[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

“Oh, yeah.” He was thinking about Tony, driven home in a police car after visiting the outpatients and the station. His taxi left on the roadside to be towed away, with vomit on the back seat and blood up the front fender. It was his livelihood and he had most likely lost it tonight.

  “I’ve thrown up too,” Mark said, and Sam looked at him with muzzy interest. He wondered at sounding so facetious about it. A girl had been killed.

  “Your friend’s family…? The girl’s family…?” He spoke unsteadily. “Have you seen them?”

  She lowered her glance, hair falling across her face in oily ribbons. “I saw them. I couldn’t speak. What do you say? I couldn’t say I was sorry, or…” She hauled in a shuddering breath and retched drily. Mark rose to fetch a basin but she waved him feebly down. “We’ve both been sick tonight, eh?” Sam gave a feeble, conspiratorial grin. “But they didn’t expect me to talk at all, it turns out. I saw them in the station…and they said, the mother said, that I’d been through a terrible ordeal myself, that they understood if I…I was the lucky one! Her father said that! He held my hand and said how I’d been luckier than their Trisha. I should be glad, he said, and he squeezed my hand. Dead hard.”

  She looked narrowly at Mark. He flinched and she saw that his eyelids too were coloured in.

  “They said he had a skinhead in the back of his taxi. Covered in tattoos. I saw you. I knew your face.”

  Mark made as if to go. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why did you?” Sam’s voice was hard, her body rigid, feet pushing her away from him like someone clutching in a dream. She was thinking furiously: he was a passenger in the taxi when it happened, when it knocked down Trish. What did he see then? What has he seen?

  “I came to say sorry.” He was standing up. His words barely registered. “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

  Sam was standing on the kerb. She was clutching a bottle loosely around its neck. Trisha, a little ahead, was screaming at her. Her ugly pink gash of a mouth glinted threads of spittle. “Fucking cow, Sam! That’s fucking it this time! How can you do it to your best mate, you fucking—”

  Trisha’s eyes were glazed over, as if in shock, widened obscenely. She leaped at Sam with wet, red palms in an embrace as sure as sex. Sam wielded her bottle with a shriek, clonked Trish once across the neck, pushed her backwards onto the rain-sticky road.

  Sam reeled onto the path, cracking the base of her spin as she hit a puddle and the taxi’s headlights bore down on them both, sluicing around the corner, sweeping over, swallowing up Trisha’s lazy body.

  “It was all my fault.”

  Mark felt awful saying that. It sounded inane.

  “I distracted Tony, the driver. I was ill in the back of his cab. I know him, he was giving me a lift, he can’t get the cab dirty, you see, it’s his job, he was distracted, and I…it was my fault.”

  Sam closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. It was all Mark’s fault. She felt the thickly padded springs of her mother’s old settee rubbing painfully, a dull, throbbing pain in her coccyx. She tasted the wine, sitting in the gutter, shoving her tongue into the bottleneck for the last drops, staring at the street, people from the pub, ambulance, taxi, police, all at dangerous, crazy angles; the mess in the dark. It was all Mark’s fault. He had laid his blame before her.

  Sam opened her eyes again and spread her palms. “I forgive you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I forgive you.”

  His face tightened to a complex mesh.

  “She was my best friend. I won’t say a thing. She was my best friend. Don’t torture yourself, Mark. It’s all over now. I won’t say a thing.”

  “You forgive me?”

  She took his hand; she was suddenly, frighteningly lucid. “Never tell anyone what you’ve just told me,” she said. “Never. Hold me.”

  Clumsily he gripped her as she bent forward, burying her nose in the front of his shirt, squeezing out tears and mucus into his throat’s hollow. Never tell, he thought. Tony won’t tell. Tony will take it.

  Sam shivered against him. Instinctively he wrapped himself about her, responding with an animal warmth, without thought. He made himself pliable.

  “Mam won’t be back to listen,” she was saying. “I’ve no one else to talk to. Trisha always listened to me. She was my best friend.”

  He swallowed an impulse to vomit again and was surprised by Sam reaching up to kiss him. She bore down and burrowed into him, her fingers clattered and jabbed at undressing him. He was stunned; the erection she procured for him was sluggish, merely warmth, but it was the response she wanted.

  Sam made urgent, sickly love to him and his head rocked against the lampstand. He nudged it too far as he came with a confused moan; the lampshade swung and collapsed, smashing, pitching the room into purple. Sam sank to sleep on his stomach, clutching at the whirling patterns of his skin, the vortex etched on his torso. Mark allowed his head to fall back across the armrest. They slept till mid-morning, dehydrating steadily through the night, their headaches knocking uneasily against one another’s skin.

  FOUR

  I’VE A FEELING THAT MY LAST LETTER WAS STRANGE. A LITTLE BITTER, perhaps. Was it? I’m sorry, Mark. I only send the better ones. That one sort of slipped through. A waste. I suppose we’re lucky to have this contact at all.

  I’m content, though. At least on paper I have your undivided attention. These words, for your ears only, can’t fail to be taken in. On paper we value each other all the more. If I was there, with you, you would start to fade away. You would have switched off by now. You always did. Does Sam get annoyed with you for that? Your self-absorption. Staring at the back of your hands, following the tracery of lines up your wrists. I’d trail away speaking eventually, you’d not even notice, and then we’d both be looking at your tattoos.

  The most eloquent part of you. Well, maybe not.

  I remember your look when you were being tattooed. Impassive; you were brave. It seemed so painful. All that fine shovelling into skin, the deft glutting and smear of crimson and indigo. We used to go weekly, Saturday mornings, and I’d sit quietly to watch. I felt like holding your hand, telling you how to breathe, urging you to push. Did you watch your Sam give birth?

  Utter self-absorption, though. You looked so fulfilled while you were being done; this week’s bare patch of flesh bright under the noxious yellow light. Old Marjorie, dipping her nibs and scratching away. She never failed to look impressed. Her best customer, you were.

  I remember a certain day. She was more concerned for you than she was for her own profit. She unplugged her machine, broke her trance and asked, “How long is this going to go on, exactly?”

  I jumped in my seat, I can tell you. I thought we’d been rumbled.

  You just looked at her. “All the way,” you said. “I want the whole lot done.”

  She cackled. “Saucy. I’m not sure Eric would want me to keep doing you if that’s the case.” I could tell she was unnerved. She went on to warn you about that girl in Goldfinger, dying because she’d been painted head to foot with gold paint, which clogged all her pores and suffocated her. In the film and in real life.

  “Life imitates art,” you said, as if that was the sort of thing people say all the time. “Don’t worry. I’ll breathe.”

  She returned to work, sponging your stomach down.

  “It’ll be ever so painful,” she said.

  “It always is.”

  “I mean, when we get to your…sensitive parts.”

  You tossed me a wry look. “It always is.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Here, lots of men have tattoos. It’s a real cliché. Criminals, hardened, with tattoos. Roses, scrolls, daggers, Mother. It’s like having you here around me, almost; disseminated throughout the hundreds of bodies here. At the thought of that, I could swoon during communal showers. I could run from one illustration to the next, yet never find you. Never hope to reconstruct you.

  It’s ironic, really. I’ve no
tattoo of my own. No reminder of you, ripped from your flesh, painted onto me. You’re everywhere else instead. It’s as if you’re famous, with your face on every magazine. Bits of you are printed everywhere here. And I am, essentially, only me.

  Perhaps this letter is stranger than the last one.

  Love,

  Tony.

  FIVE

  IRIS MUCKED IN. SHE WAS AN IMPOSING PRESENCE, DRAWING ATTENTION to herself, wedged standing up against the plush red pew amongst rows and rows of squirming, anxious children. With her soft pure-wool girth she touched the back of the seat in front and the front of her own.

  Doris Ewart, harassed and scarlet, was glad of the impromptu help. Doris passed her a Co-Op carrier heavy with cartons of orange juice, for Iris to dispense along her row. The children about her, parents too, hushed down when the fat woman bent wordlessly to give them each a carton and a straw.

  “Sit down, Iris,” Peggy hissed irritably. “Stop making a show of yourself. Those teachers are paid to do that sort of thing.”

  Sitting next to her grandmother, Sally was looking slightly embarrassed, and beside her, Mark was sucking at his own orange juice, waiting for the show to begin.

  The fat woman, however, was in her element. Her outdoor coat was fuchsia. She was overripe, a swollen berry of a woman, squeezed into the seething, over-elaborate Civic Theatre where, above the bobbing heads of the children, lithe and gilded cupids and satyrs were secreted among florid nips and tucks of cream masonry and scarlet drapings. Here Iris felt supremely comfortable, with everyone swayed by her air of authority, drawn to the gaudy splash she still, in such a setting, managed to make.

  Her lips, fuchsia also, were smacked in satisfaction, her mouth sensuous and prim. Hands reached out to her across the rows, sweaty, chocolate-smudged, hot and grasping hands. She passed out the drinks with unhurried assurance, as if daring the pantomime to begin before her task was completed.

  The air started to dim perceptibly about her; pink, amber, a lambent honey. The audience quietened, slowed their movements, watching the empty stage with its grim ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING safety curtain. It was almost as if someone had levered off the lid of the theatre’s roof and poured the building full of stiff, lucid treacle. The audience were still, preserved. Anticipation was sweet.

  Iris took the last drink for herself and sat down with a sigh as darkness set in.

  “Just in time,” Peggy mumbled.

  “I like to give a hand.”

  “You like the attention.”

  Iris was staring at the safety curtain as it rose. “I won’t deny I miss it.”

  With a bang, a violent glittering of indoor fireworks and gasps of enchantment from various parents, the Good Fairy picked her way centre-stage.

  Sally narrowed her eyes. “She’s holding a microphone.”

  “Ssssh!”

  Peggy leaned across. “It’s best to be prepared, in my experience. In case people aren’t listening properly.”

  Sally took the hint and settled back with a tolerant expression.

  Last year the pantomime had been Beauty and the Beast and Mark had laughed all the way through. Sam had come too; the in-laws weren’t invited. It had been Sally’s first Christmas in school, her first school trip, a family occasion.

  The Beast had been the star of the show. Mark was mortified when they swapped him for the prince at the end; Sally too. Sam was merely reassured. The star was Conrad the Wolf, a veteran TV puppet Mark had once adored as a child. Conrad always sat on a podium without a handler and condescended to the entertainment of children as a vehicle for his own brand of raucous humour. In 1979 Mary Whitehouse, having switched channels one Saturday teatime and been barraged by lupine double entendres, had called him ‘filthy’. Conrad disappeared from the air forthwith, consigned to the tawdry netherworld of civic pantomime, where the smut still flowed like wine and Mark could laugh himself silly, to the mortification of his wife and child.

  Sam refused to come to the show this year, in case the same thing happened. She knew that the first rule in child-rearing was feigned innocence.

  The big star in Darlington this year was, however, squeaky-clean Rosalyn, the winner of the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest. Still audibly Dutch, despite brief international fame, she was having an awful time with Snow White’s lines, which were, for local interest, written in a Geordie dialect. Iris snorted occasionally as Rosalyn stumbled her way through, looking relieved and happiest when she could sign a song or pretend to be doing some housework.

  “Isn’t it funny how Europeans never sing with an accent?” whispered Peggy. “Look at Abba.”

  “Dietrich and Pavarotti,” Iris grunted.

  Even the dwarfs looked pissed off with Rosalyn. This year it was their turn to make leering jokes for the baffled audience. Mark didn’t find them half as funny as Conrad. At the end of Act One they returned from a days work at the mind, each clutching a can of 7-Up, and singing the theme song from An Officer and a Gentleman, ‘Love Lift Us Up’.

  “They never had 7-Up in those days,” Sally complained above the clamour of children and parents stamping out for the interval.

  Mark asked, “How do you know it’s not happening now?”

  Sally sighed. “All fairy tales are a long time ago. Wooden houses and people singing. It’s obvious. She had a broom and no Hoover.”

  Iris ushered them along their row. “Are we going for a drink?”

  “So why do they have 7-Ups?” Sally demanded.

  “Um,” Mark began. “Listen, I’ll go up to the bar and order—you go to the loo with Auntie Iris and your nanna. They’ll explain.”

  “Thanks, Mark,” Peggy hissed as they entered the swell and press of the crowd.

  “I THINK SHE’S A DREADFUL WOMAN.”

  Sam’s judgement had been final. Mark wasn’t allowed to contradict her, although he had already admitted to a sneaking admiration for the woman who had taken up his wife’s space in Peggy’s house and made irrevocable changes. A Tuscany patio, with herb garden. The dining room knocked through.

  “She acts like she’s something.”

  “She is something. Your mother’s lover.”

  They were still newlyweds. This was seven years ago, and Mark didn’t yet know how far he could push Sam. She burst into tears as they walked back to their flat. His heart went out to her because he saw she still had a smear of grease on her trembling chin. She chews when she cries, he noted with a shudder.

  “You’ll have to get used to it,” he said gently.

  “I can’t. It’s so awful. She’s so fat.”

  Mark sighed in the manner Sally was to pick up at an early age.

  He carefully set down the interval drinks. The table was next to squabbling kids clustered about the coloured monitor showing the safety curtain lowered onstage. They were delighted by the idea that they could watch the show up here on television if they wanted. They fought over the best view. One was asking his mother if they could stay up in the bar. She cracked him one.

  That evening with the grease on Sam’s chin had been the last time they had met as a happily fulfilled foursome, for dinner at Peggy and Iris’s. Soon afterwards Sam had started up the feud, with all the zest she usually employed in feeding used boxes to the cardboard crusher at work.

  Iris had cooked and then insisted that they watch an American TV movie together.

  “Oh, no,” Mark had smirked, “not the Freak of the Week movie. Which minority are they tastefully handling this week?”

  Iris smiled serenely. “It’s called Mom’s Apple Pie.”

  It turned out to be about a single mother who tells her children, in the most tactful manner possible, that she is a lesbian. The children eventually, after about ninety minutes and a good many phone calls, come to accept her as still the same old mom and she makes them a nice pie at the end to prove it.

  Mark watched, slightly bemused, soaking up the therapeutic benevolence Iris was sending out in waves as she snuggled massively up to Peggy
. Peggy was, however, stiff and alert, watching for Sam’s reactions.

  Sam was furious, Mark could tell by the extra-deliberate way she smoked a whole pack of Marlboro Lights and refused to take her eyes away from the screen, even during adverts. When the credits rolled she locked herself in the downstairs toilet.

  “Sam, love?” Peggy rattled the doorknob for a few minutes, then joined Mark and Iris over the washing-up.

  “We’ve upset her,” she said, watching Mark’s patterned arms wiping suds away.

  “Maybe that’s what she needs,” Iris said blandly, rubbing plates dry. “Shocking her into facing the truth.”

  Peggy winced. Iris kissed her nose.

  “I didn’t mean that nastily. It all shows just how much she feels about you.”

  Later, under the streetlamp, with Sam sobbing in his unresponsive arms, Mark related this conversation in the hope she would be touched.

  “What?” She drew back. “I was furious—and that showed how much I loved her?” She laughed bitterly. “How fucking typical! Typical fucking selfish, the pair of them!”

  Mark frowned at her.

  “Couldn’t they tell—couldn’t they even fucking tell that I don’t care that much about them and their doings? I was crying for myself. Too selfish even to see that. Those poor kids in the film—they were just like me and what she’s been putting me through.”

  DID MARK LOVE SAM?

  It was all so complex now. So tied up in vested interests, matters of life and death.

  These days it was so hard to get a straight answer from him. He had no objectivity. If someone stopped him, here in the bar, someone leaned across from another table and asked, as a matter of interest, “Do you still truly love the woman you married in the eyes of God and the law?”, he’d be utterly stuck for words. This was one of his worst-case scenarios, this abrupt question. It was one that must come sooner or later, from some quarter. It was the test he was most likely to fail.

  He couldn’t say yes or no.

  He’d come through with flying colours on Take Your Pick.