[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  “And some ginger snaps,” he said.

  “You look like a Red Indian,” she breathed.

  She was a pretty girl, but wore too much blusher, he thought. An urn must ruin the complexion.

  “How?” he asked.

  “Are you a skinhead? National Front?”

  “No. Where’s my ginger snaps?”

  “You must get a lot of stick.”

  “It comes with the territory. For Red Indians.”

  “It must do. Eight-five pence.” He felt for the change. She added, “Sod it. Have it on the house. I could stare at you all day. You’re like Terminator II and the Bayeux Tapestry rolled into one.”

  He went back to sit among the watching frocks. His eyes were tired again. He hadn’t even seen Terminator II. A headache was starting up. That’s what you get for thinking about your wedding day. He caught sight of the waitress, collecting cups, crumpling chocolate wrappers, observing him.

  Women react strangely to me. I’ve only noticed it the last couple of years. They must always have done, but something made me realise. What?

  Oh, I remember what it was. My head-on collision with heterosexuality. You remember, Tony. You were there. You were driving.

  I thought, because I didn’t notice them, they never noticed me. The child’s solipsism. When Sally was younger and wanted to stay in the bath, she’d drape her flannel over her face and go invisible. But we could still see her.

  You forced me to come out a second time, Tony. You drove me to it. Literally.

  That was a sick joke.

  She’s still watching.

  He finished his ginger snaps, rubbed his eyes again and got crumbs in them, making them worse.

  A hangover on my wedding day, not unusual for a groom. Except I spent my stag night alone, in the new flat, with a bottle of whiskey. You couldn’t come out to play. The one time it was publicly sanctioned and we fucked it up. You should have got me pissed, driven me to the back of beyond, stripped me naked, tied me to a lamppost in the dark, shot arrows at me and left me there. Then you were supposed to come back and get me to the church on time.

  But you didn’t, Tony, did you? You’d already given me away.

  He left a ginger snap to bulge slowly in his half-finished coffee, and a tip for the waitress.

  Sam was furious when he showed up early.

  THREE

  LOOK AT HIM, WAITING THERE. NOT AN OUNCE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, standing next to the knickers. He’s scaring custom away. I could let him wait all day, Sam realised. What would he do then? Would he give up? Look slightly baffled, be vaguely upset, turn and stroke some lace, examine sizes, prices, pretend he was a customer, a transvestite? How far can I push his patience, his utter passivity?

  Women were slipping past him as if he were another dummy, or a lizard in camouflage, blending with the foliage, stock-still and itching to blink his tender eyes.

  Those eyes flickered now across the shop. Sam gripped the till corners and the thought crossed her mind once more. He can hear everything I’m thinking.

  But that’s rubbish. We’re still married, aren’t we? I’ve no reason to believe that.

  She steadied her gaze on the black Perspex Christmas tree beside the till. It was roped in junk jewellery, glistening with earrings. Sam let the jagged anger draw back, filled her mind instead with lettuce-fresh thoughts, determined to be relaxed for her lunch hour. The crossness abated. She had found her exit. I make myself a Gothic heroine; stonewall myself into the bowels of my own black castle. And I make my own way out. When it suits me.

  “What’s this stack of voids doing?”

  Her hand flashed out to grasp tatters of till roll off the counter.

  “Who’s done all these?”

  She looked at Tracey, who was new and currently making a pig’s ear of wrapping somebody’s goods. Tracey was biting Sellotape.

  “It was me,” she mumbled. “I made a few mistakes on someone’s Access. I’ll sort them out when we get a moment.”

  Sam scattered them. “You’ll do them now. Otherwise you’ll forget and I’ll have hell balancing the till tonight.”

  The supervisor pushed past the new employee on her way to the staff rom and Tracey had a stabbing moment of guilt over that Access bill she hadn’t filled in properly.

  Would Sam find out and make her pay?

  “I DON’T WANT TO WAIT LONG TO EAT,” SAM WARNED HIM AS THEY HIT the busy street. He was dawdling behind her.

  “Where then?”

  “Was Sally all right at school?”

  “She always is these days.” He sniffed. “Takes it in her stride.”

  Sally had had a hard time at the beginning of school. The kids were so noisy, everything was so small. Mark remembered the face she pulled on the first morning, confronted by all the worn miniature furniture. She looked stung, as if patronised. Mark wanted to explain to her: It’s not a joke, love. This is where you begin to be catered for. Your Local Education Authority takes pains to shoehorn you from this point on; starting with this desk and this chair, horizons to suit your current size. Later there’ll be free school dinners, field trips, exams, then either a student grant or a flat of your own. Sally had turned up her nose, burst into tears.

  Mark said, “She’s all settled in now.”

  “She’s going to do well at school.” Sam paused at the street corner, overwhelmed momentarily in the oncoming traffic. Shoppers made their way forwards by brandishing laden carrier bags before them. Everything about them was challenging, alert. All of a sudden Mark felt like giving in. “We’ll go to that vegetarian hole,” Sam decided. “It’s all right if you sit in the cellar and it’s rarely full. Vegetarianism will never catch on here.”

  “I like it in there.” Mark smiled as they made a bolt across the street.

  “Doesn’t fill you up, though, does it?” she said, grimly holding her breath as they passed the market’s wet fish.

  “Not always.”

  They found the café busy upstairs, one haggard, hennaed waitress with a glottal Austrian accent tending the customers in an atmosphere redolent of nuts and spices. Everything was olive green and pine. They went down to the empty cellar and sat at an expansive kitchen table.

  “You’d think more people would come down here.” Sam drummed her fingers on the pine. “You can stretch your legs in the cellar.”

  “Speaking of meals—” Mark scratched his nose uncertainly and took his jacket off. “Your mam stopped me in the park to talk about that dinner.”

  She had the menu open, running a groove down its polythene innards with her nail.

  “Sam. That dinner.”

  She looked up. “I know. I’m sick of hearing about it. It’s still on.”

  “Christmas Eve.”

  “Right. But I’m not having them over on Christmas Day.”

  “Right.” Mark still felt that a real reconciliation would involve Sam inviting her mother for Christmas Day.

  “She’s not getting into my house on Christmas Day.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  Her eyes flashed. He flashed his back.

  “It’s Christmas Eve or nothing,” she said. “And you did look cross then. See, you can do it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I love you, Mark.”

  “Mm.”

  She did. But he made her cross. Especially when he was being effete. He hated being called that. The irony was, he had taught her that word himself. He taught her how to curse him.

  She had been about to sling a plate across the bedroom.

  “You think I’m effete, don’t you?”

  She swung the missile back. “What does that mean?”

  “Ineffectual. Poncy.”

  “Yes.” She threw the garlic-butter-smeared plate, and it shattered against the wall. A startled silence rang between them.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” he said quietly.

  “I can. You effete!”

  He dropped heavily onto the bed. “I
t’s an adjective.”

  “Oh. You effete bastard.”

  “I am. I am. Take me.”

  And now he had given in—completely and utterly—to her mother. After all the ruckus, it had been Mark who slunk round to patch things up with Margaret. He never liked rows.

  “I don’t like confrontations. It’s my upbringing.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have married me, sweetie.”

  He was supposed to smile at that. He didn’t.

  While they were waiting for the Austrian waitress to descend to the cellar, Sam said, “This is all your fault. I could have been shot of her for good.”

  “You’ve got your independence. There’s no need to cut all ties. You’ve got what you always wanted—your own place.”

  She gaped. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “I want to order now. I know what I want.”

  “Do you really think that’s why I’m with you?”

  “It’s not often I know what I want so early on. It’s quite unusual.”

  “You ungrateful bastard, Kelly.”

  “What?”

  “You think I’m only with you to escape Peggy?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s part of it, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a side effect. A good one.”

  “And we stay together for the sake of Sally, the flat and the absence of your mother.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Not to mention Iris.”

  “Don’t mention Iris. Where’s the fucking waitress?”

  The waitress was at that moment taking cautious steps towards them. She surprised them both by leaning over the banister.

  “Could you please come upstairs and be served there? I am by myself today and cannot leave the till unattended. Thank you very much.”

  They glared at each other, the menu and the space on the stairs the waitress left behind. Upstairs they saw the café was still full. They pushed out again into the marketplace to look for somewhere else, avoiding the Austrian woman’s eye.

  “I fancied something meaty anyway,” Mark said loudly.

  It was at moments like these Sam discovered to her surprise that she loved him more than he made her cross. When they were being thrown out of places. When they had their faces to the wind, giving parting shots. They could wander about, nowhere special to go. Be children, sexless, with no particular home. They would find on, make a den, play mams and dads.

  A market van slewed past in a kerbside puddle, splashing water up their legs. “Christ!” Her dinner hour was running out.

  “I know—” Mark beamed, changing gear—”just the place.”

  THE ONLY TIME SAM HAD EVER SEEN MARK KELLY COMPLETELY NAKED was in family holiday photos. A tubby blond child wading starkers out to sea. From the first meeting onwards she had known his body; yet as far as she was concerned, it was coated with a different flesh. A blue and green patinaed flesh, a chitinous second skin. The coloured shell of a Smartie. Something she hadn’t been early enough to penetrate.

  Not that she hadn’t tried. It made her giggle. The second night of the crap honeymoon, alone in the half-decorated council flat.

  He begged and wept, he had his comeuppance; she penetrated him quite literally, smearing a melted dinnertime candle in rose-scented hair conditioner, ramming it gently up his arse, back again. He begged and wept.

  “Now we’re quits,” she had said, frowning slightly.

  He thanked her, uncertainty rippling through the demarcated contours of his shuddering skin. But they didn’t do that again.

  “It’s not the thing,” he said quite suddenly in the tenderest part of the night, “to be buggered by one’s new wife.”

  In an obscure way, she found that touching. In those early hours the candle burned with a tang of rose, and something inscrutable and bloody.

  Yet the moment she first clapped eyes on him, he was there in his peacock finery; jade and azure, standing on her mam’s front doorstep, the night of the accident.

  Immediately she saw that between the slats of tattoo, his face was stark white in shock.

  “Who are you?”

  She left the catch on. It was past two in the morning. She had sunk half a bottle of whiskey, just as the doctor had ordered. Her mother was out with Iris somewhere, or at Iris’s posh cottage; there was a strange man at the door, tattooed, in shock, and tonight of all nights.

  “I’m Mark Kelly. I was in the taxi.”

  She stayed still and reeled within. “Oh?” She thought she should add, “Perhaps you had better come in,” but her tongue had turned to sponge in her mouth. She chewed at it cautiously. Her mouth filled with saliva and bile.

  “Excuse me.” She squirmed, threw open the catch, dashed past him and vomited thickly on the lawn.

  Mark fell to his knees beside her and clapped her on the back—a bit heavily, she remembered thinking.

  “Get it all up, love. Nothing to be ashamed of. You’d had a fuck of a night.”

  She spewed and among it all came the questions she wanted to ask. They crackled inside her skull, scored lines in a dot to dot that never quite articulated itself. Mark drew his arms around her thin cottony blouse, pulled her into the illustrated warmth of his body, fed her a documentary, supplication, apologies. All of which she followed only vaguely.

  “You’ll be all right. Any more? Come on, have another heave.”

  She did—and wondered at herself for trusting him in this most vulnerable of moments on her mother’s lawn. Sheer bile and water welled up in her stomach. She pulled with both hands at Mark. “Mark? Is that your name?”

  She felt him nod.

  “Look after me for a bit, Mark.”

  He whispered against her hair, which, she felt disgusted to realise, was slicked up with spew. He whispered that he was already looking after her.

  A few minutes later he hauled her indoors and snecked her mother’s door after them.

  THEIR SECOND CAFÉ THAT LUNCHTIME WAS VERY SMALL AND FULL APART from one cramped table in the corner, and decorated with a display of novelty tea cosies that were ‘available upstairs’. They squeezed themselves in, Sam brushing irritably at the scum of breadcrumbs, dried gravy and sugar crusts that grimed the tablecloth. “It’s horrible in here,” she hissed.

  “Stop talking so loud. They’ll hear you.”

  She fell to watching a family group across the aisle; a young couple with aged parents. The old man was stiffly formal in hat and coat, consenting to be taken out at Christmas. Neither he nor his wife looked as if they got out much. His daughter-in-law scrutinised the menu on his behalf.

  “Lasagne, Dad?”

  He wouldn’t look at her, nor modulate his voice to café-polite level. “I don’t know what the hell that is.”

  “It like…pasta.”

  “We like things with gravy,” said his wife.

  “I don’t want gravy when I’m out,” he shouted. Sam thought he must be off his head. Inadvertently she caught his eye but looked away again. The old man dropped his voice to add, “I won’t have anyone’s gravy but Mother’s. No one else can do gravy, as far as I’m concerned.”

  His wife glowed with pride.

  Sam wondered what her father would have been like by now. Loud, oblivious, wedged into a café in out-of-date clothes, shouting about gravy?

  Mark was ordering some coffee. He asked what she wanted. She shrugged and let him plump for toasted sandwiches.

  Peggy knew what lasagne was. She had moved with the times. It was something middle-class, something you didn’t get years ago because it was too foreign. Package trips with Iris. Her horizons had been broadened like anything.

  “They’re just so nauseating together,” she said. “Peggy and Iris.”

  “They might think that about us,” Mark shrugged. They had been through this conversation before.

  “But we’re married. We’re allowed to be nauseating.” She watched his jaw muscles work in
irritation, denting the pattern of his face.

  “They’re happy, right? Nothing you can say or do will spoil that, so leave it be, Sam.”

  “I can’t help wondering what Dad would think about them.”

  “Just because he’s gone, you can’t make him the arbiter of all taste and moral judgement.”

  The waitress was unloading their coffee cups and milk jugs. “The management apologises if your coffee tastes like tea,” she said, but remained unheard.

  Sam warned, “Leave my dad out of this.”

  “You dug him up again.”

  Her hand shot out, upsetting the milk. “Fuck!”

  The waitress frowned. “I’ll fetch a Jay cloth. It’s a shame, wasting good milk.”

  “I’m sorry I said that, Sam. But your dad isn’t here to judge any more, and he hasn’t been since you were fourteen. What would he think of me? By your reckoning, he wouldn’t approve of me, my tattoos or my past.”

  “He wasn’t a complete fascist. And he needn’t have known anything about what you used to be.”

  “So he needn’t know anything about what his wife is now. Your mam needs what she needs. Leave her to it, love.”

  Sam took the proffered Jay cloth and swabbed the table herself. “I don’t want any funny business from those two in my house on Christmas Eve.”

  “IS THERE NO ONE HERE TO LOOK AFTER YOU?”

  Sam stood swaying by the sink, in case she felt ill again. Weakly she pointed out where everything was kept for coffee. Mark made two strong cups.

  “I live with my mam. She’s out. She doesn’t know about any of this.”

  “You must be in a right state.” He gave her a mug, which stung her fingers. “Let’s go and sit down.”

  Mark sat on the corner of the settee, under a shaded lamp whose orange light turned his tattoos a puzzled grey. He nudged Sam’s knees, got her to put her feet up.

  “When will your Mam come back?” She wants looking after, he thought. Besides, when her mother does come back, I’ll have some explaining to do. I’m a complete stranger.

  “She probably won’t, till morning. She’ll stay with Iris. I’ve told you that once.”