[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  “I only wish I had my book,” he said.

  Wendy bit her lip.

  “Belinda and me were jokes before we even met,” he said. “Only separately. I was a joke when I first met you, hon. Asking to come back to your mother’s flat, asking to be part of your family. What was I like?”

  “Lovely, Timon,” she said. “Always lovely.”

  He relaxed in her arms then and grinned. He kissed her, quietly and unexpectedly and how soft and full his lips were. His teeth gave her lips a playful nip and stayed there, just for a breath, then he pushed at her again, pulling her into his warmth, where she rested.

  “If we make love,” Wendy said, “it won’t be…”

  He hushed her and started to undress her, pushing the warmed clothes down onto the sodden ground. She felt her skin tighten in the cool air and tasted the soot that lined her throat. And tasted Timon’s mouth on her again. She smoothed his chest as his shirt dropped away, fumbled with his belt. Felt her knees crack as she bent to lie beneath him, heard his belt and keys and money jingle as he came to straddle her, his feet tangled and tied together. She laughed. “I’m fucking soaked now.”

  He brushed her hair back, pulled leaves and twigs away and eased some feeling back into her. He tugged his cock free of his tangle of clothes and she thought, in a rush: old pal, hiya, you’re the first proper cock I ever saw and at last, after all this, he was sliding it into her and he lay on her breasts and sobbed as he held it there inside her. Wendy gripped his sides and felt his feverish sweat slick her thighs, her hands and she thought, not for the first time, that she and Timon had been each other’s consolation prizes all along, right from the start.

  Katy pushed Astrid straight into the waiting party. More tents had been struck right at the edge of the glen. A less raucous gaggle of unicorn followers awaited them. Even the horses were quiet and watching. Astrid’s wheels squeaked and protested. “Shit,” Katy said.

  Astrid never said a word.

  The followers of the church lit torches and came out to meet them. With them came the Professor. He wore a neat black suit, but he was huge and lording it over everyone present.

  He laughed, loud and deep inside his gullet to see them struggling, stuck in the rutted mud like this.

  “Bring them to the camp,” he chuckled.

  The followers helped Katy with the chair.

  Katy clung on. “Take me to your leader,” she muttered.

  “More for our happy gang, our wondrous breed,” the Professor laughed. “Our ever-expanding troop.”

  Astrid’s face contorted in anger. She could have spat in his eye. “We don’t have anything to do with you. You are spoiling the memory of Belinda.”

  “A rival faction,” he purred thoughtfully.

  “Faction my arse,” said Astrid.

  “My dear,” he said. “What are you like, riding that fine, steel steed of yours? You are like a little centaur. A plucky centaurina. Perhaps we could adopt you as our new figurehead. You can be an emblem of the challenges we face as we ride onwards, ever onwards.”

  “Do you really believe all your own shite?” asked Katy bluntly.

  “Oh, yes,” said the Professor. “And come morning, all the world will see how much we believe.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Katy.

  “Take them,” said the Professor quickly, and Astrid was plucked wriggling out of her chair by willing, dead-eyed stagehands. Her chair—with its lacquer of nail varnish and twists of old tinsel—was booted into the fire.

  “Cocksuckers!” screamed Astrid, held struggling and suspended. Katy was pinned to the ground.

  “These two reek of the corrupted world,” glowered the Professor, raising his voice to carry to the others. “They are sullying the air and the chaste minds of the true followers. These two have renounced nothing. They are in our midst and they bring with them poisonous thoughts.” He clicked his fingers. “Bring them to my tent.”

  His harem tent was larger than all the others. It was dark and smelled of fish and chips, which one of his lackeys had brought out for him from the hotel. Astrid and Katy were pushed down on the lumpy cushions and bound with coarse cloths.

  “Jesus God,” said Astrid. “I think this is it.”

  They were left for some moment while the Professor addressed his closest followers. They heard him through the canvas.

  “I will teach these two myself and convert them to the purer way. Even though our journey is almost over and morning will see us reunited with the visitors and long-gone from here, we still have time for two more conversions. I shall take that burden upon myself.”

  The rabble were clapping and jeering him on and he was ranting, spittle flecking his perfect, neat beard. He talked once more about the perfect, sexless visitors, all reason and perfection, who would pass by soon and take the purest home.

  “They all want to be horses,” said Astrid.

  Katy was thrashing about in her bonds to free herself and fell into a jumble of the Professor’s personal effects. His stinking clothes. She cursed. Tins of Heinz soup, a little stove, a portable Byron, a tin opener and a white sliced load, half gone. She twisted and swore and scratched the flesh off her wrists getting the tin opener into one hand.

  Then up went the tent flap and the Professor was crouching over them while the followers guarded his read.

  “Which of you lovely converts is going to be the first?” he grunted.

  “Mandy was right about you,” Astrid shouted.

  “Mandy?” he asked, mildly surprised.

  “Everything she wrote in her book. Everything she said.”

  “Do you know the beautiful and treacherous Mandy?” he smiled. “My Scheherazade?” He unloosened his suit trousers, closed the tent flaps behind him with a cough. Then he yanked down his boxer shorts and pumped furiously at his fat purple cock. “And will you two tell me stories to delay my coming? What elegant circumlocutions can you describe?” He advanced on Astrid. Hmm. No legs.”

  “Leave her the fuck alone!” Katy yelled. “She’s got no fucking legs.”

  “I know,” he said gleefully. “Isn’t it convenient? I’d prefer her with no arms as well. But what can you do?”

  Katy lashed out with her whole bound body and tripped him so he fell, heavily between them. He bolted up, surprisingly fast for his state and size. He lunged at Katy.

  “I don’t know what or who to do first!” he cried.

  “You’ve promised these people impossible and horrible things,” said Astrid.

  “They’ve done it to themselves,” he bellowed, drawing up onto his knees, making a playful grab at Katy. “They had the fucked up space-agey ideas in the first place. They want to think space is all unicorns and happiness and purity—so who am I to stop them? I want to believe that too! That’s what I long for. Purity!”

  His hands shot out to grab Katy then, and with enormous strength he pulled her down to him. He dragged on her hair and set about pushing his wet cock in her face. She rolled all too compliantly, the tin-opener’s stubby blade glinting once, brightly on the air, held up close to her face as she made one untidy gash at the base of his cock, squishing it neatly into his balls.

  He stared down and his look at first seemed to be one of puzzlement at the way he was losing his erection, and then at the blood rushing out and the wormy silver threads of the tubes from his balls spilling apart in dirty festoons. Then he howled and pitched over onto his side.

  There was a pause before the unicorn people came running.

  “I know,” breathed Katy. “Jesus God. Jesus fucking God.”

  “Katy,” said Astrid. “That is blasphemy.”

  The tent flap shot open. “He’s had a heart attack!” Katy shouted, to buy them time.

  “He was trying to be fucking us both,” Astrid added, “and he took a massive fatal attack of the heart!”

  By then Katy was attacking her own bindings with the tin-opener. Free, she pushed past the stricken followers and dragged Astrid bodily o
ut of the tent.

  By the time his followers managed to pull the wailing bulk of the Professor onto his back and discovered his wounds, the women were gone. Katy staggered headlong into the grass, half a German sikh grasped in both arms.

  “Murder, Katy,” Astrid was whimpering. “This is murder we have created.”

  Nothing more was said until they were back in the hotel room they were sharing.

  They looked out the window and saw the fires still raging. There was no sound from Timon and Wendy’s room. There were no policemen at the door, axing their way in, no management calling, no ambulance bawling. They were out in the wilds and the fuss was dying down.

  Bloodied and sooty, Katy and Astrid slept.

  Timon and Wendy slept half-naked in the grass and they hadn’t fucked at all. He’d fallen asleep inside of her at his first thrust and shrivelled and crept back out and she’d slept too, holding him tightly.

  When dawn came they were the first on the whole glen to wake up.

  The fires were smouldering gently and sending out purplish, dirty-looking smoke as they died. The horses were all gone. Fled at last. And the dancers, the revellers, the followers of the Professor’s church, lay still on the ground.

  “Everyone slept out of doors last night,” said Wendy, dressing hurriedly.

  She and Timon stumbled down the hillock towards the fires’ remains. Each member of the church lay oddly straight, at regular intervals on the ground, describing a ragged circle. Each had a square of blue silk over their faces, their chest and arms.

  Elsewhere, in the smaller camp, it was the same.

  All had neat blue silk covering their faces, except the tortured remains of the Professor, and the last surviving member, the woman in the black sweatshirt whom Wendy had met years before. She was the Church’s very first member and author of their manifesto. She had been laying them out till dawn, until now, when she was sure she was almost too late to catch the Starship as it passed. Quickly she took the pill and lay down beside the fire where the black charred wheelchair sat in a heap of hot rubble. She swallowed the pill down, thinking the Professor was doing some very strange things last night and maybe his ending wasn’t what he had planned. She was thinking that maybe they were wrong to let him get so extreme. Maybe last night he was showing a true underneath self. The unicorn woman couldn’t think straight about it. Yet it was too late now, with everyone following the plan to its end at last. All of them gone home like this. All she could think of was her glimpse of the dying Professor’s ruptured scrotum and those pale ribbons hanging out. She’d thought: That’s all his power spilling away, spilling into the mud? That’s his words, that’s his long sentences coming out of his punctured balls?

  She swallowed her pill down and lay straight in the filthy earth and tugged the silk that she’d kept for herself into a neat diamond over her face. She closed her eyes to wait.

  FORTY-TWO

  In the end all you want to do is protect them. I’d spent so long in the years of being married to Josh wondering if Katy could feel like my daughter. It didn’t matter in the end. She was mine because I wanted to protect her, an urge that came out of nowhere and pushed me to go after her, to check who she was with, what she was doing, that she was safe. When she took up with David—and she did, she took up with him again as soon as we returned to London—I was meant to be jealous and cross, maybe eventually concede and realise that I’d grown older, and let him go by. I never felt like that. Maybe at first I did. What I felt in the end about Katy with David was relieved, that I knew him, and that he was all right really and he’d be good with her. After Argyle she was in a peculiar state. We all were, but it hit Katy worst. We found both her and Astrid the morning after and they looked like a bomb had dropped. They were past being surprised by the deaths of the church people and how the followers had turned on the Professor and killed him in his tent and pulled his balls off him. Katy looked stricken, and Astrid just looked at Katy, as if waiting to take her cue. ‘Jesus God! What a surprise!’

  Timon looked guilty. He thought he and Belinda had caused the deaths. You couldn’t get it through to him that there’ll always be people to hang their suffering and needs on something you’ve done. They used you, Timon, I tried to say. He wouldn’t have it. He drove us back to Edinburgh a couple of days later, once all the circus around the cult had died down. We had to answer questions. Timon was conspicuous, was known to the media and the police, but they also knew the reason he was in Argyle. His relative fame protected him. He was treated carefully, as the surviving partner of a woman worshipped by a suicide cult. We were given counselling, emergency support talks in the lounge at the back of the hotel. I couldn’t say much about it really, and I don’t suppose Katy or Astrid did either. They had seen less than we had.

  All the sombre way back to Edinburgh, I wondered about the Professor. He thought he was protecting his church, his herd. In the videotapes they had made in their London headquarters—and sent, in advance, to the BBC and ITN—you could see his love for his people, how they believed they were going on to something better. While we stayed on in Argyle the tapes were broadcast, full of dire warnings of what they intended to do to themselves. The members looked certain and delirious with anticipation. Of one last rabble-rousing festival and then… off with the visitors. They were getting what they wanted. They knew the non-church world would never approve or understand. They sent messages explaining to their individual families, and those people had to watch their children changed, visionary, thinner, posthumous on the nine o’clock news, days after the event, saying that they were happy and sure.

  The Professor loved his herd. You could see that much. And he was protecting them in the only way he could think of.

  Since all my friends were split up by then and living in different cities, many of the fantasies we spun out when we talked on the phone was that we could all get together and stay that way, just for a while. Deadlines would come up, events for us to gather round. My wedding had been one and we seemed nearly complete then. The century’s end was another: one of those turning points you wouldn’t want to go through without seeing everyone, like it’s your last day on earth. But that New Year, and all the ones since, have seen everyone in separate places they wanted to be.

  The Professor got all of his people together.

  He managed it, for one final bash.

  At school—I must have been thirteen—we had a kindly biology teacher who was coming up for retirement, but he hadn’t lost the knack of talking to people our age. Nothing creepy or too pally in the way he went on with us. He was a smiling, sandy-coloured man and he pulled no punches, spared us no silly jokes when he told us, as he had to that year, all the facts of life. When he said about crabs ‘in your hair down below’ and about your monthly periods and the way you might feel, there was always this very proper sympathy coming from him. He died and there was a special assembly and lots of us cried. We didn’t know him well, but it seemed like we had.

  Once he’d done some elementary physics with us. He made one girl hold my upper arm in front of the whole class. “Now, what do you think,” he asked us, “if she kept hold of Wendy’s arm like that for a thousand years, would her arm wear away eventually? Or…” and he instructed the girl to rub my arm gently in one spot, like she was swabbing me for an injection. “Would it wear away in less than a thousand years like this?”

  I always thought of that lesson in friction when Josh held me in one of his doggy hugs and when he decided it was time to break apart he would rub my upper arms briskly as a signal. Usually it was me pulling away first, wriggling and impatient. But the time he rubbed my arms I thought: in less than a thousand years he’ll wear me down to nothing, and then I won’t have to look after everyone.

  So it was true that if you held on tight to someone and didn’t move at all, they lasted longer.

  Now I knew that wasn’t true, but my implacable thirteen year old self would still occasionally remind me.

  We sa
id goodbye to Timon and Astrid at Waverley station and we were bound for London again. I waved at Timon, who’d held still inside of me, as if friction was the last thing he’d wanted to cause.

  Within a year Timon published his book at last, a slim, narrow, rewritten hardback with photographs, which sold shitloads. It sold on the back of the cultists’ suicides and there were rumours that Timon had sorted the whole thing. The whole kit-kaboodle, said Aunty Anne, who turned out to be one of the murmurers . She read the book and thought it was disgusting. In this version of the book Timon made heavier use of the letters that had flown between Belinda and himself before their first meeting. He admitted to me later that they were there to fill up space.

  “And now everyone thinks they know Belinda,” he said. “They can’t see the difference between knowing someone in the flesh, and having read about them.”

  I thought this was startling coming from him. He’d thought he’d known everything about Belinda just from having read those same letters. He’d changed his mind, now there was no physical presence to back them up. Yet he published the letters virtually intact, and let everyone think they were getting to know someone in all their glory.

  Because there were photos, I appeared in the book. The atrocious Polaroids of our Christmas together, right before Serena appeared. They made a double page spread in the book. I had a raft of footnotes to myself. I am footnote girl.

  Dear Timon,

  One day I would like to come to Blackpool and see you at work. I wouldn’t tell you I was coming. I’d let it be a surprise. Wendy always tells me that surprises are the devil’s work and that we should avoid them—did she say that when you knew her? I think she wants an easy life and one shock-free.