get a bit hot. Lola pushed her fingers into her diaphragm, just as I had taught her, and breathed in so that the muscle pushed her fingers back out again.
‘Good!’ I felt a buzz, a flash of pride even, and in my moment of optimism I stupidly added, ‘And remember to tell me a story.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lola let her hands flop to her sides and her bum flop back into the chair.
You idiot, Ash!
‘Nothing,’ I shouted over Barry, ‘I mean, don’t worry about that yet. Just concentrate on the breathing this time round.’
‘But I don’t understand. Why do you keep asking me to tell you a story? If I’d wanted a job on fuckin’ Jackanory I would’ve gone to the BBC not COME TO YOU.’
I stopped the tape again just before she finished and her last few words boomed around the suddenly quiet room, sounding more aggressive than even she intended them to be. I think she even rattled herself a bit, so she patted her black bobbed hair in case her rant had knocked something out of place.
‘OK,’ I said, as if I was talking to someone suicidal on the roof of a high-rise, ‘it’s just that with Barry Manilow, probably more than any other singer, his lyrics are telling a story, taking you on a journey. And this song is probably the most…story-like of all. So let’s hear in your voice and see in your face the story of the showgirl, every man’s dream, top of her game at first; then, by the last verse, she’s a tragic figure, lost her love, lost her mind…’
Actually, underneath all the cha-cha-cha and brass fanfares this is a bloody depressing song, don’t you reckon?
‘Go for it and you’ll knock ’em dead, trust me. And who knows, if there’s anyone from the BBC in the audience you could be the first drag-queen presenter on Jackanory.’
She almost smiled, but she sucked it away like she was eating a sherbet lemon. She stood up, though, and smoothed down her skirt. Tapped each stiletto, the same colour as her lips, into threadbare bits of the carpet and pressed her finger into her diaphragm.
Result!
I rewound the tape to the beginning of the song – must get a new deck, it sounds like one of those crappy scooters the kids burn up and down the estate on thinking they’re the mutt’s nuts. I pressed play. It’s going to start chewing the students’ tapes up soon, by the sound of it, and I don’t need to drive any more away.
Lola started singing about Lola, a showgirl with her hair full of yellow feathers and a dress cut down to…somewhere. It sounded like a cross between Mr T and Cilla Black, but at least she was starting to breathe in the right places and in the right way.
Perhaps I should invest in one of these new minidisc things. It’s bound to take over the world and I’ll get left behind as usual. Ten years ago when Brothers in Arms came out on the first CD I dismissed them as a fad…derr! And now I wouldn’t go anywhere without my CD Discman.
Lola followed Manilow like an echo in a haunted house as he crooned about Tony and the showgirl, working late nights in this cheesy club, where at least they had each other…Whoopee.
‘Good, keep it up, this is great!’
Oh my God, I’m looking at Lola’s tits! Or bra full of socks, or whatever it is she’s got stuffed down there. Ash, you’ve really got to get out more. Yeah? And we all know what happens if I ‘get out more’ – I keep a journal of my social life on my arm, written with a cheese knife.
But Barry and Lola loudly suggested that I should get myself down to the Copa, Copacabana. Music and passion are apparently always in fashion there. As long as I don’t go and fall in love, they warned in suddenly sombre tones.
‘Don’t fall in love…Well?’
‘I agree,’ I said, then quickly realized I was not having a conversation with Barry about relationships. ‘I…think we’ve nearly cracked it. Seriously, there was much more power in that, right to the end of even the long lines.’
Lola stood there, arms folded across her…chest; she raised her eyebrows and the stud through her right one shot up in the air like an antenna searching for bullshit waves. I thought for a second she had sussed that I could’ve been paying a little more attention during that run-through. But then I saw her surprisingly-white-given-all-the-cigarettes teeth for the first time today as her inflated lips peeled back like a horse’s into a smile, her eyelashes whipped her cheeks and she clicked her heels together like Dorothy wishing her way back to Kansas.
‘You think so?’ Her voice went from its usual foghorn bass to Mariah’s fifth-octave squeak in just those three words. ‘Do you think I’ll be ready for the show next week?’
‘We’ve got another lesson before then, haven’t we?’
Idiot!
Lola flopped to the chair and searched in her bag for a cigarette. ‘So you’re saying I’m not ready.’
‘I am saying that after our next lesson you will be completely ready.’
I started making a meal of putting away my folder of notes to signify it was time for Lola to go. She offered me a Marlboro so I couldn’t resist one more lesson for today.
‘No thanks, I don’t smoke – and neither should you if you want to improve your singing, especially the breathing.’
‘Oh fuck off, Mother Teresa!’
Nothing like respect for your teacher, eh!
‘Sinatra smokes, Robert Plant smokes, Edith smoked,’ Lola smoked. ‘It didn’t do their voices any harm, did it?’
I was dying to point out the slight difference in the quality of their voices and Lola’s at her age, and the fact that Piaf died of cancer, but I thought she might beat me with the sharp end of her stiletto. Besides, Lola’s attention was fixed on the ceiling now and other voices barking through it.
‘Jesus Christ!’ In her posh-camp bass you felt every consonant and vowel of a phrase like that. ‘What the hell are they up to?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about them, they’re at it all the time, sounds like they’re tearing strips off each other, don’t it? Usually it’s at seven in the morning, although what there is to argue about at that time of day is beyond me, I tell you.’
Lola blew her smoke at the ceiling in disgust. ‘Listen, Ashley, I’m not racist but…’ Here we go, that magic phrase that always comes before a racist comment. ‘With those kind, even when one of them says “hello” to another it sounds like he’s saying: “Your mother’s a whore.”’
‘Those kind’ are Africans. I couldn’t tell you what country exactly, but I’ve lived in London long enough to know a lot of people from a lot of countries and I know they are from Africa. And there was an element of truth in what Lola said, in her sledgehammer-subtle way, but I prefer to see it in terms of music. That’s what it is – just a different song, a different style. Heavy metal may sound aggressive to your gran, but it’s a beautiful thing to a metal-head. A different language, and the culture it has evolved in is just a different style of music – each to their own, I reckon.
But when they argue like that, the
