The Whiskerly Sisters (37 page)

There was nothing to do but sit and wait. They spent their time sipping cocktails and watching the room slowly fill up. Celia had been right. It wasn’t long before there was nowhere to sit. Fresna ramped up the excitement by telling everyone about the fabulous show they had seen the week before. Celia nodded enthusiastically.

Suddenly, the lights were dimmed and an expectant hush filled the air. There was a momentary pause followed by a burst of piped music while the audience settled into their seats. Since cruise ships are renowned for their first class entertainment, everyone was certain of a good evening ahead. The star of the show, the beautiful, willowy Giselle, was eagerly awaited. As hostess for the evening, she would be opening the show. There was a swish as the curtains were pulled back to reveal an empty stage. A spotlight appeared and into walked a tall, fabulously clad blonde. As she walked to centre stage, the diamante in her lavender, thigh-slashed gown shimmered and sparkled under the lights. She wore wickedly high grey suede shoes with matching arm length gloves. Diamante sparkled from her ears and her neck. She was stunning.

Something in Charley stirred. She sat up, leaned forward and looked more closely at the woman directly in front of her on stage. The woman looked straight back and then, astonishingly, gave Charley a saucy wink.

It all came together in a blinding flash. She gasped and her mouth fell open. She turned to her friends and found them staring too. It couldn’t be! No fucking way! It couldn’t be, but it was.

Sly.

As the girls turned in their seats to stare at one another, she found Fresna grinning at her broadly. She knew! This was what she had been keeping up her flaming sleeve. Celia, on her immediate left, nudged her elbow and whispered, “Bet you weren’t expecting this?”

“Bitches!” Charley whispered back. While the women on the front row caught their breath and settled down, Giselle towered above them, standing serenely on the stage, waiting for the little furore to die down. When everything was quiet and she had the room’s full attention, she approached the mike.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome,” she began in a low, throaty voice. “Tonight is such a special night for me since I have some very special friends in the audience. Such dear, dear friends of mine and I hope you will allow me to introduce them to you.” The audience stirred and Giselle waited.

“Well?” she asked eventually, putting one hand on her hip and yawning sexily. “Talk about making a girl wait.” She waggled her hips at the audience, who roared their approval.

“Thank you,” she demurred coquettishly.

Turning her attention to her friends on the front seats, and with great confidence, she made them stand and turn to face the audience. Even Bex, who tended to be shy, was given no choice.

“Darlings,” she trilled to her audience. “I give you my friends, my companions, my ladies in waiting. I give you the Whiskerly Sisters,” and, regardless of the fact that no one in the audience had a clue what she was talking about, they nevertheless applauded.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur. The girls were mesmerised by the transformation in front of them. Giselle, still obviously a man, had all the charm and elegance of a woman. Furthermore, she was funny and witty; she knew how to work an audience and get them to do exactly what she pleased. Charley couldn’t help wondering where the hell Sly had found his theatrical skills. When she left the stage to other actors, she was missed and the whole room welcomed her back. The show was excellent, but its centrepiece was magnificent – the incomparable, the superb, Giselle.

All too soon the show came to its finale and the stars took their bows. The curtains closed, the lights were turned up and the room was filled with the sounds of subdued piped music and muted conversation.

“Fucking pinch me,” said Izza to no one in particular.

“Exactly,” replied her mother. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“See, I told you he would turn up when he was ready,” said Celia smiling widely.

“I’m speechless,” said Tiffany. “Amazing!”

“That’d be a first,” retorted Celia, full of herself now and bursting with pride and excitement. It had been a tough few days for the normally outspoken women, but she had not let the cat out of the bag. Fresna had threatened her several times with hell and damnation if she had dared.

“You cows,” said Charley, quietly. “Why the hell didn’t you give us a heads up?”

“Yes,” agreed Bex. “You could’ve let us know.”

“And spoil the surprise. Not on your flaming nelly,” replied Fresna. “You should’ve seen your faces.”

“Cow,” repeated Charley without malice.

“You should’ve been here this time last week when we saw him. You could’ve knocked me down with a feather and I wouldn’t have got up for a week,” Celia told them.

“Eyes front ladies, here she comes,” announced Jax and, as one, the girls turned back towards the stage to find Sly, shrouded from head to foot in a magnificent fur trimmed, silk dressing gown, walked towards them.

“Can I get anyone a drink?” he asked as the girls crowded round him. “You look as if you need one,” he added laughing and bending his head to receive their hugs and kisses.

“Where the hell have you been?” demanded Charley.

“And how the hell did you end up here?” asked Jax.

The girls crowded round him eagerly, admiring his gown, peppering him with questions. They wanted to know everything. How come he had disappeared again? Why hadn’t he been in touch? And how, in the name of all things holy, had he ended up here, top of the bill on the floating theatre of a flaming cruise ship?

Never in a million years!

“Out with it,” insisted Izza as soon as they had all sat down. A waiter had been dispatched to fetch more cocktails and the girls were frantic to hear his story.

“Don’t leaving anything out,” Charley warned, looking Sly straight in the eye.

Following on from his night time rites of passage into the outside world in the company of the Whiskerlies and, finding his confidence growing, Sly, or Imelda as he had begun to call himself, began experimenting with solo trips. He began slowly, taking short excursions to neighbouring towns, testing the water as he went. Finding nothing much to worry about, he explored further afield, trying a day’s shopping followed by a trip to the theatre or the cinema. As he began to take on more and more of the personality of Imelda, to his surprise, he found that he began to crave what he had previously shunned; the company of others in similar boats. Eventually, he found his way to a club on the outskirts of Milton Keynes where a weekly Drag Night was held. Suddenly feeling like a very small fish in an enormous pond, he retreated into his aloof self, took himself off to a corner of the bar and stood drinking alone until a kindly tranny by the name of Cynthia took him under her wing and introduced him to her crowd. They greeted him warmly, but like no one out of the ordinary, which made Sly, who had always believed he was different, feel completely normal for the first time into his life. He began to delve deeper and deeper into this much misunderstood, cross-over, cross-dressing world, revelling in the knowledge that he was not alone.

It was on a trip to the West End for the Alternative Lifestyle Ball that he met up with Fjordors, a slender, flaxen haired Latvian in his late thirties. Fjordors, or Fee as his friends called him, was not a cross dresser, he wasn’t a tranny. He was gay and he was quite simply the most stunning individual that Sly had ever met and so it was that, at the age of forty seven, Sly, at last, fell head over heels in love.

They began a passionate affair, crossing the distance between them as often as work would allow. Having lived alone for most of his life, and never really needing anyone, Sly found himself consumed. Together, they explored the depths of Sly’s increasingly demanding sexuality, lying together naked, tangled and breathless amidst the satin of Fee’s king-size bed.

Fee told him little of his life in a tiny, tucked away village in Northern Europe, merely remarking that he had found it difficult to express his artistic nature in such a corner. As soon as he could manage it, he fled to London and apprenticed himself to a self-employed seamstress, working alongside her in the glamorous world of high fashion. In the evenings, he attended college where he practiced his English and, when he felt he was ready, signed up to a beauty course and discovered the world of cosmetics. Using his new found skill, he developed his career by working freelance as a make-up artist and costumier. His talent for both was such that he was never short of work and often sought after for special period dramas or fantasy films where his creativity was given free reign. After several years of hard work and long hours, living in shabby, rented accommodation in seedier parts of London, he had finally saved up enough money to put down a deposit on a little flat in the suburbs.

He told Sly that he hadn’t really wanted to go to the Ball that night, but had been dragged there by the crowd he was currently working alongside. They had flatly refused to let him stay home when there was a party going on and had organised a taxi to fetch him. He shuddered inwardly at what might have happened if his friends had not been so insistent.

The affair could have gone on as it had, without much change, if Fee had not been woken up in the night by persistent knocking at his door. Sleepily, he had climbed out of bed and picked up the intercom. He was shocked to hear the voice of his brother at the other end, ordering him to open the door and let him in. Their father was very sick and he was needed at home in the family business. Slamming the phone down and refusing to answer the door, Fee stumbled back to bed and lay awake shaking for the rest of the night, remembering his childhood. His brother had not gone away and followed him to work the next morning, shouting angrily at him in their native tongue about family loyalty and Fee’s disgusting self-centredness. All this was accompanied by dramatic gestures and thumps. When Fee refused to respond, his brother tried to grab his arm and pull him along. Fee wriggled out his grasp, ran across the crowded road and leapt into a passing taxi, disappearing quickly into the bustle of the London traffic. Later that evening, he turned up unexpectedly on Sly’s doorstep with a heart full of love and a tale full of hate.

They had to get away he told the astonished Sly; his family would never let him go. They would track him down relentlessly and force him back to his homeland. They had found him once, they would do it again. In vain did Sly try to calm down his lover, even warily suggesting that a short trip home to visit his ailing father might be a good idea. Fee was frantic, yelling at Sly that he could never understand what it had been like. Sly was wasting his time if he thought for one second that he would ever go back. He would rather die! On and on he stormed, pacing up and down, gesticulating wildly to emphasise his distress and working himself up into a frenzy.

It took Sly the rest of the night to calm his lover down, after which, they spent the next three days talking and planning. An agreement was reached. They could not bear to be apart, but Fee felt he had no choice but to leave the country. He could never be free in England again.

Fee never returned to London. Sly resigned from his post as Head of Nursing, convincing his bosses of an emergency so strong that he was forced not to work out his notice, thus leaving his colleagues bewildered and very much in the lurch. Together, they crossed to the continent and worked a series of low paid jobs. It was Fee who came up with the idea of applying to a cruise line and they were both successful. Fee worked behind stage supporting the cast and happily resumed his life, content to be among the paints and powders, wigs and costumes he so loved. For Sly, the transition proved much more difficult. Whilst he enjoyed his role as a nurse in the tiny Medical Centre, caring for the wide variety of minor injuries and illnesses that came his way – sunstroke, nausea, the occasional bout of diarrhoea, strain and stress injuries from overdoing it at the gym or falling off a donkey – he suffered terribly from seasickness. For eight long weeks he endured until he finally found his sea legs and began to enjoy his new life on the ocean wave.

It was quite by accident that he took on the role of Giselle. The ship’s multi-national, fast turnover crew were very used to the unusual and found nothing strange in the passionate love affair between two of their shipmates. Shipboard romances were common, usually short-lived and so no one turned a hair. Given their very different working schedules, Sly found himself increasingly behind stage, assisting Fee with the costumes, a button here, a stitch there and, in between times, he renewed his interest in costume design.

During a sudden outbreak of Delhi Belly amongst the crew, the theatre company found itself several stars down and with an audience expecting to be entertained. When the Director decided that the show must go on, the programme was re-jigged and a hasty rehearsal scheduled with whoever was available. It was all hands on deck that afternoon and Sly launched himself into the frantic venture with gay abandon. To everyone’s amazement, he blossomed. The Director watched him with amusement, then interest and then wonder as Sly’s long hidden alter ego took to the stage like a natural. Her timing was perfect, she found she could hold a tune, she found she had an innate sense of comic timing.

And a star was born!

In reality, it wasn’t that easy. There were other stars to consider, other flamboyant artistes with signed contracts and quick tempers and, in any case, Sly still had a job, yet somehow the Theatre Director waived away all the obstacles to insist that Sly join the Company as soon as the paperwork could be signed. In the meantime, he took him under his wing and taught him as much about stagecraft as he could.

A compromise was reached with the shipping line. Sly would work out his time as a nurse but, two evenings a week, he would join the rest of the cast on stage in the shape of the sultry, sexy, fabulous Giselle. He delighted his audiences so much that his fame spread like wild fire; even members of the crew crept into the back of the theatre to watch him on their nights off.