[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Perhaps the kids at school last week had got it right. Iris clearly believes in Santa Claus. Even if she was using him as an excuse for Mam running out of the flat. For a moment Sally imagines the night as Iris pretended it; her mam calmly discussing Santa’s engine parts with him. The sad old man and the reindeer watching in head-shaking consternation. Her mam can do things, sort things out, Sally knows this. She calls her dad cack-handed and pathetic because he can’t. That was why he stayed at home while Mam ran out.

  It is real, then. The whole thing is true. Sally wishes more strongly than ever that she had a stocking to leave out.

  She turns over to look at the frozen window and wonder what Santa really looks like. At school they spent a morning drawing pictures of how they all thought he would look. Everyone gave him bright red clothes. A number of scuffles broke out in the classroom because there wasn’t enough red crayons to go round. It became quite a heated issue.

  Sally couldn’t see the problem. She hung back and complacently coloured her Santa Claus a deep midnight blue. There! Then she gave him a glorious hat woven from emerald holly leaves, and gloves a startling white like those of her talking Mickey Mouse, which was propped at the end of her bed.

  At lunchtime Miss Francis pinned up all the Santas and the class stood back to admire the effect. Sally’s dashing and brilliant Santa was consigned to the edge of the display. Probably because hers was faceless and this had made Miss Francis shudder, but Sally had drawn him that way because she couldn’t imagine what face he should have and didn’t want him to be an old man the way they said God was, and anyway, she didn’t know any old men to copy it from.

  Which Santa, if any, will come tonight?

  “Sally?”

  The voice is oddly familiar. She won’t wonder, yet, who it is. If it is someone she doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to know about it yet.

  “Sally? I’m here to tell you a story.”

  She is still watching the window. Soundlessly she shrinks down inside her duvet. White hands creep up through the opened window. They have three black stripes up the back like Mickey Mouse’s gloves. They pause, unsteadily, on the sill cluttered with Sally’s toys, tottering on their fingertips as they find a space. They turn slowly about and then, with their ten digits as little feet, do a rapid dance. Sally laughs aloud.

  “I’m here to tell you a story and then we’re going to go to the North Pole,” the voice tells her, and Sally realises that it is the gloves talking.

  “I see that you read a lot of books, Sally. You know lots of stories already. Far more than the other kids at school. That’s why you hang back, isn’t it? When the other kids rush in, you hang back because you know what happens to people who are heedless. You’ve seen what goes on in the world, in stories. It also makes you think about things more, doesn’t it? But it makes the other kids difficult to talk to sometimes. I know that. I know how hard it is for you. They seem like babies still, don’t they?”

  The gloves have jumped lightly down from the sill and independently they clamber across the strewn book covers. The pale, tapered fingers caress the titles as if, in this way, they can read.

  “I imagine, Sally, that you’ve read lots of those books where people visit magical and mysterious lands. Where they explore. There are lots of books like that, and those are the best ones, aren’t they? That’s what it’ll be like when we go to the North Pole.”

  “Are you Santa?” she asks levelly.

  “I can be anyone. As you see, I have no face. Put on any you like, but we’re going to the North Pole nonetheless.”

  Sally considers this. “Good,” she replies.

  “When you grow up,” the gloves say thoughtfully, coming back together and steepling their fingers, “you don’t have to stop having adventures, going into those magical lands. But it’s more difficult. The magical lands are more…ambiguous. Do you know what that means?”

  Sally shakes her head, sitting up now.

  “It means complicated. They might be one thing or they might be another. You can’t be sure. The land you go into could be bizarrely magical or it could be completely ordinary. And these grown-ups find it harder to get there in order to decide. They have to depend on each other believing that the place they have found is special. If they were alone, as Alice was alone in Wonderland, then Wonderland might never have come about. It might have fallen to pieces in an instant.”

  “It does fall to pieces,” Sally complains, “at the end of the story.”

  “Exactly. When grown-ups are there, they need two of them and between them they sustain the illusion. Do you see what I mean?

  “My story now is about Sam and Tony. They went into a land that might have been magical, it might have been quite ordinary. They never really found out. Before they both went in, their paths had never crossed before. They would never have known each other if they hadn’t set out to explore this particular place.

  “This place was a park, like those old-fashioned Victorian parks that are ringed around by iron railings, crowded in by trees and sluggish streams that wend down gentle hills to seep into bronze lakes.

  “When Sam and Tony went in, their hands came away from the heavy iron gates smudged with rust, like bloodstains or pollen. When they entered this enchanted parkland, it seemed to them like a wonderful child’s playground, inhabited only by the stillest objects. They went exploring.

  “What looked from outside the railings like a perfectly ordinary old park, inside proved to be stuffed with wonders. As they passed, the flowerbeds shook out and displayed the most exotic hothouse flowers, densely whorled and brilliant heads which nodded and followed their progress. In the trees, gaudily painted banners were stretched out with slogans printed in archaic languages. Fireworks speared the sky and hung there all afternoon.

  “A rickety wooden bridge, bright scarlet, led them to the blue castle in the centre of the park. From a distance it had looked like a castle, a monument, but as they entered through a head-high number six and climbed inside, up the staircase of moving clockwork parts, they saw it was really a giant alarm clock. Here within, the metal building shuddered with ticks like heartbeats, passing inexorably towards the moment the bells would ring, as if alert to intruders.

  “From the top of the clock, sitting on top of the shiny gold domes of its twin bells, Tony and Sam looked down on the spread extent of their discovered land.

  “It stretched in five vast directions: four branches of solid, intricate geography leading downwards from the clock in the centre, and one promontory to its north. This northern realm bore two limpid ponds, open to the sky. Tony left Sam for a while, climbed down the clockface, and headed off up to this realm.

  “All that night he roamed labyrinths of golden brick, trying to find those lakes. The brick was real gold, oily and soft to the touch. Sometimes he would meet dead ends; occasionally he came to a small, neat garden where the flowers never looked quite real. They were drawn with the expert haste of a Chinese watercolour; the pink flowers a single broad stroke, branches a twist of black.

  “At last Tony found one brown, oval lake. He shielded his eyes and looked to see if Sam was still watching from the safety of the alarm-clock monument, and she wasn’t. She had gone to discover things on her own. Quickly Tony undressed and slipped into the pool. It was cold but, as he swam, the viscous water began to warm and support him. It was like the Dead Sea, it kept him buoyant.

  “Elsewhere Sam was leaving the clock at the centre and then she was running through a field of ornate, abandoned, pale blue statues. A horse twisted its marble wings back, rearing and defending itself against the onslaught of a frozen gryphon. Angels and saints watched solemnly from atop wonky pedestals; some lay crashed sideways in the dust. Tearing the length of this cemetery of icons, Sally realised none could harm her, but she never stopped for breath till she reached a kidney-shaped field of poppies.

  “At the other side, drowsy and careless, she reached the orchard she had seen from afar. The air was ra
nk with overripeness, but Sam loved the smell and the squash underfoot of the flesh of fallen, wasted peaches. In the shaded, autumnal alleyways the colours were high; she ate the fruit and smeared herself in juices. This kind of thing often goes on in these stories.

  “In their separate ways, Tony and Sam had decided that they would both be happy to stay in this place. They roamed and ran wild all that night, and each subsequent night for a month. Tony would return most often to the pools that warmed him as he swam; Sam to the orchard where, each evening, new fruit would meet in the centre, at the alarm-clock monument, as the bells rang out over the landscape. They would tell each other what they had found.

  “They never told each other, however, that they had both resolved never to leave this land. They pretended to each other that they would leave, separately, quite soon.”

  Sally asks, “Were they in love?”

  “Not with each other,” the gloves tell her sadly.

  “Why not?” Sally can’t see any other point to a story for grown-ups. It’s what they’re usually like.

  “In the end they met on the other side of the world.”

  “What?”

  “Well, one night they both went too far. Tony swam too deep in the pool, and Sam ate her way too far into the delicious forest. Without the other knowing, they both sank so deep through that they came out on the other side of the world.

  “More places to explore! And here there were words, pricked out in blue flowers, blue bricks and clipped into trees. Words they couldn’t read because they were too small to fit all the letters into the proper perspective.

  “At last, that night, they met each other on the rocky spine of the land, from which vantage point the spread of the country was laid out once more. Their current position was high above the rest and the realms flung themselves out, if seemed, in languid abandon. A storm crashed all about them, obscuring the extent of the land they had both made their own.

  “And then, when Tony and Sam saw in each other’s faces the determination not to leave this place, they both resolved that the other must be made to leave right then.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…even though a grown-up knows it takes more than one to keep the illusion up, they always want to be the only one. The single Beloved. And so…”

  “And so what happened?”

  “A terrible battle ensued.”

  “Who won?”

  The hands drummed a gentle tattoo on the top of a pile of books. “No time now, Sally,” they whisper. “It’s early Christmas Day. Soon it’ll be too late to catch up with the magic of the Eve. We’ve got to leave for the North Pole right now. Come on; get ready.”

  Sally hopped out of bed and started to dress. “Will you tell me on the way who won the terrible battle?”

  “Maybe later. Stories aren’t always in the past. I still don’t know how this one turns out. It is still unwinding itself in the storm. It’s happening somewhere else. We’ll just have to see. Come along now; it’s time.”

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG, IRIS WAS JUST COMING IN FROM A LONG WALK. Peggy snatched up the receiver and gave her a curt nod. “It’s Sam,” she mouthed, watching Iris heave her snow boots off.

  “I want to talk to Mark.” Sam’s voice was hard.

  “He’s here,” Peggy told her. “He’s in the bathroom.”

  “Would you get him?”

  “Get Mark,” Peggy hissed to Iris. “Sam, where are you?”

  “I’m staying with a friend.”

  “That policeman?”

  “Yes, that policeman.”

  “Shouldn’t either your or Mark be in the flat…just in case?”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do. Why isn’t Mark at the flat? Why is he still at yours? Why can’t he be at home?”

  “We’re keeping an eye on him. You saw what he was like. He’s completely off his head.”

  Iris had come back. She tapped Peggy on the arm. “He’s coming. Let me speak to her.”

  Peggy handed her the receiver. “Sam? Listen,” Iris took a deep breath and weighed in. “Sam, we have to let the police know now. It’s been a whole day. This is madness. If we want—”

  “Keep your fucking nose out!”

  Mark stood behind Iris. He was deathly pale, expressionless. As he took the phone, Iris gasped. He had blanked out the tattoos on his face with thick white foundation.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Iris has been telling me we have to phone the police.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve…heard something.”

  “What? Who from?”

  “We had a call.”

  Iris shot Peggy a look. A call? Peggy nodded quickly.

  Mark went on. “Tony phoned me. Sally’s safe. She’s with him.” He could even hear Sam grip the receiver tighter.

  “Where? Where has he taken her?”

  “Sam…Sam, we have to be careful about this…”

  “She’s my fucking kid, Mark.”

  He breathed out slowly. “Mine as well.”

  “She came out of my body, Mark. My body, not yours. You’ve tried to keep me out the whole way along. But not even you can change this fact of nature. That bairn came out of my body, and…” Her voice snagged and she stopped.

  Mark repeated, “I think we have to play this very carefully. I don’t know what’s going on exactly. I don’t know what’s going on in Tony’s mind.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past the pair of you to have planned this together.”

  “Sam, I…”

  “Oh, don’t flounder. Look, just tell me; tell me you didn’t have this planned.”

  “No. It—”

  “What did he say then? Where is he? Where’s he taken her?”

  “They’re in Leeds.”

  “Leeds? What the fuck for?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just where he went.”

  “Are we going to get her back?’

  “Yes.”

  “Should we get the police now? If he—”

  “No. Now listen, Sam. We had twenty-four hours without getting them. What if we did now? What would they say? You know what happens with these Home Alone cases. That’s the way to lose Sally for good.”

  Sam kept quiet. He heard her breathing. He thought she was calming down.

  She said, “I don’t know what the fuck you thought you were doing, leaving her, parading about with—”

  “Don’t go into all that now.”

  “I don’t intend to. I don’t want to know. I just want my daughter back safe. What did he say on the phone?”

  “He wants me to go down. Tonight, to Leeds. To see him and talk.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Don’t try to—”

  “We can’t fuck this up, Sam. I don’t know what state he’s in.”

  “What does that mean?” She sounded frightened.

  “I don’t know. But he says that Sally is safe and happy. He wants to see me tonight. Look, I’ll sort it out.”

  Sam was silent. He went on, “Where are you now?”

  “I’m…staying with a friend, still.”

  “That copper?”

  “Yes, that copper. Bob.”

  “Right.”

  “He wanted me to report it. We’ve rowed about it all day. This could really foul up his career.”

  “Tell him to keep his fucking nose out.”

  “I’m not going to talk about this now. We’ll keep the police out of this, right?”

  Mark felt himself sneer. “We’re no strangers to that, are we, Sam?”

  She simply repeated, “I’ll keep the police out of this, so long as you bring my daughter back from Leeds with you.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “What?”

  “When we get back to normal? Will you keep the police out of our lives then? This Bill, or Bob, or whatever you call him?”

  She gave a shuddering laugh. “I don�
�t believe you. Just get on that train, Kelly, and sort that pervert out. Now!”

  The phone clicked off.

  Iris said, “I don’t understand.”

  “While you were out,” Peggy told her, “we had a phone call.”

  Mark was tying his shoelaces. “It was Tony.”

  Peggy took hold of Iris by her elbows. Over the past day it seemed at times as if Iris had been worst hit by Sally’s disappearance. As dawn came up on Christmas morning, she had been sitting among the abandoned wrapping paper in Mark’s flat.

  “My fault. I put her to bed. I never closed her window. It was my idea to go walking like that…like bloody…like…” Sitting naked still in all the rubbish, she had looked pathetic. Peggy had been caught between the sight of her, Mark slumped on Sally’s bed, and her own panic.

  Now Iris was asking, “Who is Tony?”

  Mark was stuffing things into an overnight case Peggy had found for him. “Someone I used to know. That note in the Christmas pudding was from him.”

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  BOB’S HOUSE WAS A PIGSTY. SAM HAD NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE. SHE SAT down on the green settee, on a tangle of stale blue shirts. She’d never dreamed this would be the way to leave Mark, nor that these would be the circumstances of her escape.

  On the wall there was one of those mass-produced paintings from the seventies showing a child with a tear rolling down his cheek. These paintings were rumoured to be jinxed and the cause of house-fires. Bob’s mam, he said, had pressed it upon him when he moved out to his own home. That and his tea service. He put by her feet a cup of thick, greasy tea.

  “You made me sound so bad just then, on the phone,” he said.

  She took her head out of her hands. “What?”

  “You told them that I wanted you to report Sally’s disappearance just because of my work.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters if I come out of this looking like a complete shit. I care, too, you know. I want to do something.”