by Geoff Ryman
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?'
A guy called 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 kidding, 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 tha
t 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?'
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.'
Billie slumped back, shaking her head, now a slower gesture of stupefaction. 'Why are you fooled, baby? Why are men fooled by whores? We hate you sons of bitches.'
Michael was saddened. 'Do you want to go now?'
'Yes. Now.'
Billie stood up as if her joints were aching. Her eyes were desolate. Suddenly she was back in her polka-dot dress, as if it were a home or a bad habit. Her history, Michael saw, was always dragging her down, behind the beat.
'Anything I can do for you before you go?'
Her mouth did a disparaging downward turn that was also somehow amused. 'You keep talking about Angels. When I was a little girl, I always wanted to see an Angel.'
There was a swelling in Michael's heart that seemed to flower out into the world. There was a crackling sound in the air, as if roots were growing in speeded-up time. The air in the room blossomed. Petals of light unfurled.
In the centre of them stood Henry. The unfurling continued. Wings rose up behind Henry's back, silver and fleecy. Henry wore a 1930s dinner jacket, and on his arm, ready, was the silver fox fur.
'I'm just your foil for the evening,' said Henry.
Billie dipped slightly, calm smoothing her round high brow. She did her downward smile, pleased and gracious.
In December of 1938, Billie played downtown in a club called Cafe Society. Her new style transfixed the President's son and white society ladies who had married for money. In 1939, she recorded a draggy song with the Cafe Society Orchestra about a lynching. Columbia had refused to record it. In Britain the BBC banned it. Nevertheless, the first time the world heard 'Strange Fruit', it ground to a halt.
'My stole, please,' Lady Day asked the Angel.
Henry held it up for her and she slipped delicately backwards into it. Henry said, 'I'll take you to where the band is playing.'
The two of them walked arm in arm towards Michael's wall. He could see them walking well into the distance beyond the wall. Could he hear an orchestra? He saw Billie laugh and place her head briefly against her escort's shoulder. Girlish and ladylike, she did a little skip of joy, and told a joke that made the Angel laugh.
Do blondes have more fun?
So.
Michael finally went out and had some fun. There really was, on the face of it, nothing else to do.
He got his final marks for the first year of his degree in Computer Science and they were surprisingly bad: a 68 per cent overall. Despite his hours of programming, Michael had not performed well on the final.
I don't have the time to study, Michael realized. Suddenly he knew that he wouldn't start the second year in September. It was as simple as that, as simple as a flower opening. It didn't even feel as if he had made a decision. He felt relieved by the simplification of his life. He had other things to do.
Michael called up the entire New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. They looked so big and beautiful from a distance. Up close they were bulky and hairy and broken-toothed.
Michael pulled down one pair of black shorts to reveal a round, hard tummy and perfectly ordinary white genitalia. Michael knelt in front of them. The favour was returned. 'They're kinda sweet,' said the player, in mild surprise. 'It's not that bad.'
Michael called up a famous Maori player as broad as he was tall. The Maori's eyes glittered with something between rage and panic. He kept jumping; the miracle spooked him; desire was an affront. Michael assured him that all would be kept secret, that no one would ever know. In practice, the Maori was far more passionately accepting than his teammate had been. To Michael's surprise, the warrior presented himself face down on the bed. Crowned with a Viagra headache, Michael prised open the boulder buttocks and pushed himself inside. It was like fucking a turtle; the brown back was sectioned with so many muscles it looked like a shell in patterns. The body was not used to being penetrated. The sphincter clenched and squeezed. This had an unfortunate effect of trapping blood in Michael's cock, making it bigger. The drag of inner wall across the head of the penis made Michael gasp. The Maori's face was contorted in pain, and suddenly, in one lunge, he extruded Michael's dick. Michael came while being pushed backwards.
The Maori left Michael with a quick post-coital word. 'Maori men don't sleep with each other. It messes us up. We sleep with white guys, and there is less contention. Thanks.' The Angel gave Michael a hearty athletic slap and rolled to his feet. His air of expectation left Michael no option but to fade him out.
It was a madness of the spirit to call up Harry Houdini. Michael had seen a nearly nude photograph of him in a review of a new biography. Houdini had loved his mother and loved being photographed wearing as few clothes as the law of his day allowed. The body in the photographs was without fat in a way that modern bodies never are. Despite the rounded muscles, Houdini looked malnourished, pale, and as hard as p
olished marble.
Michael called him and Houdini somersaulted into Michael's sitting room wearing baggy bloomers. He smelled of the past: sweat, hair oil and sauerkraut. Houdini pulled down his bloomers and begged, 'Photograph me! Photograph me!' The genitals were lost in a tangle of fur and looked unused. Michael coaxed him to the sofa. Michael touched his chiselled chest. No, no, it was all too awful, he could not contemplate it, though he writhed in Michael's grasp with the thrill of being exposed.
All Houdini wanted was to be stripped and bound and photographed. It was a bit cruel, but Michael explained to him, in halting German, that he could never be photographed. Then Michael sent him back to his mother.
Michael's greatest mistake was great indeed. He conjured up Alexander the Great on a wet Sunday afternoon.
It was just after a phone call from Philip. Philip hadn't found a place to live yet. Would Michael mind keeping his things a while longer? Michael now wanted nothing more than for every trace of Philip to be gone from his life. 'I've bought a whole new set of crocks,' Michael said. 'I need the space. I'll put yours in the basement, OK?'
'Yes, all right, thank you,' said Philip and his voice still chimed: take care of me, protect me. 'Could you pack them carefully? I mean it would be great if I could just come and collect them and they were all packed.'
'Come and pack them yourself,' said Michael. 'I won't break anything, Philip, but I do have other things to do!'
The call left him shaken and annoyed. No doubt they both wished their old lives could evaporate painlessly. It wasn't going to be like that. Michael found himself reaching for the whiskey bottle. He stopped himself. No, Michael, those are the old days.
Energized by anger, he did the craziest thing he could think of. Years before he had read, in floods of tears, The Persian Boy, Mary Renault's novel. As if tearing the reality of the London flat and his old life into tiny pieces of paper, Michael reached down in time, for Alexander the Great.
He could feel time, its depth and chill, as if he were reaching down the air vents of a seven-storey underground city. He could feel its dank breath on his face. The London air in his flat rumbled and rolled back like a giant stone in a tunnel passageway.
