When he came back from the country, Sykes moved in with an ancient transvestite called Fabulina. Fabulina owned a boarding house and rented out rooms for an hour, a day or a lifetime. Her tenants were mainly queens, transients and addicts of every kind. It was Fabulina who saved Sykes’s life when he embarked on a deliberate and intensive quest into the realm of narcotics. He experimented with every pharmaceutical in the alphabet, searching for the one that would numb his mind yet enable his body to pursue its career as a prostitute. Whichever substance he selected had to be compatible with alcohol and marijuana: the staples of the society he had affiliated himself with. He assessed each drug, and combination of drugs, annotating the results in a notebook. He finally settled on a vertiginous blend of amphetamines and barbiturates — Duramine and Mandrax. But not before one of those experimental cocktails almost stopped his heart. Fabulina found him crumpled on the kitchen floor in a pool of vomit. She dragged him under a cold shower, fed him coffee and then walked him up and down the hallway all night until he returned to his senses.
Fabulina had gentle, compassionate eyes and a vicious tongue. She had been renowned as an ice skating star in the forties and on the piano in her sitting room there was a framed and autographed photo of Fabulina hefting Sonja Henie into the air. Fabulina looked slim and handsome with just a suspicion of mascara.
‘That bitch weighed a Norwegian ton,’ Fabulina said. ‘But your mother had muscles then. Beefcake on ice. I was so gorgeous I could have fucked myself. I tried once.’ Fabulina posed and preened, fluffing the sparse hair that had been so often bleached and hennaed that now it grew out naturally pink. Fabulina hardly ever dressed in drag anymore. The Full Catastrophe as she called it. She was happy in an old sequined blouse, slacks and a pair of fluffy slippers. But on her birthday the anniversary of her ersatz engagement to her beloved Winny, the business-man, gangster and politician who had endowed her with the boarding house, she made the effort.
‘Ah, Winny,’ she would say dreamily. ‘Sir fucking Winston. He treated me like a queen. Champagne for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Before he scuttled back to his bitch wife. What a prick. But what a prick.’
She would spend the whole day preparing herself and emerge corseted and bewigged, ready to be escorted out to dinner by her current favourite.
After Sykes’s overdose, he became Fabulina’s close friend. They would sit for hours over countless cups of tea, smoking and gossiping and telling each other the history of their lives. Fabulina was the only person to whom Sykes could describe not only the disturbing things that happened to him as a whore but also how they made him feel inside. She allowed him to cry. She sometimes cried with him. Fabulina understood the loneliness of life on the outskirts where the valency of friendship was low — allegiance was easily sacrificed for the next taste or the next trick. For the hookers and drag queens and junkies, duplicity and treachery were the ironies of everyday life. Often people suddenly disappeared or died.