Free Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn Page A

well-named after all) it became bloated and blown.
    The naming ceremony took place at the annual flower show at Chelsea and was performed by the Queen Mother. She was wearing one of her Monet-print floaty outfits with a major hat and a flesh-coloured elastic bandage under her stocking on one leg.
    We passed a happy few minutes talking about digging in manure and bonemeal and how to deal with root rot, and ‘the incredibly beautiful Madame Alfred Carrière, and her cousin, Mrs Herbert Stevens’, who I gathered just in time were bothroses like myself. The whole conversation could have been in Gujarati for all I understood.
    These details feel real: I can also remember (I think I can) the satin scalloped lining of the tent, the sickening thick aroma of the exhibits and the music of a pipe-band.
    But the occasion is one of hundreds in my life which I am more and more convinced I can only have read about or seen on television and which must have actually happened to somebody else.
    Some of my most dream-like recollections involve the royal family (and are therefore made more dream-like by the awareness that they are the country’s favourite fantasy-figures). The most dream-like of all – it plays itself back in SloMo shot through medium gauze – involves the present Queen.
    I performed at Windsor Castle several Christmases running. There was a show in a private chapel, converted for the occasion, followed by high-tea and a party for the staff and the family. My first visit is the visit I remember most vividly.
    Edmundo Ros, the Latin specialist, provided the music for dancing that year (it was almost certainly 1956 or ’57). And the evening wound to a close with everybody snaking around the state-room in which the dance was held doing a ragged, high-spirited conga.
    But for reasons of etiquette or protocol (I didn’t know the reason) the Queen found herself excluded. She was still a young woman then, as of course I was, slim and pretty. And I happened to look up at one point and see her standing alone under a Flemish tapestry of Actaeon being torn apart by dogs, smiling happily and clapping in time with the music.
    On an impulse, I dropped out of the conga-line and approached her. I might have curtsied first – a quick dip – but the next thing I remember is placing my hands on her waist and steering her on to the floor to join the dancers. She was wearing a suit which was double-layered – coffee lace over blue – and I remember thinking even at the time that it felt like net curtains against windows to touch.
    I was aware, in the short time that I maintained this taboo contact, of my whole system going into overload in an effort to accumulate all the information it could – the look, the feel, the smell (I was almost certain I recognised ‘Miss Dior’); all the data ordinary subjects are unable to access – and running a flash-check on it against what I knew of these properties in other women, including myself.
    I wanted to know, I now realise, what the hungry stage-door touchers and gropers were always wanting to know about me: if, and in what way, I differed from ordinary mortals. Whether the close eye-balling, the constant exposure, the incessant reproduction of the image had added to, stolen from or in any way affected the composition of the in-the-round, blood-and-guts person.
    Was I in any essential way different from them? Was Elizabeth II, great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, direct descendent of Dick the Shit and Henry VIII (true? – history is almost as much of a black hole as nature studies), was she in any tangible way different from me?
    *
    I look at myself sometimes when I’m out walking in the country. at the waxed jackets and bush hats, the warm-up trousers and sights-of-Roma headscarf, the army surplus mittens and vinyl trainers and other items borrowed from Kiln Cottage, and wonder whether it’s possible to read in my present appearance anything about what I once was.
    Do I look like a