Pongo #67

Miffy

At least they’re not charging you to check your bank balance yet. Which is just as well, as it’s on a par with forking out to have a dentist scrape your teeth with a prong; an activity, I always find, closely followed by some old bag telling you how much worse it was to go to the dentist in their day, and how they used to electrocute you and punch any troublesome molars out with bare fists, or fetch a road drill for cavities, and about how you were GRATEFUL.

I’m shaking as I send my card into the darkness. I never used to need to go through this. Good job, because back then the screen was always too high up for me to see. I’d just spend and maybe joke about putting some aside for retirement, and spend some more. Mainly on frou-frou frocks, so I could write it off as tax expenses, but never really a thought to it all ending. Since I’d started work at the studios, there had never been anything but rabid demand for my films

I miss it. Not just my director, and I know I said was planning on getting out, but everybody says that. It’s like the retired doorman from the Ginway Street Hotel. Having spent the ten years leading up to his retirement moaning about the tight clientele, he now parks his car across the way sometimes, and winces when his replacement lets people by without a smile, or with dull buttons or a rumpled collar, or lets the wrong people by altogether without question. The old guy in the car, who would bitch daily about the restrictions of the uniform while employed, would now run a hand over his anonymous civvies – the shapeless cotton of the tee shirt and the maddening everywhere of the jeans, searching for a boundary, a stiff hem or a sign of something, and then he would drive home. This happened most days. One of the girls at the studio told me that – she specialised in voyeurism and gave good story as a result.

Pin number in. The machine has a think to itself.

I miss being able to go to work every day and feel someone on me, in me, the cocoon of the lit set – be it faked-up kitchen, sauna, Bedouin tent. It wasn’t very sexy – more like a crap themed party in which only a couple of people showed up. I’d be there, this child slave girl in scarves, bindi, various mismatched signifiers as a result of sloppy research, but then none of my fan letters ever complained that the strapping Viking penetrating me should not technically have had a horned helmet.

It was always warm. The main smell was peach lube. That and fresh smoke layered onto stale. Marty never made anyone go outside (practical reasons as well as compassion: nothing closes you up, undoing half an hour’s fluffing, quite like a smoke in the frost), and so the scents piled on top of each other like clothes after a long night’s dancing.

The studio was a homage to prohibition. Marty loved the old gangster films, and decked out the outside of the building and the reception area like a funeral parlour. The sign read “Happy Endings”, which always made me smile. Some people, like me, the gatekeeper girl on the desk would recognise and send straight through. Others, newbies etc. had to ask to see “my mother with one eye”. Anyone not savvy about the password would be directed through into an antechamber in which they could peruse genuine catalogues of mahogany coffins and floral arrangements. If they got any orders, they’d send them on to their ‘sister company’, a genuine parlour in Central. I think the elaborate nature of the set-up charmed a lot of top guys and girls into working for Marty. That and his compassion for smokers, which made up ninety percent of the cast.

If I hung around outside the studio – which has been boarded up and annexed by the police since the attack and subsequent raid – I’d look like a right necro because the “Happy Endings” sign’s still up, albeit bumblebeed over with half-flayed police tape.

Aaaand the results are in. £9.96. Which means I’m four pence short of being able to draw out any money. Great. I really need a f – fuckmittit.

I think I have some pasta. Why did I walk so far from home? I can’t get a train back now. I think I have pasta in the cupboard. Marty, where are you?