Utter self-absorption, though. You looked so fulfilled while you were being done; this week’s bare patch of flesh bright under the noxious yellow light. Old Marjorie, dipping her nibs and scratching away. She never failed to look impressed. Her best customer, you were.
I remember a certain day. She was more concerned for you than she was for her own profit. She unplugged her machine, broke her trance and asked, “How long is this going to go on, exactly?”
I jumped in my seat, I can tell you. I thought we’d been rumbled.
You just looked at her. “All the way,” you said. “I want the whole lot done.”
She cackled. “Saucy. I’m not sure Eric would want me to keep doing you if that’s the case.” I could tell she was unnerved. She went on to warn you about that girl in Goldfinger, dying because she’d been painted head to foot with gold paint, which clogged all her pores and suffocated her. In the film and in real life.
“Life imitates art,” you said, as if that was the sort of thing people say all the time. “Don’t worry. I’ll breathe.”
She returned to work, sponging your stomach down.
“It’ll be ever so painful,” she said.
“It always is.”
“I mean, when we get to your…sensitive parts.”
You tossed me a wry look. “It always is.”
I didn’t say anything.
Here, lots of men have tattoos. It’s a real cliché. Criminals, hardened, with tattoos. Roses, scrolls, daggers, Mother. It’s like having you here around me, almost; disseminated throughout the hundreds of bodies here. At the thought of that, I could swoon during communal showers. I could run from one illustration to the next, yet never find you. Never hope to reconstruct you.
It’s ironic, really. I’ve no tattoo of my own. No reminder of you, ripped from your flesh, painted onto me. You’re everywhere else instead. It’s as if you’re famous, with your face on every magazine. Bits of you are printed everywhere here. And I am, essentially, only me.
Perhaps this letter is stranger than the last one.
Love,
Tony.
FIVE
IRIS MUCKED IN. SHE WAS AN IMPOSING PRESENCE, DRAWING ATTENTION to herself, wedged standing up against the plush red pew amongst rows and rows of squirming, anxious children. With her soft pure-wool girth she touched the back of the seat in front and the front of her own.
Doris Ewart, harassed and scarlet, was glad of the impromptu help. Doris passed her a Co-Op carrier heavy with cartons of orange juice, for Iris to dispense along her row. The children about her, parents too, hushed down when the fat woman bent wordlessly to give them each a carton and a straw.
“Sit down, Iris,” Peggy hissed irritably. “Stop making a show of yourself. Those teachers are paid to do that sort of thing.”
Sitting next to her grandmother, Sally was looking slightly embarrassed, and beside her, Mark was sucking at his own orange juice, waiting for the show to begin.
The fat woman, however, was in her element. Her outdoor coat was fuchsia. She was overripe, a swollen berry of a woman, squeezed into the seething, over-elaborate Civic Theatre where, above the bobbing heads of the children, lithe and gilded cupids and satyrs were secreted among florid nips and tucks of cream masonry and scarlet drapings. Here Iris felt supremely comfortable, with everyone swayed by her air of authority, drawn to the gaudy splash she still, in such a setting, managed to make.
Her lips, fuchsia also, were smacked in satisfaction, her mouth sensuous and prim. Hands reached out to her across the rows, sweaty, chocolate-smudged, hot and grasping hands. She passed out the drinks with unhurried assurance, as if daring the pantomime to begin before her task was completed.
The air started to dim perceptibly about her; pink, amber, a lambent honey. The audience quietened, slowed their movements, watching the empty stage with its grim ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING safety curtain. It was almost as if someone had levered off the lid of the theatre’s roof and poured the building full of stiff, lucid treacle. The audience were still, preserved. Anticipation was sweet.
Iris took the last drink for herself and sat down with a sigh as darkness set in.
“Just in time,” Peggy mumbled.
“I like to give a hand.”
“You like the attention.”
Iris was staring at the safety curtain as it rose. “I won’t deny I miss it.”
With a bang, a violent glittering of indoor fireworks and gasps of enchantment from various parents, the Good Fairy picked her way centre-stage.
Sally narrowed her eyes. “She’s holding a microphone.”
“Ssssh!”
Peggy leaned across. “It’s best to be prepared, in my experience. In case people aren’t listening properly.”
Sally took the hint and settled back with a tolerant expression.
Last year the pantomime had been Beauty and the Beast and Mark had laughed all the way through. Sam had come too; the in-laws weren’t invited. It had been Sally’s first Christmas in school, her first school trip, a family occasion.
The Beast had been the star of the show. Mark was mortified when they swapped him for the prince at the end; Sally too. Sam was merely reassured. The star was Conrad the Wolf, a veteran TV puppet Mark had once adored as a child. Conrad always sat on a podium without a handler and condescended to the entertainment of children as a vehicle for his own brand of raucous humour. In 1979 Mary Whitehouse, having switched channels one Saturday teatime and been barraged by lupine double entendres, had called him ‘filthy’. Conrad disappeared from the air forthwith, consigned to the tawdry netherworld of civic pantomime, where the smut still flowed like wine and Mark could laugh himself silly, to the mortification of his wife and child.
Sam refused to come to the show this year, in case the same thing happened. She knew that the first rule in child-rearing was feigned innocence.
The big
