by Paul Magrs
“And how old is that?”
“Just past forty. And then some. I want to see what life makes of you.”
A chill crept past Colin then, but he stopped himself. Hadn’t he thought similar things about his cousin? Hadn’t his father said them?
“It will be busy tonight,” said Colin. “You’ve got a drag karaoke and cheap spirits.”
Serena smiled as if he had said something very witty. “Oh, I enjoy rubbing shoulders with all the gay boys. They love me, you know.”
“Do they?” said Colin.
“I think my gay friends, my gay London friends, rather identify with me. I’ve had life’s hard knocks. I’ve reinvented myself. I know about men. About desire. I understand them.”
“Edinburgh queens aren’t the same as London queens,” said Wendy.
“A queen is a queen is a queen,” Serena corrected her. “It’s in the nature of these things. Despite all appearances, nature is immutable, sweetheart. Whatever they look like, or behave like, what all the queens are doing is simply this: they’re feeding off the Dionysian energy of the place. The city.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Look at this street,” Serena said. “All these Georgian houses. How pure, neat, straight they are.”
“The product of a tidy mind, Captain Simon says,” said Wendy.
“Jesus God,” said Colin.
“Exactly,” nodded Serena. “I believe that cities are the great sites of the age old battle between culture, classicism, purity—the Appollonian project, and that which is repressed, vivacious, diabolic, lascivious—the Dionysian. This walk from the Royal Circus to your little nightclub—CC Bloom’s, did you call it?—represents the divide and tension between those two warring worlds.”
Colin sniffed. “But I know some rich old queens who live up the posh end.”
Serena smiled at him like he hadn’t got the point. She said, “I myself love the tension more than anything. That’s what people miss out, when they talk about treating queens as ordinary, about regarding them as normal. You see, they aren’t ‘normal’, and nor would they want to be. They’re partaking in the eternally queer Dionysian revels…”
“Excuse me,” said Colin. “How come you get to categorize everyone?”
“It’s my prerogative as a faghag. I’ve been hagging longer than you’ve been fagging. So listen and you might learn a thing or two.”
That shut Colin up until they crossed shrouded Gayfield Square, London Road, and were safely in CC’s. When they turned around, he had vanished.
“Probably he found some friends,” Serena smiled, when Wendy started to make excuses for him. “I’m afraid young Colin doesn’t like me very much. He never did before.”
Wendy said, “I’ve never heard him sound so argumentative with anyone before.”
“He resents me. I’ve known his mother for years. He should thank me, really. It was me who warned her that he was growing up queer. Saw it a mile off, of course. Gaydar bleeping. And I, after all, was the one who had to talk to and console Anne after his diagnosis. He didn’t do anything for his poor mother. He clammed up in himself all that time. I had to explain everything to Anne.”
“It must have been very hard for her,” said Wendy. They were moving through the crush with their drinks, towards a table. People squeezed up.
Then Serena flung off her black wool coat to reveal a skimpy rubber outfit and black stockings. Wendy stared: you could virtually see the woman’s nipples. Serena flicked out her hair, laid her coat on a chair and glanced round to see that she’d been noticed. “My faghag’s outfit,” she said. “All the queens love a little light bondage. They think I’m hilarious.”
The man next to her muttered at her and both she and he guffawed. Serena sat down and Wendy asked, “What did he say?”
“I’ve no idea. His accent was impenetrable.”
Downstairs they found Colin in the dance floor, talking with
an ex. He was glad to be rescued.
“He came running over as if I was his best friend,” he said. “And he was the one who was a complete bastard to me. That chef.”
“Oh, him,” said Wendy.
Serena was looking for a space on the floor to drop her cigarette. “Are we dancing?”
So they danced with Serena, who seemed to jockey everyone around her and fall purposefully into strangers’ arms.
“Look at him dancing on that podium!” she shouted. “Looking at his reflection. Whooo!” she whistled. “I love narcissists who can really pull it off!” She shrieked at the boy. “He can’t, of course.”
Then she was dancing with an older man in a leather harness, and several young women in T shirts that had ‘Spice up your Life!’ and ‘Tits!’ printed on them. She came up to Wendy with a bottle of amyl nitrate. Wendy felt immediately sick.
“She,” Wendy told Colin, dancing over to him, “makes me feel ancient.”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t you like to be like that when you’re her age?”
He gave her a look.
On the steps of the dance floor they found Astrid, perched in her wheelchair, sucking a cocktail through a straw. “I’m here with Tom,” she screeched over the music. “You remember? The nice man from the dirty man’s place, where they sit in the nude in the sauna?” Wendy nodded. “He’s had a terrible time getting me down the stairs to here. He promises he will dance with me. I tell him, I hope I don’t spoil his chances tonight.”
“Hey,” said Colin. “You’ve got tinsel tied all around your chair.”
“Tom said I had to glam it up. He was right, I think.” Then she saw Serena, dancing with the young women. “Jesus God, is that your Aunty’s friend?”
Wendy nodded.
“She will be falling out of that dress.”
“I think she’s pissed out of her head,” said Colin. Then he gasped, because Serena was holding one of the women in a close embrace and they were kissing as they danced.
When Serena joined them at the bar, she said, “I kept telling her I was never a dyke. Well, not a very good one. Sometimes these young women just won’t listen.” She turned to Wendy. “Don’t you just love being post-feminist?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Oh, it was such a relief to me. It was my very own Stonewall riot. I felt free to attack anyone the slightest bit dowdy.”
“Ah, Tom,” shouted Astrid. “This is Wendy’s aunty’s best friend, Serena.”
“Tom runs a gay sauna,” shouted Colin as Tom, grinning, pumped Serena’s hand.
“Delightful,” said Serena. “You must have a lovely time.”
“Wheel me on!” called Astrid. “My request has come on! I bribed the young lady for Tom Jones.”
Serena stood to watch with Wendy as the others gave Astrid a hand, and unclipped her brakes. “I rather like it here,” she smiled, her mouth going up at the side. “I thought it would be much more earnest than this. And I absolutely love these baby gay boys in their swishing kilts.”
They helped Serena to her bed at five o’clock. She howled at
them to take her shoes off first, or she’d break her ankles in her sleep. “Will you be quiet?” hissed Colin. “My dad’s sleeping…”
“Oh, he can’t hear anything,” mumbled Serena, ashamed.
“He can hear everything,” said Colin, and walked out.
“That Tom, the sauna man, is a lovely man,” said Serena.
“Hmm,” said Wendy, struggling with laces.
“Why aren’t there any saunas for women like that? Why don’t they think women wouldn’t want love like that? Why can’t women do their thing? In the dark, in dark cellars?”
“Would you want that?”
“Oh, yes,” said Serena. “I want to be in the dark.”
The next morning she was immaculate, sitting early at the table in a neat grey suit, sipping coffee from an orange bowl. She was talking to Aunty Anne and they were making plans.
“First stop will be N
ewton Aycliffe,” Anne was saying.
“That ghastly place. There’s nothing there. Not for you.”
They talked like very old friends, Wendy thought, not thinking they needed to look at each other.
“You must come to London. With me.”
“I need to go to Ralph.”
Serena scowled.
“Don’t you approve of this Ralph?” Wendy asked, and they stared at her. “None of us have met him.”
Serena composed her features and would say nothing more on the subject of Ralph. She inclined her head in a suggestion of a bow. “I must thank you for a lovely evening,” she told Wendy. “And for removing those ridiculous shoes of mine.”
Aunty Anne looked amused. “Wendy doesn’t realise that beauty means pain. I imagine she was very scornful of your shoes.”
“I don’t remember,” said Serena.
“Wendy doesn’t approve of dressing up and making an effort.”
“She looks charming.”
“As she gets older, she’ll see the effort it takes.”
“Hmm,” said Serena, gazing at Wendy, who was surprised to find she enjoyed this attention.
“Aunty Anne, you make me sound like a slob.”
“In many ways you are. Are you going out like that today?”
“Yes.”
“There you are, then.”
Serena said, “Your Aunt hasn’t kept with the times, Wendy. She doesn’t understand. I’m sure, Anne, that Wendy knows very well what clothes and disguises can do. She has a shrewd head on her shoulders.”
“Perhaps,” said Anne sourly.
That morning Aunty Anne set to work with dustpan and shovel, mop and scalding water. “These bloody stone floors,” she said. “These bare boards! There’s hardly anything to hoover. There’s nothing like hoovering.”
“Why are you cleaning everything?” Colin asked, squeezing between shifted furniture. He hadn’t seen his mother do this for years.
“I’ve got the urge to purge,” she said.
Captain Simon sat by his friend that morning, thinking it might be the last time he’d see him.
Where will I be without you, Pat?
I haven’t many friends these days
it isn’t like the old days
when we
did we
know each other back then?
Sometimes I think I remember
and I can see you and me and being in
fields and the moving dogs
and leaves stuck-in-grass
it all comes back
You never asked me questions
You thought I was boring, I know
I think I’m boring, too
a boring friend
who always wears the same yellow
coat and I don’t remember why
and with you goes whatever
clue I might have had.
Pat slept fitfully through that day and, in the late afternoon, the sky over the Royal Circus already black, Colin was sitting beside him, staring at lit windows when he died.
THIRTY
The idea of influence came up and it seemed that everyone was talking about it. Serena Bell spoke again about the two combative spheres in the world, the Appollonian and the Dionysian, and Wendy started to find her persuasive. On the streets of Edinburgh, when life returned to the city, ordinary, ordered life after their rather subdued Hogmanay, she saw men in pinstriped woollen suits bustling round the insurance buildings in St. David’s square and they looked browbeaten by Appollonian culture. They swished past the drunks and the down-and-outs, who to her now seemed like the battered survivors of Dionysian rounds.
Whenever Wendy was introduced to someone’s view of the world, she found it pervading her own senses and everything started to look that way. She took to Serena’s influence as easily as she had taken up Aunty Anne’s reducing the world to one divided between women who kept themselves nice and those who let themselves go. Still jogging around in her head was Belinda’s point of view over a world of replicants and holograms. Serena Bell’s classically composed scheme of things was all the more seductive, however. Serena seemed to give licence to all sorts of behaviour: all was inevitable, everything explicable. At Uncle Pat’s funeral service early in the New Year, Serena startled them all by reading Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ in a throbbing, passionate contralto. Colin was offended to hear his father called a rough beast—he was sure that’s what Serena intended—slouching towards Bethlehem, or anywhere. Wendy thought he should give the woman the benefit of the doubt. Probably she meant nothing by it. She’d just wanted to hear her own voice in the dusky chapel, being melodramatic. At the same service Aunty Anne wanted and got Verdi’s Requiem, just like at Princess Diana’s do, and she sobbed just the same.
The idea of influence was there all the time. Colin complained that Wendy was getting far too taken in by Aunty Anne’s friend. “She’s a fascinating woman,” said Wendy. “A real survivor.”
Meanwhile, Timon was terribly wary of her. “You’re mixing in esteemed circles now, hon,” he sad. “She’s taken you under her wing.”
“She gives me the willies,” said Belinda. “But isn’t she glamorous? She’s like one of those paper dollies you used to press out of card, and dress up how you wanted…”
Aunty Anne said, “I think Serena’s very taken with you, Wendy.” And it was decided that Wendy would accompany Serena to London in the days following the funeral. Aunty Anne was also going south, but only as far as Newton Aycliffe, to see her fat man. She would meet them later in Kilburn, where Serena kept her little house.
The flat in the Royal Circus was breaking up. When Serena had read Yeats aloud in the chapel, Wendy latched onto the words, ‘The centre cannot hold’, and she suddenly saw that Uncle Pat had been their centre. And now they were going their own ways. Uncertainty was the prevailing mood and when they gathered in the evening, it wasn’t with any real purpose. Even sitting at the scarred table, drinking and talking as always, it seemed as if they were waiting for something and they didn’t know what.
Serena was down the hall, playing Shubert again, very deliberately and it seemed she was biding her time.
Colin and David were the first to go. They flew to Paris. “I’ll see you in London later,” Colin told her. “You make sure you look after yourself.” He wasn’t at all sure he should leave Wendy with the others, but knew for himself he had to get out for a while. He wanted to see David in some completely other context. They were at that stage and needing to spend some time with none of the others about.
Timon and Belinda went to the west coast, taking the camera. There had been a rash of UFO sightings in the press and she wanted to capture them on tape. Her idea was that, this time, they both would get themselves abducted. They could be great ambassadors, and she would never be afraid with Timon in tow. They told Wendy this. “Take care, hon,” said Timon. “And keep your elasticity.” This time it sounded like a warning not to get swayed by anyone else’s ideas. That seemed like a joke, coming from Timon.
“You’re the naïve receptor,” she told him.
He took a laughing gulp of coffee and found it cold. They had sat for hours that morning, saying tentative goodbyes. It was time for them to go.
Belinda wouldn’t stop hugging and thanking her for introducing her to this lovely man. “My life has changed,” said Belinda, “more than I could ever have imagined.”
They left, making Wendy feel like a success.
Serena booked them tickets at Waverley for King’s Cross.
“You have the whole of the capital to explore.”
Wendy found herself being surly. “This is a capital, too.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t done London before. Do you realise how weird that is? At your age?”
Aunty Anne packed up Uncle Pat’s things. She had a variety of charities bring their vans to the front door and made the others carry the boxes down.
“Does Colin know you’re throwing out
his dad’s things?” Wendy asked.
“Oh, yes.”
But he didn’t. When he returned from Paris, weeks later, he was horrified.
On the train they talked about Serena’s suffering. She did it lightly and with the utmost irony. Wendy was glad to hear her talk, to take her mind off her adopted town, slipping away.
“Of course I have millions of friends, the world over. And I can put the masks on. I never look lonely or tired. But I am lonely, truly. I despise going back to that house in Kilburn when it’s empty and I’m alone. I adore taking visitors with me.”
She clasped Wendy’s hands across the table. The train was full with people leaving after the New Year and both Wendy and Serena had bags on their knees.
“Most people wouldn’t say they were lonely,” Wendy thought aloud.
“Most people are without feeling,” said Serena. “But they are all damaged and chipped in some way. And I might hide my scratches and knocks under a surface of brilliant irony and, if I say so myself, glamour, but you learn to turn the damage inwards. Like a display of fine china. You have to show them the best side. Pull me out of my cabinet, though, and you’d see. Turn me round in a strong light and then… oh, my dear, I’m a horror!”
She made Wendy laugh.
“One day I’ll tell you my story.”
Here it comes, thought Wendy. Someone else telling me things. If only it was Mandy with this talent for eliciting confidences. She needs the material. But Mandy tended to make people fall silent. Her beauty and her muttering closed other people off from her.
“But I shan’t tell you yet,” Serena went on. “You’re at a funny age to hear a story like mine. I wouldn’t want you to judge me too harshly.” Then she bought them a bottle of wine from the refreshments trolley, which they drank from plastic cups, and by York Wendy was fast asleep.
She was dreaming of Aunty Anne. This had been triggered by Serena saying, as they passed through the low, flat fields outside of Darlington and Wendy’s head swam: “Your aunt, of course, has never quite learned the true extent of my wild side. She needs to believe in my civility, my good manners. Anne refuses to recognise any other aspect in me at all. She makes me feel full of contradictions.” Serena sighed as they hurtled through Darlington station and Wendy imagined her aunt only a few miles away, already in Newton Aycliffe and already part of her other life.
