[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

by Paul Magrs

  Jep is standing up in the cot I bungled together from bits and pieces. Things chucked in skips. It’s probably a death trap. I’ve tried to make it safe.

  Whenever he wakes me I hate him. I get so tired. But the sight of him, bracing his weight on unsteady legs, makes my heart contract and relent. I touch him and there’s all his soft, resilient bristles and I feel scared and angry, too. I press the meat on him and, closing those too expressive, too alert eyes of his, he nibbles it experimentally. And I feel rather than hear the satisfied clasp of his pointy little teeth as he gobbles up the flesh. His eyes open slowly, almost shyly and look at me, I think, in gratitude. And I hate the way he can see in the dark.

  It is then I decide to do the impossible thing. The thing I decided upon in the dead of one night last week. The cruel but perhaps necessary thing. I lift him up. He’s turned so heavy. I tell him this, holding him up under his armpits as I walk to the bathroom. There’s no window in the bathroom. The light comes on like the light inside the fridge and at the same time the air conditioner rasps into life. It has a grill of metal slats clogged with lines of dust, all heaped there. It makes you wonder how much dust you are taking in all the time. As I strip Jep of his baby things on the bathroom floor, I’m imagining running a finger through those lines of dust and dislodging them. How they would feel, soft and brushy, and trickle through my fingers.

  What if I hurt him? If anything happened to him, I know I would feel it twice as bad. I hold the pad of one of his tiny hands between my thumb and forefinger and I feel the squash of it. I’m more scared of my potential to do him harm than he is. I run hot water, cold water into the basin. I’m glad there’s still hot water left. The immersion tank here is rubbish.

  Because he’s so tired — and contented now that he’s at last eaten his fill — he’s quite compliant and lies nearly still for me. Oh, his underbelly’s such a lovely, pale shade of gold. The rest of him is tougher and darker, autumn-leaf gold. I’ve got soap, lots of it and with my one free hand, as I use the other to stroke his tummy, I froth it into a rich green lather. Under my hand he gurgles and purrs. I work the soap into his fur, all over, soaping these little limbs, every inch of him. I am careful around his eyes, of course, and he blinks at me, watchful. Then I have to hunt around for a fresh, unused, disposable razor blade. By the time I have found one the soft, lathery bubbles have begun to pop, leaving his fur smarmed and sticky. I wet him up some more and, taking one little hand in mine, shave a first, experimental strip off his chest.

  Even in a city full of queers, I still get panic attacks about standing out in a crowd. Nanna Jean once said, in one of her more dour and paranoid phases, “Ah, you shouldn’t be dyeing your hair red, Andrew. That’s how they see you in a crowd. That’s how they get you and beat you up.” Now, is it any wonder that I grew up like this?

  Today, trolling round the shops and the sales in Princes Street, I had this awful, sneaking sensation of panic. I wanted to scream out in the record shop. I couldn’t get home fast enough. Of course I couldn’t scream out. Not now that I have responsibilities. I couldn’t scream out for the sake of the child.

  I took him out round the shops with me for the first time. He clung to my neck in one of those baby pouch things they design for parents. Walking the streets, not looking for anything in particular to buy, I felt proud and scared and worried and conspicuous. In the end I just had to come home. I used to love going round the shops. In the past few months everything has turned on its head.

  Jep was asleep when I came back up the red fire escape. I put him in his cot and paced the flat.

  Of course I have to learn to be happy and confident, walking about with him on the streets. I can’t leave him here all the time when I go out. Though already I’m guilty of that. If I lived in Phoenix Court, the women would be reporting me for neglect. But I can’t be with him twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, he’s more resilient than a normal child.

  When I first walked out with him, his slight weight pressing on my chest, his bundled legs squashed against my stomach, I was struck by a very odd similarity. It was something I’d never have suspected. The conspicuousness I felt walking around with my new child was very like what I feel, now and then, when I think people are giving me second glances and thinking, queer. What a strange and sticky comparison! I don’t know whether I feel better, if it makes queerness more normal, or whether I feel sad, because I feel doubly on show. have to have a think about that one.

  I went to sit in Princes Street Gardens. I sat on a bench and watched the sunbathers, the rollerbladers, the ambling mums and dads. Jep’s fingers were tapping at my throat and I unzipped my jacket so he could see out. Twist round and look at the world, Jep. His eyes were startled by all the light. How green they are! His slits of pupils were more unnerving, almost, in the open air. I hoped no one would come close enough to examine him. And I felt guilty thinking that about my beautiful child. I should want to show him off. His fingers still pressed at my throat and I thought, What sharp little nails he has. I wondered about cutting them off, but decided against it. Not after the ridiculous, futile, fur-shaving exercise.

  That night I worked so long and hard, attempting to remove his gorgeous but too conspicuous golden plush. I carved into the shaving foam and at first he lay stunned, letting me stroke his fur away. I thought I could remove all traces of his leopard spots with a swift and trusty blade. After a few strokes I became less careful, and he turned fractious and twisty. I nicked his precious skin, bright blood welled up and he howled. His face was a tight mesh of anger and pain.

  I flung the razor into the bath, horrified by what I’d been doing. What I’d been doing to my own flesh and blood.

  I picked up my cold, wet, soapy child and licked the tiny wound on his stomach. His blood tasted, naturally, like mine. Soap got into it and he yelled and kicked some more.

  I felt the naked, bristly flesh under my tongue where I had tried to shave him. I felt the neat straight line of where the resilient fur resumed.

  I held him out to have a look, once his cries of protest had tired him out and he had quietened.

  In that patch I’d shaved clean of fur, his spots were as bright and evident as ever. They stared back at me and I thought, I’m such a stupid prick. I’ve been shaving the proverbial.

  I sponged him clean of soap and put him back to bed.

  So you’re stuck with these spots for life, Jep.

  He’s humming into my neck in apparent contentment as I think this, as we sit in the sun in Princes Street Gardens. He hums rather loudly, deep in his throat.

  The odd thing is — and I can’t be sure yet if this is real or not — my spots are starting to fade. Each day they have grown a little less distinct. But perhaps I am making this up. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m coming or going these days. Such are the joys of fatherhood.

  The people passing by our bench feel tempted to come and see my child, to pet and examine him. It’s a compulsion they have. I try to ward them away and luckily this works. I feel them thinking, What’s this lad doing with a baby that small? It doesn’t look right. He looks a bit rough, that lad. Where’s the baby’s mother? Shouldn’t she be in charge of the child? He isn’t holding that baby correctly. Look how clumsy he’s being!

  Of course I can’t be sure of what they’re thinking. But I do feel clumsy holding Jep. How am I supposed to know how to hold a baby? No one’s ever told me. It isn’t instinctive, at any rate. I imagine that it is for mothers.

  I try not to think about the actual scene of giving birth. I feel like you do in those dreams where you are somewhere you know you shouldn’t be. In a supermarket with no clothes on, upon a theatre stage in the wrong play and none of my lines learned. There are times between the moments of sheer panic when it’s just me and Jep and everything’s fine. He’s a loving bairn. I can see that already. He’ll be intelligent too, and strong. He stares at you when you talk to him, stares at how your lips work, as if deciphering your words. You can see by his e
yes how intelligent he will be. That split lip of his, that cat’s muzzle, twitches slightly in response, as if he’s preparing words of his own. He has vestigial whiskers there, the short hairs stiff and brushy.

  I gather him up and like any other baby he smells milky and clean. Except when he’s just eaten and you catch that whiff of dead, raw meat on his breath.

  We walk further into the park and I decide I like it here. Funny to think it’s so near the busy heart of town. It’s so peaceful. We round the corner and there’s the golden fountain, teeming with warriors, horses and trumpeters. The fountain I saw in my dream before I came here.

  “That must mean we were meant to come,” I tell Jep. “If I saw it in my dream.”

  Then I have to go to the loo, even though I hate public toilets, how dark and messy they always are. I have to go to the loo quite a lot these days. Does having a baby mess your waterworks up?

  I have to take Jep into the cubicle with me.

  These toilets are kept quite clean, luckily. I suppose it’s a very touristy area and they have to put on a show. The gents is busy with dads and their small sons and they’re all chatting away along the steel urinal.

  When I’m using the loo I read the graffiti out of habit. A fair amount is about football and some of it is about the Scots versus the English. Most of it is of course phone numbers and desperate-sounding messages suggesting times and places. Some vicious, homophobic replies. Bigger than all the other writing, in thick black marker, straight in front of me it says: GOOD COCK FUN. And it seems like a slogan, a simple advert. Jep’s head is lolling against me as he nods off to sleep again. I realise, as I step out of the cubicle, that I’m blushing.

  What would Nanna Jean think of me?

  I can think of one or two things she’d have to say about all this. Oh, I want it to turn out all right.

  To start with, I want to present Nanna Jean with her great-grandchild, because that is what he is. I can see myself travelling south to Tyneside, arriving at Newcastle station, carrying Jep bundled up in baby blankets. I cross the white marble, the cool, crowded expanse of the platforms, and get us onto the Metro. As the shuttle flashes between the crumbling red-brick houses and over the green river, I’ll be having second, third, fourth thoughts about knocking on my nanna’s door. What if she rejects me? What if she rejects my child?

  So here I am, on the last leg of my journey back. She’s had her front door repainted, I see. A glossy scarlet. I knock and it’s then that Jep starts to cry. He doesn’t cry often and the noise he makes is strange. It raises the hair on the nape of my neck and my stomach knots up for him.

  I can see Nanna Jean through the door’s frosted glass as she undoes all the locks.

  When the door opens, she smiles. I suppose you could say her face lights up. Her hair’s been tinted that tobacco colour. She goes to the place where they let students practise on you. She’s in a flowery blouse and yellow rubber gloves. She is staring at the baby now.

  I suddenly see how small my child is and I have this stupid thought that if maybe I’d given birth to a larger child, she’d be more likely to accept him.

  So this is what she’ll say. This is what she’ll do. She’ll make me feel at home. What am I thinking? I grew up here. Nanna Jean made her home my home when I was little, when my parents died. She denied me nothing.

  “This home will be yours,” she once said fiercely. “Till the day I die this home will be yours.” I knew then that Nanna Jean would fight for me, whatever came. Whatever was wrong with me, she would defend me. In the end that was the one thing I knew I had: this woman who believed in me. Vince never had that. He and his dad never got on, his mother ran away. Penny’s mother ran away, too. I was lucky. Even though an orphan, how well I was parented! So do I feel secure about Nanna Jean?

  She’ll take my spotted child to her bosom. That magnificent, matronly bosom under layers of lace and silk and cardy. She’s not had any great-grandchildren yet, no tiny bairns to lay on that breast. Will she let Jep clamber over her old-lady bulk? That small leathered nose of his, twitching, wet, inhaling the old-lady smell of face powder and sweet, cheap perfume.

  Nanna Jean belonged to a generation that wore fur. Women of her class knew they’d never get this close to the real and lavish thing.

  In that back sitting room, which is still her favourite room, the gas fire will be blue and orange, spitting, fluttering. The telly will be on. The pot will be mashing under an ancient, stained tea cosy, as if she was expecting us. She’ll look kindly as she eases herself into her squashy brown armchair. But her eyes will look tired and knowing. At first glance she has worked out what’s been going on.

  Like an old woman who has seen everything, she will say, “I know what you’ve come expecting me to say.”

  I blink.

  “You’ve come expecting me to say that everything’s all right.”

  I open my mouth to tell her that it’s not forgiveness I’m expecting. I just wanted her to see my son. My son. My insides do a little flip when I imagine this phrase to myself. I get a little glow. A hard-on without having a hard-on.

  Nanna Jean will shush me. “I can’t say that I like the way you’ve chosen to live.”

  I want to ask her, How do you know how I live? But I don’t push it. I remember the shameful made-upness, the living one minute to the next, the hand-to-mouthness of my current life and I shut up.

  “I can’t say that it’s not a disappointment, our Andrew,” she says.

  I brace myself to be told that I started out such a sweet boy. I had everything in front of me.

  She says, “I thought everyone had made sacrifices for a reason. We all had no money. We all muddled through. We lived ten to a house and no one got any privacy. No kind of life at all. And we all thought we were doing it for a reason. You had to. It kept you sane, to think that the ordinary, day-to-day suffering you were going through led to something. It was for the benefit of someone else. For your children and their future.”

  Nanna Jean lets out one of those long, expansive sighs. The sort that seem to reach right back in time.

  For some reason I don’t feel like I’m being preached at. Before, I might have. I’d think, here we go again. All about the old days. Old days and sacrifice.

  Nanna Jean wears that make-up she discovered and came to late in life. She’s my glamorous granny, but now her mascara’s coming down in long, gentle fingers. Her face is smudged.

  “I lost your mam. You know she was my favourite. I never made any bones about that. It was for her I thought I’d put everything by. She was my new life.” Nanna Jean pulls herself together, as she always does when she talks about Mam, and moves swiftly on to the subject of me. It’s always like this. We’re Russian dolls, slotting neatly in and in and in each other. She says, “So I placed a lot of hope in you, Andrew. I won’t pretend that’s not true. I had high hopes of you.”

  Now I sit down on the low, uncomfortable couch along one wall. As if cross at not being talked about, Jep is restless in my arms. I squeeze gently: we’ll be talking about you soon.

  I ask her, “What were you hoping for? What were you expecting out of me?”

  For a moment her face clears. Now she really looks like she’s thinking aloud and being honest with me.

  “You wanted to see me married and with nice kids, didn’t you? And a job, a proper job, and—”

  With a sudden, sharp gesture she cuts me dead. “Stop it, Andrew.” She looks hurt. “Give me some credit, man. We both knew a long time ago that was impossible.” She stares at me. “Didn’t we? That sort of normalness. We both knew it wasn’t going to happen. There was no point in waiting and pushing for it.”

  “Oh.” I wish I hadn’t shoved my oar in. I should have given her more credit, she’s right. Nervously I’m fiddling with the tassels on my baby’s blanket.

  She goes on, “What my hopes were about was more general. I wanted you to find the way you could live, and be happy.”

  Simple as that? I
give her a sceptical look. Like, you don’t believe all that liberal shit, do you? I can’t really believe it of this Tory-voting, council-house-owning elderly lady. She can’t really mean this.

  “I thought,” she says, “you might be the first in this family to start making your own life up the way you want. I thought you might not have to compromise...quite as much.”

  Nanna Jean stares at my baby. “Now you’ve landed yourself with a bairn and all the cares that entails. Same as the rest of us all did, going back generations. All right — you’ve waited till the grand old age of twenty-four. That’s good. But you’ve still given yourself the job of being responsible for another human being. Did you do it just to have someone to love?”

  “I…I don’t know what to say.”

  “I did,” she says. “I married to have a baby, to get someone to love.”

  I never knew this. I’d just assumed that in those days —when were they? — women just had babies because…because there was no pill. They had them natural and easy and they had large, problematic families. I don’t say anything.

  “Don’t you love your life?” asks Nanna Jean. “You live in that city of yours. It’s cold and heaving with busyness and noise. The place where you live is dirty and you’ll never have everything you want. You don’t feel like a normal part of life at all. You’ve not got any of the normal things, the things that someone of your age might expect. The little comforts and consolations. But what freedom you’ve got, our Andrew! I can hardly believe it. You’re in a place where anything can happen. The way you live, you’re only ever a few steps from something new.”