[Brenda & Effie 06] - Brenda and Effie Forever!

by Paul Magrs

  I can’t say I relish the idea, but it’s good to see her up and about and enthusiastic. Maybe there’s something a bit feverish about that enthusiasm, though.

  ‘I’ve still got all my Sixties gear somewhere,’ she tells me. ‘I had a very stylish wardrobe back then, you know.’

  I don’t think I have anything suitable. I don’t even know what town I was living in during that decade, let alone what I was wearing.

  It turns out that Mrs Claus has given Effie a ring this afternoon. She is keen to see her, now that we’re back from our hols, and issued this invite. It seems that Sixties nostalgia is now the big thing amongst the pensioners at the Christmas hotel.

  ‘We could do you up as Dusty Springfield,’ Effie tells me. ‘You’ve already got the beehive.’

  So I find myself being dragged up and dragged out to the hotel on the clifftop that very night. I feel a bit ridiculous in white plastic boots and a too-short dress and my eyes ringed in black. Effie looks much more stylish, of course, in a sea-green Biba frock and wooden beads. She’s carrying a pashmina she bought in Paris for her mother.

  Yes, her mother. I still can’t get over the fact that the grotesque and borderline psychotic Mrs Claus is my best friend’s mother. It was a secret only revealed to us last year and it caused quite a lot of bother at the time. Revelations like that always do.

  Still, Effie seems to have accepted her into her life all right, especially if she’s buying her presents on holiday. She can’t be all that disturbed by the connection, even if Mrs Claus is a murderess.

  We step inside the ludicrous, crumbling, festive confection that is the foyer of the Christmas hotel, and Mrs Claus is there to greet us in her motorized scooter. She folds Effie into a monstrous hug and shrieks with pleasure over the silk scarf all the way from France. I stare at the garishly painted old floozy with her candy floss hair and her bauble earrings and her frankly bizarre outfit made of pink and leopard-spotted fake fur fabric.

  ‘You two look just the business,’ she cackles as she appraises our Sixties outfits. I flinch at her slightly mocking expression as she looks me up and down. It’s true, I should never have tried to carry off this zippered polyester mini dress, the size I am. But to hell with it. We’re here now. I just have to brave it out.

  Then we’re in the ballroom and there’s glitterballs galore and all kinds of psychedelic effects ravishing the place. The pensioners are decked out in flamboyant vintage fancy dress, more or less fitting the theme. Mrs Claus zooms around the room, checking that everyone is enjoying her theme night, and Effie and I take to the floor. ‘Mellow yellow’, ‘Itchycoo Park’… we’re awash with golden oldies and, for a moment, swaying dreamily on the spot, I feel as if my memories of forty-odd years ago are almost on the point of seeping back.

  Memories – that reminds me. I shout through the scintillating air at Effie, ‘Are you going to tell your mother about your trip into the past in the Limbousine?’

  She pulls a face. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I take this to mean that Effie doesn’t quite trust the old harridan either. Not quite.

  There are some astonishing sights on this dance floor. Under all the bandanas and beads and feathers and wigs you’d hardly know the average age was about one hundred and twelve.

  I leave Effie jogging about to Lulu and slip off to the loo.

  It’s only when I’m done and washing my hands that I hear the siren song issuing from the cubicle I’ve just exited.

  At first I doubt my ears. They’re just ringing from the deafening volume in the dance hall.

  But no. That’s definitely singing. A high, warbling, rather tuneful voice echoing through the pipes. How many miles of pipes must there be in this huge old hotel? Hundreds of miles, surely, running like hot and cold veins through the walls, all of them layered in coats of paint.

  She’s singing one of the Sixties songs from the disco. ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco.’ It’s a haunting voice she’s got. Ethereal.

  I’m poised in the doorway of the cubicle, my hands half-dried, ears cocked, when I’m joined in the ladies by an old woman in a swirly orange frock and a blue feather boa.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ I ask her. ‘Am I just imagining it?’

  She gives me a very funny look. And I realise it might seem a bit strange, an overweight Dusty Springfield listening to a singing toilet. I blush and listen a moment longer, but it’s no good. The mermaid voice has gone.

  I hurry out of there and find Effie bopping alone to the Beach Boys. I can see she’s got a couple of the old fellas casting her looks of approval. I don’t know where she gets her energy from.

  I try to tell her about the mermaid singing, but she doesn’t seem all that interested. ‘Those daft kids have got you over-reacting to everything,’ she tells me. ‘We don’t need to go looking for spooky problems, Brenda. Those things tend to come to us, remember?’

  She may have a point.

  The evening proves to be pretty enjoyable in the end. Mrs Claus keeps out of our way, and nothing more is said about any kind of spooks or manifestations. We’re free to get ourselves a bit tipsy on cherry brandies and to dance ourselves daft to Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits and the like.

  I swirl about in my own psychedelic haze for a while, and I really do feel like I could reach out and touch those elusive memories from the 1960s. I was in London, I think – one of several times that I lived there. And maybe I was in Liverpool, on special assignment for some kind of secret organization… yes, and I was a hatcheck girl in a gloomy club… it was underground…

  But the memories twist and shake about like the bright fragments inside a kaleidoscope.

  Then, all of a sudden, it’s time to leave. It’s after one o’clock in the morning and everyone is staggering about looking for their dropped bits of fancy dress, their boas and their beads and bangles. The final dance comes on and many of the oldsters are staggering about in each other’s arms to a Cilla Black song.

  Effie fetches her wrap from the cloakroom and I wriggle into the orange woollen poncho, which turns out to be my favourite part of the evening’s outfit.

  Outside the Christmas hotel we get separated. One minute I’m talking away to her and humming ‘Pretty Flamingo’ and I’m wondering if we’ll be wanting a hot dog or a bag of chips from the vans lined up on the cliff road, waiting especially to fortify the geriatric revellers streaming out of the hotel. Then, suddenly, Effie has vanished.

  At first I’m startled. Maybe she’s copped off with an old gentleman? She certainly turned a few heads with her ensemble tonight, and she drew admiring glances for her elegant and dreamy dancing.

  I hurry up and down the pavement outside the hotel, getting more worried as I do so. I don’t want to make a fuss. Of course, Effie is her own person. She can do what she wants. She’d be embarrassed if she was having a private moment of some kind, and I came galumphing along, shouting her name.

  But there really is no sign of her.

  The pavement clears and there are queues at the steaming, fragrant chip vans.

  And it’s just then, as I stand feeling deflated and on the point of giving up, that I see it.

  Long as a double decker bus, it seems. Gleaming cream and white and entirely spotless.

  The Limbosine glides past me almost silently. It glides past the whole of the Christmas Hotel and along the West Cliff and its windows are dark and inscrutable. It ignores all of us, especially me. It’s as if we aren’t even here, as the Limbosine goes about its quiet business.

  And I just know for sure that Effie is inside.

  §

  There’s not much point in going to bed tonight. Once I’m home I get the coffee pot going. It’s a new, fiddly one I bought in Italy and it sits on the top of the stove. It produces the thickest, strongest brew I’ve ever tasted, and that’s precisely what I need tonight.


  I sit up in the early hours in my Dusty Springfield outfit, having a vigil.

  I know she’ll come knocking at about the same hour as last time.

  How I wish I was still on holiday. How well I slept, those nights in Paris, when I hadn’t a care in the world. It seems like a charmed time now. A different era, impossibly far-off.

  Just last week I was sitting in the park with my shoes off, letting myself snooze in public. Now I’m as tense as I ever was, with Effie out there somewhere in the night. What if this is the night that the Limbosine and its creepy Chauffear don’t bring her back..?

  And then, at half past four, she’s banging at my front door again.

  I scurry downstairs to let her in.

  Poor Effie looks haggard from her second ride in the mysterious vehicle. When she claps eyes on me she gives a little gasp. I realise I’m still dolled up as Dusty.

  I help her to drag herself up to my attic and I make her some spicy tea. She sits slumped in the green bobbly armchair and stares straight ahead.

  ‘Did it happen again? It must have, mustn’t it? For you to be out all night. I saw the car, it went past the hotel. And I knew he had taken you again…’ I’m gabbling I know. I ought to shut up, and let her gather her thoughts.

  She smiles at me, though. A distant smile. Wistful, maybe.

  ‘Well?’ I burst out. ‘Tell me what happened tonight!’

  And so she takes a deep breath, and tells me.

  §

  ‘This time he was different. He was a bit more brusque, perhaps. Almost as if he resented having to pick me up again and do what he had to do. I was anxious, actually, because of the mood he was in when he drove us along the seafront, gathering speed as we went. Was I silly to think he might have been glad to see me again?

  ‘I detected an air of resentment in him. He looked over his shoulder at me in my Sixties-style finery and he tutted, tossing his head. It was as if he was taking me under sufferance. As if he was doing this whole thing for somebody else’s sake.

  ‘Anyway, he wasn’t going to talk about it or explain to me. It seemed as if he was determined to say as little as he could. So I just sat back in the soft leather embrace of the backseat and let him take me where he wanted.

  ‘What’s next? I wondered. And I didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘It became clear that he was driving me home from the Christmas Hotel. He was guiding that long, shark-like car through the narrow cobbled streets towards our part of town, Brenda. Straight back to my tall, crooked house with all its many rooms and its wonky rooftop. I almost shouted out, hey, if you’re just taking me home, you could have offered my friend a lift as well…

  ‘Naturally, it wasn’t as simple as that. As we came up the hill from the harbour the sea mist was thickening and swirling about us far more than it ought to on such a clear night. I peered out of the smoked glass of the windows and wondered what it was I was seeing. It was a real pea-souper, purple and lilac, shot through with lime green bolts of what… lightning?

  ‘The Limbosine sailed smoothly through the billowing mist until at last we arrived at my front door. Straight away I knew there was something odd about this. The whole frontage of my shop was altered out of all recognition. The door itself was painted glossy red, and a garland of dried grasses and herbs was hung upon it. It was a witchy thing, a magical warding off thing for evil spirits. And the bow windows of my shop were sparkling clean, dust-free and revealed quite a different interior from my own jumbled Emporium. This window was all serried ranks of bottles and jars crammed with unguents and pills in a million colours. And there were posies of herbs tied up with string.

  ‘I knew where I was before I even saw that front door open and the little girl come out into the foggy lane. It was the same little girl as I had seen during my last night ride with the Chauffear. The same stringy hair tied in pigtails and the same dirty knees, all scabby from her tomboy’s games. She clutched her ragdoll to her and was followed out into the dimly-lit street by the formidable figure of her Aunt Maude. How vast and impressive her aunt looked out here, in the close confines of the winding Whitby streets. She was a monstrous woman – though it sounds awful to say this. Then she was in her prime, a woman who seemed as tall as the gas lamps and as broad as the alleyway she led young Effryggia down, towards the harbour.

  ‘We followed them, my disgruntled driver and myself. I didn’t need telling that’s what I must do now. I knew these figures couldn’t see us or our car and they wouldn’t mind us tagging along and listening as Great Aunt Maude took her tiny charge on a late night walk and explained a thing or two to her.

  ‘I listened in. I knew what was going to be said, though. It was all coming back to me. This was the night that my grand Aunt Maude told me kindly but firmly that I had to go away. There was to be no fuss and no tears. This was how it had to be. For my safety, and so that all my aunties would worry about me no more. I must be sent to a place of safety.

  ‘Of course I cried. I bawled and howled right there on the spot, by the dark harbour. All the lights were out, of course, for the blackout. The dark sea seemed like one enormous creature, a terrible oily mass pushing up the dock to eavesdrop as I wept into Aunt Maude’s Persian lambswool coat.

  ‘I had lived with my aunts in that crooked house all my life. Ever since my mother had abandoned me, shortly after my birth. She had run off with a bad man, I knew, and she had trusted her sisters to take every care of me. Which they had, and now I was eight and they had decided to send me away.

  ‘It is for your own safety,’ Aunt Maude wasn’t one to be moved by shows of messy emotion. ‘You must be sent further inland, my pet. The Nazis will be coming from over the sea, trying to invade. They’ll try to bomb the town when they fly over, attacking all the ports. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve tried to hex them, to dance them away… and we will carry on doing our witchy duty. But you, Effryggia, you must be sent to safety.’

  ‘And so it was sorted, and arranged very quickly. I remember that it seemed as if all the arrangements had already been made, behind my back. There were distant relatives, or friends, or other witches – it was never very clear to me – but there were two women who ran a sweet shop in a small town deep in Yorkshire, and they would be glad to take me in. I was to be evacuated. That was the new word I learned that night from my formidable Aunt Maude.

  ‘And then the Chauffear and myself were on the move again. We drifted into the air like ethereal beings and followed my younger self and her Aunt Maude back into the house. The next thing I knew we were with them in the book-lined room at the very top, observing them, peering over their shoulders.

  ‘Aunt Maude had heaps of her old books out, laid open on her long work table where she would sit to study such things. Arcane lore, she always called it. Witchy wisdom, passed down through the centuries in these battered volumes bound in leather, their pages soft vellum, frayed and singed at the edges by flashes and bangs and sparks of magick.

  ‘Now she was applying herself ruthlessly to these priceless tomes, using a jagged razor blade. It was the very blade I’d seen her use to trim away the dark hairs that grew on her nose and chin. But now she was slicing certain pages from her books. I gasped at the first incision. It was as if I heard that Grimoire cry out in pain. I looked at my Aunt but she was grim-faced and determined.

  ‘‘These are the most powerfully magic pages,’ she told me sternly. ‘The most potent spells. If they were to fall into the hands of our Nazi enemies, then the game would be up.’

  ‘Terrible images filled my head. Did Aunt Maude really think the soldiers would come here? Would they really invade us and storm into our home and take away things like these books? Could that really be possible? But Aunt Maude wouldn’t talk about it any more. She concentrated hard and studied the pages, staring beadily at diagrams and equations and incantations, working out which were the most vital. Then she slice
d them out of their bindings and pasted them into an unassuming scrapbook, such as could be bought from any stationers. It was strange to see her working with a brush and a pot of glue, pasting these unholy relics onto sugar paper pages.

  ‘At last she told me: ‘You will take this with you and guard it with your life. No one – Nazi or not – would believe that I’d entrust the crucial pages of the Books of Mayhem to a little girl. That may be our only hope of keeping them.’

  ‘Next thing, I’m watching myself watching Aunt Maude packing my tiny cardboard suitcase for me. And I remember this. It’s the night before I left to stay with these other women. Aunt Maude pushed the scrapbook to the bottom of my case, underneath freshly laundered and ironed vests and knickers and balled-up socks. The scrapbook’s pages were fattened and still damp with glue. For weeks afterwards all my clothes would smell of paper glue and inky cuttings.

  ‘My other aunts came running in and out with bits and pieces they thought I would need during my evacuation and my absence from our home and their pillowy embraces. They brought sachets of herbs to help me sleep in an unfamiliar room, knitted bedsocks, a torch with an everlasting battery, chocolate coins, spicy mints, and a velveteen Panda bear Aunt Natasha had spent many evenings sewing together and stuffing with dried lentils and peas. By the end of it, I could hardly close my case, and it was incredibly heavy to carry.

  ‘‘There’ll be folk to help you,’ said Aunt Maude. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘The other aunts whispered amongst themselves. ‘You’d think she would offer to help, wouldn’t you? Her mother? You think she’d take her away. She’s bound to be living somewhere safe. She could look after the girl.’

  ‘Aunt Maude didn’t like it when they mithered and chuntered in front of me. She snapped at her sisters: ‘Don’t confuse the girl. She’ll be perfectly all right where she is being billeted. Deirdre and Val will treat her like a queen. You know they will. And as for the child’s mother, well. The less said about her the better.’