Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  The second stands out because it records the only sign of slippage; the only hint that the official personality may not also be the real one.

  It was taken at the beginning of a short autumn season at Blackpool aimed at the Illuminations trade – all those people coming into town to drive up and down the front and look at Bugs Bunny and moving-leg can-can dancers and The King and I recreated in tableaux of jerky lights.

  It shows me posing with one of the fortune-tellers off the Golden Mile, the old crones who, with their brassy rings, ratty furs, crimson lips and yellow beach-donkey teeth filled me with a deep, instinctive childhood apprehension (rats in the toilet, spiders in the sink).

  I’d only agreed to the picture under duress from the management, who claimed the publicity would be good for business, but whose real motive I suspected stemmed from a superstition that a refusal might result in Gypsy Rosalee or Gypsy Petulengro putting a jinx on the season.

  She arrived backstage, I was wheeled out, and as the shot was being set up she looked at me the way I had always dreaded and told me (had she been tipped off I was a reluctant subject? merely picked up on the negative vibrations?) that she saw death in my aura. ‘I see death in your aura‚’ she said in a matter-of-fact way through lips whose colour bled in tiny tributaries towards her nose and her chin.

  At which point she prised open my palm with her jemmy-like fingers and the flash-gun released its acrid memorialising puff of smoke.

  If they’re right, and the whole of a life may be summed up in a momentary appearance, then perhaps this is the definitive shot of me here: a state of upheaval struggling to disguise itself not quite successfully behind a happy smile and a mask of impassivity.

  To be the owner of a famous face, even in the days when mine was famous, in an age when the advertising and publicity industries were in their infancy, was an enlivening thing. You felt invigorated, extra-alive, knowing that you were out there somewhere, circulating, multiplying, reproducing, like a spore in the world, even when you were sleeping.

  I recognised it this way once when a train in which I was travelling creaked to a halt unexpectedly. I was in the toilet at the time, and when I looked out through the clear oval in the frosted window to see what was happening, I saw a girl with two young dogs on leads walking in a field of half grass and half mud of the kind that you get on the sumpy industrial edge of towns, close to the railway lines.

  The field was bounded by a metal fence and, beyond that on three sides, by allotments, pigeon sheds, a row of run-down houses, some small factories. The girl bent and let the dogs off the leads and then, for as long as I watched, remained absolutely still as they reeled and boxed and tripped over each other, racing back to her occasionally for reassurance and to show their pleasure, burning off their energy.

  *

  When Cary Grant was in London filming Indiscreet with Stanley Donen in the late fifties, he used the time to go round the archives and newspaper libraries and, with a razor, personally removed all references to his former existence.

  I have thought of him often in recent days as I lurked in the lairs of the information professionals, listening to the squeak of rubber on parquet, the trill of a distant phone, the murmur of a discreet enquiry, waiting for an assistant to resurface with the anorexic envelopes and whippy folder-files bearing my name.

  The pictures I have fanned out in front of me aren’t much to show for the thousands of exposures that were made. But they tell me something I was curious to establish: they tell me how dedicated ‘F.McL.’ has been in his scavenging; how thoroughly he has picked the bones clean.

  F.McL. – my taxonomist, my taxidermist, sammler, embalmer, stasher and storer, considerer of trifles, tireless tender of the flame.

  Francis McLaren. Biografiend. Fetishiser. Jealous hoarder of my life.

  Nine

  The scenery keeps going by like a sentence read a dozen times and never taken in. Most people seem to have given up trying.

  They are hemmed in by presents that, when they carried them on to the train, made them walk like fat people. The presents are wrapped in ways that speak of the full, well-paid lives they have made for themselves in the city, and explain their flushed, glassy-eyed exhaustion. They are travelling north to spend Christmas with their families.

  The man in the seat next to me is trying to ground himself by listening to the Elgar Cello Concerto played by Jacqueline du Pré. I have identified it from the tsk-ing and buzzing that is the fall-out from the detonations happening in his brain.

  I have the perfect anecdote teed-up ready and waiting in case we have to get into conversation, which I hope we won’t.

  I saw Jacqueline du Pré from the upper deck of a bus in Knightsbridge about a year ago. She was wearing high black polished boots and a sleek deep-pile black fur coat and sitting in a wheelchair waiting for the lights to change.

  When they did, she was tipped backwards at a furious angle by the woman with her, who repeated the procedure at the other side to get the wheelchair up on to the pavement again.

  I pressed my face against the window and looked towards the sky to try to see what she might have seen: it looked like sand pounded solid by the surf, but there was no way of telling how it might look at the end of a backwards-falling movement through nearly ninety degrees and with bodies surging by on either side.

  Her cheeks were inflated like bladders as a result of the drugs she was taking, and brightly veined. The hands which produced the growls and runs and sweeping cello chords I can hear pounding into the head of the man who happens to be sitting next to me lay uselessly in her lap.

  *

  Every record I put out in the fifties carried HMV’s ‘Dog and Trumpet’ trademark, adapted, so it was said, from a painting showing Nipper the fox-terrier listening to the voice of his dead owner, and sitting (so it was further said) on the lid of his master’s coffin.

  The message of the drawing now seems obvious: death-in-life, life-in-death, phonographic magic; record listening as a seance where you choose your own ghosts.

  (In 1950, half a century after Nipper himself had died, EMI organised an exhumation at the site in Kingston-upon-Thames where he was thought to have been buried. A few bones were found, but it couldn’t be claimed with any certainty that they were Nipper’s.)

  At the time, though, it never occurred to me to ever wonder how the sounds that came out when I opened my throat ended up embedded in acetate and vinyl. It certainly never occurred to me that they were going to be entombed there for ever and always, time immemorial, world without end.

  The records were breakable and therefore disposable. They were as short-lived as the careers of the people who performed them: the obsolescence was built in.

  And yet yesterday I was able to sit at a study cubicle in a wood-panelled room with a brass-and-crystal chandelier and have my self played back to me, moment for moment, bum note for bum note, breath for breath. The quality of reproduction was so advanced I imagined I could hear my heart pounding between phrases, my lungs tightening, gathering their strength; I could almost hear the threads of saliva breaking in that moment thirty years ago as I parted my lips to sing.

  The room was laid out like a language laboratory, with individual control panels, headsets and table-top partitions. There were two or three other people doing research in addition to myself. The technicians, who remained out of sight, on the end of a phone, provided a one-to-one service: you only had to say the word and you could have the strings separated from the bass, or the vocal mixed up or mixed down or even isolated from the backing track completely.

  When I had this done I experienced an odd sensation of my voice being poured back where it had come from; of something returning to its source; of a cycle being completed.

  Everything had been transferred to tape. The next person to play this would hear only dead air, tape hiss, only the fleck of a human presence woven into the pattern of interference.

  It was overcast and raining beyond the big gro
und-level bay window, with sudden flurries of rain and the odd pedestrian running to find shelter. The rain whipped around the telephone box opposite, which I could see was plastered with stickers offering services of sexual degradation and humiliation.

  ‘For security reasons this room is patrolled periodically. We are sorry if this causes any distraction’, a sign said high on a wall close to where I was sitting.

  I don’t know how long I had been there when I was startled – I did literally jump; something fell from my lap to the floor – by a hand touching my shoulder.

  I was listening to my 1954 cover of Kitty Kallen’s ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’, cranked up so high it should have been physically painful, and apparently I could be heard some distance away, in other parts of the building, double-tracking, singing at the top of my lungs and intruding on the study environment like a Saturday-night drunk.

  *

  A modern structure of red metal and perspex has been erected inside the old Victorian shell of the station, in line, I take it, with British Rail’s current ‘We’re getting there’ slogan. They are playing seasonal muzak, as they were three hours ago in Euston. It swims around in the space between the old roof and the new like some kind of orchestral insulation. ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’ changes to ‘Jolly Saint Nicholas’ just as I reach the barrier.

  I apparently met Francis McLaren more than once, many years ago, when he was still in short trousers. But nothing about the figure stepping away from the newsagent’s hole-in-the-wall and making a bee-line for me strikes me as in any way familiar.

  Who looking at him now would guess he was the slave of a secret passion? Or identify me (more accurately, ‘me’) as the object of it?

  The car-coat is beige, the shoes sensible, the trousers just perceptibly flared and hoisted an inch or two above the ankle. The pink of the shirt he is wearing gives some colour to his face, which has adapted to the Arctic-blue lighting of the modern office the way lower life-forms adapt to deserts and tropical swamps, and has sickly sick-building-syndrome circles under the eyes. His tie is fluttering excitedly over his shoulder and he has his left hand pressed to his right temple, chimp-fashion, to prevent the ropes of hair impeding to make a second streaming pennant, as he comes.

  Sight. Smell. Sound. I see him before I smell him. I smell him before he speaks. What the bottle probably describes as ‘a masculine fragrance’ is coming off him in wavy concentric lines, like cartoon shorthand for extreme ponginess or heat.

  But before he even speaks he slips an Instamatic from the plastic pod hanging from his shoulder and snaps off a single frame. ‘Well. Who ever would have believed it. You. I mean …’ – he wants to correct this to ‘Alma Cogan’, but doesn’t – ‘Here. After all these years.’

  When I sensed weakness, my instinct was always to bore in, grind down. I can see I’m going to have to fight it in the hours ahead. Travelling by train in order not to disappoint his expectations is a concession I resent. Ditto the metallic green puffa jacket (I feel like a misplaced present in it) and dated comin’-atya make-up I sensed the role demanded.

  When he goes to pick up my overnight bag I tell him I’m capable of carrying it myself. With both our hands gripping the handle, though, I get a sense of the shivering and shaking and old knee-knocking heebie-jeebies and let him have his way.

  In the car-park, a lot of the first pleasure of being reunited is already evaporating into irritability and apprehension. For all their best efforts and good intentions, the members of various parties are quickly reverting to their old roles. From several family saloons come the sounds of peevishness and bickering. A woman slaps a small girl across the back of the legs as we pass, producing ear-piercing screams. There’s some Christmas paper with a bow still attached on top of the litter-bin closest to where F.McL., as I can’t help thinking of him, is parked.

  When he opens the tailgate of the car, the rear shelf rises dinkily with it, like a music box. He puts my bag in next to a pair of heavy-weather boots and a golf umbrella, then holds the passenger door open for me in a display of old-world manners. (‘Miss Cogan says she prefers considerate fellows with good manners to the Adonis type and has dark thoughts concerning the “Hiya, babe” variety of male.’ I don’t know where or to whom I said this, but naturally he would be able to tell me.)

  Inside, the car is anonymous, clean. The smell of plastics and laminates and disinfectant competes with his own artificial odour. There are no distinguishing features.

  When he switches on the ignition, the radio comes on with it – a news report of a smash-and-grab at a local building society, which he hears to its conclusion before turning it off, in the way of somebody used to always riding alone.

  He pulls on a pair of open-weave gloves as we take our place in the stream of home-bound traffic, and it occurs to me, not for the first time, that nobody knows I’m here.

  Women start to become visible in bright, well-lighted kitchens, preparing evening meals while half-watching television, going through the same small repertory of gestures, as we draw clear of the town centre.

  The driver of a car cruising alongside us opens his window just enough to let a chewing gum wrapper float out on to the air. Something in my expression must suggest disapproval, because he gives me the finger. F.McL. appears not to notice.

  ‘Twenty-eight years,’ he says, carefully avoiding any contact between his gloved hand on the gear-shift and my thigh, calmer now that we’re moving. ‘November 15th, 1959. A Tuesday. I was only about eleven. That was the first time I met her. You.’ (He doesn’t like the sound of this.) ‘Alma. My mother booked in for me to see her at the Manchester Palace. Billy Daintie was the support. I have the poster of course. And the programme. And – although I can’t be categorical; I wouldn’t want to swear to this – I think the dress she had on that night.’

  I ask him how he managed to get backstage; it was never easy. But he’s overtaking and so doesn’t immediately answer. He hikes himself forward so that his face is within inches of the rearview mirror and continues rocking agitatedly until he’s safely back in lane.

  ‘My letter of introduction from the fan club. On the door they said: She’s having a bath between shows. Then you can imagine the trepidation, a child going down the corridor to this big door and knocking, and then the husky voice saying “Come in” … I wasn’t by myself. There were others. She saw a few of us at once. I mean, she never made much of a fuss of me. I was just one of the many.’

  Now there are fewer kitchen windows, the distance between them is greater, the darkness more intense. Out of the darkness looms the business park where Francis McLaren is a paper-pusher for the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, the Equal Opportunities Commission, I can’t remember.

  Membranous buildings with wigwam roofs and curtain walls and abstract facings of lime-green and peach and pink rise out of a landscape of pig breeders and car breakers and humpy ploughed fields.

  He seems increased in definition, less battened-down, being close to his place of work. ‘We’ll have everything in there when they’ve finished. Swimming pool, squash courts, restaurant, wine bar, cycleway, equestrian centre, pub, a trim trail, nursery would you believe … Built on a hundred acres of Lancashire rubbish,’ he says, with an air of triumphalism. ‘Three point five million cubic metres of earth was rearranged, with the older rubbish being turned over the newer, more unstable stuff to compress and control it.’

  This new landmark dissolves like an apparition and the stench of slurry starts oozing through the ventilators. He squirts water onto the windscreen, as if there was some connection. He does it in the deft, almost sly, way that television weather forecasters move seamlessly through their sequence of maps and satellite pictures.

  We turn right on to an unlighted road, and drive for what I estimate is three or four miles until we come to a village with a fish-and-chip shop and an ’8 ‘Til Late’ with pre-packed fuel heaped like anti-flood defences outside it and a SlushPuppy beaker revolving lopsid
edly in the window.

  We pass a school and a mill, then start climbing towards a group of farm buildings which open directly on to the road: the big sliding doors of one of them are parted to provide a glimpse into a high dark space which suggests dungheat and bodyheat and the passivity of dumb animals.

  A short distance further on, we turn between a pair of concrete pillars that must have once held the estate gates, into a semi-concealed cut or snicket. The road is pitted and cobbled and at the end of it, illuminated in the headlights, a gate opens into a field.

  ‘Be it ever so humble,’ he says when he switches off the ignition, but makes no attempt to move.

  ‘One thing I’d like to say to you, I meant to say over the phone, so as to avoid offence.’ I see a curtain move at a window. Somebody, possibly in the nearby field, calls to their dog. ‘You haven’t come to ask if you can borrow anything, have you? Because I’m sorry, but I’ve had a bad experience, as you know from my letters. I’m a very poor judge of character; I take everybody on face value. Now I never, never, never let anything of Alma go from the house.’

  As I duck into the cold, I do something I haven’t done for years: I go to bunch my clothes to my body the way I had to do to get in and out of doors, and up and down stairs when I was, as they used to say, gowned. It’s something I found myself doing involuntarily in off-stage life as a tic, a kind of neurotic mannerism (I was constantly afraid I was going to send glasses flying, sweep things off tables; that my body mass was several times greater than it was). It was something I had to learn to train myself out of.

  He calls his cottage ‘… this ole house …’. Written this way in his letters, but spelled conventionally in wrought-iron, as I now see, by his front door. The roof and outside walls are corrugated, like a temporary building converted for living. There is a porch made of trellis with bare branches twisted through it.