Lust

by Geoff Ryman

  She growled.

  ‘And then, there was this session with Teddy Wilson? Now, Teddy Wilson didn’t even like me. John Hammond made him do it and they fast-timed “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”. What nobody knew is what I could do and that the session clarinet was a guy called Benny Goodman. He was a wild cat, in those days. They fast-timed and Benny and I just said to hell with it, let’s cook. And we did. And I heard it slot together. I heard the angels turning the bolts. And I knew. I knew then I was the best, and I knew it was going to take time. That bitch Ella had a better voice and she left people happier. But I was going to be the greater singer. And I knew it would cost, I knew those bolts were just another jail. God was always going to want me for something.’

  Billie took a deep breath. ‘And now he’s gone and done it again.’ She smiled, drank in liquor and smoke and then announced, ‘I know what you got to learn.’

  Michael felt slightly forlorn. ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘You,’ she said, bracelets clacking slightly against the glass, ‘need to learn how to have a good time.’ Her eyes brimmed with something like mockery, but it was not unaffectionate. ‘Let’s see. This is London, right? I bet you don’t even know where the hot spots are.’ When she said hot, she meant hot. This woman knew how to swing.

  ‘This is how it works,’ she told him. ‘You go to the swankiest place you can find where they play good jazz, because that is where jazz makes its money, honey. But you talk to the guys, and they get to know you, and pretty soon, you find yourself invited to where the action really is, where the guys go to jam afterwards. That’s where you learn the music. That’s where you learn the life.’

  The only jazz place that Michael knew was Ronnie Scott’s. He’d been there once in his twenties and his main impression had been that it cost a lot. There was a sudden blurring, and Billie’s hair was suddenly conked and plastered close and she wore a clinging white satin dress, and round her shoulders a perfectly unfake fox fur.

  ‘Where’s the gardenia?’ he asked.

  ‘Gardenia?’ Her face did a comic double take.

  ‘For your hair. Um. They won’t know you’re Billie Holiday without it.’

  ‘Gardenia, huh. OK.’ And one appeared. ‘Folks will just say she can’t afford a hat.’

  ‘It’ll be your trademark.’

  She adjusted everything, and turned, Lady-like, to be admired.

  ‘They’ll think you’re a drag queen.’

  Michael had to explain that drag meant something different these days. Lady was not exactly pleased to be told she could be mistaken for a man. ‘So how come you got hair like Norma Shearer?’

  ‘A lot of guys have hair like that now. In fact, it’s kinda old-fashioned by now.’

  ‘Tuh. It’s never-was fashion where I come from.’

  Michael wore his only jacket, a kind of brown-green with a zigzag tweed, and Billie just laughed at it. ‘I hope the whole town doesn’t dress like you.’ She touched his mane lightly, and then tried to jab it down into some kind of order. ‘Actually, you know, that hair’s kinda pretty. So one thing here is going to be OK. The boys are prettier.’

  They swooped down on Ronnie Scott’s in a taxi. The foyer was charmingly naff. It looked like something from a 1960s James Bond movie, hanging red plush curtains, black leather sofas and hundreds of photos of jazz stars on the walls.

  Just inside the entrance there was an ordinary business desk and an old white guy wearing clothes like Michael’s. Sitting on the arm of the sofa just behind him were a gang of people who had the air of working there, sharing jokes. They looked like James Bond too, in jackets, turtlenecks and medallions.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Billie, approvingly. For her this was swank.

  A tall gangling man was leaning over the desk, signing in. ‘I’m a guest actually.’ For some reason he was carrying a single trolley wheel.

  Billie nodded at the wheel. ‘You play that thing?’

  ‘It came off. I’m the bass player.’ He shuffled with humility, skinny but with broad shoulders, big flat fingers, and Farah slacks.

  Billie teased him. ‘Bass player. You’d make more money playing a wheel. No bass player ever makes any money.’

  The guys on the sofa laughed. An older black guy, speckles of white in his hair, stood up and chuckled. ‘Specially the way you play, Jack.’ All Jack could do was shrug and smile and escape. Billie was already one of the gang.

  Except for the little old white guy behind the desk. ‘Standing room only. Cloakroom’s over there,’ he announced. Billie slaughtered him with a glance.

  ‘Isn’t anybody going to take a lady’s coat?’ Billie demanded, giving them lessons in manners. She shrugged it off to reveal her finery. ‘Alphonse?’

  She had decided to call Michael Alphonse. It amused her to show up on the arm of a certifiable nerd. Michael felt like an Alphonse. He took her coat and he geeked his way towards the tiny cloakroom.

  Billie looked egregiously resplendent. The old black guy strolled towards her. ‘You don’t have to try that hard here.’

  ‘Try? You call this trying? You should see what happens when I try.’

  She amused him. He ushered her up to the Please wait to be seated sign, consulted his book, and ushered them into the club.

  There were ranks of narrow tables with little lights, and brass rails between levels and red tablecloths, and old fashioned straw lampshades that Michael wanted to call Tiffany. There were German tourists in long green gabardine coats and trimmed white goatees; skinny intense young men with black sweaters; a waiter with an Eraserhead haircut; women with hair as long and heavy as curtains with Dusty Springfield mascara.

  Billie was fascinated. ‘Everybody looks so sharp.’ For her, this was all from the future.

  They were sitting near the stage, and the lights spilled over onto her. Billie strode languidly to the table, milking the distance across the floor, making sure the satin caught the light.

  They were going to have to share a table. Three rather large black men looked up, less than pleased.

  Michael pulled a chair back for Billie, scraping it too loudly on the floor, for which Billie admonished him with her eyebrows, even though the sound made everyone turn towards her. She descended onto the chair as if it were a hereditary throne.

  Alphonse was quite a fun character to play. Playing him gave Michael front. ‘I’m Alphonse,’ he announced to the guys. ‘This is Billie. I’m just her foil for the evening. We don’t sleep together or anything.’

  The guys blinked as if swallowing something.

  Billie opened her evening bag and flourished a cigarette. ‘I don’t suppose any of you gentlemen have a light?’

  The gentlemen looked at each other uncertainly. ‘Uh. I’m afraid the club has a no smoking policy.’

  ‘A what?’ Billie was outraged.

  ‘At least down here in front,’ said one of the guys in glasses, exchanging a glance with his bigger friend.

  ‘It’s bad for you.’

  ‘What is this a sanatorium? If it ain’t one kind of prohibition, it’s another.’

  They kept talking. Yes, they were musicians, yeah they knew some of the band this evening, uh, well, yes they’re pretty good.

  ‘So where do they play hot jazz in this town?’

  Dave leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Well, I don’t think there is any. There’s cool.’

  ‘Cool, what’s cool?’

  ‘Uh, after be-bop? Charlie Parker?’

  Billie was fearless. ‘You’ll have to educate me, I’m from 1938.’

  Dave’s smile was a little wayward: OK, he would play along. ‘You haven’t heard of Charlie Parker?’

  She shook her head. ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Kansas City.’

  ‘Hmm. Good town. Basie’s from Kansas City. I toured with him for a while. Basie swings. But then, he has my man Lester.’

  Dave cocked a big, brown, doubtful eye at her. This Lady knew her stuff, but she must be kid
ding, or just out of her mind.

  Dave had big broad shoulders, and thick thighs, and a touch of a potbelly under a fine red woollen sweater. Just as an aside, Michael quite fancied him.

  ‘Well. Charlie and Dizzy came up with this new style called be-bop. And then there was this guy Miles, who was in on the birth of the cool, which takes us very speedily to the 1950s.’

  ‘1950s. Shoot. Jazz in the fifties.’ Billie made it sound like the next century.

  The band came on. Jack the bass player thunked away happily. The singer was a well-known Ella mimic, who clearly enunciated her way through a set of very standard tunes to approving, undisturbed applause.

  Billie groaned. ‘Doesn’t anybody in this town swing?’

  ‘We do,’ volunteered another one of the guys, in huge unflattering thick-rimmed spectacles, and only then remembered to check with the others with a sideways glance.

  Dave took over again. ‘We’re going someplace later, if you’d like to come along.’

  They ended up in a drinking club downstairs in Goodge Street. Billie did no entrance routine there. She folded up the stole like it was a sweater and crammed it behind the seat and asked, ‘You fellas want a drink?’ Michael paid.

  The guy with the spectacles turned out to be called Alphonse too. So Michael and Alphonse exchanged sympathies for the name. ‘Bill, John, Richard, anything. I said, Mum, why Alphonse? She said it was because it was her cousin’s name.’ Alphonse had a cold. He sniffed and pushed his spectacles further up his nose. He looked at Billie at the bar and leaned forward to Michael and asked, ‘How for real is she?’

  Michael said, ‘Get her to sing, and you’ll be surprised how real.’

  Alphonse said to Billie, ‘He says I’ve got to hear you sing.’

  ‘Does he now?’

  ‘Well, I think we all do,’ said Dave, smiling. Wickedly, they suggested ‘Lady Sings the Blues’.

  ‘What’s that, I don’t sing the blues. No, I want to have some good times.’

  ‘Well, you tell us what songs you know, and I’ll see if we can play them.’

  They settled on ‘Miss Brown to You’.

  Alphonse played piano and the piano was vacant. It was vacant mainly because there really wasn’t room to sit behind it. So Alphonse played standing up, wedged against the slightly peeling red paint.

  Billie started to sing in a thin rough voice with a timbre like a trumpet. Their faces fell, and kept on settling. Billie snapped her fingers, she swayed in place, she nodded appreciatively when Alphonse took over, and said ‘Yes, yes, YES,’ while he played. Billie did everything that was naff and old-fashioned but it was somehow indisputably the real thing.

  Dave and a Brazilian called Jorge looked at each other and shook their heads, startled, amused and slightly beside themselves.

  The band from Ronnie Scott’s came in, to much shaking of hands. Dave swivelled all his attention on to them. There was laughing about the night’s set, scornful dismissal of a colleague who hadn’t shown up, a reference to Dave’s domestic situation … everything that could help make Michael feel spare.

  Billie sizzled back to the table, ready to snap up more people. Alphonse sat next to Jack the bass player and started to sparkle, his eyes and glasses gleaming.

  It was past Michael’s bedtime. He was in a dive with Billie Holiday, and he kept nodding off. He saw the rest of the evening in a series of fast cuts. He glimpsed Billie back at the table, wreathed in smoke, barking with laughter. He saw Billie with eyes shut, swaying as Al and Dave played together. Billie and Dave danced. Dave, looking fat and awkward, tried to keep up with a woman who could genuinely do the Lindy Hop.

  Michael looked up at Alphonse and said in a voice that sounded like dirty tapeheads, ‘I’m not really up to having a good time.’

  Alphonse laughed, and unsteadily gripped Michael’s knee. ‘You look shattered, mate.’

  ‘Work in the morning,’ Michael remembered. His watch said 2.00 AM. He stood up and murmured excuses.

  Billie jumped up and smooched him on the cheek. He gave her the keys and explained how they worked and made sure she had the address. ‘You take care now,’ she said and sounded like she meant it. Michael stumbled out into the balmy night air and somehow staggered safely across Tottenham Court Road to the flat.

  Very suddenly he was alone in his own bed, and wide awake. He thought of a potbelly under a red jumper. He was very sure that the skin on the stomach would be smooth and warm and the flesh loose and gentle to the touch.

  Experimentally, he called up Dave.

  Michael asked him, ‘I don’t suppose you would ever normally consider sleeping with me?’

  Dave looked surprised and responded, ‘Not to be rude, but normally no. I’ve got a wife. And a girlfriend. My time is taken.’ The Angel began to look about the flat and wonder how he got there. Suddenly his hand went to the bridge of his nose. Knowledge had come to him. ‘I’m…’ he stopped.

  The Angel sensed what he was, and therefore, what Billie was. ‘That means that she … she really is…’

  Michael nodded yes.

  Dave bowed slightly to the miracle. Suddenly he chuckled, as if surprised by something. Smiling, he sat down next to Michael and reached up and pulled off the sweater. The real miracle was not that the Angels had physical presence. The real miracle was that no matter who they were, they wanted Michael.

  Michael looked at the swollen belly covered in tight curls and remembered the clunking way Dave danced. It sometimes happens that when you see the body, desire burns away like a fog.

  Michael remembered who he had spent the evening actually talking to. He remembered glasses and the coincidence of nicknames, and a hand on his knee. He called up Alphonse. Alphonse smiled sweetly and evidently did not need a miracle to make him say yes. There was no potbelly under his jumper. Michael did have a good time after all, within his limits.

  Billie trawled her way back at breakfast time. Michael was downing repeated cups of coffee in an effort to jolt himself awake. Billie was listless, dragging her stole across the carpet. Michael told her, ‘Go sit in the sitting room, it’s more comfortable. You want a cup of coffee?’ Tame, somehow, she turned and went into the front room with its sofas and bay window, and she slumped, staring.

  ‘Worse for wear, huh?’ he said, trying to keep his own pecker up.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not that,’ she said, and accepted the coffee. ‘We all went back to Dave’s place and they played me this stuff.’

  She shook her head again, and sipped the coffee. ‘Man I heard metronomes with more swing than that stuff. What did they call it?’

  ‘Hip hop? Drum’n’bass?’

  ‘Drum’n’bass. Man. I mean we had technology. We got mikes. We used it to make music more human. The mike meant you didn’t have to shout at a song and deafen it. You could seduce it, make it relax and start talking to you. I mean that stuff don’t even have songs. It just goes tick tick tick as fast as it can. There ain’t any time even for a tock.’

  She rubbed her eyes.

  ‘In the future,’ Billie Holiday said, ‘there will be no such thing as swing.’

  Michael heard sadness in her voice, and sat next to her.

  Her eyes didn’t blink. ‘It’s all gone. My whole world. My music. There are no little clubs like I remember. The life isn’t there, even the black folks’ve got their mortgage in the morning. They all think I’m just play-acting for a while. They don’t know I’m stuck in it, up to my knees.’

  Billie looked up at Michael. ‘Guess what I’m saying is easy. They’re all dead: Prez, Bean, Fletcher. We’re just stuff in the history books that a few professors play.’

  Michael put an arm around her. ‘Everybody plays you, Billie. Anyone who likes music at all plays you.’

  ‘Big deal. I’m talking about how a whole world can die.’ She sighed and patted his leg. ‘I get fragile sometimes. I get fragile and I slump back. Or I get high. You got anything other than hootch?’

&nbs
p; Michael shook his head, no.

  ‘Good boy. Keep it that way for mama. That stuff kills.’ Billie sighed again. ‘I would like to think that this had some kind of point. If I did sleep with you, what else would you learn?’

  ‘I think I’d be like one of those standard tunes that you first have to teach to be still before you can teach it to swing.’

  That’s what she did. She kissed him as if he were a microphone, to amplify and quieten at the same time. He lazed in her grasp, kissed her beautiful breasts, let himself be played. Nothing much happened, except that it was happy and sad at the same time.

  Even the way she made love was old-fashioned. No biting of nipples, no women on top. When Michael didn’t get erect, she just shrugged.

  ‘Between the booze and the scag, baby, half the men I’ve been with couldn’t get it up. And in the end this is what they wanted, just this human touch.’ Her fingernails traced something on his chest, like a child’s drawing. ‘I mean that is what this is all about, baby. People want love. I think I find it sometimes, but then it always seems to go away again. I get mean. Or worse, I turn into a doormat and eat my heart out for some worthless slicker.’

  The hands suddenly seemed seized and she looked up. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Men and women, they’re no different. They both want love. So why do you take it, this miracle of yours?’

  ‘Take what?’

  ‘Substitutes. The quick fix. Hell, opium is a better deal. I mean if I were you, I would go tell God to go monkey with somebody else’s life. How is it that you men are so easily fooled?’ Her eyes were outraged; she pulled back from him.

  ‘What is it, Billie?’

  Her head was doing quick little sideways shakes, rejecting something, fighting her way through it. ‘That look on a trick’s face when he’s had a fourteen-year-old girl, and she’s hated every second of it, but she’s just kept smiling and smiling because she’s scared and her mama needs the money. She been dry through the whole thing, and he sure as hell knows what that means. But he puts on his socks that his wife washes for him, and you know? He looks perky. He looks pleased. He looks like he’s just had something real special and sweet from that young girl.’