[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  They both looked at me funny.

  No matter who wrote those books—young or old, male or female—they all wrote about me. A woman of eighteen, stepping into the world, waiting to see what it will bring her.

  “A beautiful woman of eighteen,” I added. “It’s all my story.”

  “Well,” said Timon. “That’s what you’d call an epiphany.”

  Wendy looked suspicious. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Literature at Manchester Poly,” I said, “And I start in the autumn.”

  SIX

  That summer their mother died. She was at home on the sofa, which was just as well. She would have hated to die in hospital. “And you know what us lot are like,” said Aunty Anne. “Something would happen, a whole series of horrible somethings, and none of us would get to her bedside in time. She would pass away all by herself, because we were still waiting for buses.”

  As it was, their mother died with her family standing around her.

  “All my eggs,” she whispered, and they looked at each other.

  Her hair was just growing back, into a tufted, punky style that suited her. But she looked drawn and tired out. They had known for some weeks that this was the last round of her fight.

  “You’ve been in and out of this hospital,” said Aunty Anne. “They’ll be sick of the sight of you.”

  Their mother smiled. “I had more false alarms when I had our Wendy.” She looked at Wendy. “You were doing the hokey-cokey for a fortnight.”

  Wendy nodded. She stood and watched, shocked by how calm everyone was. Their mother was dying and so they were all on their best behaviour. Their mother was dying and they watched it like they might watch from the Golden Mile as the rides on the Pleasure Beach burned down.

  She had managed one last trip into the world. She was in a wheelchair, which Aunty Anne soon caught the knack of pushing. Aunty Anne was laughing the whole of this period, but if anyone elbowed in to help push their mother’s chair, she would turn ferocious. Cheerfully setting her own weight behind her sister was the one practical thing Aunty Anne could do. She could lend her sister those marvellous legs, for a week or two at least.

  Sunday best, walking abreast, the whole family went to visit the waxworks on the Golden Mile. Their mother had a hankering to see the Chamber of Horrors. Timon came with them, and he was the most shaken by the grisly spectacles they took in that afternoon, following the wheelchair’s slow, squeaking progress from tableau to tableau.

  “Isn’t it scary!” whispered their mother, and the girls had to agree. Threads hung from the dark ceilings, brushing their faces like cobwebs.

  They passed through the Vestibule of Murderers, the Grotto of Stranglers, and the Annexe of Slashers. They watched jerky, animatronic bodysnatchers pulling parts of waxy bodies out of holes in the waxy ground. The parts looked mushy and useless, but the snatchers looked pleased with themselves. Dry ice curled everywhere, sea green and blue. A mad husband was dunking his wife in a frothing and steaming bath of acid. Then came the best part: the Hall of Monsters. Vampires squatting in clock towers, feeding the bats and frightening the hunchback. Those same vampires issuing suavely from behind bedposts and wardrobes. Frankenstein and the Wolfman were in a woodland setting, both cursing their heritage as, behind them, the creature from the black lagoon came dripping up the shore. In a golden tomb the mummy was clutching its bandaged head as it came back to migrainey life. How pleased their mother was to see them in the flesh.

  Finally there was the Anatomy Exhibit, which was only for adults. It was full of life-sized dummies, mock-up, simulacra of bits of bodies. Cross sections and amputations, remains and souvenirs. It showed all the things that could go wrong with you.

  “It’ll be like a freak show,” tutted Aunty Anne. “I’m not going there. Let’s go and see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Now, she had a pair of legs, didn’t she?”

  Their mother didn’t want to see the Anatomy Exhibit anyway. “Too much like real life,” she said.

  The most sombre room was that full of famous rulers. It was at the end of their trip out. The displays were roped off, as if these really were eminent and important persons that commoners weren’t allowed to touch. It was the least popular room, especially on a hot afternoon.

  “Look at all the jewels!” said Aunty Anne. “Imagine they were real!”

  Wendy thought her aunty sometimes sounded like someone who had always been poor. And yet there was her husband, apparently a millionaire. They all watched the spotlights glimmer on theatrical jewels.

  Their mother took a large orange out of her handbag. She waved it at Mandy. “Here, love. Nip over there. Shove it inside her dress.”

  Mandy’s face lit up. She took the orange.

  Aunty Anne started to laugh. Linda said, “You can’t...”

  But Mandy was over the rail in a flash. No alarms went off. No one noticed. She put the orange where her mother had told her, and gave Maggie Thatcher a third tit.

  Their mother had brought a whole carrier bag, full of sick room fruit. “I’m sick of the sight of fruit!” she laughed. “Fruit makes me think I’m ill!”

  They progressed into yet another chamber of famous people. These were the real stars. The daughters took their instructions, and the pieces of just-past-their-best fruit that she handed them. Ceremonially, they jumped the braids and trip-wires and put:

  A banana down the skin-tight dancing pants of Michael Jackson.

  A pear down the back of Arnie Schwarzenegger’s bathing trunks.

  A whole pound of clementines down the front of Barbara Cartland.

  Grapes in the hands of a supine Liz Taylor, and

  an apple, like Magritte, like Wilhelm Tell, on the head of Superman.

  SEVEN

  They thought our mother was reckless. They thought she was brassy and loud and that made her reckless.

  Then, when she became scared of everything, they lost patience with her. Why couldn’t she be brave any more? Why wasn’t she laughing in people’s faces, or hurling herself into the wind? People need other people to be brave.

  They thought her life had made her timid. Her husband had walked out and started another family. She became increasingly poor. She brought up three girls alone, and then she became ill. She took a whole load of hard knocks. This eroded her courage, they thought.

  But I knew our mother better than anyone. She was always a worrier. She was never as defiant as people thought. I saw her close that front door and cry hard tears. When there had been a stand-up slanging match outside on the walkways, or down in the street, and our mother was involved, she’d give as good as she got, or better. But when she was back in private, those defences would fall away. She’d look shattered.

  She had spirit, but not entirely the sort they thought she had. She was quieter than anyone would believe, especially in the years when she was laughing her head off. Even when it seemed she did everything she could to draw attention.

  All these things to deal with. Her bits and pieces. Who’d have thought she owned so much? Would anyone want any of this?

  Looking at her living room (and it was hers now, not ours, as if her going had pushed us out and the things there were already in the past) I realised that there was a horse motif throughout our mother’s choice of ornaments. I couldn’t say I ever noticed it before. Horse brasses hung dully on their black leather straps. Horse shoes were nailed above doorways for luck. Pictures of horses pulling ploughs or carriages were in the hallway. Her china shire horses lined up along the bar’s frosted glass. Even the soda syphon had a horse’s head.

  Only now she was gone was I seeing things.

  She had three shelves of novelty tea pots, all for show and never use. They were in the shape of cottages, castles, Blackpool Tower, Dusty Bin, the Rover’s Return, a red phone box. I lifted up all their lids and peered inside, finding buttons, toggles, two stamps and some old earrings, not very nice.

  They are some kind of fake gold and one of them is cr
usted in black and brown, with a wizened bit of what looks like scab. I drop it back into the teapot when I realise that what I’m holding is the earring that Mam ripped out of Mandy’s head. I’m looking right at a chunk of Mandy’s earlobe. These earrings have been hidden inside this house-shaped teapot, ever since the night Mandy came back late and announced that she had given her virginity gladly to a boy called Martin.

  The earring—once yanked out of her ear—got thrust into this pot, bloods and shreds of flesh and all, and forgotten about, as Mandy howled and bubbled. Linda called an ambulance and when it came we all raced off to watch Mandy get stitched up at three o’clock in the morning.

  Mandy was fourteen and I was eleven and she told me, to reassure me, that it was just a grown-up row they’d had. She and Linda never skimped on the details they hoped would educated me, and that included those of her deflowering. They wanted me to know what I had coming to me. They wished someone had explained things properly to them. Our mother was never a very skilful explainer.

  Mandy had wanted to lose her cherry in the open air. After the Pleasure Beach that night she had taken Martin, who was in her composition class, to the park, and they rolled under the trees. She let him push a finger into her and then, nervously, both afraid they would buckle and snap it, his tight cock. He pressed on for two or three strokes and then he got scared he would come inside her. She said to push in a couple of times more, just so they’d be able to say they’d actually done it. He fucked her like he was washing up the very best dishes, gritting his teeth. Martin, relieved, pulled himself out and tossed himself off in the long grass. Mandy watched interestedly. Then he tucked himself away and helped her up. She came home, and that’s when Mam hit her, for the first and only time in both their lives.

  Aunty Anne said she was never a one for looking a gift horse in the mouth. She said this and she wasn’t trying to be funny, but the things she was referring to were all horse-shaped. Our mother’s ornaments, horses of different sizes, textures and colours. Bequeathed to our Aunty Anne by my mother’s slim will. They presented themselves to her as a quandary. What do you do with a load of horse-shaped household objects? And, as Aunty Anne pointed out, it wasn’t as if she was settled in her own place. If she had her own house—fine—maybe she could consider filling it with horse memorabilia. But she doubted her lover in Phoenix Court would be thrilled if she brought these things to him.

  They made quite a collection. We laid them out in rows on the living room carpet. Horse-shaped everythings, even teaspoons. Our mother’s will had stipulated that if anything with a horse on it was to be found in her flat after her death, it was Anne’s. Our Aunt was surprised as any of us. On the day of dishing out the bequeaths and leftovers, Aunty Anne found herself looking at hundreds of gift-horses.

  We brought them out from under the bed. They were on shelves, in cupboards, on top of wardrobes.

  “I could open a restaurant and the theme could be horses. I could display these to the public, for a charge.” Aunty Anne was full of schemes like this.

  “But do you like them?” Linda asked pointedly. She didn’t, that was plain. She was looking at a stuffed donkey from Spain. It was wearing a sombrero.

  “I don’t really like them, no,” said Aunty Anne.

  It seemed a terrible thing, to criticize a dead woman’s taste.

  “Then you’ll have to get rid,” said Mandy. “We can’t leave them here.” Bit by bit we were cleaning out the whole flat. No one quite said that we were leaving forever, but it was obviously in the air, with every neglected corner that got swept, every cubbyhole that got emptied.

  Aunty Anne decided she would sell of her horses at a car boot sale on a Sunday afternoon. None of us had a car, so that was something to work round. She thought about borrowing one, but then a very nice man in charge told her she could lay her wares out on a wallpapering table instead. So she set about flogging her horses.

  She found that she was a very successful saleswoman. She haggled and hectored and hooted with laughter. There was such a commotion around her stall that no one could go by without looking. All of Saturday night she’d been up making toffee and cakes and scones, using up the bags of flour, icing sugar and spice that were left in our mother’s kitchen cabinets. Aunty Anne was selling cakes for thirty pence each.

  Gradually she let fly our mother’s herd...

  She made forty-seven pounds and announced that she would take us all out to dinner.

  Timon would get her used to being normal again. Mandy told him, “You’re the only one who can bring her out of herself.”

  There was little Wendy wanted to do except sit in the mostly-emptied living room and watch videos. Her mother’s horror videos were almost unbearable to her, because each time the monster crept up on the heroine, Wendy could hear her mother shouting out: “He’s behind you!” She could hear her mother cackle and groan each time a dodgy special effect burst or splashed or lurched onto the screen. She could hear the mocking shrieks of her mother in the gratuitously bloody bits. But Wendy went on, through hot, still afternoons, watching every one of the tapes.

  When Mandy asked him, Timon readily agreed.

  Wendy only shrugged when he said, Come out. Face the world again.

  He took her into pubs and they would sit whole afternoons and evenings away. They drank themselves drunk and sober again.

  That man over there, look how long his swallows of beer are. He’s really drinking it down. Gollop gollop. His eyes are wide and his eyebrows go up like he’s being forced, but no one’s forcing him. I can see right up through the end of his glass and his mouth opens and shuts in close-up.

  What’s Timon saying to me?

  They say a child can’t imagine the world going on beyond their own death. That the point of maturity is marked by the realisation that life goes on without you. My own horrid epiphany was that the world went on longer than my mother. I couldn’t believe it.

  Ping ping ping.

  Snapping the apron strings.

  At that time I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t listen to a word Timon tried to tell me. I’m sure he was telling me sensible, supportive stuff. He had lost both his parents. He knew the territory. And I, who by then had spent a year hanging onto every word uttered by this big, beautiful man...ignored him.

  In the pubs where we sat smoking the afternoons away I would look at the carpets and think about how they were stiff with bitter. For some reason I found the long, sunny afternoons hardest to get through. I became fascinated with the scarred varnish on the bar and tables, and thought about how, for generations, they had been scoured by spirits. The place was sodden with booze. Its medicinal tang hung in the gloom.

  If they asked me, how did I respond to my mother’s death, what would I say? There wasn’t much I could say.

  Did I, like Linda, throw myself into my work?

  I had no work.

  Linda won herself awards for her immaculate service. Got herself promoted. Now she was allowed to do in-store make-overs. Lovely. Shoals of nervous women brought their unmade faces to her counter, and fidgeted there on stools, submitting themselves to her expert fingers.

  Her insurance clerk Daniel wanted her to go higher and higher.

  Take your beautician’s exams, Linda!

  She wanted to be a Doctor of Glamour. A Professor of Beauty.

  Because he was good at getting things insured, Daniel was promoted, too. He bought a house on a new estate, out of town, where all the houses were in cul-de-sacs and made of gingerbread. They stood with discreet distances between them. Neither saw any reason why Linda shouldn’t move in straight away. Our mother had died. The family was already broken up.

  Mandy, Timon and I helped them to move. Daniel covered their new, barely-dried walls with brown hessian wallpaper. They had Swedish-type furniture, all bought to match. Minimalism, Daniel informed us, was his watch-word. Linda didn’t look so sure. She liked things that would draw the eye. In their new house they didn’t eve
n have a three piece suite. They had bean bags in different colours, and scatter cushions. Aunty Anne wasn’t impressed.

  “You show all your drawers, sitting in these,” she said, smoothing her skirt as we all sat in bean bags. It was the evening of their moving in, and we were eating fish and chips, starving after all the lugging around. Linda had fetched them in as a treat for the workers. You could tell by the look on Daniel’s face that he wasn’t keen on us eating in his new front room.

  Aunty Anne had come to inspect the place once the work was over. “Am I showing my drawers, Daniel?” she cawed. She loved to find new ways of distressing him. “But look at my lovely legs!” She lifted them in the air, slumping sideways in the orange bean bag.

  Mandy’s response to our mother’s death was to plunge herself further into the nineteenth century. Even the way she talked started to change. She talked in whole sentences and would put on all these silly voices, like someone in a book. She was making plans for moving to Manchester, and met a man on one rainy, flat-hunting trip. They had frothy coffee in Meng and Ecker’s after a matinee of Saint Joan at the Royal Exchange. He was in a sky blue plasticky coat and she knew almost immediately that he was the one. His half moon glasses had yellow-tinted lenses and he talked knowledgeably about cubism and modernism and Virginia Woolf and, by degrees, Mandy said, she could feel herself being seduced. “The moment he got onto stream of consciousness...I was lost...”

  Meanwhile I was pretending to be of drinking age, and trying out every drink ever invented. Settling on which would be my tipple. My downfall and demon. Campari and lemon. Egg nog. Lemon vodka. Peach Schnapps. Southern Comfort and lemonade. The sicklier and stickier the better. It was as if I was determined to make myself ill. And I was still but a child, with the same sweet tooth. I discovered After Eight flavoured vodka. But I never threw up, not even drinking these ever-sweeter confections. I kept them all in. I made my own self as sweet as could be and, through a dreadful summer of mourning, steadily fermented.