[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

by Paul Magrs

  Am I a fag hag? She ripped open the boxes of vegetarian lasagne and pricked the plastic sheeting, as instructed, with a fork. Was it going too far to harangue a one-night stand of my gay friend on the bus back from Darlington? No, it’s not going too far, she thought. Andy was upset and I would harangue anyone for that. But she supposed she was a fag hag anyway. My natural element, she thought glumly, plumping up the sealed bags of mixed salad and shaking the various dressings, is with queers. How can it not be? And maybe that’s why life just recently with Elsie and Craig seemed so exotic and desirable. I’m living in the straight world, Penny thought. I’m taking a holiday in the world of the straight. But it wasn’t where she belonged. I’m straight, she thought, but there must still be something queer about me. She stared at Elsie’s kitchen. The ceramic dogs and chickens she kept her knick-knacks in. The corn dollies nailed to the walls. I’m on holiday in someone else’s life, she thought again, and turned the oven on.

  Elsie came back when dinner was almost ready.

  “That smells lovely, pet. Bless you, aren’t you clever!” She went to hang up her coat. “Craig’s out with the lads. He won’t want tea. I saw him before I went out.”

  Penny tutted. She took the wine from the fridge.

  “Eeeh, wine! Aren’t we wicked!” Elsie grinned. She rolled her cardigan sleeves up. “We’re like the continentals, having wine with every meal. You’re starting me on bad habits, pet. Now, what can I do?”

  “It’s all ready,” Penny said. “It’s nothing special. Just stuff ready-made from Marksies.”

  “You still had to put some thought into it!”

  Elsie was grinning at her as Penny passed her a glass of white wine. The older woman smacked her lips. “Lovely. Not too sweet. I’m sweet enough.”

  Elsie had been cheerful these past couple of days. If Penny didn’t know better, she’d think that it was a relief to Elsie that Tom had vanished. It meant she could think of him less if he wasn’t there. But Penny had been seeing lately the various layers of self-protecting nonsense which helped Elsie through each day. Elsie had thrown herself into her job at the spastics shop. She had brought Penny back a pair of scarlet patent-leather shoes.

  They fitted. “If I click my heels three times, will I go home?” Penny asked.

  “You what, pet?” said Elsie.

  “Have you been at work today?” asked Penny. She noticed Elsie checking to see she was wearing the new red shoes.

  “Not today. I went to Bishop. I popped in on your mam, actually. Still no change.” She mouthed the last few words respectfully. Penny felt stung, as if Elsie was accusing her of neglect. Elsie was beginning to sound like Liz’s very own High Priestess. Tending to her altar, sitting by it every other day, leafing through Take a Break, watchful for changes.

  On the bottom of her boots Elsie had snow chains which, she had once explained to Penny, came from an offer in the Daily Mirror. Their metal teeth gripped through the black ice of pavements. They were a lifesaver. If Liz had had them that night in the play park, she mightn’t have cracked her head. Penny stared at Elsie’s boots and felt like throwing them out of the window.

  “Dinner’s almost done,” said Penny.

  “I’m off for a widdle.” Elsie jumped up. “I get all excited when food’s ready, don’t I?” With that she hurried through the living room.

  Penny was pulling the silver trays out of the oven, a tea towel bunched around her hands, when Elsie yelled out.

  “What is it?”

  She found Craig’s mother staring through the window at her back garden. She was shaking from head to foot.

  “Some vandal’s been in and destroyed my garden!”

  Penny looked.

  Every paving stone in the patio had been extracted and stacked neatly to one side, as if they were ready to be taken away. The dirt underneath was dark like rotten gums. The trellising up the fences had been dismantled and lay in splinters of blond firewood, and the rose bushes had been hacked systematically into useless thorny bits. Pink and yellow flower heads were heaped in a corner. Even the small pond had been drained. The orange bodies of the fish were lying to one side, as if resting. It reminded Penny of when vandals broke into the Blue Peter gardens and turned them upside down. That had made the evening news and the old man who tended them cried on the telly. All that work.

  “My sweet peas are up, too!” Elsie cried and dashed outside. “Who would do a thing like that? It wasn’t like that this morning.”

  It was so neat, Penny thought. Someone had taken great care to take it all neatly apart.

  I still don’t know what to think. The truth of it is that I came home high as a kite. I was out of my skull, but I never imagined it. This is what I saw. It was true. Penny was out in that garden in the middle of the night with her arms raised above her head. Her hands were black and the rest of her was lit up.

  I came home from my night with the lads. That was a successful night. I was back in with the lads. And there’d been me thinking I wasn’t part of them any more. Since I’d moved out and taken up with Penny, since I’d started working out with Andy, I was sure the lads would think I’d turned my back. But I should have known better. They’re loyal in a way you can’t put in words. At least we don’t talk about it. Our night down the Turnbinia and the Acorn just happened, we didn’t plan it, but suddenly we were all together again and it was like nothing had changed. I was relieved. I got drunk because I was so relieved. And they were happy to have me back again. We trogged back over the Burn singing Oasis songs at the top of our voices. Only Steve wasn’t there. I asked where he was. I got a shrug from Rob. “He doesn’t come out as much now,” I was told. “It’s different.”

  We ran through the trees, still laughing and singing. My head was pounding, but the kind of pounding that makes you shout louder, run faster and you don’t care. It’s good for me, that. I stop thinking I’m going to trip over. And we were running through the trees and there’s all the hills and tree roots and if I thought about it, I could kill myself with this leg and everything, but when you’re like that and you can hear all your mates yelling out and everything, you don’t worry. I don’t.

  They left me at the corner of Phoenix Court. I got invited back to the Forsythe house for a smoke. They all watched to see what I would say. But I thought I’d go home. Penny and my mam waiting. I said that and waited for someone to make a skitty remark. But Rob clapped my back and said, “See you, son,” and they all moved away, waving me good night. I was relieved we were still a team, but in a way I was more relieved to see them go home, the night finished, unscathed.

  I walked past our house and I saw the back garden. Penny with her hands up in the air. She was concentrating. All I could think at first was of the Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four. With the powers she had gained from being struck by cosmic rays, she could generate invisible force fields. Make matter do anything she desired. When artists drew the blonde, willowy, beautiful Invisible Girl, they indicated her force fields by inking in dotted lines that radiated from her forehead as she frowned and made things happen. Now I cursed the darkness and my ten pints of Stella because, try as I might, I couldn’t see the dotted lines in the air coming from Penny.

  Yet she was making things happen. My mother’s back garden was up in the air. Rocks and stones of different sizes, clumps and tussocks of grass all dribbling bits of wet frozen soil were sailing and dipping through the air. Bulbs and shrubs and half-grown roots tangled and whirled in the dark, brushing by one another as if working out where to go, where to set themselves down again. The roses, my mother’s roses she was so proud of, transplanted from one council-house garden to another over the years, danced about each other, and reattached themselves to the bits of twig and branches that clicked back into one piece and snuck their roots into the ground.

  At first I thought Penny was using these unknown, diabolical powers of hers to destroy my mother’s garden. I almost shouted out for her to stop. But then I realised, as the rocker
y and the shrubbery and the sweet peas were sucked back into the cold earth, that she was rebuilding it. She was making it better than it had been before. Like giant dominoes, the paving stones slapped onto the ground, one after another. Then she was finished. Her body sagged with exhaustion and that glowing light ebbed away.

  I wanted to dash over and give her a kiss. My own girlfriend. My new, clever girlfriend. With superpowers!

  THIRTEEN

  ‘There was a little monkey,

  ran across the country

  fell down a dark hole

  split his little arsehole

  What colour was the blood?’

  “Frank!”

  She grabbed her son by the arm and shook him. She shouted indoors again.

  “Frank! Come and listen what this son of yours has learned!”

  For good measure Fran shook Jeff again and the tears bubbled up in his eyes. He wouldn’t let them go, however. He set his face in defiance against her.

  Fran didn’t know where her kids learned it from. There was her eldest, out at nights and only fourteen. Frank said she was a little tart, the way she dressed. He said he hated his own daughter.

  “Come on! You’re coming inside to tell your dad what you’ve just told me!” Not even four and coming out with things like that. “You’re not playing out for the rest of this week!”

  Jane turned up for a pot of tea and she commiserated. The kids were getting cheekier. “But what role models do they have? The little bairns look at the grown-ups and look what they’re getting up to!” She looked round at the other houses in the close. “If I was a kid today I wouldn’t know if I was coming or going.”

  They went in to sit in Fran’s kitchen. Jane wanted to talk through plans for her Peter’s birthday. She had read something in Bella magazine about making your garden into a circus and fairground by painting cardboard boxes. She liked the idea of a party with a theme. Fran thought Jane liked the idea because it meant she wouldn’t have to have anyone in her house.

  “So I might have to ask you for some help,” she said, “painting the boxes in circus stripes.”

  “Right,” Fran said. But none of us can paint, she thought. She imagined how it would all turn out. Jane would end up with a pile of rubbishy painted boxes in her garden and that would be the party. Her soft son would be disappointed and cry, Jane would get cross and hit him, then send everybody home. Fran wanted to say you were better off having a clown party at McDonald’s. They did all sorts for the kids there.

  “Have you been to see Liz recently?” asked Jane.

  “Have I not told you about visiting with Elsie?”

  Jane nodded. “It all got eclipsed by the story of you going to the loony bin with Elsie.”

  “Don’t call it that.” Fran pursed her lips.

  “Elsie’s gone bloody daft now,” Jane said. “She was out in her garden this morning, sobbing and shouting and waving her arms in the air. I leant over the fence to see what the matter was.”

  Elsie had looked desperate and worn out, still in her housecoat and nightie. Her hair was out of its bunches and she was raking her hands in the soil.

  “I kept my voice as normal as possible and I asked her what was going on.”

  “And?”

  “She said her garden was back to normal. She said that the day before it was ruined and now it was all better again.”

  Fran said, “I think she must be under some stress.”

  “She would be.” Jane stared out of the window. “Hasn’t that Penny let herself go since taking up with her Craig?”

  “Do you think so?” Fran asked. “I thought she looked happier.”

  “That’s just sex.” Jane sniffed.

  “Maybe I should go over to Elsie’s,” Fran mused. “Talk to her. See if she wants anything doing.”

  “I’d keep well away. That husband of hers. You don’t know where he might be lurking.”

  “That’s awful!” Fran gasped and gave an involuntary shiver.

  “Well. He gives me the creeps. He could be hanging around anywhere.”

  “I think he’ll have left Aycliffe behind,” Fran said. She looked at Jeff, her young, sulking son in the corner of the kitchen. “They all do.”

  Mark Kelly turned up. He was in his jogging outfit, a more neutral blue than his tattoos. Jane was quieter with him there.

  “Do you think Penny and Craig will last long as an item?” Fran asked.

  “Who?” he asked.

  Fran explained, smiling. Sometimes Mark was slow on the uptake. He couldn’t keep up with everyone’s business.

  “That Penny’s an interesting lass,” he said, looking for his cigarettes, patting his pockets. Jane saw that he had one of those bum bags on. She didn’t like them. Mark, she noticed, was the only person Fran let smoke in her kitchen. When he sucked on the cigarette she watched the tender bit of his temples move and dimple.

  “Have you been to visit her mother in hospital?” Jane asked him. “Have you been to see Liz?”

  He frowned. “Should I? I don’t really know the woman.”

  “It just seems like everyone’s going up to see her,” Jane said. “Like a bloody shrine. All of us touching the hem of her gold lame frock.”

  Fran cackled. “That’s good, that!” Then she was ashamed of herself. That poor woman, in a coma. She told Mark the poem her son had come out with. Mark spoiled it by laughing long and hard. His laugh was so infectious he started Fran and Jeff off too.

  “I still don’t think it’s funny,’ Jane said. “If my Peter said that, I’d —”

  “Jane, man,” Mark said abruptly. “Sometimes you’re a pain in the arse. You think you’re so bloody proper.”

  Fran loved this about Mark. He said exactly what he meant. Plain as the tattoos on his face. With a final slurp of tea, Jane took herself off home.

  “You’ll have started something now,” Fran said, who would bend over backwards to avoid falling out with Jane. Jane could be quite nasty.

  This is like a story I’d forgotten. Was it one of the Ladybird books? Sometimes I’ll remember those stories and see the picture exactly as it was. I’ve still got all those books, on a bottom shelf at Nanna Jean’s. But I needn’t open them to see the pictures. They’re all in my head. How all those characters chased the Giant Pancake, or pulled the Giant Turnip out of the ground, or got swept up in the molten deluge from the Magic Porridge Pot. I liked the obscurer fairy stories. Chicken Licken proclaiming disaster everywhere. And the one I have forgotten, but am reminded of tonight by my dream, is the one where the dog runs through the streets of a town with a princess strapped to his back. Every night in the story the dog has larger and larger eyes: the size of dinner plates, of cartwheels, of round towers. And the princess is always strapped to his back.

  In my dream of course it isn’t a dog with gigantic eyes roaming the streets. It’s a leopard. I’m leopard-dreaming again.

  The city is unfamiliar. The leopard is pounding down a long, empty road. The tarmac shudders as his paws crash down, one after another. His tongue lolls out of his mouth and he slavers, with much less self-possession than usual. I’m used to seeing my leopard looking dignified. Here he’s dashing about like he’s been set free.

  The shops are all shut and dark. Opposite them there is a vast rock like a ruined wedding cake. On top of it a castle slumps and squints down through the chilled mist.

  I’m following my leopard as he leaves the main streets and, moving slower now, more stealthily, patrols the older part of town. Where the streets crisscross above and below each other. My bearings are lost. He pads to a standstill in an abandoned marketplace. A drunk old bloke sits against a pub wall. He clutches to his chin a bottle of QC sherry and sings into it: “Vol as — re, uh uh uh—oh…” The leopard stares at him from across the street until the old man notices. The old man’s anorak is shredded all about the sleeves. It looks like it hasn’t been off his back in years. Stuffing’s coming out like upholstery. When he sees the leopard, he p
anics and can’t move. He yanks out handfuls of his stuffing and throws it, sobbing, “Shoo, shoo!” And I know how he feels. In my dreams I’m always shooing away the big cats. And my limbs get full of dread and I can’t move fast enough. Every second I think I’m going to be eaten. in my last dream that’s exactly what happened.

  And how can I be so lucid when I dream like this?

  The old man reeks of stale piss. The leopard wrinkles his moist, leathery nose and moves on.

  There’s something exhilarating about the way he runs easily through the city. He’s unimpeded. He’s liquid amber, slipping cursor-quick up alleys and stairways. The city is old, it seems old and continental, but cold and unforgiving. You can feel the air shiver with alarm at the leopard’s incongruity.

  I’m pleased that, in my dream tonight, I can keep the cat at an arm’s distance. I feel like an observer, tailing him. Tonight he isn’t into mauling or molesting me. He has other concerns.

  Down another main street the nightclubs are emptying. Bouncers corral red-faced, sweating women and men along the curb, some into taxis. Some form clusters and gangs that roam off back into town, shouting, breaking glass, tumbling into the road. The leopard sweeps past. When I follow I feel worried by the crowds. I hate going past straight nightclubs as they close and empty. I feel menaced. Vince told me I go about with a sign on my forehead telling fellers to beat me up. And they can see me too, in my dream. Some bloke lifts a bottle to hit me, a soppy grin on his face, but I manage to dash on.

  I stumble into a park, through a small graveyard, in the shadow of the castle I saw earlier. The leopard is by a fountain, all golden heroes with torches and lutes. There’s a fine mist of spent cold water. He jumps into the fountain and gleefully submerges himself. He knows I am watching. I wait. The night closes in around me. The street noise has faded away by now and I no longer feel scared.

  With a sudden burst of laughter and noise, the leopard jumps back out of the green water of the fountain. He jumps right over me, and I get showered. When he touches down, somewhere over on the grass, I see that now he has a princess strapped to his back. A sleeping princess in a golden frock, who barely moves a muscle as the leopard thunders off into the trees, back to the long main road. Mind, she’s knocking on a bit for a princess. She must be in her forties. And, as I watch, she stirs and wakes, jolted alive on the leopard’s back. She clutches her bouffant wig to keep it on straight. It’s Liz.