by Weldon, Fay
And we ate and I thought that would be the end of it. They’d come to accept me, surely. I was the same person I’d been the day before – Jack’s doxy, cause of the Reading Embarrassment (Mrs Stubbs had turned up at Reading Station Car Park, the Band’s final pick-up point, to discover her husband with me in tow) and if they didn’t mind that why mind this? But they did.
‘Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh,’ observed Pedro. Well, he would: his background being folk. The band put up with him and his vibes, but he wasn’t their regular guitarist. ‘Slumming along with us ordinary folk,’ said Karl (who’d been to Eton and spent his life slumming) and took from his pocket and unfolded (elderly men always fold a lot, and tightly, running a firm finger along every available crease: the only firm thing left, I daresay, so they use it whenever they can) a copy of the Sun some six months old, not just yellow but brown, and still discernible, that unfortunate photograph of me topless and apparently dancing on a table at a wild party, quite irrelevantly heading a report of a special public meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. ‘New Look at Sandra’s Society’. Once they have this kind of photograph on their files they keep using it. I’d begged Matthew (my lawyer husband) to sue, but he said no: better to just let the matter die down.
‘That photo,’ I said now, tentatively, ‘is misleading. I was standing on a table to change a lightbulb, and stretching up, and wearing a tube top, and that’s the kind of thing that happens.’
They laughed.
‘If you want to dance naked on tabletops,’ said Steve, ‘that’s your business. I suppose the Press is after you now, to see what’s next, and we’re it.’
‘Jack’s it,’ said Karl, and laughed. Envious old trout.
‘All that’s behind me,’ I said. ‘Finished. This is a new life.’
‘We must seem very dull and ordinary to you,’ said Steve, glinting through his pebble glasses.
‘None of you seem the least ordinary to me,’ I said, ‘If anything, the lot of you are positively extraordinary.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Sandy, dangerously. It was obvious I was in a no-win situation. And Jennifer, sensing trouble, moved uneasily and said:
‘More bread, anyone? Who’s for another dollop of jam? I’m sorry it’s not home-made, but it’s better than nothing,’ but no one took any. They looked at me instead.
‘I think the Band’s great,’ I said. ‘And the music’s the greatest, and I’m proud to wear the Citronella T-shirt.’ And I raised my mug of coffee to them all, and that helped. A simple, sincere act of flattery has got me out of many a tight spot yet! But where was Jack? I needed him. My body, as much as my mind, noted his absence. And then I heard the notes of his trumpet out in the courtyard. Jack was practising scales, pre-breakfast, as was his habit. The notes would drift into a tune and then out again into another key and another scale and another tune. Jack, in fact, was showing off.
‘Pity he didn’t play like that last night,’ said Karl. ‘He was all to pieces.’
‘He doesn’t get enough rest,’ said Stevie of the abstemious trombone, leering at me through the pebble glasses, and Jennifer frowned and clucked.
We sat and listened, perforce, and the pure notes shivered the motes of dust from the kitchen shelves and they fell dancing in the streaming sunlight to the floor. But the silence was not easy. My presence inhibited ordinary conversation. Starlady Sandra, discoverer of the Planet Athena, for a short time a media celebrity: still, as they say, just about a household word, a faint flame fanned into brightness every fourth week on TV, whose views were solicited by feature writers as to what they were giving for Christmas, how they cut their toast, what length they wore their skirts, whose naked boobs had appeared in the Sun, was not wanted here. They felt as Jack did – cheated, taken for a ride. Silence was their weapon. They fell silent as teachers do when the Head comes into the staffroom, as the Mothers’ Union does when the Vicar approaches, as does Claridges’ Dining-Room as Princess Margaret enters. No matter how the Head jollies things along, or the Vicar swears the oaths of the common man, or Princess Margaret smokes yet another sinful cigarette, it only makes things worse. We are ordinary folk, they cry in their hearts, and proud of it. Nothing singular about us, no sirree! We’re every-day, part of the team; we are the herd whose whole point is our lack of singularity. Bad... to you who are singled out, for good reason or bad!
And then Frances said:
‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’ve never even seen her programme,’ and everyone laughed, and felt easier, except Frances herself, who looked at me balefully with her lovely, moist, cowlike eyes. The white showed above the iris, I noticed. No amount of cosmetic surgery could cure that, I imagined.
‘Everyone had enough?’ said Jennifer, whisking a paper table cloth away. Did she bring them with her: did she expect the disaster of our billeting? Karl assured us before we left that we’d be put up in proper French hotels, two-star. Was it that Jennifer lay awake each night planning how to be everything to someone, to provide something for everyone, preparing for all eventualities? Perhaps as a child she’d read The Swiss Family Robinson; perhaps she’d been carried away by its enchantment, grown up always to have at hand the equivalent of one of those convenient shipwreck chests from which necessities could be produced – not a mere rope to tether the wild goat but, better still, a knife to cut the creeper to bind together to make the rope: for here she was with length after length of paper tablecloth that could be cut up into squares for toilet paper (toilet paper, anyone?) or spread on some filthy, wormy old door she could always somehow find and place on fruit boxes to make a table, so that breakfast (which she would also somehow extract from the natives) would not only taste good but look good – ah, this trip, this band outing, this general disaster was Jennifer’s moment of triumph, you could tell from the small smile of bliss on her lips. The great hour of the Band’s need! Spoiled only by me, bringing with me the flavour of illicit sex, my uneasy mixture of fame and notoriety, diverting the full attention of Jack the mad trumpeter, leader of the Band, he whom every woman fancied (even Jennifer) and I had got.
Jack put his trumpet away, and came to finish the last of the coffee and no one said anything nasty to him at all.
‘Time to hit the road, everyone,’ said Jennifer, and the Band dutifully rose, and made its preparations for departure, and Jack took me by the hand and led me up the dusty stairs with the broken banisters to the very top of the house, and the small under-the-eaves room, where doves cooed and fluttered (the roof must actually have holed. The French simply don’t seem to care about these things) and pushed me up against the wall, or one of them, and unbuttoned my jeans, and tugged them down and inelegantly but powerfully and briskly fucked me, so the ancient plaster behind me frayed and powdered and fell in showers over my heels. I remember I cried out, and the sound echoed. A lesser man would have said ‘hush’. Jack didn’t bother. He didn’t care. Let the Band know. What did they not already know?
‘Better?’ he said. How did he know? What did my face show? Had I appeared to so much as notice his sexual remissness, let alone care? Surely not! Oh, but I was truly colonised. Jack sent his spies into my head, amongst the crowded passages of my thoughts, taking note, detecting rebellion. He humiliated me as the conqueror does the conquered, making sure that’s the way it stays, that no one gets any ideas.
‘Better than what?’ I asked coolly, instead of saying yes, oh yes, and my defiance seemed to set him off again, and I was glad of it.
‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘They’ll be waiting. Mustn’t upset Jennifer. She’ll have her stopwatch out.’ But he kissed me lingeringly, almost romantically, as if in apology for the brusqueness of his behaviour, and I was glad of that too. I did not doubt he loved me – albeit as the conqueror loves the conquered. Let them mutter and murmur and squirm, that’s okay, that’s expected, that shows they’re worth the conquering; but let the spies report back any sign of real unrest, of organisation, an
d the iron hand descends, and informers turn into secret police, spies turn into torturers, and misery abounds.
‘That was to keep you going,’ said jolly Jack Stubbs. ‘Until I come home tonight.’
‘But what will I do all day?’ I asked.
‘It was you who said you wanted to stay behind,’ he stopped at the door and said. He was as tall as the door. He would have to stoop to leave the room, this lengthy man whose lengthiness extended to all other parts. I stayed where I was, my jeans at least modestly replaced, though I seemed to be shirtless – my shirt, I now observed, in a crumpled ball beneath my feet; how had that happened? – still pinned against the wall by the sheer memory of the extent of his presence within me.
‘Did I?’ I said. ‘I must have been mad.’
‘It’s best if you do,’ he said. ‘Frances is getting jealous. Give her a day on her own with me, and she’ll be fine.’
‘Keep an eye on her,’ I said, ‘or she’ll be off.’
‘She’s too young for that. Fifteen!’
‘Growing up fast,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to have a talk some time, you and me.’
‘What about?’
‘Things,’ he said. ‘Where we go from here. We can’t be on the road for the rest of our lives.’
‘Why not?’
‘You being who you are,’ he said. ‘It alters things.’
‘How?’ I couldn’t see it, wouldn’t; standing there in disarray.
‘A man has his pride,’ said Jack, Mad Jack, Leader of the Band. Proud Jack, like any other man. But love conquers all. Doesn’t it?
‘They’ll never have me back,’ I said. ‘I’ve burned my boats. You’ve no idea!’
He looked me up and down, with his bright knowledgeable eyes, and smiled, and moved back towards me.
‘Takes a lot of burning to sink a boat. Careful, or they’ll tow you back into port.’
‘They never will,’ I said. ‘Never, never, never!’
But Lear said seven ‘no’s’ in a row, and it did him no good at all. And the minibus’s horn went, long and loud, and Jack moved away from me, saying, ‘I have to go,’ and I knew he did, but I took it as a bad omen.
I had better report what happened after Jack left, pounding down the stairs, clatter-clatter, the better to keep Jennifer happy, though I had rather not. I watched the dust of his departure subsiding, gently falling through the beams of August sunlight – already just slightly autumnal – which shone through the cobwebby windows. I was released quite suddenly and irrationally, as when the door of a washing machine after its fast spin finally allows itself to be opened, from my pinning to the wall, and crossed to the window, and saw what I did not want to see. The Renault 12, packed with the day’s necessities – bass, banjo, guitar, clarinet, drums, trombone, trumpet, various stands, sound system, microphones, shirts, T-shirts, cassettes, stickers, badges, the Band itself, Sandy already at the wheel and Jack just getting into the back, pulling first Jennifer, then Frances, up behind him, the doors closing, the van driving off, and nothing left, nothing, just the bare French yard, the French morning sun, and a kind of lonely shuttered desolation.
I couldn’t bear it. My private parts still buzzed and zinged. What had been replete and satisfied now hungered and thirsted. The doves fluttered and pecked at my feet on the powdered plaster, for spiders and weevils and all the things Jack and I had disturbed. The birds seemed strangely tame and not disconcerted in the least by the odd activity of humans. I looked around for any possible source of satisfaction. It was going to be hard to come by. The door handle seemed about the right height, of cold, shocking metal. I took off my jeans and rubbed myself up against it and, with the aid of my fingers, came and came again, and cried out without shame, so the doves rose and departed through a crack between eaves and ceiling into somewhere less desperate and agitating. Then I felt better, as if I had involved just not the organic world but the inorganic in the patterns of the changing universe. Drawn them in, united them. My flesh and cold metal had had business together and very right it seemed. Thank you, long Jack. Thank you, brass door handle. May the electrons fly, may the cells of the flesh learn how to welcome them, and not resist them.
Perhaps I am mad.
5
Mother’s Got a Headache
My mother was mad. I don’t mean mad in the way of wearing unexpected hats, wearing bright tights when everyone else wore dull, or talking too brightly and too long, or spending too much money at the shops, all of which can classify a woman as mad, that is to say disconcerting – Tamara? Oh, Tamara’s mad! Such fun, on a good day; really trying on a bad – but clinically, definably, schizophrenically mad. An inhabitor, on and off, of lunatic asylums, a plodder in wrinkled stockings down shiny pale green smelly corridors, a hearer of voices in the head which urged her to burn and murder, a perceiver of visions before the eyes which made her see devils in corners performing hideous obscenities, which she would, en crise, attempt to nullify by imitation.
Or thus a kind psychiatrist once tried to explain the voices and the visions to me, sorting out a little of my confusion and despair. I belong to the school of thought which sees mental derangement as a matter of chemical imbalance in the brain – if the balance is out of kilter, however minutely, the mind picks up information from itself and processes this alongside what comes in properly and in an orderly fashion from the senses. If you’re sane, a dog is a dog, yellow is yellow, bread smells like bread. If you’re mad the dog is more than a doG, possibly God in reverse, yellow is something sinister, bread smells like shit so perhaps is shit. Everything is more than it should be. The mad are not happy: they are overloaded. They hate.
Now there are many driven by circumstances to dwell in lunatic asylums or let their stockings wrinkle and their jackets stain in what is known as ‘community care’: their eyes may dull and glaze, their face muscles stiffen in imitation of the real thing, but they are merely refugees from life, the ones who can’t stand it a minute longer. These are mere pretenders, they are not the genuinely, tragically, frighteningly mad.
Do you know, if good people, and many such there be and I do not include myself amongst them, opened a hostel for the mentally unbalanced next door to me, I’d move out. I wouldn’t be one of those who joined a protest meeting – ‘We Don’t Want The Mad Here’ – that kind of primitive hysteria which always bubbles up in the general populace to prevent social improvement, prevent the arrival of Utopia – I wouldn’t have the face; I’d lose street credibility. ‘Starlady Sandra in Madhouse Feud’! I’d just keep my mouth shut and move out, saying the place was too damp.
At times in my life I’d tell myself that my mother was merely one of the pretenders, one of the ‘driven mad’ not ‘born mad’. Driven mad by my father. (There’s another story, and certainly one my grandmother liked to believe.) But I never quite convinced myself: the desire to murder was there in her brain, the devil’s glare in her eye, as she stared at me, her daughter. And the frequent approach of the madhouse staff, syringes and strait-jackets at the ready, made it difficult to maintain the illusion. No, here was no pretender to the mad state: this was the real thing. Mad Tamara was born, mad she remained. In my veins runs the blood of the past. My mother’s insanity, my father’s sanity. Now there was a man who was sane: whole committees of sensible men (not a woman amongst those jurors) and some of them most cultured, agreed that he was sane. That was in 1949, at the Nuremberg Trial. Then they took him out and shot him dead. Sane, sane. But all that’s another story. I notice I have said ‘they’ shot him, those cultured, censorious, shocked folk, but of course they didn’t do it themselves: they appointed a firing squad of rough soldiery to do it for them. Officers seldom actually kill. The judge doesn’t switch on the electric chair, let alone slam prison doors. Lesser men do that, who don’t have the same sensitivities. Well, we all know this. In the meantime, my father doesn’t have a grave, so we can’t lay flowers: we, his many, many children.
Of course I’m
in flight from the past. Who isn’t? There is a good deal to escape from. None of us are born to ordinary parents, but to the one way or another insane, the one way or the other cruel. I am just an extreme example of the human race, scratching away with my pen, thinking this, writing that, working out a story about Jennifer, on a door on two boxes which makes a satisfactory table if I don’t lean on it too hard (if I do, it tilts) from time to time moving my chair, with its one almost-broken leg, out of the sun, as that splendid orb creeps up and round the courtyard rooftops; and as and when the white paper throws up too much reflected glare for comfort, conscious of the pleasure still lingering between my legs, and confident of its eventual renewal; with a couple of doves – perhaps the same two? but who could tell? (Doves? They all look alike to me! Seen one, seen ’em all) to peck and coo about for company. Even I can be happy: mothered as I am, fathered as I was.
So happy I was, in fact, that I put down my pen and skipped around the courtyard a little – the sun was not yet so high and hot as to make such an act unthinkable – and saw my new life stretch ahead of me, my life with Jack as Sandra Stubbs, no longer Sandra Harris, Sorensen or Starlady. When Jack understood I was now Sandra Born Again, that he was my saviour, that I had been reborn the night I met him, the hour his body entered mine, why then he would be easy in his mind, as would the Citronella Jumpers. All would be well. True, the body of past that pursued me was powerful and heavy, more than most had to put up with, but I’d do it, yes I would! Who wanted a proper writing desk when a door on two boxes would do? Who needed gold taps and a navy bath and the dinner-time conversation of astronomers and barristers; water came as well from a rusty tap: a truer, more honest converse from musicians. For I could see, even in my elation, that if I lived with Jack I would also live with the Band. Musicians today live as they always have; as actors have: nothing changes. The troupe is all, the Band is one; like footballers, back-biting and sniping off the field, divided by temperament, but on the field united by common experience, exhilarated by a common joy, totally loyal, each one nothing without the group, everything within it. And women have always up and followed, off with the raggle-taggle gypsies oh, as Pedro would have it, away from the warmth and safety of their familiar lives: in flight from boredom.
