by Paul Magrs
“I’m going to try that number he gave us.”
They parked to one side and Sam told them all to go and get a cup of tea at the café while she phoned. Bob and the ladies complied wordlessly. The ladies were gagging for a drink and the toilets again, and Bob saw that look Sam had. He saw it at times when she cradled him between her knees, down in the basement, beside the cardboard crusher. When she decided the shop could do without her a little longer, that was when she got that look. Determination fired by a keen hunger. “Again,” she would demand and despite the laugh in her voice, the rest of her worked with an urgency that was as serious as it was skilful.
There was a great deal at stake today. A great many irons in this fire. Bob imagined the clinker spat out of today and the havoc it might wreak as it landed all around. In the face of this, all he could do for the moment was scuttle away and buy them all a cup of tea.
“COULD YOU FETCH HIM? THIS IS SAM, HIS WIFE.”
“Sam?”
“Mark, we’re here. We’re slap-bang in the middle of Leeds.”
“That’s quick.”
“We were up at the crack of dawn.”
“Sally’s having her breakfast. She’s fine.”
Sam listened and with satisfaction heard the tinnily distant voice of her daughter asking, “It it Mam?”
“We need more directions,” Sam said, almost accusingly, as if he were withholding vital information.
Mark almost told her to ask a policeman. Instead he passed the phone to Sally, who had come to stand beside him.
“Mam?” Sally began.
“Sally! I’m coming to get you.”
“Oh, Mam. I’m sorry. I thought I was going to the North Pole.”
“It’s all right, Sal. You were kidnapped. Listen, I love you. I’m coming for you.”
“I’m all right, Mam. It’s good here. They’ve got books. But I’m sorry I ran away from home. I love you, Mam. I love you…Mam? I’m sorry.”
Sam’s jaw wasn’t working properly. It juddered and refused to make proper words. Hot tears worked past her eyelids and scorched her face. She felt they must be audible. When she tried to speak again she gave a hard gasp, which she swallowed, and then a high, keening note that she chewed off quickly. Gripping the receiver tighter until it shook in her hand, she realised Mark was back on the line. She wanted to tell Sally she loved her again. For some reason this was more like loss than Christmas Eve.
“Give me the directions, Mark,” she said. When he spoke, she could tell that he had heard the tremor in her voice. He, too, seemed beaten into submission. Was that a pleading tone, an edge of guilt, that she heard in there? God, we hurt each other, she thought. Then he broke off and she could hear him talking to someone else, a male voice. Sam’s stomach lurched. Tony?
“Sam?” Mark asked at last, this quiet exchange over.
“Yeah?” By now she had her tone controlled. She was back in charge.
“The best thing would be if Sally and I met you in a place down the road. It’s a bit complicated here at the house. Apparently there’s a kind of French patisserie that’s really nice.” He waited for a response.
“We’re not on a fucking holiday, Mark.”
“No, but I think it’s for the best if we meet on neutral ground.”
Neutral ground. So. Lines were being drawn up. Their lives were changing. In the clicking silence of a bad but local connection, they were renegotiating the lines their lives would take. Tight-lipped, she took down the address of the place, directions, and the time.
“See you then, Mark,” she said.
“Right.” He sounded clumsy. In their worst moments she had never been able to forgive him for sounding so clumsy. If you are clumsy, you can at least cover it up in your voice or appearance for those who have to rely on you. “I love you, Sam.”
She put down the phone and cried again, forehead pressed on the numbered buttons.
“WE COULD BE IN VENICE, OR PARIS, OR…” IRIS SAID WONDERINGLY, gazing about. “We could be anywhere.”
They were sitting at one of the garden tables with polystyrene cups of tea, on the pavement outside the gallery.
“It’s bloody freezing,” Bob gasped and bundled himself up in his coat. He looked to see if Sam was coming.
Iris had a spread of leaflets out on the table. She had picked them from the gallery’s foyer on her way to the toilets. “They had all the picture rooms roped off,” she sniffed. “It seems a waste, just keeping open for the toilets.”
“I didn’t see you complaining,” Peggy said. “Anyway, we’ve got no time for looking at pictures today.”
“No.” Iris was glancing through the leaflets. “There’s a Hockney exhibition round here. It looks fabulous. Did I tell you I was in Los Angeles in the late sixties?”
Bob was watching Sam walk slowly across the flagged square towards them. There was such a careless sexuality about her, he realised. When so much about her was deliberate and intent, that was completely natural. “What were you doing there?” he asked Iris.
Both of the ladies looked at him. They weren’t quite used to him yet, and they certainly weren’t expecting him to ask questions.
“I was having a very expensive affair with an extremely famous man,” she snapped. “And writing my seventeenth novel while I was about it.”
“What was the novel? I might have read it.”
Peggy’s mouth twitched into a smile. She’d never seen any evidence that Iris had written books either. “I was a different person then,” Iris would say with a shrug whenever Peggy asked to read something she had written.
“I should like to say which it was,” Iris replied. “It became a very famous film and if I tell you it was entirely autobiographical, I think you’ll appreciate that to tell you would be to breach a confidence.” She sat back smugly in her fuchsia coat and exclaimed, “Sam! What did he say?”
“More directions.” She flipped the piece of paper onto the table before Bob. “I meant get the tea and drink it in the car. You’ll die of exposure and piles out here.”
Bob told her, “We all think it’s quite nice.”
She turned on her heel. “I’ll wait in your crappy old car then. Come and tell me when you’re finished, then maybe we can do what we’re supposed to be doing here. And that’s not a pensioners’ bloody day trip.”
They drained their cups hastily.
“Things are astir,” Iris muttered.
“She was the same as a child. Getting her way by going off in a huff. She was taking the moral high ground at four years old.”
“Sally’s not like that.”
“We’d better follow her,” Bob said, getting up.
Peggy picked up her bag and fixed him with a look. “I think you’re going to have your work cut out for you with our Sam, Bob.”
She allowed him to lead her back to his car. He did this with a small glow of triumph: he had won her over.
Behind them came Iris, struck suddenly with dismay and the uncomfortably familiar feeling that things were moving on again. She remembered a wonderful merry-go-round in Munich in the 1860s.
It was gaudy and beautiful and exciting but terribly unreliable. You could never tell when it would stop, or start again. Lapses sometimes seemed very close together; at other times, unbearably far apart.
Iris had seen more life changes than anyone she knew, and she could read the signs.
NINETEEN
UNTIL NOW, MARK HAD THOUGHT OF HEADINGLEY AS A BIT LIKE BISHOP Auckland. Rough as guts, with patches of struggling greenery. As they walked out to find Richard’s ‘sweet little patisserie’, however, he saw that the place had more going for it than Bishop.
It was a reclaimed northern town. Someone had taken hold of the run-down place and injected it with bourgeois taste. It was a whole theme park with added delicatessens, second-hand bookshops and tea parlours tucked away up seedy gullies. Money had gone in with students and young professionals, who’d cropped up among the elderly and the ém
igrés, and they’d turned the air of the pace into slum honey.
On the way they popped into a delicatessen. Yellow light slatted in onto sanded tables and Mark and Sally sat to wait while Richard chatted with the woman serving as if they had all day.
“We need avocados,” Richard said. Mark was about to point out that the house was already littered with them, but Richard added, “Tony has a craving for them.” That name shook Mark up slightly. He joined Sally in a game, guessing names for all the colourful things on display in the refrigerator.
They still had a while before they were due to meet Sam. In a leisurely drawl, the woman behind the counter was explaining how you could make your own sour cream. She seemed utterly contented with her job. She had purple hair and moles and brown, strapping arms. Perhaps this was a cooperative. A metal whisk and bowl appeared from nowhere and before they knew it she was going a demonstration with the top of a bottle of milk and half a lemon. “There’s some kind of chemical reaction when you use metal, and it sours up nicely.”
They watched with interest as she worked away, but soon she was frowning, disappointed in herself, because it hadn’t come off. “Well, you can take this for forty pee if you like. It’s not proper sour, though.”
We’ll hold it under Sam’s face when she sees us, Mark thought. That’ll curdle it. He stopped himself. I’m just bitter, he thought.
Richard was making it easier to face Sam. Whenever Mark’s thoughts veered towards the harder questions—Will she be furious with me? Will she go off with the copper? Whom did I have sex with last night?—Walking down the grimy, freezing main street of Headingley, Richard would interrupt him, saying, “See that newsagent’s? If you go in, don’t look shocked when you get your change. Bloke who serves you has two thumbs on one hand!” Passing a junk shop, he would say, “Art Deco elephant-foot umbrella stands in there. Very swish.” Now he turned to Sally as they left the delicatessen. “We must take you to this little bookshop right near the house. They’ve got beautiful old books for children.”
Her face lit up and snared Mark’s attention. His stomach was heavy with dread now, as the time crept on. “Can we go, Dad?”
“I’ll take you this afternoon,” Richard promised, “and buy you a special book for being good while you’ve stayed with us. Call it a late Christmas present.”
“Thank you, Richard,” she said with a big grin.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mark said.
“I’d love to.”
“Dad, Richard’s my new Christmas friend.”
“Is he?”
“I met him on Christmas morning. Can he visit us at home?”
They paused at the corner of the street, waiting for a gap to appear in the traffic.
“Of course he can,” Mark said.
Seeming pleased with this, Richard went on telling Sally about the bookshop, hidden up an alley right by their house, and how some of the kids’ books there were magical. Nobody had read them since they were printed, years ago, and you’d be finding things in them that weren’t at all widely known. Some of the stories, in fact, could turn out to be like shared secrets between you and the person who wrote them.
“Just like real life.” Mark often said that upon hearing something banal. But he was rather touched that Richard could engage Sally’s attention like this, knew just how to pitch the conversation for her. And what was more, on this particular sugar-bright post-Christmas morning, Mark fancied the arse off him and wished that it had been him in the white gloves the previous night.
“This is it,” Richard said.
They were facing the plate-glass window of a small café. It had only two tables and one was taken by an old person of indeterminate gender and catholic tastes; he or she had each of the morning’s papers and three novels fanned out. The window and counter inside were covered with white paper doilies and golden twists of new bread. The air was heavy with cheese and coffee. They were glacé cherries stuck on almost everything that didn’t move.
“You’ve got everything here,” Mark said. Right now he wanted to open and run—oh, he didn’t know—a café? a delicatessen? something just by his estate. This was north, and they managed it here. Couldn’t he stretch this boundary somewhat and take this gorgeous continentalism a little nearer Darlington?
Richard and Sally were having milkshakes. When Mark asked for a black coffee, the man with a beard and a transatlantic twang asked if he was quite sure. Mark sighed; he was used to getting hassle over counters. Maybe he thinks I should be ordering lager or superglue. When Mark insisted, he was given a cup with a thin dribble of black in the bottom. He couldn’t be bothered with smart-arses this morning and asked for a top-up in a tone that implied he would stand for no shit. The aproned man gave a cultured shrug and filled his cup to the brim.
As they sat waiting for Sam’s party, Mark drank the scalding brew and within seconds he was reeling. His eyes flicked back and forth across the stretch of road through the window and his fingers drummed nervously on the stripped pine. That’s good stuff, he thought, his mouth lined with what felt like tar, and his brain singing.
SAM WAS FIDDLING WITH THE KANGAROO’S EARS IN THE FRONT SEAT AS Bob ran to pay for the petrol.
“She’ll love that,” Iris said, passing the mints back to her. “She’s not got a kangaroo already, has she?”
“She’d better not have,” Peggy muttered.
“Not like this one.” Sam smiled. It had an elasticated pouch with a miniature version of itself stuffed inside. “Well, I hope Mark’s little chum is going to buy us lunch,” she said. “A patisserie. My god!”
Bob came back and said it was only a couple of streets away. They drove off to look for a parking spot, Joni Mitchell on the cassette player, her voice the exact blue of the morning and the yellow of the light.
It would be, Iris thought, the most pleasant of mornings, if only so much didn’t hang in the balance. Then the remembered other good mornings she’d had and reflected that the shadow of a threat always made things more intensely enjoyable.
“We’re here.” Bob parked them behind a vast playing field.
Sam clutched the kangaroo to her and felt sick to her stomach. What was she expecting? It was only people she had to deal with. Most of these people she knew and loved. Any trouble she’d meet would be caused by people and she had her professional manner; she had the key to working these disputes out. The only things to fear, the only things beyond human intrigue and her control, were natural disasters. Unfortunately, love was a kind of natural disaster affecting the lives of all the people she was dealing with today. She wasn’t sure she could handle it.
Joni Mitchell sang ‘Strange Boy’ and Sam paused for breath before opening her car door. The ladies were already put on the grass, clicking their tongues at the view of Leeds.
“Kiss me, Sam,” Bob said and she did. “Just…”
“What?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“Remember that whatever goes on today—however all this falls down and comes out—I’m here for you and we can carry on and sort out our lives together.”
Only twenty minutes ago Bob had felt so sure of it, of her, of making all their future lives tick.
She smiled at him. “We’re fearless, right?” When she ruffled his thick black hair, he saw with horror that his eyes were filling up. “Hey, we fuck right next to a cardboard crusher—nothing human can put the willies up us, right?”
They laughed a little bit over her unfortunate phrasing, got out and locked up the car. The air smelled of cold sunlight and croissants and maybe impending snow.
TWENTY
IT DID SNOW THAT AFTERNOON. ALL THAT AFTERNOON AND ON INTO AN evening that turned from a noun into a verb: the evening was a softening and a balancing, an imperceptible change from afternoon to night-time. Leeds seared with a blurring whiteness. It snowed for another three days and the year limped towards its demise with its rough edges smoothed over, its waning light busy with snow and more snow.
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sp; The roads were chaotic. Up the Pennine roads to the west, unwary drivers slowed to twenty in the gloom and bided their perilous time until they found themselves in a geriatric convoy. Nervously they would push on together, the reasoning being that should disaster strike, they would all go together. The radio and the television broke up their festive programing to warn people in the northeast not, if they could help it, to leave their homes. It really wasn’t a good idea.
And this lasted into the New Year. Hard luck on those who had got carried away with the Christmas spirit during the holiday and slipped from their homes to celebrate elsewhere. Worse luck on those who were where they shouldn’t be. Even more disastrous for those who were somewhere they plainly didn’t want to be and were now, for the time being at least, thoroughly stuck.
To some it might be quite cosy. With their feet up, snowing in by the television set with enough food to last, enough wine and fags and good company. The powers-that-be telling them quite categorically that they oughtn’t move from their very armchairs if they wanted to live. Beyond the thick curtains, moving with certainty in the dark, a vertical and unceasing ocean was breaking crest after crest onto the ground.
The weight of snow creaks perilously on council house roofs and guttering. Mould on indoor walls freezes over black, like bark. But to be in your own home, even with the pipes cracking and distended and the central heating knackered and the Birdseye trifle remains in the fridge looking less inviting by the day, even this is better than to be out in the woods and away from home.
Trains stop. Motorways are broken up and sent home. Doors slam. Lights go on but curtains are drawn, futile against the careless paws of snow. The streetlamps buzz on and they stay on.
When you’re out somewhere strange, there’s an odd comfort you feel, and resent feeling, about the streetlamps. They spread an impersonal, slightly gloomy continuity through your journey. They tell you, You’ll see a lot more of our sort before you hit home.
