Swan Songs

by Swan, Tarn

  He was determined to enjoy his celebrity for as long as he possibly could. I felt a bit mean for my earlier annoyance, as I observed his shiny-eyed pleasure at being the object of attention. He looked all of nineteen, fresh faced and boyish. Still, I’m only flesh and blood and my annoyance resurfaced and increased when despite my very meaningful glances he accepted the offer of a second glass of wine. He smiled appealingly at me and I told myself not to be so mean spirited and allow him his moment of spotlight. However, when he very naughtily accepted a third large glass of vino my goodwill became strained. He was pushing the envelope. He would happily have stayed and nattered for hours, but as soon as he’d consumed the third glass of wine I politely made our excuses and insisted we made tracks.

  We had strong words in the car on the way home. I told him I had a good mind to discipline him. He apologised and said he hadn’t meant to flout me. He’d just been enjoying himself. It wasn’t every day that people were falling over themselves to talk to him and didn’t he deserve some compensation for having been confined to a badly decorated canal boat with a flatulent dog, no telly and a man whose musical tastes comprised of Des O’Connor, Val Doonigan and The Worsels. It was no bloody wonder his wife had wanted a divorce. He was surprised she hadn’t sued him for mental cruelty or even tried to kill him. His piece de resistance was his declaration that Barbara was a very dear girl, but she was no compensation for me when it came to love and company and he just wanted everyone to know how happy he was to be home again. I was won over, or defeated, whatever way you want to look at it. Twinks in full flow is a bit like a strong river current and apt to sweep you away.

  My suggestion that we give the PP a miss caused such humungous disappointment that again I capitulated. I told myself that I was being selfish in the circumstances and it was natural for someone of Twinkles temperament to want to ride the crest of the wave. It was a mistake on my part. For a start he was tired, he just wouldn’t admit it. In the event he didn’t enjoy himself. He ended up having a blazing row and not with Natalie for once. It was with an unusually bad tempered Rick who suggested that Twinkles and Barbara must have been in on the stunt from the start. He voiced the opinion that it was a really shitty thing to do to people you were supposed to love, but then everyone knew what a cheap whore Twinkles was when it came to grabbing the limelight. I thought Rick was well out of order, but I didn’t get a chance to remonstrate with him. Seizing an ice bucket from the bar Twinkles tipped the contents over Rick’s head while yelling that when it came to whoring everyone knew he was the biggest one around, and his rectum had experienced more high speed entries and exits than the Channel Tunnel. He then tried to ram the empty bucket onto Rick’s head. The evening was over.

  On the way home Twinkles started crying and said he noticed that I hadn’t exactly leapt to his defence. It was obvious I agreed with Rick the dick’s, assessment of him. I told him I had been too busy preventing him carrying out a serious assault with an ice bucket to really have time for reasoned argument with Rick. He said I should have offered Rick out for calling him a whore. I obviously didn’t care about his honour. I said I cared very much about his honour, but I just wasn’t into duels at dawn and anyway he had more than avenged himself. Poor Twinkles, his makeup was devastated by the time we got home. I ended up with both his false eyelashes blinking on the front of my shirt along with streaks of mascara, foundation, lipstick and eye shadow. I looked like an example palette for Elizabeth Arden products. I helped him cleanse and moisturise and get ready for bed reassuring him that I knew he’d had no prior knowledge about the kidnapping. I also told him that I’d been very wrong not to put my foot down about going out and I was effectively grounding us both for the weekend. Come tomorrow evening we were closing and locking the door and we were not re-emerging until Monday morning. We were going to decompress come hell or high water.

  On Saturday morning I reminded him that we were out of circulation for the weekend and also told him that I wouldn’t be able to meet him for lunch, because I had a lot of work from during the week to catch up on. He said he was very sorry to have inconvenienced me so much and if it freed up more time for me he would get the bus to and from work. I gave the remark the lack of attention it deserved and dropped him off at work as per usual. Once home I settled down to clear a backlog of paperwork while mentally planning a nice dinner for Twinkles and I to share that evening. I was looking forward to it.

  He called me at lunchtime full of excitement to tell me that we’d been invited to dine at the very exclusive Judges Hotel Restaurant, as guests of Teddy and Maurice. Maurice’s well-heeled parents had booked one of the restaurants rooms to celebrate their ruby wedding anniversary and had told Maurice and Teddy that they could invite some friends. I cut through Twinkles’ excited chatter to ask when the invitation was for, even though I had a sneaking suspicion that I already knew the answer. He said ‘it will be lovely, Tarn, lots of champagne, fabulous food and dancing.’ Again I asked him when the invitation was for and he said ‘People kill to get a reservation at Judges, all the celebs go there, it’ll be great fun.’ I once again asked WHEN, at a volume that couldn’t be ignored and my jaw tightened as he confirmed my suspicions. I said one word. No. He said, ‘Tarn?’ I said no again. He then said he’d already accepted. I told him he could call and un-accept. He said it would be too embarrassing. I said tough and he’d get over it. He hung up on me.

  My personal view was that Teddy and Maurice had had someone cancel on them and they had asked Twinkles and I because we’d be an interesting little space filler after what had happened. We’d be touted around as a form of light entertainment. Twinkles of course would be more than thrilled to have a fresh audience to play to, especially one that had an outside chance of containing someone even faintly famous. As I worked I just about cracked the enamel on my teeth tapping at them with the end of my pen and mulling over whether I was being selfish. I had told him categorically that we were not going out and he had flouted me yet again. I needed to reassert my authority for both our sakes. I should have done so on Friday when he made arrangements without consulting me and again when he accepted more drinks than I had told him to and I shouldn’t have given in to his desire to go the PP. I was preventing us getting back to normal as much, if not more than him. It had to stop.

  He was in a foul mood when I went to pick him up, hurling the shops metal shutters down with such force that he set off the alarm and had to reopen the shop to reset it. As he was coming out again, a wannabe customer tried to enter asking for a watch battery. Twinks curtly told him that the shop was shut and he wasn’t opening it again for a frigging manky battery. The customer demanded to know the managers name so he could write and complain, to which Twinkles replied that he was the manager, so why didn’t he just take his minging watch and frig off. I was appalled and said so. Twinkles (or Jonathan as he was by then) told me to butt out and not try to tell him how to do his job, as he didn’t tell me how to do mine. Once we were in the car I asked if he’d called Teddy and Maurice to cancel. He snapped that he hadn’t had time and in case I hadn’t noticed he’d been at frigging work all day. I told him he could ring them the moment we got home. He said I wasn’t being fair. It was only one night, we would never get the chance to dine at Judges free of charge ever again and we could stay home on Sunday. I said NO and that’s FINAL! He said YOU MISERABLE BASTARD! From that moment on a heavy silence fell between us. I wrenched at the gear stick so hard I was amazed that it was still attached to the car when we arrived home.

  He slammed the car door when he got out, followed by the garden gate, followed by the front door…in my face. By the time I got indoors he was on his way upstairs and I was on my way to losing my temper. I told him to ring Teddy and Maurice and he shouted that seeing as I was the one who didn’t want to go, I could ring them and tell them myself. I followed him upstairs to find him sitting on the bed unwrapping a Terry’s chocolate orange in preparation for a sulking by chocolate session. I told him to pu
t it away and get his bad tempered rump downstairs pronto and make the call to cancel the invitation he’d had absolutely no business accepting in the first place.

  The chocolate orange exploded on the wall just above my head and I was showered in chocolate segments as it separated. That was it, the proverbial last straw. Hauling him up from the bed and seating myself in his place I yanked him across my knee and set my palm dancing merry hell on the seat of his trousers. Then, holding him firmly by the wrist, I took him downstairs, dialled the number, put the receiver in his hand and told him to make a civil and regretful excuse. He did so, naming me as the culprit who had thoughtlessly forgotten to remind him that we had already committed to an engagement that evening. As soon as he put the phone down he said he hoped I was happy and tried to twist away from me, but I was having none of it.

  I whisked him back upstairs where my hand continued the conversation it had begun on the seat of his trousers; only I expanded it to his bare bottom and upper thighs. I was not going to have things thrown at me. I was not going to be sworn at and called names. I was not going to be flouted, and when I said no, I meant no and if he dared to make just one more multiparty decision without consulting me he would be one very, very sorry man. Twinkles was upset at being punished, but what upset him more was that by the end of the spanking I was sobbing just as hard as he was. I had been stressed out of my head for days and something had to give. I lay back on the bed with him plastered on top of me and we just held each other until the tears dried. We didn’t speak and eventually the light faded and it grew cold so we quickly shed our clothes and got under the covers, reaching for each other again, and it was in that tactile silence that we reconnected emotionally. He fell asleep first. I felt it weight his body and slow his breathing but I wasn’t far behind. We slept deep and long.

  I awoke early on Sunday morning to find him gathering up chocolate segments from the bedroom floor. He smiled and held one out to me, but I shook my head so he made to eat it himself, but I quietly said no and he set it aside. I made a big breakfast. We were both ravenous having eaten little the day before. Afterwards I finished my paperwork while he did some housework. Lulu phoned to say he’d missed us last night and to ask Twinks if he wanted a ride out on the back of his bike. I shook my head and he declined without rancour. We tidied up the garden in readiness for autumn, and then we drove to the coast and had a long walk along the beach before returning home to make and eat a leisurely dinner. We took a bottle of wine upstairs to bed and drank it while reading the Sunday papers. The day reaffirmed our relationship in the kind of ways that had sense and meaning for him and I. We both enjoyed it and the sense of peace and closeness that came from it. Decompression successful.

  5th October 2005:

  Norman Bates Strikes Again

  There was absolute pandemonium at home this morning. Twinkles found a grey hair and went ballistic, plucking it out without mercy. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it wasn’t even his grey hair. It was mine and it wasn’t attached to my head either if you get my drift. I went from enjoying one kind of blissful stroke to almost suffering an altogether different kind of stroke when our sexy morning shower together turned into something resembling a scene from a Hitchcock Horror. Terrifying screams suddenly erupted into the region of my groin and were quickly followed by an excruciating pain. I feared that a homophobic and invisible Norman Bates had stabbed first him and then me in the unmentionables. I came damn close to disgracing myself in the bowel control department and my poor balls just about drew up to join my Adam’s apple with the shock. He shot out of the shower cubicle holding something between his fingers. Taking it across to the window he examined it and then shrieked, ‘it is, Tarn, oh my God it is, it’s a grey hair!’

  Once my eyes had stopped watering and the pain had passed I sharply swatted his damp buttocks and told him to stop the hysteria immediately. Anyway, it was not grey, it was just a lighter shade than its brethren and it did not mean I was going, as he dramatically put it, ‘Prematurely Grey.’ Though God knows I’ve had enough stress lately to send me snow white, never mind grey. I wouldn’t allow him to check for any others, either down there or on my head. He gave me an especially close and affectionate hug as we parted for work, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew he was slyly perusing my scalp for signs of a colour decline.

  He had a present for me when I picked him up from work this evening, a bottle of Grecian 2000. He’d bought it just in case a dramatic downstairs decline happened overnight and spread to my head. He’d also had a word with the lady pharmacist in Boots who said she didn’t think one grey hair down there was anything to worry about. It was quite common and it could be years before I got another one. She did say that it was true that some men went grey early, but then again some didn’t. He’s a little toad. I’ll never be able to face going in that branch of Boots again, not knowing that my pubes had been a topic of discussion. The last straw was when I overheard him chatting to Lulu about it on the phone. Lulu is as big a gossip as he is. By Friday there won’t be a soul on earth, and certainly not in the PP, that doesn’t know I had a grey hair down there. Only it will be like Chinese whispers and the one will have become many. I told him I was going to get him one of those ball gags that the bdsm crowd favour and make him wear it. I also told him that living with him was guaranteed to turn me grey before my time. He primly informed me that I wasn’t exactly a picnic to live with, and I’d likely turn his hair grey with my brutish, domineering ways before he turned mine grey.

  He’s stark naked and sitting cross-legged on the floor at the moment. He’s meditating and getting in touch with his inner self, though he’s the only person I’ve ever heard of that meditates while stuffing their face with chunks of Terry’s chocolate orange. If he eats much more of it his inner self will explode. I know what he’s really up to. He’s actually indulging in a fit of sophisticated sulking. He wanted Teddy and Maurice to come round tonight and continue with the lip-synching tuition, but I refused. I’m not ready for another session of dancing torture with nurse Teddy and doctor Maurice.

  I’m going to lay down my electronic quill now. Twinks is looking a bit dejected. I don’t suppose it will kill me to do some lip miming practice with him. I hope I can manage to keep a straight face. He got really vexed with me last time we tried it because I was so self-conscious and felt so silly that I kept cracking up. He takes his art very seriously and I shall get my wrist slapped if I don’t follow suit.

  8th October 2005:

  Family Bereavement

  My dad called me on Thursday morning to tell me that Nana had died in the early hours. He said, ‘your’ Nana, almost like she was nothing to do with him, like she wasn’t his mother. It bothered me a bit, as if he’d distanced himself from her. Of course I’m being very unfair. What else could he say? She was indeed my Nana. It’s funny how things can bother you sometimes, inconsequential things. Perhaps it’s just a way of coping with, or possibly avoiding, deeper feelings? I’ve been thinking about family relationships and it seems to me that men and women who become parents lose their identities several times over in the process. It happens first when they become a parent and then again should they become a grandparent. I think it’s probably a more pronounced experience for women. My Nana’s birth name was Lillian Granger. Marriage changed first her surname and then child bearing took her Christian name, and she became not so much a person as an office: mother, mummy, mam or mum, or variations on that theme. Then when her children had children, she became Nana. Lillian was lost somewhere and in the end, she was even lost to herself when Alzheimer’s slowly claimed her mind.

  Lillian Granger Swan, wife, mother, grandmother, spent the last eighteen months of her life in a nursing home. It wasn’t too bad at first. She was a little bit confused, but she still recognised us all, though she was convinced that mum and dad were still married. None of us dissuaded her from that; there didn’t seem any point. She was also convinced that the ornamental cat that stood on a shelf in her room w
as real and she would talk to it, stroke it and feed it, a sight that was simultaneously very funny and heartbreakingly sad. She had always been slightly bemused by my relationship with Twinkles, never quite certain as to whether I was hitched up with a woman or a man or both. Nevertheless, she liked Twinkles and she enjoyed his visits, because he made her laugh and he made her feel important and pretty by manicuring and painting her nails and dressing her hair, things that I could never have done for her, nor my dad. Gradually her condition deteriorated and she would hold conversations with people who had been dead for years, including my Grandpa, while forgetting the names of the living. I can’t describe what it feels like when someone you love no longer remembers who you are. As her confusion deepened she became more and more agitated by a world she didn’t understand anymore. Finally, my Nana, who had been the most gentle of women became very aggressive and violent and poor dad had to agree to her being given what amounted to heavy sedation to calm her. It was then I suppose that our visits lessened. She didn’t know who we were and our presence seemed to distress rather than comfort her. We were strangers and somewhere deep in her mind lingered a warning against strangers. She would sit fastening and unfastening the same button on her cardigan until the button inevitably came loose, and then she would scream. It was unbearable on many levels, not least because you couldn’t console or comfort her. She had loved to be hugged by her grandchildren, but now she reacted like someone under attack, fighting, biting and scratching. I would look at her and try to see something of the Nana I once loved, and still did love, but she was gone, lost. Twinks told me that she could never really be lost, because the real her was forever held within my memory and my heart.