by Paul Magrs
Incredibly, Liz was trembling.
I’ve made her tremble, thought the bus driver. What does this mean? And at their table Fran and Jane saw that they were dancing still and they wondered. What does that mean? Vince and Andy were drinking and keeping to themselves, casting only occasional glances at Penny’s mother and the spectacle she was making of herself. This was one of the few times that Vince wasn’t thinking, What does it mean?
Cliff the bus driver was, at that moment, thinking to himself. This woman has an erection.
Liz at last seemed to relax again. She steadied her weight against him and looked him in the eye. ‘There’s something you ought to know.’
The bus driver nodded tersely. ‘I know.’
‘That I’m a man?’
‘I’ve known for a while.’ He smiled at the confusion in Liz’s face, at the thought of the erection under that gold lame frock. ‘I’ve known that all along. But it is nice to be convinced, I must admit.’
Liz gripped him more tightly than she meant to. ‘Does it show? Does it really show?’
‘Nobody ever has to show anything they don’t want to. It’s up to the rest of us to guess.’
‘I knew that. I know that. You guessed well.’
The song went on.
EIGHT
Penny always loved her dreams and she was sure they were better than anyone else’s. A bad sleeper, she had trained herself to go off into a kind of trance, sitting motionless with her dreams superimposed luridly over everything else. There was no way she was missing out on dreams, no matter how little she slept. And as she dreamed, her blackened fingernails tingled.
Tonight she was sitting very calmly at the dining-room table, staring into her own reflection in the framed picture opposite. Around her head, almost outside her range of vision, floated three objects. They were an egg timer, a little man made of china and a brass coffee pot.
In her dream she allowed herself a quick smirk.
Once you had the knack it was very easy to keep all these things together in your mind. You simply had to stop up the holes in your head.
She closed her eyes and made herself sink.
Out on the coast road in the night, she was walking along and looking out to sea. The North Sea was still and black. Beside her the road was quiet and, as it dipped and rose with the lie of the land, these few bleak miles between Shields and Sunderland, she watched the tireless seabirds commute between the vast rock out at sea and the Roman remains beyond the road. The Roman remains were weathered and copper-coloured, looking like an abandoned wedding cake, its icing picked away. Penny decided to cross the road and examine them. And on the road, she realised then, there were a number of dead dogs. They lay at awkward angles and blood was pooling around their open mouths. A woman was whimpering, her anorak bundled up around her, visiting dog after dog, nudging them, shaking them, coaxing them with clumsy words. It was Nesta, her hair silver and dry in the moonlight. She was setting a bowl beside each dog and, taking a milk bottle out from an inside pocket, pouring them each a small drink. Penny crossed the road, ignored by Nesta and the dogs, wanting to say, What if a car came by? But she crossed and said nothing, making for the grass, for the tussocky hills and the Roman remains.
Looking back, the pale bowls of milk on the road looked like satellite dishes. In the long grass there were shouts and squeals of fright and merriment. She squinted and, just by the sheer drop of the cliff, Fran, Frank and their four kids were shouting and running about, each with a butterfly net, recapturing their gerbils. When one was found, they’d pop it in an empty lager can.
Penny climbed up to the crumbling, muddy remains of the Roman fort, and by one of the entrances she discovered a miner’s lamp and a diving suit. It was like the Famous Five. Next thing she knew, she’s slipped into the suit, which seemed to have a vital, rubbery life of its own. Her helmet lamp flashed on and she plunged into the Roman doorway which, as she walked in, became the entrance to a steeply declining tunnel.
God, Penny thought. Not this one again. She was revisiting the scene of her most shamelessly Freudian dream. Worse than the one about riding down the street on her mother’s sewing box. These were the underground caverns where, in one recurring dream, the Big Fat Wailing Worm lived. It lived in Lambton, brought back from the Crusades by a local knight, chucked down a well, grown to monstrous proportions simply to terrify Penny. It pursued her across moors and into houses, where she would slam doors on it, making it pull backwards and forwards through thresholds, eventually burning down the house with its friction and its wailing. But this wasn’t one of those dreams.
Beside her, Andy’s Nanna Jean was standing in a clean pinny and her usual immense black frock. Penny had no idea who she was, but she seemed friendly enough. Jean was explaining that this wasn’t an awful white wailing worm dream. ‘But you have to go right under the water, through the caves to the rock, hinny,’ said the old woman.
A question popped into Penny’s head. ‘How is your friend?’
‘She’s dead, bonny lass,’ said Jean. ‘She walked out under the ice. Best way to go. Now you go on, catch up with the others under there.’
Penny gulped and struggled onwards. She left the old woman far behind as the tunnel grew thinner, the walls slicker and colder. She was potholing now, she thought, with a grimace. She remembered hearing something about fish with no eyes. Down here, they didn’t need eyes. Down one hundred and twenty feet: she counted every one and soon she was where she presumed sea level began. Then down again, wading purposefully, training her lamp on the walls, throwing crazy shadows. On the bloody orange walls were stencilled bits of bodies, as if someone had been drawn around, like a template. There were pictures of madly galloping black horses, antelopes, dog creatures and things that were half seal, half penguin. Penny stared at them as she went along, hunting for drier land.
And then, suddenly, she was hauling herself on to a dry, sandy shore. She must be far beneath Marsden Rock. She couldn’t quite believe she had climbed so far down, across and up again, even in a dream. Then, Vince was helping her to her feet. He was in his sharp purple jacket and suddenly she felt clumsy in wetsuit and flippers.
‘Hi-ya, pet,’ he said. ‘I thought you were stopping in tonight.’
Penny asked, ‘What was it you were saying about not believing in world-sorrow, and not believing that things fitted together?’
‘Did I say that?’ He sounded puzzled.
‘Yes, in a lesson.’
He shrugged. ‘That was a lesson. That was E. M. Forster. This is real life.’
‘You don’t believe that!’ she said accusingly. ‘You think you should live out what you say in lessons. You aren’t cynical!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
Vince glanced over his shoulder, into the darkness beyond the beam cast by her headlamp. He nodded at the black pools of water. Penny turned sharply, picking out Andy, crouched on the water-worn shore. He was holding out his hands, laughing softly at something in his palms. He was still dressed up Goth for his night out, his leather jacket creaking in the near silence. He motioned Penny to come and see what was in his hands.
Unsteady on her feet, Penny shuffled away from the wall and focused her light on Andy. Vince followed behind. As Andy’s face turned brighter, Penny could see the little creatures dancing on his palms, hopping lightly from hand to hand. Tiny black horses, dog-things, antelopes, seals and penguins. Some were clinging on for dear life, hooking fragile legs on his huge, clumsy fingers. They kicked and stamped in the air and against his flesh, colliding with each other, haring about, glowing. More of them were pattering over slimy rock, coming to him.
‘He has a way with animals,’ Vince said, and the sound of his voice made Penny jump. She looked up at him and jumped again. He had donkey ears and a donkey tail and his eyes had a sexy and lugubrious cast to them. ‘Andy’s in touch with his animal self,’ he said. Vince reached into his purple jacket pocket and produced three green apples. An expert
juggler suddenly, he tossed them into the dark for Penny to catch.
Then came the braying of a horn, the wild lurching and flashing of gas lamps and, with a terrible clatter of hooves, a carriage appeared on the road leading into the rock. A stage coach painted gold, with flashing leaded panes, pulled by a troop of white, steaming donkeys. The vehicle was filled with boys, pushing and shouting and laughing. The coachman brought them to a halt and waved his riding crop at Vince and Andy. Above his tightly knotted scarf, Penny saw, the coachman’s face was brightly tattooed. ‘It’s our lift home,’ Vince told Andy. Andy scooped as many little creatures as would fit in his pockets and then he was off, running after Vince, to the carriage.
Penny watched them go.
As they rode off, vanishing up into the island at last amid howls and jeers, she set about balancing the three apples round her head. They were all the vividest green, an invisible thread connecting them through the cores, keeping this perfect triangular formation. Penny levitated them, one single perfect crease in her forehead. Gravely they revolved about her as she exerted her own gravity.
As the fruit encircled her head she sat back and grinned, relaxing now. She clapped her hands and the triangle held in place, its shadow smudging blue on the dark wood of the polished table.
‘Father, mother and the holy ghost,’ she said in a singsong voice. ‘Me.’
Then there was a knock at the door and the fruit dropped, thumping one two three against the wood as if plucked and flung.
Penny brushed away her shock, settled her heart rate, and went to turn the kitchen light on.
‘Who is it?’ she asked through the kitchen blinds, fingers resting on the key in its lock.
‘Jane.’ Her voice sounded thick, as if she had bitten her tongue.
Penny paused. Before opening the door, she offered a brief prayer. If I’m going to be bludgeoned, let it be quick, if this isn’t really Jane but a psychopath…
‘Your mam’s not with us.’
Jane was slumped against the doorframe, coloured a brilliant emerald with the dark foliage of the garden behind her. Fran hugged herself nearby, looking embarrassed.
‘She’s making her own way home, pet,’ Fran said. ‘She’ll be in soon.’
‘We got a taxi,’ Jane told her. ‘Guess what it cost!’
‘What do you mean, making her own…?’
‘It was twelve quid.’ Jane pulled a face. ‘I spend less on food for a week.’
‘Why didn’t she come home with you two?’
Fran said, ‘Jane here had a head —’
‘She got off with someone, that’s why. Guess who?’
‘She what?’
‘Yes, she did. With the bus driver. With my bloody bus driver!’
Fran took Jane by the shoulders. ‘Come on. Time for home.’
‘And he’s called Cliff!’
Fran marched her out of the garden, calling back to Penny, ‘Sorry about this. She just stayed back for a lift. She’ll be in soon, pet. Night.’
The gate slammed and Penny watched them disappear around the corner.
It was that time of night when the white lights in town, from the cinemas and take-aways, were all switched off. Only the streetlamps burned. Everything was flat and dull and yellow as Vince and Andy linked arms down North Road, following the cracks in the pavement.
They kept in step. ‘We’re walking at exactly the same pace!’ Andy shouted. ‘And we didn’t even realise it! Fucking brilliant.’
‘Smart.’ Vince concentrated on the gaps in the paving stones. Paving-stone width didn’t quite correspond to the length of their strides. On a first step their toes would nudge a crack, then the other foot would land dead centre in a square, then the first foot land half across a crack, then…’
‘We’re not even walking with equidistant paces, either. Frightening, isn’t it?’
In his enthusiasm for the sound of their own joint footsteps, Andy couldn’t hear the others behind them. Vince could. To him they sounded too stealthy. He tried to urge Andy on, to get them home. He always found himself in this position, trying to see things through to the end.
They paused by the church, where a turn-off led up and down a dip in the landscape that concealed the industrial estate. Here you could see the sky pulled in tight over a low horizon that was made of a single row of Georgian houses. They were square like cartoon teeth, some of them punched in. A gas tower rose out of the dip, a huge metal drum gazing over the town from within its metal cage.
‘I used to think you could go up to one of those and puncture it with a knitting needle. And the skeleton would still stand,’ said Andy.
There was a terrible cracking noise as someone smacked him round the head from behind. Those following on had caught up. Andy slumped into the church railings.
Vince watched him buckle, head forced between his knees. He gave a grunt of surprise. Then he saw three men in heavy hooded tops and loose tracksuit bottoms. Closest to him, one with lank hair, green in this light, had his car keys bunched across his knuckles.
Andy groaned, shaking his head from side to side. It’s all right for you, Vince thought. You’ve already been hit. You’re exempt from responsibility. You don’t have to do anything now. He bunched his fists by his sides.
‘What was that for?’
The two behind Car Keys had been shuffling away. They had seen the dark trickle running from behind Andy’s ear, shocking as a split in his white collar bone. They snorted at Vince and moved in close again. ‘Fucking queers!’ Car Keys grinned.
‘How can you tell?’ Vince asked.
Car Keys smacked him across the mouth with his empty hand and Vince fell, taking the kick to the stomach surprisingly well. He hooked his fingers into a pavement crack, as if trying to see down it.
‘Cocky little bastard, inne, lads?’
Vince let his forehead rest on the concrete. God, this is so banal, he thought. What’s the matter with them? It’s not even as if we’re getting beaten up by interesting people. Why doesn’t Andy bloody well do something?
Car Keys kicked him again, in the groin, and Vince sent his stomach splashing into the road. He was hoisted up by the armpits against the railings and slumped there, his body below gut-level making no sense at all.
‘We don’t want him choking on his own spew, do we?’
Andy was trying to speak.
‘What’s that one saying?’
He was holding out his palms.
‘Fucking cocksucker!’ They laughed. ‘He’s begging for it.’
Car Keys went over to Andy, gripped his head and pulled it into his own crotch. Andy twisted his head aside. There was a crack, then an acrid smell, the sharp ozone scent of pain and pissy tracksuit. ‘Suck it. Go on.’ They laughed again, then Car Keys pushed him away. He fell into Vince.
‘Come on, lads!’ Having exhausted their range of possibilities, the little gang went away.
‘Vince?’
Vince had been pretending to be dead. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself. ‘Yeah?’
‘For a while there, I couldn’t see.’
‘Shit!’
‘It’s OK now.’ He shifted his weight on to Vince’s legs. He had to whisper. The whole road was rocking from side to side for both of them. Vince whispered back, breathing with difficulty.
‘We’d better move. If the police find us lying like this, they’ll fucking beat us up.’
‘Right.’ But Andy put his bleeding neck down on Vince’s stomach. He too was suddenly fascinated by the weedy cracks in the ground. ‘When I could see again, there were things crawling out of the pavement.’
‘Yeah?’ Vince sounded as if he was trying to sleep. ‘Glowing things. With arms and legs and heads.’
‘He hit you round the head.’ Vince’s hand reached up, touching his shoulder, and Andy gave a sob. ‘Sorry.’
Andy reached the worried hand with his own. ‘Little animals. When I could see again, I saw little animals. They were climbing into my ha
nds.’
‘I’m sorry, Andy. I’m sorry.’
Vince curled over and was sick again.
Having left Jane sprawled on her bed in her best green dress, Fran at last went home. Before passing out, the younger woman had looked around the almost bare room and said, ‘It feels strange without Peter here. Even though he’s asleep through the night and I usually get lonely. I can hear him breathe through the walls. The house seems alive.’ Then her head hit the pillows. Peter was with her mother Rose and, presumably, the man with the wooden leg.
Fran left her breathing coarsely through alcohol fumes. One arm hung limply off the bed. It had dislodged a stack of paperbacks. Their golden titles and authors gleamed under the streetlight poking under the blind. Fran left quietly.
The street was nearly silent. No trouble tonight. But there was that odd tension in the air. It had been around since midsummer, the time of the riots in North Shields. Here there was an air of expectancy. Fran felt the whole town was asking for trouble. She shivered as she passed the bus shelter, but there was no one in there.
She unlocked her kitchen door in a rush of panic and stepped into the dark warmth, wondering how Penny felt. Her kitchen’s slatted light was still glowing. She was up and worrying about Liz. Fran recalled that image of Liz and the bus driver, kissing, pressed close, on the dance floor. Liz had been leading the dance. Was that because she was taller?
With her door securely locked behind her, Fran went about turning lights on. An expensive night. She’d had a good time, though. Not too bad. She was a bit tipsy and not very disappointed and she still looked great to boot. Great-ish.
In the living room, basked by the light from the hall, there was Frank flat out on the settee. The two youngest, Lyndsey and Jeff, were crooked under his arms. All three slumbered peacefully, wrapped up in each other. The carpet was littered with empty beer cans and storybooks.
She frowned at him. She wasn’t drunk. Keeping pace with him had increased her tolerance. His tolerance was beginning to disappear altogether, whereas she was going from strength to strength. She picked up Lyndsey to carry her upstairs.