[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Two women were talking.

  “…hairy. I know. I said. You know what it’s like.”

  “Where does she live then?”

  “Up the posh end. Past Shildon. Near that pub where you sit outside and they bring you sausages.”

  “Like the continentals do?”

  “She had a conservatory put on.”

  “Has she, now?”

  “But when you go past on the bus you can see right the way through her house because of it. All the way to her front passage. Silly cow! How they could make her detective inspector when her house is a burglar’s paradise…”

  “It’s a select area, isn’t it?”

  “I’d never have selected it. There’s horses and all sorts in the fields there.”

  Irritably Bob switched them off. Beside him, his mate was moaning. He’s having a heart attack, Bob thought. Fuck! I wanted an exciting life on the force and here it is. Gossip and coronaries; fucking hell.

  Bob looked at his friend, who was now sitting quite still in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead as if he had seen something breathtaking in the middle of the black windscreen. Bob might have been tempted to check that nothing was out there, but he could see straight away what the problem was.

  “You’ve locked your bloody jaw, haven’t you?”

  His mate gave a terse nod, eyes bulging out only slightly less than the waxy orange half stuck out of his mouth. His lips were stretched like elastic bands, looking as if they were about to split. Bob felt like just getting out of the car and walking away.

  “You’re not having me on, are you?”

  Bob’s mate looked at him with the first signs of an angry panic snorting up in his nose. He stopped short, as if realising how close he was to suffocation.

  “Bloody hell! We’ll have to go to casualty.”

  His mate waved his hands no and spent some moments finding a pen to scribble on the back of a charge sheet, “You’ll have to suck it out.”

  “It’s an orange, not snake fucking venom.”

  The rising panic in his mate’s eyes, made worse by the dashboard’s baleful glare, seemed almost pleading to Bob. With an embarrassed cough and a glance around, Bob repositioned himself in the driver’s seat, cupped a hand round his mate’s neck for support, and hesitated, inching forward, over where to bite in first.

  WAITING UP FOR SAM, MARK, IRIS AND PEGGY WERE BECOMING A TOUCH maudlin.

  “The thought I can’t stand,” Peggy was saying, and the others listened carefully, “is that we…oh, I dunno…fool ourselves into making compromises. You know.”

  They all thought about this. Somewhere at the back of his mind, as he rubbed a forefinger into a square of eyeshadow, Mark was wondering how appropriate a conversation this was to be having just now. It wasn’t the sort of thing to be discussed between partners with others present, and he felt it might touch too rawly on his doings with Sam. Nevertheless, as these conversations most often tend to, it rumbled on under its own momentum.

  “What do you mean?” asked Mark, greasing the cogs.

  “Well…” Peggy stirred herself to be self-revelatory, quite forgetting that even as recently as this morning she had thought of Mark as less than trustworthy. “What I mean is that whatever we assume is good, whatever we think works, what we think we’re happy in…What if, really, we’re lying to ourselves?”

  “Oh, God!” Iris said, quietly aghast for a number of reasons.

  Mark bided his time, expecting to hear the groans of a very old chestnut being rolled around the room. He sat back and said, “The way to look at compromise is that it’s salvaging something, when if you didn’t, you’d probably end up with nowt.”

  Peggy blinked. “You needn’t tell me about compromise, Mark.” She bit her lip. She had overstepped the rules. Here, in this game, they were all equals. There could be no rank-pulling. “I’m on about something worse than simple compromise. That’s a day-to-day activity. If you don’t compromise all the time, then you’d have no character, no personality, no body at all. Identifying yourself, specifying yourself is all compromising; of course it is. You put up a good shopfront and flog it for all you’re worth.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Iris.

  “No, what I’m talking about here is fooling yourself. We’ve just been on about sex, right?”

  “Right.” Mark nodded, though he couldn’t remember. He hoped, vaguely, that he hadn’t put his foot in it.

  “That moment, think about that moment when you at last succumb to the charms of a new lover, wherever it is, in whatever circumstances.”

  Iris and Mark both thought hard.

  “What do you feel? Beside all the lust and anxiety and so on? Underneath it all?”

  Her audience looked blank. What was it they felt? As persistent and obvious as their own accelerated heartbeats? They both had their own ideas, yet were content for Peggy to vocalise them.

  “What you feel then is relief. That’s part of it. Like that ache, like a nostalgic ache; homesickness. It’s a parting grief, right at the start of an alliance. As if you were living your life backwards and the first moment of intimacy is experienced as the last ever. You know that ache? Your chest drum-tight inside? At this particular moment you invest so much that you make your own entire bodily and mental fabric drum-tight. You pull it all together in a vulnerably taut net for the other to fall onto. You feel relief that they are prepared to fall; fear that they’ll rip straight through.

  “But the thought I really hate,” said Peggy, and a tear slid down her stoic race, “is that the feeling I’ve called relief or fear is really only gratitude. That we are pitifully glad to make ourselves so vulnerable. We’re only too happy to see someone, anyway, fall in our direction.”

  She put down her glass. Mark and Iris put down their own glasses, as if following.

  “It’s warm in here,” said Peggy. “We need to take a walk around the block.”

  “Go out?” asked Mark.

  “We often go out walking at night,” Iris told him.

  “In the nude,” Peggy added. “You know we’re nudists?”

  Mark knew, but he was still shocked.

  “Would you mind awfully, Mark?” asked Iris. “Since Sam’s not here? We’d hate to miss our nightly ritual.”

  Dumbly Mark shook his head and Iris, beaming, stood and took off her scarlet cardigan. As Peggy went on talking, her lover removed layer after layer of woollies. Talking, Peggy was undressing too, folding her clothes and putting them neatly on the settee.

  “It’s like getting rid, for a little while, of the excess baggage. You’ve really no idea what it feels like, Mark.”

  “I’m sure I don’t.” He poured himself the last dribble of gin.

  “We all carry so much stuff around with us.”

  More shocking than the sight of Peggy’s bare breasts and limbs, to Mark, was Iris’s apparent shrinkage. Beside the messy heap of garments she had rapidly made, Iris was a shadow of her former self. The fat lady had dwindled away before his eyes and Iris herself was quite unaware that this might be surprising.

  She can only weigh about seven stone, Mark thought. Both grandmothers were now looking at him with blasé, almost bored expressions. And, despite Iris’s bodily revelations, Mark found nothing shocking about their nudity. They were just another part of the family, and this scene tested that feeling. Their pale flesh was no more alarming than a glimpse of his own bare feet.

  “Would you let us out, then?” Peggy smiled.

  Mark stood, carefully setting aside his make-up case and his glass, and, also careful, now that he wasn’t embarrassed.

  “Mark,” Iris said. “You carry a lot of baggage with you.”

  He nearly laughed. “I know I bloody do.”

  “Why not, just for an hour or so, drop it?”

  Mark found it odd, in a way, speaking to this new, terribly thin Iris. He frowned for clarification.

  “Why don’t you join us, out tonight?”

  “What
about Sally?” he asked immediately.

  Peggy waved a hand. “She’s asleep. We won’t be far. And naturally, we’re both witches. So I’ll cast a protective spell.”

  Gratefully he said, “I think you already have, Peg.” He gave a brief sniff of a laugh, looked down, then took off his shoes and socks.

  He said, “We’ve talked about making yourself vulnerable; and we’ve agreed that we do it all the time. Be we still find it hard to do, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” Iris said. “Don’t come out tonight if you don’t want.”

  His bare feet could mean equally that he was settled in for the night, or the opposite.

  “No,” he said. “I feel warm…and a bit, well, quite a lot pissed. If I can’t take off all my clothes and go for a walk in the middle of the night with two old dykes, what else would I do?”

  “That’s the spirit!” Peggy grinned as he pulled his shirt over his head and unstrapped his watch. “Absolutely cynical and absolutely sentimental at the same time. That’s the combination we like.”

  Peggy and Iris grasped hands for a moment, almost in pride, as Mark concentrated on stripping off his jeans and underpants. Almost a moment, too, of solidarity in the face of something alien to their nightly ritual; whether alien because his was a naked male body, a sexual other to them, or because his body was thoroughly tattooed, they wouldn’t have been able to say. But when Mark looked at them both with that silly, shy grin, and glanced quickly down as his own, oddly boyish body with its gangling limbs and quite small and sleepy cock, they felt a blush that was merely the envelope of warmth released from the private space around him, and it included them.

  “Ha’way, then,” he said. “Let’s hit the town.”

  THIRTEEN

  SHE FOUND HER POLICEMAN BUSY IN THE LINE OF DUTY.

  Skidding on sheer ice, Sam hurried down the hill to the layby. Relief glowed through her, making the gin in her belly bubble up in anticipation. Here was the police car she had been looking for tonight and, odds on, her Bob was in it, traffic-watching. She knew they put unmarried bobbies on the job during sacred holidays; they were missing less, they had fewer family ties. But Sam wanted Bob tonight.

  As she tottered closer to the panda, she peering in through the dark windows, hoping for a glimpse. She saw the white cords of his neck twisted round, the Adam’s apple working, as it did when he talked to her. She could watch the muscled intricacies of his body work all night and never hear a word, she said. She loved to watch him talk. And the dark fingers of hair spread down his neck; definitely Bob.

  Relief and savage joy picked her up like a weightless doll and flung her the last remaining steps to the car door. Her frozen fingers clutched at the handle and, with a swift scorch of adrenaline, she wrenched it wide open.

  This was a police car she was attacking! Imagine doing this if policemen were fully armed! She was risking her life and flouting the letter of the law, but only because she wanted to see Bob.

  Bob was caught at work, delicately nibbling away at segment after segment of the orange. For a quarter of an hour now, with his mate squirming and moaning beneath him, he had been popping the tiny cells of flesh between his teeth, sucking out the volume of juice slowly, painstakingly.

  Sam stared dumbfounded at this revealed tableau. Bob had swung round, mouth dripping orange juice, his whole face smeared and pith stuck in rags on his stubble. His mate still lay prostrated with the bulk of the fruit wedged solidly in place.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Sam demanded, appalled by unsure what, exactly, she was looking at.

  “What are you doing here?” Bob asked.

  She couldn’t figure this out at all. Bob’s amazingly serene tone and the stillness of the other man conspired to make her believe that she was the one out of the ordinary. For a moment she was about to close the door again, say goodnight and slip away.

  “I came looking for you,” she said. “I needed to see you.”

  “Right,” Bob said. “Get in the back.”

  Sam was watching his throat work out of habit as he talked. She could see he was angry, and so she complied.

  “I’ll see to you next,” he said as Sam got in and sat quietly on the cold back seat. “I’ve got this stupid fucker to sort out first.”

  His mate gave a low growl of complaint, but Bob shot him a warning glance. At last Sam asked, “What’s happening, exactly?”

  Bob ignored her and examined his friend again. “I think I’ve made it worse.” His mate whimpered a single note of inquiry. “I think I’ve pushed it further in.”

  Sam was beginning to wish she had braved it out at home. She wasn’t up to having another facet of Bob revealed to her tonight.

  “Sit back,” he told his mate. “We’ll have to change seats. I’ll drive you to hospital.”

  “Hospital?” echoed Sam.

  “Put your seatbelt on,” Bob snapped at her and climbed out of the car, motioning to his mate to move seats. His friend looked glum, acquiescent and, as he struggled over the clutch, supremely uncomfortable.

  We’re going to the hospital, thought Sam woozily, and settled back in confusion. Bob took the driver’s seat and started the engine. As the wheels ground into the hard frost of the layby, Sam concentrated on the pleasingly aggressive noise of the motor and was content to be born along for a while, slumped in the back seat, during somebody else’s drama.

  “IT’S SO WARM!” MARK GRINNED, LINKING ARMS WITH THE TWO OLD dykes. And it was; he couldn’t work out how. They were walking the perimeter path of the estate, quite sedately. As they passed under each streetlamp he felt they were giving off a radiation as gentle as the lamps.

  “It’s just the gin,” Peggy said.

  “And the female bonding!” cried Iris.

  The houses were dark and built like shoe boxes. At night they seemed the size of shoe boxes, as if, driving past, you could stretch out a lazy limb and scatter them across the ground. There was no one around to notice the walkers tonight.

  Beside the estate, the fields rolled dark and static with frost, pressed under a weight of violet cloud. The town clock rang out the odds and only then, as the hour reminded Mark of Sam’s running out, and of Sally being in by herself, did he give an involuntary shiver. The soles of his feet were hard, glass slippers on the tarmac, his fingers so cold that if he bit his fingernails now he would expect them to snap, and his balls felt as if they’d knotted right up inside out of consternation, as a plane taking off retracts its wheels.

  They passed into the older streets with their bristling high hedges and patios left alight for Santa Claus. Once, a dog came sniffing out of an alleyway, saw them from afar and bolted. They were approaching the town centre and still hadn’t seen anybody real.

  “I never meant us to come out this far,” said Peggy. “Isn’t it a pleasant night?”

  “I can’t believe we’ve walked so far into town like this,” Mark breathed.

  “It’s quite a coup,” Iris cackled.

  “But naked!” Mark was starting to be shocked by himself.

  Iris stopped to look him up and down. He was suddenly acutely conscious of his shrinkage. “Just look at yourself,” she told him. “You’re not more naked now than anybody ever is when they’re out.”

  She left him to absorb this as they walked on in their threesome. Through the town centre, Mark glanced less and less covertly at himself in the darkened shop windows.

  There he was, as he imagined himself in his best dreams, authentic in a public space in his own private markings. Iris and Peggy exchanged another of their swift, proud glances as he looked over his shoulder to see the extent of the drawings down his back.

  “I look wonderful,” he said to the twin pale figures who had led him to this. They were outside the subdued window display at Woolworth’s and Mark gave a slow twirl. “It all looks wonderful. I never thought I’d ever see all of myself, together.”

  The three of them breathed in their spiced moment of epiphany. They knew the
se things didn’t come about too often.

  Then, without particular displeasure, they realised the moment had been broken by the hum of an approaching car.

  “I DON’T BELIEVE THIS!”

  “Mmm?” asked Bob’s mate.

  “All bloody night sitting with nowt happening.” Fiercely he swung the car to the left.

  “What is it?” asked Sam, sitting forward, stomach lurching with the panda.

  “First him and that orange, then you, Sam, and now this. All hell suddenly breaks loose. What a bloody nightmare!”

  He hauled the car to an abrupt stop in the middle of the street. His headlights picked out three luminous bodies outside Woolworth’s.

  They stood in the mesmerising glare of his discovery, not in the least bit startled. “Look at this lot,” Bob spat in disgust.

  Sam began to throw up noisily in the back seat. Bob’s mate gagged on the fumes and the stuck remains of his packed lunch.

  SALLY HAS ALWAYS SLEPT WITH HER WINDOW OPEN. OF COURSE IT IS a chancy business on this estate. The last thing Mark does each night before going to bed is to check each window in the flat, especially the easily forgotten one in the bathroom. But ever since she was old enough to argue, Sally has insisted on having hers open while she sleeps. She can’t breathe otherwise, she says.

  Late at night Mark goes through the routine of sealing up the flat, locking the door and putting a kitchen chair behind it, and sometimes he will stop and listen to, perhaps, the slow moan of the wind through Sally’s window.

  Tonight she is awake and the air is cool and still. She is thinking over the whole business of Christmas Eve, and starting to regret that she doesn’t have a stocking set out for Santa Claus. At school some of the kids were talking last week about leaving out wine, mince pies and some carrots for the reindeer. Sally kept her mouth shut, wondering how the kids didn’t work out that reindeer would never get through the door to eat carrots.

  The moonlight is flat on her rows of cuddly toys; bears, gorillas, koalas, cats. Its progress across the room is stilted by piles of books. She has no bookshelves yet and her collection is scattered, some resting open, ready for other bedtimes.