‘I only work in tenners,’ I said.
2
Wogan
MARIA: Well thank you. It’s nice to be back.
WOGAN: That was a terrific song. Beautifully sung. Nothing wrong with the old vocal cords then.
MARIA: Thank you.
WOGAN: You’re a bit shy aren’t you? A girl like you. You’ve sung with Dean Martin in Vegas … what? … come away. You’ve topped the bill at the Palladium. You’ve had your own TV show. Come on my girl. You’re not shy are you?
MARIA: Thing is Terry, I’m a bit shy because I’ve heard from my showbusiness friends what a thrill it is to touch your knee.
WOGAN: Oh, not that again. People are willing to pay good money for that. Oh, go on then, seeing as it’s you. It’s a bit better than your average knee isn’t it?
MARIA: My mother will be so jealous.
WOGAN: Enough of the mother. I’m younger than I look. Doing this show has put years on me. Now, enough of this tomfoolery. You’re very much back and to hear you sing it’s like you’ve never been away at all. You were very young when you first came to everybody’s attention. Do you think that’s hard for a performer? When you see some of the younger ones coming through …
MARIA: No, not really. I just loved singing.
WOGAN: But it’s the pressure isn’t it?
MARIA: That’s right. Some of the things that were happening, I don’t think I even realised how big it was. You just turned up and somebody gave you a costume. It was just so brilliant and exciting for a young girl.
WOGAN: But pretty daunting. Here you were – what, twelve, thirteen years old – away from your family and down in London. You’re busy, so you don’t have the time for normal things, do you? You wouldn’t call it a normal childhood.
MARIA: Such a new place. I mean, I had never seen traffic lights before coming down. Things like that.
WOGAN: Is that right?
MARIA: Yeah, and double-decker buses. It was amazing really. But my manager was always showing me the ropes. I’ve always had my own room and everything.
WOGAN: Not normal though, the normal things children do with themselves.
MARIA: Well, it was normal to me. I loved singing and the performance bit was always in me, I suppose. We used to sing at my mother’s parties and we’d put a curtain up at the door and they were just really, really good times. There’s pressure, but when you’re new to the business you only see the bright lights and you think wow.
WOGAN: I know you don’t want to go into this too much, but you’ve been ill a lot over the last couple of years. You recently admitted in an interview that it was the slimmers’ disease, anorexia nervosa. How did you cope with that?
MARIA: I don’t know really. I suppose you just get caught up in wanting to look your best and at stage school you see the other dancers and you think, ‘It’s not fair, they look better than me.’ And you don’t realise you’re losing that much weight. I don’t know really. You just want to be the best you can.
WOGAN: You’ve been very brave to talk about it. And you’re over it now. You’ve got the new show in Blackpool. You’re fighting fit, and food isn’t a problem, is that right?
MARIA: Definitely. I just want to sing again and do what I do best.
WOGAN: Your family are all Italians, aren’t they? You’ve got the café and the old fish’n’chips up there in Scotland. You’ll be able to join in with all that again?
MARIA: Uh-huh. It’s nice to do the normal things and be with your family.
WOGAN: The illness must have put pressure on them. Have they been supportive in seeing you through?
MARIA: Oh definitely. They’re always there to help me if I need them. You can always rely on your family.
WOGAN: That’s terrific. What about this celebrity business? People like you who come from normal backgrounds and then make it as a singer, it’s a fascinating business for people, isn’t it? I mean, when you go through a bad patch it’s all in the magazines and everybody’s interested.
MARIA: I don’t know. It’s easy to criticise people for liking all that but if you go to work every day it’s probably quite nice to hear a singer you like or see someone doing well or buying a nice house or whatever. I don’t know. It can become a bit much I suppose. You’ve just got to ignore some of the stuff that’s written and remember who you are.
WOGAN: I’ve got to ask you. How’s the old love life?
MARIA: People are always asking me that! The truth is I’m too busy at the moment for a relationship like that. There’s always so much work to do.
WOGAN: Well, you’ve got all the time in the world for that. I must say it’s been a tremendous pleasure having you on the show, and looking so well. We wish you the best of luck. You’re going to do another number for us, what is it?
MARIA: It’s a lovely song called ‘One Day at a Time’.
WOGAN: Ladies and gentleman, back on form again, and appearing up and down the country from now until Christmas and we hope for a long time after that, please put your hands together again, for the lovely Maria Tambini.
3
They
‘I’ve been waiting to talk to you for a long time,’ he said, ‘and sometimes I’ve looked for you when I looked at other people. I only realised that at the Metropole last month. I only knew that when you walked over to the table and sat down.’
She felt nervous in her fingertips, but she lifted a hand from the table and brushed the hair from his eyes.
4
Light Entertainment
A bus was hired to take Maria and the band and the dancers up for the Blackpool Christmas Special. Maria sat at the back looking out of the window; the speed England passed the window made her unsettled and she bit her nails to the quick.
Stop the bus. I want to go back. He is working now at his desk and he is inside his shirt. I want to go back.
As the bus moved up the motorway, Maria imagined the houses and the electricity pylons were blurring into fuzz. Marion came up to the back and told her there was no reason to look so sullen. ‘The show’s a sell-out,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to do the show,’ said Maria.
‘Well that’s a lovely attitude, Maria. Just perfect. We’re trying to get you back to work, dear. Can you look at me when I’m talking to you?’ Maria turned round; her eyes were damp and for a moment she wanted to slap her manager in the face.
‘How long will it be before I’m back home?’
‘In Rothesay? There’s no plan to go –’
‘In London!’
‘This is a fearfully good three-week engagement.’
‘How many …?’
‘Eight shows a week.’
Marion’s face seemed blurred and there appeared to be static around her head and over the window. Maria blinked and tried to pull herself together. ‘It’s a good arrangement, Maria. Are you feeling weak? You’ve always loved working. What is the matter, dear?’
Maria kept as much of her life secret as she could. That had been her habit; it was now her character. She liked to think of Marion knowing nothing about her; she took comfort in the notion that she was able to make herself a stranger to her family. Marion shook her head and walked back to the front of the bus, and Maria, feeling at once elated and hungry and weepy, looked out at the crackling and fizzing grey of the motorway.
He showed me the blind place at Ovingdean, with the glass place that overlooks the water and you can nearly see all the way across to the Continent. The men used to be soldiers and they are his friends now and when we walked up the hill we all sat on the grass and the men were chatting. We walked off and stood on our own and he held my hand and gave me an apple. My stomach was turning and it was just us standing there and I began to cry in front of him. ‘I don’t deserve this,’ I said. And what he did, he kissed the apple and he put it in my hand. ‘It’s me that doesn’t deserve you,’ he said.
Maria fell asleep in confusion as the bus moved and her head was elsewhere and strange
to her. Months ago, before she met Michael, she had started having ‘static’, that’s what she called it: she would be walking down the street and suddenly it became like a television at night after all the programmes have finished. The greyness seemed to pour into everything she looked at. At times, talking to one of the dancers or trying to learn the words of a new song, she would be aware of the world moving away from her, growing unfocused, and her insides would flutter as she stepped into this far-away place. All the while, she would smile more, giggle more, trying to present a lively girl to the people in front of her, yet for all her words, for all her songs and showbusiness gestures, she experienced herself, more and more, as entirely removed from reality, at first pawing the static around her to find her bearings, but then, as the minutes passed, as the hours and the days passed, becoming inseparable from it and seeing only greyness.
When she opened her eyes her head was against the window. It was dark outside, reindeer glowed by the road, the Seven Dwarves showed their different faces, and Little Red Riding Hood was shadowed by a purple wolf. Pinocchio was in conversation with Jimminy Cricket. The Darling children flew over some cardboard London. Dorothy glowed in her ruby slippers and Cinderella was separated from an elegant shoe, left by accident at the base of a neon staircase. With her head on the window, Maria stared out unblinkingly, and the Blackpool Illuminations reflected on the wetness of her eyes. She could see clouds of colour, rotating, flashing, travelling over the glass towards her. It took seconds for her to realise she was looking at the Blackpool lights. A Star Wars tableau hovered into view: Princess Leia with a small robot.
‘Have you woken up?’ said Marion. ‘We’re almost at the hotel, dear. Aren’t the illuminations beautiful this year? They get more and more amazing every time. Can you see them?’
‘Yes,’ said Maria.
At the Winter Gardens there is a wooden board in the ticket hall which commemorates the legends of British Variety. After playing for a fortnight, Maria went down there one afternoon before her show, with nobody about, and looked up at the board. She had been talking to Michael every night on the phone and she dreaded that he was bored with her already and it made her panic a little as she looked at the names on the board. ‘Arthur Askey,’ it said. ‘Danny La Rue.’
During the Blackpool run Maria was mostly on her own. She wasn’t joining in with anything and never ate with anyone. ‘Don’t you start’ is all she would say to people who asked how she was feeling and what was she going to eat. But she had good showbusiness manners: she would always go and shake hands with any new act that came into the show. Albert Gay, a ventriloquist from Lancashire, was supposed to be on the bill for the whole run, but he was drunk on whisky all the time, and finally they fired him. The night before he went, Maria turned up at his dressing-room and found him slumped in a chair in the corner. ‘Aren’t you going to do your make-up?’ Maria asked.
‘No, little girl,’ he said, ‘I’m colourful enough.’ He sat thinking for a second and opened his mouth. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. The sound was clear though he hardly moved his lips.
‘Let me tell you something, Albert. I couldn’t care less about this show or about any of it. Make-up. No make-up. I couldn’t care less. I’m not the boss here, you can say what you like.’
‘You’ll go far,’ he said.
‘Can I have a drink?’
‘You what?’
‘I’d like to have a drink.’
Albert Gay took a bottle of Bell’s out of the drawer and shaking his head just the once he went for two glasses.
‘You know what this place smells like?’ said Albert. ‘It smells of chips and orange peel and sweat, and it’s been like that for as long as I can remember.’ Maria smiled and then winced as she drained the glass. She held it out. They drank two more.
‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she said.
‘We all are,’ he said.
‘I wish I could just leave here.’
‘Shhhhhhhh,’ he said. He put a yellow-stained finger to her lips and shook his head. Then he drank the last of the Bell’s and spoke about years ago. He closed his eyes at one point and went on speaking. Maria slipped out of Mr Gay’s dressing-room and went back to her own, where she locked the door and was sick.
There was too much weight on her face and she couldn’t stand her chin. Growing tearful, she dabbed her blusher-brush into a tray of ruby-coloured powder and stroked it up her cheekbones. She saw a bunch of carnations standing against the mirror with a note. ‘I’ve seen your show every night Maria and think you’re great,’ the note said. ‘Please keep on singing and remember the old ones are always the best. God bless you. Kevin Goss.’
*
There were people whose interest in Maria Tambini seemed to rise with her decline. Over the years she had uncovered an audience who were attracted to her suffering: she could disappear into her illnesses for a year or two, and during this time letters and cards would arrive, written by people who only saw her perform once, in Blackpool perhaps, or in Bridlington, or who remembered her big smile on Opportunity Knocks. They wondered, these people, as they said in their letters, what had happened to Maria Tambini and how she was getting on. Some of them had found one of her old LPs at a jumble sale: it made them think of how much she had given and how sick she had become and that they needed to reach out to her. At the office, Marion Gaskell had a giant file of these letters and a few more would be added to it every week.
The summer after the Blackpool season, Maria went to perform at Butlins in Skegness. She did the first evening with Cannon and Ball and it turned out to be fun: she and the dancers had good memories of working on the television show, and the two men teased her and made her feel stronger somehow. She was given a large chalet at Butlins. She felt it was damp but she didn’t complain; at night, though, after the show was over, she would lie in the bed listening to the sound of drunk people laughing outside, and she felt the cold in her bones.
He kissed me on the stairs to the rooms at Ovingdean. He made me steady on his arm and I could feel his fingers move over my shoulders and into my hair and breathing quick and the feel of his jaw was scratchy and bending down to my mouth he put his tongue into my mouth and right then I wanted to bite his tongue and suck it and there was water in my mouth and I could feel my breasts. I wanted him to put his tongue there so I said to him all I want is a cuddle that’s all I want if you don’t mind is a kiss and a cuddle.
Michael came up from London one weekend. They went on the boating pond and went into Skegness where he bought her a gold bracelet. ‘Can we put our names inside?’ she asked. The man in the shop engraved their names while they waited, and Michael took her hand so easily, and she promised herself she would come and buy him a watch one day. Sometimes he would just put his lips high up on her cheek and whisper to her. On the monorail going round Butlins he drummed out a rhythm against the window and made a voice like Louis Armstrong’s and when she giggled he leaned over and clasped her knees and kissed her head. They looked down at the Ferris wheel, the rows of chalets, the fountains, the outdoor swimming-pools and the factory dining-halls. ‘It’s like a concentration camp down there,’ Michael said.
‘I want to move away from Marion’s house.’
‘Live with me,’ he said.
‘I’m not ready,’ she said. ‘It’s too big a jump. Do you think I could find a flat close by?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘Definitely.’
‘I won’t always be asking for help, Michael,’ she said. ‘It won’t always be me needing help. I hope not.’ He leaned in and held her ears and widened his eyes and she laughed into his mouth.
‘I love you,’ he said. And there on the monorail – so high over Butlins, close to the first real sun of the British summer – Maria kissed Michael as if to lose herself in that small act, or gain him for good, and they went on kissing and Michael soon tasted salt in his mouth from her tears running down. ‘I’m going to loo
k after you,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I will.’
‘We both will,’ he said.
The train started moving again and they had a view of the sea outside the fences of Butlins, the beaches going out of Skegness. ‘It’s dead nice, the water today,’ said Michael.
Maria looked out. The sea was a great slab of dark grey card with a million dots of white and silver appearing and vanishing. ‘Michael,’ she said, ‘I’m not well.’
‘You’ve lost weight again,’ he said.
‘Not that,’ she said. ‘I can’t be normal. I always feel I’m falling backwards into somewhere. The noise, the greyness: it’s like static. It’s like the crackling and interference you get on a radio or something.’
‘We’re going to work this out, Maria.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened it’s going to get me.’
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ll work it out.’
They climbed down the steps onto the pavement. Both could feel the heat and Maria noticed their shadows on the ground; his seemed so massive beside hers, and she looked up at him and saw he was not a giant, merely taller, and his short hair was neat and dark like his eyes. ‘You are my handsome man,’ she said out of nowhere. He squeezed her hand.
‘I have to get going for the train,’ he said.
‘I hate it,’ she said.
‘I’m going to find you a lovely flat.’
‘I hate singing.’
‘It’s not for long. But if you really want to leave I’ll take you out of here right now.’
‘I hate them looking at me.’
A family walked past and stopped near them at the ice-cream kiosk. The woman’s hair was peroxide blonde, she wore a dab of pink lipstick, she held her purse in her hand, and the man wore a cardigan and suit trousers despite the heat. Beside them two small boys were dressed identically in sky-blue shorts. The man and woman argued about whether they should go to the bingo or ballroom dancing. The smaller of the two boys looked round at Maria and Michael and stared at them. He came over with a book and a pen; the book said ‘Autographs’ and was filled with the Redcoats’ signatures. ‘Could you be in my book?’ said the boy.
Personality Page 28