by Paul Magrs
What did they tell you? That you floated up to a high luminous white point in the ceiling and when you looked down you could see your own body in repose. Like an empty crisp packet. Of course Liz would be the type to come back.
Something of what she saw at Bishop General had depressed Fran. It was to Mark, and no one else from Phoenix Court, she explained this. Mark wondered why she could trust him with her anxiety. He wondered about this as she was telling him, and he thought maybe it was because they had already shared tragedy. They had a shared history of tragic, true-story films and they knew all about hospital bedsides. She said to him, “Remember that film about the coma patient? I remember one thing, they return to being like a bairn in the womb. They curl up. From lying down they curl up and even suck their thumbs. They make themselves small as possible.”
“Horrible,” Mark said.
“I can’t imagine that happening to Liz,” she said.
I was listening to him going on and my mind was not really on it. “So tell me,” I said — and I’m a master of small talk —”tell me about your New Year’s Day.”
“Oh, with the family.” Mark pulled a face and the tattoos got pulled out of shape with his frown.
As he told me all about it, I wanted him to gather me up...and do what? Take me off to bed?
I just wanted him to gather me up.
Andy, man, I was berating myself. Get a grip. Who else do I know weak as me? Penny’s strong. No one fettles her. Vince always gets what he wants. Here’s me hanging on Mark’s every word.
“Well, you know I’ve got this ex-mother-in-law, Peggy. She took it upon herself to cook for everyone. She wanted the whole family together and that included me as the father of her granddaughter — Sally’s my daughter.”
Was he saying that pointedly to me: ‘Sally’s my daughter’? I already knew he had a daughter. “And of course Peggy’s got her own baby to look after, just gone two. Sixty-six and looking after a bairn like that and she’s wanting to cook for everyone.”
“She sounds like a star.”
Mark snorted. “Peggy’s a star all right.”
“Where did she get a baby from at sixty-six?” I asked.
“Oh, well.” Mark threw up his hands and looked as if he didn’t want to explain. I didn’t mind. I could do without all the complications of his life. “Put it this way,”’ he said, “she had a baby last year when she wasn’t expecting it. It came as a bit of a surprise to all of us.”
“Right.”
Now I was looking round at the living room and to me it seemed tidy. It hardly looked lived in at all. Mind, I’m used to number sixteen which, while it’s never dirty exactly, we’re not dusting everyday. And there’s a kind of rumpled chaos about the place. I like that. It’s homely. ‘Rumpled chaos’ was Vince’s phrase for it, by the way. Things lying about. Always there’s clothes horses up with shirts and pants drying. A pile of CDs and tapes out of their cases on the floor in front of the stereo.
In Mark’s flat you got the feeling that whatever he used he put back in its place immediately he was finished with it. I think that’s unnatural. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like something had been excised from the place. Maybe signs of other people. His wife and daughter, of course, and I felt sorry then for analysing what he had or didn’t have lying about. This environment was so obviously the result of his being left all on his own. He made the best of it and for him this meant a crippling nearness. I went to the bathroom and noticed that round the edges of the bath he’d neglected to remove all traces of his ex-family. There were a number of those plastic characters you get bubble bath in: Ariel the Mermaid, Minnie Mouse, Robocop. I was almost tempted to check if he’d cleared out his daughter’s old room. I don’t know why. I knew he had her staying at weekends, so it stood to reason that her room would be kept the same as ever. It was something perverse in me that wanted to see her room like a shrine.
Honestly, I think I’m turning into a sick bastard.
I reckon I do need to get out of Aycliffe for a few days, I thought. They’re all doing my head in. I’m sick of seeing Penny with a face like a slapped arse. Sorry, Penny, that’s not fair. I owe Nanna Jean a visit anyway. I didn’t go and see her during the festive season. Festive season! I’ve had more festive shits. Nanna Jean was in Corfu anyway with the girls from the club. But she’s due a visit. See her tan.
I went back to the living room and Mark was putting his jacket on. “Listen, I’m still starving. Do you want to come and fetch fish and chips with me? We can have them here with the wine you brought.” That smile of his held an infectious enthusiasm. It was like when he put me to bed on New Year’s Eve and, in so many words, unbuttoning my tartan shirt, he came out to me and made the loveliest pass that anyone ever has. He made it all into a wonderful joke with that grin.
I said, all right. But I only had, like, one pound fifty on me. “My treat,” he said. “Like I said, I should have cooked properly for you. These are guilty fish and chips.”
We walked out in the snow. It was dark again and I thought about Liz lying in the play park all night. You can’t help thinking about it. Her blood is still frozen there. You can see it. The kids were playing with it the other night. Dirty little monsters, playing with Liz’s frozen blood. I watched out the window and it made me want to run out and tell them, “Don’t play with her blood!” I saw a dog lick it, too.
We walked out to the Redhouses. I always thought that the fish shop there was dirty and I wouldn’t have gone there if it had been my choice.
I said to Mark, “Was the other baby there on New Year’s Day?” I meant his ex-wife’s new baby, the one he had been roped in to deliver. He sighed and said yes.
“I’m getting attached to the little thing. Another little girl.”
“Was her father there?”
“Bob the policeman?” He scowled. “We tried to make more of an effort to include him in the conversation. My ex-wife gets cross when we leave him out.” He shrugged. “He’s so boring.”
“But your wife loves him.”
“Well.” For the first time he looked perplexed. I had probably overstepped the mark.
I said, “It’s amazing you’re all still so much a part of each other’s lives.”
“It’s the bairns,” he said. “All the bairns keeping us together. Making us eat family meals and watch the big film on the bank-holiday afternoon, while Peggy fusses round, making us tea as well as dinner.”
I said, “It’s got to be more than the bairns. There are lots of divorced and split-up families and they don’t carry on like you lot. I think you lot are quite unusual.” We were at the fish shop by then. There was a queue inside and it was steamy. I leaned against the far end of the counter and ran my fingers on the dimpled metal. A sign said not to burn myself on the glass.
“Unusual?” He smirked, but not as if he was really listening to me. “Compared with my lot, Andy, you don’t know what unusual is.”
Now I smirked. “You reckon?”
And we were smirking at each other until it was our turn.
Back at his flat he put the telly on while we ate. I picked at the fish, teasing off its yellow cardigan of batter and eating it in strips. The wine was rough and it seemed to cut through the claggy grease that lined my throat. We watched a bit of the film that was on that night, Big. I bloody hate that film, Tom Hanks acting daft. I said to Mark, whenever I really want to see a smart film and I’m depending on there being something good on the telly, it always turns out to be Big with bloody Tom Hanks. Or Three Men and a Little Lady.
Mark asked me what my favourite film was.
I said, Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
He went, “Oh.” He hadn’t seen it.
I must have kept making bored noises all the way through the film. He picked up on them and realised I wasn’t enjoying it. He drew the curtains and took away the plates, which had been resting at our feet, smeared in grease and tomato sauce. I could hear him washing up.
I went to stand behind him at the sink. I was being bold, I thought, standing right behind him.
“So there’s been no word from Liz’s boyfriend, has there? That Cliff?” he asked. I watched his blue hands moving about in the suds. The air was scented with vinegar from the chips and the red wine.
“No, there’s been nothing,” I said. “We don’t know where he is. He should be here, though. Taking some responsibility.” I kissed the back of his neck clumsily and he flinched at the contact.
“He used to live in the flat above this one,” Mark said. “Until he ran away with Liz last year.”
“Did he?”
“He’s a good-looking bloke.” I watched him finish the few dishes, dry his hands and screw the tea towel up. He stood still, facing away from me, and I started to feel a little silly, leaning in close like this.
“Will you let me stay tonight?” I asked and was wondering as I said it why I asked like that. I sounded so subservient. What did I think I was doing?
“Andy,” he said, turning, ‘I…”
I stepped back. “Right.”
He could see the look on my face. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I think you’re a great bloke.”
“Right,” I said stupidly, again.
“You know I fancy you,” he said. “Obviously you know that.”
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t remember where I’d put down my coat when we came in with the chips. I wanted to go back to number sixteen. I’d rather put up with Penny being miserable than this.
“It shouldn’t really have happened on New Year’s Eve,” he said, and sighed. “It was like I took advantage. Andy, how old are you?”
I turned to go. “Fuck you.”
I wanted to scream at him that his finer feelings weren’t the issue here. Whether he felt he had taken advantage or not, I never cared. I wanted to tell him we were bonded in more than just one mistaken night. It was something I felt in the pit of my stomach and it wasn’t that I thought our complicity was a good one, a healthy one or a positive one. I just felt we should...I don’t know...cling together for a bit.
But when I made a rush job of saying goodbye and leaving then and there, he just looked relieved. And I didn’t see Mark Kelly again till I came back from Tyneside. That was more than a week later. The time-scale we work on, well, it might as well have been a year. By then things had moved on — what do they say? — apace.
Andy dreamed for much of the night about the animals he knew were on Mark’s body. Were there really seahorses and centaurs? Had he seen them? Great, splashy butterflies on his shoulders; cherubs and turtles malformed with age. Was he making it all up and giving Mark’s body more credit than it deserved?
There was no leopard, he was sure about that. He’d have noticed any leopards a mile off. After a while in that dream the creatures in their tattoo colours cleared away and made space for Andy’s favourite.
In a weak spot the leopard will come back and give me that
baleful stare.
Mostly his eyes are green and blue and I’m sure that he’s a he. He has that hungry look men get.
And women don’t get that hungry look? Oh, don’t quote me on this. I’m only talking from my experience.
Green and blue, eyes like clocks. Eyes always at twelve, always at dinnertime. This is the eye of the leopard that comes back to look at me.
I have fallen out of bed because the leopard looks at me. He doesn’t do anything else, he gives me that hungry look and, in a weak spot when I’m not feeling my best, it’s enough to startle me out of bed.
I woke tangled in my sheets. I woke wrestling them, damp, and I thought they were his pelt, glossy and wet, coming flayed and free in my hands.
His mouth hangs open all the time, he’s frozen like that. Not stupidly like a dog’s mouth, panting and sloppy. His mouth is open in a grin that cracks his head wide open and his ears stand on end, his whiskers all a-tremble.
I haven’t described his spots yet. The leopard’s proverbial spots.
Look! that black-lipped, pink-gummed, bloody and ivory grin proclaims. Oh, look at my proverbial spots!
Tonight I veer my eyes away from his marks, as if at a defect. But how can I? His spots are everywhere. A pox on him! His covering is comprehensive, from the ends of his whiskers to the tip of a tail that twitches and coils to punctuate the sentences I invent for him to say. Oh? he purrs. Ah! he murmurs. Oooh...he concedes, jabbing the air with that tail of his, dot dot dot.
Under, between and round the spots his fur is tough and golden. It cascades over muscle. If you opened him up, you’d expect him to be golden through and through. But he’s not, inside he is fibrous red meat, like me and you, my leopard.
Those black spots, now that I can gather myself up to stare uninhibitedly, are the exact size and shape of lip marks, all over him. Someone in black lipstick has taken him and kissed him all over. As if with equal parts passion and possessiveness, they have laid a claim to his pelt and marked it for their own. They have kissed his twinkling golden ears, his fairer, tightly muscled sides and even the soft, dimpled pads of his feet.
Have I mentioned before that I dream of my leopard at times like these? When I feel like this?
It comes from the time I lived in a taxidermist’s. Before I lived in Penny’s house I had rooms above my uncle Ethan’s taxidermist’s shop in Darlington. Downstairs in the gloom, surmounting mildewed pedestals and scratched glass cabi-nets, were stoats and kingfishers, everything you’d expect. The cupboards were full of all his stuffing paraphernalia. There was a back room where he would set to hollowing the poor beasts out and patching them up again.
In the front window, sunning itself in the meagre light, his leopard surveyed the length of North Road with that same baleful stare. He said he never would sell that leopard. It was as broad across the shoulders as I was and from its nostrils to the end of its tail it almost spanned the width of the shop.
I used to do bar work and when I came back late to the empty shop and flat there would be only my leopard to greet me. To say, How was your evening? Why are you so late? Who is this you’ve brought home with you?
Look what the cat’s dragged in! he’d go, and I would laugh.
Uncle Ethan let his taxidermist business go and I had to move out. “It was a liability,” he said, “and believe me,” he added, “a man with a wooden leg knows a liability when he sees one.” All the animals went and I wanted to keep the leopard for my own. Yet at that stage I didn’t even have a home. I could just see myself on the streets with a leopard in tow. Bringing Up Baby. So I just lost sight of him.
Some nights he’s back, looking at me, giving me advice.
Often I tumble out of bed, all sweaty, when I see him in the night.
He jumps up on his hind legs and presses his paws into my shoulders. The retracted nails dig into my skin but never break the surface. All the while I get the feeling my leopard is trying to impress something on me. His advice.
When I dream of him tonight, the night I’ve been round Mark’s, the leopard’s telling me I was right to think I should get out of Aycliffe for a while.
Go north, the leopard is saying, pressing his paws on my shoulders, his mouth gaping wide, his clock-faced eyes implacable.
All right, I say, I’ll go north.
Then I wake myself up by sneezing and realise I’ve come down overnight with germs.
More snow has settled, it’s six o’clock and I can hear Penny knocking about in the kitchen downstairs. When I get down there she’s making up some sandwiches for my bus journey north. Somehow she already knows I’ve decided to go. I thank her, though sometimes it unnerves me, the way Penny just easily, unquestionably knows exactly what I have been dreaming of.
EIGHT
Elsie’s incentive for working at the spastics shop was this: getting people to look in. After all her years on the town she knew nearly everyone who came through those doors. Some came in especially to see her. It was what she liked best about the job.
It wasn’t paid work. It was all for charity and she wasn’t one of those who expected to get something for nothing.
“There’s also something else,” said Charlotte, when they stood listing incentives to each other over the counter. “There’s also the fact that we get the pick of the best stuff. That’s our best perk.”
Charlotte was a bit posh, Elsie thought. The older woman put on this accent, even though she had lived in Aycliffe for years, well before her man died and she was widowed. She came to the spastics with a clean, pressed pinny every morning.
When Elsie was on the till she could hear Charlotte crashing and stumbling about in the sorting room upstairs. She always got there first, rooting around in the donations, setting stuff aside, pricing things up with the yellow stickers. Elsie hardly ever got a look-in. She found herself thinking unkindly of Charlotte getting to the best donations with those hands of hers like claws. The old woman was twisted up with arthritis and her hands were purple, so that Elsie could hardly stand to look at them. Charlotte had difficulties pushing the till buttons. It was terrible and embarrassing to see. That was why, usually, it ended up with Elsie stuck behind the counter serving people, taking money and chatting away. Meanwhile Charlotte fussed around the racks, straightening and sorting, then ducking upstairs to poke around for the cream of the crop. Elsie knew for a fact the old woman put 20p stickers on the things she wanted for herself. And grudgingly she paid this nominal amount, going home with bagfuls of goodies every teatime. God knows how she got it all to fit into that bungalow of hers. She lived just off Phoenix Court, in Catherine Cookson Close, and thought she was a cut above.
“Someone asking after you,” Charlotte called, waving one of those hands of hers in front of Elsie’s face. She knew Elsie went off into these dozes and she clicked her fingers under her nose to bring her round. Elsie hated it when she did that.