PARTY GIRL
by
Heather Macleod
I’m going back, on the Sylvania. Frances is there, hurrying me, saying we’ll miss the boat. It’s like that scene in the Titanic, you know the one, where Leonardo de What’s-his-name wins the ticket and scrambles aboard. Everyone’s jostling for a place. There’s no time to pack, no time to think even, and I’m flustered. I know it’s my hairdresser day. I shouldn’t be doing this. She charges if I don’t cancel.
We’re on board now. All I have with me is the blue-and-black silk, screwed up in a bag. Totally unsuitable. No make-up, no pants even. Frances offers me hers, great baggy things, stained, no elastic. But there’s no way I’m wearing those. And no mirror to pluck my eyebrows. I spend most of the voyage alone, in a tiny cabin avoiding the cold. Well, how can I go on deck, dressed in silk and no knickers? And I’m…well…scared.
……….
I wake up, sobbing. I’m hovering over my body. It’s a shock, I can tell you. There’s tubes up my nose, colostomy bag, a great gaggle of machinery pumping my lungs. And a distant pain like the noise of a train disappearing. Two white clad nurses. Their voices come and go like the signal on my kitchen radio. Chances of revival, kidneys, dialysis. Christ! Then….nursing homes! If they think I’m going back into that shell to live with a lot of urine-soaked gah-gahs, they’ve got another think coming! God if I could only reach down and pull out the wires, blank out that screen.
I hadn’t imagined this. I mean, when you’ve been diagnosed with gout you don’t imagine being here after less than a week. Why, if I’d known, I’d have had gone out with a bit of a bang. Drinks all round, cocktail nibbles, caterers…
Woops! Thought I was falling there but realise now I can zoom in and out for a closer look. Don’t want to get too close though, just in case. The nearer you go, the greater the pull… There, that’s about right. Well, if I didn’t have tubes up every orifice, I wouldn’t look so bad. Skin still fairly tight, still a good colour. People thought I used a sunbed. But, no… though the foundation helps, expensive as it is. True, the eyebrows need a bit of attention but the auburn in my hair keeps well. Debbie does such a nice job. All that personal attention. Letting someone get so intimate with your head without it leading any further. The heater orbiting like a ring of Saturn. Yes I’ll miss those trips – though not the waxing, the tweaking, the attempts to keep testosterone at bay. Debbie will be wondering where I am. And I don’t suppose she’s thought to tell her. Pam I mean.
Oh for Christ sake, don’t pull back the sheet like that! I don’t want to see those legs, broken veined and swollen, the blackened toes, the gangrene spreading! That’s much better. They used to be nice, you know, my legs.
Always my best feature, Bernard said. Remember the time in the bunny suit and the fish-nets? I nearly brought the house down! And the compliments!
Yes, take my hand if you must - though I’ve never been one for physical contact, at least not beyond what I pay for. Strange… it looks waxy, and when the nurse takes my pulse, I don’t feel her fingers against my wrist.
Still, it’s not as if I mind. The bang, that is…. I’ve tried at Holm Park but it’s no good. The sex ratio for one - 6:1 and not in our favour - and that god awful warden Pam treating us like imbeciles, telling Maeve not to drink and drive, her idea of a little joke when she comes to wheel her away early. And then, when you really need help, like putting in eye drops after the cataract…. No, there’s really no-one, what with Bernard long gone and… Funny…why that, now? Haven’t thought about it for more than half a century. The baby, I mean. Just lived long enough to give it a name. Couldn’t think of anything at the time, and he was there with Bernard, comforting him…. So that’s what we called him. Alan. After Bernard’s best friend. Stupid name for a baby…
Sorry, where was I? Parties? Yes…all a bit jaded, all rather depressing, rolling out with our zimmers. I mean what do we get together for? To see if we can guess whose next or whose missing, like those ridiculous childrens’ party games involving memory and trays and countless little knick-knacks? The music gets quieter, the chairs get fewer but we’re not fighting over those remaining. And with Alzeimer Barbara and Parkinson George, even the drinks get spilt or go missing. We all behave badly, dropping off like flies, drooling dentures, smelling. Our diaries are littered with doctors appointments. Conversations inevitably begin with ‘do you remember’ and many of them don’t.
My god but we could entertain then, the music, the dancing! Only…she didn’t like parties, not really, always shy as a violet. I’d watch her surreptitiously swigging the adults’ drinks. I’d think ‘takes after me’ and then have to check myself.
Yes, the only thing left to look forward to - my lunchtime tipple. And then the evening binge. And lately the two have merged into one long hazy twilight. It’s when I pour my Bell’s I think of her. Scotch on the rocks. Not whisky. After all those years of conditioning in the States. God, I could do with one now! Even a martini. Bernard knew how to mix a drink. Cocktail-shaking like a mad marionette, grinning impishly. Always came out just as I liked them. Used to do it for her too, and pop in those maraschino cherries and a little paper parasol. It would make her laugh. Funny when two beings click just like that.
She was the child he never had. His ‘party girl’, he called her. The only time he really saw her. At birthdays, he would join in Pass-the-Parcel and show off his magic tricks, toss the Birthday girl up and down till Frances had to stop him. Quite frankly I found those events a bore, Frances so sweetly wrapped up in the children, Bernard pranking around like an idiot. Just left me and Alan. And he would be absorbed in his chess. I’d sit in their conservatory, smoking, drinking, waiting for all those pretty little girls to go home. I’d wonder about him and me. I mean he was such an intellectual, lost on Frances. Don’t get me wrong, I never stepped over the line. He wouldn’t have noticed if I had. Sometimes I scarcely think he knew he had a daughter. Wasted on him.
Then there were the Adult parties, the intellectual sort, celebrating the lives of Burns or Mozart, or when we had to make hats depicting book titles, you know the thing. I could never be bothered and Frances would fix me with her withering look. But Bernard always made something suitably tantalising and abstruse, involving his ‘party girl’ in some obscure way. And she would love it.
And then I’d be the entertainer. You see, it was the only legitimate excuse. The only way he could see her. I knew he needed it, and I didn’t mind. Really. I was in my element, being a hostess. I’d get out the fluted patty-tins, the ones from Good Housekeeping, and bake dozens of little pastry cases, stuff them with crab, stilton pate, chicken supreme... Make jellies in moulds, salmon mousse in curved copper fishes… Meringues and lemon chiffon pie from The Joy of Cooking. Oh yes, I put everything into it. I made it my life. The built-in bar, patio umbrellas, barbecue set. The hire-in staff, croquet, fairy-lights.
I always invited those who might reciprocate - the Anglo-Americans, the Bletchley lot, that chap who won the Crossword Puzzle during the war… you know, the Daily Telegraph one…. what was his name… And then you couldn’t keep away Irish Maeve (always a bit over the top on booze) and bottom-pinching Jimmy (a real fop)… With luck, Frances and Alan would bring her along. Bernard would be a different man then, letting her make punch, holding her hand while he socialised, fetching her crisps and getting her to pass round the sesame toasts, pimento olives… and tickling her relentlessly. And so he got his fix. And she seemed happy. Though I could have strangled her that once! When she spilt coca-cola all over my lamb-skin rug. Alan bought me a new one but it wasn’t the same, not such deep pile….
I never thought she liked me. Not really. But once, I remember her coming towards me through the chinese lanterns. Asked me for a mustard sandwich. It made me feel… well, flattered, to have that attention from a child. She liked them, you see. And her mother never let her have them. I took her to the kitchen, sat her on the stool at the breakfast bar and let her spread mustard thickly onto white bread. I lifted her up by her hot little armpits, felt the weight of her…. She fed her crusts to Bilco.… There, it’s come to me! Why couldn’t I think of his name last week when Mrs Next-door brought that ridiculous ball of fluff round, cocking its bloody little legs against my tubs…
Frances would bed her down, when she got tired. At the parties, I mean. One night, retrieving a stoal from the bed, I found her, courried into the furs, asleep. Only time it’s ever touched me. I just wanted to take her in my arms. Escape from the balcony. Call Bernard from the pay phone down the road and together we’d run off with her. Pretend she was ours. But of course I didn’t. It was too cold a night. I went back downstairs and poured a stiff drink. I didn’t let it happen again.
Christ, I could do with that drink! If I do come round just make sure it’s the first thing they give me. Three large measures…
She was always making me presents, for some reason. Boxes covered with torn-up sweetie foil or cross-stitch mats. Sometimes those ghastly Christmas biscuits, all floridly decorated with cochineal, silver balls and finger prints. Or chocolate truffles, sweating from the palms of little hands. Could never bring myself to eat the stuff. Always headed for the pedal-bin. Bernard once discovered the peppermints stuck to the side of the bin liner. Why did I do it, he asked. Why did he think? Anyway one year when she was older, it was something more practical – a measuring glass covered in some lurid paint which I could easily peel off. For my scotch, she said.
It was the last present she gave me. For some reason, it signified the end. They never came to parties after that. Some disagreement between the men. Something she’d said or insinuated. She was growing up, changing, we all were. And then they moved back to the States. And it was never quite the same. Then Bernard…four or five years later. He reversed the Riley, and hanged himself from the garage rafters.
……….
I’m dreaming again. At least I suppose I am. I’m still floating but the nurses have dimmed, I can’t feel the pull. I’m back on the boat, on deck now, coming into a harbour, docking. There’s a warm, sweet breeze. I’m wearing the silk, and the fact that I have no pants feels now, somehow…well, liberating. And then I see them, blurred at first but gradually focussing. All those party people who have peppered the years with their deaths. All looking immaculate, so young and happy, their glasses clinking, raised in silent toast to me. I shiver with delight, but then feel confused, unsure, ashamed almost. Should I join them? I certainly don’t look my best. And then…floods of relief! I see Bernard, elbowing his way through the crowd, late as usual. He looks great. He sprints up the gangplank, carrying something in his arms, shouting in that theatrical voice of his. I reach out to him. It’s easier than I think, the stepping off. And look…look what he hands me! A baby, healthy, radiant. Grasping at the clear, blue, endless air.
© Heather Macleod
Reproduced with permission
D.H. LAWRENCE
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
VIRGINIA WOOLF
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ANDRE MAKINEClick image for a profile of Makine on the Politburo Diktat website; to read a review of Makine's 'Once Upon the River Love' on the Boston Globe site, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
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WILLIAM DALRYMPLEClick image to visit Dalrymple's official website; for Tehmina Ahmed's interview with Dalrymple on the Newsline website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
BRUCE CHATWIN
SYLVIA PLATH
ANNA AKHMATOVA
CAROL ANN DUFFY
DON PATERSON
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS
W.H. AUDEN
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