Twelve Stories

by Paul Magrs

  My husband is still out there somewhere, testing his limits in the ice and tundra. He found it necessary to go everywhere and do everything. He wanted to—whatchacallit—carpe the diem and seize the day. Well, I never saw the point in that. Live within your resources, I say. I am an imperfect woman. The only woman on earth not made by God. He is an imperfect man. Don’t rock the boat.

  I was born in Orkney.

  My father lived a little while in a castle there. He was obsessed with his work. His successes drove him to work harder. It is fair to say he was in the unshakeable grip of his past successes.

  I had no mother.

  I can remember the moment my eyes first opened. I remember that I had language immediately. I had that gift of tongues.

  One of the lucky ones. I saw Herr Doktor looming above me and knew he was my father. My organs and limbs, curiously, felt natural to me and quite lived-in already. I saw my husband then, grinning in at me through the high window and I was ashamed of my nakedness.

  My father, Herr Doktor, had an even more extreme reaction to my husband’s delight. My father attempted to murder me, only minutes after he had completed delivering—is delivering the correct word? Only minutes after he had completed orchestrating me.

  Already mad, my father left me for dead, to fend for myself, pursued by demons of his own, actual or otherwise. My father and husband ran off to chase each other, leaving me to do what any woman ends up having to do at one time or another. I picked myself up, I pulled myself together and I decided I would have to look after myself.

  I travelled through Scotland. I explored a little of this half familiar, sometimes hostile world. And at last I settled by the sea.

  I pretend I am the age I am. I mean, the age I appear to be, and that is now coming up to pension age. Effie keeps asking when I’ll be due for my bus pass. She’s guessed it must be soon. She already has hers and she isn’t too proud to get on the buses for nothing. Effie says we’ll go on trips together, up the wild north coast, and count the pennies we’ll be saving. I haven’t the heart to tell her my pension will never come. I’m not on the official records. Really, I don’t exist. It’s hard to explain that to your best friend.

  Effie thinks I’m a marvel, the way I’ve kept my youth and vitality. I know she means this must be a compensation for being so plain. ‘Rather plain,’ is the worst thing I have heard Effie say about a woman. She has never asked about the scars on my face. Too polite to ask. And, not being the type to stare into mirrors much, I forget they are there. I do enjoy running my fingers along the puckers and gathers of my scars. But I try not to do it in company, because people find it disconcerting.

  I have always used a lot of make-up. There is something satisfying about plying on layers of paint and grease, knowing that you are the same person underneath. I have always found it steadying to know myself exactly. I am alone on this earth. No parents, no siblings, no children to divert or confuse me. I have only ever been perfectly myself. And that perfect self takes the eyelashes and sticks them on with glue; each black lash long as a spider’s leg. And she washes, comes and fluffs up her various wigs. I have always wanted to blend in, to be one more barely-visible woman. I imagined I could draw nearer to the world of human beings and believe myself part of them.

  Here I am in Whitby. The homely, caring bed and breakfast lady with the air of quiet authority. When I first came here I was a savage, unversed in the ways of people. I listened to the screaming, wheeling gulls. From the jetty I watched the shot grey silk of the perplexing sea. I could smell the vinegary warmth of the fish and chips the holiday people on the prom were eating. I might have hated them all and thrown in the towel right then. What was I? A freak of supernature, a thing of shreds and patches. I might have killed myself. But I didn’t.

  In my prime I would marvel at the symmetry of my body. I was my father’s second masterpiece, though the renowned and skilful Herr Doktor put me together in all haste. Why, the only thing that marks me out is the particular slenderness of my legs. Even if I have the head and heart of an old lady, I still have the legs of a dancer. My nimble pins astonish Effie.

  I can’t give Herr Doktor sole credit for the way I have worn. I have looked after myself pretty well. A self-made woman, after all.

  I read in the newspaper today that policemen had found a woman’s dismembered hands tossed into a hedge somewhere in Norfolk. They are trying to identify her and locate the rest of her. ‘Listen to this,’ gasped Effie, as we sat in her bookshop and drank coffee. I can’t understand her thirst for gory tales. I took the snippet from my oddly thrilled friend and all I could think was the usual thing, that had haunted me down the years:

  From where did my father get his materials?

  Where do my own parts come from?

  And I set down the newspaper and stared at my own, rather large, hands.

  ‘Effie,’ I asked one day, as we walked down to the shore. ‘Did you never think you wanted children?’

  I had never asked her this before. As she sighed gently and looked back at the town, I thought I had maybe gone too far. Then she said, ‘Bessy, we make certain choices in life, don’t we? There has to be choices. You can’t do everything.’ She shrugged her thin shoulders inside her good green winter coat. It was pattering on to snow. ‘There are always going to be roads never taken.’

  She often said things that seemed like quotations from books I hadn’t read. We walked on. The breeze that had plucked up, bringing the dry snow, was making a dog’s dinner of my wig, which had just been set. ‘Didn’t you ever think,’ I began, ‘that it’s a natural part of a woman’s life to have a child? An inevitable part?’

  Efifie looked at me sharply. We were level with the raucous, golden amusement arcade. ‘Have you had children, then?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  Effie grunted. ‘Well, I never wanted to.’

  ‘I think I did,’ I said. ‘But it never happened.’

  She tossed her head briskly. Evidently it was something she didn’t like talking about. ‘Why don’t we go in for some tea, hm?’

  We sat in a hotel’s window watching the snow come down on the prom. We had tea and cakes and I quite resented paying someone else’s prices for an inferior tea. The cream wasn’t what I would call fresh. We were quiet and at last Effie said, ‘I never quite got the hang of men.’ She smiled tightly, looking back at the sea front.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never really given them a whirl.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, hoping to make her feel better, ‘I haven’t either.’

  Though the reason I was given birth was to be some man’s concubine. Two men cooked me up between them. Without them I wouldn’t be here. But when Effie talks about men I am almost shocked to realise that I have never known men in the way that women mostly know them. My wedding day never quite came off.

  All the way home through Whitby, Effie and I link arms against the bracing wind and the oncoming snow, which has started, at last, to lie.

  In the Sixties

  Were there really Quarks and Krotons queuing peacefully on the platform at King’s Cross? Bustling gently and eager; lumpen crystalline beings awaiting enlightenment. That was just a dream, just a dream. All those pilgrimages they went on, all those mystics. A dream we were all in. Under somebody’s laconic spell. We went on a steam train up to Wales, to spend a wet weekend in an old Butlins camp, which had been commandeered for the purposes of the spiritual revolution. We went to liberate ourselves and dressed in all our feathered finery because we knew the press would be there to see us off. A gorgeous jamboree on the platform, and the train’s engines and carriages bedecked with flowers and charms.

  The chalets of the holiday camp reeked of incense and drugs. Music blared through the tannoy system. We arrived in hopeful droves, moving in a kind of bleeding elastic tango of compulsive need, bells and cymbals clashing, bongos bonging. And the corrupt old mystic sat on his tasseled cushion under the fiery glitter ball in
the dance hall. He had us kneeling at his feet and chanting. Did we see through his shenanigans? His hokum and blarney? Of course he was the Master under his saffron robes and beads and flowers, with his ray gun close to his twin black hearts. Once we were firmly under his heady influence, swaying and orchestrated, this otherworldly demon was exhorting us: ‘You must return to London. There you must destroy Dr Oho!’ But we were too far gone other than to shrug and puzzle over the meaning of our spiritual leader’s maniacal laughter.

  Some of us got a bit of the true picture when, one night on our Welsh pilgrimage, he had us perform a full black mass and there was this awful stink of goat’s cheese and boiled eggs in the dark. I remember Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith telling me late one night in their chalet, that what he really wanted was for the Cyborg-men to invade Britain. He’d have really loved it. He got off on their little blue bumps and their robot arms. Just before the Seventies began, he wanted to bring them on down in their ships the size of department stores. Land them displaying their glittering windows in Sloane Square, right beside Peter Jones and extend their escalators, letting their vile automata file onto the rainy street. Let’s see them horde and lord it down the King’s Road, shooting fashion victims, photographers, the rich.

  Anyway, besieged on all sides, Sylvia said. Peculiar lizard men were meanwhile massing in caverns deep underground—did I mention them? And in the toppled, forgotten sunken cities of the sea—indignant fish people. It was a crazy time, full of schemes. Dr Oho’s response (and this infuriated the Master) was to become a quiz show host. A light celebrity. Get his face on the cover of the Radio Times. He’d given up the crazy stuff, though he threw magnificent parties for freaks and hangers on at his house in Maida Vale. His old public call box was the centre-piece, though only the selected few were allowed to venture in for a peek during those weeklong festivals of hallucinogens and duty free.

  Tall, skinny fella with a gaunt, alert face. Looked like he might have been a B movie idol in the forties, early fifties. Now in his sixties with a twitchy silver tash and combed back hair and bright blue eyes. He chimed in with the raffish Bohemianism of the time by affecting Edwardian-cut clothes in extravagant shades of velvet and silk. The young girls loved him, flocking to his sides. He did them card tricks, passed out Quaaludes and enticed them into his shambolic time machine. It was like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with the added piquant threat of alien attack and enslavement. Dr Oho had retired, though, and all he did was throw parties. The sixties had, unequivocally, been his decade, and that decade was shutting up shop. He wanted to go out in a delicious burst of decadence and glamour, waving a big fuck-you-very-much to those, up above, who had mysteriously decided that his travelling days were done. When he was very stoned and bitter-sounding on some nights, he would rail against the myriad injustices of the universe. His gathered guests would wonder and nod. All the great and the good, and some of the wicked. I saw Dusty Springfield once, with Mida Slike, the international spy. Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart whispering sweet nothings into the ear of Shirley Bassey and then Tom Jones, while a stern robot dog sniffed his crotch and Reggie Kray kept an eye on the door. Cilia Black and Lulu sang a combative ‘Step Inside Love’ on a gin-sodden stage, to a small crowd that included Angus Wilson, Judy Garland, Iris Murdoch, Marianne Faithfull, Brian Jones, Dirk Bogarde, John and Yoko, Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Joe Orton, Jackie O, Beryl Reid, a Cyborg-man and Jamie McCrimmon. I saw Joe Orton take brawny misplaced Highlander Jamie to one side, into the gleaming kitchen, press him up against the spit-level grill and explain how he, the greatest playwright of the age, was prepared to let the kilted, time-travelling tyke take his cock in his mouth and suck him off. It was all in Orton’s diaries, found by his agent, the day after he was murdered, how he’d always longed to take McCrimmon down the throat. ‘One day, Jamie, it’ll all be filth like this. It’ll all be fan fiction. Slash fiction. Do-what-you-want fiction. That’s what we’re starting here.’ And of course Jamie would do it—but only if the Cyborg-Man could watch. It was a Cyborg-Man mark two model, fresh from dusty Telos. The kind in extra bright and tight tinfoil and an arrogant slot for a mouth.

  Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch were, yet again, discussing the problem of portraying authentic evil in the modem novel. They were on bean bags and getting through the champagne at a terrifying rate. He was all togged out like a Victorian gent, only every stitch of his apparel was a florid pink (as was his beaming face) and Iris Murdoch had her floppy-collared blouse untucked, her tweedy skirt awry. From her hair, you’d think she’d just woken up. Dr Oho breezed past and told them, if they really wanted to know about the problem of evil, they ought to get themselves to the nightmare world of Waro, where everyone was a vicious bastard. If they’d seen the final assault on the dread Cyborg-Men city, then the two of them—dilettante bourgeois humanists that they were—would understand it all. Angus smiled gently, beguilingly, and told him that the Cyborg-Men city was simply an effusion; a symptom of the same quandary. How else was it generated in the mass unconsciousness; how else had it caught light in the public imagination, burning with such fervour in the hearts and minds of a nation’s mechanised school children (sending them spinning round playgrounds, arms and fists extended, chanting evil lines?)—if it wasn’t all a result, a dreaded psychic, delayed fallout from the not-too-distant Second World War? Weren’t Dr Oho’s dreams of easy travel elsewhere just a vision of how the world might have been? Dr Oho sniffed his warm cherry brandy and cursed novelists of all persuasions.

  ‘He still believes that he could take us there,’ Iris Murdoch said benignly She fixed him with a baleful stare. That’s his inner landscape he’s sailing into—peopled by Mechanoids, Thais and Voords. He’s an authentic English fantasist, plain as any Tolkein or Lewis. It’s all whimsy with him and we ought to respect that, Angus.’ Dr Oho looked slightly mollified, but felt subtly miffed. He had a certain respect for this Iris (unlike the other Iris, currently rolling around on the floor of the cloakroom with Robin, Batman’s fantastically-endowed boy companion.) Though he thought Murdoch’s imagination tainted by a certain continental inflection. ‘If it’s true,’ she said carefully, ‘the fourth and fifth dimension, all of that, perhaps you’d care to round off the night by taking us there?’ Angus shook his head and chuckled. ‘It was just a dream, Dr Oho. It’s just a dream.’ Then his eyes lit up, because Steed and Emma Peel had, at last, shown up, with more champagne. They were always good for a laugh. ‘I get all my information from the Ministry and the divinely lissom Mrs Peel,’ Wilson purred. ‘That’s how I move from the comedy of errors, the country house—to the global novel of paranoia, multi-culturalism and desire on a phenomenal scale. Iris Murdoch was explaining to Dr Oho that Angus Wilson had been the same since the mid-sixties, when he had started teaching English Literature at the University of East Anglia. ‘Talk about the Cyborg-Man city!’ she cried. Mrs Peel flung herself down on a plastic inflatable and cast a smoldering look at Mrs Gale who was dancing in a quite vulgar fashion in the knocked-through lounge with a delirious Jerry Cornelius.

  ‘Put me in a novel, Angus,’ Emma sighed. ‘Rescue me from kitsch.’ Angus was dismayed. ‘I’m afraid it’s all downhill from here, my dear. Everything we do now, at this fag-end of time, it’ll all end up kitschy quite soon.’ Iris Murdoch struggled to her feet, taking hold of Susan Sontag’s proffered arm. And, on the stage, David Bowie was doing a storming rendition of ‘The Laughing Gnome’. Then he went into some rambling account of how his songs were transmitted into his brain by a transsexual alien being who lived in a gorgeous pyramid on Mars.

  Anais Nin, diarist and globe-trotting nymphomaniac arrived, evidently believing it was a Come-As-Your-Own-Madness party (another one). She had dressed, to that end, in a vast, gilded birdcage, with eyes painted on her breasts. ‘It’ll do, dear,’ said Dr Oho, as he made his way through the press of the crowd, Marianne on his arm, murmuring softly. Not quite the end of the decade. It was November the twelfth, 1969. John and Yoko, hairy an
d stoned, were still in their white wedding suits. They were wanting another bed-in, to protest something or other, but here weren’t enough futons and duvets to go round and, anyway. Dr Oho didn’t quite approve of that kind of thing. Not bed-ins per se, but directionless protest was a drag.

  It was my birthday. I mean, the very day I was born. Not in Maida Vale, not at this gaudy carnival, in the midst of all the tinseling and streamers. I was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear. I didn’t know it then (how could I?) but I really wanted to tell them not to get too excited, not to get too whipped up in their premature pre-millennial fever and fervour. I wanted them not to self-destruct or to wake, queasily despondent, with massive, decades-long hangovers. I wanted the party to go on till I got time to catch up and join it.

  It poured down. A very black night. The rain coming down silver and black. Early global warming and the streets heaved and pulsed with rain. Trees crackling and tumbling, shops underwater, cars and Cyborg-men floating helplessly away. Catastrophes of JG Ballardian dimensions. I fell to grateful sleep that first, that very first night of my incredibly long life and I was content and sure that the party would go on.

  It was very early morning and Maida Vale was flooding out. Waves of party guests were leaving, trashed, distressed. Noel Coward swanned in late with Dietrich piggying on his back, both decked in peacock sequins. They watched, delighted, as the dregs of Dr Oho’s End of the Sixties Do followed him into his public call box. That night, an impossible number of the clamorous throng vanished inside. You could hear them shrieking with pleasure within. What a magician! Noel took hold of Dietrich’s tiny hand. ‘Shall we?’ She shrugged and took a sip from her black cigarette. ‘Who will miss us if we go? We might as leave with them all.’ The two of them brought up the rear, nodding a curt hello to Jamie the Highlander, who looked sated and licked, bleary-eyed and sheepish. The wooden doors shut behind them all. After a few seconds, the light on the top of the box started to flash white, spasmodically. Then, with what sounded very much like the closing chords of the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ (or was it the start of ‘Help?’), it disappeared.