by George

by Wesley Stace

  “What’s that, George? I didn’t quite hear. Listen closer, everyone! What’s that you say, George?”

  Quietly: “Berlin or Bust!”

  “What? They can’t hear you.”

  A little louder: “Berlin or Bust!”

  “Louder!”

  “BERLIN OR BUST!”

  “Louder!”

  Everyone joined in the chant:

  “Berlin or Bust! Berlin or Bust! Berlin or Bust!”

  JUNE 29TH, 1944

  In show business terms, we have decided upon early retirement. There is no future for the act. It is better that we split up.

  JULY 8TH, 1944

  Our number is up. You will never hear from me again. You are dead. And I will soon be dead too. Find me in Paradise, where we shall never be parted. I know you will. Arrivederci.

  In the words of the immortal Nellie Wallace:

  A man may kiss a maid good-bye;

  The sun may kiss the butterfly;

  The morning dew may kiss the grass;

  And you, my friends . . .

  Farewell.

  Part Two

  The Tip of My Tongue

  We are George Fisher. We speak as one.

  In fact, we don’t speak at all. When we finally met, there wasn’t much to say. There was much not to say.

  Oh, we used to chatter away, never together, naturally, but with our various ventriloquists and interlocutors. We were always happiest in conversation with our family.

  No longer.

  One word: everything changed. Therefore, silence.

  What is a child given to make him quiet? A dummy. In America, a pacifier. It shuts baby up.

  I wrote that for Dr. Hill almost a year after I found George I thought I was writing about one thing; I was writing about another.

  “We” was, needless to say, just I. Of a dummy and his partner, only one is doing the talking — the other might look as if he is, but this is only an illusion. The same goes for the silence. But “We” felt safer, “I” insufficient, foreign, and, after what I had read, frightening: the isolated voice, unheard and unfulfilled, self-justifying, shy and withdrawn, captured for eternity, aching for release, willing its own extinction.

  And why did I end up hiding behind my namesake in silence, as Joe had? I told myself that by suppressing the diary, I was protecting those I loved: keeping my mother in blissful ignorance of her father’s true character, saving Queenie the needless pain of knowing his aversion to her. Imagining myself their protector perhaps gave me the illusion of control.

  It was gradual.

  From the time of his attic liberation, we were inseparable. The diary was back where I’d found it — rolled into its twin tubes, secured with twists of wire — and, with George on my knee, there was no fear of the contents’ getting into the wrong hands. He was a card I kept close to my chest, out of sight only when he was in his box. His old home demolished, I put a handle on my Upside tuck box (which seemed appropriate — it literally had his name on it) and padded the interior with foam. With a needle, thread, and some matching green felt, I patched his blazer where the moths had done their worst. He looked perfectly presentable at the dinner table.

  “It’s so strange having George back down again,” said Queenie, clinking an imaginary wineglass with her own, pleased to humour me in what she saw as an amusing eccentricity in cherished family tradition. “The cleaners did a nice job on that blazer.”

  “Hope they gave you a discount,” said Reg. “Hardly seems fair to charge full price.”

  Expressionless, I rolled my last pea back and forth across the plate. We could natter on as normal about the price of dry cleaning, but there was only one question worth asking, and I didn’t know it at the time. It was on the tip of my tongue. Small talk was impossible. Words were running out.

  For the first time since anyone could remember, Frankie’s dance card was empty until the regular Christmas knees-up. Her engagement with West End Story had ended acrimoniously. A Fisher always jumped, was never pushed, but the unscheduled departure left Frankie with time on her hands while Ricky tried and failed to pull a replacement rabbit from the hat.

  A celebration, which coincided with my sixteenth birthday, welcomed her home, but the reunion meal, typically the most joyful of get-togethers, seemed theatrical, phony. I thought it was perhaps the unwelcome addition of Ricky at the family table. I felt distant, having to keep myself in check, to remember my lines. Frankie accepted my namesake without question, winking at me as though his presence were primarily for her benefit. I struggled to keep up amid anecdote and gossip, but the surface volume was too loud, like the dust and scratches on a 78. They didn’t seem to hear me over the crackle — so I gave up and sat motionless, staring aimlessly into space, wondering who was standing at the top of the staircase in silhouette now, wearing the black hat and veil, posing with the cigarette holder.

  “What’s up, Georgie?” asked Frankie, who had been enumerating the shortcomings of the West End Story cast. “You’re not your normal smiling self.”

  “There’s two of ’im, for a start,” said Ricky with a cackle.

  “And both looking so handsome! Good seeing you back downstairs on Civvy Street, George. Anyway, glad to be rid of them,” said Frankie, polishing off the previous conversation. “And there are some quite nice opportunities out there, right, Ricky?”

  “We’ll rustle something up,” he said, unreassuringly.

  Rustle something up? I had never heard Frankie speak of opportunities, only firm offers, alternatives between which she could choose with a wave of her magic wand. Peter Pan again or a tour of Seven Brides? Ding! The lesser option disappeared in a puff of smoke. An opportunity was demeaning: it implied an audition that allowed the possibility of rejection. As Ricky rattled on about changing tastes, it became clear that business was not all that it might have been. I said nothing.

  And then it happened.

  “What are you moping around for, Georgie?” Frankie curled an eyelash in the folding side-wing mirrors of the dresser that had been her father’s, as she readied herself for Ricky to drive her into town for one of the auditions. Fisher women could chat unhindered through any facial contortion, whatever the factor of its difficulty, so makeup had always been a good time for stories and secrets. “Sit on my bed, like old times.”

  George and I plonked down in silence. He had sat here many times before, watching Joe prepare; I’d spent hours watching Joe’s daughter. Backstage, in the infinite fun-house reflections, Frankie threw on the slap with aplomb, always finishing off with a celebratory cloud of fixing powder. The real world, however, where the view from the balcony mattered less than the subtle close-up, was more demanding. She mouthed instructions to herself — tweeze, conceal, brush, powder, blush, and line.

  “Look at you two,” she said, without moving her lips, as she bared her teeth to eradicate rogue lipstick with a determined little finger. “I remember sitting next to him with my dad: me on one knee, him on the other. They used to read me Beatrix Potter together in this very room. . . .” She gave a snippet in their two voices and fell into reminiscence about her childhood. I found myself avoiding eye contact at any mention of the war hero, an acrid taste at the back of my mouth. I fiddled around in George’s hollow. “. . . And then I only saw him once more, when he came down to the Northleach house where I was staying the weekend with Evie. I was already in a few parts here and there, I think . . . ’40, ’41, yes. In fact, they’ve asked me to talk about Tommy Bright at a tribute, but I don’t recall him liking children at all, and I shall probably have to make something up. . . . And that was the last time I saw my dad and George, both in their uniforms, heading off to be heroes. I can’t remember much besides that and the noise of his motorbike. It’s funny what you forget.”

  I wanted to tell her every detail: they had been playing pelmanism when her father came to the door; they drank tea and made daisy chains in the garden; she had told stories about the Bright Spark then t
oo. The bleakness of my situation, the loneliness of the secret-bearer, took me by surprise: tell her any of that and she would have to know everything.

  “That was the last time I saw Dad. I still have his letters, of course. . . .” She opened a drawer and took out the familiar box in which she kept the bundle of her father’s letters. She read at random: “Don’t imagine that the scene on the front has any connection with our present whereabouts, little miss — that’s just to fool the enemy!” “Good luck in your next part, my darling girl. We’ll hope they send a print out here for us.” “Give my love to your mother; be good to her.” Taking one look, and remembering what he had said in the diary, I saw what Frankie could never have suspected: none were from her father. They were forgeries, either Evie’s or Queenie’s, or at their behest. These were all the memories she had of him. And I could crush them in a second. I had to protect her.

  Seeing my tears in the mirror, she stopped, tweezers poised uncertainly, smile disappearing with the dimming of her eyes. She took me in her arms, stroking my hair, without asking what was wrong. I could have stayed forever in her silence. Finally: “Georgie?” I shook my head. She started to cry too, laughing at herself in recognition of the fact that, though it was selfish to worry, her makeup remained a concern. She checked the time, a practicality neither of us could ignore. “What is it, darling? Is there anything wrong? Is it serious? You must tell me.” She was perplexed that her mothering hadn’t made the difference. I thought hard before I answered, too long for her. “In trouble? Ill? A girl? Something you want to talk to Reg about?” I shook my head. She considered a quick reapplication, tilting her head back to avoid further misfortune. “Good,” she said, giving the word the full weight of conclusion. She shook her face out, testing the elasticity of her cheek with a disappointed harrumph, and decided where the damage limitation should begin. She marshaled her arms into a small purse for last-minute cosmetic manoeuvres, and presented herself to the mirror again, then to me. “How’s the repointing?” She looked perfect. The doorbell rang, and she whispered the mildest profanity as she gathered accessories. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  We wouldn’t. She blew a kiss, to avoid unnecessary messing, and left us sitting on her bed.

  “Knock ’em dead” were the last words I said.

  * * *

  It was just like the war: careless talk costs lives. The secrets felt safer that way: my eyes open, my mouth closed. And I felt better too — protecting them with my silence.

  At first, it wasn’t mentioned, as if I were avoiding exacerbating a sore throat. Frankie treated it as an elaborate joke between inverted commas for everyone’s amusement. There was the occasional remark, but no one threw me against a wall and ordered me to make conversation. When it could no longer go undiscussed, the family was all sympathy.

  “It was a big change leaving Malcolm Collins,” Reg theorized. “Perhaps he’d rather go to another school.”

  “School!” Frankie thought the problem (assuming it could even be labelled a problem) would politely go away if ignored. “He’s perfectly happy working with Brenda’s lot, aren’t you, Georgie?”

  “Perhaps he’s a little depressed,” said Queenie. Would food be my cure?

  Only Ricky hit the wrong note on a couple of occasions (“Still in Coventry, are we?”), for which he received Queenie’s withering stare.

  “I’ve been down in the dumps myself,” Reg said considerately. “There’s nothing wrong with being down in the dumps.”

  “Of course there isn’t,” said Frankie. “That’s one thing, but not depressed.”

  And round, and round.

  Work at Crystal Clear, however, went on unaffected. Frankie was right. I trusted Brenda, and the work suited me. I’d taken George in as soon as I’d found him.

  “Creepy” was Brenda’s verdict.

  “A real antique!” said Tim. “But think about it: not much good to us down here, old son.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Roger, shaking his head as though he’d just been set up on Candid Camera. “I got our new selection from Daedalus, and the first movie is . . .” He flicked through a few sheets of paper. “The Dummies of Doctor Diabolicus. You couldn’t make it up.”

  “Sounds diabolical,” said George. It was unspoken policy not to comment on the quality of the movies to which we lent our expertise, but the remark was allowed, given the source.

  My withdrawal made little difference as I stood beneath the screen and poured fizzy lemonade on the patch of tarmac to accompany the silent rippling of the sea on the shore. I’d never said much down there anyway, except to Brenda. Roger nicknamed me Harpo, and that was about it.

  Work commenced on Doctor Diabolicus, a low-budget rip-off of the recently popular Magic with Anthony Hopkins, which had featured a mentally unbalanced ventriloquist whose astonishingly unattractive dummy, Fats, “talks him into” murdering his agent (and probably his girlfriend, Ann-Margret, too, though I slept through the end).

  If George had now been able to write the second volume of his diary — The Comeback Years, a sequel no one could have predicted — he would have been horrified with the current state of ventriloquism. It had gone to hell.

  A glorious Indian summer in the 1950s (when ventriloquism was so fashionable that Peter Brough’s dummy Archie Andrews was voted “Most Popular Radio Personality”) had eluded George entirely. TV had been bad news for the radio vents, their poor technique brutally exposed by a remorseless camera. The illusion was better in the audience’s imagination, and Joe had been far ahead of his time in his quest for perfection. But no technique could help George now. He looked as old-fashioned as Narcissus had once seemed to him. He was lucky anyone wanted him out of the box at all. People no longer wanted to see a little schoolboy sitting on a grown man’s knee.

  The contemporary dummy of choice was an anthropomorphized cuddly toy — a huge yellow ostrich or a small white sheep, a massive crow or a cheeky monkey: theirs was a neon menagerie of Emus, Orvilles, and Nookies. Even Queenie had Mikey, her green astrakhan alien, a floppy mass of fur through which were discernible only two eyes, a mouth, and a dangling nose in technicolor orange. As Joe had predicted, the dummy had taken over in spectacular fashion.

  The movies were responsible. Ever since Dead of Night, they had added spice to a tired idea by bringing centre stage the dynamic between ventriloquist and dummy, emphasizing the schizophrenic nature of the act, the violence latent in the frantic verbal sparring. When the audience could no longer suspend its disbelief, it was left with a man on stage, frustrated by, arguing with, committing violence on, himself. George, the chirpy Cockney schoolboy, became a malign midget, a devil doll, the ventriloquist’s id. Perhaps the furry, flopsy friends made it all seem fun and harmless again. Once a religious mystery, Joe’s sacred art, ventriloquism was now a creepy nostalgia act, a party trick on a par with juggling. Rarely seen on television, it survived only on the pier and at the children’s party, those last refuges of old hat. It had been a very Eden, but now there was no return. Paradise was lost. No wonder people looked at us funny.

  “Oi, Harpo!” Roger shouted when we were getting nowhere with The Dummies of Doctor Diabolicus, which featured (inevitably) a schoolboy not unlike George as one of the satanic ventriloquist’s malevolent mannequins. “Stick him out here. We need some inspiration.” George became our mascot.

  I took my daily tube in to Crystal Clear, often returning in Brenda’s car. She even encouraged me to let her give me some recreational, and illegal, driving lessons so, conversation now at a premium, we could occupy ourselves on the way home. She was unflappable, long-suffering: she taught driving as she stage-managed.

  As the months went by, the central debate became whether I needed help. Help, however, required a clear admission that it was required (tantamount to a plea of guilty), and this would not yet willingly be given. Fishers had little truck with doctors and dentists, their instruments, invoices, and appointment books; rather Madame Arcati with
her crystal ball and tea leaves than a psychiatrist. My retreat wasn’t normal, yet I went to work, came home, watched TV, washed dishes, and generally remained a regular, if not vocal, member of the household. I hadn’t ceased communication entirely. I hummed, I pointed, nudged, and tapped, all of which was incorporated into the daily routine. I just didn’t chat.

  “You don’t mind going to see someone, do you?” asked Reg finally. The voice of reason spoke directly to me. He saw no stigma at all.

  “He doesn’t need to,” said Frankie firmly. The very fact that it had been mentioned showed how worried they were, how changed I was.

  “Perhaps he wants to. Unless he’s planning to be the world’s first silent ventriloquist act. . . .”

  “A mime!” suggested Frankie in my cheerful defence.

  “Look at him! It’s time to see someone,” said Reg. Frankie got up, thrust her chair under the table, and walked to the kitchen, but Reg was firm. “This has gone on too long.”

  As years before, I found myself unexpectedly moved by his concern, his unsentimental masculine common sense. I shrugged and nodded.

  “All right, then, me old cock!” said Reg and clapped me on the shoulder.

  Frankie popped back in with a look of relief, as though she had been complicit, hers a necessary role in his plan to bring me to my senses. I smiled, which she took to be thanks.

  I had told myself I would be humouring them: help was useless. I knew full well why I wasn’t talking; I didn’t need someone to shuck me for the truth.

  But when I shrugged and nodded, it was an elbow in my ribs. Whatever the reason, I was a shadow of the boy they knew. Sullen, sad, sluggish, silent: I needed help.

  As I sat in a waiting room decorated with educational posters and children’s storybooks. I tried not to speculate about Dr. Hill’s other patients: the redheaded, harelipped eight-year-old whose appointment always preceded mine; the pretty ten-year-old who quietly read while her father listened to a tiny lisping portable radio through an earplug; the Indian boy whose mother talked at him only in his native language. And what on earth did they make of the sixteen-year-old perched on the small chair, with the ventriloquist dummy and the tin of rolling tobacco?