Next to Billie Holiday.

At fourteen, Michael didn't really know who Billie Holiday was, except that maybe she was something to do with Motown. Lost in the doldrums of knowing no one in California, being a teenager, being gay, Michael suddenly heard a voice that sounded like he felt.

Jazz was supper-club music for people who wore slightly transparent socks and liked it when Frank Sinatra sang 'hot damn'. It was in old movies. And in this old movie-music style was someone singing about a lynching. The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, drawled a slow, sad, horrified voice.

There was something relentlessly modern about it, like someone singing Brecht or a song about a serial murder. It was perfect, just perfect. It was cool. Michael could see himself coming back from California with that kind of music and being cool.

He reckoned that the stores in the camp would be good on jazz, so he went there and asked by name for Billie Holiday. They stocked a lot of her product. By luck alone, he landed on the fifties album, Lady Sings the Blues. He read the song titles, which for the last time, would mean nothing to him: 'God Bless the Child', 'Lady Sings the Blues', 'Strange Fruit', 'I Thought About You'. Walking back to the bus stop, he met someone who was almost a friend, a Marine's son on the baseball team. With him was the coolest guy of them all, the son of a black officer. His name was Hendricks, Rousseau Hendricks, and he claimed to be Jimi Hendrix's cousin.

By now Michael's taste in records was a reliable source of scoring social points for the children of Marines. Nobody, but nobody, bought Julie Andrews records except Michael. So when the white kid said, with a hooded smile, 'What have you got now?' Michael had a sudden surging stab of pride. I'll show you.

Out came the blue album. 'Oh, man,' said the white kid in real embarrassment. The record looked old.

But Rousseau Hendricks looked up, his eyes widening. 'You bought this?'

'Yeah, it's got all her best stuff on it.' At least, that's what the guy in the record department said.

'And that's the best there is,' said Rousseau. The white kid scowled. Michael had scored cool points plus. Michael knew then that his instinct had been right; Billie was what he needed.

Michael returned to Britain and scored cool points all through his brief period of glamour. He played Billie Holiday for Bottles in the long magic afternoons before parents came back from work. It was like listening to the Bible.

'Oh, that is the story of my life,' Bottles had declared. It wasn't then, but it was soon to become so, for a while.

Later, Michael read the biographies. Her voice had not always been sandpaper; she had not always sung in a heightened style. The recordings from the thirties were smooth, dapper, even merry.

It was that Billie he called up. She arrived direct from 1938, having left the Artie Shaw band.

Billie arrived unfussed, plump and pretty in a blue dress with white polka dots. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette, looked at Michael and crumpled forward. She leaned back, smiling, narrow-eyed and took one long draught of her cigarette as if it were a cooling drink.

'Oh, baby,' Billie muttered to herself. ' Man. ' She shook her head.

'What?' asked Michael nervously. 'What?'

Billie blasted smoke out of both nostrils. 'You don't even know what you want, do you?' Somewhere there were nerves; she suddenly reached up to tug on her hair. 'You going to offer the Lady a drink or not?'

'Sure. Um. Whiskey? Gin?' Michael tried to remember what he had in stock.

'A Grand Slam,' she said confidently.

'What's that?'

'Oh, man,' she groaned again. She strode into his tiny kitchen. 'Where do you keep the hooch around here?' She started to mix the drinks. It was Michael who was fussed. Michael fussed around the cabinet and the ice-cube tray.

'So. You don't know why you called me here.'

'I… uh… a friend suggested it.'

'Um,' she said, sounding completely unflattered. 'Maybe I ought to meet your friend instead.'

'I… I'm supposed to be exploring sex or something, and I guess I'm trying to do justice to women.'

'Justice to women. My, my. You reckon that's possible?' Billie unobtrusively took down another glass and started making him a drink too. 'Looky here. This is how you fix a Grand Slam.' She showed him, and passed him the glass. 'Here. You look like you need it.'

'Thank you.'

'You're welcome.' She said it because it was good form to do so, and comportment was important. 'So. What do I get out of this?'

'Well, some people think it's neat being alive.'

'I never did think that life was neat particularly. Death's part of the deal. Why should I be happy to be resurrected as a whore? Hmm? When I spent all my whole waking life trying to make myself a Lady?'

Michael coughed, with unease. 'Yeah. I… uh… I'm a bit English and to us a Lady is some old bat whose great great grandfather was good at railways or killing people and who lives in a stately home.'

Lady Day suppressed a prejudice of her own, visibly swallowed it. Who were more ofay than the English? Then something like sympathy swam into her eyes.

'A Lady is somebody with dignity. And nobody can take that dignity away.'

Sympathy swam up in Michael as well. 'Did you get there?'

'Yes,' she said in a determined voice. 'Yes, I did.'

And Michael wondered: how much of her future does this Angel know?

Lady Day was concerned about this present. 'So you see why I don't accept this situation. I was a whore at fourteen because my mama had just become one too, and it was the only way to put food on the table. I didn't want to be no whore, I was made to be a whore, and a stupid white judge put me into the workhouse at fourteen years old. She didn't jail the men who paid me that fifty cents. They knew I was fourteen. They didn't go to jail.'

Smoke poured out of her nostrils like scorn.

'Men like you. White men who would never have a black gal in their house.'

It was not often that an Angel expressed active, positive dislike. Michael wondered what to do. He could send her back, but that would be chicken-shit. So, Michael told himself, hear the truth, tell the truth.

'Not men like me. Those men were seventy years ago. And they weren't gay.'

'Gay?' She scowled and was bumped from behind by a chuckle. 'What, you a whore too?' Then she was bumped by the truth. 'Oh, I get you. You're a pansy.'

'Yup.'

'Aw hell, there was a pansy craze not so long ago. A lot of clubs had pansy comperes. A couple of guys in bands were like you and they were always pretty nice except Moose. He always used to get drunk and mean and call everyone else a sister. He hated women though he was one himself.'

Twang. Like a guitar string something snapped. Billie suddenly stretched out like a cat finding a warm place to sit. 'So. You been whoring around.'

Michael explained. 'It's like a gift. I can sleep with anyone I want to. Alive, dead. Except they're not real.'

Billie coughed a cigarette laugh. 'Man, you won the male jackpot.'

Truth. 'I'm impotent and it's ruined my life so far.'

'Ruined, how?'

'My boyfriend's left me, and I'm not concentrating on my work.'

'Sounds like life, baby.'

'No. Not when I can call dead people back to life.'

Billie thoughtfully plucked a bit of stray tobacco from the tip of her tongue. 'So. You got yourself a calling. Nobody said being called was any fun. I got myself a calling. It kept me alive a long, long time after all I wanted to be was dead.'

She managed a smile, held up her drink and toasted it, toasted her inhuman calling, toasted Michael's calling too.

There was this time, I was singing against Baby White at the Apollo. And all the Apollo wanted was fast-time stuff, and folks who sang like it was opera, and they thought I was just imitating Louis. So I got up there, and I dragged anyway. Dragged behind the beat. I did not knock 'em dead at the Apollo. Not 'til ten years later, anyway.'