[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  They both fell quiet at this. Liz was shocked by his bitterness.

  “Have I been getting on your nerves?” she asked.

  Cliff glowered. “All you go on about is leaving Newton Aycliffe behind, about how I’ve taken you away from everything that’s yours.” He sighed. “You make me feel like I’ve dragged you off and made you a rubbish bargain.”

  “Cliff,” she said. “It’s been wonderful, this trip. I’ve loved it. It’s just not…”

  “It’s not real life, is it?”

  When they walked back through the park they started to notice the brighter flowers that hung from some of the trees, looking tagged on like Christmas decorations. Amazing this far north, this time of year. Obviously a well-cared-for garden. Liz dropped some change in the box as they left.

  In the car Cliff said, “Do you want me to take you home?”

  She stared at the windscreen as it started to rain. “Don’t know, Cliff.” She pulled a face into her mirror. “I don’t think so.”

  I tried to tell him I needed a routine. it does me no good not knowing what’s coming next. That sense that you are free to do anything depresses me. Because in the end anything that free has to be boring. Life made up minute-by-minute makes me sad. It’s like being old or mad or with nothing to do. Cliff never agreed. Cliff with nothing to do was like a child.

  My Aycliffe routines. I loved them even though I didn’t know it. How’s about that for a sad, small life? But it’s only when I’m stranded in the mountains, looking at bigger skies than I’ve ever seen, that I start to appreciate…I don’t know. Getting the Road Ranger to the town centre. The tantalizing Cliff taking my money, punching my ticket. Belting round the supermarket, filling a trolley. Fresh bread and sausage roils from the bakers. Picking up shiny magazines in Stevens. Sitting in the Copper Kettle and gassing with whoever I see there. Swanking through the precinct and knowing that I — more than anyone there — am looking drop dead.

  Here there’s no one to see me but Cliff and is it awful to say this? He looks less tantalizing driving a car than his bus, when it was scandalous to talk too much with him. The sign by his head warned his passengers not to address him when he was driving. So we stared at the sunburned nape of his neck, his dark curls sweated down on the skin.

  I’ve got him and don’t know what to do with him.

  He pointed out that it could be the countryside that was getting her down. “You’re not one for open spaces.”

  He took them to Glasgow, where the rain kept up and the turn-offs into town confounded them. The middle of the city was like being in canyons. They parked and hunted the car boot for an umbrella.

  Full of holes, Cliff muttered and chucked it. They went by the town hail. Elkie Brooks was on posters outside.

  “Pearl’s a singer…” said Liz reflectively.

  “We could go and see her if you liked,” Cliff said.

  They found a bar instead.

  Whenever Cliff comes City he wants to know about the gay scene. It’s funny but I can never be bothered, really. It’s the same old thing wherever you god. Smell of poppers, dance music, old fellas sitting round.

  It’s not something I’m used to but Cliff likes it and so I go.

  This bar we’re in, Friday teatime, is like a barn and filling up already. I’m forty-one and sitting in a bar where the only words in the song they’re playing that I can make out are, ‘Tie me up’. If I wasn’t in a frock, would I look like the other, older men here?

  Cliff has a theory about me and gay bars. If he believed in it, he wouldn’t bring me to another one, but he does anyway. He says they are the places I look less real. Is it because of strobe lighting? My make-up looks put on with a shovel. Once he said I had this mask on. When he said it my face could barely move. My eyes felt like holes cut into an egg shell. My clothes feel over-dressy, but that’s not me trying to look smart, me trying to outshine. It’s me sending up the idea of wearing women’s clothes. That’s what it looks like when you put me here. That’s what, I think, Cliff ’s trying to say. Here, everyone can tell I’m a man.

  No one has to look twice. Of course I’m going to hate a place like that. The scene unwomans me.

  The room this time is small. When they open the window for more air the noise of the rain is too fierce. It bounces off the glass and soaks into the golden, velvety curtains.

  Liz lies her slimmer, paler body over her lover’s and wriggles herself as if into him. His cool knees press against her sides and how secure she feels. Her palms rest flat on his stomach. So hard, like a carapace, like the red, cooked shell of a lobster. Imagine sliding your lover under the grill.

  And what else did he say — that expert — about cooking a lobster?

  She stirs, wondering what to do with him next. Their eyes lock over his body and they pause. Seconds creep by.

  He said you have to keep their claws still with elastic bands, or they’ll cut you to ribbons. They’ll nip your vitals off. And here is Cliff, flat on the mattress, trussed up with the belts from both their dressing gowns. His wrists are bound and lashed to the door handle of the en suite bathroom. How he loves to be beyond control like this.

  Liz looks him over, gives the smooth, rosy skin of his rib cage a cautious lick. She savours the bouquet of their mingled smells and pulls both their cocks together in one hand.

  She’s almost delirious with tiredness because once again they’ve been awake most of the night. In hotel rooms and B&Bs they’ve taken to watching late movies, one after another. Tonight in this fuggy Glasgow hotel room they’ve seen Queen Christina. Garbo dressing in a velvet Robin Hood suit in snowy old Russia, being a pretend boy to woo a Spanish nobleman. Playing Cesario to his perplexed — until he sees her breasts — Orsino.

  As they make love Liz thinks about the film. She looks far away. Cliff has noticed that this is what she’s like, in the seconds before she comes. When she does, her sperm shoots past him, falls on the pillow case with a loud crackle in his ear. Cliff comes at the exact same moment she does. He always does. Somehow, like spies, they’ve managed to get themselves synchronized.

  He lies quiet and waits for Liz either to untie him or wipe him off. He feels covered, as if someone has painted him with the stuff. Jackson Poilocked, he rests with Liz’s slight weight keeping him down. He stares at her thin chest and torso. The plump nipples and the odd swelling of her pectorals, almost like an adolescent girl. As if Liz’s gender is changing course through sheer force of will. He knows she is off the hormone treatment. Liz stares down at him, with one fingertip smearing sperm into his hairy stomach, like Nivea.

  I dream sometimes when I have sex, she thinks. that’s not to say I get bored and make things up to pass the time. Nor does it mean I’ve fallen asleep and these are real dreams. And I don’t exactly mean those all-too-brief flashes of utopian insight you might get on the way to coming with someone. I don’t exactly mean that, but it’s similar. It’s just funny, what goes round your head when you’re making love.

  I saw Cliff in red and gold soldier’s braid, in a horrid woodland, banging on a tree under which he knew a witch lived. She had a home tiled in black and white, well below the stinking forest floor, its roof tangled in tree roots. She showed Cliff the three dogs guarding the three pots of treasure — gold, silver and copper. And the dogs had eyes in ascending sizes; eyes the size of dinner plates, of cartwheels, of round towers. I thought, how does she fit such vastly-eyed hounds in her underground home?

  As Cliff thought about stealing the treasure and winding up with the beautiful princess — which was me, of course — I was coming to the realization that it was The Tinder Box, the story I was thinking of.

  Cliff took both of us in his hands to make us come; seeding up, making the red tender flesh inside the skin appear, then disappear. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  I saw the nude princess strapped to the back of the dog with the biggest eyes. Baying at the yellow moon, he pelted through the streets of the city; obeying the s
oldier, his new master. And no one from the princess’s family ever saw her, or could find her again.

  That was the dream I was going over.

  Cliff says that, during sex, all he ever thinks about is whether he’s doing it right. He says he can’t stop it. And there’s me supposing he’s all easy and unselfconscious. He tells me how he thinks over what we’re doing. Afterwards he narrates it all back to me. I think it’s just an excuse to talk dirty to me.

  Bless him.

  It rained the whole time they were in Glasgow.

  They went to the Versace shop and made each other try things on. Liz always found herself marvelling at Cliffs perfect shape. She liked to show off for him. She marched him into their poky, minimalist dressing rooms, and out again, in a variety of improbable outfits. Clothes just hang off him, she thought. He looks so nonplussed.

  A display dummy fell and almost crushed somebody's child while they were there. The mother was off chatting to her friend and, before she knew it, the kid had pulled this metal thing down on himself. Liz managed to pull him away just in time.

  The woman looked a bit spacey as she thanked Liz, then Cliff, then Liz again, and she pulled her toddler to her. Cliff dragged Liz out into the street before she gave the woman a piece of her mind.

  "Careless people like that,” Liz ranted, “shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.”

  He looked glum. “I’m careless.”

  In another gay bar for lunch—Cliff was finding them everywhere — they were playing Karen Carpenter’s long-lost solo LP.

  “She should have sung a song with Elvis,” Cliff said.

  “That would have been something.” Liz looked round. The bar was dark and full of flashing games machines. Karen Carpenter’s voice made Liz feel sad, and vaguely guilty for being hungry and looking through the menu. She was pleased Karen managed a year away from her drippy brother for her own music. At least she had that time away.

  "Just think,” said Cliff. “As Elvis was getting fatter and fatter, Karen Carpenter was getting thinner and thinner.”

  "Maybe he was eating her.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “I wish I hadn’t thought of that.” She shook her head to clear it. "Look, can we go to a normal bar one in a while?”

  “What’s wrong with this?”

  She sighed. "It’s like the Cantina scene in Star Wars before they farted it up.”

  “I thought we were escaping from the straight world.”

  "Well, that’s ridiculous. That’s like saying we’re into the universe of anti-matter. Life’s not like that.”

  He had BOYZ magazine open on the table, it showed a map dotted with all the queer hotspots. It was an alternative Britain. When they re-entered England tomorrow, as they planned to, it would be according to this map. Heading down the west coast; to Blackpool, then across to Manchester. You could plan your life and never go near the straight world again. Suddenly Liz felt queasy.

  “Everything’s about having a good time,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, it’s what we used to call the nite life. Everything on this map is about the nite life.”

  “Don’t sound so disapproving,” he said. “We met in a seedy nightclub, remember.”

  “I know, and I wouldn’t be without it, but…you can’t you do at night!” She burst out with this too loudly and the people at the next table looked up.

  Then their food came and the next thing was that Liz had a headache because of the dim lights. It could have been any time of the day or night in lighting like that, which is flattering to the over-forties, but it always killed Liz’s eyes.

  They set off the next morning. The weather was lifting.

  Cliff said, “Anyway, when we get back to England it won’t all be fun and games. We need money. I’ll have to get some work.”

  “Doing what?”

  "Some kind of labouring thing, I suppose.”

  She watched the countryside flash by. They were heading to some gay B&B in Penrith he’d read about.

  “I don’t know where all the money’s gone,” he said. “We’ve just been chucking it away.”

  "Yes,” she said. Talk of money always filled Liz with dread. Being asked what she did with money was like being asked what she did with time. They both just vanished. That’s how life went by. Best not keep count. She’d never balanced a cheque book or kept a diary in her life.

  "You’re very quiet,” Cliff said.

  “I was just thinking, I never have anything to show for what I spend.”

  He laughed. “That just means you’ve had a good time. You’ve blown it all.”

  She smiled. “People are jealous of people like you,” he added. “You don’t worry about blowing it.”

  “Everything vanishes,” she said.

  When we leave Scotland, more pictures at the border.

  A twelve-foot column of rock on a hill marks the change, with the names of the countries it divides chiselled either side. Cliff wants to photo me pointing at the names. This is where we’ve been.

  A woman with an accent you can’t pin down is boiling hot dogs and pouring cups of tea in a caravan. She’s got a plastic headscarf on, keeping down her wispy hair, because the wind manages to reach right into her van.

  We are about to be served when from behind us a little old man shouts out that he wants two bacon sandwiches, but he's ot queueing in the cold. He’ll wait in his car with his little old wife. Then he sees hes pushed in on us.

  "Sorry, honey,” he shouts to me across the car park. "Ladies first.”

  Each street on our estate of yellow box houses has a smaller box somewhere in it and these are bungalows for old people. They never look happy. In the street just down from us a car tore through the wall of their bungalow because it was right on the main road and they go mad on that corner. The car screamed through the itchyback bushes and bang: killed the old bloke inside on the spot. He’d been sitting watching daytime TV. Those walls must be held up with nothing.

  Do the pensioners inside know the sort of danger they inhabit daily? Is their irksomeness excused by that knowledge of the threat of sudden, arbitrary demolishment?

  Charlotte lives at the end of the row and she has nothing to complain about. Her bungalow is nowhere near the main road and her garden is smashing, nothing like the poky bits of concrete we’ve all got. You get all the perks if you’re old. They put you on the phone for nothing. She had lovely flowers out all the year round, it seemed. She used to get a man in to do that, but now her garden arrangements have changed. Her garden is, if anything, even more sumptuous.

  We always reckoned she must have quite a bit stashed away. Her husband had been someone, they said, and she still had an accent. Not posh but a bit southern, which marked her out. She played hell when the bairns went near her windows.

  Think of a tortoise with white, flaccid skin and its shell crowbarred off. Charlotte to a T. You’d see her silhouetted in her french window of a night in her orthopaedic chair that swivelled round and we used to say she’d put herself back in for the night. She had one of those dowager’s humps and we’d think it was wet and adhesive beneath her cardigan, fresh from the shell, lobster pink.

  She never had tortoise hands — those are like elephants’, aren’t they? Though her fingers were oddly short, as if she’d worn them to the bone, working. Old, she still worked, in the Spastics Society shop down the precinct. Those short fingers had crossed my palm with copper once, when I was about ten — Hallowe’en 1980. We were running from door to door wearing bin bags and asking for money. Charlotte made a big show of looking for her purse in all her kitchen drawer, asking me about my family. She seemed genuinely concerned about them, making me worry whether I wasn’t concerned enough. Her questions placed them in peril, I felt. She hoped, she said, that my mummy and daddy would sort out their problems soon and that it wouldn’t affect me too deeply.

  Back home, later, I counted up my carrier of coppers and told
my mam this in an offhand manner. She went up in blue light. My dad and she were living in different places, he at one end of the estate and she, with us, at the other on a social fiddle. The council had given him a single person’s flat by the shop and the Chinky. We went over to hoover and dust every Saturday morning. His shared front door faced the grass at the back of the Chinky and I found heaps of discarded pink shrimps. For a while I thought they’d been rained, the way they said things got rained in The Unexplained, that magazine.

  Mam said Charlotte was a nosy bitch.

  Charlotte has worked down the Spastics shop for years. In there it always smells of washing powder and sweat. They arrange second-hand clothes on chrome stands in order of colour. In spring everything to the front of the shop is yellow. They fill the window with chickens made out of woolly pompoms. These are made by Charlotte, all winter long. Sits in her orthopaedic shell through the devastating cold days, when she lets the younger volunteer lasses do the earlier shifts, and she runs up furry lemon chickens. I bet it’s a lonely thing being old on our estate. Even if they do put your phone line in free.

  They’re all pensioners who work in the Spastics shop down our town. Is this because they have more hours to fill in? When you are old, life has shrunk horribly to nothing and its warp and weft can’t be pulled back to a decent size, no matter how much you tug. Surely in those circumstances you want to wring the best you can out of what’s left? How can giving it all to charity constitute the best? An overflow, if anything, a by-product of pleasure: you can give leftovers to charity, but the main action?

  I’d ask Charlotte if she was as selfless as this. Why does she put on that red nylon pinny in the morning to stand behind her counter doling out bargains, oddments, other people’s discarded crap?

  Would she admit I get first dibs on the decent stuff’?

  My goodness, the bargains!

  The things people do away with!

  They don’t know when they’re well off. I tend to be in there quite often. I like to look at books because they get quite a good, eclectic selection. There’s always somebody literary dying in Aycliffe and their goodies wash up here. I became addicted to checking out the Spastics shop after finding Anna Karenina for fifty pence. But on every stiffened yellow page, can I inhale someone else’s last gasp? It’s a wonder if I can’t. Intellectuals always smoke and these books are preserved with a laminate of nicotine. I think, Was this the book dropped from a dying grasp? This, the last sentence read? Look: I’ve read on further!