[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  “Oh, yes,” Mark said.

  “It’s ‘Heroes’,” Sam muttered, tactlessly dabbing at the stain, “by David Bowie.” But a new song had begun—Marlene Dietrich intoning ‘Give me the Man’—and the rest of the main course was taken up by a long story from Iris about the decadent nightlife of Berlin. Sam gritted her teeth all the way through; Mark was politely interested—and genuinely so, at one or two points; and Peggy looked down at what she was eating, wordlessly. She glanced fiercely at her partner only once, when Iris let slip that she was talking about Berlin of the nineteen twenties, and had once appeared in the same cabaret as Dietrich herself.

  “It was fabulous. You would have loved it.” She patted Mark’s hand and crammed her mouth with sprouts.

  “Should that make you the same age as Marlene Dietrich?” asked Sam icily.

  The ensuing pause fell unfortunately between tracks on the tape. “Darling,” sighed Iris, “you should never ask a lady her age.”

  They lit cigarettes between courses. As if on cue, Iris produced a ridiculous holder which, they found, had a spring strong enough to catapult dead filters across the length of the table. They were beginning their fourth bottle of wine and moulding little balls out of melted candle wax when Mark went to deal with the pudding.

  He reappeared in the doorway, sucking his fingers. “Have you doused this in petrol, Sam? It almost blew up in my face.”

  “Just light it,” she snapped, getting up from her seat. “What’s wrong with you? Oh, I’ll do it.”

  “Sit there,” Mark said, cross more suddenly than if he hadn’t been drunk.

  “Oh, this song!” Iris cried, toddling over to the hi-fi to turn up the volume. Nimrod booked out of the speakers. Peggy felt, quite distinctly, the glass tremble at her lips.

  Moments after Mark returned to the pudding (finding the sauce smouldering in the pan), Sally appeared in the dining room in her dressing gown, her hair fluffed up with static and clutching a stuffed koala bear to her chest.

  “Darling!” Iris predictably burst out and went scuttling for her carrier bags. Sally looked a little alarmed.

  Sam slammed down her glass and growled, “Would you once—just once—say something without the words ‘fabulous’ or ‘darling’ in it?”

  Yet it was Peggy who looked as if she had been slapped. And what made it worse for Peggy was that Iris didn’t respond at all to Sam. She simply stopped in her tracks, clutching her bag and smiling foolishly.

  Sam added, “And could you please stop talking about yourself all the time?”

  “Have you…” Peggy began tentatively, turning to Sally, “Have you come to see if Santa’s been?”

  Taking a deep breath, Iris smiled reassuringly and asked, “Sam darling, are you always this fabulously premenstrual?”

  “Dad!” Sally cried, coming to life as Mark carried the lit pudding into the room. He held it level with his shoulders so that his face and forearms were polished with a spectral gleam.

  “Ta-dah!” he announced. “And I think clever Mam’s gone and put coins and fortune cards in this, too!”

  I’m going to choke on this, thought Peggy, as Sam plopped a large spoonful of pudding into her bowl. Dimly she recalled all the other moments in her life when she thought something was going to choke her, and almost all seemed preferable to this one.

  “Aren’t you having any, pet?” Mark asked Sally.

  “Leave her. She’s opening her prezzies.” Iris pushed her own bowl under Sam’s nose and they all turned to look at Sally, on the rug in front of the television set, in piles of shredded colourful paper. She unwrapped her gifts as if still dreaming. She had decided to herself that she was still dreaming; Christmas had come hours early this year. If it was real Christmas the grown-ups would be watching her more closely.

  Sam finished dishing out and uncapped a bottle of gin. One of the comfortable, square bottles, the girth of which neatly fits the palm.

  “I’ve got a fifty-pence piece!” Iris shouted out. “Sally, you really ought to have some pud! You get free surprise money with every portion!” She waved the coin and the square of lilac paper it had been folded into. “And what’s written on this? Is it my fortune?” She read aloud, “’Age before Beauty’. What’s that supposed to mean? What have you got, Peg?”

  “Two pence.” Peggy shrugged. She looked at Sam, who shrugged too, and poured herself more gin. “And this says, ‘There’s no place like home’.”

  “They’re not fortunes,” said Iris, “they’re mottoes. We got it wrong. They don’t tell your future at all.” She paused in one of those curious moments of lucidity and doubt often brought on by alcohol, and added, “These aren’t about the future; these are about the way things are.”

  Sam let out a sharp yelp of laughter and raised her glass to her mother’s lover.

  “What do you have, Mark?” Peggy asked him gently.

  “No money.” He smiled sadly. “Just a piece of paper. Lots of writing, though, by the looks of it.” He began to unfold it.

  “What does Dad’s future say?” Sally asked from the carpet. “Mum, what does Dad’s future tell us?”

  Sam slipped back into the kitchen with her glass and the bottle.

  In the oven the lilac paper had turned brittle and crisp. It was charred slightly at the edges and botched with alcohol and grease stains. It was a letter than began, ‘Dear Mark,’ and continued the length of the sheet in Tony’s customary scrawl, the black ink burned a deep brown.

  “What is it, Mark? Quite a long, involved one?” Iris stopped, noticing his expression.

  Behind them all, the back door banged shut. Not loudly, now with any particular finality, but with a breezy negligence that left an awful silence in its wake.

  TWELVE

  IT HAS BEEN DARK FOR HOURS AND THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO till morning. On Christmas morning, traditionally, everyone tries to get up before it is fully light anyway. Parents are harassed into waking early. All over the estate tomorrow morning, lights will click on, orange squares of windows, beaded with frozen black dew, competing with frail red streetlamps, which buzz indecisively, wondering whether the night is really up.

  All over the estate, first cigarettes will be shakily lit, kitchen doors creak open to let eager dogs out and dogged cats in. First pots of tea will be brewed, too weak and too milky, poured in haste and abandoned to cool as other rituals exert their demands.

  Here, houses are very close to one another and the same rituals are gone through a thousand times over, within a few hundred square feet. Yet each family, still in their pyjamas, exchanging presents with the TV on and unwatched, will be entirely unaware of their neighbours that morning. Neighbours will had wished each other a merry Christmas the previous afternoon, when they were out with their kids to see the council Santa Claus come by their street on his lorry decked out with fairy lights. On Christmas Eve they locked and bolted their doors and will emerge only once tomorrow morning, to crush armfuls of used wrapping paper into their wheely bins.

  The council won’t remove a wheely bin that is too full to shut. The neighbours press down the paper harder, reflect on the waste, maybe even stand on it with their full weight. In a quiet moment, perched unsteadily on top of their binful, they might reflect upon the silence of the streets. It will be about eight in the morning, say, and although it isn’t a white Christmas, the tarmac is bright with untouched frost. Then they’ll go in, back to their hive of activity, nervous hilarity, disappointment and torpor. They won’t emerge properly until Boxing Day when, perhaps, it will be time to visit relatives across town.

  In the darkness before that dawn, it is almost like any other night. Even the twenty-four-hour garage opposite the flats is still open. The garage is new and under the white lighting its brickwork is a sickly colour and seems fake. As Sam wades over a churned-up field of long grass and brackish, part-frozen water towards it, she remembers the garage in the Noddy books and how it had been made of alphabet blocks or something. She recalls
Noddy stopping off for petrol, before he was hi-jacked and joy-ridden by the gollywogs, taken to the forest and ceremoniously gang-raped. Reading the sanitised version of this story to Sally recently, Sam had been disappointed by the changes. How much gin has she drunk tonight? She shudders and stamps her shoes clean on the garage forecourt.

  Inside the shop they’re playing Cliff Richard’s Christmas album and the girl at the cash desk is looking oddly at the man facing her. He taps his plastic card on the desk in what Sam would take to be a threatening manner.

  This shop is much too large for what they have to sell. This is all she can think in her state. Large white bottles of oil and pop, and about four flavours of crisps. And cigarettes, of course, which is what she is here for, but she takes one of each flavour of crisp anyway. When she is miserable sometimes, crisps seem the only thing. She thinks it has something to do with the noise; there’s nothing like stuffing yourself with loud food.

  She waits blearily in turn, eyeing herself in the mirror to one side of the till, behind the sweet racks. She looks a blotchy mess, of course, and begins to suspect she is looking into a two-way mirror. Something to do with safety, crime prevention, probably, since garages are so often in vulnerable spots. Into this mirror she mimes, “What the fuck are you looking at?” and to herself, insides lifting up in a pang of lust, “Crime prevention! If only I could find him now!” At this moment, having escaped the home, what she needs is someone entirely other.

  Luckily there is one other; an Other she has prepared earlier.

  The conversation between the cashier and the card-tapping motorist has begun to seep towards her now. The man’s vehemence has been reaching out, trying to draw her attention.

  “Fucking bastard. Fancy lying in wait. Lying in bloody wait. It isn’t on. Skulking in dark corners like a fucking pervert.”

  “They’re having a clampdown,” says the cashier a little nervously, yet managing to insinuate a you-should-have-known-better tone. “A clampdown on drunk driving. Haven’t you seen the adverts?”

  “Drunk! I’m not drunk! I’m steady as fuck! Look at that!”

  He held his hand still under her nose and enlisted Sam. “Am I pissed or what?”

  Sam, who was absolutely pissed, said, “Yes, but it shows up in your bloodstream. Or in what you breathe out…in the fumes. It shows up all right. The policemen always know best. They know what you’ve had.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said the man, “I agree with what they’re doing. Shouldn’t let lunatics at the wheel arseholed, knocking over bairns and what have you, but a decent, respectable man like me being pounced on, fucking pounced on in the night as I’m coming home—well, it makes me want to throw.”

  The cashier looked alarmed.

  Sam asked, “Where was this?”

  “What?”

  “Where are they lying in wait, did you say?”

  “That’s right; you’d better know where to slow down, too, lass. You’ve had a skinful as well, ’an’t you? They’re down by the Burn. In the layby before the bridge. There’s no bloody streetlamps, so you can’t see them sitting up there all night, as if they’ve nothing better to do on a Christmas Eve, the bastards.” He looked down at his hand suddenly. “I’ve snapped me fucking credit card now.”

  Blanching once more, the cashier looked towards Sam, who had taken the opportunity of slipping unnoticed, for the second time that night, out of the door.

  “LET HER COOL OFF, MARK,” IRIS SAID, SOBERING QUICKLY WHEN THEY realised Sam had stomped out.

  “She’s probably just gone out for a quiet cigarette,” Peggy added, as between them they ushered Mark over to the green settee. He was still clutching the letter from Tony in two hands before him, and both grandmothers were tactful enough not to ask what it was and why it should have whipped up such a storm.

  Mark couldn’t quite take in what the letter actually said. The fact it was a letter from Tony and that Sam had got to it first, and then served it up in such lavish circumstances, was enough to render him well-nigh catatonic.

  Solicitously Peggy hurried Sally back to bed to wait for morning. She whispered a few things as they went about magic letters from Father Christmas, and how Sally had witnessed part of the mysterious night-time magic that went on behind-the-scenes, unnoticed by children, each and every Christmas Eve. Sitting up in bed, Sally’s eyes widened in interest. Peggy improvised, “Yes, it was a magical letter from Santa saying that his sleigh has run out of petrol just out of town, and your mam has had to go out and help him get it started again. She’s good like that.”

  Sleepiness overcoming her, Sally repressed an expression of extreme scepticism and lay down.

  Mark’s eyes flickered backwards and forwards across the crackling sheet of paper, until he came to the phrase, “I’m coming back for you now.” It repeated itself over and over to him, making no sense whatsoever, until Peggy rejoined them and quietly put on another tape.

  “There’s another bottle of gin,” Mark mumbled. “Open it, would you?”

  “Two bottles of gin!” Iris exclaimed, and went to find it.

  “Mark, we’ll give you your present now,” said Peggy, reaching into one of her carrier bags. “It seems the thing to do.”

  “The thing to do,’ Iris repeated, “at this particular juncture.”

  “Right,” said Mark, with a forced smile, making himself fold the letter away into his jeans pocket. Iris passed him a full glass. I’ve been drinking for nearly twelve hours straight, he thought. What a long day! Then there was a heavy parcel on his lap and he mustered his smiles, flexing his fingers to unwrap it.

  “It may need some explaining,” said Peggy as she watched him work.

  Inside the parcel there was a leather case with a zip. Dismayed, Mark assumed it was shaving things. The way Sam seemed to discuss his shaving habits with everyone always dismayed him. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Open it,” prompted his mother-in-law. Over the rasp of the stiff new zip she and Iris exchanged a tense smile.

  Mark found his own eyes staring back at him from a compact mirror set into the opened case’s lid. They were surrounded by little squares of pastel colours, and beneath these were strapped a series of dainty brushes and tubes thick with what felt like some kind of unguent. Mark stared dumbfounded at his present.

  “We thought you might appreciate this,” Iris smiled. “We made sure we got most of the colours in suitable flesh tones.”

  “What’s it all for?” he asked at last, completely at a loss.

  “You see, Mark,” Iris sighed. “We understand that conspicuousness, while sometimes being a wonderful thing, can also at times conspire to be a drag.” This was a prepared speech, delivered with great aplomb. Mark blinked and reached for his glass. “So, now, basically, when you want to move about the populace undetected and unremarkable—”

  “You just slap on a little foundation, blusher and so on, and off you go!” cried Peggy, stealing Iris’s thunder.

  Realising what they were on about, Mark looked down again at the make-up case. “That’s so sweet,” he said and promptly burst into tears.

  “More drinks!” Iris called out, as if she were the sort to be embarrassed by overt shows.

  “THERE’S FREEZING MIST ON THE RIVER,” BOB SAID, WIPING CONDEN-sation off the windscreen.

  “It’s so parky,” said his friend, who was in the driving seat.

  “It’s too cold to snow,” Bob added.

  “It’s always too cold to snow.” His friend looked disgruntled. He poked about inside his lunch box for a while, then looked at his watch. “Nearly midnight. Happy bloody Christmas, Bob!”

  “Yeah; same to you.” Bob poured a drop of brandy each into their flask-tea.

  “I suppose what I mean, Bob, is that, just when it seems as if it’s cold enough to snow, it suddenly gets too cold and then it can’t snow. Like the sky needs unblocking.”

  “Yeah, right.” Bob looked at his watch. “Not much traffic.”

&n
bsp; “Just as well.” Bob’s mate sniffed, loud and long. Bob, who wasn’t usually sensitive about that kind of thing, shuddered. Sometimes it was hard work, traffic duty. Sitting long hours over the dashboard together, out in the night. Even tonight. Some of the married blokes down the station said they saw their wives less than their traffic-duty partners.

  It was a long, lonely job. Traffic duty does not encourage a vital inner life. But partners on these jobs developed a different rapport and adapted to one another’s bodily presence. They, for example, know how often the other had to go to the toilet. Tonight Bob and his mate had been taking turns to nip down the road to piss in the Burn. Traffic police even had to learn to fart without compunction sitting next to each other and, on cold nights like this, unwilling to wind down the windows. Luckily this night was a quiet one; it was a widely held belief in the force that the more exciting the car chase, the greater amount of farting went on. That’s something they never tell you on the telly, Bob thought.

  He said, “This road’ll be icing up tonight. Look at the mist. God help them if they come speeding down here tonight, the piss-heads. They’ll be straight in the Burn.” Thoughtfully he rubbed at his itching chin; his five o’clock shadow was now seven hours old.

  “I hope they don’t bump into us,” said his friend.

  “We can nip out of the way.”

  His friend looked sceptical.

  “I’ve been in the thick of some nasty dos,” Bob insisted. “Not a mark on me.”

  Nervously his mate went on fiddling with the remaining item in his lunch box, a very large orange he had left till last because it had been an unpromising look about it. He unpeeled it morosely, stopping to whisper “Shit!” when the all-in-one-piece rind fell to pieces in his hands. He asked, “Do you reckon I could get the whole of this orange in me gob, all in one go?”

  Bob sighed. “Shall we see what’s on the radio?” he asked as his mate prised the fruit into his mouth.