Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

'You're looking so old,' she said. 'That's a compliment.'

  'And you're looking so over the top. And that's a compliment too.'

  She smiled in approval. You don't take any shit if you want to sit at the right table. 'I bought us a bottle,' she said with a swagger.

  Michael led her into the dining room, where there were champagne glasses. 'Babe,' he said, expertly feigning a seventeen-year-old feigning sophistication. 'Tell me. Who should I screw next?'

  'A woman,' she said and blew out smoke. 'A woman definitely. It's just so naff being trapped with one sex.'

  'Well OK, but who? I've already slept with you. If you count as a woman, that is.' He opened the cabinet for glasses.

  Her face started out mean and bitchy. 'If you ever sleep – get to sleep with me and I get to – oh bollocks!' She stamped her foot, and started to laugh at herself.

  'The line you're looking for goes: if you do sleep with me and I ever hear of it, I shall be very, very annoyed.'

  She nodded yes, yes, I screwed up.

  'The implication is that my dick is so small you'd either be asleep or you wouldn't notice.'

  'All right.'

  Michael had another one at the ready. 'It's a wonderful old joke, I haven't heard it in months.'

  Being bitchy was such a simple, innocent game really. Why had he been so scared of it? Bottles laughed and gripped his arm. 'All right then, but at least I bought us a bottle.' She was suddenly the gauche loud girl of years before. 'And, just to complete the image of sophistication, I bought us… a couple of straws.'

  And that made Michael laugh.

  They sat down at the kitchen table and Michael expertly turned the bottle around the cork and not the other way around so it didn't gush. This impressed Bottles beyond all reason. 'Tch. I usually get it down my front. Here you go.' In went the straws. They had accordion bendy bits, which Bottles adjusted to face each of them.

  'Honestly, it's like we're at an American soda fountain or something.'

  She nodded and laughed, yes, yes, that was the joke.

  Something about Bottles changed who Michael was. Around her, he was able to tell jokes. 'Do you want to put ice cream in it? I mean, really come on like an urban sophisticate.'

  Bottles mimed laughter silently. Silence was her way of controlling what she knew could be an ungodly squawk. Silence did indeed give her a certain lacquering of dignity. She wobbled her eyebrows, stuck the straw in, looked him dead in the eye, and began to blow into the champagne, frothing it up. Bottles doubled up with laughter, and let rip a horrible, piercing screech of a laugh. Michael looked at her, maintaining a stone face. That set her off again. Just as she was recovering, he leaned forward as if in sympathy, to pat her arm.

  'Suck, dear. Blow is just an expression.'

  Bottles had probably arrived stoned, which might account for the callisthenic effect the next laugh had on her; she looked like she was doing some kind of warm-up exercise. Conversation took a back seat to the recovery of composure.

  Bottles wiped her face. 'Oh, man, if you had done that back in 1977, you'd have been in a band.'

  'Now then. You will recall, we were discussing who I should fuck next.'

  'Indeed. And I have just the gel for you.' She was imitating some kind of school-ma'am. 'That American singer you like so much. No, not Julie Andrews.'

  It was Michael's turn to laugh.

  'The other one.' Her voice returned to normal, perfectly serious. 'The good one.'

  Why are men satisfied with whores?

  There were some pretty weird radio stations in Southern California in the 1970s. They were meant to lose money. Tax-loss radio, it was called. Tax-loss radio broadcast from trailers or the basements of disused churches. The DJs played whatever they liked: Black Flag next to Tony Bennett next to Miles Davis next to Magazine.

  Next to Billie Holiday.

  At fourteen, Michael didn't really know who Billie Holiday was, except that maybe she was something to do with Motown. Lost in the doldrums of knowing no one in California, being a teenager, being gay, Michael suddenly heard a voice that sounded like he felt.

  Jazz was supper-club music for people who wore slightly transparent socks and liked it when Frank Sinatra sang 'hot damn'. It was in old movies. And in this old movie-music style was someone singing about a lynching. The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, drawled a slow, sad, horrified voice.

  There was something relentlessly modern about it, like someone singing Brecht or a song about a serial murder. It was perfect, just perfect. It was cool. Michael could see himself coming back from California with that kind of music and being cool.

  He reckoned that the stores in the camp would be good on jazz, so he went there and asked by name for Billie Holiday. They stocked a lot of her product. By luck alone, he landed on the fifties album, Lady Sings the Blues. He read the song titles, which for the last time, would mean nothing to him: 'God Bless the Child', 'Lady Sings the Blues', 'Strange Fruit', 'I Thought About You'. Walking back to the bus stop, he met someone who was almost a friend, a Marine's son on the baseball team. With him was the coolest guy of them all, the son of a black officer. His name was Hendricks, Rousseau Hendricks, and he claimed to be Jimi Hendrix's cousin.

  By now Michael's taste in records was a reliable source of scoring social points for the children of Marines. Nobody, but nobody, bought Julie Andrews records except Michael. So when the white kid said, with a hooded smile, 'What have you got now?' Michael had a sudden surging stab of pride. I'll show you.

  Out came the blue album. 'Oh, man,' said the white kid in real embarrassment. The record looked old.

  But Rousseau Hendricks looked up, his eyes widening. 'You bought this?'

  'Yeah, it's got all her best stuff on it.' At least, that's what the guy in the record department said.

  'And that's the best there is,' said Rousseau. The white kid scowled. Michael had scored cool points plus. Michael knew then that his instinct had been right; Billie was what he needed.

  Michael returned to Britain and scored cool points all through his brief period of glamour. He played Billie Holiday for Bottles in the long magic afternoons before parents came back from work. It was like listening to the Bible.

  'Oh, that is the story of my life,' Bottles had declared. It wasn't then, but it was soon to become so, for a while.

  Later, Michael read the biographies. Her voice had not always been sandpaper; she had not always sung in a heightened style. The recordings from the thirties were smooth, dapper, even merry.

  It was that Billie he called up. She arrived direct from 1938, having left the Artie Shaw band.

  Billie arrived unfussed, plump and pretty in a blue dress with white polka dots. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette, looked at Michael and crumpled forward. She leaned back, smiling, narrow-eyed and took one long draught of her cigarette as if it were a cooling drink.

  'Oh, baby,' Billie muttered to herself. ' Man. ' She shook her head.

  'What?' asked Michael nervously. 'What?'

  Billie blasted smoke out of both nostrils. 'You don't even know what you want, do you?' Somewhere there were nerves; she suddenly reached up to tug on her hair. 'You going to offer the Lady a drink or not?'

  'Sure. Um. Whiskey? Gin?' Michael tried to remember what he had in stock.

  'A Grand Slam,' she said confidently.

  'What's that?'

  'Oh, man,' she groaned again. She strode into his tiny kitchen. 'Where do you keep the hooch around here?' She started to mix the drinks. It was Michael who was fussed. Michael fussed around the cabinet and the ice-cube tray.

  'So. You don't know why you called me here.'

  'I… uh… a friend suggested it.'

  'Um,' she said, sounding completely unflattered. 'Maybe I ought to meet your friend instead.'

  'I… I'm supposed to be exploring sex or something, and I guess I'm trying to do justice to women.'

  'Justice to women. My, my. You reckon that's possible?' Billie unobtrusively took
down another glass and started making him a drink too. 'Looky here. This is how you fix a Grand Slam.' She showed him, and passed him the glass. 'Here. You look like you need it.'

  'Thank you.'

  'You're welcome.' She said it because it was good form to do so, and comportment was important. 'So. What do I get out of this?'

  'Well, some people think it's neat being alive.'

  'I never did think that life was neat particularly. Death's part of the deal. Why should I be happy to be resurrected as a whore? Hmm? When I spent all my whole waking life trying to make myself a Lady?'

  Michael coughed, with unease. 'Yeah. I… uh… I'm a bit English and to us a Lady is some old bat whose great great grandfather was good at railways or killing people and who lives in a stately home.'

  Lady Day suppressed a prejudice of her own, visibly swallowed it. Who were more ofay than the English? Then something like sympathy swam into her eyes.

  'A Lady is somebody with dignity. And nobody can take that dignity away.'

  Sympathy swam up in Michael as well. 'Did you get there?'

  'Yes,' she said in a determined voice. 'Yes, I did.'

  And Michael wondered: how much of her future does this Angel know?

  Lady Day was concerned about this present. 'So you see why I don't accept this situation. I was a whore at fourteen because my mama had just become one too, and it was the only way to put food on the table. I didn't want to be no whore, I was made to be a whore, and a stupid white judge put me into the workhouse at fourteen years old. She didn't jail the men who paid me that fifty cents. They knew I was fourteen. They didn't go to jail.'

  Smoke poured out of her nostrils like scorn.

  'Men like you. White men who would never have a black gal in their house.'

  It was not often that an Angel expressed active, positive dislike. Michael wondered what to do. He could send her back, but that would be chicken-shit. So, Michael told himself, hear the truth, tell the truth.

  'Not men like me. Those men were seventy years ago. And they weren't gay.'

  'Gay?' She scowled and was bumped from behind by a chuckle. 'What, you a whore too?' Then she was bumped by the truth. 'Oh, I get you. You're a pansy.'

  'Yup.'

  'Aw hell, there was a pansy craze not so long ago. A lot of clubs had pansy comperes. A couple of guys in bands were like you and they were always pretty nice except Moose. He always used to get drunk and mean and call everyone else a sister. He hated women though he was one himself.'

  Twang. Like a guitar string something snapped. Billie suddenly stretched out like a cat finding a warm place to sit. 'So. You been whoring around.'

  Michael explained. 'It's like a gift. I can sleep with anyone I want to. Alive, dead. Except they're not real.'

  Billie coughed a cigarette laugh. 'Man, you won the male jackpot.'

  Truth. 'I'm impotent and it's ruined my life so far.'

  'Ruined, how?'

  'My boyfriend's left me, and I'm not concentrating on my work.'

  'Sounds like life, baby.'

  'No. Not when I can call dead people back to life.'

  Billie thoughtfully plucked a bit of stray tobacco from the tip of her tongue. 'So. You got yourself a calling. Nobody said being called was any fun. I got myself a calling. It kept me alive a long, long time after all I wanted to be was dead.'

  She managed a smile, held up her drink and toasted it, toasted her inhuman calling, toasted Michael's calling too.

  There was this time, I was singing against Baby White at the Apollo. And all the Apollo wanted was fast-time stuff, and folks who sang like it was opera, and they thought I was just imitating Louis. So I got up there, and I dragged anyway. Dragged behind the beat. I did not knock 'em dead at the Apollo. Not 'til ten years later, anyway.'

  She growled.

  'And then, there was this session with Teddy Wilson? Now, Teddy Wilson didn't even like me. John Hammond made him do it and they fast-timed "What a Little Moonlight Can Do". What nobody knew is what I could do and that the session clarinet was a guy called Benny Goodman. He was a wild cat, in those days. They fast-timed and Benny and I just said to hell with it, let's cook. And we did. And I heard it slot together. I heard the angels turning the bolts. And I knew. I knew then I was the best, and I knew it was going to take time. That bitch Ella had a better voice and she left people happier. But I was going to be the greater singer. And I knew it would cost, I knew those bolts were just another jail. God was always going to want me for something.'

  Billie took a deep breath. 'And now he's gone and done it again.' She smiled, drank in liquor and smoke and then announced, 'I know what you got to learn.'

  Michael felt slightly forlorn. 'I wish I did.'

  'You,' she said, bracelets clacking slightly against the glass, 'need to learn how to have a good time.' Her eyes brimmed with something like mockery, but it was not unaffectionate. 'Let's see. This is London, right? I bet you don't even know where the hot spots are.' When she said hot, she meant hot. This woman knew how to swing.

  This is how it works,' she told him. 'You go to the swankiest place you can find where they play good jazz, because that is where jazz makes its money, honey. But you talk to the guys, and they get to know you, and pretty soon, you find yourself invited to where the action really is, where the guys go to jam afterwards. That's where you learn the music. That's where you learn the life.'

  The only jazz place that Michael knew was Ronnie Scott's. He'd been there once in his twenties and his main impression had been that it cost a lot. There was a sudden blurring, and Billie's hair was suddenly conked and plastered close and she wore a clinging white satin dress, and round her shoulders a perfectly unfake fox fur.

  'Where's the gardenia?' he asked.

  'Gardenia?' Her face did a comic double take.

  'For your hair. Um. They won't know you're Billie Holiday without it.'

  'Gardenia, huh. OK.' And one appeared. 'Folks will just say she can't afford a hat.'

  'It'll be your trademark.'

  She adjusted everything, and turned, Lady-like, to be admired.

  'They'll think you're a drag queen.'

  Michael had to explain that drag meant something different these days. Lady was not exactly pleased to be told she could be mistaken for a man. 'So how come you got hair like Norma Shearer?'

  'A lot of guys have hair like that now. In fact, it's kinda old-fashioned by now.'

  Tuh. It's never-was fashion where I come from.'

  Michael wore his only jacket, a kind of brown-green with a zigzag tweed, and Billie just laughed at it. 'I hope the whole town doesn't dress like you.' She touched his mane lightly, and then tried to jab it down into some kind of order. 'Actually, you know, that hair's kinda pretty. So one thing here is going to be OK. The boys are prettier.'

  They swooped down on Ronnie Scott's in a taxi. The foyer was charmingly naff. It looked like something from a 1960s James Bond movie, hanging red plush curtains, black leather sofas and hundreds of photos of jazz stars on the walls.

  Just inside the entrance there was an ordinary business desk and an old white guy wearing clothes like Michael's. Sitting on the arm of the sofa just behind him were a gang of people who had the air of working there, sharing jokes. They looked like James Bond too, in jackets, turtlenecks and medallions.

  'Mmm,' said Billie, approvingly. For her this was swank.

  A tall gangling man was leaning over the desk, signing in. 'I'm a guest actually.' For some reason he was carrying a single trolley wheel.

  Billie nodded at the wheel. 'You play that thing?'

  'It came off. I'm the bass player.' He shuffled with humility, skinny but with broad shoulders, big flat fingers, and Farah slacks.

  Billie teased him. 'Bass player. You'd make more money playing a wheel. No bass player ever makes any money.'

  The guys on the sofa laughed. An older black guy, speckles of white in his hair, stood up and chuckled. 'Specially the way you play, Jack.' All Jack could do wa
s shrug and smile and escape. Billie was already one of the gang.

  Except for the little old white guy behind the desk. 'Standing room only. Cloakroom's over there,' he announced. Billie slaughtered him with a glance.

  'Isn't anybody going to take a lady's coat?' Billie demanded, giving them lessons in manners. She shrugged it off to reveal her finery. 'Alphonse?'

  She had decided to call Michael Alphonse. It amused her to show up on the arm of a certifiable nerd. Michael felt like an Alphonse. He took her coat and he geeked his way towards the tiny cloakroom.

  Billie looked egregiously resplendent. The old black guy strolled towards her. 'You don't have to try that hard here.'

  'Try? You call this trying? You should see what happens when I try.'

  She amused him. He ushered her up to the Please wait to be seated sign, consulted his book, and ushered them into the club.

  There were ranks of narrow tables with little lights, and brass rails between levels and red tablecloths, and old fashioned straw lampshades that Michael wanted to call Tiffany. There were German tourists in long green gabardine coats and trimmed white goatees; skinny intense young men with black sweaters; a waiter with an Eraserhead haircut; women with hair as long and heavy as curtains with Dusty Springfield mascara.

  Billie was fascinated. 'Everybody looks so sharp.' For her, this was all from the future.

  They were sitting near the stage, and the lights spilled over onto her. Billie strode languidly to the table, milking the distance across the floor, making sure the satin caught the light.

  They were going to have to share a table. Three rather large black men looked up, less than pleased.

  Michael pulled a chair back for Billie, scraping it too loudly on the floor, for which Billie admonished him with her eyebrows, even though the sound made everyone turn towards her. She descended onto the chair as if it were a hereditary throne.

  Alphonse was quite a fun character to play. Playing him gave Michael front. 'I'm Alphonse,' he announced to the guys. 'This is Billie. I'm just her foil for the evening. We don't sleep together or anything.'

  The guys blinked as if swallowing something.

  Billie opened her evening bag and flourished a cigarette. 'I don't suppose any of you gentlemen have a light?'