[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  The careers consultant regarded her serenely, half his face shrouded beneath the lampshade hat. She wasn’t pretty enough to model, he thought, and went on. ‘I gave this talentless boy a block of wood. Out of desperation, you see? A perfectly ordinary block of wood and a chisel. And when I came back to him, he had made me the most wonderful antelope you have ever seen. Vocation, you see. He had found his at last. A beautiful creature… I think I still have it in my filing cabinet. It is one of the great successes of my teaching career. That and my portfolio, of course. These days, I believe that same boy is very high up in the town council.’

  He rose to his feet. ‘So, Miss Robinson, you have some serious thinking to do. Some serious thinking on practical matters. We shall talk again soon and, if you are still keen on typewriters, we can have a look into some secretarial courses together.’

  ‘Thanks for all your help,’ said Penny and left.

  Upstairs she stuffed her head in her locker. It was midmorning break. Someone in the common room was playing the Cure. She strolled over and asked the boy in dark-framed glasses standing by the speakers if she could put something on. She dug out Vince’s tape of Hunky Dory.

  ‘That’s really classic, that,’ said the boy who had been forced to remove his Cure album. He was talking to another boy in dark-framed glasses and a cardigan. ‘Changes’ stuttered into life over the speakers. ‘He influenced everyone; the Cure… yeah, everyone.’

  Penny liked to think she was bringing some style into their lives. ‘Bowie is God,’ she said.

  And they nodded respectfully, as they would for a recently deceased aunt whom they never really knew or understood. ‘My dad reckons this LP is a classic,’ he said.

  Penny already knew. She had lived already. Her shift key, the perennial tingling, whatever she liked to call it, had elevated her way above the trees and houses. This was, after all, the term following her great summer of experience.

  That summer in Durham she had had her romance with a boy called Rob. Rob was on probation for something that sounded like ‘feathery’.

  ‘Fucking chickens!’ Penny would crow.

  ‘I was robbing houses,’ Rob would mutter, abashed. ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Chicken fucker,’ she’d snicker. ‘You smell of stuffing.’ With him Penny had entered the late-night high life of the ill-lit medieval town centre and discovered that the very hippest of her peers spent their summer evenings on benches with bags of glue and bottles of Woodpecker.

  ‘Losers,’ she told Rob after their first night out. ‘How can glue sniffing solve anything? Ha ha ha!’ Rob didn’t get the joke. He clung grimly on to her, unsmiling all the way home. She was tottering about, having sniffed too hard that night, and eventually she threw up in a shrubbery.

  ‘There’s a technique to sniffing,’ he said, patting her back. ‘You have to respect the glue.’

  ‘It’s all over my jacket,’ she groaned. ‘Like spunk. Never again.’

  Rob’s advice about ‘respecting the glue’ confirmed for her his status as an arsehole it would be safe to chuck by September. ‘Respect the glue,’ she would mutter to herself. ‘Typical!’ Rob looked affronted. ‘That’s typical of your sort,’ she would accuse him. ‘I suppose you respect the government and magistrates, too.’ Rob scowled at her. He thought she didn’t know what it was like to be on probation.

  To all and sundry, all that summer, Penny would announce, ‘Rob’s really sweeping me off my feet.’

  It was a whirlwind. Experience everything, she was instructed by her innermost drives. At the peak of summer she found herself sucking, sniffing, chewing, drinking, laughing, frotting, coaxing, snorting, smoking, bleeding, gorging, sighing, retching, fucking, and starting at last to sort the sheep from the boys. And tingling always, shift key firmly depressed; shift lock, in fact.

  At the beginning of September, Penny kicked leaves down the road, all the way from the whirlwind, into autumn, and back to school.

  It was two garages knocked into one. The walls inside were soft with artificial light and clouds of sprayed colour. Cushions and bits of dismembered settees were strewn about, with acrylics, fabrics, zippers wound in waiting piles. Everywhere there was foam rubber. Jaundiced squares of sponge, fleshy slabs rounded at the corners. The room was a soft, comforting room. Here sofas were put back together. It was a surgery for the badly upholstered.

  Frank was slumped on a mass of Styrofoam, knocking the mouth of a can against his teeth. His cigarette smoke rose in a blue plume to the naked light bulb above him. He wasn’t meant to smoke in here. The materials were dodgy.

  Gary was wrestling with unwieldy cushions through his dinner hour. He was in mourning for his dog. He hadn’t told Frank anything about it, about finding his dog dead and surrounded by policemen at the side of the road first thing this morning. He had no idea how the dog had got out overnight. He worked continuously, stretching covers over, peeling them back, zipping them carefully up with pursed lips. His hands moved absorbedly over cheap fabric.

  They hadn’t spoken at all this morning. Frank had been lying around, stewed to the gills. Gary’s only comment had been to zip up zips with more than his usual vehemence.

  They hadn’t spoken properly since Fran’s argument and the threat about the axe. Frank would instruct Gary in his work — he was, after all, supposed to be teaching him — in as few words as possible. Gary would reply, ‘Yurp’ or ‘Got it’, and take his duties over.

  It was Frank who broke the fractious silence. ‘Does your wife go out a lot?’

  The question startled Gary. He dropped his latest cushion on to the pile and wiped his mouth on the arm of his camouflaged jacket.

  ‘She never goes out. We’ve got the kid. I don’t go out.’ He spat on the concrete and rubbed it away with a corner of his next cushion cover. ‘I walk the dog… of a night and that’s about it.’ For a moment there Gary had forgotten, and mentioning his dog almost made him break down. He strangled a sob in his throat. There was no way he’d let Frank see him upset. Ammo to the enemy.

  Frank remembered how difficult it was being newlyweds. He remembered spending a lot of time indoors, and then standing at the bottom of his garden, waiting for the taunting fly-overs Fran’s brothers made on horseback.

  ‘I think Fran’s going to start spending money. Going out more.’

  ‘Get her a new armchair.’

  ‘I did last time.’

  ‘Get her another one.’

  ‘There’s only me and her who sit on chairs.’

  ‘Get them recovered.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘I was just suggesting…’ Gary let it go. He remembered that they weren’t supposed to be speaking, having threatened to do each other in.

  ‘That bloody family of hers.’ Frank spat too, but it was thick with beer and clung to the can. ‘Them and their horses. Giving her ideas.’

  ‘You’ve given her all she needs.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘Yurp,’ Gary asserted, consolingly. He bent to start work again. He held up some material. ‘This is a new print, this. She’d like her three-piece recovered in this. I won’t say owt if you whip some.’

  ‘I don’t pinch stuff.’

  ‘I just said —’

  ‘And you don’t either. You’re unemployed, remember?’ Frank swapped cans and glared at his apprentice.

  ‘Yurp.’

  ‘Bloody horses! Giving ideas. Bloody cushions!’ Frank slid sideways in the Styrofoam. ‘I’d take her out, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘You’ve got everything you need?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to this now.’

  ‘It’ll be a laugh.’

  ‘You look lovely in that. We’ll get you cracked off with someone. No bother.’

  Fran laughed. ‘Thanks anyway.’ She peered into a dark shop window. Kerry had been right. ‘I’m walking round in an anorak I’ve had ten years and my hair’s all —’

  Liz was
dashing off to the bus stop, swinging her carrier bags. ‘Get a wig then!’ she cried.

  Fran ran after her. ‘Look! Look who’s driving the bus!’ The bus stopped and, pulling up for them outside the fish shop and the video shop round the back of the precinct, the bus driver grinned at them.

  ‘All aboard!’ he shouted.

  SIX

  Vince had a suit that his father had bought him when he was seventeen. They went shopping together in the Metro Centre in Gateshead when the sales were on. Thinking back, it was the last real thing they had done together. In the spring of that year his father realised that soon Vince would be leaving, that by the end of the year he would be gone. The father would be on his own in the little house by the playing fields. He held no illusions about Vince’s attachment to him. He knew that, given one sniff of freedom and the life beyond, Vince would be away like a shot. Father and son had only ever been held together by a kind of tacit, improvised trustfulness.

  His father wanted to buy his son a suit for the interviews he would be having at universities. He couldn’t be there himself, he couldn’t drive his son to all the different towns, but he wanted to do something. He didn’t think a boy that age should want his father there with him, anyway. One breakfast-time he tried to bring this up: how much support would Vince be needing to do this, this breaking away? And Vince looked up from his cornflakes mystified, as if he’d always assumed he’d be on his own. Worse, for his father, as if he’d assumed he was already on his own.

  There was a vigorous practicality in his father. He’d been through the army. Grown up in the fifties. He’d worked with men in garages. He’d known times of austerity and rebellion. He’d done it all on Teesside, where such things struck harder. So he could submerge his deeper upsets and resentments and concentrate on the proper things he could do for his son at this time. Arranging for a van, for example, to transport his few things to college in the autumn. Making sure he got his head down and revised hard enough to pass his exams in the first place. His father could see this process as some kind of endurance test and, that way, he could understand it. Vince had to run the distance. And that included smartening himself up for interviews.

  At seventeen Vince would have been happy to turn up looking a state but his father wanted to see him right. At seventeen he barely even thought about what he was wearing, slouching around the place in faded jeans and those bloody green trainers of his. He’d had them for years and he wore them in all weathers. His father was a dandy, sprucing himself up teddy-boy style for the big club every Friday night in his drainpipes, midnight-blue jacket and shoestring tie. He manicured his quiff in the mirror in the living room. Vince’s father knew what you had to do to pull the lasses and get on in the world. He stood and stared and sighed at Vince’s wilful negligence of his appearance.

  The day he drove him up to the Metro Centre, his father took a long appraising look at him while they had cappuccinos in a Grecian-style cafe. How much like his mother he was! Almost a man … well, he was a man, really. And there was that pale skin, the orange hair, the same mouth. Vince’s dad remembered the very day Vince had told him he didn’t want his father kissing him any more. It wasn’t long after his mam had walked out. Looking at Vince’s mouth now, across the table from him, his father could forget that the voice coming from it was broken. He could find himself wanting to kiss it. As your kids got bigger, your thoughts got funnier and more complicated. Sometimes you didn’t know where you were. And there was the kid, completely headstrong, set on what he wanted. It was always the parents that got left mixed up, wasn’t it?

  ‘Drink up,’ his father said. ‘We’d better go and see what we can get you.’

  Vince would have liked to look in the bookshops that afternoon, but Dad didn’t read. He barely watched television. Anything that entailed sitting down longer than ten minutes without eating or drinking was suspect in his world. Whenever Vince was reading he could be sure Dad was doing sit-ups on the top landing or tinkering with his car.

  ‘We’ve got to decide what sort of suit you’ll need and how much I can afford to spend.’

  They headed for the escalators, and Vince realised he was scowling. He really didn’t want his father going to any expense. He didn’t want to be any more indebted to him than necessary. He hated the thought of his father standing there when he was being measured and trying on suits, Dad attempting to impose his own vision of his son on him… Vince liked to play himself down in his green trainers and his ‘Meat Is Murder’ T-shirt.

  As they headed down the brightly lit hallways of the Metro Centre, Vince’s mind was made up. He was having cheap and he was having tacky. Something he couldn’t respect or feel grateful for. Sometimes he got into these moods. I’m a spoiled cunt, I am, he thought savagely as they went through Next, Top Man, Principles, Burtons. I’m purposely turning up my nose at everything he suggests. It’s all I ever do. Why do I treat him as if he’s always got to be making up for something? He was the one here for me. He did me right. But no matter how hard done by he thought his father was, left behind with an ungrateful son, Vince was far more angry on his own account. He felt that no one had ever talked to him. Someone had taken a look at him and simply assumed what he wanted: this is the kind of life you want, a boy like you. All he wanted to say was that he wasn’t a boy like him. He clung doggedly to a private self, an inner self they didn’t see.

  His earliest book was one of fairy stories, an anthology whose spine wore away with overuse, far outlasting the building sets, the electronic devices and mechanical things his father bought in ensuing years for them to share. And in the book was a retelling of Pinocchio. For Vince it had always gone without saying that he and his father were Gepetto and Pinocchio. The tale underlay their everyday lives as surely and obviously as genetics. It was something he never questioned, even as late as seventeen.

  When Vince looked back to his first suit, the one he wore at seventeen, it made him cringe. It was a lightweight, satiny material of blue and white checks. He wore it everywhere, even to school, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows like someone out of Miami Vice. And his hair was streaked with gold, cut spiky, blown back on top, grown long, almost halfway down his back.

  Vince got his place at Lancaster without even having to go for an interview, but his father still wished Vince had chosen a nicer suit.

  In Darlington on the afternoon of their reunion Andy pulled out scores of old photos and laughed at Vince, such a child of the eighties. Vince had his head in his hands, cursing.

  He was wearing the suit the first time Andy met him. They met in Sunderland, at Roker Park. It was 1987, the year of David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour, and they were on the same coach party from Darlington. Their relationship was cemented that warm, drizzly afternoon, standing in the pressing crowd, right at the front, right under the shadow of the sixty-foot-tall perspex spider that Bowie was going to perform on. Doggedly they kept their pole position in the stadium crowd and talked and talked for the hours until the evening concert was due to begin. Vince shared between them the cheese-and-pickle sandwiches his father had packed for him.

  When Bowie came on, just yards ahead of them, it was with irony and aplomb, in his own lightweight, satiny suit, his own teased-up, bleached eighties hair, but he was also a terrible disappointment. It seemed that he had lost his edge. All his weirdness just seemed put on. But, jostled and pulled around by the mass of swaying bodies, Andy and Vince kept looking at each other.

  Andy had come dressed in what Vince would soon recognise as only one of his many outfits. He had a separate guise for everything and, for that first meeting, he was done up as Bowie in 1976: the black suit, white shirt, powdered face and slicked-back hair. Bowie when he had integrity and a bone structure you could chop sticks with. Vince was looking increasingly less at the stage, more at the boy right by his side.

  At the end of the concert there was no encore, because it had started to rain. Vince was thoroughly pissed off. Bowie’s one last chance to r
eprieve himself was the promised encore: singing ‘Time’ and being crucified on angel’s wings at the very top of the perspex spider. He’d done it at Wembley. Oh, but not in Sunderland. Course he wouldn’t do it in Sunderland. Vince stomped out of the stadium, through pissy-smelling underpasses, making for the car parks. All the while Andy kept pace with him. Their ears were ringing, they realised when Andy stopped to buy a T-shirt from a bloke by the exit.

  They stood on the sparkling tarmac of the car park outside. Andy said, ‘I don’t really want this, I don’t know why I bought it.’

  Vince was craning his neck, concerned that they’d never find their coach, or that it had already gone. ‘It’s a souvenir, I suppose.’

  Impulsively Andy said, ‘You have it. I want you to have it.’ He held the T-shirt up. Bowie with that teased-up gold hair.

  Vince smiled. ‘Cheers. Do you know where our coach will be? I forgot where they told us.’

  ‘Let’s go and look on the main road.’

  The main road was right on the coast. The sea was high on Wearside that night, crashing in thin waves on to the path and the road itself. There were coaches and stragglers tunelessly singing ‘Let’s Dance’ everywhere up the road.

  ‘What if we don’t get our coach?’ Vince said, starting to worry.

  Andy had pulled his leather jacket back on. The wind was unsticking his slicked-back hair. He was strolling nonchalantly, gazing out at the black sea. It was as if the rush and panic of the other seventy thousand people flooding out of the stadium at midnight hardly touched him. He couldn’t share their consternation or enthusiasm at all. He was walking, leading Vince further down the coastal road, away from the noise. ‘It would be all right,’ he said. ‘It would be all right even if we did get stuck here. My nanna lives down in Shields. Two miles down the road. She’d put us up.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vince marvelled at how easily he could come up with contingency plans.

  ‘Do you really fancy sitting on a coach with fifty Dario Bowie fans singing “China Girl” and throwing up in the gangway?’