by Paul Magrs
Tonight as Mark runs, as he starts to sweat, he feels like throwing off his gym kit and running naked but for tattoos. He feels free to run where he wants.
At last, coming round on his second circuit, he starts to plod, to weary. His legs shake. He stops in the main road and, outside the Forsyths’ old house, he sees a minicab slow to a halt. Craig clambers out with his bags and looks around at the street. He’s looking smart and sure of himself. His gaze lights on Mark immediately. Unhurriedly he feels for taxi change.
“Now then, lad,” says Craig, tight-lipped.
Mark crosses the main road to see him. Mark feels light and loose-limbed, the opposite of the thickset, powerful boy. Mark comes to stand by Craig. Now then, Mark thinks. He hates this about Aycliffe men. Their bluff, bullying, obvious insecurity. He gets called ‘lad’ by Craig, fifteen years his junior.
“You’re back then,” Mark says. He feels at a loss. Craig still hunts around for money. “I reckon Penny will be pleased.”
“Do you know who I was staying with?” Craig looks at him.
“No, I —”
“Andy.”
“Oh. How’s he doing?”
“You should go and see him, Mark.”
Mark smiles. “All the way up to Edinburgh?”
Craig is insistent. “He has something for you.”
“What?”
Craig shoulders his bags and turns to the Forsyth house. He hands the impatient driver the exact change. “An addition to your family.”
“Don’t let that taxi go!” This is Fran, running slap-slap-slap on her slippers from Penny’s house.
Craig and Mark turn to stare.
The taxi has just pulled away. Craig darts after it. A burst of speed and he’s rapping on the driver’s window, forcing him to stop. Craig looks smug. They look startled at Craig. Where did that speed come from? Isn’t he meant to be lame?
Penny comes up after Fran.
“We’re going to the hospital,” she tells Mark.
“Did you lock up your house properly?” asks Fran. This is the kind of thing she frets about.
“Where did you come from?” Penny asks Craig sharply.
“Scotland,” he says, grinning even though he doesn’t want to. “I came back.” His month away seems like a lifetime. The longest month of his life. He looks at Penny now, her long, mousy, distressed hair, her shapeless dress, her thick socks fallen round her ankles. He’s missed her.
“What’s the hurry?”
“The hospital phoned. Mam’s woken up.”
Craig feels this like a physical blow. “You what?”
“They’ve known that she was…coming near the surface, but she’s back!”
“Come with us!” Fran tells him. She bundles them all—Mark included — into the cab.
“Bishop General,” she snaps at the driver, plonking herself in the passenger seat and noting that the meter is already running. There is a sickly smell of forest-floor potpourri. It would be cheaper to buy a car, she thinks, than taking a taxi in every catastrophe.
All the way there, Craig feels ill.
“See?” Penny bursts out triumphantly as the cab negoti-ates the dark country lanes on the way to Bishop. “Nesta and the others didn’t do any harm after all! They did the opposite! They must have done Mam good!”
Fran looks round and gives a sickly, worried smile. A death’s-head Hallowe’en grin of reassurance she’d be better off not bothering with. Penny sits uptight, scared, grinning madly back. She looks out of the window, feels Mark’s hand on her lap. He sits tense and sweating between her and Craig. It occurs to her suddenly that since she last saw her mam she has fucked both these fellers. Craig looks less cocky now than she has ever seen him. What’s his problem? It isn’t his mother on the slab.
On the crackly radio Abba sing ‘Voulez Vous’. To break the tension, the taxi driver starts to tell Fran why he called his firm Tiger Taxis.
“All that itching,” Penny says suddenly, “was scabies!” She leans right across Mark’s lap to tell Craig. She practically shouts it in his face. He looks so stubborn and dull she wants to shake him. “I went to the doctors to get it sorted out. You bastard! That was scabies you gave me!”
Craig blanches, and so does Fran.
Craig asks Mark, “If she had it, did you get scabies as well?”
“Who off?” Mark asks.
“Her.”
“Me?” gasps Penny. “How would he get it off me?”
“Ha!” Craig turns to see her. His face all twisted up. “Andy told me what you wrote to him. How you shagged the bloke with tattoos.”
“Oh,” says Penny.
They all sag back into the backseat. The taxi hurtles on. Over hills and bumps, jolting them.
“Yes, I did get the itching, actually,” Mark says.
Imagine! Fran thinks as she listens — imagine itching under all those tattoos! Your real self itching to get out!
Listening, she realises that she herself has started to itch.
“Have you got rid of your itch?” Penny asks Craig.
“Yes,” he says crossly, unsurely.
“I got some stuff on prescription,” she says. “You have to paint your whole body covered from the neck down.”
Craig laughs. “Did he do it for you?”
“Oh, man,” Penny curses. “We only shagged once.”
At this the taxi wobbles slightly on the road.
“How’s my mam?” Craig asks.
“Marvellous,” says Penny. “Apparently she’s brought my mam back from the dead. She’s like bloody Jesus round here, your mam.”
“Maybe now,” Mark butts in, “we can ask Liz who got to her. Who beat her up in the first place.”
For a moment — a shattering, self-condemning moment — Craig hesitates. Then, flustered, he says, “Anyway, Penny, it’s all true. Andy has got a baby. He’s got himself a baby from somewhere. He’s not making it up.”
Fran twists round. “He’s got a baby?”
“He says it’s his own.” Craig nods to Mark. “And his.”
Penny starts. “Are they all right?”
“Fine,” Craig says. But the car has pulled up in the dark hospital forecourt. Here already.
“Seven quid fifty,” the Tiger Taxi man tells Fran. “Make it six. You lot are better than the telly.”
They bundle out into wind and rain.
“What a night to come back on!” Fran whistles.
That cold is coming off the fields and the open country. She realises that she too is talking as if Liz has been on a journey. As if she has been in outer space. She’s talking like one of the superstitious ones. With her rational, everyday mind she knows Liz has lain still in the same place for month upon month. But how seductive it is to believe her to have been submerged in another world. Vital and living all the time, translated elsewhere. And now returned and full of news.
Mark is standing alone for a moment. I have a baby, he thinks. He looks to where north must be. Tomorrow he will check that he has money for the train fare. He is sorely tempted. If he can, he will go to Edinburgh.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tom is furious. He has appealed to the doctors and nurses and they brush him off. They are in the room now, shutting green screens around Liz. Putting the machines back on her. Surrounding her with the menacing paraphernalia of care. Tom is used to people playing doctors and nurses.
He kicks against the door they pushed him through. Nesta and Elsie are sitting back down. Elsie even has her knitting out.
“We are responsible!” Tom cries. “It was we who provoked her back into life! How dare you — how dare they shut us out now?”
These are the crucial moments, when Liz has feet in both worlds. Maybe several worlds. Tom feels he is missing something he has striven all his life to be near. Beyond that simple grey swing door there are mysteries going on. They’re keeping him out again. People with more money, more qualifications, more confidence than he has.
“Th
ey won’t let me in, Elsie,” he says. His own defeated tone surprises him. He doesn’t sound half as angry as he feels inside. She puts down the yellow baby booties she is knitting and pats the chair beside her. Come and sit, she tells him with one of those easy, eloquent quirks of her mouth. Then she mothers him.
He folds into her usual embrace and closes his eyes. They won’t let him in.
“I tried, Elsie. I tried to get in. I tried to find out.”
“I know,’ says Elsie. “But they’re busy in there, looking after Liz. You have to let the experts in. You wouldn’t want to get in the way, would you?”
“No,” he murmurs into her woollen breast, while all his thin insides cry out, Yes! Yes!
Minutes pass. He gets back his calm. He thinks. Mulls over.
“Liz is at that special edge,” he says. He can sense Nesta listening from across the room. “We all work to our own edges. Beyond which we can’t go. Liz has gone further than any of us.”
Elsie smiles embarrassedly.
“It’s the edge,” he goes on, “at which we become unconscious or go mad or depressed or get sick. There we are hopeless. It’s where we end up when we can’t pull ourselves together any more.” He looks up into Elsie’s eyes. “I had to see what was there. I had to see Liz at that edge.”
She looks sadly at her Tom. This isn’t proper religion. It wasn’t what he was like before. What’s he been reading while he was away? This sounds American. Like those clean-looking young men who come round the doors in nicely pressed suits.
He also makes Liz’s struggle for life seem like something she’s best off losing. He even sounds as if he wants her to go further over that bridge. Funny thing to want. You want people to come back from the edge, don’t you?
Elsie sees in a flash that Tom wants more than anything a glimpse of another world. He’d ruin anything to see that.
Elsie turns cold. She’s besieged with worry. Across the way, Nesta looks as if she has fallen into a trance of her own. Elsie thinks that Liz might be better off not coming round. Not if she has to live like a vegetable. That’s the worst thing. Not being able to see to yourself.
The best thing would be going in and out of consciousness for ever. A gentle up and down. Elsie could imagine ebbing and flowing and feeling happy. Sometimes you’d have to take responsibility, take a grip…other times let it go and let your nearest and dearest gather round you to take care. Liz is better off now, doing this hokey-cokey with her coma.
To Elsie, Liz is a porpoise, a dolphin, a mermaid.
Once, Elsie’s doctor gave her a relaxation tape of whale song. It never worked, but she could see how it would for some. Liz swims underwater. Indigo and violet, her element, streaked with weed and silver bubbles. Her golden frock tapers to a strong and luxurious tail. She crests and breaks the surface. Takes in a vast, replenishing breath. She dives again, and hesitates. For a while she delights in being amphibian. She loves her ambiguity. This can only last so long. But Elsie pictures Liz as she turns cartwheels, somersaults, Catherine wheels with exotic fish flitting off in terror. Taking a long time to decide.
Then, startling in that still waiting room, come Fran, Craig, Mark and Penny.
There hadn’t been time for anything lately. The ordinary
running of Elsie’s house had gone to pot. She liked to get her messages in every morning. That way, she didn’t have too much to carry back from the town centre. Just enough each day to fill her tartan pully-basket. Every time she walked down town she thought, if I had a car and drove myself, I could do all my shopping at once, on a Saturday, and fill the boot with everything I needed for a week. But what then? Where would I go on the weekday mornings?
With all the hospital visiting and the drama, things had got out of hand. On the night Liz woke up, Elsie and Tom came back to their house and found a scabby crust of bread and half a carton of rancid milk. Nothing at all to make a meal of. The middle of the night and they were starving, disappointed, dulled by the end of the drama. Elsie went off to bed and dreamed of owning a deep chest freezer, stocked to the icy brim with chicken Kievs, vegetable pies, toads-in-the-hole.
Before they left the hospital Elsie had snatched a few words with her son. She was breathless and overeager and thought perhaps she would scare him away.
“Are you coming home with us, pet?”
He smiled, not wanting to hurt her feelings. They were by the sliding automatic doors, the midnight winds whipping through. “I might follow on,” he said and let his mam go.
Elsie took this for an answer. She was glad just to have him back in her sight. And she was cross with Tom for virtually ignoring her son. Tom was back in that world of his own as he climbed unsteadily into their cab. Here we go again, Elsie thought glumly. He’s going to get all morbid because of the way they treated him. They shoved his nose out of joint. Once the others arrived Tom hardly said a word. The atmosphere in the waiting room, although tense, became less sepulchral. Some of Tom’s magic and mystery vanished. The others had been laughing and joking with a slight hysterical edge. They were tense with laughter, anticipation, fear. Elsie had stared at them almost jealously, and tried hard not to want to be part of that little gang. Fran, Penny and Mark and the way they had apparently taken in her son.
Elsie’s cab drove away and she watched the hospital entrance vanish. She watched the blue of Craig’s tracksuit until they were gone.
Next morning she got up, bustled about, and went downtown early to stock up the larder. When Craig came back she wouldn’t want him thinking she’d run the home into the ground. He wasn’t back yet. She wondered if he’d stayed all night in the waiting room. Elsie pulled on her thick winter socks. Winter drawers on, she thought ruefully, and found the first, early frost of the year lying across the street when she left the house. Her pully-basket wheels creaked and squeaked on clean frost.
In the supermarket she moved thoughtlessly between aisles, knowing where everything was. She caught a glimpse of herself and thought, I’m not looking my best. But what did that mean, anyway? Who looked their best when shopping? And who’d be looking at her? It was true she knew everyone, but that didn’t mean she had to put on a show. And this morning she was determined, tossing things into her wire trolley.
She thought how much Craig had changed. How carefree he once was, how cavalier before, when he used to play out with the Forsythe gang, the rough lads over the road. Even though they were up to bad things, perhaps, Elsie still knew where he was when he was with them. If she wanted him, she still knew how to get hold. And those lads were always polite with her. Fellers seemed to know by instinct to treat her like a lady. She was pleased with this thought.
When Craig was in another town, it was a different story. How could she know what was going on? He wasn’t a sensible lad, really. He was too trusting. Didn’t know the ways the world worked. How nasty people could be. He needed her there. There were things he couldn’t do. And! This was the clincher! The reason he should never leave. His father had left for a different town and Elsie had thought of him, ever since, as dead.
Here in Red Spot they were branching out. Food was more exotic. She stared at racks and shelves of cook-in sauces. You just tipped these on top of your meat or your veg. She wondered if it was economical. She never liked those meals that came all in one pan. It didn’t seem nice. Saved on washing up. But she didn’t like all the spices. When Penny was in the house, she’d been cooking all sorts of extravagant things for Elsie and Craig. This was one: chicken korma. Sort of yellow. That had been all right.
There was something boyish and easy and uncomplicated about Craig. Now he seemed to be more serious and sorted out. It was something in the way he held himself. His common sense took her by surprise. Last night she’d let him just about dismiss her. She listened to him and did what he said. It was almost a relief to do so. Yet he was her bairn!
Elsie turned the corner with her trolley. She was nuzzling the fake fur trim on her anorak hood, lost in thought.
Big Sue was in frozen foods, looking at the vegetarian selection. She was going over to that way of thinking. Elsie had packed it in. You never knew what you were eating anyway. You might as well give up your resolutions and go with the flow. Like they said about mad cows, we’ve all been eating cheap burgers for years. We’ll all be bloody mad by 2020. be too old to know the difference, Elsie thought with satisfaction.
Big Sue nodded and mouthed across the chest freezers, “I heard all about it.” She was behaving as if something mysterious had been going on. “I heard all about last night’s events, from Nesta.”
“Oh,” said Elsie, looking at the veggie selection without much enthusiasm. Bits of cauliflower and broccoli stuck in cheese sauces. Flans. She couldn’t feed her men on that.
“Isn’t Nesta a star? She could be a medium. Go on the telly.” Big Sue’s wide mouth twitched, relishing her own irony. She added, “I was sorry not to see Liz actually return. But I was there for the first moment she woke up and spoke, did I tell you?”
“Yes,” said Elsie blandly.
“‘Back to the sixties’!” said Big Sue in a ghostly voice.
“Hm,” said Elsie.
“And,” Big Sue went on, unperturbed, “I hear Craig’s back from Scotland. You must be glad.”
“Very glad.”
“And —” Big Sue leaned closer — “that he spent the night round number sixteen with that Penny. That must put a smile back on your face, Elsie. The thought of them getting back together.”
Elsie looked up and smiled slowly, thinking of half-finished yellow booties.