by Paul Magrs
Across the Burn the ground had sheeted over with the dirtiest, most walked-on ice she had seen. It was hazard-ous, climbing up the hill into town. Cars zipped by on Burn Lane and it took Penny half an hour to walk in the same direction. She had to leave the path and struggle up the hill, finding footholds, clinging to branches. It was like taking hold of the trees’ fingertips, snapping them off when she leaned too hard, when her feet slipped. If it had been up to her, she’d have stayed indoors today. Hidden in the house with a good book. It was one of those very black February days.
Elsie wouldn’t leave the house. At first Penny suspected she was just lazy. Then she remembered that Elsie was the type to gad about town come hell or high water. When she was happy with Tom, it had been their favourite thing to traipse the streets in all weathers, knocking on the doors of friends or acquaintances, getting themselves brought indoors to talk about God. Elsie had always been less keen on the God bit. She just liked the visiting. But these past few weeks, she was more inclined to stay indoors. After that business with the garden she was often to be found staring out of her windows, as if waiting to see what would happen to it next. She confided in Penny, saying she thought it was haunted. Now Penny wished she hadn’t set it all to rights again, and just left it in the mess it had been. It was only to cheer Elsie up, but her small spell had caused more harm than good. Elsie thought that she was cracking up now. She sent Penny to fetch her messages from town, and had decided to stop work at the spastics shop for the time being. That was one of Penny’s jobs for the afternoon; telling Elsie’s colleague Charlotte that Elsie was planning to stay away.
Penny reflected on how caught up she was in Elsie’s and Craig’s lives. Soon she would be doing everything for them. It was so easy to get sucked into where other people were headed.
Already it was getting dark. Friday tea-time dark. This time last winter she used to go shopping for groceries with Andy. They would walk back this way, through the Burn, along a route that she would never dare take alone. It was sinister down here in the dark. A curious vegetable gloom which a couple of years ago she would have found mysterious and exciting. Now it was terrifying. Would Andy have been much help anyway, if someone had jumped out on them? Funny, it was only now that she thought of that. They had their own stolen shopping trolley from Red Spot and they wheeled it unsteadily up and down the icy hill, laughing and shouting in the dark as they followed Burn Lane by its dirty yellow streetlamps. Andy was probably depending on Penny’s help, should anything have happened.
This was one of the big changes to her life lately. She now had something she’d never had before. A man’s man. She smiled to herself. Craig was what you would call a man’s man, and you wouldn’t be saying it with an ironic smile, a wry lilt in your tone. You wouldn’t be making a sly jibe about his sexual preferences. You’d be saying quite plainly and honestly that he liked to go out with the lads. That his dealings with the outside world were all located in the world of men. And home was where the women were. Penny wondered if fag hags grew up. She wondered if she could think of Andy and Vince as...well, not childhood friends exactly, but people she’d played with on the way to growing up. And there was something in their adventures and their love affairs that seemed juvenile to her, once she thought about it. They were flippant about the whole thing. They laughed about all of it. They were so careless with each other, as if they’d never grow up. Because, now that she thought about it, they never had to grow up. They wouldn’t have a family life like others had. They could stay boys like that for ever. And that wasn’t something Penny could do. She had to find something of her own. These past few weeks Craig had been looking like an alternative. A man’s man, who knew how life and mechanical things worked.
She had reached the long road at the top of Burn Lane. Now the streets were flatter and safer all the way to town. Maybe this felt a little like betrayal. She had lost her interest in Andy’s life, in Vince’s. She was there if they needed her. And besides, Andy must know that she’d already moved on. She couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t pretend she hadn’t spent all her time with Craig. The other night, she’d been proud of Craig going out with his mates again. Actually proud he never came home till the early hours, stinking of lager. She’d been pleased that he was back in with his mates. He made them sound fearsome. Esteem meant a lot to them. There was a pecking order. She wondered if he would show her off to his gang.
Esteem. Penny stopped. She was in the middle of Faulkner Road, a street of pensioners’ bungalows. Was this all about her self-esteem? Here Craig was, apparently doting on her. Was she accepting this for the sake of her self-esteem? Was she changing everything she ever thought just to bask in the compliment of all his attention?
Crap. This was just the way it was. She was having fun and maybe some security, too. The sense of somebody being there for her. He lay against her at night and his body was hard all the way down her side.
Charlotte had taken it upon herself to shut up shop. Penny banged hard on the spastics door. When the old woman let her in, she looked pinched and red.
“What’s happened in here?” Penny gazed around the shop’s inside. It was like a bomb site.
“You tell me,” Charlotte snapped. She snatched up her dustpan and brush from where she had left it on the counter.
“Have you been burgled?”
“The till was open. I was stupid. I hadn’t emptied it last night. It’s not like we get a fortune coming through.” She sagged inside her clean pinny and had to sit down. Obviously she was blaming herself.
“Did they get away with much?”
“Oh no,” Charlotte said. “Look.”
Penny went to the till to look. All the paper money was still there, but shredded into tiny pieces. Green and orange confetti littered the floor all around. The coins were partly melted, fused into each other like a pocketful of chocolate buttons. Penny reached out to touch them, to see if they were warm.
“Who could do this?”
“Don’t touch them,” the old woman said, standing up again. “I haven’t had the police in yet.” She drifted over to the clothes racks. She had kept everything beautifully hung and colour-coded, almost so that you’d never know it was a second-hand shop. The blouses had been slashed with knives and they hung in tatters. They looked odd, still colour-graded like that.
“Has everything been ruined?” Penny asked. “How did they get in? Why would they do it?”
Charlotte shook her head. She had tears bubbling up. “All this shop does is raise money for them poor crippled bairns,” she said. Penny was shocked to see her cry. Charlotte seemed to work at keeping her feelings in. She acted hard on purpose, as if life had grieved her. Penny went to her and the old woman put out one of her clawed hands to keep her at a distance. Or maybe it was for Penny to take. She couldn’t tell. To be on the safe side, she stopped. Charlotte dabbed at her eyes with her other hand and the gesture was clumsy and childlike. “Sorry for crying. This is my work, you see. It makes me feel rotten, seeing it like this.”
“I bet.”
“Has Elsie sent you?” Charlotte was trying to make her voice sound normal again. “I wondered where she was.”
“She said she won’t be coming in for a while,” Penny explained. “She’s not felt herself just recently.”
“Hm.” Charlotte picked up a china shire horse. Its head had been cracked off at the neck. “She’d had her eye on this.” She set it down. “I could do with her help, cleaning this lot up.”
Penny bunched up her sleeves. “I’ll help.”
“That’s good of you, dear. I was going to phone Big Sue, too, at the Christian Café, see if she’d bring some of her cronies. They’re always well-meaning.”
When Big Sue arrived, full of purpose and with a roll of black bin bags and a few of her religious pals, she was shocked by the mess. “I’ll bet it was those rough lads who took my underwear,” she breathed. “This is the kind of thing they get up to.”
“Now, now,” said Ch
arlotte. “It doesn’t do to cast aspersions.” She was back to her brisk self.
Penny was thinking; what if it was the lads from over the road, from the Forsyths’ old house? Was it the kind of thing they would do, just for a laugh? And a worse thought: had Craig been with them? Last night was another night having a laugh with the boys. Was this how they amused themselves? Yet surely Craig couldn’t have been party to any of this. It was his mam’s shop. He couldn’t spoil that.
This was Andy’s idea, the step machines and the rowing machines. I never used them before. They recommend aerobic exercise as part of your work-out plan, but I always thought it was just the lasses who did all of that. But Andy was into it and said we should warm up on the step machine. You’re up on a height and it’s like running in slow motion. You’ve really got to push down as you run, and the music from MTV helps. Andy always goes like the clappers when Take That or someone come on and you’ve got to laugh, really. He’s not very strong or fit but he can give the step machine hell He goes scarlet and the sweat streams off him. I’m on the stepper beside him, paying close attention to what the computer and its little green displays are telling me, when to speed up, when to cool down. Some of the lads in the next room, doing the weights, are taking the piss. They think you lose muscle and bulk, exercising like this. The woman in charge, Mary, went past a few minures ago, and gave me a smiling nod of approval. So I’m doing it right. She plucked her Lycra pants out of her bum as she went by, thinking no one could see. Like a fuchsia thong. Gave me the horn and I sped up to take my mind off it, but that made me worse. My fifteen minutes is almost up, but I can’t get off here with this stiffy showing through my shorts. That Andy for one is bound to notice.
He still gabbles away even when he’s exercising. He doesn’t understand that you don’t always want to talk when you’re doing the biz. He’s saying that being on a step machine is like running in a dream. All that effort getting nowhere. Mind, I know what he means. Then he’s telling me that he dreamed last night of chasing a leopard and it was like running on this. He tells me all sorts these days and I feel uncomfortable when he does. Like I’m preparing myself for what’s coming next. Like it’s something that’s gonna embarrass me. I don’t know what. I think he talks so much because he sees less of Penny. He’s stuck in her house by himself a lot of the time. I’m most of the company he gets. So he crams in all his talking when he’s down here. I let him go prattling on.
This machine’s good for my bad foot. I never thought of that. Since I’m running on the spot, my foot strapped in secure, it isn’t getting any stress. I’m getting the benefit of running without having to move. That’s smart.
Him going on about his dream reminds me of mine last night. I woke up and felt sick, like you do when you’ve dreamed something awful. When it takes five minutes to convince yourself it wasn’t all real. Penny never woke up and at first I was pleased, because I woke up with a cry. Then I wanted her to ask about it, but she didn’t, of course, because she sleeps like anything.
I was on a shingle beach, a small one like Robin Hood’s Bay. Dad took me and Mam there for a holiday. It looks like someone’s pushed all the buildings right up to the shore, and they all topple one into the next. Quaint, my mam called it. I was on the beach and there was a boat going down, just that bit further out than would be safe to swim. Even though it was that far away, I could see who was aboard. I put my hand up to shield my eyes and saw it was a black dinghy and its rubber was punctured all the way around. Like someone had sunk their teeth into it. Dracula, who came ashore nearby in Whitley Bay, had jabbed his vampire teeth into the rubber.
I was on a jetty and trying to run to its end, see if I could help from there. My foot made me lag behind. My mam was with me, shouting that I had to hurry up.
And who was out on the dinghy?
People from Phoenix Court. They were waving and shouting, their mouths open like goldfish wanting feeding. Liz and the tattooed man, Penny and Andy, all of them shouting at me.
But I can’t swim. My foot is like a weight tied to me. It would never flip like a proper foot. In school swimming lessons I could never propel myself. And I burned with shame throughout because everyone could see that foot in all its glory. When we jumped in the heavy, warm, chemical water, the crazy distortions made its ugliness leap up at me. Of course I couldn’t swim.
My mam said, “They’re going to drown, Craig.”
And I hate having dreams like this, where they put guilt on you. My mam turned away in disgust. She spat into the water. In real life she never spits. So I must think this is how she really thinks of me. She tossed off her cardy, the one I hate, with the pink embroidered cats, and leaped into the sea. She dove straight and looked so graceful. But the sea was green and cold and dark and somehow I knew it had just sucked her in and she wouldn’t be rescuing anyone.
The step machine lets out that heart-stopping bleep. Fifteen minutes. I’m relieved. I slow, slow, stop, automatically checking out how many staircases I would have climbed if this was real life. How many calories I’ve burned. Andy is already off his machine. He’s over by the rubber plants in the corner, talking with Penny, who’s come to meet me.
FOURTEEN
Craig thought he was going to die and that was why the future wasn’t worth thinking about. Once he startled Elsie by saying something along these lines. They were at the fairground; Craig was ten, an age when he stayed close by his mam. She said he needn’t grow up poor and uneducated like his mam and dad. Craig came right back with, “We’ll be dead by then anyway.” Elsie was shocked.
“What does that mean?”
“There’s no point in thinking about when I grow up,” he said with a shrug, gazing dispiritedly at the lights of the dodgems. “Can I go on them?”
Only if Elsie could come in the same car and keep an eye on him. She drove and let him place his hands on the steering wheel. The air smelled of rubber and crackled with the static that powered the cars. Someone rammed them and jolted Elsie’s neck. Her concentration was off because she was thinking over what her son had said. He came out with odd, gloomy things. She thought it was them funny comics he read. Once he’d told her he wouldn’t feel guilty shooting her in the heart if she was taken over body and soul by a Swamp Thing.
“Is it because of your bad foot?” she asked him, as sensitively as she could manage, swinging round in a dodgem car, grappling the slippery wheel. Maybe she should wait till after, but she was anxious to know what was going on in her son’s head.
“You what?” He looked at her, scowling. She knew he hated mention of his bad foot. “No, it’s nothing to do with that.”
Elsie thought, He might think that. He might think his foot will spread, that the crushed, diseased flesh will kill the rest of him. If I was a kid with a foot like that, I’d look at it, clutch and feel it at night and think that it was going to kill me. Especially if I read the weird kind of comics Craig reads. They’re always about monsters and things.
“Then why do you think you’re going to die?”
He sighed; she could almost hear it above the noise of the fair. Sometimes he looked so frustrated with her. “I never said just me. I said we’re all going to die.”
So that was it. “This isn’t about nuclear war again, is it? Because if it is, I’ve already explained to you about that.”
He tutted. “No, it isn’t about nuclear war.” Though he hadn’t really believed Elsie’s saying that it was all right if you hid under the stairs and ate tinned peaches. It was at this age that Craig started to feel he knew more about the world than his mam, and each thing she tried to tell him from then on only compounded that impression.
“We’re all going to die anyway, aren’t we?” he said with a bright smile. It was something he’d learned in comics. The superhero comics never flinched from deaths. Someone was always getting it. Look at Gwen Stacey, killed by the Green Goblin. Chucked in the river. Spiderman had been distraught. It had taken years for his alter ego, Peter Park
er, to learn to love again. That was when he started knocking about with Mary Jane, who always called him Tiger. Craig had his first wank over Mary Jane. In his recurring daydream he’d been dressed as Spiderman and she felt him through his red and blue Lycra. “You’ve helped me love again,” Spiderman told Mary Jane in the comics, and she smiled, pleased. On the bathroom floor Craig stared at the widening pool of his white sperm and hardly dared touch his numb cock. His first sex was fraught with the idea of rescuing love from the jaws of death.
And the Green Goblin himself had been killed, the inadvertent victim of Spiderman, a bittersweet revenge. Found dead, he was unmasked and revealed to be the insane father of one of Spidey’s best college friends. The irony of life! Something else Craig had gleaned from comics, alongside the inevitability of death, was that your oddest, deadliest enemies are often just around the corner. Anyway, how could he explain this to Mam? She always wanted to bring all his worries and frowns and nightmares back to his broken foot or his absent father. I don’t care about either of those things, Mam, he wanted to say. But the wet way she asked and guessed around him made Craig angry with her.
When their go on the dodgems was over, one of the Gypsy fellers jumped on the back of their car, clung to the pole and drew them to a standstill. When he grabbed the pole, he took some of Elsie’s flyaway ginger hair and yanked it by accident. She screamed out. This and her subsequent muttered complaints took her attention off her son’s morbidity as they wandered through the rest of the fair.
Fish and chips on the way home and that was their Friday night out. In bed Craig listened to his mam play Shirley Bassey and he thought about why it wasn’t worth bothering.
