Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints Page 3

  This was really quite stupid of her. Biddie and I worked well with stylistically challenged females. We would have taken an enthusiastic interest in tawdry Rita and restyled her hair and found a way to make her feel special.

  We would have invited her over for some of Biddie’s Findus frozen “boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce.” Scrambling to subsist without Doreen’s home cooking, Biddie adopted this dish as his main source of protein. (On one memorable occasion he incurred a small but nasty cod-butter burn on the forehead when one of the aforementioned bags ejaculated unexpectedly. It was his own fault: he was trying to bite it open after being unable to locate a pair of scissors.)

  Effortlessly, we would have become Rita’s willing confidants, commiserating with her about the impenetrable psyches and uncouth, stinky ways of the male gender, a subject with which we, as fresh-faced twinkies, were just beginning to grapple.

  After some hot, greasy cod and girly chitchat, we would have dressed Rita in groovy vintage crepe dresses stolen from jumble sales and then dragged her off for a promenade down Portobello Road. We would have told her with relentless conviction how amazing she looked.

  Rita needed us. Her personal style was a disaster. With her white plastic footwear—sling-back stilettos or shiny vinyl boots—and her red patent plastic minitrench, she was not only tacky but astoundingly unfashionable. We marveled at the archetypal sleaziness of her look. Clearly, she had no idea what a floor pillow was. She was not one of the Beautiful People. She was one of the unsavory people.

  Every evening Rita would sally forth in her démodé finery with an air of what can only be described as the very opposite of perky optimism. As we watched our monosyllabic neighbor lurching off into the drizzle, we wondered if she would come back in one piece.

  She did.

  Like a battered old homing pigeon, Rita somehow always managed to find her way back to her roost, and because of the intimacy of our living conditions, we were always acutely aware of her return.

  The noise was specific and distinct: It was the noise of an inebriated prostitute trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to insert her key in her own front door. This scratchy, irritating cantata went on for about five minutes and was accompanied by Rita repeating the phrase “Sod it!” and, if there was a man in tow, making all kinds of depressing double entendres about not being able to “get it in the hole” et cetera.

  If we were feeling philanthropic, we would put her out of her misery and open up the front door, for which service we received no thanks from grumpy Rita. Kicking the front door closed with the thick heel of her white boot, Rita would then stagger toward her own apartment door, where the key-insertion shenanigans would begin anew.

  This interminable racket was, however, only a warm-up. Once inside her abode, Rita took center stage and the real performance began: throat clearing, the unzipping of boots, smokes and coughs, slaps and tickles, unapologetic belching, and the sound of someone peeing in her own sink (we did that too) were all clearly audible.

  After some desultory grumbling and mumbling, usually about money, the copulating would start. There is no way to describe the horrifying, apocalyptic Wagnerian symphony of noises which would erupt once our neighbor began to service her clients. Suffice it to say, it was loud, and the thin skin of Masonite which separated our two abodes, rather than acting as a sound barrier, merely amplified the erotic activities of our white-boot-loving neighbor.

  Maybe she was really enjoying it, or maybe she was just hell-bent on making her clients feel like they were performing well, or maybe she was screaming at the agony of her life. Whatever the case, this was the one arena in which Rita allowed herself to be operatically expressive.

  “Sounds like someone’s fucking her with a floor lamp,” remarked Biddie in his Happy Harry voice, after we had once more been roused from slumber by Rita’s primal howling and wailing.

  More often than not, the plumbing would get in on the act, banging and screaming and gurgling along with Rita. There was no way that we, even if we were completely drunk, could ever sleep through this auditory onslaught.

  Corpselike from exhaustion, we lay side by side under our respective stained and threadbare candlewick bedspreads, silently praying that the cacophony would subside at some point before daybreak.

  Thanks to the telepathy which comes from long-standing friendships, I knew we were both having the same thought. Maybe Doreen and Cyril were right. Maybe we should have stayed in Reading at our safe suburban department store, where the motto was “Never knowingly undersold” and nobody knew what it meant and everyone thought we were special. The smiling faces of the good people in Soft Furnishings and Clocks and Watches wafted through my sleep-deprived consciousness, beckoning me back to Reading and a simpler, more wholesome life.

  Rita’s screeching finally subsides.

  The sodium streetlights flood our domestic squalor, silhouetting the floor pillow, making it look a bit like Ayers Rock, and casting a pall on our demented quest. On top of the wardrobe sits Happy Harry, who by now has come to personify my impending madness.

  Will we ever find the Beautiful People? Will I go stark raving bonkers in the Malaysian Simulator? Stay tuned.

  CHAPTER 2

  FUN

  Poverty is vastly underrated.

  In the 1950s, my parents were broke. Despite the lack of cash, Betty and Terry remained glamorous. When their favorite shoes wore thin, they inserted slivers of cardboard into the soles and continued to wear them.

  During most of this decade, my family and I lived on the top floor of a dilapidated rooming house in Reading. Ours was a two-room flat with no kitchen or bathroom. Betty, wearing spike heels, carried our water up the stairs in buckets. This did wonders for her already shapely legs.

  Terry, who also had good legs, was unemployed at the time. While Betty pounded the streets scrounging clerical jobs, Terry whiled away the hours teaching himself Latin. His goal was to gain entry to the University of Reading, where Latin was an annoying and archaic requirement. It was during this period of leisure that my dad became our personal couturier, hand-sewing little outfits for me and my sister, Shelagh.

  Terry was exceptionally versatile. His skills extended way beyond dead languages and sewing. During this rooming-house period, he also designed and constructed most of our furniture. He scrounged orange crates from the local greengrocer and transformed them into chicly minimal occasional tables. They really were occasional, in the very strictest sense of the word. Most of the time they were orange crates, but occasionally they were tables.

  Terry’s skill diversity was equaled by the diversity in his own personality: sometimes he was very butch and sometimes he was quite fey. More often than not, he was both. He was the kind of bloke who could repair his own motorbike while listening to Maria Callas on the radio and weeping. He loved women, but he was never one of the guys. With his taste for ascots and opera and Latin, he was the ideal parent for an emerging invert such as myself.

  Betty and Terry always referred to this cardboard-in-shoe period as the happiest time of their lives. Why? It was a combination of things: They were young and in love; they were proud to have helped kill Hitler; and they were happy to have escaped their respective families. They had yet to encumber themselves with any strange lodgers or mentally ill relatives.

  Terry successfully taught himself Latin but was still unable to gain entry to university. He abandoned his academic aspirations and took a position working night shifts in the BBC news department. His job was to monitor Radio Moscow and keep the world apprized of any Cold War developments.

  During the day, instead of sewing and sawing, he now slept.

  Life, for my sister and I, now took a Dickensian turn.

  Shelagh and I were sent to the Orphanage.

  There was no such thing as day care in Reading in the 1950s. Ever resourceful, my parents went to the local orphanage and made an arrangement to drop us off every day. Cunningly they referred to it as “the Nursery.” Either way
, it was a grim, underfunded, state-run institution.

  The orphanage kids were not only violent and unpredictable but also prone to diarrhea and vomiting and dreadful, streaming colds.

  My sister is still furious about the orphanage years. She bridles with outrage when she recalls Johnny, a boy who repeatedly stole, and wore, her red Mary Janes. Johnny’s other favorite trick was to pile us both into a perambulator and push us over a precipice.

  The orphanage was very Lord of the Flies. We even had our own Piggy, a Down syndrome child called Roderick. It wasn’t long before my sister and I joined the unsupervised mob of evil toddlers who persecuted poor Roderick on a daily basis. Shelagh was complicit in a dreadful game where Roderick was run over repeatedly by a tricycle. Recalling the drama and cruelty of our orphanage years can reduce the good-hearted Shelagh to tears in about thirty seconds.

  I am definitely less scarred by this period than my sister. Though the orphanage years left me terminally prissy and germ-phobic, I like to think we were somehow privileged. Not everyone gets to hang out with rage-filled, love-starved orphans at such an early age. We were given a perspective on life which is not afforded to every child. At the orphanage we came face-to-face with the hoodlums and grifters and headline makers of tomorrow.

  Saturday was our day to recuperate from the miseries of the orphanage. While Terry slept, Betty racked her brains to think of ways to keep us entertained. With limited resources, the pressure was on. Ere long, our mother had figured out a winning and very unusual formula: she developed a knack for turning mundane events into whirlwinds of hysterical excitement. Under her supervision, the opening of a soup can became the most insanely thrilling movie premiere on Earth.

  “Who wants to watch me put on my bracelet!!!???”

  “Someone in the room is going to paint her nails!! Who is it!!??”

  “Gather round. There’s a bus coming up the hill. You don’t want to miss it!!!”

  We soon got the hang of it. Betty was the M.C. and we were the salivating audience. We understood our role. On cue, and at the drop of a hat, our job was to become totally apoplectic and frenzied.

  “Who wants to play with an envelope?”

  “Yeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  “Stop screaming! You’ll wake up your father!”

  In no time we had learned to scream silently.

  One rainy Saturday there was a lull in Betty’s fun factory. She seemed to have run out of ideas. Panic-stricken, she scampered downstairs to the shared kitchen. She returned seconds later carrying the battered tin which contained our favorite food: miniature chocolate Swiss Rolls. Extracting one small log, she proceeded to cut it into minute slices. She then arranged them enticingly on a bright pink plate. With a bold flourish, she placed her offering on one of Terry’s occasional tables. Without further ado, Betty tore my teddy bear from my arms.

  “Today is . . . Teddy’s birthday!” she hissed, in a stage whisper which raged with pent-up excitement. My sister and I pogoed up and down appreciatively and as quietly as possible.

  From this day forth, Teddy’s birthday became the ultimate panacea.

  It’s freezing and there’s no heat and we all have double pneumonia—It’s Teddy’s birthday!!

  It’s been raining all weekend and we can’t go outside because we’ve all got cardboard in our shoes—It’s Teddy’s birthday!!

  Teddy’s head fell off—It’s Teddy’s birthday!!

  Teddy’s birthday never seemed to lose its sizzle. There was no limit to the number of days in a row we could celebrate this occasion with the required levels of verve and hysteria.

  One Saturday, Betty had an epiphany, or possibly an attack of cabin fever. Or maybe she had finally OD’d on Teddy’s birthday.

  “It’s time you kids saw the World!” she announced, grabbing her purse and throwing on her favorite garment, a white, flared mohair steamer coat with three-quarter-length sleeves.

  Betty’s new concept was inventive, bold, yet incredibly simple. We would go to the local bus station and take a round-trip ride to a neighboring town in the Thames Valley. Which town? Any town. What could be simpler? What could be more fun? The scenery was not much to look at, but with Betty’s unstoppable showbiz enthusiasm, how could it fail to be anything other than grippingly scintillating?

  And yet it wasn’t.

  It was completely and utterly horrible.

  Confined in our seats, all we could do was stare out the window. And at what? England, merry England, whizzing by in all its rain-soaked wretchedness. The vista was both boring and incredibly sad. Not even Betty, with her glass-half-full, manic optimism, could put a spin on the montage of monochromatic misery which confronted us. It is forever etched in my memory.

  So many appalling tableaux spring to mind! I distinctly remember seeing a middle-aged woman in plastic rain hat standing on a street corner looking as if she were about to burst into tears. Nearby a young mother, probably unmarried, is pushing a pram through dog poop while cursing at her mewling brat. I remember a group of little boys staring at something horrible squashed on the pavement, and groups of little girls trekking across a bomb site and looking furtively behind them as if a beast of some description were following them.

  “What the hell is wrong with these bloody English people?” said Belfast-born Betty, who lost no opportunity to contrast the joie de vivre of the Irish with the unmitigated dreariness of the English.

  Betty pointed out a red-faced man in Tyrolean hat. We all perked up a bit. Then we saw that he was sitting next to a homeless senior citizen who was cooling her gums with an ice lolly shaped like a rocket.

  England, merry England.

  The bus stopped every now and then. On one occasion, a bunch of unruly kids piled on. I recognized them from the orphanage. They stood on the seats with their muddy feet and screamed at each other.

  “Why can’t we do that?” I asked sincerely.

  “Because we are different,” replied Betty with queenly emphasis.

  The bus continued its journey through Kafka country. The view was dominated by factories, smokestacks, and municipal buildings. There were no rosy-cheeked milkmaids or herds of brown cows with silky lashes.

  The soot-blackened industrial sprawl was depressing enough, but worse still were the residential areas where the citizens of England lived out their short, untwinkly lives.

  The streets were so small that, even from the vantage point of our bus, we could see comfortably into the living rooms and bedrooms of the passing houses. I observed a worn-out, prematurely aged mother scrubbing the steps of her tension-racked row house. Inside a man was swatting large flies on his window with a rolled-up newspaper. Upstairs a demure lady wearing a twinset and pearls clutched a letter which obviously contained bad news.

  Next door a lonely secretary was eating beans on toast at six o’clock, illuminated by the cold, gray flickering light of her telly. She will finish her food by 6:20 P.M., and then what? How about an evening stroll down by the gasworks?

  The 1950s were grim. Nobody is to blame. That’s just the way it was.

  In this rushing panorama of English life, recreational activities appeared to be extremely limited: taking a constitutional next to a polluted canal; dozing in a bus shelter; briskly walking to the local butcher shop. Housewives emerged from these establishments clutching bloody packages containing lamb chops or miscellaneous offal. They looked vaguely disgusted, as if they had been sold rotten meat. If anyone in England ever celebrated Teddy’s birthday, we certainly never witnessed it.

  The bus stopped again. A very tall, severe woman with a crew cut climbed aboard. She was wearing a shirt and tie, a tailored army greatcoat, and flat men’s wingtip shoes. We recognized her. She was the receptionist at the local doctor’s office. Her name was Fern, and she sometimes wore a monocle.

  Betty smiled.

  Fern acknowledged Betty, saluting in a military fashion.

  It was Rhett Butler doffing his chapeau to Scarlett O’Hara.

 
Fern’s air of masculine chivalry immediately restored order to the bus. The orphanage kids stopped spitting and wiping their phlegm on one another. Everybody onboard made slight postural adjustments. Fern had that effect on people.

  Fern took her seat across the aisle. Betty and Fern caught each other’s eyes again and quickly looked away.

  They had something in common.

  They were two self-invented people wordlessly acknowledging one another.

  On the next hill, the engine stalled. The bus stopped. The bus went quiet. We hoped it would not roll back down the hill and into the canal. Fern projected an aura of reassuring competence. We waited anxiously for the deafening engine to start again.

  My sister broke the silence.

  “Why is that lady dressed like a man?” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. Everyone turned around to look at Fern. Fern stared straight ahead. Betty lit a cigarette.

  Betty glared at Shelagh, but Shelagh did not see. She was too busy staring at the fabulously androgynous Fern. Was she seeing the glimmering signposts to her own lesbian future?

  “Well? Why is she dress—”

  RRRooarrh!

  The bus lurched forward. Betty exhaled a sigh of relief and nicotine and smoke.

  Much to Betty’s relief, we were soon back at the bus station.

  It was getting late. Terry would be leaving for work soon. If we hurried, we could all celebrate Teddy’s birthday together.

  CHAPTER 3

  BLEACH

  “My mother is called Betty, but her real name is Martha. She bleaches her hair and she drinks gin.”

  I wrote this miniprofile when I was nine years old. It was part of a school essay. Our assignment was to describe each member of our family.