by Paul Magrs
More than a wrapped sweet or a bar-room belle, Penny looked like a mermaid. Her newly hennaed hair was piled loosely on top of her head and the scarlet tendrils over her face looked plastered as if she had risen from the depths. Liking the effect, she dabbed her face with a bit of glitter and reached onto the window sill, plucking up the six dried starfish she had bought in Whitby. They were smaller than her palm and easy to pin into the soft mass of her hair. She stood and showed off to Andy.
“You’re fucking mad!” He laughed. “Starfish woman!”
She took his drink off him.
“Any fights yet?”
“No proper fist fights. Maybe a few sharp words. Some nasty looks. Mostly they’re having a laugh.”
Penny went to look out of the window, at the whole of Phoenix Court being steeped ever more deeply in snow.
“Here’s two more,” she laughed. “They’ve come all dressed up, look.”
Andy saw his uncle Ethan and his new wife Rose struggling across the car park dressed as pirates.
Uncle Ethan was capitalising on his wooden leg, wielding it with aplomb, shouldering his navy greatcoat which had, for the evening, a gaudy stuffed parrot stitched to one epaulette. It must have been a parrot saved from the stock he’d given away when the taxidermist’s closed. Andy was glad to see it come in handy. Or maybe his uncle had always harboured some desire to be a pirate. Maybe he was secretly pleased with having a leg like his. You could hear him now, throwing back his great, grizzled head and going “Harr-ham Jim lad,” and flicking up his eye-patch to make Rose laugh. Rose was dressed as Jim lad. Her navy breeks and striped Breton top seemed stretched to over-flowing. That she was in her sixties was something Andy often found hard to believe. She was a bright, brassy, infectious person. Even he could see how sexy she was. Her humour was all tits and bums and sauce and what made him laugh most was the way it mortified Jane, her rather uptight daughter. Rose was a scandalous presence whenever she came round Phoenix Court. Andy thought she’d done his uncle a lot of good.
“Who told them it was fancy dress?” Penny asked.
“We’ve all got to come dressed as something,” Andy said. “Anyway. Maybe they’ve come as themselves. We have.”
There was a swift knock at the door and they realised that the party had spread upstairs, too. Mark’s head popped round the door, startling them with its sudden inky blue.
“Uh,” he went. “The phone for you, Andy. You better hurry, it’s coming long-distance.”
Andy shrugged, on his way. “Who do I know..?”
As he left the room, Penny got one of Mark’s too-bright grins. “I’ve got a starfish on my right shoulder blade,” he said.
Silhouettes went darting by the windows. The curtains in the Forsyths’ house hung in tatters, partially blocking the bright lights within. Dark figures massed, broke apart and loomed recklessly close to the glass.
Nesta watched for a moment from the street and then hurried on. The Phoenix Court party seemed almost sedate compared with the lads over the road. They weren’t any less noisy, that wasn’t it. The sound of the Brotherhood of Man (`Save All Your Kisses for Me’) blasted as loudly from Penny’s house as did the hardcore dance music from the lads’ house. Yet Penny’s noise didn’t seem threatening. That was the conclusion Nesta came to. The doors and windows of Penny’s house were flung open and figures were out in the garden, getting cool air into stifled lungs. Red faces hung out of windows, calling and squealing. There were bairns running about and you could see Frank leaning in the doorway, eating from a jar of pickles and watching his kids play in the snow by moonlight.
But over the road the noise seemed menacing. It came thumping from a sealed house as if building up pressure. The house looked fit to burst open.
Nesta crossed the few hundred yards to Big Sue’s bungalow. The field of virgin snow showed plainly that Sue hadn’t left her door that night. She was too scared to walk past the Forsyths’ house alone. Well, these days. Nesta certainly thought of herself as a prouder and braver person and, in her own secret ways, she was. I may look no different on the outside, she found herself thinking as she banged on Big Sue’s door, but I feel like I can do more. It isn’t all so hard.
Big Sue’s head poked out of the toilet window above. “Is that you, Nesta?”
Nesta looked up, startled to see Big Sue without her wig on. A few soft strands hung past her face as she squinted into the gloom.
“Ay,” Nesta’s face was stiff with cold. “Lerruz in, man.”
Big Sue always made her own clothes and this made Nesta sorry for her. She would look at the thick curtain-material skirts the old lady wore and her heart went out to her. She’d tried to tell Sue she ought to...well, smarten up. To update her image. To do like they said on This Morning and have a makeover. Nesta had shown off her new leggings, saying Big Sue should have some. They always look smart. But Big Sue had her Singer, she said, and she could run up anything she desired or needed, quick as a flash, from oddments. What I like, she said beadily, on the day Nesta suggested a shell suit like hers, what I like is being self-sufficient. Nesta pointed out there was a warehouse on the industrial estate where you took your design of how you wanted your shell suit to look, and they would do it for you. She and Tony had tried it: eighty quid and they gave you a stencil of a little feller to colour in with felt tips, just how you liked. They’d had a lovely pair made.
“I’m happy how I am,” Big Sue insisted. This New Year’s Eve she was wearing the same shapeless, mustard-coloured tardy and pea-green skirt. Impatiently she ushered Nesta in, locked the door again, and took her into the living room.
The one thing Big Sue never skimped on was hats. She had a marvellous selection of ones dating right back. She even wore them indoors, watching the telly. On top of her wig too, which must have been scratchy and hot with the heating on. Nesta had brought her one or two back from the car-bootie as presents, but she’d never seen Big Sue wear those ones. Tonight she wasn’t wearing a hat. She sat on her swivel armchair in the centre of her living room with a completely naked head and, even though she was pretending to be as gruff and ordinary as ever, this was the biggest sign of her distress.
Wisps stuck all around the surface of her head. They put Nesta in mind of an Easter-egg-painting competition at school years ago. Nesta had messed up her display of three eggs. She’d been doing Planet of the Apes, but two broke in transit so that was the apes gone. She just did Charlton Heston, sticking his cotton-wool hair on with PVA. That went wrong too and his hair was reduced to shreds and patches of fluff. Nesta was bursting to tell Big Sue, You look like my Charlton Heston egg! But she held herself back, being too used to people just looking at her, baffled, when she said the first thing on her mind.
Nesta was the first person Big Sue had seen in days. Even plain, stolid, expressionless Nesta was a welcome sight. There were high spots of colour on her cheeks so you could tell she’d been on the cider already and her self-bleached, dry-straw hair was standing nearly on end. Why can’t she put a brush through it? What irritated Big Sue most about Nesta was her eyes, which were never fully open. She looked perpetually on the point of nodding off and it made the older woman want to shake her.
“You have to come to the party,” Nesta was saying. “It’s an all right do.” On Big Sue’s china cabinet her wedding clock bonged out eleven o’clock. “All the street’s turned up. You can’t miss everyone. They’ve all asked after you.”
Sue’s face crinkled into a smile as wide as Nesta’s hand at the thought of being asked after. She was a broad, motherly woman who had never had kids, which always surprised Nesta, who’d had bairns without really thinking about it. When Nesta was having bairns it seemed to be in someone else’s hands. Nowt for her to do but get passed pillar to post and that was all right. Nesta thought Sue’s breasts under her hand-knit cardy must be colossal, like water-filled balloons. She wondered if she would finish up one day with breasts like that.
“I’ll see,” Sue began.
“Maybe I’m not up to all them faces tonight.”
When Nesta opened her mouth to protest, Big Sue held up her hand. “Oh, you know, Nesta. When sometimes you can’t imagine wanting to talk to anyone?” She gritted her small, square, yellow teeth and snatched a Regal from the pack by her side. “Nesta, I just feel shy.”
Quite often people assumed that Nesta never listened to them, or that she never knew what was going on. Thinking her blithe or stupid, they never expected a clever or considerate response. As if the black of her thick mascara, the flaking gold and green of her favoured eyeshadow, obscured the world beyond her most immediate, selfish concerns. Sometimes Nesta saw more than people imagined, and she understood.
“Sue, I had this time...just before my trouble last year...and I couldn’t leave the house. It’s really horrible when you get like that. But don’t give in to it. You know that, in the end, you have to get out and do things.”
“Oh,” Sue began, “I’m not housebound—”
“Listen. I want to explain.” Nesta bit her lip. “You know what got me out of the house in the end?”
“Was that when you had all that bother and disappeared?” asked Sue, being as tactful as she could.
“Hm. The only way I could leave my house was to go with that man. It was all I could do. To stay with him in the daytime in his house and then for both of us to dress up at night and walk the streets in disguise. Really...I didn’t feel normal enough to be out in the day.”
That was the end of Nesta’s explanation. It was more than she had told anyone in the year since her breakdown.
Big Sue said, “It isn’t that I don’t feel normal, exactly...” She took a long drag on her Regal. “And I don’t feel altogether scared when I’m outdoors. Not all the time. There are some nasty buggers out and about and it pays to be careful, but I won’t let them terrorise me. It’s just, when I’m out, I feel exposed.”
Nesta looked at her friend and it seemed she was the same size as the chair she was sitting in.
“Come on,” Nesta said. “Come out with me.”
“I’m not dressed.”
Nesta shrugged. “My stepmam used to say, if you want to get ahead, get a hat.”
Minutes later they were trudging up the main road, linking arms as they sloughed off the drowsiness of Sue’s gas-heated living room. Big Sue took small steps on the slushy path. She said of the Forsythe house opposite, “Look at them with their lights on, music blasting. I wonder if they’ve still got all my knickers and bras.” She had a brief flash of all them lads, running about indoors, playing the fool with her new underthings. “They must be sick in the head.”
Nesta was turned the other way, squinting into the drifting darkness of Woodham Way. The road was almost smooth and unruffled. There’d been little traffic that night.
Big Sue said, “Fancy driving a taxi tonight.”
Heading towards them, nosing determinedly through thick snow, came a big black cab. It ploughed blindly past the bus stop and as it swept past Nesta and Big Sue, they saw that there was only one passenger. She sat in the back seat, staring at the houses of Phoenix Court. Her hair was golden and fluffed up proudly.
Then the taxi was gone.
Big Sue let out a great cackle. “You know who that was, don’t you?” She picked up her pace.
Nesta stared after the car. “I think I do. Do you think she’s come back for the party?”
The older woman grinned. “Ha’way, Nesta. I reckon this do is gunna be a good ‘un!”
FOUR
At number sixteen the party was well underway.
When the schmaltzy songs came on, Jane was in the corner, nuzzling another cocktail. Who was standing next to her this time? One of Judith’s teenagers, listening politely as Jane bitched about everyone dancing. Sheila and Simon were hugging each other close in the middle of the impromptu dance floor. The song was ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ and they seemed to be mired in the carpet’s swirling orange pattern. They stirred, hardly shuffling their feet, staring into each other’s eyes. He’s a skinny little thing, Jane was hissing to Judith’s son, he has to crane his scrawny neck to see into his wife’s eyes. He clung to her as if they were in a flood. His too tight jeans had a crotch that sagged low and his bomber-jacket sleeves were bunched up as his wife wheeled him slowly about. Sheila was gargantuan, with masses of kinky mushroom-coloured hair. Now he pushed his head flat to her breasts and she stared serenely out. Sheila watched their daughter slip quietly out of the back door.
“She goes collecting stones at night-time,” Sheila explained to Fran over her husband’s shoulder. Fran was dancing with her own husband, but she felt forced into it. She gave Sheila a sickly smile. “She makes her own jewellery, you know,” said Sheila proudly.
Jane’s attention was drawn away from the happy dancing couples. Her mother Rose and her pirate lover wanted to talk seriously to her about something. All she remembered afterwards were their mouths working earnestly, through the love songs. She was nodding intently, as if taking in what they said. But talking with Rose was impossible with that bloody stuffed parrot staring her right in the eye.
Penny shuffled through to have her mermaid frock admired by Rose once more, and Jane was glad of the distraction. Rose was calling out, “Oh, if I was still under twenty I would dress as a mermaid every day!”
Penny was telling them that she had nachos under the grill. “You what, pet?” Rose was saying. “What’s that you’ve got?” Jane’s mother had taken a shine to the motherless Penny. Of course Penny was so much more glamorous than Jane, Rose’s natural daughter. And all Jane could think was, What on earth are nachos? When Penny showed them, they were like plates of crisps with cheese and tomatoes and olives, which Jane usually hated and these ones tasted of TCP.
“Ooooh!” Rose smacked her lips. “Eating with our hands! This is like our cruise round the world!”
Penny filled the dining table with scalding hot plates of nachos and they all crowded round to eat with their hands.
“It’s all right, pet, I’m not after one of your fancy cocktails.” Penny put the shaker back on the sideboard and smiled. She recognised the old woman as Elsie, but couldn’t remember having talked to her before. She was a friend of Jane’s, one of those nosy types who couldn’t be bothered to actually get to know you before they knew all your business.
Elsie’s eyes were pink and they settled uncertainly, speculatively, on Penny, as if she was after something. “I’m just on the gin, if you don’t mind,” and, almost shyly, she proffered her glass for a top-up.
Wasn’t she an alkie? Hadn’t Penny heard that somewhere? And wasn’t she the one with the religious nut for a husband, the feller who reminded Penny of Dracula? He’d lope across the kiddies’ play park and you’d make sure not to cross his path. Penny had even stood at a different bus stop just to be away from him. And, of course — she recalled this as she hastily mismeasured the gin — Elsie was the one whose son was over the road with the bad lads.
“Ay,” Elsie said appraisingly. “Our Craig’s right about you.” She stared at Penny’s dress and Penny thought for a moment that she, like Rose, would say she wished she’d dressed as a mermaid in her youth. “Do you know our Craig? Have you met him yet?” Elsie was keen and rabbity, with urgent, pink-lined eyes, forcing Penny back against the dresser.
“Who’s Craig?” Penny asked, and found she was looking for an escape. Something about Elsie set her teeth on edge. That overeagerness of hers and her humbleness. One thing Penny had learned from Liz was to keep your distance. Penny trusted to a certain reserve. She knew that the way she carried on seemed the very opposite of that, as if she threw in her lot willy-nilly with just anyone, but that wasn’t quite true.
Now Elsie was staring into Penny’s face as if she could see the future there. Maybe she could. She looks like a bloody witch, Penny thought, and then stopped herself. What if Elsie really can see what is coming? Penny wasn’t prepared to dismiss the possibility. Her starfish bristled a
t the idea, she could feel them close to her scalp, mumbling their eager suckers on her dyed scarlet hair.
Pleased with her own circumspection, she beamed at Elsie, ready to start the conversation again. “I was miles away, Elsie. I’m sorry. Was I rude?”
“It’s that night,” Elsie said, stealing a glance at her watch. “It’s that night when we’re prone to slipping off miles away, thinking about people.” Elsie rather startled herself with her own lucidity. There was a grasping sensation in her chest and she thought she was going to vomit, but it was a sob, a deep, sudden sob that took her as much by surprise as Penny.
Penny seized Elsie’s glass of gin and found herself giving her a hug. That peppery hair in her nose made her think, This is how red hair ages. It was harsh against her face and smelled sour. She wondered if she would end up like Elsie, as if they’d met across the ages. Am I anything like her? Elsie was bawling now, right into the front of Penny’s crinkly mermaid dress. “Bathroom,” Penny said.
As she led Elsie there, through the massed bodies, squeezing between balloons and treading on beer cans, Penny was wondering, What if Elsie were to succeed? Surely she was here to matchmake. If she managed to get Penny and her Craig together, then what would happen? What if she and Craig married and got a kid and a council house here? Would Penny after twenty-odd years wind up the same as Elsie? Was it as easy as that? In the relative quiet of the bathroom she sat Elsie, still crying, on the toilet seat’s pink cover. Penny poured her a cloudy, toothpasty glass of water. Was that the clean and simplified trajectory of a life? What other factors need she take into account? The marriage plot almost seduced her by its simplicity. She watched Elsie gulp the water down.
Suddenly Elsie tipped her head, as if it was far too heavy, into the bathroom basin, and bellowed until Balti and gin rushed out.