That’s what I thought it was—said Luda, beginning to wane.

  I had no intention of stopping then, and I haven’t changed my mind tonight; let’s say you’d found yourself sat in the audience and you didn’t believe in ghosts or magic; you might decide you were witnessing a different kind of dénouement.

  The Phantom’s committed an unforgivable crime but what’s he supposed to do? He’s a tortured artist with self-esteem issues! He can’t help the hand he was dealt! Everyone else seems to get what they want, except for him! He’s only trying to express his pain, to make a story of his inner turmoil, instead somehow screwing everything up in the process. The Phantom’s merely human. We forgive the special man his excesses, we permit the rock star to act out the compulsions of his id. We’ve come on what they like to call a journey with the Phantom, applauding his desperate attempts to keep it all together, to make it right, while he’s getting it all wrong, sinking deeper into sin and psychosis.

  We know how it works—the show must go on, after all—and so we watch, wincing, as he tries to keep the wheels of the production turning by taking on the traits of the actors he’s killed, until he can’t be everyone, he can’t go on anymore, deafened by the clamor of competing voices, the carousel of contending recriminations in his head. He struggles to cope until his mind just squeezes down and flattens under the pressure, shattering along brittle fractures at the slightest stress, the least criticism.

  Luda nodded slowly, beautifully, as if nodding had been invented to show off her graceful neck.

  I thought that as well—she said.

  In the final scene of The Phantom of the Pantomime, we’re watching nothing more or less than a human personality flaking away. A silly old man dying in his own firework light. The Phantom is literally shedding scraps of himself, dissociating as he goes, leaving behind the husks of the people he’s tried to imitate.

  It might all be psychological—I said. He literally loses his mind—but we see it as symbolic. The last bit where they’re all singing together and it’s the pantomime that’s real?

  The Phantom can never escape the final chorus. He’s doomed to fail to get it right at rehearsal yet here in the spot on opening night, his performance is flawless when it matters most—the farewell, the curtain call that’s no more, no less than an idiot’s return to the locked ward where he belongs, high on Thorazine or slumbering through a pointy ECG.

  So, it’s a fairy story—she said. Then it’s a ghost story. Then it’s a detective story, then it’s a serious drama about mental health. Fuck’s sake!

  How I loved her, and how I loved having Luda around! Thinking about it now, I wish everything had been different.

  More like all at once—I clarified. It’s a musical too. There’re songs and dances and romance. A good story comes with a sprinkle of everything, like real life. I mean, doesn’t it? We’ve always known it was this way. We’re born understanding the rules. It’s why we love camp and theater. It’s why we’re drawn to the Glamour’s candle flame. It’s what turns a roll of Lycra into a starfield of a dress and makes hot-ass novae of even the dimmest, loneliest lights.

  I still don’t understand how he can die and then come back—she said, gnawing like a bobcat on this major bone of contention. Is he Jesus as well?

  Jesus?—I said. Where did you get that from? I took the script from her hand, swiftly flipping to the end pages to make sense of what she was on about.

  You’ve got all the pages in the wrong place—a hundred and five comes before a hundred and ten—and I pointed to the page numbers to prove it, before reshuffling them into traditional numerical sequence and passing back the draft.

  Doesn’t matter—she said obstinately. Is he dead?—and I nodded emphatically, certain of that much.

  He doesn’t come back—I said. Change the subject.

  That’s when Luda pounced.

  Tell me about them—she said quite innocuously, or so she thought. Your group—the Troupe.

  I thought, if it gets her off my back about the Phantom…

  * * *

  —

  The Troupe started out as a defiantly idiosyncratic “indie” band playing upbeat angular electropop that sugared the pill of pungent lyrics inspired by Joe Orton plays, Alan Bennett, and Morrissey. I flattered myself as a hotter, younger, more alternative Danny La Rue, updating the Grand Dame’s all-round entertainer appeal via family-friendly fetish wear and cultish outsider humor.

  When I came out, aged twenty-eight, as nonbinary, genderqueer, or whatever they’d call my fraction of a degree, my slender wedge of the Gender Spectrum these days, the boys in the band simply accommodated my new look into our repertoire. With that unique newsworthy ingredient to establish our originality, we really took off. The surreal skits between the songs got longer, more elaborate, and more outrageous and we found ourselves ever more popular as a result.

  Soon, as they say, fast-forwarding through the dismal early years of seclusion, experimentation, and disenchantment that we mined for fossil fuel to power the Troupe’s success, soon we were selling out and selling out night after night at the Festival. Then, like eager bees to our sweet jangling pollen, came the TV offers. We chose Channel 6 because only they were willing to guarantee total creative and artistic freedom, which wasn’t true of course but sounded convincing enough at the time. Contracts were signed like post-modern masterpieces. Souls were never sold, I maintain, only rented. We traded in spiritual Airbnbs the Evil One could hire for orgies and black masses on condition the keys were returned, and the place was left relatively tidy at chucking-out time.

  Luda handed me a steaming mug with #1 DAUGHTER printed on the side and perched beside me as I fired up the computer and googled “the Troupe,” sitting back smugly to watch page after page appearing on-screen.

  You did ask—I said, blaming her for this demoralizing plunge into my archive. I hate the past. I have no pangs of nostalgia for better days. I don’t want to be young then, I want to be young now.

  You were famous—she said, hoarse and lamplit, inching closer with the sharply indrawn breath of a doubting nun perceiving Christ in the shadows of the convent rockery.

  The ragged bitten edge on every word when Luda spoke was all I needed to hear; her vocal cords, protesting at their daily Olympian workout, cried out for the divine salve, the performer’s friend that is the infusion of lemon, ginger, and honey in boiling water.

  Is that you? Luda leaned in close to the screen, then turned to me incredulous—You look HOT!

  I knew that. As I hope to have made clear, the fact that I’d once looked hot haunted my every waking hour, but to hear it said in present tense was very heaven. Tragically, the moment was blighted by the smell. I couldn’t help but notice, now that her size 8 feet were planted on the cushion, how the soles of her tights gave off a rich and rank boys’ gymnasium whiff.

  We were a bit like the Monkees—I ventured. The Goodies? Luda waggled her head uncomprehendingly. The Young Ones? The Mighty Boosh? Kids in the Hall? Nothing registered. I’d discovered an immutable law of nature that stated any cultural reference prior to last Tuesday would be squandered on Luda.

  We played ourselves as an unlucky boy band called the Troupe. I carried on, reducing our shtick to its molecular basics. There were five of us, a rock-and-roll kid gang playing out weekly surreal and satirical misadventures in a pop-culture fantasia populated by down-and-out vampires, alien cannibals, supermodel succubae, and ghosts with body issues.

  The Orton-inflected running gag saw us so desperate to achieve success, we would try anything: cheat, steal, lie, betray one another, and even murder to get a shot at the ever-elusive big time, which led us into the kinds of bugged-out scenarios our show relied upon. It was all played for laughs, and we portrayed ourselves as relatable grotesques whose schemes tended to end in disaster, so no one went away hating us.

  Luda had located a celebrated sketch we’d done as a parody of those blood donor commercials where eager volunteers rolled up their sleeves to do their bit.

  PLEASE GIVE BLOOD—

  Sad music scored poignant images of a group of underprivileged-looking men and women in capes and tuxedos, long white dresses, huddled in the cold around a brazier.

  VAMPIRES ARE HUNGRY TOO THIS CHRISTMAS!

  Falling foul of a new generation’s changing fashions, our entire oeuvre was later reevaluated, possibly accurately, as tasteless unfunny dross.

  As if conceived to add fuel to the critics’ bonfire of condemnation, one of my regular characters was Fanny Bathory, a withdrawn Goth girl with the power to manipulate any conversation into the same frank and depressing discussion of which from a list of gruesome suicide techniques she should choose to end it all.

  Fanny is surrounded by funny, optimistic, compassionate friends, but as the sketches progress and accumulate, every supportive comrade winds up driven by the nihilistic dreariness of Bathory’s death-obsessed monologues to take their own precious lives, each time landing a different and more elaborately cruel punch line.

  I can see how it might come across as tactless in hindsight. Different days. It doesn’t even sound especially amusing when you say it back, but it went down a treat in a less sensitive time.

  You had me in that same dress!—Luda exclaimed. You can fit in it!

  She’d scrolled through pictures of me to settle on a publicity shot where I’m serving sexy schoolgirl pink vinyl realness, sucking on a massive rainbow-frosted spiral lollipop and corkscrewing my blond bunches around my index finger as Jennifer Freckles, a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth sociopathic sweetie-pie. This drug-addled disco bimbo was responsible for the spiritual cannibalism of everyone drawn into her web; in a backstory we only ever hinted at, “Jennifer” would turn out to be an alien crab posing as human to attract and devour its prey.

  With a yelp, Luda recognized the same neon-dawn-pink rubber gymslip she’d modeled for our ill-fated party night. Like her, I looked indecently good in it, Or I did, decades ago.

  Boys had my posters on their wall—girls too—I said ruefully. I have to admit, it was something I’d heard rather than witnessed for myself, but we did a roaring trade in pinups, so at least let me fantasize about hordes of troubled youth pleasuring themselves to a self-interrogating climax with me forever blowing taboo bubble-gum kisses from their bedroom walls.

  She wanted to know where, if I was so great, it had all gone wrong. Who or what, which one of us had sharply tapped the hammer, broken the safety glass, and ended the Troupe, and in what emergency, what last-ditch attempt to stop the gravy train shearing off the rails had our breakup occurred?

  It’s never any one thing—I told her, but there was no escaping the fact my understanding of what was happening was couched in metaphor and high bullshit. It went to my head and my head couldn’t handle the load.

  The media began to focus on Luci LaBang at the Troupe’s expense, that’s all it was. They were each brilliant in their different ways, but it soon became apparent I was doing the lioness’s share of the interviews and the photo shoots.

  It was Luci LaBang declaring war on fixed gender identity in French Vogue, vamping for Vice photo spreads on Alphabet City corners, sprawled in shredded PVC and black lipstick, in gritty SoHo loft conversion monochrome for the pages of Iniquity.

  My rise to prominence especially upset our gifted lead guitarist, pretty-boy heartthrob and chief scriptwriter Jeremy Painter. We’d been friends from years before I came out and I have to say he was very supportive, especially after seeing me done up for the first time that night I turned up at his door with a bottle of pink champagne in my hand and pharmacological starbursts crazing my stare.

  He’d been so kind and understanding as I released cataracts of upheaval and guilt and relief. All it took was that warm encouraging hug, that kiss on my forehead as he put me in a taxi home at 4 A.M., and I was tumbling down love’s Alice well.

  I’m surprised we managed to keep our hands off each other for as long as we did. We let the sexual tension squeeze down to a volatile explosive pressure for years as, alongside the other three, we fused into a single five-headed, twenty-limbed Voltron power suit to tirelessly build the act and conquer the world.

  So it remained until I was nearly thirty-five, looking my very best if I may say so on account of sharpening up my drag to unheard-of levels of artistry. Straddling the divide between bimbo and MILF, lean and whetted like a greyhound, driven by jealousy, arrogance, and rosé bubbles, I couldn’t wait a single second longer to push my luck with my best friend.

  In the ensuing effervescent chaos of popping corks and popping pills, Jeremy and I were whisked into the whirlpool of a passionate affair during a weekend publicity trip to Berlin. Me in my insufferable femme fatale phase, single-mindedly scraping the moral barnacles from the newly gleaming hull of my Ship of Theseus.

  Since that wild night in a Reeperbahn gay club we vowed we’d never repeat, I now had something to prove to myself and became obsessed with the idea of “stealing” Jeremy from his pretty girlfriend, Chloe. I wanted him to renounce her like Peter renounced Christ, to disavow the straight world and join me in a shifting jet-set delusion of first nights, fashion shows, and international sex crime.

  We talked of running away together, slipping the traces of fame and expectation. We would travel the world, agents of chaos, harbingers of a new world order of polysexual insurrection, drugs, and gender dysphoria!

  Naturally, none of it went as smoothly as our well-oiled dreams do.

  The weekend we spent together was spectacular I have to say. Jeremy, the Troupe’s heartthrob, fed me strawberries dipped in champagne and in a crescendo of cheesy perversion that was my idea, I enacted a lap dance wearing lingerie I’d helped him choose that day as a gift for his girlfriend. On my knees between his thighs, tearing at the studs and the zip with both hands, tugging his boxers down to release his erection into my face with the force of a homicidal Jack-in-the-Box, I knelt at the gates of Heaven.

  Am I better than her?—I repeated, until eventually, on a witches’ brew of powders, lascivious disinhibition, and a touchingly genuine momentary desire to indulge my squalid fantasies, he admitted I was as he erupted down my throat and gasped—yes, yes, yes!

  After that precious fifty-six hours of sexual betrayal, he wouldn’t speak to me.

  I turned up at his place the next weekend, mascara dribbling down my blushed and bronzed cheekbones as I used tears to draw a picture on my face of my helpless devotion.

  He kicked me out, literally stuck his big army surplus boot in my red-vinyl-varnished arse and thrust me back through the door onto the street—we were friends, he kept saying. We only worked as friends. This could never happen again.

  It happened two more times after that—the last a scribbled inspired sketch of what we might have been if he was less timid and I was less unbearable.

  What might have been the once upon a time of a fairy tale to end them all soon revealed its true nature as the opening dramatic hook in the Troupe’s final chapter.

  In the sizzling afterburn of our magnesium flare liaison, the people who knew us were rendered blind and speechless. Chloe complained of Jeremy’s increased aggression in bed. The weight of words unspoken began to throw the whole Troupe off balance; the act wobbling at first, correcting a so-far-reliable internal gyroscope to account for the extra baggage for at least as long as we could before the inevitable fatal tumble off our axis.

  Chloe took Jeremy back on the same understanding that lips would remain forever zipped and although they never went through with the marriage, and she’d dumped him soon after for a shadow cabinet minister, I’d heard there were two bright, brilliant kids now, so at least one prong of our throuple’s trident contrived to make a successful stab at a happy ending.

  As we Troupers swaddled in layers of protective emotional armor to face the winter of our careers together, the light drained out of our days, and where warmth had been there came a creeping irreversible frost.

  The Troupe played a few variations on the theme where I’d come on as a boy and the rest of the gang would be in drag, but it didn’t stick. Our audience had made up its mind what it wanted from us; any deviation from the Platonic ideal was immediately rejected until nothing we did could ever match all the things we’d done.

  Or so we told ourselves; the truth is that whatever Jeremy and I had incited, whatever chain reaction we’d set in motion, the effect was to undo the chemical bonds that held the Troupe together.

  Which one is he?—said Luda scrolling through pictures from when we were young, while my mood darkened to indigo and beyond, into the infra-somber ranges of the emotional spectrum.

  Before I had a chance to point out Jeremy, she got there first—I’d fuck him—she said with confidence.

  Well, I did—I said ruefully. I took the hit, so you’d never have to.

  So, you don’t speak to any of them now—Luda pressed, even though she could tell I’d had enough of this.

  Fuck no—I said. By the end, Jeremy and the others were collaborating without my input on sketches that expressed everything they wouldn’t say to my face, skits powered by the black residues of their pressurized anger that hinged on what a sly, devious, and manipulative bitch I’d always been. Starry-eyed and so full of myself I was no longer qualified to imagine how much these people I loved could hate me, I recited my caustic lines, oblivious to the burns.

  When I realized what the Troupe’s infamous “Your Immediate Attention” skit was about, I was mortified. The last thing I wanted was to provoke such negative feelings in people I cared about.

  I took the opportunity to go my own way and never really spoke to any of them again after that.

  You got famous and they didn’t—Luda said presenting her own blank appraisal. They were jealous—reducing all those years of reproach and spoiled circumstance into a T-shirt slogan. I loved her for that too.