To the Devil - a Diva!

by Paul Magrs

  As she took it from him she was reflecting that she hadn’t done badly today in the taking-people-over-stakes. She’d always had a knack for that. Just twenty-four hours and all her life had changed around completely. All sorts of fabulously sinister things were in train and she was having goose-fleshy bumps of nostalgia at the very thought.

  She knew that this was all down to the intercession of the Brethren. She knew it was they who had brought about these sudden upturns in her fortunes and she was glad. She knew that their powers were boundless. The Brethren had fingers in a surprising number of pies.

  This text message had to be from them. When she clicked it on the screen she was reassured to see their distinctive Gothic font:

  ‘Excellent progress, daughter. The Brethren advise that U rest well over the coming weekend and prepare yourself for the rigours of your first week back in harness. We will B in touch with further instructions.’

  They were always solicitous. They always made her feel special. The Chosen One and all that. Karla was obscurely chuffed by that treatment. They’d been a bit quiet for a few years and she’d wondered if they had forgotten all about her. Hey! Remember me? You’ve got a willing servant in Cricklewood! And she’d found herself, during those wilderness years of the convention circuit and appearances on daytime quiz shows, craving the attentions and flattery that the Brethren had always given her. She had started to assume that other, younger, more useful agents had come along.

  But they were loyal, she had found. They had bided their time. Waited to deploy her again. Struck when the iron was hot. Now she was in her prime.

  Karla was thrilled by all of this.

  The Brethren knew what they were doing. They had been marshalling and instructing the likes of her for decades; for centuries. She didn’t really know who they were or what they individually did in their daylight hours, but she had every confidence in them. She was their daughter and she would do their bidding without question.

  But no one told Karla when to take it easy. It was all very well for them to text her, saying rest up over the weekend. But she was all fraught now, all keyed up. Ready for action. As she erased their message she was even bridling slightly. All these years without them, she was damned if they were coming back and telling her what to do every minute of the day. She was used to looking after herself.

  ‘You seem cross,’ Kevin the porter noted, fiddling with his golden buttons.

  She shrugged him away. Made him pour her a drink. Crème de menthe.

  ‘I can’t keep you here forever, Kevin,’ she said, settling into a high-backed chair. It was like a throne and the fabric was warm on her bare back. ‘I mean, it’s very nice having you jump at my every word, but you must have other duties to perform, for the other guests.’

  ‘The management have placed me entirely at your disposal.’

  Have they indeed? She couldn’t help beaming at this. ‘Pour yourself one,’ she said. She watched him unsurely sip his drink. She nodded for him to sit on the end of the bed. She let the awkward silence settle between them.

  ‘Do you have family, Kevin? A girlfriend?’

  The atmosphere in the room was cloying; snarled and snagged like cobwebs. He coughed on the fumey drink.

  ‘Married. Two kids, three and eighteen months. Boy and a girl.’

  ‘Family man,’ she smiled, clunking the ice in her green glass. ‘Nice.’

  ‘And you?’

  She stared at him. For a moment he seemed almost insolent. Sitting there on her huge bed, mussing it up. Asking her personal questions. But there was a guilelessness about him. She had to remind herself: this man was in thrall to her. He couldn’t do her harm. Her own powers were augmented by the forceful wills of the combined Brethren. Nothing could touch her now.

  Yet her voice came out choked and harsh. ‘No, Kevin. I have no family. I’ve no one at all.’ She put a hand up to her face and covered her eyes. She felt her lashes scraping on the crêpey flesh of her palm and she heard the rustle of Kevin getting off the end of the bed and coming over to her, in one smooth movement.

  ‘But anyone can see,’ he was saying gruffly, ‘Anyone can see that you deserve to have people devoted to you.’ He was all concern. He was anguished with concern, she could tell. ‘I am devoted to you. You know that, mistress. And others will be.’

  Now he was kneeling in the thick pile of the carpet. She took her hand away from her face and looked down at him. His face was pale and earnest, and his eyes were shining a startling blue. She liked the way his eyebrows were so thick and dark, arching up into his brow. Incredulous that she could think herself alone.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m apt to get like this, Friday nights.’

  TWENTY

  Sometimes Colin wondered why he bothered coming to Slag! bar on his nights off. It was like being in work all the time. Like all his life revolved around this part of Canal Street: like he could never get away.

  The place was filling up. The nighttime drinking crowd were here in earnest. They bustled and shoved at the bars on each level and they hustled and hurried up the open plan stairs.

  You had to go somewhere on your nights off, he told himself. You had to go out.

  He met Raf and Vicki at the long, shiny bar, where they were already ordering shots of schnapps and looking quite excitable. They had both dashed home from their comics shop at tea time – Vicki to West Didsbury, Raf to Rusholme – and then they had dressed up. Raf was in an extraordinary suit made of some sheeny, cerise stuff, his shirt cuffs falling over his hands. Vicki was wearing a high-necked cashmere pullover, and Colin was surprised to see that it didn’t have any kind of design on the front.

  ‘We’ve both made a stupendous effort,’ Vicki said in her rasping voice. Colin saw that she was eyeing his own outfit. He was in just another tight T-shirt. It was the same as his work one, except it didn’t say ‘Slag!’ on the front. He stared back at Vicki until she looked away. He knew she didn’t like him, and was at a loss to know why. Sometimes he thought she was downright spiteful. It wasn’t even like he’d ever been nasty to her, or said anything out of turn. She had just made her mind up to treat him like a twat. He was surprised she had even agreed to come on the same night out.

  Raf was always oblivious to the tensions between his two best friends. When Vicki had one of her digs at Colin, and Colin bit his lip and refused to be drawn into a barney, Raf would gaze away into the distance. Even if Colin snapped back and the two of them ended up rowing, he wouldn’t be pulled into it. Raf liked to think his pals got along with each other like they got on with him: easily and smoothly and with him serene, at the centre of their attention. Any discontent and he switched off. Somehow he made this seem like exquisite good manners.

  ‘We got you one of these,’ Raf said and passed Colin a tiny plastic shot glass. Colin would have preferred a pint of lager. These plastic pots put him in mind of medication: Night Nurse or something. He gulped it down.

  Raf leant in and whispered: ‘She was on the tea-time news. Did you see it?’

  Colin nodded and smiled, a bit disconcerted by that rapt look on Raf’s face. It was exactly how he’d been at the Birmingham convention. That’s how all the Karla fans at Slashcon had been, and Colin had imagined himself in a hotel full of zombies. Zombies who filled their days and nights with amateur erotica and wistful dreams about people off the telly.

  ‘I watched it with my gran,’ Colin said.

  Now’s when I could tell them, Colin thought. I could tell them what Gran had said. When she was shouting at the telly and squawking at the pictures of Karla on the box. Before she bolted out of the flat to call on Effie. I could floor them both this time. I could knock their socks off if I told them both: my gran knew Karla Sorenson. Years ago, when they were kids. When they grew up in Salford together. What would Raf and Vicki say to that? When they hear that I’ve got another connection, another route into your precious goddess

  Yet he held off. For now he would keep sch
tum. It was an admirable display of restraint from Colin, he thought, and he congratulated himself warmly and silently. Usually he had this urgent need to unburden himself of secrets in front of Raf: all his messiest, most treasured secrets, for Raf to listen to, to turn over, to make of them what he willed.

  Colin was glowing and mulling this over and realised that Raf and Vicki were rabbiting on between themselves. Vicki was asking, ‘Do you think you’ll start writing FanFiction based on Menswear, Raf? To keep your website up-to-date?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘I think I’ll have to.’ Then he was leading them out of the heaving bar area and up the steps to the rooftop garden. Colin followed in his wake, and he kept having to nod to punters, who recognised him from behind the bar. Or maybe they just half-recognised him, and couldn’t remember where from. He felt weirdly out of his context and like no one would ever remember him for just himself. He sighed and looked down at the open-plan staircase, thinking: I was mopping these stairs spotless, just this morning. And now everyone’s treading all over them: muckying everything up.

  The lamps and the heaters were burning and sizzling out on the terrace. The space was only half-full and, as they leant on the balcony, over the potted shrubs, it was a bit like being on the prow of a cruise liner. They took in the view of the streets along the canal: the surging mass of people bobbing along in every direction.

  Vicki was rasping away and Colin gritted his teeth at the sound of her voice. ‘I feel like we are about to touch greatness. I can just sense it. Can you guys?’ She gave an elaborate shudder and gazed out at the spotlights beaming beer adverts onto the low-hanging clouds. ‘It’s like we’re about to come into contact with something … bigger, and much more fantastic than ourselves.’

  Raf raised his eyebrows like he couldn’t imagine anything at all, bigger and more fantastic than himself. Colin pulled a face. ‘What’s that you’re on about, love?’

  ‘Vicki has got highly-developed psychic abilities,’ Raf reprimanded him. ‘I’ve learnt to trust in her intuition.’

  Colin sighed. ‘You’re only on about Lance. He’s just the bloke who lives next door to the bar.’ He nodded at the fire escape leading up to Lance’s pad. They all looked. The blinds were drawn all the way across the tall windows. There was only a faint suggestion of light and life within. A tantalising sheen of light, Colin thought. He wondered what Lance was up to. And what state he was in by now. Colin sighed. ‘He’s just some bloke off the telly. That’s not greatness.’

  Vicki widened her eyes and blinked at them both. ‘I’m not just talking about meeting people off the telly. I mean … something more.’

  Raf was rivetted. ‘What, Vicki?’

  She chewed her thumb. It looked dirty. ‘I don’t know yet. But there’s something brewing here. Something stirring … Something out of the ordinary.’

  Raf peered over the balcony. ‘You can probably smell the canal.’ His shrewd eyes flicked to Colin. ‘So. When do you think your celebrity pal will turn up?’

  ‘I explained before, Raf. He isn’t here every night. I told you, we might not even see him.’

  Vicki surprised him then, by talking sense. ‘We shouldn’t get all our hopes up. Let’s concentrate on having a nice night together.’ She smiled sweetly at Colin. ‘You know, I don’t mind it here much. It’s quite pleasant, for a gay place.’

  There was a cool, slightly rancid and beery breeze slicing through the tall rooftops, ruffling the awnings and spiralling around the dark turrets of the apartment blocks clustered round the canal. Colin shivered and wondered what Vicki imagined was brewing around them; what it was she thought was stirring in the night. He was watching her narrowly and then she was whipping her jumper off over her head and messing up her hair. As she tied her pully round her waist he saw what was on the front of her T-shirt. The words: ‘Lance Randall in Menswear’, and a fuzzy screen-grab of him flashing his cock. Vicki pulled it tight, down over her boobs and grinned at the two of them. ‘Ten quid down the Arndale. Not bad, eh?’

  Colin didn’t dare imagine what Lance would say.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sally was less prone to dark moods than Effie. This was because Effie lived in that poky flat and Sally was up in the sky with all that light and air. Sally was sure of this. And when Effie had one of her moments of despair, Sally tended to leave her to her own devices.

  Tonight, out on the ring road, at the long tables of Harry Ramsden’s restaurant with all the old dears, it was Sally who was slipping into a funk. She was grateful that Effie had enough respect not to try to pull her out of it.

  ‘You’re not having much fun, are you?’ was all she said. ‘You’re not exactly the life and soul.’

  Sally just glowered. She was finding it hard to join in with the others, singing along with Alma Cogan, Frankie Vaughan. She felt a fool, sitting with these people her age, dolled up in her new black dress. Most of them were paired up and being quite exclusive, opening and closing their mouths; warbling along with their emptied plates set out in front of them. Dirty plates smeared in chip fat and tomato sauce.

  And, Sally thought, I made a mistake in having those spicy pickled onions. She’d ordered this speciality side dish here before and knew full well they repeated on her. Now she had biliousness to add to her list of woes. But she knew her trapped wind was just a symptom of something deeper, and worse.

  These people around her embarrassed her. She felt daft for thinking this would have been a good night out. She felt silly in advance, thinking of how she’d be telling Colin, later, that they’d had a lovely time. Even the food hadn’t been top-notch. They must give the substandard fish to block-bookings, she thought: all the black bits, all the soggy batter.

  She was looking at Effie and the cronies through Karla Sorenson’s eyes. That’s what she realised. She was wolfing down pickles that made her eyes water while everyone sang with Peggy Lee and she was wondering bitterly what Karla would make of this lot. Karla, who had managed to escape from her own generation. Karla, thinking that she, Sally, was done up too flashy, too cheap.

  ‘Are you having a pudding?’ Effie asked her. She watched her friend crunching the last of the pickles and dabbing her fingers on a paper napkin. Sally shook her head quickly. ‘That’s not like you, either.’

  Thankfully the music had subsided as everyone set about deciding on their sweets. Besides Effie, Sally hadn’t talked to anyone tonight. Usually there was a bit of backchat, a bit of banter. Maybe some harmless flirting with the likes of that Trevor. But Trevor looked proper thick with his skinny wife tonight. He was all brushed up in a navy blazer, on best behaviour. Talking his wife into a knickerbocker glory.

  ‘Do you ever wish you had a regular fella, Effie?’ she asked, suppressing a small belch.

  Effie’s lips pursed. ‘I do not. I’ve tried that once and I wasn’t overly keen.’

  This surprised Sally. ‘When was this? Who was it?’

  Effie sighed. Self-disclosure. This was the price of drawing Sally out tonight. ‘It was years ago. He was the son of my mother’s best friend. They set us up. He was a big soft thing who spent his time putting model warships together. A bit simple.’

  ‘I take it it didn’t last long.’

  Effie shrugged. ‘Almost six years. We all went to Mass together, as a foursome. And into town on a Saturday afternoon. Mam and Mrs Barnet were good neighbours for years, so I had to tag along, and so did this great gallumphing lad. Daniel. When Mrs Barnet passed away it fizzled out. Daniel wouldn’t leave the house. I think he went funny. Mam didn’t think I ought to go round anymore, not even to check on him. Yet she had been the one pushing us together. Trying to get me off her hands. When he went a bit daft and you didn’t see him out and about and his net curtains were looking dirty and shabby, well, then she nipped it in the bud. She called the Social Services on him.’

  Sally was staring at her friend. She had never heard any of this before.

  ‘They put him away in the end. Led him out into the stre
et. He was in his pyjamas and they were too small for him. We went out to look and I didn’t know whether to wave or what. He had all of this grey hair poking out through the gaps in his pyjama top. He looked really startled, standing in the daylight, out in the street.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sally. ‘That story’s really cheered me up.’ Then she touched Effie’s hand gently. ‘Sorry. But that’s an awful story. How old were you?’

  ‘I was nearly forty when they led him away,’ Effie said. The singing was starting up again. ‘It was my last proper chance, really. That’s what I realised, a long time after.’ Sally poured them both another dribble of tea. ‘He was my first and my last.’

  ‘Were you intimate together?’

  ‘Just a bit. He was ever so careful with me. Scared he would damage me. I remember his hands had all these scars from his modelling knife. And dried bits of that flaky Airfix glue.’

  ‘Effie,’ Sally said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s to be sorry about? It mightn’t have been the romance of the century, but it was my little bit of excitement. It was mine.’ Her mouth twitched. She smiled. ‘I haven’t lived much, have I?’

  Sally laughed. ‘Who has, really? How do you measure these things?’ Sally was wondering: just how much have I lived? Can I really say I’ve had more excitement than Effie has? More chances?

  ‘I’ll tell you who you can measure against,’ Effie said. ‘And none of us have really lived, compared to the life she’s had.’

  Sally knew what she was going to say. ‘Karla.’ The word made her shiver. That name was the one behind all her gloom and dread tonight. It was that name that had put her out of sorts.

  ‘She must have lived enough for all of us,’ Effie said. ‘She’s had all of our lives and more to spare.’

  Sally said, ‘I would like to see her again. Just once. Just to see what she’s like now. After everything. And to see if that’s true. See how much life she’s really had. And what it’s all done to her.’