Personality Read online

  Through the floor and rising still are basement rooms, dark and ill-attended, with old, painted cloths and screens lying around, and one large room’s corners are heaped with dust-covered blankets and painted shoes. A voice comes near, amplified.

  ‘… came to an end after a mightily successful run on both radio and television …’

  Up through a layer of plaster ceiling and wooden beams.

  ‘… a little girl who has become one of the most sought-after performers in the business, and a personal success for me …’

  Passing a layer of electrical wires.

  ‘… delighting audiences. I mean that most sincerely …’

  Through the quiet space of an orchestra pit.

  ‘Your Royal Highness, lords, ladies and gentlemen. Please give a warm Palladium welcome …’

  And slowly, at last, slowly, at last, through the wooden boards of a stage and into the air.

  The stage was black. A spotlight came on, and standing at the centre was Maria Tambini, her bright, even teeth smiling the long distance. Poreless skin, hair blow-dried into waves, her eyes saying yes, her blue dress sparkling. She held a microphone and as she walked forward the music began. A huge backdrop of coloured butterflies brightened to the rear, the lamps burned, and suddenly, as the music crashed into life, many dancers in black and white trousers and skirts ran from the wings to encircle her. She stretched out her hands. She came to the front and swayed with her palms held out and in an instant there was a whole event crowded around her voice. Up there Maria was the very soul of vigour and good humour, and every note she sang was a declaration of plenty.

  Oh-oh-over and over

  I’ll prove my love to you

  Over and over, what more can I do?

  Over and over, my friends say I’m a fool

  But oh-oh-over and over

  I’ll be a fool for you

  Cause you’ve got –

  Personality

  Walk –

  Personality

  Talk –

  Personality

  Smile –

  Personality

  Charm –

  Personality

  Love –

  cause you got a great big heart

  Well over – and over

  I’ll be a fool for you

  Well, well, well over and over

  What more can I do?

  8

  America

  Another season, Maria was sitting by the window of a plane flying to America. The month before, her mother and Alfredo had come to London and taken her from a private clinic, where she had spent several weeks, suffering from what the Daily Mirror called ‘exhaustion’.

  ‘I don’t like London,’ Rosa had said. ‘It’s that big, and the people are unfriendly.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here,’ Maria said. ‘And you Alfredo.’

  ‘It’s merely a glitch,’ said Mrs Gaskell.

  ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ asked Rosa.

  ‘A glitch,’ said Mrs Gaskell, ‘nothing to worry about. I think Maria hasn’t been eating quite as well as she might.’

  ‘She used to eat just fine,’ said Rosa.

  ‘Okay,’ said Alfredo, ‘she’s on the mend. You’re on the mend, aren’t you darlin’?’

  ‘I’m right as rain,’ said Maria.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to come back up the road,’ Rosa said. Maria frowned, and two spots of red came quickly on her cheeks, lighting her papery complexion.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to work again.’

  ‘London’s too big,’ said Rosa.

  ‘There’s plenty of work for her,’ said Mrs Gaskell.

  ‘It’s not the same down here,’ said Rosa. Maria stared into the blankets.

  ‘No mum,’ she said, ‘it’s not the same. This is where I live now and I want to sing again.’

  Rosa’s mouth twitched. She licked her lips and lifted up her head to show a fierce smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘far be it from me …’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘I don’t know that you have a say, lady,’ she said, ‘and I was the one that stood by you when you wanted to go into all this.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Maria said.

  ‘Oh well, you’re fine,’ said Rosa, ‘that’s the main thing.’

  ‘I think it’s time for Maria to get some rest,’ said Mrs Gaskell, putting another get-well card on the bedside cabinet and placing her hands on the bedclothes in a gesture of conclusion.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll decide when it’s time to go,’ said Rosa. She turned to Maria. ‘I see a helluva difference in you, hen. You know the room is there for you if you want to pack this in.’

  ‘No mum. I’m fine, honestly.’

  ‘It’s not really a failure or anything,’ said Rosa. ‘You don’t need to see it that way.’

  ‘I live here now,’ said Maria.

  ‘You live here now,’ said Rosa.

  They sat in silence.

  ‘Say hello to the Winter Gardens for me, Uncle Alfredo,’ said Maria.

  ‘Of course I will,’ he said. He winked. ‘And you hurry up and get a few Italian songs into your act,’ he said. ‘You’re giving us a right showing-up, so you are.’

  Rosa stood up and closed her bag and wrestled with a drip-dry overcoat. She tightened the belt, leaned over the bed and kissed Maria’s forehead. ‘We’ll away for the train now,’ she said. ‘It’s been a nice few days and you’ll be on the phone?’

  ‘Cheerio mum,’ said Maria. ‘Say cheerio to Granny Lucia,’ she said to Alfredo.

  ‘I’ll say hello to her,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing her soon I hope. She’s always asking for you.’

  ‘Tell her I miss her.’

  ‘And she misses you,’ he said.

  On the plane Maria lay back and watched the shapes of the clouds. She was tired. Mrs Gaskell sat next to her reading a programme from an opera she’d seen with her husband. ‘I never quite find the time to read these,’ she said.

  Two men in front were talking in American accents. ‘You should never make the mistake of thinking Las Vegas is normal,’ one said.

  ‘I know that,’ said the other. ‘It’s a circus. Jesus Jones. It’s the biggest friggin’ circus in the world. I’ve never considered it normal even for a second.’

  ‘Do you know what Newsweek said about Elvis when he first appeared there?’ said the first man. ‘They said he was like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party. I’m serious.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘There’s worse than that,’ said the same one. ‘You know that during the 1960s, when the nuclear tests were taking place, some of the big casinos used to run “bomb picnics” into the desert for gamblers and their families.’

  ‘You’re shittin’ me?’

  ‘Check it out,’ he said, ‘straight down the line.’

  Mrs Gaskell paid no attention to the people in front. She read the programme for La Bohème, ate a petit four, and occasionally glanced at Maria’s tray and suggested she try something. ‘It’ll be quite some time before they offer us anything again,’ she said. Maria just scraped some cubes of roast potato under the chicken and stared out the window. Much later on, somewhere over Illinois, she pretended to eat a roll and butter. The pieces of bread went down the side of her seat; she rubbed the small pats of butter up her arms, into the skin, into the creases around her elbows, and eventually, as the smears began to dry, she felt somehow content, at one with the pure air outside the window.

  *

  The lights of Las Vegas were known to her. Looking over the strip – the Sands, the Golden Nugget, the neon hearts and the miles of cars – she began to remember the promising suns and the night-lights of Bute. It was not any Bute that had ever existed in the world, but a place that lived in her mind, where the days were Tupperware-coloured and filled with summer dreams, where children lived as children in a painting, where even the rain was a habit of the emotions, and where imagined waves came rolling into a
n imagined harbour. Las Vegas – there now, alive, beneath her balcony – was simply a part of those imaginings, and in the full glow of the Nevada evening the city was familiar.

  She was there to sing for one night only. The theatre could be found somewhere in the hotel, the MGM Grand; she was part of Dean Martin’s Summer Benefit for the Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation of America, and was staying in the hotel’s Emerald Tower, where framed posters hung along the corridors. The posters advertised past concerts featuring the great heroes of song and dance, and that night they made Maria feel she was truly part of a special tribe. Mr Martin held her hand and told her she was ‘a great little Italian kid from Scotland, La Piccolina Signorina Lampadina’.

  Mrs Gaskell seemed almost to grind her teeth with pleasure; she blushed full of pride and professional well-being to be standing there with Dean Martin and the others. ‘She’s not nearly so young as she appears to be,’ she said nervously.

  Lucille Ball came over to Maria after rehearsals and said, ‘God bless you, honey. You’ve sure got what it takes.’

  ‘And might you be the fairy godmother?’ said Liberace, putting his ringed hand out to Mrs Gaskell.

  ‘I’m simply thrilled to meet you,’ she said in return.

  ‘Charmed,’ he said. ‘I love your English accent.’ After a pause, during which Liberace stared at Maria and smiled, he told a story about being a young performer on the Colgate Comedy Hour. ‘Now, that wasn’t the day before yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re ever in London …’ said Mrs Gaskell.

  ‘I’m very often in London.’

  ‘How exciting. You must come and see us. If you give a concert …’

  ‘So darling of you,’ he said, and he smiled. ‘I can’t tell you how much a boy can miss the Savoy.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Mrs Gaskell.

  Maria noticed how thin the gentleman’s wrists were and how narrow his face. She felt jealous.

  ‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well, I suppose she is,’ said Mrs Gaskell. Liberace ignored her and looked at Maria.

  ‘Is that so, dear?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m a Catholic.’

  ‘I still say my prayers,’ he said. ‘I say them every night.’ Maria didn’t know how to reply. She smiled. He began to turn away and winked at her. ‘We Catholics oughta stick together,’ he said. ‘All this performance …’ He made the word long and swishy like his coat. ‘We invented it, honey-pie.’

  He walked off and was joined by the stage manager.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Gaskell, ‘wasn’t he just marvellous?’

  Later in the day Maria sneaked down to the gaming hall to see the people winning and losing, and it was the circus atmosphere around the slot-machines that gripped her most. It seemed frightening after a while: all those lights, and the fixed look in the people’s eyes, their fat hands cupping the coins, their fat arms pulling the lever, the wheels spinning.

  Amusements.

  She walked down the lanes of one-arm bandits and the sound of crashing coins and bleepers got to her for a moment. The noise was too loud and the people were over-weight and didn’t care about losing the coins; they would just put more into the slot and keep staring at the machine.

  And what happens if the amount just keeps getting bigger and bigger and the thing is spinning and there’s nobody to stop it? The numbers. What if the machines just get so good at taking the money they begin to devour everything and then they devour the people while they’re standing there?

  Down the street was a Walkway of Fame – golden shoe-prints and hand-prints – made from casts left by many of the great performers who had come to Las Vegas. To get away from the slot-machines, Maria walked the length of the strip. It was good exercise, she said to herself, and she was able to stop and try her own hands in the pavement prints. Sammy Davis Junior had small hands but long fingers: Maria’s were so small they looked lost inside the brass crevices. Yet she wasn’t satisfied to find her hands were smaller. Some of the casts had been taken from the prints at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It said so on a sign. ‘Shirley Temple brought America through the Depression with a smile,’ it also said. Maria grew excited when she saw Shirley Temple’s prints on the ground. When she put her fingers into the brass, she felt the cold of the metal and at the same time realised she was touching something that maybe Shirley Temple had touched. She kept her hands there on the pavement, and her mind filled with old pictures. Around Shirley Temple’s hand and tap-shoe prints were other tiny prints, Jackie Coogan, Baby Leroy, Deanna Durbin. Maria wasn’t sure about some of them, but she put her hands in theirs anyway, and after a moment she felt sick. Her hands were too big for these prints. She felt faint. Her fingers were horrible.

  She walked up and down the strip. She saw her shadow moving along the pavement in front of her, and after an hour she began to feel happy again, passing food places and breathing in the smells of onions and hamburgers. She passed all the places again and again and felt gratified with her shadow on the ground. It was like levitating. She needed nothing. She would eat nothing. She walked down the street and it was as if the whole street and the whole of Las Vegas had been built for Maria Tambini, and the traffic moved in response to her walking, and the people only existed as so many atoms squeezed and channelled by her presence on the street, by her power as she travelled forward, controlling everything, and her body seemed almost nothing, cleansed and empty like the shadow on the pavement, and for her the warm breeze itself was shaped and commandeered by her mood.

  The theatre was hot and full of people clapping and laughing. Along with the excitement, feedback squealed from the amplifiers, but the applause covered it, and the stage was quickly a furnace of good cheer. Dean Martin and Maria Tambini are standing there together, smiling into their microphones. Mr Martin puts his arm around her waist. Maria wears a smile too big for her face and a skirt a few years too young.

  ‘How are you, darling?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You oughta take a rest cause you really worked hard there. You sing terrific. That’s hard work you know.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You belt out a loud sound. That’s hard work for a girl. A girl can’t do it a lot but you do it enough for eleven girls.’

  She giggles.

  ‘You’re cute. You’re pretty and everything.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You sing terrific. I couldn’t believe it. I thought there was a ventriloquist back there, like a big bear that was going “raaaaa”.’

  She covers her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Are you thrilled to meet me? You should be.’

  The audience laugh.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you wanna talk about something?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Urn. Um. Um. Swinging on a Star.’

  ‘“Swinging on a Star”. You wanna do that first?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You don’t look like you mean it, little sister. You wanna do something else?’

  ‘“Rockaby”.’

  He laughs. ‘Don’t start causing me trouble, honey. You’re super-terrific. Okay boys – hit it.’

  The brass section explodes into the song. Dean Martin stands back holding a drink and smiles approval at the audience while Maria gathers up the sound and belts it over the audience. ‘Give it hell,’ he says.

  In her room that night she drank glass after glass of water from the bathroom. Crouching by the bed, with the sound of police sirens outside and the hotel television issuing canned laughter from the corner, she sucked a piece of toast and then spat it back onto the plate. She scraped a line of skin from a nectarine and licked the pulp inside. Her head pounded. She threw all the scraps into the bin and went into the closet where she found a bag with a furry pencil case in it. She counted out twenty laxatives and swallowed them with the water.

  *

  They came
into Grand Central Station, the daylight glinting through the compartment, and opening her eyes, smarting, Maria saw the tracks and the other trains, the precise movements outside, and at the opening of the final tunnel they all seemed to pick up speed, the trains, and turned like silverfish into the depths of New York.

  Maria loved how the station made her feel so small. The windows up there just cancelled you with beams of light: she walked beside Mrs Gaskell and felt invisible with so many people around her, and yet she was tugged by Mrs Gaskell’s officious nature to be both present and correct, so they marched across the concourse and out of the station, Maria edged into occupation while wishing only to fade under the buildings and the glass.

  ‘Will you eat something?’ said Mrs Gaskell.

  ‘Not hungry,’ said Maria.

  ‘This is a jolly good opportunity for you, Maria, so let’s have none of your nonsense while we’re here. I’m not your mother and I refuse to follow you around with a teaspoon.’

  ‘Good. Nobody’s asking you to.’

  Mrs Gaskell stopped short of the line for the taxi. ‘You’re too bloody thin!’ she said.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Maria. ‘Everybody wants me to walk about like a blob. You just want me to be a blob. I ate my breakfast.’

  ‘You put it in a tissue.’

  ‘I didn’t! I ate it! It’s in my stomach.’

  ‘Stop it, Maria. This is nonsense.’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter. Just leave me.’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘I won’t discuss this any more, okay? I am not standing here talking this kind of rubbish with you. I have eaten my breakfast and I feel very good if you must know.’

  A driver with a black cap and a name-card came out of the crowd and helped them with the bags. ‘I have such delightful memories of the park,’ said Mrs Gaskell. They drove across town and Maria smiled out of the window on her side. Mrs Gaskell reached into her coat pocket and brought out a flapjack. She placed it on the seat between them. ‘Please have a piece before the rehearsal,’ she whispered. And then: ‘I beg you.’