In Search of the Missing Eyelash, page 9
Inside, the pub is filling up by the bar. I can see there are empty tables at the back near the pool table. It is mostly men in tight T-shirts and jeans who want to stand up and be the first to be seen. There is a difference between those who sit down and those who stand up in bars and it’s not just about if there are any seats free. Women like to sit down, as do gay couples that have been together for twenty years.
I am a sitter if I can be, but Petula isn’t. That’s probably why Petula has a tiny bottom and mine spreads onto other people’s seats on trains.
At the end of the bar there is a fed-up drag queen in a wide backcombed black wig sat on a stool, smoking, with two clear drinks with ice and lemon in front of him which is probably gin. A strapless blue sequinned dress with a split up the side cuts him under the arms and wasted flesh hanging off his shoulders drops over the edges. From his face and legs you would think he was younger, but his chest is wrinkly and neck ringed with age. He has a medium-sized cleavage pushed together and covered in glitter and his legs are perfectly shaped and smooth in light-coloured tan tights.
Men have better-shaped women’s legs than women do.
The make-up is immaculate. I go and stand next to Petula at the bar and look. He has highlighted over his eyes on the bone that’s under his eyebrows with a silvery blue like Petula’s and then gradually darkened into the sockets. He has powdered his nose and chin to make them softer and tried to disguise his Adam’s apple with foundation and more powder. There are long lines of rouge on his cheeks to suggest cheekbones. His lips are painted on and out-lined, bigger than what’s probably underneath, and he has long false eyelashes which look as if they are heavy to lift, either that or it is his bored demeanour. I am drawn to his red glossy lips and his painted red fingernails as he sips his drink. His hands seem large and bulky compared to the glass.
He is performing tonight. There is a showbiz photo of him on the door, a professional black-and-white one with his head thrown back, laughing.
The DJ is setting up behind the decks and starts to play Kylie. Petula has a ten-pound note in her hand and is ordering two Slippery Nipples.
I sit down at a table at the rear of the bar while I wait for Petula to get served. Two women with short spiky hair are playing on the pool table. They have roundish faces and no make-up on. They have tiny breasts under their polo shirts and I wonder if on a certain day at a certain point they gave up on wearing skirts and relaxed into looking that boyish. I don’t know if they ever wanted to look like women (as women are told to) and then I think about whether it’s to do with want at all.
And what is a woman if Simon thinks he is one deep down?
The drag queen at the bar is called a female impersonator but there is nothing particularly female about him looking like that. Most women don’t want to look that glamorous any more as people would say they look like drag queens. It’s all become a bit unclear. There’s nothing particularly female about the pool players either. And I am only called feminine because I have long hair and wear lipstick and am fat and curvy with breasts too big for my bra, but female and feminine are separate things, and yet they’re not, not really.
And then it becomes quite clear, Simon has been a male impersonator all his life, he has had to pretend to the world that he is a boy when really inside he’s been a girl. But why would he want to be a girl when being female is about artifice, let’s pretend, putting things on, in, pulling bits off, plucking, waxing, cutting; squeezing into a shape or an idea.
The drag queen knows it’s not about looking natural, with his caked-on face and breasts made from the fat on his back. Maybe the androgynous pool players have got it right.
I wonder if Sally feels more like a woman because she is with Fat Neck.
Thank God Petula is back. She was laughing with the barman, safely flirting with him over the names of our drinks, and I marvel at how easily she makes friends.
Before I know it I am feeling a little slurred, my debit card is behind the bar and we are on doubles. I have been squished into the corner by a group of foreign students who have taken over our table. Petula has been chatting to the bouncer for twenty minutes so I decide to go to the loo and I am in a queue for the Ladies behind two men. Madonna is playing upstairs, ‘Like a Virgin’. I am nearly at the front of the queue and the two men go into the cubicle together. I feel like saying something but remember the new equality law and think maybe it extends to the toilets. After several minutes I am trying not to jig up and down outside when they reappear and I wonder what they have been doing. There is piss all over the floor and the toilet seat. I hover over the seat and have to hold onto the empty toilet-roll dispenser to steady myself as I am more drunk than I thought.
Edging my way through the dancing crowds back to our table, I can see Petula leaning against the wall by the entrance, talking and blowing smoke out with the bouncer. When I get back, the foreign bunch has spread out over our seats. I say excuse me and push back into my corner. One of the girls has dark elfish hair and is looking at me from across the table. She isn’t bad-looking so I put my head down and look up with one of my eyes slowly winking and lips semi-parted in a sultry smile I have practised. She looks away and I feel foolish. She gets up and walks over to the pool table with her back to me and I strain my head to look for Petula. The winking doesn’t work this time but I tell myself that it can’t have a one hundred per cent success rate or everyone would be doing it.
The foreign students up and leave after the one drink that they made last for over fifteen songs. My table seems to be the only empty space for a while and I tear up a drinks mat advertising cider. I am relieved when three women arrive and then fill the space after asking if the seats are free. Two are clearly a couple and have started kissing energetically in front of me and I can see their tongues in each other’s mouths going round and round like a washing machine. The girl with them has sat down next to me, opposite them, and is concentrating on rolling a cigarette. She looks as if she has had to get used to her friends doing this and wants to avoid watching it. She is young, like a student, and I glance at her hands and then a drink arrives on the table from the barman and Petula is waving at me from near the door, gesturing that she is going back outside. I watch her go back to the entrance and she points at me from outside and the bouncer and her both wave at me. Once hard, his face is now overly animated and friendly. Petula has a straw in her drink and as she slumps back against the wall I can see she is sucking it for the bouncer in such a way that made Ivor and Ewan undress her very quickly before. The arrival of the drink is a good thing as it’s made me seem popular and like a local. My finger taps on the glass to the music that has crept increasingly louder since we arrived. You’re not supposed to realise it, like the adverts which are slightly louder than the programmes on the TV. It is becoming very hot in the corner and so I undo my mac and take my arms out of it, trying not to nudge against the student girl next to me.
Then the main lights go off and I want to make a joke to the girl next to me about murder in the dark but I don’t. The stage lights come up and there is a fake drum roll and people hush and form an audience around the stage and I am thankful to be pulled out of myself by the entrance of the drag queen.
20
Candyfloss floats on top of the dark urine, a delicious cocktail shot called Brighton Pier.
I never realised the pier had such an underbelly.
‘I’m going for some fresh air,’ I’d said to Petula, holding onto the handrail outside the bar.
The Aquarium is closed for the night; the fish have all retired, sleeping in their unblinking manner and that famous stingray named Ray, who you can actually touch and who smiles and waves in a weird celebrity way, knows he can stop performing and just float.
All things change when the light has disappeared. The moon grants permission for things unimaginable by day. I’ve heard that some people can only have sex with the light off or at night. And some people demand that you keep the light on. Some people are freed by the dark and others are trapped in it.
There is safety in light. Elsie sits behind her lounge window with the orange neighbourhood watch sticker on it each night, in her high-back chair with just the lamp and the kitchen strip light on for comfort. The sun setting marks the start of her curfew and she doesn’t go out after dark. She sits and waits for the burglars and the rapists and the paedophiles with her theatre binoculars in her lap, her phone a hand span away on her telephone table. She sits by her window when there is nothing else for her to do. It fills the time between having her tea, going to bed and watching what she calls her programmes. I think of her as a balding Miss Marple, watching and noting down the details of the street outside on her notepad with the pencil neatly tucked into the spiral at the top when not in use. She saw a three-legged fox once at ten to nine. She showed me the pad the next morning as evidence, as if writing it down on the pad made it true. Her handwriting is like yours used to be, a bit spindly.
And some people like Petula use the light. She told me she only really enjoys sex with the light on so she can see the other person’s sex face. She likes to see the contortion, she says it turns her onto know what she can do to someone else. I kept my eyes shut with Sally; whether the light was on or off I kept my eyes closed as I liked the shapes on the inside of my eyelids that Sally’s hands used to make when she touched me.
But now I can see under the pier the small orange glows of fire from drug addicts burning things on foil, and other people lurking around in the shadows around the iron pillars. There are dogs too. I want to go and see, I don’t know why but maybe it’s for the same reason that Simon and me once went to Cardboard City in Waterloo on an outing. To see something that was as far away as possible from Mum chopping the tops off of our boiled eggs with that frustrated expression, something that would shock us into realising how lucky we really were. It didn’t change a thing. You know, they cleared away all the cardboard shacks, along with the homeless people, and made it into a huge round cinema that no one I know goes to, and, by building what is called a stateof-the-art cinema, it has made the homeless people totally homeless. I’m sure people go now without even knowing what was once underneath.
Funny how we weren’t allowed out after dark in those days, but I am now. Of course I was a child then and vulnerable, but am I that different? I still have the same feet. Though we were allowed out at night when we were away at the holiday camp, that was only to go to the clubhouse where bands with names like the Las Vegas Sisters and Pink Blancmange would come and entertain us. We would dance until our fringes were stuck to our faces with sweat and we had stitches in our ribs and Mum would stay in the caravan with one of her love books and a Martini and lemonade, no ice. Simon and me were told to stay together and never leave one another and we did what we were told as we got on, mostly, which I know is a rare thing between siblings. We knew we had to stick together, and Simon was no trouble at all.
By daytime, I know this area as the bit of the beach where the toilets are with those swirly wet sandy floors, which you hope is the water from wet feet and not children’s wee. But stood here, by night, watching the waves froth onto the pebbles and the light from the pier fall just past me, it is all so unfamiliar, I am unfamiliar. And I realise this beach isn’t for night-time, the night-time beaches are the ones where a coconut could knock you out at any time.
Before coming down the steps to the beach, I bought six hot doughnuts from the American Donuts stall on the pier. They are covered in sugar and slightly damp and underdone on the inside, hot and crispy to the bite. The grease has come through the brown paper bag making it slightly transparent and my hand is all oily like from when you get a sausage in batter from the fish shop in a perforated-edged envelope. I bought six as it’s more economical and I am eating them all as quick as I can as they won’t be any good once they’ve gone cold.
Above me I can hear the dull thud of the music from the pier. My boots are next to my feet with the socks tucked inside and my feet are crunching back and forth on the pebbles and I know I’m hurting my soles into trying to feel as if I am real. The sea hurts my toes as it comes and goes along with the sensation in my feet, staining the bottom of my trousers a few shades darker black. The sea sounds as if it’s rolling its tongue across the pebbles, throwing itself crossly forward then dragging itself back like a heavy curtain. The motion is mesmerising and I stay stuck for a while until a dog snarls under the pier.
Looking back, I wonder what type of music if played on a tannoy would move the gang from under the pissy-smelling pier; maybe
Rod Stewart’s song ‘Sailing’ over and over again would drive them up the steps into rehab. It’s never really crossed my mind until now, but even though I know they are drug addicts and have a reputation for stealing what they can from their mothers’ purses, maybe they are quite happy as they are, as they don’t really know the full extent of their unhappiness. Or perhaps they are oblivious to how happy they might be and how small pleasures are to be found in making a packed lunch for someone to take to work, like I did for Sally. Maybe they are lost like Simon and don’t want to be found and don’t know what else to do as the drugs must make you feel like you don’t have any choice.
It’s turned cold now and this is nothing like it was before; this place and the drug addicts are menacing as they walk out from under the pier. I turn away and pull on my boots, catching the skin of my right leg in the zip as I rush to leave. Then I look up to the pier and wave at the red square which could be a lifebuoy or a meeting point, pretending it is someone peering down waiting for me. They are getting closer, the druggies, so I shout out up at the pier, ‘You stay there, I’m just coming.’ And in my mind the person on the pier does a thumbs-up sign and I feel safer already. The gang stops at the wall which divides the pebbles from the path and I have to make my way past them up the steps to the promenade. My back flinches knowing they are behind me. I almost expect to be hit over the head with a bottle, but nothing happens. I go onto the pier as if I am really going to meet up with a friend, and I realise I have convinced myself that there is someone on the pier waiting for me and that they must just be around the back of the palmistry hut where I always wanted my hand read as a child. Now it’s empty, I suppose as it’s out of season. I can’t tell from up here whether the gang are girls or boys because their hoods are glued up around their heads. But I guess they are mostly boys, as they are sitting with their legs open and are flat-chested.
No one is waiting for me.
Past where you can have your name written on a grain of sand and just before the entrance to the fruit-machine hall, there is a group of four men with ruddy faces poking their heads through the same holes which Simon and me did all those years ago. They think it is funniest to be the mermaid and are taking turns having their photos taken on mobile phones. The two painted characters, the mermaid and the diver, are sat on a rock which looks like the surface of the moon and the mermaid is brushing her hair and holding a hand mirror. The men are pulling the sort of faces which they assume a mermaid would have, their lips shaped in an ooh and their eyes stretched open. The painted figures are surrounded by a tropicallooking sea and Brighton Pier is featured in the background. You can tell it’s Brighton Pier because they’ve included the helter-skelter in the middle and also because no one would be daft enough to paint any other pier on a painting to be featured on Brighton Pier. Inside the fruit-machine hall, I go up to the change counter.
The sign above it is illuminated red around the edge and they have written the word ‘change’ in a Western-film-type lettering. The girl is sat piling up coins into slots on a wooden tray and she doesn’t look like she is from a Western. I ask for a pound’s worth of ten-pence pieces and watch her pickup the pile of coins and drop them into the brass dish between us, without looking up. Behind her there are shelves of stuffed toys, presumably given by people who didn’t really want them after they’d won them. I play on a fruit machine called Golden Fruit. I win 20p when three cherries appear and the machine lights up and I’m not sure whether to gamble it all. I do and lose. But for that small moment I think I’m going to hit the jackpot and my stomach flips. That’s what keeps you playing.
Later, leaving after I’ve spent another pound on the horse race where the miniature plastic horses mounted by their tiny jockeys run their cranky race over and over again, I see the girls from the hen party with their heads poking through the seascape. They are staggering about, bare-legged and with drunken arms around each other’s shoulders.
Revisiting memories is such a bad idea. I realise that there is nothing physically here in Brighton any more, it’s all in my mind and I don’t know how much of it is true without the photographic evidence to prove it, without the writing on the pad. I wish my memory would allow me back in so I could live back there for just a little while, when it was simply me and Simon and Mum. But nothing is working for me here. The drug addicts are trying to get out of it, whereas I’m trying to get back into it.
Instead, I’ll go back to the bar to see if I can get that girl smoking roll-ups to talk to me. She should as she is minding my drink and coat and I shall buy her a drink as a thank-you reward.
21
