Luda, p.19
Luda, page 19
Here he comes tumbling out of the laundry basket, flapping around like a ghost until they shake him loose from a sheet.
Now he’s on the run from the police, with the flower of Peking’s constabulary represented by Sergeant Ping and Officer Pong. I know!
I’m sorry. I’m only telling the story; I didn’t make up the names.
The idea is for these two to chase Aladdin around the stage—with strobe lights lending a delirious silent-movie feel to the proceedings—until he tricks them into thinking he’s absconded between the rollers of the mangle so they have to dive in after him. Which they do without a single thought for their own safety.
During this bit of biz, the first cop, Ping to give him his dignity, dropped behind the prop and crouched there to be replaced by his stand-in.
In the early days of the pantomime, they’d rely on a midget to play the part of the now shrunken lawman—and apologies if I’ve resorted to a word that’s passed into infamy. Lawman that is, not midget.
The trouble is, the safe option of little person could just as easily apply to a child as a four-foot, six-inch-tall adult and, in this case, it actually does.
In our production, the part of the micro Sergeant Ping was reserved for a little boy named Ales Margin. This preening twig had an online following of two thousand witless tweens lined up to help delude their tiny hero at a moment’s notice into a belief that one brief appearance onstage as a miniaturized law enforcement officer was nothing less than the first rung on a golden ladder leading all the way to an Oscar nomination.
Margin rolled out from a hidden compartment under the mangle wearing a tiny helmet, tumbling gracelessly across the stage in a high-pitched voice yelping—You’re under arrest! Where is that Aladdin? This was guaranteed to have the audience in stitches, but even the voice wasn’t his own; we had the odious Dez Blue huffing on helium balloons to provide comedy falsetto from backstage.
The second policeman, Officer Pong as I’m sure you recall, tried to steer clear of potential outrage by emphasizing the aromatic implications of his name—so that when he chased Aladdin into the mangle and was horribly trapped there like his fellow constable, while Twankey and Aladdin worked the wheel frantically to free him, it was to the accompaniment of a fruity farting cannonade that never failed to bring the house down.
Ping’s partner emerged from the mangle played by a roll of wallpaper with an elongated drawing of Pong printed there and suspended on strings to simulate movement.
In my infernal exile from mental and physical health, laboriously turning the mangle wheel backward in some hopeless effort to rewind the doomed plods, it struck me there was something queasy and gut-curdling about the flimsy policeman bending and flopping his way across the stage. His serpentine peristalsis evoked the invertebrate inchworm crawl of a soul broken for fun in Hell.
I knew I was losing it. The wheel in my hands endlessly rotating. Samsara. Ixion. Saint Catherine. Wheel of Fortune!
All I could do was face her down, communicating all my disappointment, all my fear and suspicion in one lethal death-dealing killer line.
I faced Luda at last. I was supposed to say—Now what have you done to me, Aladdin? I knew that much.
I took a deep breath and began to belt out my lines, which emerged, not entirely surprisingly, in the form of sick. With all the gusto of a top-flight tenor exploding into “Nessun Dorma,” I projected both my voice and the partially digested ingredients of the lunch I’d hardly eaten toward the rear wall of the theater.
You’d better take Luci home—said Float to Luda, who nodded gravely.
* * *
—
We sat silent in the taxi. I couldn’t look at her again. I couldn’t do much except stare straight ahead without triggering a cold sweat and an up-thrust fist and forearm of waiting bile in my clenched esophagus. It went on like this for more than half the journey before she played the first move.
You’re not supposed to get jealous—she said, as if the game came with a rule book and she was finally having to explain the basics to a tyro.
Who says I’m jealous?—I said. And of whom? Was I jealous of them? Or of Luda?
You are—she said. You shouldn’t be but you are. Interlude. She took my hand, enfolded me in that liquid blue gaze, and progressed to her next move.
Can I stay tonight?—she said. The cockroach problem at my place got worse…
I had a nasty reply kept in reserve, but my tongue stayed tucked in its holster, which was just as well, and I sighed instead, laying my head back on the seat, exhausted by life in the material universe and the length of this sentence.
I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you—Luda said with a catch in her voice that recalled Rentboy’s apologetic nasal register. You’ve been really nice.
She looked so sincere, so convincing a lifelike portrait of someone caught in the act of being sincere that it hurt.
I put a chicken in to roast and left Luda to take care of the bread while I had a smoke and a sweltering bath. Gliding a razor delicately round the base of my balls, my smooth perineum, the threat of cosmic justice diminished, as the great mass of anxiety broke apart into smaller clouds of nebulous apprehension, wispy puffs of disquiet that disintegrated into condensation. By the time I turned up in the kitchen, freshly shaved from the bath and swaddled in a plump duvet, I found her draining schmaltz from the baking tray into a chipped Pyrex bowl I’d kept for decades.
Is there anything you can’t undo?—I asked, running a jaded eye over the scorched, carbonized sweet potato she’d failed to rescue from the oven’s crematorium.
We can do chicken soup tomorrow.
Together we selected out the few edible potatoes into a side bowl and tossed the chicken breasts and legs on a pan to make fried chicken sandwiches, with jalapeños and salad.
Then she put me to bed and later she joined me, stroking my head as she asked me to explain my bizarre behavior earlier.
I just felt sick—I told her honestly. Nothing to do with ghosts or bad luck.
None of it’s real—she confirmed. I looked it up. Murdo McCloudie died in his bed when he was seventy-four, singing “Jerusalem” in French translation so it says.
I touched her Artemis-bow lips with my finger.
Who are you?—I said. What are you, baby?
I didn’t mean to hurt you—she promised. They were just boys—just people having sex. You’re special. You’re different—and so it went.
Love bombing, that’s what they call it. It’s what I’d expect if I joined a cult like the Children of God. Hustlers for Christ, Sex for Salvation. It’s what comes before what happens next in the structured, calculated breaking down and reprogramming of another human being, in a procedure perfected by Scottish mind control maven Ewen Cameron, who makes his way back into the plot soon enough.
An intriguing fiction will always outlive a commonplace reality.
She and me, we’re chemsex-loving gender rebels.
Then we’re some late married couple in the kitchen, like it’s eighteen years after the honeymoon and they still get on. If it all seems too dirty-cozy, too good to be true, think of me raised up on clouds of glory so bright I couldn’t see a thing around me.
I’ll go back home if I have to—she told me. I’m starting to quite like the cockroaches. I’ve given them names. There’re Nero and Mike, Tug and Penny, and Gran. I’ve decided to capture and release my favorites before the exterminator comes for them.
Nero and Mike, Tug and Penny, and Gran. How could I fail to love Luda?
They’re not welcome here—I said. You’ll have to find alternative accommodation for the cockroaches. But you can stay for as long as you need to, babes. You’re always welcome chez Luci…
Looking back, it was that scene in the movie where the idiots invite Count Dracula or the lesbian vampire Carmilla across the threshold and, given license, the monster takes immediate advantage.
That night we watched The Omen on TV. Luda had never seen it, or so she claimed. I did notice she was more sympathetic toward the infant Antichrist than to any of his victims.
He’s just a little boy—she insisted, burying the lede.
* * *
—
Murdo McCloudie’s surrender of his rationality to the deadly gravity of myth and madness gave me the slick segue I was looking for to another of the lessons of the Glamour.
I sat her down in my chair in front of the mirror’s double hinged segments, folded open like a gatefold sleeve on an old LP record.
Today’s lesson: Consider the Narrative. The Frame.
If you understand how to manipulate the context around anyone or anything, you can quickly reduce a complex and contradictory human life to a simple story—to hero or villain, Beauty or the Beast—and disarm them as completely as if they’d been hamstrung.
Like Molly Stocking, feminist, tigress, scapegoat hung out to dry as a sex-crazed murderess. You’ll see.
I want to know the secrets of the Glamour—Luda had said.
I hesitated—I know you do but what do you plan to do with them?
She didn’t answer the question, just said—Teach me the magic!—whining like a ten-year-old girl begging for a pony in the gap year before discovering boys or other girls. We went to the spirit world together! You saved me from the spirit cow!
She kissed me warmly, the way you would a relative, snuggling up close, supple and warm.
You’re responsible for me!
Of course, she always knew what to say. She was made that way.
The ongoing first-person story you tell, the central role you imagine yourself playing needs to be strong, I explained to Luda, who nodded eyes round as a cartoon bunny. Whatever your character, it needs stable foundations, like a tree needs deep roots, to resist the storms that shape it. Even if you only see yourself as weak and shallow, you can stand strong in that conviction. But all it takes is one chink in your armor, an Achilles’ heel; all it takes is for the right person to distract the audience with a story that’s more powerful and plausible than your own; a true tidal wave of a tale so convincing and extraordinary that your love of cats, or an innocent preference for lemon mousse, can easily get swept up in a chaotic flotsam of insinuations calculated to expose you as the villain, not the hero.
Suspecting nothing, I felt calm and collected after all the attention I’d received. My personal pedalo revolved afloat on a still and wine-dark sea. Aegean-night-blue ceiling overhead. The walls merging with the sky above the tenement conversions. The ski-jump shadows cut by the blinds.
Sex was always prowling on the perimeter, held at bay by the rules of mistress and pupil, an electric fence to curtail the impure impulse.
Luda pacing the room next door, rehearsing lines beneath her breath. Her breath.
Dazzling late-summer stars waltzed through the plane of the ecliptic, spitting light like the stitched sequins on that dress Mum bought to trigger Dad, launching intercontinental ballistic divorce proceedings. The dress that started a riot and atomized the family. Lost. Hidden. Forgotten.
Neither of them ever found out where the limp and blameless murder weapon wound up.
* * *
—
That rainy humid night when I was eleven, Mum took off to the movies with Aunt Rae, a routine they repeated every Wednesday no matter what was showing, while Dad embedded himself in the guilty semi-dark, the semi-silence, the flickering semi-shine of his private Plato’s cave, draining a bottle of Fastbuck to ease his glide into jellied oblivion at the TV. Serenaded all the way by the mournful dying rasp of Johnny Cash.
While Dad splayed effortlessly in his plush recliner, allowing his bowels the time they needed to perfect a sequence of spectacular endangered elephant herd impressions, I carefully unlatched the back door and slithered through the crack between latch stile and jamb into the panoramic sparkle and the brittle shiver of a winter night with its sky opened out as if to reveal the inside of a vast illuminated box, with countless hollow pinholes admitting only a fraction of the brilliance of a higher astronomical world that shone above the 3-D crossword puzzles of the housing blocks. There was another, lordly world beyond this one where the mannie-queens revolved in all their stately, spinning-top majesty and fancy delicacy, observing a newly hatched child rebel creep to the bin shelters under a sequined roof.
There followed some distasteful rooting through cereal boxes, slimy squeezed-out sachets of cat chow, butchered sanitary towels, sticky packaging, and bubble wrap, but it didn’t take me too much longer to retrieve the dress from the communal garbage. I swiped away lamb-and-turkey-flavored nuggets of jelly and gravy before clumping the fabric underneath my coat and sweater with a giddy thrill of transgression. The treasure was mine now. The night belonged to me.
While Dad was asleep, and before Mum came home from the pictures and the traditional follow-up G&T in the Quo Vadis with Rae to gently unlock the door before padding on her stockinged feet to sleep on the foldout bed in the guest room, I pulled the dress over my head and posed in front of the tall mirror in the hallway at the top of the stairs outside my bedroom door. Naked legs, head cocked, hair brushed and sleeked into a bob, appraising the effect as I strove to imitate the models in Mum’s fashion mags.
I looked, I decided…sexy.
Sexy!
And although the dress seemed longer and more modest on me than I’d hoped, it seemed to me in that moment as though I’d found the lock for that key I’d been hanging on to my whole life, the purse for my belongings, the pocket where I fit as snug as a warm hand on a winter’s day.
I was finally worth watching.
The dress is still there in a drawer. I kept it all these years. A trophy. A totem. Not even Luda knew about that.
When I was twenty-one, trying on the first pair of heels I bought for myself with my own money, I scissored four inches off the hem of the dress to make a pelmet mini, extending my slender boy legs to infinity.
It became the cassock of my secret order, my surplice, my chasuble, my glitter-spattered habit, and I kept it safe, worn only in times when ultimate Glamour is called for.
I’ll tell you about that later.
But only if you’re good!
Do you think I’ll look like you when I’m old?—Luda mused, seemingly incapable of unfastening from her own mesmeric blue gaze in the mirror as she tallied up the figures and reckoned the arithmetical gulf that separated us.
You should be so lucky—I said, leaning over her shoulder so we were cheek-to-cheek. How old do you think I am anyway? Go on. Have a guess.
Must be about five hundred. She poked her tongue out. At least!
I pulled a mock sulk that barely hid a real one.
Five hundred’s just a number—I breezed on, lifting the loose skin over my cheekbones with my fingertips. They say five hundred is the new three hundred.
During this brief interval in the proceedings, we can take a pause to remind ourselves that there is an end to all this in sight and we’re almost halfway there. That doesn’t mean you can stop paying attention. In fact, you’ll have to try harder from here on in.
We’re only almost halfway!
I’m being generous—she said.
I’d raised the subject of Botox again. I couldn’t go on blaming defects in the glass for the pouchy signs of “tiredness,” or the magnetic-field pattern of lines at the outer corners of each eye.
It occurred to me, and I know this might be hard to believe, that even with a very high bar to clear, I was becoming vainer and more dissatisfied with my appearance now that I had Luda for constant dispiriting comparison.
There’s nothing wrong with how you look—she said, but she was looking at herself, tilting her head to enjoy each view as she rolled her eyes up and reran Aladdin’s act 1 vow of love for the unattainable Princess Jasmine under her breath.
Can’t you see the lines?—I muttered, pushing and pulling at loose skin.
I’ve got lines of my own to worry about—she protested, flapping her script.
There’s a reason for it. Everything I’ve told you. Dropping pearls, leaving clues, hinting at intimations. It might have been easier to explain it all up front and, looking back, I think I did but instead I chose to play a game. It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
After all, Luda, as her name practically yodels across the peaks of the Tyrol, was playing a game too. I don’t mean that figuratively, in the modern sense, like emotional manipulation and gaslighting or whatever, although there were oodles of that too.
I’m talking about a literal game no one suspected she was playing let alone winning. A board game with human lives as counters. A bagatelle with rules, moves, tokens, forfeits. It wasn’t chess or Go or Monopoly or Risk. Not Snakes & Ladders, Scrabble, or backgammon.
The name of the game, fittingly enough, was Golden Dames, but we’ll get to that soon enough.
Hang on a second till I have a sip…
It’s top-drawer champagne at least. I always insist, only the very best on my opening!
Opening night, I should say! I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea.
That’s Spem in Alium going around again, coming back into view like a comet.
I’m fixing my lips now, inking the arc, but I can still talk. I’m a professional. Communication. Charisma. Gift of the Gab. They all come as side effects—siddhis of the Glamour.
I start by extending my lip line past its own natural contours to imply a pumped-up porno pout, glistening with gloss and wax. The collagen fillers make it easier.
And here’s a tip: The color goes on first. Then a coat of powder to fix the layer of gloss—do that a few times and you’ll build up a shiny molded-plastic finish that can’t be shifted by anything less than a kiss from a stick of dynamite.
