Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online Page B

of both my father and my mother before I noticed something that seemed impossible in my eyes: June Satin had a mend in her stocking!
    Her immaculate toes were as usual framed in the brilliant straps of her slippers. But there, in addition to the dark hint of nail polish that was always visible, on the cusp of her big toe, at the summit of the pretty stairway of her perfect foot squatted what looked like a medulla, a tarantula of last-minute mending. Hallelujah! Succour for the week! Hope for the suffering! Was blind but now I see!
    June Satin’s toe-hole was a chink through which the light suddenly seemed to come flooding; it exploded off the mirrored ball turning slowly under the ceiling (people were walking above us), lighting up a world of the possible. Suddenly now the shoes of the band personnel, for instance, weren’t uniformly glassy, but horizontally striped with the dust in the creases. There was a buttonhanging by a thread from the sleeve of the double-bassist’s jacket. The band desks, monogrammed and slickly finished from a distance, proved to be scuffed and jerry-built on closer inspection. (And offered a microcosm of the show-business life, as I was to learn with experience. You should have seen some of the things those boys kept back there – pictures of their wives and kids, pornographic pictures, chewing-gum, packets of biscuits, rags to hawk and spit in.)
    So hats off to Junie. Hers was an invaluable lesson in the crucial part attention to detail plays in sustaining an illusion. I became a fanatic about footwear as a result of that small moment of awakening, and a perfectionist with a prickly and enduringly ‘difficult’ reputation.
    The strongest memory I have of my mother is of her in turban and apron in a steam-filled kitchen, boiling dyes in order that a pair of shoes might exactly match the colour of my latest over-the-top stage creation.
    This was our regular drama: her sweating and stirring, mixing and matching; me shaking my head dismissively and sending her back to come up with something better. A heartless image, I agree, loaded with pathos.
    So let me quickly set beside it another – of me, the biggest-drawing entertainer in the country and a mature woman, through television and radio a virtually inescapable presence, living in trepidation (I was a baroque, moygashel-and shantung-hung definition of the word) in case anything should happen to prevent me putting in my nightly call to the widow Cogan.
    Wherever I happened to be, whatever I happened to be doing, a call, preferably on the stroke of eleven, is what she expected. Failure to deliver resulted in extraordinary scenes and recriminations.
    Anguished calls to the police and the papers, for example, reporting my disappearance (they knew to humour her). Locks changed on the flat we lived in together after my father’s death in London (although she always saw it as me living with her ). Records smashed ( my records – records, that is, with my voice onthem – for preference). Clothes that turned out to be slyly mutilated the next time I went to wear them …
    Oh she was something, my mother.
    *
    This peculiar ménage, of just myself and Fay and no sign of a male presence, was something which, understandably I suppose, people used to find intriguing, even in an era when nice girls didn’t.
    The conversation would always proceed along predictable lines whenever the ‘human interest’ scribblers (gossip-mongers) came calling: uneasy opening pleasantries, then a trade-off of industry gossip, leading to the interview proper – biographical background (no matter how many times they’d read it); current hopes/ambitions/corny quips/crackerbarrel philosophising – ‘I have always prided myself that my fans are not the unruly type. I feel the attention of the fans is flattering to me as an artist.’ The usual bushwah, in other words.
    It was only when notebooks were being pocketed and the smell of alcohol was finally starting to defeat the