[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  “But I’ve got everything I need,” Sally pointed out.

  “You can never have enough,” Sam corrected, and turned to smile at her, caught in a sudden bar of turquoise light. “And a girl can never have enough clothes. We’ll take you buying clothes. You’ll be a trendsetter when school starts again.”

  “But we wear school uniform.”

  Briefly Bob reflected—and then stopped the thought quickly, guiltily—that this would all come out of his pocket. Only a few weeks ago Sam had been moaning about not being able to afford the Christmas presents she had already bought. Now, suddenly, life had changed, and shopping was high on her agenda. He couldn’t help feeling vaguely disturbed that these changes were to come at his expense.

  “You’ll like Bob’s house, Sal. It’s bigger than that poky old flat. With a little garden for you to play in.”

  Sally leaned forward slowly. Sam could see the tiredness round her eyes, her mouth pulled down in drowsy irritability. She looked as if she wanted to get something off her chest before she fell asleep.

  Sam asked, “You’re not going to throw up, are you?”

  Bob froze.

  Sally shook her head. She asked, “Is that what you want me to call him, then?” She blinked slowly. “Bob.”

  Sam smiled and looked at Bob. He took his eyes off the road for a second and all three felt the car slide, with terrible slowness, a few inches, then right itself.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” she hissed at him. “Well? What do you want to be called? Uncle Bob?”

  Sally was sinking back into the upholstery. “I’m not calling him Dad,” she said, her voice slipping further and further away.

  “You won’t have to,” Sam murmured. “Call him Bob. He’s Bob. He’s not your dad, for better or worse.”

  AT TIMES, ALTHOUGH MUCH OF THE TIME PEGGY COULD FORGET THIS, Iris embarrassed her. It was a class thing, she thought dully. Iris wasn’t constrained by the same behavioural doctrines. She never tailored herself down to fit into new surroundings. If anything, she turned the volume up. Often Peggy was exhilarated by this. It opened up new worlds and made the old ones less intimidating. It worked wonders in the bank, at the Social Security. There was a brash confidence and assurance that came with anyone who wasn’t working class. There was never a temptation to tug the non-existent forelock and take what was offered.

  But then again, that assurance could also be embarrassing. When they walked into the gallery, Wagner was playing and, almost immediately, Iris was whooping along with it and shrieking about Valkyries. Heads bobbed up from the pictures, from behind vases, around the bookcases. Iris was quite oblivious. She explained in a voice twice as loud as it need be that she and Peggy were postmodern Valkyries.

  “They’re playing our song!” she cackled, and Peggy gave her a sickly smile.

  They were inside what felt like an old warehouse, which vibrated along with the Wagner. Paintings and drawings hung everywhere on wires, over the wide windows, were propped nonchalantly on antiques. The tender yellow and purple necks of lilies thrust everywhere. When Peggy allowed herself to stop being irritated, and made herself feel pleased that her lover was back to normal, she found that she thought the place was breathtaking. The air was thick and sweet with pollen. The paintings were familiar. Peggy clutched her bag to her chest and stood before a huge panelled picture, resonant with deep, clouded blues. Beneath the spread petals of a large white splash, a boy’s pink body wavered, stretching deep across the canvas.

  Iris came to stand with her. “The Valkyries were seer women who judged the fate of warriors,” she said.

  Peggy tutted. “Don’t say you were around in those days as well.”

  “No, but Valkyries stick around in history.”

  “I thought you wanted to look at these pictures.”

  “The other thing is that Valkyries had the power to turn themselves into swan maidens. Imagine wearing wings! But all their powers would then reside in the wings, and if a man stole them, then they were lost.”

  Peggy shuffled down the room, glancing over the etchings of naked boys, indolent and faintly eroticised. Other faces, less attractive, of all types. The lines wobbled away from a harsh realism towards a cartoonlike facileness. All these faces looked bemused. Their expressions seemed to Peggy to sum up her own feelings at the moment, and it cheered her up. These people, these friends of the artist, she thought; you can tell they’re living complicated lives. In the pictures where they’re together, you can tell it isn’t all a picnic. A pursed-mouth bemusement seemed like the only rational response to them.

  She turned to see that Iris had sat down in a high-backed chair next to a potted plant. She plucked a handful of ostrich feathers from a nearby vase and fanned herself lazily. Looking up, she saw Peggy standing over her. “The Valkyries decided, Peggy. Don’t you see? They determined which warriors would fall in battle, or who would get to Valhalla. Isn’t that where we are? Aren’t we in a battlefield? Aren’t all those in our family warriors?”

  “I don’t think we’re as important as that,” Peggy said sadly. “I don’t think it makes much odds to them at all what we think. The younger lot will press on with whatever they fancy doing, regardless.”

  “But we can still put spanners in the works.” Iris was starting to look crumpled up again. Peggy felt a twinge of dismay. “We can still talk sense to them.”

  “We’re old.” Peggy shrugged. “They can see better than us, I think, what’s for the best.”

  “When I write a novel again,” said Iris, rallying once more, “and I shall, I’ll call it Swanning About.” She cast a glance back to the painting of the boy jumping into the pool. “Because that’s what we’ve all being doing, isn’t it? We’re all dead selfish with each other. But our best moments together, when we love each other most, is when we show off for each other. When we are as fabulous as our friends think we ought to be.”

  “I think so,” Peggy said; guilty again that Iris had embarrassed her.

  “All we want is for the world to value those we love as much as we do. Not to inflict itself too hard on them. To be kinder. And my book will do that. I want it to show us all at our best and at our worst. It’ll be about the warriors I know now. And since I’m a Valkyrie, at least when I’m writing, and since when I’m writing, I can rig all the rules, I’ll make surer we all get to Valhalla.”

  Impulsively Peggy bent to hug her. For a moment Iris seemed terribly frail in her arms, thinner than ever beneath her many layers. Peggy felt she was embracing a heap of cushions. “It’ll have to be Valhalla,” she sniffed. “I don’t reckon any of us will make it to heaven. Not the heaven my husband used to rant about, anyway. That was just for legitimate family.”

  Iris cackled again. “The Valhalla I’m going to rig up is one for family members of the most illegitimate kind. Old dykes, tattooed faggots, divorcees, co-opted coppers, the lot. Blood doesn’t count for much, I don’t think. The messy stuff’s best avoided.”

  Passers-by were staring now at the two old ladies making a scene in the middle of the gallery. The ostrich feathers were spread out, dropped at their feet. Peggy was beyond embarrassment now. When she felt as touched as this, she usually felt sick with love. Her heart seemed somewhere at the back of her throat. For Peggy, the timelessness of lovers meant the minutes she couldn’t swallow her saliva. It welled up in tenderness until she swallowed and tears slipped out.

  “I love the idea of us being warriors for each other,” she said. “It makes us seem on more or less the same side.”

  “I think, in the end, we are.”

  “But some of us have to bear the brunt of it,” Peggy said. “I think Mark’s going under. I’ve not seen him like this before.”

  RICHARD FOUND HIM IN THE SMALLER GALLERY UPSTAIRS, GAZING AT the bright, abstract shapes of Hockney’s ‘Very New Paintings’. One in particular had caught his attention. Richard stood by him and politely looked at the purple, orange and yellow curves and folds, the speckled, swirling
contours, graphs on an Apple Mac swollen and distorted.

  “Fucking hell,” Mark said. “I came out of the bogs and walked into twenty-four original Hockneys.”

  Richard grinned. The room was like a tunnel, with barred windows running opposite the paintings. He waited until a group of nice ladies left the gallery, discussing cake decorating, as far as he could tell, and asked Mark, “So how’re you doing?”

  Mark pointed to the painting directly before him. “This is amazing,” he said. “But that’s almost what I’ve got all up my back.”

  “YOU’VE STOPPED TALKING,” BOB SAID, AND LOOKED AT HER.

  She had been dozing off to the radio. Now that Sally was asleep in the back, something had relaxed in Sam and with the loss of her vigilance, her need to stay awake had gone too.

  “This takes me back—” Bob grinned—”to my earliest memories. My mam was never quiet. She still isn’t. You’ll meet her soon. You’ll get on like a house on fire, but, God, she can talk! When I was little, the only time I remember her being quiet was when we were out in the car.”

  “What was that?” Sam was only half-listening. She suspected Bob was talking for the sake of it. He needed to talk to dispel the claustrophobia. Outside, the snow was falling heavier than ever and they weren’t much further on in their journey. The pace was slacker and there were hardly any other cars about.

  “Even before I can remember, they used to drive the car out at night. In the middle of nights, when I couldn’t sleep. Mam would sit in the back with me on her knee, hoping the drive would lull me. Dad would be driving, silent as ever. They went on midnight runs out into the countryside, all those rolling hills and tiny, winding roads around the Dales. They went miles. Or they went up round Durham, or the streets of Darlington, through endless black streets.

  “When I got older, too old to need lulling to sleep, really, the trips went on. I think it was because they’d gone off sex. But I remember the smoky quiet inside the car, and looking up out of the window at the huge buildings with black eyes and frightening turrets. That’s what ordinary buildings looked like. And in the countryside the land rolled on for ever. Everything outside was terrifying and somehow that was reassuring. Any nightmare you could ever have was out there, externalised so that it could be dealt with.

  “Great child psychology, but they never knew that. They were just out for a nice run while the roads were empty. Inside it was a haven and they were peaceful and still. My mam’s always smoked like a kipper, and when I was small, you could hear her lungs working, an almost inaudible wheeze. It sounded like someone gearing up to speak and changing their mind at the last minute. We’d drive on for hours on end, it seemed like, in this quiet, as if waiting for the next thing she’d say, but knowing it would never come until the morning, over breakfast, when life was back to normal.”

  She looked at him for a moment, thought for a little while, and took the reins of the conversation over to tell him about her early years. About her mam and dad, and how her dad had died. About the mother-daughter fights which were mostly carried out in agonising silences. She could never associate silence with anything but suppressed anger. And yet it puzzled her that she had carried those silences on when she was at odds with Mark. And she explained that this night was quite different for her, in that she found the silence as they drove compelling, calm, healing, even. It was a new experience for her. She thanked Bob, said she was glad he was driving them.

  She passed the Extra Strong Mints and hunted out a tape to play when they slipped past the range of the local radio station. When she opened her window a crack to smoke, there were thick snowflakes and the wind’s low moan. Quickly she shut it again and filled up the car interior with smoke. A new doubt crossed her.

  “Do you think we’ll make it tonight?”

  “I was hoping to get the traffic report on the radio before it went off. I’ve no idea. And the trouble is, in these conditions, none of this looks remotely familiar. I don’t know how far we’ve got to go.”

  Sam sank back in her seat. She was beyond frustration or anger. There was a weird lucidity about her rising panic. It was there, along with the doubt in Bob’s capabilities for getting them home safe. But its rising was a slow, slow process. It seemed as if it would take as long to reach it catastrophic height as this snow would to cover and bury their car. Fighting the panic down was a sheer and stealthy battle, one as dogged as the car’s own unrelenting progress. We can’t be buried, she thought, diffidently, if we’re still moving. It’s as simple as that.

  THE GALLERY SEEMED TO BE OPEN TILL QUITE LATE. IT’S SO CIVILISED AND so restful with it, Mark thought as he sat and just looked. Open all hours, free to get in.

  The warehouse windows were black now and in response the colours here indoors were sharper. It’s like being inside my own body, he thought, oddly. Someone’s sorted this all out for me, he thought. Someone who knows me better than I do.

  Iris and Peggy were looking at the prints and cards for sale at the other end. Everything seemed disordered. Mark couldn’t tell where the originals ended and the cheap reproductions began. It was, he decided, in the nature of this art, and was pleased with the thought.

  Eventually they decided that it was time to leave. Puccini was playing while they had one last drink. They inhaled the smell of coffee, of pollen, of cigarette smoke, and prepared to store it, to meet the rare, frozen air outside.

  Richard led them across the Mill’s car parks, over the roads to the bus stop. “We were daft, really, for coming. I hope they haven’t taken the buses off.” Leaving him and Mark to keep an eye out for their transport, Iris and Peggy popped into the off-license across the road.

  “It’s coming!” Richard yelled as they appeared in the snow-clogged doorway, gripping carriers on their way out.

  As they bustled on board, Peggy thrust a bottle-shaped parcel into Richard’s hand. “Whiskey,” she muttered, as he stared at the neat twist of paper covering it. “As a thank you.”

  It took almost an hour to reach Headingley again. They sat on the front seat on the top deck and got through two bottles of red wine, passing them back and forth and slugging it back. Iris always kept a bottle opener in one of her capacious pockets.

  Wine jolted in the bottle as it knocked against their teeth when the bus rode unsteadily over hills. Up here they had a cinema screen of a window, and Leeds was dark, inscrutable in the snow. They smiled drowsily, warmed by wine, and exchanged glances when Mark began to sing. He had a terrible voice and no one could quite tell what it was he sang. But they joined in anyway.

  TWENTY TWO

  SHOULD WE TAKE A LOOK AT THE INNER MAN?

  Mark sits in another of Tony’s living rooms, slumped on a sofa. His feet worry at the woven mats and he weighs a glass of whisky in his hand.

  He doesn’t believe in the inner man. Were we to draw out such a thing and wave it under his nose, he wouldn’t be convinced. Imagine saying this to an unbeliever: here is your soul. Here is your essence.

  The white marble fireplace is streaked in grey veins and here rest two shining violins. Not just for effect, it seems. They lie as if recently put down, as if the air hums still with their interrupted music. They’re taking up too much of his attention. People do daft things with interior décor. They make features of all sorts, and expect you to admire them.

  He is surlier as the night goes on. That fragility has gone out of him. The slow evening, the company, the emptied bottles on the carpet, all of it has first pulled him together and then put him out of sorts.

  Peggy and Iris have withdrawn to the kitchen for a little while; the drink has dissolved their reserve and they are raiding the absent Simmonds’ pantry. Richard has nodded his assent to them and he still sits across from Mark, watching his mood darken.

  Mark is barely aware of his presence. Yet, when he stares at the French windows that lead to the patio and its herb garden, he laughs aloud and says, “I like your conservatory effect.”

  Richard smiles and
sips his drink, unsure.

  Mark doesn’t believe in the inner man. If he did, he certainly wouldn’t want one. It’s like those razor-blade adverts where they sing about not wanting to hide the man inside. Who’s that supposed to be, exactly? Mark would laugh if he didn’t suspect it all leads to something sinister. ‘The man inside’ sounds rough, chest-beating. It makes Mark feel uncomfortable. He succumbed to life with Sam only because she seemed to understand. Despite everything, she seemed to understand. Although she looked the sort to want a big, strapping, sexist bastard, she settled for Mark. She has never—not even in their worst times—demanded the presence of Mark’s man inside. Never has he felt obliged to fabricate such a thing.

  Then what does he believe in?

  He believes that we all have pasts. He can’t quite see himself with an interior world of essences and memories, arrayed in neat little bottles on shelves. Somehow Mark can’t think of himself as a human minibar, the sum of what he is, jiggling and chinking inside.

  Hearing the slow tick of the clocks, Richard’s occasional impatient sighs, Peggy’s and Iris’s distant giggling, he now thinks that his past is rather figured out upon him. When he thinks of his history, he is a silhouette-Mark and his past is a Mark-shaped continuum dwindling back to a still point: his beginning as a plain full stop. The point of no return, and he could return to it when he liked. He could stare within and pore over that point of innocent origin.

  But people do. They believe they carry within themselves simple, smiling children, untouched by experience. They fondly think they can regress. Mark scowls. He decided that they think this way only because they can afford to. Just as they can afford to leave violins lying about for ornament and effect.