by Gordon Burn
Having made his selection, the volunteer would be asked to tell the audience how many pages there were in the volume he was now holding.
He would then be asked to nominate a number (‘Pick a page! Any page!’) between one and the number he had just mentioned. This done, he would next be asked to pick another number corresponding to a line of text on that page and to read the line aloud slowly to the audience.
As he read, the magician would chalk the words on the board, writing rapidly, dotting the ‘i’s noisily and using other bits of stage business to bring up the dramatic tension.
I would sense the hush and hear the urgency of the scrape of chalk on board as I sat waiting to go on. And when I did, I would invariably reach out and turn up the volume on the Tannoy in my dressing-room in order to catch what the odd words, wrenched from their context, were this time around.
The act would be brought to a conclusion by the conjuror removing a cigarette from a silver case, showing it to the audience with a flourish, bringing a light to it, and exhaling a long puff of smoke up into the spotlight to prove it was real.
Then, taking care to ensure that it flashed a semaphor in the light as he produced it, he would take a razor-blade and carefully slice through the cigarette paper from top to bottom. Finally (drawing back his cuffs conspicuously to show that the hanky-panky didn’t happen at this stage), he would tamp the loose tobacco into the cupped palm of his assistant and pass what was left to the volunteer from the audience.
‘Would you please read what is written on the piece of paper you are now holding in your hand, puh-le-e-e-e-ze!’ And what was written, of course, was what was spelled out on the board which the assistant was now parading across the stage like one of those girls in savagely-cut satin hot-pants who go around with the round-cards at championship boxing matches. Cue walk-off music. Cue applause.
These meaningless snatches of sentences, recited importantly several times in the course of a few minutes, in a disembodied, almost an incantatory way, could be oddly potent. With the repetition, some sort of meaning seemed to coalesce around them.
Many times I would be halfway through the first song of my set and I wouldn’t have heard a word that I’d sung; my mind would still be snagged on some random string of words which, more often than you would think possible, seemed to have a hauntingness or mysterious resonance.
I can now remember only two of them.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away is one.
‘You’ve dyed your hair since then,’ remarked Jordan, is the other.
Why I should have remembered these two and wiped the rest is impossible to know. But the fact is that they stay lodged, stubborn as meat between the teeth, when many things of much more obvious relevance or significance have been casually flushed away. It has encouraged me to nail my flag to the mast of randomness and chance.
It is something I think about often in the evenings when I find myself idly leafing through a book here in Kiln Cottage, waiting for something to leap out and grab me.
When it does, I might include it in the notebook I keep for the purpose. It was 99 per cent virgin when I came here, as her record company used to boast of Joni Mitchell in the sixties. But now the covers are ringed from cups and glasses, and some of the pages are stuck to each other with make-up, spilled coffee and dog-slobber.
There is no television in the cottage, but it is well stocked with books. There are full bookshelves either side of the open fireplace in the sitting-room. Books line the upstairs corridor. There are even books wedged under one of the legs of the bed in which I sleep, compensating for the way the floor dips away to the window overlooking the quay – E. Keble Chatterton’s The Yacht-man’s Pilot of 1933; and, on top of this, a dog-eared copy of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, with a cover painting of a woman by Toulouse-Lautrec – only her hair and a hand rather tensely gripping the back of the garden bench on which she is sitting are visible.
If I was ever serious about making good the gaps – the outbacks and Saharas – in my knowledge, the last few years have been the perfect opportunity. The trouble is, I lack the application. I have always been a dipper and a browser; have always enjoyed what in today’s terminology I believe is called ‘grazing’, rather than the full tombstone read.
Books, like churches and classical music, have always made me feel turned in on myself and involuntarily gloomy. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but there’s hardly a book that I’ve started at the beginning and read all the way through.
The only exceptions are the American pulps, the paperback shockers which circulated on the long train journeys we were always undertaking between engagements in the fifties. They completed my education.
Like violets, and small saucers of prawns and whelks, they were sold by men with trays around the pubs in Soho and the equivalent areas of the bigger towns, and this contributed to the sense of illicitness I always felt about them. ‘Any health mags, love stories?’
I always picked them up from where they were lying in a studiedly casual way and read them with a growing feeling of guilt and a packed hotness behind the eyes.
They will always be connected in my mind with stalled Sunday-afternoon rail journeys between, typically, Middlesbrough and Nottingham; with northern industrial light working its way across worn carriage-cloth; and with the unfamiliar, not unpleasant, sensations they started up in me.
Sin Circus. Shame Slave – She knew the little tricks that fan lust in men and women. One Hell of a Dame – The naked story of lusty-bodied Sheila whose uncontrollable desire put her name in lights. Resort Girl. Diamond Doll. She Had to Be Loved. Gay Scene – Every time a man had her it was rape. But with other women it was love. Gutters of lust ran wild in this Sex Town.
Along with the American magazines you found on sale at some station bookstalls – Zipp, Abandon, Caress, Hollywood Frolics – these were titles which struck me then as a kind of concentrate of eroticism. (And recalling them now, I have to say, still gives me a certain frisson.)
As the fifties drew on and the profession started attracting a higher percentage of what Fay called ‘strollops’ and professional good-time girls, I was dimly aware of scenes from the covers of Shame Slave and Sex Town – spectacular cleavages (the breasts very boldly shaped and divided) and Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls; rippling torsos and luxuriant chest wigs – playing themselves out in the digs around the country where we stayed.
Despite the standard rule about no ‘take-in’, these places were alive with sexual activity: Atomic Armfuls … Bikini Bombshells … sexsational sex romps and hi-jinks … dolls on dope … daisy-chain dollies … The News of the Screws got it more right more often than probably it even realised.
When I returned to London at the end of my first hike around the provinces, I recall my mother taking me firmly by the shoulders (she had to propel herself on to her toes) to give me the third-degree. ‘That’s it,’ she wailed after an interval. ‘I knew it. It’s happened. You’ve changed. You look hard already.’
I was always promising myself that I was going to read something more nourishing. I appeared to have plenty of time at my disposal. The problem was that it was effectively dead time – too long to do nothing in, but too short to do anything in particular.
Every day was geared towards the evening’s performance. I was obsessive about protecting my voice. I was always detecting coughs and infections. For years I endured breakfast-time (that is, lunch-time) witticisms about what I was hiding behind the foulard scarves with which my throat was lagged. Most nights, as I think I’ve mentioned, I was sick until my ribs ached before I had to go out and be the vivacious little miss with the bubbling personality. Books never had any place in this programme.
The countryside represented one of the holes in my knowledge of which I was most conscious.
‘Country’ to me was the sleepy boring bit between the incident-filled narrative of the cities; the nothingness spreading out beyond town boundaries, where the trol
ley-wires terminated and real life dwindled to an incandescent dot, and then quickly faded to nada, like television at the close of transmission.
I only knew the flowers everybody knew. I didn’t associate flowers with the seasons. Roses were something that arrived wrapped in cellophane, with a small white pill in an envelope to prolong their life. It remained the case even when I became a variety advertised in the bulb and seed catalogues myself.
In the days when it was as much a part of the celebrity ritual as being hi-jacked for This Is Your Life and being greased up by that old phoney Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs, I had a rose named after me: a pale tangerine-coloured tea-or damask-or old-rose that turned slightly less anaemic-looking when (perhaps it was well-named after all) it became bloated and blown.
The naming ceremony took place at the annual flower show at Chelsea and was performed by the Queen Mother. She was wearing one of her Monet-print floaty outfits with a major hat and a flesh-coloured elastic bandage under her stocking on one leg.
We passed a happy few minutes talking about digging in manure and bonemeal and how to deal with root rot, and ‘the incredibly beautiful Madame Alfred Carrière, and her cousin, Mrs Herbert Stevens’, who I gathered just in time were both roses like myself. The whole conversation could have been in Gujarati for all I understood.
These details feel real: I can also remember (I think I can) the satin scalloped lining of the tent, the sickening thick aroma of the exhibits and the music of a pipe-band.
But the occasion is one of hundreds in my life which I am more and more convinced I can only have read about or seen on television and which must have actually happened to somebody else.
Some of my most dream-like recollections involve the royal family (and are therefore made more dream-like by the awareness that they are the country’s favourite fantasy-figures). The most dream-like of all – it plays itself back in SloMo shot through medium gauze – involves the present Queen.
I performed at Windsor Castle several Christmases running. There was a show in a private chapel, converted for the occasion, followed by high-tea and a party for the staff and the family. My first visit is the visit I remember most vividly.
Edmundo Ros, the Latin specialist, provided the music for dancing that year (it was almost certainly 1956 or ’57). And the evening wound to a close with everybody snaking around the state-room in which the dance was held doing a ragged, high-spirited conga.
But for reasons of etiquette or protocol (I didn’t know the reason) the Queen found herself excluded. She was still a young woman then, as of course I was, slim and pretty. And I happened to look up at one point and see her standing alone under a Flemish tapestry of Actaeon being torn apart by dogs, smiling happily and clapping in time with the music.
On an impulse, I dropped out of the conga-line and approached her. I might have curtsied first – a quick dip – but the next thing I remember is placing my hands on her waist and steering her on to the floor to join the dancers. She was wearing a suit which was double-layered – coffee lace over blue – and I remember thinking even at the time that it felt like net curtains against windows to touch.
I was aware, in the short time that I maintained this taboo contact, of my whole system going into overload in an effort to accumulate all the information it could – the look, the feel, the smell (I was almost certain I recognised ‘Miss Dior’); all the data ordinary subjects are unable to access – and running a flash-check on it against what I knew of these properties in other women, including myself.
I wanted to know, I now realise, what the hungry stage-door touchers and gropers were always wanting to know about me: if, and in what way, I differed from ordinary mortals. Whether the close eye-balling, the constant exposure, the incessant reproduction of the image had added to, stolen from or in any way affected the composition of the in-the-round, blood-and-guts person.
Was I in any essential way different from them? Was Elizabeth II, great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, direct descendent of Dick the Shit and Henry VIII (true? – history is almost as much of a black hole as nature studies), was she in any tangible way different from me?
*
I look at myself sometimes when I’m out walking in the country. at the waxed jackets and bush hats, the warm-up trousers and sights-of-Roma headscarf, the army surplus mittens and vinyl trainers and other items borrowed from Kiln Cottage, and wonder whether it’s possible to read in my present appearance anything about what I once was.
Do I look like a woman who witnessed a violent disfigurement, was the subject of This Is Your Life and conga-d with the Queen in the same brief span of her life? Or do I look like all the other women out walking their dogs along the edge of the cliffs on the coast path – thick-thighed, unhurried (nothing to hurry home for), of indeterminate age and sex until they come within polite ‘afternoon’-ing distance?
In all these years, only one of them – mail-order trail boots, duvet jacket, lovat tweed headgear, a classic example of the breed – has given me any reason to believe that she might be anything other than she seemed. ‘They try to mount her and she doesn’t like it,’ she said when she saw my miniature Pinscher worrying the business end of her Sheltie. ‘Not unless they buy her a drink first.’ Said with the kind of pale smile that contains an entire history.
At the beginning, I held out against being the shapeless ragbag I am when I go out these days. I wore obviously unsuitable things on purpose, as a way of billboarding the fact that I didn’t want to join the club. Being slapped around by the weather a few times quickly brought me to my senses.
Now when I think of my clothes I tend to think of them in the terms in which, in his published diary, Alan Bennett says his mother thought of hers:
My other shoes
My warm boots
That fuzzy blue coat I have
My coat with round buttons
I made a note of that at around the same time I made the following note, which seemed a perfect encapsulation of the person I was trying to get away from.
She is the kind who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacement to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life. (Unattributed)
There was a time when I couldn’t let anything go. I used to have three or four sizes in everything because I never knew what I was going to fit into; I had to rent rooms in the flat of the woman downstairs to store the overflow in.
Now I enjoy living in this temporary way: unanchored; unburdened, often not even able to call the clothes I stand up in my own.
*
Some days the cliff path is buzzed by military planes from the base along the coast. They scream in over the fields, follow the line of the cliffs for a couple of miles, then wheel away over the Channel, leaving behind a low rumble followed by silence, and the dog pressed against my leg, cowering, and the wind thrumming and the sheep unconcernedly cropping round tough plants with pink and mauve and yellow flowers which are called campion, ragged robin, thrift, sedum and veronica, but which is which I don’t know.
From above, and at speed, and thrown at a panoramic angle, it all must appear pleasingly unified and inevitable – the picture elements, although discrete, psychologically understood as composing one continuous picture.
*
Everything in Kiln Cottage – books and furniture, cutlery, crockery, all the household bits and pieces – was from the people who had been there before.
This was Mr and Mrs E, Staff’s parents.
Staff was a London show-business lawyer whom I felt I liked, although I knew him only vaguely. He belonged to that group of people, and it was a large one, whom I had only ever met when either one or both of us was three sheets to the wind; half-seas over, at some party or other.
Staff was born at Kiln Cottage. He grew up here and his parents lived here until their deaths.
Throug
h the clusters of pictures in the downstairs rooms it’s possible to trace his development from toothy schoolboy to public schoolboy to his Moroccan-sandal and tie-dye phase. The pictures stop some years short of his present bi-continental, sherbing-and-jogging, prinked and polka-dotted urbanity.
Mr and Mrs Ε had three children, whose faces are now all as familiar to me as my own from their pictures. Susie (‘Sookie’), the younger daughter, obviously had theatrical ambitions at one point. There’s a grainy Spotlight-style portrait of her wearing the copper ring, Juliette Greco hair and exaggerated cow lashes which were de rigueur in certain circles when she was young. She is gazing heavenwards out of the left of the picture in response to the lensman’s no doubt husky request for ‘misty eyes’. Make magic with that face.
Ruth, the elder daughter, is the breeder. Pictures of Ruth’s compliant, button-nosed children hang in velvet frames in several of the rooms. If I think of the children as being – how shall I put this? – dead, of having retreated from, rather than moved forward into their lives, that is partly the effect of the Polaroids, which have become sun-bleached (the light here most of the time is hallucinogenically bright), giving the young flesh a green, loose-on-the-bone, sickeningly disinterred look.
But it is also partly the fault of the faded burgundy velvet which surrounds these snaps and the grime-stiffened pieces of ribbon to which they are attached.
In the days when I was still noticing them – still noticing everything that I now accept as just everyday domestic clutter, mere atmospheric fill – I was tempted several times to remove the pictures or turn them face to the wall. What stopped me is the thing that has always stopped me making any kind of even minor change in the years I’ve been dug-in here.
It pleases me that, with the exception of a couple of personal eccentricities which we will no doubt take a turn around later, there is hardly any more evidence of my existence in the cottage today than on the day I arrived.