[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  Soon it became a game to take Wendy out. The two oldest sisters did it for a laugh. The town about them was so familiar by now that it held no terrors. They could fettle anything. They could jab a single, slender finger and tell anyone to go and swivel. They were sluttish and shrewd and their tights were sheer on the long, long legs they’d taken from their mother. Their mother had blue, pulpy veins coming up at the backs of her legs, especially at the backs of her knees. But the legs of her two eldest daughters, Mandy and Linda, were practically flawless. Up and down the promenade they clicked in unison, in stilletos, drawing the glances of lads and women outside the arcades, the pubs, the late night cafes. Up the promenade following the shabby illuminations and the music that went with them was Motown, all different songs, coming jumbled up from pub doorways.

  Mandy and Linda brought Wendy out. Sixteen. She’s of an age to get out and have some fun, they told their mother.

  “I don’t know,” their mother said. “She’s very young for her age.”

  Mandy, the eldest, tossed her headful of marmalade curls. “You’ve kept her soft. You’ve kept her too babyish.”

  “Well, I still don’t know.”

  All this as Wendy sat with them at the tea table, fiddling with crumbs on the gingham cloth. She walked her fingers on the blue and white centimetre squares. She closed her eyes and walked her fingers. If both fingers rested on blue, then she’d go out with her sisters. If both landed on white, she’d be staying in. If she had one on white and the other on blue, then she’d go out and walk right into her True Love. She’d never have to go out again. Life would come easy after that.

  So this is how it was to be part of the crowd. She thought they would be more aggressive. It came as a surprise to her, that people stepped aside to let her past. She thought you’d have to fight to find your way. But Wendy knew she had it easier because her sisters went first, cutting a swathe.

  They stopped outside of the waxworks. Here there was a glass box the size of a phone booth. Inside it rested a puppet clown, life-sized, his bald white head pressed against the glass.

  Mandy told Linda to put ten pee in the rusty metal slot. ‘Watch this,’ she told Wendy.

  The clown shook himself alive and they drew back.

  He waggled those white hands like landed fish. He threw back his head and roared with horrible laughter. He belly-laughed fit to burst and it echoed inside the glass cabinet, crackly like something on the telly. The clown’s face was rigid, with his scarlet lips shiny like boiled sweets, drawn back and his teeth poking out. His plastic tongue waggled as he guffawed, thrashing about, stotting himself deliberately off the glass.

  A crowd gathered to see the hilarious clown.

  “It’s awful,” Wendy tried to tell her sisters. The laughing went on forever. The tape in his head must be on a loop, she thought. You could hear the thing hiccup when it started again.

  Wooo—whoooo—woooo

  A woman beside Mandy went funny when she saw the clown. Throwing back her own head she screamed and screamed and grabbed Mandy’s forearms. She laughed and gabbled in her face, right up close. Mandy jumped back and shook her off. The old woman kept ranting like the gift of tongues: It’s funny, isn’t it? Tell me it’s funny as well. Others around were joining in. It was infectious and jolly, wasn’t it? It was meant for fun. It was meant for joining in.

  Mandy was cross now, and led her sisters away. It was dark and time to go for supper. She wanted to sit on a high stool at a chrome-plated bar and eat fish and chips, swinging her legs and watching out the window at who went past.

  “What did you think of that clown?” asked Linda, the plumper, middle sister. She was in a skinny rib top which did nothing for her. It had horizontal bands of orange and purple.

  “I hated that clown,” was all Wendy could say. “It was like something out of a bad dream.”

  “You,” Mandy sniffed. “You never think anything’s funny.”

  “That’s not true!” Wendy cried. “I like a good laugh!”

  If there was one thing their mother had taught them, it was that laughter was the best medicine. Their mother had forgotten her own best lesson. These days she hardly even cracked a smile. She was in tonight, ironing. She had a pile hip-deep, she said, and what would they all be wearing next week, if she didn’t do it? Wendy said they’d all do their own, but their mother wouldn’t hear of it. She knew her two eldest wouldn’t dream of helping out. She’d brought them up spoilt. They wouldn’t do a thing around the flat. No, tonight their mother was indoors with an Ali Baba basket full of laundry and the telly on. Tonight was the final of ‘Opportunity Knocks.’

  She wondered about her girls, out on the town. These were busy nights on the promenade. All sorts of people were abroad. But her girls had to learn to get out. She’d never wanted her daughters to be the type to hold themselves back. And she was sure she could trust Mandy and Linda to look after the little one. They loved each other really, her girls.

  But couldn’t girls sound vicious sometimes?

  TWO

  Sometimes it was like I was the favourite sister and Mandy felt she could say things to me she wouldn’t tell Linda. I loved these times, my face scalding over.

  We made Linda stand outside the place where we had our fish and chips. Poor Linda, kicking her heels on the pavement and watching through plate glass as Mandy and me took our seats at the gleaming counter. “Only two stools,” Mandy had trilled. “You’ll have to do without, our Linda.” And to Linda’s stunned face she added, “We can’t make our Wendy do without, can we? Not the baby. What would our mam say?”

  So me and Mandy watched Linda lean against the glass as we had our supper. I stared at the flattened part of our Linda, the orange and purple stripes of her.

  “Sometimes she’s got no sense,” Mandy told me. “She’s like a big lump.”

  Feeling horrible and thrilled, I agreed with her, sucking up a hot strip of golden batter.

  Mandy went on. “Remember when we had that big scene, when Linda said she couldn’t sleep on patterned sheets and pillowcases?”

  I nodded. Mam had been upset because she couldn’t afford new, plainer bedclothes. So Linda was stomping her feet and yelling, Fine! She’d strip her bed down and sleep on the bare mattress. Mam was shouting back that no daughter of hers would sleep on a bare mattress.

  It turned out that Linda would wake in the middle of the night and look down at her pillows and sheets. In the dark the giant pink and blue petals of the print scared her. She mistook them for blotches of blood, come some way out of her body. Often she thought her ears bled in the night.

  “There was a reason for it,” I said to Mandy. But she had taken up staring at the man serving behind the counter. A black man, with the darkest skin you’ve ever seen. He was in a pinny striped red and white as toothpaste and he wore a white cardboard hat, folded to the right shape. I thought he must fold a new one at the start of every shift. It looked just like one of the white card trays he was shovelling chips into. He worked silently, under illuminated boards of prices and faded pictures of different dinners. Besides the mushy peas, I realised, everything they cooked was beige.

  “I really want to have a black man,” said Mandy suddenly, in a different voice. She was fixated on this one. She watched his hands work, binding someone’s parcel in reams of newspaper. “Just to see,” she added. I thought, this must be the kind of thing she can tell me and not our Linda.

  “Isn’t that a bit...I don’t know...a bit racist?” I said.

  She looked sharply. “What?”

  “Wouldn’t he think you were just after him because he was black? For the novelty?”

  “Nah.” She was always sure of herself. “He’d be pleased. And it’s not just because he’s black anyway.” She tossed that hair. “They’re meant to have right big dongers. Haven’t you heard? I’d just like to see, for once.”

  “Just for once,” I repeated and I must have turned scarlet. I went back to watching Linda, watchin
g us from outside.

  Linda:

  Mandy thought that our sister was an experiment.

  We stood her in front of things, to get her reaction.

  When she was very young we stood her in front of the radiator, to see if she would melt.

  Later, we tried to dye her hair. We used: tomato soup, gravy browning, lemon juice, olive oil.

  When you’re a middle sister (like me) you have no power. Not unless you are distinctive, and I was never distinctive. Mandy was special and big and Wendy was special because she was small.

  I could only ever watch and marvel. My sisters seemed so original. Where could I begin...to even make a mark?

  I was a lump. I’m not pitying myself. I was a lump, I don’t care. I’m stubborn, unchangeable. But I’m also steadfast, reliable.

  When I grew up and went out to work they put me on the make-up counter in Boots and I stayed there. I tell women how to make the best of themselves. I like it.

  Mandy was jealous of my job, when I first got it. ‘You! How can you get women to make the best of themselves?’

  And it is true that I was never glamorous like our Mandy is glamorous. She seethed for a week or so and boycotted Boots. Then I started bringing stuff home—free samples and whatnot—and we were friends again.

  I tried explaining to Mandy. She would be too lovely for my job. She would be too intimidating behind my glass counter. Behind the racks and rows of mascara brushes and the gorgeous coloured tips of lipsticks. She’d be too lovely.

  I on the other hand put the punters at their ease. I was every woman. I looked the same as everyone else. I stood as good a chance as they did of looking nice, given the right make-over. They’d look at me and think... well, I look better than her, and she’s stood on display.

  So there I was again, pacifying Mandy. Volatile Mandy who could flare up for fun. You had to watch your step with her.

  I felt like warning the men she went out with. I saw them step out onto a minefield. I waited for them to snag trip-wires, to find their feet caught under the flat, deadly weight of mines.

  Mine mine mine. Mandy could blow us all to smithereens with her selfishness.

  She walked into any room expecting all eyes on her. Soon that made her wearily expectant. She hated the way she made eyes light up. But woe betide any that stayed dull for her.

  Oh, she could treat people disgracefully.

  Just when Mam was getting her life back together, getting herself a new beau, a dapper little man from the old-time dancing, Mandy shoved her oar in and ruined things.

  The dapper man came calling on Mam. He came in gleaming dancing shoes. Mam was readying herself in her room. I’d never seen her so breathless, so enjoyably anxious, since dad had left us, years before. She fussed on in her room and we looked at the little, proud-looking man.

  He came floating into the kitchen and Mandy punctured his sails. She looked at his shiny dancing shoes and said, ‘You only wear them so you can look down when you’re doing the waltz and see our mam’s knickers.

  How mortified he was. How mortified we all were.

  Then Mam came in, looking all dolled up, and she saw how we were. Mandy looked smug. Then we saw how she had written in the steam on the glass kitchen door that our mam was in love with the dapper man. Words to that effect. It made them even more nervous of each other.

  Other times he came Mandy would lay out our father’s photos on the mantlepiece, and leave out things that had belonged to him, all about the place. His old slippers by his chair. As if we were expecting him to wander back in. We weren’t, but the dapper man took fright and never came back to call on Mam.

  Poor Mandy.

  People who are cross all their lives worry me. I’m waiting for them to go off with a bang. Mandy would shriek and veins would bulge out on her temples.

  Once she got me down on the floor and kicked me, in the stomach, in the face, wearing her good new shoes. We weren’t kids then. I was sixteen. There’s a nasty streak in her. Even I—her closest relative—would say that about her.

  Mam once said: “You know, don’t you, that you’ll never be as closely related to anyone as you are to each other. Not even to me.” She looked along the line of us, proudly. “You virtually are each other. There’s all the same stuff in you.”

  She wanted us to look after each other and do well.

  She tried to instill that in us, as if she knew she wouldn’t be around to see how we’d turn out. She could see it all coming.

  Mandy used to laugh at our mother for her fear, but some people can feel a cool shadow on their heart. They know how things will end up. They know they haven’t got long. She was like this, I think.

  She tried not to fret, but she let it out just enough to make Mandy rebel against her cautions and scruples.

  Mandy brought danger home.

  But secretly I think our mother enjoyed the marvellous creature her eldest daughter had become.

  “When I was your age, I’d never have dared...” And our mother would laugh. She’d learned to laugh again at our exploits. Not just Mandy’s, mine as well. Because sometimes - now and then - I had my moments, too.

  I wish our mother could see how we’ve all turned out.

  That seems the most important thing now.

  That’s all I wanted to say.

  Back to Wendy.

  They told me it wasn’t really going on the fair if you didn’t go on something that scared you. Me, I liked the animal house and the hall of distorting mirrors.

  In the hall of distorting mirrors we came out as each other. Mandy laughed to see herself looking dumpy and short. She could afford to laugh, it was so far from the truth. Linda went tall and straight as Cher. She was the only one of us to improve herself. My head went down to a pinhead, my boobs swelled up and my hips were a mile wide. That was the funniest thing all night.

  We came out and queued for my favourite...pink candyfloss! And that was when my sisters decided it was time to test out my bravery. Or to teach me bravery, I suppose was the idea. Anyway, they dragged me across the other side of the Pleasure Beach, to a roller coaster that was built of iron and sun-bleached wood. Its expanse rolled for pointless miles, sheer into the night. The ground about it shook with pressure, and all I could smell as we waited in line was tar.

  They took me on the roller coaster because they said it was

  easy. When you went on it, it wasn’t like you had to do anything. You sat down, made yourself comfortable. You pulled the chipped metal bar down in front of you and that would hold you in. It felt slack and heavy and I had no faith in it. I sat in front of my sisters, and they sat side by side. We climbed aboard on a flat stretch where you could make believe this was a toy train, a normal train. You could pretend you weren’t about to climb and climb and climb...

  I hated most the going up. Slow grinding to the top of the world...

  Closing my hands on the rail and closing my eyes

  On the first dropping away.

  On the first one I could see the beach, the full sweep of it,

  and bugger me if the Golden Mile isn’t curved after all,

  and not a straight line at all.

  A mile away, the pointy tower tried to plunge itself into my heart,

  On the drops and slow ascents there was all the time in the world

  for the beetliness of cars

  the antiness of pleasure-seekers below

  and what shocked me most

  was how I jumped out of my seat

  the whole way I hardly sat down.

  Climbing on, Mandy and Linda had told me

  the worst thing you can do is

  raise both hands above your head...

  You’d be sucked out,

  protective bar or no

  protective bar.

  By gravity, by air pressure, by magic,

  and you’d plummet,

  spectacularly...

  You’d be in smithereens,

  Linda said.

 
You’d meet the train again as it grimly looped the loop

  You’d drop on your pals, and kill them as well

  And I knew

  I just knew

  In the seat behind

  my sisters were waving both their arms in the air

  they didn’t care

  They sang at the tops of their voices for as long as they could,

  and then they started screaming for joy.

  Almost straight away afterwards they wanted to go on the Mad Mouse. But first they laughed at my face.

  “Wendy love, you’ve gone green!”

  “She can’t even open her mouth!”

  I wanted to sit upstairs in the Wild West cafe opposite the Mad Mouse while they had their go on it. It was a smaller ride than the roller coaster, but it was even more hair-raising. From what I could see, anyway. Its drops were harder and its corners joltier. They got into a carriage the size of a mini and knocked themselves blissfully sick on something that looked as solid as a bag of four-ply wool. Their car had mouse ears and a tail that flapped behind, shedding sparks.

  I went to the cigarette machine. I was clumsy getting the cellophane off a pack of Embassy Milds. I didn’t really smoke usually. They tasted harsh.

  Mandy and Linda came to collect me.

  “She doesn’t look well.”

  “She shouldn’t have come on with us, if she knew she was going to take bad.” This was Mandy, who would only indulge you so far, and then she would turn.

  “I haven’t taken bad,” I said, tossing away my fag ends and standing. My left leg felt a bit numb down one side, on the hip and ankle. I thought it would fade as I followed my sisters back through the Pleasure Beach. I thought it was from the way I’d been sitting on the ride.

  Awkward. I was awkward. I ached, and I could still hear the rumble and shriek of the rails.

  THREE

  How do I account for laughter? Where do I begin? It’s the hardest thing to write about, after love.