Luda, page 39
I must admit to a manic hormonal rush; I felt like a soldier preparing to go completely over the top: the glitter bombs, the gummi Dum-Dums, the pink bubble guns of the camp fusiliers locked and loaded with Fairy Liquid.
I won’t fib; I can’t say for sure what would have been my real answer to Victoria Marvell’s question. If I could have a tailor-made living toy to twist and remake in my own image, a human blank page on which to exercise my creativity, what would I do?
What would you do?
If I was offered a breathing dress-up doll to improve upon, make better, guide, or control, would I be the kind encouraging mentor I want to be, striving to make her better, stronger, more self-confident?
Would I be the cruel domme taking advantage of my puppet’s breached walls, her smashed defenses? Would I choose to twist her into ever-more-grotesque shapes in my well-meaning attempts to teach her how to be me?
Me in love with me.
Wouldn’t that be something?
I ask myself what I would have said if I hadn’t seen what Madame Vicki Marvell didn’t want me to see. If I hadn’t figured it all out, right there and then. I’d called it all along; the carefully curated set and setting, the destabilizing narrative delivering random electroshock therapy so you can hardly think.
I could tell by the way she’d been sitting. It’s a subtle thing but if my ultra-critical eye couldn’t always detect the smallest flaw in perfection where would I be? They may have been shaved and taped, but you can’t hide the tricks of the drag trade from an old pro.
Victoria Marvell was not who she claimed to be, nor what she claimed to be.
Victoria Marvell, the Crow Queen, the Morrigan, had a cock and balls sandwiched between her smooth thighs.
I knew I’d find Luda in that house of Marvells. I wondered how long it would be before she showed up for the big climax.
* * *
—
By the time I got home, I’d sandpapered my fingernails down to the bleeding raw pulp. These things happen. Thank fuck for press-on talons.
Let’s not beat about the bush. In fact, let’s leave the bush out of this altogether. Consider the shape of the game plan, the pentagram, the horns raised in a divided universe, emblematic of a severed alienated Creation much like the one I’ve had so much fun with.
Let’s lay our Tarot spread on the table.
Double is Dual, is Deuce, Trump 13, Le Diable, Diablo, the Devil.
The Horned Gambler. Two-fingered gesture. Lord of the Divided World. The Player of Games. Magister Ludi.
Luda.
Get thee behind me, Satan!
Isn’t that what they used to say?
If you ask me it’s practically a proposal!
It wasn’t necessary, Elspeth informed me, but against her best advice I chose to have my fillers topped up. I regarded the injections as equivalent to polishing a protective battle visor.
There was bright work to be done. I was determined to scintillate.
When she was done with my procedures, I gave Elspeth five free tickets to an opening night I knew would never come and told her to expect some surprises.
She said Heather had another message for me, but I didn’t want to hear it. I knew what it was.
She’s behind you!
* * *
—
We were drawing to the close of what should have been the last full rehearsal before curtains up at the end of November and the whole thing was in pieces.
Props and wardrobe threatened industrial action, the catering staff remained as elusive as Borrowers, while the publicity and administrative departments continued to firefight the sun with water pistols.
May Tang-Taylor, citing a bird flu diagnosis, opted to relay her contribution remotely, which meant the Empress now appeared onstage in the form of an open laptop, a radical rendering of her character as a rogue AI in some flattened-out post-human sci-fi variation of our production.
For her part, Aiysha Dyce, the influencer influenced, had resorted to a series of excuses that became so complex and self-referential, we were left with the bewildering impression that she had somehow installed her ailing grandmother in a cattery and was now struggling to secure a comfortable bed in a senior care facility for Burmese Blue kittens Tabby and Toby.
With Luda a no-show, Dee Jayashankar, weighed down with protective charms that were effective against jinxes and maledictions but powerless when it came to health and safety regulations, doubled briefly as Aladdin while we went through the motions with the apprehensive air of convicts rehearsing their own executions.
Abanazar, thoroughly defeated, remains unrepentant until Aladdin offers him a simple choice. On one hand, he can face exile, banished into the desert to live among the wild creatures.
Abanazar, mollycoddled in silk sheets, mosquito nets, and warm baths for most of his life, is horrified by the possibility that he might have to share a bed with nature.
He protests, demands another option.
Or—says Aladdin, adjudicating—you can stay here in Peking.
Abanazar shrugs—obviously duhh—but there’s one condition.
One condition? The wizard’s Adam’s apple bobs like a yoyo, sensing his future closing in like the rungs of a bamboo cage.
Here’s where Twankey makes the closing scene, wearing a wedding dress of such scale and construction it could pass as a marquee tent capable of hosting the royal reception. In full sail, a sugar galleon, I enter like Queen Bod in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Punk Gloriana. The shotgun Wedding of the Faerie Queen.
Fluttering massive spangly Venus flytrap eyelashes at my cornered groom releases a clap of wind that blows the toupee off his head. The wizard, bidding farewell to any vestige of backbone, twists and turns to wriggle invertebrate out of his obligations. Err, I think I’d rather go into exile—he admits and as I stalk him across the stage, a plus-sized hunter-killer shuttlecock, he scrambles aboard the Magic Carpet screeching—Get me out of here!
But the living carpet hates Abanazar too and gives up its animating ghost, collapsing the villain to the floor as Twankey tears the bridal wrap from her body like a Band-Aid off a startling wound…
The Widow steps on sky-high heels from the deflated cream blimp of her dress, the feathered frou-frou, fishnet, and frill that froths around her knees. Abanazar screams. The audience gasp sucks all the air from the front rows, causing the short of breath to briefly black out with the shocking reveal soldered into those last instants of conscious awareness…
Underneath the avalanche of that dress, emerging from a bang and a landmine glitterburst of mauve smoke and tinsel, comes Widow Twankey buttoned into the Phantom’s trademark tuxedo with its withered lapel rose, its mildew of twinkles.
One by one the cast is blanked into shadow until only Jasmine, Aladdin, and Abanazar remain. The wizard hides his face. Thunder rolls among the rigging, as the Phantom lays his hand on Jasmine’s brow, as she turns pale and breathes her last, as Abanazar cries out, only to be silenced in his turn.
The Phantom’s hand attempts to close to a fist around Aladdin’s slender throat. The deafening crack of the crash box comes as an elemental shock wave resonating into the lightless soundless void out past the footlights. The scooped-out sound of a night wind is all we hear, until the first nervous coughs come from a shaken audience set adrift in darkness…
A distraught, solitary Twankey begs the onlookers to forgive her ugliness as she fastens a crablike hand to her face and casts around for a mask to obscure the frightful sight of the terminal mutilations of age. Some thaw in the Phantom’s glacial psychopathic veneer is embodied in the spotlight that now begins to flash on and off, following the plotted course of Dom Float’s stage proxemics to starkly isolate one motionless standing figure after another—the Genie, the Wizard, the Slave, the Princess, Aladdin—arranged as upright bowling pins on an invisible five-pointed star, lifeless in a pallid freezer cabinet half-light.
In that failing heartbeat pulse of the overheads, in the random sequence of beam and blackness, the Phantom undergoes a startling process of metamorphosis.
Crushingly aware of how alone he is on the darkened stage, the Phantom tries his best to repopulate the immaterial palace of his mind.
He twitches, jerks, and jolts, a puppet strung all wrong, and becomes in rapid turn each actor, fluent for moments and snatches of dialogue in the body language of every character he’s dispatched till another takes its place; Jasmine’s sweetness unhinges its courtly delicacy, extends quivering girl power daring to become Aladdin’s reckless acrobatic bravery, before developing from his youthful optimism the restricting carapace of Abanazar’s age and skulking guile. A chameleon rippling on a Transactional Analysis Personality Grid, the Phantom twisting, turning, boasts and laments, sobs, guffaws, until worn down by emotional erosion, polished smooth by the rough edges of all those big personalities, he crashes to his knees, an upside-down letter Y with all the focus, all his grand intent, draining to a fork, a split, a dual runoff where the energy seeps from his body, neutralized by the Magic Carpet spread beneath him, bleeding into the pattern.
Proceeding with slow ceremonial steps and gestures, the policemen Ping and Pong are first to rise from their grave to join the Phantom onstage. More summer sundown shadow than form, they take position and together use unnaturally long spatula fingers to press the Phantom’s mask into place on Twankey’s skull. The faceless lawmen don’t seem all that funny anymore. The desert atmosphere evokes the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Coming-Forth-By-Day.
But then—There comes a time—I croak, and the Flat Policemen begin to nod along with the lamenting rhythm—in every life to draw a line—repent your crimes and count your dimes and this is mine—
Escorted by Ping as witness or most likely evidence. Aladdin is summoned from the shadows to stare accusingly, lips sealed in mute disillusion.
This court demands the full name of the accused…
You can feel the sidewinder flex of disquiet passing through the audience. It can’t end like this. Our stories can’t have such bleak conclusions, can they?
I give them just long enough to lose hope then I lift my head with a mischievous grin—My name?—I say. Start with the hard ones first, is that your game?—and I mobilize the power of audience participation to save the day.
I start by saying—I’m not sure I know who I am right now, but I do know I asked you lot to remember it for me—cranking the pressure until they’re close to eruption. Now, it’s not something like Tom, is it? Fanny? Fanny Tom, is that it?
OH NO, IT ISN’T!—I’m assured by a wall of sound you’d feel deep in your womb if you had one.
I can never remember—I go on. I’ll tell you what! Can you help me boys and girls and all the rest?—the energy is accumulating, compressing to power a two-word explosive discharge.
If I asked, you’d be able to tell me who I am, wouldn’t you?
WIDOW TWANKEY!—comes the two-thousand-voice salute from a crammed auditorium.
What’s that? I cup my hand at one ear. I can’t hear a thing.
WIDOW TWANKEY!
What’s that?
WIDOW TWANKEY!
WIDOW TWANKEY!
Three’s the starter’s gun; my posture cracks loose from the Phantom’s wretched self-defeating hunch, decrinkling to full height, chest out, tummy in, pre-ZENT ass! And with a music hall flash and flourish I strip off the Phantom’s penguin suit intact as one piece, as it might be a poster from the old regime, torn from pockmarked walls on the first day after revolution.
Did I hear someone say Widow Twankey?—I inquire at full “Hello Wembley…” volume, accompanied by a sassy shoogle of my simulated tits.
Underneath I’ve been hiding a mini-smock, all fizzy orange and chemical blue striped tights and a washerwoman’s apron so brief you wouldn’t get your money’s worth blowing your nose on it.
It’s as if I’ve never been away!
Then I take a bold step forward on my platforms to hit Dom’s mark, a play token skipped into place by an expert gamer.
It’s quite routine—I wink as the tempo shifts up to a suggestive bump-and-grind. To take a good long look—kick! At all the books you’ve cooked—kick!
At all the things you’ve seen and all the dreams you’ve dreamed!
And don’t forget the chances that you took!
Kick! Bump!
And here on the brink overlooking the orchestra pit I come to a hipshot standstill. Twankey counts the pauses under her breath. We lean into the hall, deploying our right palm as an amplifying parabola behind our ear, and we listen deep into a stopped hush such as might follow time’s last orders.
Before the lazy drift of silence can settle, Ping first, in a tentative whisper, joined momentarily by an emboldened and, I’m scandalized to report, visibly aroused Pong, begins to hum along.
But as you reevaluate—
Remember that it’s not too late
To choose a different character to play
Now Aladdin comes to stand by his mother’s side adding his clear-running young voice raised in forgiveness, seasoned with fresh wisdom and experience, to this conclusion, this musical summing-up of our shenanigans.
The play’s the thing but here’s the thing
As actors we just put away
The doubts and deeds of yesterday
The orchestra launches itself like a supersonic ICBM into the closing number, where everyone we thought had died is alive once more on the Day of Judgment, or an amateur musical theater version thereof, performing the Resurrection reprise in formation under Twankey’s outstretched wings—
As strident harmonies braid into a complex single human voice uttering wry defiance into the unimpressed empty, our whole ensemble returns from the ghost world to reassemble onstage like a tour party around their guide through the dodgy East End of Erebus.
Reborn with each repeated scene
A slate wiped clean, a haunted screen
No trace of anywhere we’ve been remains be-cause…
Cheers vent with a sound like a sudden monsoon downpour. Abanazar snarls, curses, shakes his knuckled fist, and is gone forever in a blast of violet smoke and tinsel pyro while those of us who remain onstage blast into the recurring earworm chorus.
We’re phantoms at the pantomime!
Come paint your face, rehearse a rhyme!
Everybody! Clap in time!
That’s not to forget how what’s played as an upbeat plot reverse, an act of good magic triumphing over bad, can just as easily signify the apocalyptic schism where the Phantom loses his, her, their minds, rupturing into multiple contending components in a last-ditch effort to cope with the punishing jackhammer wallops of self-awareness and guilt followed by guilt and more guilt and guilt.
The only way out is a volunteer disassembly where Self throws in the flannel and surrenders to jabbering Legion, to become asylum choir, belling out Spem in Alium in forty different clashing keys and tempos.
We’re phantoms at the pantomime!
We’re ghosts in grease, all fog and lime, we’re peak performers in our prime!
Twankey’s retreat into the comfy validations of psychosis leads us by the hands into the grand finale.
Where 5 is 5 and 9 is 9!
Everybody! Sing in time!
We’re phantoms at the pantomime!
It’s a soaring heartwarming outro, except the chorus repeats too many times for comfort, repeating as police lights repeat, as the house lights go up, repeating like a copier turning out duplicates in an empty office as if it intends to continue repeating indefinitely, still harping on long after the audience has dispersed into the jagged wet slap of Storm Ingmar, still humming the nagging repetitive refrain, repeating, repeating.
Phantoms at the pantomime
Phantoms at the pantomime
Phantoms at the pantomime…
There was sarcastic applause from the front stalls. A steady handclap.
The pigs were back. After all I’ve been through, I don’t see why I should put it any more delicately than that.
* * *
—
Speaking of sniffing around, that’s me wrapping up my nose now. Brushing contour down both sides from the bridge to a point above the tip, sculpting a narrow doll-like shape. A dab of white down the center seals the deal.
I’m eking out the second bottle of Mumm, trying to make it last the way you do when you’re a kid with a can of fizz, timing to the moment before the last bubble pops and all that’s left is an oily flat treacle.
Now, where was I?
That’s right! Under investigation!
* * *
—
This time I got straight to the point of the air-drawn dagger and asked the policemen why this boy’s case was so important. Did they understand the damage to my reputation these unfounded allegations were causing? Had they seen the newspapers?
The more charismatic of the pair, which only required him to demonstrate all the personality of a coat on a hook, asked me if I’d had any dealings with the Marvell family. I tried not to jump but it felt like every cell and molecule farted at the same time.
Are they the ones with the daughter?—I ventured. She disappeared—I said.
They wanted to know if I’d met Charles or Victoria at any time during pre-production, but I could honestly say I had not and in addition had no idea why I might have reason to.
Dom cut in at that point—red-faced—Lu—he said—the Marvells were major sponsors. I don’t think you ever met them, but they were patrons—
