Profile In Courage?

Some time ago I worked near a very popular beach, in an area filled with many wealthy people, but also populated by residents of numerous seedy boarding houses, squatting inelegantly inside the lovely bones of old beachside mansions.

Some mornings as I drove to work, I would pass a particular woman - always walking in the same direction, at the same time, up the same street, towards the same pub, dressed in the same way.

She was quite elderly - at least as far as I could judge - with a heavily made-up face - foundation clinging to her wrinkles; heavy metallic peacock shade of eye-shadow; thick black eye-liner, not always following the shape of the old eyes; tattered and awry false eyelashes, fluttering a little in the sea-breezes, like a battered old flag; carefully, if unsteadily, painted-on surprised black eye-brows; scarlet lipstick, patchily mocking the old lips by delineating their ghost.

The old body was forced into a tight, garish, short dress - its shape disciplined and tormented by heavy corsetry and stiff bras into a parody of lush curvature - and a low-cut bodice showing off the wrinkled breasts.

Her legs, swollen and lumpy with black veins, were exposed by black fish-net stockings, and her painful, old feet were squeezed into pointy, stilettos, forcing her to hobble her way along.

Atop her head was an extraordinary Rapunzel wig - flaxen, immensely long, coarsened and stiffened by lacquer and grime, and piled in overlapping and twisted spirals higher and higher and higher and higher yet, always seeming to teeter on the edge of a great fall, yet kept in place by pins, faith, willpower and years of discipline and custom.


I wonder if, in her mind, she was still the woman she had been - famous brothel Madam, perhaps - or stripper - whatever; whether her denial was complete or a carefully constructed rococco edifice, thin and likely to craze, like plaster.

She disappeared, one day - I do not know where to. I hope she died in her raddled finery - defiant, pathetic, monstrous - toppling, perhaps, from her bar-stool in mid-smoke or drink or cough or cackle - not tamed and stripped and dressed in a mauve flowery nightgown and fed weak tea.