The Year of the Ladybird

by Graham Joyce

  Nobby’s excitable energy wasn’t the only reason why I was so shattered. I’d had my worst night so far. I couldn’t sleep. I’d had the window wide open but the air was stifling. Every time I thought I might drift off to sleep I had an image of Terri mouthing that single word at me.

  In fact it wasn’t just while I was sleeping. After the assault on Luca Valletti I’d taken a seat at the side of the theatre watching the show without really seeing any of it. The entire Variety act. Paget and Drum, the comedy duo. Shelly Breeze – I’m not making up these names – doing her diva routine. Abdul-Shazam in his fez inserting swords into a casket containing one of the dancers. Oh yes, Nikki danced at the edge of the stage. She was magnificent under stage lights. All the dancers were and they maintained dazzling smiles that you rarely got to see offstage. But at some point in the show Nikki caught my eye, and she winked at me.

  Finally Luca, consummate professional that he was, topped off the show. He had a white silk scarf wrapped tightly around his bruised throat and you wouldn’t have known what had taken place in that theatre ninety minutes earlier. He had this farewell song – something about fighting in the Foreign Legion – where he waved a white handkerchief and the ladies in the audience took pocket handkerchiefs out of their handbags and waved back at him.

  And so I go

  To fight the savage foe,

  Although I know

  I’ll be sometimes missed

  By the girls I’ve kissed.

  They lapped it up. But I couldn’t help thinking about what was going on in Luca’s head as he smiled and sang and levelled the blade of his hand at his breast.

  So I’d spent an entire evening thinking about Terri; and I’d spent a night tossing and turning in the heat with her face appearing in the dark. Now I was about to go into the theatre where I would see her cleaning the stage. I knew I was going to have to fight to avert my eyes. I thought I was transparent and that the chirpy mad Mancunian or Nikki or Tony or all of them would see through me straight away. I was ready-tailored Music Hall material. I’d only been in the camp a week and I’d fallen for the old story about rescuing the woman with the mop-and-bucket.

  But when I walked in I didn’t get to see Terri at all. A much older woman with a dry scowl and a giant hair-pin was up on stage swinging the mop to and fro giving the boards a good grinding. Tony sat in the front row of the seats, legs spread far apart, his well packed midriff spilling over his belt buckle. He looked glum.

  ‘Where’s Punch and Judy, then?’ I said. I was trying to sound distant and casual.

  ‘What?’

  I jerked a thumb at the new cleaner.

  ‘Chance they’ll be fired,’ Tony said.

  I was crestfallen. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really,’ he said dryly. ‘Turns out it’s against camp rules to disconnect the windpipe of your bill-topping Italian Tenor. Who’d have thought it? What’s the world coming to?’ He yawned; a little theatrically, I thought. Then his eyes fell on my room-mate behind me. ‘Nobby, you good-for-nothing Mancunian bastard.’

  ‘Charming, fucking charming,’ said Nobby, ‘you get one dose of gastroenteritis for a couple of days, one miserly virus and you stay off work to protect your mates from contagion and what abuse do you get? What abuse do you get? I’m glad you asked me that. I’ll tell you what abuse you get . . .’

  But I wasn’t listening. I sat down. I was too busy thinking about whether something precious had been torn away from me or whether I’d had a lucky escape. I know that if Terri had asked me to walk over a cliff with her I would have followed, just for the chance of a kiss on the way down.

  Nikki, in crisply laundered whites, crashed in the seat next to me. ‘Why the long face?’ She lifted her leg so that her exquisite right ankle balanced on her tantalising left knee. Her pleated white skirt fell away to expose her tanned thighs.

  I realised she was talking to me. ‘Can’t sleep. Since I’ve been here.’

  ‘You’re not drinking enough, college boy. Or too much.’

  ‘I don’t like getting drunk. I’m a mean drunk.’

  She looked at me sceptically and was about to speak when Tony jumped out of his seat and clapped his hands loudly.

  ‘Right then, if I can interrupt you love birds,’ – he was looking at me and Nikki – ‘let me point out we have a big day ahead of us. Before that, please, a big round of applause for Nobby who decided to come to work today.’

  Ironic applause followed. I found myself joining in.

  ‘Fucking charming, that!’ Nobby said. He started to say a lot more but Tony waved him into silence.

  ‘Girls, whist-drive this morning and round-the-clock. Sammy, you do the Glamorous Grandmother and don’t let those old birds grab your wig this week. Nobby, supervise the Crown Bowls if you please.’

  ‘Fuckin ’ell,’ Nobby croaked, but to himself.

  ‘Nikki, show David the cheeky on the Junior Tarzan and the Bathing Belle around the pool. This afternoon, everyone in here with me for the prize giving and farewell. That means all of you and that means you as well, Nobby. Right, out you go, and smile like it’s already home-time.’

  By ten o’clock we had the open-air swimming pool arena set up, with the PA crackling and buzzing. It was already sweltering. We broke the rules and took off our heavy blazers and worked instead in our whites. Let them fire us, Nikki said, drawing columns on a sheet of paper attached to her clipboard. Then she looked up, put her pen behind her ear and reached out to hook something off my shirt. It was a ladybird. She blew it off her finger.

  ‘And another,’ she said finding a second on my collar. ‘They’re all over you.’

  The ladybirds darting through the sultry morning air were well outnumbered by the Junior Tarzans. The sunshine seemed to bring them out. The Tarzans, that is. About seventy or eighty skinny kids and a dozen fat ones, all aged between seven and eleven, sporting swimwear and lined up around the edge of the pool. It was my job to employ the PA system to rustle up a couple of impartial judges, over which Nikki would preside. I was told to whittle the eighty kids down to a more manageable dozen. I had to ‘interview’ each kid in turn and keep it interesting. I failed. The only thing I could think of doing was to get each lad to say his name into the microphone and to offer a semblance of a Tarzan-like jungle cry. After the discriminating judges had got the number down to a dozen contenders, we started again, this time with a fiendish question, which was ‘Do you help your mum with the housework?’ These things passed as entertainment and all the boys got a stick of rock. The winner’s name – the boy with the best blood-curdling cry – had his name written down on the clipboard for the prize-giving show.

  There was a half hour break before we ran the Bathing Belle competition designed for young women aged between 16 and 21. This time I got to be a judge along with a fresh pair of holidaymakers and Nikki did the interviewing. It all went fine but the heat was building. At the hottest part of the day the girls were forced to swat the flying bugs as they described their hobbies and expressed an interest in World Peace.

  We agreed on a pretty winner and Nikki made the announcement. Nikki embarrassed me by declaring that part of the prize was the chance to give me a kiss. I took it all in good part as the winner planted her lips on my cheek. It wasn’t exactly a hardship.

  As the Bathing Belle competition was wrapped up, half a dozen sexy promotions girls dressed in hot-pants and low-cut blouses moved about the campers with trays of cigarettes. The hot-pants livery matched the design on the cigarette pack. It was a marketing drive for a cigarette called Players No. 6, a market-leader of the time.

  One of the No. 6 girls went into action on me, but I explained I was a non-smoker. I got chatting and she said all the girls were ‘models on assignment’. I didn’t know what that meant. To me they looked like pretty girls peddling coffin nails; though the girls were okay and I kept that opinion to myself. I noticed that Nikki, also a non-smoker, was sniffy with them.

  Nikki and I took our
clipboards and tin bins – emptied of candied rock – away from the pool and went to the cool of the cafe. I had a question for my fellow Greencoat. ‘Nikki, is everyone here on the take?’

  I wasn’t just thinking about what Nobby had told me. I was also flashing back on Colin’s words on my first day. Give ’em a cigarette but don’t never buy ’em a drink.

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Dunno. I thought we were just paid to give everyone a fun time. But it seems like everybody’s got an angle.’

  As I spoke, one of the No. 6 girls drifted near plying her wares, all smiles, full of easy charm.

  ‘Watch that girl,’ Nikki said.

  The girl, a willowy brunette, made a sale to a beefy looking man seated at a table with his wife and three children. Everyone was sucking on a straw dipped in a vividly coloured milkshake. Money exchanged hands and the girl took a pack of cigarettes from her tray. She popped the cellophane wrapper, flipped open the pack and flicked the box so that she could proffer one of the cigarettes to the customer. Then she discarded the cellophane wrapper in her tray. The customer, impressed by this sexy, extra little service smiled happily and the girl moved on to the next table.

  ‘What did you see?’ Nikki said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Nikki sniffed. ‘Not very clever for a college boy, are you?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘She makes the sale. She unwraps the pack for him as a nice little service. She flips open the lid and offers him a ciggie and that’s when she takes the voucher out of the pack. She tosses the voucher, with the wrapper, back into her tray and lights the ciggie for the dumb customer. Those vouchers trade for goods. It takes an age to save up the vouchers but if you skim one off each sale it’s worth a small fortune to you. Watch her again.’

  I studied the girl making another sale and this time I saw it: a green voucher slipped out of the pack and dumped in the tray with the wrappings. ‘Doesn’t anyone ever complain?’ I asked.

  ‘Most don’t notice. Most who do notice, they let it go. When the one person in every hundred complains she’ll apologise and give it back. If the customer complains further she might even pretend to cry and will claim it’s the only way they get paid. She’ll live with one complaint in a hundred.’

  ‘Well, it’s a small thing.’

  ‘It’s fucking stealing, is what it is,’ Nikki said sharply.

  ‘Okay, okay. You’re right.’

  But she was exercised now. ‘The whole camp is run like this. Who gets the kickback for letting these girls come in? Pinky and Perky, that’s who.’ Perky I discovered was her pet name for the man in the blue blazer who’d interviewed me while feeding sparrows from his desk. ‘Every promo you see on this site. Look at the little ponce who runs the arcade machine. He sponsors the Bathing Belle prize. You’ll see why this afternoon. And the bookie who comes on Donkey Derby day to fleece the campers. He pays to get his nose in the trough. Why haven’t you got a uniform that fits? Cos they budget for the gear but pocket it rather than give Dot the money she needs to kit us out. Everyone here has an angle.’

  ‘I don’t have an angle.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘What’s my angle, then?’

  I didn’t get an answer. She slipped on her sunglasses and looked away from me.

  ‘All right then,’ I asked her, ‘what’s your angle?’

  ‘My angle is figuring out everyone else’s angle.’

  I do believe that Nikki was good at that. I studied her as she stared moodily over at the No. 6 girls moving through the tables.

  I felt a stir amongst the people around me. It was Tony – or was it Abdul-Shazam – making his way between the tables, cracking jokes, shaking hands. Before my conversation with Nikki I would have said he was just doing his job, being a fun guy, giving everyone a laugh; but now I could see how he seemed to swell and feed and fatten on the attention until he seemed taller and broader and shinier than everyone else in the room. I thought that it might be possible to do both things effectively at the same time.

  He took a chair at our table. ‘All sorted?’ he asked me, loudly enough for everyone around us to hear. ‘Signed all those boys up for the Foreign Legion? And did you get a date with the winner of the Bathing Belle?’

  Nikki saved me from having to think of a smart answer. ‘He done brilliant.’

  Tony smiled. ‘Well, you must be good because Nikki hands out compliments like a Yorkshireman parts with his money. But don’t let it go to your head because she’s impervious to all offers.’ Nikki was about to object but Tony threw his arms wide and burst into song, some old music hall thing about waiting forever for the girl of your dreams. He got a ripple of applause for it.

  Nikki looked like she’d heard it all before too many times. She drained her coffee and picked up her clipboard. ‘Okay I’ll see you lovely boys later this afternoon.’

  Tony watched her go. ‘Pretty girl isn’t she, that Nikki?’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘You will say. If she could just relax and whiten up a bit she’d be the perfect woman.’ I wasn’t sure if he’d said ‘whiten’ or ‘lighten’. Tony ordered a coffee and another for me from a passing waitress. ‘Mind you, I can’t blame her.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You know something, David? The boys and girls here have taken to you.’

  I felt my cheeks flame.

  ‘They like your easy way with things,’ he went on. He was over-focused on me, not breaking eye contact for a second and I felt uncomfortable. ‘They like your style. You’re also smart and they like that.’

  ‘But Nikki is smart, and so are some of the others.’

  ‘Some,’ he said. He gave me a huge smile. I noticed again that an element of the near-orange suntan was actually residual stage make-up. ‘You represent what the smart ones aspire to. College and all that. But there’s no side on you. They expect you to be stuck up but you’re not and they like that.’

  Partly to deflect Tony’s embarrassing focus on me, I launched into a notion that I had about ordinary people who didn’t get a chance to go to college. I said that I met lots of folk who should get the chance but never did; and that at college I had met a lot of posh types who didn’t deserve the chance at all; and that the awful British class system was at the root of a lot of injustice in our society. While I banged on Tony stared at me with shining eyes, as if no one had ever said this before, even though he must have heard it a million times.

  He waited until I finished and looked at me seriously. ‘You see, David, the people in this country don’t know what’s coming. There’s a recession deepening and things are going to get ugly. But they don’t see it. They’re like the drunk who doesn’t want to leave a party. Well, it’s time they sobered up and realised that we’ve had the party and it’s time to pay the cabbie and go home.’

  I didn’t know which cabbie he meant, exactly, but I nodded anyway. ‘What we want,’ he continued, ‘is more ordinary boys like you going to college. This is the future. Not a gang of toffs quaffing champagne from a lady’s slipper while they formulate government policy.’ He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘They’re rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, you understand that, don’t you, son?’

  I said I did.

  ‘I knew you were a good ’un as soon as I clapped eyes on you. You can tell. Only you have to be careful who you’re talking to. They don’t want to talk politics, most of this lot. They’d rather suck on the titty and leave it all to others. I knew you were different.’ He got to his feet and picked up our empty coffee cups, even though there was a waitress to collect them. ‘I’ll pay for these.’ He went over to the counter and made a joke with the girl working the till. I didn’t see any money change hands.

  When he came back he said, ‘You’re not doing anything tomorrow, are you?’

  The next day was Saturday, changeover day. It was my day off and I had no one with whom to spend it. I shrugged.

  ‘There�
��s some interesting people we want you to meet.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Midday, outside the main gates. We’ll pick you up in the car.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Midday. Tomorrow.’ Then he turned and walked away from me, breaking into some old crooning song. There was a very old white-haired lady at a table near the door. He dropped into a crouch, grasped her hand and gazed soulfully into her eyes as he sang. Then he released her and was gone.

  The Friday farewell show came and went. It was led expertly by Abdul-Shazam in his red fez. He was good. He had the audience feeding from his hand. He expertly set up his gags (jokes were called gags by showbiz people) with terrific timing. He improvised around the names of the prize-winners and nothing fell flat. I got to help with some of his magic act, around which the prize-giving was structured. It was exciting to see the simple mechanisms at large, the false bottoms, the fake linings of the magic act. Rather than stealing away the enchantment, this insight only made it more fascinating. With light and shadow everything worked. Kids and adults alike were drawn up on stage and induced to stick their hand in a velvet bag or under a steel blade. Their trust was uncanny. They abdicated all responsibility. They let the authority of the stage take over them.

  The power wielded under the arc lamps by Tony-Abdul-Shazam was a little bit disturbing. Only I and his other stage assistants were close enough to see the perspiration that went into his act. Everyone who came on stage was given a baton of candy rock they could carry away with them, a multi-coloured magic wand. Yes, when they got back to their seats it would be nothing more than a stick of sugar in a cellophane wrapper, but by then it was someone else’s turn to be up on stage, blinking, dazzled by the limelight.

  The farewell show was eventually followed by the Friday Revue and I noticed that Luca’s attitude had changed. He breezed in before the show and he was polite, he greeted everyone; but he was professional and distant, flinty even. Then he shut himself in his changing room. As soon as the last dancer had high kicked the finale into touch and the show was done he bid a cheery buona notte and was out and off the premises sharpish. He showed no more interest in staying behind for a drink. I was disappointed. I was a young man looking to learn about the world and I wanted to hear more of his wisdom. He was an artist: not like Picasso, but still a true artist, living by his talent. His path was different to that of other men, and I was disposed to learn something from him. Colin had put a stop to all of that with a single burst of hair-trigger violence and brutality.