Twelve Stories

by Paul Magrs

  How amazingly relaxed Gran must have been. The sun and sangria had worked wonders on her, evidently, that she was so relaxed. Really, looked at in one way—the holiday had been a great success.

  Mum gave Beryl a very odd look.

  The news of her death got to us on the Friday night. We got a garbled phone call from the Spanish police. It was all crackly and hissy, all the way from Tenerife. And there was Beryl, on the line, telling us it was true. Gran was flat out dead. Lying there in the hotel. Beryl had come direct from the scene of the disaster. She thought she’d better let us know straight away.

  And then—after a horrible weekend of aftermath and grief and all the things that go with that sort of sudden, shocking news—came a post card from the continent. A day-glo postcard from Gran herself. Full of chat and holiday-type expostulations. Nothing startlingly original or pithy or profound. Just the usual wish-you-were-here’s; the weather’s lovely; Beryl’s so stingy.

  The lots of love.

  I watched my mum reading it over, that Monday breakfast time. She turned it over and over. Scrutinizing what was, essentially, a very ordinary, jaunty, crumpled post card. She was searching it for clues. For something else. Some missing grain of wisdom, or extra piece of love.

  Something—anything—in that posthumous postcard from Spain.

  We all knew—even mum knew—that it wasn’t really posthumous at all. Of course Gran had sent it when she was still quite alive, running around with her best friend Beryl, up and down the prom, round the swimming pools and amusement arcades… Of course, while she was tipsily scrawling her messages of love and fun and cheap wine to us on the back of that card, and sticking down the oddly-coloured, funny-tasting stamp, she never for a second thought that this card would reach home and she never would.

  This card was just meant to be a tiny piece of her; a quick, off-the-cuff thought from her; a token, a gesture, popped into the post box quite casually. And she would see us again, in the flesh, quite soon. In fact, the post card would probably arrive through our letter box after she was back home, with her tan already fading and her photos developed. Wasn’t that usually the way?

  Mum had that post card framed. The picture on the front— a coral-white hotel with a million balconies and all those acres of baby blue sky and frothing sea—that was turned to the wall. Wasn’t interesting to us. Worse: the place that killed my Gran, her mum. The wicked, foreign place that did her in. Instead, mum put the written side of the post card facing outwards. That mud-coloured stamp and smudged postmark. Gran’s rather girlish hand. She’d learned her style so long ago and it had stayed the same—as had her hair, her clothes, her manner of speaking. Why change a classic? She’d just grown greyer, then whiter, then creakier then stooped. Her handwriting was just a bit shakey on the card but, as mum said, that could have been the drink.

  Gran didn’t drink in England. She kept that for the continent. Booze was foreign and special and dangerous. Like noticing sexy men or wanting to wear gaudy clothes. We were often shocked and thrilled by the thought that she and Beryl had been drunk while abroad—it sounded to us like they had shaken themselves free of Earth’s gravity. They were floating away from us—tipsily burping and hiccuping—tumbling and twirling in a sky full of stars.

  She slipped and tripped on the poolside. One of those crashing, sickening, awful moments when someone GOES TOO FAR. When they get over-excited, do something silly and COME TO A BAD END.

  She who’d been so rational and precise. She who’d been scientific.

  Gran was leading a conga around the bar, round the hotel reception, outside onto the terrace and round the pool. She was the life and soul that night. Everyone remembered that. The English woman who’d started exhorting everyone to get up! To come on! To join the conga! She got everyone mucking in and kicking up their legs.

  At home Gran was more self-conscious than that. When she queued for things in shops she kept her eyes dead ahead; lowered them when speaking. She warned me: don’t stare. Don’t catch strangers’ eyes. You can draw maniacs to you. Stalkers. Bad men. Mad scientists. That’s how they latch onto you.

  So could we really believe that Gran had all the over-fifties dancing around like mad? Did any of this ring true, what Beryl was telling us? Beryl, in black, in a big hat, at the funeral. Laying on the waterworks. A bit thick, mum said. She and Gran weren’t that close really, though they holidayed together each year. Though they were lab technicians in the same place, all that time. They’d had some bad fall-outs over the years, on ferries, planes and funiculars. Usually about money or somesuch.

  Anyway, the point was—about the late postcard. Gran’s own, familiar, unremarkable hand—a hand known to us from other cards over the years—and gift tags and letters sent during family squabbles. The card that came after her death, as if she was despatching missives from the other side. That illusion that she’d found a post box in the hereafter. The fact that for a second— just a second—both mum and I—puzzled and wrong-footed— could believe in such a thing.

  A message from someone already dead.

  Like the light from stars when we see them down here on earth. Whether we’re somewhere normal at home, or somewhere exotic. It’s all the same. By the time we see that starlight it’s already dead. It’s the speed of light. The speed of life.

  It’s something we were doing at school just about the time Gran took her jump into the deep end—into that swimming mass of reflected stars in the pool. And it stuck with me—that nugget of physics—that tiny, mad piece of physics—about the only thing that ever did stick with me. The only bit I remember of Gran’s beloved physics—her bodies in motion, her unstoppable forces, her bending rays of light through space…

  When we see stars, they’re already dead. Spectacular, distant, having a rip-roaring time up in space. But they’ve taken so long to shine—they’re already dead. They just don’t know it yet.

  And if we don’t tell them, they never will.

  They can still do the conga round swimming pools. They can still send post cards home.

  Another Go

  Derek’s father, who I’d always liked, apparently died of a wasting virus. In the intervening years, sort of thing.

  His father was lying there with them all sat round and they said, like, shall we switch him off? They said he’ll be a complete vegetable if we don’t.

  So Derek’s had some sadness, in his life, like we all have, over the years. It hasn’t all been plain sailing for any of us, at the end of the day. Even him, even with all the money he’s accrued with the business and that. He’s still lost out. But here he was, anyway, after all this time.

  Standing there at the bar—Singles Night, if you please— smiling at me, like butter wouldn’t melt, literally.

  ‘Shall we give it another go, Sandra?’ Can you credit it? After all what he put me through. I can’t even think of the 1980s without going funny, and it were all because of Derek.

  I reminded him. I said, you with your BMW now. You never had that when you were married to me. You never had that when you were back in your council house. Back in your mother’s house where you had coats for blankets over the bed. Your cooker had four tonnes of grease on it. You’ve got a short memory, mister. And he might have gone lah-di-dah and pretentious, but I could see he was missing summat.

  There was something gone in his eyes. Fifty-quid haircut and all togged up, but I was the one who stopped him in his tracks. It was me. I knew I was always special to him. I know he’s had a lot of women over the years. But I was different. I was that bit different.

  Upshot was, it come Valentine’s and he was saying, marry me again. I’ll take you away from all your scumbag family and friends. I’ll really take you away this time. We can make it this time. I said, I met you with nowt and I don’t want your diamonds and showing off now. But then I was sucked in, wasn’t I? I found I were wanting to escape Blackpool for Benidorm. We were on the Promenade and I had my good winter coat on. You could smell the horse muc
k from the carriages, all along the Golden Mile. And I felt this funny sensation. My gold chain was slipping off my wrist, you know the one. And I took it for a sign.

  He wanted to show me a life like I’ve never had. Was that it? Was that why I was ready to get back with him? I can’t do anything on my own. I can’t walk in anywhere on my own. I can’t even sit in of a night on my own. So what do I say to him? Do I go back? If I do, am I saying all the intervening years were just a waste of life? Am I saying that? Am I, at the end of the day? What shall I say?

  Collecting Ada Jones

  My mother had a dream. When Ada Jones died and it was on the news, she cried, and then she had the dream. Only recently I’d been sending her copies of all the Ada Jones paperbacks that she’d read in the Seventies. From Edinburgh, London, Norwich, I’d sent them in brown paper parcels, as and when I’d found them in charity shops. Some cost twenty pence, some fifty. They were riffly and thick, soft with yellow pages. Pleasing in the way that old paperbacks become, falling open in the hand.

  Ada was prolix, English, voluble, warm-blooded. Her books were meaty and fat; seething with life, love, mystery, pain and early death. Ada Jones herself was one hundred and six and we are told her publisher has stored in his safehouse enough new Ada Jones to staunch the Christmas rush to bookshops till ten years hence.

  I wanted to collect up the books my mam had been reading since first discovering Ada Jones in 1969, the year I was born. After knitting and reading, waiting for me, she’d gone on to read them all, collecting and keeping pace with the terribly old and prolific author who, as we all knew, came from my mother’s home town and wrote in the same warm, affecting, apostrophe-flecked dialect.

  They say she lived on the same street as my Aunties in the nineteen thirties. She used to come round and sit by my great grandmother’s range. She gossipped, ate cake, and patted the hairless cat, Lucky. Her ears were pricked up, taking in stories.

  Mam used to give her books away. All the women in the family used to read Ada Jones and the novels were trafficked around the place; smuggled in handbags and shopping bags, on the rounds of family visits, as the families drifted and started to live further apart. Some stayed in the north and others went down south.

  One thing about lending out paperbacks: they never come back. They aren’t meant to. They get passed along to friends at work, at bingo, around the doors. It’s as if these books don’t belong to anyone. They somehow have to be shared around, these stories.

  Ada Jones’s readers aren’t book buyers and keepers. They only need to read each novel once and the essence is sucked out, the good been had. As if there’s always the assurance that another Ada Jones will be arriving, fresh and familiar, sooner or later.

  My mother, dreaming, had an urge to reread the books that had fogged together in her mind. The heroines and predicaments blended one into the next. She found she wanted them clearer, as if, that way, she could make the last three decades make sense. She missed her books and, when she cottoned onto the fact that my Big Nanna was despatching them willy nilly to her gambling cronies or to her religious pal, Sally, she stopped lending and sending them out. But by then she found she’d lost everything she’d spent thirty years reading.

  No wonder she has a hoarder for an eldest son. A packrat who buys a house with an attic big enough to stuff with the novels he has already read. A son who knows that you have to have lots of books knocking about the place.

  Her dream was this, when Ada Jones died.

  She knew that the man Ada had married in the ’forties, and to whom she had been devoted ever since, would never last long without his long-beloved. The retired school headmaster, neat and punctilious, sat proofreading Ada’s eight unpublished manuscripts as she took her last gasps in hospital.

  My mother dreamed that he finished reading those last and, as yet, unseen books, her final messages to the world, and then he would die, too.

  ‘I would be happy for him, because he couldn’t go on without her. They were devoted. There’s no point hanging on alone, is there? I’ve told Tom, though, that he has to go first, ahead of me, and tell me it’s all right and what it’s like up there.’

  In her dream Ada Jones’s husband expired quietly eight days after his wife, after reading a novel a day. But he never went until she had returned to him as a spectre; restored to youth and vigour and the pale kind of glamour that the greatest fictional heroines have. Ada Jones’s blue shade came tapping at the consevatory windows like Cathy came back to rap on Wuthering Heights. She told her longtime companion, Mr Jones, that, really, the hereafter was all right. It was safe—nothing magnificent— but it was, in fact, happily ever after, after all. She was happy. She was waiting for him.

  My mam dreamed this and, as with so many of her dreams, it happened more or less just like this. She told me about it after the event, when she had been proved correct.

  On the TV, the local news were covering the auction of Ada Jones’s belongings. The money was going to charity. My mother had wanted to go. But what would you bid for? The writing desk hadn’t gone for much. One woman was deliriously brandishing what appeared to be Ada Jones’s food mixer. The books, my mother said. I would want just one of her books.

  The most important thing, though, she was sure, was what she had discovered in her dream. That Ada Jones, the author, and her ancient lover were in heaven. And heaven was safe as a humane and uplifting ending. It was warm and consoling as familiar, unfussy, colloquial prose.

  The Longsight Branch

  March is the noisiest month in the branches above Longsight and Levenshulme. Spring hasn’t quite yet come to South Manchester and the trees seem lifeless and dead. The spindly boughs of the horse chestnuts are drooping in the chill and you have to be right up close to see that they are bursting already with hard, sticky buds, eager to pop.

  And us lot are out and about, rattling the branches, bashing the trunks, tapping on the twigs and pelting about like billy-o. Tap-tap-tapping on the Longsight Branches.

  All along the railway lines from Piccadilly in the heart of the city, all the way to Stockport and the distant hills, further than any of us have ever been in our lives, we are massing and tumbling and scampering. It sounds undignified, but so are we. We love being out and about. After an achey, cramped up winter, the dregs of which are still in evidence around us—ooh, it’s nice to be out.

  My name’s Elsa. Hello, there!

  This isn’t a happy story, by the way. It’s about the first tragedy of that dramatic year. It’s about that particular night, very early in the year, when the world was coming back to life and we were bashing away on the branches, belting around and sending messages with all our news on the mossy jungle drums. That particular night when Roger died.

  I was going to have a night on the tiles. The kids were tucked up. My old mother was round to guard the nest. A Friday night in South Manchester. Fluffing up my tail. Rubbing my eyes till they were keen and bright. And then comes Roger’s message.

  I can tell the difference between everyday chatter and the sound of genuine, raw alarm. And distress.

  We were helpless. All his family and friends and colleagues. We stood on branches a sensible distance from the house as it blazed. And we knew he was up there, on the roof. Smoke plunging into the dark skies all around him. The trees that stood taller than the house itself swayed in the buffeting blasts of heat. He had sent his pleas to us through their branches. He had pulled at them and tried to hoist himself to safety. Why didn’t he just climb away? Old Roger—he was nimble, he was the quickest of all of us. Why couldn’t he just get away from that house as it burned?

  God, what an inferno. In the early evening dark it was a terrible gold. Sheets of unforgiving flame came pouring, upstairs and down, from the windows of the derelict house.

  Oh, there he is! Look! He’s there!

  Someone caught sight of old Roger. Hopping about on the roof tiles. They must have been searing hot. Scalding his thin, sensitive feet.

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sp; Help me, save me, his message had cried. Bringing us here to the house. I caught a glimpse of him then. His lithe, gaunt silhouette darting about. Too late to hop onto any of the branches. They had transmitted his SOS to us, but they were too hot now for clambering along. Now they were crackling into flame. The new sap blistering, the powdery lichen and the fresh buds flashing into fire.

  He was up on the roof. There was no way down.

  The crowd in the trees gasped in horror as the flames snatched and caught the tree tops. A terrible thing for squirrels to see. The way fire can run along the byways and thoroughfares of our fives, devouring everything in its path, destroying the sheer, twisty lifelines we depend upon. We were transfixed by the inferno as it began to spread. And we lost sight of Roger for a moment. Next thing we knew, the whole house was engulfed. The rooftop was a flickering halo of flame. He was definitely dead. He had called us in time to see his final demise.

  Poor Roger. I had known him for years, you know. We had been kids together. Gadding about on the branches of Longsight and Levenshulme. He was always foolhardy, always that bit too cocky.

  Now the human fire brigade and their massive engines and what-have-you were arriving. They would put paid to this disaster and bring the flames under control. They have to be admired sometimes, the things that humans can do. They’d turn this hideous and hellish sight into a quagmire of darkness and damp ash. We drew even further back, to safety. It was all much too late. Roger was gone and there was nothing any of us could do.

  Wayne had grown up with Roger and me and the whole lot of us round those parts. When I turned to go he was standing there. He was trembling with fury. Said something about how Roger had brought all this disaster on himself. How he’d toyed withcalamity. But I was in no mood by then to argue with Wayne. I hurried home to my nest and my kids and my mother, who was sitting in with them, while I was having what was supposed to be my night on the town. Rudely interrupted by the death of a good friend. It’s a rough life sometimes, up in the trees.