by Paul Magrs
“You hardly know the kid. She’s mine.”
“But if we…carry on, if you stay here; she’ll be mine, too, then.”
“Leave it for now, Bob. Don’t fuck it up by talking about it now. It’s like tempting fate. Just don’t do it.”
Bob had seen Sally only once before. It had been one of those rare days when Sam finished work early because Mark had a job interview in Darlington. On the spur of the moment she asked Bob to come with her to meet Sally, instead of keeping their usual rendezvous. At the bottom of the school gates Bob had carefully shaken Sally’s hand.
“Are you being arrested?” she asked her mother.
Sam was watching the other mothers watching them. Let them, she thought. She liked to be thought of as an unusual family. “He’s a friend of ours.”
“Are you giving us a lift in your police car?”
“We’re catching the bus. Bob has to go back to work.”
The child had given him a long, appraising look. Bob had been pleased; he felt himself being measured up as a replacement father. Sally had smiled briefly and then walked slowly past, dismissing him.
“She likes you,” Sam told him afterwards.
“Mark’s going to Leeds tonight,” Sam said. “Tony’s in Leeds.”
“Tony?”
“His ex-lover. Remember? He’s got Sally.”
The blood drained from Bob’s face. “Christ!” He looked completely helpless. “What’s going to happen, Sam?”
“I wanted to go down to Leeds with him, but he wouldn’t let me. He’s got to sort this out for himself, he said. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Ha!”
“Is there an address?”
“He wouldn’t give me one.”
“So we just have to sit?”
“Looks like it.”
“While those two faggots discuss the future of our family?”
Sam looked up at him with the greased tea cooling in her palms. “Our family?” she asked.
“PLEASE, MARK,” PEGGY HAD SAID, “PHONE US. TELL US WHAT’S HAP-pening.”
On the bus all the way to Darlington her words kept coming back to him. What did she think? That he’d just up and leave them in the dark?
“Will you come back tomorrow?” Iris had asked. Her voice was broken. They were in the kitchen just before he left. He hoisted the bag over his shoulder, knotted the scarf at his throat. Iris looked exactly what she was: a little old woman, distracted by fear. She had never struck him that way before. It was as if, after her ritual disrobing on Christmas Eve, she had remained a pale shadow of her former self. Then she had appeared pared down, vital; the essential part of Iris. Now she just looked stick-thin and frail with anxiety. Mark couldn’t bring himself to reassure her.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said truthfully. “I’ve got to see what Tony wants.”
Neither Iris nor Peggy knew what Tony was like; they hardly knew anything about him. But Mark did. Until a certain age he had known everything about Tony, and Tony everything about him. Perhaps this was Tony’s way of bringing him up to date. He was being summoned to a résumé. That was the way too look at it. That was the safer version. It was the benign version of Tony he had fed Iris and Peggy, and now all three were depending on it.
The bus was empty and Darlington was stark, almost Gothic as they slipped in through freezing fog.
He was surprised by the reflection of his own face. He had forgotten about the make-up, and now registered how natural it made him look. He still wasn’t quite sure why he had done it. In the small bag he was carrying, he had packed the leather case. It was a kind of talisman, because he had been given it just before the disaster.
The make-up was also a means of going incognito tonight. As if this were a spying mission. He barely recognised himself.
There was also another possible reason for it. But he pressed that down as soon as he thought it: the notion that he was making himself look as much like his old self as possible. Tony would remember him the way he was before the tattoos were completed. And suddenly Mark realised what Peggy and Iris hadn’t said. The words they hadn’t dared to speak as he left tonight had been clearly etched in lines of worry.
They thought he would end up going back to Tony. The suggestion had hung in the air of that kitchen. They thought it was obvious that, faced once more by an ex-lover, off he would go.
But the idea had never occurred to him. It had never seemed real enough to become an idea. He was concerned with Sally. It was Sally he was going to see, it was his daughter he was out to find tonight. If he started thinking now about seeing Tony again, it would be too much to handle. This trip was for Sally. He couldn’t see Sally and Tony in the same scene at all, not at all, not yet. Their existences were mutually exclusive, just as a multiple-choice question couldn’t have two answers ticked. He couldn’t picture Sally and Tony together, not even on a train station platform, waving him down.
Preoccupied with Sally, Mark had given little thought to the questions of why Tony wasn’t in prison, how he had found their house, how he had managed to abduct the child. Sally’s absence was the only real thing. Mark had been devastated by the sight of the scattered books on her bedroom floor, the dawn light fingering their dust covers on Christmas morning, her bedclothes mussed up.
To Mark tonight, Tony was merely the vehicle of this disaster. Not a real person; nothing to do with this person Mark used to know, used to love. For the moment, Tony was nothing more to Mark than the sneezing and grinding of the bus as it crawled into the station stop in Darlington.
“WHAT A CHRISTMAS!” PEGGY SIGHED AS SHE SAT DOWN. SHE HAD WASHED everything in sight in Iris’s kitchen. They had completed a dispirited meal. This was the first time in years that Iris’s cottage had seemed unfamiliar to Peggy. Washing everything in sight seemed a way to reassert her ownership and to quell the bouts of panic.
Sitting still for the first moment since Mark had left for Leeds, all she wanted was to turn things back.
To before Christmas, say, when they were at the pantomime together. To before Sally was born, even, so they could have all those years again; have her novelty and newness, the bewildered charm of her. And even, if they could, turn time back to before Sam and Mark married, before that accident, before Iris and Peggy were together, when Iris was alone in her own home. So many wrong turnings they’d be able to reroute. How much effort would it take to achieve all that?
Yet it seemed that all the effort in the world was being wasted right now, by Peggy herself, holding her tears back.
“Oh, God, don’t cry,” Iris said. “I thought you were keeping strong for us.”
“Just shut it for now, would you, Iris?”
Iris put the telly on. Christmas programmes. Something brash on ITV, foreign cartoons on Channel Four, opera on Two, and on One a sitcom Christmas special shot abroad. She turned down the sound and listened attentively.
“He’ll be on the train by now,” Peggy said.
On the coffee table between them stood the teapot, cooling slowly, and the phone.
SAM TRIED, BUT SHE COULDN’T SEE HERSELF FINISHING WORK EVERY DAY and coming back to Bob’s bleak kitchen with its cracked lino. And who would pick up Sally from school? A policeman couldn’t stand each day at the gates. He had odd hours. He’d never consent to being the househusband Mark was.
She still couldn’t see a life without Mark. The future had come down like venetian blinds. Bob’s venetian blinds covered every window—it seemed fitting for a policeman, she thought—and their slats were bent and buckled by his impatience when opening windows.
The house had no reverberations for her. Not like the warm pinks of her own kitchen. The air here was dank, chilled. Was Bob mean with the central heating? That wasn’t a good environment for bringing up a kid. Sally would catch her death.
He had come into the kitchen after her. She heard his footsteps, hesitant, respectful, on the yellow lino. This was his house; she could imagine him alone, crashi
ng heedlessly from room to room. He put his arms around her.
“What are you doing?” His voice dripped with pity.
Her spine stiffened slightly. Patronising bastard.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Putting the kettle on?”
“We’ve drunk gallons of tea today.”
“Some Christmas,” she said. “I’m sorry, Bob.”
“If this hadn’t happened, we’d never have spent Christmas together at all.”
“It’s not how I would have wanted it.”
Bob said, “We’ve smoked nearly eighty fags between us, all day.”
“Just hold me for a bit,” Sam told him.
As he did so, clumsily, she thought: No, I can’t live here, not like this. Sally wouldn’t stand for it, anyway. She’d never like it here. But her thoughts went twisting round. Oh, she’d put up with it. She’d have to. She has to be with her mam. That’s the way it has to be. That’s the proper way. She’d get to like it wherever I was. She’d have the things she likes, she could bring her books and her toys with her. Bob would build bookshelves. Kids are resilient; she’d soon settle in. Kids change and they can adapt.
Mark had changed Sally. He’d taken her away from her mam. His influence had drawn her away. That was why she was distant, why she found it hard being with other kids her age. Mark worried about that. He told Sam about Sally standing out like a sore thumb at school. It made Sam ashamed. She knew Sally could shake that off once she got back with her mam. She cursed Mark for making her daughter weird.
“Let’s go to bed,” Bob said. “We’ve had enough of this day.”
“I’m so tired,” Sam said, almost in spite of herself.
Bob asked gently, “Are you up to it?”
“Hm?”
“Our first night together, under a legal roof?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, we’ve got to take advantage of it, haven’t we? And we’ve got to take our minds off the worry.”
He breathed through his mouth into her face. Suddenly the blush of dark beard on his chin appalled her.
“Mark’s on his way to Leeds,” she said, drawing back. “He ought to be there soon.”
Bob frowned. “Don’t think about it, Sam, love. Remember the night he ran off? When you were expecting? It all gets sorted out. Come on. Let’s got and forget about it for a while; let’s go and fuck.”
She shook him off. “Keep off me! I don’t believe you. I’m staying up tonight. I’ve got a lot of stuff to think about.”
“You can’t stay up all night.”
She set her jaw. “I can do what I like.”
IRIS SAID, “WE’VE BEEN THROUGH WORSE THINGS THAN THIS.”
Peggy shook her head. “No, we haven’t. This is the worst.”
“It’ll be all right.” Iris came to sit beside her.
The phone was still cold; they caught themselves staring at it, yet again.
“I mean it,” Iris continued. “We’ve seen worse times.”
“Like when?” Peggy looked up with dark mascara fingers down cheeks leathered with fatigue.
“During the Second War. We were married then, struggling in Berlin. In the court of James II. When I was Cleopatra and you were Mark Antony.”
“You’re insane.”
“But quite serious.”
“You’re not starting this living-for-ever shit again, are you?”
“Well,” said Iris, “the Cleopatra bit was a sensational lie, I admit. But I am saying that we’ve both seen rough times all through history. We’ve always been in love—for five centuries now—and we’ve always come through it together.”
Peggy gave a brittle laugh. “I’ve not lived for five centuries.”
“No, but I have. You’ve been reincarnated, again and again. You just can’t remember as I can. It’s been me who’s had to run after you, find you, make you love me, time and time again.”
“Oh, sod off, Iris! I’m not in the mood for this.”
Iris startled her by bursting into tears, heavy, gasping sobs. Her small frame fell against Peggy’s. “It’s all true. Don’t pull away from me. I couldn’t go looking again. I want this to be our last life together, I want us to grow old together this time, and I want us to protect those younger ones around us. I want Sally to come back safe, and for Mark to bring her. I don’t want it to break us up in terror. I just want things to be all right. And for you to believe in me, Peggy.”
Her lover gathered her up and Iris sobbed until she fell into a deep sleep. Peggy felt cramp building up in her leg, sitting awkwardly until the night’s television finished. This is madness, she thought. We’re all cracking up over this.
TRAINS ARE SO BRIGHT INSIDE. ESPECIALLY AT NIGHT, AND MARK WAS all nerves. The blue plush of the seats was like sandpaper against him. Again, he was alone as he travelled, slipping into an unfathomable south. Alone he could believe it was all a hoax. He could see nothing outside. Only, occasionally, an industrial estate would flash by, bristling fuchsia and sodium light, pluming pearl-coloured smoke.
He avoided looking at his reflection. The foundation he wore made him look ill. He looked too blank in this light.
It was the last train. The conductor was fractious as he waited for Mark to produce his ticket.
“My child’s been abducted,” Mark told him, by way of explaining his confusion, as the conductor clipped his ticket. “I’m going to find her.”
The conductor nodded gloomily.
“How far to Leeds?”
“Half an hour.” He passed on to the next carriage. Mark heard the scream of air as the doors opened, leaving him alone again.
How will I know when we get there? Just wait until a sign appears, white and glaring at my window, saying ‘Leeds’? Until Tony and Sally are peering in at me? How will I know?
Mark had never travelled far. To stay at home seemed safer; it had everything he ever wanted, or so he told himself in his more optimistic moments. At least, he could make it in any environment he wanted. And so he had; and they were happy, weren’t they? They had made a happy family together, successfully, by staying in the same place at the same time.
He knew he had made Sally as nervy of travelling as he was. Somehow the neurosis had been passed on; it wasn’t one that Sam had ever had. Sam went out to work daily, thought nothing of catching the bus last thing alone in the dark. Sally had squeezed herself in warily that day they had taken the bus to Darlington to see the pantomime. The sight of strange buildings had been enough to unnerve her. And she had been sitting with her father the whole time. God knew how she was coping with being taken to a strange town by a strange man.
He had fallen into a desperate, headaching sleep, and woke just in time. He found himself slumped, wino-style, and rose up to look out. Floodlights showed the span of conflicting rail lines that crossed and recrossed as they approached the gaping mouth of Leeds Central Station.
Well, Tony, I’m at your mercy. You’ve got my attention at last. Just make sure you look after my daughter.
Mark gathered up his belongings and started struggling towards the automatic doors as the train began to shunt to a stop.
You’ve got some explaining to do, Tony.
FIFTEEN
ONCE THEY HAD BEEN IN A ROCK-AND-ROLL BAND TOGETHER. IT WAS when they were fifth-years and most people were leaving school. They rehearsed in Tony’s living room because his mam went away at weekends to stay with a newsagent in Chilton. On Sunday nights she would return elated and bearing surplus copies of that day’s papers. The house was free all Saturday for the band and friends of the band to fill it with their black, laminated amplifiers, crushed lager cans and blue smoke.
Mark was the singer for a while but they stopped him because he screeched the high notes in songs like ‘Rebel, Rebel’ and spoiled it. Tony played guitar and he was in charge; it was he who had to relay the band’s instructions to Mark. Mark didn’t mind too much; he was happy simply to hang around on a Saturday, help
out with the equipment and chat with the girlfriends of the band in Tony’s mam’s kitchen, where the dirty crockery would stack up through the long, noisy afternoons.
The other members of the band had already left school. Some were in the borstal up the road, or on remand, or they were about to go into the army after summer. Sometimes Mark thought Tony liked hanging about with boys who dressed hard and shaved their heads. Their girlfriends changed week in and week out, except for Pauline, who was the fat drummer’s girlfriends She wore heavy black eye make-up and her hair was bleached and stringy. She sat nervously at the edge of the settee with her cigarettes, tapping ash into a used beer can, and helping the drummer sort his kit out at the end. Eventually she was consigned with the other girls to the kitchen, after they had spent one afternoon laughing all the way through ‘Psycho Killer’, which the boys were committing to tape.
Working on the band, Tony was intent and gloomy. Only occasionally would he lighten up and enjoy himself. He was given to messing around, drawing long, blood-curdling screeches out of his guitar in the middle of the songs. These always overrode whatever the singer was screeching. This was another reason Mark had been happy to move over and leave them as a mostly instrumental band. Tony was unequivocally the star.
Mark still thought it unfair that the girls were banished while he was allowed to stay and watch. He had been laughing as much as they that time. Then he saw the reason: Tony had drawn up a band rule that was meant to get them to work more tightly as a unit and make them concentrate. It was a kind of forfeit game: the blinds were drawn down, and for every bum note or mistake they made, the band member had to remove an article of clothing. It would fine-tune their performance and loosen inhibitions, Tony told them.
The lads in the band looked at each other, laughed a bit, and finally shrugged. Yeah, whatever. Might be a laugh. Tony winked at Mark, who was sitting by the rubber plant. This was his leaving present to him. Of course he was allowed to stay and the girls must go out into the kitchen.