Luda, page 16
It’s the next frontier, isn’t it? Votes for children. I’m all over it. They couldn’t do a worse job.
Being eleven is a condition of being twelve, or twenty, or thirty-five. Or fifty. You can’t have it any other way. There are no forty-year-olds who managed to miss out on being eleven.
And yet, scientists tell us, and they sometimes know what they’re talking about, they tell us how every seven years we exchange every single molecule, or maybe it’s every atom of our bodies for new ones, that get recycled from the restless particle churn that’s been going around and around since the Big Bang or whatever creation myth you’d prefer to argue in favor of.
There’s that ship in Greek mythology, the ship of Theseus—where they start out replacing the worm-eaten mast, then they find they need to refit the rotten planks on deck, before they’re on to rebuilding the damaged hull and casting a new anchor chain, while the gunwales and the fo’c’sle, or whatever it is they call it, receive their own makeover, chucked on a skip, and replaced by newer, stronger parts.
The existential question being: It’s got the same name on the prow, the ship of Theseus, and it’s freshly painted in the old-fashioned style with the inevitable glaring mystic eye at the front—but can it really be called the same ship?
What makes it the ship of Theseus, other than consensus?
With people, there’s the same lifelong exchange of particles but instead of making us look box-fresh, these new incoming atoms know to make us look older. They’re programmed to build us a personal ship of Theseus that gets leakier, less seaworthy with each new influx of spare parts.
With us, it’s the whole human race that’s the ship; we’re the nails that get rusty and need to be replaced by shiny new pins that look the same and do the same job but aren’t “us” anymore.
As I always say when I want to shut down a boring conversation, if you filmed a whole human lifetime, from birth until death, and sped the playback up to last an hour, you’d witness a transformation to outdo the most shocking effects sequence ever seen in any horror movie; this bouncing bundle of newly born wrinkled fat unfurls and inflates from its explosive hospital arrival into a bright, inquisitive child—then it’s honed by time into a handsome man or beautiful long-legged woman striding vigorously through the world until piece by piece it wizens and goes gray, evaporated by the friction burn of time, until the knees turn brittle, the eyes go out, the stripper’s in a wheelchair, the hero’s a dotard, and the gorgeous paragon of forty minutes previously collapses to dust, shrieking like a noonday vampire on soiled hospital sheets.
These are the futile voyages of the Ship of Theseus from port to faraway port, on its three-score-and-ten-year mission to seek out new life. Lose a bit here, gain a bit there. No one will ever know the difference.
I don’t mean for it to sound so grim. If you’d never been eleven, you wouldn’t be here, would you? As adults we’re all balanced on the frail shoulders of the infants and tweens we once were, wobbling on their epaulets to reach the lofty vantage points of middle age, blinking above the tree line as we wonder if the physical effort was worth it for the cheerless panorama.
Chipper as Victorian chimney sweeps, our younger selves earnestly support us, bearing the grim load of their own future histories with uncomprehending smiles on their fervent little faces.
So, where’s eleven? I know I spent a whole twelve months there, so why can’t I stroll back down those old tarry streets in summer, smell the air freshener scent of wildflowers in that time-lost garden in July, see Dad riding his bike, Mum when she suited a bikini rather than a coffin’s plush?
Why can’t I visit? I remember being there through a sort of fog, I’m sure you do too, and I’m positive things like Mum and Dad and the door and the couch were real and solid, so where did all of that go? Why can’t I walk to it? Why can’t I point to it?
Why can’t any of us stroll back to the days of being eleven and shake paws with our not-yet-threadbare teddy bear, Boggles?
Time’s tricky. Invisible, never satisfied, time holds us fast as it tracks us through the waving elephant grass of our imagined days, our estimated hours. Time’s fangs coming closer, always there, camouflaged in the momentary stalks, its steady approach detected first by the older or the weaker members of the herd, the outliers who need to stay alert to stay alive…whom no one listens to anymore…
I do get morbid sometimes. Tonight, on opening night, especially. There comes an awareness of darkness and purple, the webs of spiders and Fates, and what might be stuck there.
Eleven’s a funny age.
I was eleven when my mother brought me into Gasglow city center on the number 36 bus on a rainy school holiday in summer to buy a special dress. Not for me, I hasten to add, but after what happened that day in Levitz’s department store it might as well have been.
I’ve been wearing dresses ever since.
* * *
—
So, there I was, and from our privileged viewpoint thirty-nine years later I invite you to progress along my timeline, ladies, gentlemen, et cetera, to a point several hours after the remarkable incident that was to occur on third-floor ladies’ wear in Levitz Bros. department store; here’s little me curled in on myself, a living comma, water swirling round my own drain, on the fat, familiar, threadbare couch in our living room, paging through a Batman comic, while Mum and Dad yelled at each other in the kitchen. Again.
Like me, reading through his adventure, Batman could move in only one direction, from the start of the story to its end. Left to right toward a prearranged destiny.
Where I was from, as seen in relation to Batman’s existence on the page—and you’d be right to imagine I’m no Caped Crusader, although we both share a common enthusiasm for tights and boys in panties—what made me exceptional was a talent for moving backward and forward through Batman’s life as it was paced out in boxy ruled panels across the pages from the foggy dockside wharf on page 1 to the sinking schooner at the end—
I found I could pause on page 12 then go back to page 5, to study clues the artist had left. I could skip from an inescapable death trap on page 15, to the Batman’s triumphant defeat of the disfigured, mentally ill “villain” without any of the intervening sturm and attendant drang.
These thoughts—entertained as Mum and Dad volleyed shrieks and accusations—were not entirely welcome, it must be said.
As I’ve hinted earlier, something unprecedented had happened to me that day in August. The profound meditations on cosmic geometry that now troubled my prepubescent skull even as crockery shattered inevitably next door were only side effects.
A cymbal crash of commemorative GASGLOW 1938 WORLD EXPO plate shards accompanied Dad’s throbbing aggressive bass line and paved the way for Mom’s shrieking solo vocal, whose nerve-shredding treble and tremolo I recognized as performance, not real feeling. Her litany of indictments and disappointment was a shrill libretto she’d learned by copying the actors in films and soap operas.
Back in the safety of my comic, Batman was hot on the trail of a new opponent I hadn’t heard of, Spook-Man. I flipped listlessly through the pages and back, settling on the ads, then searching for the missing ingredient that had once brought these crude pen-and-ink drawings to life. Something was wrong. The story felt lacking in some essential vitality. Viewed through the ass-end of the captain’s telescope, these were simply unsophisticated scratchings made by artists who knew they could be better, if only they were given more time or more money, or more respect.
A terrible thought rang its bell in my mind: My hero was a loser! Batman was a wank!
Looking back at that strange day from here, maybe it had something to do with the steady drip of pre-adolescent hormones—perhaps it was the loss of some focused attention that grants us complete immersion in play and picture stories, where we consciously dissolve the boundary between reality and illusion and toys turn real.
I don’t know. I’m not Sigmund Freud. Look at me. I’m barely done up. Too much talking, not enough slap. And I’m onstage in two hours!
It wasn’t long before we found ourselves, the Caped Crusader and me, his boy partner, approaching the end of the story where Batman had, true to form, gotten the better of Spook-Man by exposing him as an embittered, probably disfigured Hollywood stuntman.
I flinched as another precious kitchen thing broke into bits. More jagged fragments added to family life’s accumulated rubbish heap, for Dad to painstakingly glue back into place as if completing a grim jigsaw portrait of his increasingly fruitless marriage to Mum.
Through the crack between the peach-painted kitchen door and its frame, I caught a strobe-flash slice of time where Dad was a snarling monster. All man, all teeth and fire and pain.
Clutched in his fist, a sparkly evening dress. He seemed to throttle it in his grip, and shaking it like maracas in my mum’s face, Dad roared his wounded vocal accompaniment.
The bull-bellow contained a simple request broadcast at 120 decibels: He wanted to know where the fucking dress had come from.
I could tell him that! If he’d asked me first, all of this might have been avoided. It was, as usual, my fault they were fighting.
It was none of his fucking business, Mum screamed. What did it matter to him? When was the last time?
Usually when they fought, it was over money, or the lack of money but recently the tenor of the exchanges had taken on a new flavor of poison.
Only I knew she didn’t have a lover. Not yet. That came later. She’d bought the dress herself, to make Dad jealous.
I know that because I was with her when she bought it.
* * *
—
That day, as I started out explaining, we’d hopped the 36 bus into Gasglow city center from our house on Stonepark Street, part of what they called a post-war housing project on the South Side. It was raining, so I’m thinking it was probably oh—any month of the year in Gasglow, but most likely August. Low pressure on the barometer. Warm and wet.
The 36 was my preferred bus journey, with an absorbing, wide-ranging route that wound lazily through the rich enclaves of Breckridge and Prospect Gardens with their cranky turreted mansions and gated entrances. They looked like the haunted houses you saw on TV and in the comics, so that’s what they were to me: haunted houses, old and rich in character, where lonely young women were glimpsed at the windows in pale shifts. Then past the ice rink and the transport museum whose vaulted hangars were strung with World War I biplanes frozen in victory formation above cold grand halls showcasing out-to-pasture steam locomotives, tractors through the ages, and the decline of the tram.
Past the Brutalist mall complex where despairing trees grew in the yards. Where there were cinemas, fast-food outlets, and pharmacies, there was the 36, its unwavering course plotted through the tangled railway yards and bus depots on the South Side of the Dare, before crossing the Bridge Street Bridge into Gasglow city center, past the theater district, up Charity to Saxonhall, on its halting progress via Calvinside and Nethersdale, to the leafy West End’s churches and tennis courts; its patisseries, wine bars, and outsized porticoed townhouses.
Lost in the shuttling, interlacing paths of raindrops racing on the window, and unwilling to get wetter, I’d have happily stayed with the 36 all the way to its terminus, where Newtonsburn’s bowling greens, its spacious heights, surveyed the mysterious northwest sprawl of the city, with the blue-hazed outline of the Duncairn hills beyond, but Mother was on a mission. Only the big stores on the busy shopping grid of Gasglow central could fulfill her special requirements.
In the rain, keeping up the halting, hiccupping pace of a three-legged horse just to stay inside the protection radius of Mum’s umbrella, I dodged among jostling wet strangers.
Outdoors felt like indoors, that day when I was eleven, as if we’d all crowded into a sauna still wearing our clothes in prudish awkwardness. People steamed like kettle spouts and brought with them the smell of damp Labradors, rubber, soaked carpets, reeking the way rolled-up towels do carried home in plastic bags from the swimming baths.
By the time we’d segmented ourselves through the spinning doors of Levitz’s department store—five floors where all the treasures of civilization were spread out for sale, or so it seemed to me although at that age I was only interested in the toy department and, for some reason, the electrical goods section—the intervening floors, specializing in shoes and underwear, held the same attraction for me as the adult news bulletins on TV.
Rain ran from the tips of umbrella ferrules to form puddles on floors, until nothing was dry. The escalator repurposed as a mechanical waterfall feature.
When we reached the third floor with its fashion concessions, Mum swept and spun through rack after rack with a brisk professional eye that allowed her to appraise and reject items for sale with a glance.
She’d always been fashion-conscious, my mum. I think I’ve mentioned that. Her tabloid-sized paperback copy of Vogue from the ’30s to Now had been a bible of mine growing up. The other Holy Books and Grimoires of the Glamour that Mum bequeathed were Hollywood’s Golden Age and Marilyn, with poolside pictures of Monroe by Bert Stern to accompany Norman Mailer’s nigh-on ecclesiastical devotions.
While Mum went to work, I scanned the photographs of models on the hosiery packaging. It looked like an enviable life: stretching out your long legs in nice tights, or racy stockings and suspender belts, or even better clad in the sleek and futuristic compromise that were hold-ups, while photographers bottled you in their lenses at your best, looking willowy and vague, livening up the shelves among the other three-inch-high Cottingley Fairy photos.
I liked pictures of beautiful things, like the model girls and cars in Vogue. Clara Bow. Veruschka. Kate Moss. The shape of the ’20s, the ’60s, or the ’90s. Attenuated, stretched-out, and frankly boyish. I was confused back then; I thought I found women like that sexually attractive, when the truth is, I was just envious. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
There you are—I heard Mum say, but she wasn’t talking in my direction or about me. She already knew where I was, stuck on the end of her hand.
Mum was addressing an elegant store dummy, wrapped in a short and black spangly cocktail dress. Not the sort of thing a married woman in her late thirties might instinctively choose.
This dress had been designed for cocktails at the casino in Monaco, or Ferrari rides at dawn through twinkling party cities on the Riviera.
It was sewn to be unzipped and emptied of its gently perspiring contents into an apartment with French windows letting onto a shallow wrought-iron balcony overlooking Montmartre.
It was lovingly cut to be cast in a heap of stardust beside scattered Safrano roses and empty bottles of Clicquot on the Persian carpet next to a four-poster bed in Nice…and Mum knew it.
So, while she was preoccupied by the alarming price tag, I performed a subtle Houdini twist I knew would loosen my fingers from her handcuffs grip. A free agent, I went for a wander among the aisles like Mini Odysseus on a budget. Leaving me to drift, Mum made a beeline for the sales desk where I, from the corner of my eye, could see her pointing out the dummy to one of the cashiers. She was asking if they had a size 10.
I thought she was talking about me, but as I said, I was eleven, not ten, so I don’t know where I got that from and right about then was when the overhead lights intensified to create the same hyper-real effect you get onstage when the house beams are being tested all at once and everything from the studs on the cheap seats to that crack in the trapdoor seems to be screaming for immediate attention at the same time.
The cut-glass clarity of brilliant stage-level lighting exposed in a frank appraisal the obvious artificiality of the big store backdrop I seemed to have come unstuck from. Solid walls were cardboard sets, flimsy and wobbling, that threatened to fall flat any moment, exposing the stark mind-bending machinery of time and space behind their painted scenery.
This loss of reality or volume came with a corresponding drop in temperature. I understood I was flat too, projected on the same backcloth, sketched on the same stretched paper with no more thickness than a shadow and now that I think about it, I knew that paranormal chill again when Luda walked into the audition and again much later in the story, as you’ll find out…
So, here we’ve reached the point—if we didn’t get here already—where what I tell you next could easily prejudice your outlook on my glossy fingernail grip on sanity.
I know what you’ll think, but when you sit down together and the decision-making hinges on “what about that bit when she talked about hearing voices…” please take the following into consideration.
Remember I’m eleven years old. I’m foot fancy, loose, and free on the third floor of Levitz’s lingerie, fashion, and ladies’ wear, my mum nearby, still gassing with the till girl. It doesn’t matter; she might as well be a million miles away. None of it matters.
So, let me tell you about this voice—it came from inside my skull, but it wasn’t my voice, and it wasn’t any of the voices and characters I knew intimately from what I liked to think of as my inner Committee—the Bully, the Loser, the Leader, the Joker, the Judge, the Lover, the Artist. The Asshole.
It said—What are you looking at?
As I came closer, the overhead lights oscillated on the dress, so that each careful step caused sequins to turn on and off in random configurations. There was something welcoming, even comforting about the dress winking its Christmas tree semaphore. It was sending me messages.
All I had to do was learn its party vernacular of tinsel and twinkle.
I was fine with the dress itself, fascinated even. It was the inexplicable plaster-and-paint figurine wearing the dress I couldn’t be too sure about. The heightened reality, the searing fretted edge on everything, was so overwhelming I felt no fear, only surprise. Shining gift-wrapped surprise after surprise like all my birthdays combined—firework displays of surprise too bright for fear or reflection.
