Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

  Simon never knew why she bothered talking to the old bitches. They came out with a load of shite. And the old blokes! Eyeing her up.

  ‘This is the important thing. Education.’ The woman was nodding and jogging the bairn on her knee. God, she can’t have had more than ten hairs on her head. ‘And it’s good for you to have something to occupy you, too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Kerry said.

  ‘I remember. Having bairns and being in all day. You need something. I never had the brains.’

  ‘What’s she on about?’ Ray asked Simon. ‘Scruffy old bitch!’

  ‘Ay, Kerry’s let her have our bairn on her knee, an’ all! Ah, she’s telling her all about that course of hers.’

  ‘What for?’ Without realising it, Ray was tapping his foot to the buskers’ playing.

  ‘And it’s an English course, you say?’

  Kerry nodded.

  ‘I’ve got a grandbairn gonna do her GCSE English this year. She’s very good at English. Spell anything you like. I can’t put two words together so it can’t be my side of the family she gets it from.’

  ‘I want to go on and do it at university.’

  ‘Well, I wish you luck, pet. There should be more women going off to places like that. College educations. They reckon it’s happening, though, don’t they?’

  ‘I’ll do it from home. Part time, like.’

  ‘That’s good. English. It’s like I told Lisa—that’s my grandbairn, the eldest one—when she was choosing which exams to take in her GCSEs. I said, your maths and your English are the most important ones, pet. That’s what they always ask for. Your writing and your numbers. That’s what you’re gonna need. The teacher agreed with me, like. Lisa took my advice. Will you be doing maths?’

  Kerry smiled and reached over to take the bairn, who was getting bored now, sucking on a pulped handful of Flying Saucers. ‘Just the English,’ she said. ‘It’s enough for me.’

  Buckling the bairn into her chair, she added, without knowing why, ‘I’m reading The Tempest at the moment. For my course.’

  ‘Are you?’ The woman was tapping her feet to the buskers now and she looked vague, as if she’d forgotten what they’d been on about.

  ‘By Shakespeare.’

  ‘Shakespeare, eh? Well, then.’

  ‘It’s about a fairy called Ariel.’ Kerry looked about, getting ready to go into Boyes. ‘Well, I’ve only read the first scene or so.’

  ‘My attention goes,’ said the woman and with her fingers combed her hair which had flapped loose in the breeze. ‘I read a few lines of something and honestly, if you were to ask me what it was about, I’d not have the first idea. It’s just me, man. I’m daft.’

  Kerry stood with the pushchair in the hardware aisle and as she stared at the display of little packets of tacks and nails she had tears bursting up in her eyes. Boyes was empty and musicless and so she could hear her husband and Ray, over in the cheap records and ornaments, laughing.

  ‘It’s about a fairy called Ariel. She bloody lives in books.’ That laughing in Ray’s voice she remembered from school, his accent thicker than ever in mockery.

  ‘Fucking Ariel the fairy!’ She could almost hear Simon shaking his head. It was as if the bairn were listening in too, she was so still and quiet.

  Kerry hardly knew what she was looking at. Screws and pins and needles and that. All different sizes, lengths, types. A short man with a dark tache and a striped shirt came over to her, his nylon trousers whishing up the aisle. His badge said ‘Derek’. ‘Can I help?’

  Simon was shaking his head ruefully, his voice taunting. ‘Ariel the fucking fairy!’

  ‘Sixty-nine pee a pound!’ Ray laughed. ‘Ariel the fucking fairy—69p a pound!’ They both laughed.

  ‘Washes fucking whiter an’ all!’ Simon said, too loud. Derek kept his eyes on Kerry and waited for her reply, determined not to hear the laughter a few aisles away.

  Kerry said, ‘I want to put up a whole wallful of shelves as cheaply as possible.’

  ‘Listen, listen, man…’ Ray was giggling like a kid, almost painfully, as if he was about to wet himself. They were both in a silly mood, poking through Boyes’ cheap goods. Simon held up two flower-fairy fridge magnets.

  ‘Look at this fucking rubbish!’

  Ray laughed a laugh like a snort either side of his mouth. Simon made the fridge magnets do a dance.

  ‘Listen, man,’ Ray said, still laughing.

  ‘Paul bloody Newman’s salad dressing! Looks like his spunk in a bloody bottle.’

  ‘Ugh, shurrup, man! Listen—Ariel’s tasty dog!’

  There was a pause. ‘What?’

  They both remembered, at school, when someone would come out with a new word or phrase that would take off. They could become brilliant insults if used right and had to be coined with love. Ray had excelled at buzz words. He laid claim to classics: ‘foy dog’, ‘fester cat’, ‘dipshit’, all had been his once upon a time. He’d hear people all over school, saying his words, laughing. Neither he nor Simon had heard a good one in years. But this had the feel of something good.

  ‘Say it again,’ said Simon, starting to giggle.

  ‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog. Like on the poster in Weigh Your fuckin’ Own.’

  ‘Ariel’s tasty “dog”.’

  ‘“Ariel’s” tasty dog.’

  ‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog.’

  They laughed again.

  Blushing, Kerry listened to Derek telling her how chipboard was her best bet, but she’d have to buy it down Homeplan and cover it with something. Sticky-backed plastic. Thirty-eight pence a square foot it used to be… He rushed for his calculator and slid it out of its smart plastic wallet. ‘I’ve not done these kinds of sums in ages. Hope I can still do them. Now, what lengths do you want?’

  ‘Ariel’s tasty dog.’

  ‘The wall’s about twelve feet long. And I want shelves down to the floor… from the ceiling. About five… shelves down.’

  ‘Have you got a lot of plants and ornaments then, pet?’

  ‘Books. I’ve got a lot of books everywhere round the house. Thousands of them in boxes. Cluttering up. I want them putting right.’

  ‘Thing is, the chipboard only comes in eight-foot lengths.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘“Ariel’s” tasty dog.’

  ‘So I reckon… do three sets of five, four foot long each.’

  ‘What? Oh… yeah.’

  ‘But don’t do them right across, like one long shelf. To make it good, like, urn…’

  ‘Stagger them?’

  ‘Do one set, then set the next set, like, halfway down a bit… so they’re, like, staggered. Then you’ve got… ends at either side. Like bookends. And that’ll look really smart.’

  ‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog.’

  ‘When you said stick them up with grey brackets… ?’

  ‘You get them here.’ He went and picked up a handful of the grey L’s. ‘Twenty pence each.’

  ‘That’s cheap.’

  ‘There’s nowt to them. You drill in these, put the plug in the wall and that expands so they don’t come out again and you screw in your screw. Oh. Is your wall brick or, like, cavitied?’

  Kerry pictured it. Last winter when the pipes went funny something discharged itself endlessly, night and day, inside that wall. It had definitely sounded like a cavity. Christmas she had spent reading in the kitchen listening to the cavity filling up with water. She told Derek this. He frowned.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very good, does it?’ He fished out a packet of plugs. ‘Anyway, these are for, like, cavitied plasterboard walls.’

  ‘Oh… it’s an outer wall I’m on about.’

  ‘Then that’s what you call a brick wall. You want the other plugs.’

  ‘Right.’ Kerry straightened up. She glanced across and the bairn was looking restless, a packet of curtain hooks wedged into her mouth. ‘I’ll not get stuff now. I’ve got to go home and find out whether we’ve g
ot a drill or not.’

  ‘This is the bit you want. A twelve or an eight.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Your own place, is it?’

  ‘Ariel’s tasty “fucking” dog!’

  Derek shook his head. ‘I’m sorry about them lads.’

  She took off the bairn’s brake. ‘Yeh. It’s me own place.’

  ‘Well, I hope you get your shelves sorted out.’

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Aw, look, man, you’ll love this. Look!’

  Kerry came back into the front room to see Simon, his voice raised excitedly, dragging out his Picnic Cool Box.

  ‘You’ll fucking love this.’

  ‘What is it?’ Here Ray was less sure of himself. He was much less cocky in Kerry’s house. Simon had set the white plastic chest between two armchairs in front of the telly. He flipped open the lid to show Ray it was full of cans of lager, all kept cool. ‘Look—we leave it right here. It’s all ready for the fuckin’ World Cup.’

  ‘Ariel’s tasty dog!’ Ray said and sat down in the chair next to Simon. They opened a can of lager each.

  ‘The bairn’s just gone off to sleep,’ Kerry said, heading for the kitchen. ‘Keep your voice down a bit.’

  They didn’t say anything but when she was in the kitchen she could hear through the serving hatch that Simon said ‘Ariel’s tasty dog’ again.

  The kitchen table was stacked with the paperbacks she was reading just now—The Go-Between, The Tempest, Emma and York Notes on all three of them. Her A4 pad was out and a reporter’s book of pencilled notes. The kitchen noticeboard was a collage of the bairn’s scribbles and potato prints and Kerry’s clippings and marked essays and forms. On the cooker pans were bubbling and she had about twenty-five minutes to read before dinner needed to go out.

  Scene One was a long one in The Tempest. She liked the name Miranda and wished she’d thought of it before, to give to the bairn. They’d settled on Julie.

  When she had shelves up, covering the length and height of the outer wall of their bedroom, would she arrange her books alphabetically? Or would she put them in any old order, for the fun of seeing what ended up rubbing shoulders with what?

  * * *

  The football was finished and they had made a little pyramid of their empty cans on top of the telly. They were throwing the bairn’s toys to knock them off.

  ‘Tea’s ready,’ Kerry said. ‘Are you stopping for your tea, Ray?’

  Ray held up a spongy dog with floppy ears. It was Julie’s first toy. Simon had brought it to the hospital. ‘Ariel’s tasty dog!’ Ray cackled. He sniffed the toy and smacked his lips. ‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog!’ With that he bit off one of the spongy dog’s ears.

  ‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’ He spat it out and threw the toy down. Then he saw that Simon wasn’t laughing.

  ‘The bairn’s had that since she was born, you tit!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you’ve fuckin’ knacked it. I bought that for her when she was born!’

  ‘Oh.’

  Kerry picked the dog up. She asked Simon, ‘Have we got a drill?’

  Ray looked worried. ‘What?’

  ‘I want to put my own shelves up. Like staggered shelves up. For my books.’

  ‘I’ve got a drill somewhere. What are we going to do with the bairn’s dog?’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody ruined, isn’t it? Your mate’s bloody ruined it.’

  Ray tried to make them laugh. ‘But it was Ariel’s tasty dog!’

  Kerry tossed the dog into Simon’s Picnic Cool Box. ‘Get out of my house, Ray. Don’t fucking come back.’

  They were in bed early that night. Kerry tended to stay awake later, sitting up to read. She was still on with her Shakespeare. Simon was getting so that he hated the cover of that book. It was an old-fashioned one, and reminded him of the books in school.

  ‘Ariel’s tasty dog,’ he murmured to himself, lying away from her as she read.

  ‘What?’ she asked, and the phone rang.

  They let it go a few times, down in the hall.

  ‘It’s past midnight,’ she breathed.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he said, sitting up now.

  ‘It’ll be your mam. She’s died.’

  ‘It could be anyone. Anyone could have… had an accident.’

  The rings went on.

  ‘Aw, get it,’ Kerry said. ‘It’ll have the bairn awake.’

  He got up and went downstairs in his underpants. They were partly rucked up and she saw he had a spot coming on his bum. Funny, she thought, what you notice. The ringing stopped and she listened hard to catch what Simon was saying. She couldn’t pick it out so she looked at the book again, but nothing would stick. She realised her heart was hammering away. It was as Simon had said, when he was drunk and sentimental on New Year’s Eve, having a bairn made you scared of many more things. And that included the phone ringing when you weren’t expecting it. It was as if your nerves were made to stretch further. She was pleased Simon felt like that too.

  He came back. ‘I don’t believe him.’

  ‘Who?’ She pushed The Tempest away as Simon slid back under the quilt, shivering.

  ‘Bloody Ray! He’s out in Darlington. Pissed out of his head. Ringing up, all upset. He wanted to apologise, he said.’

  ‘He what? Ray?’

  ‘He wanted to talk to you, really, but I told him you were asleep. He’s bloody crackers. He reckons that, tomorrow, he’s gonna go round all the shops in Darlington to look for a toy dog exactly like the one he ruined.’

  Simon snuggled down to sleep again. She listened to his five-o’clock shadow scrape on the pillow. She had a very hairy husband. Hirsute, she corrected herself.

  ‘He phoned after midnight to say that?’

  Simon looked round. ‘He also said we were his favourite friends.’

  She tutted. ‘Favourite bloody friends!’

  ‘He’s a nutcase.’

  ‘He’s your bloody friend, not mine.’

  Simon’s hand slid across to her under the quilt. She watched its impression beneath the fabric, thinking of Jaws. He said, ‘He’s just Ariel’s tasty dog.’

  ‘Don’t start that again!’

  In the next room the bairn started wailing.

  ‘Shite!’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Kerry said, though it wasn’t her turn. She was better at quieting her.

  Simon groaned. ‘It’s like having two kids.’

  When Kerry went to see her she was standing up in the cot, clinging to the bars and rocking backwards and forwards, yelling her head off. She’s a gutsy one, Kerry thought. She’s gonna have a right life, this one. She picked her up and she wasn’t wet or anything. She was just cross.

  Mother and daughter had taken to having midnight traipses around the back garden. The bairn had come to expect them. She was just reminding her mam. As soon as Kerry took her down the stairs, into the kitchen, the bairn shut up. She gurgled, even, as Kerry opened the back door and stepped out into the gravid summer air. The lawn and bushes of dock leaves and nettles, all their hedges, were a deep mysterious blue. Kerry’s bare feet shushed through the grass.

  ‘You know, I wish we had called you Miranda,’ she told her daughter.

  Julie just cooed with her head facing backwards over Kerry’s shoulder, as if she was being winded. She cooed because something had caught her eye.

  Kerry turned, to squint at the bottom of the garden, trying to see what the bairn’s keen and milky-blue eyes had seen.

  A lithe, bone-white, quite hairless fairy eased himself from under the hedge. He didn’t notice Kerry as she held her breath and gripped the bairn tighter. Ariel was intent on his mustard-coloured pit-bull terrier, which had shot under the hedgerow ahead of him and was now digging a hole in the lawn.

  Simon will go crackers about his lawn, Kerry was thinking. He was painstaking when he laid that. It was like carpeting. And that was what he had been meant to be looking out for in Boyes thi
s afternoon—shears—but Ray had kept distracting him.

  Soon the dog had made a sizeable hole and moonlight glinted off something down there. Kerry assumed it was a bone but the grunting yellow dog took it out and laid it carefully on the grass. Then Ariel gave him a swift pat and they both bolted back into the undergrowth.

  She watched a moment and then went to see. They had left her a spanking new drill, minus its bit. Julie clapped her hands. Well, Kerry thought, we can buy the right-size bit from Boyes, from Derek.

  SEVEN DISENCHANTMENTS

  Until the very end my grandfather kept a suitcase with him. ‘I’ll fight it tooth and nail, every step of the frigging way, and they’ll never get hold of it.’

  The last time I saw him, in the home, where he died exhaling the dust of his carefully cluttered objets, he was clutching the case to his chest, struggling with inarticulate hands at the clasps.

  His stockinged feet, meanwhile, curled about the gramophone which sat like a faithful hound. He was basking in crackling, booming Puccini arias. ‘I’ve taken up opera—me! Frigging opera!’ His feet, far steadier than hands, stroked the wooden gramophone’s sides. ‘I’ve found it’s the best there is for vibration. The vibration warms up my feet. When you start to die, it’s the frigging feet as gets hit first.’

  How long would his shaken form hold up? I wondered. Opera couldn’t keep him warm indefinitely. I stepped past the bric-a-brac and the pleasantries, asking, ‘You wanted me for something?’

  When he looked up there was fear and defiance in those eyes, a blue translucence like the finest china, cracked and patched with threads of dirty yellow glue. He must have decided I was an accomplice. Relenting, he said, ‘This suitcase. It has to be kept away from them.’

  ‘What’s inside it?’

  ‘Your frigging inheritance, my lad.’

  ‘Shall I open it now?’

  I have always enjoyed opening presents. Despite what they say, the pleasure is neither in giving nor receiving.

  It is always in opening, for giver and receiver both. The jouissance of discovery, the shattering of bondage. As a child I anticipated a career in either burglary or escapology. I Penetration and extrication have always been my areas of expertise. I could never stand a cluttered room or a bolted^ entrance. It strikes me now that, even during the gaudiest of sexual permutations enacted by my person, I have submitted j to very few enacted upon—or within—my person. I have always been the Alcatraz of sexual partners—immune and integral, even at the point of crisis.