Ménage (8 page)

Back in my room, as I lay back, as if in déjà vu, I knew what would happen next and sure enough it did. I heard the stereo start up, then those ridiculous keyboards, that sounded like a kiddie’s toy version of Duran Duran meets a church organ – ‘Disparu’ by the Duchamps.

‘
J’ai disparoo, tu as disparoo
 . . .’

Our secret album and he was sharing it with her. I fought a small surge of jealousy, then conquered it, telling myself that yes – through her I was already, in many ways, reliving my conversion to the wondrous ways of Saul. I
smiled
to myself as the synthesisers wangled and the backwards audio samples of cats miaowing got louder and the she-man’s voice rose to an epic operatic flat note.

‘
Nous avons deees – par – oooo!
’

There are markers, signs, points of no return in every relationship, tests to be endured and questions to be answered, a yes or no as to the future. In ancient times men went to a seer or oracle. And so Saul insisted we take a trip to Hackney to visit Edna – the exemplary living artwork. Funny, how he never said, — Let’s go buy some hash from Edna: His many paranoias and claims included that our phone had been tapped by MI5, due to his previous undisclosed subversive activities.

As he readied himself in suitably contradictory attire, it fell on me to explain the deal to Dot. The more I told her the more absurd every word seemed.

Edna lived in a high-rise on Hobbs Estate, which was mostly abandoned. She dealt mostly in hash, downers, hallucinogens and handed out spliffs like cups of tea. She held Saul in great esteem as they had some secret history. In her clouds of hashish smoke with her mystical wind-chime vinyls, she was surrounded, daily, by a harem of stoners who worshipped her every word. Saul believed Edna existed beyond the limits of the known world – on a good day.

For some reason I tried to shy clear of the most important fact.

— Oh, and she’s a man, I mean she has a penis, she’s saving up to get it cut off.

Dot, giggling, said it would be cool if she dressed in her new men’s clothes again. I voiced some concerns, as that part of Hackney was pretty rough.

Saul emerged, to the sounds of the Revolting Cocks, head to toe in leather biker’s gear with a Chanel scarf round
his
waist, bandit-like, and two beauty spots on his left cheek. Dot was inspired and ran off to get her camera so as to film him. He struck pouting poses for her in his doorway while I got changed. I really had nothing that could compete. Even the things I borrowed from him sometimes just didn’t sit well on me, being too tall and gangly. As I tried on thing after thing, I could hear them laughing beyond my door and I got to worrying about this whole Edna thing.

The first time I met her/him was like an exam, as if Saul was testing my endurance. I got scared and hogged the spliff and got so high I whited out and ended up walking through the depths of black Hackney till 4. a.m. trying not to throw up. Amazing that I wasn’t mugged.

We headed out together, and I had only managed some eyeliner by way of transgression. Yes, something was up, some great mystical evaluation of Dot’s future. She was bouncing along, arms interlocked in ours, all questions, in her shoplifted jacket with eighties yuppie shoulder pads. We took the 58 bus and Saul sat quiet and cool just telling her, wait and see, which only fuelled her excitement.

The incredible thing about Edna is that she is a white man with breasts that have grown from years of hormone therapy, but she seems, quite simply, to be from another planet. Her dreadlocks, mousy brown and three feet long with extensions and sometimes ribbons; the kaftans and Japanese kimono trousers; the Jesus sandals. Miraculously no one ever shouts ‘Poof’ or ‘Queer’ at her in the street. They must assume she’s some kind of hybrid Hindu swami meets Rastafarian bong queen meets, I don’t know, Hare Krishna. The question of her true sex never arose, neither did her skin colour and she was so clearly white, whiter still since she never left the hash smoke to see the light of day and lived like her home-grown weed in curtain-drawn darkness with only UV lamps to light the way. Her sex/race
seemed
inconsequential to the total alienness that emanated from her. Which was why it was both baffling and astounding to behold her boyfriend, Dan – a deeply homophobic ‘real’ East End bloke, who could have been a bricklayer or football hooligan shouting, ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go.’

I tried to confess my anxieties on the bus but Dot was trying to film Saul as he had her in hysterics over Edna’s plaster-cast penis collection.

I feared Dan though. Maybe he’d just done too many drugs and didn’t actually notice that Edna had a dick, a very large one too, she often said. When she got enough money to get it cut off, she said, she was going to have it embalmed and exhibited with the plaster casts on her shelves. Dan never missed an opportunity to scream at fucking poofs and nonces. Maybe he was just in denial, maybe it was the return of the repressed, or the fact that, as Edna said, he’s manic-depressive and paranoid schizophrenic. He always seemed to have wet lips, a sure sign of medication, and he could become terrifyingly animated at times, waving his hands about and shouting, and was over six three. Edna always calmed him with a spliff. I was not sure that was wise given the other medication he must have been on.

We were at the entrance and I was twitching, nervous about the locals.

— For God’s sake, put that camera away, muttered Saul.

Before us, the shellsuits and shaved heads, the black urban poor, that Saul called buppies. No one was over fourteen and all of them deadly looking, and a girl, no more than twelve with a pram. And there was Saul with Max Factor and Dot dressed as a man.

To get in, you needed to ring her outer buzzer. Saul always did this; he had a password he wouldn’t reveal to me. Sounded like Balzac or ball-sack. Dot clung to my arm
as
he led the way inside. The place gave me the shits. Most of the windows on the twenty-eight floors were boarded up with metal. I reassured her that while it looked quite terrifying there were only twenty or so people left inside, all on different floors, all on drugs, all minding their own lucrative business. A weird kind of inverted Thatcherite Neighbourhood Watch scheme, watching out for the cops.

Up the needle-crunching shit-smelling steps. The sign above the buzzer said:
Dr Edna Archimedes: Philanthropist, Homoeopathist, Herbologist, Unnaturalist, Poetess
. The sticker below that read:
No fucking shoes
. Sure enough, shoes were lined outside her door. Four pairs, mostly hippy moccasins and varieties of Jesus sandals, one pair of Doc Martens with painted flowers on, sitting below the hollyhocks and petunias that surrounded her doorway, a miraculous growth of nature in a place of concrete as terrifying as the graffitied promises of death that we met in the stairwell: DEEDEE POSSE; GANG BANGED SHONA HERE; £5 A SUCK.

Dan answered the door, like Frankenstein’s monster, not acknowledging faces. His own was already slack with meds. Saul led the way in, Dot reached back for my hand, her eyes darting round. I tried to whisper explanations as we were led deeper into the boudoir, the Bedouin tent, towards the sound of Tibetan chimes from the living room. The corridor, strung up with scarves and silks as if corners and right angles offended Edna’s circular yin and yang fengshui sensibility. There were plants everywhere and the heavy sexual musk of patchouli, bergamot, Moroccan black, sinsemilla, inhaled and exhaled, sweated through plant lungs. It wasn’t like entering a flat, but an organism, the walls themselves seemed to breathe, the red silks billowing every time there was a draught or someone moved.

There were silent nods as we entered. Edna was in the
midst
of it, rolling her infamous eight-skinner. A nod from her to Saul. And there was that woman there too, the one who’d been trying for years to ape Edna, the post-colonial PhD scholar from the London School of Economics.

Dot gripped my hand tighter, scared, as I was, at the sight of Edna, lighting up with the Hindu gods behind her, and things which might have been shrunken heads from Borneo sitting on her stereo. The eight-skinner was passed on and Saul went to her, smooching. She whispered, — Who are these people? Even though I’d been here three times before. Saul whispered back then took the spliff. After that she was all arms round Dot, complimenting her on her suit jacket.

— What a handsome young man!

Edna leaned to whisper to her and Dot blushed. Edna pulled down her kaftan to show her breasts, asking Dot to touch. Dot anxiously did as told. Giggling as she touched Edna’s nipples.

— God, they’re bigger than mine!

Edna play-acted an orgasm, declared that we were cool and could stay. Saul nodded as he passed back the spliff. Dot was her best friend then with many whisperings and tokes passed between them. The Tibetan chants were put on and it was time for the initiation.

There were seventy-five of them, made over a period of fifteen years. Each one cast by hand by Edna applying the plaster to the member. Each sat erect above eye level on the shelf that she had put up where the dado rail once was. Like Greek statues around the Parthenon. Like saints round St Peter’s. And she had sucked or fucked them all, and had many stories, of their different lengths and girths and textures and personalities. — And this is Mathieu and this is Kahil and you have to see Jose. So many, almost impossible to give them all the common name of penis. I could never stop myself wondering if there was this much variation in other
human
organs: eyeballs, kidneys, tonsils. I always got a visceral reaction to them. A kind of sickening in my stomach. The one up there at the back, how was it possible, how could it be real? As long as my forearm and as thick as my wrist. My God, how could Edna ever have . . .? I always had to take a Rennie.

Dot found the whole thing hilarious as Edna brought them down for her to feel and assess, as if antiques from some golden age now lost to humanity.

— And this is Dave, God, he was a god.

— Wow, Dot laughed, somewhat embarrassed, as I was for her. As I am every time I witness Dave’s superhuman, Übermenschian girth. I’d passed on the spliff.

— Where is Dave when we need him? Dot giggled.

— We don’t ask about Dave, Edna muttered then went back to her meditative pose, cross-legged. The Tibetan wind chimes, the breathing.

And I knew from reading between the lines that Edna had lost many lovers. That this was why she dealt drugs. That she wanted to talk about the cocks but the truth was she had survived when so many of them were sick or dying now. When she talked it was not of now or five years ago but of 1978, before the plague.

Saul was oblivious to my anxieties. He took a deep draw and passed one of the acolytes the money for the quarter.

Dot was kissing Edna’s cheek and telling her she was the most amazing person ever – all she wanted to do was film Edna for an hour, a day, could they hang out together and make an artwork? Which was the worst thing to do because then there would be the photos and the records and the photo album, which was Edna’s history.

— Oh, yer a smasher! Edna declared — Here, I’ve got just the thing for you. We watched then as Edna went into her art box and got out some glue and some scissors. She cut a bit of Dot’s hair, then all was hidden from us. Minutes
later
Dot turned to us, sporting a moustache. All were laughing as Dot and Edna struck poses. Dot asked me to film and took my hand.

Then the most disturbing thing happened. Dan, as if woken from a coma, suddenly started shouting at me and Dot, waving his fists.

— Ya fackin’ nonces! Poofy bastards!

Terror. All the acolytes left hastily with their pills as Edna tried to calm the monster. We thinly scraped out without any actual violence, with many apologies.

Heading home on the bus, I was spliff-sick and Dot was ranting about how radical Edna was. Saul fell asleep on her arm as she stroked his head and I fought the jealousy impulse.

Edna saddened me, though I didn’t tell Dot this. The names changed, the locations, but it was always the same story with her – about how she’d been in every band from the Sex Pistols to Suicide (and even the bloody Duchamps) and knew Vivienne Westwood and Dee Dee Ramone and Warhol and Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop and Ginsberg and Valerie Solanas and Andreas Baader and Che Guevara and had fucked them all and they told her she would be the greatest artist ever. And how she was going to be fabulous again as soon as she got the operation and she’d almost saved enough, another five years. I’d known her for two and it was five back then.

In another five she would be dead.

Her hash was cheap, too cheap.

The trip to Edna’s had greatly inspired Dot. It was strange but the more she dressed as a man, the more enthusiastic she was and the more attractive to my eye. Saul too seemed to be struggling with new emotions, as he was grumpy with her at times, a sure sign of attraction.

We were walking through Hackney, days later, her with Edna’s moustache reglued to her face.

— How do I look? she squealed as she bounced along. — Am I a man yet?

— It takes more than a few props, you must learn how to walk like one, Saul snapped at her, — Stop looking around with amazement.

So his lecture began.

— Look at your feet, stop bopping about. You’ve got to resent everything and everyone. To own the very ground you walk on. If anyone comes near you, growl and defend your space. This is what men do.

Dot tried it, playing the man on the street, clumping along; it was impossible not to laugh as she filmed her own feet.

— You see, Saul expounded, — masculinity is as fake as Barbie, it’s all learned responses. Tell her about school, he said to me.

And as she pointed her camera and we passed real person after real person, I started, quietly, so the real people wouldn’t hear – of how I was bullied at school, after my dad left and we moved to a new town, a poor town, for not knowing how to walk right and talk right. ‘Ballet dancer,’ they called me, ‘Poof.’ Each word reinforced with a punch to the nose, the face in the dirt. How I’d learned to survive by practising the moves in a mirror.