[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Colder still and the men decided to down tools and abandon the Roman remains till spring. It is so cold that it frightens them. This kind of weather will crystallise fragments of lost souls in the air. They rekindle themselves and brighten jewellike when it comes in dark. Centurions gather on the ramparts in their leather skirts with the wind whistling through them, their dead eyes quartz.

  In the cold imagined by Iris’s friend, the Roman remains can complete themselves.

  Old outlines glisten silver on the air, tugging at each other like a big top going up. They stir the air to recall what once stood there. Moisture freezes, clicks into place and recreates a fabulous ice palace on the reconstructed site at the top of the town above the docks.

  Patient Iris’s window is open and the time is right for irises to open. Unseasonably, perhaps, even dangerously, in midwinter. But what does Patient Iris care for danger now?

  She is open to the elements. Her sores expose her to the harshest that the north can offer.

  The cold of the north heals up Patient Iris for ever. Her gasping, fishlike internal organs stop collapsing and freeze. Her bedsores harden. Iris reaches with one arthritic hand to splash a little scent behind each ear before she allows the cold to come over her entirely.

  Scent catches at each earlobe and dangles there, perfect crystal earrings. And now Patient Iris is sealed for ever. The fate of those at extremes, like here, at the top of the hill.

  She decides to pop out for a walk. It is first time she has fancied walking in ages. Perhaps Dolly is still out there somewhere, saving sailors, or Roman centurions, under her voluminous skirts.

  Patient Iris stops by the docks to see the seal mothers return and, sure enough, she is rewarded by the sight of their stolid, hard-working bodies.

  She is much braver now that her phone is left off the hook and she can wear her bedsores as jewellery. She will skate over the ice to see how the burgeoning families are doing. She will talk the snorting, whiskered mothers through a difficult night, as their children are slapped out like old shoes onto the bloodied grass.

  ONE

  YOU NEVER TELL ME HOW THE KID IS. YOU NEVER MENTION THE KID AT all. Why is that? She must be a big part of your lives. Both your lives. You should tell me more about her. I feel like I’m the mother. Funny that, isn’t it, Mark? If things had been different, I could have been.

  I know. Very different. But still.

  Don’t give my love to Samantha. It’s best not to. I don’t know whether she has any idea that I still write to you. Does she, Mark? Do you tell her? When you put the kid to bed at night, when you turn off all the lights in that nice flat of yours, do you scoop your wife into bed, hold her close and tell her that I’ve been writing again?

  I doubt it somehow. And I wouldn’t like to interfere.

  It’s best if she forgets all about me. Whatever she knew. I was just the one behind the wheel. I’m the one she never has to think about. And that’s all right. I’m content to be out of her sight. Out of sight, out of mind. I don’t want to be in her mind. I don’t like her that much.

  Hear that, love? I don’t like your wife. I know you’ll forgive me for that. I’m sorry. I’d like to say I thought she was worthy of you. But there you are. She isn’t. You’re pathetic.

  They’re trusting me to use the library now. Three books a week. I go for the classy stuff. I’m reading up, improving myself. Where was Madame Bovary when she first got the shakes? What colour was Anna Karenina’s dress when the train hit her? I’m filling up every corner of my mind with trivia from the literary greats. There’s some talk of an Open University course. They’re keen on those here. I’ve got all the answers.

  The best bits I read, I copy out onto separate bricks. By my bed, where they can’t really be seen. Though I don’t mind if people look across my bed and read them. Me and you, eh, Mark? Both of us exhibitionists, deep down. It sticks, that kind of thing. You’ll be finding that out, I imagine. We’re both thirty-six now. The shit has well and truly hit the fan. Stuck there, dried out nicely. The fan goes on spinning.

  So, tell me all about the new life. About the kid. One thing I’ve been wondering about. Was she born looking like you or Samantha?

  Was the kid born tattooed?

  Much love,

  Tony.

  TWO

  “IT’S SUCH A SHAME.” MISS KINSEY RATTLED THE STAFF ROOM’S BLINDS, peering at the driveway. “He’s such a nice man, really.”

  “Who’s that?” Doris Ewart had Living magazine out on the table. She was memorising instructions for making cardboard snowmen that really glittered. She thought her class might appreciate them.

  “Sally Kelly’s father.”

  “Oh, him.” Doris joined the headmistress to see. “Poor child. Unfortunate name.” Doris sifted through the mass of parents and children waiting for her to dash out with the school bell and call them in. What a lot of parents wear shell suits, she thought and sighed. You’d think they’d make more of an effort.

  “Poor child,” the headmistress murmured.

  “Whose class is she in?”

  “Miss Francis. Class Two. She’s only four. We let her in early. Apparently she’s very bright. But look at him.”

  Sally Kelly’s father was now in full view. From behind their venetian blinds, Miss Kinsey and Miss Ewart stared at a tall man in jeans and denim jacket. He stood among the school’s prematurely aged parents: mothers with twin pushchairs, bleached hair, chapped red hands and faces, all of them about seventeen. The older mothers were dressed to look young, bridging the gap out of what might appear to be courtesy. They were in their mid-thirties, squashed into tight jeans, arses like obscene blue peaches. In their midst, so still he might have been inconspicuous but for the space left around him, Mark Kelly was holding Sally’s lunch box and Sally’s hand. Sally stood quietly, unbothered by the other children.

  You could see from here, Miss Kinsey thought, her intelligence. She held the other children away from her. She would have problems with that. They’d turn on her. At the moment they were too scared to, scared of her father. Heavens, who wouldn’t be? Soon, though, their parents would teach them that they needn’t be frightened of Mr Kelly at all. But he wasn’t a nice man. The should just laugh at him, as though he were deformed. As though those were scars on his face.

  “I spoke to him last summer,” Miss Kinsey said thoughtfully. “At Sports Day. That is, when I had a free moment during Sports Day.” Doris Ewart had been found in the staff room at the end of the day with a half-empty sherry bottle and the school caretaker. The headmistress had been forced to begin each race herself. “And he proved to be an exceptionally articulate young man.”

  “You would never think it,” Doris muttered, nursing the school bell, which she had just fetched from the cupboard.

  “Perhaps you had better avoid rash judgements?” suggested Miss Kinsey with a hint of kindness. “After all, he only looks like a thug to most people’s eyes. Think of it as a cultural thing. If he was a foreigner we could probably regard him as ethnic. Charming, even. They are quite…tribal, aren’t they?”

  In the morning’s pale wash of light Mark’s tattoos were pricked out neatly in thick stripes of green and blue. His natural flesh glared out between chinks in the design. From this distance he might have been wearing a Norman helmet. Bold slats crossed his cheekbones, accentuating the thrust of his jawline. The pattern continued down his throat, feathering the neck of his t-shirt. The hands that held Sally’s lunch box and Sally’s hand were similarly darkened. It was largely assumed that his whole body had been done.

  “It must have cost a fortune,” said Doris Ewart. “I’ll ring the bell.”

  The headmistress nodded absently and watched how the predominantly female gathering kept away from the Kellys. Those sidelong glances. Fear? Ridicule? Miss Kinsey wondered, Was he really covered from head to toe?

  On the doorstop of the main entrance Doris Ewart summoned her already sapped strength and rang the bell with bot
h hands. The crowd broke up and began to file into the school. The Kellys mingled, but remained quiet.

  “Such a shame,” said Miss Kinsey again, and closed the blinds.

  EACH MORNING THE YOUNG MISS FRANCIS WOULD STAND BY THE TINK-ling terrapin pool in the centre of her classroom and welcome her children in. They clustered about her, checking the class pets were still there, crowding her with news. Their parents clutched coats, shuffled about, said a few words to one another, pressed kisses on their children’s faces and snuck away.

  Mark liked Miss Francis. She beamed at everyone; she wore Laura Ashley frocks, different-coloured flowers all the time. Sally regarded her father diffidently. Mark was embarrassed by this coolness. The teacher was in turn embarrassed by Mark’s attempts at friendliness. He’s trying so hard not to seem frightening to the children, she thought.

  “How are the terrapins?” he asked.

  “All still alive,” she said brightly. “Thank God,” and shuddered.

  This was Miss Francis’s first infant class. In a rush of enthusiasm at the beginning of the school year she had bought thirty-two terrapins, one for each child in her care, and named them all accordingly. The children’s names were printed in nail varnish on the tiny creatures’ murky-coloured shells.

  Miss Francis bent to point to the sludgy base of the clump of fern. “There’s Sally Kelly,” she said. Mark and Sally watched it basking on the shore, poking in the mud with one flipper. Sally went to sit at her desk, unimpressed by her namesake. Miss Francis looked at Mark.

  “Would you mind me asking…?”

  His smile was shy, creasing the tidy blocks of colour on his face. “About?”

  “Why did you give her a name that rhymed?”

  Mark frowned. “It’s not rhyme. It’s assonance.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s named after Sally Bowles. You know, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.”

  “I see.”

  “As in, ‘Life is a cabaret, old…’”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “Well, it comes from a novel, really, Goodbye to—”

  “I think we’d better push her back in. By the looks of things, she’s been out of it all weekend.” Miss Francis cupped one careful hand and gave Sally’s terrapin a nudge into the viscous green water, where the other thirty-one were having a lovely time, in the laborious, determined way that terrapins have. “There we are.” She wiped her hands on her print dress.

  When Mark left the classroom, he heard Miss Francis clap her hands together and announce that Andrea Fisher had spent the weekend laying Martin Rodgers’ eggs on the artificial bank. There was a stunned silence, then uncertain applause.

  PEGGY, SAMANTHA’S MOTHER, SPOTTED HIM ACROSS THE PARK. HE LOOKED up to see her wading across the soggy grass, cursing as she splattered her tights. “Mark!” she called feebly. “Over here!”

  He was waiting for the bus into town. He was early yet, sitting on a swing in the park by the stop, scraping the soles of his boots on the slimy asphalt. Without kids the park was desolate. Sea birds hurled themselves at each other above the grotesque iron spider that formed the ground’s centrepiece. Peggy leaned against one of its legs to catch her breath.

  “There’s all sorts on that playing field,” she said as he came to meet her. “It’s awful, with kiddies about.”

  “Hello, Margaret,” he said, forcing her to look at him and grimace.

  “Have you been to school with our Sally?”

  He nodded. Peggy was very short and determined, clutching a fur-trimmed coat about her. She spoke vehemently, rapidly, yet rarely looked at the person she was speaking to, as if the distraction would crack her determination. She amused him.

  “What are you doing playing on the swings?” She almost followed this up with, ‘like a big soft bairn’, but Samantha had warned her about that.

  “Just…” Mark’s smile flickered; he patted his breast pocket, which crackled with Tony’s letter. “Just waiting to go into town. Shopping, you know, see Sam.”

  “She won’t want disturbing at work.”

  “I often pop in. She likes it.”

  “I used to work in a shop. I hated people popping in. It puts you off your stroke.”

  “She’s got a very professional manner.”

  “Yes.” She eyed him, thinking, could plastic surgery do anything? Most likely he’d come out worse than ever. She said, “I wanted to check with you again—well, with Sam really, but you’ll do—about the dinner party.”

  Mark nodded and pretended to look blank. The prospect of this do amused him more than Peggy did herself.

  “Is everything still on for that?” she asked.

  “As far as I know,” he said.

  She wished he had more about him. Even with a face like the London A to Z he could look pretty vacant. “And Sam’s quite happy to…?”

  “She’s coming round to the idea, slow but sure.”

  Peggy looked up at him. He was surprised. Uncertainty played about her eyes, tugging the little puckers of fat. “I want this to happen properly, Mark. I want us all to have a nice time. Now I know dinner parties aren’t what the likes of you and I are used to, or Sam for that matter, professional manner or no, but it’s the way Iris likes to have things done. And she wants so much to be liked by you and Sam. She’s trying hard.”

  “Sam’ll cook something nice. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  “I’d do it myself, invite the two of you to mine, but Sam wouldn’t come back to the house…”

  “I know. It’s all right at ours. Neutral ground.”

  “It’s hard for Iris too, you know.”

  He smiled, thinking the conversation had come to a natural end, and watched his mother-in-law gather herself back up into some semblance of rigour, shrugging her old-fashioned coat stiffly into place. She dabbed the corner of her eyes with one crooked knuckle, overdoing it, he thought.

  “Your bus is here.”

  Feeling dismissed, he shot off across the grass towards the white minibus purring at the kerb. Peggy watched; he was bright blue against the dull green, vital with a kind of skinhead sexiness. She shuddered.

  THE TOWN’S FAIRY LIGHTS WERE MEAGRE THIS YEAR, SLUNG OVER THE main street and precincts with torpid abandon. The bulbs crackled in tinsel wreaths as the rain came down. The biggest shops had the better displays clustered about themselves, first hands in the tin of Quality Street.

  Mark got off at his usual stop in the very centre of town, where the tarmac was sizzling with wet bus tyres and nearby, a student pavement artist threw down his pastels in disgust. On the pavement outside Marks and Spencers his Hellas and the Nymphs had turned into a lurid green paste.

  Mark went straight to the new arcade. Here everything was lavish, smelling faintly of floor polish and Poison. Mirrors came at every angle, throwing images of unhappily dressed prospective customers back at themselves, and of the gleaming, bullet-shaped elevators that shot up and down between levels of the arcade.

  He was reassured by his own constantly monitored presence. He looked like someone drawn in blue biro. A scrawl, he thought, and went for a coffee in the ladieswear department of a store overlooking the main street. You couldn’t smoke there, and the frocks pressed in and peered over the tables in pristine, season-coloured ranks.

  For her wedding, Samantha had worn an immense white dress and veil, tugging it brutally through the narrow hallway of the registry office. Peggy had knelt on the welcome mat to pick sycamore leaves out of the train. Mark held the door and Sam’s prim bouquet. She let him keep it. “It suits your makeup,” she said and smiled.

  His eyes rested on the tiny pulse working away at her throat. The sight of that and the softness of the light, filtered through the doors’ cracked stained glass, eased his aching eyes a little. He bent to kiss her throat in that spot, and from behind them rose Peggy’s voice, warning that they were blocking the way and that there was bound to be another lot in soon.

  During the service (�
��Looks like Gran’s old front room,” Sam muttered to her mam, who shuddered) the woman who married them took an obvious dislike to them and kicked up a stink about them having only one witness. “You need two,” she said.

  “Mam’s got eyes in her arse,” Sam said. “She counts as two.”

  The registrar simmered. “Could you ask someone to come in from the waiting room, please?”

  Peggy, realising the gravity, picked up her handbag to go.

  Mark said, “Couldn’t I be the bridesmaid as well?” He proffered his bouquet limply. Samantha giggled and bit his shoulder.

  “I don’t think you’re treating this quite seriously enough, Mr Kelly—”

  Sam broke in. “Ignore him. He’s just a camp bugger.”

  “You bitch,” he muttered, teeth clenched. “Can we just carry on through the service till we hit the bit that needs witnessing?”

  The registrar groaned. “Really, they need to see it all. It’s a ceremony.”

  “Mam’ll be back in a minute,” Sam urged. “She’s persuasive.”

  The registrar continued. “And do you, Mark…”

  “Look who I found across the road!” Peggy cried, pulling another figure in a smart suit and hat into the room. The newcomer’s orchid, Sam thought, was a spiteful green. “Iris was just across the road! What a coincidence! What a godsend!”

  “What a godsend!” Sam spat.

  “Amen,” Mark sighed.

  “Only too happy to oblige,” Iris grunted firmly and bustled into place beside Mark.

  The rest of the event proceeded without hitch. Mark and Sam spent their honeymoon decorating their new flat on the estate, and Iris went back home with Peggy.

  HE WENT FOR ANOTHER COFFEE. IT MUST BE A DIFFERENT GIRL SERVING this time, he thought, she’s looking at me with renewed horror. There was still half an hour before Sam’s lunch break. The waitress held his cup under the coffee nozzle and it rattled against the steaming grill in the counter.