Paula

We all wear a mask.

You want to know who doesn’t? Every person of note, the saints and the sinners. That’s who - and that’s all. The rest of us feel the constriction of our disguise, but would rather die than take it off.

Paula was a costume designer, a woman in network demand during her purple years. You have to have a feel for humanity, past and present, to set the tone of a piece; to live and breath it. You have to know what a fishwife would have worn in the soot of the 1880s, and what a middle-class mumsey wears now. You’ve got to feel it in your bones. And she? She always reminded me of a twenties flapper. She was skinny in most parts, and wore her hair in a jet black bob. Her eyes were less adorned than her lips, which were habitually streaked with a matt cherry red. Not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, but charismatic, and charisma may well carry you through more decades than the latest in pocketed trousers.

And she bore the mark of that singular decade. Something tragic beyond the Sidecar. A giddy devil-may-care which disguised, to a close observer, something quite unsustainable.

Did I like her? Not really, not at first. Her husband, her second husband, used to come to the pub where I worked, every day at the same time. On each of these days, he wore a crumpled linen shirt with faded jeans. He was objectively handsome for an older man, but beyond the set of his features there was nothing about him I liked. He sat in the same seat, at the bar, and ordered the same drink and the same side. Pistachios. He would drum his fingers on the counter and complain, every day, about the volume of the music we played. It was not loud. He just had a querulous auditory canal, like all his strings were wound too tight.

I hated him. I thought he was capable of harm. It was a feeling that pervaded my mind and then, ineluctably, took a tenacious hold in my gut. He was a bad fucker. And then Paula would come in after work, and she would take a stool next to him and drink a bottle of wine in an hour. No small talk, no pleasantries. I was just the barmaid, and they were the set designer and the costume designer on the biggest show on TV at the time. Household names? No. Arrogant? Absolutely.

They were unloveable. Both of them.

At some point, the husband, Christopher, stopped coming to my bar and settled for another that was an equal distance from where they lived: a large, four-bed detached along the village high street. I thought nothing more of it beyond voicing a vague relief that he was no longer a regular. It’s not like the man was any trouble, but he left a taint. A whiff of brimstone.

On his last day on this earth, he chose to return. The same drink, the same side, the same un-ironed shirt. When he came in, I turned the music off in the bar, because I was wearing my mask too. The one that hides what I really think. It was always within my gift to not serve him, without proof of mitigation. That’s why you don’t piss off barmaids, because in that very specific time and place, they have more power than you. Whoever you are. But when I saw his silhouette coming through the narrow door, I just flicked the volume off, and to this day I can’t really explain why. Maybe I sensed something worse than bad, and I didn’t want to pour petrol on the flames.

But later on that night, he was the one who poured the petrol.

The following morning, when I turned up for work to clean the place and prepare it for opening, my landlady came down the stairs in tears. She didn’t know the whole story, but she said a kid had been killed down the road. That’s all she knew, but I knew. I knew it was him.

Christopher had one natural son with Paula. He was step-father to another, still a boy, but some years older. His natural son was seven, blond-headed Bobbie, a little tyke in the manner of young lads everywhere. There was a divorce looming by then, and Christopher wanted custody of both the children, although Paula was the mother of both. He said that Paula wasn’t a fit mother, and he may or may not have been right about that. Men can be so persuasive in these matters.

On that night, in the four-bed detached on the main village street, Paula was staying with her parents, the older son was staying with his natural father, and Christopher and little Bobbie were there alone. Christopher was drunk when he left my bar that day, and then went to the other bar where he got worse. He was late picking the boy up from school, dishevelled, pissed and aggressive. Little Bobbie didn’t want to go with his father; told a concerned teacher that he could be mean. But off they went all the same.

He smothered Bobbie with a pillow that night, believing that he was about to lose the custody battle. It turned out he was going to win it, but that was for later consumption. He then tried to set alight to the house, maybe to try to prove the boy died of smoke asphyxiation rather than the Dunelm pillow he’d killed him with. Probably to prevent his wife from selling the house when he was gone. Either way, he sat drinking some more in his smouldering house and then took himself into the garage, where he was found hanging in the early hours.

A couple of days later, I got a call from the police, who were trying to build a picture of that final day. They asked me what I thought about Christopher, as I had served him often enough. And I told them that if they lined up every last man in that village and asked me to point out who was the most likely person to do that, I would have pointed at him. And that led to a terrible, oppressive sense of guilt. I felt that it was my fault, somehow. That I didn’t say something to Paula, still a stranger to me at that time. That I knew, without doubt, that he was damaged and fatally dangerous.

Maybe at work he wore a mask, but with the little people like me …

*****

I wonder myself why I’m telling you this, because I know you must be by now. This, I suppose, is about the aftermath, which I can’t get to without telling you the beginning. The foremath, a word which doesn’t exist, but surely ought to.

Due to Paula’s connections, Bobbie was given a lavish funeral with local TV coverage; a cortege along the length of the village, with Paula in a brazen red dress, clearly drunk, singing, walking alongside a donkey, Bobbie’s favourite animal. Yeah, it didn’t go down too well, but I guess all we can ask out of life is to get through the day, whatever that looks like.

It was another five years before I got to know Paula. She had married again, (an Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas), to an amiable Midlander who also worked in the industry. They moved into a small terraced house not far from my own. They drank in the local bar, the one her second husband spent his last afternoon in, and they seemed happy. She looked glamorous, untouched almost. It took me a long time to warm to that idea - that she could have so easily have skipped over it all - or at least that she felt it necessary to pretend she had.

Eventually, when she trusted me, the subject came up - and it was all nicotine stained jokes swallowed with white wine. She told me she’d make an excellent undertaker, so used as she was to the morgue. Talked about how he’d dressed his wee body every day in fresh clothes up until the funeral, never dropping a tear in the delivery. And I suppose the penny began to drop with me. This woman was grieving and yet was incapable of doing it in the time-honoured, conventional ways. Each morning, whatever her despair, she applied her mask, took a shallow breath and faced the world.

It was a cutthroat world, too. She was well-paid when she did work, but there were no buffers, and no pension. And I guess she didn’t want people to worry about her, to tread over the soggy ground of her tragedy. So she played flippant, like the chicken who carries on strutting and pecking until it drops dead, because it is the ultimate prey. It was a mask of financial imperative, but it didn’t translate well. It never did with her.

A couple of years into their marriage, her husband approached me in the street and asked if I would clean their house whenever Paula was away. He gave me a key and told me to keep it a secret between us. She was still getting work, but it was becoming more intermittent. She was drinking heavily and it was reaching a point where her vices exceeded her talents.

So I let myself in, once a fortnight or so, and worked my way through the tiny house, which had stairs so damned steep you would surely die if you slipped down them in the night. The place wasn’t that bad, not when I went there, but in the end her husband told me not to come any more. It had got too shameful, he said.

That’s when I suppose we all noticed the two Paulas. The one with the mask, and the one without. I bumped into her in my local shop one day, quite literally, and she looked right through me. She wasn’t wearing makeup and her skin was marked with psoriasis. She looked raw, like she’d been flayed, and she smelled of urine. In her basket was five bottles of white wine, and it was all her thin arms could do to carry it around with her. I followed her, knowing this part of the game at least. She would walk the aisles, pretending to look for food, knowing that people were watching. She bought hummus. Good girl. That's what I'd have bought. We met again at the till, but I played dumb, and let her pass. You get to that state, and the last thing on God's earth you need is someone else's vicarious concern.

And yet two days later, she looked perfect, like Dorian Gray when he was out of the attic.

I met her husband, by chance, crying in the park on a late summer's day. He told me she wouldn’t leave her room, that she pissed in bottles and defecated in bags. And yet several days later, there they were in the same park, he looking relieved, signalling with his eyes. She wore exquisite clothes and makeup, topped off with a jaunty red beret. The mask had returned, that porcelain beautiful thing. That fragile thing.

She never once mentioned Bobbie by name, although when I was cleaning her place, I saw his school shoes under her bed, all scuffed and muddy from school. That was where she kept her grief, under the bed, whilst a photo of Marilyn presided above, blowing airkisses to the world.

This pattern continued until it ran out of yarn. One cold, February day, Paula died at home. She always loathed the summer and I don’t think she could suffer another one; all the kids off from school.

A mask is like any other artefact. It must be used sparingly and carefully; an evening frolic, an important interview, dinner with the family at Christmas. But Paula, she wore it too often and it got all thin and frayed, and such had been the habit of donning it, she couldn’t remember what it felt like to put it down.

Until she did put it down.