by Paul Magrs
“I want you to join with me, Nesta,” said Tom.
His most commanding voice, I noticed. Almost his vampire voice. The husky, deathly voice he would put on for our Christopher Lee black-cloak, pointed-teeth games. Her squinty eyes goggled under his influence. Why was he Bela Lugosing Nesta? What did he want with her?
“Oh yes?” She batted her thick black eyelashes. Now she’s gone all flirty and flattered, I thought. Now she wants to do everything she can for him.
“I have a special gift,” she said thoughtfully. “I must put it to proper use.”
“That’s right,” said Tom. “You must come with me to see Liz. There is work to be done.”
“Work?” Nesta and I asked together.
“Liz is on the cusp,” he said. “She is at the limit of experience. She is on the edge. While she is there, there are questions to be asked, before her spirit returns to us.”
“When she comes back, will she be normal again?” I asked.
“As normal as the rest of us,” he said.
“Good.”
“While she is on the edge, we must ask what it is like,” Tom said.
The room had become dark around them.
“Are you sure you want to know?” Nesta asked. Her white forehead as she frowned was the brightest thing there.
“She is approaching the totality of her experience on earth,” Tom explained. The shadows on his face were long and dark. “Of course we need to know. I need to know.”
Andy is waving Craig off at Waverley Station in Edinburgh.
Craig stands with his bags in the train doorway. Andy has Jep in his arms.
“Are you sure you won’t come back to Aycliffe?”
Andy shakes his head, grinning. He shuffles his feet and talks to his child. “Wave, Jep.”
Craig has spent almost a month with them.
“I’ll pass your love on...to everyone,” Craig says.
The guard is going by and checking on doors. He has his white table-tennis bats at the ready, to signal the train to leave.
“Good luck with your mother,” Andy says.
Craig pulls a face. “She’ll be all right.” He knows already how she will try to make him feel guilty for staying away a month.
The train leaves.
Jep squirms in Andy’s arms, to keep sight of Craig —Uncle Craig — and to wave. How he’s grown! His sharp nails click on Andy’s new tartan jacket.
Then the station is left behind.
The city flashes by. Savacentre. Terraces. The Meadowbank stadium. The land either side settles down to green. Then the sea appears.
Craig’s mam isn’t so bad. Elsie has sense. But he has to tell her that he’s moving out of home. He’s leaving Aycliffe. He doesn’t know yet where he’s going. She’ll take it badly, but maybe she’ll understand in the end.
He can’t live with her and Tom. It’s too sweaty and compressed with all of them there. Too many people on a long, breakless journey in a single car.
It’s a step backwards for all of them, living together.
Seeing Andy has convinced Craig of his need for a new town, autonomy. Managing his own life. Paying rent and bills and fetching in his own groceries. Maybe he can put some of those skills of his to use.
Andy told him he should set up in his own business. Andy wished he had talents like Craig’s. Craig could turn his hand to anything. You’re a handyman! Andy told him, laughing.
I’m a handyman, thinks Craig, heading south.
Changing of the guard. Fran walked out of Liz’s room, straight into Nesta, Tom and Elsie. The three of them sat in the waiting area, not talking, not reading, staring at the door. They looked keen. She wanted to ask them, what are you expecting? And why are you flocking here all at once? They wanted to see Liz doing handstands, jumping about. Tom would be putting it down as some great religious experience. It was too awful to think about. Elsie and Nesta pulled along for the ride, his handmaidens. Fran didn’t trust Tom one bit. He looked manic and calm at the same time. His eyes were silver. He was like a toad with silver eyes. Now he was pacing towards her.
“No change?”
“Nothing,” said Fran, buttoning her coat.
“I think all this…expectancy will come to nothing. It’s just raising Penny’s hopes. There is no hope. I don’t see Liz rallying.”
“Ah,” said Tom. “You don’t know the signs. The proper signs.”
“Don’t I?” Fran looked at the two women, who were still sitting. How quiet and submissive Elsie was when Tom was there to do her talking.
“Forgive me,” said Tom. “But you are ignorant. Liz is a person on the edge. The mistake people like you make is to treat them as dead already. Liz is on the verge of a new phase of life. She is in a very creative limbo. She is communicating with us in a host of different ways. We simply have to be sensitive and receptive.”
“Right,” said Fran, shouldering her bag.
The two women stood up.
“We must go and see her,” said Tom. “We have work to do.”
Fran said her goodnights and left.
As she passed the reception, she wanted to warn the nurses that religious nuts were taking their turn to sit with the helpless Liz. Yet she couldn’t do it. She imagined the receptionist — one of the organised, clever-looking, self-important, I’m-really-as-good-as-a-doctor type — staring back at her. Telling her wearily that they get all sorts in here. They’ve seen all the religious nuts in the world.
And who was Fran to criticise anyone and what they did at the bedside? She’d spent an hour with Liz tonight, going over in detail the state of her marriage, then her relationship with her mother.
Leaving Ferryhill, Fran had tramped miles cross-country just to spill out her feelings to Liz. She wished she had a horse, to bring her much quicker to the sickroom. She wanted to fly that distance at great speed. Liz was the first person she had wanted to talk with.
They drew up their chairs around the bed, Tom, Elsie and Nesta.
Didn’t she look a treat? Under white blankets and sheets Liz lay very still and straight. Nesta was right. Her colour was back, peaches and cream. Those strong, mannish features. What a handsome woman. Tom felt the urge to pray, and suppressed it. When he looked at Liz he felt almost sexy. She was lovely, but it wasn’t sexy in the usual way he felt. He was hungry for something bigger. This was different to the body and its usual appetites.
He looked at Nesta. She looked so dopey. Frustration rose in him. Don’t let any of these bitches let me down. Liz is my bridge to another world..Nesta is my mediator to Liz. He hated being this dependent. He had to fight down the panic, learn to depend. Learn to trust these silly women. “Nesta?” he asked gently.
Something went through her head. A beat, a message. That running of the beat of a song she had heard. When her adopted father died, she told her adopted mother that what she needed was a radio. They play you pop music twenty-four hours a day and that distracts you from thoughts of the dead. The ongoing music makes the time go fast. Fills up your thoughts. What you get into your head is a beat going on like this, like rap music, insistent. A kind of music Nesta never liked, but there you go. It was funny what got into your head.
She liked her mind because there was never a dull moment. Is everyone as entertained as this? As busy like me? Music and pictures and links between scenes and words over pictures and then all change. Nothing long enough to catch a hold of. When some time in the eighties, when the new computer technology took over the telly, when rap music and jazzy coloured graphics came on everything, for the first time she felt at home. Telly became more complicated, more demanding to watch. For the first time she had something to point at and say, There! That’s how I think! That’s what it’s like in my mind all the time! Music and pictures and changing, shifting one thing for the next. You can’t unsnag the sense of things. Which was why Nesta found it hard to keep on top of the plot.
She didn’t move at the same speed as other people. Her mind was fa
ster. She worked at the speed of telly.
At first Nesta didn’t know what to say. She looked down at her lap, the chapped hands resting there.
“Clear your mind,” Tom told her. “Slow your breath, the pace of your thoughts. Breathe in time with Liz. Listen to Liz breathing and you match that. Be at one.”
Fat chance. This was like music and movement, all those years ago at school. Miss Simmonds clapping her hands in the school hall, which smelled of varnish, dust, dirty sandshoes. The record player would start up, the Nutcracker Suite crackling out of a box of blond wood, like a coffin with a grill on the front.
Everyone urged to dance round in squeaky sandshoes in their dark-blue knickers. Dance round like sugar plums, like fairies, dance round, use the space, feel the music, express yourselves. Miss clapped her hands to start, to speed up. Everyone moved. Someone giggled. Someone farted. Someone giggled some more.
“Talk with her,” Tom said. “Keep your breathing even, Nesta.”
Who does that old bastard think he is? thought Nesta. He’s like Uri thingy on the telly, Geller. Bending spoons and putting you in trances. Do us a trick, man.
Nesta stared down, shy all of a sudden. She didn’t know what to say now. The talking she had done before, she had done because she wanted to. Big Sue should be here as well. She felt bullied by Tom.
She found she was staring at the silver locket she always wore. In her teens she had pasted in two tiny cameo pictures cut from the TV Times: Bet Lynch from Coronation Street and Meg Mortimer from Crossroads. They were her strong women icons. They were the faces that would inspire her to get what she wanted from life. She clicked open the silver locket and looked at the faces of these women.
Inspire. Inspire me and Liz. Breathe in with Liz, and out. If only she could shut out those faces of Elsie and Tom staring, wanting a part of this. They were like vultures them two. Like vampires.
“Do you remember how David Hunter was always trying to take ownership of the Crossroads Motel off Meg?” she said. “Meg would never give in. She was saving it for her children. Crippled, ginger Sandy, who was in a wheelchair and died. And Jill, who was blonde and lived in that lovely house called Chimneys. She was divorced from a man who beat her. Meg wanted the motel for Jill, who ended up marrying another awful, slimy man called Adam Chance. Then Meg had had enough and you thought she’d committed suicide, swallowing an overdose of Valium while the motel was on fire. It was Bonfire Night, about 1980, remember? The motel in flames. Only Meg indoors. All the staff and guests at the firework display. Jill turned, saw the real fire, yelled out, ‘Mum!’ It was terrible. But Meg survived. Went off on the QE2. Signed over her shares in the motel. That evil smoothie David Hunter —what a charmer! — took over. Adam Chance — another smoothie! — took over some of Jill’s shares when they married. Jill went back on the booze. Funny how those awful men took over in the end.
“Like Bet Lynch on the Street, for ever trying to get away, pinning her hopes on another man. Leaving and coming back with her wings broken. She ended up in Spain. You never found out if she was happy, did you? You just have to imagine. Why couldn’t these women be happy where they were? In their own programmes?”
Nesta draws breath. She is out of synch with Liz.
Something is happening.
Elsie shouts out, “Do something.”
“Fetch a nurse!” Tom yells.
Nesta blinks. None of them know what to do. Liz is hyperventilating. She starts to thrash about on the bed.
Tubes plop out of her nose. She is disconnecting herself. She shouts something about the motel being on fire.
“Yes! Yes!” Tom shouts at her, overcoming his panic. Now he’s fascinated and eager. “Tell us more, tell us about the fire...”
“I’m on the boat now,” Liz says, lying still again. “The fire has finished.”
“Where is the fire?” asks Tom, leaning close.
“They dragged me out of the fire. I’d left, but you never knew.”
“Where is the boat going to?” Tom asks.
“To the other land, the new place,” she says.
Tom nods smugly. “The next place!” he echoes.
“You all thought I’d perished. You couldn’t find my body. But I was on the QE2, ready for a long-earned rest.’
“Are you going to the next place now?” he asks, urgently.
“I am wearing a white headscarf and a white frock, and here I am, wishing to sail into the sunset.”
Elsie gasped. “She thinks she’s in Crossroads!”
Tom stared aghast at Nesta. “You’ve brought her back to life!”
Liz starts to cry. She cries lustily, with all of her might.
TWENTY-SIX
“To me,” Fran told her husband, “they looked shifty. I wouldn’t trust them an inch.”
“There you go,” he tutted. “I knew this would happen. All this hospital visiting.”
It was a gloomy night. Fran was glad to be indoors again, but she had brought the atmosphere in with her. She couldn’t shake the feeling off. She wanted to sit down, put her feet up. Frank had the house upside down, up to his eyeballs in mortar. He was building in the living room in a little vest top.
She stared at his freckles, just fading from the summer. He had them all over his shoulders, too. “I’m taking care of my mates,” she said distractedly. “Liz needs looking after.”
Frank grunted and went back to work. He buttered each of the breezeblocks carefully. He’d put plastic down so he’d get nothing on the carpet. At least he’d taken that precaution.
He was in a new, industrious phase, building an indoor fish pond for their living room. He’d drawn up all the plans. There was to be a fountain, plants, weed, fairy lights. These days he always had his little projects going. He’d moved on so much from his days of drinking lager and doing bugger all else. To that extent Fran was proud of him. She wasn’t keen on the fish-pond idea, but he was obsessed with fish. He’d put a tank in the bathroom. Watching fish, he said, made him drink less booze.
She wondered if Elsie was drinking less again, with her Tom back. She preferred Elsie pissed.
“The way they trooped into her room,” she said, more to herself. “Like they were going in to interrogate her.”
He commiserated. “Tom, Elsie and Nesta. What a bunch!” They weren’t his favourite people.
“I think I’ll pop out and see how Penny is getting on. I should tell her about this.”
He stood up and raised both eyebrows. “Don’t go stirring up trouble.”
She drew in an audible breath. “It’s never me that does the stirring! It’s always me that wants things to settle down!”
On her way to Penny’s she bumped into Mark.
“Have you seen Penny today?” she asked.
“Me? Should I?”
“Oh,” she faltered. “I thought...”
Mark smiled gruesomely. “You thought what, Fran?”
“Oh, you know.” She smirked, wanting the tarmac to open and swallow her up. “The usual idle gossip. The usual bloody rubbish.”
He snorted. “Ay, I know all right. You heard that Penny and I were an item. Well, we’re not. That’s Elsie, sticking her neb in and trying to cause bother.” He squinted at her in the gloom. They used to be close, him and Fran. As close as you could get watching sad TV movies together. “Hey. You don’t look right.”
“Frank’s right,” she said. “I do spend too much time running after people’s lives.”
He nodded. “Maybe you do, Fran.”
“Cheers!” She laughed, looked down and saw that she still had her slippers on. With her toes she could feel a worn hole the size of a ten-pence piece. Running out in her slippers. The pink fur was all wet. It was as if she thought all of Phoenix Court was indoors, her house.
“But,” he said, “if I needed a good mate on my side — I’d wish it was you.”
“Oh, get away!” she chuckled, and submitted to a quick, clumsy hug from the tattooed man.
The kitchen was lit up inside and steamy with cooking. Penny’s blurry purple shape came to unlock the door.
“Is it Mam?”
“It’s something and nowt, pet.”
“Come on in, Fran.”
Penny had been doing herself a stir-fry. The kitchen was scented with ginger and soya sauce. Fran wasn’t sure, but as they passed through the kitchen into the living room, she thought she saw the water chestnuts tip themselves into the spitting wok. “Should you leave that cooking by itself?” she asked, following Penny. Penny said it was all right.
Fran started to take her coat off as Penny turned down the stereo. Carole King. The phone rang.
“It’s the hospital,” Penny said, before she even snatched up the receiver.
This is a fairly warm night for the time of year. The boxy houses are chocolate brown against the evening’s dusky pink. Mark thinks the estate looks like a chocolate box tied up with a ribbon — the triangles and oblongs of the rooftops.
When Mark returns home he has a sudden inspiration and changes into shirt and shorts. A quick jog around the streets. Twice round the estate is a mile. He’s been missing the gym without Andy to goad him on.
He slips out into the near-dark. On the narrow streets between terraces, his trainers make hardly any noise. The pavements glisten under soft yellow lights. He remembers the night, almost two years ago, when his mother-in-law and her lover persuaded him to join them on a naturists’ promenade round the streets of Newton Aycliffe. What a night that was! He flinches automatically from the memory. But it is bliss to be out with bare arms and legs, running till it becomes thoughtless. This must be one of the last nights of the year for being out like this. It strikes him how quiet the streets are. Are people that scared?
Mark thinks, I’m doing my own reclaiming of the night. Whenever he sees someone by themselves, a woman alone or a child, he crosses the road so he’s not coming up behind them or having to run towards them. He has to keep that distance. He hasn’t seen any of the rough lads from over the Forsyths’ house in a while. Whatever the phrase ‘rough lads’ means, anyway. Mark supposes that, when he was their age, he was a ‘rough lad’ too. He still has a shaved head. He thinks people are overreacting to these lads on the estate. It doesn’t do any good to get too alarmed. It puts all the power on the aggressor’s side. Those lads could rule the place now. Look how empty the streets are tonight. People prisoners in their own homes.
