Ménage Read online

  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 witn
ess 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.

  Dot kissed my cheek.

  — So, show me, she said then. And so I taught her the prole walk. Two legs wide apart, the upper torso stiff, shoulders rigid, the hand in fists, as she filmed and Saul expounded.

  — Yes, you see, like the pavement is yours and everyone else can fucking die. Someone wants your space, some refugee mother with a child, you take wider strides to say fuck off. Spread your legs, like you have a humungous cock.

  — But I –

  — We’ll fashion one later with a sock.

  Later we shoplifted a can of beans and headed home and I felt like he was Henry Higgins and she Eliza Doolittle. The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain – By Jove, I think she’s go it! A woman passed us by. Dot lowered her eyes.

  — What in hell’s teeth do you think you’re doing? Saul muttered.

  — Sorry, what – what?

  — Women! My God, don’t you know this? You’re supposed to stare the poor bitches down, once they’ve passed, turn and ogle their arses. It’s despicable and bestial, I know, and I’ve never done it myself, but I’m told they like it, women that is, even expect it of you. We have yet to evolve.

  Dot tried to man-walk but she was too curvaceous.

  — No wiggling and giggling!

  — It must be so dull being a man, she laughed.

  — Indeed, I try to avoid it as much as possible, Saul muttered in utter seriousness.

  Back on Old Street, Dot asked me to take the camera and film her, as she ran to a certain point then turned and walked slowly back towards us both, trying to eradicate that swing of the hips that had so aroused me. She stumbled and we both reached to help her up, our hands meeting round her waist. We marched then, à trois, struggling to keep straight faces as we passed the many that stopped and stared at the three apparent men, two with moustaches. But Dot was disappointed, people had thought it a joke and she wanted to pass as a real man – in Safeway’s or the Queen’s Head. It could be her first artwork. We were all drunk and it was crazy. To ‘go for a pint’ as men. A joke gone far enough.

  It was almost 4 a.m. but Dot insisted on binding her breasts with a bandage to make them lie flat, and asked me to help. As I assisted my fingers brushed her areola and I had to leave swiftly to address my growing affliction.

  I must have been dozing off when I heard her voice in low tones.

  — C’mere, you sexy man – yeah you, you’re so cool, so hard.

  I opened my eyes but she was nowhere to be seen. I crept to my door and discovered her in the bathroom, the door half closed. Again I heard her say, — C’mere, sexy guy, big strong man. I peered through the gap in the door and there she was in the mirror, flexing her muscles in the mirror, talking to her own moustachioed face, filming herself. I must have made a noise because she opened the door and caught me there. After a humiliating silence she burst into a fit of the giggles. She laughed so hard her moustache flew off into the toilet. I fished it out and we stared at it as if it were dead. I returned to bed telling myself I was not to fall in love. It was a weakness, Saul said, and I thought him right.

  We’d been hit by a plague of moustaches. In the days that followed she scrawled them on every available newspaper and magazine visage. I vividly recall a very large Nietzschean one on the lip of the newly elected Clinton. She’d taken her moustache video to Goldsmiths and it had not, however, gone down at all well. Nonetheless, she was unperturbed in her quest to pass as a new man. Saul insisted she desist. — We are being emasculated, he claimed in utter seriousness and went clean-shaven in protest.

  The Queen’s Head was a terrifyingly proletarian establishment full of old piss-head cockneys and young concrete-covered builders and a barmaid who looked like Dolly Parton’s mother and always had red lipstick on her teeth. Even when it was just Saul and me in the pub we were invariably threatened with death, so for us to turn up with a moustachioed Dot was beyond insanity. However, her promise of free drinks had Saul reach
ing for his coat.

  Dot had her video camera primed but I insisted it would only draw attention and proposed we at least hide it. As we hesitated before the pub entrance, and she checked to see if her moustache was still in place, I had a sudden urge to hold her hand and tried one last time to talk some sense into them both – it would lead to A&E tonight. But Saul was already marching in with Dot’s twenty in his hand, proposing Scotch malts. It was not that I did not want to appear a coward, but rather that I thought they would be safer with me there, and so I followed.

  Old leather seats, neon lights and Formica tables. No one batted an eye as we stood at the bar. Dot kept re-adjusting her moustache and I worried that with all the fiddling it would fall off in her hand. The stench from the Gents was exactly the same as the beer, as if they were actually drinking piss. An old fuck was slumped in a corner, alone, a pool of fluid beneath his feet, with a catheter tube visible. Two builder types were boasting of some fight with acted-out punches.

  — Facka went for me and I ducked and got him a left hook on the fackin’ vera. An’ the uver caant comes at me, knowhatahmean.

  — The inherent violence of the proletariat is a result of their failure to embrace their revolutionary potential, Saul muttered discreetly. — One always turns one’s failure against oneself.

  He seemed oblivious to the very real threat as he ordered the first round, pints and whisky shots for us all. Dot was shaking and I had to control the need to hug her. Saul whispered to us both, — Stop looking around. The savages are distracted. Just stare at your pint and consider it a phenomenological event à la Sartre.

  A scar-cheek asked us where we woz from. Dot was too scared to speak. Saul, having downed his shot and half his pint, had the Dutch to reply on our behalf.

  — Idaho, he said in a voice that had no trace of American about it.