Playing Out Read online

  ‘What are you on about, Terry?’

  And, still going out to the nation, I announced, ‘Great big bloody hairy crocodiles on my little island!’

  Then came a swift commercial break and I was mobbed by a flurry of furry grandmothers.

  By the time I had fought past those liver-spotted claws and their brandished chequebooks, I was back in hospitality and Adele had been whisked away by the man who accused her of being evil.

  Monica advanced slowly from the opposite corner of hospitality, slugging back the free wine with a Sobranie decorously on the go. Recognising her elevated rank, the others drew apart, giving her access to me. Monica’s green eye-shadowed eyes narrowed with indistinguishable lust and menace.

  Oh, dear! I don’t want this to sound misogynistic. Here I am making Monica a vamp, Adele just dopey, espousing the virtues of living in a phallic monstrosity, my own terror of crocodiles in fur. But I’m sorry. This is social realism. The seals were all ladies and I thought they were lovely. Until the crocodiles got them.

  So Monica came up and plied me with drink and vile smelling gold-tipped cigarettes. She explained that she’d been longing to meet me and had known that one day she must.

  I was, I admit, quailing. And the floor manager kept appearing, wanting to shoo us out of hospitality. ‘How did you know about me?’

  ‘Why!’ She smiled. ‘You’re the strapping young man who works my darling husband’s lighthouse, aren’t you?’

  I was dumbstruck.

  ‘What a coincidence we should meet here today! Was that your little friend making an emotional display of herself? You see, I was hoping to meet you soon anyway, because I already knew about your crocodiles.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Genetic engineering, dear. I have a contract with some industrialist chaps. They’ve been running this little number up on my behalf for a few years now. You’re ideally placed to fetch them up for me. Honestly, my dear, you’ve no idea what it cost me. Chanel looks positively off the rack compared with paying off the big boys.’

  ‘You paid someone to make hairy crocodiles?’

  She blew smoke at me. ‘Darling, it’s called postmodernism. You may literally live in an ivory tower, but you must have heard. It’s all the rage, dear.’

  And then she bunged me a wad of notes to round up her precious mutants.

  For once I was under no illusions. The phone in hospitality rang at my elbow and I snatched it up as she went on smoking. It was Max, my unctuously superior boss and—as I had discovered—her husband. He purred into my ear as she watched, telling me I had to give her what she wanted. It was more than either of our jobs was worth. Then he was gone.

  ‘I’ll send a whopping great helicopter over tomorrow night, when it’s dark,’ she continued smoothly. ‘It’ll have to be under cover of darkness in case the papers are watching.’

  ‘But…’ I stammered.

  ‘What?’ she snapped.

  ‘Adele’s taken my tickets, my money… I can’t get home anyway, until I find out which hotel she’s gone to.’

  ‘Oh, you are tiresome!’ She glanced around quickly. ‘Luckily I enjoy sailors.’

  ‘Pardon?’ But I’d never been a sailor. I dressed that way, but it was a pure affectation for the sake of wandering about on my rock.

  She looked at me as if my stupidity turned her on. ‘I’ll pay your fares and things if you fuck me in my furs on that settee. Max can’t bring himself to do it with a wild beast.’ She wasn’t particularly wild. But the fur got up my nose and made me sneeze all the way through. It was bizarre, like fucking a strategically shaved bear. And I, poor, bereft, isolated lamb, hadn’t done anything of the sort since the days of Adele. Being clasped between shiny thighs as I screwed by rote and stared at that forehead, I was stunned.

  Into submission and I was sent out on the streets to return to my rock and dutifully round up the crocodiles.

  The next day darkened and waned on my rock sublimely as always, though I wasn’t to know this was my last night there. I was busy at work, getting ready for the distant whirr of helicopter blades.

  In my befuddled state I had dreamed of what I thought of as an infallible plan. At least it had seemed that way on the queasy ferry trip, during which my prick had throbbed in self-pity until it spied its lovely, welcome sister, my lighthouse. I had decided to dress myself as a seal and lure my prey.

  Hours I spent gutting the miserable carcasses and stitching them—like a perfect sailor—into one huge and, I hoped, convincing creature.

  I tried it on and I must admit I looked fabulous. I still wear my sealskin occasionally, and flop about on beaches the length and breadth of the country. What else ought I do without a job? We workless, heterosexual men have to do something for kicks in an age which is ‘postmodern, darling’.

  So off I went, the following night, stumbling on my cumbersome tail across damp rock. What now? I wondered. Do I shout, ‘Come and get it, boys’?

  I remembered the sight of the seals that gambolled in shallow waters and on the shingle. I emulated that for a bit, thrashing the water to make ripples that the beasts might sense. That was when I found I quite enjoyed it; the rancid stink of the fur’s uncured interior and the tang of frozen salt water. I came inside my second skin a couple of times and, while thus distracted, heard the crocodiles snorting as they came.

  They almost got me. My eyeholes had slipped in the post-orgasmic panic, yet still I ran like hell up the beach.

  They pounded through the surf on their stumpy little legs; fifteen, twenty, thirty of them. Luckily I couldn’t see them, but to hear them was enough.

  In that instant I thought, Yes! Kill them! I agree! Much better to wear the bastards and swan about in society than let them run about innocent lighthouses wreaking havoc! Their venomous chops clattered and slavered hungrily at my scraped heels.

  And like the lights of heaven, the lighthouse shone brightly down upon us. I was, once again, stunned. Then, as the crocodiles all peered together up at the tower, we saw that a helicopter hovered beside it and had discharged one of its company into the lamp room. She waved at me. Adele.

  Adele was training the light down on us as the crocodiles circled me and began to look nastily suspicious. We’ve been fucking set up, one gnashed to his neighbour, and was right. And so have I, mate, I thought miserably, preparing to be devoured.

  But down swept the helicopter and Monica herself appeared at the open hatchway, mink stoles flapping and forehead glinting in the night. With a well-modulated scream of triumph she picked off each of the beasts with a poisoned dart. She took them all and never disturbed a hair on their heads.

  I passed out and, when I came to, found myself dressed as a seal with Monica bending over me and Adele busy all around, helping to sling the creatures into the back of the helicopter.

  ‘My daughter.’ Monica glowed with pride, and I passed out again.

  Now that I’m out of a job, I sometimes come to stand on this particular beach—dressed in my neat little suit, although it’s shabbier now and smells awful—and I look out at my precious ex-sanctuary.

  On the promenade every now and then you see someone being the height of fashion, glowing the chemical green of a furred crocodile. Usually a woman, but affluent queers are getting into the same kind of thing. The animal-rights lot are up in arms. But they can’t decide how natural the things were in the first place. It’s an ideological problem. It’s postmodernism, dear.

  I was lucky, really, to escape only unemployed. They actually wanted to silence me. Monica gave me a speculative glance, when they had me trussed up under house arrest in their opulent front room. She’d always wanted a sailor suit. But Max looked nervous at that point and they let me go. I wasn’t furry enough, it seems. Every one of my hairs had dropped out in fright that night and that’s another reason—besides disenfranchisement and simple fetishism—that I like to wear my second skin.

  Maybe Adele will come back, catch me up one day, and explain her
political qualms about this. I may have been in a phallic ivory tower, but I think, surely, her own ideological position needs to be clarified a little? I mean, how can one chuck buckets of pig’s blood one day and cull crocodiles the next?

  I miss my nice simple tower. Life was so easy when I was a sex symbol, master of all I surveyed, with only the seals and Scandinavian shoppers to please. Lighthouse keeping’s a dying art, fuck it.

  EMMA’S SITUATION

  Our landlord didn’t visit very often, and when he did he would tell us about his once giving Lulu a lift to Leicester. In the days when the boy she was with looked more like Lulu than she did. When she was a rising star. He told this story so he could look at Emma and, with an ingratiating nod, say that he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he saw her on the telly, as he had seen Lulu, two weeks after he had driven her to Leicester, singing ‘Shout’.

  Emma would flap her arms about, shake her head and lower her eyes murmuring soft deprecations, still giving him her best profile. Then he would bustle out with a little giggle, clutching his rent cheques. ‘Lulu!’ Emma would exclaim as his car was heard roaring back off to Leicester, and I would be reading again.

  She straightened her rubber gloves and went back to cleaning the toilet, each time. Our landlord always discovered us like this, me reading, her cleaning the toilet.

  It was part of our little ruse for renting this tiny canal side house that we pretended to be, of all things, a couple. Whenever the rent was due, or the soot-encrusted wiring fused, I would grimly submit to one of our landlord’s visits and gamely feign heterosexuality. Emma played along like the fine actress she thought she was and would drop in the odd mention of my incorrigible untidiness. Just like a man, she’d chortle, and toss her hair.

  Our landlord would be upset, she reasoned, to find that we weren’t a couple. Not that it was in the contract that we were meant to be. Not at all; it stated plainly that we occupied two rooms and that each room had its full complement of accoutrements. But when the landlord showed us round he giggled, sidled, nudged, and made it quite plain that he thought we looked good together. Emma put her head on one side and fluttered her eyelashes. At that point I barely knew her but, looking back, should have known then that she was off her head because those eyelashes fluttered out of synch with each other. A bad sign.

  Two memories of that day we looked round the house by the canal and signed the contracts: Standing on the black iron bridge spanning the canal, staring into the sheets of brown water, wondering if I could stick her for a full year. Next to me she was in four-inch platforms, rocking on the wooden slats, draped in black net. We were waiting for the landlord to arrive from Leicester. We really needed this house. I was being thrown out of my old house the next day, and Emma’s friends had let it be known that they weren’t into having her in theirs, either. Until the previous week I had been going to look at this place with a boy. But there had been a scene, a skirmish, a deconciliation. As a consequence he dyed his hair red, I stopped reading his poems, and we both made alternative arrangements. My alternative now tilted her wide-browed, triangular face towards me, pouted and purred, ‘I think that’s him there, with the carrier bag. He’s a dwarf, look.’

  In those platforms she walked like a camel’s front half. Her leggings were beige, to exaggerate the effect. It meant that she reeled helplessly and harmfully through the narrow passages and pasteboard rooms of the empty house. By the time she hit the biggest room, at the top, she reined herself giddily in and declared that we would both be taking it.

  The dwarf and I exchanged a mild glance. These middle-class girls knew how to get what they wanted.

  My second memory is of turning the mattress in the biggest room. It had been designated mine, since it had a double bed and, as Emma hissed at me while we examined the bathroom in the extension out back, I was sexually active while she most certainly wasn’t. Then, without turning a hair, she raised her voice to ask the dwarf if he minded Blu-Tack on the flock?

  So in the biggest room the landlord suggested we turn the mattress. I don’t know why, really; we were checking the furnishings, testing the inventory of bits and bobs. The wardrobe door had just creaked and sidled itself off its hinges, banging against the wall, so I think he was out to distract my attention. When we looked at the mattress either side, he sadly surveyed the stains and clicked his tongue. The last resident was a lady,’ he apologised, taking us both for men of the world. Then he explained that she had been on medication, and that was why the wardrobe was broken. The lady routinely flung herself at the furnishings.

  We had a kitchen window which stared straight out onto the bridge and we could watch people coming back from town. As the first few weeks went by I laid a neat row of emptied green bottles along that sill, then across each scrupulously wiped surface, the top of each dusted cupboard, and around the skirting boards. I had Pre-Raphaelite postcards stuck to each kitchen cupboard door, and my ghetto blaster permanently by the draining board, belting out Liza Minnelli’s greatest and Philip Glass’s Low Symphony morning, noon and night. It was fabulous.

  The overspill of paperbacks from my room and the living room appeared in tall piles on top of the telly (whose tube had already blown) in the kitchen’s corner where the stairs ended. I worried sometimes about the pages being impregnated and warped by the cooking fumes, but, since each book was a slim volume of something or other anyway, decided it wasn’t a problem.

  There were a lot of fumes, though. Each bottle in those careful rows represented a meal cooked at some elaborate length by me. Since I taught at irregular hours, I would often start cooking at two in the afternoon and dinner became an increasingly baroque affair. I set myself into a pattern of cracking open the latest Bulgarian red and plunging into the first glass as the oil began to shimmer and boil in our wok. The glasses were a moving-in present from a very dear friend so, I reasoned, it was a waste not to keep them in almost constant use. I had lovely teatimes stirring the wok with a fag in hand, Liza shrieking out ‘Maybe Next Time’ again and again.

  Emma eventually pissed me off because when it came to her nights to cook she did some terrible things. Rehearsals went on late or, when they ended on time, they had drained her too much. She produced chicken casseroles for which the contents were tipped altogether into one dirty pan and allowed to broil till they emerged in a grey broth thickened only with splinters of bone.

  And the washing-up! On went the Marigolds, but for Emma, washing up meant turning on the cold tap and dangling each item under the flow for a few seconds, then tossing it willy-nilly into the nearest cupboard. Looking in the cupboards later was just distressing. Slimy wet plates and saucepans still caked in grease, scabbed in sauces and rinds of dead pasta.

  This was the girl, the eldest of the many offspring of her house, who had had to take charge of the housework in holidays. Her father was a stern Indian Catholic who knew where he wanted his daughters to be. And that was in the kitchen, by the playpen with his youngest son, while his wife recovered from nervous exhaustion on his Bupa insurance. I met him when we first moved in and he brought Emma’s clothes, her cheese plants and a Hoover in his car. All the way from Buckinghamshire, so he must be fond of her, I thought, despite all her late-night rantings about her evil father. He took me gently aside in my nice bright kitchen and warned that, at the end of the academic year, he wanted his daughter sent back to him intact. I laughed in his face at the time.

  Later, when we stopped eating meals together—after a particularly rushed concoction of Emma’s into which she had slipped an entire jar of garlic granules by mistake and still expected us to eat it—dinner became an even more elaborate charade of careful planning. When I let Emma do hers first, however, I would go to the cupboards to take out the dripping, filthy utensils and crockery and just about quell the nausea in time to hear the actress’s decorous retchings and splashings from the bathroom. Which put me right off cooking again.

  Emma would appear jauntily pale in the kitchen, unasha
medly wiping her mouth on her sleeve, belch bile fumes at me and ask, ‘Aren’t you eating tonight?’

  I tried to get in with my cooking before she did. Which was easier those nights she had her friends round for tea. They liked to eat late and on the floor in the living room, where they played Wink-Murder and talked about their respective senses of isolation. I would come downstairs to find the curtains pulled down, chairs overturned, dirty plates strewn. Everyone looking guiltyish. In their hands Wink-Murder could turn rough. And once I found one of the Adonis queens from theatre studies whom Emma had befriended, standing in the centre of their seated circle in nothing but a towel. Emma was looking straight up at his polite bulge in front and enjoying the game, popping soft mints into her mouth.

  I guess I was making a nest and lining it with the stuff I wanted around me. At first, even though it was late in the year, the light came slanting yellow and clean through the house all day. When I filled the place with flowers, tucking them into jars of coloured glass and two by two into wine bottles, they shone.

  Maybe I should have let Emma have more of a say in the way it looked. But she paid very little attention. The housework she did do was bathroom cleaning, sporadically and with great aplomb. This never prevented me finding the occasional spattering of vomit down the toilet bowl, the slovenly beige bulge at the U-bend’s mouth..

  Emma showed off the house and—to begin with—her housemate to her new, theatrical friends. They weren’t real theatrical friends. They were, for the most part, pinched-looking, oddly dressed, nice middle-class boys and girls who, in order to be given second-class degrees, were required by their third-rate department to perform in about four plays apiece and perhaps have a stab at directing one. Emma worked hard at befriending them so that they would give her parts. She wined and dined one called Simeon to get to be Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

  These friends looked at me askance. Especially the hugely fat girl called Clara whom Emma took as her extra-special friend. Clara was prone to feeling isolated.