Mr. Flood's Last Resort(10)
Renata favors the more is more approach when it comes to makeup, but it is artfully applied. It’s the makeup she wore all her working life, only modified to create a kind of off-duty screen-goddess look. It isn’t natural but, as she says, it gets off one stop short of destination drag queen. Renata’s greatest fear, amongst all her other great fears, is to die without makeup on. In the event of an accident or congestive heart failure I am to administer makeup before I even call the ambulance, although Renata fears the effect will be more Pablo Picasso than Vivien Leigh.
She pulls up her sleeve and points to the place her watch would be if she lived a practical existence, ruled by anything other than the moon and her whims. “Do you have time?”
I always have time. “Go on and sit down. I’ll finish making the tea.” I slip off my trainers with a respectful salute to Johnny Cash.
She frowns. “What about the ginger twins? You know, if you finish making the tea another individual has started? The risk of red-haired babies?”
I have taught her all the Irish superstitions I can think of. She likes them very much. She has added them to her own cockeyed beliefs and now the universe has become even more fickle and absurd.
I nod sagely. “There’s always a risk. Did you measure the tea leaves into the pot already?”
She shakes her head.
“It should be fine, then; anyway, I haven’t had a ride for years.”
“And I’ve never owned a uterus,” she says with a lurid wink and sashays off down the hall, leaving a trail of frangipani behind her.
“Good for you.”
*
RENATA HAS the tray ready in the kitchen. I love the way she does it properly, with the little milk jug and tongs, although neither of us takes sugar. When I carry the tray in she smiles up at me from the sofa.
Even when she’s smiling Renata has a formidable look about her, despite her gentle Aquarian soul. Her cheekbones are brutal, and her dark eyes, an unexpected gift to her mother from a Portuguese sailor, have a simmering tarry depth. In Renata’s eyes there is the creak and pitch of a thousand ships and the moon on the water and the song of a sad drunken deckhand.
Amongst friends, a wry half smile is common to Renata and a candid grin is not rare. With strangers Renata has the countenance of an occupational hangman or an overworked doctor: knowing, dour, and vaguely resentful. I have seen many a tentative smile flounder and break against her foreboding expression, for Renata only smiles when she wants to and never to make friends.
Renata draws her eyebrows on by hand, giving them the devastating curve of a committed femme fatale. She wears a headscarf tight to her forehead, with the tail ends twisted at the back to form a kind of dancer’s bun. Sometimes she trades her headscarf for a felt turban. Occasionally she adds a beret or a fedora. In the spare room three wigs perch on disembodied polystyrene heads. They are called Liza, Rita, and Lauren and are black, red, and blond respectively. These are worn rarely and only when she has guests. For everyday wear she chooses a kaftan or kimono, enjoying their carefree bohemian glamour. She inclines towards fabulous prints and startling colors.
Although her passport puts her at sixty, Renata will admit to no more than forty-five. Born Lemuel Sewell, she was working on a building site and wearing frocks in her spare time when she met Bernie Sparks in a pub in Catford in 1972. She spent the remaining years of Bernie’s life as his wife, sexpot, and magician’s assistant, as the occasion demanded. For Bernie she shaved three times a day and forsook friends, family, and her own name. Bernie’s magic act guaranteed a lucrative summer season at holiday camps and seaside theaters. In winter Bernie took to the betting shop. He drank perennially.
For a fine-boned East End boy there was the compensatory lure of ostrich feathers, gold stilettos, and being sawn in half twice nightly. But Renata had wanted a different life, as a geologist or a holistic private detective. Or even a life that combined both, allowing her to solve gemstone-related misdemeanors mindfully.
This is the path Renata would follow today, she says, if she were able to go outside. For a free spirit Renata is grievously confined.
Her fears are, in ascending order:
The pubic hair of strangers
Bridges
Tuberculosis on doorknobs
Rabid dogs
Helium balloons
The certain likelihood of one, or all, of these factors being present beyond the front doorstep of her maisonette makes going outside inadvisable. This is because Renata’s universe, like most people’s, is constructed on a Sod’s Law principle.
I put the tray on the occasional table next to her and sit down on the plastic sheeting she spreads on the sofa for visitors.
Renata lifts the lid of the teapot and pokes warily at the tea leaves. “So, how was Flood today?”
“He said my name.”
“See You Next Tuesday?”
“No,” I say. “He used my actual name and then he sort of smiled at me. I was cleaning cat shit off his hob.”
“You bear these crosses.”
“Not as many as you, with your mortifying corns.”
“I’m a martyr to fashion footwear.” She waves a feathered mule.
“We never learn. How was your day?”
Renata closes her eyes and tilts her head up to the light. Her eyelids are a vivid shade of blue. “Blended sockets.”
“Arresting. So a full and productive afternoon, then?”