‘I’ve never really understood what that was,’ Sandra said. It seemed to Madame Astarti that Sandra’s thin red lips mouthed the words a second or two behind the sound and she leant forward to tell Sandra that she was out of synch with herself but lurched and nearly toppled from the stool.
‘What is it exactly you don’t understand, my darling?’ Brian asked Sandra, ‘the word “white”, the word “slave” or the word “trade”?’
Sandra’s neck and cleavage had grown scrawny over the years so that parts of her now resembled a chicken. She crossed one artificially tanned leg over the other and waved a gold strappy-sandalled foot around. ‘Coming to see the show this season, Rita?’
‘As if I would miss it,’ Madame Astarti replied. Brian and Sandra weren’t just Brian and Sandra, they were also ‘The Great Pandini and his Lovely Assistant, Sabrina’ – staple fodder for summer shows and holiday-camp seasons across the land. Every evening, Brian abandoned his British Home Stores pullover and polyester slacks and was transformed into a vampirish figure courtesy of a top-hat and a swirling black cape lined with scarlet satin ‘from Remnant Kings at seventy-five pence a metre – that’s fifteen shillings a yard to you and me,’ Sandra said to Madame Astarti. Sandra herself donned fishnets and black satin and prepared herself for being sawn in half and vanished.
‘Dickie Henderson,’ Sandra said, ‘now there was a great performer.’
‘Is he dead?’ Brian asked.
‘Could be,’ Madame Astarti said gloomily. The heat and the noise in The Crab and Bucket were beginning to make her feel quite ill.
‘Another one?’ Brian asked cheerfully, more to himself than anyone else.
‘You’ve had too much already,’ Sandra said. ‘I’ll have a port and lemon, you’ll have a half, no more. Rita?’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
‘Fag?’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Did you hear about that woman?’ Sandra asked, her face looming in and out of focus, ‘the one in the sea. Dreadful thing.’
‘Do they know who she is yet?’ Brian asked, downing his half and then staring hopefully into the bottom of the glass as if he was expecting it to come back.
‘ Was , Brian, was,’ Sandra corrected him. ‘She is no more. Her name, I believe, was Anne-Marie Devine.’
‘Was what?’ Madame Astarti said, spilling her drink all over herself.
‘Anne-Marie Devine,’ Sandra repeated, ‘a lady of the night. Rita, are you all right?’
‘A lady of the night?’ Brian said.
Sandra took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Give us a light,’ she said to Brian.
Oh no, Madame Astarti thought, they were beginning to –
‘Poor cow,’ Brian said. ‘I wonder what she looked like?’
‘About my height,’ Sandra said, ‘not very bright.’
‘I bet she’s a sight.’
‘Give you a fright.’
Madame Astarti moaned, the room was beginning to spin, she must get out of this nightmare.
The wind roars, the seas howl. Nora is standing on the headland like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I think she is trying to conjure up a storm. It is a diversionary tactic – she will do anything rather than finish her tale.
My mother is not my mother. My father is not my father. Nora’s father is not her father. Lo we are as jumbled as a box of biscuits.
The World Is Hollow
THE GROUND FLOOR OF THE TOWER WAS IN TURMOIL – A rowdy crowd of people milling about, uncertain as to what they were supposed to be doing. Many of them, naturally, were there simply on the off chance that something exciting might happen.
~ Excitement is very over-rated.
A few of them were heckling Roger Lake, who was in declamatory mode, standing on the stairs that led up to the library. Roger was preaching to an attentive group of militant students, most of them apparatchiks of the Socialist Society. A lot of them were sitting cross-legged on the floor so that Roger looked as if he was taking a primary school assembly. This inner sanctum looked as though they should all be waving little red books and were very vociferous. I was beginning to get a headache again.
I caught sight of Olivia, standing aside from the crowd. She looked oddly disengaged as if she had been hypnotized. Someone waved a placard behind Roger Lake’s head that declared firmly INSURRECTION IS AN ART AND LIKE ALL ARTS IT HAS LAWS which I thought had probably been dreamt up by Heather, but Olivia said, ‘No, Trotsky, actually.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked her.
‘I think Roger’s advocating overthrowing the establishment,’ she said, looking rather weary, ‘and setting up a “University of the Street” or something in its place.’