by Paul Magrs
I hope she’s shaved properly, Penny thought. Of course she has.
This was the crucial moment for Liz. This was the moment by which she could gauge the future. It was the moment when something new becomes something current and ongoing.
Penny recalled one of the late-night washing-machine conversations, years ago. Her father sitting in a kimono, clean-shaven and with his hair cut short. He was telling her about one-night stands and lasting relationships.
‘A first meeting, first-night sex, is something that seems to happen outside of time. The mental life is suspended, no matter how lucid and unphysical you may be. Thinking about consequences is for the future. You’ve been rendered exempt from time. The next morning, waking together, may still be like that. But it is too early to be sure. It is not until the moment that the lover returns’ (This moment. Penny was thinking) ‘or when you return to the lover, that you may begin to see how things will end up.
‘Does he smile? Does she look happy to see you again? Are you content to return to the present together? To pick up the everyday strands at once and in the same place, start to wind them together into a tangle of both? Can you tell?’
Liz beamed. ‘I’m so pleased you could come.’
‘I can’t,' Andy whispered, corpsing with laughter. He was crushing his jacket into the mattress with his back, squirming as Vince unpicked his fly buttons with his teeth. ‘Not with your old man downstairs.’
Vince drew back, palms pressed down like the Sphinx, pinning Andy to the bed. ‘He’s probably listening in.’ Thoughtfully and tenderly, he took Andy into his mouth for a while, nuzzling shoulders under the backs of Andy’s legs, feeling the thighs relax and tense, of one movement now. He loved the feel of the end of someone’s cock in his mouth. The oxymoronic thrill of it: something so tender and yet determined. It was the most intimate thing Vince knew. They had hardly exchanged two sentences tonight and here they were.
He paused at a well-known point, recognising the spasm. The lull before crisis. ‘Well, I can. And so can you.’
And he proved it.
Andy had come home.
TWELVE
Penny looked down at the ruined remains. They had been talking for so long that the leftover garlic bread was hardening. Almost an hour ago the music had petered out without anyone getting up to change it. Their conversation had carried them through. It had been endless, seamless. Cliff never stopped.
Liz held her wineglass carefully, watching him talk, content not to break in. The night had been hers also. She had been full of energy. Penny wondered whether she was on something. She kept jumping up as if pulled on wires for more wine, more food.
Just after one, Penny shook herself free of the scene. She looked at the rumpled tablecloth, the crumbs, the scattered cutlery, and thought over this talk — the relaxed tone, the loud vigour of their mutual epiphanies, and the starchy friendliness of the evening’s start. She was keeping it all in mind. Saving the implications for later.
‘I’ll have to go to bed.’
They looked at her. She liked the bus driver. He had done everything he could to make her like him. So she did.
‘Thanks for your company,’ he said.
‘That’s all right,’ she returned.
Liz grinned at her and Penny made her way out into the hallway, securing the door behind her. Naturally she stood to listen.
Nothing at first. Liz and Cliff were evidently wrestling with the weight of each other’s undivided attention. Then the odd murmur, their conversation was picking up again. Penny caught, ‘… a lovely girl. You’ve done amazingly well, bringing her up on your own.’ She groaned and headed off up the stairs.
Cliff’s voice sounded more distinctly. Yet she could not be sure whether she had heard correctly, so she sat perfectly still on the middle stair and listened hard just to make sure.
‘I’ve been following you around. You know that, don’t you?’
As if he was enacting a scene in a play, weighing down his words so that everyone could follow.
‘Have you?’ Liz wasn’t playing his particular game. She was still indistinct, slurred, playful. Penny thought, when people turn serious, they have to pretend they’re in a TV play if they want to come across as real. Cliff was suddenly intent, almost hammy.
‘Ever since the day you moved in.’
‘Oh.’ There was the clinking of glass, the thud of an empty bottle.
There was that dusty smell of carpet, poking itself right up Penny’s nose, and the tough, fibrous feel of it, harsh down her side as she leaned across the stair. She put her forehead on the next step up and closed her eyes.
So that’s all right, then. He’s in there pleading his troth. Liz will be pleased.
How can the room, she thought, spin round like this, when my eyes are shut? All the darkness available to her was oscillating. She shifted her head and everything began a sideways slide. It was as if a plug had been pulled in one corner of her brain and the fluid had begun to roar away, leaving her parched and sick. Then the darkness was clearing in bleeding patches of purple.
‘You want to stay, don’t you?’
At least the conversation was gentle. There was no fighting, no raised voices. Penny’s memories of sitting on the middle stair in the early hours all had to do with fighting going on. Flinching at the sounds of breaking glass, praying that there would be no injuries, though there always were.
‘Yes, I want to stay. I don’t want to go now.’
Staying.
People can’t be relied upon. People leave, people go and you can’t stop them. They expend themselves in your life and they have to go. Penny knew this. For her, life seemed to be about the very act of relinquishing. She had let Liz go, freed the constraints and waved goodbye in the school corridor. But did such acts necessarily involve separation, separateness, never seeing again?
The patches of purple in her darkness lightened to a view of violet snow, crusting the brickwork of the cathedral and castle in Durham. A scene plucked from her childhood, the winter sky that turned the snow purple on the night her mam gave her back to her dad.
Penny was five. She stood on the bridge alone with the searing cold. She was fascinated by the buildings looming above, over the river. Their tops surmounted high embankments formed by blackened trees. All the buildings were chocolate brown, ancient and edible. She stood in the middle of the bridge, her footsteps in either direction now lost.
Two cars faced each other across the bridge. Their separate headlight beams shone across the slush and refused to meet, to illuminate Penny.
Mam in one, Dad in the other. Mam had left her, swished away in her long brown coat, back to her own car. Dad was coming out of his, hurrying towards her, urging his daughter into the safety of his car, where it smelled of cigarettes and Bob Dylan was playing. Penny at the age of five watched this bearded father in his patched jeans and headband with interest and hindsight.
He approached her with a smile. ‘Let’s get fish and chips. You must be starving.’
‘No, Liz,’ she was bursting to say. ‘You’ve only just cooked a lovely meal for me and the bus driver.’
And that shifted the dream’s tone. Her father frowned under the lemony streetlight, his beard softened and vanished. His features darkened and became harder, pricked out in eyeliner, lipstick, blusher. His hair sprang out into well-tinted curls and his body actually changed shape. He grew aware, almost painfully aware of each nuance his movements took on. He moved with grace and it seemed to cost him dearly. He was starting to act as if the eyes of the world were watching each fragment of his body.
His heavy man’s clothes were falling away. He was in his gold lame, skin-tight and shimmering across the snow, a hot knife through butter.
Ravishing, Penny thought. Yet when you were close enough to see the eyes you could count the cost of the scrutiny he suspected. From nowhere he produced a black scarf, calmly wrapping it about his throat. To make it look more tender, more vulnerable, make it
seem as if there was not an Adam’s apple there.
Each sinuous movement was a dead giveaway. He hung his head and stared down at himself. Penny watched her father in a dream become a mother, and worry that the world might glimpse the impression of his cock through what he liked to wear.
But this dream came up to date. Cliff appeared, hiding part of Liz’s body with his own, in an embrace acknowledging and discreetly accommodating everything of which Liz might be ashamed. Cliff tugged her away and they went to the Hillman Imp, driving off and leaving the bridge one-sided.
Something caught in her throat. Penny sensed one side of herself sinking again, balance gone. She looked for escape to the other side of the bridge, where the mother, the original mother, had gone, but had left her car standing abandoned. Penny had the keys in her hand. It meant mobility, that she must have money of her own, now, in this dream, this new life. She wouldn’t be stuck for ever on this bridge. Keys, money, cars, all of these could rescue her from the mid-point in ways that people could not.
She started to walk towards her mother’s empty car, but her resolve was thrown off balance by her heart missing a beat. Something moved across the bridge before her. Little creatures, cackling and sniggering, running and hopping through the wet snow. They flung themselves into it up to their fragile necks, stopping Penny in her tracks for fear of treading on them. A constant stream of gleeful animals, scampering out of the brickwork, holding her up.
What were they up to? Freed from the cracks in the stone, what were these miniature buffalo, ibexes, antelopes doing?
Like ants they worked together. They hoisted their loads
(What are they carrying? Penny wondered, squinting) and as one they negotiated familiar burdens over snow.
Round, dark shapes were bundled on their shoulders. Apples. Lots of apples. The little creatures carried apples and laid them down at Penny’s feet.
‘Apparently she was at the Riverside Institute for depression.’ Fran shrugged. ‘I never knew that before. So the police are quite worried about her. At least they’re taking it more seriously.’
Jane sat opposite her, by the television set, with the last weather report of the night casting a blue gloom. Peter was in his pyjamas, glad to be up this late. He was showing Vicki how his Ghostbusters toys worked. Vicki was still in her coat, a carrier bag of clothes, hastily packed, beside her.
‘I’m sorry about this, Jane. We haven’t got the room at ours for Vicki as well. I’m going to be up all night with the baby.’ Jane was altogether bewildered. ‘That’s fine.’ She wasn’t used to having people in her living room, especially at this time of night. ‘What’s her stupid bloody husband doing?’
‘He’s going off his head. Out looking for her, on the streets.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I had no idea she was on so much treatment. It explains a lot.’ Fran caught Vicki looking at her, faintly puzzled. She’s not deaf, Fran thought.
‘It does.’ Jane yawned. ‘So anything might have happened.’
‘They think she may just have wandered off. They said she may just wander back again. It happens.’
‘We’ll have to see.’
‘I’ll let you all get to bed. Thanks for taking Vicki on. Like I say, we’ve got a completely full house. She’s got the stuff she needs. The police are coming round in the morning… statements and that…’
Jane quietly led Fran to the door. They were shaking their heads at each other in unspoken bemusement. They both knew that something, possibly something awful, might have happened to Nesta. Saying it aloud would make it seem closer. They also knew that she might simply have wandered off. That possibility seemed worse, somehow.
‘Look at this.’
They laughed when they found Penny asleep halfway up the stairs. Liz took her ankles, Cliff her head and shoulders, and together they carried her upstairs, into her room, and arranged her on the bed. It didn’t disturb her in the slightest. There was the faintest of smiles on her face.
‘God knows what she’s dreaming about,’ Liz said.
They were relieved to have Penny to take upstairs. It got them both up there, the heart of the domestic home, without embarrassment. Cliff was staying. Liz showed him her bedroom and he smiled. She left him like that and went to the bathroom.
Catching his jeans on barbed wire, he felt rather than heard the rip. As he bent to free his leg, the undergrowth seemed to uncoil itself, move in on him. The vegetation glistened like oil in the darkness.
‘Nesta!’ he hissed, with a sob.
His palms were full of crumbling earth, reeking of petrol as did all the earth by the Burn. Cars on the road above him moaned past. Tony made for the concrete bridge beneath the road and called out ‘Nesta!’ again for the benefit of the echo.
He watched the play of moonlight on the stream, stared at the graffiti on the underpass wall, which appeared brown in this light. He couldn’t read, so it wasn’t a clue he was looking for. Tony crouched down and sat on the path, his back to the wall, finding himself damp in a puddle. Piss, by the smell of it.
Looking down for a dry patch of concrete, he found Nesta’s heirloom Victorian locket. It had been her foster mother’s. His heart beating, he flipped the locket open and saw Nesta’s pictures of Noel Gordon and Pat Phoenix inside. They had been cut out of the TV Times a number of years ago, and pasted carefully into the locket’s open shell with nail varnish. He had found a clue.
Liz stood very still, gazing into the half-length bathroom mirror. Her shoulders sat square in the frame, as in a formal portrait. She was face on, unblinking; unabashed like a tailor’s dummy.
Cliff was poised behind, his chest just touching her shoulder blades, the rest of him bracing her weight, as if she were about to snap and fall.
‘You and your obsessional nature!’ Liz smiled, and watched her lips work. ‘Fancy following me into the bathroom. Is my toilette so fascinating?’ The harsh lighting rendered her make-up shiny, and showed the cracks in the tiles. Cliff’s warm face appeared on her shoulder. He nudged her Adam’s apple with his nose, making her gulp. She took a tissue from the box on the cistern and started to wipe her make-up off.
He watched her very carefully as she wore through the layers with daubs of cold cream. Finished, she looked the same, only paler. The bottom half of her face was cast in a bluish shadow. Liz reached for a long-handled, bright gold razor on the windowsill.
‘I’ll do it,’ the bus driver said. She thought about complaining as he took the shining blade from her, applied lather to her face, covering up the shadow, but she stopped herself.
‘I was never any good at shaving,’ she said as he began to carve into the soap with deft movements. ‘Nobody ever taught me properly.’
His face was intent as he worked, moving delicately but surely about her. He eased back her head to expose her throat and she felt her breath catch, hearing the rasp of the blade. At one point it struck with an audible nick. She saw the alarm in his eyes.
Liz stared at the bright line of blood darkening in her reflection. ‘Shit!’ She made a grab for more tissues, holding her head still.
Cliff darted forwards with his tongue, and licked away the first drops that had formed. He grinned, smearing his teeth with her blood.
‘The biggest taboo, these days,’ he said.
‘Stupid! You should be more careful.’ She held damp tissue to the cut, alone with the pulse of blood in her neck, feeding into her own consoling hand. Cliff went back to holding her from behind, dropping the razor with a heavy clatter into the sink.
They stood for a while, until the bleeding stopped. He unzipped her dress and began to peel back the shoulders, gently undid the bra and helped her let the falsies fall with dignity on to the heap that her discarded dress had made.
‘What I always wanted, really. People like you are so hard to find. You’d be perfect as either a man or a woman. But what I really wanted, you are. A woman with a prick.’
He’s nice, but maybe a bit shallo
w, Liz thought in order to distract her attention from the mirror image. The narrow man’s chest with its hair and wiry muscles. And the shock of her wig on that body, the face now androgynous and beautiful. Flowing and abundant false hair on a stringy, underdeveloped body.
Until now she had avoided seeing this combination, woman’s head on a man’s body. Usually, the wig came off first, then make-up, and then she was just a man in a dress. That was all right, a standard figure of fun. But with her wig still on and the clothes on the floor, she was a woman inside a man’s body. She looked at herself as she was now, standing in her Marks and Spencer’s knickers with the shaft of her stiffened penis strapped by the elastic to her stomach.
With his index finger Cliff traced the shape of her nipples, the cool tip making her shiver. He cupped his hand around the smoothness of a pectoral. ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? But you’ve got all different things…’ His other hand reached to the end of her cock where a glistening droplet was forming. ‘But you’re really all woman.’
She thought, I’m content to let him say this to me. He’s defining me absolutely and I’m quite content to let him. What does that say about my current state of mind?
But I can be anything. It’s a political thing, a personal choice. I am determined to be what I want. Yet at his touch I harden and seal. If he says I am a woman, a woman with a prick that he wants to marry, then I seem happy to be that. Why do I do that? How can I let him?
But his jaw was resting heavily on her shoulder, one palm grinding gently into her chest as he moved his own body against her from behind, making her follow his rhythm. She fell into it, pulled by the arc of tension across her chest and drawn out on the raw, choking bliss as he fingered her cock. His fist closing over the apple-red flesh, drawing reluctantly away, fingertips playing over it, a beautiful but sullen tropical plant, almost about to flower.
