The Ruby Slippers (27 page)

He is watching the TV now in the sitting room. These awful programmes used to make him restless, spoiling for a fight, but now they hold his attention for up to two hours at a go. She can hear a syrupy sales-channel voice cooing and gushing over cheap jewellery. Before, he wouldn’t have stuck with this kind of trash for longer than five minutes. He must have fallen asleep in front of it. Good. Less work for her.

■ ♦ ■

‘Good,’ says the voice. ‘Now, listen . . .’

‘How did you get my number?’ jabs back Harrison.

‘That’s neither here nor there. Now listen, six thirty, down by the bridge next to the playground.’ He weighs it up. There is authority in this voice, and he likes the way the guy gets right down to it, not at all like the grocer man. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘So how come I don’t deal with the grocer no more?’

‘Do you want the money or not?’

‘Yeah. But why you—’

‘Good. Six thirty. Don’t be late.’

■ ♦ ■

He goes through his wardrobe, looking for sporty clothing: T-shirt, baggy track pants, and the Nike bag, of course, to carry back the money. He likes the look of himself in the mirror. Yeah, when he has money to spend he’ll wear this more, only more out-there and with plenty of real gold. And come to think of it, he will take sports more serious, have a couple of hoops in his garden and join a gym if he can’t stretch it to have his own.

Great Aunt Crystal is overjoyed to see him so caring of his appearance. She struggles to get up off her knees in front of the oven she has been cleaning, and looks him up and down: ‘So, honey, where you going?’

‘To play ball.’

‘Who with?’

‘Ah, the usual suspects.’

As the door shuts after him, she smiles broadly to herself: Goodness, the boy is coming out of his shell!

■ ♦ ■

And so Harrison turns up at the right place at the right time. The man had sounded reasonable and not unfriendly and when he had asked why they should meet there as opposed to anywhere else, the man had simply said over again, ‘Do you want the money or not?’ But now, arriving with the darkness, he suddenly feels not so good about rushing into it. And he is right to have these feelings, because out from behind a wall come two big men in dark practical clothing who, without greeting or explanation, proceed to punch, kick and pummel him to the ground. As they do this, not a word is said, not even to curse or to express their contempt of him. It’s a technical beating, their kicks and punches carefully placed for maximum pain and minimum damage, to cause fear and distress but avoid real harm.

And when Harrison lies groaning on the ground, one of the men stands over him and lets go a shower of money, a hundred dollars in brand-new one-dollar bills, tumbling all over him and settling like snow, the just reward for all his pains.

■ ♦ ■

‘Incredible,’ says Steve.

‘Incredible,’ says Jack.

‘Incredible,’ says James, as they all stand back to look at the figures on the screen. And it is indeed beyond belief. The guys at Woody’s did not forget Jack’s big idea and they did not dismiss the notion of the memorial to Paolo as a naive fantasy cooked up by a few half-cut guys on a spring evening. Rather, James found himself swept up in a whirlwind of good intentions and willing hands as people decided they should go for it. The ruby slippers had meaning, and not just for them. And so their plans had taken shape: they would call on people all over America and ask them to pledge a single dollar and a dream, in return for a share in the slippers. Woody himself rang James and offered the run of his back room, and in a flash the guys came together to donate their nights and weekends.

‘OK, time to eat,’ declares James, and watches with quiet satisfaction as the others down tools and take up pizza. Jack is there, the mainstay, and there is Steve, an older, bearlike fellow who hardly has a word to say to his fellow man, but can whisper all kinds of poetry into a mainframe to make it sing. And there is Miles the musician, who seems to be able to do just about anything except get on with people. Between the four of them, they have in ten days got the whole juggernaut up and running, incorporated a not-for-profit company, begged, borrowed and stolen the hardware, and harvested returns beyond their imagining. The pledges have just poured in. Americans of every gender, age, colour and persuasion, snapping up their dollar shares in the Ruby Million – $800,081: that’s what it says on the screen, and how close they are to the magic number. ‘Hey, James, sit down and eat yourself,’ calls out Jack. ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but I’ll try the pizza,’ jokes James, sharp as a tack.

As he sits quietly chewing, with high harmonies drifting in from the piano-room singers, James feels what it is to be human among humans and to know that laughter is as essential as oxygen. His father starved himself of it and look how poisonous he became. Corinne drove it out of her life and played the martyr and look what happened to her. James reflects with quiet satisfaction that this has been a good thing for him, and has in fact made him unafraid to be what he is: a gay man among gay men. He thinks, too, of the sheer multiplicity of human beings he has come across in the campaign, so many of them decent and kind, but so many others crazy to the hilt – the obsessives and JG nuts who think that just by wearing cheap imitations of these shoes you can blow up your own magic balloon and float away inside it. Then, with their own variations of insanity, were the rednecks and the queer-baiters, quick to send their ugly illiterate messages, saying how faggotism was a disease sapping the manhood of the nation, and how he and his kind should be put up against a wall and shot.

Schwartz, his manager, visited him personally to complain because the press flocked to the library, hot for the story. But even he had the common sense to acknowledge that all publicity is good publicity for the NYPL. James knows the visit was a warning, though, and for a few minutes he starts to dwell on hurtful things. Then Jack floats up a harmless little question: ‘So, James, what you gonna say tonight?’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yeah, on
New York Now
.’

‘Tonight?! Is it really tonight? Hell!’ What a thing to forget. They had invited him on the TV station to tell the whole damn city about the Ruby Million and he had fallen in without a murmur. What had gotten into him, he who had always preferred to stay quiet and out of the limelight? He looks around at his companions in crime. Well, he can’t send Steve, that’s for sure, him taking a minute to complete a sentence, and certainly not Miles, who is as abrasive as a cheese grater, nor Jack, who is too much the child. Nothing for it, he will just have to go and do it, for Christ’s sake. Nonetheless, he hasn’t a clue what he will say, which is all too clear on his face, because Jack, by way of encouragement, says, ‘You’ll be fine. Tell it how it is – the facts, the figures, which are all great. And I could go with you, if it was OK?’

‘Go with me?’

‘Sure – if you want me there.’

‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ he says mildly, but inwardly irritated that Jack should once again muscle in like this. ‘But we should meet up there, if you don’t mind. I need to go somewhere first.’

■ ♦ ■

The door opens and Harrison shuffles in, a walking corpse. Great Aunt Crystal lets out a godforsaken wail and drops the vase of flowers she has been fussing with.

‘Oh my golly gosh, what happened?!’

‘Look at me, Aunty Crystal,’ he whines, all attempt at pretence gone, all need for slyness and secrecy beaten out of him, along with the fierce desire that drove him to such trickery. Now he is like a child again, wanting the comfort that can come to a child. Crystal throws her arms around Harrison, and he allows himself to be held, feeling the bumps and bruises a little less cruel and deadening than they had been on his stumbling journey home.

‘Who did this?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Call the police, we should call the police!’

He is not quite enough of a child to let her take him down this road. Instead, he tells her he went to the cops already but couldn’t tell them anything because he hadn’t seen anything, just a couple of men in the dark. And he tries to put her mind at rest by telling her it’s bumps and bruises only and no real harm done. The motive was robbery, he adds, them having taken his sports stuff and all out of his bag – the same bag that’s lying downstairs, behind the bins where he has stuffed it. (After the men stopped beating on him and ran off leaving him lying there, he had gathered up the scattered bills and dumped them inside.)

When Crystal has done bathing his face and fixing him a bite to eat and offering a prayer, Harrison drags himself to his room. And there he lies down, and turns over and cries, not because he is a baby, not because he cannot take pain, but because he has lost something he believed would change him and raise him up to better things. Everyone deserves for their life to come to something. Even a bad man can have good dreams.

■ ♦ ■

People always say how glamorous it was for me, to be in Hollywood, working on what was to become so amazing a movie, and that to be with Judy Garland herself and hear her sing was such bliss. It’s strange that I never felt this at the time, and yet the more I look back, the more it has indeed become magical to me and belonging to a dream
.

Of course this was 1939. In Europe the war was soon to come and there came terrible times. Magda wrote to me on only one occasion, after I had written many times before to her. She asked if I would help her family to escape because everything had become terrible. They were in fear the Germans or the Russians – they did not know which – were to invade at any time. My mother had died, which was terrible to hear, of course, and made me cry for days, and they were soon to be in starvation. Starvation. I did not know what it means – they were not in front of me for me to see. So often people say they are starving when their meal arrives late in the restaurant, and here she was saying they are desperate and telling me there is a way that I could help them from America
.

She told to me that I should obtain work for Janis in Hollywood – just to get my bosses to write letters saying they are prepared to give him work as carpenter or electrician, it did not matter which one, because he will supply papers to show him to be essential worker. Of course, I know this is ridiculous, because Janis is just trader selling things and always full of fantasy. Also, who am I to go to studio managers and get letters, Mr Louis B. Mayer? No, I am new to the job and I am just a dresser, right at the bottom of the heap. It was ridiculous and also, now that I have to say the truth, I had enormous reason to be angry with my sister and her husband, and because of this I do not really understand and I do nothing, not even to reply. Again I do not know why – maybe because I did not understand the power that was in my hands, or maybe because I could not imagine in my mind the terror that was happening in the peaceful country of my memory. Or maybe it was because I did not want to be coming to face again with things I had tried to forget
.

So I did not take any action, even though I do not believe anything would have come from it if I did. Also, I was selfish, and for the first time in love and making friends and thinking only for each day, not of the suffering of others. But all of this later came on my conscience, and behind it all there was another, deeper shame. The truth is that I turned away, not even meaning to – not because I was cruel or desiring of revenge, but because I did not stop to think, and because there was grief in me and because really I was still so young
.

I mention before that I was in love. This was a handsome young actor, Tom Shelden, he had only a bit part in the movie, but saw it as a stepping stone. He had been a stage painter but had big ideas. He came from a good family, of which my mother would approve, and he was so funny all the time – a big man and brave, but with the manner of a little boy, always being naughty but charming, so that you would shower him only with kisses instead of smacks. Much of my father I saw in him – the charm and the courage. In appearance he was like Clark Gable and just as manly, but fair of hair with the same twinkling eye. It was so true because I once had meet Mr Gable face to face. But there ends the resemblance, because Tom could not bring these qualities onto the screen and could not deliver lines in a believable way. I know this because they send him scripts for test, which he read to me, and never they came out right and I could see that he would not have success. So, it was the man I gave myself to, not the glamour and money that might come to him. It was for love alone and I could see all my happiness in his eyes. And yes, it was Tom who was the man with whom I went to the Palace of Oz when it was deserted, and who was with me when I found the ruby slippers. The events of this I write in another letter, which I place separate to this account. Should you find this you also find that story
.

B
ORED
to the edge of reason, Siobhan flicks and flutters between chattering ads, hyperactive comedy shows and stiff-backed, stern-faced news blasts – babbling nonsense, all of it. She stretches back, idle-fingered, for a banana on the dresser behind her, and it falls to the floor. As she is crouching down, fishing and fumbling for it, she hears a familiar voice and looks up. There – impossible – on the screen is her dad in a blue suit, sitting legs crossed on a couch, jabbering away under the lazy eye of the chat show’s host, who sits by, picking his nails: ‘Well, the whole thing has been totally, totally beyond believing . . .’

‘Mom! Mom!’ she mews as James witters on, bright and eager. She has forgotten that Corinne is out, practising with the Newton Harbour Sound Collective – her ‘weekly dose of choral tranquillity’, as she calls it.

‘It started off as a crazy idea, then became a not bad idea . . .’ continues James. ‘Then so many amazing, kind people came to us from everywhere, and it just kind of took off under its own momentum, and I knew it was a really good idea.’