[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Like a cassette player with heads so dirty they snag the tape with their accreted scum and release it grudgingly, his words would unspool. Ribbons of excuses, ameliorations, disclosures both shocking and painful. Downright lies, too.

  Yes, of course he loved her. She was grafted into the pattern. In the tenderest, most inextricable manner, through the pity and shame their daughter Sally evoked in him. Sally stood baffled between them, dipping her toes in rock pools of their complications. She was growing up, supposedly clearing the decks for complexities of her own. But how could she even start when all this had gone on before? Her own life before it really began was framed in deceit and misalliances. Her parameters were already set in a kind of intrigue; and she was meant to be innocent, surely. Sally’s jaded air suggested to Mark that she had a sense of her own inauthenticity; she was not a real child, not, in some way, ‘natural’ enough. As if she, too, felt she oughtn’t be here.

  She reminded Mark of Tony.

  Tony was somewhere on the edges, somehow unchanging. His integrity made Mark feel false, fickle, hypocritical.

  How much had he changed? There was no way of telling. Tony was his yardstick, against which he once measured how much he had deviated from their shared ideal. The charter they drew up for their future lives was still sketched out in his head. Something about not compromising, not being bourgeois, not making money, settling down, selling out, or being shocked, and always being there for each other.

  In 1970 they built up defences to guard against the threat of impingement on the single cell of their friendship. They made the agreement one October night, the Wednesday between their thirteenth birthdays. It was raining heavily as they sat on a bench in a park on their housing estate. Here they sat every night, at an age when anything outside of sport seems inappropriate and boring. Hanging around, they drew up a manifesto.

  Over several nights they took a good look at each other, listed faults, failings, tendencies in themselves, and cauterised them firmly, scribbling in the back of a school jotter. They pressed the matter home with smudges of blood. There was a slight shiftiness to this moment of bonding. They were watching for the other’s truthfulness.

  Is he as serious about this as I am? I bet he isn’t. I bet he’s pretending. See how far I’ll go. He’s just doing it to pass the time. He’s just doing it for a laugh, and he’ll tell everyone about it later.

  They tested each other. They picked magic mushrooms and took fifty each. Tony’s mother working through the night sometimes in the hospital. They sat in opposite corners of Tony’s bedroom and narrowly watched each other’s hallucinations. Until morning their delusions filled up the empty air between them. Neither fell asleep, neither was sick, neither got scared.

  They drank a bottle of vodka together, another night at Tony’s house.

  By now it seems as if they were as alike as they ever could be. They had gauged each other meticulously and calibrated themselves to one another. It one developed a certain gesture, the other would copy it and soon the gestures they used seemed to have no single originator. Their language became incestuous, knotted up in its own idiosyncratic field of reference.

  Tony, though, was the quieter, dark and brooding, broader and with beard-growth already at thirteen. Mark had his first skinhead, inspired by a Richard Allen book they had both read. One night Mark shaved Tony’s head to make them more alike.

  “We’ll never have the same starting point,” Tony complained. “We can’t be identical twins. Even with my hair like this.” He sat in his mother’s living room on a newspaper, swamped in dark tatters of hair.

  “It looks very nice, though,” Mark found himself saying.

  “Nice?” Tony frowned. “I thought we said that was a bourgeois word.”

  The vodka-charged air bristled between them. The discussion of their physical difference, avoided till now, had knocked a chink in their cell’s armour. It depressed them and made them aware of themselves as physical presences, potentially uncomfortable with each other. Changes must be made to the manifesto. They needed to appraise themselves in a new way. After the drink was finished, they were reduced to kneeling and measuring their cocks against each other, trying desperately not to touch. It was as hard to balance as it had been to make their erections appear to be in the cause of their science.

  “Hold them together,” Mark said with a lucid, calm precision.

  Tony looked at him oddly, and, with a slight tremble to his fingers, pressed the two shafts together.

  “I’m taller, so we can’t measure properly.” He lowed himself, managing to pump Mark gently as he did so. “Too low.” He rose slowly, then down again.

  “I’m a lot smaller, anyway,” Mark breathed.

  “You might get bigger.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “If I do this.”

  With a sublime nonchalance that won Mark’s heart for ever, Tony bent down to suck him off. Mark stared down the line of his back, the crest of soft shining hair rounding his thighs.

  It was the first time this had cropped up. They listened to the noises Tony made as he set to work, trying not to laugh. So warm; Mark felt he was bleeding, especially when Tony’s teeth jagged on his foreskin.

  The manifest redrew itself in lurid terms, terms that were never articulated except in the wordless press and rustle of that first time. A new language of tenderness was generated between them. Mark looked own at Tony’s head, absurd over Mark’s opened jeans. His whole body compromised like this, down on Mark as if in worship. Mark put his hands on Tony’s head to feel the new-cut hair. The feel of it thickened his cock, the world burgeoned beneath them, a sense of his own potential, as if this made everything suddenly possible. Words crept through his clenched teeth in a whole set of appendices to their original agreement.

  He ran his fingers along Tony’s throat, the soft quiver underneath. Tony came up to kiss him, and they embraced this particular taboo with aplomb. It was so much more unhealthy and immoral than the action of the hand that stroked Mark’s prick until it coughed up phlegm-like semen, Mark pushing forwards, collapsing Tony beneath him as they kissed, squirming the mess between them. After this, Tony tried to fuck Mark. Acquiescing, struggling out of his clothes, he shivered and cried out when entered.

  “There’ll be lots of other times,” Tony said softly as they lay, a little apart, breathing more regularly, letting surprise settle in and dry off. “So this is what we were up to all along. I had no idea. Fuck shoplifting. This is really living on the edge.”

  Mark tugged his lifeless cock aside, felt the wet, like blood, smearing his thighs. It seemed like everything had been wrenched out of him. Disembowelled, he waited for morning.

  SINCE LAST YEAR THEY HAD DONE THE BAR UP. IT WAS BIGGER, WIDER, ART Deco with arched windows that saw the town roofs. This as the height of the pantomime rush, the week before Christmas, the theatre’s grandest moment, with school parties filling the foyer, stairways and balconies. The kids were clustering about gold-framed photos of last year’s stars.

  “Remember Beauty and the horrible Beast. Remember last year?”

  The kids nodded solemnly, gazing at Conrad the Wolf.

  Mark saw Iris and Peggy bringing Sally up the stairwell. They noticed him and forged their way through, complaining about toilet queues.

  A rush of softness filled him at the sight of Sally’s school socks hanging down, the trepidation in her eyes as she eased past school friends who showed no sign of recognising her.

  She was so quiet, so meek. She sat next to her father, waiting until he assured her that the lemonade really was for her, then sipping slowly at it. He was scared for her, learning to ride her life like a bike, up crowded theatre steps. She had grandmothers for stabilisers, but how long before they fell away? Mark wouldn’t care so much, but a crappy old bike, every scrap of it in some way second-hand, was all they could manage for her

  He suddenly realised why, at base, he fought so stubbornly against Sam’s one-woman feud. I
t was because Sally needed Peggy and Iris so much. Sam didn’t love her daughter enough. Sally needed these surrogates, and she knew it herself.

  “Thanks for taking her,” Mark said.

  “Are you enjoying the show, Sally love?” Iris bellowed, patting her fuchsia coat as if looking for something.

  Sally looked up as she carefully lowered her glass. She beamed brilliantly. “I just love it. It’s all so easy.”

  Iris smiled kindly, as she often did to soften Peggy’s occasional bluntness.

  “Life is so easy in there. It’s all love and magic.”

  The two grandmothers cooed over this until the end-of-interval bell rang, starting a swift exodus to the stairs. Mark slipped an arm around his daughter and gave her a tight hug.

  “I’m glad we thought of you, Sally Kelly. You were a good idea.”

  She smiled.

  During the second act of the show, Mark leaned to offer Sally a wine gum. Her hands were full. Cupped in her palms she held a tiny, sleeping terrapin, her own name etched on its shell in nail varnish.

  Mark looked away and forgot all about it until they climbed aboard the school coach to go home.

  “Sally,” he said as they say in place. “You haven’t got a terrapin with you, have you?”

  “No, Dad.”

  He nodded. The coach pulled away. She had left it in the theatre. Mark was obscurely pleased.

  SIX

  WE KNEW ALL ABOUT EACH OTHER’S INADEQUACIES. IT WAS PART OF THE bargain. We would compensate for each other, cover each other’s blind spots as we brazened life through, walking abreast. We were inseparable.

  I wonder about Victor Frankenstein. My reading—for my course—has become a little sidetracked; I’ve read Frankenstein twice this week. It was because my library privileges have been temporarily withheld too, mind, and I can’t get anything new just yet. But luckily I still had this one. Have you read it, Mark? Have you ever wondered exactly what is going on in that book?

  This is the sort of thing you get to thinking about on a course like mine. You start to take things apart, to wonder exactly what they’re really saying. Books aren’t just decoration, it turns out. They’re not just stories, icing on the cake of real life. It’s what they don’t say that’s important, apparently. And something is going on in my copy of Frankenstein. It is as if it is somehow infested; this book has bedbugs. When I read, something darts across the yellowed pages, just ahead of my eyes. I read and reread, hoping to track it down, yet fearing infection. Something nags at me.

  In case you haven’t read it, it’s a book about betrayal.

  In case you’ve only seen the film, it’s really a book about love. About loving someone so much and having it thrown back in your face, you turn entirely the other way; meticulously, systematically, you take to bits and pieces the circumstantial impedimenta that hedge in and create the beloved’s life. Hatred takes over; hatred is the dark, glossy, bloody obverse of a love that is fused by another obstinacy. Fused into molten rivulets, as in welding.

  It’s a difficult book; I haven’t figured it out yet. Frankenstein makes the monster; he wants to take him apart. Yet it is the monster who also hates and wants to take his creator’s life apart, bit by murderous bit. I think, perhaps, they are in love.

  Somehow they can’t cope with it. This is a long time ago, this book. Still, I am told by my study notes that it is widely regarded as the world’s first science-fiction novel. Surely in science fiction the wildly outlandish is permitted existence? Couldn’t they have come to some kind of settlement up on that mountain; faced the truth, in the teeth of the tempest, about their feelings for each other?

  We did, didn’t we, Mark? In the early seventies. It was different from the nineteenth century. It was easier, perhaps, to feel easy about messing about with each other. Everyone was queer, it seemed for a time. You only had to turn on the telly. Or maybe we just saw it like that. We created the world we wanted to see, in the glorious haze we set up in our nonchalance for convention.

  Who created whom? That’s what it comes down to, I suppose. And, I suppose, we could say that we at first attempted to create each other, each in the image of the other. Naturally it couldn’t work, but it got us together. It worked in as much as it got us sleeping together.

  I could never believe how easy it was. I never thought, at first, that you were being natural. I thought you were putting it on, to please me, to come up to my level, that you were submitting to some glorious image of ourselves. But you seemed keen enough. I was, despite our wanting to be twins, the elder brother in that respect. I brought you on by hand, you might say. You had no idea what I’d already been up to. For me, there had never been a first time. I seduced you, Mark; the innocence was all yours. There was no mutual ground-breaking or discovered; nothing natural about it. And perhaps this was the first betrayal: Mine.

  But yours was the bigger. Oh, yes. You grew to fill up the mythological space I had cleared for you. We both outgrew the twins thing. Sticking together, walking abreast, or sleeping squashed together with secretions gluing our flesh, we matured enough to realise we still had separate agendas to fulfil. You started your tattoo thing when you were sixteen. A rose across one nipple, huge and garish. You had been reading Genet. I watched. But I had seen you naked. And as the weeks stretched by, taut as your stomach, the artist’s head poised above it, scrawling away, I thanked my lucky stars that I had been there first. Now, I thought to myself, whoever came after me, because I knew they would, would never know you as wholly as I did.

  Samantha lives with you. Samantha has given birth to your child. You and Samantha have a home and she sees you every day. She has the luxury of growing bored with you. She can afford indifference to Mark Kelly, and from what your letters say, indifference is the word for it. I oscillate between extreme emotions, but maybe that’s just me. But she will never know you whole. I imagine you sleeping together. You are in armour and, in the end, impervious to her.

  SEVEN

  TRACEY CAME OFF HER MID-MORNING TEA BREAK FEELING STUNNED. She had been allowed ten extra minutes. Sam’s voice crackled through the intercom into the breezeblocked corridor where they were allowed to smoke and informed her that she could have a bit longer; Sam was enjoying herself on the floor. Tracey lit another fag in celebration as the music in the shop—a Madonna compilation—doubled its volume and could be felt vibrating in the brick at her back. The extra fag made her feel sickly, but she went back to work smiling and surprised.

  “You’re cheerful today,” she told Sam, whom she found rearranging a display, jogging lightly on her toes to ‘Vogue’.

  “All you need is your own imagination…” sang the supervisor. When Tracey looked carefully, however, Sam’s eyes were hard and she was singing through gritted teeth. Her handiwork with the display, too, was inaccurate and seemed to be more for the sake of something to do. She wielded a staple gun ferociously and said nothing when a woman, right in front of them, knocked a number of slips off their hangers and left them lying there on the mustard-coloured carpet.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m on my break now,” Sam grinned, slinging down the tools of her trade. “You’ll manage if I take a little longer than usual, won’t you?”

  Tracey nodded dumbly, gazing at the wreckage of the display. It was of winter scarves and shawls, all of them pinned to the walls. Sam had wanted a Bedouin-tent effect and had ended up with a jumble sale.

  “Yes, I might take a little longer, because I’m going to take those boxes down to the crusher. It’ll save you a job.

  Samantha waltzed off, singing again. Tracey sorted out the fallen slips and went to the till. Almost immediately a queue started to form and, as she served, she phoned Letitia, the supervisor in the Bishop Auckland branch. Letitia had trained here, under Sam, and occasionally had helpful hints for Tracey.

  It sounded as if they had Prince on in Bishop Auckland. “It’s bad news, I’m afraid,” Letitia warned. “That’s exactly what she
’s like when something really bad is about to happen. You watch yourself, Tracey.”

  At least, Tracey thought, fiddling with the Access machine, and her customer watched anxiously as it ground across her precious card, they don’t have intrigues like this going on in McDonald’s. They’re rushed off their feet at Christmastime, but they don’t get time for anything personal. Her boyfriend Hugh worked across the road in McDonald’s. Usually she thought she was one up on him, working here. He had a big boil coming on the back of his neck, from the grease.

  AS SAM STOMPED HER WAY DOWN THE BACK CORRIDOR, FOOTSTEPS RE-

  sounding ahead and behind, she felt herself growing lighter on her feet. She felt superpowered; it took the merest effort to open the steel concertina doors to the lift to the basement. With a deft flick of the wrist she wrenched them open, and set about slinging the useless cardboard into the dusty alcove. This should have been done weeks ago, but it was fitting to her present mood. A good pile built up inside the lift of partly collapsed boxes spilling cellophane and tissue paper. Even, she noticed as she climbed in with this detritus (having to stand on the pile, there was so little room), a number of delivery notes and seconds, strewn about. Today she couldn’t care less. Sam slammed the doors and jabbed ferociously at the button labelled B.

  What had made her feel light and strong like this was the shedding of guilt. Too often had she stolen into the basement for an extended fag break and felt creepily guilty about it. While she was down there, with the cardboard crusher glinting its metal teeth, the cardboard riding up under the wire mesh as if in some ghastly parody of copulation, she often saw Mark staring at her from the jagged shadows, his tattoos pricked out in the scant light. But not today.

  The lift shuddered and jolted. She thought she’d just die if it stuck now. Already she was slightly late. It would be entirely typical if she were late. Thanks, God. But the lift resumed its surly descent. Sam had a horror of God. It was because of God that she still thought, in her heart of hearts, that she had killed her father at the age of fourteen. And that was where the guilt sprang from.