[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  She had brought a whole load of bags, which they had to help her with. She pulled Wendy into a stiff, cold embrace. That same old yellow coat seemed strange here in London. “Hey, I’m freezing. I thought London was meant to be a few degrees warmer?”

  “Are you all right, then?” Wendy asked. “Serena said about… you arguing with your man.”

  “No argument. I took one look at the old slob and thought: I’m not having my life dictated to me by the likes of him. The big pig.”

  “That’s not how you talked about him before.”

  “Well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, or something. I’d forgotten the reasons I was so glad to leave and go to Blackpool in the first place. So that’s that.”

  She struggled into Serena’s living room and flung herself down on the William Morris sofa. “You’ve been making a few changes in here, Serena.” She kicked off her shoes and examined her feet for signs of travel-damage. Her hair was blonde again.

  “Yes,” said Serena thoughtfully. “Let’s have a drink.”

  “God, yes. Do you know, he had a whole posse of these devout, fawning, bored women around him. They were tending to his every need, apparently, and now he never leaves the house at all. He doesn’t need to. Hasn’t tried for months. Doesn’t even think he could manage it. I looked at him and thought, I don’t need the likes of you.”

  “Hear, hear!” said Serena, passing her a Pimm’s.

  “I never liked all the god business anyway,” said Anne. “And he had the nerve to ask me if I’d been faithful all the time I’d been away. Not a word about poor old Pat! Not a dicky bird!” She took a long slurp.

  “You’re here now, anyway,” said Serena, sitting herself carefully opposite. Wendy took her own glass and sat down too.

  “And I’m staying,” said Anne firmly.

  “Here?”

  “For now, if you’ll have me. But I’m buying my own place. In London. You’re always telling me this is the place where it’s all happening. That I have to get with it. So here I am. I want in, now.”

  “Right,” said Serena, her mouth going up at one side. Wendy knew enough about her by now to know it wasn’t wry amusement, it was nervousness.

  “So you’ve got a full house now,” laughed Anne.

  “So I have.”

  “Just wait till she,” Anne nodded at Wendy, “starts inviting all her pals. You’ll have women with no legs, fat mad women, blacks and allsorts on your doorstep.”

  Wendy realised that Anne had already been drinking.

  “She’ll turn this house of yours into the same as Pat’s place. A home for freaks and skivers.”

  “Oh…” said Serena mildly, as if about to say that she wouldn’t mind, but then she decided that she rather would.

  “No, I won’t,” said Wendy. “And don’t call them freaks. It includes you too, Aunty Anne.”

  “Of course!” she grinned, raising her glass in a toast. “And I’m the Queen of the Freaks. I’m the Queen of the frigging Freaks.” Then she burst into loud, wet sobs.

  Serena, who couldn’t deal with tears, ducked into the kitchen to check on dinner. She was doing something complicated in parcels of pastry, she said, and had spent an age twisting them into just the right shape. Wendy was left to comfort her aunty, which she did awkwardly.

  “I’m rich, now,” Aunty Anne said, and blew her nose. “Look! Black snot. I’ve only been here for half an hour.” She looked at Wendy, gauging her reaction. “I’ve come into what they used to call a fortune.”

  “Uncle Pat?” asked Wendy, and her aunty nodded.

  Serena was back in the room as if called. “So you really are going to move to London?”

  “A nice big house,” said Anne. “Of my own. At last.” She smiled blearily at Serena. “I’ll need help.”

  “And you’ll get it. So this was your news! Wonderful!”

  “Colin’s still abroad with that friend of his.”

  “David,” said Wendy.

  “He doesn’t know about the will yet. He gets enough, and the flat in the Royal Circus, of course.”

  “Bless him,” said Serena. “I can help you shop for furniture, fabrics, things… you must have a garden, of course, and…”

  “It’s not the only news,” said Aunty Anne. She looked at Wendy. Wendy felt herself blush, guessing what was coming next.

  “I don’t…” Wendy began.

  “Three million pounds,” Aunty Anne said, in a curious, toneless voice. “That’s how much he left you.”

  Serena dropped back into her chair. She stared at Wendy. “You clever thing!”

  Anne glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Why… just… I mean, nothing.”

  “You can take it back,” Wendy spluttered, as if her Aunty had offered her cash. “It’s not mine. Give it to Colin…”

  “Won’t Colin be furious?” asked Serena. “He was the son and heir. Doesn’t this cut down his share?”

  “Apparently,” said Anne, draining her glass, “he already knew about the whole thing. He didn’t want much anyway. Pat said so in the will.”

  It sounded to Wendy like her uncle had been talking again, from beyond the grave. She wanted to hear him, to argue the toss with him. Just to hear him again. Parachuting, he had said, was like coming all over the sky. But trains made him vibrate too much. She wanted to ask, what did dying feel like, then? She started to cry and the others didn’t notice.

  “That’s why Colin took himself out of the country,” said Anne. “To be out of the way when this happened.”

  “Three million pounds,’ Serena repeated softly. Her hands, her long white hands, had flown up to her throat and they were still resting there.

  “Can I contest it?” Wendy asked.

  They looked at her sharply. “Can you what?”

  “I don’t need it. I can do without it.”

  “You Uncle Pat,” said Anne, “wanted you to prosper. He said as much. He said he wanted to put wind in your sails. To use your imagination. He wanted to see what came of you.”

  “But he can’t,” Wendy mumbled through her tears. “He’s dead. The money won’t help that.”

  Serena came to stand beside her. She touched Wendy’s hair. “It has its consolations, Wendy. You’ll see in the end, that life is all about finding consolations.”

  Anne helped herself to another drink. “After I get the house underway, guess what’s next?”

  They looked at her.

  “Tummy tuck, bum lift, face lift, liposuction. The whole kit-kaboodle. I want to bring all of me into line with my legs before the new millennium.” Then she danced a quick two-step on Serena’s hand-woven rugs.

  I was always thinking about the next thing. I know I gave

  that impression of drifting along and latching onto people, or letting people latch onto me, whichever way you want to put it. I gave the impression there was nothing I wanted to do, nothing in particular. I couldn’t answer when they asked me what I wanted to do. My junior school teacher said I could sing. Miss Kaye made me sing out notes loud as I could go and she felt for my diaphragm, said it had a silent g. She said that I really could sing and that I should learn. After that I never thought about it again: I thought I already could, just by her laying hands on me. Mandy said, Linda said, Timon said, Aunty Anne said: ambitions are things you have to work at. I suppose they despaired at me that I never got behind one of my ambitions, like they said they did to theirs, and pushed for all I was worth. I got caught up in other things and if I gave the impression I didn’t care, well, it was false, because I did care. I was always thinking about the next thing.

  The next thing would stun me into inactivity. I knew it was out there, Jaws-like, waiting for its moment. It hypnotised me. I went from friend to friend, home to home, knowing that, eventually, it would come to me.

  Money comes as a great relief to anyone, of course, and it comes as a special relief to people who—forgive the cliché, Colin—live on their nerves. I
was trapped moment to moment, unable, unwilling, to see the larger sweep of time. My mother was dead and I couldn’t get by inside her living experience. I had nothing to project my own experience against. When I got to know the hairdresser, Lisa Turmoil, I was jealous of her because she was doing the job, living the life, that her mother had done before her, and her mother before that. They slotted in like Russian dolls. If my women role models were Russian dolls, they were a mix-matched set, and no one got the right bottoms and tops and some were even left without one half.

  I made excuses for myself.

  I want you to see how I managed, or didn’t manage, to handle my life, my fortune, and my eventual husband.

  I was aware of all the other lottery winners in London, in the country over. I was one of them now, by default. Since it had started in 1993 the National Lottery had created a fair number of overnight millionaires whose lives, although they various protested this wouldn’t be the case, were changed utterly. I was aware of my fellow millionaires, new to their lots, when Serena and Aunty Anne took me out to the big shops. We were like zombies, acquiring cards and new agendas, replacing everything we already owned, and dreaming up the things we had got by without until then. Funny thing was, I never saw a brazen new millionaire, mouthing off in a department store, demanding the best of everything and more. They were, we were, rather shy, as if the money had come to us through dodgy dealings. I felt a fraud.

  When Uncle Pat won his fortune it was a Rollover week. That was what they called it when weeks had gone by without a jackpot winner, and the Saturday totals had rubbed up together and multiplied and the pile of dirty money mounted ever higher. He never went on the telly to receive his cheque and crow at the watching multitudes. No congratulations from a top star. No Astrology Annie, the bizarrely witchy presenter who used arcane lore to foretell the week’s lucky viewers. Uncle Pat took the money and hid. He didn’t go out buying things in London.

  I did. It was like one of those stories, about the father who takes his young son to the whorehouse at the edge of town. He leads the boy to the pro, pays her handsomely, and instructs her to give the boy a birthday rite of passage he’ll never forget. Afterwards, the father takes his son back, tips and woman and says: “Thank you for turning my boy into a man.” And, in the old, old story, the boy glows with spent pride.

  Aunty Anne and Serena led me into Piccadilly, then Knightsbridge, with fatherly care. They took me to the correct glass altars and made me spend. Aunty Anne did her own spending, collecting valuables for her new home. She was like the father who, to pass the time, diddles the brothel-keeper, an old friend of his.

  I couldn’t get very excited about all of this. You were meant to come out of the revolving doors swinging your heavy shopping bags by their gold braid handles and you were meant to be ecstatic. I couldn’t keep up the ardour. My excitement—and I did try hard, for the sake of the others—pretty much flopped.

  While Aunty Anne and Serena tried on clothes I slunk off to a gleaming coffee bar and wrote out large cheques to Mandy, Linda and Timon. I told Mandy to leave her Professor, Linda to leave her boring new husband, and Timon to come with Belinda to see me. I posted them off and decided I wasn’t going to spend another penny that day.

  I would try to think more clearly about the whole thing. About the next thing.

  The ladies found me sitting at a table at a Rennie-Mackintosh fountain, following the iron curlicues of a peacock’s tail with my gaze, completely absorbed, and to them I looked morose. I was so out of step with them. They were in their glory days, I realised. Aunty Anne’s independence had come at last. They were free to live the high life they had always wanted, and had goaded each other into finding. In an old Hollywood film, this period in Aunty Anne’s life would be represented by a breathless, luminous montage of her having a whale of a time: riding in taxis, pointing impulsively out of the window, measuring new, vast windows for curtains, instructing removal men and artisans, trying on a range of fabulous hats, going to the races and stepping out of those eternally revolving doors, swinging her shopping bags.

  The first thing that came back from Timon and Belinda was a

  spray of pink lilies, delivered one morning to Serena’s flat in Kilburn. A tight, frosty morning, newly February. The man carried the flowers to Wendy like they were a baby, swaddled in polythene. The outward furling petals looked so exotic, bobbing on their stalks. The orange stamens goggled as Wendy took the prize.“Lilies are for funerals,” said Aunty Anne. “Haven’t we had enough of those?”

  Serena fussed around Wendy. “Oh, they’re for any time. These are magnificent. So fleshy and cool. Who sent them?”

  Wendy read the card. “Timon and Belinda. They found a florist in the Western Isles.”

  She read:

  We’re coming to see you! And we’re bringing back the cheque so you can rip it up—very kind of you and all, but—well, anyway, we’ll talk about it when we get there—in the wicked city—we’re going to be famous, Wendy!—we’ve got some footage!—breath-taking world-shocking mother-fucking footage!—This will be as big as the 1967 Big Foot home movie, when the lady Big Foot was filmed running back into the snowy woods through the fallen logs—and as talked about as the alien autopsy at Roswell in 1947—oh, boy—you’ll see, Wendy—you’ll see what we’ve seen!—Just wait!

  Love to you,

  Timon and Belinda.

  Wendy looked up. “They’ve filmed some UFOs.”

  Aunty Anne tutted.

  “They’ve got evidence?” asked Serena sharply. At Christmas she had heard all about Belinda’s preoccupations.

  “Apparently. They’re bringing it to show us.”

  “They’re coming here?”

  “To London. I don’t know where they want to stay.”

  Aunty Anne looked at Serena as if to say, see? Now you’ll see. Here come all of Wendy’s funny friends.

  Aunty Anne was about to move out to Putney at last.

  Anne had ridden all over London on the tops of buses and in her taxis, her A to Z flat on her lap, spying out her perfect house. “And it has to be perfect,” she said, “because this is me, now. This will be the place where I will eventually drop. I mean, I’ll stay there—in bliss—until my dying day. No compromise this time. I’ll know exactly what I want when I see it.”

  It turned out that the best she could imagine for herself was a tall, narrow house in Putney. It was just across from a florist and a chain French restaurant, here she soon enjoyed going for late breakfasts. Serena was gently scornful of Anne’s choice of mansion home. But her friend had fallen in love at first sight. “Look,” said Anne. “All these beautiful, empty white rooms. I don’t need any more than these.”

  She started to ask Wendy when she would move in with her.

  Wendy saw, suddenly, that she was in a tricky position. Serena stepped in. This was over pastries and bowls of coffee in Café Blanc, opposite the new, empty house. “I don’t think Wendy knows what her plans are yet.”

  “What are you, her secretary?”

  “Perhaps Wendy is going to buy her own home?”

  “She isn’t even eighteen. Of course she isn’t. I’m the one looking after her.”

  Wendy sighed. There was no use intervening in skirmishes between her aunty and her friend. Wendy and her homelessness were the ostensible subjects, but this exchange had more to do with a host of historical entanglements the two women had got themselves into. They were cool with each other for the rest of that day, rallying only later, when Anne bought Serena a very smart handbag.

  It was at about this time that Wendy went through Piccadilly late one night, bored with waiting for the number twenty-two to Aunty Anne’s, and she joined the loud gaggle standing around Eros. He looked so flimsy up there, Wendy thought sadly. The whole of Piccadilly Circus had seemed disappointingly small to her, the first time she saw it. It was just like the Golden Mile in the round. There was a dreadful place, a kind of museum of pop music, and they had duff waxworks stand
ing on balconies, high above the hectic streets. With beseeching arms, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger and Brenda Soobie stood looking very unlifelike in the air above Eros.

  Standing there, Wendy watched the people hanging around in groups. Tramps and dossers and the homeless, drug users and pushers, boys and girl she supposed were selling sex. She tried to tell who was who and felt absurdly like a bird watcher, clutching her Observer Book.

  I know nothing really, she thought. I’ve never spent a night on the streets. Not even outdoors in a tent. She thought about sunbathing in Gayfield Square with Colin, and how they realised they were being stared at by the pissheads over the low wall.

  I could be mugged, thought Wendy, who had two hundred pounds in her pockets. Anything could happen to me. And this is London. No one would care. No one would stop to see what was happening. She was in an old T shirt and jeans again, her trainers were ripped and flapping apart. Or I could disappear here and turn up anywhere. Just another teenaged girl in London.

  She counted out the money in her pockets and took a deep breath. Then, walking back to the bus stop by the cinema, pushed ten pound notes into the hands of everyone she passed. Some blessed her, some told her to fuck off. By the time her bus came, she still couldn’t decide whether it was deeply unsatisfying or not.

  In the new house Aunty Anne was standing red-faced with arms akimbo. She was among her freshly-delivered cases and boxes. How few old things she had. She’d jettisoned her old things as easily as she had Pat’s. Some of these boxes bore the names of smart shops. Nothing was unpacked yet, apart from what looked like a banana tree in the living room.

  “What’s the matter?” Wendy asked, seeing her face.

  “We have a visitor,” said her Aunty Anne and, as if on cue, the downstairs toilet flushed thunderously and out came Captain Simon, rubbing his wet hands on his yellow coat.

  “Wendy!” he cried. She hugged him and was sure that his white moustache had flourished since they’d been apart. He looked older.

  “He isn’t staying,” said Aunty Anne flatly.

  “Ohh,’ Wendy waved her away and brought the old man through to the kitchen, which was the only habitable room. The surfaces were strewn with unspotted and fragrant herbs and crumbs of black earth. “Are you going to stay with us?”