‘Oh baby, I know, but we can’t go back now, they’re showing people round and you hate it when strangers come marching through your house, don’t you?’
‘HOME NOW NOW!’
Dot was trying to placate her with her Hello Kitty dolly, which was immediately thrown to the floor.
‘Just a few more weeks, baby, and we’ll have a lovely new place.’
That was it. The little brat stared at her mother, took a deep breath and held it.
‘Now stop that,’ Dot said, throwing Owen a worried glance. ‘C’mon, don’t be bossy-breath, you know Mummy cries when you do that.’
Molly closed her eyes and crossed her arms, puffing her cheeks out.
‘Please, baby, stop that, it’ll make you sick.’
The kid’s face started turning red.
‘Ohmigod, this isn’t fair, I know you miss the old house, but we can’t stay there forever.’
Owen had grown increasingly aware of how Dot’s patience was being strained. Truth was he didn’t want her to get a new place, and would come up with any number of subtle criticisms of her planned homes just to postpone the possibility of her moving on. It would only be so long till she worked out his little strategies.
Molly knew. Her face started turning purple. Dot was in a panic. Grabbing her arms, shaking her. What the hell can I do? thought Owen.
‘Molly, stop that, you’re going to faint, stop that!’
Slap her, that’s what Owen would have done, or walk away.
The kid’s head dropped forward and Dot screamed, catching her.
‘My God! Molly! Molly!’
Owen leaned forward to help take the kid’s weight.
‘Don’t touch her, she’s done this before, I know what to do. God, how did this start again?’
Dot laid her dead-looking child down on the floor, started whispering and kissing her.
‘OK, OK, we’ll go and spend the night there, OK? In the old place.’
Miraculously the kid breathed again. The whole thing had been a ruse.
Owen stood there like a fool, useless and resentful that the child had not only got her own way but expressed her irritation with him, his flat and plans. Molly was on to his postponement tactics and suffering because of them.
‘Could you just leave us alone for a minute?’ Dot said on her knees in the midst of the mess of teddies. He stepped away down the hall and looked back at them both framed in the doorway. They looked like refugees, desperately hugging each other. Don’t shut me out, Owen thought. Whatever it takes to stay together, I’ll do it.
*
It had been a particularly cold February and Saul spent most of it in a drunken coma, rereading his Beyond Good and Evil, dressed in three layers with the bar fire on all day and night beside his bed. I sensed that his drunkenness was due to his suspicion over my affair with Dot. Certainly he’d become more averse to her presence, failing to even attempt to make a start on the text she’d asked him to do for the Bug show.
— Don’t bug me with your bugs. I’ve enough in my bed as it is! Go back from whence you came! Back to your parents! First-class airmail, to the bloody turret, to the menstrual hut you must go!
For days he had been seeding references to her parents into his every sentence, leading her to think that the plan for a visit was her own idea.
— Fuck you, she shouted back. — If you ever met my father you’d be shitting yourself.
— Try me, he replied.
I could do nothing to stop it – the gauntlet had been thrown down and the showdown arranged. Dot paid for the taxi to St John’s Wood and said there would be lots of free booze because her mother was an alcoholic. She intended to blag or pinch another eight hundred from Dearest Daddy she said (Saul having pissed away all of the last amount Dot loaned him), but she seemed completely oblivious to Saul’s plan to dump her there and escape debt-free. Images of what would result if I refused to go flooded me: Saul would be alone with the father, whispering profanities like ‘Don’t you agree, we could do with another Falklands to keep the number of plebs down?’ He’d vomit on their chaise longue as they sat down to tea and cakes and accomplish his plan, with Dot being placed in care that very night. I was caught in the middle again, fearful of exposing his deception to her, but equally anxious of her finding out that Saul had been scheming in my ear behind her back. Why I had not stuck up for her and ceased doing his dirty work, I did not know. I decided to accompany them to defuse the situation.
I’d done my best to dress smartly for the occasion wearing my pinched Oxfam suit and best pair of Docs. There was no polish so I shined my shoes with margarine. Saul had been playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in preparation and emerged wearing his SMOKE CRACK WORSHIP SATAN T-shirt. Dot on seeing this decided to outdo him and put on his COCKS SUCK T-shirt. A petty game of radical one-upmanship ensued, with Saul, quite unexpectedly, taking the opposite tack and selecting his stolen Armani, while Dot went for red torn fishnets and that thing she’d recently shoplifted that she called a skirt that I would have described more as a belt, Saul’s army boots and another layer of the mascara added to the accumulated remnants of the last week’s. Also in competition seemed to be the amount of alcohol they could consume before even setting foot outside. I sensed that seeing her well-heeled parents might be unsettling for her.
The taxi turned the corner onto a row of huge St John’s Wood mansion houses. While Dot paid and tipped the man we decanted and stood in the drive before the vast edifice. There were at least twelve windows with almost medieval-looking frames, and trees and flowers of every imaginable variety as if the place was a botanic gardens; the lawn was a long-abandoned tennis court and there were his and hers BMWs in the drive. An irrational fear of the wealthy overcame me. I registered something similar on Saul’s face.
— Home sweet home, Dot said as she staggered to the doorbell. The woman who answered was not at all what I expected her mother to look like. Short and olive-skinned, Portuguese or South American.
— Hola, Pilita, Dot chimed. I’m just popping in for a bit. Daddy’s not here, is he?
— No, Miss Dorothy. Away till Tuesday.
— And dearest Mamma?
— In Italia to Friday, you not get message?
— Of course, good, good, off you go then, you’re excused.
It was a surprise and somewhat scary to witness Dot as an affluent young brat, bossing around the Third World slave. So she had known all along that her parents were away. I started to sense that Dot had another kind of surprise prepared for us. She led us along a corridor lined with images and certificates of her father’s glory. Trophies and awards, framed certificates and memberships of this prestigious club and the next, photographs of groups of men in suits.
— As soon as she’s gone, we’ll steal the booze, Dot whispered.
She gave us the guided tour with an exaggerated posh voice. There was an almost feudal castle-like stairway straight out of Brideshead Revisited; teak bookshelves lined with every imaginable psychology text and mini-busts and sculptures of Greek philosophers.
— Of course, Daddy is from a long line of respected psychiatrists, specialising in the neuropathology of women. I was one of his most difficult cases!
She seemed to relish how uncomfortable she was making us feel. She led us along a corridor lined with framed photos. Mostly of herself, always in the centre of the picture, looking like a boy, serious and androgynous, in an all-girls’ school, at a sports club, always with awards and certificates. Photos of her with her father’s proud hand on her shoulder, the mother nowhere in sight. She seemed top of every class. The hall was like a hall of fame, like they’d built her up to succeed at everything she ever tried.
She caught me staring and pushed me on.
— Over there’s the west wing. When I had my episode, I had my deathbed there. They really thought I was going to die.
I hoped to hell none of this was true and that she was just playing a game with us. She winked at me. I could n
ot tell if she was just making this stuff up.
— Charming, Saul muttered. His plan had completely backfired and he seemed almost scared. She led us into Daddy’s study and sat in his leather chair at his big desk, flashing her torn fishnet crotch. The entire place looked like a facsimile of Freud’s original.
— I think it all started because he’d stopped sleeping with my mum, and then I got boobs and he started freaking out. I tried to make them go away by not eating but it only made it worse. He’d have preferred a son, I think. The three of us drove each perfectly insane. Poor Daddy.
Saul tried to ignore her, his eyes were fixated on what looked to be a stuffed badger. Saul pulled his finger back swiftly from the animal, as if bitten.
Dot laughed at him.
Pilita called goodbye from the front door and within seconds Dot declared that the mayhem should commence. She spun round in her daddy’s chair, went into his desk drawer, leafed through his many credit cards, and pocketed one.
— What shall we spend it on, boys, a pizza or a prostitute? Purge or binge?
Many questions were troubling me about her past and her present incarnation. Saul loved stories of the aristocracy and their debauchery, but I could tell he had never come this close before. Dot ran out of the room and we were alone.
— We should go, I said.
— Don’t be a chicken, he replied, — this is all quite perversely fascinating.
Dot returned with a bottle of vodka, some glasses and a huge pack of duty-free menthols and threw Saul a packet, then another, teasing him, I could tell, making him reach for them and pick them up from the floor. She poured us both huge shots of vodka.
— But . . . what are we actually doing here? I asked. Saul was staring at the huge vodka bottle.
— You’re not afraid of a little bit of transgression, are you? she laughed. — Come on, boys, I have a surprise for you.
The scene that was unfolding was a little too like one Saul had told us about the Duchess for my comfort. 1920s New York – an orgy in a rich man’s Upper West Side mansion. Artists and aristocrats naked and crawling in blood, semen and broken glass. Saul was too busy lighting a fag to notice my appeals for his intervention. Dot left the room and I caught her at the corner, and whispered, — What’s going on?
— Oh come on, I told you I’d have my revenge, let’s just see how much he can take. Shh, he’s coming.
She led us then, giggling and ranting in her exaggerated voice, to her mother’s bedroom. Marimekko curtains and trims, potpourri, festival masks from Venice, a huge bed of seventies-style silky sheets made up like a hotel bed but with fluffy cushions; a Hindu god in ivory by the bedside.
— What if she comes back?
— Oh O, must you always be so practical? She’s never here, she can’t stand being near the old bugger.
She pulled her mother’s clothes out of the seventies mirrored walk-in wardrobe and threw them on the bed. Saul lit a menthol off the end of the last and stared out the window. I asked on his behalf if it was OK to smoke in her mother’s bedroom.
— Fuck her, Dot laughed. — She smokes spliffs in here secretly all the time. Tragic really.
Dot held a sixties Chanel dress first to herself, then her eyes shot from Saul to me. Panic surged through me.
— I think . . . this one’s for you, she said to me with a wry smile.
— What?
— It’s art, she laughed. — I’m going to get my camera in a min. And this – with the utmost seriousness, holding up a floor-length crocheted hippy cheesecloth dress, — is for you, Sozzle.
She must have known that Saul would take offence at that particular garment. If so, it was a cunning move. He seemed oblivious to the greater question of why the hell we would be dressing in her mother’s clothes in the first place, as he then searched through the wardrobe trying to find something more ‘him’. In his silence he was, perhaps, working out the weight of bottles he could carry home or some other calculation for maximising our exploitation of the capitalist context. I was still counting on him to stop the farce, but he was fully engaged with the textures of silk and chiffon and nylon and I was thrown into confusion as Dot took off her clothes and, naked before us, pulled an eighties business suit from the wardrobe, declaring it ‘very her’. She was to dress as her father.
— Come on, girls. You like dressing up, don’t you? She winked at me. — I’ll get you some panties.
I was terrified then that if I opposed the plan it would only take the smallest slip-up for Saul to know that Dot and I shared a sexual secret. I agreed to put on the Chanel number, in the hope of silencing her, and started to undress.
— You too, Sozzle. He was still fussing over the many styles. A green-and-yellow-striped seventies flared jumpsuit, a ball gown, a Versace in gold lamé. I stood in my underpants, hoping that at any moment he would explode in rage and declare the game over.
— What’s wrong, Soz, you scared? She poked his belly.
How clever of her to know that for Saul to seem scared of any transgression was tantamount to an exposure of hypocrisy.
— I’ll bet Owen makes a better woman than you do, she added. — I’ll award points and a little kiss for the winner.
— I’m a fucking damn sight more of a woman than you’ll ever be! Saul snapped back.
There was no way out. Saul insisted on dressing alone in the en suite on the condition that Dot fix him a tall Martini, while he flicked the Versace in her face, picked up a pair of strapless heels and pootled off inside, satisfied that he was once again laying down the rules for us all. I asked her again what the hell we were doing. All of that stuff she’d said earlier about manic depression and her deathbed, was any of it true?
— Shh, my dreary dear, she said, quoting him, — we’re making art. Then she ran off to fix more drinks and get her video camera. I was left alone in boxers and socks before the mirror, the little black dress in my hands.
My humiliation grew as my member nodded in approval as I slid the tight dress over my head. I struggled to think of something horrible – the yellow slime in the kitchen sink – the bluebottle infestation in the old bin-bag room – the toilet clogged with Saul’s shit-smeared tabloid pages – the breakfast bowl I once found crawling with maggots – anything to make my swelling subside. But the sight of the bulge in the tight material, then that of Dot wiggling naked into the room with the three pint glasses filled with cocktails and her video camera – I sat down rapidly, resting my elbows on my knees, crossing my legs to hide my aching weakness.
The clink of the glasses must have been what roused Saul from the en suite. The image of him then, thick black stubble and the legs of some kind of anorexic gorilla, chest bones from a prisoner-of-war camp highlighted by the sheer lamé dress. Dirty overgrown toenails hanging over the edge of the heels.
— Et voilà! he called out, striking a pose. Dot stifled a laugh, and raised the camera – we both knew better than to laugh at Saul for any reason.
She complimented and toasted us both, clinking glasses, as if sensing that a moment of silence would bring it all to an end.
— Oh, but we need to get you stockings, my cherubim! 15 denier, I think, to hide the hair, and foundation to cover the stubble. You both really should have shaved. Oh but you look so glorious! My little peaches – I could eat you all up.
I worried then that we were not making art at all but re-enacting some perverse primal scene that her father had once put her through. But she chattered on, high-pitched and high camp, as her hands rummaged through her mother’s lingerie drawers. And part of me did want to wear suspenders and stockings and lacy panties and to beat Saul in this competition of hers.
The cocktails were finished, so then there was gin. Dot poured a huge one for Saul and his humour seemed to come back with every millitre of alcohol more.
— Just a smidge more debauchery for me my dreary dear.
All the lovely expensive frilly thrilling thingies laid out on the bed, and Dot was ta
lking about how her mother had really been a burn-your-bra hippy but her father liked her to dress like a ‘real woman’, as she put on the old man’s double-breasted padded-shouldered suit.
I must have been drunk, because I’d forgotten the why and where of it all. I turned my back to them and tried to pull a stocking on but my foot got stuck. I lost my balance and fell back onto her mother’s bed. Dot was laughing, manhandling me.
— No, no, not like socks! She took it from me, rolling it up. — Like this, like putting on a condom. Her fingers through the silk, tight round my foot, winking at me again.
— You should have cut your toenails, silly sausage, we don’t want to ladder Mummy’s best stockings, do we, she could get suspicious. I made facial expressions to try to express my anxiety. She put her finger to her mouth to shh. I checked Saul’s face to see if he’d seen the secret exchange, but he was head down, another menthol lit, rolling on his stockings, mumbling, — Philistine, have you never worn silk before?
Nothing I could say or do. The beauty of it struck me then. Of games, how they eclipse reality and become their own. Life should be a game, Saul once said. I told myself to relax and play it out. We sat so quietly, attentive, in our dresses as Dot put the lipstick on us both, then mascara, Saul play-acting the spoiled girl-child.
— Why him? Me first, me first!
In compensation he demanded a beauty spot, which Dot dutifully gave him.
— Bigger, bigger, he was shouting. — I want to be a slut! Another gin and he was proclaiming that we should, nay everyone should, do this every day.
Dot was up, video camera in hand, filming me, as I forced my feet into her mother’s tiny stilettos. A moment of bonding then with Saul in which he laughed at my ill-fitting feet, oblivious to his own, him pouting and blowing smoke rings, Dietrich-style. My knobbly knees. A little game of insults, in the name of competitiveness.
— My darling. You’re a dog’s breakfast.
— It’s a dog eat dog world, I said. Surprised that, for once, I’d come up with a witty riposte.
— Indeed, let the best bitch win!
Ménage Page 17