Read by David Mildon
Mick’s gold lamé jumpsuit reeked: of sweat, of beer, of that gummy stage makeup, in the armpits and down the crotch. He noticed when he shimmied into it in the green-room, zipping it to his sternum.
He could have had it washed, he imagined, but could you dry-clean a thing like this? He couldn’t imagine picking it up, in a swishy, loud garment bag; the winking looks from behind the counter. He couldn’t imagine even being in a dry-cleaner. Or a launderette: watching the gold lamé spin, like an astronaut tumbled in a rocket ship; like a man washing his Mam’s best Debenhams dress.
Pinch him, they were on the Beeb. They’d be beamed into everyone and their nan’s sitting rooms—like the moonwalk, like Ted Heath, like all his rock heroes. He remembered watching The Yardbirds on this show: face pressed so close to the screen it staticked his hair, so he could see Jeff Beck’s fingers ripple. It barely even mattered that Mick was going on with a man Melody Maker had recently called “camp as a row of tents” and Mick’s dad had called … well, never mind.
“Ten minute warning.” Dark fringe and a clipboard, angling around the greenroom door.
There had been other costume suggestions, of course. David was fizzing with them, like hangover aspirin in a glass: turquoise suits; knitted catsuits with half the arms and legs missing, designed that way by some Japanese guy; a pig-printed babygrow he and Angie should have put on their kid (who was always naked). Silk dresses David insisted were actually designed for men, as he swooned around in them, acting like some Arthurian legend, or Elizabeth Taylor. All the sort of thing that would get a man punched, or worse, if he ever wore it north of Watford. The type of thing the women would never even dream of wearing, if they knew what was good for them.
Today, when Mick saw him during the sound-check, David was in a quilted, fluorescent jumpsuit, and platform boots that matched his tinned spaghetti hair—looking like Willy Wonka, or a headache, more than an extraterrestrial. Mick didn’t trust David’s ideas about Mars.
“Hey, pretty boy, stop admiring yourself.” Trevor, elbowing him away from the mirror. He was trying to get the slap out of his silver-dyed sideburns. He was in moonboots and a blue jumpsuit, shimmering even under the greenroom lights. But that blue was the colour of an American sportscar and Trevor had clung to those bushy, dangling sideburns by letting Angie bleach and tint them chrome. Mick should have thought of that but—he squinted again in the mirror, over Trevor’s head—would a green-dyed moustache have let him hang onto any of his tattered masculinity?
“God, you stink,” Trevor said.
That helped, Mick thought.
He sniffed and it was a little like the smell of his Hull Corporation overalls, when he’d drop them into his mother’s hamper on Friday evening, after a week of tending to municipal hedges and football pitches. Crusted with dirt, a yeast of sweat and beer baked into the fabric and the cloying scent of mulch hanging over all that, like a tart’s perfume. That smell was present even after the hamper lid clammed shut; it would follow him down the stairs.
But his Mam had concoctions, Ariel powder and bleach, and somehow the overalls were always returned to him on Sunday evening: scrubbed, sometimes stitched, and smelling faintly of candyfloss and the breeze on their estate. And his girlfriend up there, Denise, said she liked the reek on him; said—as she lay back on the settee in her Mam’s sitting room and shivered off her cardigan—it made him smell like a man.
But Denise was gone and after just a week in London: a week at Haddon Hall; a week of David and Angie swapping outfits and playing sex games and séances in the parlour; a week of sleeping on a harem spread of mattresses on the landing. And then there had been the incident with the mimes.
Mick had begged, although, in retrospect, not as hard as he could have. He could have got down on his knees, but the carpet was covered in Chinese pottery, most of it recruited as ashtrays, and a stranger, yet another man with a handbag, was pretending to sleep on the couch.
Finally, he and Denise had it out under the gingerbread moulding on the porch.
“You know I don’t agree with this either. The costumes, the noise—Denise, please!”
“Oh, there are parts of this you agree with.”
In the end, he hadn’t been able to get the white mime makeup out of the crotch of his jeans or explain it away, and Denise had gone back up North. It was the first ever time he’d wished he knew how to do laundry.
He last saw her at the coach station, suitcase with all her clothing swinging under her belly. And within a month, she was phoning him from Hull Royal Infirmary, saying his son had been born and she was naming him Nicholas.
He had a few photos of Nicholas now, sent down second class post, the envelope dirty like it had been stepped on. He’d kept one in his guitar case for a while, but it had got crumpled, colours rainbowing where it folded, like petrol spilled on a road. He should look for the other photographs, see where they’d got to. They’d seem to just drift off into the occult jumble sale of Haddon Hall. With the silver-painted ceilings, the Buddhists and swappable boyfriends always traipsing through, and David’s brother, fresh off a sectioning, ranting in the kitchen.
No, Denise had been right: it wasn’t a good scene for a kid, or even Polaroids of him. He wasn’t sure what David and Angie were doing there with a kid themselves—named like a toy robot, toddling around between the amps and the dragging velvet curtains. Angie never paid him much attention. She was too busy goading David in his manias, for Kabuki (or was it Kubrick? Depended on the week), for mime, all those things luring him away from rock ‘n’ roll. Too busy making acrobatic noises from their bedroom, carried all the way down the acre-long hallway, even over the new T. Rex. And revving the sewing machine in the turreted parlour, whipping up more girly, outrageous costumes for them all.
“Mick, Mick, dar-ling,” in that American voice, “can I measure your thighs?”
In the mirror, Trevor wrinkled his nose: “Can’t you wash that thing? They’ll smell you through the television.”
That made Mick smile: all those kids with their eyes superglued to the BBC, sniffing something more than their mothers’ beans and mash, something that wasn’t David’s patchouli and French perfume. Something that wasn’t “stardust” either (Mick actually imagined space smelled like chemicals, like emptiness, like Elnett, in Denise’s hair and David’s—and his Mam’s). No, this was something earthier than that, ripening, from the hedges of Hull.
“Five minutes, lads.” The lass from the BBC again, her voice gently chiding.
“We’re the Spiders, love,” Trevor said, half swagger, half mocking it all.
“Yeah, from Mars, isn’t it?” The door squealed open further. “That’s what it says here.” Her fingernail tapped on the clipboard. “Nice of you to come all this way.”
“Where are you from, love?”
Mick turned and she was blowing that fringe off her pretty forehead; saying “Basingstoke”; lowering the clipboard to show jumpered tits. And she was looking at him, more than she was Trevor and his basset-hound face. Of course she was.
“You have eyelashes like a cow,” Angie had told Mick just last week. Some weird American fetish, he thought; Angie was full of them. Farm animals this time. But when he let her stroke mascara onto his eyelashes, he couldn’t deny girls looked at him more. They’d always looked at him—he’d had his pick, of lasses on the Greatfield Estate; of all his sister Maggi’s friends; of David’s fey mime crew, leaving their white makeup on all the pillows on the bed on the landing. But with clumpy, spider-leg eyelashes, they looked at him even more, took off their shirts faster, seemed desperate to get him out of his silly clothes.
Trevor saw Miss Basingstoke’s gooey eyes and admitted defeat; pushed past her and out of the greenroom.
She was still looking at Mick, biting her lip.
“I heard a secret that you’re actually from Hull.” Her plastic bangles clinked up and down her arms, as her wrists moved, as she swung her hair behind her shoulder.
Mick nodded. The mascara and the gold jumpsuit helped, but you couldn’t beat the ‘strong silent’ thing. And anyway, he could already hear the amps zapping, Woody pegging a steady beat.
But he’d be thinking about those bracelets clinking up and down, all through “Starman,” as David swanned around him.
I had to phone someone, so I picked on you…
*
As they pulled out of White City in the limo he saw them: kids, acres of them, in stardust makeup and fuck-me pumps, waving wind-tattered posters and screaming. Auntie Beeb had cherry-picked some kids in tank-tops to sway behind The Spiders on Top of the Pops, but here were David’s real, most feral fans—probably some of the crew who hung around Haddon Hall like refugees from a starship crash; the boys indistinguishable from the girls, like the youth had hurried up and evolved themselves out of gender into shimmering catsuits.
At least Miss Basingstoke still knew how it worked between men and women; she landed in Mick’s lap before they even crossed the Thames. Trevor had scrunched out of his moonboots and his tube socks smelled like corn chips and toenails, and that was overriding the beery reek of Mick’s gold jumpsuit, so she sidled even closer.
Angie slithered her hands into David’s catsuit, nudging down the zipper.
“You were super. Knocked ‘em dead. Every kid who watched that tonight wants to be you. Or do you.”
She’d been like this since the BBC bar, jabbering on as if David had just completed the moon landing himself; as if by stepping onto that peach soundstage carpet and into England’s front rooms, he’d taken one giant leap onto the cratered, Swiss-cheese surface of rock superstardom, and all by himself. Did she even remember the end of David’s song about that, Mick wondered? A man untethered from home, floating away in a tin-can. But never mind that: management was already talking about an American tour, the bus that would swoosh them between Cleveland and Dallas.
“You going on this tour too, Angie?” Mick asked.
“Yes, of course. Who else would do your mascara?”
“Just wondered about the kid that’s all…” Mick mumbled.
“He can come. We’ll show him America. It’ll be educational. ”
“Do you think we’ll get to meet Andy Warhol in America? I wrote him that song,” David said, quietly. He was trying to act wounded because someone at the bar asked if they’d all wandered in off the set of Doctor Who. But Mick reckoned he was secretly flattered.
“This is taking forever.” Miss Basingstoke, husky in Mick’s ear. “Where do you live?”
“Beckenham. Bromley. This, uh, mansion there. Or just the ground floor.”
She squirmed off his lap. “God, you have come from Mars.”
He still managed to get her up to the landing where the Spiders slept, but only after a communal showing of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a gong bath, four spliffs, Zowie crawling out of bed twice and Angie taking off her top. When David whisked out a beret and a bouquet of rubber flowers, Mick saw his exit. He remembered when rock was about respectable, old-fashioned debauchery: women and drink.
At least here, on the crazy-paving of mattresses and Indian blankets, men were men and women were women. And this one was pulling her jumper over her head …
*
Musical interlude; something women like, like Marvin Gaye. Denise had always nixed The Stooges, although that was loud enough that his parents wouldn’t hear the bedsprings through the whisper-thin walls. But he needed to stop thinking about Denise at times like this: Denise’s nice hair and Denise’s nicer tits—he had to remember not to say “Denise.”
*
“Hey, what’s this?” Miss Basingstoke was wiggling something out from under his pillow. A crumpled photograph; she smoothed it on the tangled sheets between them. It was taken in Mick’s parents’ front room: Denise and Nicholas on the settee.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s, uh, my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—and son.”
“You’ve got a kid?”
“S’pose so. Never met him.”
“Why not?”
“Denise didn’t like London. Didn’t like it ... here. Thought it would be bad for the kid.”
Miss Basingstoke lay back, staring at the silver-painted ceiling. Shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself. “Is it cold in here?” She got up and scrabbled in the sheets for her jumper. She found it wadded under Mick’s gold jumpsuit. She sniffed the wool delicately. “Ew. When was the last time you washed that thing?”
“Not sure how, really. Hey, do you know?”
Even in the dim light, Mick could see her roll her eyes. “Menstrual blood and witchcraft.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” She put on the jumper and flopped back, careful that none of her touched Mick. “God, all men are the same. Even gender-bending rock-stars, especially rock-stars. You just want us to do the work. Chop the lines, wash the costumes, raise the kids. You can wear a whole Boots’-worth of makeup and bend like a pipecleaner, but it’s all the same.”
Mick didn’t know what to say.
“Thank fuck I’m on the Pill,” she said to the ceiling.
*
That night, through a haze of Afghan Gold, Mick thought that maybe when he went back North at Christmas, if he went back North (although he couldn’t imagine what half-naked, Buddhist perversions David and Angie would inflict on Christmas), he’d get this bleeding jumpsuit washed. He’d ask his Mam about it. Or Denise.
(c) Lauren Van Schaik, 2020
Lauren Van Schaik’s short stories have appeared in The White Review, The Cincinnati Review, and previously at Liars’ League. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she won the David Higham Award, and in 2018 her novel-in-progress, Joplin, was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize.
David Mildon is an actor, playwright and founding member of Liars' League. His stories “Worms’ Feast” and “Red” were read here and appear in Arachne Press anthologies London Lies & Weird Lies. Plays The Flood and Leaves have been produced on the London stage along with many shorter pieces. Acting work includes the National's production of Consent at the Harold Pinter.
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