Alma Cogan (13 page)

I recognise the voice doing the talking-up – a disc-jockey from my own time, apparently still going strong.

I look out the window and see the computer-generated logos and graphics spinning and cavorting as a reflection on the bland agribusiness landscape through which we’re travelling.

Reality digitised and broken down into megabits or bongo-bytes, then replayed as a kind of endless fidgeting or fluttering on the periphery of experience, at the edge of vision. Motes dancing on the air. That’s what I see. That’s what I seem to be constantly seeing.

We slow to a crawl for no obvious reason. We are apparently climbing a steep gradient, although no incline is visible. Then we pack up speed again and glide past a racecourse with deserted grandstands and hand-painted numerals slotted into a big churchy frame giving the date of the next meeting.

The past, in the shape of a shingled farm building, a farm dog skirting the edge of a field on its half-haunches, a plot of country graveyard bordered by slabby barbered yews, will occasionally be glimpsed in profile for a few seconds before the road presents itself full-face and sets you back on course across the surface.

‘Minute in the mouth, month on the hips,’ I hear a child a couple of rows back chastising its mother.

‘It’s one of the places where you can get really
good
camel’s hair.’ This from a character in
The
Mannequin
, a frail but feisty old lady, evidently the owner of the department store where the action – a bit of love-interest, a lot of knock-about – takes place.

I find myself wishing it was time for Sue to come round again taking orders. (There are no catering committees involved, no portion control practised here. It’s a system that allows the personality
some play. Sue’s chicken roll with Paxo stuffing and honeyglaze ham with pease-pudding now both sound particularly good.)

I know that at this point, though, Sue will have got her head down, squeezed in among the cases of no-brand cherryade and cola, the caterers’ jars of beetroot and brown sauce that occupy the back seat and mark out her territory.

Her bit is the bit next to the toilet cabin. ‘If you sprinkle when you tinkle,’ a rather startling little notice in there says, ‘please be sweet and wipe the seat.’

Turbo-Intercooling. Chilled Distribution, the rolling logotypes say in the winter dusk.

Imagesetting. Interprint. Computrans. Superdrug. Control International. Corporate Synergy.

Then: Get In Lane. Filter Right.

We slide past convoys of wagons on the left, their house-sized loads mysteriously belted and tarped. There are no heads visible, only ghostly forearms and slicked denim thighs and the unexpectedly homely cabin bits and pieces brought along to fend off the loneliness of the road. (Already some Christmas lights are in evidence – strings of coloured lights looped round windscreens to give a festive/sad, lyrical/tawdry Santa’s grotto feel.)

We have slowed to a crawl again, due to some obstruction or accident. We sidle alongside a lorry carrying an alp of giant concrete pipes. There is a dog curled up asleep in the seat next to the driver and a newspaper flattened against the steering-wheel.

SHAMEFUL, CYNICAL AND CRUEL it says in letters as black as death across the front page. And, over the constantly-retrieved, flatly-lit picture of Myra Hindley: ‘Police step up macabre search for young bodies in the snow as Moors murderess Hindley confesses after 20 years’.

The picture (blurring slightly with the movement of the engine) fills almost the whole of the page. Is it possible to discern evil, as many have supposed, in the cavernous upturned eyes, the pasty planes, the heavy bones, the holed hedge of bleached blonde fringe, the fondant of deep shadow, like a choke-collar,
under Hindley’s chin? Is this the look – frontal, insolent, the unintimidated direct address to the camera – of
ein
richtiger
Teufelsbraten
, a true devil’s dish?

The features are individually too familiar by now to be read as an integrated, blood-warmed face. As usual, Hindley looks like a composite, an identikit, a media emanation, a hypothetical who never existed in the flesh.

But we are moving again. Or the wagon is. I have to look across at the dark field, the stripped trees, the traffic on the distant feed-road to get a bearing.

The cabin dog staggers to its feet, makes one and a half circles, then folds itself back into the hollow made by its body. Between my feet, in his bag and still, I hope, sedated (there are two hours at least to go), Psyche performs the same bit of business in perfect unison – as if one was the object and the other the shadow cast by it (remember all those Fred and Ginger routines?); one the voice and the other the echo.

I’m confused about how to react, whether to feel beguiled or repelled (why did I almost say ‘warned’?) by this sudden, oddly haunting piece of synchronicity.

As he inches ahead, I see that there’s a fresh and feminine-looking continental quilt bunched up behind the driver’s head and a bunk-space it must feel good crawling into at the end of a hard driving day.

Four days back in London and no contact so far with my mother nor any attempt to make any. So I have forced myself to make the effort to stir my stumps and take the trek (and it is a trek) today.

It’s like the war again in the Tube. During the war the identification boards on stations all over the country were painted out to fox the enemy; the trade papers for the week billed you only as appearing ‘somewhere in East Anglia’.

Stations all along the line are being given a facelift. Station names are obscured by scaffolding and ladders and the clouds of demolition dust that gust out of service tunnels and ventilation ducts, adding to the curious world-in-flux, sand-bagged atmosphere.

The result is a lot of craning and straining at every stop from people like me who are not familiar with the route, and tired looks from the desk-jockeys and Tube rats who know its every lurch and door-slam better than they probably thought they were going to know anything in their lives.

The work in progress means an unbroken blankness that brings the blackened walls pressing in and accentuates the snugness of fit between the bore of the tunnels and the poreless silver skin of the trains.

The ads have been cancelled with blackboard paper: its surface seems stretched and buckled with the vitality of what lies concealed underneath. Occasionally it is possible to see beyond the screens that have been erected on the platforms to sections of the rind-like saloon-bar and lavatorial tiling which is in the process of being overlaid with wafer-thin mosaic and ceramic tiles in more up-to-the-minute, razzle-dazzle designs.

Also advertising panels where posters from as far back as the
thirties have been roughly ragged-out and lie exposed in archaeological clarity/complexity, like layers of the city’s skin.

An awareness of the present being a membrane grown over the past (and of the future constantly threatening to occlude the present, in an imperceptible lapping movement towards the centre from the edges) has been with me since I was a child planted between my parents at the Troxy.

One of the things about growing older is that you start to develop a kind of X-ray vision by which any building can suddenly appear as depthless and liquid as a slide image thrown on to whatever you remember standing in the same space at an earlier time.

I feel certain that it is to avoid these woozy sensations and achieve a less slippery fix on things that people in their declining years (Cleve of course is full of them) move away from the areas they have known all their lives and re-root themselves somewhere where the past is less likely to rear up and go boo! and there is a sense (a sense at least) of immutability and permanence. To stay is to risk the psychic dizziness that in the end can drag you under.

The pace of change has been so fast in the decade or so I’ve been on hold that certain districts of London for me are like a chimera.

The supermarket which I use almost on a daily basis when I’m in London was, in an earlier incarnation, a theatre I played many times. I was a regular on a popular variety programme,
Chelsea
at
Nine
, which Granada Television put out live from there on Monday evenings in the mid-50s.

It is inevitable now that as I hesitate in the space between the delicatessen counter and the chiller cabinets, which, by my reckoning, is just about where the pass-door from the stalls was located, I sometimes seem jostled by ghosts and golems and uneasy souls – many of them not released yet from their earthly vessels.

Because of its fashionable location rather than its history (though I do wonder how big a part that plays) it’s a place that
attracts a reliable sprinkling of famous, or nearly famous, or formerly famous, faces. (The papers have run items on it.)

The striking thing in almost every instance is how fleeting the resemblance is between the popularly circulated public image, the official template, and the patsy with the wire basket.

Stripped of that elusive X ingredient essential to the projection of the well-presented, value-added self, they (
we
– I can’t leave myself out of this) appear not only deflated but somehow dully denatured.

The low-wattage of the has-beens is understandable and mostly involuntary and can be put down to age, obscurity and the extended season of disappointment and failure.

The former footballer, the disgraced children’s television presenter, the
Army
Game
actor, the
Ζ
Cars
star, the playwright who has been famously blocked for twenty years, the precociously successful novelist who has since lost the thread, the clapped-out dress designer, the one-time prince of the voice-over, an actress of whom it was once said she couldn’t ad lib a burp after a Hungarian meal …

When we see each other we take avoiding action or, if it’s too late, exchange brief nods of recognition and turn hurriedly into another aisle, although this doesn’t always work.

Some time ago I found myself in the check-out queue next to one of the beefcake balladeers from the old days, a passable Vaughn Monroe copyist, who was clearly in the grip of some personal sadness – grandson a junkie, had up himself for shoplifting or persistent importuning; I honestly didn’t know.

He had a Walkman headset clamped over his ears. It was tuned to one of those all-talk, a-problem-aired-is-a-problem-shared stations specialising in opinions by the mile and round-the-clock confidences, confessions and hair-curling personal disclosures.

He never listened to music, he said. Music brought back sad memories. His skin had the texture of days-old orange peel; it was crystalline with whiteheads. The headset went on whispering into his chest as he spoke.

Listening to the news and phone-ins was like listening to a never-ending serial – things were happening to other people, and they were mostly bad. ‘It takes you out of yourself and instead of brooding over your own problems you’re listening to and living in other people’s messes. And it keeps you company. Music puts me in a melancholy mood. I start thinking about the past. It makes me want to go and get loaded.’

Since then I have seen him palming cherry tomatoes from the salad bar and chewing contemplatively on them as he dragged his big feet around, zombie-fashion.

But it’s the others, the ones whose careers still have some heat under them, who are currently making some noise in the world, who seem if anything
more
ghostly, more spectral – shadow creatures bewilderingly adrift from the lustrous, confident, open-featured people (the people with something to sell, always some aspect of their own uniqueness) showcased in the newspapers and the colour supplements and radiating from the television screen.

It is difficult to believe, for instance, that the small, pinched, rather furtive woman who always takes an unusual interest in what people are putting in their baskets can be the celebrated writer familiar from the magazines that I get third- and fourth-hand from a neighbour in the country.

The truth is I had thrown the relevant issue – A Home in the Life or A Day of My Own or This Hectic Life or My Favourite Tipple – away with the rubbish (I’m the last one in the chain) before it dawned on me where I had seen that burnished old bird, posing in a shaft of light in her Chelsea salon, before.

(She had her bathroom painted half a dozen times before she achieved the exact shade of cerulean blue. She has an aversion to cats and is devoted to Jean Muir’s classic simplicity.)

In the shiny pages she is palpable, coherent, identifiable,
com
plete
. In the supermarket in her frazzledness and ordinary dishevelment, indistinct and all but invisible. And she is not alone in her invisibility.

The actress who lives with the American novelist; the model-turned-actress who is combining a successful career with bringing
up a Downs baby; the Lloyd-Webber lyricist with the eighty-foot kitchen and industrial hob, the newsreader who has just run his first half-marathon, the singer with the on-stage rasta hair extension, the controversial architect, the quiet Stone, ‘the girl with the laugh in her voice’ – all are equally phantasmagorical, intimately familiar yet worryingly unplaceable to the tricked, the tired, the glutted eye.

It seems odd to me now that I ever had to invent strategies for going unrecognised. Today I walk past old friends and acquaintances in the street and I might as well be Myrtle the Turtle. They don’t see me.

The me that they remember looking like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag (as one of them has unsentimentally described my seventies appearance) is now bantam weight, standard-looking, almost stringy. Most of the excess poundage has been eroded and chivvied away over the years as a result of all that walking and cliff-top buffeting.

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the sleepy commuters as we hum forward through the underground tunnels of north London, I see my fifty-four-year-old face staring back at me from the depths of a dirt-dappled window, looking all of that, yes; a touch reptilian and leathery, certainly; but with nothing uplifted, tucked-upped, sliced off or surgically repositioned.

In middle-age I’ve developed a sort of deracinated, nutty gypo look that I play up whenever I venture out in public with vaguely ethnic bits and pieces – cambric shirts, tortoiseshell combs, metal-threaded prayer shawls. My hair is longer – what my mother (oh Jesus, my mother) calls bedroom-length. It’s been wrecked by the sun and salt, but that gives it a careless, tendrilly appearance that I can live with for the present.

My hands, as it happens, are the part of me that has altered most. From being porky soft and mottled, they have turned spartan and squared off, like the hands of market traders and old landladies that I admired – women who thought nothing of going into a chicken up to the elbow to haul out the giblets or into a stopped lavatory to the shoulder; who unflinchingly saw
to the corpses of family and neighbours and rose well before anybody else in the house to lay fires on chilly, misty mornings.

(Fire-lighting is one of the skills I have acquired: it gives me unreasonable pleasure to be on my knees among the clinker with coal-dust under my nails, taking the sulphur of struck matches in through the mouth and exhaling it through the nose.)

Having said all of the above, however, I have to confess that Ronnie, among others last night, recognised me as soon as I stepped out of the lift into Seigi’s.

‘Hey what the hey. Elma!’ Ronnie said, seeming to take my coat, relieve a tray of a fistful of glasses and steer me towards the table where he was sitting in a single movement. ‘Look what the wind’s blew in. Crazy-looking threads!’

I remembered this – the way you were aware of the music as a distant pulse before you’d finished paying off the taxi; how it entered you through the soles of your feet as you stood waiting for the lift to come; how it steadily increased in volume as you rose through the building, past stone corridors and darkened offices with doors of rippled glass; and how finally the noise embraced you, along with the smoke and the human hubbub and the heat; how it played you like a flounder and then slowly wound you in.

A plant glowed emerald green in the foyer. Bottles shone behind the bar; waitresses went back and forth in the sketchy light wearing waist-high tutus. But the dominant feature of the room was, as it has always been, the nightscape like a painted
backdrop or diorama – the night city achieved effortlessly in a few broad strokes: splashes of white to suggest lighted windows or reflected light or a swathe of light glancing off rainsoaked bricks high up in the night; torch bulbs for the hard bright stars.

It would have seemed old-fashioned as decoration if it hadn’t been real: too cornily concrete in a world tuned into the associative, the abstract. If you went up to the window you could vaporise part of the city with your breath on the great cold pane.

‘ElmaTonyaTonyaElma,’ Ronnie said. Tonya was a peach-blonde no longer in the summer of her years. She was wearing shiny black ciré stretch-pants and a panther limned across her angora sweater with sequin-peaked ears and red ruby eyes.

‘Elma and me go way back, like …’ – Ronnie flubbeled his lips with his fingers, obscuring how many – ‘… years.’ He tapped the untipped end of a cigarette quickly on his thumbnail and sucked in a long blue flame. Tonya indicated that she was already lit. ‘Ohyeah. Yewshaw. Like for life. Am I right El?’

But even with one eye closed against the smoke Tonya was giving me a look I recognised. I knew that was coming next. ‘Weren’t you …’

The champagne flutes were generous and thistle-shaped, made of an industrially-etched crystal sharp enough, if gripped hard enough, to cut your hand.

‘Yes.’

Club lighting is an under-acknowledged art – the pin spot, the subtone wash, the optimum angle. I knew she wouldn’t have rumbled me without it.

Tonya herself had chosen her place intelligently, half in and half out of the creamy glow reflecting from the table and just to one side of an uplighter concealed in the plant trough running along the back of the banquette.

She was pushing a few scraps from the complimentary buffet unenthusiastically around her plate with a fork that looked enormous in relation to her beaky white knuckles. ‘You’re not much fun, are you?’ Ronnie bawled at her over the music. ‘Look at it. A wall of wet paint.’

Tonya brought a napkin to the corner of her mouth, taking exaggerated care not to smudge the velvety brown line that defined her lips. ‘It’s a cordon bleu cook sitting here,’ she said. ‘Trained.’ Then to me: ‘Not that I want to eat well all the time. I can eat, let’s say, baked potatoes every day, but now and again I like to put a spoonful of caviar on top, you know?’

Pernicketiness about food is a trait that has been shared by all of Ronnie’s girls, which suggests they must get it from Ronnie: it is what he expects; part of the high-living etiquette. Whenever you saw a plate of steak going back to the kitchen at the Stork Club or the Empress or Churchill’s, you always knew that Ronnie was in with one of his
tsatskes
.