[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Richard gave a breezy, overplayed chuckle, and said, “Shouldn’t you be going now? Remember what Tony said?”

  Simmonds slammed a cup and saucer down on the table. He had been about to pass it to Mark. Enunciating very clearly, he said, “I’ll leave when I decide, miss. You’ve not got this place over my dead body yet. I’m making tea for our guests. Then I’ll go.”

  “I can make tea,” Richard said, entirely reasonably.

  “Yes,” Simmonds said. “I know.” He examined his knuckles thankfully for a moment, and reached a decision. “Make your fucking tea, then.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen. He stopped in the low doorway and hissed, “Queens!”

  Sally was playing with the dog under the table by then, and Richard has happily fetching the sugar. “What was that about?” Mark asked.

  “Mad as a bloody hatter.” Richard shook his head. “You saw. Resents me, Tony, whatever Tony does. But he’s the man with the money. Or he used to be. Jesus!” He wiped his sugared fingers down his apron after spilling the packet into a bowl. He’s rattled, Mark thought, worse then he’s letting on. “You’ll get used to our ways here. I know it looks completely loopy right now. You think it’s all right, don’t you, Sally love? We’ve had a lovely day together.”

  “Leeds is great, Dad. Can we move?” she asked, looking up from under the table. Even she was different, brighter, almost vivacious. “Have I missed Christmas Day?” she added, with one of her more familiar, peculiarly adult expressions.

  “Honest, I had no idea what you were going through. I thought she was on a legitimate visit. Mark, isn’t it? Tony’s talked about you.”

  “Has he?” Mark couldn’t keep the coldness out of his voice. Richard was merely implicated, there was no need to freeze him out. For the moment Mark could only look at how he was being construed in all this—the furious, bereft father storming into the antique collector’s priceless haven, kicking up a fuss. Richard’s shy deference puzzled him, too. Richard saw him as the straight man, vengeful, rightfully so, a breeder on the rampage. Mark was furious at himself for thinking that Richard was actually quite sweet: that offhand shyness was balanced by real concern. Mark was the one being strong, that was how Richard saw it, but all Mark wanted now was to cling to Richard’s apron and ask for some comforting.

  He was surprised. Richard smiled again gently, handing him the tea. “I think it’ll be all right,” he said, adding, “The phone’s right beside you.”

  “PEGGY!” THE SHRIEK RANG THROUGH THE HOUSE.

  Peggy was in the bath and came lumbering down the hall to meet Iris.

  “I’ve got the address. She’s with Mark. She’s perfect. I mean, she’s safe, happy…she’s all right!”

  Peggy grasped Iris to her and gave her a soaking. “Oh, God! Oh…my Orlando.”

  SAM WAS ASHEN-FACED, EXHAUSTED. THE PHONE SLIPPED FROM HER grasp and hit the carpet. Carefully Bob replaced it and didn’t dare ask what had been said.

  A few second passed and then she looked up.

  “It’s an address in Headingley. We’re going tomorrow. Will you drive?”

  SIXTEEN

  SALLY HAD BEEN GIVEN A ROOM THAT HAD ONCE BEEN A SORT OF DRESSING room adjacent to Mark’s. At first he insisted on keeping her where he could see her.

  “She’ll be all right,” Richard told him, showing them round upstairs. The ceilings were too high here as well. Mark couldn’t help feeling intimidated.

  Since Simmonds had gone off into the night, the atmosphere had lightened. Dinner was in the warm kitchen. Richard produced food from the cupboards and the narrow fridge and they sat by candlelight, talking quietly and laughing. They were like three children with the grown-ups away; Sally was pleased they could stay up so late.

  Richard had opened some wine and Mark did something he had never believed he would that night: he got happily drunk. After Richard had shown him where Sally would sleep, within his earshot, and they had seen her to bed, they went back to the kitchen, drank some more and screamed with laughter at Mark’s story about Christmas Eve, the bits about the walkabout and the orange in the copper’s mouth.

  The tension had gone. Everything that had tightened and tightened and then burst into disaster over the last few days was suddenly erased. When Mark reflected on the events leading up to Christmas, he marvelled that he had never seen the danger signs. Sam had been flaunting them. He saw that now. She had worn them appliqued on every word and gesture during the whole month’s run-up to Christmas. Even that final, patronising kiss on the chest had been an act of sarcasm. Gradually, Mark came to the realisation that Sam had been looking for a reason to leave him. That fitted. It really made sense. The mad letter from Tony she had found gave her the perfect excuse.

  He was smiling, confirming this to himself, when Richard ducked back into the kitchen, clumsily uncorking a bottle with the wrecked opener and a teatowel. “What’s so funny?”

  “Not funny,” Mark said. He wore the smile of someone about to make a major life change, the sort of smile he had seen on Oprah during afternoons home with the telly. “Just sort of pleasing.”

  “Good,” Richard said, pouring.

  “So what’s the set-up here?”

  Richard’s face darkened momentarily. Then he blushed, and they both laughed. “I’m never quite sure,” he admitted. “But whatever it is these days, Mr Simmonds just isn’t happy with it.”

  “No?”

  “Well, you saw how he was. They got me in about a year ago, to look after the house. They go about all over the place, selling stuff. I don’t know much about the business, though I’m supposed to be learning. I was hand-picked to carry on the family firm.”

  “Here’s to happy families!”

  “Yeah, right. To both of ours, invented or otherwise.”

  “So what’s Tony like now?”

  The younger man rubbed his eyes with a sigh. He looked tired. Mark realised that Richard had spent quite a lot of time in Sally’ company, and he knew how conversations with her could go on and on, once they started. Once she knew you were interested, there was no letting up. Richard looked wrecked. But Mark needed some advanced warning about Tony.

  “You do know,” Richard said, “that the minute he gets back, he’ll harass me for the same information about you?”

  “We’re not playing bloody courting games,” Mark said. “He kidnapped my fucking daughter! He’s lucky I’ve not had the police in and—”

  “Well, he knew you wouldn’t do that.”

  Sinking back into his chair, Mark said, “I thought he was still in prison. He wrote me letters for years pretending that he was.”

  “A little game. They’re always playing games here.”

  “It’s just so bloody weird.”

  “I suppose it is,” Richard admitted. “And it’s wrong to include people from outside, like you and your family. It’s bad enough when its just indoor games, when they’re fucking up each other’s minds, and my mind. But we’re all willing victims of it, here. Even I am.” Solemnly Richard swished his glass. “I’m no innocent. I wasn’t in the first place.”

  “Why do you stay here?”

  “It’s a job.” He shrugged. “A bloody good job. You want to see the money going through this place. And if you’re on the inside here, there’s no questions that it’s yours as well. It’s a family. We’ve had some lovely times. No, we really have. It’s a different world to where I’m from. And…I reckon I love Tony a bit, too.”

  Mark nodded. “I can imagine.”

  “It’s weird, the relationship I have with him. It’s like most of the time he takes my personality, everything I am, then raises it to the nth power. He elevates me. Other times, he blasts straight through it and I’m a body, a thing for whatever he feels like doing. I just assume that’s how it is with older men.”

  “It’s how it is with Tony. It was that way with me, and we were together at the same age. I’ve never had an older man, I must admit.”

  “Well, you’ve
been on the straight and narrow for a while now, haven’t you? In fact—” Richard’s eyes were mischievous—”you’re now in the position to be an older man yourself.”

  Mark choked. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  SALLY SLEPT DEEPLY IN A CYLINDRICAL DRESSING ROOM WHOSE SINGLE wall bore a spiralling shelf. Sally slept surrounded by an interminable coil of books, and she dreamed of a Möbius strip. She dreamed of climbing a friendly gradient, stopping here and there to browse through other people’s stories. She dreamed and dreamed so completely, so far from the rest of her life, that images from this night would recur at scattered moments throughout the rest of her formative years. But she would never put them in any kind of order.

  That night in the converted dressing room, however, the world was hermetically sealed, complete and replete with each answer she would ever need.

  “MUSIC!”

  In the half-dismantled dining room, Richard found a wind-up record player. They danced together for a while, until it was about four in the morning.

  SEVENTEEN

  DRUNK THIS TIME, MARK WASN’T ABOUT TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. He hadn’t meant to get like this again. At one point, dancing in the dining room with Richard, feet scraping on hollow wood, he thought, I can’t handle it if this is another epiphany.

  Getting drunk could bring on disaster. You widened out and out and embraced everything; you said anything you liked, did anything you felt, and hoped the world would relieve you of responsibility. This night, too, he could feel his sympathies widening and knew at the back of his mind that he couldn’t afford to let them. He was still here on a mission.

  Richard was by turns diffident and keen. This night could go any way they fancied, really, with little lost either way.

  But Mark knew that upstairs Sally slept in the circular room, and when they reached four o’clock all he wanted to do was fall asleep outside her door. He wanted to guard her room tightly with the full weight of his body, until morning came and they could leave. It was time to shut down and wait until sensible action was called for and could resume. Tonight was not the time nor place for giving anything away.

  Richard shrugged as Mark reeled away from him, tangling his feet in the dirty canvas sheet where the assorted objets were laid out. Mark explained that he needed to sleep. His ‘goodnight’ was one of those very polite ones, resolute yet fond, and could be taken by the younger man as a final word on, and even a betrayal of, the atmosphere they had summoned up between them. Richard showed him up and Mark was so intent upon the thought of being a dead weight of protection for Sally, listening in his stupor all night for her breathing through the door, that he was now no longer conscious of Richard as anything but a guide to that resting place.

  “In here,” Richard reminded him, patting his shoulder as Mark slid past into the warm room. Richard switched on the bedside lamp and then was gone, the door clicking behind him.

  Once in bed, Mark screwed himself up tight in the bedclothes and listened. Nothing; but her room was lined in books, he recalled, and insulated. With his night vision tilting side to side and his breath rattling in his chest, stertorous as though he were already asleep, he went to her door, opened it a crack and checked she was there. She was: a half-moon of pillow-reddened face showed under mussed-up hair, the fat fingers clutching an opened book over the covers.

  Mark slumped back into bed and wound himself up secure, making his presence as stolid as he could. When he closed his eyes he felt everything tip slowly into the mattress; nothing would stop the inexorable slide other than keeping his eyes open and lying quite still, in a vigil. He didn’t know how far the dark slide would take him but he was sure it wouldn’t be into a contented sleep. So he lay still on his side with heart palpitations, able to make out the room’s single round window, high upon the wall across from him.

  “Let’s see what’s through the round window today.”

  Sally was too young ever to have watched Playschool. That seemed a shame. She hadn’t seen The Clangers, either, Hector’s House or Tales of the Riverbank. She didn’t have much patience with what there was on kids’ TV these days. Either it was way above her head or way below it. Mark watched with her sometimes to get her interested, but it all seemed to be teenage boys in dance bands parading about with opened shirts and only their underpants on. Sally grew bored and wandered off to do something else. She’d be absorbed in a drawing when Sam came in from work, and Mark would still be watching Take That in action. Sam would tut.

  When he heard the patter of tiny feet on the room’s bare boards, he thought he was merely inventing it. Then he thought Sally was up and about. But she was heavier than that. Having woken up, she, like her father, tended to lumber about. She had inherited his heavy sleeping; they ate breakfast, mornings, in companionable silence, as if each mulling over the night’s images.

  These were tiny, deliberately footfalls in his room, and Sally’s door was still safely shut. Somebody was being extra careful. They could be the sound of a long, long approach; carefulness from a very great distance. He lay still and vaguely enjoyed the thoughtfulness and respect of whoever it was.

  Then, a terrible creak of floorboards. Something was definitely up. He had to do something, now; anybody with any sense would. The sound of weight on old wood was close by him and required reaction. Slowly Mark drew back the covers and lay ready to jump up. His body was knotted with that back-breaking tension of being disturbed in the middle of the night.

  He was looking out into the dark, but the round window gave out only a narrow channel of milky light, showing a harmless chair in the corner. Mark felt a hand touch lightly on his shin. He wouldn’t look. There was no sound, no breathing yet; nothing palpable other than the hand, and then another, pausing and then pushing a little weight on him to see what he would do.

  They were caught in a deadlock; he refused to do anything until the hands declared responsibility by manifesting a full presence. The hands waited there as if for an invitation. Mark could believe, there in the dark, that their owner existed in some other place, in another dimension. The signals he was getting from his body were now so muffled by alcohol and exhaustion that he felt he had no responsibility towards them; it was all a million miles away.

  One of the hands reached a decision and moved the length of him, removing itself at his thigh, hovering, pondering; the other was still at his knee, as if waiting to hear from its mate.

  Summoning his breath, Mark asked, “Richard?”

  Both hands left him for a second and Mark thought they were gone. Then one palm was pressed down on his chest, fingers slow and questing; the other hand rejoined him tentatively at the tip of his erection. He hadn’t known he had one; he was so distant by now that it could have been something supplied by that returning hand.

  When one touched his face in a caress, he felt the slight brush of fabric; the hands wore gloves. As he arced his spine and it cracked, he was twisting slightly, raising himself. The hand worked steadily, worked him off in a sure, palpating grip. Both hands were stark white.

  A slow hiss of suppressed breath could be heard now under the gasps Mark felt himself giving out. One hand roamed his face and neck and pushed him down against the pillows suddenly as he came.

  The deep slide into unconsciousness began again and the two hands reunited themselves to smear sperm across his stomach and chest, easing him to sleep with a balm of his own making.

  THE MOON WAS STILL OUT, BUT BOB WAS USED TO EARLY STARTS. WHILE he waited in the car he had the engine turning over nicely, his first fag on the go and Radio One turned up. He hung one arm out of his window and drummed on the paintwork, relishing the cold now that the car was warming through inside.

  The could keep this day in some perspective if only he regarded it as just another day’s work. He was trained to cope with emergencies and that was exactly what today was. He was a policeman and knew how to draw himself back from other people’s panic and act sensibly. That was all he had to do today, ke
ep a cool head on. He would get them through. He just had to drive, act as a soothing influence and not allow himself to pick up Sam’s bristling air of rage and worry. If he got sucked into that, he’d be no use at all to her.

  The moon was set in a blue so tender it forced the early starts to squint away. Its fresh resilience shamed their tiredness. Bob felt cramped and knotted up with tension; he had indigestion from bolting his breakfast and leaving the house without a cigarette. Sitting in the car park, he waited for Sam, Iris and Peggy to finish their business in the services, and watched the sky.

  Sam had instructed him last thing last night that Iris and Peggy would be coming with them. She had obviously thought it through and decided that he couldn’t leave them out. When they pulled up outside Iris’s cottage this morning, in the waning dark, Bob had been slightly nervous of them. He needn’t have worried; they were much too preoccupied to think anything of him.

  “This is Bob,” Sam had said pointedly as they froze on the front doorstep. She refused to enter Iris’s house.

  Peggy had given him a quick once-over. “Thanks for offering to drive us,” she said.

  He wondered, perhaps she felt as daft as he did. She was the one, after all, he’d seen wandering around starkers. She was probably grateful he hadn’t run them in. It was well within his powers. She looked the sort, really, who would respect the police and take well to having one as a son-in-law. At least she would know then that her daughter and grandchild were safe.

  Nothing else had been said about or to him. The women spoke to each other or not at all. All this made it easier for Bob to exert his reassuring stoicism.

  Would this be how things would carry on when all this had blown over? He wouldn’t mind if it was. He knew how families of women worked and knew how to find his place in them. Men were best off keeping quiet and out of it; relied upon, gently mocked but, all in all, respected. In the first half-hour of this morning’s trip he had already sussed that this was how this lot worked.