Funny Girl(3)

She didn’t feel anything. Or rather, she noted her absence of feeling and then felt a little sick. It would have been nice to think that she’d been wrong, that she didn’t need to leave her father and her town, that this was a dream come true and she could live inside it for the rest of her life. She didn’t dare dwell on her numbness in case she came to the conclusion that she was a hard and hateful bitch. She beamed when the mayor’s wife came over to put the sash on her, and she even managed a smile when the mayor kissed her on the lips, but when her father came over and hugged her she burst into tears, which was her way of telling him that she was as good as gone, that winning Miss Blackpool didn’t even come close to scratching the itch that plagued her like chickenpox.

She’d never cried in a bathing suit before, not as a grown woman anyway. Bathing suits weren’t for crying in, what with the sun and the sand and the shrieking and the boys with their eyes out on stalks. The feeling of wind-chilled tears running down her neck and into her cleavage was peculiar. The mayor’s wife put her arms around her.

‘I’m all right,’ said Barbara. ‘Really. I’m just being silly.’

‘Believe it or believe it not, I know how you’re feeling,’ said the mayor’s wife. ‘This is how we met. Before the war. He were only a councillor then.’

‘You were Miss Blackpool?’ said Barbara.

She tried to say it in a way that didn’t suggest amazement, but she wasn’t sure she’d managed. The mayor and his wife were both large, but his size seemed intentional somehow, an indication of his importance, whereas hers seemed like a terrible mistake. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t care and she did.

‘Believe it or believe it not.’

The two women looked at each other. These things happened. There was no need to say anything else, but then the mayor came over to them and said something else anyway.

‘You wouldn’t think so to look at her,’ said the mayor, who was not a man to let the unspoken stay that way.

His wife rolled her eyes at him.

‘I’ve already said “believe it or believe it not” twice. I’ve already admitted that I’m no Miss Blackpool any more. But you have to come clomping in anyway.’

‘I didn’t hear you say “believe it or believe it not”.’

‘Well I did. Twice. Didn’t I, love?’

Barbara nodded. She didn’t really want to be drawn in, but she thought she could offer the poor woman that much at least.

‘Kiddies and cream buns, kiddies and cream buns,’ said the mayor.

‘Well, you’re no oil painting,’ his wife said.

‘No, but you didn’t marry me because I was an oil painting.’

His wife thought about this and conceded the point with silence.

‘Whereas that was the whole point of you,’ said the mayor. ‘You were an oil painting. Anyways,’ he said to Barbara. ‘You know this is the biggest open-air baths in the world, don’t you? And this is one of the biggest days here, so you’ve every right to feel overcome.’

Barbara nodded and snuffled and smiled. She wouldn’t have known how to begin to tell him that the problem was exactly the opposite of the one he’d just described: it was an even smaller day than she feared it would be.

‘That bloody Lucy woman,’ her father said. ‘She’s got a lot to answer for.’

The mayor and his wife looked confused, but Barbara knew who he was talking about. She felt understood, and that made it worse.

Barbara had loved Lucille Ball ever since she saw I Love Lucy for the first time: everything she felt or did came from that. The world seemed to stand still for half an hour every Sunday, and her father knew better than to try and talk to her or even to rustle the paper while the programme was on, in case she missed something. There were lots of other funny people she loved: Tony Hancock, Sergeant Bilko, Morecambe and Wise. But she couldn’t be them even if she’d wanted to. They were all men. Tony, Ernie, Eric, Ernie … There was nobody called Lucy or Barbara in that lot. There were no funny girls.

‘It’s just a programme,’ her father would say, before or after but never during. ‘An American programme. It’s not what I call British humour.’

‘And British humour … That’s your special phrase for humour from Britain, is it?’

‘The BBC and so forth.’

‘I’m with you.’