Zimmer: A Cockney Venus, an Oyster or Two & a Very Good List

2

Amelia awoke the next morning to the buzzing of her 7a.m. alarm. She’d slept restlessly, and woken with a jolt, a vivid dream still nudging at the edges of her consciousness. When last had she dreamt? It had been Fevvers, in her dream, Amelia was almost sure of it, from a book she’d read many times over as a teenager, the “Cockney Venus” of Angela Carter’s creation in Nights at the Circus. The book had been a birthday present from her Nana, a great enthusiast of Carter’s short-lived literary opus.

Another mischievous, spirited mind snuffed out by a cancerous body. She hit the snooze button, and rested her head back against the pillow, trying to make sense of it all.

The aerialiste had taken centre-stage in the circus ring of her dream, rounded in on herself, her identity concealed for dramatic effect in a robe of red and purple feathers that shimmered and ruffled seductively with every small movement in the spotlight. But the audience, Amelia among them, ringside, knew they were in for a treat. Trapezes were lowered as, back arching to the audience, Fevvers had risen slowly, teasingly, letting the feathered robe fall to the floor to reveal her own set of magnificent wings as they rose above her head tip-to-tip, reaching out beyond the towering headdress of ostrich plumes, in and of itself a miraculous balancing act.

The audience held their breath, as the aerialiste, the one and only Fevvers, took hold of the trapezes, firmly, one in each hand. She slowly raised herself on classical ballet pointe and spun, at her own precious leisurely ease to Moloko’s ‘The Time is Now’, crescendoing like a sensual drumroll.

With each inch of rotation her pink, fleshy leotard, all but nude, sparkling scandalously with sequins covering only the groin. As she lifted her head, chin tilted defiantly daring anyone to believe it or not, she gazed squarely out into the audience, unfolding her wings a full stupefying six feet across. A woman with the wings of an albatross.

The crowd was becoming restless with the sheer spectacle of it all, cheering her on with catcalls and wolf whistles. Then, strangely, as if with a sudden change in air pressure, Amelia had felt the gaze of the aerialiste dead on, singling her and her out alone. And there it was, as she lay in bed, the image flooding back to her without a shadow of doubt, the face of her mother, smiling, beckoning, mocking, wings aloft and impressive beyond measure.

No longer Fevvers at all, but unmistakably Georgina Young.

The myth to beat all myths that Amelia had always suspected her of being.

Like a head on collision.

Mind still in a fog, reeling from her heady dream, she switched on the gas top for the kettle, reaching next for the coffee granules in the top refrigerator side drawer. A routine her body knew by rote, even if her mind wasn’t in it. Feeling something soft rub up against her bare legs, Amelia suddenly remembered her impetuous guest from the day before. She’d been so caught up in what her dream may have meant, so shaken by her mother’s challenging expression, like being visited by the dead, she’d all but forgotten until this present moment.

“Oh. Hello. So, Ailuros, I guess you’re here to stay. For now. Mmm...” She scanned the pantry again but to little luck this time. “We better do something about that.”

Coffee could wait. She turned off the gas top and went to her bedroom, grabbing her old Calvin Klein jeans and a plain cotton blouse from the cupboard. Donning a pair of flip flops at the door on her way out, she turned back to the cat with a wave.

“See ya in a bit with breakfast.”

It was only a short walk to the nearest corner shop. In between the shelves of confectionaries and worse-for-wear Fruit & Veg, Amelia carefully regarded the various tins all advertising contented felines from Smoked Salmon Supreme to Turkey Roast Delight. Puurfect Chicken Livers & Jelly seemed like a foolproof choice for the otherwise inexperienced cat carer, she decided.

“Add a box of Malborough, won’t you, Bennie.”

She’d quit. Some months ago. But the dream had left her a little unsettled.

A cigarette or two seemed harmless enough.

For today and today alone, she made a pact with herself as she pocketed the box along with the change.

Amelia returned and opened up the tin of cat food, spooning it into the chipped china bowl from before. She placed it near the front door and watched on as Ailuros readily wolfed down its contents once more. That was easy enough, she reckoned, congratulating herself on one job well done so far that day. Time for that coffee, as she turned the gas back on. But she still couldn’t shake the dream. She tapped on the box of cigarettes, silver foil torn off the end, and drew one out, lighting it with one hand while reaching far back under the kitchen sink with the other for the ashtray’s shameful hiding place.

The cat had now begun to mark its territory, rubbing itself up against any and every available surface.

Check gender of cat at earliest convenience, she made a mental note to herself.

The cat seemed to appraise all at its disposal with an equal semblance of proprietorship and disdain and for a moment, this sole intruder’s mere presence made her feel ill at ease and self-conscious, at once judge, jury and defender of this place she called home. And tentatively at that, for she had to admit, there was little homely about it.

There was little to it at all really, than the perfunctory indicators of day-to-day living.

The kettle and small gas stove and even smaller refrigerator in the kitchen. One wall clock, the beige threadbare sofa, coffee table and small bookshelf, her only rug and a rudimentary television set in the lounge. The wifi device and her laptop to mark any other kind of significance of habitation. Her bedroom under scrutiny fared no better. Chest of drawers, one hanging closet and a side table with her alarm clock and a bargain bin side lamp from the local hospice charity shop, with a dirty faded yellow lampshade she imagined had once been a more pleasant shade of green, alongside her single futon and bed-base.

“Not much to look at it, is it, Ailuros?” she grimaced, and took a long, briefly reassuring drag. Minimalist but nothing intentional about it. A non-descript cottage for a non-descript person, Amelia concluded ruefully, thinking back on the razzle, dazzle and rhinestone of her dream. Everything always seemed to feel possible in a dream, didn’t it?

Then you woke up to real life.

She stubbed out her cigarette and took another from the box, lighting it up without pause, in a sigh of resignation. She hated that she could be so bloody fatalistic. She cursed herself. So unlike her mother, a woman who took destiny into her own hands like it was nothing. This was no life for a thirty five year old woman. And Georgina Young, Amelia was absolutely certain, would have told her as much.

Amelia was almost her mother’s age before they’d lost her to the car accident.

She considered how much her mother had accomplished by then. A renowned and respected artist by all accounts, celebrated the world over in the right circles.

She thought back too on the home she’d shared with her mother and how there had never been so much as a single dull moment.

Whether her mother had been belting out Joan Armatrading and Nina Simone from the baby grand piano with a midday dirty martini or a blushing negroni on a late, warm Summer’s afternoon… Other times humming along to one of her many records on their gramophone player, from Billie Holiday to the Andrew Sisters… The house was always filled with music.

Amelia could watch her mother at work for hours, enraptured.

Cutting a striking figure at her easel, her wild curls tamed as best as was possible and pulled back with a twist, a single chopstick and a bandana, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of her full, expressive mouth, standing back every once in a while to appraise her work. Lighter in one hand, paintbrush in the other. A grunt for satisfaction. The click of the lighter and a long draw on her fag for disapproval, before she flicked the ash into a black bottomed oyster shell, furiously smudging away with the tip of the brush, the morning’s labour soon all but erased. Georgina Young had never been precious when it came to her own work.

Sometimes she’d pick up the palette and get right back to it. Other days, she would slump in the leather lounger, steaming palpably with a quiet unspoken fury.

It was on these few and usually far between days, when her mother fell into one of her gloomy funks that Amelia knew well enough to make a swift turn in one of her well-rehearsed disappearing acts. Amelia Young: The Invisible Girl.

The most treasured of her secret havens was at the far end of their garden, tucked away beneath the river indigo with its dappled light and sweet little leaves and pink and white blossoms. A tree in daily benediction to the Black Madonna her mother had carved from dark Teak wood, the Madonna reclining in the folds of her robe with her bare feet placed before her, such beautiful feet at once so unburdened and so grounded that they could carry the whole world’s sorrows and then some. She had been enshrined by a glorious fountain mosaic of seashells and ocean-worn pieces of multi-coloured glass.

Amelia took comfort in the Madonna figure always, a quiet corner interrupted only by the gentle trickling of water.

But there were other occasions, even rarer, when her mother would be struck by the fancy of a frivolous mood, more often than not after one of their mornings combing the seashore for shells and other bits of debris from driftwood to rusty tin cans.

Her mother would wade into the waters, until knee-deep, salt and sand, sea-foam and kelp swirling about her, fully clothed all but for her feet, she could feel them sink deep, taking root and planting seed in the ocean bed. If her mother ever really showed any signs of the maternal with the young Amelia, it had been on their visits to the beach.

On the way home, cooking be damned, they would stop at the local fishmonger and her mother would shrewdly barter him down on his freshest oysters.

Georgina Young proving a quick hand with a shucking knife, they would feast upon their return home on fresh oysters (“The taste of life itself!”) and salted pistachio nuts and ripe, deep red cherries, popping a couple of bottles of chilled prosecco on ice for good measure. Amelia even remembered the labelling on the bottles, beautifully embossed in shimmering blue and silver, a man meandering down a river in a gondola past the weeping willows. Her mother giddily tinkling at the piano while Amelia, herself more than just a little dizzy herself on the delicious Italian bubbles never once denied her, giggled and hiccupped away.

Georgina would egg her daughter on to dance and dance and dance to the music, and happily, in those moments Amelia savoured as if punchdrunk on liquid sunshine itself, she’d weave her little footsteps, making patterns on their lush Persian rugs on tippy toes, as tall as she could stretch herself, round and around until they’d both fall in a heap, her mother sliding off the piano stool in a mock display of inebriation, belly-up on the floor.

It was then and only then that her mother would reach out a hand and gently sweep away at a stray piece of hair on Amelia’s forehead, eyes shining with sentimentality, and softly whisper, “I love you, my dear young Amelia Young. Promise me that you’ll create one day. Anything. Just create and take heart and find joy.” Amelia had promised each and every time. With all of her heart and with all of her innocent naivety that she’d never go back on her promise. “Pinkie promise, mommy,” she’d say each time locking her little pinkie finger with her mother’s.

How promises could be broken with the passing of years. It gave her pause for thought, though she was hesitant to face its truth for wasn’t it always that the truth was rarely pure and never simple, as her mother had loved to quote Oscar Wilde.

All the same, Amelia just couldn’t ignore the sudden wave of emptiness as it overwhelmed her.

She leaned back into the sofa, and closed her eyes, feeling a moist touch against her cheek. The cat stood astride the arm of the sofa, softly purring and rubbing her warm, whiskered face and cold nose up against Amelia’s own face, which she now realised was wet with tears.

“I must seem so very dismal to you,” Amelia turned and for the first time since the cat’s arrival, reached out a hopeful hand to stroke Ailuros.

But she couldn’t dwell in a heap on the sofa forever.

Amelia got to her feet and went to her bedroom, though still daydreaming. She retrieved the few precious keepsakes of her grandmother that she hid from sight, beneath her socks and stockings, in the side left drawer of her chest. The matching set of compact mirror and cigarette case of mother of pearl inlay rimmed with gold. Her grandmother’s signature scent, an almost empty bottle of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. A framed black and white of Portia Young as the Fairy Queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And a single cream, beaded silk glove. Amelia held the palm of the silk glove to her cheek.

Next she removed the lid of the perfume bottle, inhaling and exhaling in slow steady breaths, nose close to the scent, growing intoxicated on its bewitching, delicate notes of orange blossom, violet and spicy star anise, welcoming the caress of its warm and inviting base of iris and soft vanilla. Finally she opened the cigarette case and drew a final long deep breath, catching still ever so faintly her Nana’s other signature scent, the homesick embrace of that long-lingering whiff of her Vogues. Amelia gave in to nostalgia completely.

Maybe it had all been the dream’s doing. Maybe the mysterious cat’s. Like some Dickensian ghost of days past. And maybe she wouldn’t create, not in this lifetime, in the way her mother had hoped, but there was still a chance she could be the curator of her own life.

Seized by a curious boldness, she pulled out from another drawer a pen and a blank sheet of paper and sat down at the coffee table. A to do list.

“That’s what we need. What do you reckon, Ailuros? Just a little to do list. I think we could manage that, if nothing else. Something’s gotta give, something’s just gotta give.”

Sucking on the end of the pen long and hard, she had to get it just right, and for right now. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

Point1, Amelia began. Find joy in dinner for one. She, who so often ate out of tuna tins and yoghurt tubs, deliberated over this first sentence. She thought back on her mother. Take heart, young Amelia Young. Upon closer introspection, she scratched out Find and replaced it with Take. There. That was better. Point 2, she continued. Fill empty spaces with art. That shouldn’t be too hard. Point 3, lest she lose her momentum. Grow something. Amelia paused. And try not to murder it, she added, remembering an attempt at gardening years ago in college with a lime tree that had fared a tragically short-lived fate. Point 4. Purchase something for sheer luxury’s sake. Her Nana would’ve liked that. She chewed on the end of her pen once more. The last point wasn’t the easiest for Amelia but it was about bloody time, her newfound gumption surprising her. Point 5. Make a friend. A cat couldn’t count.

“However adorable you might be.” But Ailuros simply looked back at her as if imploringly, eyes like two miniature saucers, with a faint little meow and a paw raised to Amelia’s jeans. She bent down to scratch the cat’s back, and felt a deep affection well up inside her as Ailuros arched to her touch.

“Alright, alright, let’s practise this whole friendship business on each other first.”

It was a new day, for a new Amelia.

Shells from the Sea by Elizabeth Varley