[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  Table of Contents

  Phoenix Court Series

  Does It Show? - Paul Magrs

  Introduction

  Does It Show?

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  Nude On The Moon

  Bargains For Charlotte

  About the Author

  More by Paul Magrs

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  I began writing this novel in the summer of 1991, when I was preparing to return to college to start my MA in Creative Writing. It’s quite common for people to do those courses now, but not so much back then. I could hardly believe that such a thing was allowed: that I could get a bursary to spend a further year at university, writing my novel.

  That summer I was back at our family’s house in Newton Ayclilfe, on an estate where everything was built of black brick and which I call, in these early books, Phoenix Court. I hadn’t been back for a while and that summer it was good to absorb the sights and sounds of the place again.

  There was hardly any room in that house. Certainly not to work and write. I ended up more often than not perching on the back doorstep, reading library books and watching the world go by.

  Our house in Guthrum Place was by the main road connecting all the estates. You could watch the minibuses running up down, doing circuits of all the streets and ferrying everyone to the town precinct and back. The precinct looked like Logan’s Run or Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but with pensioners in anoraks, pulling shopping trolleys.

  I watched all our neighbours and the way they went from one house to the another. The women would drink tea in each other's kitchens and when the sun came out they would drag their chairs into their front yards and sit smoking and gossiping, their voices drifting over the dark, creosoted fences.

  All the kids in our street were little that year. My sister was four and playing out with a whole gang of small kids who would go haring around, holding hands, in the wind and rain and some gloriously hot days.

  There was so much going on to keep up with. There was the mother and daughter who were dragged out of their house by the police in the middle of the night, and everyone hurried outside to watch. It was well-known they were running a kind of brothel in their two-up two-down. Then there was talk of someone being held hostage. And there was the gang of rough lads across the main road in the Yellow Houses, who set their pit bull terrier onto the old man who lived next door to them. It was supposed to be a joke, but he fell down dead of shock on the hottest day in August. Everyone was out watching this happen: I remember the dog barking and the appalled silence.

  I kept taking notes all summer. I kept writing down the dialogue. I was keeping tabs on everything, just as I always had, since I was a kid.

  Gradually I formed a story to do with a woman who once lived in these streets in the Seventies and who was moving back in the Nineties, having reinvented herself out of all recognition. She had a daughter who was starting at the local Comprehensive School. Both women find themselves drawn into new friendships and relationships and the book would be all about huge human emotions and life-changing moments being played out on a seemingly tiny scale. It was going to be a Magical Realist epic on a council estate in the North-East. A phantasmagorical opera set in the midst of concrete brutalism.

  Lancaster University was similarly concretized and minimalist. Soon I was back among its dreaming spires of poured cement. I had intended to use my MA year writing a gay bildungsroman, telling the tale of my childhood, my parents’ divorce, my artistic and sexual awakening and all that jazz. Then the course began and I found I was writing about Phoenix Court.

  The workshop group was composed mostly of well-to-do lady poets in their forties, returning to education. Some were friendly, some were not. It was all very middle class and polite, with the snarkiness dialed down for the few hours we spent in class each week, then unleashed full force in the vegetarian cafes and coffee bars where we wasted our afternoons. Again, I was agog - watching how all these characters behaved.

  For my first submission to this class in the autumn of 1991 I found myself handing in a chapter about Fran and Frank on a hot summer’s day in their yard. I loved the dialogue, that’s why I chose to show it to the workshop, rather than writing a chapter of that Queer Autobiography I’d been planning. It made me laugh. It made some of them laugh, too. Others, though, were mystified.

  One of the poets said, ‘Forgive me, but can we really call this literary fiction? And isn’t literary fiction what this course is about? I don’t know what you would call this, actually. These are hardly the kind of characters one would expect to find in a literary novel.’

  Someone shot back with an example or two of working class characters in literary fiction. They mentioned Faulkner. ‘But that’s in America. That’s different.’

  “And besides… this is much too like a… soap opera, isn’t it? People talking like this in the North?”

  “It’s just fiction,” I kept saying, all that term. “I don’t believe in genres. There are two types of fiction. There’s the good type, that you want to read and there’s the bad type, that you don’t want to read. There are books that are crap and sound bogus. And there are books that ring true. Books that are about something. Books where the voices are alive.”

  Maybe I didn’t put it as concisely as that at the time. But that’s the position I was trying to articulate, all that year, as I wrote my way into the story. Mostly I just kept quiet and smiled at their comments and wrote my weekly chapter.

  As later submissions went in and were photocopied and disseminated I gave them episodes of gay sex and tales of Goths and taxidermists and pensioners finding love late in life. I delighted in mixing and stirring up my characters and having their stories overlap as the weeks went by. I loved revealing the secret of the novel’s ‘star’, Liz. The class was shocked by the big reveal. They were disgusted. Some of them refused to believe it.

  I tossed in surreal moments of Magical Realism. I let my narrator wander between points of view, moving stealthily from house to house, all over Phoenix Court.

  “It’s a kind of Magical Realist Queer Working Class Heterotopia,” I told them. “Not a Soap Opera.”

  For me, it was about how people can live on a grand scale, even in reduced circumstances. A woman can be a queen in her own council house and in the midst of her own community. And so can a man.

  Anyone in the books I write is capable of finding love, and sometimes they find that the things they’re really looking for are quite surprising.

  I was working all this out when I was twenty-two and doing my MA. And twenty-four years later I look back and see that I was learning to be my own kind of novelist. I was discovering that dark comedy was my thing. Also, that ensemble casts were my thing. I was finding that I love lots of dialogue and for description to be pared back, and I love flicking swiftly from scene to scene, moving as swiftly as TV movies do. I enjoy swimming from mind to mind and getting my readers to eavesdrop on fascinating characters as we witness them at their very best and their very worst moments.

  My basic thesis was - and still is - that everyone has a fascinating life, whoever they are. It just depends on how much of it we are allowed to see, and how much they are willing to let it show.

  Paul Magrs Manchester April 2017

  PROLOG
UE

  Penny had always been a bright kid. She was born on the ninth anniversary of the first moon landing. Her father wrenched her from the incubator and ran to the steps outside, by the car park. It was a warm summer’s night.

  He held her out to the moon, swaddling clothes draped down to his elbows. ‘You’re going there, Penny,’ he said, face shining. ‘You’re going to the moon, you are.’

  And as the nurses came bustling through Reception to retrieve her, Penny glanced up at the moon, then witheringly at her father.

  ‘Fat chance,’ she said. ‘I know where I’m going.’

  ONE

  You’re too good to be true, she thought.

  He winked at her in the rear-view mirror again.

  Jane smiled back. Oh, Christ! It can’t be happening to me. Not on a bus. Not on a Road Ranger.

  I think I’ve been reading too many of those books, she thought, straightening her skirt. Those £4.99 romances with the gold foil titles. They were to blame for this. All that passion in the past.

  She could read a whole book in a night. Jane read fast. Now that Peter had his regular seven-o’clock bedtime, she could put her feet up with a cup of tea after Coronation Street and read straight through to the early hours. She couldn’t sleep. She was becoming a romantic.

  Into the slightest, shiftiest smile from a bus driver’s mirror she could read an entire, torrid romance. It was a good job she’d finished with Jackie Collins. Because the sexy bits in books like those got her going.

  Not, she grimaced, that there was anywhere for her to go.

  Reading the sexy bits nowadays was like putting warm water into an old vase. Swirl it around to get the bits of dried mould out. It’s still an old vase. And she squirmed at the memory of her husband. He revolted her in retrospect. Words on the page would fade back to being just that: a routine set of instructions, a black and white description of what someone else once got up to.

  Those moments at night took her to the bedroom window to watch all the houses. The squat cubes, mustard under the sulphur lights; a cool silence with the occasional insomniac car passing by making the sound of ripping silk. Jane watched and protected the estate from fire, burglary, disaster. Until dawn came, touching the upturned faces of satellite dishes. If she kept still, the morning calm would draw the warmth out of her. Until last night’s romance drained out of her memory.

  ‘Had a nice day?’

  The bus driver’s half-reflection was looking at her. She took him in. Part of a head of soft dark hair. Smiling as if he really wanted to be talking to her. She was the only passenger. His question sounded too familiar for public transport. Jane was more used to the mute conversations held with her own hollowed-out face in the window.

  At first she was content to let the question sink in, then stirred herself to answer. Over the sewing machine rattle of the engine she said, ‘Not really. I went to the car-boot sale over at the Equestrian Centre. Six cars and a couple of wallpapering tables. Not many bargains.’

  He nodded and grinned. She wondered if he thought she sounded cynical. Surely she never came across as hard like some of the women round here? He must get them all coming on his bus, sitting in their ski pants and anoraks.

  Jane concentrated on the real him, the back towards her, steering the vehicle. Did it cost him any effort, guiding this snub-nosed minibus through the estates? She didn’t think so. He seemed ever so relaxed. They should keep the older drivers, the sour old men with their Woodbines and Brylcreem, for these endless roundabout runs. Surely her young driver, arm lolling easily out of his window, felt too confined here? Wouldn’t he prefer the more taxing stretches? Up the scalding motorways in an Express Coach, to Newcastle or Middlesbrough on a limited stop.

  ‘Are you working all day?’

  She thought she better ask him one back, to show interest and keep the conversation running smoothly through the plotted terraces and crescents.

  ‘I finish at half past two.’ He reached to rub the back of his neck. ‘Then I’m done for the day. After that I’ll be out sitting in the sun.’

  ‘Lovely. It’s a lovely day.’

  He could get out of that uniform. It must be stuffy on a day like this, all that nylon. A day when the colours were vivid: the houses orange, the newly planted trees a squeaky-clean green.

  Driving must pay well, she thought, and he’d have a large garden at the posh end of town, sloping down to the building site beyond his fence. He’d be lying on a blanket on a freshly laid lawn. He’d lock that uniform away as though it was a snarling beast, to be held at bay till Monday. And his body would be lean and tanned, bristling with the dark, oily hair he was scratching now at the back of his neck. Lying senseless, sun-soaked in white shorts, no longer at the service of the public.

  He was too good to be true. Friendly to all and sundry. There was a meaty, solid look about him. The reddish tan set off a white grin he would flash at anyone. But Jane was sure he never smiled at the other women the way he smiled at her.

  This morning she had seen him leave his post to run after some woman who’d left her shopping on his back seat. He left the bus unattended to catch up with her. Climbing back aboard, he had caught Jane’s glance. He smiled as if they both knew a secret. Her secret had been that she was watching his too-tight transport-issue trousers.

  She wanted to kick the double seat in front in frustration. Even then he’d only look at her with a baffled smile.

  She wanted to tell him to keep driving, to go right past her home stop. Take her miles and miles round the winding estates, no matter how mundane the journey, no matter how well routed. She wanted him to drive her to his garden, sit her on his lawn and ply her with soft drinks, wearing his white shorts.

  ‘You’ll think I’m mad,’ she said. ‘Because I’ve been on your bus four times today.’

  She watched his reflection. ‘It’s the only way to travel in a town like this, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘And a day like today, well, it’s too hot to walk.’

  He was right. It was an Indian summer.

  A breeze whistled under the hydraulic doors, cooling her. Her damp palms were dirtying the paper bag around her newest paperback.

  * * *

  Fran sat down on the kitchen doorstep. She gave Frank a wan smile.

  He was stripped to the waist in the back yard, teasing the kids in the paddling pool. They were screaming and floundering around under the slender ribbons of tap water from the hose pipe he trained on them. They were glad of an afternoon with their father in a playful mood. It was almost a shock to them to see him like this. Only yesterday he’d had one of his off days. He hadn’t gone to work in the converted garage over the road, he couldn’t face it; instead he sat in their darkened living room until bedtime. All day he had stared murderously at the kids’ gerbils. The kids had kept right out of his way.

  Jane’s little Peter was there too, clambering up the side of the plastic pool to fling himself back into the soap-frothed water. Fran was surprised he wasn’t missing his mam. She never thought Jane would leave him, even for an afternoon. Peter was growing up alone under her fierce protection and it wasn’t often she let him out of her sight. She’d be back from the car-bootie soon, though, and Fran just knew she wouldn’t take Peter straight home. As usual Fran would have to entertain the pair of them.

  She hated asking Jane if she would have another cup of tea, knowing Jane would pretend to think deeply about it and reply, ‘Go on then.’ As if she was doing Fran a favour! That riled Fran, but she would smile as the water drummed heavily in the kettle.

  Jane was off looking for the Real Ghostbusters toys for Peter’s Christmas. Fancy planning Christmas in September! Jane said she was almost ready for it; she could wait to get her turkey. Fran didn’t dare think about Christmas yet, aside from getting the cleaning job at Fujitsu, five till ten of an evening, for a bit extra. She needed it, with the four kids and Frank. Jane only had Peter to think about.

  She had so little else to consider, she had man
aged to learn everything there was to know about the Real Ghostbusters. She knew exactly what her son needed to complete his set. Today she was on the hunt for a plastic toilet that filled up with ectoplasm, but she wasn’t sure she would find one. Fran had no idea what her kids’ fads were. They seemed to change so much. The last she remembered was East 17 and Take That. Were they still trendy? Compared with Fran’s kids Peter was a slow, resolute child, at least when he was with Jane.

  ‘Dad!’ Kerry was Fran’s eldest, nearly ten and looking clumsy in her bathing costume. She submitted to this afternoon in the garden as a kind of ritual humiliation. But Fran could also see that Kerry was playing outside because she was pleased her dad was back to normal. ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out with that hose. Calm down, Dad!’

  Laughing, Frank turned up the force. The jet thrashed the water into foam. The younger kids straggled, waving their arms, to the buckling sides.

  ‘Frank!’ Fran warned from the doorstep. He glanced down, readjusted the nozzle and looked suitably chastened.

  At least he wasn’t drunk. Fran just wished he would put a shirt on. He must be feeling happier about the situation at work. Most blokes would be happy, she thought, being self- employed, working just across the road from home. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she’d asked more than once. ‘You’re your own boss.’ Yet he reckoned that self-employment wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He didn’t like the responsibility. At the moment he reckoned there was a terrible atmosphere between him and his apprentice, Gary. ‘I’m responsible for that little bastard and I really just want to deck him.’ Fran thought he took it too much to heart. She couldn’t imagine her husband being anybody’s boss, though. Somehow she never fancied going over the road to where he worked to check it out.

  She was seven years older than Frank. He was twenty-four when they married and hardly drank at all. Their wedding reception was held in Fran’s mother’s front parlour, where Frank was told he was bringing Fran down in the world. ‘But she loves me,’ he protested. Fran’s mother sneered. He was drinking Babycham at his own wedding and he had a whiny, womanish voice. He went on, ‘So there’s nothing you can do about it.’