by Paul Magrs
Ethan Nesbit sighed. ‘Business is down.’ The scraping noise came again. He must be shifting position, Vince thought. Getting a better purchase on the pitted floor as he prepares to deliver terrible news.
‘Nobody wants taxidermy these days,’ he said. ‘You know, I used to have regular customers. People who had big houses with dark corners. They liked to fill them up with beasties that looked natural, ready to spring up at unwary visitors, or friendly-looking things, happy to be there.
‘But customers go away. People die or they change their minds. Things that aren’t stuffed aren’t constant.’
The taxidermist laughed at himself, at his own wit and wisdom.
Vince sat down on the stairs, listening harder.
‘That’s not true,’ Andy said. ‘Some of them fellers in the shop are starting to go off. It’s the damp.’
‘Shit!’ The old man’s mug came down on the Formica with a sharp crack. ‘Have you been putting the fire on regular like I said, to warm them through?’
‘Course I have.’
‘Well,’ said Ethan bitterly. ‘The long and the short of it is that this place is finished with. Animals are dead and gone. You young people are wanting computer arcades, aren’t you? Video shops and internetting, that’s you lot.’
Vince knew Andy too well. He could hear him shrug in response.
Then Andy said, ‘So you’ll want me out, then?’
The old man didn’t say anything.
‘Uncle Ethan …’
Vince stopped himself from laughing. Uncle, he thought. That’s why the rent’s so cheap. It’s not a sugar daddy, it’s Uncle Ethan. Like something out of fucking Dickens.
‘You’ll want me out of the upstairs.’
‘When your parents died I said I’d watch out for you. Give you somewhere to live.’
‘You never adopted me. Anyway, I’m all grown up now, aren’t I?’
Glumly the old man said, ‘Aye, but to chuck you out on the street… God knows what your little Nanna Jean will say when she hears.’
‘Maybe she can put me up.’
‘Haven’t you heard? She’s trying to get into the Sheltered.’
‘Not Nanna Jean. She wouldn’t go into Sheltered. She says it’s like living in MFI.’
‘Aye, well. That’s what she reckons.’
Andy let out a slow breath. ‘Everyone’s giving up the ghost.’ By now Uncle Ethan sounded doubly apologetic. ‘You see, I need the money. It’s time I cut my losses. I’m getting married, son. I’m giving up all the animals and I’m settling down. I want you to be happy for me. I want you to be my best man.’ The taxidermist couldn’t keep the tremor of excitement out of his voice. In his mind the conversation had passed on to pleasanter things. There was a spring in his conversational stride that surprised both Andy and the hidden Vince. He sounded like a much younger man, just embarking on something. This vigour of his shamed the pair of them and made them feel sapped.
It was Nirvana in the sixth-form common room this morning and that was the last thing Penny wanted to hear. She sat in her squashy chair and glared at everyone. This morning she had woken on the living-room carpet, rueful and stiff. She couldn’t quite remember walking back from the road and the fields. Somehow she had got herself back after walking for hours. She arrived home in the dawn. Now she felt dirty and crusty and Kurt Cobain wasn’t helping, bless him.
She was in torpor and what she wanted to be was organised, even prim, like the other girls who sat round now, eating their sandwiches early, from very small Tupperware dishes which they balanced on their knees. Nibbling crispbreads and considering their options. Penny wanted to shape up, suddenly.
She went to the window and stared out over the drab school fields. From way up here she could see the dark, forbidding trees down the Burn. She could see the grey ribbon of Burn Lane, connecting the Yellowhouse, Blackhouse and Redhouse estates to the town centre. I’ve got a whole panorama here, she thought, distractedly. She wondered if Liz was home yet, crawling back from wherever she had ended up with the bus driver. Surely they’d never shagged on board his Road Ranger.
‘Penelope, I’ve been looking into those clerical courses for you.’
‘What?’
Her careers consultant was standing behind her, his pale, podgy face in her personal space. ‘Last time you mentioned that you were interested in typing …’
Her heart sank. ‘No, I’m not.’
His mouth opened, revealing very small teeth and a mouth full of saliva. His teeth were like a breakwater. Penny thought, No matter what, your teeth are always wet.
‘I’ve put myself to a lot of effort on your behalf, young woman. How can you simply change your mind like this?’
‘I never made it up in the first place.’ She looked him up and down. She stared at his green nylon suit and realised his limitations. She saw that he thought he was doing her a favour. ‘I never wanted to be a typist.’ He’s doing what he thinks is a day’s work, Penny thought. Messing about with all the things I want, trying to make my ambitions manageable. He’s one of the people whose hands I’m in. Look at him! I’m better off doing stuff for myself. ‘I never said I wanted to be a typist,’ she said. ‘Oh, fuck it!’ She dropped her English file at his feet and fled to the toilets.
It was a windy day. The wind blew itself round the town-centre corners, it blew people into shops they didn’t want to visit. The precinct was oddly silent as Jane arrived, though there were as many people as usual. Newton Aycliffe was a funny town, she thought, because people stopped and talked in the town centre. They danced an awkward quadrille and moved from group to group, spending ages, talking about nothing. When she went to other towns everyone seemed to go dashing about. Jane didn’t think it was because people in Aycliffe were friendly. They didn’t have anything to do, she thought.
At first the keening wind seemed to have killed the noise. Tossed it elsewhere, across the rooftops and over the clock tower, dropping it heavily into a field. But it hadn’t. As she made careful, tiny footsteps under awnings, she realised that it wasn’t sound the town was missing.
It was artificial light. Everything was dimmer. The shop signs, the windows … they were all dark and inscrutable like neglected fish tanks. Shit, she thought. Half-day closing. But it was only eleven o’clock. She went in the ladies’ in the arcade and there she found Mary, who looked after the lavs, sitting in candlelight. Mary took great pride in her job, and you could find her sitting in her glass-fronted office every day, in her trackie bottoms, knitting and chatting to all her customers. She kept her lavs a treat. She was a reassuring presence, watching over her endless knitting for vandals or anything untoward. Today she was in her glass office surrounded by her twelve grandchildren. Boys and girls of all ages, all eating Greggs pasties and sausage rolls, unperturbed by where they were. Mary sat in the middle of them, proud, glowing in candlelight. It was like a holy picture, Jane thought when she walked in.
‘All the leccy’s off in the centre,’ Mary told Jane as she gave her change for the lock. ‘It’s a disgrace. All the leccy’s gone off in the wind.’ Mary repeated herself, Jane had discovered. It came of seeing too many people in one day, being obliged to make conversation with them all. When Jane sat on the lav, she heard Mary tell someone else, ‘It’s a disgrace. Leaving us in the dark with no leccy.’
When she went back out she noticed that some shops had resorted to candles, too. From the outside this gave their facades a Victorian glow. It was like going round Beamish, the open-air museum. Jane had hated it there when Peter’s dad took her, when they were together. He’d made her go down into the pit with him. A real working pit and her afraid of heights. ‘But it’s not heights,’ the ignorant bugger said. ‘It’s underground. How’s that heights?’ And at the bottom Jane had passed out, which served him right. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost the bairn.
The Spastics Society and the Gas Board looked inviting and curious, Olde Worlde. And Woollies! Woollies looked a treat! Oh, it w
as like something out of Scrooge. An air-raid shelter full of yellowing candles had been unearthed and they were stuck throughout the entire shop. No longer plastic and dirty white, it was graced with a dusky vitality.
She pushed in to see the glints of purple, gold, green of the pic-n-mix display. And, with a throbbing heart, she waited for the coast to be clear, and filled her coat pockets with humbugs and eclairs and blackcurrant limes. No surveillance cameras either. She felt about twelve. She looked at the wax congealing on the video counter, pooling on shelves and getting stuck in the silver tinsel they already had on display. She looked at the hushed faces of the customers. They were acting as if they were in a cathedral. This is how shops used to be, she thought. Warily they all went up and down aisles, unsure of what lay hidden in corners. Usually they would bustle up and down, finding everything uniform, exposed. There was a gentle calm about Woollies this morning. And the absence of music, Jane thought. That helps, too.
It was getting late. She had to pick Peter up.
Vince was hoping he could duck into the staff room at lunchtime and quietly go about his business. Get some coffee, set about marking. Keep his head down. But it was at this point that the PE teacher decided to acknowledge him.
That face coming across the room at him. That bloody monkey face! His pitiful strands of hair over skin the texture of an avocado. This man was avocado-shaped, in fact, in a too tight, unwashed tracksuit. Mrs Bell had made Vince smirk once by remarking that they should all complain about the PE staff wearing their tracksuits in the rest of the school. Teaching other subjects dressed like that! She thought it was awful. And she thought it was unwise, his blithely stomping about the place in his tight tracksuit bottoms, showing the plain impression, as she put it, of his genitalia. It wasn’t right.
He came up to Vince and there was the smell of cheese-and-onion crisps on his breath. ‘Have you been in the wars, then?’
It took Vince right back. This bloke’s face was always bearing down on him when he was in his early teens. Whether it was cross-country, swimming, rugby or the long jump, there was his bloody awful face coming into view and screaming at him to put some effort in. His face going scarlet. The other lads sniggering. Once he’d stood them all in a line and thrown a cricket ball at every one of them so they could catch it and get over their fear of hard balls. He’d taken Vince’s glasses so they wouldn’t get smashed and of course Vince couldn’t see a thing. In protest Vince went from being hopeless to not trying at all. He simply wandered around the cross-country course down the Burn, twenty minutes behind everyone else, trudging through the black mud. And then he’d have this face screaming at him. And again, when everyone was showered and dressed and he showered alone, he’d have this face bellowing at him through the steam to hurry. To get out of his sight.
‘Yeah,’ Vince said. ‘I’ve been in the wars.’ Under all his bruises he could feel himself colouring further.
There was a kerfuffle at the door as the careers master came in and caught sight of him. ‘There’s someone wants you,’ he said. ‘Penny Robinson has locked herself in the sixth-form ladies’ toilets and she wants to talk to you and no one else.’ Vince turned to go, frowning.
‘Well,’ said the PE teacher. ‘Isn’t that the girl you were out having lunch with?’
‘What?’
The careers master had turned to listen, too.
The PE teacher said, ‘You heard. Someone saw you out on the town and then catching the bus with one of the sixth-form girls.’
‘So?’
‘One thing you have to learn,’ the PE teacher said, ‘in this job. No matter who they are, no matter how much they’re begging for it, no matter how much you want to give it to them, you have to stop yourself. Isn’t that right?’
The careers master nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Right,’ Vince said.
He went straight to the sixth-form block and, with an air of unabashed curiosity, pushed his way into the ladies’. ‘Pen?’
No urinals, he thought. They’d be hellish things to sit on, he supposed. He tried to imagine life without urinals.
‘Pen?’
‘I don’t like being called Pen.’ She was in the furthest cubicle.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Did Mr Polaroid send you?’
‘Yes, but I’m concerned as well.’
The door opened, allowing him to slip into the little room to find Penny sitting on a cracked lid.
‘Hi-ya, sweetheart.’
She looked at him. ‘Do you know what we remind me of?’ she asked.
‘Go on.’
‘Some awful cheap version of one of them brat-pack films from the eighties.’
Vince grimaced. ‘You can be Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.'
‘I feel more like Molly Sugden.’
‘Why don’t you like being called Pen?’
‘It’s what Liz calls me sometimes.’
‘Oh.’
Now she was staring at his bruises. ‘Jesus, what happened to your face?’
‘Does it show up that badly? Can I borrow some foundation off you?’ He knew she must have some. Her skin was still quite bad, lumpy and inflamed under a coat of foundation. She rummaged in her bag. He asked, ‘What’s all this about?’
She stopped what she was doing for a moment. ‘Do you ever feel like you’re bottom on the list of everyone’s priorities?’
‘All the time.’
‘I think that now and then and it scares me.’
‘It’s best to assume it,’ he said. ‘And then, when suddenly you’re not, when someone is thinking about you, really thinking about you, then that’s a bonus.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Can I stay here until that happens?’
‘’Fraid not, pet.’
‘What happened to you, anyway?’
‘Queer-bashers.’
She started to apply make-up to his bruises. He gasped at the coolness.
‘They got me and Andy after the thing last night. It wasn’t too bad.’
‘Is Andy all right?’
‘He’s fine now. A bit sore.’
It was funny having his head in her hands like this as he talked. She felt his voice vibrate through the soft white skin of his throat. ‘How are things with you two?’
‘Oh… well,’ he said. He wasn’t at all sure what to say in school. ‘I’m not sure if we’re sticking together. I don’t know.’
‘I liked him. I thought he was nice.’
‘Really?’
‘The little bit of him I saw, yeah.’
‘He was my first lover,’ Vince said. ‘Isn’t there something sad in me going back to him? Isn’t it just like coming home and working in my old school?’
The toilet in the next cubicle flushed. They heard someone step out, hastily wash their hands, and clip-clop out of the ladies’.
‘Fuck!’ Vince hissed. ‘It’ll be round school in seconds: Mr Northspoon’s a big fag.’
‘It was my fault.’
‘Never mind. Maybe it’s best if I’m out at work.’
‘Yeah?’
He shrugged.
‘Vince, my mam didn’t come in last night.’
‘Is this what this is about? I saw her last night. She was in safe hands, I think.’
Penny screwed the cap back on the tube of foundation. ‘Safe hands? You saw her with the bus driver, then?’
‘Someone’s told you? Yeah. She was having a whale of a time.’
‘Good.’
‘Ha’way, pet. Let’s get out of the toilets.’
‘Honestly, when you go on about queer-bashers and all that —’ She shuddered. ‘It makes you wonder if it’s worth going out anywhere. Sometimes I think I’m scared of everything. The whole world. Even my mother’s out on the prowl at night.’
‘You want to get on out there! Show them what you’re made of!’
‘Yeah?’ She stood up from the loo and kissed him on the cheek, an unbruised, un-made-up part.
Peter has the sweetest nature. The sweetest boy. Rose thought the words over and over before Jane arrived late to collect him. He would grow to be a fine young man. A credit to his mother. Rose could see that now. She wasn’t surprised that her daughter couldn’t. Jane just didn’t understand the things Rose understood about men. Jane hadn’t held on to her own man, Brian, and Rose could see exactly why. Brian wanted a drinking buddy and, although Jane had never known it, that’s what Rose became for him after he left her daughter. She took him in and saw him right. She despaired of her daughter’s inadequate love. All these men wanted to feel they were Sweet little kids, whatever they did. That was all Jane had had to do for Brian. He was a pig all right, Rose could see that. But a beguilingly rough pig, with a nasty temper and a passion she had taunted and brought to a head. She seduced him, bringing him running upstairs to her room, just days after walking out on Jane. He needed it, Rose needed it, and Jane need be none the wiser. Brian was walking out of their lives, he’d be gone soon, that was the way Rose looked at it, and she had been determined to fuck him. It was the one time, in her eyes, that it could have been respectable. She nursed and rocked his heavy fleshy body between her thighs, ran her hands through his thinning pale-yellow hair and told him he was pushing his fat, unwashed dick into his son’s grandmother. And, funnily and pleasantly enough, he’d come back for more of the same over the years. She was fond of him. A sweet lad.
When Jane turned up, Rose was doing her ironing again. She told her that Peter had surpassed himself. There was nothing, no tantrums or doldrums, to report. He had gone to bed when Nanna said, eaten all his tea, played nicely and spent most of the evening talking with his new uncle Ethan, who was soon to be his new granda. That was the sweetest time of all last night, Rose thought. Ethan and Peter had talked about animals. Ethan knew all the animals and he promised to teach Peter how to talk to them. Peter’s eyes lit up.
