by Paul Magrs
The night had been jump-started into something exciting, waking Mark from his stupor and self-absorption. Now abruptly it seemed to have ended and no one was happy.
Mark had never really used sex to forget. It had never seemed the thing to do. Tonight it had and he was starting to suspect he’d chucked it all away down the sink.
Never mind. With nothing to regret, he decided he’d better get himself away to bed.
THE HOUSE WAS LABYRINTHINE. ALL THESE HALF-ASSEMBLED DINING rooms, sitting rooms. In the front hall connecting them all, he found Richard standing pissed and nonplussed before two familiar, abandoned heaps of clothing.
“I was going to lock up the front door,” he said. The key was ready in his hand.
“Oh,” said Mark. “They’ve gone out. They do this sometimes.”
“They’ve taken the spare key.”
“They can look after themselves.”
“It’s weird,” said Richard and they both laughed.
A tense moment hung between them.
The phone on the table beneath the chandelier started to ring. Mark looked at it and so did Richard. There was a spread of recent glossy magazines fanned out. As the ringing went on he found himself fascinated by the grinning faces of their covers.
Richard said, “I’d better answer it. Get yourself up into bed. You’ve had one fuck of a day.”
Mark complied and thudded up the stairs. He was happy to have instructions and it was only when he groped his way into his rom, with Richard’s low voice on the phone fading out below him, that he realised he still didn’t know what was happening tonight.
He shut his door, left the light off and, quivering like a teenager, threw off his clothes. In the dark, alone, he even felt embarrassed by his erection. Might all be for nothing. The frosty moonlight still came down from the round window. So here he was again, waiting in the dark.
He pulled the chair to the window and looked down at the snowy city. The weather was worse than he thought. The park beyond the houses was like a mixing bowl of wet meringue. The trees were picked out in irritable black exclamation marks. And there were two human figures, arm in arm, quite a distance away but distinct all the same. Their walking was easy, easy.
Mark put the antique chair back in place and lay on the bed. The house was still, silent, and he shook with fatigue and wretchedness and the threat of anti-climax.
He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them he saw that perhaps that trick with time was happening all over again.
Because the white gloves were hovering in the air above him. At the foot of the bed they spread their fingers in greeting. He seized up in terror, having forgotten this point in the previous night.
He had forgotten so much. So much.
And here they were again. One reached down to stroke his foot. With an elegant gesture the other turned a pirouette in mid-air and landed on his stomach, gave a quick caress and returned to its mate.
Mark found he couldn’t speak.
The hands pressed fingertips together and seemed to think. This was like watching a magic show.
The room was about to spin round, he felt. He pushed his own hands down on the mattress to weigh it down. And he watched. Watched as, just like a magician, one of the hands apparently reached into the other’s invisible cuff and produced…a bright pink disc, the size of a fifty pence piece.
It roved about the air in circles, to make sure it had Mark’s attention. Then deliberately the hands brought the pink disc down until it was level with Mark’s head as he lay. He looked down the length of his body and the bed as the white fingers worked dexterously.
There ought to be musical accompaniment, applause and a spangly assistant. Because surely this was magic?
The pink disc turned inside out. It was swelling out, a stretched luminous pink. Now it had an odd strawberry shape. The fingers tugged and rolled and the shape grew. At last it described a thick, long-familiar cock erect in glowing fuchsia.
The hands displayed their palms in triumph, back at their natural height. Ta-dah!
You must remember this, the gleaming cock implied as it bobbed through the dark toward him. A kiss is still a kiss…
Stealthily the hands reached out to him and with them, following inexorably—since there was indeed some invisible connection between these members—came the cock. Mark was thinking, This must be real. The way the erection swayed and dipped and slapped against the invisible stomach. Only a real one looks this absurd.
The hands clutched his shoulders, then there was a weight on his chest, the warmth of a body, as the luminous pink thing jabbed its way blindly towards his mouth, shuddering as it nosed up to him.
Mark reached his hands up to the empty air and touched it. It pulsed and squirmed under pink rubber. He gently stroked at the dark and felt solid, stiffly haired legs. The chest was taut and clenched for his explorations, but he could see the doorframe through it.
Insistently, the cock wavered under his nose.
Not yet, Mark thought. Not by a long chalk. First he wanted to ask something.
“Tony?”
The question fogged the air.
And then there was a knock at the door. It opened and admitted a shaft of yellow light. “Mark?” Richard asked and stepped quickly inside. “The phone. Sally’s been calling us from—”
By the hall light Richard could see Mark stretched out in his gaudy nakedness. And then he saw the hands and cock poised above him. He fell against the doorframe.
Mark felt the bedsprings jolt and sing as the body on top of him launched itself across the room. He sat up stiffly to see the gloves double themselves into neat little fists and knock Richard flat with two quick jabs.
The hands turned to survey Mark. The condom had sagged by now, hanging dolefully. One hand snatched it off with a snap and flung it angrily at the bed. And then the hands were gone, slipping out of the door, into the light.
Mark jumped off the bed to see to Richard.
He was bleeding and gasping and had to be helped over to the bed. “So you saw him,” he said. “You saw him, after all.”
“Sit down,” Mark said and hugged him to him.
In the mussed-up covers they embraced. They were both shaking badly. When Richard scraped his back with his watch, Mark remembered he was naked. Between them, between his own exposed tattoos and Richard’s new bruises, his erection was back and squashed uselessly. It didn’t seem to matter. With a sudden certainty and blocking out whatever other doubts he had, Mark said, “He’s not coming back tonight. I know Tony of old.”
Mark got up from the bed and clicked the door to. Gently and mindful of the fresh bruises, he stripped Richard off, wiping the blood from his chin with the already stained shirt.
Then he wrapped him under a sheet with his own body and, quite slowly, he made love to him with a relief and gratitude they had worked out between them and shared equally by now.
TWENTY THREE
“OF COURSE, A VALKYRIE’S NATURAL ELEMENT WAS NEVER THE SNOW…”
Iris and Peggy made their way through the park back to the house. They never thought themselves lucky to avoid getting arrested in the dead of night. Bob in his panda on Christmas Eve had been a shock, but at the time they had been more shocked to see Sam sitting behind him. Their nightly exhibition struck them as something justly beyond the bounds of law and order.
The still-falling snow was gentle on them, and warm because of the whisky. They ought to have drunk vodka, Peggy murmured at one point, to feel that needlepoint warmth brewed for burning flesh free of ice. Its lingering savour might have suited the scene. Vodka rinsing through the body sets up a clatter of sleigh bells, a far-off baying of hounds.
“And what is a Valkyrie’s natural element?” she asked Iris, gripping her arm harder than she needed to. The ground was becoming slippery; the grass was a black pelt matted with slush. And Iris seemed nostalgic tonight, wistful, so that Peggy was reminded of the sea-change her lover had promised.
&nb
sp; “Well…” Iris began. “The Valkyries only crept about in snow in the line of duty. Battlefields were often in the far north. With the sun never setting and blood freezing in their veins, armies would battle for long, long hours on the glaciers. The combat was slowed down almost in stop-motion animation. For some reason the men liked to fight that way. Sometimes the glaciers would shake out their bedspreads and freeze the combatants to the spot. Even wounds blossomed gradually in those wars. And the pain of bloodshed was postponed by cold.
“These were the places Valkryies had to visit. But to get there they had to travel back and forth across the North Sea. That iron-grey sky which rides up high, impossibly high, it seems, to meet the horizon, is the natural element of the Valkyries.”
“I see,” said Peggy, who had grown up in North Shields and knew all about the sea there, thank you very much.
She used to take the young Sam to the fish markets on Sunday mornings. Clutching the bundle of Sunday papers, Sam stared into ferocious maws until she told her mam she didn’t want to go any more. Peggy was pleased that at last Sam was expressing an opinion. She didn’t mind stopping the trips. They never bought anything anyway. They went because Sundays at home were just dire; the old man coughing, praying, coughing.
Iris said, “Surveyed from above, those currents seemed a symbol for possibilities. When a Valkyrie looked at the patterns made by the thrashing sea beneath her feet, she could still say to herself, well, anything might happen. The thrill of predestination went through her when she realised that everything was still up in the air.
“But when she came to the bleak fields of snow, the pattern was already set, she could no longer fiddle with the outcome. All she might do then is pick up the pieces. A Valkyrie prefers things in flux.”
They had arrived back in the street.
“I always think,” Iris added, “of snow as a signal that things are virtually settled. As if it were raining plaster of Paris.”
They stopped under a streetlamp, watching with perfect equanimity as a single, exhausted car slewed to a stop outside Tony’s house. As the doors on either side creaked open and its amber lights popped on inside, the ladies saw that Sam had returned.
For a moment, Peggy felt like diving into the nearest hedgerow for cover, but Iris urged them on.
“Let’s see how the plaster hardens,” she said determinedly, bustling onwards to meet Sam and Bob, who was carrying the sleeping Sally.
Peggy didn’t like the sound of this plaster hardening. She could almost sense it inching along her skin, bringing up the gooseflesh. She thought of the slow, cool clasp of plaster dragging over her face. She pictured herself and Iris frozen in their tracks by the hedges, a statue of two linked old dykes. It would make life so much easier simply to adopt one decorous position and hold it for ever.
But Peggy still had the salt and ice of the North Sea in her veins. Coming from a town battered into submission by its exertions, she knew that if she stayed still, she would freeze. So she was determined to keep going, even if it led her into disaster.
“Hullo, dear,” Peggy said. “So the weather was too bad, then?”
Sam looked her mother up and down and rolled her eyes.
Bob said, “We almost got stuck.”
“Let’s get Sally inside,” Iris suggested.
I’M NEVER GOING TO SLEEP AGAIN, MARK WAS THINKING.
Richard lay crooked in his arms, like a baby. Mark lay slumped against the headboard. You couldn’t trust the night these days. It had brought so much unexpected stuff his way recently. Visitations of the worst sort, which he had brought upon himself.
And he thought about the years of taking every night for granted. Despite everything, with Sam he felt safe. With a grim determination, a Lego-building look on her face, she had protected him and Sally from the world. He was learning to give her credit for that. Even reading Tony’s letters, secretly, before he got them, could be seen as part of this protective process now. Furious and with accusations flying, Sam had been protecting Mark nonetheless.
Richard murmured in his sleep, shifting position, seeming to want to roll away and lie by himself. With a twinge of regret Mark let him. It almost feels like betrayal when someone does that, he thought. As if, with sleep, a selfish negligence sets in, and their body can feel free to cast you aside.
Of course you only get that feeling if you lie awake all night, thrumming with tension, like a violin set aside, and alert to signs of anything less than slavish devotion. Mark didn’t expect that from Richard.
How many nights had Sam laid awake, watching Mark’s body inch away from her?
He remembered now, those nights of knowing full well that she was awake and knowing she wondered whether he was. He would be pretending sleep and fiercely thinking of ways to extricate himself. How he could make it seem natural to be turning in his sleep towards the coolness of the further part of the bed.
Thinking it over now, it struck him that any glimpse of a new life, any whiff of change in the air, brought him the exact prickle of pleasure given him by turning to lie on the fresh side of the pillow.
On him Richard was stirring awake and Mark almost forgot to breathe. He was suspended, waiting to see where a conscious Richard would turn.
When Sally opened the door a crack and crept in, on her way to her own room, Richard shook fully awake.
“Goodnight, Dad and Richard,” she whispered, and Mark saw she could barely keep her eyes open.
“Night, love,” he said, and Richard looked up, shocked.
Sally was like a sleepwalker, flat-footed across the carpet, opening the dressing-room door.
“Hang on,” Mark said. He couldn’t trust the night these days, but Sally seemed real enough.
Richard was sitting bolt upright, gripping his shoulder. “Shit, I forgot; the phone! They said they were coming back tonight!”
The dressing-room door clicked shut and they listened to Sally stumble through her scattered books and drop with relief into bed.
SAM KNEW WHAT POSH WAS AND SHE WAS DETERMINED NOT TO BE
in the least impressed by Tony’s house. Not being impressed had been a key element in her refusal to acknowledge Iris’s impact on Peggy’s life. So Sam sneered at the chandelier in the hallway and the ornate mantelpiece in the living room, where they sat, shivering with fatigue.
Iris and Peggy dressed quickly in the hallway.
“Sally knows where her room is,” Peggy called out. “There’s no sense in keeping the poor thing up any longer.”
Sam was too tired to argue. Bob was no support. He was stretched out on a scarlet chaise longue and snoring. She had never heard him snore. With a jolt she realised she had never slept with him before. He made the same noise snoring as he did fucking and that revolted her. She was thinking, He’s always on the job, just like a bloody copper. He’s never off duty, never out of uniform. If they were always together, those stertorous groans would punctuate her every move.
Peggy sat by her. “I’m glad you’re back. We can sort things out now. It didn’t seem right, you just storming off like that.”
“We had no choice about coming back. This isn’t with my tail between my legs, Mam.”
“I didn’t imagine it was.”
“I never do that.”
“I know you don’t.”
“We’re going to be snowed up. Snowed in. It’s outrageous out there.”
“Well,” Peggy said. “At least we’re all safe.’
Sam snorted. “In this house. Have you seen him yet?”
“The mythical Tony? No. I don’t think he exists at all.” With this Peggy stood. “I’m going to find you a room upstairs. I think Iris went to hunt one out for you and Bob. We all need to rest just now.”
Sam looked at her. “Thanks, Mam.”
Peggy smiled.
“Mam? Just…would you tell me…I haven’t acted like a kid in all this, have I? I’ve not been like some big daft bairn stomping about and shouting the odds, have I?”
Sam pulled back and looked at her mother. “That sounds as if there’s something you want and daren’t say.”
“Ah,” said Peggy. “Your professional manner. You sniff things out. Yes, there’s something I want.” She stood again and looked at Bob, and Sam. “I want things to stay exactly as they are. But knowing that they won’t, that they can’t, I daren’t say that. I daren’t say that’s what I want. Because nobody else wants that.”
Peggy went off to find Iris, to allocate the rooms. It was as if the house had somehow become theirs and they were playing the competent hostesses.
Downstairs Sam cast one disappointed look at Bob and, to keep herself awake until she had found a bed to fall into, went hunting around the other rooms.
The detritus of the evening before lay strewn around: crumbled cheese and biscuits, empty bottles overturned and glasses smeared in fingerprints. Vaguely Sam wondered whether Richard had copped off with Mark. It oughtn’t to make any difference now. Well, they all seemed to have had a nice night, at any rate, to judge by the remains. A better night than we had, she thought, blizzarded in Bob’s crappy car.
Could Sam have consented to a safe and pleasurable night, even to see her husband seducing—or being seduced by—a stranger? She didn’t know. Unless pushed, Sam never knew how possessive she would be.
She happened upon the dining room where the candelabra was pasted to the whitewashed sill by wax drips. Nothing had been done with the china on the tarpaulin. The pieces still waited, gleaming, to be hauled like swag to markets: teapots, Toby jugs, figurines twirling painted skirts, dead clocks and toast racks. Both desolate and exotic, this tableau drew her attention for a few moments.