[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  “Have a nap,” said Pat. “You look ever so tired.”

  “I was making sandwiches at seven this morning. I don’t know why so early.” She lay back in the sand and, with Pat watching her, she drifted off.

  Wendy took a while to decide she was in the spot she wanted. “Perfect.” She flopped down. “I like this better than red hot and sunny. It’s warm and still.”

  “You’re very affected by your surroundings,” Timon observed. “I’ve watched you. You settle in and then… it’s not that you blend in, exactly.” He looked around, thinking. “Putting you in a place, that’s like dunking a biscuit in a cup of tea, hon.”

  She sat up, leaning on one elbow. “That’s not very flattering.”

  “Has she changed, then?” asked Belinda.

  “Quite a lot,” said Timon. He discomfited Wendy by looking straight at her. “In Blackpool you wore your youth very close to the surface. You jangled with it, glittered. Like the place itself.”

  “Oh, very poetic.”

  “Trying so hard to be pushy and grown up, you gave it all away. Finding something to frizzle your energy away on.”

  “Oh, energy,” said Belinda.

  “Here, though… I suppose you’re still dashing about. You listen to people better, you know. You give them more time.”

  Wendy flicked at an insect crawling on her arm. “When Mam died I realised there were so many things I hadn’t asked her about. I felt stupid. In the end we’d spent hundreds, thousands of hours together. She told me things about her life, but I can’t believe there are so many gaps. There’s just a few funny stories left. That’s all I remember.”

  “It’s true,” said Timon. “That’s it. Funny stories and accidents.”

  “Like when she weed herself in the magician’s cabinet, and when she kissed the headmaster. When she got us shoving fruit on the waxwork dummies.” Wendy smiled. “But we sat together saying nothing sometimes. Watching silly old films, monster movies. Talking about nothing in the kitchen, eating sausage sandwiches with too much pepper. I think of all the things I could ask her now.”

  “It sounds like you had a great time,” said Belinda, staring up at the sky. She was in a sundress, Wendy realised, of the same yellow as the Captain’s coat. Cut from the same cloth.

  “So that’s maybe why I listen now. Hoping to hear stuff. I miss too much.”

  “Everything effects you,” Timon told her. “You hear enough.”

  They lay quietly for some time.

  “Timon’s changing, too,” Belinda said. “Since he’s been here, aren’t you, hon?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m enjoying my writing, suddenly. Before I didn’t. I made myself cross when I wasn’t writing. Now…”

  “We have lovely day,” said Belinda. “He works at the kitchen table and I make him do regular hours. Like a proper job of work. He’s going to be a great success.”

  “Belinda’s teaching me to cook. No more fish and chips. Or, only when we want. She’s taught me to wash my colours separate, instead of jamming everything in the machine together.” He grinned.

  Across the way, Captain Simon and Astrid were playing travel scrabble. The two of them were hunched over the tiny board. “Jesus God!” burst Astrid. “Zygote! What is ‘zygote’?”

  “Is that the beginning of a beautiful relationship?” asked Timon softly.

  Belinda looked weary. “My brother doesn’t have beautiful relationships. More’s the pity.” For the first time she sounded like she wanted him off her hands. Wendy saw that it was she who propped the Captain up, not the other way around. Belinda lowered her voice. “The Captain of old… he never knew difficult words. That’s one of the subtle ways in which he gives his game away.”

  “Oh…” murmured Wendy, not wanting to go into this now. She stared off at the sea, at the island a little offshore and its lighthouse. She imagined growing up on an island with no one around her. Rab was still throwing the stick for the dog. Neither seemed to be getting bored.

  “You make me laugh,” Colin told David. “Coming out all this way, driving us all out. To spend the day with a load of old women, my dad and me.”

  David shrugged, his chin resting on his knees, which he hugged to his body. He was staring at his new boots. Colin had helped him choose them in the sales—shiny red patent leather. “I haven’t seen much outside of Edinburgh. This is nice. A bit of seaside.”

  “It’s true,” Colin said. “When you live in the middle of town, everything comes to you. You don’t go out much.” He wondered why David was looking so glum. “Go and talk to Wendy. You know you want to. Don’t let that Timon monopolise her.”

  “Oh, they’re old friends. They have to catch up.”

  “They’ve had plenty of time for that,” said Colin briskly. “They weren’t even together, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  David perked up. “I didn’t know that. I assumed they had been.”

  “There you go. Talk to her. It’s the only chance you’ll get at… seeing her again. If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s not what I want.”

  This brought Colin up short. “I thought you’d done all this to impress her.” He tried to temper his native cynicism. “I thought bringing us all out was your gesture.”

  “No,” mumbled David. “Not in that way, anyway.”

  “It looks like you’ve done Dad a power of good.”

  Pat was taking in slow, careful breaths of the sea air, as if he could drink it in. He looked alert and composed, a rug pulled up over his knees. Although he’d come out under protest, claiming that the whole day was a silly exercise—he’d even used the word farrago—the old man had dressed himself up for the occasion. A newish green tweed suit, a checked waistcoat. His shirt loose on his wattled neck. He gave the impression of paying no heed whatsoever to the various people and conversations around him.

  David looked at Colin. “You don’t see, do you?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How many straight male friends have you got, Colin?”

  “What? Oh, I don’t know.” Yet he did know. Since getting to know David and Rab he’d been seeing a whole other world. “What are you going on about, anyway?”

  “You’ve got none, have you? Apart from us?”

  Colin shrugged. “It makes no difference to me where my friends are coming from. Or who they’re coming with. I go around with you and Rab, I suppose, because we get on. That night I went to yours, with Wendy after the club, the night you and her copped off and slept together, we all got on then, straight away. We’ve got stuff to talk about. It’s easy. We have a laugh. I’ve probably got more in common with you than all the other queer blokes I’ve knocked about with.”

  David was looking uneasy. “And haven’t you ever wondered—I mean, has it ever been at the back of your mind—that you might get me, um, into bed?”

  Colin laughed. “Why you? What about Rab?”

  David said, “Because you talk to me more. You spend the time with me. I thought…”

  “Oops,” said Colin. “This sounds like the end of something. I didn’t think we’d have this problem. Look, David. I thought you knew a little more about me by now. I treat all my friends the same. With a bit of manners, I hope. When I do come across males of the straight persuasion, like yourself, I treat them nicely, but distantly, with full ceremonial honours. I treat them—and no pun intended—like proper ladies.” He sighed out his cigarette smoke, disappointed. “So no, I won’t assume that just because we’ve slept together a couple of times you were doing anything other than trying it out. I won’t assume we’re, like, boyfriends all of a sudden.’

  David rubbed his eyes slowly and they both listened thoughtfully as they squeaked in their sockets. Crumbs of sand, inevitably, got in there. “Oww,” he cursed, and rubbed harder, complaining.

  “Just like a straight man,” said Colin, and passed him the water bottle. “Sluice it out. If thine eye offends thee…”

  David saw to hi
mself, and eventually sat with very pink eyes and a wet face, looking at Colin. “You still don’t see what I’m on about, Colin. I want you to take me home one night soon. I want you to take me home up that fire escape and fuck me on my bed.”

  Colin snorted. “I don’t do requests.”

  “I’m not having you on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve said it all wrong, haven’t I?” David rubbed one eye.

  “Don’t start that again. And yes, you have.” Colin thought. “But you like ladies!” he burst.

  “Honestly. Is that the extent of your understanding of the…”

  “Yes, yes, the complexity of human sexuality. And yes it is.’

  David smiled. ‘I want you to… do more things to me.”

  “Do things?”

  “I want to try it out some more. All of it. ”

  “So I’m going to carry on being your little chemistry experiment set?”

  “Yes. No. Oh fuck. I like you, Colin. And… I fancy you.” He smiled, shy, looking down.

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Like a bastard.”

  Only then did Colin let himself realise that he himself had an erection. He said, “I want to go home now.”

  “Tell them,” David laughed.

  “I can’t…”

  “Can we go off in the dunes?”

  They looked, and the tussocky dunes receded far into the distance, up to the woods, beyond which their minibus waited. It certainly looked promising. But they saw a whole host of flashing, silver kites lurching and wheeling above them. The dunes were full of kite-fliers.

  “Shit. That’s because the breeze has picked up,” said David.

  “Let’s stay put, then,” said Colin, settling back down. “I can absorb this more slowly, then. At my leisure.”

  He lay and watched David stare at the empty stretch of beach. It was studded with black and green granite and the occasional waves crashed down as if the North Sea was throwing in its final chips again and again and again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was some old portrait painter I read about once who said it. He was asked about his flesh tones. So subtle, so lifelike, so impossible to get. You’d think they were fresh on the canvas, still living, decades after the jewelled worthies and the smug matrons were dead and gone. Asked his secret, the old painted said he mixed his colours with brains.

  And when I read that I saw him dabbing his brush in real brains, as if their substance could lend something to the colour, not just grey and white. Other painters had used semen, shit, blood, piss. Their portraits would reek. Untreated, they would smell like the bodies of the unwashed.

  I also thought about how it meant putting something of the substance of the person into the picture. It was like voodoo, it seemed to me. Mummifying bits of them against their own image. All I can do with the portraits of everyone I knew is put their brains in with what they said to me.

  I look at photos of them all and it’s part of my morbid imagination, part of me, that I can picture levering off their skulls and see their brains like yolk inside. The photos aren’t very good, of course. Everyone is caught at their worst moments. Most of them have red eyes, flash-blind, cats caught on the prowl. On one set of pictures, Christmas that year in the Royal Circus flat, everyone looks pissed. All except Serena, Aunty Anne’s friend, who came to visit on Boxing Day. Serena looks like someone who is used to being photographed. Her head tips forward slightly, so her eyes look larger than they are. Her hands are folded neatly on the lap of her smart dress. It could almost be that she is on her best behaviour for her visit, but I later found that she was almost always as composed as this. Someone had removed her anxiety glands.

  Her flesh tones are perfect, even on these rotten, blotchy, precious photos. When whoever created Serena and knocked those pigments together, they were definitely using their brains. She was luminous. Her words were succinct and uttered with perfect, dry diction. It was Boxing Day that Serena arrived, following our two days of haphazard festivities. She came to stay and her style was a rebuke to all of us.

  When I look at these pictures of Serena with us at dinner on Boxing Day, 1997, it isn’t pissed we look exactly. It’s messy. As if we were making an unprofessional job of being ourselves.

  Mandy never came for Christmas.

  Middle of December she sent a card, a letter, and a photo of herself by the canal in Lancaster, holding and showing off her proud bump.

  Dear Wendy,

  Daniel is a fart. It’s official. Maybe you’ve already heard from Timon, but Daniel as horrible about the baby. He never wanted it, won’t deal with it. It was my choice, he said, I stopped taking the Pill. I took his stuff without even consulting him. I suppose that’s true, but he’s pretty careless himself. If I wasn’t going to have an abortion, than that was it. Nothing’s improved since then. I’m getting bigger and bigger. Squeezing him out. I don’t go taking him drinks and food anymore when he’s working. When we were first together I went on like a fool.

  So, soon, I’ll be moving out. Taking baby and going.

  His yellow glasses piss me off now. Jaundiced view of the world and all. At first I found a little cynicism sexy. I’ve got to get my act together now.

  What other news?

  My Professor—remember? The grizzled one who I was proofreading for? Took me to dinner when the book was delivered to his publisher. I got a special thank you in the acknowledgments. He ordered extra bottles of wine. He treated me nice.

  He wore a kind of safari suit, wrinkled at the elbows and knees. The best restaurant Lancaster has to offer. Talked to me all night about witch-burnings and magic cults. In another age, he said, he would have been a necromancer. I could have believed him. Paid for it all with his golden card and tried for a fumbling snog in the car park. I put him off.

  It was one of those chilly, misty nights we get along the canal. I walked home alone, with only the swans on the black water for company.

  I told Daniel his Professor had tried to kiss me. He’d been working all night on his thesis. That bloody old woman of his. I think he’s in love with her. Obsessed with finding her, bringing her back out into the open, out of her seclusion. I said, maybe she’s happy staying at home knitting, watching telly, doing old lady things. That caused a row. Bigger than the row about his hairy, horny old Professor.

  “He tried it on with me, too,” said Daniel.

  “When?”

  “It was a supervision session we had in a pub. He asked me straight out if I swang both ways.”

  “Swang? Is that word?”

  “Yes. His beard tickled when he kissed me.”

  “You let him?”

  “I told him to fuck off. I’m changing supervisors.” That was even more pressure on him, he said. Added to what me and the baby are giving him.

  Next thing I knew, the Professor was ringing the house daily.

  “Are you ok to speak?”

  And I kept saying no, and putting the receiver down.

  The house kept smelling dusty, cigarettey. I was convinced the floorboards smelled dirty, and were cobwebbed up underneath. In the knotty gaps I could even see the grey webbing. I bleached the boards and they went all patchy.

  Then, one day, I let the Professor talk for a little while longer. “It’s about the short story you gave me. Success, Mandy!”

  “You what?”

  “I sent it to an anthology. An annual collection for new writers. I acted as your… uh, agent. And they took it! That’s a hundred pounds! The beginning of your career! The letter came this morning.”

  I met him in the white, fussy Georgian tearooms in town and he showed me the letter on stiff, creamy paper and it was all true. My first story sold and I hadn’t even tried.

  So there I am, Wendy. The book comes out in March. I’ll send you a copy. There’s a party in London and the Professor said he’ll come with me. I have to write more stories, he said. He tells me I’m a genius and now he hangs on my every word.
He wants to write them down, which is, of course, only flattering.

  I mean, all I wrote about was Mam, about Blackpool, the Golden Mile, me, you, our Linda. It was a tiny, tiny, short story, about the fair and Mam dying, what she was like at the end. How she used to watch monster movies. At the finish of it I have her down on the beach, on the wet sand, walking out to sea to catch up with Dracula, who’s turned into a bat and flying home. It took me ages to get it right. Yet it seems to have worked.

  Shall I send you a copy?

  If I write a novel that sells millions, becomes a movie, I could take the baby anywhere.

  I have to think about what I should write next.

  The Professor has a room in his attic and I’m moving into it this week. I haven’t told Daniel yet. Leave him alone for Christmas. The Professor thinks I should write a Gothic novel. He would. A ghost story. I remember what you said once: that to see a ghost you have to have suffered. There’s a beginning.

  Happy Christmas Wendy—I’ve no money for presents—but all my love, anyway.

  Mandy.

  That Christmas Wendy thought: I’m surrounded by bastard writers.

  Maybe that’s when I decided that one day, I’d get my own back on them all. Eventually I’d learn the skill, the lingo, the patter, and do it myself. With the language and the patience and everything I remember, I could wrest my own life back for myself. Away from the separate me’s in pages by Mandy, in the funny, stolen fragments that Timon produced, even in some of Rab’s endless sub-clauses. Even he managed to smuggle me in. I want to get it all back, and put it in one book.

  My eventual husband, Joshua—we’ll get to him soon—he had versions of me. Paintings and drawings of me framed in his exquisite flat. He commissioned people to come and have a look at me. I haven’t got any of those pictures. Didn’t want them. To me, all of those pictures are saying, “Who does this woman think she is?” The artists were coerced into making me their subject. I came out wrong in those, because I never have to be coerced. I slipped into the things that people wrote and no one had to pay for that. Joshua wasn’t happy though, unless he was paying for something. Usually paying over the odds.