by Paul Magrs
Frank woke and smiled. She said to him, Thanks for looking after the bairns. You look like an Athena poster, all lying there. Help me with these two.’
He struggled to sit up without disturbing them. He remembered something. ‘Oh, yeah. We set the gerbils free by mistake.’
Via Phoenix Court, Serpentine Walk, Guthrum Place and finally Sid Chaplin Close, Penny was striding purposefully out of the estate, where the houses looked ghastly and squat and dark, with eyes made of satellite dishes squinting at the sky. She got to the main road, which was by now devoid of life, past the new petrol station, and made for the countryside. Beyond the woods stretched farmland for miles around, curiously silver and unthreatening in the night. The fields were passive, crops inhaling and exhaling with the breeze. She followed the winding roadway, kicking the stubborn grass of the verge, up and down the dips in the countryside. Very sensual curves, she thought, and imagined strolling the length of a giant’s spine.
Oh, Gulliver, Gulliver, please roll over!
Shit, I left the lights on in the house. Never mind. It’ll put the burglars off.
She was walking to clear her mind. The mind she had worked so hard at cluttering. All I want is stability, she thought. I did think we had it. But no, he wants more.
Why all of a sudden? What’s going on in his — sorry, her — tiny mind? She never tells me anything now.
‘It’s just us, Pen,’ Liz had once said. ‘You and me for ever now.’
And now Penny was thinking, Am I just being jealous?
‘We’ll be here for each other,’ Liz once promised. ‘Mother and daughter.’
‘Whatever,’ Penny had replied. ‘But yes, we will.’
When she was twelve her father told her about the facts of life.
They were sitting in front of the washing machine at four o’clock in the morning. He had a mirror placed on top of it and he was shaving off his beard. Penny listened and watched with great interest. She had never seen her father with a bare face. Even in the ancient hippie photos, the ones with her mam, back in the sixties, he had his beard. It had grown and grown and now he was sick of it. As he talked about sex and love and trust, they had the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds playing. When Penny imagined the kind of relationship she was meant for, the kind of love she deserved, it was always to a faint strain of Beach Boy harmonies. Sexy boy sopranos in concerted voice, promising her the world.
‘You see, Pen, there’s this thing that they tell you is out there in the world, and they call it sex. Apparently it’s something that men do to women and it’s how babies are born. And it’s the thing young men are encouraged to go out into the world to find, like a good job, and when they find it, they’re supposed to marry whoever it is that gives it to them.
‘Then they can start having sex with other women, if they like, and go out to look for that. Most of them feel obliged to. A lot of men believe it is the women who give them sex and many vice versa. They don’t think about it much, but it just kind of happens. It’s a process involving the penetration of the female by the erect male member and the discharge of various fluids.
‘Love, too, is something they are told is out there, and sometimes they go looking for that as well.’
‘I see,’ Penny said thoughtfully. She had been told all this already, at school.
‘What I want to say is this, Pen. Sex is not something “out there” at all. It’s not something you hunt or that you are forced into finding, hiding or secreting. Neither is love. Sex is a thing that makes you fall in love with another person, another body, for an uncertain span of time — however long, however short — and you have that time to accommodate that person into your physical space in whichever way you both prefer. Sex is open and free. Admission free to the public, open to all comers. It is not something forced on you from the outside. Ever.’
‘Right.’
‘The same thing with love. Love is a thing that can make you have sex with another person, another body, for an uncertain span of time. That time is for accommodating that person into a particular place in your heart. Usually they stay there.’ He finished shaving and turned to face her, looking very strange with a complete face. ‘I’m telling you this now because it is something I will never have again. I’ve done everything I want to. I’ve shared that private space. Now I’m just making myself comfortable with the space I have left. And I’m going to be looking after other people.’
Penny stood looking out over the new golf course. Flags were bent in the rinsing wind. The moon was out and thick with suds.
He changed so quickly. As if he had died and come back as someone else. I thought I had a chance to catch up. I did have a chance. I fell in love with him all over again. He was my hero… my heroine. I was so proud. He became so much lighter as a woman, younger and funnier. It’s nice to have a mam like that. I’ve had both parents… and only had to get to know one real person. He’s a bargain. He was all for me, she was all mine. He promised.
Penny wept a little at the foot of the golf course and glared at the moon. ‘You’re going there, Penny. You’re going to the moon.’ When had he said that? She knew that he had, but couldn’t remember when. Typical him. Typical her.
‘Fat fucking chance!’ she yelled at the moon. ‘I’m not going where he wants to go. If he wants to start fucking around and being tarty, that’s fine. I’m no longer part of his space. I know where I’m going. And I’m not going to the fucking moon!’
And then she remembered exactly when her father had told her about the moon. Penny could feel the night breezes on her baby face, and she could picture herself there. Later her father said they were struck by lightning. For hubris, he said. Daedalus and Icarus, and they hadn’t even left the ground. And lightning from the moon was transformative, he said. Hence the change in their fortunes. The savage blast from the moon, which only the nurses who came running observed, that explained her dark powers too. And the moon had wrought an extreme change in her father. It had made him Liz. These were the unacknowledged, uninterrogated truths of Penny’s life. These were the stories.
And what a load of bollocks, she thought. Fancy believing that! She felt embarrassed now, blithely explaining to Vince on the bus that, as a baby, she’d been struck by lightning. I’ve made myself look silly, taking other people’s stories for granted.
There was the sound of an engine. At first she thought the moon was powering up to blast her again. But she looked down the bumpy country lane and saw a small white bus heading towards her, towards town. Strange time for that, she thought, as it came closer, moving fast. She saw it was almost empty. One figure was standing beside the driver. Like Boadicea in her chariot, racing into town.
The bus hurtled past and Penny flung herself back off the tarmac, into the ditch. For a moment she had been transfixed like a rabbit.
Within seconds the sight and sound of the bus was gone. She was left with muddy shins, a slightly sprained ankle, a bitter aftertaste.
Reinvention, Penny thought. Things are moving.
NINE
Vince was wincing as he came downstairs, looking for Andy. It was just past seven in the morning and neither had been able to sleep. A milky weak sunshine came through the wirenetting windows into the taxidermist’s shop.
Everything downstairs looked flat in the dawn, filmed with dust. Birds of prey stared at the floor with their wings pegged out, half-ashamed by exposure. Voles and hedgehogs clung to their mildewed logs. The single leopard stood arrested in pride of place in the window. He was crammed with fake, lumpy bones and patched here and there with scraps of old fox fur. Affronted by the light’s intrusion, his eyes raked the street.
Andy in his Noel Coward dressing gown had the collar pulled up like a boxer before he goes into the ring. Perched on the butterfly case in the middle of the grey and yellow room, he was rotating his neck slowly, breathing raggedly. He’d switched the gas heater on and the air was warming. Salty and vinegary at the same time, it had a comforting smell, underlaid with a m
ustiness Vince supposed came from the animals.
‘Hi-ya.’ Vince took him a cigarette. They couldn’t find matches and Vince knelt painfully to the heater to light both from its orange grill.
Last night they had elected not to go to Casualty. Vince thought that, when they eventually arrived there, right across town, they would only get embarrassed, sitting in a roomful of real and terrible cases. People with bits missing, heart attacks, accidents. He thought they’d feel shamed into doing something dreadful to themselves, to justify the visit. So they struggled back here and mopped themselves up.
Andy had no qualms about tapping ash on to the shop floor. Vince mentioned it. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Andy said. ‘Everything in the shop is dead. The room is full of ash and dust.’ It was true, the heat was stirring the air up and it was full of particles which could have come from anywhere.
Vince found an ashtray anyway, under the counter, by the till. There, too, was a whole row of glass bottles. They had home-made labels and he found their colours enchanting. In the new light they shone and he found himself, without even thinking, stuffing one, no larger than a Body Shop tester, into his pocket.
His head felt twice the usual size. Someone had put a football inside his skull and inflated it through his nose. His flesh was pulpy and about to peel away. He had checked in the mirror already and his cheekbones were nowhere to be seen.
When he sat beside Andy, Andy was saying, ‘Just when you feel great, when you feel calm and nothing could get at you, there’s always some cack-handed fucker to come along and shove you back on your arse. To remind you that you’re just a piece of shit on the pavement. Just like they are.’
Vince took a slow drag of his Marlboro Light. ‘Yeah. You’re right.’
Andy turned to him. ‘So?’
‘What do you mean, “So”?’
‘You said I was right. But what do you think?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. We got tumbled by queer-bashers. It happened and that’s it. It’s the risk you take.’ Andy resumed looking out of the window. He looked to where the leopard’s gaze was fixed. His face flushed red. ‘You’ve got a real fucking attitude problem.’
‘What?’
‘Can’t you even get a tiny bit worked up about this?’
‘What’s the point? You’re just narked still because you got knocked on your arse. It reminds you you’re just like everyone else.’
‘What?’
‘This is what it’s like when you live in a town. You take your chances. I’ve lived in bigger towns than this.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Mr Fucking Cosmopolitan. Just because he’s been to Manchester a couple of times.’
‘Fuck off, Andy.’ Angrily Vince stubbed out his tab. ‘What do you mean, I’ve got an attitude problem?’
Andy burst out laughing and hugged his bruised ribs. Uncertainly Vince joined in. Then a dark silhouette swung into place in the doorframe. It set about unlocking the shop door.
‘Fucking hell, it’s Ethan Nesbit!’ Andy whispered hoarsely. Suddenly he felt very stranded on the butterfly case. It seemed as if every stuffed beast in the shop had shifted its gaze to the door, hackles were invisibly raised and butterfly wings were astir beneath them. Keys rattled against the lock.
Vince froze. ‘Who?’
‘He owns the shop.’ Andy drew his dressing gown in and tied it tighter as the door opened, admitting more of the bland light and revealing what to Vince looked like an ancient grotesque in a raincoat, balancing skilfully with one hand on the doorknob. The tip of his wooden leg was still on the pavement outside.
‘What’s been going on here, then?’ rumbled the taxidermist.
The boy in the silk dressing gown gave him a shrug.
‘We got stuffed.’
That morning, to make herself feel better, Jane threw open the washing machine and rammed in armfuls of dirty washing.
Already she felt guilty for her big night out. I’m not being a proper mother, she thought, as the engine throbbed and the first wave of escaped water began to spread across the lino. It was a thought brought on from the outside: I’m not doing my duty. It pressed like a cold flannel against her temples as she sat with the day’s first cup of tea. The regular thud from the machine’s motor kept pace with the pounding in her head. Like penance. She found she was staring at her Kevin Costner calendar as though it was the most interesting thing in the world.
Very soon she would have to walk across town to fetch Peter. Life would begin again in its old pattern. She could hardly wait. Her current novel waited face down on the table, split in thick halves, demanding attention. The insistent pulse of her daily routine itched on her skin, calling out, wanting to pull her from this inactivity, quell the depression.
Soon, subdued by the routine, she would be able to fall back into her book and find out what an awful time her characters were having. She thought of them like that — as her characters. She hadn’t created them, but they had been given to her, to read about, to live among for a little while. On Tyneside they lived in the shadow of the docks in the days when there still were docks — days Jane imagined as always dark, morning, noon and night.
She hefted the rubbish from its plastic bin, opened the kitchen door and waded with it into the back garden. Getting rid of rubbish also made her feel better at times like this.
How many times like this had she seen? Quite a few, and it never stopped seeming that the nights she spent not caring, smashed out of her head, took place on another planet. A planet where her usual life was something to laugh at, something so narrow and silly it was incredibly funny. On nights like those it was all so difficult to believe. Everything became a mockery. Even time.
Especially time. Time was her enemy. It took so long. She threw grappling hooks at the future, one after another, hooking them on to significant events (Peter’s holidays from playgroup, a night out, a clothes party, Christmas, Peter’s birthday) and she would haul herself towards them. Often she would sit in the kitchen, finding herself counting minutes down from sixty in an effort to annihilate the time between now and then in interminable, easy calculations.
Nights like last night made all that into a joke. Those nights out flew by. They took all her counting, her scrimping and saving and pissed on them. Money was like time in that it was spread thinly out, taut through her waking moments. Then it snapped back like elastic when she got drunk. Time and money both vanish, she thought, when you catch a taxi home.
She thought again about what that taxi fare would have bought, what it might have been important for. She had to decide that it was a different sort of money. The money was a casualty of one of those nights. It didn’t count.
Jane shuddered and pressed the rubbish down, shoulder-deep, in her new council wheely bin. They wouldn’t take it if it wasn’t pressed right down. They made you buy your own plastic bags now, as well.
She straightened to see a tall figure in a dark coat scooting across the road. It was hurrying away from the block of flats at the end of Phoenix Court. Jane’s eyes narrowed at the sight of carefully teased, bleached blonde hair, the slash of gold beneath the calf-length man’s greatcoat. Jane opened her mouth to call out, but Liz had vanished, ducking into her own garden. Jane went back inside.
This was something out of the ordinary, at least.
It would do for later. Right now she wanted the ordinary. She went to have a bath, spurred on by the enthusiasm of the washing machine.
While Andy sat the old taxidermist down in the back kitchen and saw to some tea, Vince trudged upstairs again. He decided he really had to get back into school. His first lesson of the day was at one fifteen. As far as they were concerned he was still full of germs, but he felt he was letting things slip. And now he had to go walking in with his puffy face and his purple patches of flesh. Let them talk, though. Obviously he was already getting on Andy’s nerves.
The heads on the staircase walls studiously ignored him as he came back down clutching shoes and coat. He hover
ed halfway, listening to the voices in the kitchen. The Axminster drew his attention and he stayed there, fascinated. He could never resist eavesdropping. In the voice of the old man downstairs there was a power that unnerved him. But as he boomed out staccato sentences in that tiny kitchen, it was not without a certain tenderness. Through every word he said he sounded sorry. Vince wondered what bad news was coming Andy’s way.
‘Of course I don’t mind you having friends to stay. I think it’s healthy.’ Table legs scraped on the stone floor. Vince imagined them sitting awkwardly at the scarred Formica, balancing their mugs. Then he thought. Shit, it was probably the poor old bastard’s leg scraping the floor. Thoughts of physical pain, illness or debilitation always gave Vince the willies. His stomach folded in on itself with a roll of empathy.
‘What’s the visit in aid of, then?’ Andy was being quite rude. This bloke did own the place, after all.
‘Are you sure you oughtn’t phone the police?’
‘Quite sure. They can’t do anything.’
‘All the same…’
‘Just forget it.’
‘You’re your own man, Andrew.’
‘Yes, I am. Now why are you here?’
‘Problems.’
‘Really?’
‘I haven’t opened the shop up in three months.’
‘I know. It’s been nice and peaceful.’
But Andy hated that peace. The night before last he had whispered fiercely to Vince that he detested living above a shop that was always shut. He said he wouldn’t have minded a closed shop full of clothes or furniture. ‘But it’s a shop of dead things.’
Vince had laughed. ‘And that’s not good for a healthy young imagination.’ He was trying to play down Andy’s distress which, in the middle of that night, was quite real. It was as if he’d saved it up until the moment he knew Vince would come back. He could tell him he hated the way he was living now. And Vince thought that it must be terrible, to work in that bar at night and come home alone to a dark shop, a shop empty apart from stuffed, mildewy bodies with black, glassy eyes. Imagine coming home to that threadbare, testy-looking leopard.