But you could have been,’ she said. ‘You could have been any number of things.’

  Betsan said, ‘And where did you meet Grandad?’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ she said. ‘I had boys flocking around me. I could afford to take my pick and I chose the one with brains, like Gaynor did.’

  Larry said, ‘What about the next ten years? Any unfulfilled ambitions?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Except to meet Omar Sharif again. I met him at Thelma’s, you know. Beautiful eyes. Beautiful manners. That’s someone to model yourself on, Ricky. Omar Sharif or your Uncle Selwyn. Perfect gentlemen, both of them.’

  Jennifer said, ‘So what’s your secret for a long life, Grandma? Ninety years old and your ticker’s still going strong.’

  ‘Hard work,’ Mam said. ‘Hard work, a sober life and a clear conscience.’

  Dilys said, ‘It didn’t do Arthur much good.’

  Sel said, ‘What do you think of Las Vegas, Fraser?’

  Fraser said he didn’t understand how anybody could live there. He said it had to be the most dispiriting place in the world.

  Betsan said, ‘You’ve obviously never been to Saltley.’

  Fraser said New Zealand had everything: rainforests, volcanic lakes, dolphins, snow-capped mountains.

  Hazel said, ‘We’ve got mountains here. We had mountains in Wales.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got greenery and space. Opportunities. Law and order. Best place on earth, isn’t it, Jen?’

  We’d never called her ‘Jen’.

  Sel said, ‘Well, it’s a lucky man who finds the place he was meant to be. You like dolphins, and law and order. I look out across Vegas after the sun’s gone down, see the Strip starting to sparkle, see my name in lights, that’s what I love. And we’re not short of space here, Fraser. There’s nothing but bloody desert from here to Salt Lake City.’

  Ricky and Kim couldn’t stay for the evening party. He was going to Memphis, Tennessee for an eating contest, hoping to improve his personal best for glazed doughnuts; forty-one in nine minutes. ‘Happy birthday, Gran-gran,’ he said.

  ‘Ricky,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you find a nice white girl?’

  We had celebrities wall to wall for the poolside party. Dino Martin, Prince Farakasi, the Kirk Douglases. I played the Chickering grand And we did a medley from Sel’s hit album A Boy’s Best Friend. He sang ‘Through
the Years’, ‘Mamma’, ‘The Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad’ and the one that always got her blowing her nose, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.

  Mam danced with Sel and Milty Berle and Joey Bishop, and Hazel and Dilys got a bit silly with Burt Reynolds dancing a threesome. We had two beverage fountains, one for sparkling wine, one for nonalcoholic fruit punch, an eighty-pound spit-roasted pig and a chocolate mint layer cake.

  And we finished off with a little firework display set up on top of the garden wall. ‘Ninety Glorious Years’ it spelled out at the end.

  Hazel said, ‘How does it come about that a nasty piece of work like your mam gets so doted on and we’re lucky if we get a phone call from Jennifer?’

  Dilys said, ‘It’s a different generation. They don’t bother with things that don’t interest them. No sense of duty. It’s more honest, I suppose. Jennifer’s busy with her own life now and what’s she got in common with you? I’m the same with my pair. I look at Gaynor sometimes and wonder what to say to her. But I’ll tell you why Sel panders to Mam so much, singing these silly old songs. He’s scared of her. In a lot of ways he’s still a kid. He daren’t do different.’

  But I’m not sure Sel was ever afraid of anything. I think he believed he’d been touched by angels’ wings.

  People were still dancing and Mam was still going strong, but Sel said he thought he might turn in.

  Jennifer said, ‘You all right, Uncle Sel?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you,’ he said. ‘It’s been a big day, though. Who’d have thought it, eh? All for little Annie Boff from Ninevah Street.’

  Jennifer said, ‘What’s wrong with him, Daddy?’

  I said, ‘He’s just not used to being up before midday.’

  Pearl said, ‘His tail light’s out, Miss Jennifer. You’re the only one around here appears to have noticed. He’s still motoring, but his tail light’s out.’

  I said to Hazel, ‘What do you think she meant?’

  ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ she said. ‘I don’t care how much they torture him at Caliente Springs. A man who eats a quart of ice cream every night shouldn’t be dropping weight the way he’s doing.’

  Women! They’re always reading between the lines.

  If I were hanged on the highest hill

  Mother, o’mine, Mother o’mine,

  I know whose love would follow me still

  O Mother, O Mother o’mine.

  KIPLING

  THIRTY-THREE

  Dilys didn’t fly home with Gaynor. She said, ‘I’ll go home when Sel stops looking like a death’s head.’

  Hazel and Dilys had both got it into their heads that he was ill, but he filmed a new series of Queen for a Day and then he opened a new show at the Flamingo, five nights a week, three costume changes per show.

  Hazel said, ‘I wish he’d cut down on the cigarettes.’

  I said, ‘He’s got shows booked solid for the next twelve months. He’s getting the swimming pool re-tiled. You don’t bother with things like that if you’ve got cancer.’

  Dilys said, ‘All he seems to want to do is sleep.’

  I said, ‘He’s always been like that. You haven’t toured with him the way I have. He always slept in after a show.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But now he sleeps in when he hasn’t done a show. Pearl says he used to like pottering around in the afternoon, rearranging his figurines, or going shopping. We haven’t been shopping once since I’ve been here.’

  I said, ‘Sel, everybody’s worried about you. Pearl says your figurines need dusting. Hazel and Dilys are moithering because you never go shopping. Thelma keeps telling me the name of her doctor. Now, what’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Bring the girls to watch the new show tonight. They’ll see for themselves. Mr Starlight is all revved up and ready to go.’

  He’d always kept things light for the Vegas showrooms. ‘It’s not like a show for my ladies,’ he used to say. ‘These punters don’t want their heart strings pulled. When you’ve spent all day at the crap tables, you need cheering up.’ And his new repertoire was certainly very lively: ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, ‘I Love the Nightlife’, ‘Singing in the Rain’. ‘Glamour with a good beat,’ he said, ‘that’s what I give them. “Be-bop-a-lula” in diamonds.’

  He did the first set in a Capri-blue lycra all-in-one covered in teardrop sequins and matching high-heeled boots. ‘Come Fly with Me,’ he sang, ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘Fever’, cracking jokes, borrowing a Kleenex from three girls sitting at a ringside table.

  ‘This air-conditioning too cool for you?’ he said. ‘I’m freezing. I’ll just go put on a few more rhinestones. Back in two shakes.’

  Those Flamingoettes were something, but I couldn’t enjoy them with the lady wife sitting one side of me and my sister on the other, so I went round to see Sel during the break. Then I saw the change in him. He was slumped in an armchair breathing something through a mask. He waved me to sit down.

  ‘Oxygen,’ Brett said. ‘He gets out of breath.’

  I said, ‘He always did. Who told him to take oxygen?’

  Brett didn’t appear to know. I sat and watched him, dabbing at the sweat, sucking on the gas.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘That’s better. See? Good as new. The girls enjoying the show?’

  I said, ‘Is this what the doctor ordered?’

  ‘Doctors!’ he said. ‘I don’t bother with doctors. Hallerton gets it for me. That boy can get anything. Know what I mean? Anything at all.’

  I said, ‘You’re sick.’

  He said, ‘I am fifty-five, Cled.’

  I said, ‘And I’m sixty-one, but I don’t need breathing apparatus. Tell them you can’t do the second show. I’ll tell them.’

  ‘Mr Starlight never cancels,’ he said. ‘The only show Mr Starlight ever missed was at Industrial Brush and that was due to the hand of God.’

  Hazel gave him such a telling off when she heard about it. She said, ‘Apart from anything else, it’s dangerous. All those people smoking. You could cause an explosion.’

  He winked at her. He said, ‘Wherever I am, whatever I do, I cause an explosion.’

  So he carried on, goofing around, like a spring chicken. His jacket had big pink roses on it, like a cover for a three-piece suite, except it was all sequins. He only slowed down for his final number. ‘One for the road,’ he said, ‘and for my baby too’ – ‘September Song’.

  Every night he played to a full room, every night he finished in a jacket that weighed a ton, but the last couple of weeks there were signs he was slowing up. Brett would be sitting outside in the motor, waiting to take him to the Strip, and Sel was still in his bathrobe, not even shaved. And it didn’t go unnoticed in the press that he wasn’t quite A1. Bambi Allen wrote about him in Celebrity!:

  Mr Starlight’s new high-octane, diamond-studded show at the Flamingo, Las Vegas has done little to allay concerns about the super-trouper’s health. The trim rejuvenated figure he unveiled six months ago is beginning to look plain haggard and word on the Strip is that Mr S is running on an empty tank. The big question is, what’s wrong?

  Hallerton Liquorish allowed it to be known that Sel had developed an allergy.

  Mam said, ‘I’m not surprised. He takes stray dogs in and he doesn’t know where they’ve been.’

  Dilys said, ‘I think it’s anaemia. You can’t work as hard as Sel does living on pineapple and ice cream. You don’t get the nutriments you need. That’s the reason I don’t diet any more.’

  Mam said, ‘The reason you don’t diet any more, Dilys, is that you don’t have any self-control. You never did have and that’s why you’ve given in to obesity.’

  I said, ‘I wonder if it’s drugs. He told me Hallerton Liquorish can get him anything.’

  Hazel said, ‘Meanwhile, he’s getting worse. Why doesn’t one of you just call in this doctor of Thelma’s? Sitting around here theorising. Just do something.’

  Mam said, �
��It’s none of your business. This is Selwyn’s home. Mine and Selwyn’s.’

  Hazel said, ‘Cled? Are you going to do something? You seem to be the man around here.’

  Mam said, ‘No he’s not. I am. And if Selwyn doesn’t want a doctor he doesn’t have to have one. He doesn’t like people going into his bedroom.’

  Hazel said, ‘Then he can see him in the front hall. He can see him in the jungle ruddy atrium. As long as he sees him. Cled?’

  I said, ‘It’s a very tricky situation. Obviously, to a certain extent you have to respect a person’s wishes. Then again …’

  Hazel said, ‘Right! That’s enough. I’m getting that number from Thelma.’

  Mam said, ‘I think your wife’s going mental, Cledwyn. I think she’s the one who needs the doctor.’

  Dilys said, ‘I think Hazel’s right.’

  Mam said, ‘You would do. You never did have a mind of your own.’

  So Hazel set things in motion and Mam went and shut herself in her room, to mark her disapproval.

  Hazel said, ‘He’ll come this afternoon. His name’s Dr Rosen. Now you’d better go and tell Sel.’

  I said, ‘You go. You started all this.’

  She said, ‘I can’t. Sel doesn’t like women in his room.’

  I said, ‘Pearl goes in.’

  ‘Pearl’s Pearl,’ she said. ‘Go and do it, Cled, please, before I prove your Mam right and turn violent.’

  His breakfast was on the side, not even touched. He was still in his pyjamas but he’d put his hair on.

  I said, ‘Is there something else you fancy? Slice of toast?’

  He always loved marmalade. ‘It’s not that I don’t want it, Cled,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got trouble with my dentures. I can’t chew.’

  He took his top plate out and showed me. His gums and his tongue and down into his throat as far as I could see, everything was covered with horrible white spots.

  I said, ‘Leave your teeth out. Let the air get at it.’