Playing Out Read online

  In this particular scene, I must admit, my grandfather’s suitcase had me more than intrigued. I could not help it; an erotic frisson charges the air of any present-giving I am party to, whether that gift is a person, a unique opportunity or a device of some kind, which only I can open.

  ‘I’ve kept it till the bloody end, unopened—for you, son. Only you can open it. It’s all yours.’

  I wrenched it from his feeble grasp, kicking the gramophone and causing the needle to shriek across several grooves as I did so. The music startled and hissed; a delicious death rattle halfway through ‘O mio babbino caro’. With that, I thought I myself might die from pleasure, the scene was so rich, piquant with resonances. The old man settled back under the music’s upswing, toes curling at the edge of the box, the oily sheen of the record’s surface reflecting dully in his bifocals, and I set to attacking the rusted hinges, buckles and clasps of his precious suitcase.

  ‘Because you’re frigging choosy, aren’t you? Just like your old grandad. Well, here’s something to see you right. Make proper use of it and you’ll never be wanting!’

  I’ll never be wanting. I have wanted for nothing. You were wrong, grandad; frigging wrong. I have wanted. I have wanted badly. You could never see me right. You never even saw me open the suitcase, saw me react. Just as well, perhaps, as at first, I was wholly underwhelmed at the gift. Monumentally pissed off, as it happens, with what I had to smuggle out of your room, out of the rest home, while matron checked you over, slipped shut your eyelids, called the coroner and so on.

  You never wrote your will down, you old bastard. So I had to thieve the thing, effectively, in order to carry out your wishes. And your wishes involved my being bequeathed… this. Well, well.

  Like any good giver of presents you understood the psychology involved. The receiver is to be seduced. They want to have their wishes taken away from them, their power of choice and responsibility frazzled away in the acid bath of somebody else’s hierarchy of value. I, like everyone else, wanted to be whisked away, swirled into the updraught of the desires you had projected upon the space allotted to my own… and set down again in a new set of circumstances defined by your gift.

  You gave me that, and I thank you. But in the past I have cursed you. This is a moral little tale, I suppose, by virtue of the fact that I have indeed come to a bad end. I can’t help that; many do. I probably shan’t sound moral.

  You see, I was given a lack of choice. My desires were plucked out of the air for me. They solidified and took on life, based on woolly presumptions of what I might like.

  And I… I wasted them. I stretched my desires hard; they snapped back like rubber bands.

  I once knew a man who collected rubber bands, dropped by the postman or schoolgirls in the roadside. He said you never knew when they might ‘come in’. I said they might have been anywhere. I buy new rubber bands when I need them. And I waste them shamelessly. In fact, I’m the one who drops them by the roadside. All mine are snapped, like old knicker elastic; they will never ‘come in’ for anything.

  I am voracious and fickle. That was my downfall. If I point to a moral by having a downfall; so be it. I also had a rise and a rise and a rise… pointing to a different moral, I hope. Voracious and fickle; you stretch as far as you may go and push on and push on and scratch and claw, bellow and rant your way on and out and into sheer, certain disaster and the cliff edge of workaday morality skids from under your soles and then… you are propelled back to your original state. < Where you may bleat of morality, warn others of stretching their elasticised bondage. Or you relish the telling as you soar 1 ever onwards, Oz-bound on the cyclone of your desires, the knicker elastic snapped and shrivelled like a severed umbilical • cord behind you.

  Fickle as ever; I like to think of myself like that. That is; immoral and with my knicker elastic around my ankles.

  It’s spot-the-contradiction time.

  Having stressed my absolute nonpassivity, I go on to chat about the bliss of having one’s desires imposed—almost ; brutally—upon one’s person. It’s a slippery slope, passivity; one I’ve been down many a time.

  And inside the suitcase, you ask?

  A book with empty pages. When I took it home I thought. Screw this particular symbolic frisson for a lark! Grandfather had handed me my future, to inscribe it for myself. The world was an empty page at my fingertips. No, this isn’t a story about writing. God forbid. I never wrote. This isn’t a story, it hasn’t a moral. For tucked in between the pages were seven pressed flowers. I counted them. They were different sorts. I know nothing about flowers so I can’t describe them. Some were prettier than others.

  My grandfather’s message, on the flyleaf: ‘Drop them in ! water and watch them come to life… only one at a time… when you’ve had enough of one, try the next.’

  Japanese paper flowers. They expand in a delicate china bowl, swim out through the centre of the water, reel and span their allotted globe… I decided to try one out.

  My first flower was the man with the elastic bands. He wasted nothing; we traipsed the streets together looking for odds and ends. We hunted through junk shops and he, like Grandfather, cluttered out the place he occupied, rent-free.

  It was a barge on a canal. When we made love, below the water level, we could hear the keel slap and rumble on the external pressure. There was a glass floor and one night, glancing sideways, I saw two badgers swimming below our boat. One bared his fangs and scratched the glass. My lover threw a rug over them, to keep them out.

  He was, I suppose, a kind of ideal man, though he never struck me as that at the time. Michelangelo’s David? Masculinity that can afford to be fey, slouched at the steering deck, hand on hip as we foraged down the ship canal, me bent out of sight, sucking him off as he called out to fellow sailors that passed us by. His prick reminded me of a prawn; there was something fishy about him altogether, I decided. Eventually I threw him back, and tried another flower.

  A big box of chocolates which, in my mood, didn’t last long at all. My canal-faring days were over; my lover, quite naturally, had vanished the same moment that the chocolates appeared. Nothing unnatural about that. How many men sail off into the night and leave behind a confectionery surrogate?

  And all because the gentleman loves a good surrogate… I gobbled them up quicker than I had the prawn, hidden on my knees on his poop deck.

  Then came the lady with the fruit. She stepped straight out of the Pre-Raphaelite catalogue. I was secretly ashamed at whatever unconscious desires I had, through her apparition, articulated. I felt I was somehow denigrating women with this stereotypical flame-haired beauty, recumbent on the sort of marble flooring rendered exquisitely by Alma-Tadema. We had pomegranates everywhere, crushing and popping their juicy cells like fragrant frogspawn in the clash and lick of thighs and hips.

  A thigh and hip diet full of vitamin C… then the meatier, more equatorial juices, the colonial issues that I admit I probed for as if they were indeed an elixir of life. Does this denigrate her? Did my idyll of Michelangelo denigrate my prawn-pricked lover on the canal? What denigrated them most, perhaps, was the utter dejuicing enacted upon them. I have, in my time, extracted juices. I am the man from Del Monte, declaring the eternal ‘Yes!’ in my white hat and resilient, immaculate suit. It is stained when seen up close. I left them both as husks; the pulped rinds and kernels scattered in my wake.

  A cellar full of wine. I was thirty by now and dying for a drink. I got pissed for a while. That was a poppy, that flower. I know that one; the fumes were intoxicating even before its heady incarnation. I emptied the musky old bottles one by one, greedily, by myself. I found myself replenished, eager for more. Three flowers left.

  Rampant Colette, the rapacious grande dame with the grace to regard me still as a boy, though the crow’s feet were there, albeit invisible with foundation. We romped. Never before had I romped. I felt like a puppy. She was huge, this woman; catastrophically huge. She offered me an arid landmass to ' clamber and
keelhauled myself on her vigorous bulk. I who, when first mate on the barge or juice extractor by the pool of the dewy-eyed girl, had felt dignified, self-possessed and… well, large, was dwarfed by this grandmother. Earlier, exactness, precision, the delicate clasp had been all. Now I needed to take a running jump, hold on for grim life. She, in her turn, toyed with me, flicking me about with able, coarsened hands. She ripped me to shreds, parts of my body were tattered and bloody after each encounter. But I loved it.

  As I say, she was catastrophically huge and her heart, so deeply buried and imperturbable, gave a resounding click one afternoon as I tricked her into coming. Penetration had never done the trick; it was a slight thing, the licking of her nose with a feather that tripped the alarm, as I bobbed in and out of her like a sewing needle, but it was too much… and that was that.

  He was angular and stark and, I grudgingly admit, my next Japanese flower was quite like my earlier self. I was of an age to appreciate a retrospective narcissism. Like that portrait of Isherwood; the wryly salacious glance in the mirror at the younger you. I let him, as my poor dear Colette had let me, cross and re-cross the continent I had drifted into. He rummaged amid what he would turn out to be, but with reverence. I was his temple, his monument, and he came to me to pray. As pigeons spatter on Nelson’s column, he brought forth his juvenile cockfuls of phlegm onto me. I took the tribute well; cleaned my roughening edges on his purer lines.

  Naturally when his grandfather copped it, he cleared off with the inheritance. He got money. The lucky sod.

  And my last…

  We are always told to keep the best to last. In a meal, with the courses and deliciously aromatic, steaming constituents arranged before us, the least wasteful, most sensible among us save the best till last. Michelangelo on the barge knew this. He ate the prawns in the cocktail last of all. I laughed at him; stole them before he ever got that far, from under his intense Mediterranean gaze. I could never bear puritans. Luckily I never had one for long.

  But my first flower would have appreciated what Grandfather bequeathed me last of all.

  The last flower trembled between my fingers above the water’s eager meniscus. It was a crushed, violet rose. Genet would have approved. I held my breath; number seven. I didn’t dare tear through the empty book’s pages to check that I hadn’t counted incorrectly. I opened my hand and the petals fell.

  It was a rubber band.

  When I finish scrawling this, on these pages thickened and stiffened with canal water, chocolate smudges, fruit juices, wine stains, come from men and women… then I shall press them back together. Perhaps the book, its spine thwarted with fattened leaves, ruptured by sated desires, will refuse to shut. To this end I am going to use the rubber band. I don’t know where it may have been… but who cares? Just look where this book has been. Michelangelo was right, in a way, in that woolly head of his… rubber bands do ‘come in’. This one will stretch a coherence across the messy infusions of my life.

  And one day, most probably quite soon, I shall stretch it. Stretch it open… like foreskin, like hymen… and peer between the dark pages for the signs, the delicate rustlings between the sheets of more dried Japanese flowers, the ones I know must still be in there, somewhere.

  JUDITH’S DO ROUND HERS

  I’ll tell you who I’m a fan of these days, and that’s that Roseanne. You know that fat wife on Channel Four? I think she’s dead funny. And it’s like they say in the TV Times: she’s a role model.

  She’s my role model now, I’ve decided. She gets away with it. She’s not ashamed of who she is, and she tells people what she thinks of them. She doesn’t put up with any old shit.

  I was at work when I was reading this interview with her, the one in the TV Times. We keep them on the counter with the evening papers. Which means we have to stand there all week with the same old famous faces staring up at us. You can watch the weeks go by that way.

  Last week it was Roseanne and I thought she looked dead glamorous. Well, she is dead glamorous for a fatty.

  I’m not being nasty when I say that. She says she’s a fatty herself, she admits to it and has a laugh about it. She’s famous anyway and it needn’t bother her now. She knows she’s a fatty and really, she’s made her fortune out of it. And I can’t use it as a term of abuse anyway, because when the chips are down, I’m a fatty. Mind, it’s got me bloody nowhere.

  So all last week it was Roseanne’s face staring up from the counter, and that’s when I read the interview. It was quite interesting. She’s had a hard life, actually, even though she’s on the telly and that. I felt quite sorry for her.

  I like a good read. Especially interviews with stars like that. When they’ve had a decently hard life, but everything turns out all right and there was stardom waiting just around the corner.

  We get all the magazines with that kind of real-life stuff in here. So I can have a good flick-through when we get slack. I needn’t ever buy the things. Which is a saving, really, because I think I’m addicted, sometimes, to showbiz gossip and chitchat.

  No, that’s not true. Some of them stars I couldn’t care less about. Specially some of them younger ones. Pauline, who I’m on with serving usually, asks me who it is on the cover of Hello! or Top Santy or whatever, and sometimes I just can’t tell her. Who are these people? Why do they think they’re famous? I have to look to see what it says underneath their faces.

  I couldn’t tell you who was who on Home and Away these days. They all look the same to me. And Neighbours. Now at one time I could have told you everyone in that, and everything what they were up to. But now… They’ve chopped and changed actors and that so much, I’ve not got a clue. So I have to look at the names under the faces.

  Pauline still follows both, so she knows more than me. She still asks me to read the names out. Tell the truth, I think the lass has trouble reading. She squints up right close at invoices and stuff. And she’s only just out of school. I’ve told her—I’ve had a lot longer than she has to forget everything what they taught me!

  Anyway, yeh, so I read these chitchats and articles when we get a moment to ourselves. I mean, there’s always someone in the shop. It’s one of those shops where there’s always someone coming in for something. We’re handy and that’s the point. Cigarettes—we’re the place they come dashing out to and we’ve got an impressive range from your Craven As and your twenty-five-to-a-packet Royals, all the way up to your John Players and your Marlboros and even your Hamlet cigars. Top-of-the-range stuff we don’t sell a lot of, but makes the place classier to have on show.

  Or at least, so says Eric. Now Eric’s the bloke who owns the place. He’s a bit younger than me, in about his mid-forties I’d say, and he speaks a different language. He’s been in business and done courses. I’d call him a greedy bugger, actually, but to give the bloke credit, he’s turned this place into a gold mine. But it’s for no one’s benefit but his own. He serves his community, like he says, but it’s also for his community that he’s got broken bottles cemented round the wall at the back of the shop. What about that bairn—he was only a bairn—trying to break in round the back that night with his mates? Slashed all his legs, top of Eric’s back wall. Severed tendons, the lot. And what does Eric say? Serves the thieving get right.

  That’s what I mean by a different language. Eric’s forgotten. Now I know the family that kid’s from. They live by us. They’re not that different to what Eric’s lot were like.

  Yeh, I remember Eric from when we were at school. He was starting at the secondary modern when I was finishing. He lived by us. Like I say to Pauline, I’ve had the time to forget all-sorts from my schooldays, but some things just don’t go. Na, they don’t. Mind, Eric hasn’t let on that he remembers me. I’ve said nothing to him and I won’t do neither. Just let it go by.

  I daren’t think about all the water under that bridge, mind. I look a bit bloody different now. I was in my prime then. I was a bonny lass and they noticed me. Now I’ve—what’s it they say in the s
limming magazines? I’ve ballooned. That’s it. I’ve friggin’ ballooned.

  So to Eric, I’m just like any of the other clapped-out, hard-faced, fat-ankled women round here. Just the woman behind his till he pays a pittance to.

  Eric’s got a wife a bit younger than him and she’s not from around here. He’s got a smart son who’s up at the new university in Sunderland, doing business. Eric lets the kid run this place in his holidays for practice.

  Now him, he talks a different language again, that kid. Alex, they call him. But he’s got the same shaved neck, the same soft-looking smile and the same tucked-in arse that Eric used to have, bless him, so I forgive him bossing me about when he’s down. Even if he is a short-arsed nineteen-year-old and really, on this town, I’m old enough to be his granny.

  I’m a glamorous granny! They have special nights for them down the Rec. What do they call them? Grab a Granny nights.

  I went once, for a laugh, when I felt like I was looking a dog. I went to cheer myself up and feel younger. Sure enough, it was a load of witches in there trying to cop off with all these old fellers who’d come in a bunch from the British Legion over the road. You could tell they were from the British Legion because they wore them blue blazers with badges and caps and they reeked of booze.

  Among that lot I was like a babe in arms. I was like one of them tarts off Baywatch who you never recognise but with all the tits and hair. Dead sexy like, at least, compared with the competition. All them hags in their mohair jumpers and thick tights. So I could have had me pick of any old feller there.