[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

by Paul Magrs

  It turned out Joanne had said this was from her mother: smack. Judith was horrified. “Whey, now they’ll sack me for sure!”

  “That would be unfair dismissal,” said her daughter implacably. “And besides, do you think that cocky little short-arse will want to tell his father he was clocked one by a lass?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Well then,” said her daughter. “Your job’s safe.”

  And she was right. Not a word was said. But the atmosphere in the place had turned awful. The boss’s son treated her like dirt in front of customers. He wouldn’t let her play the tapes she wanted over the speakers — she loved the Pan Pipes, she thought they were relaxing. He insisted they had a station with lots of contemporary, dancey pop music. Judith came home each night with her head throbbing.

  “My feet and my head are throbbing!” she’d cry, throwing herself in a chair. “I hate that shop!”

  It was a shame. That shop had once been such fun. It had seemed like her own private shop. It was funny how things went downhill, how times changed. How you were never aware of your own peak.

  She walked to work, ten minutes or so, with a heavy heart. First thing in the morning it was dark and the ground was silver. They said they could still have snow this year.

  For the first hour of each morning the shop was hers again. The boss’s son wouldn’t be in till eight at the earliest. Judith was there for the early crowd wanting fags and milk and papers. Often she saw Fran when she was returning home from her cleaning job at Fujitsu. For that first, very early hour, it could seem that things were just the same. But then, when it became a more ordinary time of day, when the charm of earliness wore off, that brat would arrive to start shouting his mouth off.

  This morning Judith unlocked the shutters and the whole series of locks that kept the corner shop safe. The lights on the deli counter and the fridges were left on all night, so the first thing she saw in the gloom each morning was, beyond the dark shelves and aisles, their lemon glow.

  There was more light in there this morning. Her heart gave a twinge when she saw that the door to the back was wide open. Now that was always locked at night. Could she remember locking it last night before leaving? The backroom lights were blazing. They forced a wedge of cold light into the shop itself. The boss’s son would go mad if she had started to forget to lock things up. That’s where the safe was, in there. He’d have an excuse to sack her if she’d gone careless. She struggled to take herself through to the back, to check that everything was all right. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t dare look at what she’d find.

  The lino was sticky. It was crunchy with pieces of glass. Lemonade bottles had been smashed up the middle aisle. Now that she stopped to stare, she could smell the thick sweetness in the air. Almost hear the distant fizz of spilled pop going flat. And lying on the floor in front of the meat counter was a boy. A grown man, in a T-shirt and pants, curled up as if he was sleeping. He lay in the debris. Judith wanted to run screaming, but there was also something vulnerable about him, the way he was lying, that drew her. His hair was smarmed to one side, stuck down with something. One arm was flung out in sleep along the floor and his fingers twitched slightly in time with his breathing, which sounded heavy and disturbed.

  It was that lad from over the road. “Andy?” she said. Why would he have broken in?

  She stumbled closer and her heart was making a racket in her chest. She couldn’t hear his breathing pick up as he started to wake. She looked at the spots up his arms and legs. Those limbs shifted, stirred under her scrutiny. One arm was clutching a heavy, wet object to his body. It had left dark smears on his shirt and his face. As his eyelids flickered he nuzzled this object, the size and shape of his own head, almost lovingly.

  Judith had been bending to help him. What Andy clutched to him was slick with blood and it glistened. She could smell what it was before she could see for sure: a massive and fatty hunk of raw meat. He’s pulled it out of the freezer, she thought. He’s defrosted it by hugging it to him.

  She backed off.

  His eyes opened fully. “You broke in,” Judith told him.

  He sat up. His face crumpled as he realised what he could taste. He dropped the joint. “Blood,” he said. “Where am I?”

  “Why did you break in?” Judith asked. She went to turn on the main lights.

  When they came on it was too bright, fluorescent. He stared down at himself and he was stained pink from the meat and his own blood. His palms, he saw, were shredded from climbing the walls, from breaking in.

  “I don’t remember coming here,” he said, as Judith came back up the aisle to get him.

  “What is it you’re covered in?” she asked.

  “You mean my spots?”

  They both stared down at him. Then Judith snapped into action.

  “Listen, there’s not much damage. I don’t know what you did, or why, but I’ll not say owt. You’re a neighbour. Just go.”

  Andy struggled to his feet. “I don’t know why I’m here.” He wanted to spit so badly.

  “I can see you’re not your right self,” she said. “You could do without the police interfering. Just get yourself home, bonny lad.”

  He didn’t need telling twice. Judith led him to the back room and opened the door.

  “Thank you,” said Andy. “Judith, isn’t it?’”

  She nodded, looking at his mouth, smeared in blood. His teeth were pink. Look at what I’m helping, she thought. He could be anyone. “Go!” She pushed him out.

  Andy ran.

  Big Sue and Charlotte called for Elsie that morning. They

  banged on the door for twenty minutes.

  “Even if she’s gone crackers, her son should still answer the door,” reasoned Charlotte. But there was no sign of her son, either.

  “And where’s that Penny?” asked Big Sue, backing down the garden path and staring at the upstairs windows of Elsie’s house. “I thought she’d virtually moved in with them. Give it another knock.”

  Charlotte was wearing that dashing hat of hers, the one with the scarlet feather. It bobbed in time with the knock she gave the front door. Nothing. “All the blinds have been pulled.”

  Big Sue gave a sigh. “She can’t say we haven’t tried to pull her back to the land of the living.”

  “That’s right,” said Charlotte. She’d wanted to tell Elsie that the shop was shipshape once more. That, no thanks to Elsie, they were up and running again.

  “She must have gone into one of her depressed phases,” said Big Sue.

  “Or she’s drinking again,” muttered Charlotte.

  “Could be.”

  “She could be lying in a stupor. Choking on her own vomit.” Charlotte shuddered. The last time Elsie was drinking, she’d been doing it at work. She was too scared to drink at home, where her Tom could see. At first it had been quite amusing, Elsie livening the place up by trying on all the clothes. She kept dashing into the changing cubicle and coming out dressed up in the most ridiculous things. Layers and layers of multicoloured outfits.

  Big Sue said, “Where should we go, then?” They had banked on spending their shared day off at Elsie’s, cheering her up.

  Charlotte nodded at Nesta’s house across the close. “I think we should check on the mum-to-be,” she said. “They say the house is filthy inside. I wouldn’t mind getting a peek in.”

  “Ha’way then,” said Big Sue, who was concerned too.

  When they left, Elsie bent to peer through the blinds, making sure they were really going. She was in the kitchen, holding her breath.

  Water ran down the walls. The floorboards were soaked through. The lights were still off. Craig hadn’t come home last night, with or without Penny.

  Elsewhere in the house the floor creaked. “Craig?” she asked unsteadily.

  Andy was caught red-handed heading off down the stairs with his rucksack. He had used all the hot water in the early morning tank and had hurriedly packed himself some essentials.
In clean, fresh travelling clothes his skin felt scalded clean. This was his getaway. He had just enough money. No complications.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  Penny called from the top landing. She spoke with that guarded, almost frosty voice she’d been using with him just lately. What have I done to her? he thought. Maybe she had been odd in anticipation of this moment. She’d known for a while I was going to walk out on her. If I leave number sixteen, he thought, then Penny is here by herself.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking up. She was wrapped in a towel, heading for the bathroom. “Are you going to your nanna’s again?” she asked. She looks scared, he thought.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Weren’t you going to tell me you were going?”

  He smiled. “Yeah. I was.”

  “Were you?” What do I sound like? Penny wondered. He can come and go as he pleases. It’s nothing to do with me.

  “Listen,” he began. He didn’t say anything else.

  After a moment of staring at each other, up and down the stairs, she said, “This time last year this house was chockablock.”

  “I know.” He smiled. “I’ll phone when I get there. give you the number.”

  “Right,” she said, and watched him hurry down the rest of the stairs. “Wait,” she said. “You’ll need some cash. You’ve not got anything.” She came down the stairs.

  “What have you got?” he asked. “You can’t afford—”

  “Liz left me a bit,” she said and, with that, went to the dresser and unearthed an envelope full of notes.

  Wordlessly he took it. Once more he headed for the front door.

  After it slammed there was a momentary silence in which she held her breath. She could picture Andy doing the same thing outside. Then he did what they both knew he was going to do, and put his house keys through the letter box. The metal flap clacked and the keys arrived in a sudden jangle.

  SEVENTEEN

  If there’s one thing I’ve had to become, it’s self-sufficient. I don’t need anyone in the house with me. Imagine living in a place where when you put something down, it stays there.

  Here was Penny in the middle of the afternoon. She was sitting on the tyre swing in the kids’ play park. These were good places to mull things over. Her boots were planted firmly on the gravel and she felt suspended, hunched up in her cardy. It was coming in cold. Here came that snow they were talking about. This winter was never going to end.

  Penny looked at the houses around her in Phoenix Court. All full of people. People squabbled and grabbed things. They shouted in your face, exerted their demands on you. You had to take notice. My house was as busy as the rest, she thought. Now I could do with some time on my own.

  This afternoon I should go and see my mother. She lies in Bishop Auckland, waiting. She doesn’t know any different, but she’s putting on that guilt. That easy emotional blackmail. Even the nurses there think I’m awful. They think I’ve abandoned Liz. Is she as good as dead? Andy said I shouldn’t give up hope and I was shocked at the suggestion I had...but perhaps I have. Whatever’s lying in Bishop Auckland isn’t my mam. She’s like someone made up.

  Mark came out to see Penny.

  She looked up from the swing. “We’re like kids, meeting in the park after school.”

  “You’re going to catch your death,” he said.

  “Andy’s gone off somewhere. He packed a couple of bags and wouldn’t say where he was going to.”

  “Right,” said Mark. He thought about Andy for a second, but didn’t have much of a picture of him. I’ve slept with him, Mark frowned, but I can’t recall much about it. He remembered more of what he’d seen of Andy in the gym. Sometimes sex was too close up.

  “Come and have some tea with me,” he told Penny.

  She smiled. “Is that a good idea?”

  Mark shrugged. “I reckon so.”

  He held out his hand. He wore a plain yellow shirt and the sleeves were rolled up. Oh, what a colour he was in this grey afternoon. She stared at the hand offered to her. What was on it? The thing with Mark’s tattoos was that you could focus on one thing at a time. Something would jump out at you and snag your attention, then the rest would become a backdrop. Everything on him jostled and competed for your attention. On his palm, among other things, there was an eye. Which, as she looked, became a perfect blue egg wedged in the stretched jaws of a snake, which heaped its manicured coils around and around Mark’s forearm.

  “Take my hand,” Mark said.

  She took it, prepared to hop off the swing. Under her own palm that drawn eyeball flinched. She felt its lashes brush the tender part of her wrist. The snake shivered and squirmed as he helped her up.

  “Something happens,” she said, “whenever we—”

  “I know.” He grinned. “Sssh.”

  Penny touched her fingertips to the orange triangles she saw poking out from under his shirt. They were the petals of a tiger lily and the pollen was thick and felty.

  In the days when they were happy they played some funny games. You do, don’t you? Looked at cold, it might seem perverse or kinky. But that’s not what it was like at all.

  I loved Tom. When I first saw him at the fair, the day he took me round the back of the generator, I could see he had more to him. He had a mystique. He came from somewhere else. There was a power to him.

  When we were happy he loved playing those games, too. Sex was something he blushed about. He was like a boy about sex. For someone so worldly like Tom, it was funny to see him get coy like that. He was clever and yet when it came to matters of the bedroom he stammered and didn’t know the right things to say. Lucky I did. In some things at least, I was never backward in coming forward.

  Look at him here.

  Elsie had gone back to the memory box, pulled away the ribbon, and was flicking through the pictures. They smelled of Poison, the perfume Tom bought her each Christmas. She could see him at the counter at Boots, dressed in black, hideously embarrassed as he asked for ladies’ perfume. No way he could have bought me lingerie.

  In the broken fold-down cabinet Elsie had hunted out the emergency candles. They were old and cheap and kept there for power cuts. She set them in saucers and lit them and soon the wrecked living room glowed almost cosily. She found the half-bottle of brandy she’d stashed away and let her eyes slide past her ruined belongings.

  In one power cut she’d sat up all night, terrified. This was before Tom. She had shouted at Craig to wake up. He came blearily to her bedside. “Get the candles out of the cabinet downstairs,” she demanded, sounding scared.

  The poor lad (where was he tonight?) hobbled down the stairs. She listened to his every move. He was plunging into the pitch dark. He was being lulled back to sleep in the dark. When he found his way by touch into the living room, he very carefully slid apart the wall unit’s glass doors. Like a safecracker, listening to the heavy, dangerous swish of the glass. And then what he came for went clean out of his mind. He fished around in the cupboard and, instead of candles, produced a folded sheet of paper. Very carefully he returned to his mam’s bedside and presented her with the red electricity bill.

  “What’s this, you bugger?” she howled, flapping the paper in the dark.

  She hated power cuts. With no lights, no cooker, no telly, she felt abandoned by the world.

  Tonight she had to squint in the gloom from the candles. She held the photos up to her nose. Here was Tom. Never photogenic. Craig as a bairn. Ah. He’d kill you for saying this now, but he looked like a little girl, right up until he was thirteen. He was too bonny for a little lad. When he was thirteen the woman in Greggs the baker stared at his long blond hair and asked Elsie what her daughter was called. That was the woman in Greggs with that disease that made her eyes bug out. Craig glared back at her with hatred. Then he went up the ramp in the precinct to get all his hair shaved off at Roots, the unisex salon. He was a proper rough-and-tumble little boy, whatever he looked like.
/>   Now she had a handful of those square photos from the early seventies. The colours were thinning out on these old snaps. On the Polaroids she had from the early eighties, too, the colour was fading. Here was Craig in football kits, in tracksuits...he was never out of sports gear. On school photos he wore elasticated ties, sharply pressed shirts and the baggy bottle-green jumper of the Woodham Comp uniform. Year after year in these pictures he gave the photographer a sickly smile. Look how self-conscious he was, Elsie thought. I never saw that at the time. You always think boys are indestructible. That’s how they go on. Oh, look, in this one he’s at that awkward stage. He was all gawky, his hair fluffed up, his teeth sticking out. He’s got a smile on like he’s messed his pants. And the sweatshirt he’s wearing is one I bought off the market. It says ‘ET Lives!’ and there’s a picture of ET. That funny face of Craig’s above it. He looks like bloody ET — how could I have been so cruel? Bless him!

  Elsie started to laugh. It was awful, but it was funny too.

  There was a heavy thump from upstairs.

  “Craig?” she called, suddenly alert.

  Elsie struggled to her feet.

  Another thump. It came from her bedroom, directly above her. Well, who would be up there?

  She put down the lilac memory box and the empty brandy bottle.

  Upstairs he had lit candles of his own. He waited by the bedside. He was setting the timer on the Teasmade, like they always used to when they shared a room. That’s what he used as an alarm clock. Every night he poured the clean water back to go round again.

  “Hello, Elsie,” he said as she came into the room. Her bedroom hadn’t been vandalised. She stared at him.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she said. “How we were happy. How we used to play.”

  He was dressed all in black. He was lanky, skinny, his hair brushed back. He looked neat and sexy as he hadn’t for years. When he smiled at her, the frail light shone on his sharp teeth.

  “I’m glad you’ve been thinking of me, Elsie,” he said.