1982 Janine (42 page)

Nothing new will grow in a mind containing a Cadillac containing Janine reading a story about Nina surveying herself in a full-length mirror. She has decided not to compete with other women by adding tarty accessories to the skirt and shirt. She wears these only, standing barefoot and stockingless, her face washed naked of all make-up, her hair unpinned and unclasped hanging loose behind her shoulders. No jewellery. No bra either, but though the shirt is semi-seethrough, the extra thickness of silk on the breast pockets prevents the aureoles of her nipples showing as more than faint darkness. And although shirt and skirt are decently fastened (skirt white denim with brass buttons shining like gold) she looks wonderfully lovely, young and enticingly defenceless. She is amazed by herself. If she appears like this among richer and older women who have dressed as outrageously as possible she will be the star of the party. But can she go outside like this? Why not? The night is warm and she does not mind some dirt on the soles of her feet. Nina is starting to interest me more than Janine does. The doorbell rings.

She opens and there stands Frank and Tom. She says, “Hiya!” and placed hands on hips, flaunting a little. “Like it?” she asks.

“Oh honey,” says Frank, “you really are too much. You are now really
something
. Meet Tom, Nina.”

Tom is well over six feet tall with a fierce black moustache, but a pudgy figure, a slight stoop and half-moon bifocal
spectacles make him look like an absentminded bank clerk, despite a broad-brimmed leather hat, a leather waistcoat story with a tin star on it, leather trousers, high-heeled boots and two thick belts creasing his hanging abdomen, one with a lariat and handcuffs hanging from it, one a cartridge belt with holster and pistols. Nina cannot take him seriously. His gravelly Texan drawl fails to disguise a voice naturally high-pitched and Eastern. He growls, “Nina Crystal?” and takes her hand.

“That's me all right!” she says. His grip of her hand tightens. He says formally, “Well, Nina, I have bad news for you. The new mayor has ordered us to clean up this town, so we are taking you and a few other bad girls a long long ride away from here to a place where you cannot tempt honest, cleanliving citizens. You will have no time to do that because you will be working very very hard for bad boys like me and my pardner Frank here.”

She laughs and says, “I see the party has already started.”

“Yep,” says Tom, “and will last longer than you ever thought a party could. I now pronounce you hooker – and sheriff.”

There is a sudden click. Tom lets her hand go and she sees the wrist is handcuffed to Frank's. Frank grins and tugs her out the door saying, “Walk, honey.”

“Wait! I want my handbag!” she says, pointing to it.

“I'll get it,” growls Tom, “you've other things to worry about.”

“Your friend takes this game very seriously,” she murmurs to Frank on the way to the elevator.

“He enjoys it more that way,” says Frank. “So will you, eventually.”

In the elevator they find the Bronsteins, an elderly couple from upstairs who have always (Nina feels) looked at her with grave suspicion because she is young, attractive and lives alone. They now stare at her with open mouths. “A fine evening, Mr and Mrs Bronstein,” says Nina, but they do not answer and Nina finds it hard not to laugh aloud. She is full of confidence and merriment, excited by how much she will excite people at the party but taking none of it
seriously, especially not her impossibly sweet, helpless, nude-under-two-garments self, certainly not that big slob Tom with his fierce moustache, dimly peering eyes, heavy guns and ladies' handbag. I like Nina. She reminds me of a friend I used to know, who?

Diana. I saw and heard nothing of her for ten or twelve years but when my marriage ended she began haunting me. I glimpsed her for half a minute in a remake of
The Thirty-
Nine Steps
, and for slightly longer in a good but badly publicised film called
Country Dance
. Her voice occurred in radio plays I tuned into by accident. One evening I bumped into Brian in a loungebar in Irvine. He had a family now and worked as a speech therapist in local schools. He and Diana still corresponded. He told me that after the Edinburgh fiasco she had left Glasgow without completing her course at the Athenaeum. She went to London, auditioned for a part in one of Binkie's shows and failed to get it. She took a room near Swiss Cottage, bore an illegitimate son and managed (I cannot imagine how) to bring him up on money from the Social Security and from any acting job she could get, which at first was chiefly chorus work in cheap pantomimes and extra work in cinema adverts. Brian said she also got help from men friends. I thought he meant that she did a bit of polite whoring, so I was annoyed by his tone of mingled envy and admiration. I said, “Her son can't have much of a life.”

Brian shrugged and said, “My children don't have much of a life either. Their mother and I give them a lot of attention and every material thing they need, but all the time they squabble over trivialities. The boy says he wants to be a rock star, but though he twangs on a guitar he refuses to take lessons and has no interest in any other music. The girl is slightly older. She wants to be a film star or a housewife. Nothing else strikes her as desirable. She has no interest in acting or drama and spends her spare time on fashion magazines, make-up, frocks, swapping clothes with friends, going to dances and gossiping about who kissed who. I met Diana's son last year and found him terribly impressive. He's cool, quiet and gentlemanly. He prefers the company of adults to children. His mother would like him to be an
actor but he's determined to be a policeman.”

This left me with nothing to say at all except, after a pause,

“I'm sorry Diana is not a successful actress.”

He said, “But she is! She has worked with most of the good British directors by now, and whenever they want to make a small part memorable with some extra humour or intelligence, she is one of a few dozen professionals that they know they can depend upon. She is a successful actor just as you are a successful electrician or engineer or whatever it is you do nowadays. Neither of you is famous but you've both always done what you mostly want. Unlike me.”

I said crossly, “Why should a speech therapist envy an unimportant actress and an unimportant supervisor of security installations? I can tell you this for a fact: if you've ever cured one poor kid of a stammer you've done more human good than I've done in my whole career.”

He sighed and said, “Yes, I suppose teaching is an honourable profession, even my branch of it, but my life has been wasted by an adolescent dream. I wanted to create companies which would hold audiences spellbound – I wanted to be magic. Our Edinburgh adventure showed what a fantasy that was. Whenever I feel depressed nowadays I suspect that my fairly loving wife, my averagely happy home, my socially respectable job, are consolation prizes for being a failure and a weakling.”

He sounded exactly as if he was me. I could not let him get away with that.

“Brian,” I said, “you were a great director! The whole enterprise was created by you. You made a company out of a lot of disgruntled people who often disliked each other and didn't particularly like you. We did astonishing things for you, things we could never have done for ourselves. I learned stage lighting and set construction, I became inventive because you demanded it. You goaded us all into a new kind of life and got us working together in a highly successful comedy, don't you remember? But you were best when things went wrong. You did not curse or blame us, you worked to repair our damaged egos. You would have brought the whole show to a highly profitable end if I had not suddenly removed your theatre.”

Brian stared hard at me for a while, then chuckled. He said,
“Jock, I did not direct that show. You did.”

I stared at him. He said, “As soon as you joined us you took us over, every one of us. You devised a lighting script which set the rhythm for everything we did. You built a set which decided every move we made. You recast the play with Rory in the lead and the play benefited, and when at last we met the Queen of England, I exaggerate, I mean the Queen of the Golden West End, you were the only one with the confidence to speak for us. You were a bit fierce and abrupt at first, then you relaxed and became jocose and condescending. You were very very funny, and though the Queen was not amused the rest of us were proud of you. But I stupidly lost my temper in a police station so you gave the show up as a bad job and that was the end. ‘Well,' I thought at the time, ‘the electrician giveth and the electrician taketh away. God damn that bloody electrician.' For a year or two I would wake up at night, grinding my teeth and actively hating you. You showed Helen and Diana what a weakling I am. You showed me what a weakling I am. I have no hard feelings about it now but it was a bitter pill to swallow when I was nineteen or twenty.”

I cried out, “Nobody ever thought you were a weakling, Brian, especially not at the end. You and Diana and Roddy and Rory were the strong members of the troop, it was Helen and I who cracked under the strain. As for the lighting script, Diana and Roddy devised that – I simply told them what could be done and implemented their suggestions. And the stageset was what any first-year engineering student would have been forced to devise in the circumstances. And when I told you to give your part to Rory I was only voicing what everyone else had been saying behind your back for weeks. I said it out loud because I had an urgent private reason for returning to Glasgow and half-hoped you would tell me to go to Hell.”

We were both astonished by these disclosures and drank deep while pondering them. I said, “It was all an accident – a wonderful accident. I wish it had happened later in life. The further I get from our time in Edinburgh the deader I feel. I am no electrician, no engineer, I no longer do what I mostly want. I am a supervisor. An inspector. A spy.”

Brian said, “We were no accident, we were a co-operative. I suspect all good companies are co-operatives who won't admit it. I could never have admitted it when I was young, because I wanted to be cock of the walk. I wanted to be king. And Jock, for a while I was a king. It's true, isn't it? Two splendid girls loved me. For over two weeks I had them on alternate nights, nearly. I sometimes wonder, nowadays, if my imagination did not cook that up to compensate for sixteen years of solid monogamy, but no, it really happened, I think.”

I said, “Forgive me for asking a delicate personal question, but how did you make love to she who eventually became Mrs McLeish?”

He said, “I will gladly forgive you for any question you ask, Jock, but I do not understand that question. Explicate.”

I said, “One day in a tearoom, shortly before my marriage, Helen told me, with a touch of scorn which seemed aimed at myself, that your performance in the sexual act was, at a technical level, differently structured from mine. I have often worried, I mean wondered, exactly what she was referring to.”

Brian shook his head and said, “I don't know. Everyone's lovemaking must have an individual twist but I doubt if mine is more twisted than most. I've always been too shy to attempt more than slight variations on the missionary posture. I may have been more experimental in my late teens but I doubt it. I was a virgin before Helen slept with me.”

This news gave me vertigo. It still does. If Helen lied to me then twelve years of marriage were built on falsehood and the past stops being solid. I can put up with a lot of present misery if it is solidly based, but if I am wrong about my past WHO AM I? If the reality I believed in is wrong, how can I right it? What solid truth can we find in our mistaken heads? My head is a windy cave, a narrow but bottomless pit where true and false memories, hopes, dreams and information blow up and down like dust in a draught. Vertigo. No go. So go to Dianina I mean janine in cowhide breeks in a Cadillac reading a CATTLEMARKET story about Tom Frank Nina crossing a pavement (side
walk) sidewalk to a parked Packard (is Packard still marketed?) shut up Nina crossing a pavement (sidewalk) sidewalk to a parked Packard (is Packard still marketed) shut up Nina crossing a pavement (sidewalk) sidewalk to a parked Cadillac of course. This mind is inclined to twist into a spin so go more slow.

Bypassers stare at the far too theatrical scene as sweet, barefoot, nudeunderwhiteskirtshirt, loosehaired Nina crosses sidewalk between sheriff Tom, cowboy Frank. In back of Cadillac Nina sees what seems laughing foxy face of wicked little old lady. Frank unlocks cuff from his wrist, opens back door, relocks cuff on insideofdoor handgrip, then roughly, insultingly, embraces Nina, pushing hard tongue into her mouth, hard prick against her stomach. Released she gasps, “I don't like that.”

He grins and says, “Tough”, opens carfrontdoor, gets into drivingseat, slams frontdoor. Standing on pavement Nina yells, no, hollers, “Frank, I don't want to come.”

He says, “But you will, you're part of the vehicle now”, and starts the engine. Angrily she slides into the back seat and slams the door. She does not really believe the car will drive off with her chained outside it but she wants to escape the blankly fascinated stares of five or six male bystanders who watch her as if she was a film commercial for something they would dearly like to buy. She is almost glad when the car slides away from these gawping bastards though her heart thumps and a throaty, slightly gasping voice beside her whispers happily, “Hi Nina, I'm Sherry. Ain't you terrified, honey? Look what they done to me.”