Luda: A Novel

Where to begin?

That’s the big question, I hope you’ll agree.

You. Me. Where do any of us begin?

Face it. An ill-judged wink across a crowded dance floor invites a lifetime of school bills. An inebriated fumble in the dark, on the playing field, in the cloakroom, gets the same job done just as well.

Even you, hearing this, you might be the product of a case of mistaken identity that wound up in the maternity ward.

I’m not judging.

Judging is your job. You’ll have to reach a verdict after all the evidence in the case has been presented. That’s how it works.

Off we go; the pistol cracks, jump-starting a spirited, high-heeled lunge from the starting blocks as we jostle for position in the Human Race; digging in for the long haul; and what starts as a spirited marathon sprint, winds down over decades until it’s a hundred-meter medicated crawl to the finish line.

That’s what you’d say if you were trying to be clever, I suppose.

Lucky me, I don’t have to try. I’ve got the front stalls and balcony eating out of my handbag most nights. I can bat an eye, purse my lips, and bring the house down like a drone strike any night of the week.

Tonight happens to be a Wednesday. Like yours truly, it can go one way or the other on a Wednesday but the weather’s rotten outside, as my dripping, demoralized umbrella will confirm, and that’s generally enough to guarantee a packed hall from the orchestra pit to the gods and nosebleeds.

So, if you ask me, and on the clear understanding there’s nobody else here in the dressing room, you may as well take the plunge: It doesn’t matter where we begin, does it, babes?

When all’s said and done, we start off with nothing. You and me both, and all the rest. Hardly matters what happens in between; we arrive with nothing and we finish with nothing, am I right?

Zip. Zilch. Nada. Naught. Nil.

What better place to commence my narrative than here, with nothing at all?

At Ground Zero.

What makes me so certain I’ve got nothing? you may ask.

I can tell you it’s because I know for sure I’ve got nothing to lose.

If you’re already asking yourself, How long can she go on and on about nothing, settle in, I’ve only just gotten started.

Nothing is a blank canvas, you see. Nothing is a mirror waiting patiently for an anticipated reflection to show up. A lonely-looking glass in an Oscar Wilde fairy tale, aching for that special face to drift into view, bringing purpose to its blank existence.

Which returns me to me, unsurprisingly, looking in a glass like that one in the story Oscar forgot to write. Me and the wicked queen from Snow White.

Honestly, if I could sum up my whole life in one image, there’s a mirror on the wall and there’s me, looking in, or looking out, it’s hard to tell with mirrors.

If anyone ever asks, I describe myself as an artist, and an artist needs a carte blanche to get started.

This tabula rasa I call my face has, for quite a long time, been every bit as vacant as it gets: symmetrical, bland, uninhabited, you could say. A halfhearted sketch for a grand, abandoned project. Even these reluctantly accumulated lines and folds and cracks appear to me as if they’d much rather be somewhere else; livening up an Etruscan vase in a museum or adding texture to some moth-eaten rolled medieval tapestry.

Faced with that crumpled imprecision, the only reasonable response is to sanction a scorched-earth policy. Vietnam. The Gulf. Afghanistan. Agent Orange. Edit out the errors, blitz the flaws, illuminate the trenches with color and contour.

Let scarlet poppies bloom on the graveyard pillows of my lips, soldier dear!

Come to think of it, you could say I’ve been touching myself up my whole life if you wanted to lead with a blue note.

As if to prove my point, having prepped the canvas with Derma Shield, the foundation goes on first—and these days, I might as well layer it on with a trowel, or a bulldozer. My sponge has to work harder than a navvy spreading tarmac on a highway surface pitted with artillery potholes.

I dip two fingers in the pot to scoop up a generous cool blob of W5 Kryolan pancake base before rubbing my palms together nice and slow, so the emulsion squishes through my fingers in creamy prayer. Then, placing the tips either side of the bridge of my nose, I draw my digits down in a tribal chevron.

It’ll take as long as it always takes, time enough to say everything that needs to be said. If Luci LaBang is ready when it’s curtains up, everything else is secondary.

She’s on her way, floating up from the depths to the mirror’s surface to replace my vacant features, Narcissus in middle age, in all her airbrushed Hollywood splendor.

Soon, she’ll shatter the surface tension of the glass. She’ll float up through the bulrushes, like Lizzie Siddal doing Ophelia, and screen-print herself onto my skull.

—

No matter how smooth your skin is, how good your diet’s been, how young you still look for your age; no matter how much Botox you reluctantly forked out for three months ago, at Luda’s request; there’s no escaping fifty years of age. It’s that five-knuckle rap on the door you can’t put off answering. That sinister, long-anticipated stranger, sidling up to whisper a bedtime horror story you’d rather not hear, let alone live through. Until you’re left with no choice.

Mine is the character arc, mine the journey, no one would choose to take: hot young Drag Princess with a weekly show on TV to aging Pantomime Dame in the blink of a mascara-clotted false eyelash.

As for Luda, we’ll get back to that soon enough.

Some of you may require a sympathetic context for my howls of outrage, so allow me to digress briefly on the pantomime, an arcane form of art so coarse and lowbrow it wasn’t deemed fit to share a pigsty on Noah’s Ark, let alone passage to the Americas in the company of Charlie Chaplin and the first rollicking wave of music hall immigrants.

While the Little Fellow invented the idea of global stardom, pantomime elected to stay behind in the old country, determined to continue its backward Bedlam scuttle down the theatrical tree of life, aiming, you might think, for some simplified one-celled form of entertainment, and ultimately merciful oblivion.

The show began, historians insist, as commedia dell’arte, with Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin doing their three-way satirical ménage for libertines and proles alike. Soon, following some process of reverse evolution, commedia dell’arte turned tail and slithered back into ancestral swampland there to wind up squatting in the mangroves and limelight as pantomime, the lowest of the low arts. The performance equivalent of atavistic reversal.

The word itself was coined in 1717 for an ad in The Daily Courant, I looked it up. But it wasn’t until 1860 that anything we’d recognize as a traditional pantomime came along—that brash, shambling steam engine of profanity, song, and gender meltdown that runs year in, year out. Summer seasons in the resort towns, winter in the cities.

I was thirty-six when I did my first one. At a time when I needed something new in my so-called life, I spotted a niche.

You could say I identified a neglected area of the Arts where no one seemed to be experimenting or innovating. After the success I’d scored being the prettiest one in the Troupe—as we’d decided to call ourselves in that search for a post-ironic sweet spot between Warhol’s Factory, the Manson Family, and Monty Python—I could see my face becoming more angular and, quite frankly, more Cubist with every passing month.

Fresh creases put my red lips in ironic double parentheses every time I smiled. A murder of crow’s-feet trampled through the sooty ovals gathered round my eyes. These signs of time’s creepy crawl were not so much as to ruin the effect, especially when I was done with my kit, just enough to remind me of mortality and the no-longer-Romantic brevity of youth and beauty. As if anyone needs reminding.

Am I right?

I needed a new frame for this changing face; if TV’s hi-fidelity microscopic scrutiny was guaranteed to reveal way too much in the close-ups, I’d stage a retreat to the theater, where everything happened in longshot. I belonged in a house of ill repute where the men were girls and the girls were boys 24/7 and no one called the authorities.

Pantomime fit the bill.

Little did I know I was entering my prime, like Miss Jean Brodie. Pantomime was the crown and I was the jewels. I’d found my vocation.

Prime, it goes without saying, comes before a Fall.

—

My first big splash came with the Prague Millennium production of Cinderella. I’d decided to play both Ugly Sisters at the same time as a schizophrenic having surreal, obscene conversations between her contending dual personae, or whatever it is they’ve got going on. We didn’t do a lot of research into the issues around neurodiversity, I’m ashamed to say.

I’d designed a costume split down the middle with one sister on the left wearing shredded punk vinyl, all chains and razors, and her twin on the right wrapped in trashy clinging Lycra Day-Glo bimbo Flamingo sugar-pinks and acid-drop yellows; a death-dealing lollipop in the shape of a person.

It looked fantastic onstage, but I can imagine how offensive it might come across these days so it’s the kind of experimentation I tend to shy away from.

I prefer to trigger laughter not PTSD.

Those were different days, a raw-meat decade sandwiched between transient periods of political correctness, so it’s no surprise the audience went feral for my Ugly Sisters.

Playing my own comic foil meant I could time each joke to perfection, something that’s not always the case when your straight man is some half-witted clot of hair and spray tan off a soap or a reality show.

My toes roll up like witches’ slippers when I think about the parade of boy-band rejects or popular bloggers I’ve had to witness—hauled blinking into the footlights as Buttons or Wishee-Washee, effortlessly translating their lack of talent in one area of the arts to a fresh platform of humiliation.

I’ve watched more naturally gifted entertainers at a chimpanzees’ tea party, pelting one another with feces and fairy cakes.

Forget it, Jake, I used to say—it’s pantomime.

Which brings me right back here to where it started. Dragged high-kicking and screaming in falsetto toward the black-hole spiral sink of the world-famous Vallhambra Theatre. Downtown Gasglow. Down and down am I dragged.

And re-dragged.

Fortunately for us all, I’m something of an expert when it comes to drag.

The so-called Grand Duchess of Gasglow Music Halls, the Vallhambra was designed by visionary architect and spectacular suicide Murdo McCloudie, in that amazing Deco-coco style that reminds me of cover paintings on old science-fiction paperbacks, yellowing into nostalgia in the windows of used bookstores, back when used bookstores and books were a thing.

After a suspicious blaze that left it hollowed, all façade and nothing behind, like a Hollywood stage set, or a pop star, the building ascended Phoenix-like, shaking cinders from its gilded plumage.

During the ten years that followed, the Vallhambra was lovingly and painstakingly restored—if by lovingly restored you mean glammed up like a resurrected temple whore from ancient Egypt.

A bit like myself in that regard: struggling to stay sexy, remain relevant, and cheat the wrecker’s balls long past the glory days.

West of Circle Station and north of the river Dare, you’ll find the happening part of town they call Gasglow’s Broadway, a mile and a half of strip and glitter and trashy, flashing come-ons.

The theater’s situated near the intersection of Gargoyle and Charity in the guts of the city of Gasglow, opposite the Sugar Shack pole dance club, sandwiched in a vile spit-roast between the Emperor, catering to devotees of big musical productions like Nixon! The Satanic Bible and Papa Zombi! and the Pandromo, which specializes in stand-up comedy tours and variety shows.

Gasglow, where the rain it raineth 330 days of the year, and horizontal sleet accounts for the days when even rain is too dispirited to fall. Gasglow, where six months of perpetual gloom incubate monstrous genre mashups.

Supernatural romance. Sex noir. Comedy Gothic. It’s all on the menu.

—

The high priests of meteorology have predicted a near-hurricane for tonight, the third named storm in the last month. This one christened Storm Ingmar for sins yet to be announced.

I wouldn’t blame Ingmar for lashing out. Who’d want to be called Ingmar? The competition’s too fierce. With Ingmar on the rampage, the Vallhambra offered its patrons sanctuary from the tyranny of Nordic Fimbul-weather.

We could be relied upon for shelter and community. We dispensed firelit visions of the Middle East and far Cathay. Man-made magic hours. Indoor summer. Sunshine and laughter guaranteed.

We had no time for stuffy ballet or strident opera on bright West Gee. You could get all that any day of the week at the top end of town—the Dramakademie doing Euripides or the Oresteia. Down on Gargoyle, the fun cathedrals offered light entertainment for the masses; dancing men and hot clever girls who knew how to make you laugh. Jokes. Songs. Sing-alongs. Spectacle and breathtaking illusion assured.

Once through the revolving doors of the Vall, it was Aladdin’s cave inside. And I should know—I’ve been in and out of Aladdin’s cave every night for the last six months.

I wish, listeners! Stay tuned for more on those headlines!

Which brings us back to where I am right now. In front of a mirror, with my face in its own bulb-edged comic-book panel, preparing to put my makeup on…

Don’t fret, I can tell the whole story while I’m getting done up.

For tonight, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and all the rest, I intend to vanish behind the florid features of wily Chinese washerwoman Widow Twankey, the comedy Dame role in a production of Aladdin, itself framed within a larger—let’s give the thing more respect than it deserves and call it post-modern—narrative driven by bloody revenge, black magic, and dodgy philosophy, then titled The Phantom of the Pantomime, which is, to all intents and purposes, the plot of The Phantom of the Opera drugged, kidnapped, and rehoused in the ghetto of Irony.

The Phantom of the Pantomime tells the story of a theater troupe rehearsing a production of Aladdin that’s struck by a series of inexplicable accidents and deaths.

Inexplicable that is until the introduction of the titular Phantom—a disfigured actor who’s been orchestrating the production’s misfortunes.

As the cast numbers diminish, it falls to the remaining players to assume the roles vacated by their unfortunate colleagues.

Until eventually only one actor remains playing all the roles.

According to Dominick Float, our gifted, dangerously overweight director, the descent of culture that informs The Phantom’s subtext is implied right there in the title’s biblical plummet from the high-flown operatics of the bourgeoisie to the proletarian troughs of panto sing-along. This structure finds itself reiterated in the tragic story of our histrionic lead, who, if I can lower the tone for the moment, effortlessly puts the tit into titular character.

Now, I can already hear voices raised in protest all the way across the People’s Republic, from Andong to Gorno-Badakhshan, from Xing’an to Hainan—what’s the story with a non-Chinese actor playing a Chinese character?

When faced with panto’s melting boundaries and blurred identities, race is no more stable than gender, as you’ll discover. Men transform into women, girls blossom into boys, and the poor get the chance to roll in vulgar wealth as class itself deliquesces to tasty bone stock in the bacchanalian broth.

This is where it gets complicated: Aladdin is from the Middle East—the story originated as one of the Thousand and One Nights tales that helped spare Scheherazade’s swanlike neck from the butcher’s blade, but here’s the thing: the pantomime Aladdin? It’s not set in Scheherazade’s Arabia; it takes place in China. On the stage, Aladdin is a Chinese boy, son of the washerwoman Widow Twankey.

DNA was spliced from mythic and modern-day China with a rogue sequence from the Middle East to create a single imaginary sprawl of hybrid cultures that fused a Bedouin Sahara with the paddy fields of the Cultural Revolution and its rubbish heaps of broken spectacles.

The pantomime’s anachronistic collision of places and times suggested a dreamlike half world where familiar stories played out in endlessly retied knots through a confused congestion of half-real cities and times, embedded in nested narratives handed down through generations.

Widow Twankey’s a textbook example of the confusion; when she was born to the boards in 1788, Twankey was Ching Mustapha, an unlikely cross-pollination of cultural signifiers that suggests an exotic variant of cocaine and reminds us how surprisingly widespread was the Chinese Muslim population of London in those days.

Now I’d like you to picture the most offensive stereotype of a sex-starved gossip—and you’ll have me down to a T.

You’ll also have Widow Twankey, who’s all about flashy gutter comedy. Outrageous peacock costumes, fake tits and upholstered ass, winks and asides to the audience, double entendres. You know the kind of thing:

She’s eagerly looking forward to a big hand on her entrance. Mug to the back row. You can see she’s got big things ahead of her. Out-thrust chest. 44DDs by the looks of them.

Twankey is outrageous, vulgar, and grotesque. And that’s just her earrings. It gets worse the more you pay attention. Don’t come looking for subtlety or nuance, and you won’t be disappointed.

The Widow is a flouncing, indomitable monster. A brash and trashy caricature even the goggle-eyed toddlers and the special-needs adults they wrangle to the matinees can recognize and identify. But she’s no more Chinese than the people of Tibet.

Which brings me back to my point that casting a bona fide Chinese actor might be a way to double or triple the offense. Really, it’s up to our hypothetical Chinese individual to draw his or her own conclusions before getting snarled up in what can be a heartrending, demoralizing audition process.

As far as I know, the role’s open to anyone, regardless of ethnic origin or political creed, so why not have a Chinese man take a swing at Widow Twankey? I know I’d pay to watch that.

Anyway, enough chat about 19 percent of our planet’s entire human population. Let’s steer this back to me.

Although you might never have guessed from my present radiant demeanor, I’d found myself in a desperate tailspin after turning forty and breaking up with Luci. For a while I even considered suicide, until finally I went through with it, only to discover I’d guzzled an overdose of placebos.

You know how they work; I’d already convinced myself my organs were shutting down one by one, so that’s exactly what I experienced. In excruciating detail. The placebo effect they call it. And while it was happening, I had quite a big sort of revelation.

I realized I’d been split in two. I’d been separated out, curds-and-whey-style, then subtracted from myself. In some black and backward act of alchemy, Mercurius, the androgynous spirit of wholeness, had suffered a near-fatal sundering somewhere down the line. One half abandoned, stumbling and flabby, with his neuroses hanging out like guts, the other banished to the Twilight Zone, leaving only traces and spoor: the cobby husks of her dresses, her empty coats and vacant shoes; drained bugs dangling on their hangers in a spider’s web of wire.

Matter and spirit, formerly mingled as one in ecstatic harmony, felt like awkward strangers now, reduced at best to strained small talk over a dispiriting brunch. My spark-haired Ariel was gone, exorcised. Only doughy Caliban remained, weighed down with his mud and mortality, cultivating a life belt of lard that kept me afloat in the featureless ocean of Nowhere.

Without Luci, I’d become a hollow man, a creepy piñata packed with nothing you’d want. Six years had passed since I’d put her away, since that separation. That primordial error.

I prayed. I prayed to triple-faced Mercurius to release me from the downward Coriolis suction. I prayed like a motherfucker for deliverance. I prayed so hard that three days later, the phone rang as if to shut me up. Even then, I had Two Ladies from Cabaret as my ringtone. I still remember it.

The caller was a forty-three-year-old neurotic genius named Dominick Float, then weighing about as much as one of his thumbs does now, and he wanted me to audition for his new musical. The production company had bigger names topping their want lists, he explained; screen stars, established comics, he said, but he’d seen me chewing up the boards with my Ugly Sisters in Prague, he remembered me from the Troupe shows on Channel 6 and felt I could bring an edge to his vision for this thing called The Phantom of the Pantomime.

I’ll admit I was flattered, but at that point the confidence I once imagined I’d have forever had evaporated like a fertile green Saharan oasis in the haze between the endless dunes. I couldn’t recall the taste or shape or texture of confidence, to tell the truth, so I told Float I hadn’t considered anything in the performance vein for a long time. I didn’t say it in so many words, but I left him in no doubt: I considered myself more than a little bit past the lipstick, lace, and lingerie stage.

Float, unwilling to surrender even a single pixel of his personal vision, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and insisted I audition. Where Twankey was concerned there could be no past it.

Sir Ian McKellen had smashed the role at the Old Vic when he was sixty-five, a newly minted pensioner qualifying for a bus pass. I was an ingénue by comparison, Float assured me. I did like the sound of that. Flattery was music.

What else could I do? I prayed like the penitent Mother Superior of the Order of Ravens to Mercurius, who had, in infinite mercy and cruelty, tossed this raw and shiny bone for me to gnaw upon. I surrendered myself to the grace of my patroness and the Odyssean tides of the Glamour. The choice was clear: accrue more misery until I sagged beneath the damp cold accumulation of years and regrets or—

Or summon up the bright snake-eyed demoness I’d banished on my drunken stagger into middle age. While I became the stomach-turning portrait in the attic, she’d stayed young, flash-frozen, immaculate, waiting for her time to come around again. Waiting for me to summon her back into my evacuated life, trusting that the fire of her incendiary aura would shine so much brighter than the putrid phosphorescent glow of my personal decay.

Drag had been with me almost my whole life up till I separated from myself aged thirty-eight.

From the days when I was waist-high to that monstrous store mannequin, the one I’ll tell you about later, I’ve been attracted to the power of fashion, deception, illusion, trickery. The fake, the synthetic, the scary boundary where Artifice becomes the Uncanny.

Possibly, Doctor Freud, if my mother hadn’t been overprotective, if circumstances and lack of closet space hadn’t compelled her to leave a tempting chest of drawers in my bedroom with her stockings and bras inside, I’d never have made the choices I did, it’s true. Mum’s drawers had it all. And she was a very stylish good-looking woman, my mother, so I didn’t get my start dressing in twinsets like some of these old-school CDs you used to see in cheaply printed contact rags; the ones who looked like ghosts showing up bored at séances, or mediums possessed by their own elderly relatives.

I didn’t identify with any of that and I never felt trapped in the wrong body. I was more than satisfied with the slender-limbed form I’d grown to inhabit. I didn’t need boobs or a womb to complete me, only flamboyant clothes and cosmetics. All I wanted was to look fabulous, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like the photographs of those eternal fashion models I grew up admiring.

For me it was always about the drag.

What am I? Where do I fit on the scale, or the spectrum? How would I know? I’m sure I don’t have time to be a narcissist—I’m too busy checking my makeup in the mirror.

My head was, still is, a half-built haunted arcade of shifting selves and liquid identities, voice impressions, disguises and shadows, reflections and lightning among the rafters.

Either there’s nobody there at all, or dozens of us share the one skull, passed like the ball in a very strenuous game of Rugby Union. I was chosen to join the unseen throng on the day I saw the door in the Horus-inked eyes of the mannequin.

In truth, at the secret heart of me dwells something attenuated and alien, a long-limbed genderless flame if I had to be precise. Existing so close to the boundary with Nothing at all, it could pass for anything. Shakespearean, an alien, a Puck perhaps, its general gas-jet attitude easily summed up in the trickster’s famous quote: …what fools these mortals be!

Just an old-time nonconformist!

I’d been branded on that steamy August afternoon all those years ago by the cosmetic runes of the Glamour, its hieroglyphic alphabets sketched in Egyptian kohl, Nefertiti’s death mask illuminated with bold lip pencil outlines. I was drawn through the shimmering cut-price veil, the glittering bead curtain, the tinsel portal that opened onto sorcery and to Luci.

In the beginning, I had no separate stage name for what I became when I was dressed and made up; as I said, there was no inner division. It was only later, when we started up the Troupe, that I christened myself at the font of Mercurius:

I became Luci LaBang, a nom de plume dripping with steaming pearls of meaning.

But latterly, I’d given up Luci. I’d made my tearful farewells. Her dresses haunted the closet, unworn, sulking spooks. Being honest, I was scared to call her back, certain she’d never allow my face, that pocked and dimpled canvas retrieved from a carpet-bombed museum, to distort her beauty. I was frightened of what I might find when I dug her up, smelling of mothballs and accusation.

But I knew there was no backing down; Widow Twankey, avatar of the Three-Times-Perfected, had delivered the perfect excuse. I was being presented with the opportunity to surrender to something stronger, faster, more real than anything I’d been for so long. I would light my old lamp and dust off my wand, my rusty dagger, my cup, and my books. My Louboutins and Agents Provocateurs.

I would summon the Glamour one last time and let it burn me to chemical incandescence in its blue occult flame.

A couple of pills started me down the Yellow Brick Road. Vodka tonic, double. What’s the worst that can happen? I thought. I’ll shit myself and choke on my own vomit in the back of a taxi or onstage. At least I’ll die with dignity.

I always start with the music—my personal theme tune is Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, which is Latin for Hope in Any Other, as if you didn’t know. I can’t tell you how upset I was when they used this music for a shoddy sex scene in a terrible film based off an even worse book. It almost but not quite ruined it for me. Nothing can spoil the impact of forty voices rising, up and up, all sparks and chimes and the bright glory of God.

I raised my vivid lipstick aloft, my crimson wand, and called her name, Luci Luci Luci—three times and there were ripple flickers on the still pool of the mirror, and there beneath the surface, the afterimage of a remembered face arose—the Lady of the Lake preserved in the green tank of her frozen millpond, waiting for the looking glass to thaw…

I drained a tall flute of pink champagne—which is exactly what I’m doing right now—if you’ll excuse me…

Think of it as the sacrament. The Cup of the Blood of the Moon. The cannibal Grail of the werewoman. Call it what you like, if it gets you in the mood for transformation.

Mercurius, brother-sister, dark and light, up and down, Hermes Aphrodite. Bride and groom wedded as one.

So unfolded the celestial ascending spirals of Spem in Alium hand in hand to Heaven with increasingly pleasurable pharmaceutical rushes, that came on as fresh and childhood-scented Easter breezes blowing away those last leftover autumn leaves of crispy fear, shame, and doubt.

I was invincible. I was morning incarnate rising over the jagged peaks of Kanchenjunga. Where tumbling unfinished thoughts and cycling jingles had ruled the inner airwaves, where private critics formerly jostled to judge every move and condemn every word, there was only air-blue silence and what you might describe as limitless magnificent transparency.

The muscles of my face relaxed, becoming slack and pliable to the touch. I pushed and pulled, and carefully reset each learned configuration of zygomatic arch and risorius, levator labii superioris, masseter. Tweaking and palping, I sculpted a new expression into place. A new mask.

The ritual progressed—these were white hours with no time—I couldn’t remember how her fabulous smile wound up on my face, but I supposed I must have put it there. Her Babalon scarlet rising in satanic counterpoint against the heavenly silver choiring of King’s College, Cambridge.

Angels and the devil in a tango, complementary partners arranged as tessellated black-and-white tiles in one of those ever-so-clever M. C. Escher drawings.

There I was, with all this joined-up thinking going on, absentmindedly scooping homemade lentils-in-stockings tits into my bra before I realized the music had come to an end.

In that hush profound there was only the Sangreal glow of the face in the mirror.

Fairest of them all.

Her familiar, forgiving smile making its way through the wrinkles and slap, a beloved song surfacing out of static on the radio.

Hey you.

The wig goes on last, an exclamation mark to complete and emphasize the statement. That’s when I find the tuning—and become the receiver for a force of nature I call Mercurius.

I know it sounds a bit weird, but I’ll explain later, and you’ll see that it’s bigger than just weird.

The hair was new, and smelled of plastic, packing, and processing—sacred in its box-fresh connection to eternity.

I set it in place, her crown and diadem. The Empress Twankey.

Destroya!

I looked a bit like Luci’s mother might look if she’d had one.

As it turned out, Mum looked quite hot in the full-length; a MILF Widow vamping like Cruella de Vil and Elizabeth Báthory sharing a double exposure.

Luci LaBang shaking her ass in the noonday blaze of an indoor sun, in a por favor where forty-four was just a bingo number. Magnum Force! Forty-four. And she looks—I grinned at the time—not six months past her second bitter divorce. The blood in my veins ran with alternating current, so it felt like the resurrection by thunderbolts of the Bride of Frankenstein.

Like bacon, Luci LaBang was back, sizzling on the world’s hob.

The Luci LaBang Twankey would reinvent pantomime tradition. How could I settle for anything less?

Except—except—my heels, as I recall, had become twin Rubik’s Cubes of fidgety strap and nano-buckle. Imagine two unfeasible and maddeningly intricate puzzle machines at the end of your legs, and those were my Azzedine Alaïas. I persevered, huffing and squealing with the frustration of a monkey made to do a jigsaw puzzle by scientists with electric prods, until I worked them into place and was back in stilettos where I belonged after those years flat-out in the desert.

My immense and shaggy neon faux-leopard coat swung like a bell across bare, oiled shoulders, perfume moving ahead of me as a bow wave. Pausing to let the mirror snap an unsaved selfie, I raised my faceted tumbler with a leer and a Venus flytrap wink.

Was I seriously planning on going out like this? After all these years? At my age? Forty-four.

Open the door. I tipped back the vodka tonic and a great and special quiet brought its sudden blunt calm upon the world, answering all my silly questions with an articulate silence.

Just the right side of wasted, as I hope my description conveys, I found myself descending the staircase to Cinderfella’s waiting pumpkin carriage, Duchamp afterimages stitching together as a shaggy leopard-striped bridal train at my back, head tilted all imperious, Her Majesty the Queen of the Madhouse in a drag production of Marat/Sade.

The cabdriver gawped in the tiny cameo brooch of his mirror. The brute’s semi-disorganized features twitched like gloves and I could tell I’d violated his safe space in more ways than one.

My perfume, Twankey’s perfume, was Tabu, with its overwhelming allergenic waves of suffocating patchouli, its blindingly acidic citrus squalls—less delicate fragrance, more full-scale climactic upheaval.

You like my perfume? It’s Tabu—I managed to say without laughing.

I knew what he was thinking: Tabu, as in incest, cannibalism, and bestiality.

The Vallhambra, driver, I remember instructing the by now half-Cubist cabbie. I’m auditioning for Aladdin, the panto. Widow Twankey.

His expression relaxed in the niqab eye-slit of the rearview. Now the inexplicable moment made sense. But he still rolled down the window, eyes watering. Tabu, yahoo.

The ecstasy was cresting in a calm blue-and-white Hokusai breaker, all Mount Fuji azure Zen as I tipped my charioteer with a generosity born of intoxication and clambered out, all legs and leather, strutting through the gawping throng, submerged in profound aquarium light down my old pal Gargoyle Street, basking in the silky pedestrian airflow.

Oh look! There’s me!

The Vallhambra’s endlessly revolving doors cycled a familiar face into view, this face leaving the spacious lobby as I came in. As it did, a shuffle of random features superimposed themselves over my reflection in a briefly disturbing kinetic overlap. My delighted brain assembled the jigsaw jumble of ghost-pig eyes, juicy nose, and raw-kidney lips into the image of a formerly alcoholic host of a weekly quiz show based on some old board game.

For the life of me I couldn’t recall a name. Still, that punctured party-balloon complexion deserved a witchy wink and a grin if nothing else. As our paths crossed briefly, I’d swear the ghost of a distillery followed close on his heels. Then he was gone; Tam O’Shanter pursued to his waiting limo by unquiet ninety-proof spirits and tender minders.

He looked smug, at first, all self-satisfied, certain he’d scored the gig; his Twankey, honed over years of rote performance, was the gold standard traditionalist’s take. If the production was trawling for the precise qualities this metastasizing human tumor had to offer, I was fucked up the far end of the spectrum, UV to his infra dig. He seemed to know he was the bookie’s favorite; as far as anyone was concerned, he was the most famous, the funniest: the most special. Department of Foregone Conclusions. The deal was dealt.

Until he saw me swing in.

He scanned me up and down with a personal radar and I could almost feel the burn marks on my butt cheeks where those laser-guided brown-hot peepers finally anchored themselves. I was way too high to grasp the threat he represented. I knew I had my work cut out, but I trusted my next half hour to that hopeless look in his eyes. The one that said he’d recognized me straightaway, Nemesis to his Hubris.

All I had to do was live up to the myth.

I swung my skinny protruding hips, proudly extended the shelf of my ersatz tits, and certain I’d never see the quizmaster again—

—I certainly didn’t expect to see his coffin lowered into a six-feet-deep, three-minute-long slot on the evening news two months later—

—I toppled into the audition on six-inch platform heels, made regal and ridiculous in a towering Louis Quatorze bleached-blond wig. A shaggy petrol-blue and fluoro-pink leopard-print coat. Vinyl miniskirt. Gasping for breath after a drag on Twankey’s vaper, I tripped into my routine.

Aladdin! Where is that boy of mine? There are sheets to be washed and I don’t want to get ANY MORE behind—a backward glance. MY BEHIND’S BIG ENOUGH AS IT IS!

I didn’t stop for the laugh. I was on the express train of thought, riding First Class, aware that the blast radius of Tabu had reached my audience, bringing on the first symptoms of hay fever and shock.

They would never forget this audition.

I’m very nervous—I say. But everyone tells me it’ll be all right on the night…I just hope I can remember my lines.

A half beat for the rhythm.

It’s all too easy to get my tongue twisted around a REALLY LONG HARD ONE.

I’d crafted the makeup to look like Twankey had hit the menopause at high speed, careered out of control across the midlife junction, and failed to slow down. I’d made the best of my sagging skin, the droopy jowls, the interlabial drapes, and the eye hammocks.

Mine was a Twankey who binged on celebrity gossip. A Twankey martyring herself to Botox injections and lip fillers, as if to hold back the inevitable depredations of a washerwoman’s life on the bustling narrow alleys of her make-believe Peking.

Rubber tits, augmented ass, monstrously sexual, eternally unsatisfied, driven to live or die trying; I was the Bride of Frankenstein with a Gorgon eye for the cable guy. Strutting and puffing, I found myself out of rehearsed material, improvising a Restoration Twankey, sneering down her nose and flipping her thumb in the direction of a saucy next-door neighbor’s condo.

When fortnightly to the rigs doth fly her man,

That Mrs. Egg Fu Not so Yung next door is wont to call the builders in—

To have enwhitewash’d both her porches, front and back!

Where best they’re pleased to park the van’s a guess I dare not make.

But day and night she doth extravagant deliv’ries take!

There’s no real suspense, so I won’t do the whole twenty minutes I eventually gave them. I got the part. Of course I did. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. There would be no story. No mystery.

No crime.

—

Float told me later, they were swithering between me and the quizmaster, but I think it’s important to make it clear that, contrary to some people’s opinion, I didn’t only get the part because my one rival was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s before his unlikely and suspicious death. A dementia brought on by the steady replacement of all the liquid in his body with a transfusion of alcohol, let’s face it—not by some doll I stuck pins in!

Believe that and magic’s real. And then, where are you?

Anything can happen.

—

The inaugural production of The Phantom, as I’ve explained, opened here in the Vallhambra Theatre on Gargoyle Street in Gasglow, declared that year the nation’s Culture Capital—the gesture was ironic; our meta-burlesque would open in the home of some of the most fondly remembered and spectacular productions of the Golden Age, like Cinderella or Mother Goose, when they’d have enchanted carpets zipping overhead on wires and fleets of haunted pirate ships sinking onstage.