Her Name Was Lola

34 Levy Unburdened

April 1997. Work has always been the sovereign remedy for Max. Riven as he is by guilt, shame, remorse, doubt and general funk he returns to his Moe Levy pages.

‘You took your time,’ says Moe.

‘My time took me,’ says Max. ‘Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph.’ He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Willa Cather, My Antonia

‘If I believed that I’d give up right now,’ says Moe. ‘Where are we going with this?’

‘Do you want to put down the dwarf or not?’ says Max.

‘Not if it means living in the past with nothing to look forward to,’ says Moe.

‘Maybe you don’t deserve anything to look forward to,’ says Max. ‘You’re not a good man.’

‘So why bother with me? Why not write a nice guy for your protagonist?’

‘I work with the material that comes to me and I go where it takes me,’ says Max. ‘Anyhow, no more dwarf, he never happened. We’re scrapping whatever I’ve done so far. This thing now has a title: Her Name Was Lulu.’

‘Is that the first line of a song?’ says Moe.

‘No,’ says Max. ‘Chapter One is WHEN MOE MET LULU.’

‘OK,’ says Moe. ‘Give me good things to remember.’

‘More than you deserve,’ says Max.

‘Maybe a little mercy along with your justice?’ says Moe. ‘Even bad guys can have things to look forward to.’

‘All I can promise is that I’ll explore the material,’ says Max, and he starts typing at a pretty good rate of knots. He met Lola towards the end of December 1996 and he last saw her on the 22nd of March 1997. In those three months they spent a lot of hours together so there’s plenty of material to explore for Moe and Lulu. Moe will fall in love with Lulu when he meets her at the Coliseum Shop and they’ll have many pleasant days and evenings before Moe’s wandering eye gets him into trouble.

As Max works, his mind is busy sorting words and pictures along with sounds, smells, and the taste and feel of everything in his times with Lola. Just as witnesses under hypnosis recall more than they think they noticed, Max finds details he hadn’t remembered until now. The memories are fresh and vivid, realer than themselves. Like the ribbon on Mai Dun and the mustard on Lola’s chin. There was the time in St Martin’s Lane when they found the drawings of Heinrich Kley in two paperback volumes in the Dover Bookshop. Turning the pages past elephants and crocodiles on ice skates and showjumping centaurs Lola comes upon a naked giantess who is a luxurious landscape on which tiny men climb up and slide down and variously enjoy themselves. ‘What do you think of that?’ she says to Max.

‘I’ve always known that women are much bigger than men,’ says Max.

‘Discuss,’ says Lola.

‘Have you ever seen the Whitbread Brewery horses parked outside The Duke of Cumberland in the New King’s Road?’ says Max.

‘Are you going to compare women to horses?’ says Lola.

‘In a particular way,’ says Max. ‘I was passing there once while the barrels were being trundled into the cellar. It was raining and those great horses were standing there with the steam coming up off their backs. They have something prehistoric about them, something from before Coca-Cola and McDonald’s and Walt Disney. That’s why people want to be thought well of by horses. They give the Whitbread horses apples and lumps of sugar and they talk to them respectfully. Women have that prehistoric something also. Some men like it, others are scared by it. I like it.’

‘Even though I’m smaller than a brewery horse and I’m not much good at pulling a dray?’

‘You may be small in beer haulage but you’re big with me,’ says Max.

‘Will you feed me apples and lumps of sugar?’ says Lola.

‘All the time,’ says Max, smiling because Lola is looking very coltish in a short plaid skirt, purple tights, and fur-trimmed boots. A donkey jacket, purple muffler, and little black beret complete her outfit. Her fair hair is in a long thick plait that hangs down her back, ‘if I don’t eat you up first,’ he says. They kiss among the Dover paperbacks. The ice-skating elephants and crocodiles whirl in their pages, long scarves streaming out behind them. The lights are lit in St Martin’s Lane, the sky is dark and thick, rosy with the loom of London. Snow begins to fall. ‘When it stops we can turn St Martin’s Lane upside-down and make it snow again,’ says Lola. ‘This is what it is to be happy,’ thinks Max within the memory he’s typing. Lola’s cheeks are like cold apples as he kisses them. He falls out of the memory with a sudden drop. No more Lola. ‘Ahhh,’ sighs Max.

‘What a girl!’ says Moe Levy. ‘I love my Lulu.’

‘Your Lulu!’ says Max.

‘It says right here,’ says Moe: ‘“‘All the time,’ says Moe, smiling because Lulu is looking very coltish …” Hello? Are you there?’

‘Where?’ says Max.

‘In Chapter Four,’ says Moe, ‘APPLES, LUMPS OF SUGAR.’

‘Right,’ says Max. ‘I’m with you.’

‘I feel as if I’m going to blow a gasket,’ says Max’s mind. ‘Do we have to keep doing these memories?’

‘What else have we got?’ says Max.

‘No more Lula Mae?’ says his mind.

‘Where’ve you been?’ says Max. ‘That’s all over, she’s going back to the States. She’ll send photos, I’ll send money.’

‘And have you become wise?’ says his mind.

‘Not yet,’ says Max.