[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life

by Paul Magrs

  Peggy and Iris return with biscuits, bread and cheese, and set them out on the carpet, laughing still over some private joke. They have been drinking and eating since their arrival here. The pair of them fell in love with this house straight away. Simmonds took one look at the new guests, told them that supper was simmering on the hob, and fled into the night. They sat down to a perfect Bolognese in the stony kitchen and the atmosphere warmed up.

  “Look at me,” Richard says now. He wants to start the talking up again and draws their attention by plucking at his stained white shirt. “If I went walking in the Antarctic, I’d still come back covered in tomato sauce.”

  Peggy pours him more whisky and they laugh. Having appropriated the house, Iris commandeers the discreetly hidden hi-fi and puts Billie Holiday on. So at ease is she that she has shed some of her layers of jumpers and cardigans. Yet she is wearing her blue wedding hat again, holding it down with one hand as she dances alone, on the spot.

  Mark finds he has been staring at Richard, who is now deep in conversation with Peggy and grateful for it. Across the room drift fragments of their exchange and Mark stares into his glass, trying to block it out, knowing he will get cross if he listens in too much. He hears ‘drama school’, ‘college’ and ‘father’, before he manages to distance himself enough. Richard has a veneer of capability, shiny as his expensive leather jacket. He appears to think that the world is there for him to move through unimpeded. Look at how he took control of their day today. He derailed them entirely and forced them into having a good time.

  He succeeded, too. The disasters of this morning now seem like half a lifetime ago. Richard had sorted them out. No wonder he gets on so well with Peggy. It’s the same assurance that Iris has and it’s all down to class. It is a veneer and yet Mark knows that Richard will believe in this man inside. Just as Iris believes in her own man or woman or God know what she keeps locked up within.

  When Mark thinks about Richard’s body, he thinks of cool, white flesh, well-fed middle-class flesh, softened with talcum powder. It makes Mark feel scrawny. All that whiteness, with muscles he has no pressing need for.

  One moment he is looking at Richard, his profile in the lamplight, that startling white at the start of his collar bone, seen at the loose neck of his T-shirt. The easy way he sits slumped back, one leg folded beneath him, even the shape, the fold of the crotch of his jeans. Then Mark bites back with another thought, troubled and cold, about who still has the luxury to put their pasts behind them, or inside them, or put it all down to experience.

  I’m drunk, Mark thinks. Poor Mark’s a drunk. And self-pitying; nobody has it as hard as I do. They’ve all got essences and I haven’t! Here am I surrounded by soft centres; I’m an empty shell and nothing in my life will be resolved.

  He is resenting the other three so steadily that he is alarmed when Richard gets up suddenly and flees the room.

  Iris looks at Mark as if from a mile away. At first he thinks he sees reproval in her face. Perhaps she has heard him thinking. My thoughts, he thinks, must be written all over my face. But Iris hasn’t heard or read a single thing. She smiles and shrugs and says, “I think the poor thing’s gone to throw up. Bless him.”

  Peggy is lying on the pleated mat at Iris’s feat. Mark notices she has trodden Stilton into the carpet and has some stuck to the bottom of one shoe.

  “He’s such a sweet boy,” Iris adds.

  Upstairs a door bangs.

  THE KEEN GLARE OF THE SERVICE-STATION RESTAURANT WAS LIKE WALKING into a headache. They had decided they must stop somewhere because Sally had woken up and, although she never said anything, Sam knew she must be starving. It was late. Sam didn’t want to think of herself as a bad mother. When the sign came at them out of the gloom, blue with a knife and fork, she told Bob they ought to stop for a bite to eat before pressing on.

  It was bleak inside and the restaurant was high up above the desolate, near-invisible fields. The skeleton staff were wearying and obviously convinced they wouldn’t see home tonight.

  Sam slid their trays down the self-service counter, determined to sod the expense. Bob and Sally sleepwalked after her down the yellow tiling. If adults had a full meal, apparently, children could eat their fill for just a penny. It seemed a good deal.

  The baked beans had grown a thick, overheated skin and the fish-shaped burgers were slumped in one corner of their sweating glass cabinet.

  “It looks lovely,” Sam said. “I’m gagging, aren’t you?”

  Tiredly Sally smiled and pretended to ask her Kanga and Roo what they wanted to eat. Heartened by this, Sam quietly asked Bob how much further they had to drive.

  He grimaced. “Bloody miles yet. We’re not even half way there. We’ve done about a third of the trip.”

  “But we’ve been driving hours!”

  “Slowly. And—” his face darkened— “while you were napping I took a couple of wrong turns.”

  “I wasn’t napping. Fish, chips and beans three times, please. One’s a child’s portion. I was wide awake the whole time.”

  Bob shrugged. He was too tired to argue. By now he knew Sam well enough to know that it would become something to argue about. She was no longer the demanding manageress beside the cardboard crusher. He was learning how that demanding, demonstrative nature exerted itself in all areas of her affairs. So he gave in.

  But as Sam shunted their trays up the line, and stung her fingers on the hot plates as they were passed across the counter to her, she realised that he was right. She had been dreaming that she was on a boat. A strange sort of boat, low down, on black water. More of a raft, really, and she was lying down, with two others. There was room only for three of them, and they had to paddle with their hands. It rocked wildly and for some reason they were in a hurry to get somewhere. Sally was beside her, fast asleep, and so she had to paddle harder. Someone else was on Sally’s other side, but Sam couldn’t see. She had to concentrate. The water was oily and the night was grim. The dream went on without rhyme or reason, without narrative. They paddled and held on for dear life.

  When they sat at their table and Sam did her usual trick of packing her handbag with packets of sugar and the cheap, bendable cutlery, Bob said, “We might have to turn around.”

  “What?” Sam was thinking about how she always ended up in motorway services. Wherever she went, no matter how much of a good time she thought she might have, she always arrived somewhere like this. They went, not on holidays, but on coach trips for the day. And days always ending with a sleepy cup of tea and fiddling under neon strip lights with cartons of UHT milk. The plastic lips always broke off in her fingers and she had to risk a nail to puncture the lid.

  “We might have to give up. Turn round and go back to Leeds for tonight.”

  She looked at Bob and she realised he looked hounded. What would he be doing, she thought, if he weren’t here with us? Beside him Sally was suddenly alert, listening. But was she distressed or hopefully? Sam couldn’t tell.

  “There’s a motel-thing here,” Sam said, hitting on a brain wave. “If we can’t go on.” She wasn’t going back to Leeds. What was the bloody point? She certainly wasn’t going to that Tony’s house and knocking on the door. Not back to the enemy, because that was what he was. And not back to where Mark was, either, because…because Mark had suffered enough.

  The thought was a novel one. She knew Mark would be delighted to see them, cold and soggy on the doorstep, asking to come in. It wasn’t to deprive him of his joy or triumph that she wouldn’t do it. It was because, she realised, she couldn’t bear to wrest Sally from him again.

  “A motel?” Bob was saying, an edge to his voice now. “Sam, I’m not made of money.”

  She felt this like a slap. It hit a raw nerve. Of course she never thought that, never assumed that, never really wanted that. Now the look on his face said he thought she had. That all she wanted was a nice motel. The sign outside had said en suite bathrooms, continental breakfasts and satellite TV in every room.r />
  She wanted to tell him, I’m not with you for an easy ride.

  “All right then. If we can’t go on, if that’s what you reckon, then we go back. Motels are a waste of money.” She couldn’t keep the rancour out of her voice. Even though it would make Bob think badly of her. “So we go and find Mark and beg for a place to stay.”

  Bob stared at her and she saw stirring in him vague pulses of anger, hurt and disappointment. Beside him Sally’s face was unreadable. But under the table she felt the swishing as her daughter kicked and swung her legs.

  TONY’S BATHROOM WAS FULL OF CLUTTER. ON ONE SIDE OF THE TOILET was a wooden armoire with a marble top, littered with shells and oddly sprouting plants. A slim volume of poetry pointed one corner politely at the sitter. To the other side and on the floor squatted a dirty fish tank, whose inhabitants moved through their green gloom in contemplative silence. The walls were plastered with Art Nouveau prints. Mark took all this in as he entered, bursting for a pee, thinking, Tony’s tastes have really changed.

  He swayed on the spot over the toilet boil aiming and was disconcerted by the fish peering out of the top of the tank. They looked as if they expected to be fed. Pissing was a great relief right now, as if he were emptying his body of all the toxins accumulated in the last week or so. It kept coming out long enough.

  Like Peggy, Mark was peculiar about whom he let see him pissing. It seemed a funny thing to want to watch. Men did it communally all the time, although generally Mark kept out of that. He was always the one, when faced with the jostling at the urinals, to slip into a cubicle. He wasn’t sure why. In case someone made a move, in case they looked down at him, came shuffling up—or, worse still, in case he looked at them.

  So at the sound of the tap being turned on, the gush of water, he jumped. Richard was standing at the sink, rinsing vomit from his mouth, pale and shivering. His look was deadly serious, as though he were equally shocked to be disturbed. Yet he must have seen Mark first.

  Mark felt a fool, planted over the bog by the fish tank, dick peeking out and pissing as she stared round at Richard. Richard had even more Bolognese streaked down his white T-shirt now. His long hair dipped with icy water.

  He took one step hesitantly, and then appeared to decide something. Richard strode across to Mark and gripped his upper body, one hand at the back of his head, and kissed him fiercely. Mark fumbled to keep his cock still trained in the right direction, resisted at first and then, feeling suddenly supported, relaxed into the kiss.

  The last few drops fell and he could taste a blend of whisky and tomato from Richard. He thought, But the dirty bastard’s just thrown up! How can I be doing this? Yet it didn’t matter. Now, at last, Mark was getting a taste of the inner man and he loved it.

  Richard pulled back, gently flushing the toilet, took a tissue and carefully dabbed Mark’s prick. When he kissed him again, stronger this time, he pressed his palm down upon it as if both to provoke and repress its erection. Mark was shocked more by the bristle of Richard’s beard. It wasn’t the same, kissing a man. He remembered now. Under the rustle and clash of stubbles, you never quite expected that soft whiteness. Mark felt himself pressing his mouth to the side of that face, sensing the complexities of that flesh. And he felt grateful. He gave a kind of half-sob of relief and shock, and because now Richard was wanking him steadily. He seemed much too easy and practised at this. Obscurely, this shocked Mark too. He’s barely in his twenties, he thought.

  Fuck. This is everything I thought I’d left behind. Now Richard seemed like someone Mark had always known. Mark was getting to know the whole of him, all at once. The whole of him: this was the illusion he fell for every time.

  And he had left falling for it all behind.

  But God, it felt good.

  Richard stopped. His hand slipped away and he stared over Mark’s shoulder.

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” came Iris’s voice. “I just wanted to use the loo.”

  Hurriedly, Mark tucked himself in.

  “It’s all right,” Richard said. “We’ve finished in here, I think.”

  He smiled at Iris as he took himself off downstairs. Mark washed his hands and left Iris to piddle in peace.

  IT SEEMED SUCH A COMEDOWN, SUCH AN ANTI-CLIMAX. SAM HATED

  giving in. It wasn’t her.

  The journey back, however, was identical to the way home. She could almost imagine they were going the way she wanted.

  Perhaps the snow was a little easier this way. Leeds was opening its clogged arteries and drawing them back in. It made it easy for them.

  In the back, Sally was wide awake. She was waiting.

  Sam said, “We’ll have to phone Mark at some point. Warn him to make sure we can find the house.”

  “Yeah,” Bob said. He was perturbed and she didn’t feel like asking him about it. Naturally he wouldn’t be happy about throwing himself on the mercy of Mark and Tony. Male pride.

  Mark and Tony. As if, suddenly, they were an item.

  This is our great triumph and our fabulous procession home. All of it gone to pieces. This is the way all my plans go, she thought. She dreaded this feeling that all her fire and energy meant nothing in the end. That in the end she fell apart in the teeth of the storm.

  The car was still pressing gently on, as if relieved and pleased, like Sally, to return to Mark.

  Sam was concentrating on a separate rhythm. What was it? A slow rocking, side to side.

  The raft on black water, and she felt it threaten softly to overturn. At either side the city’s walls thrust in to jar their progress and sink them. They ploughed on unsteadily. Rarely did Sam’s dreams pursue her like this. She was a woman of practical means. Life was clear-cut and dreams did not impede. Tonight Sam was, on all fronts, in between states.

  DOWNSTAIRS MARK MADE THE MISTAKE OF DRINKING FROM ANOTHER bottle of red wine.

  Peggy sat with Richard and they were attempting to pick up their conversation from some time before. But Mark could see Richard casting glances at him, only half-heartedly chatting away.

  Mark wasn’t sure what was going to happen now. Earlier the evening had been winding down towards that disconsolate, close-down blip on the screen that follows the national anthem. Now everything was up in the air again. Mark was having to pick himself up, stir himself for whatever the sequel to the bathroom would be.

  Iris reappeared, simpering and drunk. Peggy took one look and suggested some coffee. She slipped out to make it and Mark sipped more wine. It was coppery in his mouth and he felt a vague regret. It washed out that brief taste of Richard.

  Richard and Iris were talking in a half-playful, half-hushed tone. Mark wasn’t sure what about. He stretched back leisurely, unwilling as yet to commit himself to the night’s precise pleasures of what had happened. Richard’s warm, sure and only slightly clumsy hand had been quite different to anything that had touched Mark recently. He smiled in premature nostalgia at the thoughtfulness of those gestures; that quick dab of the tissue and the practised running of the finger up his cock’s tender underbelly.

  Mark had forgotten how he recognised a good lover, those who acted from the first as if your body were as familiar to them as you were. When their curiosity is accompanied and rewarded with a delighted recovery of what they always, surely, expected, then you know you have them, hook, line, and sinker; and they have you.

  “So what did you see?” Richard was jeering in a louder tone. Mark saw that he was drinking again, too.

  God, this is decadence, he thought. Like the Borgias. Nipping out to spew and snog and wank and then back in for a chat and more booze. Fabulous.

  “I didn’t see much. But it was a surprise!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Richard. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  But Mark thought it wasn’t directed at him. If it had been, it would have signalled the end of the matter. It would have been saying, I’m sorry, but it was a silly mistake. Mark blinked. Perhaps it did mean that. He knew now that he wanted Richard t
onight. He had done all along and he was pissed enough now to admit it. The thought that it mightn’t happen set up a prickle of disappointment. A surge of panic, even.

  “Well, I saw enough,” Iris was saying. She looked at Mark and giggled. “Nothing I haven’t seen before, anyway.”

  Mark lurched to his feet. “Excuse me.”

  Iris and Richard looked up in concern as he hurried out to the kitchen. Peggy was thoughtfully plunging the filter through a cafetiere as he dashed to the sink. She watched Richard follow him and lovingly pat his back as he threw up. Fastidiously Mark managed to direct the spew between the washing-up bowl and the taps. He didn’t want to disgrace himself and make a mess for anyone.

  Peggy picked up on the tenderness of the scene and left them to it. So they’ve bonded, she thought, with some satisfaction. She took coffee to Iris.

  When Mark had brought up the whole lot, Richard silently plied him with pints of cold water, then black coffee. They had a quiet exchange of ‘sorries’ and support back-pattings and shoulder-rubbings. Mark was shuddering and streaming with tears.

  At last, Richard said, “So we’ve both thrown up tonight, love.”

  Mark stared at him. He was horrified by the words. Inappropriately, of course. Richard was just being sweet. But they recalled irresistibly the disastrous night Mark had first met Sam.

  Here he hit another hinge in his life.

  His chest seized with a series of dry retches. Richard hugged him and Mark had to struggle free.

  Quietly Richard walked to the kitchen door.

  “Listen, I’ve got to go round and switch everything off. You’d better go to bed. We need to rest.”

  Mark wanted to say, That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I wanted. Not at all.

  Now Richard could reverse yesterday’s roles. With satisfaction? Mark wanted to ask. But Richard had slipped out to do his housekeeping bit. Mrs Danvers, Mark thought. Burn down Manderley; bring it all down. I’ve had enough—but to tide me over, I still want you. It was terrible, pathetic of him, but he wanted to depend on Richard now, on his sometimes eager, soft, cool, warming flesh, to give him a separate space to play upon. If only he could take him to bed. Now. But Richard had gone.