Wise Children (23 page)

‘I think you’ll find everything perfectly acceptable, now,’ said Peregrine to Genghis, who was lost for words.

But the macaw wasn’t lost for words. It cocked its head to one side and announced in stentorian tones: ‘It ain’t no sin!’

It hopped off Peregrine’s finger, took to the air and landed on Daisy’s shoulder, which gave the poor girl a chance to laugh, which was just as well as she was just about to choke.

‘It ain’t no sin!’ said the macaw again, dancing from foot to foot and winking. ‘It ain’t no sin!’

And then, thank God, reprieve. First Genghis Khan chuckled reluctantly, then he let rip a coarse guffaw. The cameras clicked, the cameras whirred, the cameras flashed and the show was on the road again. Thank God for that macaw. It saved the situation. It was trained up for a Mae West promotion, apparently, It was an escape.

In the midst of all this, I saw that one of the gorillas from studio security had got hold of Daisy’s raincoated shadow, clamped one of its great, hairy paws over her mouth to stop her noise, was escorting her outside in the most unceremonious way, in a fireman’s lift, but he also looked quite bored about it, as if he’d done the same to her before. What on earth was going on? But now a heavy silence suddenly fell; all eyes were turned towards Melchior, as he held aloft the Shakespeare pot as if it were the Holy Grail.

‘Friends, we are gathered here together in remembrance of a sacred name – the name of Shakespeare.’

Irish, I noticed, was raising a brown paper bag to his lips in a spontaneous toast to Peregrine. The macaw had taken off again and was flapping about somewhere under the roof. Peregrine got hold of the brown paper bag and drank a toast to the macaw.

‘I bear here, in this quaintly shaped casket – a casket in the image of, for me, the greatest of all our English heroes – only a little bit of earth. Nothing more. Earth. And yet it is especially precious to me because it is English earth, perhaps some of the most English earth of all, precious above rubies, above the love of women. For it is earth from William Shakespeare’s own home town, far away, yes! Sleepy old Stratford-upon-Avon, earth gathered up and borne hither as tenderly as if it were a baby by two lovely young Englishwomen, nymphs, roses, almost as precious to me as my own daughters . . . my nieces. Peaseblossom! Mustardseed!’

He called us and we knew what we must do, although he’d betrayed us once again, and this time, in public. Even so, we flitted up to him and knelt one on each side, coiling round his knee, Nora in yellow, I in pink, both of us near tears. Almost as precious as his own daughters, indeed!

‘Dora . . . Leonora . . .’

He got us wrong, of course. He didn’t even know us well enough to smell the difference, but he was well away, now it was family time. He waved his arm towards Peregrine, exiled among the writers.

‘And my brother, my own brother . . . welcome! Welcome to our great enterprise, in which you’ve played so noble a part! And welcome, welcome, to all of you come together here, so many, many folk, to engage with us in the great task at hand, to ransack all the treasuries of this great industry of yours to create a glorious, an everlasting monument to the genius of that poet whose name will be reverenced as long as English is spoken, the man who knew the truth about us all and spoke those universal truths in every phrase . . . who left the English language just a little bit more glorious than he found it, and let some of that glory rub off on us old Englishmen too, as they set sail around the globe, bearing with them on that mission the tongue that Shakespeare spoke!’

When he said that, as it came rolling out, you could almost see the tongue, on a red satin cushion, under glass.

Melchior now swung on his heel and made a sort of obeisance; his voice switched to a mellifluous croon.

‘Let us hail the vision of this great man . . .’

Genghis Khan, thwacking the crop against his thigh, stood up and took a bow, sneaking a peak at Melchior’s crotch to make sure all was still in order.

‘This great man, who first came to me in London and said, “Let us give the world the splendour of your art, and, what is more, let us dedicate that splendour to Shakespeare!”’

Everybody clapped, having no option, except Irish, who had got his paper bag back and formed a permanent attachment to it.

‘And let us hail the Queen of Fairyland herself – Titania!’

Daisy Duck parked her bum on the arm of her chair, gave the cameras a friendly wave, plus a glimpse of cleavage, and climbed up to the dais next to Melchior. Puck had managed to keep his hands to himself for ten whole minutes, but now he goosed a passing vole, who squealed. The macaw, high on a strut, abruptly extruded a greenish, semi-liquid substance that gathered sufficient impetus as it sped downwards to announce its arrival on terra firma with a lingering
SPLAT
!

‘Now, we poor players, let us all take hands.’

He clasped Daisy Duck’s hands very firmly and gave her the full force of his lovely smile, hot and brown as Bovril, and she fluttered. Tough as old boots, yet she visibly fluttered. There was a universal satisfied stir and contented rustle in the studio. It was as if he’d put them under a spell, that voice, such glamour. Everybody reached out to catch hold of everybody else as if it were New Year’s Eve, time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Fairy clutched Amazon, Amazon clutched Athenian, rude mechanical clutched lover, Nora and I clutched one another but not before that Puck copped hold of my spare hand.

Melchior raised his face to the bright lights on this concluding piece of nonsense, with his lips a little bit ajar in that selfsame knicker-shifting smile that must have been the downfall of my poor mother. Daisy looked at him as if the heavens had opened and she’d glimpsed inside. Smitten. The thunderbolt had struck. Cameras whirred, clicked, flashed. But Puck cried out with rage, dropped my hand like a hot brick and commenced to pummel with his little fists in the disputed region of Melchior’s athletic supporter, yelping the while: ‘That’s my line, you bastard!’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Irish lean over and throw up.

Genghis Khan struck down Puck’s hands with one cut of his crop and hissed: ‘Ever heard of the face on the cutting-room floor?’ That shut Puck up. He fell back. Then Melchior raised aloft the casket of earth in the hand that was not holding on to Daisy Duck.

He looked deep into Daisy’s eyes and she looked deep back. Then he let go of her, dipped his hand in the pot, scattered the earth from the Forest of Arden around him on the floor in a lovely, stately gesture and raised two fingers in benediction. What a splendid pontiff he would have made, given half the chance. Then the ancient instruments started up again and I saw Daisy furtively wipe away a tear because it had all been so very lovely and, furthermore, while Peregrine assisted Irish from the scene as the best boy tipped sand from a fire-bucket over Irish’s deposit, little Miss Sharp Eyes here was privileged to witness a positive disturbance in Melchior Hazard’s perhaps not wholly well-functioning jockstrap that boded ill for marital bliss all round.

Ghengis Khan’s office was full of orchids, he grew them himself. He liked the carnivores best and often fed them flies while some little actress quaked on the couch on the other side of his desk, where he kept a photograph of Daisy in a silver frame displayed conspicuously to show the poor things to what dizzy heights Genghis Khan could take a girl if she was nice to him. The very sight of Daisy made them drop their drawers. It was all a dream come true for Genghis. Crude power. He was the Master/Madam of a very peculiar brothel, where all the girls for sale were shadows; he bought and sold them, but the cash involved was just as real as the cash he used to pocket long ago, in Brooklyn, when he had all his hair and the Brooklyn wife he’d left for Daisy and had started out in life as a trolley-car conductor. They used to thank him at the garage when he brought his vehicle back at night. I mean to say, he could have sold it for scrap, couldn’t he? How could a boy of such vision resist Hollywood? So out he came and made his dreams come true. Literally. That was how he made his living, making dreams come true.

He carried on like a bloody dictator in that studio. The studio covered about the same area as, say, Monaco, and employed about the same population, and had a barber shop of its own, a dentist, a hospital, a canteen, a police department, as well as the actors and the directors, assistant directors, assistants to the assistants, second unit directors, art directors, costume designers, needlewomen, cameramen, assistant cameramen, key grips, best boys, gaffers, carpenters, scene painters, make-up girls, hairdressers, pimps, astrologers, whores, fortune-tellers, abortionists, writers, assistant writers, writers of additional dialogue, and common fellows, and all day long they bustled about the dusty streets of the lot, although at night it was a ghost town, only the nightwatchman, a few dogs, an abandoned newspaper blowing down a cardboard street.

There was a lawn, where you could eat your sandwiches, and a big lilypond with carp in it. Daisy’s Persian cat came to the studio with her and used to sit and stare for hours into the lilypond. Sometimes it would slip its paw up to the elbow in the water, but the fish twitched and swam away, she never caught anything. Perhaps her shadow on the bottom of the pool warned them off.

Daisy loved that cat. She went out with a net one afternoon, after she’d had a couple with Peregrine for old times’ sake, caught a carp, tossed it, all alive-oh, to Pussy. ‘There!’

She told me: on the wedding night, between the satin sheets, he said, whatever you want, Daisy. Anything. And she said, a million bucks. In cash. He blenched, chewed a cigar ragged, but he was daft with love, he made a few phone calls, kicked ass. She sat up in bed in her negligée. First of all the hotel manager came in, ushering the chairman of the bank, in monkey suit and white gloves, as if it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning, and he was followed by a copper with holsters. Enter a little messenger boy in bum-freezer and pillbox, carrying a carpet bag; another little messenger boy, likewise; lastly, a third to match. Concluding the procession, another policeman.

At a sign from the chairman of the bank, the boys all set down their bags on the wall-to-wall and bowed. Their eyes were bugging at the sight of Daisy Duck in her nightie, I can tell you, they sneaked peeks from the corners of their eyes until the chairman snapped his fingers and they scampered out. One of the coppers asked for an autograph. Genghis Khan, rendered solemn by the presence of so much money, shook the hand of the chairman.

As soon as they were alone again, Daisy opened up the carpet bags and there it was. Her million. In hundreds, fifties, twenties. Nothing, to her regret, smaller than a ten, so that she was somewhat disappointed by the sheer volume of paper that she emptied out on the bed, but it was new, and fresh and crisp as spinach.

If there’d been a burner in the room she might have cooked it up and ate it, but no burner, nor oil nor lemon for a salad, so she
rolled
in it, like a dog in shit. Ripped off her satin nightie to feel the touch of greenbacks on her skin, scooped up handfuls and poured them over herself, shrieking with glee, and kicked her heels up to the ceiling until Genghis, unable to hold back, ripped off his jodhpurs and consummated that morning’s marriage
toot sweet
, leaving the greenbacks somewhat stained.

Stained or not, back to the bank they went, next day. Daisy never forgave him for that. She’d wanted to stuff a mattress. She’d never forgiven him and now she was wreaking her revenge.

She’d been an old man’s folly, as far as he was concerned. He’d cast off that old, grey-haired, loyal Brooklyn wife for Daisy, the one who’d stuck with him through thick and thin since trolley-car days and was now mad with love, poor thing. She was the phantom caller on Daisy’s telephone, it turned out. Yes; the cast-off Brooklyn wife kept calling Daisy up, she wouldn’t speak, there would be heavy breathing and a tear-stained silence. She’d called her up in New York, those times; no wonder Perry said, ‘Poor cow.’ And, Daisy said, she called up all the time in Hollywood, in spite of vile abuse. ‘And,’ said Daisy, ‘she follows me around.’ So
that
was the solution to the mystery of Daisy’s raincoated shadow whom I’d seen expelled from the studio, that time! I felt quite sorry for her, but Daisy didn’t spare her a second thought. She was the wife in residence, and she was going to make Genghis pay.

In spite of all that, Daisy was neither more nor less pretty, more nor less smart than any other one of the hundred, nay, thousand girls who lay back on the couch and thought of stardom while he shoved it in. But she was the one who got the wedding-band because she didn’t care.

And now, she didn’t care who knew she didn’t care. Before our father could say, ‘Ill met by moonlight’, she had him up against a pasteboard tree, in the wood near Athens, under a giant daisy, in the lunch break and all the lights went out, they fused them. She thought that that macaw had got it right: ‘It ain’t no sin.’ She was in love, she was like a force of nature, but Genghis Khan was blind and deaf. Blind, deaf and dumb. He thought that he who paid the piper played the tune. An orchid never bit him back before.

And now began a dreary time. Early to bed, up before dawn and out along the mean streets as the forlorn lights were extinguished one by one to join our fellow-workers on the production line. But we ourselves weren’t so much part of the process as pieces of the product. They laid us back in chrome recliners and sprayed us with paint, as if we were a motor chassis. We watched the mirror as if the faces it reflected were those of two other women. Greenish in colour: spangles on the cheekbones. Arms and hands, greenish. The green looked weird on monochrome. We had on artificial fingernails that looked like bark. Genghis Khan was staking his all on Art.