Duration 3.20
Aptesia Fallarme, for the purpose of this biography, has been persuaded to adopt a pseudonymous identity. It's not without relevance that she chose a bird-victim who is also an actress, in which capacity, though unprofessionally, Aptesia received more than one greatful dedication of thanks. Aptesia Fallarme is supposed to have been used as the model for the character of Happy Enido in Leo-dee-nine's novel 'A Sea-Vue'.
She could fill a warm porcelain bath in twenty minutes, a warm tin bath took a little longer. To fill a cold tin bath in less than an hour needed other inducements, like a view of the sea, a cow being milked, or the sound of a waterfall.
A great deal has been written about Aptesia Fallarme, most of it exaggerated and most of it scurrilous. The fair-minded Tulse Luper said, "She was a waterfall on legs". Majority Powels said, "She was a creature designed to render the services of an oasis".
The water poured from her skin, from the corners of her mouth, from her nose. As to the orifices more specialised for the expulsion of water the audiences were rarely disappointed. And in the little bathrooms of the suburbs the water splashed upon the carpet and they clapped and threw coins into the bath. In summer she was asked to stand on the bare patches of the lawn in the garden.
Aptesia herself was certainly responsible for a large part of her exaggerated reputation. Within months of the VUE she was travelling far and wide, exploiting her new characteristics at the least reputable fairgrounds, the more obscure cabarets and eventually in a house owned by a well-known photographer in Barons Court, West London, where Leo-dee-nine must have seen her.
And the opening of an umbrella was enough. Every minute this human waterfall would shake her body like a dog and wring out her hair. H.E. Carter would run in with a dressing gown embroidered with a running faucet. At the clinic she was kept away from the radiators as she soon fogged the room. She got locked in a surgery cold store and an orderly had to chip away the ice with a nail file. After an appearance at Palm Springs, she collapsed, suffering from nervous exhaustion and obesity. The hospital arranged a programme to regulate her output. Then, against advice, she allowed her name to be used by a plastic swimming-pool manufacturer and the hospital discharged her.
Aptesia's latest and much publicised ambition is to have a baby, though she's frightened, she says, that the baby might drown at birth.
The Falls Biographies
