The House of Rumour (10 page)

That was the end of it. Jenny thought it was all just too ridiculous, while Danny didn’t need Pirate Jenny any more. He didn’t need the Female Pope. He’d found a more established religion. Always had an instinct for the main chance, Danny, even when it came to the paranormal. And it turned out to be very useful for him in the long run. Especially when he got to LA. Fantastic for contacts in the business, and especially when he started getting acting work. And now with these rumours about Danny’s sexuality, Scientology’s been a kind of protective network. Anyway, back in 1987, Danny goes off to the States, and Jenny disappears somewhere else.

You really don’t know where she is?

Nope. That’s enough of Jenny for now. Let’s talk about Johnny. And Anna.

She smiles. And you have this happy feeling of anticipation. You can get to know her better. Then you’ll be able to tell her the whole story.

There is just one thing, though, she says.

What?

There’s someone else Jenny knew then that I’m really interested in.

Oh yeah? You feel a sudden stab of dread from somewhere. Who?

Vita Lampada.

Oh.

You try to keep calm, not to react, but she’s bound to see the panic in your eyes.

Vita, yeah, you mumble. Well, Jenny knew her, yes.

And you think: oh Christ, she already knows. So she knows all about what happened to Jenny. For all this time she’s been playing some sort of game with you. You force a laugh and try to make light of it all.

What do you want to know about that old tranny?

You try to smile but you know. She’s on to you.

She died in suspicious circumstances, says Anna.

So they say.

And Jenny was close to her near the end.

I don’t know about that.

Don’t you?

Anna’s curiosity has narrowed into an inquisitive squint.

I don’t understand, you protest.

She smiles and her face opens up once more.

Look, Johnny, she says with a sigh. I should have told you before. I’m doing a story on Vita Lampada.

I thought this was about the New Romantics.

That’s a part of it, of course. But it’s Vita’s story I’m interested in.

So you know what happened to Jenny.

No, I—

Come on, you knew all along. And I actually thought you were interested in me.

What?

I thought you wanted to get to know me. Instead you’ve just used me for your own purposes.

No. I really like you, Johnny.

I’m just part of your research, you mean. I suppose this has been a lot of fun, hasn’t it? Digging up the past. My past. But I do exist now, you know.

What?

She’s looking all wide-eyed and innocent but you don’t buy it.

Whatever you might think, you tell her, Johnny is a real person.

Of course he is, I mean, you are.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is just to be me?

Johnny—

You get up from the table and stare down at her.

A lot of people say that Pope Joan didn’t exist, you tell her. You know, modern scholars, they dismiss the whole Female Pope story as a medieval legend. A crazy idea dreamt up to ridicule the papacy. Or maybe a feminist rewriting of history. Wishful thinking. And what’s wrong with that? The fact is that there is no record of a Pope John the twentieth. The succession goes straight from the nineteenth to the twenty-first. So there is a gap there. There’s always a gap in history. And that’s where some of us live.

Anna Guttridge gazes up at you, bewildered. Like she has no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t care. You turn around and walk out with the sincere hope that you’ll never see her again.

You get back to your flat and you’re still full of anger and self-doubt. What really hurts is that you’ve been made to feel false, even though it is you who have been deceived. You’ve been made to feel guilty and that’s unforgivable. There’s a message on the answerphone from Anna, asking you to call her. You ignore it. You’re like some stupid kid. Jenny would never have fallen for this sort of bullshit. She would have seen right through that scheming bitch, you tell yourself. But you? You sigh. You remind yourself that you’re a late starter. And you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

You pick up the phone and call Danny Osiris in Los Angeles. It’s three in the afternoon there, and Danny sounds terrible, scarcely articulate. You ask him whether he still has the document that Vita stole from Marius Trevelyan. He says yes and you tell him to find a safe place for it.

Then you try to relax. You remember what your therapist said: that for somebody to love the person inside of you, you have to have a clear and centred sense of yourself that doesn’t depend on anybody else. You have to be strong there, to know who you are. And you can allow yourself to miss Jenny. You know, getting rid of the body, that was easy. Burying the rest of her, now that was the hard part. You cry a little and it makes you feel better. You manage to get some sleep.

You wake up feeling stronger. You realise that it doesn’t matter what Anna knows about you. Or what anybody else knows or suspects. You can deal with it. There’s another message from Anna. This time you call her back.

You arrange to go around to her place in the evening. You dress casually, but carefully. T-shirt and loose-fit jeans, leather boots, leather jacket, tough-guy stuff. Butch drag, as Jenny would have called it. But you mean to mean business. And you’re packing something special. A little surprise for Anna.

And you take around a bottle of red wine. You know you’ll need a drink. Anna shows you into her little one-bedroom flat; you open the wine. You both get a little drunk. There’s this tension in the air. A buzz of potential charging up.

I don’t appreciate the way that I’ve been used, you say. It’s humiliating.

I said I’m sorry.

The way you flirted with me. What was that? A journalist’s trick to get information?

No. Well, not entirely.

Still playing games.

Why can’t you believe that I might actually like you?

Oh, please. I mean, you know, don’t you? About me.

About you?

About Jenny and me. This ridiculous brother and sister act I’ve been playing.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I find that hard to believe. Anyway, you wanted to know about Vita Lampada.

Only if you want to talk about it.

Yeah, well. That poor queen got involved in some serious stuff. Vita was a strange one. She was part of the New Romantic scene but always looked out of place. She was like an old-school tranny in the middle of all these fashionable gender benders. She used to get a lot of stick. Jenny liked her, respected her. They had a fellow feeling, you know? They both felt that they didn’t really belong. Jenny always said that she was stateless, and that’s what made her a pirate. But Vita and her were travelling together. Just in opposite directions. They met halfway. Vita had had an interesting life. A bit of a con artist, but clever with it. She had a great imagination. She was a fantasist really. I mean, she loved the form, you know, fantasy, science fiction, anything other-worldly. It was where she felt at home, I guess.

Is that why she liked the New Romantics?

The funny thing was she said near the end that she knew what Spandau Ballet meant. Robert Elms, the writer, he’d come up with the name of the band after seeing some graffiti on a wall in Germany. But Vita reckoned she knew what it meant. It was something she’d learnt from that Secret Service guy she picked up.

Marius Trevelyan?

Yeah. Silly cow tricked up this old punter in Shepherd Market and stole his briefcase. Turns out he’s high up in British Intelligence. Well, she was really in trouble after that. Anyway, she had heard him say something about Spandau. It was that prison in Berlin where they put all the big Nazis that they didn’t hang. Trevelyan told her that it was like a dance.

What did he mean?

Cold War stuff, I suppose. Spandau was the last institution governed by the Four-Power Authority – you know, the system that the different occupying forces used in Germany after the war. Control of the prison would rotate. That was the ballet, apparently. It made the place an important point of contact between East and West. But look, Vita might have been making all this up. Her imagination could be very vivid. She had this document that had been in the briefcase, some sort of manuscript. She gave it to Jenny to look after.

What happened to it?

Well, after Vita committed suicide, or was killed or whatever, Jenny got scared. She knew she had to get rid of this thing. So she sent it to Danny. He was in the States by then and he had the resources to put it somewhere safe.

And then Jenny disappeared.

Yeah.

Don’t you think that’s suspicious?

Oh come on, Anna, you know what happened to Jenny.

No, Johnny, I don’t.

You look her in the eyes and you know she’s telling the truth.

And you laugh out loud.

Christ, you’re not much of an investigative journalist, are you?

She doesn’t know what to say. Her face opens up with that beautiful curiosity once more. At last you’ve got the upper hand and you know what you have to do.

Do you want to know? you ask her.

She nods. Looks kind of scared. Maybe it’s the expression on your face. You must be looking a bit wild about the eyes.

Come here, you tell her.

You’re standing close together in the room, both of you feeling this intense nervous energy. But you’re in control now and she’s staring at you, bewildered. Fear in her eyes. And desire, you’re sure of it.

You kiss her. She lets out a little gasp as you pull back to look her in the eyes once more. Her hand comes up and strokes your chest gently. You take hold of it. Press it flat against your heart.

You see, you murmur, almost to yourself. I am real.

You kiss her again and let go of her hand. It snakes around to hold your back. You feel her breasts push against you, her hips shifting slightly, rubbing softly against yours.

Wait, you say, and push her away from you.

You pull your T-shirt over your head.

Look, you say, baring your chest to her, showing her the horizontal scars along the lower edge of your pectorals.

You see, Jenny got tired of trying to change the world. So she changed herself.

You unbuckle your belt and pull your jeans and boxer shorts down.

And she became the person she had always been. Me. Here, you say, taking hold of your penis. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I mean, aesthetically.

She’s glaring at it, eyes wide.

I’m very proud of it. It’s my favourite one. Custom built, you know. I had three fittings at this place in Amsterdam. Here, have a closer look.

And you gently detach it. It fits so neatly and you can hardly notice the extra-lightweight transparent harness that lightly girdles your hips.

Cyberskin, you tell her. A blend of five different silicone materials with a flexible rod at its core. Its even got an internal urinary tube so I can piss with it standing up if I want to. I didn’t want genital reconstruction surgery, well, not until they can come up with something you can fuck with properly. This, you say, holding it up, well, it’s an improvement on nature. It’s real enough. Like the rest of me.

I was Jenny, you say. Now I’m Johnny. Now love me for what I am.

3

the empress

There is an art to forgetting. History soon becomes dementia, a babble of voices clamouring to be heard. One has to have a selective memory to make any sense of the past. To forget is a cautious act of the will, more the gaining of a faculty than the loss of one. And through all the long days of his confinement, he had made it his study, his device. A trick. Revenge on the clever ones that had tricked him. Over the years there had been so many occasions when he had methodically assumed a state of amnesia that even he was unsure whether it was faked or not. And then he would have to work his way back to the beginning.

Memory: this is how we travel in time. Backwards and forwards, trying to escape the prison of present consciousness. Forgetfulness was his liberation. His retreat. His place of refuge. This secret world with no official record.

Half his life had seemed a preparation for senility. Now he truly felt as old as Methuselah, sitting in the summerhouse, waiting for the end. He had long wondered if old age might grant him its promised release from recollection. A true oblivion after all his long days of pretence. But time had its own trick to play on him. His mind was almost as sharp as the night on which he had made his flight nearly fifty years earlier. Now he was ready to fly once more, he decided. He could go right back. It was all as bright and vivid as ever.

A childhood in Egypt. Alexandria. The nights in Ibrahimieh, in a garden by the desert with its rich evening scent of violet, anemone and narcissus. He would walk out with his mother beneath the vast celestial canopy. She was the empress then, the queen of his universe. She would trace the shapes of constellations that wheeled above and pick out the brighter stars, naming them for him in a magical incantation: Vega, Cassiopeia, Aldebaran. Pointing to the wandering planets, she would tell him that the heavenly bodies had fixed courses, which mapped each lifetime that passed below. You will be a bright star one day, Rudi, she promised.