[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

by Paul Magrs

  He made his way by the lights of Aycliffe, of the industrial estate, far ahead.

  I’m not even from Newton Aycliffe, he thought, but he recognised it as a place that always drew him back. No one actually came from that town, except children born since the sixties. It was too young. It was a place that took people in and made them all the same. You all had to go to the same shops. It made no one better than any one else. It dulled the goodness out of people. It filled them with the same old concerns. It bored him.

  In the free local paper he had seen an announcement. It had puzzled him, but it had summed something up.

  Bill is seventy.

  We have no time to stand and stare

  to stand and stare beneath the boughs

  to stand and stare like sheep and cows.

  People were always making up rhymes for that paper. This one seemed to be about the way people in Aycliffe stood about doing nothing with their lives. When Tom was in the town precinct with Elsie, she stood about talking to just about anyone. Because she worked in that shop she knew loads of them. They stopped her and talked drivel. Standing and staring. Tom would feel like tearing out his hair. They went, “This is it” and “Uh-huh”, reassuring each other with their dullness.

  She has made me feel my life is over. I have spent it waiting for the future to begin.

  When Craig failed all but two of his GCSEs, there was a row. I made the mistake of saying, maybe it wasn’t so bad. I tried to hint tactfully that he wasn’t the brightest of lads. That maybe his skills weren’t the sort that showed up in exams. Elsie said that she wanted Craig to have all the chances in the world. She snapped at me, as if she thought it was me taking them away. She wanted someone to shout at. Craig just looked embarrassed. I said, of course he would have other chances. We always have other chances. Then she turned that back on herself, like she always does. “What other chances have I ever had?” she sneered. “I’m always stuck between these four walls. I don’t expect any better. But Craig should.”

  “We can always expect to have another chance,” I said.

  She blew up. “We don’t need anything else. Craig does. We’ve had all our chances. Our lives are over.”

  I got angry. I said my life certainly wasn’t over.

  “What else are you going to do with it?” She was practically laughing in my face.

  I stared at her, and I couldn’t believe she was being so cruel, so certain. There wasn’t a flicker of doubt there. I was looking at someone who firmly believed that her life could never improve or go anywhere. In her forties she had accepted that she had seen and done everything she needed to. I was astonished and scared to be with her then. Craig left the room, aware that this was now a private row, and I got the blame for that, too.

  When I looked at Elsie’s face she looked old, but also like someone resigned to being trapped in the past. She was speaking categorically and depressingly from a point of absolute certainty in the archaic past. And this is when I realised what I believe to be one of the great differences between the sexes.

  Woman is always of the past, and Elsie is no exception. She is the mother, viewed always from the present and seeming somehow behindhand. This was never clearer than in that row. I suppose this was why sex always made me feel nostalgic. The hankering for the past. The man is always in the present moment. That is why I — he is forever thinking and moving and can reflect back on things and put them in perspective.

  Between Man and Woman the future is made. But there was never to be a future from Elsie. She never wanted to have any more children. She was knocking on, she said, and her waterworks were problematic. And Craig might be jealous of a half-brother or sister. Any reason, any reason, she wouldn’t have a baby. Denying me this, she has trapped me in the present for ever.

  The town seems no closer and it’s dark now. Is there a garage near here, so I can get chocolate and crisps? When I get to Newton Aycliffe, will I go home? It isn’t my home.

  She has made me into a man-child. I will leave nothing behind me. I’ll be in the present for the rest of my time. Frozen, undead. She wanted me perfecting her house for ever.

  TWELVE

  Don’t let this be a grimace. As Craig talked to him, Andy was trying hard to look interested. They were working out together. Craig was explaining the benefits of having a work-out partner. You egged each other on.

  “I think we’re naturally lazy. We all need some discipline. You can do that for each other.” Craig nodded at a couple using free weights nearby. The older, bigger man stood poised over the one lying down, ready to pull the load away from him if it proved too heavy. He yelled, “Go on, lad!” into his face.

  Craig called everything he did on machines his ‘reps’. As Andy followed him about Craig hardly dropped his conversational stride and he didn’t seem out of breath either.

  “I always thought my stepfather was Dr Octopus,” he told Andy. He lay on his back in a crouching position, pushing weights up a slide and bringing them down with a regular, satisfying clunking noise. “My mam’s feller, Tom. I thought he was Dr Octopus. Do you remember him? Spiderman’s deadliest enemy?”

  Andy nodded absently. He stared at Craig’s weak leg, held in place by the machine. In that grip, clamped upside down, it looked almost normal. Andy knew, though, that the stronger leg was doing all the work. On that leg the muscles bunched and tensed twice as big.

  Craig was on about comics again. A week ago Andy had made the mistake of mentioning that, as a boy, he read Marvel comics. Craig’s eyes lit up. This bonded them, Penny said, and she listened, laughing, to the pair of them reminiscing about the X-Men and Marvel Two-in-One. Soon she became bored and started to mock their enthusiasm. They were talking about the Incredible Hulk and how sad that story always seemed. Andy had noticed Penny’s boredom and tried to change the subject. Every few minutes after that Craig would remember something else to remind Andy of. “Did you read that one when all the Avengers were killed off in one issue?” or “The story when the Goblin threw Gwen Stacey into the Hudson River and Spiderman was powerless to save her?”

  At the end of the night Penny said to Andy, “Well, you’ve made a friend there.” Andy rolled his eyes. But Penny was pleased they had found something to talk about. The night before, Craig had been fretting. She woke to find him staring at the ceiling. “What do I talk to a queer bloke about?”

  She laughed at him. “Anything you want. He doesn’t talk a different language.”

  To Craig, though, that was exactly what Andy did. As Penny went back to sleep, he stared at her hair mussed up on the pillow. Imagine not wanting her. It was seeing the world a completely different way. Yet they must have something in common, despite that. Craig made himself imagine not wanting Penny. Hating things about her. Thinking that he didn’t want her breasts or want to push himself easily inside her. He made himself think about fancying men. Captain America. All those superhero bodies were the same: toned-up muscles, small nipples, everything on show as they flew through the air. There was no mystery in a man’s body. It was all up and down. But that was just men’s bodies, that’s what they looked like, that’s what they were. At one level Craig couldn’t see what the fuss was about. That’s what I am, he thought and stared at Penny again. Look at her, he thought. She could talk about anything. It knocked Craig sick to think he would seem daft to Penny’s friends. They’d think he was thick and boring. It was his mam’s fault, not pushing him on to be clever, to better himself. Steve and the other lads, the company he kept, they made him stupid too. But look! Now Andy was interested in what he said about comics. They had shared all this past, all these adventures. He wondered if Andy had kept his back issues.

  Craig was taking a big chance here. I must think Andy’s friendship is worth it, he thought. And Penny. I must be doing it all for her. Because here he was, hanging around the gym with an obvious queer. It was such a risk. He had been the one to suggest they work together. Andy looked pleased. What would happen when the other lads cam
e in and saw them together? What would be said?

  Andy was on the machine now, watching as Craig set the load much lower. He tensed himself, ready to start. Craig looked at Andy’s too clean, neatly ironed black T-shirt and orange gym shorts. He thought Andy was all right really. They hadn’t said anything pointing out the difference between them, but it was there all the same. As if Andy had a funny accent. He hadn’t said anything puffy yet. What would Craig do then? For friends, he supposed, you had to grin and bear it.

  “Do you remember,” he said, “the story in the old Spiderman comic when Dr Octopus discovered his secret identity?”

  Andy gritted his teeth, hissing out breath, exhausted already. “Not sure.”

  “He found out that Spidey was really Peter Parker and that his auntie was this sick old woman. Dr Octopus pretended to be Auntie May’s real doctor, who would cure all her ailments. He came to her front door, rang the bell. He had hidden his six extra metal arms inside his overcoat.”

  Andy said, “Maybe I remember.”

  “It was fantastic. Spidey was away fighting the Green Goblin and by the time he came back home he found that Auntie May was getting married to Dr Octopus. How could he tell his auntie her fancy man was evil? If he did, he’d give away his secret identity.”

  Andy said, “I think I read that.”

  Craig nodded. “I forget what happened at the end. I remember wondering, did Auntie May have to go to bed with Dr Octopus? Would she see his other arms?”

  Later, Andy went downstairs to shower first. They had between them a tacit understanding about not seeing the other naked, as if they weren’t quite of the same gender. Andy stood aching in the shower cubicle, his head against the tiles. He felt closed in, worn down. “This every day!” he moaned. His exercise programme had stepped up. He felt stronger, flushed, but all his energy was going into it. He was doing nothing else. Without looking he felt down his arms, his chest, his newly tautened stomach. He was coming on fast. Everything felt so connected, so concerted. He should be glad. He just felt tired and sickly. He lifted his arms up to stretch.

  And there it was. He blinked away the warm water and stared. Under his left arm, printed boldly across the numbed muscle. About the size of a ten-pence piece and a kind of glossy purple black. He had a single leopard’s spot staring back at him.

  Andy turned off the shower. He stepped out to dry himself, almost slipping. He thought quickly and hard. He wouldn’t look at the spot on his arm again.

  Craig walked in as Andy dried himself. They both looked confused. Craig said, “Look how your body’s coming on.”

  Andy stared at himself. His muscles seemed suddenly hard and heavy to him. But he wasn’t sure why. He looked down at himself, but he no longer felt like his own man.

  Penny was in the arcade in Darlington when she saw Mark. He was in that clothes shop where everything was on offer with a 70 per cent discount. She realised that she hadn’t been in that shop, just because Andy reckoned there must be a rip-off involved. You didn’t get something that cheap, he said. Penny went in. It’s funny how people can put you off things.

  Mark was with his daughter, who was about ten. The girl was standing by, looking bored as Mark folded and unfolded rather bright shirts and tops. He noticed Penny.

  “What do you think?” He held a tight yellow T-shirt against himself. She saw at once that it was too young on him. But his blueness and the sharpness of his tattoos looked stunning.

  He pulled a face and shrugged. “No?”

  Penny couldn’t help asking, “Do you have to buy plain clothes, I mean, clothes without patterns, so you don’t clash with your designs?”

  His daughter gave a snort of laughter. Mark smiled. “I do, actually. At one point I never even thought about it. I wore checks and all sorts. Then Sam, my ex-wife, said I looked like a dog’s dinner. I’ve got better since then.” He pushed through a rack of velour tops, frowning. Penny thought that she, too, would grow neglectful of the sort of clothes she wore, if she were covered with tattoos. Clothes would seem too prosaic.

  “Are you helping your dad?” Penny asked the child.

  Mark’s daughter gave Penny a look. “Dad, can I have my pocket money now? I want to go to Smith’s.”

  Then she was gone, cutting through the Saturday crowd. Mark shrugged. “She’s at that difficult age.”

  Penny thought back to being ten. “She’s getting a filthy mouth on her. She answers back. She’s foul-tempered. She half understands things. And she throws tantrums like she never did as a baby.” He sighed. “Sometimes I feel treacherous. I wish she was little again. I preferred her that way.”

  “That’s natural.”`

  “And sometimes I think, I’m even glad she lives with her mother and not me. It’s a relief sometimes.”

  Penny smiled. “We’re allowed treacherous thoughts.” She was thinking, Since when did I know this man well enough to hear him talk like this? He was looking at her as if they were always meeting up.

  They caught the bus back to Aycliffe together. They had a forty-minute wait for the 213. Outside McDonald’s they queued and chatted. He asked the inevitable questions about Liz. Penny stood with her groceries from Marksies between her knees.

  “You’ve got posh shopping,” he noticed.

  “I’m doing a nice meal,” she said. “For Craig and his mother.”

  “Craig’s your boyfriend.”

  Penny nodded. She still found it odd to hear him called that. She felt vaguely proud and distressed by the term. But she put these qualms to the back of her mind. He seemed to adore her and he was attentive and so, for now, he would do. What grated was the rest of his life, which Penny found herself taking on wholesale. Elsie had become a mother-in-law in a way Penny could see she had longed to. And now, with the extra stress of Tom’s disappearance, Penny felt even more heavily leaned on. Elsie turned automatically to her clever, dependable Penny to see her through and to say the sensible things. And I’m playing up to that, Penny thought. I’m cooking them dinner and keeping the family together.

  “So don’t you see as much of Andy these days?” Mark asked. Penny could have sworn she saw, as he said this, the creeping of a blush behind his tattoos.

  “I still see him every day, of course,” she said. It wasn’t the same in the house, though. They used to do every day together, consult the other about everything. Now Penny drifted off round Craig’s and ended up chatting with Elsie and hearing her woes. Andy was in a world of his own. Penny hated to think she had made him worse. He had turned almost secretive. Something was up and she no longer felt in a strong enough position to ask what it was. He wouldn’t take her seriously, she thought. We aren’t fond enough of each other at the moment. When people live as close as we do, they have to be tougher and quieter sometimes.

  She thought Mark had a nerve, though, asking about Andy.

  “You really pissed him off, you know,” she said.

  He looked taken aback.

  “I know what went on,’ Penny said, keeping her voice down for the sake of the child. She wished she hadn’t started this. Now there really was a flush between the markings on his face.

  “I don’t know how much Andy’s told you,” Mark said. “But it was never meant to be more than a one-night stand. Honest. I thought he was clear on that. It was just —”

  “You don’t believe that,” Penny said flatly. “He’s a lovely bloke. You just fucked him over.”

  “I know he’s lovely.”

  “You’ve hardly said a word to him since.”

  “Is he really so upset?”

  “Would I be telling you if he was turning cartwheels?”

  “Maybe go round.”

  “You should have told him in the first place that you weren’t interested.”

  “He’s lucky to have you to worry about him.”

  Penny shrugged as the bus arrived. Last night Andy had woken screaming. He ran out of the house and across the damp, slushy play park to bang on Elsie’s door.r />
  Elsie hoisted herself onto her windowsill. She opened her window, terrified at what or who she might see banging on her door.

  “Tom?” She hissed. “Tom? Have you come back to me?”

  Andy stared up at her from the garden. He was in his boxer shorts, hugging himself. Penny went out to fetch him. Craig made them a cup of tea. He watched Penny cuddle Andy, who had tears streaming down his face.

  “That’s what he was like last night,” Penny told Mark on the bus next day. “That was the state he was in.” She thought Mark should know.

  Andy kept saying, over and over, “I was dreaming of the leopard again. I always dream of him when I’m not well. He stands on my shoulders. Only now he’s eating my insides.”

  Craig and Elsie stood back, baffled, as Andy clutched at Penny and told her this. He looked helpless. As Craig stared at him, he saw the scattering of black furry rings up the flat of his back. They were quite distinct, shuddering with the rest of Andy’s body as he sobbed against Penny.

  Everyone was out so Penny could make a start on tea in peace.

  She had her own key to Elsie’s house. The smell of the place as she let herself in was familiar and homely to her. The kitchen cupboards as she opened and closed-them, putting shopping away, smelled of tomato ketchup and burst tea bags. She put on local radio and stacked up her boxes from Marks and Spencer to read how long each thing took in the oven. She hated using Elsie’s microwave because its door didn’t quite fit. Penny had heard a story about a woman whose door didn’t fit and who stood too close to the radiation in her small kitchen. She ended up microwaving her own insides.