by Paul Magrs
One morning that December he came down into the kitchen. Mam had been making her milky weak tea for them both and the radio was on. Some New Wave band was on, just before the news, he couldn’t remember who. His mam started saying something bright and cheerful about the snow that was coming, how they might go sledging, when the news started up and the first story was that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York City.
Then the news was finished and the first song after that was ‘Help!’ Elsie’s face was wet with tears. She finished making the tea and sat down heavily at the breakfast bar.
“Who was it, Mam? Who’s died?” By then, though, he recognised the song as one by the Beatles.
“John was the cheeky one, he always said something to annoy the interviewer and make them look daft. It was Paul I liked, because of his eyes.”
“So why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.”
Elsie was thinking, You’re a morbid little bugger. Kids have no heart.
Craig wanted to know all the details of the shooting. Who, why, where, how and how many bullets did it take? After his mam had finished with the papers, he kept them and pasted the clippings into a scrapbook.
“And he’d just got back with his wife,” Elsie said sadly. “That awful Jappy wife. But still, they were happy.”
Craig thought, They get you in the end. Don’t bank on too much. Doesn’t matter what your special powers are, your number comes up some time or another. He tried to tell Elsie this as she played her copies of the Blue Album and the Red Album that night.
“Hush your mouth, you heartless thing!” She looked shocked at him. How dare he tell her life is futile? What was she raising here? And she sang ‘Strawberry Fields’ to herself.
These were the convictions that Craig grew up with: that it was all going to end soon anyway, wherever or whatever you were. It made him set his goals within manageable limits. He worked on his body and he sought out a girl. And here Penny was.
With Penny all this unquestioned stuff of his had to alter. He started looking at things differently for the first time he could remember. It wasn’t what she said that changed what he expected out of life, though she never shut up about things like that. She was for ever questioning things. What made Craig think again was her very presence, how much he loved to be with her. He felt full up and hungry all the time. He started to think there would never be enough time. For what, he wasn’t sure. Thinking about this showed him that he believed this time limit was on everything. They were doomed and Penny would go. So when he looked round after thinking this, at his mother’s house, their lives on this estate, in this town, they all looked too shabby for what he imagined he and Penny had going. There wasn’t enough life here for everything he wanted.
I’ve started to want too much, he thought, and this frightened him. There was a danger in wanting too much. This was the one thing Elsie had succeeded in drumming into her son. Hubris, she called it, with a sneer. Don’t get greedy like your father, she warned. It’ll end in disaster. Though neither of them knew exactly what disaster had befallen his father when he swanned off to his new life in Leeds. Perhaps things had gone wonderfully for him. What Elsie had meant, he realised, was that his father’s greed had meant disaster for her. Now Craig was thinking he could play with greed. He could allow himself to want things.
That night when Penny went to meet him at the gym, they returned to find that Elsie was out.
“I thought she was nervy about going out now,” he said.
Penny frowned. Sometimes Craig talked as if his mam really pissed him off. “Maybe she wanted something at the shop.” Penny was relieved Elsie wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have to tell her just yet about the state of the spastics shop.
There was a note on the pinboard in the kitchen. “She’s gone to Fran’s,” Craig said. “We’ve got the place to ourselves.”
“Yeah?” The house was gloomy. They walked through it without switching lights on as they went. It was like being intruders. Elsie had left the place messy, which was unlike her. Not messy enough to be worth making a comment on, Penny thought, but the place bore evidence of Elsie’s distractedness. The living room looked as if a tide had swept in and out again, subtly dislodging and disarranging things.
Craig pulled Penny down on the real sheepskin rug in front of the fire, which he switched on. The fire-effect cast orange shadows on them; Penny watched them creep back and forth on his perfectly sculpted chest when he sat in front of her. She felt the sheepskin tickle up her crack as Craig went down on her. He hadn’t done that before and he was clumsy. He lapped right into her like a mother cat cleaning a kitten. Penny said, “Is that all right?” when he came up for air and could have kicked herself for asking. Did he ever ask the same when she sucked his dick? Was this any more alarming or exotic? He grinned and went back down, as if he’d discovered something marvellous. Penny squashed his head between her legs and relished that gym-trained stamina. His ears smarted and burned as if someone was talking about him. He licked around and up inside Penny as if he was taking in some magic elixir.
Elsie’s key rattled in the door and she let herself noisily in, shouting, “Yoo-hoo?” sounding nervous. “Why aren’t the lights on? Yoo-hoo?” Hurriedly Craig and Penny dressed themselves, straightened themselves to greet his mother.
Elsie hardly noticed how flushed they looked. Penny was sure she would smell the sex in the air. Everything smeared across her son’s rueful, grinning, daft-looking face.
They watched some telly and went to bed. They had hard, longed-for sex and it wasn’t as good as the run-up had promised. They had spent too long watching Wheel of Fortune and all that stuff. They lay together, dishevelled and cross. This was the first bad sex they’d had. It was the moment Craig chose to tell Penny he had licked her innermost essence. She had transformed him magically with her superpowers.
“You what?” Her voice was hard, but there was a tremble in it. As if she had been caught out, Craig thought with satisfaction.
“You’ve passed on your powers to me,” he claimed.
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” she said, turning away from him to where the bed was cooler. She was pressed up against the wall, right into that horrible Baywatch poster. She considered ripping it down and telling him how demeaning she found it. Penny scratched at her stomach, at her inner thighs. Tonight she was alive with itches, which she put down to Craig’s scratchy stubble. But that’s kidding myself, she thought. Lately I’ve always got these itches and I’ve got to sort it out. Find out where they’re coming from.
“You do know, Pen,” he said in a low voice. It was the voice he used when they had sex. She let him get away with that then. He thought she thought it sexy, but it wasn’t really. Like that bloke off the aftershave advert. He said filthy things as he thrust into her and she let it in one ear and out the other. If that’s what got him off — she shrugged. Now he was talking like that without the excuse of sex. “I’ve seen you, you know. I’ve watched you use your powers.”
“My powers?” she repeated, and hoped she sounded sceptical enough.
“Your superpowers.”
Penny made her hands into fists under the blankets. Her black fingernails tingled, a quite different itch to that under her skin. This was an older tingling and one she hadn’t told many people about.
“Craig…I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I watched you the other night. When you were out in the garden. I was pissed, but I know what I saw.”
“I’ll tell you things in my own time, Craig. You’ve no right spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying. I caught you. You can make things happen. Like magic.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“It’s like having superpowers.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But it is! Who else can do that?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded surly. I sound stupid, she thought. I should just tell him to fuck off. Or
I should explain, calmly and rationally, that my powers, if that’s what he wants to call them, are something that I’ve always had. The power of making things fly through the air, mend themselves or to come to life has been something I’ve nearly always practised. To me it isn’t out of the ordinary. If that’s superpowers, then it’s Craig’s superpower to be able to fix tellies. It’s Andy’s superpower to desire other men. It’s Elsie’s to have ginger hair and work down the spastics. If Penny could have been bothered, this is what she would have explained to Craig. Instead she said, “Oh, man. Look. Life isn’t a comic strip.”
He lay quiet. He moved apart from her. That side of the bed sagged with his silence.
Oh, great, she thought. I’ve put him in a huff.
“I had a hideous cunt of a teacher tell me that when I was eleven. She thought I lived in comics. I did live in comics. I told her that. And that it was better than living in fucking Newton Aycliffe. That scraggy bitch laughed and told me that life wasn’t a comic strip. She lived on a farm somewhere out beyond Darlington. She came to school filthy, smelling of sweat. My mam was disgusted at such a dirty-looking teacher.”
Penny hadn’t heard him say as much as that before. Maybe the superpower he’d picked up from her was talking.
“Anyway,” she said, after a thoughtful silence. “Even if I do have superpowers — which I don’t want to say I have or haven’t, or even discuss right now, right? Even if I do have some kind of…power, then what makes you think you’ve picked them up off me?”
He turned round in the bed to face her again. “Because I love you, Pen,” he said.
She thought he must have gone mad. Or he was taking the piss. It was too awful. Here was a man professing his love. It was something she had waited for. He was offering her his ordinariness, his safety. But at the same time he had made himself seem mad and dangerous, talking about superpowers. It was like a cruel joke.
“I’m sorry, Craig,” she said, and sat up. What time was it?
“What’s the matter?” he asked, alarmed.
Penny was out of bed in a flash, hunting around on the carpet for her jeans and shirt. She was crying, she realised.
“No one’s ever said that to me,” she sobbed. “I’m going home now. Right now. Where’s my boots?”
His mind raced. He went, “But…but...” and it was as if the effort of telling her had robbed him of the power of ordinary speech. Inwardly he shook, full of adrenaline and disappointment. It was like being someone in a film. This was Craig, he had vowed never to say anything like that. And the other part couldn’t believe that Penny had reacted as she had.
“Fuck, bollocks, shit!” she cursed, hunting out her remaining clothes. She was like a scalded cat. “Look, I’ve got thinking to do. OK?” And with that, she opened the bedroom door.
“Penny, you can’t walk out in the middle of the night.”
“I can’t?’ She paused and seemed to weigh this up. To her mind it instantly became one of the disadvantages of accepting his love. She stared at him, half in and half out of his bed. But I don’t love you, she thought. And I won’t. He was expecting her to say the same back. He wanted them playing snap with similar sentiments all night long. Penny couldn’t take someone’s love and be unsure what to do with it. She didn’t want to crush someone like that.
“Are you going home to Andy?” he asked, and some bitterness crept into his tone.
“What?” She blinked. “I suppose I am.”
“Right,” he said. And then he couldn’t think what else to say.
When she closed the door he listened to her creeping down the stairs, through all the rooms, then out. Every noise was charged with her presence and her magic. Craig stared bleakly at his ceiling. But I’ll get her back, he assured himself. Now I’ve got powers too. I can win her back with the magic I must surely have taken.
Andy had been to the hospital.
As he arrived, Fran was just leaving Liz’s bedside. It was like the changing of the guard, she said with a smile as they crossed over in the corridor.
“It’s funny, I’ve sat there for hours,” she said. “And it’s, like, hypnotic.”
“I know what you mean,” Andy whispered, staring through the glass panel of the door. “She’s so beautiful.”
“I suppose she is.” But that wasn’t what Fran had meant. “I reckon it’s because I’ve been run off my feet all day, at home with the kids and Frank...and then I come here and it’s so peaceful and relaxed.” To Fran, sitting by Liz’s bedside and hearing the regular beep of her life signs was the most restful bit of the week. She found she was almost looking forward to her visits. She came alone now, making polite excuses to Elsie, and found she could talk to Liz without embarrassment. She told her neighbour all sorts of things about her life and what she wanted. Was she imagining it or did Liz look concerned? It could be the way the light worked. Fran felt they were closer friends now than in the few weeks when they had lived beside each other. Fran had told Liz how often she thought about leaving Frank and leaving her own kids. Thrilled, she voiced her most serious plans about maybe starting a new life somewhere else. Liz didn’t look at all shocked, that was the best thing.
“Good night, pet,” Fran told Andy with another quick smile as she set off down the corridor. She left the building wondering what Andy would tell Liz about. Fran laughed to herself. When Liz woke, what a lot of stuff she would know!
Andy chucked out some of the older flowers, replacing them with a handful of anemones. Their stalks were tough and haired and their heads looked sullen, peering over the lip of the glass. But were you allowed to place flowers on the life-signs machine? What if water got into the machine? So he moved the vase onto a side table.
Chitchat first. Bring her up to date with the everyday news. Maybe Liz didn’t even know who half these people were. Andy was going on about Judith at the shop and how she’d had a fight with her boss’s son, who’d been left in charge for a week. She was over twice his age and had had it up to here taking orders from a snotty kid. In the end her daughter had gone round there, waited outside in the dark for the boss’s officious nineteen-year-old son, and given him a good slapping in the alleyway. For a day or two that had been the talk of the street. What else to tell her? About the spastics shop getting done over? About the social services going round to see Nesta and it turning out that Nesta was seven months pregnant and she never even noticed? Andy could see Penny’s face now as she passed on this gossip. Penny looked sour and her tone was censorious. “How could she not know she’s in the family way?” she had sneered and to Andy it didn’t sound like her. It was only afterwards Andy realised that Penny sounded just like Elsie. He didn’t tell Liz that bit. He didn’t think she’d want another Elsie for a daughter.
Then, when he’d exhausted recent gossip from round the doors, Andy broached the subject of himself. His voice was unsteady, but he was warmed up now, used to the way his voice sounded in the cosy gloom. It might just have been inside his head. He looked at Liz and thought she looked as she had in his dream.
He found that he was telling her how worried he was. It came flooding out. In a matter of minutes his throat caught and he was crying. He let the worst of it out in great gasping sobs and wiped his eyes on one corner of Liz’s sheet, since he didn’t have a hanky.
“I’m so selfish,” he said. “Because all I’m worried about is myself. But I’ve bottled this up inside and who can I say anything to? Somehow it’s like I can’t be upset if it’s just for my sake. It’s just...I think these spots mean something terrible.”
Spots? Liz’s death mask seems to wear a quizzical frown.
“Spots.” He nods. “The size of coins. Like leopard spots, and they’re under the surface of my skin, all over my body, they look permanent and blurred...”
He pauses, then untucks his denim. shirt and unbuttons it. He removes it to show his new, gym-toned body. He twists round to see his spots and to demonstrate them to Liz. He is fascinated to see, in this clinic
al light, how they march in irregular rows up his sides, round his back in increasing sizes and denominations. The middle of his chest is almost bare, like a leopard’s tender underbelly.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asks Liz.
When he looks her way this time, that perplexed frown has subtly altered and become a look of dismay.
Andy pulls his shirt back on before the nurse catches him.
FIFTEEN
At the bus stop Big Sue looked nervy. Jane sighed. Sue’s still not getting out much. It’s like Elsie; by all accounts she’s afraid of leaving the house, too. What’s happening to people round here? She tried to get Big Sue talking, which wasn’t hard usually. Today all Sue wanted to talk about was the state of the world. How the young people were running amok. Big Sue pointed out the graffiti on the bus-shelter wall.
Phil Says: Tina I love you
Tina Says...Phil fuck off
Sandra loves Tiger Taxis driver (Kevin Costner look-alike)
Someone had drawn a TV screen with an aerial on the top. They’d drawn a newsreader next to a picture of a fat person made of circles. The headline was Fat Fuckers Take Over.
Big Sue had a point. Bairns would be reading that kind of language. Filthy language written down struck Jane as worse than that said out loud. When she read it she never failed to blush. Jane loved to read romantic novels, tumultuous, thick blockbusters which, on some wary, insomniac nights, she could finish before dawn so that in the morning her head would spin with passion and adventure. But she would snag and trip over, jolt out of her spell if there was bad language. It made the blood burn in her ears and she would go back to reread, trying to justify it to herself, mouthing the words.
There was no excuse for this in the bus shelter.
“That’ll be them lads over the road,” Jane said.
“We’re not safe in our beds,” Big Sue said, though she said it all in one rush, as if it was just a thing to say. “Are you heading into Darlington, pet?” she asked Jane. “Where’s your little boy?”
