by Paul Magrs
Penny lies in her rumpled bed and listens to the noises from down the hall. The bath is running; she can hear the drumming of water and the heavy padding of Craig up and down the hail. He always leaves the bathroom door open when he’s in there, letting the thick steam drift down the landing. She thinks it’s because he’s used to the free and easy atmosphere of the gym, where it’s all boys together.
She rolls over and groans. Now he’ll take last night as confirmation that they’re together again. Not that anything happened. Just before dawn they fell into bed and slept immediately. Fell into Liz’s pink satin bed. With Liz lying in a natural sleep, no longer touching death, just six miles away, it might have felt strange to make love here. To lay a Rorschach test of moist blotches on her pink sheets. As soon as Penny thinks this, she wants him all over again. She loves the press of his warmth down her side as they sleep. She thinks about being wrapped up in bed with him. How cosy it is even in the headiest, hardest, most intense moments of their lovemaking. And that’s because, with Craig, it is always comforting. With him she feels gathered up and safe.
“Craig?” she calls down the hall. The sloshing sounds of bath water have finished. There has been a concentrated silence during which she can imagine him drying himself. The curious, serious way he does this.
“Hm?”
Folding a corner of towel between all his toes on one foot. Lavishing a special care on that foot. Then rubbing his damaged foot briskly, as if he can’t bear to look at it.
“Come back here and talk to me!”
He appears in a towel. His hair is wet and straggly and his face is white and worried. “What is it?”
Craig looks at Penny as she sits up in bed. He looks at her small pale breasts as the quilt falls away.
“Come back to bed.”
He untenses slightly. For a moment he thinks she is going to say the thing he is dreading most. That Liz has already had a word in her ear. That she has said to her daughter, “Lean closer, my dear, and I will tell you the truth…that Craig is the culprit. Your ex-boyfriend is the thug that almost killed me. Punched me in the jaw on New Year’s Eve and pushed me backwards into a ten-month coma. That is the monster you have let into your pink satin bed.”
Evidently Liz hasn’t said anything of the sort, yet.
Penny pulls him to her. As he scrambles back onto the quilt, she doesn’t even notice that both his feet are perfect.
Last night there wasn’t much chance for Liz to say anything.
Only Penny was allowed to go in and have real words with her mother. The doctors had finished their business and were waiting for the patient to sleep naturally, of her own accord. They drew back to allow the daughter five minutes’ grace.
Penny came into the room unsurely. The light was weird, aquamarine and gold. It was like being in a fish tank. She’d once had a goldfish called Jessica, who dwindled and lay two weeks dying at the bottom of her unclean bowl. Penny expected to find Liz mooching in just that way, her scales turned the same dull gold.
Penny was aware of the watchful doctors stationed around the room like high priests. They must be student doctors for there to be so many of them. Fancy having students for my mam! She flushed with anger. They were experimenting on her.
Liz was propped on dark-green pillows. No make-up on. Her wig was nowhere to be seen. She had been stripped and lay apparently naked under the green sheets. Her chest was hairier that Penny thought it might be. No chance to shave it. The flat, haired, narrow chest shocked Penny as she came to sit by Liz. At first she thought, They’ve brought me to the wrong patient! Then, staring at the familiar features, she thought, They’ve brought my mother from the land of the dead, but with the wrong body! With an ordinary man’s body! Where’s all her studied voluptuousness? Her primped and powdered, shaved and made-up body? Where’s her jewellery, her accoutrements? It was as if she had been robbed. Her arms were stick thin, lying listless over the sheets. The two large, pale nipples surprised Penny, too. She’d never seen her mother like this. Not since she was her dad.
Without the missing wig, her natural hair seemed so short. They must have cropped it recently. It was fluffy and grey, like down on a baby pigeon.
A doctor came to stand between them. “She might already be asleep,” he said. He seemed kind and concerned. His bald brow was sweating. She watched a single new droplet force itself out of a pore as he spoke with her. He was being tactful. “Her name is down as Liz. Mrs Elizabeth Robinson. On all of our documents. We know she was living as a woman and taking hormones. We need to ask you, as her daughter, if you’d prefer her friends and neighbours to see her like this or not?”
Penny doesn’t understand.
There is a fierce heat in the room. As if Liz has come back with an explosion. Or with the fires of hell at her back, like Eurydice. A flash of burning, transformative light.
“I mean,” says the doctor, “we don’t know whether her other visitors are aware of her biological sex or not. Do they know her as a woman?”
“Oh, yes,” says Penny.
“Then we’ll have to cover up the more obviously male bits,” he says. “When they come to see her. At the moment she’s looking too…natural.”
“Thank you,” she tells him, pleased by his care.
Penny sits by her mother.
“I’m sick of this hospital already,” Liz says at last.
Penny doesn’t point out how many months she has been here. She stares in wonder and simple happiness at her mother’s face. She can’t think of what to say.
“When will they let me go home?” Liz sounds older and querulous.
“I don’t know,” says Penny, and her voice breaks. She bursts into tears.
“Hey,” says Liz. “It’s only concussion, isn’t it? I was all right. Happy New Year! I just fell over! I just fell over.”
Tom comes clean.
He watches Elsie come up the garden path. He opens the back door for her and watches her unpack all her groceries.
“Put the kettle on, be a love.”
He does so and that’s when he decides to come clean. “You know when…”
“You what?”
“You know when you thought maybe it was me who destroyed your garden and your house and all your things? When I was mad and I went missing for days?”
She stops, her head still in the cupboard for tins. “Oh, Tom,” she says. “I was upset. I was upset and lashing out at anyone—”
“It was me, Elsie. I came back a few times when you weren’t home. I wanted to ruin everything of yours that you love.”
She comes out of the cupboard and stares at him. The cupboard is above the draining board, which she is kneeling on. She looks at him from this height, her knees aching and cracking.
He adds, “I wanted to break it all apart. The petty, silly things you invest your time in. Everything you spend your love and money on. Your scraggy rose bushes outside. The ornaments you bring back from the spastics shop. All of it. I wanted to do it out of sheer, unmitigated spite. I did it because that’s what I wanted to do.”
She takes the can of beans she has just set down and flings it at him. One of the six penny tins of beans, reduced to almost nothing in the baked-bean price war. More water than anything else inside. But still it gouges a red weal in Tom’s forehead when it hits him, and he drops to the floor.
He stumbles back into the armchair, the one that smells of dog. The two inflatable reindeer are still there, having found no better home since Christmas.
Elsie takes another tin — spaghetti hoops — and throws this too. He yells in outrage as it thuds off his forearms, which he has put up, rather feebly, to protect his face. His twisted-up, ranting, loud, loud face.
Elsie cries out and reaches into the cupboard.
Marrowfat peas. Cream-of-tomato soup. Power Ranger pasta shapes. More beans. Tinned tomatoes. Ravioli. She chucks the lot. He can’t protect himself against this remorseless barrage.
Pineapple chunks. Ambrosia cu
stard.
Then she throws the jar of cook-in sauce. Chicken korma cook-in sauce explodes against his forehead in a gooey and bloody mess.
Just as well Craig isn’t home to witness this. She clambers down from the draining board once Tom is unconscious.
Now let’s see how he likes being at that precious edge of his. This is your limit of experience, lovey. You walk that bloody bridge of yours.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The poor woman couldn’t be bothered. You could see it in her face, the second the car pulled up to the kerb. Liz looked out of the back window and saw all of Phoenix Court waiting there. Everyone out to welcome her back. She smiled wanly through the window as Penny paid the taxi fare. You could see that the poor woman’s heart sank when she saw all those faces waiting in Phoenix Court. She didn’t want welcoming back. She couldn’t be bothered.
Among the crowd, Fran felt ashamed of herself. It was she who had gone round the doors, alerting everyone to Liz’s imminent arrival. Why hadn’t she used her sense and thought on, in her usual way, and realised that Liz might want some privacy? Letting everyone know like this, getting them to indulge their nosiness and standing in a cluster, lining the path between the roadside and number sixteen...why, it was more like something Jane would do.
There had been a postcard from Jane this morning. Hot from Tunisia. Picture of silvery-white sands. A sunset. ‘It’s far too hot. We should have come back straight away. My mother’s driving me scatty. Her hubby is a twat. Wish I was home in Aycliffe. Regards, Jane.’ It was addressed to ‘Fran and Family (Not Frank)’.
Jane would think this was a treat. Having the excuse to stand in the street and stare at someone’s misfortunes like this.
Fran was standing by Sheila and Simon and their two kids. Sheila seemed more gargantuan than ever. She grew with every season. She said to Fran, “It’s like we should have little flags, shouldn’t we? It’s like royalty visiting!”
“Or a film star!” said Simon excitedly. “She’s like a bloody film star!”
This was the sentimentalised picture they all had of Liz. Through her absence and her coma it had hardened into legend. The Tiger Taxi door would be opened by a man in a suit. She would issue marvellously from its snug confines in a glittering evening gown. She’d be draped in fur, her jewels outrageous in the daytime, her golden hair beautifully coiffed.
“The door’s opening!” Sheila said. “Ah, look. She’s getting out by herself.”
Penny was standing to one side, looking concerned. Maybe Liz was determined to do things for herself. With that indomitable spirit she was set upon looking after herself. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.
The door opens, the crowd shrinks back, and Liz stands up in Phoenix Court, clutching her vanity case.
Penny takes her arm.
They walk slowly to their garden gate in the silence of the gathering. The neighbours meant to clap at this point, but they are silent, staring. Liz looks down. She wears a friendly smile, but she is adamant she won’t stop to speak. They pass the neighbours by.
“She’s...she’s…” This is Simon, standing next to Fran. He is the first to say anything. They watch the gate of number sixteen clash shut behind Liz and Penny. This is his cue to say, far too loudly, “She’s a bloke!”
Fran closes her eyes and stands stock still as the crowd gabbles away to itself.
Of course. Of course she’s a man.
Liz is in a blue tracksuit, possibly borrowed from Craig. She has none of her adornments. Her hair is short and grey. She is a thin, prematurely aged man in his forties. How delicate she looks, how frail but determined. How familiar and unfamiliar. And how unmistakably male without the frock and the wig.
Someone is laughing. Someone shouts something at the door of number sixteen as it closes on the crowd.
“Well,” says Big Sue. “I can’t...can you…?” She gapes at Fran.
Fran shrugs and smiles.
She wants to bang on their door and pledge her support. But maybe Penny and her mother need some time to themselves right now.
This was news to Nesta. It was news she thought Tom should hear. She went straight round Tom and Elsie’s house to tell them: all this time, Liz was a man.
Nesta had no idea what she thought about this. She skidded and slipped her way across the street. Her new baby was bundled up in her arms. She shushed it and tried to concentrate. She didn’t know what to think until she could tell Tom. Torn would know.
Maybe Liz had come back from the other side transformed. There could be something magical in this.
“You can’t come in.” Elsie has the door chain on. Her eyes look wild, her hair hangs in unwashed tatters. No one’s seen her for days.
Nesta stands on the doorstep and stares at her.
“But I’ve got news!” Nesta says. “I have to tell Tom.”
“Tom isn’t well,” says Elsie, and for the first time looks Nesta in the eye. She recoils from Nesta’s straightforward, unflinching stare.
“Has he been taken away again?” asks Nesta.
“N-no,” says Elsie. “I don’t mean in his head. I mean he has a cold.”
“Are you sure?” says Nesta.
“Yes!” Elsie looks like she might cry.
“If it’s only a cold, why can’t I come in?”
“Oh, Nesta. you just can’t. That’s all.”
“But it’s important!” Elsie sobs.
“All right, it’s his head — he’s gone funny again. You can’t see him because he’s lying depressed in his bed and he won’t get up.”
Nesta has to take this for an answer. She shuffles away.
Elsie goes up to see Tom, lying in his bed. She leans against the door frame. His pillows are pink and so are his sheets. This is the blood that is still damp. The older blood, the three-day-old blood, is brown, almost black. The room smells. It is claustrophobic, smelly, too hot. Just like the days when he used to lie, too fed up to greet the world.
Elsie worries about what she will do with him.
Craig calls.
“It’s me! I’m back!”
Three days after his return he sees fit to come and see his poor old mam. “You can’t come in,” she says tearfully through the gap in the front door. She won’t unlatch the door chain for anyone.
“Mam?”
The front door closes.
He’s been three days in bed with that Penny. She knows it. Can’t come and see his poor old mam. He’s been in bed with that Penny all this time. Making babies. The only consolation.
I suppose, Fran thought, Liz is a very special person. She must be. That’s why we all waited by her, for her, to see that she came back safe. She catches your eye and makes you want to know.
In that way Liz reminded Fran of the good-looking kids at school. The well-dressed ones, the cool, smart, popular kids. Fran thought about this, knowing that she herself was never that popular. She was never one for standing out in that way. Her life had been one of quiet effort, of carrying on. Of seeing things for what they were. If you stand out in a crowd, can you really do that? Can you still see things as they really are?
Fran watches her husband on the night he unveils his living-room fish pond. He gathers the four kids and Fran to watch.
It is in the corner of the room, covered in green tarpaulin. It has mirrors along the back, spotlights and fairy lights. She has to admit, he has done a professional-looking job on it. If you like that sort of thing, which Fran isn’t sure she does yet. She’ll do her nut if the fish stink up her sitting room.
Frank even gives a speech before he unveils what he has built. He dedicates this pond to his ‘lovely lady wife’. The four kids clap wildly and she smirks and curtsies. “Tah-dah!” Frank goes, and peels back the tarpaulin.
It’s a nice pond. Four juicy orange carp roam around in the cool water. He’s arranged it quite nicely, with flowers and green frondy plants hanging over the edge. Fran congratulates him and he glows with pleasure. Po
or Frank.
Poor? she wonders, when they lie in bed, a couple of hours later. Why did she feel sorry for him as he fiddled on proudly with his fish pond?
Through the back wall of their bedroom you can hear Nesta and Tony next door, going for it hammer and tongs. “They fuck like rabbits,” Frank grunts, his head muffled in the pillow. Fran lies still and listens to the bedsprings going mad on the other side of the wall. She feels like telling them to keep it down. This is ridiculous. Obscene. Nesta starts wailing out her pleasure like a ghost.
Fran supposes she’s sad that Frank’s dreams and ambitions come down in the end to a fish pond. She is startled by how proud he is. Later, watching a film, she noticed him looking round at his pond and his fountain, as if reassuring himself that it was still there. Fran hates the tinkling of the filtration system disguised as a fountain. It made her want the loo. But she supposes she’ll get used to it.
In the end, she thinks, we all have sad lives. Even the popular kids at school have the same ordinary time as everyone else when they leave. By all accounts Jane was a pretty, sought-after girl in her schooldays. Look at her now, alone. Taken on holiday by her mother to cheer her up. No one is ‘cool’, thinks Fran. But we all wanted to be that. She grew up in the sixties. Everything was a French film. She worked in an office but she learned to smoke her ciggies like Bardot. She was on the lookout for Marion Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. All a-sweat, all a-flame. At that age she thought desire made you special. She thought it made you magical and cool.
She looks across the bed at Frank. She tries to block out next door’s racket. When she touches Frank, as she does now, the fine hairs on his legs stand on end, excitedly. He can’t help his response to her. Or maybe he’s turned on by the noise from next door. It’s hard not to think of sex with all that panting and shunting through the paper-thin walls. But Frank turns to her with a hard-on and they push close to one another and this time she doesn’t think it ridiculous she is so much bigger than him. They start to make love.
Even our rediscovery of each other, she thinks as he slips her straps down off her shoulders, is a quiet thing. A whispery thing. His soft red hair brushing her as he puts his mouth down to her breasts. When you lay these experiences of ours alongside those that others have…that’s when I see my life is lived on a different scale.
