Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

K. K by Liza Cody

A painter by training, Liza Cody began her fiction writing career during a particularly cold winter when her studio was too cold to use. Perched in front of the fire, she produced, in longhand, the first book of the Anna Lee mystery series, a book that won the John Creasey Memorial Prize in Britain, and received an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. Five further Anna Lee novels followed, all critically acclaimed. The story with which Liza Cody makes her debut for us is as distinguished as her longer fiction. It was written in 1988 and is currently being produced for BBC radio, but has never before been published in this country...

Let me tell you something: on a hot day at Fantasy land life can be hell for King Kong. You have to wear long johns for the itching, and by the end of the day they’re soaked. I lost pounds on sunny days. Not that it showed. A woman my size has to lose stones for it to make any real difference.

I’m not complaining. If you take all the facts into consideration, I was lucky to have the job. The facts, of course, are my face and figure.

I was always going to be tall. When the accident happened I was thirteen years old and already five foot ten.

It’s no handicap to be tall. There are plenty of models and basketball players over six feet. But after the accident I began to eat, for comfort really, and you can’t comfort yourself to the extent I did without putting on a lot of weight.

King Kong, at the beginning, was supposed to be a man. But I got the job because I was the only one who fitted the costume. King Kong is a star. I hadn’t even applied for King Kong. No, my hopes were pinned on Hettie Hamburger, one of the cafeteria troupe. But at the last moment, only a couple of days before the grand opening, they switched me with Louis.

Louis, they said, was a little too limp to make a convincing King Kong. “All the rehearsal in the world won’t turn that nancy into a plausible monster,” the artistic director said. They think just because they can’t see our faces we can’t hear what’s said about us. But we can.

“What’s that hulking great hamburger doing at the end of the line?” he said, when he came to inspect the cafeteria. “You can’t have a threatening hamburger. It’ll put the kiddies off their food.”

I thought it was the end for me. If you fail as a hamburger there’s not a lot of hope left. But the artistic director, thank heaven, had a little imagination. “See if she can get into K. K.,” he said.

I could. “Terrific,” the artistic director said. “Dynamite. Put her by the gate for the opening. She’s a natural.”

We opened very successfully, with me and the Creature from the Black Lagoon welcoming the crowds. The kiddies screamed and giggled as I lolloped around growling. They wanted to stroke my fur and have their pictures taken with me.

I can’t tell you how lovely this is for someone like me. Without a monster costume no one wants to take my picture at all, and the kiddies cross the road rather than come face to face with me on the pavement. I love kiddies, but I’ve got to be realistic. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have any of my own. Children are frightened by disfigurement and it’s one of life’s little ironies that they have only come to love me now that it’s my job to frighten them. I’m a wonderful monster, if I do say it myself. Who would have thought that someone like me could succeed in show business?

But it isn’t like that for everyone. My friend Cherry, for instance, used to get very depressed. “I’m a dancer,” she used to tell me. “A good dancer. Well, quite a good dancer. Not a bloody hot dog. It’s an insult, even if I am over thirty.”

She’s over forty, actually, but she’s right: she’s still very pretty in spite of being a little on the plump side. It’s a shame to hide her in a hot dog.

“I’ll give that agent of mine a piece of my mind,” she used to say, “you see if I don’t.” Well, maybe she did or maybe she didn’t. The only thing I know is that two years later she’s still a hot dog, and a good one at that. She says the tips are getting better all the time. She doesn’t positively enjoy the job the way I did, but she doesn’t complain much anymore.

Performers at Fantasyland divide up quite neatly into Freaks and Food, and I think it’s fair to say that of the two, the Freaks are happier in their work. They are the entertainers and the extroverts.

But they are quite territorially minded, too. I had a jungle, about half an acre of mixed conifers and rhododendron bushes with a climbing frame artfully disguised as creeping vines. You wouldn’t catch Godzilla in my domain. He roams the area around the gift shop, while the boating pool belongs to the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Of course, some of the Freaks work in teams. The Tingle-Trail is a miniature railway ride which begins in the Black Forest with the Werewolves in their various stages of transformation and ends in a graveyard with a stunning display by the Zombies, the Undead, and a pair of Bodysnatchers. There are twenty-three employed on the Tingle-Trail alone, and they have to work to a strict timetable.

The others give improvised performances. We all perfected the art of lurking and popping up unexpectedly. It is a delicate balance: shrieks of shock and surprise are the signs of a job well done, but you don’t want to scare anyone into a heart attack. There have been accidents, and we learned to watch out, especially for grandparents. The kiddies are pretty resilient; they want to be terrified. But the grandparents can be rather more fragile.

Although we rarely witnessed each other’s performances, there was a lot of respect around for the way each of us coped with our working conditions. I’d say, for instance, that the Mummy had the most difficult job. The Egyptian Tomb is a maze and a maze is claustrophobic. The Mummy was one of those men who could make something out of nothing. He stayed very still, and when he moved it was almost imperceptible. It was as if he was playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with his audience. He terrified his visitors slowly and subtly and I must say that of all of us, he was the one I admired most.

Mummy used to sing with the Scottish Opera until asthma ruined his career. He was an enormous man, but unlike me he did not work out with weights. He didn’t have to: physical strength was not part of his act. Timing was his forte. I wish I had seen him on stage — with that size and presence, coupled with his sense of timing, he must have been quite electric. Mummy was an artist and an outstandingly gentle person, so we all felt his humiliation personally.

It happened late one June evening. The ticket office had been closed for an hour and the last visitors were trickling away. I had come down from my climbing frame and was beginning to make my way over to the dressing room when a pack of teenage boys burst out of the Egyptian Tomb and chased each other to the exit. I noticed with alarm that one of them was waving a piece of burning cloth.

Fire is something we were all trained to look out for, and my first thought was that a member of the public might be trapped in the maze. I rushed in, calling for the attendant to turn on the house lights. I did not know the tomb very well and I could not waste time running around in the dark searching for a fire extinguisher.

I found Mummy on his back, his costume slashed and his feet smouldering. Smoke and shock had caused an asthma attack. He was in a bad way.

I put the fire out immediately. But it was difficult to get his head-piece off. I had to free my own hands first. My King Kong costume is not designed for dainty work and I wear huge furry gauntlets. We were in a confined space and Mummy is a big man, but I managed at last. His lips were turning mauve.

An asthmatic finds it difficult to breathe lying down. I should have propped him up straightaway. But his costume was stiff and bulky. Luckily an attendant arrived and together we managed to pull apart the intricate system of Velcro and zips that held it together.

Mummy was not badly hurt. His feet were scorched and that was about all. But I could not help thinking about what it must have been like for him trapped in his own tomb, imprisoned in his winding sheet.

The costume had been the provocation. Apparently the boys had wanted to unwrap Mummy. They had become angry and violent when they found they couldn’t.

As I say, what we all felt most keenly was the humiliation. Nosferatu put it best. “It’s the role reversal,” he said. “They aren’t supposed to frighten us. We’re supposed to frighten them.”

That made me think. “But it’s all an illusion,” I said.

“That’s right, K. K.,” said Nosferatu. “It’s all in their minds that we can frighten them, so they give us the power to frighten them. Once they stop playing their parts we can’t play ours, and shebang! — it’s all over.”

It was a conversation I kept remembering in the days that followed. A local newspaper got hold of Mummy’s story and from that time on our public seemed to change.

For one thing, there weren’t so many little kiddies. I suppose the parents and grandparents were afraid of exposing them to hooligans. And there were definitely more hooligans. Incident followed incident. Charley, the Fly, had his wings torn off. Godzilla’s tail was hacked to pieces with carpet knives. A gang of youths tried to electrocute the Bride of Frankenstein. We were being persecuted.

How strange, I thought. Because when you go back to most of the original stories, we monsters only became monstrous to defend ourselves against human persecution. King Kong is a good example. Kong was only trying to defend the tiny creature he loved and that’s why a lot of people leave the movie feeling sorry for him. This is because King Kong is not a horror film. It is a romance. Not many people understand that. But they feel it. And it was always an important aspect of my characterisation to combine King Kong’s raw power with tenderness. It wasn’t difficult: I think I’ve mentioned already that I love little kiddies.

No one could call Cherry the motherly type, but even she missed the children. “I don’t know, K.,” she said. “If I’ve got to be laughed at, I’d rather it was the little ones than these spotty jerks. They just don’t know how to have a good time without hurting someone.”

How right she was. Again, it happened in the evening. They came, five of them, just as my last visitors were leaving. They had hair so short you could see the tattoos on their skulls, and their trousers were tucked into army boots.

They ran in, beating down the rhododendrons with their sticks, yelling, “Where’s the freaking monkey?”

I stayed where I was on the climbing frame. I hoped my little family would escape quietly and go for help. But they stood there transfixed. There were three small children, I remember, all under seven. Their mother was with them, and the old man was probably her father. Very sweet, they had been, taking pictures of me holding the smallest child with the two older ones on either side. I didn’t want them to come to any harm.

Fortunately the hooligans hardly noticed them. They clubbed the base of the climbing frame with their sticks. They tried to shake me off.

“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” they screamed. “Come down and we’ll give you some nuts.” I didn’t move. They could shake that frame all night and it wouldn’t budge.

“We’ll give it some nuts all right,” they said. “If it won’t get down and fight like a monkey, we’ll drag it down.”

They swarmed up my frame. They swung on my ropes. I went from level to level to avoid them. If only the family had gone for help — if only the hooligans had been stupid — I might have got away with it.

But it only takes one with a bit of intelligence to organise the other four into a dangerous unit. He was small. He was neat. He had clear blue eyes that blazed with excitement. He was one of those lads who love a challenge. My agility on the climbing frame was a challenge. It became a competition he wanted to win.

He set three of them to drive me to the edge of the frame. The other he put on a rope. As I prepared to haul myself up to the next level, he sprung his trap.

“Now!” he screamed.

The lad on the rope swung. I saw him. coming but there was nowhere to go. He hit me like an iron pendulum and I flew off the frame and went crashing to the ground. The others dropped on me. I thought my back was broken.

They sorted themselves out soon enough. “Let’s see the bastard,” the leader said. “Get his freaking mask off.”

They tore King Kong’s face off mine and threw it into the bushes.

“Christ!” they said. “Bloody hell! Look at that.”

The little children, who up till then had only been crying, started to scream.

I can hardly bear to remember what happened, next. I suppose it reminds me too painfully of the past. You see, after the accident, after my face healed, my mother decided that it would be best for me to have plastic surgery to put things right. So I went back into hospital where they broke my cheekbones again and tried to rearrange my eye socket. But something went wrong. It does sometimes. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Maybe I rejected my own tissue.

My mother had begun hopefully but after the failure it became harder and harder for the doctors to comfort her. In the end, she took my little sister and went north to Scotland and I never saw her again. It was a relief in a way. Because as she became unable to stand the sight of my face, I became unable to stand the sight of hers. Well, not her face, exactly, more the expression on it. I don’t have to look at myself, but I do have to look at the people who are looking at me. I know I am a fright, and when people look at me they become ugly too.

The last line in the movie King Kong is: “ ’Twas beauty killed the beast.” Well, in my experience, it’s the other way round. When even the prettiest people look at me they become horrible, so the beast kills beauty.

The little kiddies screamed.

The lad with the clear blue eyes said, “God! No wonder it wears a monkey suit.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before I throw up.”

I got up. I couldn’t find my mask. I took off my gauntlets. I hit him on the side of his handsome head, and when he was down I dropped on his throat with all my weight.

You know, sometimes you find a piece of backbone in a tin of salmon, and when you get it between your teeth it breaks with a soft crunching sound. It was as easy as that.

I shouldn’t have done it. I was bigger than him. He was only a kid really — not a child anymore but not grown-up either. But at the time it seemed to me he had taken away everything that was mine. All I had was an illusion anyway — the illusion of being a monster. You can’t kill someone for that. It just isn’t enough.

The funny thing is how nice everyone was about it — even the police. “I understand,” everyone kept saying. They look at my face and they say, “I understand,” as if my face tells them everything, as if a disfigured face clearly explains an ugly action. Even the doctors, who are educated men and should know better, think it was years of taunts and rejection that drove me to murder. My solicitor tells me he’s sure the court will accept a plea of self-defence. “They’ll understand,” he says confidently.

What if I tell the court I just lost my temper? Suppose I tell them, as I’m telling you, that my face doesn’t represent me any more than yours does you? My face is an accident, but I am responsible for my actions. A sad life and an ugly face do not make me any less responsible for losing my temper, do they?

Perhaps they really think I’m King Kong, that I’m not quite human. Just as they feel sorry for King Kong, because although he’s a monster he seems to feel human emotions, so they feel sorry for me. If they really thought I was human they’d deal with me the same way they dealt with that man who murdered his girlfriend last month because she threw a plate of baked beans in his face. They don’t tell him they understand.

But look on the bright side. Fantasyland has a new regulation now and teenagers are not allowed in unless accompanied by a little child. Apart from that, Cherry says it’s business as usual. She says it’s not the same without me though, and she doesn’t think the man who took over my job will last the summer.

“He complains like anything on sunny days,” she told me last time she visited. “He’s got eczema and the itching drives him crazy.”

Cherry should know. Life can be hell for a hot dog, too, on a sunny day. You don’t have to be King Kong to suffer.