Boating for Beginners (6 page)

'Never mind,' said Rita cheerily. 'You'll know what to avoid now. It's all part of life's rich tapestry.'

Gloria didn't think so. Mrs Munde had always claimed you are what you eat. What did that make Gloria? Could she truthfully say on her wedding night that she'd never had a man inside her? More and more Gloria wondered whether there would ever be a wedding night.

No one noticed her tumult because Marlene had arrived and was clearly anxious to hear the decision.

'We can do it, but you'll have to come for a fitting.'

Marlene sighed. 'I knew I could trust you.'

'And afterwards you go for a complete rest.'

'Yes, I'll book in at a rest home and take the healing waters, even though it will mean missing the early days of filming — and I so wanted to see you three in your costumes. I'm so happy girls, I truly am,' and she kissed everyone goodbye and set off for the bus.

'Filming's been brought forward, Gloria,' Desi announced. 'They'll want you on set tomorrow to help with the crocodiles. Noah's determined to do the big scenes in one take and rehearse the extras last.'

'But I haven't collected any animals yet.'

'We don't want them all at once. It'll be bad enough when we have to go on tour in that smelly ship. I've told Noah we want a private cruiser. Why he has to tour it beats me. He could just release the movie.'

'You know what he feels about personal appearances,' said Sheila. 'He believes that the ordinary housewife and the average man in the street need something bright and exciting to polish up their dull grey lives. Besides, we're booked out everywhere; it's going to make a fortune. This is the biggest theatre spectacle anyone has ever seen, and it's got Bunny Mix doing the screenplay and YAHWEH himself helping with the dialogue. How can it fail — the winner of the Purple Heart Award and the Creator of the world brought together for the first time under the direction of one of society's most controversial and charismatic leaders who hasn't been seen in public for fourteen years.'

'Hey, that's very good,' admired Rita.

Sheila blushed. 'It's what I've written for the press release.' She went on: 'Look, why don't we all have a Nineveh deep-dish and talk about our lives. Gloria, we hardly know anything about you.'

Gloria knew that Sheila wanted to be kind but she felt it was too soon in her personal reconstruction to talk about Northrop Frye and what she suspected was happening to her. Suppose they laughed? Making the excuse that she must go and help her mother demolish the kitchen, she left. Desi, she realised, didn't believe her, but she could always explain later.

By the time she got home her mother had already started on the parlour as well as the kitchen, and Gloria wondered how the bedrooms were staying up. 'Willpower,' said Mrs Munde in an offhand manner. 'If I want the bedrooms to stay up, they stay up. I built them, they're part of my life.'

Gloria realised that there are advantages to being in the first, or metaphoric, stage of development. Her mother made no distinction between thinking things and objects of thought, and so appeared to maintain an extraordinary degree of control over her environment.

'Her control is instinctual, though,' thought Gloria piously. 'When I regain control, it will be conscious.'

Such smugness nearly always accompanies second-stage development. Gloria now no longer trusted her instincts; she was looking for clues and isolating experience. In her case this was a good and necessary thing, because she had read the whole of Northrop Frye and knew that there was somewhere else to move on to when she was satisfied with her separateness. This didn't stop her being tedious though, as Doris noted when they met the following day.

Doris had seen a lot of development in her time and she wasn't excited about Gloria's, just mentioned it casually while she waxed the stage set to resemble a place without form, and void.

'I see you're in the second stage,' she sniffed.

Gloria was startled. How did Doris know? She'd only met her once.

'Well, you seem more purposeful this morning; something about your stride, the way you hold your head, and you've already asked me five questions in half an hour.'

'Have I?' replied Gloria, incredulous.

'Six now, and not one of them about love. It's a dead giveaway. 'Course you were in a fallen state before, not a real metaphoric state.'

'What do you mean?' demanded Gloria, offended.

'I mean you weren't poetic before, just sloppy, so it's a good thing you've pulled yourself out of it. Nothing gives poetry a worse name than people who talk drivel, and try and pretend it's got an inner meaning because it's about flowers and love and things. Poetry's got muscle, you were all flab,' and Doris made a disgusted noise with her top teeth.

Gloria was ashamed; she hadn't realised that Doris could be so astute. But then she was an organic philosopher with a wealth of life as it is lived behind her. Gloria decided to be humble.

'It's the romantic fiction that does it. I've never really read anything else, except what I've picked up by accident.' And she explained how she was often duped at station bookstalls. 'But I do know those Bunny Mix love letters off by heart. They're different.'

Doris agreed they were; then Gloria told her how her mother was making the bedrooms stay up through sheer willpower. 'And she's much worse about romantic fiction than I am, so how does she do it?'

Doris considered. 'She must have a hobby that saves her. Is she interested in anything else?'

Gloria mentioned the stars, and Doris looked pleased.

'That's it then: she's joined herself to the great cosmos. Why don't you try and get her to do a degree?'

Gloria shuddered. If her mother made the second stage too she might take over the world.

'I've got to get a move on,' panted Doris. 'They want this set ready for the Creation scene.'

A group of burly men came by wheeling lights. One of them addressed Gloria. 'They want you down with the crocodiles. We've got to make this place look like a swamp in chaos.'

Gloria followed his directions, ending up at the swimming pool. Rita and Sheila were already there drinking Piña Coladas even though it was hardly past breakfast time. Gloria sighed. This was the life she had read about. How typical that she should discover it when she no longer cared.

Desi was getting into a suit of what looked like designer chain mail. She grinned at Gloria. 'They've cast me as the warlike one. I've got to tell the great Unpronounceable what a shit he's being, destroying the happy pagan order and returning us all to the soil so that he can create the world in his own image.'

Gloria thought back to what she knew about the book of Genesis. There was an explanation on the pagan gods, then a denouncement about how undemocratic they were, then a blood scene where everyone went to war and YAHWEH destroyed the mystically created world and redid it himself in colours he preferred. Then, like a gentleman, he withdrew as gently as possible until the new world had made such a mess of things he decided to intervene again, this time using Noah as an assistant. It was good box office material, providing the pagan world wasn't made to seem too attractive or sympathetic.

'Sheila's got to wear a false nose,' said Desi, picking it out of the prop box. 'We can't be too glamorous.'

Someone came running by with a clapperboard. 'To your places please, in costume please, the director's on his way.'

Rita, Sheila and Desi stood arrogantly under the orange tree that was to symbolise their womanhood. The first scene was entirely theirs. They were to make rude remarks about the Unpronounceable and complain a lot about their dwindling powers. Gloria suddenly realised that she was going to see Noah in the flesh for the first time. She sat respectfully by the crocodiles and watched the pathway up to the house. What she saw was a spherical man with a bright bald head. He was around four feet tall with the blackest, most piercing eyes possible in anything other than a crow. As he walked down towards the pool all the hired hands and technicians bowed and murmured their admiration. The figure appeared not to notice; his gaze fastened on his daughters-in-law under the orange tree.

'You're too pretty,' he shouted. 'Can't we get a wig or some false teeth?'

The costume department looked blank. They didn't have either, though they could get them by the afternoon. But Noah wanted to shoot now. 'I need the light,' he complained. 'Just look at this light.'

Gloria looked and it was just the same as on any other morning, but then she wasn't artistic.

Noah was talking again. 'Who's got a wig? I know one of you lot at least must be wearing a wig. Let me have it, come on, let's have a wig for the Lord. It's not much to ask. He made you all, so why not give him something back. Give me a wig.' He was very strong when he spoke, and soon he had three wigs at his feet. 'Thank you, Lord.' He raised his hands to heaven. 'I see the Lord is with us today. He's here on this film set, opening up your hearts to his love.' The three wigless ones felt comforted and blushed, but Noah hadn't finished. 'Who's got some teeth? Let me have some teeth for his greater glory. Praise him and give me your teeth. You'll get them back, and the Lord himself will have blest them.' One of the cameramen offered his top set (he never wore the bottoms when he was working), then another his gold-crowned dentures. 'Thank you brothers,' crooned Noah. 'I know the Lord will bless you in your endeavours today and I promise you that after this whatever you chew in his name will never make your belly ache.' From the lofty pinnacle of her second stage Gloria was detached enough to admire Noah's way with words. She was glad she didn't have any removable parts to offer, and for the first time she understood her mother just a little. Mrs Munde had been in Noah's company for fourteen years. No wonder she couldn't distinguish between subject and object when even her teeth might be whisked out for the glory of the Lord. Noah went over to the orange tree and set about making Rita, Sheila and Desi as ugly as possible. Sheila didn't like it but there was nothing she could do.

'You told me this was going to make me a star,' she moaned. 'If I'd known I was going to be treated like this I would have asked for an advance.'

'I already did,' said Desi through her chain mail. 'You know what he's like.'

'Yeah, but I always forget until I see him again,' sighed Sheila.

When they were particularly hideous Noah decided to start filming. 'I see a lot of similarities here to Macbeth, don't you?' Gloria overheard one of the art people say. 'The grouping, the thematic construction of their dialogue, the portents contained in the most casual sentences. .. ?'

'You're right, you're right. It's very much folk tale rather than myth, isn't it?'

'Hold on,' said Gloria, butting in and so scoring another personal first. 'This is the inspired word of God, isn't it? As delivered to Noah in a mighty cloud of printed leaflets?'

The pair looked at her blankly. 'You think all this is God's idea? What would the creator of the world be doing on a film set?'

'Perhaps he wants the publicity,' replied Gloria tartly. She hated intellectuals. They just smiled at her and wandered off. Gloria called after them, 'If you're so smart why have you got dandruff?'

Perhaps it was Gloria's presumptuous confidence, or perhaps just the sight of Noah collecting his wigs that caused the cosmic cloud to hover over the film set just at that moment. No one noticed, because the superbeings inside wanted to disguise themselves as an innocent bit of weather. But there was a riot going on. Things with wings and lyres begged the Unpronounceable for mercy, but not much was forthcoming.

'I want his ass!' thundered YAHWEH. 'He's gone too far this time. I never said I'd work on his filthy film. I never said I'd work with that woman either, that rabbit woman. What does he think I am?'

'Destroy him, destroy him,' urged one of the more hyperactive angels.

'I can't do that,' snapped God. 'It would mean a riot. I've just started to get some control down there, and our Good Food Guide's selling well. I like being in print. I just don't want to be taken for granted. I have my feelings too. Now who's going to think of a plan?'

Lucifer put his hand up. 'Why don't you negotiate? Arrange to meet him, threaten a bit, frighten him, tell him he's got to stop filming.'

'No, no.' YAHWEH was getting exasperated. 'I want to be toured in York and Wakefield. It's not his ideas I hate, it's the way he moves. What's the plot of this thing anyway?'

Patiently one of the angels explained; and a strange gleam came into the Unpronounceable's eye. 'An oceangoing ark, eh? That might be fun. Lucifer, tell that skunk-sized little baldy I want a meeting, right after his press reception next week. Tell him we'll land at the Gaza Strip and he'd better be there.'

Lucifer shot off, leaving the Lord a trifle calmer. Relieved, the angels went back to their hymn books.

When the crew had a steak break Gloria walked home to see how her mother was getting on. New understandings bring new responsibilities, and Gloria felt it was her duty to protect her mother from her own excesses and any possibility of further evolution, Her mother had erected something that resembled a beach party windbreak in the space where the kitchen had been. She was experimenting with Noah's machine for the Hallelujah Hamburger. When Gloria saw the extent and folly of the device she told Mrs Munde very firmly to leave it alone.