Wouldn’t you say?

  If you still can’t be certain after all we’ve endured together whether the person talking to you is even human or not, who are you to judge anything, let alone me, let alone a mind like Luda’s?

  Nevertheless, as the jury, good and true, vox populi, it’s up to you to make a critical decision shortly, partially based on everything you’ve just heard.

  If it’s any help at all, as a rule of thumb, I’ve found you’ll never erase a blank. No matter how hard you rub, it only gets blanker.

  The trouble with me is I’ve always aspired to be what’s left when the Invisible Man relaxes, takes off his fedora and his Ray-Bans before unwinding the bandaged shape into a discarded bog roll bundle on the lino.

  That unfettered absence, that unlimited potential!

  That’s why, when you scrape away the slap and ditch the wig, when you unzip the dresses, unbuckle the heels, and roll off the stockings, you’ll find there was never anything else.

  There was only ever drag.

  Which brings me to the concluding stroke before I face the critics, the ladies and gentlemen and others of the jury—a single application of Crystal Clear Shinelighter.

  This last immaculate dab, the painter’s signature, leaves a bright white highlight on the tip of my nose. It manifests as a spark from nowhere, a vacuum fluctuation in some imagined initial source, the ignition glow of the primordial atom.

  The makeup’s ace: For now, this version of my preserved face in its glass cabinet is the one to beat.

  The spiral galaxy, the starry involutions tensing in my cheekbone when I raise one corner of my mouth then the other, make me feel immortal. It’s too bad about the backslash crack across the mirror’s façade.

  This is how we disappear…

  * * *

  —

  There’s another reveal I saved till now: The kitten who died had a four-legged litter mate, a twin we rescued at the same time. Her name was Babes, and she lived and was loved for almost 140 cat years.

  It wouldn’t be panto if she hadn’t!

  * * *

  —

  Together then, let’s conjure the setting one more time in outline: a backstage dressing room where the scintillating world of showbiz meets Death! Feather boas trailed seductively through cold bony knuckles. Clothes hangers twisted into butchers’ hooks. A star of Satan on the dressing room door. Stage directions marked out with half-eaten body parts. Is that lipstick or is it spilled blood, or lines of fire? Is the fizz laced with cyanide or something much worse from the Dark Web, something to deaden the senses, to kill the nerves so the flames feel far, far away and a long time ago, breathtakingly chill against bubbling, blistering skin?

  Disgraced TV has-been Luci LaBang abstracted to smoke and tallow in her Sunday best! Case closed and padlocked.

  Luda, by this time missing, presumed shallow-graving it up on the peat bogs, would evaporate into the dead of morning, never again to be seen. She would make her way back to Purgatory, or Mystery City, for debriefing by Flat Police, awaiting her next mission, her latest seduction. As her power grew, so would her ugliness.

  Luda would resort to a porcelain mask, a Bond villain plotting reprisals from an underground lair where slashed tailor’s dummies stood guard like those terra-cotta warriors that march us in ranks back to China, to those streets in a Peking that never were and the Widow’s laundromat.

  Whatever the precise sequence of events, the chances of Luda securing the juicy prime role of Luci LaBang in any six-part dramatization of Jeremy Painter’s forthcoming auto-hagiography had fallen to zero. I’d made sure of that.

  Framed three times for her crimes, I’d be vilified in folk memory as an unenterprising serial butcher, shunned as an out-of-date offensive stereotype: hysterical cross-dressing psycho, commemorated forever in a series of trumped-up charges that validated the status quo and made all of us hysterical cross-dressing psychos look bad.

  The Vall would rise from its ashes as cheap student accommodation or it would carry on gracelessly decomposing back to its rotten foundations. In either outcome, stories would accumulate that spoke of monologues whispered in an empty room, of a garishly made-up apparition manifesting on certain nights of certain seasons in certain mirrors, as if perched intangible at a dusty dressing table backstage of the Land of the Living on some flat and disconcerting plane between the glass and its aluminum backing, choosing to attract the attention of the breathing classes by painstakingly slathering over its skull holes a half-remembered Halloween cake face, presenting the drag tutorial from Hell.

  * * *

  —

  This is how the Glamour proceeds. Like false eyelashes and a faultless bee sting of glossy fire-engine red on a pouting porker, the strange allure of the Glamour can be achieved quite easily by simply and artfully obscuring certain qualities while emphatically underlining others for heightened effect.

  The Glamour is that which is known to be false but felt to be true!

  Time to discard Salome’s Eighth Veil, to stand at last bare-assed before the court and admit with a puckish crimson grin that while my wardrobe does indeed and without doubt include the items in question, at this moment in time and in defiance of everything I’ve been leading you to believe, I’m not wearing a giant cumulus cloud of a wig or a knock ’em dead senior supermodel ensemble. My Twankey drag, my Glamour was tailor-made with words, anecdotal gold thread sewn into fanciful textures and pigments of my own devising, triggering your assumptions and dressing me in imagined regalia, the shiny apple of your mind’s eye!

  It’s not like I didn’t make any of this as plain as your face in the mirror; I’m a fata morgana, a trompe l’oeil where all it takes is a change of position for the illusion of tangible mass to reveal itself as an embarrassing misapprehension, a grab bag of perceptual cues mistaken for a room, a house, a person, a reflection.

  I told you Widow Twankey and the Phantom were one and the same!

  Round about now is when even the slowest members of the audience see through the trick, when the penny drops as four Golden Rectangles fall suddenly flat, and the spangled cabinet is gone with a bang, taking the magician with it.

  * * *

  —

  When the long arm of the law yanks open the dressing room door, expecting to catch mad Ma Twankey in the act, all done up for a one-woman suicide performance on an otherwise deserted stage, all they’ll find, those policemen and detectives, flat or otherwise, will be the basic ingredients for a ghost story: an unoccupied chair, a three-faced mirror scoured clean and disinfected of my radiation print, a drained triptych with the brightness and heat fading from its surface in smears of ectoplasmic talc. They’ll find a mystery recording on a phone left talking to itself from beyond the grave, beyond the pale, and on into the wild mauve where mystery citizens retire to lose themselves.

  Perhaps the sensitive ones, god forbid they’d have any in the force, might register the last faint traces of the features of Luci LaBang as a scorched afterimage, a retinal flare more gone than there, leaving only condensation, and an evaporating mask of makeup to show where a face had been. The Widow who wasn’t.

  Let them dust for the Devil’s fingerprints and dab for the spoor of the Horned One’s cloven stilettos in the powder and the sparkle dust. All they’ll find is this voice, and these words, the bittersweet aftertaste, the cooling lip-print where I checked out.

  Maybe then, boxed in uneasily by the multiplying corners of the scornful looking glass, the inescapable perpendicular tracks of the story, they’ll consider the frame.

  I promised you an irrefutable demonstration of the Glamour and I always keep my promises. Don’t I?

  Here, and then here, and now, where the words run clear, where the spell’s tied up in ribbons and bows, all that’s left is for me to dedicate my performance to you, long-suffering, treasured, unseen audience in your higher world of law and proportion, crime and consequence. I’m happy to take my reward in applause. Thunderous ideally, from the flats to the vaults. A vatic standing ovation like fine hairs thrilling to attention on a forearm in a lightning storm.

  And curtain calls. I won’t get greedy; three should cover it!

  * * *

  —

  “Graeme.” Luci. Twankey makes three.

  The Phantom is where that trio of faces blurs and dematerializes to a bodiless voice inside your head where your own voice normally provides narration, arriving back where we started, and not for the first time either. We’ve been here before, you and me, mirror and voice, a squirrelly feedback of alluring reflections and siren echoes propagating back to zero, back to the Bang.

  * * *

  —

  Thought for the day: If you must stop somewhere, stop at nothing!

  * * *

  —

  I leave this impossible pre-recorded confession, this voice de Profundis with a wink and a leer to the gallery, a flash of synthetic cleavage. In my dearest wishes these words will come to haunt them, all the policemen and detectives squandering valuable years, centuries of their lives to the rewind, pause, and play buttons trying to figure out exactly who did what, when, why, and to whom?

  In the event I’ve failed to say enough, or if instead it’s all too much, I’ve left a three-word kiss-off for the impatient ones who prefer to cut to the end; the abridged version, the T-shirt slogan I promised writ large on glass in swishy Mon Rouge cursive across those flat reflected faces.

  Where is it coming from, this voice in your heads?

  All together now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and others…

  * * *

  —

  SHE’S BEHIND YOU!

  For Max

  I’d like to thank my agent Peter McGuigan at Ultra Literary for cajoling me into finally writing a novel without pictures after twenty years of false starts, and my editor Tricia Narwani, for her brilliance, insight, enthusiasm, and support for the vulgar and extravagant outcome.

  Thanks also to Gillian Paterson for invaluable proofreading and comments.

  Love times love to my wife, Kristan, for holding up the sky, apologies to family—OSPD Leigh!—and friends who hardly got a word out of me this year, and respect to the latest generation of cat companions who did everything in their power to prevent me from working too hard…

  And to the denizens of the demi-monde, my sisters, my brothers, and others, to the Fabulous everywhere, I raise a glass of fizzing gratitude and solidarity…

  Sparkle on!

  Grant Morrison is best known for their innovative work on comics from the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum to acclaimed runs on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men, as well as their subversive creator-owned titles such as The Invisibles, Seaguy, The Filth, and WE3. In television, they have developed adaptations of their comic series Happy! for Syfy and Netflix and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for Peacock. In addition, Morrison is an award-winning playwright, a musician, an occult practitioner, and a stray-cat magnet. They are also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods. Morrison was awarded an MBE for services to film and literature.

  grantmorrison.com

  Twitter: @grantmorrison

  Instagram: @grant.morrison

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  Grant Morrison, Luda

 

 

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