Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online Page A

top of a TV set in place of the lava-lamp or the Spanish lady that film-makers invariably dig out when they want a shorthand way of establishing a certain kind of birdbrained, latently violent, Darren-and-Sharon fish-finger ambiance.
    In the event, it was the other regular weekly fixture in our life as a family which was to prove most effective in realising Mark and Fay’s ambitions. On Wednesdays, halfday closing in town, we would join many of our neighbours and friends from the business community at the tea dances which were held in the Famous Name Danse Salon on the front.
    I don’t think I need to go into a great deal of detail about this.The Famous Name is the kind of place that is familiar from a thousand period reconstructions. Suffice it to say that it was peach-mirrored and below pavement level and suffused with the smell of naphthalene fur protection from the ladies’ Persian-and beaver-lamb coats and chinchillette hug-me-tights. They carried their own and their husbands’ shoes for dancing in homemade bags with draw-string tops.
    In the films, there was never any suggestion that fur, which was constantly being tossed and draped and trailed across nightclub floors, could ever be in any danger of infestation or rotting. Or that the stars were ever anything less than the flawless beings they appeared. I was too young then to appreciate the important part played by lighting, camera angles, and the scalpel.
    I just knew that the scrutiny demanded by the movies terrified me. I was a little Jewish girl: dark-skinned, lank-haired, shortsighted, horribly fat; no amount of reassurance that my big nose would ‘photograph cute’ was enough to convince me. The cinema demanded perfection, and I didn’t have it.
    I remember the day I decided I could make a singer, though.
    I was wearing a touch of something from my mother which smelled strongly of cantaloupes and oranges (‘You want a man to like it, go after the food groups’ was her position on perfume, which she still calls scent) and gliding around the floor in the arms of my father at the Famous.
    I danced with Mark and Fay by turn, and had tea and cakes with semi-transparent icing while they took their turns with each other. I came up to chest-height on my mother, whom I seem to recall having heavy, pendulous breasts even as a young woman. The part of her where my hand rested had a stiff, packaged feel and was gently corrugated from her boned girdle.
    I came to just above waist-height on my father who, as usual, was wearing a suit of a heavy winter fabric which lightly inflamed my cheek. The band had only one shantooz or canary, a lilting lovely and curvaceous cutie whose general standards of presentation and personal grooming were as formidable as anything I encountered at the Troxy.
    In her dress of rhinestone lights, standing in a pool of light, never making eye-contact, singing always above the heads of the dancers to the middle-distance, she was a mirage – bleached, evanescent, shimmering. It was as though she was both standing in the light and at the same time helping to create it.
    It was an effect she was able to sustain (and I was able to learn from) by never appearing in the public parts of the hall. She seemed to dematerialise when she was out of the spotlight. I had never seen her arrive or leave, and had never spotted her anywhere in town while shopping with my mother.
    June Satin (not her real name – that has gone, unfortunately) was as other-worldly, as unearthly as anything coming out of the Hollywood dream factories. Her farts even probably smelled of violets, to revive a saying I was rather fond of (but never allowed to utter) in those days.
    On the day the scales fell from my eyes, she was wearing a dress of yellow (blue?) tussore with blue (yellow?) ornaments and bright lemon-coloured gloves extending to the creamy upper part of her arm.
    The bandstand wasn’t very far from the ground and I had skirted it several times in the stiff embrace