[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  He turned to play on the one-armed bandit Fran’s family kept in the parlour, at the end of the white leather bar. These were both from the dump. Fran’s family had made a little money in ‘antiques’. When he was plastered Frank would rail that what that really meant was that they were hawkers. They toured the town dumps and flogged whatever they could find and clean up. Fran’s mother could have her bandit, her bar, her archways and extensions all installed because she owned her own house and didn’t need to ask the council for permission. She owned her own house because once, when her two sons were hauling a battered wardrobe across the council tip in Ferryhill, they pushed it too hard down a slope, into a rusted truck. The wardrobe smashed and a hundred thousand concealed pound notes flew into the grey wind. The brothers ran about clutching them all from the air. They hushed it up and bought their own home. Frank had got to hear about it and sneered. ‘She’s as common as shit, like the rest of us, your mother,’ he would tell Fran. ‘She got her money off a tip.’

  Fran kept quiet. There was no point bringing class into it. Her mother still despised Frank. Right at the start she had said, ‘He’s a little ginger bloke! How can you go knocking about with a little ginger bloke?’ Fran’s two brothers were strapping lads. They kept fit hauling rubbish off tips and working with horses. They laughed at Frank too.

  ‘Taking you to live in a council house!’ her mother spat, into a dry Martini. ‘And your family keeps horses!’

  They never let him forget the horses. On their two most gleaming mounts Fran’s two strapping brothers would pass by the council house. Just to piss Frank off. And it worked. It always reminded him that he was a mere upholsterer, stuffing settees for other people’s fat arses, working in a converted garage, sharing his job with an apprentice.

  ‘But they’re not your real aristocracy, your lot,’ Frank would rail. ‘They aren’t proper horsy people.’

  Fran said nothing. It was true. Her mother and her brothers simply liked horses and knew how to make money from them on the broad swathes of countryside all round Aycliffe and Ferryhill.

  Now in her forties, Fran was becoming fleshy and thickset.

  I’m looking like a farmer’s wife, she thought. She wore hard-wearing clothes picked up in charity shops. She would scrub tweedy skirts in the tub until her hands were red raw. Her hair was cut neatly and scraped back off her face for the day’s work.

  Frank was slipping into a life of slipshod workmanship and frothy canned beer. Fran saw desolate years opening up. As a result she became more brutally functional, more busy. Her lack of reproach was the greatest reproach of all. This was the heaviest weight upon Frank.

  But look at him, she thought. Dousing the kids like that. He really is a little ginger bloke, with his paunch riding over his jeans like a water-filled balloon. His freckled body with wisps of red hair was wobbling as he hopped around the garden. He was red with the exertion, except for the dead-white parts of his face. They were hardened into premature old age, probably by his drinking. She hoped it was only by his drinking.

  Last Christmas Eve he had terrified them all and killed the first batch of gerbils. She got a solicitor to write to Frank — she had a letter delivered to her own door! — threatening him. Her brothers had offered to do him over. But Fran wanted to deal with him in her own way. She got the solicitor to say he would have to leave the house. He begged to be taken back.

  In among the work, the ongoing work, the shouting down the street after kids, the hands-and-knees work at the factory, Fran had taken up drinking as well. She would match him can for can. She decided she’d share the bleary world view he imposed on the rest of them. He’d get only half as much beer and she would at least be sharing the madness. It seemed easier somehow.

  ‘Honestly, Fran, you’re a madwoman. How did your mother produce you?’

  ‘Like a horse,’ she would say. ‘Squeezed me out, licked me and sent me out into the world. I’m an old grey mare.’

  He laughed. ‘Am I a stallion?’

  ‘No, but you’re My Little Pony.’

  And his face would fall. Unlike Fran, Frank had some difficulty accepting his lot in life. But he never had the energy to seek another, especially not by hawking round the tips.

  A whiplash of water went over the creosoted fence. Their youngest, Jeff, was only eighteen months, but he had mastered the art of clambering that fence. He was a tiny duplicate of his father. The incoherent bullying was endearing in a child. He was growling as his father tried to worry him from his perch with the hose. Jeff wasn’t having any of it. Without a backward glance he cocked one sausage-meat leg over the top. Frank soaked an old woman on the path at the other side. She was trundling along with her shopping trolley and hardly seemed to notice the wet in her heavy coat.

  ‘Frank!’ Fran yelled when she saw the old woman take the corner, very slowly, dripping miserably. The woman shook her head at Fran, not wanting to make trouble. She even gave her a slightly pitying smile.

  Everyone knows my business, thought Fran. Everyone feels sorry for me with the four kids and Frank. But everyone feels sorrier for Jane, with one kid and no husband. Both facts riled her and she clenched her teeth, cradling her can.

  To think, she wondered, I nearly had my own horse once. Fran watched Jane step off the bus. It’s funny, but I’m sure she’s waving at the driver, she thought. To Peter she said, ‘Your mam’s back.’

  Peter was studying the crazy reflections of his own face. They hopped like something bright on a computer. He looked up. ‘Does that mean I have to go home?’

  Fran doubted it. When asked in for tea, Jane would reply, ‘Go on then.’

  ‘I bet that woman never bothers buying tea bags,’ Frank would tell Fran. Fran never replied. Frank had no right complaining about what other people drank. Jane had no manners, though. She was immune to hinting. Once Fran had told her she was going up for an afternoon nap and Jane had sat waiting downstairs.

  Frank had noticed Jane walking from the main road to their gate. A smile of greeting played uncertainly on her face. He sloshed the water, aiming at her.

  ‘Watch out!’ Fran called, standing up. ‘He’s waving his hose pipe at you!’

  The younger woman passed through the gate and glanced at him.

  ‘Must be my lucky day. But why’s it turned green?’

  Fran said loudly, ‘Lack of use!’ They cackled, and Frank went back to fill the ever-emptying pool, gritting his teeth.

  ‘Careful, it’ll drop off,’ Jane said. Frank turned up the pressure. Peter ran to his mam. ‘Has he been any bother?’ she asked.

  Fran watched the boy grip his mother’s wrist. She’ll have him soft. She kept promising him a new dad. What was he going to grow up like? Fran shook her head. ‘He’s had a good play. Haven’t you, pet?’

  Dumbly Peter nodded. Back with his mam, he had switched his allegiance with that quick cunning of children. His eyes seemed to be asking Fran, Who are you anyway?

  ‘We brought the pool out for them,’ Fran explained, ‘because that bitch over there — that Kelly-Anne — said they couldn’t play on the grass by her window.’

  Jane tutted. She knew all about that-bitch-over-there. Kelly-Anne and her husband Gary lived right next door to Jane. He was Frank’s apprentice and he went parading around in army pants thinking he was great because he was a part-time upholsterer. They were both under twenty-one and had been kicked out of their flat on the next estate for causing rows with the neighbours. They seemed to be doing their best to be getting kicked out of here, too.

  ‘They look like weasels,’ Jane had said. ‘Both of them.’ Fran didn’t like saying anything nasty about people, she just nodded. She thought Jane was probably jealous of them really, a young couple who had stayed together.

  Even Fran had had enough of the young couple, though. The young husband would come running out of his kitchen to yell at the kids, telling them to fuck off home if they got too close to his window. They would wake the baby up, he yelled at the street
. But the baby screamed all the time anyway.

  Fran thought Frank should deal with Gary, since he was his apprentice. One Saturday afternoon a befuddled Frank had been shoved outside to get on with it. Fran assumed they would have a rapport and would sort out the friction like gentlemen. But Gary started on Frank. He screamed at the man who was supposed to be training him. Frank kept an eye on the less-than-safe grip Gary had on his pit-bull terrier. Jane said, ‘Remember how he yelled at Frank?’

  ‘There’s something creepy about that Gary,’ Fran said. ‘Frank reckons that he still won’t talk to him at work. Not since that row in the street.’

  Jane went, ‘Oh,’ thinking that she wouldn’t find much to say to Frank either, if they worked together, God forbid.

  ‘He was like an animal.’ Jane sniffed and poured more tea. She enjoyed watching a good barney, though. That time she sent Peter indoors and stood by her gate, waiting for Frank and Gary to go for it.

  ‘Don’t threaten me,’ snarled the young husband. ‘I used to box for the army, y’naa.’

  Frank was bleary and shirtless. ‘Yeah? And I sleep with an axe under the bed.’

  Only recently another fight had begun when Fran was phoning her mam from the payphone outside Kelly-Anne and Gary’s house. She was just describing a fellow cleaner at Fujitsu as a ‘silly cow’ and next thing she knew, Kelly-Anne — who’d been listening out of her kitchen window — came running out of her yard, squawking her head off. Fran was forced to hang up. The young wife had yards and yards of bright-red hair she couldn’t do a thing with. (‘She needs upholstering,’ Jane had remarked.) From where they were having a tea break outside the converted garage, Frank and Gary came running to see their wives at it hammer and tongs. Frank was hopeless but Gary leaped right into the fray.

  Kelly-Anne’s hair flamed silently as the young husband bellowed, ‘Are you calling my fucking wife an ignorant cow?’ His hands scratched privates in his army fatigues.

  It was like most rows in Phoenix Court. Everyone shouting threats and abuse and then running off home to call the police on to everyone else.

  ‘Oh, so she’s at it again,’ said Jane mildly, staring at the pool. ‘She’s a silly girl.’ Fran sighed. ‘If she’d thought on, she could have had loads of help with the kiddie from some of the women round here. Hand-me-downs and that.’ Most of Fran’s had been handed down to Jane’s Peter, though, and Jane never gave anything away.

  ‘She doesn’t think, though.’

  ‘It’s because he’s not working full time. They get cooped up in that house. And he’s got an army temperament.’ Fran gestured to the house next door to the young couple’s. ‘Sheila and Simon are asking for a transfer. They can’t stand it. And they’ve lived here almost as long as I have. They moved in the week crippled Mrs Wright in the bungalow got busted for vice. It isn’t right they should have to move because of the likes of Gary and Kelly-Anne.’

  ‘Sheila and Simon will never get a transfer,’ Jane said. ‘Their house stinks inside. Cat piss and all-sorts. The council do an inspection, you know. You have to be clean. They look into everything.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say it like that.’

  ‘But it does stink. Remember that party they had for Ian.’ Fran’s heart had gone out to Sheila at that party. Sheila and Simon had less than anyone on the Court and the buffet hadn’t been up to much. She’d made up little sandwiches cut into diamond shapes, bread and marge sprinkled with pink and yellow hundreds and thousands. All the kids loved them and they vanished. Peter cried because Jane pulled him aside and said he wasn’t to put anything off Sheila’s table into his mouth.

  Fran said, ‘Sheila reckons their little Ian is too scared to even play in the yard in case the army man sets his pit-bull on to him.’

  ‘The army man!’ Jane laughed. ‘He could only have been in for a year. What’s that — basic training? But he wears those green pants like they were going out of fashion. I’ve got some news about the army man.’

  She bustled Fran into her own kitchen. Fran knew what sort of news Jane liked. She eased the kitchen door shut behind them so the kids wouldn’t hear. Jane sat herself at the pine table and Fran asked, ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Go on then,’ she said complacently, as if she wasn’t really brimming to tell her tale at all.

  ‘Did you hear that racket last night?’

  Fran blew on her tea. Jane had already gulped half a mugful down. ‘I heard something in the street,’ Fran cautiously replied. She had been craning her neck out of the bathroom window at half past one. ‘You know our house. Can’t see a thing from here.’

  ‘Well, I was ideally placed,’ Jane said.

  You would be, thought Fran. ‘Does that woman ever sleep?’ Frank asked once. Coming back from the pub of a night he would look up and she would be staring out of her window at him. ‘Hasn’t she got any furniture to sit on?’

  ‘I think I heard that rough Helen over the road, yelling at someone at the top of her lungs.’

  ‘She was,’ Jane said eagerly. She had witnessed the whole thing. ‘She was out at the bottom of her yard holding a knife.’

  ‘I thought she’d seen a burglar.’

  ‘So did I, at first.’ Jane was withholding some delectable trump card. Fran could tell. She braced herself. ‘So I listened —’

  ‘All I heard was Helen shouting that she had seen him, whoever he was, hiding in the bushes —’

  ‘Bushes?’ Jane frowned. ‘I thought she said “bus shelter”.’

  ‘Maybe she did. The sound was distorted round our way. But she said she had seen him every night for a week.’

  Jane scalded her throat, drinking too fast and laughing. ‘For a week!’ she exploded and had to put her mug down. Fran became impatient. ‘Was it a burglar, then?’

  Jane composed herself. She struggled to meet the momentousness she felt the telling of the tale deserved. ‘Did you hear Helen shouting, “I can see you hiding there, you effing wanker! And I’m not leaving the bottom of my yard till you piss off home — else I’m calling the coppers!”’

  Fran nodded. ‘Yes, I heard all that.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got reason to believe that poor old Helen really meant what she said —’

  ‘What?’ Fran was lost.

  ‘So he knew he’d been caught, because Helen shouted, “Don’t pretend it’s not you, ’cause I can see you, with the dog,” and then he must have sloped off because Helen went back in. But then, from my window on the other side, guess who I see sneaking into his house at quarter to two in the morning?’ She sipped her tea. ‘It was the army man himself, Gary!’

  ‘He was the burglar?’ Fran gasped.

  Jane banged her palms on the imitation pine. ‘No — not a burglar! A wanker! Helen really meant a wanker! She caught him with his pants down in the bus shelter by my house, relieving himself… sexually, I mean. The dirty bugger.’ Fran’s forehead knitted up. The lower half of her face unravelled completely. ‘No!’

  ‘I talked to rough Helen this morning. I went past there especially, going to the shop with Peter. I had to ask.’

  ‘And you’re sure it was him with the dog?’ it had to be, that time of night, didn’t it?’

  ‘God!’ Fran stirred her tea. i’ll use the other bus stop from now on.’

  ‘When I got off the bus just now I had a quick look at it.’ Jane shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I was looking for.’

  ‘He can’t be very… well… happy at home, can he?’ said Fran thoughtfully. ‘And all the kids round here! He must be a right queer bugger. You hear about it, don’t you? But when it’s right on your own bus stop…’

  ‘I want to know what he was doing with his dog.’

  They burst out laughing, although Fran didn’t think it was a very nice thing to be laughing at. Frank came in to dry his hands on the tea towel. He took a can from the fridge and Fran groaned. Starting already at a quarter to three. She saw a bad night coming.

  ‘Guess what,’ she said. ‘Jane’s
been telling me about that Gary, over there. Your workmate.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about him. He can’t stuff a cushion to save his life.’ But these days Frank seemed edgy whenever Gary was mentioned.

  Jane was mouthing at Fran: Don’t tell him about it. She would be embarrassed having to explain the wanking stuff to Frank.

  Fran smirked. ‘Someone saw him in the bus shelter last night, caught with his pants down and playing with himself.’

  ‘Oh?’ He opened his can over the sink, catching his finger in the ring-pull. Beer gurgled over the draining board and he struggled to stop it. Cursing, Fran got up to help and he watched her try to save his drink. Frank rubbed the bruised knuckle on his sun-reddened belly. All the fuss diverted him from thinking about Gary.

  Changing the subject, Jane said, ‘I got chatted up by that nice bus driver.’

  Mopping up, Fran turned. ‘The one with the jet-black hair?’

  ‘Mm. He kept grinning and asking about my day.’

  ‘He’s lovely.’

  ‘I know.’

  Minutes earlier Jane had been welling up with the excitement. Now it came to describing her experience she had run out of things to say. She put this down to Frank’s presence, nursing his wounded can of beer.

  Both he and Fran were looking at her expectantly. She listened to the shrill cries from the paddling pool. There wasn’t much else to say. ‘A really lovely bloke.’ The juicy details suddenly eluded her, like the water running off Peter’s bare limbs as he staggered into the darkened kitchen.

  ‘Mam, I need a wee.’

  ‘At this rate,’ Fran said, ‘you’ll soon get him a new dad. Getting chatted up on buses.’

  Jane picked up the clinging child. ‘I’d better stick to the bus stops. There’s more action there.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Frank gurgled and, with one of his flashes of coherence, said, ‘What you miss on the buses you pick up on the stops.’