Alma Cogan Read Online Free Page A

Sebring and the others.
    Terry, I read, had hired round-the-clock bodyguards for himself and his mother; he had suffered a breakdown, gone into the bottle, and had to be given tranquillisers before testifying at the trial.
    This was all understandable. What was less easy to fathom were my own feelings of profound unease bordering on panic as a result of events taking place ten thousand miles away, halfway round the other side of the world. It was like a door had opened and the draught had blown out my pilot-light. I was on mood elevators to get me up, Oblivon to bring me down, as well as stuff I took without knowing where it was supposed to take me.
    It seemed to me at the time that we were embarked on an unstoppable downward spiral of dementia. That, anyway, is how I rationalised it to the doctors I consulted. And there’s a chance I might even have slightly believed it in 1969.
    What I very much believed – I couldn’t not believe it, faced with the evidence of depleted date-books and what I saw every time I more than glanced in a mirror – was that I was thirty-seven and over the hill; yesterday’s papers.
    When I made the decision to fade away with as little self-pity and as much dignity as possible, I made it quickly, two days into a six-day engagement at an armpit of a club on a newly-pedestrianised shopping street in the Manchester suburbs.
    What was the alternative? To hang around until I became the kind of game old dame, the kind of gutsy old shtarker who nurses her nervous breakdown on third-division chat shows and whose every public appearance turns into a psychodrama.
    In 1969I was so far from being on the crest of a vogue that I no longer registered as even a blip on the drug-fuddled, booze-addled, youth-annexed national consciousness.
    I decided to return to a commonplace existence, and cut the pretence. (What am I saying, ‘return’? All my life I had lived in the anticipation, and then the realisation, of being one of those recognised names. The commonplace was virgin territory as far as I was concerned.)
    From now on, I told myself, climbing in behind a bombed-looking teenage minicab driver outside The Recovery Room noshery/nitery in Wythenshawe, I was going to wind down from ambition. From now on I was going to live in real time.

Chapter Two
    The tide is almost out and I am standing at the window watching a man in waders making his way across the river-bed towards a boat called The Terri-Marie . The Terri-Marie (the man’s wife? his daughter? his wife and daughter? one of the eighties crop of lost-in-the-mix girl singers? none of these?) is lying at an angle in a gully gouged deep in the mud. There are coils of rope, pieces of equipment I don’t have the names for and old paint cans on the weathered and possibly slippery deck (it is close to the end of the year; the year is 1986; it rained loudly in the night).
    A bird is pecking at an orange-red berry on the old stone wall directly below where I am standing. Clear water from the surrounding hills runs swiftly along the gullies. Seagulls circle overhead yowling like cats. Other seabirds perch on roofs and on the showily customised cabins of cabin-cruisers, depositing fresh coats of lime. Smoke rises from the pastel-washed bungalows littering the hillside opposite. Something which I now recognise as an aerial root flickers at the top of the window, at the edge of vision, like a hair in the frame.
    These are the touches of local colour attaching to my present life.
    But my previous life – the life I gave the kiss-off to what seems a lifetime ago, outside The Recovery Room, Wythenshawe, Manchester; the life I surrendered as reluctantly as somebody getting up from a fire to step out into the cold and bring coal – still tugs at me, often when I least expect it. It is tugging at me at this moment, for example, in the form of music that I’m being force-fed down the telephone.
    ‘I have ——— —— for you. Please hold,’ the voice (I imagined