Title: Life as an Idol

Chapter One: In Which I Discover that I Am Not Alone

Author: mao

Disclaimer: Velvet Goldmine characters, likenesses, and plotlines belong to Todd Haynes, Michael Stipe, and the rest of those crazy kids. I'm making no money off this (at least, not that I know of), nor do I get (or claim) credit for any of that stuff. Suing me will accomplish nothing. So there. :P

Author's Notes: This is written as a memoir for Jack Fairy, about whom so little is known. I figured...let's learn more about him! So here we are.

Warnings: Some violence, homosexuality.

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My story begins in Manchester. In 1941, my mother, a Polish refugee from the Nazis, made her way across Europe to Britain, where she ran out of money, settling in Manchester. It was there that she began working in one of the many airplane factories that had sprung up since the war started. My mother was a small woman, trim, with long blonde hair always pulled back into a prim, braided bun. Her family had, apparently, had quite a lot of money back in Poland, and she was used to much more lavish surroundings than the tiny flat she shared with a few other young women from the factory.

It was several years later, when the war was over, that she met my father. He was an Irish soldier who'd spent quite a lot of time fighting in Warsaw and almost a year in Gdansk after his leg was wounded. He was nearly fifteen years older than her, but he receieved a large pension from the government for the loss of half his leg and was back to his previous job as a mathematics professor at Oxford - a position she knew would bring her prestige and a tidy sum every month.

She courted him furiously - to this day, I have an image of her whispering things in his ears, naughty things in Polish so no one else might understand them - and in less than six months, he'd brought her up to Oxford, where they were wed in a small ceremony.

In the photo of my parents afterwards, two things become very clear. Firstly, is my mother's level of commitment to him - I was to be born five months later, and it's quite obvious in the picture, if you look closely, that my father may well have married her out of guilt. Secondly, is my mother's triumph as she looks at my father. He didn't look as though he'd ever had much conviction - his hair was carroty red and wispy, receding from his hair line inches more every year. With the loss of most of his right leg, there wasn't much he could do, even with a wife.

He was tied down, and he knew it, if you look at the picture.

So I was raised in Oxford. My mother was able to have a silver teaservice, nice dresses, and a maid to come and cook and clean. She had a small silver snuff-box, though the habit had long since gone out of fashion, and it was always stocked.

I was born in early 1947, and my parents were never able to have another child, though they tried often. Although it was clear early on that this had been a marriage of convenience more than one of love - my father needed help without his leg, and my mother needed money - it becomes clear, looking over their letters and my memories, that as they got older, they fell in love with one another.

Perhaps part of it came from my mother's stubborn refusal to learn English. She honestly believed that Polish was a superior language and so learned only enough English to be able to go to market every few days. There were enough Polish ex-patriots and refugees in the area that she was able to make friends and have ladies over for tea, as she liked - whilst being able to not invite those she didn't like.

So I was brought up speaking Polish as well as English, and my father would take me with him to his office some days. I loved the wood panelling of it, the thick leather on his chair, the smell of paper and books and chalk that filled the tiny room. When we'd go into his classroom, the boys there would all smile and tease me affectionately.

I remember when I was about five, a boy with yellow hair who smiled at me every time I came with my father to work. He'd copy down his notes furiously, and when he left the room, tell my father, "I want a little boy just like that someday, Professor Malmgren," and my father would beam as the boy winked at me.

When I was six, my parents enlisted me in school. It was a private school, near the Uni, so the thought was if there were any problems of any kind, my father would be right there to take care of me, as my mother would be no help whatsoever.

The first week or so, no one noticed me. I sat in the middle of the classroom, as alphabetical order dictated, and thought about fairy tales, dragons and knights lancing their way across the room. When the teacher would call on me to answer a question (a raised eyebrow and gentle, "John?"), I would jolt to attention, sometime with the answer, sometimes without.

I found myself doodling in the margins of my workbook. I drew dragons with fire licking out of the mouths like a great many tongues; beautiful white horses for a knight to ride; myself in a bed like Snow White's, a thin layer of glass over my body to protect me. I started drawing the knight a few days later, and before I'd even thought about it, he took on the face of the yellow-haired boy, the one who'd winked at me.

He winked at me again now, from between two thin blue lines on the paper. I felt myself blushing at what I'd drawn, in the middle of the classroom (squished between Lambeth and Mott), and began a new picture, this time of the knight with the yellow hair - my prince, I decided - entering the magic castle.

I kept drawing these pictures for weeks on end. September ended and October began, cloudy and windy. As the weeks passed, I drew more pictures of the knight rescuing me from towers, from bogs, from the clutches of an evil wizard (who took on the face of a slight boy named Tommy across the room). At the end of every adventure, he would kiss me and hold me tight, and these pictures I kept private, in my pocket. They gave me a secret thrill, deep in the pit of my stomach.

It was the second week in October when someone - I'll never know who - saw these pictures and told someone else and soon - too soon for me to understand it - it was all over school that Johnny Malmgren likes to kiss boys.

I held out until the first week of November before they cornered me. Perhaps after that time I'd gotten sloppy, but I doubt it - I think my luck had just, finally, run out. After the maths lesson, they'd cornered me in the playground, shouts of "Get the fairy!" and "We'll teach you, bleedin' woofter!" encircled me, and then there they were (all of them, from different grades), hitting me, kicking me, knocking me into the gutter.

I felt each hit - and they were mostly little boys, understand, none of them were older than nine - and knew I'd be bruised tomorrow. I could feel my lips split when a particularly fat kid punched me in the face, and I tucked myself into a fetal position, any sense of dignity gone.

I will always be glad that bell rang when it did, as I felt at that moment I'd split my skin and die if it carried on any longer. I heard the bell ring - a loud, wonderfully resonant sound - and they all got up as one, ran back to the building, as I lay there in the muck, thanking God and whomever else might be listening, for that small grace.

I watched them run back into the building, and as I turned my head, I saw something glinting in the cracks of the pavement. I waited until I couldn't hear anymore shouting, any more little boy's voices, and then I began picking at the grime around the gold thing in the crack. I rubbed at it, prised it out of the muck, and found in my hand the most wonderful piece of jewellry I've ever seen, even since.

It was a golden pin, with a green glinting stone, the crevices black with the muck it'd been lying in for God only knows how long, and when I looked into it, I found myself pulled in. Hyponotised into a glittering golden and green world, with trees that dripped fruit all year round and knights would happily rescue me and kiss me afterwards.

I walked the whole way home, in the middle of the day, yet no one seemed to notice. I crept into my house only to discover that my mother was out to tea and the maid busy in the kitchen. I walked through the gloomy, unlit halls to my mother's room, where I found myself in front of her mirror, uncertain how I'd gotten there.

I looked at myself, and for the first time in maybe an hour, maybe two, I was very aware. There was a cut on my lip, and the blood - thick, red, rich - was oozing slowly out. I put a finger to it, wincing at the delicate pain working its way back into my face, and gently lowered it back to my lip.

Fairy, they'd called me. And this one: Woofter.

There were names for boys like me, I realized as I spread the blood across my lip, thinking of my mother's rouge. If there were names for boys like me, we weren't normal.

But there were more of us.

And what did that mean, anyway? Boys like me.

Fairy.

Woofter.

I slid the back of the pin into my lapel and looked at myself in the mirror, then smiled.

With the rouge-like blood on my lips, I was beautiful. And someday, they'd all understand that too.