[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  “Anyway, I spent quite some time in the war with him.” Her uncle nodded at the leering poster. “He hadn’t stared as a comic yet. But he was learning his patter. He could really talk. He chatted on when he was nervous. Making you laugh when you shouldn’t. I had to hit him once to shut him up. He was endangering us.”

  “Laughing behind enemy lines,” said Wendy.

  “Exactly. I haven’t seen him in thirty years. He became so successful, and…”

  The bells were ringing for the start of the show. The other old people rushed nimbly up the stairs for their places, putting down drinks and holding tickets aloft. Some of the pensioners were in tracksuits. Not for the first time Wendy wondered at how fit-looking, how energetic modern pensioners were. They zipped about on saga holidays, they looked tanned and lean, they knew how to enjoy themselves. Gales of laughter broke out as they jostled for their places.

  There were long gaps in his rapid bursts of activity and his rattling speech. He had every speech impediment heard of and, during his four hours onstage that night, he stammered terribly. It was part of the act, of course, or had become part, and the audience laughed at his fluffs and tongue-tied pauses as much as they did at his ribald jokes. There was that tension between what he intended to do and the moments when he clearly lost his place, his nerve failed, and he flapped his arms helplessly. The audience, Wendy realised, were thrilled to see him teeter on the edge of disaster. As if waiting to see him crumble, burst into tears, or run off-stage in fright. Yet he always rescued himself with his ukulele, holding it up to his chin and tweaking it into a few lines from one of his ancient hits, crooning along in a surprising, unafflicted baritone. Whenever this happened, the audience clapped and cheered and muffled his snippet of song.

  Wendy found her mother’s laugh coming out of her. Raucous and unexpected, welling out of her at the hoariest, most obvious dirty jokes. The old comic was quite blue. Every punchline had something to do with arses and cock, tits and what he called ‘Aunty Marys’. He winked and goggled as if he was being suggestive, but there was no suggestion in it. It was all up-front. Act One ended in a long, circuitous, almost punchline-less joke about giraffes in Edinburgh Zoo. Then he whirled off stage, limping slightly.

  A dumpy woman in a spangling black dress came on to fill the interval. She sat at the piano and did them ‘Send in the Clowns’ and the sprightly pensioners raced for the bar.

  Uncle Pat had some trouble getting out of their row. The seats wouldn’t flap up to let him past and he realised he’d left his painkillers at home. He was wincing.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  He shook his head tersely.

  All through the second act sweat ran freely down Billy Franks’ face, ruining his mascara, his purple eyeshadow. His fluffed-up, dyed-black hair started to flatten. It was soaked and his face was a ghastly, streaky colour. Beside Wendy, Uncle Pat was sweating too, his laughter punctuated by gasps.

  Near midnight Billy Franks gave it up and sent his audience home at the height of their laughter. Wendy was relieved: she could get her uncle home.

  “We’re going round the back,” he said. “To meet him.”

  The dressing room’s walls were white painted breezeblocks. It was in the cellar, and a whole lot less glamorous than Wendy had expected. A spray of irises were on a table and Billy Franks’ comedy suit and shirt were slumped on a chair. The man himself sat flabby and white at his mirror, cold-creaming his face clean. He looked around. “A young lady!” and grasped a golden dressing gown, which he pulled on unhurriedly, staring at the pair of them. “It’s you, isn’t it, Pat?” he asked with a beam of pleasure, quite different to his onstage smile.

  The two old men embraced, full of their own aches and pains. Pat said, “This is my niece.”

  Billy winked broadly. “Oh, right.” As if it was in his act.

  Uncle Pat laughed. “It is, really. Wendy.”

  “A lovely lady,” said Billy, and turned back to his mirror. “I was terrible tonight, wasn’t I?”

  “You were marvellous,” Wendy said.

  “Thank you, but no. I’m putting one over on the audience. I’m exploiting their good natures. They laugh, thinking my gaps and mistakes are part of the show. They’re not, you know.”

  “Aren’t you tired of this?” Uncle Pat said. “Week in, week out?”

  “Have to, pal. Tax trouble. I never took myself off to retire in Spain. I made all the wrong choices. In the Eighties I should have got myself a big fat lucrative quiz show like all the others did, or I should have retired gracefully to somewhere hot. But I didn’t. And here I am slugging it out still. Same old rotten material.”

  “A bit dirtier, though,” said Uncle Pat.

  “I know.” Billy looked almost ashamed. “Had to move with the times, eh? It’s my alternative phase. Good, eh?”

  Wendy was embarrassed. Billy was talking about something that was new fifteen, twenty years ago. And ‘Alternative Comedy’ was something he thought of as just blue but pretending it wasn’t. To him it was a disruption of comic tradition and one that had kept him off the telly and spoiled his career. Later that night, drunk and maudlin, he told them of his bitterness about comedy moving to telly and if you weren’t on the telly you were cheap and unfunny. “And telly was full of the right faces. All these young’uns with university degrees, all political and proper. Children. Well,” he gave wink. “My face didn’t fit, did it, loves?”

  They were having dinner in an Italian restaurant across the road from the theatre. It was deserted, but it kept open late for them. Billy seemed to know the ponderous manager, who brought their dishes himself. They ordered everything and while Wendy set to work ravenously, Billy and Pat ate little. Billy talked and twiddled a whole basil leaf in his yellow fingers.

  “I had a film part, though. My breakthrough. Did you see it? Blink and you’d see me.”

  “What was it?” Uncle Pat said.

  “Carry On Down The Pit in 1984. One of their last Carry On’s. Can you imagine? A farce about the miner’s strike. I did a cameo—recogniseable only to the cognoscenti of the avant-garde comedy fringe. Singing with my little ukulele, with a yellow helmet on my head.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Wendy, hoping she had.

  “I did a number with Brenda Soobie. Lovely girl. She must be about sixty now. We were covered in coal dust.”

  “Colin will have the video, definitely,” said Wendy. “He loves Brenda Soobie.”

  “Everyone loves her,” said Billy morosely.

  They were the only customers in the place. The manager lifted the lid on the piano and picked out a tune. He looked across at them and Billy smiled. He reached under the table for his dirty-looking ukelele and wandered across.

  “Listen,” Uncle Pat told Wendy.

  Billy sang in Italian. A long, complicated song, accompanying himself softly.

  When he finished they clapped loudly and he bowed.

  Outside he told Pat, “You’re not well, are you?”

  “Not long for this world, Billy.”

  Billy didn’t say anything.

  “I’m waiting to jump.”

  “I’ll get us a cab,” Wendy called from the road, but South Clerk Street was empty.

  “I’ve got my car,” said Billy. “I’ll drive you.”

  He had a purple Volkswagen Beetle with posters for his own show stuck on the back windows. They stopped first at an all-night bakers for crumpets and cake. Uncle Pat rapped on the red door and they were let into a steamy, noisy room with trays lined with greasy paper left out on every surface. “I’ve come for crumpet.”

  “Hey, Billy Franks,” said the skinny baker. “I’m coming to see you tomorrow night. I’m bringing ma wife.”

  “I can’t do anything for her,” Billy smiled. “Have you tried the vet?”

  They drove across town, Wendy holding the warm parcels from the bakery.

  “You’ve done well for yourself, Pat,” said Billy, gazing round at the quiet fl
at. “How did you end up with the big house? I’m the famous one.”

  “I don’t own the whole house, exactly,” said Pat. He was pouring them whisky. No sign of the others.

  “It’s nice, though. I’m still living out of my suitcase.”

  Pat had wanted to bring him back to the busy kitchen, to meet the others. He supposed he wanted Billy to entertain them some more. Or he wanted Billy to see the folk he had around him now. Maybe this was best. A quiet drink. He washed down his painkillers with Glemorangie.

  “How long do those things take to work?” asked Billy.

  “It’s immediate,” said Pat. “Magic pills.”

  “I had a magic pill to cure my impotence.” Billy looked at them expectantly.

  “It’s a joke, right?” asked Wendy.

  “No, not really. I made it up. I do that lately. I start the joke without knowing what the end will be. It scares the pants off me when I do that on stage. Everyone looking at you.”

  He tried again. “I knew a man who took a magic pill to cure his impotence.” Billy looked thoughtful. Then he brightened. “His wife couldn’t swallow it.”

  Uncle Pat laughed.

  In the very early hours of that morning I made what the old, showbizzy gentleman called a ‘gift of my splendidness’ to him. I took him to bed.

  Now look, this is the older Wendy talking to you, and it’s many years since Billy Franks died, garnering a few, smutty nostalgic columns in the Sunday papers, dead of pills, booze, neglect and a fat purple heart on a jumbo jet. Floored by the altitude, he choked out his last, a few years past the turn of the century. Floored by the air hostess, he would have chuckled, winking madly.

  I made him a gift of my splendidness back in 1997 when Uncle Pat had seen himself groggily off to bed and we watched him from the kitchen table, Billy sitting with hiccups in a director’s chair, too slewed, it seemed, even to move. He’d been tight for hours, he said, on sheer adrenalin.

  I really was splendid in those days, I suppose. I always had large breasts with very small nipples and the old fellas especially loved them. Nipples pink as Belinda’s sugar mice. While still in the kitchen I let the old comic pull my dress off, all the way over my head, untwist my bra and hold my breasts in his crab hands. I remembered then that I’d wanted work-hard, old hands on my body. I wanted to feel that. My clean white skin shook in his hands and he was tender. He listened and waited on that pulse. “It’s like holding a very young bird,” he said. “New hatched. About to fledge.”

  Like my mam I always liked a man who could make me laugh. He did so all the way to my room. I made my decision and he asked very nicely. I took him in my hands and led him down the creaky boards before he was tempted to start begging. I could see, I could feel his dauntless old pecker pushing out against his pants. I pushed one of his hands into the front of my knickers, loving the snag of his unclipped nails on my hair while he dabbled at me, with increasing confidence. His hand came out buttery and warm.

  I must have been prescient at that tender

  age or I knew what was

  coming or I jumped on the first

  chance I saw but for weeks

  I’d been telling myself

  I want a dirty old man

  who’ll cover my whiteness

  with dirty old kisses

  who’ll rove over my slimness

  with floppy old skin

  I’ll turn him on:

  Soothe his wrinkled brow

  straighten out his arms and legs

  cool his cheeks

  inflame his weakened lungs

  let him shuffle about me

  indulge me

  let him Lolita me

  Too old to be Lolita, even then.

  His body was crazed with lines, and endless mapwork. Only his thin penis wasn’t like an old man’s.

  “A comic’s vital tool,” he whispered, fitting it into me, talking more to himself. “The butt of all his jokes.” I’d had to pump it delicately to keep him hard. Till the end was wet and pink like a kitten’s nose.

  We slept in a hug that almost crushed the life out of me. I marvelled at the different textures of our skins. The variousness of his: emery board, elephant hide, richest vellum. I, meanwhile, was tight and replete.

  He was the man I once told you about. The man who giggled when he came. He climaxed and roared with laughter, shaking the bed, the pictures on the wall.

  In the morning he was gone, leaving a smell of whisky, cigarettes, of basil, crushed into the sheets and my skin.

  In Colin’s room that night, he and David held still, listening.

  “That noise,” said David.

  “Someone else in this flat is fucking,” Colin smirked.

  David lay to cover him. He buried them in covers. “December tomorrow.”

  David stared at Colin. He’d come so far. At first he would close his eyes when Colin kissed him, as if taking medicine. He’d relaxed since then. Things to get used to: beard burn, stubble burn, the double volume of sperm in the bed. The towels kept handy for afterwards. Looks from the others, at first, in the hallway. Loving the noise of Colin. Hearing another man’s voice in the dark. The strange, hairy legs beside him when they went to sleep.

  When they first spent the night together at David’s flat, Rab hadn’t been surprised. He watched them, that first time, slink off to David’s tiny room. Rab sat on the settee, where he planned to stay all night, speeding and writing his endless sentence.

  David said, “I wish you could have an endless fuck like you can a sentence.”

  “I like endings,” said Colin. “I like starting again, fresh. I like putting things in brackets for later, I like feeding them through semi-colons, propping them in parentheses. I like the endless sexy tussle of sub-clause on sub-clause. Those tickly commas. Do you want me to carry on with this punctuation-as-fucking conceit?”

  “No,” said David. “Just…dot dot dot.”

  In the dawn Billy Franks drove his Volkswagen back to his digs. Telling himself jokes, singing a loud, tuneless song.

  I knew a girl who made me

  a gift of her marvellous

  youth and her

  thighs

  and

  by my eyes!

  Her thighs were a size…!

  It isn’t true. When I was young, my thighs were delectably slim. I was slim as stair rods.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  All the way there he wanted to make jokes about it. When they walked up the beach in a procession he wanted to laugh at the motley bunch they made, carrying rugs, foldaway chairs, a couple of battered hampers. They walked slowly, letting him take the lead, letting him find their spot on the deserted beach. Anne walked with him, a tartan rug bundled up in her arms. He wanted to laugh and ask her if this was his funeral procession: were they going to push him out to sea as a lost cause, watching him dwindle away on the grey, distant water? But something held Pat back from laughing. He was touched they’d all come out with him today. What a rabble they were, though.

  “The good Lord’s smiling on us with the weather,” Anne said, startling him.

  “The who?” he said. “Since when did you…”

  “Since you stopped asking,” she said wryly, still staring at the clear, November sky. The warmth was quite puzzling. “I’ve not had a complete conversion. You needn’t worry.”

  “A devout Anne is something worth thinking about,” he smiled.

  “I’ve thought about God, this past year,” she said. “Even before our Lindsey died. Ralph’s very big on God, of course. Pictures on his walls. A Catholic.”

  The old man’s mind had gone blank. “Ralph?”

  “You see how little you ask?” she said gently. “Ralph’s my man.”

  “Your man. Of course. You don’t talk about him much.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’ve become part of the family again, Anne.”

  She looked at him. “What a funny year it’s been.”

  They were he
ading towards a soft hollow of pale sand, set back from the tide. Tussocks of stiff, sun-faded grass kept it in shelter. “Why not here?” he asked, and flapped his arms briefly to alert the others.

  “I’m glad,” he said, sitting down carefully, testing the ground. “I’m glad that I won’t have to think about next year. The years keep on getting more and more complicated.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I just want Christmas. I want it to be a success. Will you stay here for Christmas, Anne?”

  “Yes, of course. Ralph isn’t expecting me back in Newton Aycliffe.”

  “You’ve been away months…”

  “He’s always busy. He holds these Crusades, in his house. Saving people.”

  “One of that sort,” said Pat, amused.

  “So we’ll have a… family Christmas.”

  “Funny family we’ve got.”

  They watched the others settling themselves, ranging at close but separate spaces on the sand. Wendy was with Timon and Belinda and hearing about Belinda’s trips here as a youngster, about plunging into the freezing sea. How purging it was. She was laughing, throwing back her head. Her brother, the Captain, still in his immaculate yellow coat, was actually carrying Astrid, who had brought her chair, but who knew it wouldn’t run on sand. Gallantly the Captain had lent a hand. Her single long plait bobbed on his shoulder. He set her down on a blanket, which Anne was smoothing out. “Here we are,” said Anne. “All settled.” It was just past lunchtime, the best part of the day.

  Colin was talking with David, who’d brought them the van and driven them here. Anne didn’t know much about this David, but she decided she’d go over there and thank him in a moment. When his and Colin’s rather animated, quiet conversation was finished with. Last came David’s friend, Rab, in his odd woollen hat, throwing sticks for his daschund, making it splash into the tide. Rab was the funny, skinny one that none of tem really knew. He seemed reluctant to sit down, to be part of them. Anne could understand that. Other people’s family groups could be off-putting, and yet they were hardly the usual family. There was very little blood here. Still, and all. Anne felt a warmth towards all of them and it surprised her. Even for Captain Simon, talking about Germany with Astrid. Anne decided that maybe she had put the Captain in an impossible situation. Of course they couldn’t conduct an… affair under her ex-husband’s roof. She could see that it wouldn’t do. You couldn’t rely on other people to be brave. Best to let it come as a surprise, a bonus. You can’t simply demand that they be brave. Anne shook her head at herself.