by Gordon Burn
There then followed a period of drawn-out haggling, at the end of which he’d offer to settle things on the toss of a coin: heads, he’d pay twice what was written on the bill; tails, the waiter would cover the cost out of his wages over the next six months.
The opportunities for embarrassment were multiplied, of course, whenever Fay was along. ‘Do you want a lousy tip,’ she’d ask the waiter, rootling busily in her handbag, ‘or a beautiful picture of my daughter?’ (The memory of this makes me want to get off the train now, cross to another platform and start going back in the direction I’ve just travelled.)
Tony’s dead – offed many years ago by somebody in the same line. Ronnie’s still around to tell the tale, but it’s been touch-and-go, from what I’ve been able to piece together.
‘I had a breakdown not so many years ago, I had two, and was very near to death,’ he was quoted as saying in a Me and My Health feature in a newspaper that the fish happened to come wrapped up in one day.
‘I found my wife dead in a room, my mother had her leg amputated and died, it all piled up and I had a breakdown and a haemorrhage, the house was splattered with blood, all up the walls, over everything. I was taken to hospital a dying man, and I wanted to die. I didn’t care. They were all round the bed and that was the end.’
(I often used to get the feeling that the public thought everybody they heard on the wireless or saw on television all lived in a big house together and loved each other; that we were constantly pouring our hearts out and weeping on each other’s shoulders. The truth is, personal revelation remains even more of a rarity than in straight civilian circles: we know most of what we know about each other the same way everybody else does, from what we read in the papers.)
One of Ronnie’s major pluses as a person is that he hates to dwell on the past. We could, for instance, have jawed about when Seigi’s, the very club where we were sitting, was lined floor-to-ceiling in fake fur and traded under the name Wips. (There was a tank of famous piranha fish just where you come out of the lift which Ronnie plunged his bare arm into more than once and took it as a personal affront when they refused to bite.)
We couldn’t see the view of the night-time city from where we were sitting; but we knew it well and felt it like a breath on the neck – the lemon-bleary winter light, the oily sliver of silver river, the broken grid of cranes, the illuminated contractors’ signs swaying hypnotically in the wind.
We were content to sit and watch and listen to Tonya discuss Christmas shopping, Andrew and Fergie, the pound-against-the-dollar, religion ( ‘I change religions like I change clothes. But I am now in one of the most confused parts of my life. Philosophically,’ I’m almost certain I remember her saying, ‘I’m back at the Socratic “A”’), until it was time for the event that was the excuse for us being there to happen.
‘Woman’ was the title of a book and the name of a perfume being launched by the former wife of a former (dead, in his case) sixties super-swinger. The snappers who had been mooching around looking for ‘faces’ in the shadows were being corralled together in front of a low platform, and the pros took this as their cue to load up on drinks before the free-bar closed and a pay-bar came into operation.
The introductory speech was made by the owner of Seigi’s, whom I had known since he was a child and his father had part of the Freddie Mills Nite Spot. (Fay would frequently get up on the stage to sing ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’ and ‘This Is a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening’ with the ex-boxer.)
He was wearing his working uniform – a Japanese-style black silk suit with a big brooch made out of fragments of broken mirror in the lapel. Later he would change into cords and a Barbour, collect the lurcher and the pointer that were tethered to a radiator in the back room and go deer-hunting near his house in Sussex.
‘I’m not a lady as you may have gathered’ (this didn’t get the laugh he had been expecting), ‘but I have sniffed the fragrance and I think that it’s very, very subtle, it’s very, very gentle, it’s very, very sophisticated and it’s very beautiful. And that is why this particular lady is putting her name to it because she is every one of those things, believe me. Could I invite you to applaud …’
Maureen was that odd phenomenon, a para-celebrity – a celebrity by association. Now, too many years down the road, she was still trying, as the survivor of a ‘heady, frenzied’ era, to make it play for her.
As they closed in for the kill, I saw the photographers exchanging sneaky glances behind the snouts of their Pentaxes and Leicas, which meant they were going to make a monkey of her; she was going to come out with multiple chins, a mean-looking mouth, eyes as wild as a bedlamite’s.
They got her to aim perfume at their lenses in a sticky cascade; then squirt perfume in a crossfire under her nose; then to recline on the black velvet display trestle, scattering books and cheap cardboard boxes, and revealing more of herself than was sensible, including a repair ticket on the dim plastic sole of her shoe.
‘I’ve never sold my story and I can’t really understand how they can do it, being beastly to people,’ I heard one of those familiar goo-goo little-girl bedroom voices say behind me. ‘I’d have an amazing list, but you can’t go round shopping your friends, can you?’ Pause, for an inhale or a sip. ‘I might easily change my mind, of course, if things went badly wrong and I was offered staggering bread.’
The towers of books had been reduced to dog-eared rubble; dozens of pocket-sized ‘flacons’ of the fragrance had instantly gone walkies.
I returned to where I had been sitting and had only been there a couple of minutes when under/around the noise I thought I heard somebody say my name.
‘Alma Cogan, yeh?’
Starting from the feet we had: suede cowboy boots, pressed jeans, Navajo buckle, turquoise Navajo ring, plain T-shirt, linen jacket, inflamed nostrils, pupils like coal-holes, tumbling long blond androgynous hair. A portable phone jammed into his back pocket had the incidental effect of drawing the denim tighter at the front and showcasing his (bulked out?) thing (many hours in front of the mirror evidenced here). ‘Knockout. Well-pleased. Would it be cool to lay my rap on you since you’re like here?’
An expensive education lay close to the surface of the lame-brain rockbiz pose. I saw Sundays at home in the country with the parents; I saw a forest of lovingly-angled family pictures, tiny saucers under the castors on the sofa, brass occasional tables from the service days in India, smelly (‘whiffy’) elderly labs, tepid gin-and-tonics, knicker-blinds, tables with skirts.
He began to tell his story. But before he had got very far I discovered I knew it in outline already from the couple of letters I had received from the desk of ‘Jase’ (this was his name – a corruption of – what? – Jasper? James? Wholly invented? There were no Jasons thirty years ago in his particular neck of the woods).
Written on the paper of his marketing-production-management company, the letters were peppered with catalysing a little further evolution ofs and synergising with the psyche ofs and emblem of showbiz cultures and déjà vu factors.
The top-and-bottom of what he was suggesting was to put me together with a client who had recently made a ‘boldacious’ cross-over from the club dance scene and was now coming off a couple of ginormous hits in the pop chart.
The idea, as he had explained it, was to establish a whole new category of pop duets – ‘the epitome of the fifties-eighties pop collision, with shades of sophisticated boystown disco and clear bright-eyed melody’. I would figure in this as ‘a kind of art statement’.
‘One, with experience, gets this tremendous feeling. We’ve got power play guaranteed on it already. Every hour, on the hour. It’s a potentially enormous entity.’
Jase had just got his feet under the table when he was stopped in full flow by Ronnie, who was a bit fiery by now and wanted to know if he was from the papers.
‘I’ve only got two uses for newspapers,’ Ronnie said before I’d had a chance to explain the situation. ‘To cover the botto
m of my budgie’s cage and to train my dog on.’ (Having some deal on the boil that would benefit from a bit of friendly image-tweaking in the tabloids – that was different.)
‘S’funny,’ Ronnie said, plopping a placatory paw on Jase’s shoulder, ‘I went for a Chinese last night. He hadn’t done nothing. I just went for ’im.’
This was a twist on Ronnie’s most famous saying from the old days. Asked what had happened to some individual who had been causing trouble (or who Tony Dalligan suspected was about to cause trouble), his answer was always, ‘He became punched.’
After a few more minutes of banter, Ronnie drifted off into the crowd again and Jase (‘Some wild dude’) continued as if there hadn’t been any interruption.
‘What I’m saying is it could add up to a hellacious combination. It’s supposed to be secret. Like, deep graveyard. But already there’s an incredible industry buzz.’ His mouth was so close to my ear now I could feel the consonants popping. ‘He’s so impressed by how primary you remain in the culture. I can send you clips where he talks about what an avatar you are. He grew up with your records. His mother’s always been like a mega-fan. There’d be video product, other cross-media tie-ins … And you’d have points. Which could mean we were talking serious numbers.’ And so on.
But my fingers were exploring the recesses and under-edges of the seat upholstery to find the cigarette-burn that, like the hardened wad of chewing-gum, is always there.
At the same time my mind was fixed on the view that you get from the upper-deck of the coach at a certain point on the Hammersmith flyover: you look down on the raft-like canopy projecting over the entrance to the Odeon theatre and the red plastic letters that have been thrown down among all the crud that has collected there until the next time they’re picked up and hung together on the big white light-box that fills the whole of the façade to spell out the name of a headline attraction.
I also hadn’t forgotten a review I had read of the latest career re-launch of a near-contemporary (she’s slightly younger, but not much) where she was described as looking like ‘a minicab driver in Bacofoil’.
I took the business card to which he had added his direct number and the number of his car-phone and promised Jase to think about his offer and let him know.
*
I went on somewhere else with Ronnie and Tonya after leaving Seigi’s, then somewhere else and (probably) somewhere else again. I woke up this morning with the usual misheard and stray snatches of conversation swooshing around my system with the after-effects of the alcohol.
I was sure I could remember, for instance, somebody (could it have been Tonya?) talking about going to an erotic sculptor to have her ‘pussy’ sculpted: ‘I had it done in dental clay and painted blue and silver and now it’s sitting on my mantelpiece at home. I think all men should have them in their offices instead of the usual dreary picture of the little woman.’
The general atmosphere is vivid (there were peppermint-coloured nuclides of neon playing on the surface of my drink; ‘Lady in Red’ was the record playing at the time); but key details, such as the identity of the speaker, couldn’t be sworn to.
I have a hazy recollection of Ronnie putting me in a cab and scrunching a large note into a ball as he passed it through the window to the driver.
It was only a couple of hours ago, when I was getting myself organised for the schlep across London to visit my mother, that I found the samples of ‘Woman’ stinking up my bag. They were probably put there by Ronnie, thinking he was doing me a favour. I decided to leave them and take them to Fay and the other old girls who spend most of their time experimenting with hair and make-up and dressing up like weenyboppers.
The first sign of my mother disappearing off the radar was when she started swanning around in the guise of Alma Taylor, the silent movie star who she named me after. I would come home to find her with her face whited-up, sitting in front of the mirror with candles lit, pulling faces and striking poses she remembered from fifty years ago.
The next step was thinking that people on television could see into the room. ‘Pull your skirt down. He’s looking at you,’ she’d whisper during the news. Or ‘Close that drawer. He can see right in there. It hasn’t been tidied for months.’ She wasn’t even an old woman – not old old. She was sixty-eight when all this started to happen.
I got her into Dorothy Ward House by calling in a few favours. Strictly speaking, it’s a retirement home for variety performers exclusively. But by the late seventies, it was a purely academic distinction in my mother’s case. By that time she was convinced it was herself, rather than me, who had had the career.
‘The Old Pro’s Paradise’, as it used to be referred to (unironically) in the profession, is a bizarre and unnerving place to visit. Very few of its three dozen inhabitants believe they were anything less than the toast of the town in their day. The difficulty lies in deciding which Hollywood lovely or Broadway legend, which king of comedy or matinee idol they see themselves being this week.
You’ve heard the old joke: Open the fridge and she’ll do twenty minutes when the light goes on? Welcome to Dorothy Ward House.
*
The escalator at this end was roofed in with corrugated iron and chicken-wire. Sprawled on the steps outside the station were a gang of Stone Age derelicts with violent contusions and scabs on their faces as exotic as Ubangi tribesmen.
The sweet rotted smell of cider lufted from the gardens at the bottom of the hill where they go to relieve themselves. It’s still thick in my throat now that I’ve climbed as far as the Victorian villas with pink and apple-green garden paving and bottle-holders with little clock-faces on them to tell the milkman how many pints to leave and caravans and motor homes standing waxed and raised on bricks in the gravel drives.
How well I feel I know this street (and how much I loathe it). The question that nags at me every time I find myself panting up it is: what are the chances of me coming to know it even better? How strong is the possibility that I may one day have to end up seeking refuge here myself?
It’s inevitable that I’m going to sound as though I’m weeping in my beer when I say this, but I own virtually nothing. The flat in London is in my mother’s name. In the event of her death – not very far away now – the tenancy is not transferable.
Yet every time I step into Dorothy Ward House (past the mezuzah on the door-frame, under the arch ‘Stage Door’ sign in the porch) and see the cracked and faded trade ten-by-eights, the old show-bills in their frames, the collections of china dogs and toy ballerinas set out on the tops of walnut chests in rooms labelled Hippodrome, Empire, Tivoli, Coliseum, Palladium, and so on, I am reminded why I have been happy to see my own souvenirs and career cast-offs dispersed like a wig in the wind.
There are no pictures of me around my mother’s flat (and none in Kiln Cottage). There are only pictures of my mother here in my mother’s room: Fay being introduced to the Duchess of Kent; Fay making up a card school with Roger Moore, Michael Caine and Stanley Baker; Fay refreshing her lipstick at a bottle-crowded table at the Talk of the Town (Tony Dalligan is just visible in the bottom right-hand corner).
She accepts a kiss on her downy, doughy cheek but obviously has only the haziest notion of who I am or what I might be doing there.
She is wearing black lace gloves with cut-off fingers, white PVC knee-length boots and a purple dress I haven’t seen before. Ash dribbles down her front. By her elbow on the bedside table is a schooner of the Tia Maria that she keeps in the wardrobe (I have another bottle in my bag).
‘See that Rolls out there?’ she says abruptly and with such conviction I half-turn to look at the window. ‘It doesn’t mean a light. Truthfully. I thought it was all going to be different when I was a star. Not a bit of it. Don’t you think I’d like to go into town to the shops, have a rummage round? But it’s impossible, you see. The commotion. I’m a prisoner.’
Her room is at the back of the house, with a view of the garden. All that’s out there is
a wooden bench and a blackened bush in a circular bed on the lawn. Everything else has been brought inside for the winter.
It is early evening. The low murmur of the TV news comes from other rooms on the corridor. There is a chrome bar along the wall just inside the door and support-handles by the washbasin and the armchair. There’s an emergency buzzer by the bed.
‘I’ve been on bills with stars recently,’ my mother continues, ‘and I’ve been in the number-one dressing-room where they used to be and they’re down the corridor now. Which embarrasses me terribly. I couldn’t see my name down there on the bill when I was up there once.’
Silence. I shake out the few items of clothing that are lying around and fold them neatly in a pile. I open the door of the medicine cabinet and quickly shut it again. I prise some white hairs from a brush using the handle of a metal comb and, reluctant for some reason to throw them into the empty, paper-lined bin provided, flush them down the sink.
They wrap themselves around the spokes of the plughole. I poke at them with the comb as if they were something unpleasant I’d just discovered and let the tap go on running long after they’ve disappeared.
The sound of water is immediately followed by the sound of a voice coming in our direction and announcing, ‘This is your five-minute call, ladies and gentlemen … Five minutes.’
If you didn’t know the sound had a human source, however, you wouldn’t identify the cheese-grater purgatorial mechanical croak as a voice at all. Connee Emerald played saxophone and sang in an act called the Emerald Sisters and Michael. She was a celebrated West End ‘Peter Pan’ in the years before the war. Now cancer has eaten her face away and she has a throat box.
Without saying anything, my mother drains the last of her drink, makes some tiny adjustments to her appearance and begins to make her way along with the others to the lounge (the ‘Larry Parnes Lounge’ – it says this on a chafed brass plate by the door) where the evening’s programme of entertainment is about to begin.