Then Reet’s decided he’s finished with the sulky pretty boy and he’s struggling my way with his pint and my Chocolate Vodka.
And he gets the whole story out of me. Everything that went on last night. His eyes are getting wider and wider. We are sat on the tables against the wall in the back room at CC’s.
“That’s a terrible story. You poor thing.”
I just shrug. It wasn’t a big deal, last night. Reet over-dramatizes things. He has this world-weary expression he puts on. A moue, he calls it. Hang on, while I put me moue on. This is my moue, whatever the fuck that is. Anyway, he’s doing it now, staring past me as if he’s taking the weight of my world onto his shoulders. Which makes me laugh, to be honest. I’m twice as broad as he is. I make two of him. But I let Reet look all jaded and disgusted with the world for a while.
I reckon it’s all because of Pat Phoenix. Pat Phoenix is his biggest heroine in the world. In his room he has a massive blow-up of some photo from the sixties. It was used as a single cover by The Smiths. I forget which single.
“She worked hard and she played hard. She was vigorous and glamorous. And she could knock ‘em dead even with her sleeves rolled up.”
And I don’t know whether he means Pat Phoenix or Elsie Tanner. Me, I don’t have heroines, or heroes. I think it’s soft. But I can understand why Reet has them. He has them like I have lenses for my cameras; I keep mine in a box.
Here’s his Pat Phoenix face, puckered up against disaster, staring into the back room of CC’s.
The music is fierce. Karaoke’s over for a little bit and they’ve bumped the dance music back up. A techno version of ‘Wuthering Heights’. Kate Bush’s voice is sped up twice as fast. It’s so high-pitched it’s almost invisible. Even with all the shouting and squealing and stomping going on, I can feel her whistling up the hairs on the nape of my neck.
Reet has a story about his mam, down in Tyneside, seeing Pat Phoenix in the flesh, back in 1962. Pat was opening a refurbished Binns department store. There were crowds all up Frederick Street in South Shields. Reet’s main and her three sisters pushed to the front.
They saw the newly-famous TV star snip the ribbon in front of the golden revolving doors. Inside everything had been modernized, fresh for the sixties. They’d got rid of those chutes and tubes and shuttles through which they used to send your change.
The four sisters could only glimpse her, caught only fragments through the jostling bodies and bags and coats. After, they sat on the bus home and compared notes. The bus chugged through the docks and they built up, in words, a jigsaw of the star they had seen. Lovingly they prepared it for their ailing mother. Who, in a knitted black bed jacket, sat bundled up night and day in their front parlour. This was in one of the Fifteen Streets.
What came out as they sat being jogged along, four abreast on the back seat of the bus, was that Reet’s mam and her three sisters, Linda, Lydia and Laura, had all seen the true colour of Pat Phoenix’s hair. A fact obscured by black-and-white telly, magazines and newspapers.
Hair the colour of the bus they were sitting on.
They took back to their mother news that Elsie Tanner was a scarlet woman, for real.
Their mother refused to believe it, but she never watched Coronation Street again. It wasn’t that she disapproved of redheads. She just resented being hoodwinked as she put it. She liked to know what she was looking at.
Reet loves that story.
And the story I’ve been telling him?
Reet thinks it’s appalling. By this time next week, he’ll have it all over Edinburgh, whether I like it or not. I don’t give a shit. I know that’s what he’s like. He tells stories.
Last night I went home with some woman. Not my usual type. Large, forty-something, charcoal-grey pointy sideburns plastered down to her prominent cheekbones. It was down the Scarlet Empress, where I was on the final shift, three in the morning. I was clearing round, preparing to, close up.
Have I told you much about the Scarlet Empress yet?
I don’t suppose I have. It’s the queer cafe where both Reet and I work. Odd shifts, swanning about, slinking table to table, serving on, up to our eyes in it. A chatty, warm, colourful place with a huge, regular queer clientele.
At three last night I had Mary Black playing on the sound system. It could have been any time of day. I like that about the place. It’s so bright with colour — oh, everything’s faux-naif— you can’t tell what time it that is till you look out of the single window and see that the private garden is black and that lights in the terrace of houses beyond are winking through.
The bare wooden floorboards glow orange under the lights. It’s like walking on hot, glazed toffee.
Last night this woman —Anne — was the last one in. Sat by the window, making the dregs of her pint last. Eventually I realize she’s waiting around for me. She arrived with a glorious shebang of dykes at about nine and they all pissed off to see some show over the road. It was the final night for some dance-piece thing that’s had loads of publicity round here. Apparently it’s all naked dykes flying about in the fucking trapeze and, if you believe the reports, eating fruit — strawberries and that — out of each others’ quims. I’m not kidding.
Anyway, I’ve not seen it.
So the last of the
