[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  The moonlight was such that she could see only half a room. The remaining furniture was bisected by the slant of the light. In the dark half floated six avocados. As her eyes accustomed themselves, she could pick out their green skin and then, as they whirled slowly through the air, two stark white hands flexing and waggling underneath.

  Tony juggled avocados for Sam’s benefit, suppressing his giggles, and Sam didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Unwilling to trust her own imagination, she fled the room.

  She left Tony to sink to his knees in hysterical laughter. He let it out in long, whooping bellows as the avocados fell with six ripe thuds on the floorboards.

  I’m just making mischief, he thought as his giggles subsided. But I don’t really care right now. I deserve some fun.

  It was his first recent glimpse of Sam and he was reassured by the fact that she behaved, meeting him, as if she were in a horror film. It made her seem less of a threat.

  TWENTY FOUR

  EARLY, VERY EARLY, RICHARD DECIDED HE SHOULD WAKE. HE KNEW SAM, Bob and Sally were there. Things would have to be discussed.

  When Simmonds came in to go about his daily business, Richard would have to make the introductions and decide who was related to whom and how. That seemed like a moment of daylight clarity and one to be put off. Richard wanted to stretch the deft ambiguity of the night into the day. He knew that everyone else would sleep in till late, but he wanted Mark conscious and around him, with him until the last moment.

  He woke him, almost brusquely, and urged him to dress.

  “I want to take you to that bookshop. It’s not far.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it might be fun.” Richard didn’t know why, but he wanted them to do something. He wanted a peg to hang this morning on. He stripped the sheet off the dozing, still complaining Mark.

  Whose body was bright blue in the morning. Mark was oblivious to his own spectacle and Richard was half-ashamed by the shock of it. The alarm clock on his chest. An eagle flying between a unicorn’s belly and a stretch of Icelandic coast.

  Richard could see no connection between the skin and its cautious oils, the taste of it, and this incredible jigsaw. He felt hoodwinked, as if he had eaten a Mars bar with the wrapper still on. And yet…He thought about food dyes and how once, for a joke which backfired, he’d done a blue curry for Tony and old man Simmonds. It was meant to be tasteless, that odd midnight blue, but dinner was bitter that night and the old man gloomily suggested that Richard was trying to poison his mentors.

  Mark stretched and yawned, eyes squeezed shut with those fake eyes squinting unseeing at the ceiling. His William Morris prick stirred feebly and Richard wondered why he hadn’t at any point tasted the design. Those violet anemones and blue arum lilies. Oughtn’t pollen have come away on his tongue from Mark’s stomach? Shouldn’t his morning breath be complex with the juice of crushed fruit? Yet all Richard could taste still was whisky.

  He watched the silent Mark haul himself from the bed and tuck this ensemble, piece by piece, back inside his clothes. It seemed touching that he exposed all this to Richard. Richard watched him dress with fascination.

  Why was the sight of roman numerals on the clock a man had painted on his chest more intimate than taking his cock into your own mouth?

  They crept down the corridor on their way out for the morning. Everyone will sleep in, Richard consoled himself.

  But behind them, in her circular room, Sally was sitting up in bed, turning page after page of the book she had been forced to leave unfinished. On either side of them in that thinly carpeted corridor, Iris and Peggy and Sam and Bob were awake also, and yet engaged, buying time of their own.

  Something about snow and being snowed in, perhaps.

  But early, very early that morning, Tony’s house creaked in its icy coat with the secretive and relieved sounds of its visitors loving each other.

  IT WAS THE MORNING YOU WERE TOLD NOT TO LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.

  Unless absolutely necessary, you were warned to stay indoors. Outside it was risky and you ventured into its deep and even crispness at your own peril. This morning was strident and blue, offering the slightest respite in terms of snowfall, but you were told more was gathering. The sky was, as it were, drawing in the deepest of breaths, making temperatures drop, preparing to unleash itself once more. The already fallen snow developed a gleaming crust and declared its intention to remain.

  If anyone in Tony’s house had been watching TV this morning, they would have heard these warnings. In the grim dawn they might have watched the concerned, puckered faces of presenters on plush sofas urging their viewers to go back to bed.

  Why don’t you just give the day a miss? It is too hazardous out. Go back to bed, pull the covers up to your chin, and enjoy the rest of the show? You can spend all day, should you wish, entirely passively, taking in the odd magazine article and quiz show and perhaps, occasionally, apprehensively, spare a glance at the windows. The dropping snow casts moving shadows on your curtains.

  On the TV news, images remind you how wise you are to avoid snow chaos. Images of a country knocked into a standstill.

  A postman being discouraged on a long, long, slippery street. The wind snatches letters from his hand and valiantly he attempts to retrieve them…gives up.

  Eager lambs totter, slump, sink and are never seen again.

  A train has derailed itself. The black swathes of churned earth make the snow look wounded.

  Cars shunting slowly, filmed in infrared, still not getting home, batteries ticking down. The frazzled AA men get soup at motorway services.

  As it happens, nobody in Tony’s house watches the TV. There isn’t one, anyway.

  If Sam knew, she wouldn’t be surprised. She couldn’t imagine the inhabitants of this house sitting round to enjoy Blind Date. It was another reason to despise them. Sam would quite enjoy spending this morning in bed with the telly on and Richard Madely and Judy Finnegan at her feet. It’s one of the things you miss when you work in a shop. The newsreaders and presenters—our current Lords of Misrule—would demand that she embrace the novelty of this solstitial decadence.

  As it was, she is relishing quite another morning novelty: waking up with Bob. Whether it is TV deprivation and the mistaken tang of spring in the air, or whether it is the subversive cosiness of a wintry carnival, doesn’t matter. But she finds that she has Bob chained to the brass bedstead by a twined-up sheet. She has him bound hand and foot and is thoughtfully getting herself in a position to straddle him. It’s such a faff on, really. They should be doing something sensible instead, like giving Tony a hiding.

  But at the moment this is much more fun and with Bob thrashing gently beneath her, making half-hearted feints at escape, it seems as if they are in a different time; the morning has shanghaied them.

  Sam slows down, grinding in small, clockwise circles, screwing him down to the lavish mattress, and it is then she sees it is snowing again outside. She sees the shadows on the curtains, dropping almost lazily, their soft penumbra touching now and then.

  Bob gives her an impatient nudge with his pelvis and unthinkingly she reaches beneath them both to provoke him, squeezing a finger up his arse. The policeman’s eyes go wide and inside her, his cock goes off abruptly in a spasmodic fit of surprise.

  MARK AND RICHARD WERE CAUGHT THIS MORNING WHEN THE SNOW

  came down again, tripping and sliding their way through a series of alleys and abandoned streets. The junk and bursting bin bags set out after Christmas were half disguised by now and thrust themselves out like mantraps.

  “Really,” said Richard, “I wanted to show Sally the bookshop. But we’ll buy her a present there. I must show it to you, though.”

  Dully Mark reflected that he could now hear the snow. It stripped Richard’s voice of echo and all Mark could hear was Richard. In all the frost Richard’s voice was pure and uncontested.

  More alleys, more tripping.

  “Are you sure there’s really a smar
t bookshop here? It seems a bit unlikely.”

  But there was, and it was open. The doorway was low, into one of those buildings constructed for a smaller working class than the present one.

  Inside, dust and greyness and that insinuating smell of crumbling paper. The woman at the desk stacked high with newer books gave them a quick look, then ducked her head back into the span of honey-coloured light from her lamp. Her fingernail scratched down each page as she read.

  Mark and Richard went to look at the shelves and when they had something to say they said it in whispers. In here, dust sapped them almost into silence. Mark found the books disordered and dirty to the touch, some of them jammed backwards, or upside down, into any available niche. He shivered as he browsed and his legs were shaking. Just the aftershock of good sex, he realised, and remembered those sensations of anti-anticlimax.

  Mark had almost given up poking around and peered over the top of his shelf to see Richard, who squatted by the art section with a picture book of tattoos from all around the world. Sighing, Mark prepared to return to his unenthusiastic perusal—the whisper of covers’ withdrawal from close-packed shelves, the aromatic flipping of pages—when he saw one particular book at the top of the pile. The mottled golden cover suggested itself to him, slyly drawing him away from Richard and his thought that it was time to leave.

  A hardbacked novel, the span of his hand, perhaps sixty years old, with Art Nouveau stencilling and design.

  ‘Three Cheers for Retrogression: A Novel by Iris Margaret Wildthyme, Author of The Youngest Monkeys.’

  Mark’s heart bossanovaed as he looked for an author’s photograph and sure enough, in the back flap, there was Iris, looking quite bohemian and yet not much younger, draped upon a deck chair on what seemed to be the Queen Mary.

  PEGGY USED TO HAVE A DOG WHOSE LEG HAD BEEN SHATTERED IN A CAR accident. It could no longer scratch behind its own right ear and was grateful when Peggy did it, the ruined leg making useless, sympathetic kicks.

  When she made Iris come with her own right paw, it always reminded her of that poor dog. The way Iris bucked and jounced irresistibly suggested Sheba’s compliance.

  They lay clasped for some time afterwards. Peggy was constantly astonished by the heat coming off Iris. Maybe that’s why she’s so small—she burns everything off with the heat of her cunt. The word ‘metabolism’ popped into Peggy’s head. Metabolism: the archaic, chthonic goddess of the fevered morning. Peggy had had God knew how many years of cool, distant couplings with a dying husband. Since being with Iris she had never known such heat, and never become used to it. She lay still touching Iris, unwilling to leave the warm centre.

  When she did she found a loaded, steaming tea tray left outside their bedroom door. With a glance up and down the passageway—no one was in sight—Peggy picked it up and they settled down for a gentle breakfast before their frozen window.

  “Richard must be back on houseboy duty,” Iris said.

  “I can’t see that, somehow.” Peggy took her tea black, or rather a deep orange. When she sucked at the cup’s rim, its heat stung her mouth. “He was in an extreme state last night. I expect this is from that little man we scared out of the way last night. Simmonds, or whatever he’s called. It looks like he’s decided to like us.”

  “He gave me the bloody creeps,” Iris said.

  “It’s not like you to take against someone.”

  “No, it’s not, really.” Iris considered. “I think it’s because he’s a bit of a rogue element. It’s the novelist part of me speaking. The Valkyrie in me. Simmonds gives me the bloody creeps because I don’t know yet what part he has to play in this. And he looks weird wearing hi-tech trainers.”

  “I see you’ve dropped the Orlando business and you’re sticking to the Valkyrie stuff?”

  “It’s all the same. It’s all about having a long enough, wide enough view to see how people work and fit in.”

  “What makes you think Simmonds has a part to play?”

  Having watched Peggy drink her tea scalding and orange, Iris overcompensated and poured herself too much milk. “I like a tidy ending, that’s why. If I’m swooping down on Valkyrie wings to pick up the pieces and cart them off to Valhalla, I don’t like the idea of rogue elements throwing me off balance. It puts me off my stroke.”

  “This isn’t Cluedo, dear.” Peggy sniggered. Miss Scarlett was not about to be smacked about by a crowbar in the billiards room. But Peggy wasn’t to know that Sam had been menaced by avocados outside the pantry.

  “Anyway,” Peggy added, “what do you mean by a tidy ending?”

  “I mean, precisely, How Things Turn Out. Despite the weather, I want to be able to say, it’s turned out nice again.”

  “Again?”

  “This isn’t the first little drama I’ve been involved in. I’ve had more lives that you’ve had hot labia, dear.”

  “And we’re approaching an ending to your involvement in this one, Iris?”

  Peggy put her cup down and it struck a loud, clean note. She had wanted to ask this question and now it was out. Really she wanted to shout at Iris, or beg her to stay. Are you going? What about me? Where are all your clues leading?

  Iris looked at her seriously. “I might have to go somewhere, yes. I’m sorry, Peggy. It’s the way my life always works.”

  From outside in the street there came a groaning and clash of engine and gears, startling in all that enforced quiet. They rubbed holes in the window’s condensation to see a green furniture van parked outside. In his beret and trainers, Simmonds was climbing out of the cab, flanked by and busily instructing the burly removal men.

  “Here comes your rogue element, Iris.” Peggy smiled.

  And suddenly Iris looked as if she were indeed playing at Cluedo. Weighing the crowbar in both hands, adjusting a peacock feather in her hat, tightening the noose strung ready in the kitchen.

  TWENTY FIVE

  “SAM?” PEGGY TAPPED ON THE GLOSSY WHITE DOOR. “ARE YOU UP?”

  In the corridor, two of Simmonds’s overalled men were removing a wardrobe. She flattened herself against the wall to let them past. “I think we’d all better get up,” she said, knocking again. “Things are happening.”

  The door opened a crack and Sam slipped out in an orange kimono she had found. She laughed when he saw the wardrobe turning the corner, on its way down the stairs. “Everything’s being repossessed!”

  “Iris has gone to find Richard and Mark,” said Peggy. “They weren’t in their room. It’s eleven o’clock.”

  “Their room? Where’s Sally, anyway?”

  “I’ll fetch her. You get yourself sorted out.”

  Peggy dashed off and while Sam dressed, Bob was watching her, spread-eagled on their beautiful bed. “What’s happening? Don’t just leave me trussed up here like a dick!”

  “Sssh,” she said, buckling her jeans. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Sam had a feeling that everything in this house not strapped down was about to walk off. From below there came the muffled thumps, bangs and curses of the removal men. It seemed fair enough for her to rush downstairs, leaving Bob where she knew he couldn’t run off.

  On the stairway she passed by a small window and saw four of the grim men carrying the stretched tarpaulin between them like a safety net, carefully balancing the arrayed objets. Simmonds was barking at them, toddling behind in the snow, carrying the six avocados.

  “This is fucking bizarre,” she said as her mother came hurrying down the stairs with Sally in tow. Language, Sam thought to herself and swiftly picked her daughter up.

  “Are we moving house?” asked Sally.

  “This isn’t our house,” Sam said. “But they could have given us some warning.”

  At that precise moment Simmonds looked up from the van’s lowered tailgate and gave them an airy wave.

  IRIS HEAVED OPEN THE FRENCH DOORS AND SNOW TUMBLED ONTO THE carpet. “Where have you been?”

  Mark and Richard came running out of the ga
rden, stumbling across snowed-up rubble. Mark was clutching a small parcel.

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  She pointed across the living room, where the men were kicking back pleated mats and last night’s spilled bottles, getting a grip on the chaise longue. Richard looked horrified.

  “Where’s Tony?” he asked.

  “You’re a bit late asking that, aren’t you, love?”

  Mark pressed his new-bought parcel on Iris. “Hold these. I’ve got to get Sally and all our stuff…”

  He met Simmonds in the hallway. The old man was collecting up the sheaf of recent magazines and unplugging the phone.

  “Good morning,” the old man said. “I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

  “Does Tony know you’re doing this?”

  “Of course he does,” Simmonds cackled. “Why, did you think I was just reclaiming everything that was mine as revenge?”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to.”

  “I’d be well within my rights, even if I was doing that. Even the dentists’ antique casts are mine, should I ever find them. And the Methodists’ organ in the cellar. I’m taking it all, but it’s under the instructions of your precious Tony. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  Peggy, Sam and Sally appeared on the stairs.

  “Dad, we’re moving house!” Sally called.

  Sam broke in. “Mark, I want to speak to you.”

  “Come on, love,” said Peggy as she took Sally’s hand. “I think we can still get some breakfast, if they haven’t already started on the kitchen.”

  Soon there were only Sam and Mark standing halfway up the first flight of stairs. Simmonds beetled about below, but they were oblivious to him. He whistled to himself through his teeth.