Tree Surgery for Beginners

by Patrick Gale

  Darius was adamant they should move to the theatre early to be sure of a good table.

  ‘I’ll probably head off for an early night,’ Lawrence began but was shouted down by the others.

  ‘You must see her once. She’s probably past her best, but she’s still a legend,’ Reuben insisted.

  ‘So why haven’t I heard of her?’

  ‘You just don’t move in the right circles. Maybe you led a more sheltered childhood than most of us.’

  He allowed Bee to persuade him.

  ‘Come on,’ she said quietly. ‘It might be fun. And you need to sit for a while to digest that revolting pudding.’

  Lawrence had never been musical. He sometimes thought he lacked the requisite gene. He saw no reason to sing something that could be spoken in a fraction of the time. His mother loved musicals and when he was a boy would encourage him to watch television matinées with her but he found something faintly embarrassing about the moments where the characters prepared to burst into song. The artful line or two of I-feel-a-song-coming-on dialogue and the sudden, intrusive swell of an invisible orchestra filled him with a kind of rage. Live performances of any kind were even worse. He took long detours to avoid walking near the tribes of Morris dancers, folk singers and buskers who invaded the pedestrianized part of Barrowcester High Street on a Saturday. He could not bear to catch their eye or watch them fail. He was horrified on their behalf.

  When Darius found them a table, Lawrence resolutely chose the seat with its back to the low apron stage. As the waiters hurried to deliver the last orders and the overhead lights dimmed, leaving only the pink glow of the shaded table lamps and Darius’s Havana, he tried to keep up a conversation with Bee but Reuben shushed him.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘She’s coming. It’s Lala!’

  He pointed. Lawrence twisted as if by reflex and then was unable to turn away. The little band struck up, a follow spot swung across the stage to some blue velvet curtains. A black-gloved forearm emerged, diamonds sparkling at its wrist, and began to tease the curtains apart. This was evidently one of the performer’s signatures for several people in the audience let out cheers before everyone began to applaud. Then the hand flicked a curtain aside and a woman appeared.

  ‘How glad the many millions

  Of Timothies and Williams would be,’ she sang,

  ‘To capture me …’

  From where Lawrence sat, she seemed tall, at least six feet including her coiled and stacked up hair, and her voice was as deep as she was tall, an almost masculine purr with an edge of burnished copper. Her hair was so beetle-black as to seem almost blue and she had netted it with black beads which glittered as she walked sinuously forward and revealed, through a thigh-length split in her spangled, petrol-coloured dress, a huge but well-turned leg in lethal spike heels.

  ‘But you had such persistence

  You wore down my resistance

  I fell and it was swell.

  You’re my big and brave and handsome Romeo

  She sashayed along the catwalk, making a show of inspecting the men within reach. Then Lawrence saw to his alarm that she was advancing towards their table, towards him. He froze as she stopped, stepped off the low stage and singled him out.

  ‘I’ve got a crush on you, Sweetie pie,’ she crooned.

  There were a few titters, not least from Reuben, as Lala stroked Lawrence’s cheek with a gloved finger then, in a gesture as potent as it was tawdry, tossed her silk wrap about his neck like a halter then slithered it away again. She moved back to the catwalk but she sang the rest of the song to him and he could only stare, paralysed with mixed fear and shame. He realized, with revulsion, that the wrap was sprayed so heavily with scent that the fabric had felt wet on his skin. He disliked scent as a rule, preferring that people should smell of people. But the one enveloping him from the scarf was incredibly rich stuff, something made of animals not flowers, something shockingly suggestive. As she moved away to accept applause with her odd, lopsided smile and begin another song, he felt assaulted by it, marked, claimed. He was furious but he had a hard-on. He knew the music was drab, old-timer stuff that was old even when Darius and Dora were young, but it had him entranced. Doused in her scent, sweating with embarrassment, he watched her slink through her set.

  She favoured weary songs of desire and enslavement. That Old Black Magic, Night and Day, Lilac Wine, So in Love. She conjured up a world where nothing existed but idolatrous passion, self-destructive, addictive, immolating desire. Lawrence was no linguist but when she sang in Italian, in German, even in Arabic, he could tell the theme was being continued. It was ridiculous, outdated and she was old enough to be his mother. Why then did he find her so … so …? He would have laughed out loud at her for a worn old tart, only his hard-on was verging on painful and he had to cross his legs.

  Bonnie used to say that men were little more than animals in the simplicity of their response to sex. The woman’s face and age and nature were immaterial, she claimed, provided she wore the right clothes and pressed all the usual buttons. For all his occasional fantasies, Lawrence had never used a prostitute. He could not bear to see Bonnie proved right, that desire could be demystified, revealed as a matter of casual professional manipulation.

  Lala sang just nine songs. She bowed a little stiffly. She accepted flowers with downcast eyes and a murmured thank you. She paused with one arm raised on the curtain to throw them a smile from her huge mouth. Then she slid out of view. The applause continued but she gave no encores. She would be performing several more times in the course of the cruise and clearly sensed that hunger in a captive audience was preferable to satiety. Lawrence quite forgot to clap. As he turned back to face the others he found them staring at him with expectant grins.

  ‘So what did you think?’ Reuben asked.

  ‘I … I dunno.’

  ‘She seemed very keen on you,’ Bee mocked.

  ‘She’d have gone for whoever was sitting here,’ he protested. ‘It was obviously all planned. But … But she was rather amazing. Her voice is very deep.’

  ‘Deeper than mine, in fact,’ said Darius airily, topping up everyone’s wine.

  ‘Yes. Only she’s so … feminine.’

  ‘So did you think she was sexy?’ Bee asked.

  ‘Oh piss off.’

  ‘No but did you? Go on. I’m interested.’

  ‘Well.’ Lawrence hesitated. The others leaned forward a fraction to catch his answer. The band struck up again and a few couples stood to dance. ‘I dunno. What did you think?’

  ‘She’s bliss,’ Reuben sighed.

  Oh there’s no point asking them,’ Bee said. ‘They’ll just think she was camp and there’s no point asking me because I’m a girl. What did you think?’

  ‘Well …’ Lawrence felt hot, aware again of the singer’s pungent scent on his collar and fingertips. He gulped for air. ‘Yes. I suppose I did. Think she was. You know. Sexy.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Bee. ‘You see to my eyes she’s still too obviously masculine. That big jaw. Those muscular legs.’

  ‘Like Sophia Loren crossed with Tony Curtis,’ said Darius admiringly, frowning as he relit his cigar.

  ‘What’s all this about her being masculine?’ Lawrence protested. ‘She’s not some bloke in drag.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Reuben began and Lawrence wanted to punch his self-satisfied little face. ‘She’s only notoriously transsexual.’

  ‘Rumoured to be. Only rumoured to be,’ Darius qualified. ‘Of course, you missed out on the conversation at dinner, trapped as you were with Darby and Joan.’ Lawrence gulped his wine.

  ‘So tell me now,’ he said.

  ‘Well Lala obviously isn’t her real name. No one knows what that is. Though La is A in the sol-fa scale so her initials might be A.A. I suppose. The story goes that she or rather he was born in a slum in Naples, born a boy, and the mother sold him to an Egyptian pimp who trained him as a transvestite prostitute. Then some wealthy French client hears him si
nging one day in the brothel in Alexandria, falls madly in love, buys him, whisks him to Casablanca for the operation then on to Paris where he launches the new-born Lala in a nightclub. The Berkeley, I think it was. She’s a huge star in some countries – Italy, Latin America, Egypt-but her style, well, you saw it. I mean, she’s hardly hip.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a disco album?’ Reuben asked.

  Darius shuddered.

  ‘Dreadful. Dreadful. No wonder the poor creature’s reduced to working cruise lines. She’s a dinosaur.’

  ‘He … She’s not that old,’ Lawrence protested.

  ‘Very good legs still,’ Bee murmured. ‘Neck like a swan’s.’

  ‘Nobody knows her age,’ Darius conceded with a shrug. ‘Her myth has been so cultivated and elaborated that the truth vanished long ago. One version has her working as a double agent in occupied Paris. You know the sort of thing. Sleeping with a Nazi general to obtain secrets for the Resistance. That would make her ancient. But another has the first rich patron as Sacha Distel or Charles Aznavour or someone, which would only make her, what, Brigitte Bardot’s age?’

  ‘Just fairly ancient,’ Reuben said.

  ‘Of course,’ Bee pointed out, ‘she might just be a forty-year-old woman with a very cunning PR stunt and a respectable, loving background in Dinard or Auteuil.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said Reuben. ‘Leave me my dreams.’

  ‘I mean, when I said she was sexy,’ Lawrence began to backtrack, ‘I didn’t mean I actually fancied her.’

  ‘Really, Lawrence. There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Darius assured him. ‘I’m just thrilled to find your tastes less conventional than I’d always feared.’

  ‘In fact,’ Lawrence battled on, ‘it was pretty ridiculous, really, with that gravelly voice and those big hands. And she must be at least six foot, even without the hair.’

  It was too late, however. They had laid the trap and he had sauntered straight into it. They teased him more and more, Darius making matters worse by saying things like,

  ‘Careful. We must stop or he’ll lose his temper …’

  At last he made a clumsy exit, pleading exhaustion, despite their relenting pleas for him to sit down again. Rather than return to his cabin however, he was lured by the winking lights of the casino, where he drank a succession of free margaritas and ran into George and Martha. They taught him how to play blackjack and, drunkenly convinced that he had seen a sure-fire way of winning, he lost sixty pounds before Martha tapped him on the elbow and suggested that maybe it was time he called it a night.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fight it as he might, Lala entered Lawrence’s system like a virus and took tenacious possession. Prompted by the trace of her scent on his fingers as he slept, he had erotic nightmares. She tied him to a dinner table and dressed his genitals with salt, pepper and hollandaise before setting about them with a knife, fork and lip-licking relish. She made him undress her, garment by garment, until her breasts were revealed to be no more than melting ice cream. Most disturbing of all, he dreamed of catching her giggling and naked in the same bath as Bonnie and Lucy and sensed that the shame this represented was known to every passenger on the ship.

  Waking, he strove to drive her from his thoughts. Despite muscles still aching from the exertions of the previous day, he let Spencer drive him through a session of circuit training, goading himself on with the thought of how disgusted Spencer would be at the thought of desire for some ageing she-man. He sat with George and Martha through his uncle’s second Bridge Basics class, even taking laborious notes, which afterwards read like gibberish to him because he had been concentrating so little when he wrote them. He hired an hour’s clay pigeon shooting off the stern and tried to teach Reuben how to use a rifle. But all the time, all he could think of was the notice he had seen announcing that, due to popular demand, Lala’s second appearance would be after dinner that very evening. Drinking a cocktail amid the chlorinated steam of an outdoor lounge pool, he overheard two Canadian women discussing her, what suite she was said to be living in, what diet she was said to be on, whether her hair was her own and, if so, how she achieved such wiggish perfection in it. He took the lift with them and tailed them all the way to their cabin door to glean every last gobbet of dubious information. In his desperation, he nearly paid a second visit to Father Xavier’s omnidenominational god closet, only checking himself with the memory that Father Xavier counted himself Lala’s number one fan so would scarcely provide the impartial voice of reason.

  Late in the afternoon he found himself back on the windy sun deck, huddled in a deck chair beside Bee, still failing to write the letter to Bonnie.

  Dear Bonnie, he had written so far. Guess what? Darius has taken me on a cruise with him. A bridge cruise. I wish you were here too. Lucy would love it. There are lots of kids on board. Some parents must be made of money. I got your letter. You were right about the police and the press. I deserved to be locked up. I know I did. I’m so sorry though I know those are just words. I don’t know how to get this to you but when we get to Miami I’ll try to find out – (here he had tried and failed to write McBugger’s Christian name) – your address in the States. Did you hear about the van? I …

  He could write no further. He tore it off and made a neat copy in the hope that, like a run-up, this would lend him the necessary impetus to proceed but, as he tore the new sheet off the pad to write on the other side, the wind whisked it out of his grasp.

  ‘Don’t you want to save that?’ Bee asked when he made no move after it.

  ‘No,’ he said and they watched the paper dance through the railings and out over the ocean.

  ‘Was it to your wife?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got the rough copy still. I don’t even have her address. I don’t know why I’m bothering.’

  ‘After Tony died I used to write him long, careful letters then burn them on the fire.’ She sighed, adjusting her dark glasses. ‘It was like writing to Father Christmas only I wasn’t asking for presents. I was just saying how angry he’d made me.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you really think that singer last night is a … used to be a man?’

  She smiled, possibly at the abrupt change in topic.

  ‘She’s singing again tonight. Let’s go and take a really close look this time,’ she suggested. ‘No but do you?’ She shrugged.

  ‘It’s impossible to tell. Look around us. So many women could be, once someone puts the idea in your head. Men tend to have better legs but then a lot of women are cursed with big hands or moustaches or size nines. What does it matter?’

  ‘I’m just curious. Do you think she feels like a woman, if she used to be a man, that is?’

  ‘God. I dunno. She probably feels like a transsexual. However that feels. Transsexualus Transatlanticus Regina. You’ll have to bribe a cabin boy to take a peek at her passport. Has she got to you?’

  ‘No.’ Lawrence pretended to reread his rough copy.

  ‘She has, hasn’t she? She’s got to you!’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She smiled to herself then added confidentially, ‘For what it’s worth, I lied last night because Reuben was there and I like him to think I’m, well, you know, quiet. In fact I think she’s sex on wheels. And I hadn’t a Sapphic bone in my body till now. But she’s like a, well, you feel she’s seen it all and is entirely blasé.’

  ‘Like a whore.’

  ‘Yes. A mature but still very expensive whore. By appointment only. I’d be curious.’

  ‘To go to bed with her?’

  She wriggled, adjusted her glasses again. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘Could I watch?’

  ‘Ssh! Write your letter. They’re playing in the tournament tonight. We can duck out and go to hear her sing again. I’ll talk to someone and try to bag us that good table again.’

  He lost his nerve. As promised, Bee reserved them the same table. They left the others to play bridge and sat besid
e the catwalk drinking while she talked and he pretended to listen. But his nerve failed him. He could not cope. As the house lights began to dim, he jumped up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I feel a bit dodgy. Must have been that mushroom starter I had.’

  Then he stumbled out leaving Bee alone in pride of place. Outside he paced a while but was drawn back to the foyer by the sound of applause engulfing the band. He watched through a window in the door then pushed through to stand in the darkness at the back of the auditorium. Lala made her entrance. She sang her songs. Perhaps he only imagined it, but he could have sworn she paused at Bee’s table, registering an absence there. She was trailing the perfumed scarf again and he waited to see who she would pick out this time. But she picked out nobody. She was a woman. He was certain of it. Older, vampish, but undeniably female.

  When Reuben found him an hour and a half later, Lawrence was taking refuge in a figure-hugging thirties armchair in a corner of a leather-panelled bar where a few elderly passengers nursed drinks and talked softly, looking about them in a shell-shocked fashion. One pair was attempting to waltz to the barely audible slithery strings of Mantovani. After one brandy he had stopped thinking about Lala. After a second he had realized afresh how profoundly he missed his daughter. His mind had become locked on the lack of her as in a kind of groove, uselessly locked. Reuben arrived just in time.

  ‘You look almost pleased to see me.’

  ‘You came just in time. This place is …’ Lawrence cast gloomy eyes about him. Reuben looked, drew in his breath in mock astonishment and whispered,