[Phoenix Court 02] - Does It Show?

by Paul Magrs

  I’m educating myself to leave.

  You really have to poke about, between Cartlands and Macleans, to find the good stuff. But it’s there. Jane Eyre — thirty pence.

  I heard Charlotte speak quite sensitively to Ashley, a seven-foot-tall transsexual who models her hair on Liz Taylor in Cleopatra. She’d been hanging on to some special heels for her. They were a kind of present for after Ashley’s op. I was in the day Charlotte produced them from under the counter, but they were lime green. Ashley’s face just dropped and she left the shop without buying anything at all. Charlotte was furious and took a perverse delight in telling the rest of queue behind that the woman who’d just left had once been a man.

  She collected handbags for one daft old wife, Sonja, who always wore a wig, though hers was for cancer, a beehive ever on a tilt. Sonja said, ‘‘It’s forty-seven now! Forty-eight with this one, ta very much, Charlotte! And every one a different colour. I’d have a different bag to go with every outfit I could ever have!” Daft Sonja looked up at Charlotte again and Charlotte blinked those steady, judgemental eyes. “Thank you, Charlotte. Would you keep a watch out for one in baby pink?”

  Charlotte nodded tersely, regal arbiter of justice for cast-offs.

  Expert, she sat each morning in the back room of the shop with her pot of tea and barrel of digestives (in the shape of Dougall, the dog from The Magic Roundabout) and for an hour or more she would go through the bags newly hauled in for redistribution. In the dusky half-light she would gut the plastic bin bags. They’d spill and strew like a trawler’s nets. Turning stuff over in her hands, she’d inspect it, unfold and refold garments, giving them a good, careful sniffing. She counted the pieces in jigsaws and, in case one or two were missing, kept a spare, useless one to the side of her to make up the numbers. It all went with her job and her perk was first refusal and the chance to set a price on whatever she didn’t care to offer the public.

  She found an earthenware pot of gold coins. At first it looked like somebody’s urn of ashes. Somebody, perhaps, whose treasured books were stacked in boxes close by. But the pot jangled inside and she heaved and grunted at the stuck lid until it popped free and the gold poured out on her lap.

  “How much is here?” Charlotte cried, although she wasn’t a greedy woman. She was careful and always had been. Her widow’s pension went on the extravagant food she had delivered from Marks and Spencer of a weekend. Their white and green van pulled up beside her bungalow on Saturday mornings and Charlotte laid out a banquet for no one but herself. Seen in silhouette by the rest of our street. All of it would be out, uneaten, in the bottom of her wheely bin by Sunday morning. Sometimes we’d sneak a look: check. Miss Havisham. (Great Expectations — forty-five pence.)

  Her needs were met. They weren’t always outrageous. But a whole pot of gold! Who'd turn their nose up at that?

  “But what is it worth?” asked Charlotte of the bags and boxes of detritus, the heaps of semisoiled clothing, the single stuffed rocking donkey. “What’s the going rate for gold?”

  And she saw, sitting astride the donkey, a human skeleton, bracing its frail weight on the felt saddle, gazing at her with terrible blank sockets. Its skull was disproportionately large. This was a baby’s remains, rocking steadily on the donkey.

  "I don’t know what they give for gold,” said the child. “These days.” Charlotte blinked, for now it was a fully fleshed child, chubby and brown, its head full of tangled curls. “But think, Charlotte: if you bought this pot and took it home, wouldn’t you lie awake and worry?”

  She never worried. It was a point of honour with her. Her face clouded. “Worry about what?”

  “Even though your garden is wonderful, your bungalow is still ever so delicate. How easy for somebody to huff and puff and blow it in! How easy to take away your crock of gold! They leave rainbows behind, you know, for thieves to follow.”

  Lips pursed, Charlotte was writing out a tiny label for the pot, ‘20p’, and sticking it to the lid, which she had replaced. Really, it was an ugly thing. Ethnic-looking. No pattern on it or anything, no flowers. She shrugged, not to be put off.

  “I’m not one of these silly old women who keep money and valuables vulnerable in the home and get murdered in their beds for it. My mattress isn’t stuffed with fivers. I’d get these gold coins down to the bank at the first opportunity.”

  The child had small wings flapping, but these were featherless and thin: dead sycamore leaves. “You might lose the gold coins on your way to the bank.” The child smiled. “Wouldn’t you fret that the gold shone through your pocket or your bag and everyone would know what you were carrying? Wouldn’t you feel exposed?”

  Charlotte was quick. She’d been a junior-school teacher once. She knew something about answering children back. “Then I’d carry my gold in the urn. You can’t see it shine through the urn, can you?”

  She held up the nondescript pot in the meagre light of the room’s flyblown lamp. The child squinted. “I can,” he said. “And what if the bank tricks you, gives you only half the gold’s worth?”

  “I can check the exchange rate,” said the old woman vaguely.

  “Did you look at the coins? Aren’t they strange and old? Perhaps, for all they may look like gold, they are useless here and now? Mightn’t they excite suspicion and cause the bank people to point their fingers at you and jab at their alarm buttons?”

  Charlotte had heard enough. She left the storeroom clutching her new pot and paid for it down in the shop, wrapping it and putting it away in her bag before anyone could inspect it.

  But that night she walked home nervously across the Burn. She imagined that every stranger she passed could see through her shopping bag and knew about her treasure.

  The next day was Saturday; there was no going to the bank. She had her usual banquet and the only person she saw all day was the cheery delivery boy from Marksies in his green and white van. He came up the garden path with her usual boxes of luxury items. Charlotte startled him this time with a tip. He careered off in the van a little wildly, she thought, dangerously.

  She sat down to her feast with a heavy heart. The pot was in pride of place like a centrepiece at Christmas dinner, surrounded by cakes and dips and asparagus tips, flans and chicken drumsticks and salads busy with colour, stiff with dressings. The urn of gold seemed to exert its own dull pressure on her spirits. "Get rid of me,” it urged tonelessly; “I’ll bring you nothing but ill fortune. Why didn’t my last owner cash me in? Have you thought about that?”

  “That’s a point,” the infant clucked, fleshly again and sitting across the table from Charlotte. “One simply doesn’t get lucky like this. Gold coins! It doesn’t happen! Not to people like us!”

  “Why are you going on at me like this? What do you want?” She was a touch distraught.

  The child looked solemn. “Allow me to do your garden. I’d like that.” Overcome, Charlotte stood shakily and went to embrace the child, but she tripped on the rug beneath the table, fell and hit her head.

  She came to, feeling dreadful, quite early on Sunday morning. With a throbbing headache she emptied the ruined party food into her wheely bin. While out there she took in her garden. It was looking unkempt by now. Her little man hadn’t been round in a while.

  She went to bed for the rest of the day, leaving Classic FM playing on the Teasmade by her bed. She mulled over the course her life was taking.

  All Sunday she dreamed listlessly of when she was married, to a soldier and taught children and had a garden with roses in the south.

  Monday morning she was late in at the Spastics shop. She’d stopped down the Bum on her way and, in a little ceremony, on the wooden bridge, dropped the pot in the water. It hit with a ker-plunk. The water looked exactly like morning sun coming through her full cafetiere. She went to work.

  Monday morning meant a good deal of new belongings in the back room. Charlotte put on her rubber gloves. This Monday was a little below par, she thought. Or maybe she was disgruntl
ed, throwing a fortune away. She almost wished she was religious; couldn’t she have felt virtuous.

  She struggled with the clasp of a battered blue suitcase. Picturing the gold scattered on the rocks in the Bum. Those stunted fish nosing at the abandoned coins. There was definitely something inside the case; she had to check.

  Not many books this week. Not many bargains for me, she was afraid. (Though she was wrong, I found Lady Chatterley — twenty pence. But it was my own copy, donated out of spite by my sister.) And inside the case: heaps of crumbling newspaper. It came onto her fingers like grey pollen and went up her nose. The pages were dated 1933 and a heavy stench came out after all that time: rotten fish and chips. The papers were bundled around some light, solid object and she worked into this parcel, soon discovering the child’s skeleton.

  Silhouetted that evening in the matte blue window of her yellow brick of a bungalow we could see Charlotte slumped in her swivelling tortoise shell. She watched, rapt, while the child sat up at the smallest of her nest of tables and ravenously ate a meal she had cooked him. His bones were faintly yellowed, slick with plaque.

  At last the child finished his first supper for many years, belched, and began:

  “I was a child who menaced an old man who lived down our lane. He worked in his garden and I would stand in his gateway, aping his every action in order to annoy him. Cutting grass, pruning hedges, pressing saplings into the earth. I’d take him off for badness’ sake. I was only a child. Only learning. And one day he must have had enough because he brought out a sharp knife and I thought. This is it! I’ve pushed my luck!

  “Yet he came nowhere near me. He simply mimed, for my benefit, slashing his own throat, there and then in his garden. Then he went in for his tea, still furious, leaving the knife on the lawn.

  “When he returned for a last go at his beds, there he found me, white and slashed in a gleaming pool on his garden path.”

  “There, there,” Charlotte consoled him.

  An emaciated cupid, a stripeless buzzing bumblebee has supplanted Charlotte’s young man in the garden. You can see the skeletal child hovering about her shrubs in the very middle of the night, if you’re coming in late, sneaking round the houses. The child will have secateurs in hand, being business-like, wearing its ineluctable maniac’s grin. But the child is glad of the work. He’s handy, too, because his spiritual powers and knowhow ward off disasters. So Charlotte hopes she’ll never get a van or a lorry through her front-room wall, like that old bloke did. She exists within an enchanted circle of the child’s deceit and sups contentedly alone still, on Saturday nights..

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAUL MAGRS lives and writes in Manchester. In a twenty-odd year writing career he has published novels in every genre from Literary to Gothic Mystery to Science Fiction. His most recent books are The Martian Girl (Firefly Press) and Fellowship of Ink (Snowbooks.) He has taught Creative Writing at both the University of East Anglia and Manchester Metropolitan University, and now writes full time.

  MORE BY PAUL MAGRS FROM LETHE PRESS

  MARKED FOR LIFE

  Meet: Mark Kelly – a man tattooed with glorious designs over every inch of his body. He’s married to the slightly unhinged Sam and has a young daughter who’s about to be kidnapped at Christmas by an escaped convict and old flame of our hero’s. Over one snowy festive season the whole family sets off in perilous pursuit… accompanied by Sam’s mother, who’s become a nudist lesbian and her girlfriend, who claims to be a time-transcending novelist known as Iris Wildthyme…

  COULD IT BE MAGIC?

  Meet: Andy, a young gay man who finds himself quite unexpectedly pregnant. Andy runs away to Edinburgh to sample the delights of the wicked city and to give birth to a child of his own: one covered in golden leopard fur…

  FANCY MAN

  The never-before-published ‘lost’ novel that continues in the same inimitable style of Phoenix Court.

  Meet: Wendy, who grows up the youngest of three brash sisters in Blackpool and who leaves home when her mother dies. She moves to Edinburgh under the wing of her vulgar Aunty Anne, whose sights are set on the millions her ex-husband has recently won on the lottery. Wendy spends a happy summer finding herself amongst her new family: Uncle Pat, frail cousin Colin, Captain Simon and Belinda, who believes herself to be an alien abductee.

  Published by Lethe Press

  lethepressbooks.com

  Originally published by Vintage in 1997

  Copyright © 1997, 2018 Paul Magrs

  Introduction © 2018 Paul Magrs

  ‘Nude on the Moon’ first published in Crossing The Border:

  Tales of Erotic Ambiguity (edited by Lisa Tuttle)

  ‘Bargains For Charlotte’ first published in Playing Out

  ISBN: 978-1-59021-648-4

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any

  means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and

  recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

  Author photo by

  Clair Macnamee

  Cover and interior design

  by Inkspiral Design