by Paul Magrs
Next door Nesta comes with a lion’s roar. Her husband is silent, as if he isn’t even there. Soon, however, they are heard bickering about putting the cats out, about who will fetch a cup of tea.
By then Fran is about to come. It keeps building and she keeps thinking surely now, but it goes on. Tonight is quite a shock to her. She had forgotten how she and Frank were, after all, experts in each other.
TWENTY-NINE
This is us down the Copper Kettle.
It’s the morning of the sit-in, a Saturday morning. Penny took the photo. It was in the Newton News, the free paper, the following week, posted into every letter box in the town. A bloody horrible snap of us ganged round coffee tables, looking terrible, protesting. They were going to close the place because it was filthy inside. I mean, it was filthy inside. But we liked it because it was a good place to meet up. I wouldn’t have had their cakes, though.
Still. I got a copy of the original and I got it framed.
I’m on the front table, lifting a cup of coffee in a toast. I’m with Penny, Liz, Fran and Nesta. We’re all grinning madly. I am the one with the tattoos all over my body.
At the time of this photo, I was about to leave Aycliffe. I got my own copy of the photo because I wanted a memento. In fact, I think the all-day sit-in was the last time we were all together. And whatever you might say, it was quite a gang we had. Look, even Frank’s there, sitting behind Fran. He’s drinking lager. The bodies are pressed ten deep, all the Aycliffe women, pressing in to get their faces in the free paper. Their bairns, teenage lads, single mums, old blokes, all those faces you’d recognise from seeing in the precinct and just going about the place.
That was a busy day, that. The day of the sit-in. It was shadowed by bigger events. Ridiculous events.
Penny turned up and told me that her Craig was being questioned by the police. They had torn through Elsie’s house. They found Tom dead. Elsie and Craig were in for questioning. Tom was dead. Well, not many round our place mourned much for him.
Funny thing was, he’d lain there for days. Nobody knew. And, while he lay there, Fran had invoked his name in a white lie. In a ploy to get Liz out of her doldrums.
Fran went to number sixteen and stood in front of Liz. “You know what they’re saying, don’t you?” Fran meant business. She stood with her hands on her hips.
“What?” Liz groaned. “What are they saying?” According to Fran, Liz looked a sight. She hadn’t washed her hair, she wore tatty, androgynous house pants again. She hadn’t decided on whether to get in or out of bed yet, let alone which gender she was going to represent.
Since coming back from the hospital she had been lying on their settee watching daytime wily and old films, with a duvet over her legs and an old coat pulled on backwards. For warmth, she said. She couldn’t keep warm. She still had dreams of the snow and that she was turning blue. She thought, when she closed her eyes, that she was under ice, under the polar cap. So she sat curled up on the settee and shivered under a backwards coat, her arms pushed down the sleeves. Penny waited on her mother, bringing her drinks and dinner and tea and snacks day and night.
“You’ll pile on the weight if you live like this,” warned Fran. Fran thought how slim and svelte Liz had been.
“So?” shrugged Liz. “Who does that affect apart from me?”
Fran tutted. “That isn’t the Liz I know.”
Liz bridled. “I’m not the Liz you know. Haven’t you heard? Everyone has. I’m a…I’m a bloody travesty.”
“Ha!” Fran wouldn’t let herself get any more sorry for herself. “We’re all travesties. It’s all a bloody travesty, Liz, man.”
There was an amused glint in Liz’s eye at this. “So tell me, what are they saying?”
“It’s that Tom,” Fran lied. This was her great white lie, making use of poor Tom while he was lying dead across the street. “He’s been going round like an evangelical. Telling all and sundry that he reached into your perverted soul and put you back on the straight and narrow. He brought you back to life and cured you of your sickness. He found for you your true self, and that’s why you came back like this. Why you came back to us as a man.” Fran took a deep breath after this.
Liz’s mouth hangs open. She looks down at herself. She shrugs off the anorak and the duvet, and dashes to the mirror in the hallway. She is in tracksuit bottoms concertinaed around her knees and a shapeless grey T-shirt. Her pale arms are mottled with mauve and blue.
“This isn’t my true self!”
Fran comes to see what Liz can see. Liz’s complexion is pale and she seems almost featureless. A pallid, empty man.
“This isn’t natural!”
Fran shrugs. “This is what that Tom is telling the world.”
“The little bastard!” Liz says.
“Why don’t I…” Fran begins. “Help spruce you up?”
“Spruce?”
“We’ll do you a make-over. Like on the telly.” Fran, watching Liz stare at herself, knows that she has won already. “I don’t suppose you’ve thrown out your old clothes yet?”
“Oh,” says Liz. “No. Not yet.”
“So!” cries Fran. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get up them stairs! Let’s get you dolled up!”
These were the dramas we had that morning of the sit-in. Penny arrived from the police station to announce that her lover and his mother were being held in cells. Pending an enquiry. Elsie had gone doolally. Penny sat with me and smoked my cigarettes for the rest of the day.
“Have you ever ended up involved where you didn’t want to be?” she asked me. I shouldn’t have, but I laughed.
“All the bloody time.”
“I want out,” she said.
And I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I’d already booked my ticket. The next day, Sunday, I was bussing it up to Edinburgh. It was cheaper that way, but it took all day. I was going to see Andy. And going to see my son.
The next thing, into the busy café came Fran with Liz. Everyone stopped to stare. They all knew about Liz from the papers. They knew she had survived. They also knew she was a feller.
She came dolled up to the nines. It was the Queen of Sheba riding in, swanning right past the staring faces and plonking herself at our table.
She wore a fine white fur coat over a scarlet dress. Her look was imperious and she jangled with all those jewels. Her hair was up, quite different to how she was before. A more sophisticated look. It was as if she had been away all this time simply planning a new look.
Penny marvelled at her. “Fancy dressing up like this just for a protest!” She grinned, hugging her mother.
“I can’t let my public down,” she said.
Big Sue stood up and started the whole café on a standing ovation. They cheered and clapped Liz until she took her bows.
“This is ridiculous,” she hissed, but she loved it. “Where’s Jane?” she asked Fran.
Then Fran produced the card that Jane had sent, announcing she was marrying an Arab.
“She’d have married anything if they’d asked her!” Nesta cackled, but no one joined in.
“Good luck to her, I say,” said Fran.
Liz opened her handbag and slipped a bottle of Jameson’s around the table, to top up everyone’s tea.
“Get some music on!” she told the little waiter. “Make it more like a party!”
THIRTY
Ferryhill
Seventeen Years Later
She doesn’t think of it as her new house any more. You could even say she is used to it.
As in the days when she woke up to go cleaning down Fujitsu, Fran is up with the lark. She likes to make coffee and watch the light come over the flat fields. Depending on the season, they get touched with different colours. Now it is spring. Field after field turns pink with the dawn. Leaning against the doorframe, Fran cradles her mug. Usually she fusses about in her dressing gown, the radio on. A local station, on which they play nostalgic pop songs of the seventies and eighties, for th
e young at heart. Fran will watch the morning start to happen and feel all shivery and full of memories.
This morning she keeps the radio off. She has a guest in this house of hers and compared with her, he is a late sleeper.
Does Fran get many guests here? Her grown children come to stay, all four of them; the three girls are married, little Jeff comes home from the army. He stomps about the hollow wooden floors in his army boots. The girls fill the place with grandchildren. At Christmas the old farmhouse heaves with life again. But there is lots of space. Fields all around. The children and grandchildren come for the horses, she knows. That’ll be the Gypsy blood in their veins, she thinks and smiles.
She is surrounded by her family at Christmas and on other special occasions. They all live in funny places, Chester-le-Street, Penrith, Bath. They split apart and come dutifully back when they can. There is still a distance there. With her oldest girls especially, Fran can’t really talk. When she tries to, on the phone, she finds that she is passing on the other children’s news. She is a one-woman grapevine. To each other and to her face they accuse her of making trouble. Of telling tales. Of making nasty comparisons of what one sister is getting, of what they can afford, who is having a posh holiday or a new car, and who isn’t. This isn’t Fran’s intention. She simply wants to keep them up to date with each other. They need to know, she thinks, what’s happening in the family. She can’t stand it when families break apart. She’d hate that to happen to hers.
The most loyal is the youngest, little Jeff. Although he’s in the army, his room is still there at home for him. How much like his father he is.
Frank has been dead ten years. Fran thinks they would be a closer-knit family if he was still there. Last Boxing Day there had been a row. Her eldest daughter Kerry told Fran she’d killed her dad by nagging him about the booze. If she’d let him be, his heart wouldn’t have given up.
This was over dinner. The whole clan at the large dining-room table. Fran had gone to such effort: napkin rings, candelabra, everything from her mother’s posh cupboards. She was shocked, ladling out the bread sauce, stooped over, with her mouth hanging agape. At last she said, “You know nothing about it.” She stared at Kerry. Kerry had no idea how Frank had secretly learned to hate and resent his eldest daughter. He thought she was a young tart. Fran had struggled to keep Kerry ignorant of her father’s beliefs. Kerry has grown up angry without knowing why. Last Christmas she turned the full force of it on her mother.
That scene ended with little Jeff getting up, walking around the festive table and slapping his eldest sister full in the face. Anything in defence of his mam. Kelly’s husband made a half-hearted attempt to get up and Jeff warned him, with a glance, not to even try. Kerry sat and quietly sobbed into a freshly pressed napkin.
“Your dad killed himself,” said Fran quietly, and then she went on serving up dinner.
That was last Christmas. Fran wonders what this year’s will be like. If, after that, her family will even want to get back together.
She sighs and goes to open the fridge. She’ll get some bacon going. An anticipatory growl from her stomach. She hopes the smell of bacon will wake her newest guest and bring him downstairs to keep her company.
Company. Fran is sixty-eight this year. She feels much the same as ever, and she craves company. Even Elsie is welcome to stay the odd weekend. She comes to drink Fran’s gin.
This year’s Christmas will be different. Even if her ramshackle family do decide to turn up and disgrace themselves by fighting, there will be other elements present. Fran has taken it upon herself to invite those from Phoenix Court who have moved away in recent years. It will be a reunion, of sorts, of a looser, even more dysfunctional family. Penny, Nesta, Elsie, Craig, Liz, Mark, Jane...whoever else she can contact. There’s plenty of room in Fran’s house. Before she popped her clogs, Fran’s mother saw to it that there was a lot of room. The woman was obsessed with building extensions.
For once Fran is grateful to the memory of her mother. That ostentation and carelessness with money has enabled Fran to gather her invented family around her. The old white farmhouse with its pear and apple trees and stables, its sanded wooden floors, its furnishings and rugs and ornaments picked up from all around the world, is the place Fran can gather her gang.
The bacon in the frying pan hisses and spatters as she turns it over with her wooden spoon. It sounds as if it quarrels with itself.
Fran is now at the age her mother was when she died. She sees no gloomy symmetry in this. Fran thinks that you make life up as you go along. If you’re not careful you can wish yourself to an early grave. It’s all in the mind. Mind over circumstances.
And her brothers? They are somewhere exploring the wider world. Adventurously, having lives bigger — they say — than Fran could imagine.
Lives as big as Jane’s, marrying her Tunisian man and living six months out of every twelve in a desert. That has lasted these good few years. She swears blind she’s not in a harem, but Fran won’t let the joke drop. Jane is happy.
Lives as big as Liz, who rediscovered glamour. And also her abandoned lover, Cliff. Who moved to London.
Lives as big as Elsie, who escaped a murder charge and lives, the one remaining neighbour, in Phoenix Court.
Lives as big as Penny, whose father once said she’d go to the moon. Who grew up with special powers and didn’t know what to do with them. Penny is still deciding what to do with her life. She has three bairns, the first two with Craig. She’s in Darlington.
In her cooking reverie Fran is interrupted by her new house
guest.
He pads into the kitchen and startles her. She spins around and, when she sees him, sighs, smiling with relief. He gives one of his swift and unsure grins in reply and sits down at the small table, on the most rickety of the stools.
“Good morning,” Fran says. “I knew this would wake you.”
The kitchen smells delicious. His nose twitches.
He’s in bright-red pyjamas. He must have brought them with him. They don’t look cheap. His eyes are still half-closed. He looks rumpled and sweet. His hair — his fur, she corrects herself — lies every which way. He reaches for the coffee pot and smacks his lips at the gurgle and slosh of thick black coffee into his waiting mug.
“My father says when I was tiny I used to drink black coffee out of my baby bottle,” he says.
My, Fran thinks once more, what a deep, sexy little voice this young man has.
She comes to sit opposite and proffers her own mug. The spots on his hand on the coffee-jug handle, the spots all over his face, down his neck, on the V of tightly muscled chest peaking through his pyjamas…these spots are the colour of black coffee. Irregular rings, like dark-brown lipstick marks, all over his body.
Why, Fran! she thinks mischievously. You’re getting all sexy and silly over this boy child less than a third of your age. This visiting child who has entrusted himself to your care.
“Today,” Jep says, “will you take me to Newton Aycliffe?”
He says the name as if it is something fantastic. Something magical out of a book, like the Emerald Palace in the Land of Oz. Perhaps to him, that’s what it is. Names of unseen things can take on, through repeated tellings, a certain charm.
“Of course,” Fran tells him, finding that she is staring at his sharp, trimmed nails. His sleek, soot-rimmed ears.
“I feel like I know the place, you know. It’s the place I’m really from. We moved around so much when they were bringing me up...we never stuck any town for very long. But I always heard about Aycliffe. About Phoenix Court. I can’t wait to see it for myself.”
“You might be disappointed.” Suddenly, fiercely, Fran doesn’t want this boy to be disappointed.
“My dad used to say a place is what you make it,” he says, with a self-deprecating shrug.
“Which dad?”
“Both of them.”
Fran chuckles. “Well…”
Jep says, “Whatever it�
��s like in Phoenix Court, I’ll love seeing the place I come from.”
Fran walks to her wide picture window. From here, in this intense north-country light, you can almost see Aycliffe’s brown and silver buildings.
“Bonny lad...it’ll be a pleasure taking you to visit. I’ve not been back for years, you know.”
Jep gives her one of his uncertain smiles.
Then Fran starts slicing bread for her toaster. She puts the kettle on, then the radio, for an old-fashioned song. She’s enjoying this time with her new house guest. Breakfast with the bright, leopard-printed boy.
Me, having left my baby in the care of strangers, making my second trip to Twenty One, ‘Scotland’s Only Sauna Exclusively For Gay Gentlemen’. Making the best of my afternoon’s freedom, my baby with the posh couple upstairs, who have befriended us.
The eager, sopping quadrille performed by:
1) The muscled, beautiful boy who looks like he might be a sailor from the tall ships, which have been racing for the tourists down in the Leith docks. It is tall-ships weekend and the town is full of pantomime sailors in twos and threes in their pristine outfits.
2) The footballer. Pretty, too. He looked like a footballer. He had a footballer’s body. A footballer’s nonchalance in the sauna, slipping his towel open as if just to air his bollocks. I told him, as we sat on the bench, about my last visit here. “Ay, it’s a funny place,” he said. “Look at him over there, wearing shorts. Is he playing hard to get?” In here it smells of ginger biscuits and sperm.
3) The stick-thin boy, falling asleep in the jacuzzi, hugging his knees, blushing in the steam as the others sitting ring-a-ring-a-rosy tossed each other off.
4) Me.
The dark room, by tea-time, was full of standing bodies you could just about see. It was like that indefinable moment on a dance floor when someone has cleverly led the way and by the time the next fab song has come along, it’s swarming with bodies. The ice is broken.
