To the Devil - a Diva!

by Paul Magrs

  She had to fight herself awake. Panting, sweating, flustered.

  I’ll never be free. That was her first thought, whenever she woke.

  There was no protection in splendour, no succour in luxury. The old demons would always have their way.

  But here, now, in the suite at the top of the Prince Albert in Manchester she was resolving: they wouldn’t stand in the way of her career. They wouldn’t come between her and this next reinvention of herself.

  She had too much work to do.

  TWELVE

  It was going to be a wasted day. Lance decided that he deserved it. He’d had rotten news. The worst. And all he could do in response was lavishly waste the whole day.

  No one was talking to him. That afternoon he tried to get in touch with the Menswear office. Again and again. They weren’t saying anything at all and Adrian the producer wasn’t coming to the phone. Lance supposed he was too busy buttering up that depraved old hag.

  What he should be doing, what he was scheduled to do, was learning his scripts for next week. They had been couriered around at lunchtime by a motorcycle boy, who’d come clattering up the iron rungs of the fire escape just like he did every Friday. Dropping off the thick wodge of scripts – five fat volumes – and getting Lance to sign for them. Creaking in his motorcycling leathers, grinning through the visor of his helmet. Generally Lance looked forward to the courier’s weekly appearance, even though the package of laser-printed words and words and more words meant a whole lot of work for him. Learning by rote had never been his strong point. Lance preferred things to be spontaneous.

  There wasn’t the slightest ounce of joy in the courier’s advent today. Lance signed with a sigh, barely looking at him, and the lad went away perplexed. Missing the usual banter and tip. Sometimes Lance even made him a cup of tea. Not today. And the scripts still lay in their padded envelope on his dining table, untouched hours later.

  I should open them, he thought. I really should. I don’t want to fall behind. I can’t. I can’t slip behind and let that prehistoric bitch steal my thunder. Next thing I know they’ll be looking for excuses to kill me off. I’ll get fewer and fewer scenes each week. I’ll be dwindling away. I’ll rip through page after page of script, looking for what meagre lines I’ve got left to me and soon enough there won’t be any at all …

  He’d seen this happen before, to unpopular members of the cast. Those who proved difficult, demanding or just inept. One minute their character would be hale and hearty and at the centre of the show. Next, they’d find themselves hooked up to life-support and all the cast was gathering round them. They’d have to play dead with tubes up their nose, ekeing out their pathetic, final scenes.

  Then, with Lance out of the way, Menswear would become the Karla Sorenson show. They might as well change the name now, and have done with him.

  Gradually, that afternoon, he sunk into a terrible gloom. He was determined not to drink, however. He’d had a tiny sip first thing, but that was only to steady his nerves. He absolutely refused to get stewed. He’d just sit quiet. Being depressed. Doing nothing. Having what the Americans called a Mental Health Day.

  Hm.

  He went to see if he had any more empty bottles to sling down into the alleyway, but they were all gone. Even my empties are deserting me, he thought miserably.

  Now he was even wishing he hadn’t been so deliberately frosty with the motorcycle boy. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t deserve to be snubbed. Lance could have asked him to stay a little while. Pass some time chatting. Just chatting. Taking Lance out of himself, out of this crushing mood.

  It wasn’t just gloom and pique, he realised with a start.

  It wasn’t just professional rage.

  Lance sat bolt upright on his white leather settee and tried to snag the threads of emotion tangling through him. He tried to put a name to them. And when he could he found, with a desolating pang, that upmost amongst them … was fear.

  I am afraid of Karla Sorenson, he thought. She terrifies the life out of me. And then, when he thought about going to work next week, into rehearsal and meeting her and greeting her and having to put on a falsely welcoming face – there was this awful black dread coursing through him.

  She will be the death of me, he thought. Just as she was for Mum. That’s what she’s come to Manchester for. She’s here to take my very soul.

  At this, he sat quiet for a bit. Completely motionless. Then his eyes started flicking around the room.

  He hurried through to the alcove just off his rumpled bedroom, to stand before the consoling studio portrait of his mother.

  ‘I – I need advice,’ he stammered. ‘I need to be brave.’

  He stared up into her silver grey eyes. They were so understanding. They even seemed to narrow in concern across the years. Mum was smiling at him benignly from beyond.

  When she spoke her voice was liquid, musical, rushing through the glass and into him.

  ‘Then brave you must be, my son. It is all true. Dark forces are gathering in Greater Manchester. But you must fight on. Menswear is your show and proud I am of you for being its star. You must never slip, Lance. You must be professional at all times. Do it for me, my darling son. Learn your lines. Don’t let them see that you are hurt and afraid. Prove to me that you can do it.’

  Dry-mouthed, Lance watched the silvery sheen depart from the portrait’s limpid eyes.

  ‘I will, Mum,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’ll do everything you say.’

  He wanted to shout out to her. To beg her to come back to him.

  But he knew he had to be a big boy now.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘That’s amazing, Raf.’

  Vicki said this about three times as Raf divulged his news.

  ‘That’s really amazing.’

  She didn’t get a chance to say anything else as he gabbled on. It wasn’t like him, really, to gabble like that. Usually he retained his poise and cool. That was what Raf was all about. He was like a supermodel, the way he stropped and strutted about. Up and down the dusty aisles of SpoilerSpace Comics. He never broke out of that studied calm, never dropped his cool. That was why Vicki regarded him with awe, the way only someone half his height and nearly twice his weight could do. Raf was her hero.

  She looked down at herself. Down at her Yoda T-shirt. Couldn’t see over her boobs. Oh, he was a different order of creature completely. He was a supermodel and she … I have a look of Ken Barlow, she thought glumly.

  ‘Are you taking in the magnitude?’ Raf asked her sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, Raf.’ Thinking: if only. She looked up into his face.

  ‘We have to mobilise,’ he seethed, staring off into space, beyond the racks of comics, way beyond the snuffling punters. ‘We have to plan this step by step … like a military operation.’

  Vicki had missed something. Hang on. Go back. What had he been suggesting? What were they planning? And did it even matter? She’d follow him to the ends of the earth, she decided. You gorgeous skinny boy bitch.

  He was staring at her. Eyes like Frappelatte from Nero’s. Strong and cool. And a bit milky.

  Snap out of it, Vicki, she told herself. He doesn’t want anything from the likes of you. You are just his stout lieutenant. Privy to all his odd little schemes.

  ‘We have to get to her,’ he said. And took a deep breath. ‘We have to get to Karla.’

  ‘Perhaps we could ask her to come to the shop and sign some merchandise?’ Vicki suggested.

  Raf sneered. ‘Merchandise? Sign? Her?! Her, of all people, come to this tatty dump and scrawl her name on tat, on absolute awful fucking tat for this lot?’ He gestured to the few customers. They were keeping their heads down.

  ‘We stock some of her DVDs,’ Vicki mumbled. ‘And posters and stills and that …’

  ‘Ha!’ gasped Raf. ‘You think I’d share her … that I’d share Karla with the kind of … people we get in here? That I would share her with FANS?’

  Vic
ki flushed and blushed. She lowered her eyes and thought: I’m your fan, Raf. It was the first time she had put it to herself like this. But it was true. She felt about him like some people felt about Angel off Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But at least he was real. At least he was standing here in front of her, here behind the glass cabinets of the sales desk. He was bristling with ferocious energy: real and just inches away from her sweating palms.

  ‘I won’t share her,’ Raf said quietly.

  Yet you did, Raf, Vicki thought. Last October. At that convention down in Birmingham. When you came back glowing and gleaming and just about struck dumb. Like someone who’d had a conversion. You shared her then with a huge crowd of the unwashed. You’d seen her in the flesh, but you were just one of a sea of faces.

  Wasn’t that enough for you? And what are you planning now, with your eyes like the ice clinking in a Frappelatte? Suddenly Vicki felt a stab of nerves. What lengths was he prepared to go to? He was looking and sounding like some kind of stalker. Vicki knew what stalkers were like. She’d had a few of her own, working here. Really. Even me. She was proud of the fact, even though they’d turned her stomach, each and every one of them. Still. It was nice to get the attention.

  The thought of that convention made her cross all over again. That do last October when Raf had swanned off with his new pal in tow. That Colin. The one who’d turned up this lunchtime. Raf said there was nothing going on there. Just a good pal. Mollifying Vicki. Not his best pal. Just another pal. Vicki didn’t like the look of Colin, with his spiked red hair. Never had done. A real Canal Street puff. And fancy turning up here at lunchtime in a T-shirt that said Slag! all over the front. He’d get his head stoved in. No sense. Bad influence on Raf, Vicki was sure of it. Sure to drag him into silly gay boys’ world and Raf wasn’t very happy there, was he? He always came home depressed when he was out on the scene. Vicki couldn’t see what any of them saw in it.

  Anyway, Colin didn’t like or know anything about the kind of stuff, the kinds of films that Raf based his life around. Vicki had snorted when Raf told her the story of how he and Colin had met during Mardi Gras. How the superficial twat hadn’t even realised who Raf was meant to be dragged up as. ‘God, Raf!’ Vicki had laughed. ‘It was so fucking obvious. You might as well have had a big sign round your neck saying ‘I am meant to be Karla Sorenson, the well known lesbian vampire queen.’ What is he, blind? Who was he dressed as?’

  ‘No one,’ Raf had laughed. ‘Nothing. Just some dancing little gay boy.’

  Vicki had tutted. Raf didn’t have any sense sometimes. He’d never been able to find his own level; his own context, if you like. If only he’d take Vicki’s advice a bit more. She’d sort him out. She supposed maybe it was to do with his being Asian. It must make things so much more confusing for him.

  Vicki’s mother loved Raf to bits. Vicki had taken him for lunch there once. Dragged him all the way down to West Didsbury. ‘Oh, do bring that delightful girlish Asian boy back again, Vicki, love,’ Mum had said, only recently.

  Vicki brought herself back to the present. Raf was enlisting her.

  ‘I need you to come out with me,’ he was saying, deadly earnest.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What have I been saying?’ he snapped and then controlled himself. He needed her. ‘Slag! bar,’ he said. ‘Tonight. Colin’s promised me that he’s going to have a go at Lance, but I can’t trust him to do anything useful. He’s too flaky. Not like you.’

  Bit of egregious flattery there, but Vicki wasn’t complaining.

  ‘Lance Randall’s always in Slag!, according to Colin. Never out. He lives just next to it and he’s a complete lush. He’s our weak spot. He’s our way in to Karla.’

  ‘Lance Randall off Menswear?’ Vicki gasped. She was a fan of his too. She could wear her Lance Randall T-shirt. ‘Are we going to meet him?’

  ‘Too right. And,’ Raf smiled tightly, ‘one of us is going to seduce him.’

  ‘Isn’t he gay?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Raf. ‘He reckons he isn’t. Anyway. You glam yourself up a bit. We’ll meet at nine on the rooftop bar. Colin’s going to try and introduce us and then we’re in.’

  ‘So what am I there for?’

  ‘Support.’

  ‘Oh,’ she smiled, brightening.

  ‘And,’ Raf added, ‘if he turns out to be that way inclined, fanny bait.’

  Vicki, shocked, started to laugh. ‘You’re awful, Lance.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But it’ll be a laugh either way. You up for it?’

  She beamed up at him. ‘Course I am.’

  FOURTEEN

  Colin didn’t want his gran thinking he treated their place like a hotel. He made a habit of popping back home for tea with her every day. Even when his shifts at Slag! were tight, he still thought it was worth going home. Even when it seemed like he only had time enough to turn round and get back on the bus.

  He couldn’t let his gran down.

  She wasn’t lonely or bored. Wasn’t that type. She had stacks of mates and no end of gentlemen admirers, as she called them. Colin’s gran wasn’t one for being left at a loose end. Teatime was sacrosanct though, and that was when she made time for Colin, and the least he could do was be there for it.

  He caught the bus back to their estate and the whole trip out of the city centre passed in a blur. He was thinking about Raf, about Lance, about what might happen. He’d never seen Raf so animated about anything.

  They were on the ninth floor of a block overlooking the river. You could see right across the city from there: all the dark, blocky roofs under the streaky blue brown of the sky.

  When he got in Gran was frying bacon, grilling halved tomatoes, fussing in their narrow kitchen. The light was subaqueous, strip-lit and the air thick with cooking fumes, from a grill pan neither fancied scouring out. She was in a high-necked dressy dress, spangling with silver threads and a pinny tied over the top to catch the splashes of fat. She’d had her hair done. A pale blue wash through the fine scalloped waves.

  ‘Are you off out, Gran?’

  She gave a small jump and shriek and glared at him. ‘Sneaking up on me. You could have been anyone.’

  ‘I yoo-hooed down the corridor.’

  ‘Not loud enough, Colin, love. My heart’s doing twenty to the dozen.’ She had Radio 2 on, rattling away on the formica table, the extendable aerial poking out through the window. Gran thought the reception up here exceptional.

  ‘You look very nice,’ he told her.

  She touched her new hair distractedly as she poked her spatula at the bacon. ‘Do I? Thanks, love. It’s an Old Dear’s Night Out. Special do at Harry Ramsden’s. All the fish and chips you can eat and an old time singalong. Not really my thing, but I swore down to Effie I’d keep her company.’ Gran’s face was squeezed up in a grimace. She had a terrifically lined and seamed complexion. Somehow it looked good on her. Colin never understood that. She used about a million different moisturisers and youth-enhancing skin treatments but she still always looked ‘like a used bloody old paper bag,’ as she put it. ‘Still, I’m characterful, that’s what I am. Full of character. And people like that, don’t they, chuck?’ She was very slim too, and bizarrely sprightly for her age.

  ‘Are you working tonight, lovey?’

  He nodded and his gran was looking at his Slag! T-shirt, pursing her lips.

  ‘I hope you look after yourself down there,’ she said, peering under the grill, knowing she was talking out of turn. ‘There’s stuff in that local paper. People coming to bad ends. They found another boy dead, floating in the canal.’

  Colin knew. He’d seen the bunches of flowers strapped to the lamp post by the canal wall. Photos covered in clear plastic taped over the ‘missing’ posters.

  ‘He was a rent boy.’

  ‘Does it matter? He was still someone’s son.’

  ‘Didn’t mean it like that, Gran.’ He got the plates out of the cupboard. The ones with the hunting scenes trim. ‘I meant that rent
boys come in for more danger than the likes of me, working the bar.’

  ‘It’s still a dodgy place down there,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just a tourist trap now. It’s like …’ He laughed. ‘It’s like the Alton Towers of the gay world. It’s OK.’

  She peered at him thoughtfully. ‘It’s a funny old place,’ she said. ‘That whole stretch of canal, from Piccadilly Station to Deansgate. And it always has been a funny place. It attracts all sorts of people.’

  He knew better than to say too much when his gran got into one of her mysterious moods.

  He helped her dish up tea.

  FIFTEEN

  They sat in the living room to eat. Gran’s massive, evil-looking cat was stretched on the sheepskin rug. The telly was blaring. Local news. The newsreader was the one that neither Colin nor his gran could abide. He tended to read things out and then raise his eyebrow in scorn or incredulity. ‘He makes his feelings too plain,’ Gran would grumble. ‘He should be more impartial.’

  ‘Thinks a lot of himself, that one,’ Gran added today. She pointed at the screen with her knife dripping egg.

  The living room was crammed with china figurines. Every available surface was cluttered and arranged. An avid collector, Gran couldn’t resist the adverts in the Sunday supplements. Commemorative plates, ludicrously cute puppies and babies, ladies in crinoline skirts. She’d cut out coupons and fetch postal orders and wait for treasure to arrive, giftwrapped in tissue papers. Colin found himself having to be very careful, moving around at home. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Gran would react if one of her babies were smashed.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘How come you’re having your tea now? If you’re having fish and chips later?’

  She scowled again. ‘You know,’ she said quietly. ‘When I’m out … I only ever … pick.’

  He nodded. It was true. Gran didn’t like eating in public. As far as Colin knew she had always been like that. She would sit down to dinner with people and she would pretend to eat. She’d slice things up smaller and smaller and keep talking and hardly touch a thing.