The House of Rumour A Novel

2

the female pope





When Anna asks you about your sister, you know it’s serious.

And this is your chance to make your confession. To tell the story of Jenny.

The sister you got rid of all those years ago.

Jenny was the creative one in the family, you say. We grew up in the suburbs, a nice upbringing but, you know, boring. Jenny always made things seem more exciting than they really were. She was a punk before anybody else we knew. She went to Slough Art School and then dropped out in the second term. She left home and moved to London.

You stop for a moment and glance across the table at her. Anna Guttridge. A harsh name for someone so pretty. You met her at Andy Begg’s party. You flirted with her and she seemed interested. You talked about the 1980s: it’s some sort of project of hers. You meet for a drink and it turns out that she’s a writer, researching a book on the New Romantic scene or something. And she knows about your sister. Usually Jenny gets written out of that story. Maybe because she never played the game with the press. And it’s her voice in your head, saying: Johnny, she’s a journalist, of course she seems interested in you, but she’s only interested in the story. You want to reply that you can’t help yourself, that you have to take every chance you can get. It’s not easy, you know. Jenny never foresaw how hard it would be for you. To get close to people.

And in order to get close to anyone you’ll eventually have to tell them what happened to your sister. What you did to her. And you hope, well, maybe this time they’ll understand. At least Anna seems interested in Jenny in the first place. And despite everything you do want to keep her memory alive. You owe her that much. You continue: in 1978, 1979, Jenny was moving around. She ended up squatting in this big terraced house in Islington. She was singing in a few short-lived punk bands.

Where did she get the name Pirate Jenny? Anna asks. You tell her that it came from this Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song about a servant girl in a port town who dreams the pirates are going to come and kill all her masters. Jenny used to say that our only honest sense of utopia is dreaming of a dystopia for our enemies, that we want vengeance as much as we want redemption. Anyway, she’d got hold of this buccaneer outfit that had been hired from Berman’s and Nathan’s in Shaftesbury Avenue and never taken back. This was a good two years before Vivienne Westwood had a runway show of her first pirate collection and well before Adam Ant started his swashbuckling act. Sartorially, Jenny was way ahead of the game. And in other ways, too.

How? Anna asks, and you watch the quizzical curl of her top lip, the blue-green eyes that seem slightly out of focus, a smatter of tiny freckles around her nose. You marvel at the beautiful curiosity of her face.

Well, you know, right after punk no one was sure what was going to happen. Jenny had plenty of ideas. Then Anna asks: and where were you around this time?

And there’s that voice again. The voice in your head telling you to be careful. Jenny’s voice. She’s still looking out for you, despite what you did to her. You’ve got to be careful how you tell her story. You don’t want to scare Anna off. You got away with it after all these years but you still remember those questioning looks you used to get when you first started going out after she disappeared. The looks you still get sometimes.

Oh, I was still living at home, you say. I used to go up and stay with Jenny some weekends. When she got the band together, you know, Black Freighter, I used to roadie for them.

This is not quite the truth but not exactly a lie either.

Black Freighter, right. Danny Osiris’s first band.

Oh no, you correct her. It was always Jenny’s band.

Sorry, it’s just—

I know. Danny’s such a big star now. But back then he was still Danny Ogungbe. It was odd because when they met they were living in the same street. Almost next door to each other. With a Nigerian father and a Polish mother, Danny was a working-class soul boy who still lived with his parents in a two-room flat with no bath and an outside toilet. That part of Islington was pretty squalid back then. That’s why there were so many squats in the area, you know, a lot of empty houses declared substandard by the council. Anyway, Danny was a bright kid and very good-looking – the combination of African features with pale skin and fair hair made him appear quite other-wordly. He’d grown up on the wrong side of the Essex Road but he was full of dreams. He’d done acting classes at the Anna Scher school and had taught himself to play jazz-funk on a battered old Fender copy. And he had this fantastic soul voice. He started going around to Jenny’s squat to practise. They both knew other musicians so a band began to take shape. It was Jenny’s idea at first, it was her project. The Black Freighter was a ship of fools come to liberate the world from reason. She’d got hold of a Minimoog, one of those early analogue synthesisers that played only one note at a time, which was actually ideal for Jenny. She was never that musical, you see. But she was full of ideas and she wrote fantastic lyrics. The idea was to be adventurous without being self-indulgent. They were plugged into that post-punk, year-zero feel.

But Black Freighter didn’t last very long, did it?

No. Jenny always wanted to be experimental. Danny, well, he had his eye on the main chance. Who can blame him?

So was it musical differences that split the band up?

That old cliché. No, it wasn’t that. Jenny and Danny carried on writing together even after the band fell apart. That bit always worked, you know, his music, her lyrics. No, it was in the attitude that they parted company.

The attitude? Annie asks. She has thick, dark eyebrows that intersect in this fantastic frown. And you wonder about her attitude. She’s intrigued by you, you can feel it. But maybe she suspects something.

Yeah, the attitude, you repeat. Jenny was more into a sort of performance art aesthetic. She became part of the gender-bender scene, except she took it one step further. Boy George and Marilyn had this simple gestalt, you know, boy looks like girl. Jenny liked to dress so that no one could tell if she was a boyish girl or a girlish boy. She wanted to keep them guessing. The pirate has no boundaries, she used to say.

That’s cool.

You look straight into her turquoise eyes and watch the inky pupils dilate. You search for some sort of signal from her. Like a lovelorn teenager. But then you are a late starter. You’ve had a sort of second adolescence in your thirties. At an age when most people are ready for a mid-life crisis, you’re still stuck in puberty.

Tell me about that time, she says, holding your stare.

Why are you interested in this stuff?

Well, it’s fascinating, I guess.

And it strikes you that maybe she thinks you’re gay. It’s a common enough mistake: people see the goatee, check the slightly fey demeanour. Maybe her interest in you is just a faghag thing.

Yeah, well, Jenny could get extreme about gender politics but she was an idealist really. She dreamt of a world where none of it would matter. She spent a lot of time in the clubs, you know, Billy’s and the Blitz. The beginning of that New Romantic thing was fabulous.

And that’s when she ended up in the David Bowie video?

You laugh out loud.

What? she demands.

And you love the way she can smile and frown at the same time. And you want to tell her everything.

Look, Anna, you say. About gender politics.

You stop. You feel that you’re about to make a complete fool of yourself. You know you’ve got to be careful. If she finds out too early it could blow everything. You stand up.

What is it?

You want to say, but you’re not ready yet.

I’ve got to go, you tell her.

Johnny, whatever’s the matter?

You start walking and she follows you out of the bar. Outside on the street you turn to her.

Look, this is really stupid. I know you’re only really interested in Jenny but—

But what?

I’m interested in you, Anna.

She smiles.

Well, the feeling’s mutual.

Yeah? You can hardly believe it.

Yeah.

And she kisses you gently on the lips. You get all excited but you know you’ve got to take your time over this.

Then meet me here tomorrow night, you tell her. And I’ll tell you the story about the David Bowie video.



The next night you pick up where you’d left off.

It was a complete disaster, you say.

What happened?

Bowie had come down to Blitz one night, unannounced. Can you imagine? There was an uproar. Every single person in that club would have had his poster on their bedroom wall as a kid. He’d been sneaked in around the back and was upstairs in a private room. Everyone wanted to go up and see him. Especially when word got round that he was looking for people to appear in his next video. Jenny was in with Steve Strange, you know, who ran Blitz. He’d already been picked, so she managed to blag her way in. It had been decided that the costumes should be space-age ecclesiastical: dark flowing robes and gothic headgear. Jenny got into a conversation about Gnosticism with Bowie. She told him how she knew that his song ‘Station to Station’ was about the Kabbalah, and mentioned some other occult influences in his work, the Crowley references and so on. He was impressed, if a little wary. She got chosen to be in the video.

The pick-up was for six o’clock the following morning outside the Park Lane Hilton. The club didn’t close till two-thirty so Jenny just took a bit more speed and kept going until dawn. So, she was a bit wired when the coach turned up to take them to the location, which was on a beach in Southend. Bowie was in a pierrot costume, walking along the shoreline, followed by Steve Strange, Jenny, and two other girls in their robes with a bulldozer coming up in the rear. It was a simple enough set-up but it needed to be precise so people had to concentrate and follow their marks. Jenny was very talkative, from the excitement, the lack of sleep, the amphetamines, and, well, she was going a little bit mad. At first she was charming, you know, raising the energy of the shoot. Clever, too, she talked about the costumes and their meanings. She started to bang on about archetypes, saying Bowie was the Fool in his jester’s motley and she was the Female Pope in her ceremonial gown.

She soon began to get tiresome. In between takes she insisted on engaging Bowie in an intense conversation that he clearly wasn’t keen on. Jenny had no idea how annoying her behaviour was becoming. The final straw was talking to Bowie about the notorious incident at Victoria Station in 1976, when it was alleged that he had made a Nazi salute. Well, he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of that. But in some mad way Jenny thought she was reassuring him, like she was doing him a favour by bringing it up. She announced rather grandly to him that she knew that it hadn’t been a fascist gesture he was making, that it was the sign of Baphomet.

The sign of Baphomet?

Yeah, it’s some hermetic thing. You raise your hand towards heaven, then you lower it to point to the earth. It’s supposed to connect the two. It means: as above, so below, or something like that. From Kether to Malkuth, she kept chanting. There she was, manically demonstrating this sacred sieg heil to David Bowie on a beach in Southend. Well, that was it. She was hustled off the set and paid off with the fifty-pound fee. She never actually appeared in the video, though her memory distorts on that one. She was convinced it was her up there, and when ‘Ashes to Ashes’ came out, she even told everyone she had helped with the choreography. There’s this bit where Steve Strange lifts his arm and makes this bowing movement. But it isn’t the sign of Baphomet. He’s moving the hem of his robe so it doesn’t get caught in the shovel of the bulldozer.

She smiles. You check out how she looks at you. That flicker in her eyes. You’re sure now that she really does find you attractive. You do look good, after all. Pretty more than handsome, but that’s probably what she’s into. It’s just your confidence that’s the problem.

After that Jenny started acting really weird, you say.

What happened? she asks.

She started wandering around in a trance in her high-priestess drag. Taking too much speed, not sleeping, making scenes.

And it all catches up with you for a second.

It was, you give a little shrug as if trying to shake something off. Embarrassing.

You notice that Anna Guttridge has this look of concern on her face. You know, you can play this for sympathy but you can’t help but feel a kind of guilt. Which is stupid.

I tried to talk to her, you say. I tried to get her to calm down, but she wouldn’t listen to me, not back then.

And the voice in your head adds: oh, but she listened to you in the end, didn’t she, Johnny boy?

She told people that she’d been consecrated in a Gnostic Mass, performed by the Holy Fool before a juggernaut god. She declared that she was the Female Pope, come to save humanity.

What’s with this Female Pope?

Well, you know, there was supposed to be a woman pope. Sometime in the eleventh century. Pope Joan.

Wow.

Yeah. And you can imagine how Jenny loved that idea. She came up with this mad belief system of her own. She called it matrianarchy. It was all about the reversal of power. The Female Pope was like a direct assault on patriarchy, attacking it at its highest point. The world had to be turned upside down, she insisted, then we’d have utopia.

Sounds interesting.

And suddenly you feel angry. At Jenny. At yourself.

Oh, yes, it was interesting. There is a catch in your voice. It was interesting when she was picked up babbling incoherently to the ducks in Regent’s Park at four o’clock in the morning. It was interesting when I found her in a pool of her own vomit after she’d OD’ed in the squat.

Another pause.

It must have been hard for you.

Yeah.

And you realise now how much grief you still feel about Jenny. It was so clear at the time. Rational. You want to explain to Anna how it all made perfect sense. That after Jenny’s last suicide attempt failed she asked for your help. And you promised that you would help her do it properly. But you can’t tell Anna that. Not yet.

You were close to her? she asks you.

Yeah, you say with a smile, trying to make sense of the idea. But she was far away from me.

How do you mean?

I was always somewhere in the background. Her shadow, if you like.

And what is it like now?

What?

Now that she’s, you know—

Officially missing?

Yeah.

Well, Jenny never did anything completely officially. Not even her disappearing act.

Were you jealous of her?

Oh no. If anything it was the other way round.

You hope that Anna will be able to understand what happened. You need a bit of time to unravel it all for her. To unroll the scroll. You decide to tell her about Danny. Everybody wants to know about Danny Osiris.

It was Danny who helped her through the worst of those bad times, you say. He’d got himself a manager and a solo record contract. All that street credibility and bohemian chaos had never really appealed to him. He’d seen enough squalor as a kid. He wanted real success. And he knew that he needed Jenny to help him get there. They spent the first winter of the new decade writing what would become the Up Above, Down Below album. Musically, Danny knew exactly what he was doing; I mean, the album sounds pretty middle of the road now but it was so, I don’t know, calculated. It’s the lyrics that make it special. They have a deep romantic melancholia that was way beyond him. And there’s a tone and vibration in his voice that he got from her. Before that it was all technique. She taught him how to sing like a man, the real sadness of that sound. He got something else as well. It’s hard to explain in any terms other than the metaphysical. This will sound slightly ridiculous.

Try me.

Danny needed someone to sell his soul to. See? I told you. When I say this, people think that I mean selling out, but that never bothered him. Danny was clever enough to know that there was going to be two types of eighties – you know, the squats, the riots, the warehouse parties, and then the yuppies, the big bang and selling off the family silver. And he was sharp enough to know it was going to be a one-horse race. He knew all about compromise, but this was more than that. It was an energy he needed. A magical energy.

He believed in magic?

Oh, they both did. Jenny always said she merely respected the Western esoteric tradition but there was plenty of ritual and hocus-pocus with those two. I mean, pop music is so tricky, so seemingly insubstantial. A good recording session is always a bit like a seance, you’re channelling something. And when it works it’s like casting a spell. Danny definitely needed Jenny’s energy. I mean, he was having his own problems with identity.

Really?

I suppose you want to know all about that.

No. Not really.

Oh, come on. The enigmatic Danny Osiris. The press are always speculating, you know: is he or isn’t he?

I’m not really interested in that, honestly.

Well, most people are. Of course Danny knew, when he became a big star, especially when he moved to LA, that the important thing was to keep a sense of mystique. America is essentially a puritan nation. Besides, the great artist who’s a little bit repressed, that’s always going to be more interesting than someone who’s completely open about themselves. It’s all about dreams, isn’t it? Hidden desires. Jenny always wanted more than that.

And what did happen to Jenny?

Oh, well, that is a mystery. But anyway, most people want to know about Danny. He’s the one that became the superstar, after all.

I’m more interested in Jenny.

Well, they parted company, her and Danny. Sometime in the mid-1980s. On Tottenham Court Road, as it happened. They were both walking past that Church of Scientology place, you know, where those disciples hustle outside and try to get you to go in for a free personality test. Well, they both went in. Just a laugh. Or so Jenny thought. Turns out Danny took their bullshit seriously. Signed up on the spot.

That was the end of it. Jenny thought it was all just too ridiculous, while Danny didn’t need Pirate Jenny any more. He didn’t need the Female Pope. He’d found a more established religion. Always had an instinct for the main chance, Danny, even when it came to the paranormal. And it turned out to be very useful for him in the long run. Especially when he got to LA. Fantastic for contacts in the business, and especially when he started getting acting work. And now with these rumours about Danny’s sexuality, Scientology’s been a kind of protective network. Anyway, back in 1987, Danny goes off to the States, and Jenny disappears somewhere else.

You really don’t know where she is?

Nope. That’s enough of Jenny for now. Let’s talk about Johnny. And Anna.

She smiles. And you have this happy feeling of anticipation. You can get to know her better. Then you’ll be able to tell her the whole story.

There is just one thing, though, she says.

What?

There’s someone else Jenny knew then that I’m really interested in.

Oh yeah? You feel a sudden stab of dread from somewhere. Who?

Vita Lampada.

Oh.

You try to keep calm, not to react, but she’s bound to see the panic in your eyes.

Vita, yeah, you mumble. Well, Jenny knew her, yes.

And you think: oh Christ, she already knows. So she knows all about what happened to Jenny. For all this time she’s been playing some sort of game with you. You force a laugh and try to make light of it all.

What do you want to know about that old tranny?

You try to smile but you know. She’s on to you.

She died in suspicious circumstances, says Anna.

So they say.

And Jenny was close to her near the end.

I don’t know about that.

Don’t you?

Anna’s curiosity has narrowed into an inquisitive squint.

I don’t understand, you protest.

She smiles and her face opens up once more.

Look, Johnny, she says with a sigh. I should have told you before. I’m doing a story on Vita Lampada.

I thought this was about the New Romantics.

That’s a part of it, of course. But it’s Vita’s story I’m interested in.

So you know what happened to Jenny.

No, I—

Come on, you knew all along. And I actually thought you were interested in me.

What?

I thought you wanted to get to know me. Instead you’ve just used me for your own purposes.

No. I really like you, Johnny.

I’m just part of your research, you mean. I suppose this has been a lot of fun, hasn’t it? Digging up the past. My past. But I do exist now, you know.

What?

She’s looking all wide-eyed and innocent but you don’t buy it.

Whatever you might think, you tell her, Johnny is a real person.

Of course he is, I mean, you are.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is just to be me?

Johnny—

You get up from the table and stare down at her.

A lot of people say that Pope Joan didn’t exist, you tell her. You know, modern scholars, they dismiss the whole Female Pope story as a medieval legend. A crazy idea dreamt up to ridicule the papacy. Or maybe a feminist rewriting of history. Wishful thinking. And what’s wrong with that? The fact is that there is no record of a Pope John the twentieth. The succession goes straight from the nineteenth to the twenty-first. So there is a gap there. There’s always a gap in history. And that’s where some of us live.

Anna Guttridge gazes up at you, bewildered. Like she has no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t care. You turn around and walk out with the sincere hope that you’ll never see her again.

You get back to your flat and you’re still full of anger and self-doubt. What really hurts is that you’ve been made to feel false, even though it is you who have been deceived. You’ve been made to feel guilty and that’s unforgivable. There’s a message on the answerphone from Anna, asking you to call her. You ignore it. You’re like some stupid kid. Jenny would never have fallen for this sort of bullshit. She would have seen right through that scheming bitch, you tell yourself. But you? You sigh. You remind yourself that you’re a late starter. And you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

You pick up the phone and call Danny Osiris in Los Angeles. It’s three in the afternoon there, and Danny sounds terrible, scarcely articulate. You ask him whether he still has the document that Vita stole from Marius Trevelyan. He says yes and you tell him to find a safe place for it.

Then you try to relax. You remember what your therapist said: that for somebody to love the person inside of you, you have to have a clear and centred sense of yourself that doesn’t depend on anybody else. You have to be strong there, to know who you are. And you can allow yourself to miss Jenny. You know, getting rid of the body, that was easy. Burying the rest of her, now that was the hard part. You cry a little and it makes you feel better. You manage to get some sleep.

You wake up feeling stronger. You realise that it doesn’t matter what Anna knows about you. Or what anybody else knows or suspects. You can deal with it. There’s another message from Anna. This time you call her back.

You arrange to go around to her place in the evening. You dress casually, but carefully. T-shirt and loose-fit jeans, leather boots, leather jacket, tough-guy stuff. Butch drag, as Jenny would have called it. But you mean to mean business. And you’re packing something special. A little surprise for Anna.

And you take around a bottle of red wine. You know you’ll need a drink. Anna shows you into her little one-bedroom flat; you open the wine. You both get a little drunk. There’s this tension in the air. A buzz of potential charging up.

I don’t appreciate the way that I’ve been used, you say. It’s humiliating.

I said I’m sorry.

The way you flirted with me. What was that? A journalist’s trick to get information?

No. Well, not entirely.

Still playing games.

Why can’t you believe that I might actually like you?

Oh, please. I mean, you know, don’t you? About me.

About you?

About Jenny and me. This ridiculous brother and sister act I’ve been playing.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I find that hard to believe. Anyway, you wanted to know about Vita Lampada.

Only if you want to talk about it.

Yeah, well. That poor queen got involved in some serious stuff. Vita was a strange one. She was part of the New Romantic scene but always looked out of place. She was like an old-school tranny in the middle of all these fashionable gender benders. She used to get a lot of stick. Jenny liked her, respected her. They had a fellow feeling, you know? They both felt that they didn’t really belong. Jenny always said that she was stateless, and that’s what made her a pirate. But Vita and her were travelling together. Just in opposite directions. They met halfway. Vita had had an interesting life. A bit of a con artist, but clever with it. She had a great imagination. She was a fantasist really. I mean, she loved the form, you know, fantasy, science fiction, anything other-worldly. It was where she felt at home, I guess.

Is that why she liked the New Romantics?

The funny thing was she said near the end that she knew what Spandau Ballet meant. Robert Elms, the writer, he’d come up with the name of the band after seeing some graffiti on a wall in Germany. But Vita reckoned she knew what it meant. It was something she’d learnt from that Secret Service guy she picked up.

Marius Trevelyan?

Yeah. Silly cow tricked up this old punter in Shepherd Market and stole his briefcase. Turns out he’s high up in British Intelligence. Well, she was really in trouble after that. Anyway, she had heard him say something about Spandau. It was that prison in Berlin where they put all the big Nazis that they didn’t hang. Trevelyan told her that it was like a dance.

What did he mean?

Cold War stuff, I suppose. Spandau was the last institution governed by the Four-Power Authority – you know, the system that the different occupying forces used in Germany after the war. Control of the prison would rotate. That was the ballet, apparently. It made the place an important point of contact between East and West. But look, Vita might have been making all this up. Her imagination could be very vivid. She had this document that had been in the briefcase, some sort of manuscript. She gave it to Jenny to look after.

What happened to it?

Well, after Vita committed suicide, or was killed or whatever, Jenny got scared. She knew she had to get rid of this thing. So she sent it to Danny. He was in the States by then and he had the resources to put it somewhere safe.

And then Jenny disappeared.

Yeah.

Don’t you think that’s suspicious?

Oh come on, Anna, you know what happened to Jenny.

No, Johnny, I don’t.

You look her in the eyes and you know she’s telling the truth.

And you laugh out loud.

Christ, you’re not much of an investigative journalist, are you?

She doesn’t know what to say. Her face opens up with that beautiful curiosity once more. At last you’ve got the upper hand and you know what you have to do.

Do you want to know? you ask her.

She nods. Looks kind of scared. Maybe it’s the expression on your face. You must be looking a bit wild about the eyes.

Come here, you tell her.

You’re standing close together in the room, both of you feeling this intense nervous energy. But you’re in control now and she’s staring at you, bewildered. Fear in her eyes. And desire, you’re sure of it.

You kiss her. She lets out a little gasp as you pull back to look her in the eyes once more. Her hand comes up and strokes your chest gently. You take hold of it. Press it flat against your heart.

You see, you murmur, almost to yourself. I am real.

You kiss her again and let go of her hand. It snakes around to hold your back. You feel her breasts push against you, her hips shifting slightly, rubbing softly against yours.

Wait, you say, and push her away from you.

You pull your T-shirt over your head.

Look, you say, baring your chest to her, showing her the horizontal scars along the lower edge of your pectorals.

You see, Jenny got tired of trying to change the world. So she changed herself.

You unbuckle your belt and pull your jeans and boxer shorts down.

And she became the person she had always been. Me. Here, you say, taking hold of your penis. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I mean, aesthetically.

She’s glaring at it, eyes wide.

I’m very proud of it. It’s my favourite one. Custom built, you know. I had three fittings at this place in Amsterdam. Here, have a closer look.

And you gently detach it. It fits so neatly and you can hardly notice the extra-lightweight transparent harness that lightly girdles your hips.

Cyberskin, you tell her. A blend of five different silicone materials with a flexible rod at its core. Its even got an internal urinary tube so I can piss with it standing up if I want to. I didn’t want genital reconstruction surgery, well, not until they can come up with something you can f*ck with properly. This, you say, holding it up, well, it’s an improvement on nature. It’s real enough. Like the rest of me.

I was Jenny, you say. Now I’m Johnny. Now love me for what I am.