05 November 08 - 14:19
The Clinging of the Cold
THE CLINGING OF THE COLD
Donna wanted to be the first woman werewolf. You see, most of her friends dressed like vampires, with more eye-shadow than any their actual bodies cast when the sun was low in the sky. They wore loads of jingle-jangling bangles, too, but they did draw short of hanging fangs because that would have indeed been a tinsy wincey bit childish - or 'sad', as the fashionable word for unfashionable was among nineteen year old girls then.
Thus, you must understand, Donna wanted to go a stage further than her Gothic pals: break new ground, if not graveyard ground, and be a glorious wolf howling to the same moon as hounds bayed at. Donna's own glossy pelt of fur would then no doubt suit her taste for luxurious clothes without transgressing her almost religious regard for Animal Rights.
Whether Donna became the werewolf she wanted to become, you may well wonder. Bute let me tell you, I was one of those jingle-jangling friends and now, in my relative maturity, with children of what my own age was at that time (and some still younger), perhaps I can gain some perspective from memory of the events, however hazy. They do say the young have much to teach the old, even if the old were literally once the very same young from whom they now learn, if you see what I mean. Yet I daren't tell my own children (especially the youngest ones) of what our girl gang got up to, for fear of making fear a pleasure - as it was to us then.
Donna was, of course, the ring leader. She it was who darkened her mind (and ours) with decadent literature, magicked up ghosts at seances, dealt the Tarot as if she were the Devil's own croupier, 'read' various random human leavings for arcane messages and, above all, led us a strange dance, where the choreography was one day's so-called spontaneous movements slavishly followed step by step the next day ... and the next ... and so forth ... until an accident, a quirk, a flick of fate, led us into new steps ... and the copying procedure started all over again - a quaint obsession that, perhaps paradoxically, grew less obsessive as it grew more so. Donna called me her sister. In fact, we all became sisters, if not by blood, certainly by a common spirit. We sisters were the only people who knew true love - a true love for each other - purer than the pure dark of Hell. Any other love was struck from counterfeit coins. Simply sisters. What else was there? You surely can empathise, as I remember us spending weeks on end following, via short cuts, the same man as he bicycled home after he clocked off at the factory and watching his window blaze with his homecoming and then dim as he took to a quiet evening and, eventually, fade completely as he went to bed with the other man we knew lived there with him. There was no real reason why we wanted to stalk such men, but it was certainly not just for the sake of it. We simply had to continue, repeat, copy, re-enact, call it what you will, having once actually started following him - tracing an unknown obsession to its root cause. I don't know about the other girls but, for me, I felt as if cause came after effect. Now that I'm a mother and well-respected citizen, I still think the same, believing, as I do, that death is the retroactive spark for all we do in life.
And Donna wanted our following of this man actually to create the culmination: an outcome that would be the reason for doing it in the first place. Almost as if her ambition to be a werewolf depended on our perseverance of pursuit (as she called it in the bookish manner that often belied her girlishness). But then, one day, culmination came, although we didn't realise it until long afterward. The man started a new habit of leaving his house dressed in women's regalia, tottering along the pavement in high-heels and stockings, upon his short evening's constitutional. The fact he was a transvestite had now justified our following him, it seemed; that real females needed to keep an eye on somebody masquerading as one of them. This continued for weeks, until September turned gradually into November, and with it the drawing in of the evenings, the clinging of the cold. (Incidentally, as perhaps you know without me telling you, Donna's pet name for transvestites was 'magic playboys'.)
Where the line was crossed from following to leading, it is now difficult to say. In any event, one of my children has just returned home early from school with a belly-ache and I've been too busy to continue thinking about those far-off times with Donna and the other girls. All I can now recall with any degree of certainty was that nothing changed, except everything. No other way of putting it. Our mode of following the man one particular night of the first frost was unchanged. Then, having been transformed as usual into the magic-playboy persona, he walked from his front door at precisely the time we expected - but, unlike on previous occasions, he was swaddled, that night, in the lushest, most luscious mink fur coat down to the very end-pleats of his tweed skirt. But that was then, and this is now...
Today, when I tell stories to my children, including their favourite 'Ben at Beer-Mug Bay', my instinct is that their instinct is stronger than mine: that they know deep down that I have an even better, if terribly frightening, tale to tell: the one about Donna - that night - all those impressionable years ago, before I'd truly found myself (or as my self then would have said - lost myself).
My children's eyes bowl upwards, as unsteady as the minds behind them, as if you are pleading 'tell us, tell us the tale of Donna'. So, yes, we followed Donna following the mink-coated magic playboy. The streets were darkening faster than it was seemly to acknowledge, with a storm-cloud mimicking the night sky and edging over us like a tarpaulin. As I think of that occasion, with the corner of the mind that still retains a vestige of the memory concerned with the events in question, my language inevitably adopts the style of Donna's own brand of stilted Gothicism. You will understand - perhaps better than I ever understood - with the hindsight of having grown up and become real people, when you recall my words, dear children...
Anyway, you see, the prey suddenly turned in us followers' direction - far short of the usual extent of his evening's constitutional. Quite unpremeditated. Unprecedented. He raised his hands to his face, as if in open-palmed prayer, and through them horned a howl that even the real baying of hounds couldn't match. So frightening it isn't even fit to be a story for anybody, let alone you kids.
'Come on, Mummy, tell us, tell us!'
'No, dear. What happened was too frightful. Wouldn't you prefer Beer-Mug Bay?'
'No, no, tell us what really happened.'
The childish toing and froing of our banter continues, without me relenting, until I hear their father return. I feel the clinging of the cold penetrating even as far as here in the fire-lit parlour when the back door opens and shuts. Time to switch on the blazing electricity. Everything has been rehearsed to unwavering perfection. But the whimpering sound of the warm fur coat being lifted onto the door-peg is somehow a sudden reminder that their father and myself are a childless couple. Or at least as childless as two childish sisterly spinsters can be, you see, dear children, without magicking up sad ghosts.
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