come. Unless Gloria’s letter writer had the Venetian skill of climbing a ladder from a boat, I was going to be able to sleep in my own bed at night rather than across the threshold of Gloria’s bedroom.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘Especially when your living room used to be the cashier’s office where you picked up your wages every week smelling of offal,’ Gloria said ironically.
I turned back to look round the room. Wall uplighters gave a soft glow to burnished beams and the exposed stone of the three outer walls. The furnishings looked like a job lot from John Lewis, all pastel-figured damask and mahogany. The pictures on the wall were big watercolour landscapes of the Yorkshire moorland and the expanse of stripped floorboards was broken up by thick pile Chinese rugs. There was nothing to quarrel with, but nothing that spoke of individual taste, unlike Gloria’s clothes. ‘You live here alone?’ I asked.
‘Thank God,’ she said with feeling, opening a walk-in cupboard and hanging up her coat.
‘Anyone else have keys?’
‘Only my daughter.’ Gloria emerged and pointed to a door in the far wall. ‘The kitchen’s through there. There’s a freezer full of ready meals. Do you want to grab a couple and stick them in the microwave while I’m getting changed?’ Without waiting for an answer, she started up the open-plan staircase that climbed to the upper floor.
The kitchen was almost as big as the living room. One end was laid out as a dining area, with a long refectory table and a collection of unmatched antique farm kitchen chairs complete with patchwork cushions. The other end was an efficiently arranged working kitchen, dominated by an enormous freestanding fridge-freezer. The freezer was stacked from top to bottom with meals from Marks and Spencer. Maybe country living could be tolerable after all, I thought. All you needed to get through the winter was a big enough freezer and an endless supply of computer games. I chose a couple of pasta dishes and followed the instructions on the pack. By the time they were thawed and reheated, Gloria was back, dressed for action in a shocking-pink swirl of sequins. All it needed was the Brenda Barrowclough beehive to define camp kitsch better than any drag queen could have.
‘Amazing,’ I said faintly, scooping chicken and pasta into bowls.
‘Bloody awful, you mean,’ Gloria said, sitting down in a flounce of candyfloss. ‘But the punters are paying for Brenda, not me.’ She attacked her pasta like an extra from Oliver Twist. She finished while I was barely halfway through. ‘Right,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I’ll be five minutes putting on me slap and the wig. The dishwasher’s under the sink.’
With anyone else, I’d have started to resent being ordered around. But I was beginning to get the hang of Gloria. She wasn’t bossy as such. She was just supremely organized and blissfully convinced that her way was the best way. Life would inevitably be smoother for those around her who recognized this and went along with it unquestioningly. For now, I was prepared to settle for the quiet life. Later, it might be different, but I’d deal with that when later rolled round. Meanwhile, I loaded the dishwasher then went outside and started the car.
The drive to Blackburn was the last sane part of the evening. Gloria handed me a faxed set of directions then demanded that I didn’t mither her with problems so she could get her head straight. I loaded an appropriate CD into the car stereo and drove to the ambient chill of Dreamfish while she reclined her seat and closed her eyes. I pulled up outside the pub three-quarters of an hour later, ten minutes before she was due to sparkle. She opened her eyes, groaned softly and said, ‘It’s a bit repetitive, that music. Have you got no Frank Sinatra?’ I tried to disguise my sense of impending doom. I failed. Gloria roared with raucous laughter and said, ‘I were only winding you up. I can’t bloody stand Sinatra. Typical man, I did it my own bloody-minded way. This modern stuff’s much better.’
I left Gloria in the car while I did a brief reconnaissance of the venue. I had this vague notion of trying to spot any suspicious characters. I had more chance of hitting the Sahara on a wet Wednesday. Inside the pub, it was mayhem on a leash. Lads with bad haircuts and football shirts jostled giggling groups of girls dressed in what the high-street chain stores had persuaded them was fashion. Mostly they looked like they’d had a collision with their mothers’ cast-offs from the seventies. I couldn’t think of another reason for wearing Crimplene. The Lightning Seeds were revealing that football was coming home at a volume that made my fillings hurt. Provincial didn’t begin to describe it. It was so different from the city-centre scene I began to wonder if we could have slipped through a black hole and ended up in the Andromeda galaxy. What a waste of a good frock.
The special opening night offer of two drinks for the price of one had already scored a clutch of casualties and the rest of the partygoers looked like they were hellbent on the same fate. I ducked back out and collected Gloria. ‘I’ll try to stay as close to you as I can,’ I told her. ‘It’s a madhouse in there.’
She paused on the threshold, took a swift look round the room and said, ‘You’ve obviously led a very sheltered life.’ As she spoke, someone spotted her. The cry rippled across the room and within seconds the youth of Blackburn were cheering and bellowing a ragged chorus of the theme song from Northerners. And then we were plunged into the throbbing embrace of the crowd.
I gave up trying to keep Gloria from the assassin’s knife after about twenty seconds when I realized that if I came between her and her public, I was the more likely candidate for a stiletto in the ribs. I wriggled backwards through the crowd and found a vantage point on the raised dais where the DJ was looking as cool as any man can who works for the local building society during the day. I was scanning the crowd automatically, looking for behaviour that didn’t fit in. Easier said than done, given the level of drunken revelry around me. But from what I could see of the people crammed into the Frog and Scrannage, the natives were definitely friendly, at least as far as Gloria/Brenda was concerned.
I watched my client, impressed with her energy and her professionalism. She crossed the room slower than a stoned three-toed sloth, with a word and an autograph for everyone who managed to squeeze alongside. She didn’t even seem to be sweating, the only cool person in the biggest sauna in the North West. When she finally made it to the dais, there was no shortage of hands to help her up. She turned momentarily and swiftly handed the DJ a cassette tape. ‘Any time you like, chuck. Just let it run.’
The lad slotted it into his music deck and the opening bars of the Northerners theme crashed out over the PA, the audience swaying along. The music faded down and Gloria went straight into what was clearly a well-polished routine. Half a dozen jokes with a local spin, a clutch of anecdotes about her fellow cast members then, right on cue, the music swelled up under her and she belted out a segued medley of ‘I Will Survive’, ‘No More Tears’, ‘Roll With It’ and ‘No Regrets’.
You had to be there.
The crowd was baying for more. They got it. ‘The Power of Love’ blasted our eardrums into the middle of next week. Then we were out of there. The car park was so cold and quiet I’d have been tempted to linger if I hadn’t had the client to consider. Instead I ran to the car and brought it round to the doorway, where she was signing the last few autographs. ‘Keep watching the show,’ she urged them as she climbed into the car.
As soon as we were out of the car park, she pulled off the wig with a noisy sigh. ‘What did you think?’
‘Anybody who seriously wanted to damage you could easily get close enough. Getting away might be harder,’ I said, half my attention on negotiating a brutal one-way system that could commit us to Chorley or Preston or some other fate worse than death if I didn’t keep my wits about me.
‘No,
