[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  It was much the same with his own family; the three aunties and his grandmother. They were fiercely tight-knit, in and out of each other’s houses. They cooked for each other, took things round, and never quite knew whose crockery belonged to whom. His father had always been there, unassuming but strong. It just seemed the way to be.

  Bob had got used to being or not being fussed over by the women. He had gone through a fallow period when he was no longer a child, and felt it resume when he joined the force and moved to his own place. The ladies were delighted by their boy in a uniform. But they did want to know when he would bring home another woman. In the past couple of years he had felt the need for that fond respectfulness that his father had thrived on. Being celebrated as the ladies’ clever, brave boy wasn’t good enough for ever, really.

  He imagined all their lives settling down into another pattern, and hoped he had it right. The way he saw it, it was going to get better, and they would see that he was right.

  It gave him a glow of pleasure, anticipating the rightness of how things might turn out. Of course Mark was wrong for Sam; that was one of the things about these lives that was just so wrong. Bob was amazed, really, that they couldn’t any of them see it. There was nothing reassuring or stoically strong about Mark. Observed from afar, admittedly, he looked unreliable. Those tattoos of his shrieked his unworthiness, right across the road those few times Bob had caught glimpses of him, while he was sitting out in his car. Oh, Mark might have been doing things like picking up Sally from school, or a few bits of shopping, quiet domestic things, but Bob wasn’t tricked. To him Mark was the epitome of a suspected felon. Christmas Eve confirmed it, really. Bob was used to meeting people in strange, calamitous circumstances; that was when the stresses in their characters showed, and that first meeting with Mark had confirmed everything for him. Mark was the sort who needed an eye kept on him.

  Bob remembered his mam playing cards once, on a Saturday night. She showed him how to make a card house. He must have been about eleven. His sisters were all at the age when they liked to go out, and his mam had felt sorry for him. She devised things for them to do on Saturday nights. Those were the days when she wore a black wig; they were fashionable then. When he had been quite a bit smaller he had pulled at it carelessly and brought it off. He had run screaming from the room, thinking he had pulled her whole head off. His mam and sisters brought this up for years afterwards, shaking with laughter at him.

  The card house had grown bigger and bigger on the nest of tables. His mother watched the telly through it and stacked up storey after storey. When she finished, she had run through two decks of well-used cards. She turned and smiled at him. He hardly dared to move.

  “Now, son,” he said, “you knock it down.”

  “You want me to?”

  “It’ll happen sooner or later,” she said. “The slightest breeze when you open the door. It’s best to do it yourself, and then build it back how you want. The fun is in seeing how it all comes down.”

  Bob took a deep breath and blew it down. His mam applauded.

  The force had changed him, she told him seriously, after his first six months; but she knew that would happen. So long as he remembered where he had come from. His sisters looked at him with new respect, as did his aunties. His father even seemed cowed by him.

  Then he started coming in drunk after training. He fell out of the patio window and lay bleeding in the garden in the dark. New, painted veins ran up his arms, down his shirt and trousers when his mother came running down to find him, twitching on the grass. She didn’t even have to open the door to get to him; the patio had been done on the cheap and he had wrecked it.

  “Come on, then,” she said, looking at him, “let’s see you put this one back together,” before rushing in to phone an ambulance.

  And he had. He’d pulled himself together and made a success of his life. Bob felt at times that the only thing in life, the only thing you needed to know, was how to gain a woman’s respect. With that you could do anything. As far as he was concerned, women ruled the world. They made you powerful when they were proud of you, and you needed that power to make the world tick. And the world ticked, steady and strong as the motor before him, the rhythm of the song on the radio.

  The moon was shading out now, licked over by tatters of cloud. Other cars were pulling out of the services and resuming their journey. Her indigestion was settling; he was eager to be getting on.

  “AT LEAST SHE ASKED US. SHE NEEDN’T HAVE BOTHERED. IN FACT, I thought she would have refused if we asked her.”

  “You’re right,” Peggy said. “But I couldn’t see her refusing, though. She couldn’t’ve. Not today. Sally’s more important that our squabbles. She’s part of both of us, Sam and me.”

  In her own cubicle Iris sighed and tugged her knickers back up. They had been calling out over the partitions. Peggy felt a bit uncomfortable in this, even though they were both sure that they’d heard Sam clip-clop across the tiles out of the ladies’. She’d gone off to buy Extra Strong Mints for the journey. Her stomach was playing up with anxiety and her breath was vile. Not the best condition for a reunion with her daughter.

  Peggy did wonder how Sam would feel about seeing Sally again. She tried to imagine how it would happen. Sally’s disappearance had knocked Sam entirely for six. It had been a long time since Peggy had seen Sam so distraught—not since childbirth itself, and before that, the night of the accident when her friend was killed. It took a lot to get to Sam. She flew easily into tempers, but Peggy knew there was a calm about her, deeper down, that hardly anything touched. Sometimes that inner, still resourcefulness could disturb Peggy. It had first appeared when her father, Peggy’s husband, died. Sam hadn’t really batted an eyelid. But then, she’d hardly known him, really. She’d been so young. Peggy doubted that Sam even remembered her father now. She’d never really missed him.

  Peggy had never had any compunction about peeing in front of her husband. Or, indeed, had he with her. When they were first married, they had alternate bath nights and took turns to keep each other company with chat, sitting on the toilet, and never standing on ceremony when nature called. He always said that if you really loved someone, you could watch them do anything. Even defecate, he added solemnly, down on his knees as he asked for her hand and proffered his ring. After all, God saw everything you did. Why, then, shouldn’t the person you loved?

  The funny thing was, Peggy reflected as they left their respective cubicles and washed their hands in silence, she’d never actually peed in the same room as Iris. She’d never been to Leeds before, either.

  “Anyway,” said Iris brightly, “we’re going, and we’ll be there by lunchtime.”

  Iris had pulled herself together somewhat overnight, and was back in thicker clothes, padding herself out to her usual bulk. She had begun, once more, to bustle around looking organised and busy without actually doing anything. What irritated Peggy slightly was that she was wearing a wide-brimmed blue hat, as if she were going to a wedding.

  They went to fetch Sam from the shop. They looked through the glass, past the cashier. Iris picked her out and they watched. Sam was standing awkwardly, her face screwed up in indecision, before rows and rows of cuddly toys. She didn’t know what to choose. One hand held a ten-pound note and the other jabbed tentatively at grinning puppies, rabbits, bears, as if she knew she must take one, but wasn’t sure how they’d react to being picked out and carried away.

  EIGHTEEN

  SINGLEMINDEDNESS HAD EVAPORATED WITH THE FROST ON THE GRASS through the kitchen window. Somehow he couldn’t snap at Simmonds as he ranted and chattered endlessly.

  The events of the night pressed a weight of guilt on Mark. Sitting in the kitchen, he smiled and smoked and sipped his tea as he waited for Sally to wake up and come down to breakfast. He couldn’t bring himself to yell, “Fuck off and fetch Tony, I’ve had enough of this.” He couldn’t do anything until she showed up, grumpily awake once more, her face drowsy as sleep a
nd warm as cheese on toast.

  So I can smile and be a villain, Mark thought—though he couldn’t snag the memory attached to that quotation. It was appropriate enough, however. Did he really feel like a villain? He turned the word over like a pebble, weighing the butter knife in his hand and watching the old man chunter on, obliviously. Did last night make Mark a villain?

  Secretly he marvelled at his ability to turn so blithe. It seemed the height of adventure; a sexy foray into a more exotic life. Fancy coming to a house at night in the middle of nowhere, rescuing his kidnapped daughter, and then succumbing to anonymous, extravagantly casual sex with a beautiful stranger.

  The breakfast service was the very best. He was being kept like a king this morning. The old man had turned up in a better mood and was serving and supplying conversation, eager to be nice. He was sickly-nice, Sam would say, as she did about many people she met through work. She knew what sickly-nice was, and warned Mark about it. But Mark fell for it every time. He couldn’t see her taking to Simmonds, nor to Richard, for that matter, when she arrived.

  They’d be on their way by now. Here he was, buttering more toast, right in the spot where two worlds were about to collide. This was another lull before the storm. He imagined raised voices here in the old, tiled kitchen, demands and recriminations. Nothing would be the same afterwards.

  Sam would turn up to find that Mark literally had his feet under the table. She’d perceive him as changing sides, perhaps. His skin irked; she knew how to inject the slow poison of guilt. He’d been sent down here as an avenging angel and, of course, he’d had his feathers ruffled. She couldn’t trust him to do anything right. He had fallen badly, feathers crushed under the weight of a single pair of deft and expert hands.

  And Mark thought of the white gloves in the room with the single round window, the hands that had played him like a piano, and how perfect that had been. It was a seductively simple model of the way he wanted things to be: protecting and protected, with passion stealing in from nowhere and leaving before first light.

  The realisation made him feel even more guilty. A vision of what he wanted was what he could do without when his real, ordinary world walked in through the door. It was time to shrink himself back down to fit the space allotted to him.

  Simmonds was gesturing to him. “Come with me, come. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Mark hadn’t been listening at all. He followed the old man out of the back door and up the black metal fire escape that reach to the top of the house, clinging to the very eaves. Again Simmonds proved nimble in his hi-tech trainers, clumping hard on the steps and bringing down icicle showers on Mark as he followed, too perplexed to question where they were going.

  At the top there was a platform and from here they could see the width and breadth of Headingley and, beyond, Leeds, expressed in a shallow grey and brown bowl of jumbled shapes. Smoke rolled over, merged with winter clouds, as if the city were crystallising carbon monoxide for fun and relishing the spectacle of its vast exhalations.

  When Mark looked at Simmonds with a question on his face, he noticed the round window of his own room, right by the old man’s knees. I was sleeping at the top of the house, he thought, right at the top of the city. But he, in the end, hadn’t had to let down his hair to bring up the prince, a skinhead Rapunzel with a fire escape for back-up.

  “Yes, that’s your room,” Simmonds said quickly. “Did you sleep well?”

  Embarrassed by the old man’s wheedling, conciliatory tone, and not wanting to give himself away, Mark nodded curtly.

  “No—heh—visitors in the night?”

  Mark kept stony-faced, gripped the railing and stared out over the city.

  “That room—that whole floor of the house, in fact—used to be a factory, you know. It was bought in 1933 by the men who made false teeth for the whole of Yorkshire. They turned out thousands of tiny casts and posted them to dentists in immaculate parcels. Somewhere we’ve got all the casts they used to use. You’d never imagine there’d be so much variety in teeth.

  “They bought the floor off the Methodists, who’d been holding services and a Sunday school here since 1903. I used to come here three times on a Sunday when I was small, and here was where I learned to play the organ. When I bought the house from the Tooth Fairies in 1964, I sold that organ for a huge sum. I’ve even had offers for the Tooth Fairies’ cast-off casts. Isn’t that extraordinary?

  “But people will have anything if you put a price on it. You can, if you are deemed an expert, place value on absolutely anything, simply by privileging it with a single glance. People look to see where you are looking and suddenly they are interested, too.

  “Their interest is piqued. That’s such a good word. Is your interest piqued, Mark?”

  He shook his head as if to clear it and spoke without looking at the old man. “I’m bloody confused, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But are you intrigued?”

  Mark thought. “I’m too easily intrigued. I get drawn in.”

  “I thought so!” Simmonds clapped his hands. “Then we’re alike, you and I. You see, when a value is laid on an object, others follow the gaze, and a conflict of interests is bound to result. And who can unpick the crosscurrents of desires that engulf the poor, stranded piggy-in-the-middle? This is when people get jealous, you see.”

  Frowning, Mark looked at him. “And who, exactly, is piggy-in-the-middle here?”

  “Oh,” Simmonds said lightly, “I’m not drawing an explicit analogy. I hope I have more taste than to be as crass as that. I’m not a didactic man, not at all. Like any connoisseur, I like merely to suggest. If you can impute any meaning at all, set any value on what I imply, then that is up to you. As for who is piggy-in-the-middle…? Well, my dear, out of each of us implicated in this sorry debacle…I would say that we all are, wouldn’t you?”

  When would the piggies be sent to market? Mark wondered. He had heard enough and wanted to get back downstairs.

  “Did Tony come to you last night?” The old man’s eyes were bright as a cat’s.

  “No,” Mark replied. “I haven’t seen him yet at all. That’s the point. I haven’t seen him at all.”

  The old man looked shocked for a moment, as if a plan he had assumed was working had fallen to pieces in his hands. “I thought he had. I thought that was the gleam in your eye. I thought he was with you last night.”

  Mark shook his head and grunted. He turned to go back down the fire escape, not wanting to tell Simmonds anything about it. No sense in giving yourself away to strangers.

  At the bottom, in the frozen garden, he came face to face with Richard.

  “Good morning!” Richard called out to them both, smiling warmly at Mark.

  Simmonds shuffled past them, returning to his usual querulous self, heading for the kitchen.

  “What were you doing up there?”

  Mark kept his voice low and said, “He was asking about last night.” Mark was acutely embarrassed. In the daylight Richard looked even younger than he had thought. He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘WILLY CHOP WIFE WALKS FREE’ in tabloid lettering. They were strangers again, Richard enjoying Mark’s newness. But something had happened in the meantime. No matter how casual, shouldn’t there be a kind of recognition?

  “Oh.” Richard suddenly grinned. “So you told him about us getting pissed and ending up dancing like two pensioners to Maria Callas? How could we dance like that to opera? We must have been well gone.”

  “I suppose we were,” Mark said thoughtfully. “But I didn’t even tell him as much as that.”

  Richard shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter if you did. It doesn’t matter what he thinks, really. It wouldn’t have mattered, even if anything else had happened, either. Nothing to do with him. Let him be shocked.”

  At first Mark could only take in the childish impudence of his words. Then he said, “But something did happen, Richard.”

  Richard looked at him and laughed suddenly. “Yeah, right. We we
re so far gone, we’d never remember it anyway.”

  Mark froze. “Are you saying you never came back to my room last night?”

  “Mark, I didn’t. I wanted to. You knew I wanted to. But you said you wanted to sleep…you said—”

  “You didn’t come back? It wasn’t you?”

  The question froze lightly in the air. Then Simmonds rapped hard on the kitchen window. The phone was ringing.

  SAM HATED THE VERY FEEL OF THE PLACE. SHE HAD BEEN IN LEEDS ONCE before, during a week spent merchandising a new store. All the managers from within a hundred miles’ radius were drafted in to oversee and generally work their bollocks off. Too many cooks; it was a nightmarish week working from nine till nine with a bunch of painted harpies in the dust and breezeblocks and plastic wrappings of a new shop. They had been put up in a semi-smart hotel and encouraged to socialise together. Off clubbing in desolate Leeds, shooting each other at Qasar, and bargain-hunting. It had been absolutely vile.

  Dawdling through the mystifying roads that looped back and round the tall buildings and closed shops, she kept seeing things that reminded her of last time. She shuddered and told Bob to hurry up and get his bearings.

  That had been when Sam was a new manageress, one of the youngest the company had ever had. And the one with the most bloody sense. The rest of them had been silly bitches all week. Sam just wanted to go home to Mark and Sally. It didn’t seem right, not going home after work. She liked to come in to find them watching kids’ TV, dinner in the oven. Sometimes she even willed Mark not to find a job. She liked him where she could be sure of him.

  There was a big gallery with a square extension. In front, an expanse of flagstones with a patio café, its scattering of pigeons, tables, customers and a couple of phone boxes.