The Leg
I think it was Christmas 1980. Might have been 81 or 82 but I'm going for 1980. I was a painfully shy, painfully thin bearded Modern Languages student who smelled of Old Holborn rollies and peered at the world through a pair of habitually dusty National Health spectacles.
It was the holidays so I needed a job. Through a stroke of good fortune I landed a stint as Lift Attendant at the Café Royal in London, which was about the easiest job going: you simply turned up, slipped into your uniform (jacket with copious braid and epaulettes and gold buttons, white gloves which had to be draped over shoulder), then spent the evening accompanying people up and down in the lift and doing the flunkey thing: "your floor, sir", "your floor, madam" and I forget the rest of the spiel. I knocked off around midnight, or a bit later, depending. Since at that hour there were no buses back to High Wycombe (my mum's house, where I didn't actually have a room but could kip on the sofa) I generally caught the night bus to Heathrow, ordered a coffee in the all night cafeteria there and sort of slumped and dozed over a table until morning and the bus home. The pay wasn't great: tips were talked of, but never seemed to materialize. In fact the only tip I got over the whole Christmas period was from the Spandau Ballet roadies who used the capacious lift to lug their PA up to the Cadogan Room or wherever the gig was. I think it was a fiver, which was pretty generous for 1980. May even have been a tenner. Anyway, that gig was I think Christmas Eve, and the audience was some sort of debutantes' party. I'd gone up and down in the lift probably a few dozen times before I was called to help out in an emergency: one of the debs had thrown up on a fabulously expensive carpet, so Muggins was given a bucket and cloth. Didn't mind, it being Christmas and all. Well, the high point of that evening turned out to be very nearly the high point of my entire life, except for one or two good bits that happened much later, around when I turned 40. That high point was The Leg.
See, there were some photographers there from Harpers and Queen or one of them toff mags, wanting to photograph the debs, or those of them who could still more or less stand up. At one point one of them decided it would be sort of edgy if they could get one of the uniformed flunkies into one of the shots. So I was drafted in and after a bit of how about you go here, finally it was decided that it would be even more piquant and daring if I were to hold one of the debs' thighs as she did a Hedy Lamarr in one of the toff blokes' arms, or one of the other debs', can't remember.
I still have dreams about that leg. Encased in sheer silk specially flown in from Samarkand, perfumed with the choicest gin, fattened with the finest profiteroles, it was a leg from another social class, stretched out de haut en bas (from on high and in stockings), from another galaxy, another dimension. And it balanced, wanton and bibulous, in my perspiring mitts, like a dolphin on a roofrack, or an Ark of the Covenant slung between two humble camels.
I don't think you can account for the existence of a Leg like that without string theory. It needs every one of those 26 dimensions, except the last. The last accounts for me being there, and that's all: one of those glorious mistakes that the strict traffic control system of social destiny sometimes makes, letting you be in the wrong place at the right time, and discover the existence of things you were not supposed to know about, all those things that happen when your back is turned, or when the oaken doors close behind you. Those entities in the real world that the terminally unimaginative think can only be found in heaven.
It was the holidays so I needed a job. Through a stroke of good fortune I landed a stint as Lift Attendant at the Café Royal in London, which was about the easiest job going: you simply turned up, slipped into your uniform (jacket with copious braid and epaulettes and gold buttons, white gloves which had to be draped over shoulder), then spent the evening accompanying people up and down in the lift and doing the flunkey thing: "your floor, sir", "your floor, madam" and I forget the rest of the spiel. I knocked off around midnight, or a bit later, depending. Since at that hour there were no buses back to High Wycombe (my mum's house, where I didn't actually have a room but could kip on the sofa) I generally caught the night bus to Heathrow, ordered a coffee in the all night cafeteria there and sort of slumped and dozed over a table until morning and the bus home. The pay wasn't great: tips were talked of, but never seemed to materialize. In fact the only tip I got over the whole Christmas period was from the Spandau Ballet roadies who used the capacious lift to lug their PA up to the Cadogan Room or wherever the gig was. I think it was a fiver, which was pretty generous for 1980. May even have been a tenner. Anyway, that gig was I think Christmas Eve, and the audience was some sort of debutantes' party. I'd gone up and down in the lift probably a few dozen times before I was called to help out in an emergency: one of the debs had thrown up on a fabulously expensive carpet, so Muggins was given a bucket and cloth. Didn't mind, it being Christmas and all. Well, the high point of that evening turned out to be very nearly the high point of my entire life, except for one or two good bits that happened much later, around when I turned 40. That high point was The Leg.
See, there were some photographers there from Harpers and Queen or one of them toff mags, wanting to photograph the debs, or those of them who could still more or less stand up. At one point one of them decided it would be sort of edgy if they could get one of the uniformed flunkies into one of the shots. So I was drafted in and after a bit of how about you go here, finally it was decided that it would be even more piquant and daring if I were to hold one of the debs' thighs as she did a Hedy Lamarr in one of the toff blokes' arms, or one of the other debs', can't remember.
I still have dreams about that leg. Encased in sheer silk specially flown in from Samarkand, perfumed with the choicest gin, fattened with the finest profiteroles, it was a leg from another social class, stretched out de haut en bas (from on high and in stockings), from another galaxy, another dimension. And it balanced, wanton and bibulous, in my perspiring mitts, like a dolphin on a roofrack, or an Ark of the Covenant slung between two humble camels.
I don't think you can account for the existence of a Leg like that without string theory. It needs every one of those 26 dimensions, except the last. The last accounts for me being there, and that's all: one of those glorious mistakes that the strict traffic control system of social destiny sometimes makes, letting you be in the wrong place at the right time, and discover the existence of things you were not supposed to know about, all those things that happen when your back is turned, or when the oaken doors close behind you. Those entities in the real world that the terminally unimaginative think can only be found in heaven.
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