Alma Cogan (11 page)

As he lies under my hand I can tour the scars that Psyche has collected in the six or so years we’ve been together. It’s a familiar bodyscape of tendon, polyp, knuckle and gristle.

The corrugation on this knee is the result of a cartilage operation. He got the raised worm on his belly from impaling himself on a fence. The twin rivets under the hair of his right ear are where a Boston terrier’s teeth went through. The recent wound on his forechest is from barbed wire. The tissue around his upper mouth is tough and permanently engorged from the afternoon on the cliffs when an adder bit him.

The pads are always the first to go: from Velveeta, they quickly turn into rasping, industrial-strength vinyl. From there it is a short step to them being permanently marked-up, damaged goods.

It’s a process I saw happening around me in theatres for many years among all the fluffy little struggling dolls of show business. They arrived bright and unblemished and in no time were consorting with characters in mercurochrome suits and concealing bites, bruises, welts, scalds, and disfigurements whose circumstances you couldn’t let yourself imagine (cigarette burns on the lower-back, blue fist-prints on the thighs), under the layers of peach-coloured Pan-Cake makeup.

‘I don’t care if you’ve been fucking all night,’one well-loathed producer would stand in the door of the dressing-room and harangue the girls, ‘when the show starts, I want you to get out there and
show
them
teeth
.’

Psyche 2 died at the age of two, murdered, although I could never prove it, by a schizo stagehand who saw it as a way of getting at me. I should have been alerted when he started bringing him back from walks with claws missing; he eventually broke his neck, blaming it on a fall down some stairs while he was carrying him to the dressing-room area.

Psyche is out like a light; dead to the world. His eyes are turned up in his head, his scrotum (still some small signs of dermatital infection there) is twitching, and his feet are kicking against my leg in a choppy approximation of running.

A plane has just flown low over the cottage. It was loud enough to agitate the river into a sizzling, quilted pattern. The dog’s usual reaction is to dart for cover when this happens. Half an hour ago, though, I slipped him a mickey – just enough Mythium or Lythium, Oblivon or Halcion to keep him under until we’ve made it back to London.

Very soon it will be time to lift him into the zippered carrier I use to smuggle him onboard the coach. Roy, my regular driver from the village (motto: ‘Church bells not decibels’ – it’s printed on the mesh of his trucker’s cap, plastered across his bumper), will assist me in this and then, experience has taught me, work the phrases ‘dogsbody’, ‘dog tired’, and so on, into the conversation as many times as possible in the half hour it takes to travel from here to the coach station in town.

The arrangement I’ve got at Kiln Cottage is unconventional, but it seems to work. Whenever Staff or his sisters want to come back on reacquaintance visits (which is never for very long and not very often – there are too many other options open to them) I up sticks and go. These visits tend to coincide with the school holidays and the influx of happy campers and Sunday sailors into the area, so I have few complaints.

Temperamentally it suits me to be going against the flow. Even since before I was awake this morning I have been hurtling along the one-horse highways and high-hedged lanes that will carry me away from Cleve, the window wound down to give me a full hit of the phenols, benzines, hydrocarbons and other toxants and pollutants that hang in the air over the trunk road at the top of the valley like vodka in tonic and give the same sort of violent kick-start to the system.

Sometimes in the mornings when I was pulling down £500 for playing a week in Grimsby or Stockton or Wakefield, I would throw on a headscarf and a coat belonging to the owner of the
digs where we were staying and slip out past the all-night poker school in the kitchen and the bleary club hostesses who were the previous night’s take-in and climb aboard the buses taking the cleaners, mill-girls and factory hands to work. I’d sit in the fugged sleepy atmosphere, ingest the smell of newsprint and tobacco, and bask in the anonymity.

(Under normal circumstances I refused to be seen without full make-up, even first thing in the morning. If I’d ordered a meal in my room in a hotel, I would hide in the bathroom until it was served to avoid being seen by the staff.)

On the return run, we’d load up with the shop-girls for the Victorian department stores whose windows were still full of berserk-looking, putty-coloured models in stingy post-austerity fashions. From the upper deck you looked out at the wallpapers of rooms that had been half-demolished and had fireplaces and doors suspended halfway up them, or down on to the exotic plant-life that had swarmed over the bomb sites.

I used to feel sometimes, although I’m pleased I was never called on to prove it, that I would be able to say which city I was in in those days simply by the noise coining from the football ground.

The roars of the Nottingham Forest crowd, for instance, rose on thermals and became diffused as they crossed the Trent, while the cries of triumph when County got one in rolled straight into town like fog.

The wave of noise of Newcastle supporters used to break against the walls of the Palace theatre in an explosion which seemed to release the earthy sweet smell of yeast from the Blue Star brewery which it carried before it.

Bradford’s Valley Parade location resulted in the crowd sound from there being particularly big and bottomy and mysterious – the hollow-cosmos effect of the first Mitch Miller mike-in-a-lavatory-pan echo-chambers – ‘putting a halo around the voice’ is how he described it – which was later beefed up and operatically OTT-ed into the Spector sound.

With their composition floors and bare brick walls, dressing-
rooms tended to amplify anything – people arguing, a toilet flushing, football crowds. The crowds functioned as a sort of locating mechanism. Constantly on the move, as I was at that time, they gave me a bearing.

Perhaps the best way to explain it is in terms of the way some actors used the heat generated by the studio lights of the early talkies to get themselves into the correct camera positions.

‘Any film-stage properly lit becomes a veritable crisscross of unseen light beams of different focus and intensity. These soon became my secret tools for correct positioning,’ one of the old-time movie queens relates in her memoirs. ‘Realising that my facial skin was sensitive to subtle differences in emission of heat from various combinations of light beams, I came to correlate and memorise the patterns of heat and action established during rehearsal and used this knowledge to maintain correct changes of position during filming. What I recalled was a rehearsed pattern of heat. My knack involved sensing the difference between a patch of skin on my forehead and a cooler area on my cheek. Combining this fact with my memory of where I had been in rehearsals, I could even sense if my head was held in the right position.’

When a goal was scored while I was in the empty theatre gearing up for a show on match days, it could sometimes sound as though generations of applause had freed itself from the plaster-work and was rumbling eerily around the auditorium. At other times it was as if the building itself was exercising ancient lungs and ventilating.

I am sentimental about the old neighbourhoods associated with football grounds and variety theatres. Where they still survive in any recognisable form, it’s there that you’re likely to find isolated pockets of the working poor and all the textbook examples of multiple deprivation. But it is also where you will find the characteristic sparks of individual eccentricity and urban energy, advertising themselves in back-street businesses with names as impromptu and hussled together as the clapped-out premises to which they’re tacked: Kumincyde, Bed-E-Buys,
Connectuphere (cellular car phones, pagers), Sheeba Video, Vidz
₄
U.

Street-corner hairdressers have always provided a direct line into private fantasy and wish fulfilment. (‘Alma’s’ were very popular when my name was prominent on the showcards that hung in the windows among the ads for ‘Drene’ and ‘Knight’s Castile’ and still painted big on the gable-ends.)

Shobiz Hair, Hair you!, Curl Up and Dye, Eboné Stylez, Maggie’s Thatchery, Scissors Palace, Shear Class, Toffs and Tarts are some I have spotted when the bus has lurched off the motorway en route to or from London and gone barrelling along close-crowded streets that are a riot of information overkill.

It is this diversity and animal vulgarity that I miss in the de-industrialised dreamlike dead-zones that the railway stations have become.

They are places where you can buy life assurance, compact discs and twenty varieties of croissant at midnight and hop aboard a train almost as an afterthought, secure in the knowledge that there will not only be more of the same, but identical climate-modulated concourses and graphic accents, foreign-exchange franchises and spandex activewear concessions, disposed in an approximately identical layout, at the other end.

What happened to ‘the immense and distant sound of time’ hanging under Brunei’s great roofs, shrouding his cast-iron columns and arches?
Men
came
and
went,
they
passed
and
vanished,
And
all
were
moving
through
the
moments
of
their
lives
to
death,
All
made
tickings
in
the
sound
of
time
.

All this – a no doubt naive belief in what I like to think of as the romance of real life; an aversion to the security-scanned timeless present, to Sock Shop living – adds up to reason one why I ride the buses.

Reason two is financial.

Reason three is here in the person of our hostess today – Sue, as she will announce herself after a hacking cough into the mike and an attack of the giggles – ‘Hello, my name is Sue. Your driver today is Nige. Your video today is
The
Mannequin
, a present-day
fable of our time set in downtown Philadelphia. I will be coming round soon to take your orders for refreshments’ – once we are up and running.

An air of reverie surrounds Sue, which I would put down to a hangover. She has the beginnings of the hard look which comes with a hard life and age – I’d place her at about forty-six, half a generation younger than myself.

She has dark hair which she is in the process of growing out: the growth-stages are marked in shallow waves which she keeps fingering and straightening in an attempt to cover the tattoo of fresh love-bites – plum purple, no signs yet of yellowing – all in a row in the soft trench at the base of her neck. She keeps repositioning her neat, lipstick-stained company cravat for the same reason.

Although, as her passengers, we regard her with the affectless, disinterested gaze with which we regard each other, my guess is that I am not alone at this moment in imagining up the steamy scenario surrounding Sue’s overnight turn-around activities.

A few lager and blacks down the Steyne at The Blackie Boy, The Happy Struggler, The Spanish Patriot; a few Baileys and Parfait Amours at Berlins, Boobs, the Studz Bar (topless d-j, spacey globular lighting, Bonnie Tyler, Whitney Houston, Barry White in stomach-lurching quad); some fuel food – Taiwanese, Chinese, Greek, curry sauce optional; and so to the main business of the evening (a bit of split-crotch boogaloo? tarry Nepalese temple fingers? gummy African bhang? French ticklers?) In other words, the old Joan Collins never-too-old-to-rock’n’roll and the whole nine yards.

Nige doesn’t figure in any of this. At least not in my version. Nige is the quiet studious type in navy V-neck and sun-sensitive glasses who, two inches into his second pint, can be relied on to divulge an unusual interest or hobby, an unsuspected inner life – a passion for English spatter-ware of the late eighteenth century, say, or a competition-keen knowledge of the life and works of Rider Haggard or the Brontë clan or John Buchan. Just the type who can be depended on, in other words, to get you up the
motorway in one piece and keep the bus a Valium-free zone.

But if not Sue-and-Nige, then Sue-and-who? I tried to spot Sue’s partner of last night among the hostess-and-driver teams milling around on the apron at the bus station before we pulled away. Early favourite was an in-shape, light-complected Negro with a morning paper poking out of his pocket at a pardon-my-pistol angle, but I decided that this was probably just sexual stereotyping.

The atmosphere – scuzzy sex and booming hangovers and complex interpersonal dynamics – brought back memories, as it always does (as I look forward to it doing), of all those mornings when the tour bus was loading up to head off for another town in that period in the mid-to-late fifties, roughly between
Black
board
Jungle
and Little Richard finding God and dumping his jewels in the Tallahassee, when the world seemed to be being made new and new energy was flowing into all departments of everyday life.

In 1957, the business was still coming off that big beautiful sound of Patti Page and Perry Como and Kay Starr. That was fading away and the new sound was taking over. But it wasn’t an overnight affair.

When I spent the early part of the year touring the Moss Empire circuit with Britain’s first homegrown teen scream sensation, the remainder of the bill was made up of a clown who doubled on drums, a magician, a pair of trick roller-skaters, Borrah Minevitch’s Harmonica Rascals, and a man who made shadow-pictures with his hands.

Audrey of the Skating Avalons became the first casualty when she was ‘struck by a projectile’ (a commemorative Coronation compact scrawled with the words ‘We love Tommy’) while simultaneously revolving at speed on a high platform and spinning from a harness round her husband’s neck by her teeth.

Pea-shooter armies were out in force (their actual ammunition was pellets of stinging pearl barley), and it became a custom as we proceeded around the country for the front rows of the stalls to stand with their backs to the performance, with older members
of the audience yelling at them to sit down, until they got what they had come to see.