by Paul Magrs
“Thank God for someone sensible!’ Andy gabbled, shooing him into the hallway. It was still festooned with Christmas decorations, and a fresh load of balloons and streamers and holly hacked in armfuls from the Burn. Number sixteen was done up like a grotto and Mark’s heart began to warm to the idea of a party. Coloured tissue paper covered all the lights and the air was scented with mulled wine and pizza. Andy was saying, “So far we’ve had that mad Nesta, old Elsie from the corner, getting pissed already, and us. Nesta’s brought her kids and she’s feeding them all the finger buffet. Give us your coat.”
He led Mark into the living room, showing him off to the others like a prize. “Where’s Penny?” asked Mark, and Andy explained that she was upstairs hurriedly repairing herself before the rest of the party arrived. Some of her student friends, who had managed to return for one night, were conscientiously milling and making conversation with the neighbours. As Mark was introduced, Andy went to answer the back door to Fran and Frank and their four kids. Dirty Sheila and Simon came in behind, with their son and depressed daughter. Andy wondered who told them all they could bring their kids. He looked at Nesta, who was forcing her dozy-looking daughters to eat more of the nibbles. She waved a corner of sausage roll under the nose of the baby in her arms. Andy thought that kid looked like a Martian. It was thin and pinched-looking. Nesta never took it out of the pram. The poor bairn lay on its front all the time and craned its neck like a tortoise. In its mother’s arms for once, the baby’s head was inclined backwards almost ninety degrees.
Andy looked across the living room as it started to fill up, and saw that Penny’s student friends were staring at Mark. They had never seen him this close up before. Marsha, Sven, Alan and now Adele gathered around him and Mark let them, chatting politely, saying no, his daughter was actually with his ex-wife the night, and no, he hadn’t come with anyone else, not even his mother-in-law, who was still one of his best friends. The house-mates and the neighbours seemed familiar with the sketchy outlines of his life. They knew he had been left alone over Christmas, poor Mark. They think they know everyone’s business, Andy thought, and then, when they get that bit closer, when they get a glimpse of the full picture, then they see that it’s different to what they expected. Duller or more complicated or more exciting than ever they thought. And who was prepared to go that far? To see the full picture of someone’s life? Andy surprised himself, thinking this lucidly and bitterly so early in the night, only a few drinks down the line. There were hours yet to get disgusted about how committed people could or couldn’t be.
And, like the others, Andy was staring at Mark’s tattoos. Mark made no bones about them and, last summer, he had taken up jogging round and round the estate. Two circuits was a mile, he’d cheerfully tell anyone as he went streaking past, a blur of green and blue in his skimpy shorts and sleeveless T-shirt. He was the colours of a bad laser copy, parading himself at speed, thudding round the intricate streets. The neighbours would look up and think, There goes that tattooed feller with no shame.
But when you got close up — and this was the effect they were getting now — you saw all the fine detailing. Eyes painted on eyes, digits and letters, tarot symbols, fabulous horned and feathered beasts, fragments of clockwork and cartography, of texts and petals and microscopic creatures. No wonder they stared. Mark just seemed to drink in their regard and talked, talked easily. Andy was forming the opinion that the man was full of himself. He had these tattoos just to make a show of himself. That was fair enough: Andy wouldn’t and couldn’t find fault with that. But he instinctively distrusted anyone shamelessly extrovert. Now Mark was calling over and asking Nesta how she was, and Fran, and Elsie. Elsie needed no encouragement. Suddenly she was by their sides, the gin glass tilted to her mouth as she spoke, as if she was scared of someone taking it. Her pigtails waggled as she spoke.
“Hey, Mark, you’d better watch out!” She smiled. “Frank’s here.”
They looked over at Fran’s tubby, ginger husband. He was unloading a carrier bag of tinnies and talking to their bairns.
“So?”
“Last I heard, he was still after you.” Mark tutted.
“After you for what?” asked Andy, intrigued despite himself. He knew that Elsie made things up just to stir up trouble for others and interest for herself, but something in the way she disclosed things made you ask, “And what next? What else, Elsie?”
“Frank thinks Mark’s got a thing going with Fran,” Elsie burst out, tinkling the ice in her glass. “Cause he was always over there on Tuesday afternoons.”
“We used to watch films on Tuesday afternoons,” Mark said with a shrug to Andy. Andy could have sworn he saw a blush in the gaps between tattoos. “He’s daft. People will talk about anything.” Mark was cross about the whole business, really, since the idle gossip had meant an end to video afternoons with Fran. They used to share a bottle of Country Manor and watch TV movies. The video shop down the precinct rented tapes of those cheapo weepies. They were usually true-to-life stories, about people with something wrong with them or lives that turn suddenly tragic. Both Mark and Fran loved them, especially the endings, where the screen turns black and captions go up to explain what has happened to the real lives of the real people since the events of the film. He blamed Elsie for stirring up the trouble, and thought about taking her to task about it now. She had got the neighbours talking about how Fran spent secluded indoor afternoons with Mark Kelly, her living-room blinds drawn, even in high summer. She spent days indoors with a man on the dole, while her own husband was out at work. But that was all over now.
Elsie asked, “How’s Sam and the new baby?” Mark gritted his teeth. Was she setting out to be deliberately offensive?
“Last I saw of them they were fine.”
“That’s his ex-wife,” Elsie mouthed to Andy. “And the bairn’s by her new feller. Bob the policeman, he’s called, isn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Mark sighed.
“Eeh,” Elsie went. “There’s new life all over, isn’t there? Things going on?”
Andy broke in, “There’s Jane coming in, Elsie. You’re friendly with her, aren’t you?”
Elsie whirled round to see Jane coming in wearing her best green dress, shoving her seven-year-old son in ahead of her. He was done up as a pageboy, in dicky bow and waistcoat. Elsie waved and hurried over, suddenly glad to feel surrounded by people she knew.
Andy knew Mark and Mark’s tattoos from the gym. In the town centre there was a gym up the ramp, above Red Spot supermarket, and at the start of November it had become the place where Andy took control of his life. Inside it smelled of furniture polish and coffee and a not unpleasant tang of sweat. MTV played on thirteen tellies suspended from the ceiling and there was always this stilted pidgin English booming out between songs. In Completely Fit, the clientele consisted of unemployed young blokes, middle-aged women and professional people on dinner hours. They chatted and laughed and helped each other. Andy would have been shamed in a trendier or more competitive place, but here he slipped right into a work-out plan. Every morning, at eleven, he would wind down gently in the sauna in the basement, round the back of Red Spot’s multistorey car park. At first it felt bizarre, sitting naked in a wooden shed, when just through the wall there were Cortinas and Capris jostling for free spaces. But he let the sharp heat and that funny, biscuity scent of the sauna soothe away his mid-morning anxieties. His complexion was marvellous these days.
Mark started at the gym just after Andy and it was here they first spoke, as if the intense, often boastful camaraderie of the gym was more convenient for conversation than their street. One morning Mark appeared to have trouble coordinating himself on the free weights. Andy stepped in and, in imitation of everyone else at Completely Fit, couldn’t wait to offer advice. Everyone had their own little hints on how to do things right. Passing them on gave Andy a frisson, but Mark just lay on the padded bench, looking as if he wanted to laugh.
It was a bitterly cold Dece
mber. It took half an hour to warm up for work-outs and longer again to cool down to go out. Andy lay in the sauna, thawing himself out gently, letting the spiced heat insinuate itself. The first time Mark joined him in the small, dimly lit cabin, Andy sat up in surprise and shuffled along to give him space.
“We’re like battery hens,” Mark said, sitting down.
They talked and Andy stared and stared. He had trained himself not to look too hard at the men’s bodies. Yet the sight of Mark drew him in. Mark sat with his hands squashed under his thighs, kicking his legs against the wooden slats, chatting away. He sat like a kid in a boring school assembly, Andy thought.
He talked about his daughter Sally, who was in her first year at the juniors now. She had just been given her first biro and her first read-it-yourself book. Sally had been affronted: she’d spent the summer reading all of Edith Nesbit’s books by herself. Mark complained about his lodger, who had done a moonlight flit in November; about his ex-wife and her policeman lover; and about his mother-in-law Peggy, who worried too much about his wellbeing. He moaned about these things in a funny, self-deprecating way. It was as if he was saying to Andy, Look, my life is a sitcom. Just listen to this! In August, he explained, in a car stalled at a garage on the way to Darlington, with the smell of petrol almost making him pass out, he single-handedly had to deliver his ex-wife’s new baby by another man. Sam lay in the back of the car in the Texaco forecourt and yelled her lungs out at him. Why had he let her get knocked up by some copper? Listen to this, Mark said in the sauna, laughing at himself and telling the whole ridiculous story to Andy.
As he listened, Andy found himself staring at individual pieces of Mark’s overall design. A Victorian clockface spanned a good third of his chest, the hands branching from the left nipple, which looked hard in the sauna’s heat. Andy focused on this and realised that the clockface was drawn on to look cracked. Creeping through the jagged splits were lush jungle vines and between them blazed an azure sky. On the flat of his chest a parrot in crimson and gold perched on the hand set permanently at three o’clock. And, because he couldn’t stop himself, Andy slipped his glance down the flat stomach, pretending all the while to listen and concentrate, to Mark’s prick lying squashed between his thighs. The end of his cock poking out seemed a faint chewing-gum pink beside the gaudiness of his outsides. A serpent twined the length of him, slipping along segments of ancient maps of coastline, sliced dewy fruit and the furled heads of lilies.
Andy looked back up and blushed, because Mark had seen him staring. Mark shrugged and said it was time for him to shower off: school was finishing soon and it was his weekend with his daughter. Through the porthole window Andy watched him shower and imagined the water running into the plughole tainted with his every colour. But it ran clear and Mark’s tattoos showed up glossier.
They met daily and struck up a conversational ease and an ease with each other’s bodies and nakedness. Even over the Christmas period they weren’t too busy for the gym. Andy looked upon his work-out plan as a challenge, and having people who expected him there made him feel obliged to keep going. Mark was doing the same thing, he thought. More than once Mark had told him how pleased he was to get out of the house. He got the impression Mark anticipated a bleak Christmas so he invited him round to the house. Mark was pleased but said he had visits to make all round his split-up family. But here he was on New Year’s Eve, stepping into the busying party, mesmerising everyone. Here was Mark wearing an excessively baggy Marksies jumper and jeans and all you could see of the real him was that bald blue head and the backs of his hands as he opened a can and started to drink it greedily down.
Fran was asking Nesta if she had seen Big Sue since Boxing Day.
“I’ve not seen nobody,” Nesta said through a mouthful of Battenburg. Jane was seeing to some cocktails with the clear plastic shaker-maker she’d brought with her and she rolled her eyes at Nesta. Across the buffet table Nesta’s daughter Vicki was sneering at Peter, all dolled up in his frilly shirt and suit.
“She’s still shaken up,” Fran said.
“Who, Big Sue?” asked Jane.
“Since them lads threatened her.”
“What’s this?” All of a sudden Nesta was interested.
“She was on the bus coming back from the sales on Boxing Day,” Fran said. “And these lads were baiting her. They sat on the back seat and took all her bags off her. They emptied them over the back of the bus and there was nothing she could do.”
“Never!” said Jane.
“Everything she’d bought in the sales, all over the back of the bus. And she’d been getting knickers and bras at BHS. They had them all out, laughing at them. Big Sue got off the bus in tears and came straight round mine. She left all her bargains on the bus. She ran straight off, she was scared of getting battered. The bus driver did bugger all. And the lads got right off on her stop. Well, you know the size of Big Sue. She just about killed herself, running from the bus stop to my house. She thought they were chasing her. But guess where they were going?”
“Where?” asked Nesta blandly.
“Over the road?” Jane asked. “Was it that lot from over the Forsythe house?” She knew fine well it was. They’d been nothing but trouble for months.
“Ay,” said Fran, glancing through the faces at the party, which was getting busier, the lights lower, the murmur of voices building. She looked at Elsie. “Ay, of course it was that lot.”
As she said this her eye caught Elsie’s and the way Elsie flushed red made it clear she was earwigging. If there was one thing Fran couldn’t abide, it was earwigging. If you were told something in confidence or whatever, then that was OK. But listening in for kicks was the pits. Still, Fran was ashamed of making Elsie feel bad. Just one glance had been enough to make her blush. Why should Elsie be made to feel responsible for the lads over the road? Just because her Craig was a tearaway.
Fran mulled on that word, tearaway. It made her think of coupons out of magazines, of perforated edges. It was a soft word for hooligans, she thought.
Jane noticed Fran and Elsie’s exchanged glance and she went weighing into attack. “Can’t you sort that son of yours out? They’re like bloody animals over there. When are they going to get something done about them?”
Elsie opened her mouth and closed it again. Then she said, “Our Craig has nowt to do with anything violent.”
“Yeah?” snapped Jane, giving her cocktail-maker a vigorous shake. “If you ask me, they’re all as bad as each other.”
“Let’s just drop it now,” Fran said, wishing she’d never started this. “It’s a party.”
“Are they having a New Year’s do over the road?” Jane asked Elsie.
“I think so,” was the surly reply.
“We can expect fireworks then,” Jane sighed. “How long before they get guns and drugs and all sorts over there? God! It’s like gang warfare.”
Elsie said again, “Craig has nowt to do with the violence.”
But in the past year their estate had become a more dangerous place to live. Everyone was scared of the louche, raucous boys over the road and the free rein they enjoyed.
Nesta spoke up. “But what about Big Sue? Where’s she tonight? Is she too scared to come out?”
“Maybe I better go and call on her,” Fran said. “Check she’s still coming here.”
“It’s bloody rotten that she has to have an escort,” said Jane.
“It’s the way things are,” Nesta said glumly. “In this day and age it’s like having no laws.”
Elsie let out a yelp of outrage. “Fancy you saying that, Nesta Dixon! It’s not over a year ago you had everyone out searching for your dead body and there you were having saddo-masokinky sex with that young lad God bless his soul — him who liked to dress up as an Alsatian!”
This turned a few heads, but most people already knew the tale. Nesta coloured and said that she was going round to see if Big Sue was all right.
“Honestly,” Fran muttered. “P
eople don’t let you forget anything, do they?”
“Try this,”’ Jane said. “It’s a Monkey Gland.” It was bright pink, with too much Pernod.
“Do you know what you’re like?”
Andy, standing framed in the doorway of Penny’s bedroom, startled her as she was putting on mascara. She had never learned the trick of mascara, feeling it weigh too heavy and claggy on her lids. She wished Liz hadn’t left without explaining the technique.
Penny was seated at Liz’s dressing table with all the drawers open, the tins and boxes and tubes spread wide. Everything was mother-of-pearl: a gentler version of the colour of oil spillage on beaches. “What am I like?” she asked Andy, amused by the way he slouched there with his bottle of alcoholic lemonade. He looked like he was at the saloon door. And that made her the bar-room belle, but she was in a minidress of peppermint green which crinkled and felt, to the touch, like sweet wrappers. She loved being in this dress, inside its several layers, like a chocolate lime.
Andy had already forgotten his first question to her and the reply took him by surprise. He shrugged and went, “I don’t know! I’m pissed!” Really, he just wanted to talk to her and say, Come downstairs. When he looked it seemed he could see every detail of the beautiful unguents and powders and pastes on the dresser. He licked his own lips as Penny applied a last smarmy, brilliant dash of lippy. To him she looked like...who was it? Snow White? No, Cinderella, in the Disney version, when she has birds and animals dressing her up and she never has to lift a finger. He imagined that this was how Penny was made ready, all the little creatures vanishing in a miraculous cartoon puff just as he came up the stairs and stood here to look.
Penny surveyed her finished self in the mirror that stood wide and high as the doorway itself. It was fringed with postcards from all over the place. There were cards from people who had lived at the house and moved away, cards from Liz and Cliff, from the resorts they had visited and, though Andy didn’t know this, cards from Vince. Vince sent Miros, Matisses and Chagalls and Penny had alternated them with Liz’s various ‘Greetings from Morecambe!’ or ‘Sunny Scarborough!’
