[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  I would walk in your fish restaurant and emporium and order something special. Scampi or, as some of the fish shops here do, lobster and chips. Something to make me stand out. I’ve got what they used to call a quiet face and, actually, haven’t done much out of the ordinary in my life, but I would order something special, and you would look up in surprise and, in an instant, you would realise it was me.

  Dear Timon,

  My brother is a soldier and I don’t think he’ll ever stop. He’s vigorous and vigilant and in his seventies and walks the streets cursing ne’er-do-wells and slackers, or anyone who looks like they’re heading that way. One day he’ll get himself into trouble. Somehow he thinks he must always do the right thing. I think someone—the army, I suppose—took great care to drill this attitude into him. He looks upon me, his only sister, as someone who has gone to seed. He’s given up on my ever doing the right thing. I’m a hopeless case according to him, selfish and really, I suppose I am. I’m not public-spirited. I don’t believe in it. We make our own way. Don’t we?

  Dear Timon,

  I told you last time about going on holiday with Astrid’s family. We were twelve and her family let me come along, but her father wasn’t keen on me. Her mother thought Astrid should be mixing more at school and I was the mixer. Did I tell you about the pony-trekking? They rigged Astrid into a special harness thing so she could hold on safe. She was delighted because we’d assumed she wouldn’t get a go (my friend has no legs at all but she’s a lovely girl and spirited). She made me laugh going up the narrow hill paths because I was going in front and she was shouting to me about how my horse was doing a shit as it trundled along. She gave a running talk about it and the pony people were cross and horrified, because—for some reason—because Astrid was disabled and they’d laid on special provision for her, she shouldn’t be rude and act up. She shouldn’t be laughing like a drain and going: ‘Jesus God! It’s a hole not a crack that the shit is coming out of! It is shitting out bricks!’

  When we finished back at the stables Astrid’s pony, freed of its harness, skipped about happily and lay on the grass, rubbing its back. ‘It is glad to be free of me!’ Astrid laughed. ‘I can’t be such a weight!’

  All of this came back to me when we were held captive by the visitors. We saw them rarely in those days we were prisoners. But we could hear them approach, the measured canter in the corridor beyond our door. Their steady trip-trapping sounded all wrong indoors. They walked on all fours, of course, but you could never think of mounting one. When we were in the ice fields, allowed to walk and exercise ourselves under careful, baleful supervision, Marlene and I saw the visitors run and they ran like creatures that had never been ridden in their lives. They drummed up a sheeny mist of ice chips as they pelted into the distance and I worried that they would crack the ice clean across and lose themselves. They ran in formation, but we couldn’t tell one from another. They never spoke of course, and when we were in their care and sharing their shapeless, cavernous rooms, they simply looked at us with mild curiosity. Whenever they had a finickity task to carry out, one that required manual dexterity, they would lower their noble heads and use the single, silver digit they had attached to their brows.

  Dear Timon,

  Wendy and I rode out on the bus to the coast, to sit on a scrubby beach looking up at the Forth Bridge. I took all your letters to read. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have a real correspondent. Yet I’m this plump, white-haired fiftyish spinster. You must have guessed that by now. I felt safe writing anything I wanted to you, because I knew you were listening.

  Dear Timon,

  Because I felt safe I wrote things about myself no one knows properly, not even Astrid who still lives close by. Because I knew you were listening I also felt free to invent, freely, wildly, because I never had to meet you, not really. We could stop this exchange any time and it could be like neither of us ever existed to the other.

  Dear Timon,

  I felt free, at first, to invent a different me, one you could fall for, one you would want. I laid her foundations and got you on the scent. Of course now I want to make a clean breast of it.

  Dear Timon,

  No clean breasts, no fresh slates. Whatever you’ve got written from me is the whole truth. It has to be, because it comes from me, and there is nothing more.

  Dear Timon,

  So I’m doing the dance of the Seven Veils, am I? Sorry, lovey, but I’m not sure I follow the allusion. But come to Edinburgh, and bring your head on a silver platter. Ha!

  Dear Timon,

  Are you really coming up?

  FORTY-THREE

  I couldn’t settle. I came back to London and Aunty Anne said that’s always been my problem, that I couldn’t sit still. She said she’s lucky, but she’s been able to pick up her pieces wherever she is and make it her home. She’s had to, she’s had to up sticks and settle elsewhere again and again.

  I sat at dinner with them and I wondered: how did I end up with you lot? They were like somebody else’s friends and family. In the underwater dining room, welcoming David into the fold again in his different guise as Katy’s new fella. Joshua had cooked dish after dish, all of them brightly coloured and quite bizarre. He made us laugh at them all, the things he’s been trying out and inventing in our honour. He would never tire of trying things out. The only disaster was a side dish of shredded courgette deep fried in olive oil. It was me who had to tell him how horrible it was, acrid and cindery. Josh shrugged and handed me a dish of cherry tomatoes and yellow star fruit slivers.

  His sister Melissa, that black old crow, picked a fight with Serena, annoyed that Joshua’s flash friend, as she saw her, seemed prepared to fly herself to Paris to visit an optician’s. Make two trips for tests and fittings, just to get the glasses she wanted: tiny octagonal frames that would change the way she saw the world. Serena said frames were everything. “But they could send them through the post to you, lovey! I’m sure they would!” Melissa exclaimed.

  “You don’t see the point,” Serena snapped. “It’s the getting of the thing myself. It’s a trip.”

  “A trip.” Melissa tutted.

  “Look. Those are my new eyes we’re talking about. I have to see everything through them.”

  Aunty Anne was pursing her lips. I could tell she was torn between Serena’s extravagance and Melissa’s prudence, so she kept out of it.

  Katy and David seemed pleased with themselves.

  Katy was wearing a wry, lopsided smile.

  I had seen before somewhere.

  And I’m not working up to ending this with a wedding

  It’s what everyone wants

  but they like a wedding before everything stops

  Well, not here.

  Serena, become an accomplice to Katy and David, was making plans. I listened, astonished, as Josh hung on her every word. She thought the young couple should strike while their iron was hot, and get themselves hitched. Don’t let your golden chances pass you by, all that. Even more amazing, Katy was talking it all in, too. I thought maybe she was different since Argyle.

  I didn’t like the way Joshua let Serena make plans. She leaned across the table, keeping her chin low, her eyes big. I remembered the times Josh was away and Serena was my link and how glad I was of her company. How glad she made me of her company.

  It was late. Our guests were staying over. Camping out all over the house.

  It was a cold night. Our guests were drifting about the upper landings, hunting out blankets, spare pillows, filling hot water bottles.

  Josh stopped me in the hall. “You don’t look right,” he said.

  It was like being caught not looking convincing. “I don’t?”

  “Like everyone’s getting under your feet.”

  I shrugged. “I wish Mandy had come round.”

  He looked pale at this. “She’s playing it cool.”

  “Because I didn’t like her new book.”

  Josh hadn’t read it, of course. I wondere
d what he’d think. I hadn’t told him what it had made me think.

  In the confusion of everyone going off to bed, I slipped out of the house, taking only one bag.

  The last thing I saw of Joshua: him going off to bed with his hot water bottle.

  I walked out of Greenwich and, stupidly, stood in the middle of the mostly-empty road to check my bag for necessities. It would be too embarrassing to go back now. Tampons, ciggies, cheque book, cards, Joshua’s adoption folder. I was almost in New Cross before I could flag down a cab with its yellow light on.

  He asked me where to.

  “A fair distance,” I said. “Out of London, I think. Not sure yet. Hang on.” I slammed the door shut and slid back into the dark, cool seat. “Just drive.”

  He shrugged, and drove.

  In the meagre, fleeting light, I opened my bag, lit a ciggie quickly, took a deep breath and ripped open the brown envelope.

  A sheaf of crumbling papers and I scanned them quickly for a place name, anything. It seemed indecent, being too hasty, when the information had lain hidden so long. Yet maybe haste would make it current again. The driver was impatient.

  “Any ideas yet, hon?” he growled.

  Then I found it. Her name was Lisa Turmoil. She was a hairstylist, or at least, that’s what she used to be. And she was in the North of England. We would be driving all through the night.

  “Well?” he asked again.

  “Blackpool,” I said. “We’re going to Blackpool.”

  What I was doing was brave. I told myself this again and again as we gunned up the various motorways.

  Now we were in the twisted guts and intestinal chambers of the country.

  Now we were in the clogged and sooty bronchial tubes.

  I lay on the back seat and listened to the easy motor, my driver swearing and muttering, the regular thunk of the meter. It was counting down and ravelling up my fortune, portion by tiny portion.

  I woke in the North of England, in Blackpool, at drear day.

  There were sea gulls making rich pickings of the crap left on pavements the night before on the Golden Mile. Nothing had changed. We pulled up in an empty side street and the cabby and I stretched our legs.

  “I have to get some breakfast,” he grunted, and wanted paying there and then. I wrote a quick cheque, one so fast I barely had time to register the amount as I wrote it out, or to make sure that I had done it right, but it didn’t matter. The cheque vanished into the driver’s wallet. “You’re bloody mad, love,” he sighed. “What made it so important that you couldn’t wait and get the train up instead?”

  I laughed. “All of this. I wouldn’t have got to see the morning like this and in Blackpool. Taste the air.”

  “Fish.” He sniffed. “And birds crapping everywhere. Same as anywhere you go.”

  “Not to me.”

  Don’t get all sentimental, Wendy. It’s only the place you started out.

  And no one knew she was here. Not yet. No one could find her, unless they tracked her whereabouts all the way back to her childhood. That might take ages. It had certainly taken her ages. She smiled at the cabby. “Well, thanks, then.” Poor bloke. She’d dragged him out, through the night, all the way from South London.

  He sighed and tutted and started to move off. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Of course. She was.

  She went off down the Prom.

  I still know my way around here. I used to run around all these streets. I check the address on the old certificate again and I’m sure I even know the hairdressers’ shop it mentions there: the street not far from our one-time home.

  FORTY-FOUR

  She remembered reading a really bad novel about three women in New York. It must have been in the Fifties or something because it had seemed old fashioned to Wendy. The three women worked in jobs like advertising and showbusiness and modelling and they all fell in love with men who gave them—as Aunty Anne would say—the runaround.

  Wendy never finished the book because it was too long and she got sick of all the characters and then her Mandy said it was crap anyway and that she was wasting her time. All the women in the book were so traumatised by their goings-on that they started taking pills. That was the upshot.

  Then thing that Wendy remembered most, and especially the morning after her night of passion with the old comic Billy Franks, was the moment when the main character in the book eventually copped off with her boyfriend. She went to bed with him and Wendy waited for all the gory details but they never came. The women in the book had been worried that she ‘couldn’t give her all’ to a man and when she found that—shazam!—she could, then she’d come out with something that had stuck in Wendy’s head.

  ‘I function. I am a woman.’

  Whatever that meant.

  When she got up early for breakfast, ravenous and clutching her sheets for the washer, Wendy repeated the words to herself. I am a woman. I function.

  She felt curiously clear-headed.

  She was bundling messy sheets into the washing machine when she realised that she wasn’t alone in the kitchen. Aunty Anne was sitting at the table on the swivel chair. She was in her fleecy nightdress, clutching a pillow to her chest. The bottle of Glemorangie was open in front of her.

  “You look like you haven’t slept a wink,” said Wendy.

  “Pat had another bad night.”

  “Oh.”

  “You kept him out late enough.”

  “He met up with his old pal…”

  “Yes, I heard a whole lot of noise in the night. All sorts. That’s what woke me up. I got up and found Pat calling out for help, half fallen out of bed. You could hardly hear him for the racket.”

  “Oh god,” Wendy said.

  “Hm,” said Anne. She was quite drunk, Wendy realised. There was only a finger or two of whiskey left in the bottle. Her aunt was looking at her.

  “What were you doing telling him to take you out of his will?”

  “Not this again,” said Wendy.

  “If the old man wants you to have his money, then you should take it.”

  Wendy turned to leave. “I’m going to check on him.”

  “No,” said Anne, standing woozily. “He’s sleeping.”

  “Right.” Wendy turned to the washer and fiddled with the programme.

  “I’ve got some whites that could have gone in with that load.”

  “It’s started now.” Wendy sat down with her Aunt, who dropped back into her swivel chair.

  “You just go charging in, doing what you want, getting your own way.”

  “Me?” Wendy couldn’t believe this.

  “Yes, you. And you get away with it because you’re young and attractive. You don’t even know that everyone is giving you your own way. You just expect it.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Wendy.

  “Ever since your poor mum died, you’ve turned ever so hard.”

  “Maybe I have.”

  “First you want to get your hands on your uncle’s money, then you don’t. You get me to get you in with him, get you set up for life. And then you decide you’ve got principles and you’re too good for that. And so you make him take you out of the will. A poor dying old man’s will and you make him faff on with it. You’ve got everyone doing the hokey bloody cokey.”

  “All you care about,” said Wendy levelly, “is what you want, Aunty Anne. Let’s face it.”

  “I want you to be happy.” Her aunt looked tearful.

  Wendy tossed her head.

  “What, you think I’m lying?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “Of course I want you to be happy, you stupid little bitch.”

  Wendy had a burst of inspiration. “I reckon what pisses you off and gets right up your nose is that Uncle Pat hasn’t asked you what you want. No one’s asked you want you want. They haven’t done for years. You’re completely terrified that you’re past it and out of the game for good.”

  Aunty Anne picked up her t
umbler and flung it at the wall behind Wendy’s head. The crash of the glass startled both of them.

  They were silent for a moment.

  “You’ll see how it feels,” Aunty Anne promised.

  “What would happen if I took the money, Aunty Anne? It would still be the same me.”

  “You wouldn’t have to deal with the ordinary shit. The shit that’s held back me and everyone else we know.”

  “If I got that much money,” said Wendy, “I’d only blow it. I’d be surrounded by people telling me what to do. I’d listen to all of them and get properly fucked up. Look at me now! I haven’t got a penny to my name and it still happens to me! People are always telling me what I should do with my life.”

  “Because,” her Aunt sighed, “because you’re already rich, Wendy. You’re surrounded by people who want to have your youth, your time, your looks…”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “It’s true. I would call that being rich.”

  The washing machine was going into its next cycle. Wendy said, over the noise, “If I got the money I’d get right away from all of you. What would you think of me then?”

  Aunty Anne shrugged.

  “I’d leave you all. And then I’d find some bloke. I’d spend it all on some bloke who would probably be wrong for me. The first bloke who said he loved me for who I am.”

  Aunty Anne was shaking her head.

  “And I’d blow that million pounds. I’d chuck it away on the first fancy man that came along.”

  “How did you get to be so bitter, Wendy?”

  “It’s not bitterness.”

  “Sounds it to me.”

  “I’ve just listened a lot.”

  “You should learn from what other people say, but you shouldn’t let it put you off.”

  Wendy got up to go.

  “We’ll get you that money, Wendy.”

  Anne watched her niece go back to her room.

  Then she looked up at the suds sliding down the window of the washer and the wet folds of sheets as they pressed themselves on the glass and pulled away.