Part Fourteen – Glorious Gloria

The next part of Stookey Hill sees us circle back to pick up on Glorious Gloria, a former dancer with a nostalgic outlook!

Part Fourteen – Glorious Gloria

Back in the day, Gloria had been a dancer. The foxtrot and the tango were her favourites. Although she had favourites for all aspects of her dancing life.

Favourite partner: Mick Macherry

Favourite song: anything by Sinatra – so technically that’s where the “favourite” notion fell down.

Favourite venue: the ballroom at the seafront in Aberdeen. She thought that was perhaps because it was in Scotland. It felt exotic in the seventies.

Favourite dress: the bright red one, with the tulle skirts that made a ‘swoosh’ sound each time she twirled.

And in her day, Gloria did a lot of twirling.

As her bones had aged and her joints had become more arthritic, Gloria was less inclined to dance and instead started to pay more mind to the make-up artists who decorated her face with eyeshadows and rouges, lip glosses and false eyelashes. While her body might creep its slow waltz to being decrepit, she would live on as Glorious Gloria as long as she could bring a brush to her face!

And that she did. Every day. You wouldn’t see Gloria dead in Harry’s Shoppe or picking up a pizza for her sons without a dewy complexion and a splash of red across her lips and cheeks.

Each Saturday night, she watched Strictly Come Dancing. And her son, Mazurka, had got her a VPN on her iPad so she could watch Dancing with the Stars on a Sunday night. She had made herself little paddles with numbers on to rate the dancing, holding each one aloft.

Nothing made her happier.

At first, she had also worn the red dress on her evenings of dancing television. It didn’t do up at the back anymore, but who cared about that when she sat by herself, her cold picky-bits tea of glazed ham and pickled onions the only company she had?

Then, the stoop in her back had meant the dress was long. Far too long. She retired it after the time she went upstairs in a commercial break to use the toilet and stepped on it. Somehow, this caused her to smash her nose on the edge of a stair. It grew, bulbous and purple. Even her best foundation barely covered it. And she had put so much on that awkward so-and-so, Mrs Dorado from down the street, had asked her if she had custard on her face! The cheek!

So, the dress went away. Until one December when her other son, Bolero, borrowed it. She thought it was entirely inappropriate, but let him take it nonetheless. He returned it to her on Christmas Day, immortalised in a six-foot, gilded frame. He had tried to hang it above her bed, but it was too tall. So he had had to hang it sideways. She thought it was a little odd, but would lay at the foot of her bed, on her side, and admire it. It really was a thing of beauty.

Now, Gloria kept her ear to the ground on Stookey Hill. She had to. Largely because she was in an unspoken competition with Mrs Dorado herself. Gloria couldn’t abide the woman. So much so that one year, when waiting for a train at Clapham Junction, a tarot card reader had offered to put a curse on her. But Gloria changed her mind. She didn’t dislike Mrs Dorado that much. Also, it would have cost her seventy pounds and she had no way of recouping her losses if Genevieve, the mystic, failed in her exploits.

So, instead, Gloria settled for enraged glares and pinched lips across the street. Sometimes, she would shake her head and poke her finger a bit into the air, as if casting her own spell on Mrs Dorado. It never seemed to work though.

“I don’t have those gifts,” she told Bolero one night when he came for tea. She was chewing thoughtfully as she explained how she had even fashioned a wand out of a small and surprisingly long stick she had found in the back yard.

“I don’t think it’s a gift, ma,” Bolero said, eating as fast as he could. He loved his mother, but her obsession with causing the poor old dear down the street to fall into some sort of enchanted coma grated on him. There was also a little bit of him that thought it might work and he wanted no part in explaining that to the police.

Most days, Gloria walked the entire length of Stookey Hill. Twice. Up the way then down the way. She went into every shop, but bought very little. She fancied herself as a starlet of a bygone era. She would dress in dainty kitten heels and those flesh coloured stockings with the line up the back. She used to buy them on eBay, but the seller she used stopped supplying them. Instead, she had to revert to regular old natural tights from the supermarket, drawing the line on her leg with a sharpie first.

She had purchased some swishy skirts online too. Although the quality was questionable.

“They look like they have been sewn by a child!” she exclaimed to Mazurka when they arrived.

Mazurka looked over his glasses at the thin netted fabric and the small price tag that said £3.99.

“They probably were,” he said, dryly. But the notion of fast fashion was lost on Gloria. She hastened upstairs to try them on as he tried to explain ethics in purchasing clothes.

Over the top, she wore a button-down jacket. It was green with small, thin checkered stitching. She thought it looked like something Queen Elizabeth would have gone hunting in at Balmoral. That was when she decided to perfect the small, elegant wave of the late Queen, of the mind that as she walked the to and fro of Stookey Hill, she might persuade those who passed her by that she was a somebody.

And not a washed up harlot.

That was not a good day. And it might have been the real root of the rivalry that started between her good self and Mrs Dorado.

“What did you call me?” she asked, incredulous. She had taken great pains to look her best, offer her finest wave and make sure the blush on her cheeks matched the pink on her lips.

“You heard me. Showing your pants for all the world to see!”

Gloria was incensed. Had she not been the lady she was, she might have taken a swing at Mrs Dorado with her handbag. But it was a Radley bag and the small, wee doggie on it was near enough breaking loose of its delicate gold chain as it was.

It was only later, when Gloria arrived home, that she realised that her flamingo pink swishy skirt was tucked into the back of her undergarments. While Mazurka and Bolero found it hilarious, and while she did try and go along with it and laugh, she nonetheless found a special place in her heart to lurk a deep hatred for Mrs Dorado: simply for having unwittingly seen her underpants.

Her decision, one day, to pay Mrs Dorado a visit, came in part because of a wardrobe malfunction.

It started at the bakery. She was put off by the manager crying. Primmie was it? She couldn’t think of a sillier name. She’s hardly prim, is she? She had huffed to herself with the usual internal judgement she reserved for those who failed to meet the standards for public presentation of oneself.

Deciding to stick to a pre-packed loaf only lest Primmie’s running nose had escaped to any of those laid out in the cabinets, Gloria left the bakery. She didn’t hear the door close behind her so quickly as a gust of wind beckoned it to a hasty bang. It was the tear she heard. The skirt, it turned out, was stuck in the hinge of the door and her own motion forward had done nothing other than tease what was already fragile fabric away from the waistband.

The horror. A gaping hole stretched from her hips, the loose fabric, once she had prised it from the door, hanging down to the floor, showing the bakery, and anyone pausing in traffic at the junction outside, her petticoat. And while this was better than ones pants, it wasn’t much better.

Hoisting the fabric, which had seemed to gather a life of its own as it fluttered and danced in the breeze, she clamped her hand to her rear. But the breeze caught it again, determined to free it from the prison she had made with the fingers of her left hand and the loaf of bread.

There was no way she could get home.

And the closest house was Mrs Dorado’s.

Gloria was caught once more. Although this time, not in the physical, but in the fact that every time she shuffled, the wind – like a determined naughty child – grabbed the skirt and made sure it flew in the opposite direction of her travel. Then she heard another tear.

She gasped, audibly.

Not only was the waistband barely connected anymore to the rest of the skirt, but her loaf of bread was now the shape of a curiously large, rectangular pancake.

She had two choices. Make it home wearing nothing on her lower half other than an elasticated, pink tulle waistband and a cream, lace trimmed petticoat. Or stop at Mrs Dorado’s for some assistance.

Dignity lost, she resigned herself to the fact that the situation was lose lose. However, she deigned to dare she would rather lose without her undergarments on display for all and sundry.

A sharp knock at Mrs Dorado’s door yielded nothing. No doubt the old hag was out, buying ham and crisps for that son of hers.

She knocked again, but chose the worst moment to do so, since one hand was gripping the bread and that pesky wind returned, insisting once more that the remainder of her skirt was to be scattered aloft.

As she watched the pink tulle float up into the atmosphere like an elegant weather balloon, Gloria squawked and – out of new desperation – tried the handle of Mrs Dorado’s front door.

To her surprise, and delight, it was open! The silly old woman had left it unlocked.

But, Mrs Dorado’s folly was Gloria’s gain and she set about trying to find herself a nice skirt in the bedroom upstairs.

Gloria’s folly, however, came when upon entering Mrs Dorado’s bedroom she discovered…she was not alone!