[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  He wondered what they thought about him and Andy, all those bodies. They would be as impassive as Andy that morning in bed. He as dead as they, they as alive as him. He made himself mordant, zombielike, Gothic, on purpose.

  Here they were prowling an acre of recumbent forms, deliberately picking over those who, in a lifetime, would have been acutely aware of their own singularity, would have had worries of their own. Here they could no longer afford to be so choosy. They had thrown in their lot. Looking up in regret, maybe envy, surely with mixed feelings, these bodies couldn’t condemn love? Not when they could sense it so nearby. Vince decided that by now, unable to condemn, they understood.

  Before clambering over the railings into the street, Vince muttered into the dark, ‘I bet they’re having a whale of a time down there. One long, unremitting orgy. I bet heaven is just like teatime at the Marquis de Sade’s.’

  Andy hauled him over. ‘I can’t take you anywhere, can I?’

  Fran, Jane and Liz staked out a corner in a bar that had been made to look like a ship’s deck. ‘A pirate ship, eh, Jane?’ Liz winked. ‘Remember Frenchman's Creek?'

  But Jane didn’t. Their reading didn’t overlap entirely. Sipping a double vodka, she advised, ‘Stick together, girls. It’s going to be a rough night. The packs are out.’

  The place was full to capacity. People were standing eight deep at the bar, swaying in time to the music. The crowd was reflected back in the misted-up mirror behind the optics. Lots of suits, the smart-jumper brigade with their tight perms and moustaches, and then a few ravers in hooded tops and greasy hair. All the men stood in tight clusters, sticking together for now, fists around their glasses. Now and then their eyes would flick along the length of the bar at the women and at other men, as they talked about something else. This was the serious part of the night, the part in which they would discuss, decide, and realise just how pissed they were going to get.

  The women kept to smaller, yet louder, groups, all dressed young although the age range was wider. There were schoolgirls who had overdone their make-up because the club they were going to had funny lights and they wouldn’t show up otherwise. Older women with highlights in their hair blown rigid under their driers. There was more laughter from the women than from the men. They weren’t at ease, but they were confident, half enjoying, half ridiculing the attention in those nervous, shifty glances.

  ‘God, it’s like the jungle!’ Fran had decided not to drink. ‘I forgot about all this.’

  ‘Show me Tarzan.’ Liz was not joking. ‘All the men are horrible. Greasy little things. Why do they think we want them with all those muscles?’

  ‘I like muscly men,’ Jane said.

  ‘That’s because of the books you read. They’ve made you think you want something big and strapping when, really, you don’t at all.’

  ‘But I do! And you read those books, too!’

  ‘Honestly,’ Liz went on. ‘They go pumping metal, or whatever they call it, they waste all that time and energy, and then they haven’t got the life left in them to pump anything else. They come out of it looking hideous. Fat necks and red faces with bulging eyes.’

  ‘Nice bodies, though,’ said Fran. ‘I tried to get Frank to go weightlifting. He looks like a Care Bear with bis kit off.’

  ‘And,’ Liz ranted, ‘weightlifters have got tiny whatsits. It’s the one part of themselves they can’t expand. It’s sad, but the more they build themselves up, the worse it gets. That’s why they all get bulging eyes, trying too hard. What time is it?’

  ‘Late.’ Jane was well on ber way by now. She had dropped the frostiness she had earlier determined to show. ‘We’d better collect our tickets and get across to Flicks before it packs out. I want to dance.’

  ‘Let’s get on the cocktails. That’ll get us going.’ Liz moved to go, sliding across the plush. ‘Hang on a sec. Everything I’ve just said, I take back. Him by the bar. He’s built up. And just look at the packet on that!’

  Fran hurried them out while the body builder with the overdeveloped packet passed crisps among his circle of mates.

  The entrance was round the back of MFI. Andy rapped smartly on the door, which opened to reveal a bright-red room, heavy with smoke.

  The bouncer shouldered backwards to let them in. He glanced from beneath a broad brow, his pan-shovel hands making irritable pincer movements while he waited to block the doorway again. Goth Night made him uneasy.

  In the red foyer there was a window at which the cloak attendant lounged, dangling her jewellery over the ledge. As Vince and Andy approached, she pulled a wad of chewing gum from her mouth, reaching tonsil-deep with well-manicured nails, and stuck it deftly into the top left-hand corner of her window frame.

  ‘Well, boys, it’s weirdy night up there. Weirdy night tonight. We’ve got every freak, drug addict and queer in town milling about upstairs.’

  ‘Oh, we know.’ Andy passed his coat across. ‘That’s why we’ve come. It’s our favourite.’

  ‘Right.’ She seemed to be taking note of them for the first time. ‘I thought you might have been expecting to be bopping to Jason and Kylie and what have you.’ Her eyes narrowed to slits and she tested the water with, ‘Because it’s not that night tonight and the girls here aren’t the sort of girls you might be after.’

  Andy gave a conspiratorial grin. ‘As a matter of fact, we’re both quite queer ourselves.’

  ‘Are you now?’

  ‘Yes. Very queer indeed, actually.’

  Vince ushered him to the stairway, where there were posters of the Hollywood greats tacked every few yards up the furry wallpaper, leading them towards the source of the low, hypnotic music.

  ‘Bloody smart, this!’ Jane was enthusiastic as she and Liz waited in the doorway. The wine bar was full to overflowing and Fran had gone in by herself to ask about tickets. ‘Freebies and everything!’ Jane shuffled out of the way of some people wanting to leave, toppling into Liz, who manoeuvred them both towards the potted plants.

  ‘I’m not so sure it’s right.’

  Jane said, ‘My mother says it’s Ladies’ Free Night every night —’

  ‘No, I mean the whole idea of a ladies night. It seems sordid somehow. Lure in a bit of skirt with free tickets —’

  ‘Bugger that! I’m on a tight budget.’

  Forced to wait by the rubber plants, Liz was sobering fast. ‘So am I, pet. But I wonder whether we ought to be capitalising on our femininity like this?’

  ‘What, you mean, like selling it?’

  Jane was breathing thick liqueur-and-vodka fumes into her face. Liz took a step backwards. ‘Yes. No. I mean… oh, you’re right. And it is a tart’s night out, anyway.’

  ‘Too bloody right!’ Jane yodelled, startling some smart suits just easing their way inside. She leered at them.

  Liz was rescued from her moment of lucidity and doubt by Fran, who cut sharply through the crowd carrying three golden tickets.

  ‘We’re in!’ Liz grinned, snatching hers. She called over to Jane, who had her face squashed against the glass doorway, ‘Jane, we’re in!’

  ‘Yes, but it’s —’ Fran began but Liz took command, grasped both her companions firmly by the crooks of their arms and marched them outside. As they headed for the main road, Fran tried again. ‘But it isn’t their usual. They gave me the usual tickets, but they said it isn’t their usual.’

  ‘What’s their usual?’

  ‘I never asked. But they said that tonight it was Goth Night.’

  ‘It was what? It’s a what?’ Jane was struggling to make them slow down.

  ‘When they all dress up in black. You know, Goths. I got the tickets, but I didn’t know whether you’d still want to go.’

  Jane looked confused. Liz beamed. ‘You’re wearing black anyway, Fran, so you’re OK. And if the rest of them are, it’ll just make me and Jane stand out more, won’t it?’

  There’s a particular dance they do, Vince thought, all the Goths.

  He was sitting at
a wickerwork table, resting a bottle of Pils on the glass top and watching the dance floor. It was swathed in purple mist to about knee height and peopled by a series of thin silhouettes, all of them waving their arms in the air, moving very slowly.

  They seem to be beseeching. They keep looking at the ceiling with pained expressions, raising their arms and clawing above their heads, then sinking back in resignation. Like Christopher Lee at the end of a Hammer horror. It’s not as if there’s anything up there worth beseeching. A few lights. But they’re all at it.

  He watched Andy, standing in his own private space, doing much the same thing. Perhaps a little better than the others, Vince reflected. They were rocking gently and thoughtfully to Dinosaur Junior. Again it struck Vince as odd to see someone you’d been sleeping with at a distance on a dance floor. Their mystery is regained; suddenly they look independent and divorced, yet available. Sometimes he thought it might be nice to keep every lover at arm’s length, all the time.

  He started to look around, beyond the dance floor. It was dark but every now and then he would catch sight of the occasional bleached blonde head on a body slumped on steps by the bar. Next to the bar there were lots of white faces, painted white with cheekbones carefully accentuated. People with drinks were bumping into each other because they didn’t like to take their shades off. They apologised shyly to each other with shrugs and smirks.

  Now the DJ was playing the Cure. More bodies on the floor, eager to reach up and worship the light fittings. Vince sighed. He had been here before. Nothing much had changed. Something about Andy and Andy’s attitude over the past two days had almost convinced him that this time would be different somehow. Classic, even. Vince was beginning to distrust his own perception of what ‘classic’ meant.

  He wanted something to look back upon in his old age. Something about which he could declare, ‘I was there. I was doing that then.’ He wanted something to write his memoirs about. At times he felt that the whole of life was geared around doing enough things to fill up all your memory-time in old age. He wasn’t going to have children. Classic memories, classic thoughts, and the power to vocalise them. That was what he wanted for his old age.

  At other times he couldn’t imagine living beyond the age of twenty-four. It seemed obscene somehow.

  Fran, Jane and Liz were shuffling their way into the darkness. They squinted into the smog, assessing the state of play.

  ‘I don’t really like it.’ Jane had to shout over the music (‘Boys Don’t Cry’, which she remembered from the Youthy years ago).

  ‘They tried to warn us,’ Fran said.

  Liz seemed delighted with the place. She pushed through the knot of figures standing by the door and made for the bar. The others followed.

  At first Vince was mildly surprised, as others were, by the sight of the three women coming in and ordering exotic cocktails on the wrong night. Then he recognised them as Penny’s mother and her friends from the cafe yesterday. This is it, he thought, standing up. This was the something different. Bauhaus were crashing into ‘Ziggy Stardust’. His heart skipped a beat as he went to tap Liz on her golden shoulder.

  She was caught in verbal mid-stride, carefully enunciating a list of cocktails across the sloppy bar. She turned open-mouthed to Vince. ‘Penny’s little friend!’ she gasped. Fran and Jane shoved in closer, glad to have something on which to concentrate in a place that felt threatening.

  ‘Vince!’

  ‘That’s it. Are you here with friends?’

  ‘Is Penny here?’

  ‘No; this is the old mothers’ night out. I’ve never been in here before. Is it any good?’

  Her dress really did stand out against all that black. She was a shining gold from the highlights down. Even her face looked burnished and colourful.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’

  Liz beamed. ‘To “Ziggy Stardust”? I’d be delighted.’

  She left Fran and Jane to order the drinks.

  Fran found them a table in a dark corner. There was only one other person there, a drunk girl with very short hair. She was glaring into her handbag. ‘Men are all bastards,’ she told Fran and Jane as they sat down and she stood up to go.

  ‘We know,’ said Fran with a smile.

  ‘I’ve shrunk one of them to fit inside this bag. As revenge.’ She held out her velveteen handbag and gave it a vigorous shake. ‘It’s an antique bag. He’ll probably ruin it. Bastard!’ She lurched off towards the exit sign.

  ‘Drugs,’ Fran said. ‘Make them say the strangest things.’

  ‘Why do they cover all their nice black clothes in flour?’ Jane asked.

  ‘God knows. So they’ll look old and dusty.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘I know what you mean. But we can’t be that old. Look at Liz.’

  They looked at Liz, slow-dancing with one of her daughter’s friends, forming the only couple on a floor of solitary shamblers.

  ‘But she’s … she’s a floozy.’

  ‘I suppose so. But I don’t feel very old at all. I hope they play the Stones tonight.’

  ‘I would never want to be as young as this lot ever again.’ Jane blearily took them all in.

  ‘They’re probably older than you are now, some of them. What are you; twenty-six?’

  Jane thought. ‘But what I’ve done has put me in a different age — a different generation. I’ve been married and I’ve had a kid. That makes me like all of this lot’s mother. At least in the eyes of the world. I’m responsible now, aren’t I?’

  ‘Right now you’re arseholed, pet. Worry about all that in the morning.’

  Vince caught Andy’s eye from across the dry ice. His chin was propped on Liz’s shiny shoulder and Andy was glaring at them both from beneath his blue spotlight. Vince ignored him and went back to talking to Liz as ‘Aladdin Sane’ began. Another macabre slow dance.

  ‘Why didn’t Penny come out?’

  ‘She doesn’t go out much. I worry about that. She’s not like her mam at all.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Vincent, pet.. .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Penny told me about you being bent. I’m pleased you told her. It wouldn’t have been nice for her to get a crush on you. You did well to nip it in the bud.’

  Vince frowned. ‘It just sort of came up in the conversation. There was no particular reason —’

  ‘You what?’ The louder part of the song had begun, breaking into their conversation.

  ‘I said, I just told her. Because I wanted to. Not because I thought she fancied me.’

  ‘Oh, but she does. I think we have very similar tastes, me and our Pen. You’re very nice.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Vince noticed Andy stalking through the milling crowd, across the floor’s glowing squares, towards them.

  Vince stepped away from Liz. ‘Well, thank you for that, and thank you for the dance.’

  ‘The pleasure was mine.’ Liz bowed just as Andy reached them.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked with a mocking leer.

  ‘This —’ Vince began, but Liz caught his arm and interrupted.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to leave you. Somebody’s just walked in.’

  ‘That was Penny’s mother,’ Vince explained as she shot across the floor to the bar.

  ‘I remember one school party. It was the first time I ever got pissed. We smuggled booze in under our coats.’ Jane was, by now, turning sentimental. ‘One lad had to get his stomach pumped. We took all the tinsel off the tree and wore it round our necks like them Hawaiian things, or Wonder Woman. Someone yanked the tree right over and there was hell on the next day.’

  Jane’s voice dwindled away. Someone was striding towards their table. He was in blue jeans and a bright white shirt, open-necked. His skin was ruddy, healthy as a Red Indian’s.

  And he was being intercepted by Liz, who appeared before him in a shower of gold. Together they seemed to abandon the idea of visiting tbe table and went off to the dance floor in
stead.

  Jane watched her bus driver disappear. Her mouth fell open. She had forgotten all about nostalgia. ‘She’s done it again!’

  Vince and Andy retreated to the sidelines. Vince was suddenly intent on getting drunk. When he placed his elbows on the table he could feel spilled beer soaking through the material, spreading up his arms.

  ‘Surely you can’t be jealous,’ he said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Why did you leave me out there by myself?’

  ‘You like to dance and mope about by yourself.’

  ‘Occasionally it would be nice to have my boyfriend with me. So people can see.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Vince. She could be your mother.’

  ‘No, she couldn’t.’

  Andy started fiddling with money for more drinks. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Vince looked for his own money. ‘Yes.’ He paused midrummage, looked up and smiled. Andy bent down for the expected kiss.

  ‘Andy… we were only dancing.’

  The music was ghastly. But they were oblivious. A space had cleared for them in the smoke, as if they needed more room for their colour. They were very still, holding each other, barely dancing at all.

  ‘I came down after my shift finished. I finished early tonight.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I wanted to find you.’

  Liz nodded. ‘What’s your name? We only know you as our bus driver.’

  ‘Cliff.’

  She nodded again, as if she knew already.

  ‘Yours is Liz, isn’t it? Elizabeth?’

  ‘Just Liz.’

  They carried on dancing, dancing very slowly and wondering why they were dancing like this. And what it meant.

  At the end of that song, on a low, rumbling, drawn-out note, Liz seemed to collect herself in and, Cinderella, tried to pull herself free. He smiled and drew her back, into the next song.