TWENTY-NINE
“There is a smell here,” said Serena Bell sharply, and stopped, taking a keen lungful of night air. “A kind of national aroma of Scotland.”
Colin and Wendy waited for her.
“Old smoke and hops and sea, I suppose.” Serena sniffed at the wool of her smart black coat. “When I come here, it soaks into me and when I return to London, it’s still there.”
It was the few quiet days before Hogmanay, and they were taking Serena out to CC Bloom’s for a drink after midnight. Wendy was startled that Serena had accepted their offer, and rushed back to her room to change her outfit. She thought Aunty Anne’s friend must have been used to much fancier company. Colin, though, was taking careful note of how the woman had latched onto Wendy, going everywhere she went, watching her every move and reaction. She was definitely sizing Wendy up.
“I’d like to see you at my age, Wendy,” Serena laughed.
“And how old is that?”
“Just past forty. And then some. I want to see what life makes of you.”
A chill crept past Colin then, but he stopped himself. Hadn’t he thought similar things about his cousin? Hadn’t his father said them?
“It will be busy tonight,” said Colin. “You’ve got a drag karaoke and cheap spirits.”
Serena smiled as if he had said something very witty. “Oh, I enjoy rubbing shoulders with all the gay boys. They love me, you know.”
“Do they?” said Colin.
“I think my gay friends, my gay London friends, rather identify with me. I’ve had life’s hard knocks. I’ve reinvented myself. I know about men. About desire. I understand them.”
“Edinburgh queens aren’t the same as London queens,” said Wendy.
“A queen is a queen is a queen,” Serena corrected her. “It’s in the nature of these things. Despite all appearances, nature is immutable, sweetheart. Whatever they look like, or behave like, what all the queens are doing is simply this: they’re feeding off the Dionysian energy of the place. The city.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Look at this street,” Serena said. “All these Georgian houses. How pure, neat, straight they are.”
“The product of a tidy mind, Captain Simon says,” said Wendy.
“Jesus God,” said Colin.
“Exactly,” nodded Serena. “I believe that cities are the great sites of the age old battle between culture, classicism, purity—the Appollonian project, and that which is repressed, vivacious, diabolic, lascivious—the Dionysian. This walk from the Royal Circus to your little nightclub—CC Bloom’s, did you call it?—represents the divide and tension between those two warring worlds.”
Colin sniffed. “But I know some rich old queens who live up the posh end.”
Serena smiled at him like he hadn’t got the point. She said, “I myself love the tension more than anything. That’s what people miss out, when they talk about treating queens as ordinary, about regarding them as normal. You see, they aren’t ‘normal’, and nor would they want to be. They’re partaking in the eternally queer Dionysian revels…”
“Excuse me,” said Colin. “How come you get to categorize everyone?”
“It’s my prerogative as a faghag. I’ve been hagging longer than you’ve been fagging. So listen and you might learn a thing or two.”
That shut Colin up until they crossed shrouded Gayfield Square, London Road, and were safely in CC’s. When they turned around, he had vanished.
“Probably he found some friends,” Serena smiled, when Wendy started to make excuses for him. “I’m afraid young Colin doesn’t like me very much. He never did before.”
Wendy said, “I’ve never heard him sound so argumentative with anyone before.”
“He resents me. I’ve known his mother for years. He should thank me, really. It was me who warned her that he was growing up queer. Saw it a mile off, of course. Gaydar bleeping. And I, after all, was the one who had to talk to and console Anne after his diagnosis. He didn’t do anything for his poor mother. He clammed up in himself all that time. I had to explain everything to Anne.”
“It must have been very hard for her,” said Wendy. They were moving through the crush with their drinks, towards a table. People squeezed up.
Then Serena flung off her black wool coat to reveal a skimpy rubber outfit and black stockings. Wendy stared: you could virtually see the woman’s nipples. Serena flicked out her hair, laid her coat on a chair and glanced round to see that she’d been noticed. “My faghag’s outfit,” she said. “All the queens love a little light bondage. They think I’m hilarious.”
The man next to her muttered at her and both she and he guffawed. Serena sat down and Wendy asked, “What did he say?”
“I’ve no idea. His accent was impenetrable.”
Downstairs they found Colin in the dance floor, talking with
an ex. He was glad to be rescued.
“He came running over as if I was his best friend,” he said. “And he was the one who was a complete bastard to me. That chef.”
“Oh, him,” said Wendy.
Serena was looking for a space on the floor to drop her cigarette. “Are we dancing?”
So they danced with Serena, who seemed to jockey everyone around her and fall purposefully into strangers’ arms.
“Look at him dancing on that podium!” she shouted. “Looking at his reflection. Whooo!” she whistled. “I love narcissists who can really pull it off!” She shrieked at the boy. “He can’t, of course.”
Then she was dancing with an older man in a leather harness, and several young women in T shirts that had ‘Spice up your Life!’ and ‘Tits!’ printed on them. She came up to Wendy with a bottle of amyl nitrate. Wendy felt immediately sick.
“She,” Wendy told Colin, dancing over to him, “makes me feel ancient.”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t you like to be like that when you’re her age?”
He gave her a look.
On the steps of the dance floor they found Astrid, perched in her wheelchair, sucking a cocktail through a straw. “I’m here with Tom,” she screeched over the music. “You remember? The
