[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Now it was Peggy’s turn to stop in her tracks. “Iris, what the devil are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about a sense of history,” said her lover levelly.

  “And you know about that,” Peggy sneered, “Mrs Orlando.”

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “If you must know, I’ve had it up to here with your pretentious bloody twaddle. You could at least have a little sensitivity and see that I’m in for a hard time tonight with our Sam and all. Just shut up about yourself for a bit. I couldn’t give nick about the land or your farm or bloody alarm clocks. Just think of me for a while.”

  “Peggy, I…do nothing else.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it. It’s just that I’ve been thinking of everyone I’ve left behind in my past. Living as long as I have, I’ve had to forget about a good many loved ones. Owning up to my true age today…well, it’s made me have to face my own immortality.”

  Peggy gave a short, bitter laugh.

  “Don’t laugh at me! I’m standing her, telling you, I can’t bear the fact that, whatever happens, I will live longer than you will, and I’m scared by that.”

  “Bloody nonsense!” Peggy snapped. “Don’t talk to me about death.” Peggy had had her share. A thought struck her. “Anyway, you’ve just said again, about growing up on this very land in the thirties with your brothers.”

  “Yes,” Iris said glumly. “The fifteen-thirties.”

  “Oh, bugger off, will you?” Peggy had stopped at a garden gates. As she reached for the latch, she clumsily broke a series of icicles from the wood. “We’re here now. No more talk about history. This is now, and it’s terrifying enough.” A child’s silhouette appeared in the door’s glass panel. “Merry Christmas!” Peggy cried, swinging her shopping bag aloft.

  “WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN WRAPPING FOR ME, THEN?”

  Credits were rolling over Rebecca. Sam sat between Mark’s knees. He was a bit dizzy from the gin. Smells of cooking bloomed all around them. He was impressed by Sam’s sly competence in getting it all together. She rested her elbows on his thighs, drummed an ironic tattoo on the crotch of his jeans with her fingertips.

  “You’ll just have to see, won’t you?”

  “And will I be happy?”

  Drink always did this to Mark. His most complicated statements flatted out into faux-naïf statements and he spoke with primary-coloured words. Always rather pleased with the effect, he felt that only then, pissed, was he expressing himself. Now he waited on her reply.

  “I hope you’ll be happy,” Sam smiled, drawing herself back slightly. “With the way it all turns out. Now. Hold still. This is Christmas Eve, and I want to touch my husband’s heart.”

  Quickly she unbuttoned the front of his shirt, briefly exposed his chest, kissed his left nipple. Right in the centre of the blue clock face he had printed there.

  TEN

  I AM AN AWFUL IRONIST. ACTUALLY, NO; I AM A WONDERFUL IRONIST. It’s just that I get carried away and do it a bit much. I’m sorry, Mark. You know how I am, that you have to take a pinch of salt with the way I pitch my salty wit. I’m not sure that Sam knows, however. In fact, I imagine she takes me pretty much at face value. And believes every word I write to you. Oh, dear.

  I am aware by now that she reads the letters I send. It’s something I’ve picked up on. I even tailor certain things for her delectation. Like my last one, full of raving insults hurled straight at her. I wonder how she took that. I picture her flat on her back in the basement of her shopping arcade with her policeman stooped above her, and she’s mulling over my nasty missive. I wonder if that’s how it really happened.

  Did you know that she sees a policeman behind your back? Behind the cardboard crusher beneath the dress shop?

  No, take it from me, and with a pinch of salt. It’s all ironic, Mark. I’m pulling your leg. I’m taking the piss.

  Observe those two euphemisms for verbal wit. Both are bodily. Is irony, my irony, quite so penetrating? Does it have a physical manifestation? Believe me, I am not malicious; my wit is meant to strike glancing blows only.

  And you are armoured, Mark.

  And me, I have decided that enough is enough.

  Christmas is coming and I don’t want to spend this one alone.

  I think the time has come for some straight talking. I want to sort a few things out. Here I am—Jim’ll Fucking Fix It—and I’m going to sort out our lives. All our lives. Watch me pass into the present; I’ll insinuate myself into our current lives and I’ll cause a disturbance. I’m moving in on you all.

  Too long, too long I’ve been a disturbing memory, a ghost somewhere on your horizon. I want to make myself imminent. Sam, I assume you are reading this first, as usual. Let me warn you first. You, to whom I am an obscure, invisible enemy. I shall manifest myself from Mark’s past, subtly as a virus. Here I come.

  You, Sam, you and your jolly policeman friend were right. No; they don’t hand out lilac writing paper in prisons. My lilac paper was a little scam, another piece of irony. I wondered how long it would take to click. It was, literally, a piece of textual irony. Fingering those delicate sheets, I wanted both you, Sam, and you, Mark, to reach separate and horrifying conclusions. The conclusion that, no, I wasn’t really languishing at Her Majesty’s leisure. She would never waste her pastel paper on convicts. No; I was languishing at Sam’s leisure instead. I was waiting for the realisation to click and then, then I would strike.

  Now, in fact.

  Rest assured, Mark, I’m coming back for you.

  See you soon,

  Tony.

  ELEVEN

  “THEY’RE JUST DARLING,” IRIS GASPED AS SHE FONDLED ONE OF MARK’S proffered golden cherubs, adding, “darling” once more with affection.

  “I thought you’d appreciate it.” Mark and Iris gazed together at the Kellys’ Christmas tree, which Mark had arranged the previous afternoon. His chosen theme had been angels and fruit.

  “Haven’t the false grapes got a funny texture?”

  “Plastic,” Mark grinned.

  “Yes, but quite pleasant.” She weighed a pendulous clump thoughtfully in one hand.

  “Let me take your coat,” he suggested and waited till she put her bags down. They were bursting, he noticed, with crackling parcels. Sam would have another go about the old dykes ruining her daughter. He took Iris’s heavy fuchsia coat, under which he saw she was wearing an extremely baggy scarlet cardigan.

  “Got to keep the chill out,” she said, “I know; I dress like a bad lady, don’t I?” Almost nervously she hugged that expansive girth and Mark felt ashamed of his staring. “Peggy always ribs me about the number of layers I wear.”

  “Does she tell you off that you’ll ‘never feel the benefit’ when you won’t take them off?”

  “Something like that.”

  Mark was surprised; he had never seen Iris anything less than skilfully and dynamically sure of herself. Here, in the corner of the flat’s sitting room, dwarfed by the silver tree and cast in the magenta haze of its fairy lights, she was…well, flinching at almost everything he said.

  He decided to put her at ease, as he would any visiting old dear. (But Iris, surely Iris never needed putting at ease? Once, even, he had seen Iris eat a whole half-pound of Quality Street as she shopped in Gateway, and throw away the box, unconcerned, before reaching the checkout. Iris lit cigarettes in libraries and complained there were no ashtrays. Nothing that was known could put Iris off her stroke.)

  He said to her, “Why don’t we both dig our feet in and keep our many layers on for the evening?” Saying this, he winked broadly, and she saw, with a jolt, the bright green iris and blue pupil drawn on that eyelid.

  “I think we shall need thick skins tonight.” She smiled, returning to fondle his fake fruit.

  This was the cause of Iris’s perturbation. Part of her was worrying at the door into the kitchen. As she exchanged Christmas chitchat with her ostensible son-in-law, the protective and r
esponsible part of herself was prying its way through the serving hatch, under the door, into the damp heat of the kitchen, trying to listen in. She wanted to interpose her layered bulk between mother and daughter, and yet the sensible remnants of her scattered thoughts suspected strongly that this was simply not on.

  Mark caught her glance. “Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I’ll fetch Sally in a moment. She’s been in her bath long enough now. I’ll get her ready for bed and bring her to see you both.”

  And that would ease the tension they both could feel building up through the wall. Sally could become the focus for a while and teach them the true meaning of Christmas. Iris cursed herself inwardly. She remembered a swift jab of spite she had once felt towards Sam, newly pregnant and espousing the most banal of her views on Christmas: “It’s for the bairns, really, isn’t it? And New Year’s for the grown-ups. That’s how it’s always been.”

  Iris had nearly choked on her own venom. I could tell you, she thought, of other Christmases. When children rarely existed as such; they were merely young animals, dressed and fed almost for amusement’s sake. Those were brutal winters and the creatures often died. Here in the north we huddled by candlelight in halls and the music was rich and the dances were regimented. And Christmas—the solstitial rite—was all for adults. It represented the sharp end of the wedge, the frozen hinge of the year, and it was all about self-gratification.

  Only adult human beings know fully about gratifying themselves. There is a vocabulary of sensuality acquired only by living and if childhood is anything, it is a bodily progress towards bearing the full weight that learning this language involves. Perhaps, Iris might have told Sam crossly, Christmas ought to still be for adults; a time for drinking themselves and fucking each other stupid. The New Year might better be for the as-yet-inarticulate children. They need the new year more than we do, surely. The articulate—the sensually articulate—tend to fall back into a satiated torpor. This is the meaning of decadence. So why not set the little bastards off on their own quest for decadence? Set them down on January the first, with the first crisp breeze in the air, the new orange mists rising. Let them begin their own search; leave us with our Christmas hangovers.

  Iris meditated solemnly on the irony of herself and Mark relying on a child to deliver them from a sticky family situation. Like something from a sitcom. The two queerest people she knew, and the most motherly by far.

  The two real, natural mothers were meanwhile beginning to raise their voices behind closed doors.

  SAM WENT WIPING ROUND THE KITCHEN SURFACES AS THEY TALKED. Peggy restrained herself from commenting, though Sam’s dishrag was making some surfaces dirtier than ever.

  They had once had a terrible row about this. At sixteen Sam had left home for the first time because her mother accused her of deliberately spreading germs in her kitchen. Now this was Sam’s own kitchen and it really wasn’t Peggy’s place to mention hygiene, not even if she was eating here tonight. She listened to Sam talk, but her gaze was fixed narrowly on the tannin-stained sink, which was waist-deep in greasy brown water. There were tea bags bobbing about in it. Peggy had a wistful glimpse of Iris’s kitchen, with its sanded, hard-worn surfaces, its glittering utensils.

  Still, there was something touching about all this mess. It was the mess created by her younger family’s daily lives. Wallpaper, tablecloth, pictures on the wall, all clashed in uncomplimentary shades of pink, mixing gingham, stripes and floral patterns. What made it cohere was the notion of family. Blood relationships, Iris would insist, always encourage bad taste. There, above the sink, hung a calendar made at school by Sally. One of those fluorescent-paint jobs, where they make a butterfly by folding the painted paper down the middle, opening it out again. Peggy wondered why she hadn’t been offered a new calendar made by Sally. Sam’s earrings, clumpy and fake, from her last day at work—this afternoon, in fact—lay at rest on a shelf, by the scales, like golden insects. On the table by the washing machine—which was on, as it always was here, drenching their little chat in consoling noise—was splayed open a Jeanette Winterson novel of Mark’s. Peggy recognised it; Iris flicked through her books occasionally, a box of chocolates on her knee.

  Seeing her mother notice this last item, Sam snatched it up on her lap round the dishrag and flipped it into the gap between washing machine and work surface. Then she flung open the oven door and went jabbing at the spitting roast potatoes with a fork.

  Peggy couldn’t help advising. “Turn them over; those sides are done.” She added, “You’ve made your own Christmas pudding!”

  Sam, turning the roasties over, nodded with her head in the oven.

  “I don’t know how you’ve found the time. All that messing about, all those ingredients…I’ve seen them make them on daytime telly, and it looks an awful job. And you a working mother!”

  Her daughter straightened up, saying, “Oh, I quite enjoyed making that. And the Christmas cake. I made a huge, fuck-off Christmas cake, do you want to inspect it?”

  Peggy held up her hands. “Perhaps we can try a bit after dinner.”

  “After dinner you’ll be stuffed,” Sam promised.

  “Oh…good.”

  “No, I had a wonderful time making all that, a few Sundays ago. Getting my hands into the mixing bowl, all those squelching ingredients, getting really dirty…” Fastidiously, Sam turned the heat upon the cooker’s rings.

  “I’ve never been one for cooking,” said Peggy.

  “Banana sandwiches.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve just remembered,” Sam said. “Banana sandwiches. Left on the table with crisps, when I used to come home from school. When you were up at the hospital with Dad, or when you were working. Sometimes a Mars bar, too.”

  “Fancy remembering that, pet.” Peggy hesitated before glowing over fond memories.

  “Didn’t you used to call them ‘funny teas’? Those snacks we used to have, sometimes even when you were home? They were fun, I remember. I used to look forward to them. I even preferred them to sit down, cooked meals when Dad was well. It was as if we were—I don’t know—girls together. With banana and sugar sandwiches…and stuff…” She refilled both their glasses.

  “Nursery food,” Peggy smiled. “It’s amazing you’ve ended up so slim. By your age, I’d gone to pot. Pot-bloody-shaped.”

  “Do you know, it took me years to realise that those ‘funny teas’ weren’t just for fun? I realised they must have been when you were quite…when you were really hard up.”

  “I can’t really remember,” Peggy murmured into her glass, squinting as if at dregs.

  “You were making the best of things. Making a virtue of them. I mean—sugar sandwiches! When I think back at all that, I can see clearly what you did. I was thinking about this the other day. It’s just heart-breaking.”

  The cooker’s buzzer went off. Sam shrugged herself up from leaning against the linen closet and went to see to it.

  She went on, “I suppose I can only appreciate this now, the way you had to struggle through, salvage things, keeping me in the dark, because of my being a mother now. We’re bonded in a particular way. We share things like that. I find myself struggling, keeping Sally in the dark, shielding her from the hard stuff, trying to make the visible stuff better.”

  “You’re doing a grand job with her.”

  “There’s so much, though, to keep her in the dark from.” As she took the warmed dinner plates out from under the grill, they clanked and jarred on Peggy’s nerves. “It’s why, Mam, I wanted you round tonight, really. Why I wanted us to talk again. Do you see? Because it’s so hard?”

  Peggy was itching to go and give her a hug. It was a visceral sensation, a welling-up, as if she could take three steps across the lino, enfold Sam and stroke away the size and age of her, cuddle her daughter back out of competence and adulthood. But Sam had two fistfuls of cutlery and was thoughtfully wiping each piece with the teatowel.

  “I’ve messed up the timing a bit with th
e dinner. I think I’ve fucked the vegetables.”

  “Never mind, pet. What’s important is, we’ve had this talk.”

  “Perhaps I’m not so domesticated, after all.”

  Her mother was fixated for a moment by the green and purple butterfly calendar. The paint was so thick it had cracked in places; little chunks had dropped onto the draining board, where Sam’s dishcloth had turned them into garish streaks.

  “I think you’re doing fine. And Mark’s doing fine, too, considering. And don’t worry about keeping Sally in the dark from things. Children find out…”

  “But I do worry about that.”

  “Trust your own feelings. She’ll turn out how she turns out. You turned out all right, didn’t you, with me?”

  Sam dropped knives and forks loudly onto the pile of plates. “I don’t fucking want her to turn out like me.”

  Something beat feebly at Peggy’s inner ear. The aftershock of ringing cutlery, her own startled heartbeat. She swallowed, waiting for Sam to continue.

  Sam looked her mother in the eye. “You, Mam, to be quite frank, never kept me in the dark enough.”

  THEY SAT DOWN TO DINNER. MARK CARVED THE TURKEY STANDING UP IN the candlelight, making it clear that he was doing it under duress and, as it were, between inverted commas. The women applauded likewise as he passed neat slivers round. Iris dished out more wine.

  “Oh, what’s this music?” she exclaimed, banging down her glass and slopping a little on the cloth. Mark looked from the purple stain to Sam.

  Sam said, “It’s a compilation tape Mark did for me, a few Christmases ago.”

  Iris was shifting about in her seat, waggling her hands in time to the music. “But this particular song—what is it?” Without waiting for a reply, she went on, “You know how some pieces of music, some songs, the first time you hear them and every time afterwards, they make your insides jump up inside you? And want to be out?”