by Paul Magrs
Don’t knock it, she thought. I’ll settle for safety just now. Voices came from upstairs and further back down the lower deck. Voices raucously enjoying themselves on the last bus home. Whoever they were, whatever they were up to, Penny found them unnerving. She wished she was in a gang. Purposefully she had sat right behind the driver. He had a thick red neck and his bald head was white as a knuckle under the lights. Whenever she looked at him for reassurance — measuring his dependability every time she got a twinge of nervousness — he seemed to sense it, and turned to give her a sly wink. He was in the same uniform as the nice bus driver, the sexy one her mam and the other Phoenix Court women had befriended. But he wasn’t the same at all. Hyde to the nice driver’s Jekyll, he drove double-deckers through the dark and ferried the town’s dregs round the estates.
Darlington hadn’t been as much fun as Vince had promised. It was grey and wet, full of charity shops, age-blackened buildings and cemeteries. From the moment they arrived Vince had looked troubled, set upon his mysterious business. As they passed the afternoon in bookshops and wandering the back streets Penny was aware of his nervousness and dread. It was as if he was reorienting himself, unwilling to explain anything to her. She wondered if it was something criminal he was into. Then she thought, surely not. If he was into something dodgy, then he’d never be teaching. It might, of course, be drugs. He was in Dario to get some stuff off someone. That made sense. She started to feel sick with fretting as they sat in a vegetarian cafe by the marketplace, by which time Vince was starting to perk up, going on about, of all things, the nature of desire and love. As he talked and the sense of what he was saying slid over her head, Penny gazed at him and wondered if he was stoned or tripping now. ‘What do you think, Penny?’
She shook herself out of it. ‘Hm?’
‘I asked if you thought loving, desiring, wanting someone could last out years of not seeing them.’ His hands were tracing patterns on the oilcloth. ‘What do you think?’
At first she felt toyed with. Then she thought, he really wants to know what I think. ‘It…’ she began. Oh, I don’t want to sound trite, she thought. But what do I think? And she realised, what she believed in did sound trite. ‘It takes a lot to shake feelings like that off,’ she said. ‘And I think love continues. It moves into different forms, or becomes something else. But it’s still there. And what happens to it then depends on the people involved.’ She swallowed.
‘Wow,’ Vince breathed. ‘You should be on This Morning, doing the phone-ins with Richard and Judy.’
She flushed. ‘Cheers,’ she snapped.
‘No, honest. That was good.’ He sipped his tea. ‘You sound like you’ve thought about this stuff.’
Penny shrugged.
In Dressers’ book department Vince whisked her from shelf to shelf, telling her who was rubbish and whom she ought to be reading. He would pluck books out seemingly at random, flick through them and announce his verdict. Dressers was old-fashioned, its floor wooden and groaning as he dashed about.
‘You’ve read everything,’ Penny said.
‘Nah,’ he said, thrusting something else at her. ‘But enough to know. It won’t make things right, reading good books. It won’t make them easier. In fact, it usually makes things harder.’ He had passed her a novel called She’s Come Undone.
‘Great.’ She went to buy the book, just to placate him. In the queue she asked, ‘Are you always a teacher?’
‘What? But I’m being a friend now. Honestly, if you read this stuff — the best bits — it’s all here. Honest. Friends always recommend books. If they can do that and be unconditional with their respect and love and support and tell you you look nice when you might not… then that’s all right.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Penny nodded as she handed her money over, wishing Vince would keep his voice down just a bit. The lady behind the counter didn’t look impressed.
Then he announced they should go to the Arts Centre in Vane Terrace to see a particular show, a dance piece. She had never been to see a dance piece before and, to start with, had a vision of some sort of ceilidh thing, where she’d be obliged to whirl and skip about in a barn with people watching. Vince appeared to pick up on that as they walked down the narrow and seething Posthouse Wynd and he told her, ‘It’s like a play. About an hour long. People with superbly proportioned bodies running about on white lino, probably. And there will most likely be a huge fridge or something in the middle of the stage.’
Now the 213 was circling the deserted town precinct. They had reached Aycliffe with Penny hardly noticing. She’d have to watch out or she’d be missing her stop. Wake up in that terrible bus station in Sunderland. Upstairs the noise was louder, as if they were all unduly excited by the sight of Aycliffe town centre. Penny groaned at her own prissiness.
I’m only jealous because I’m not drunk and I’ve not had a nice enough time.
Vince had bought her a couple of pints. She was surprised, really. It seemed as if he had no recollection of their teacher-pupil dynamic. Now he sat them at a low, round table in the foyer of the Arts Centre and made them both drink pints of fizzy lager. He was looking to Penny to get him through something. When conversation lulled at one point, round about half past five, he hissed somewhat desperately, ‘Talk to me! Distract me!’ Penny had asked him about college, where he had gone, what he would recommend. Vince warmed to this, telling her a whole load of silly stories about the things he had got up to. Just when he had got into his conversational stride, he jumped up and hurried off to the box office. Penny watched him chatting to a young woman who stood between the till and an oversized vase of arum lilies. Vince was asking after someone, asking if they weren’t working tonight. When he returned with two tickets for the show — it was called ‘Fridge’ — he seemed disappointed.
He waved her money away. ‘My treat,’ he said, and fell quiet until it was time to go in and see the show.
Penny wanted a body like that. She wanted to dance like that. She wanted to come out under lights in front of all these people and she wanted to be lithe and bendy and braced full of tension and supple brilliance. She wanted to wrap herself around the beautiful body of the male lead. Until the final moments, when he crept off into the huge fridge in the centre of the stage and closed its door, her eyes were on him, licking in every detail.
Outside again, where the bar was now fuller and louder, busy with the night-time crowd, the cinema-goers, the drama youth group, the poetry workshop, she told Vince she had loved the show. She was glad he had brought her. He said bitterly, ‘I was right, though. Another fucking fridge piece.’ They were at the bar, where a woman on a high stool held court and talked about flamenco. ‘Sorry, Penny,’ Vince said sheepishly. ‘I’m horribly cynical and queeny sometimes, aren’t I? It’s only put on. No, I’m glad you liked it, pet.’ He ordered two more pints.
They sat by a large window and Penny looked out at the park in Vane Terrace. It was sinisterly Victorian, box trees and holly beyond the Arts Centre’s driveway. And then she saw someone was standing beside their table. He was collecting the empties, but he was staring down at Vince.
All in one go Vince looked scared and relieved. He was on his feet in a flash and then he didn’t know what to do. The man collecting the empties seemed pleased to be clutching his tower of empty pint glasses and his plastic basket. ‘The woman at the box office said you might be in tonight,’ said Vince. He tried to laugh. ‘We both look like we’ve seen Banquo’s ghost, don’t we?’
Both Penny and the man collecting empties said, ‘Who?’
He was about Vince’s age, Penny decided, but he dressed younger. He was in a white Adidas top, the ones with stripes and flashes and irony. He wore his jeans slouched down, his hair clipped short and he had a nose ring. Vince commented on this.
‘Had it years,’ was the reply. He was a boy. Penny thought, in a way Vince wasn’t. They might be the same age, but this one was aspiring to boyishness and Vince was not. There was a surliness about him, to
o, that seemed as much a part of his outfit as the trainers with their tongues sticking out.
‘This is Andy,’ Vince said to Penny. And all at once he seemed genuinely relieved. As if something he had worried about had turned out all right. But what had happened?
‘I’ll finish with this lot… I’ll be back in a second,’ Andy said. And he was gone in the crowd. Vince sat down with a sigh, brushing the hair out of his eyes with both hands.
As the 213 weaved and plunged down Burn Lane and entered her own estate, Agnew Two, Penny devoted a moment to inventing excuses for her lateness. She should have phoned. But Liz trusted her. In the summer she had been out all hours, coming back the next day sometimes. These were the dark nights, though. By their nature they became more hazardous. She thought, Oh, here I am, backwards and forwards on the bus to and from Darlington. It all seemed a horribly futile exercise, going somewhere and coming back. What happened in the middle ought to transform or replenish you or do you some good. Had it really? Here she felt a stab of spite towards Vince. He was doing something else. He wasn’t just slinking home unchanged. He had stayed and was, presumably, being transported into some other state. Oh, I’m tired, Penny thought. And I don’t want anyone to be happy.
The bus seemed to be groping its way blindly to the top of Phoenix Court. She got up ready to ting the bell.
Andy had sat at their table until closing time. When Penny started drinking soda water, the two of them switched to gin and tonics. They were talking more freely, enjoying themselves, enjoying each other. Penny watched. They were laughing and, when the other wasn’t paying attention, giving sly, appraising looks. Gauging each other. Penny was drawn in, aware of something private going on but not shutting her out. She felt suspended, sitting there. Vince and Andy ordered tequila slammers for them all to end with and together drilled Penny on the procedure. The salt on her fist, the exact force of the slam on the yellow table top, and the etiquette of sucking a lemon wedge. ‘Got it?’ Vince asked. ‘Lick, slam, suck ... on a count of three. It has to be all together.’
‘It’s our favourite thing.’ Andy grinned. ‘You get licked, slammed and sucked. One, two . .. three!’
And, still smeared with wet salt and lemon juice, tequila burning their throats, they hurried out into the night, which had turned freezing. Almost without a word they escorted Penny to her bus stop. She asked if Vince was coming back to Aycliffe.
With an eye on Andy, Vince explained that he wasn’t. He was heading off up to North Road, where Andy had a room above a taxidermist’s shop.
Penny nodded. ‘You might as well get off now,’ she told them. ‘It’s a long walk up North Road. You won’t make my wait any shorter, staying here till the bus comes.’
‘Are you sure, pet?’ Vince asked. He raised his eyebrows in concern. A smear of lemon on his cheek was bright under the streetlight. Penny had an urge to wipe it off. Andy stood a couple of paces back, bouncing on his Adidas heels, eager.
‘The 213’s due any minute,’ she said and smiled. ‘Go on. Have fun.’
Vince smiled almost shyly then, and suddenly both he and Andy were gone.
The bus groaned and hauled itself shuddering to a halt at the stop outside Penny’s garden gate. She jumped out and thanked the driver, smiling with relief to be home, and he winked at her again.
As she turned she saw that there was something dark bundled up in the corner of the bus stop. Was it someone sleeping there, or rubbish piled up, or…? She thought it might be a big animal. It growled at her.
Penny stepped back, and, as a van went by on the main road, there was a sudden burst of light and she could make out the shape of a bloke sitting on the ground at the back of the bus shelter, clutching his little dog to himself. The man’s face was turned to her, twisted up as the headlights swept over it, and she realised that she knew who it was. One of the neighbours from round the back, the one who went marching about the place in his combat trousers.
‘Hello,’ she said uncertainly. And then she thought, bugger this, and dashed off across the grass and round the corner. The grass would be clogged with dog shit and things you couldn’t see in this light, but she was past caring. At last she burst through her own garden gate and fiddled for her backdoor key. Then she saw that all the downstairs lights were on. Liz was still up. Waiting up and worried. From inside came the muffled sound of a record, an old one. Rod Stewart, Penny thought. The odd thought struck her that maybe, when her daughter wasn’t around, Liz allowed herself the luxury of being nostalgic.
‘It’s nice, this,’ Jane was saying. ‘I get so bored at nights with no one round.’
Liz went to turn the record over. ‘But you say you do a lot of reading?’
Jane drummed her fingers on the six-high stack of novels she was borrowing. ‘Oh, I do. I read these one a night. But you finish one book, and you start another, and you read that, and you finish it… nothing seems to happen in between.’ Jane looked down at the novels. Glimpsing their titles, the promise of their cover illustrations, she felt with a flush the inadequacy of what she’d said. When she had a book on the go, it was all right. She was in that world. It was somewhere to go back to. A place where everything fitted together.
‘Well, it’s nice to have friends to visit as well.’ Liz sneaked a look at her watch. Jane had been round for seven hours. She had followed Liz into the house on their return from town. At first Liz had assumed she just wanted to see the house, to see what things Liz had. Nosy, but natural enough. And of course the house was in chaos, with boxes and crates still blocking the hallway, the settee under plastic wraps. Jane had plonked herself down on it, drinking tea and eating biscuits, rustling the plastic all the way through the evening. She seemed impressed by Liz’s belongings. She sighed with pleasure at her ornaments from around the world, Liz explaining that each knick-knack had its separate story, and she smiled at the records Liz set about unpacking for the first time from her cardboard boxes.
‘All a bit before my time,’ Jane said.
‘Are they?’ asked Liz tersely. She was tired and worrying about Penny. Jane was trying to give her a crash course in what went on in Phoenix Court. She’d already talked her through Fran and Frank’s marital problems, all the scandal that went on round the flats when someone’s bairn vanished last Christmas, and the tale of Jane’s mam Rose and her one-legged lover. ‘I don’t think she should encourage him,’ Jane was saying as Penny let herself into the kitchen. ‘I mean, she throws away so much of herself on these men. She never gets anything back.’
Penny was surprised to hear anyone else there. ‘Who’s that?’ she shouted through.
Jane, misunderstanding, explained as she followed Liz into the kitchen. ‘My mam. She’s marrying a bloke with a wooden leg.’
Liz put the kettle on. She gave her daughter a searching look and said in one breath, ‘You’ve met, haven’t you? Jane, Penny, Penny, Jane. Penny, I’ve been worried sick.’
Jane laughed. ‘It’s rubbish, Penny. I’ve been here all night and she’s never mentioned you once. We’ve had the sherry out.’
‘Actually, you’re wrong.’
There was an awkward silence. Penny slung her coat off and hugged it to her.
‘So, where have you been, Penny?’ Saying this, Liz felt terrible. She never talked this way to Penny. She was worried, but she was also aware that she was performing for Jane’s sake. Jane was nodding. They were mothers together, wanting explanations.
‘I went to Darlington with Vince… the man you saw me with.’ Penny felt pinned to the Formica bench.
Jane took the last drop of sherry and prepared to go at last. She said, ‘You’ve both been lucky today. Your mam was asked out by that lovely bus driver.’
She hadn’t kept the resentment out of her voice. They all noticed.
‘Are you going to see him, Liz?’ Penny asked.
‘You call your mam by her name?’
‘Um ... sometimes.’
‘My mam would kill me if I did that. D
ifferent generation, I suppose.’
‘Something like that. Are you going to see him, then?’
Liz handed Penny a cup of tea. ‘I doubt it. But the lasses round here are organising a night out. Jane’s been egging us all on. Tomorrow. I’m going out then.’
‘You’re mad not to see the bus driver,’ said Jane, pulling her coat on. ‘I suppose it means he’s not married, anyway...’ She did her zip up thoughtfully.
‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ Liz said, opening the door. ‘What people claim to be has nowt to do with anything. People lie.’
‘She’s a philosopher,’ Jane told Penny.
‘No, I’m not. Good night, Jane.’
Jane blinked, aware she had said something wrong and not sure what. ‘Thanks for the books. I’ll probably pop in tomorrow, then.’
‘You do that.’ Liz forced a smile and hustled her out. She slammed the door behind Jane and rounded on her daughter. ‘Well?’
Penny was looking shamefaced. ‘I haven’t done anything silly.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not the silly you think.’
‘And Vincent?’
‘I got the last bus home by myself. Vince stayed in Darlington with his boyfriend.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, oh.’
‘A disappointing day, then.’
‘Mm.’
Daylight came bleakly over the estates. The gaps between the sandy-bricked buildings were sludged with leaves turning to paste. There was a searing brightness in the air as the milk boys pulled up, sitting on the back of their van, clambering off and dashing about at first light.
Fran was earliest out, doing the five-till-seven stint at Fujitsu. She liked it first thing. It was as if all Phoenix Court was hers. She felt that way about all the streets, walking through town to the factory. By the time she returned each morning to get the kids out of bed, the estates would be coming to life, cars starting up and steaming, crowds coughing and stamping at bus stops. At seven each morning it was as if Fran relinquished her world to everyone else. And at seven her shoulders ached already from wielding round her super-Hoover, her superb industrial cleaner, her futuristic hobbyhorse. The one thing she loved about her morning job was her new-found skill wheeling about the floors and gangways at Fujitsu with this monstrously powerful machine. She rode it on the polished floors and she rode it like the wind.