[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  “I know.”

  “Serena hasn’t. Serena’s hardly got any.”

  “Now, Katy. I’ve told you before about upsetting Serena.”

  “I’m not upset,” said Serena. “It just… for god’s sake, Josh, she’s nine years old. She’s old enough to know what she’s saying.”

  “Of course she is. And she knows what she’s saying, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, I wish she’d learn some manners.”

  “Manners are for people who want to hide something,” said the child. It was obviously something she’d been told many times.

  “Yeah,” said Joshua. “Manners suck. My lovely daughter and I are on a crusade to rid the world of manners, aren’t we? And tell people what we think of them?”

  “Yeah, Serena, you’re…”

  “That’s enough, Katy.”

  It was the day before we were due to visit them at Greenwich that Mandy arrived at King’s Cross with her few bags, her unborn baby and her author’s copy of the book in which her story was printed. She signed this and gave it to me on the way to Aunty Anne’s house. “I can’t take your copy!” It was a thick paperback, over five hundred pages of stories, with a union jack on the cover. BritLit Four: New Stories for a New Britain.

  “Have it,” she sad. “I’ll pinch another at the launch party.”

  Which was next week, at SuperBooks in Charing Cross Road.

  “Are you nervous about it? About being launched?”

  “Am I hell.” She glanced outside as we heaved around the corner into Sloane Square. “It’s only a story.”

  Her house almost completed, filled with the spoils of many consultations and shopping trips with Serena, Aunty Anne was spending a lot of time at home in Putney. It seemed to me that the place didn’t quite suit her. It was all that minimalism—far too much of it—good for the soul as it apparently was. She had lots of space to move around in, which she liked, but the walls were bare apart from a few examples of chilly abstract corporate art, which she didn’t like much anyway. “I’m investing,” she explained, “in bloody horrible stripes and dots.”

  When we turned up she didn’t seem very pleased to see Mandy.

  “And you’re keeping well?” she asked. “No problems?”

  “Having babies is easy so far,” said Mandy. “I’m a text book case.” Mandy had already told me that she was having sleepless nights, not only because of the writing. And she had gory morning sickness. When she talked about the muscles of her stomach stretching apart to make room, I thought of butterfly wings being pulled off and it made me feel cold. As always, Mandy spared me no details. Aunty Anne was quizzing her about her plans, subtly making it clear that she wouldn’t be welcome to stay here forever.

  “I’m looking for a place of my own to rent. I thought maybe I’d stay her. See what literary London has to offer.”

  “You wont’ be doing much in literary London with a kiddie to see to. Why don’t you go back up home?”

  Mandy didn’t answer that one. “I was sorry to hear about Uncle Pat.”

  “He had a rough time at the end.” For weeks Aunty Anne had been silent on the subject of Pat.

  “I remember him telling me how chickens drowned in the rain. He told me that years ago.”

  “He was always telling you daft things,” smiled Anne.

  “I wish I’d come up to Edinburgh.”

  “You were busy,” said her aunty, and pursed her lips.

  “It was a busy year,” said Mandy.

  “I’ll help you put your things upstairs,” I said. Upstairs, the guest rooms were perfect, untouched.

  “She’s going to live in a completely empty place,” said Mandy. “She’ll be all alone and go bitter.”

  “She’s a funny woman,” I said.

  “When she first came to Blackpool last summer, you thought she was marvellous.”

  “Did I?”

  “That’s just you. You get swept up into people’s atmospheres. Their auras. Who is it now, then?”

  “Oh…” I said. “No one.”

  Aunty Anne hadn’t said anything about Uncle Pat since she said to me, just after the Strange Matter show: “It was him, wasn’t it?”

  “Who? When?”

  “Tell me you saw him as well. On that stupid bit of film your friends had. I know they’re playing games. And I think it’s cruel. I feel got at, personally. I don’t know what they’re doing, but…”

  “What are you talking about, Aunty Anne?”

  “They’ve sliced and spliced their film up, haven’t they? To make that fake spaceship landing. They’ve got their publicity and everyone thinks they’ve very clever, but I’m hurt, Wendy. It was a horrible thing to do.”

  I think I knew what she meant.

  She went on, “Those people coming out of that… that thing they filmed. The spaceship. Your Uncle Pat was there, wasn’t he? They put him there, on that fake film.”

  “I don’t know what it was, Aunty Anne. They believe in it. I don’t think it was a fake.” This was at the time that Timon and Belinda were making their rounds of the late night chat shows, magazine interviews, and we didn’t see much of them just then. They were living in a hotel, and planning to go to New York, taking their film with them. I had watched it repeatedly and really couldn’t believe it was faked. Aunty Anne said, “I wouldn’t put anything past them. That Belinda wants so much to believe in it all, and Timon is helping her out with her delusions. But I think it’s wicked and cruel, putting Pat on there. Didn’t they realise how it would make me feel?” She tried to drop the subject, and couldn’t. “And Captain Simon, for god’s sake! Large as life and coming out of a spaceship! Pushing Marlene Dietrich in a wheelchair!” She left the room then, to check on dinner.

  What surprised me more that Aunty Anne’s grievances was that she had failed to see what I saw, the first time I watched that footage in the TV studio. Standing behind Marlene, with Uncle Pat and Captain Simon and the horse, almost a silhouette in the glare of the weird light, was Mam.

  So we didn’t come back to the subject of Uncle Pat again until Timon and Belinda were about to return from New York. By then, Mandy had launched her writing career with BritLit Four in Charing Cross Road. I had been round Joshua’s house in Greenwich, and Colin had arrived, fresh from Paris.

  It was only then that we heard that, en route to Heathrow, Belinda had completely vanished while in first class, leaving a half full glass of champagne, and Timon in the toilet.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It was Serena’s joke that Josh was an aesthete and a dilettante collector of valuable odds and ends. She made him into a monster of unappealing material appetites. And it was true, he was a demon in a junk shop, scattering lesser items and rival browsers, spending his little cash on useless, often bizarre gee-gaws. He had an eye all right, but not one like anyone else. He had taste, but it was quite strange.

  He wasn’t the snob Serena thought. She made him out to be someone who always had to have the best. What he really liked were things that drew the eye. So although he didn’t himself drink, he had a drinks cabinet stocked with every bottle you could think of, just because it was a funny old, red lacquered thing.

  Serena came with me those first few times I went to the house in Greenwich. It was a curious, red-bricked house which stood alone, just a slice of air between it and the houses either side. When Serena was there she relaxed into the oddity of Joshua’s home, into the purple room, the orange room, the underwater dining room and she always made a point of extolling his taste. I used to think she was living out her own idea of her friend. When he met him, at Oxford, he was quite young and she took him up and started to mould that taste of his with bursts, prolonged or brief, to a whole range of aesthetics. Now that his taste was formed and very nearly complete, she admired her own handiwork, ignoring those parts that didn’t accord with the original plan. Funny woman.

  The Josh I think of is much more ramshackle. It’s the Josh who, ye
s, dressed himself up three times a day in colourful outfits, but fretted and asked me continually if he was going out into the world looking a fool. Whose exquisite jacket pockets were held together by the tiniest of safety pins. He always liked shopping in the most expensive shops and bought two of everything he liked (one for best, one for everyday), but only in the sales, when he could become quite fierce and managed to get forty, fifty, sixty pounds knocked off his total. His bookshelves were replete with shining hardbacks, many of them first editions, but he was no reader. Serena gasped over his wide and eclectic tastes. Later he confessed to me that hardly a spine on that shelf was sufficiently cracked to prove that he’d opened those books even once. Text worried him and made him feel insecure. Younger, he’d been braver, and read widely, dismissing and commending authors as he still did the columnists of newspapers and the people they wrote about. Text that came loose in newspaper sheets, he had no problem with. When it came bound up in covers (and the only hardcovers he bought were perfect bound: he despised those glued-up fakes), then that text stole his nerve away. Nevertheless, the gleaming, colourful shelves in the underwater dining room, floor to ceiling, looked wonderfully expensive. The room was called the underwater dining room because Katy had covered the windows with blue and green cellophane, casting us in aquamarine shade. Mermaids and octopi appeared everywhere, as cut-outs, standing figures, rubber toys. Other rooms were similarly given over to whatever father and daughter could dream up. The white marble fireplace in the living room was, as Serena said, as finely dressed as the shoulders of a Duchess, with antique clocks flashing their expensive innards, porcelain figures and full-bellied cases, but there was also a plastic Godzilla and a string of fluffy parrots.

  Joshua made no explanations of his taste. He wasn’t a bore who talked you around his every acquisition. When I asked, though, he did tell me about the four pictures in the hallway. They came from a children’s book he had found in a junk shop. They were grey and framed in grey, the only other colour being orange, for the oranges that a girl was shaking out of a tree and her hair, which was styled in a vivid bob. I loved those pictures, ripped from four moments in the book’s adventure. I asked Josh, but he could never remember what book it had been. It was ages ago, and he hadn’t taken much notice. He just liked the drawings.

  He had his reasons for liking everything, according to his own, quiet scheme of things. And so if he liked you, you automatically felt vaguely pleased with yourself.

  He drove a petrol blue Skoda, which was the biggest challenge to Serena’s blithe assertion that he always bought himself the best. He’d snapped it up for seven hundred pounds and boasted that it had never given him a moment’s bother. He had a car tape deck that slid out of its place in the dashboard and when he left the car he brought this with him. He carried that tape deck by its plastic handle and it looked like a compact metal handbag and I told him so.

  When he drove me around London, when he drove me anywhere, I used to love sitting beside him. I would look at the night road, until he noticed out of the corner of his eye and look back at me. “What?” He would fumble for a cigarette. I would slide my hand under his thigh while he drove. I don’t remember how that started. I just liked the warmth and weight of him. He got used to me doing that. When I forgot, and neglected to absently slide my hand between the seat and his thigh, he would turn and look aggrieved. “Mm! Hand!” When he was pleased he would tilt his head side to side and didn’t know he did this until I pointed it out.

  I sometimes think the whole pattern of my falling in love with Joshua was in my pointing out things he did naturally. I noticed them, said them, and he’d feel silly until I told him they were lovely things to do unconsciously and so we’d go on.

  Yet I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve already told you I fell in love with the fella, and Serena and I haven’t even visited Greenwich yet.

  They were still only getting to grips with building the Millennium Dome at that time. They were nailing thick metal sheets onto the struts. They looked like plates over a skull. When it was up and finished and empty, I thought, Joshua would have a smashing view.

  That night early in March we arrived and Joshua was still busy preparing himself. Serena treated the place like her own, hanging our coats on racks dangerously overladen with Joshua’s and Katy’s array of outdoor things. She went through to poke about in his tiny galley kitchen which, she said, she approved of because everything in it was white and cobalt blue. On the way she pointed things out and I caught my first glimpse of the grey and orange pictures, the clockwork owl, and the Peruvian armoire freighted with Art Deco tableware. Serena was stopped on her way by a woman she obviously knew and hadn’t been expecting. She executed an embarrassingly phoney double-take as the woman, an ample, mumsy figure in flattering black, looked up and smiled.

  “Wendy, this is Melissa. Joshua’s sister.”

  The woman rose to offer a plump, ringed hand. She had been sitting with Katy and they’d been listening to our approach. Between them they had a Sega Megadrive console upturned and opened like a patient on an operating table. Melissa waved a baby screwdriver at us. “We knocked this contraption over and buggered it up.” She sighed. She had a pronounced Welsh accent, which was surprising if she was meant to be Josh’s sister. She looked at Katy. “Sorry lovey. I don’t think I can fix this.”

  Katy tutted. “I shouldn’t have bothered asking you. Can you mend things?” she asked me.

  “Me? Oh god, no.”

  “He shouldn’t leave fragile things out,” said Melissa primly.

  “Joshua,” said Serena, “has a horror of unbreakable things. He thinks people who keep indestructible things around them must be dangerous.”

  “I’ve never heard him say that,” his sister snapped.

  “He obviously has other things to say to you.”

  Between the two women there was a palpable air of antagonism.

  Something has happened to my language.

  When I set out on this thing, ducking and

  diving through my early life I was

  switching points of view and first

  person was something I dipped

  into and out and I was quite

  different

  Now I’ve switched on one mode

  I’m coloured by another time in

  my life

  Back then I would just have said:

  “Them two women hated each other’s guts.”

  Now,

  something has happened.

  “You haven’t introduced your friend, lovey,” Melissa told Serena.

  “This is Wendy. You remember my very good friend, Anne? She’s Anne’s niece.”

  Melissa snorted. “That coarse woman from Blackpool? The one who kept talking about her legs and her millionaire husband?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I must say, you don’t look anything like your aunty.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Ah now,” said Josh’s sister. “Look, I’ve offended you. You mustn’t listen to me. I’m an idiot and a bore. I interfere and I always know better than the other person. I’m sure your Aunty is a tremendous person.”

  “After your brother,” said Serena stiffly, “she is my closest friend.”

  “That’s no recommendation, eh lovey?” Melissa gave a deep laugh. “My brother and Serena here are about the flakiest people I know. It’s all greed and taste with them.”

  Serena looked mortified.

  “Yet they’re happy in their own way. And Katy here is an absolutely midget gem.”

  Katy looked at me again. “My dad fancies you.”

  “Katy!” said Serena.

  “He said! After the baths the other day, he said… I could give her one.”

  “He did, did he?” cackled Melissa. She looked like a bird, sitting on her great haunches, twisting her head to listen to Katy. I found out later that she was slightly deaf, and used this as an excuse to talk that bit louder and cut across what
others were saying. Next to me, Serena’s irritation was such that her hair was just about standing on end.

  One thing I had to get used to was how late Josh always was. In that respect he really did live in a world of his own. He could never quite see that by keeping people waiting he could piss them off. I’d find him, terribly late already, partly dressed and staring at two pairs of neatly-ironed socks, making up his mind which colour. Once we rowed about his returning from a meeting he had out of town, some business connection. He was due back at ten, didn’t arrive until half past two, hadn’t phoned and didn’t see why, when he showed up, I was beside myself.

  Eventually that night he appeared, barefoot, reeking of some obnoxious Harrods aftershave, in slim, black Italian trousers and a black ribbed top that clung to him. He had shaved, which was disappointing to me.

  He hugged me quickly, impulsively, crushing me to his tight chest. “I love these breasts,” he said. “I could push myself up against them all night.”

  “Josh!” cried Serena, grabbing her own hug. “You’ve turned all rough.”

  “I don’t care,” he said lightly. “Now, have you all been introduced? I can’t bear doing that stuff.”

  “They’ve already started to fight,” said Katy.

  “Good. I think we should eat straight away.”

  In the underwater dining room we ate trout by candlelight and Katy made a big show of pulling out her fish’s crisped eyes and snipping at their roots. I laughed. There was a salad of nothing but cherry tomatoes in mustard and oil. Josh was crazy about cherry tomatoes, bursting them between his teeth like grapes when he read the papers.

  “I shall have to make a file-card out on you, lovey,” said Melissa, from across the table.

  “Oh yes?”

  Josh said, “My sister is so stupid that she forgets everything about everyone. She pokes her beaky nose in everywhere, but retains nothing. At home she has a boxful of little cards, with all the details written in. All the gossip.”

  “It’s my system,” said Melissa, helping herself to more of the runny and tart summer pudding. “It’s so I can keep up with what the world is up to.”