[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  “It looks as if we’re all going to have to go home today, anyway,” Mark said. He spoke hesitantly, almost politely, as if to a stranger. Sam resented this. “The trains should still be going.”

  “We’ve got ourselves into a bloody mess, haven’t we, Mark?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Did you fuck that lad just because you found out about Bob and me?”

  “Come off it, Sam. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “I wouldn’t sink that low. I couldn’t give a shit about Bob.”

  “You’re a conceited bastard, Kelly.”

  “How do you make that out?”

  “Any other, normal man would be furious and fuck someone else out of revenge. You just please yourself.”

  “Right.”

  But by now they were grinning at each other. Sam smacked him hard in the face.

  “You see,” she said, “if that had been the case, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But if we’re both serious about going off and…Well, if you’re set on this Richard like I’m on Bob…and we decide to break up our happy flat—”

  “You made that choice before I did, Sam. You decided to move out yesterday. You went.”

  “And I’d still be gone if it wasn’t for the snow.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing else to say to each other, then.”

  They looked at each other and found it hard to synchronise their expressions. Just like old times. They had never known, when they looked at each other, whether to laugh or cry.

  “I think there’s a fuck of a lot we’ve still got to say to each other,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He shook his head, still ringing with her slap. “I’m going to get my stuff and see Sally.” His daughter didn’t seem quite real to him this morning. He hadn’t expected to see her so soon. He was more surprised to see her today that he had been last night, finding her apparently patrolling his dreams.

  “I don’t think I can do it, Mark.”

  His feet kicked at the next step up. “Do what?”

  “Do you know when I was happiest?”

  “Go on.”

  “Each night when the bus pulled up outside our flats. When I’d finished work and our place was warm and you and Sal had already been in for a few hours. Or when I could watch you sleeping at night. Fuck. What am I saying?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Bob’s a boring fart,” she exploded. “And he thinks I’m after his money.”

  “They get quite a bit, coppers.”

  “Come on then, Kelly. Tell me you don’t really like fucking boys.”

  “But that’s not true, Sam. You’ve always known that.”

  “I can’t fucking win, can I?”

  “Where’s Bob now?”

  “Oh, I left him tied to the bedposts.”

  “BOB, WE’VE BEEN TALKING…”

  Sam let herself into the bedroom to find it close and dusky. Bob was snoring again, his limbs flung out. Mark peered in and Sam shook her policeman awake.

  “Big cock,” Mark commented. “is that what you were after?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Bob woke with a shout and stared in dismay at the two of them standing there.

  “It’s all right. I’m not sticking around,” Mark said, sitting on a corner of the bed.

  “Mark’s seen it all before,” Sam reassured him.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Bob warily. Throughout their training, policemen are warned about compromising themselves. And here he was.

  “Bob,” Sam began. “Do you love me?”

  “I…Of course I do, Samantha. Look at last night.”

  “Enough to want me and my daughter living in your nice house?”

  He stammered, “Yes. You know that.”

  “But more than Mark does?”

  “Mark doesn’t want you at all, Sam. You’ve said as much. He just wants the kid.”

  “’The kid’?” asked Mark.

  “I’ve done a hell of a lot for you already, Sam…I don’t believe this. Get that faggot out of here and let’s discuss this—”

  The door shot open and two removal men appeared. “Oh. Sorry. We’ve got to clear this stuff out.”

  “In a minute,” Sam said in her best manageress voice. “Two shakes.”

  The removal men exchanged a glance and retired.

  “Mark and I are evolving an outrageous plan,” she told Bob.

  “Sam!” He was shouting now. “I’m sick to the back teeth of fucking outrageousness. Why can’t we just go home—to my bloody home—and tell this twat to piss off? Why can’t we just be normal?”

  Despite her careful equanimity, something in Sam stirred. It was a memory of her father’s barking rages and how she had been forced to watch them from a similar position. She never did have a good bedside manner.

  “Sam,” Mark said. “Why don’t you get your policeman to define ‘normal’ for you? If he comes up with anything interesting, let me know. I’m off to pack before those men get all my things mixed up.”

  MARK’S BELONGINGS HAD ALREADY BEEN DISTURBED. THERE WASN’T MUCH to go through. Sure that this would be a short trip, he had brought only one bag with him. Beside the rumpled double bed in the room at the very top of the house, this bag was being turned inside out and a swift ransacking was under way.

  And who was the perpetrator, breathless and busy?

  As Peggy, Iris and Sally ate breakfast, flinching every time someone nearby dropped a vase or banged furniture against a doorframe, items of Mark’s clothing were being strewn.

  As Sam untied Bob and told him to shut his mouth and dress so that the men could take his bed away, the perpetrator was choosing, with careful deliberation, what to wear.

  And, as Simmonds wrapped pieces of china in fuchsia tissue paper, looking up at the ceiling as if in expectation, this perpetrator made himself apparent.

  In the top room he pulled on Mark’s spare jeans, easing into their cool, creased legs, fastening the buttons with fingers that trembled.

  The shirt he slipped into bristled with static. A cheap shirt with threads dangled, buttons missing, but it was charged with Mark’s presence. Tony breathed him in.

  When the door swung shut, Tony turned to face it.

  Mark stopped dead. He stared at his emptied bag because it was easier to look at that than at Tony. It gaped at him.

  At one time they had delighted in wearing each other’s clothes. Turning up places dressed as the other. The thrill of unwashed things, to wear the other’s essence.

  And here were Mark’s clothes now. The striped shirt that was his warmest, his most comforting, the jeans that fitted him like no others. The shirt wasn’t properly fastened and where it hung open—Mark forced himself to look—there was nothing underneath. He could see the back of the shirt.

  Tony’s arms were raised in a gesture of welcome. No hands. Only the cuffs of those familiar sleeves.

  “Here we are then,” came Tony’s voice. “In the daylight.”

  A headless man. The shirt’s collar was loose and open about nothing. From here the voice welled up, the first time Mark had heard it in years, thought it had echoed through letters and ploys and the silent hands. Tony’s voice had a timbre that raised the shaved hairs at the back of Mark’s neck.

  It threatened to pull him back. Tony was beseeching. An amputee.

  “You’ve gone…” Mark whispered, “…fucking crackers.”

  Tony produced his white gloves with a magician’s flourish. He put them on and, with a curiously tender gesture, caressed his own invisible face. “Have I? Quite honestly, Mark, I don’t know where I’ve gone.”

  And Tony gave a low, regretful, yet thoroughly sane chuckle.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “Don’t know.” The shirt shrugged. “It’s good to see you, Mark.”

  “What did you want? Wh
y did you lie?”

  “About being in prison?”

  “Yes. All of it. Why take Sally like that?”

  “It’s good to see you, Mark. You look so good, I could eat you. You always did that for me. I loved you, Mark.”

  Mark went to sit on the bed, by his opened, upturned bag.

  “Oh, I know,” Tony went on. “This isn’t the time or place to go into all that now. I thought it was. I didn’t see at first. But now I’ve had you all here and I’ve seen how you go on, see how you work as a family.” Tony’s voice was tinged with scorn when he said that word. “I see how things are. How complicated. Should I really thrust in my love, my old, decayed, long-lost love, to further complicate matters? If I loved you truly, I’d quietly step aside and give you an easier ride. I’d be discreet and kind and let you forgive me.”

  “Tony—”

  “Hang on, Mark. What I’m saying is that I made it seem, in my own mind, all too simple. I just had to storm back into your life, make you notice me. Such as I am. I thought I was enough for you to love. But when now I look back to all that stuff in the past, I see that you never really loved me. I’d forgotten. I could see then more clearly than you could. You tried so hard, but you couldn’t. And I never stopped wishing that one day you’d wake up and realise that you could. That you could commit yourself to my protection.

  “But Sam is the one that protects you, Mark. You know that. I, on the other hand, scare the shit out of you.

  “We created each other. But you can’t love me because you know that we can destroy each other, too. You’re like a dam, brinked before the burst. All I need do is pick away one motif in your overall design—pluck away that clock on your heart—and you’d fall to bits. I oversaw the construction of your bricolage, Mark. I was the proud father watching the tattooist’s needle work as she brought you to death. I’m too implicated in your birth—as any parent is—to bring you up safely.

  “But Sam can take you all at once, can’t she? She has veneered that tender skin of yours and kept all the pictures together. You’re a whole man at last. I see that now, and it’s all down to her. There’s no chink in that armour for me to find.”

  Mark was shaking his head.

  “In my early on, transparent reasonings, I thought it was a simple matter of sexual politics. How dare she take my man? But it’s not an issue of your bisexuality, or your selling out. It’s me. I just wasn’t right for you, was I? Sam is, and maybe Richard is, too. Perhaps you can engineer a way to have both? You deserve that. I can say this because I do love you and want to see you get what you deserve.”

  The empty figure bent to kiss him. Mark felt the swift brush of Tony’s cheek.

  “I’m fucking noble, aren’t I?” Tony laughed. “And you thought I was insane and demonic!”

  “But what about you, Tone? They’re taking everything out of the house, you know—”

  “I’m clearing out. It’s all my idea. I’ve got the money now to chuck all this crap away. Disperse the fragments of this shitty life and start up again somewhere. It’s quite exciting, I suppose. I want to prune away the loose baggage, the extra elements, and transform what can be transformed into something more useful. Without all the belongings, I’m literally nothing. I had to put on your clothes in order to talk to you just now. Just think, I can put something else on and allow myself to be anything I want. Oh, you needn’t worry about me, Mark. I’ll crop up somewhere, unexpected. As something unexpected. It’s in my nature.”

  “You were never going to hurt Sally, were you?”

  Tony sighed. “No. Actually, in the end, I went through with it all because I thought you might like to meet Richard.”

  Mark looked shocked. Tony went on.

  “That was a lie. But it makes me sound clever, doesn’t it?”

  Mark stood up, unsure. “Tony, would you let me…?”

  “What?”

  Mark went through his bag and produced the make-up set given him by the ladies. “I want to see how you are now. I just want to. Whatever you think, Tone, I did love you when we were sixteen. We made each other. And it may be dangerous and impossible to carry that on. I don’t know. I don’t believe in rules, in essential truths. We might have made it. But life got in the way. Circumstances stepped in and they changed us all. We can’t regress…can’t take it back to how it was, start again. That’s why I want to see your face now. If we’re moving on, I can’t go on thinking of you as you were when we were younger.”

  Tony sat on the antique chair, white hands harmlessly on his knees. Clumsily, inexpertly, Mark set to work with the make-up. Tony came up, gaudy in purples, blues, pinks. His cheekbones were too sharp and his eyes slightly startled.

  AND TONY SAT BEWILDERED AS MARK MADE HIM UP. AS HE ALWAYS

  had, he sat passive and let it happen. It struck him then, This is how it always was. This is how it worked. And why, in the end, after all the pontificating, it was no good. Not for Tony. Tony could be as sensible about Mark’s life as he wanted, but in the end Tony knew the involvement with Mark was bad for him. Because here he sat, letting Mark do this to him.

  He felt the delicate scrape, brushing and tweaking of cosmetics. No one had touched his face in years. These parts of his body were brought back into existence.

  Once more he was in the position of being grateful to Mark for making love to him. Tony was back where he had been at sixteen: full of relief and gratitude that Mark had risen to meet his challenge, in whatever form.

  Mark was oblivious, as always, having been gently probed and manipulated into this position of reciprocation. As far as he was concerned, he was being nice. He was doing something for Tony, making things better. It was that innate child-rearing instinct in him. He was, after all, a breeder. But Tony was angry. Mark could be provoked to make the significant gesture and give the kiss-off to this life in a perfect, epiphanic scene. But it’s always got to be me doing the provoking, Tony thought.

  I sit here passive, being painted on, for Mark.

  As I lived here for years, pretending to be in prison, selling antiques, being shat on by Mark.

  And as I was sent down, in the first place, taking on Sam’s culpability for manslaughter, all for Mark.

  At the outset I was the one to let Mark know his potential. I tempted him into looking at me, at my body, and led him to what his inarticulate desires were clamouring for.

  I didn’t create you, you bastard; I was the raw material you took yourself from. You’re a thing of shreds and patches, a snatched-together, botched-up man, and you’ve left me behind. But I am your inner man, Mark; you have me inside.

  “There,” Mark said at last. “So that’s how you are.”

  He sat back on the bed to survey his handiwork.

  Through the colours Tony’s face rose up to meet him, through the false accentuations, the pouches, the changes worked over the years. With the face of a clown, a drag artist, an embalmed corpse, Tony looked out through a complex, unreadable mess of emotions. But Mark looked and he thought, This is Tony. Changed, yeah, but so have we all. So this is what the years do? And it’s good to get the update. But this is Tony after all. At least as close as you could ever get.

  “Go now,” Tony told him, with some difficulty. “Just go, Mark.”

  Mark went.

  And when he went, at last, Tony walked to the window. The snow was coming down, thick enough to give him a reflection. He saw himself once again.

  “Simmonds!”

  Anger does strange things to people.

  When circumstances get too much, when they crash down like portcullises and you are expected to become something else again. And you’re tired, tired of hauling yourself up out of the mess gratitude and relief have made you into. When your self-respect has scraped too thin, and you’re not sure there’s enough left for you to reinvent into yet another, hopeful self. That’s when anger does strange things.

  Tony attacked the bed. It was, after all, the root of his problems. He stripped the she
ets and shredded them with his gloved fingers, and the bits fell in a mock snow shower. Then, gathering all his resentment, he took a deep breath and hauled the bed around on its castors. With a final burst of righteous adrenaline he sent it crashing through the bedroom wall.

  “Simmonds!” he screamed. “Simmonds!” he howled at the old man who had rescued him from penury once before. He had one more use for Simmonds and, furious, he waited for the patter of hi-tech trainers.

  He stared in the meantime at the destroyed outer wall. The snow was falling thick beyond and coming into the room. The crash of the bed into the garden below still rang in his ears.

  Tony didn’t question how he could have managed such a thing, how he had gathered the strength. It seemed entirely reasonable. When you’re as impossible as I am, Tony thought, you learn not to worry.

  Impossible he might be, but the wind coming in through the trashed bedroom wall was freezing him as he stripped off Mark’s clothes.

  “Simmonds!” he yelled again.

  Like a smashed window in an aeroplane, the gash in the wall let in the sky and it fought for possession of him. Tony stood with his handfuls of Marks clothes whipping up around him.

  The old man had been standing in the doorframe for some moments. Mark had pushed past him on the way out, almost startled to see him in the same room as Tony. Somewhere in the back of his mind Mark had expected them to be the same person. Anything was possible. But Simmonds was real, just an old, old fuck of Tony’s. The cast-off older man, a withered shell Tony was good enough to keep about the place.

  “Why didn’t you come when I shouted?”

  Simmonds looked to where Tony stood, where he was visible by virtue of the mess he had made. Simmonds was used to the ways of his one-time golden boy, his only love. He was used to his invisibility. Talking to Tony was like spot-the-ball. Simmonds played the game with the dogged optimism of a lonely pensioner and he knew how to field Tony’s anger. Today, though, he would play a dangerous game with it.

  “He’s told you no, hasn’t he?” Simmonds sneers.

  Mark’s clothes are wrung out in mid-air, eloquent with fury. Tony answers stiffly, “Yes.”

  “I know rejection. You can’t hide that’s what you’re feeling. Not from me.”