by Paul Magrs
They stayed there until the last minute, when it started to pour and turn dark in earnest. Penny was content to sit on the shore and watch the others climb trees, hang from branches, skim stones, dash about. She watched them make a holiday out of her birthday. They did it expertly, with the ease of people used to pleasing themselves. Her housemates were all in their early to mid-twenties and didn’t mind playing at being children as much as she, in her late teens, did. Then Vince was sitting beside her on a flat rock, tugging up the collar of his purple suit jacket and brushing the sandy hair from his eyes. She thought that the two of them together must look like the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. She kept this to herself, however, knowing it would derail Vince into a long, cryptic discourse on Lewis Carroll.
She said, “You’re going to go, aren’t you?”
He looked across. “I applied for a job down south. And I got it.”
“South.” She whistled. “Does our school know?” Her heart was doing twenty to the dozen. She had provoked him into honesty and now she couldn’t believe they were discussing this so blandly. She had asked him wishing only to be proved wrong.
“I won’t go leaving anybody high and dry.” He had gone cold again, staring at the lake. Motorboats were slashing past in the near distance. You could see people sat on the back, holding wine glasses carefully and staring at Penny’s birthday party on private land.
“But you’re cutting your links with Aycliffe.”
“I think I have to, Penny.”
“I’ve known you would sooner or later.”
“I’ve loved living at number sixteen.” He smiled. “If anything’s kept me and Andy going past our sell-by date, it’s having time together in the home you’ve made for us.”
She shrugged. “Hey.”
“No, it’s true, pet. You brought us all together. Look at the rest of them.” He nodded towards Sven and the others. Sven had his faded jeans rolled up to his knees, making a show of plodging out in water that would be freezing. “They all love you. You have a gift for connecting people.”
“That’s from you, teaching me E. M. Forster.”
He smirked. “Right.”
“I wish you’d stay, Vince.”
“I know. And I’m leaving you in the lurch, mopping up after me. Andy won’t be much fun for a while after I’m gone.”
“He’s not going to be happy,” she said lightly as they both looked at Andy. He was self-absorbedly slinging stones into the brown water, trying and failing to make them skim. For that day he was dressed like someone out of Blur, or, as Vince pointed out, himself at the age of nine.
Vince was saying, “I’m not flattering myself. I don’t think Andy will be devastated to finish with me. But he’s not going to be ecstatic, either.”
It seemed to Penny that she’d had almost a year of them charting their separate graphs of each other. They never had tallied and both had – if she were honest – worn her out. The treacherous part of herself gave a pang of relief at Vince’s news.
“You never saw a future for the two of you, did you?” she asked.
“We met when we were seventeen. We thought we were the only two puffs in the northeast. So of course we mean a lot to each other now.” He gave a laugh that was almost mocking. “Now that we’re so sophisticated. Nah, we still mean a lot. But I don’t know what he wants any more.”
Penny looked down. “I’ve known him less than a year and he’s changed so much in that time. He’s become more — I don’t know.”
“He’s opened out,” Vince said. “I suppose he’s more amenable to people. I’m glad the two of you have become friends.”
She looked at him, thinking he was being sarcastic. But he wasn’t. He felt that he was passing Andy on to someone. It was a relief Andy had someone there. Vince remembered being surprised at how solid a team Andy and Penny had become. He first saw it when he himself moved in, back in March. One Thursday night, hauling a few bags and boxes of essentials, Vince had at last left his dad’s place. He found the squat’s inhabitants eating bowls of cereal in the living room, watching EastEnders in a smog of Benny Hedges. The household had just opened up to let him in and, even though it was to Andy’s single bed in the narrowest room that Vince automatically went that night, he was treated by Andy and Penny as just another nonpaying guest. On some unspoken level they realised that Vince was, in his own blind way, passing through. Andy had seemed equivocal, almost diffident about his presence.
How to tell Vince that? Penny wondered. Vince who thought Andy clung to him and needed passing on from carer to carer. Vince who, thin-lipped and anxious, now seemed on the verge of changing his mind about moving on, suddenly fearful of upsetting Andy. Penny thought Andy was looking gorgeous that afternoon. His uncertainty and nerves brought up to the surface everything that was most endearing in him. When anyone talked to him he flinched and smiled shyly, struggling to join in with them.
Vince resolutely said, “No. I do have to go south.”
She laughed when he came downstairs at last, dressed up for the party, because he was in a cowboy outfit. The least excuse and there he’d be dressed up as something. It was funny tonight, with him standing there in leather chaps and a red and black plaid shirt, because her song for the afternoon had been ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. She had played it again and again as she cooked and prepared.
Standing in the kitchen doorway, Andy adjusted his red bandanna, mystified by her laughter. He was often perplexed by what Penny and her friends laughed at. He assumed they must have college jokes, or jokes that went above his head.
Penny ran the tape back once more to play him the song. When it started, he realised the joke and relaxed.
She snorted. “You were meant to be down here, helping with the party food.”
The heat in the kitchen went streaming out of the opened window, into the dark with the cigarette smoke. Outside there was a thin patter of snow starting up.
“Oh.” Andy shrugged. “I had a crisis about what to wear.”
Last year the organisation of the Hogmanay party had been the same: Penny running about until the last minute. She’d be a drunken mess by the time the guests arrived. She’d forget to get changed again, too. Well, the guests could take her or leave her. Andy would always be immaculate, of course. She looked him up and down and decided that he made quite a sweet cowboy.
Our second party! she marvelled, and poured herself a second toast. Celebrating over a year of cohabitation.
Andy poured his own glassful, leaned across and kissed her cheek. “Happy New Year,” he said, and she could smell his freshly washed hair under the bandanna. He lived in a borrowed room, signed on for income support and housing benefit, but he bought expensive shampoo, even with his hair shaved on number seven. She was glad he was dressed as a cowboy tonight. For an hour or more this morning he’d been digging through Liz’s wardrobes in Penny’s room. He tried on a couple of her dressy outfits. Tacky dresses, he called them, and he looked stunning in them, she had to admit. Penny wouldn’t have refused him if he’d asked to borrow one for the party. At the same time she wouldn’t have been altogether happy seeing him come downstairs done up as her absent mother. And the party guests might prove a problem. She wasn’t sure how they’d deal with her housemate in drag.
“Do you reckon we’ll get everyone turning up?” she asked worriedly.
“Course we will. They love a good do round here, don’t they?” He was distracted by the blinds rattling against the open window. “The wind must be picking up. Should I close that?”
“We’ll be getting a blizzard.” Oddly, the thought only made her feel cosy. She liked the idea of the house with a partyful of people trapped inside, a snowstorm raging out there in the estate. Imagine being snowed in and the party just going on!
Andy went to shut the window. As he did so, a sudden gust sent a black slip of paper spinning into the room.
“What’s that?” He jumped back, slamming the window. Penny picked it off the carpet. “
An empty After Eights packet.” She turned the black envelope over in her fingers.
“Oh.” Andy went to change the tape.
When Penny was little and couldn’t sleep, she and her dad would eat After Eight mints in the kitchen at night. They would leave messages for each other pushed inside the packets, hidden in odd places. She looked inside this one, but there was nothing there.
We used the black envelopes from After Eights to tell each other the important things. It worked. The messages got across.
And it wasn’t like dad was a bad communicator. He brought me up wonderfully. He knew the things to say. Some of the women I know, they were brought up knowing nothing. When they had their first period, they thought their insides were coming out. Dad told me everything. Sometimes sitting as we watched the washing machine thumping round all night. Sometimes roving miles in the car through the dark, sometimes via black envelopes. I suppose the ones in the envelopes were the ones we wanted to keep.
Keepsakes. It’s a good word. I have a green After Eights box, I’ve kept for years. Like a tiny filing cabinet, crammed with messages on different coloured bits of paper. They’re almost worn through with rereading. Funny what you keep. All the things dad told me. Then, when he became Liz, what she went on telling me. Things about me, things about her. I had this feeling that, when the After Eights mint box, when the tiny filing cabinet was full, then I’d know everything. My growing up would be complete.
It’s full, all right. You can choose at random, pluck out an envelope, the box will still seem full. Inside, some precious sliver of wisdom or nonsense, still smelling of minty fondant.
That box caused a row between Andy and me. Not too long ago I found him in Liz’s room, now my room, with the envelopes spread on the bed. I walked in and found him absorbed in them, opening out folded sheets and poring over the whole set. Greedy for the full story.
“I never worried about people going through my stuff,” I said. “I let everyone live here and I never thought it would happen. I’m too trusting.”
Andy was trying to push the letters back in their pockets, to sort out the damage he’d done. I worried that he’d spoiled them, or ruined their order. He stammered apologies.
“I’m just nosy,” he offered at last. “I see something like this and I can’t help myself.”
“But it’s my stuff! My private letters!”
“I didn’t know that! Not until I found them!”
“You shouldn’t have been here!”
“I was bored!”
“Bored? So you go rooting around in my stuff?”
He looked exasperated with himself. “Yes!”
I laughed at him. “Have you read all these?”
He sat back down on the bed. “I’ve been reading them all afternoon. Sorry, Pen. But...” He shook his head. “You’re so lucky. To have all this. It’s like all you need to know about life. Important things and daft things. But things you’d forget if they weren’t written down. All about you and…your parent.”
So he knew the thing about Liz. Now he knew that she didn’t start out as my mam. He’d read her letters beginning to end, and they started out signed at the bottom, ‘love, dad.’
“Just call her Liz,” I said. “That’s what she wants to be called. If she ever comes back, that is.”
“I think she’s an amazing person,” he said, which made me laugh again.
“Maybe she is.” I started packing away the notes. He’d laid them out very carefully, I saw, in precise order. Trust Andy to look after my things. “Did I ever tell you…” I said. “About Liz, when she was my dad and I’d just been born...and he took me out to look at the moon?” I tried to find the piece of paper where he’d written this down. One of the very early ones. “He said we were both struck by lightning, and that’s why I grew up with black fingerends and bad headaches.”
“How can you believe stuff like that?”
“When it’s all you’re told, you have to. And with Liz…you end up believing anything.”
“My parents didn’t leave me anything much,” he said. “They never got a chance.”
He’d already told me how they’d died. He was brought up mostly by his gran, is what I’d gathered. When he moved in here he brought hardly any stuff with him. Andy is someone who comes without baggage. Me, I’ve got baggage coming out of everywhere.
“But that means you’re rooted somewhere,” Andy said. “All this stuff is full of memories. It’s your life and it means you belong.”
I wasn’t convinced. “But without it, I could up sticks and go anywhere. Like Liz did. Like you could, anytime.”
“It’s easy to get rid of stuff. Just chuck it. That’s what charity shops are for. Get rid.”
He knew I couldn’t do that. Something ties me here. Not just waiting for my mam to come back.
I put away the box in her wardrobe. Among all her things. Wigs, roped beads and crusted, glittering fake jewellery. A selection of mandarin fingernails. “Oh...” I said. “You could guess from this lot that she’s a tranny. What self-respecting woman would have a wardrobe like this?”
He chuckled. “You have now, pet.”
“Hm. So I have.”
THREE
For years Mark Kelly had believed himself to be surrounded by people. His life was made too complex and problematic by a constant stream of relations and friends, and friends of friends. People crowded into his life and pressed their concerns upon him. He had grown up wanting to stand aloof, but always felt himself pulled right in.
His ex-wife Sam had a thought or two about that. “Crap. You love getting mixed up in it all. You’re just bloody nosy. You’re more interested in what’s going on with other people than you are in your own family.” This was one Saturday afternoon when he came to pick up his eight-year-old daughter Sally. Sally watched the familiar row go backwards and forwards. Nothing much changed for Sam and Mark. Mark was still living in the flat in Phoenix Court where they had all lived together. “You couldn’t bear to leave that street,” Sam jeered. “You think too much of sitting with all those old women and their tittle-tattle.”
Sam didn’t think much of the inhabitants of Phoenix Court. She thought herself a cut above. When Mark told her that, she flew off the handle. She told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. He should have wanted more, he should have provided better for his child and wife. He should have been more ambitious. Couldn’t he see it was driving her mad, living on that lousy council estate? Of course she wanted to be out and in a new Barratt home near Darlington. She lived in one now, with Bob, a policeman. Mark had to travel through Darlington on the bus to pick up and drop off Sally at weekends. On Sunday nights Sam would put their child in the bath and quiz her over what her father’s life was like now.
Now Mark was living with no one. For a while there had been a man living there with him. Richard, who had befriended Sally and whom Sally talked about a lot when she returned home to her mam. Sam would listen pursed-mouthed to this, and could barely restrain a crow of triumph when, one day, Sally announced that Dad’s friend Richard had returned to Leeds.
“Your little boyfriend’s gone then, has he, Mark?” Sam said this as she pushed her daughter’s arms into her anorak. Sally pulled free and put it on for herself.
“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” said Mark, glowering. He didn’t think his life was any of Sam’s business now. Whoever came and went into his life had nothing to do with her. He, after all, never asked about her dopey policeman, did he?
Sam gazed at him as he stood in the porchway of her new Barratt home. She was surprised by a surge of affection and physical desire for this man. It was the way the light came in through the porch and lit up the many shades of blue of his tattoos. His all-over markings shone in that light. They reminded Sam of their years together. There was no one on this planet with a body like Mark’s. “Are you OK then?” she asked in a more subdued tone. He nodded, and took Sally.
This exchange had been quite recent. Ma
rk had lost his lodger in the small flat. Sam and her policeman were taking Sally to the in-laws for Christmas. Mark would be alone for much of the festive period. He couldn’t believe that his days would be empty of people. That wasn’t like his life at all. On Boxing Day he had resorted to visiting his mother-in-law Peggy, who still lived nearby. He took a present for her new child Iris, who was barely two and walking about all over the place. Peggy could see how down Mark was. But she was glad of a quiet time, herself. Christmas two years ago, when Sally had been kidnapped and they’d all gone running about like mad things, was a mite too busy for her liking. She let her tattooed boy go, and watched him walk down the garden path through the snow. She felt fond of him, and sad for him. He was meant for better things. Peggy wondered if Mark in his mid-thirties thought that he’d spoiled his potential.
He was glad of this party tonight. At one point he was going to throw one of his own in the flat, but thought better of it. They’d all come snooping round, fascinated by how he was managing on his own. Luckily this do was on at number sixteen. The kids here were welcoming, he thought. That was how he thought of them, as kids. This was Mark in the second half of his thirties, looking at the inhabitants of number sixteen — Andy, Penny and their fluctuating roll call of hangers-on — and thinking, youth.
What a frame of mind to arrive in! Knocking on a door on New Year’s Eve feeling old and alone. He forced an uneasy grin and knocked again. The music within was already fairly loud, so he couldn’t be that early. When Andy opened the front door, he was still laughing at something. To Mark he looked the picture of carefree youth in his check shirt, his cowboy outfit. It was very nearly an uncharitable pang of irritation that Mark tried to squash at the sight of his host. Andy looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world. But at least he looked pleased to see Mark.
