[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

Anne hugged the pillow from Pat’s bed to her chest. What she had told Wendy was true. Pat was sleeping restfully now, of his own accord.

  Last night she had sat with him after his funny turn. The room still smelled of vomit, even after she had scrubbed at the carpet and stripped down the bed as he slumped on one corner of the mattress. To her, the room seemed tainted by his sickness: the smell was in the air, touching every available object and surface. This whole flat was full of sickness, she thought, watching Pat start at last to fall asleep in his clean bed.

  When Anne went out to work in the fleamarket and car boot sales, even though she was immaculate and fit as a fiddle, Anne was sure that others, strangers, could smell and detect that lingering hint of sickness, as if it had rubbed off on her.

  She listened to his flutey snores. She watched the tiny tremors in his white eyelids.

  He hadn’t needed money or prestige or any of the rest of it to make him dignified. He always had that about him. It was natural. She’d recognized that much, the first time she’d seen him, doing a rubbishy magician’s turn on talent night in a Manchester pub. She would say—though not to his face, in case it made him big-headed—that it was a natural aristocracy that Patrick had. He would behave like a gentleman if he lived in a slum.

  Tonight she had seen him shivering, calling out in a weak, high voice. She had seen him sitting on the edge of the bed, caked in his own sick and shit and the whole mess smelling of alcohol. She had seen him crying and cursing himself. When she sponged his naked body down she had been crying too. His seemed like a body she had never seen before. She had become just a nurse.

  Now he slept.

  And she watched him, as she held the pillow to her bosom. She cradled it like she had once cradled Colin, when he was so tiny Pat had hardly dared touch him in case he broke. At the time Anne thought Pat wouldn’t hold the child because he wasn’t his. He was above such things. He’d taken them in, married her, adopted the baby, but he wouldn’t claim him as his own. But Anne had been wrong. Colin was far more Pat’s child than hers.

  Pat was never indifferent. He was scared and puzzled. He was bewildered, perhaps, but he was never aloof. He had loved them.

  Anne held the pillow out and held it a little way above his face. Silently, silently. She didn’t want to wake him. She wondered what it would feel like. It might be rather nice. All that clean warm white pressing down. Taking you in. She would have to press down hard enough. She would die if there had to be a struggle to the end.

  And from down the uncarpeted corridor she could hear the sounds from Wendy’s room. Squeals and panting and muffled thuds.

  Did you press it down hard like a surprise or did you lower it gently so the feeling was imperceptible? So the dense weight touched his face and it would be like a slow, everlasting kiss?

  She didn’t know.

  It was almost dawn.

  She had let the dawn creep in.

  She didn’t know now, how this had to be done.

  For a second though, Anne felt more powerful than she had in years. But she couldn’t do it.

  She pulled the pillow back to her breast and cuddled it there, as if to keep it away from Pat’s face.

  Then she got up and went heavily to the kitchen to drink, to get drunk, and wait for Wendy.

  Aunty Anne watched the skylight turn a bright and fresher shade of blue and the stars go out over the Royal Circus.

  She thought: if I’d been a different sort of woman, tonight I could have committed the biggest act of my life.

  But if she’d killed Pat, shouldn’t she have killed her sister, too? Wouldn’t she then be guilty of letting Lindsey suffer needlessly?

  Anne hadn’t acted in either case and she was glad. Not glad for them, but glad for herself.

  None of these things, she told herself, are for me to sort out.

  AFTERWORD

  Fancy Man was written under the influence of Henry James and Shirley Bassey and Jeremy Hoad, to whom it is dedicated, with love.

  With Fancy Man I moved away from Newton Aycliffe, from the town of my growing up, froM the Phoenix Court trilogy.

  I went elsewhere, like I did in life, ages ago.

  I still want to write about the North.

  I’ve lived in and written about the North East, the North West, and Edinburgh.

  And it isn’t really all about the bleak working class north, and travelling south.

  Wendy goes south and my quandary as much as hers, as well as Isabel Archer’s before us, was where to stay put.

  Your fancy man always tries to take you elsewhere.

  Newton Aycliffe and Phoenix Court still drew me back, of course.

  It’s where Aunty Anne’s own fancy man wedged his glorious bulk and from where he refused to budge.

  Perhaps I’m as drawn to origins as I am to the way we reinvent ourselves.

  I’m always interested in survivors.

  My characters, my family, my friends are survivors.

  This book also comes with thanks and love to another long list of people who have influenced me and go on doing so.

  “All the lighting in here is from candles,” said Katy, staring across the oyster bar. “It’s like sitting in a cave.” It was atmospheric here, they all decided. It was coming up to midnight and it was even snowing outside.

  They were in a bar under the dripping stone arches in the east end of the city. After the shops shut town was almost empty. Katy, Simon, Douggie and Shelley had come out to celebrate and do tequila stammers. Lick-slam-suck. Chins gleaming with salt and lemon juice. Puddles of Montezuma on the table, soaking the Rizla papers. They’d had nachos, of course, and the orange mess of their leftovers sat with them all night. ‘Wonderwall’ came uninterruptedly on the juke box: someone’s favourite.

  In her spare time Katy was a painter, but she worked in an office. “The way the fight here is moving...it’s like that cartoon. Remember Roobarb and Custard? It was done with scribbly felt tip so the colours jogged about and hurt your eyes. It’s like that here.”

  It was Katy’s birthday. She’d already had a bottle of wine at work. Her friends’ presents were laid out on the table. Housey things because she’d moved in with Simon.

  “But he’ll get the benefit of these too!”

  Simon ran a self-conscious hand over his new-shaved head. “Smart.”

  Matisse-blue salt and pepper shakers. A fun orange plastic cafetiere, more show than use. A silly collage pasted into a green frame, from Douggie, a painter friend of Katy’s. “This means,” she said gloomily to Simon, “we’re really fucking married now!” Quite suddenly she felt like crying. She went to the loo and sat there for a while. There was no paper. She found a few shredded bits in her pocket.

  What had Simon bought her? A food mixer. So she could make her home-made hummous even better. Four cloves of garlic, just how he loved it. He’d waited till tonight, to give her card and present with the others. Blithely he’d let her leave the fiat this morning, her birthday unacknowledged. This made her cry as soon as she reached work and the doorman told her many-happy-returns. Simon looked gorgeous with his hair new and fluffed up. The goldy studs of his piercings glinted and his clever hands picked scabs of wax off the bottle.

  Shelley had brought After Eights. She didn’t have much money because she was doing voluntary work down the homeless centre. She came all dreaded up like a crusty, and got everyone to use the black envelopes the mints came in to send each other silly messages. Simon wrote one for Katy that said he wanted to go down on her when he got her home and Douggie got it by mistake. Simon coloured.

  He and Katy lived four flights up a red fire escape in Thistle Street, the centre of town. The fire escape was the only way in and out of their new flat. To them it seemed quite hazardous, quite glamorous.

  After midnight they found the empty city frozen and sheeted with ice. Their party stuck together for half an hour, sliding about on the ice. In St. David’s square, taking long running jumps and skating easily. T
hen they broke up, leaving Katy and Simon to go back to their canyon of warehouses. A streetlamp was level with their front window and shone in yellow on them as she laid him down on the sofa, their hard, green, 1950s sofa. She undressed him slowly, like a present.

  “I’m the same old thing inside,” he said. She couldn’t disagree. The same old salty taste of him.

  He gave her something in a home-made box. Something arty farty. It was a packet of Marlboro Lights with only one in. He had dipped a single ciggie in pink glitter. She held it up and laughed.

  “A camp fag!” she said. “A glittering fag,” he said.

  Before he could stop her she’d lit it and taken a drag. She coughed and coughed and he thumped her back and the cigarette, dropped in the ashtray, put itself out.

  Shelley and Douggie couldn’t call it a night. They shared a flat further out of town and wanted to make the best of being here. As usual Douggie was pulling them towards the Queer Triangle, towards CC’s and dancing. “I’m tired,” Shelley wailed, standing in the abandoned main street. He was skipping ahead, oblivious to the cold now he felt he was getting his own way. Shelley wore six layers, jumper on jumper and two denim jackets. She had worn these in the advice centre office, where the clients came off the freezing street in even more layers. Layer-chic, Douggie called it. Like all the gay boys here he wore his clothes as small and tight and thin as they would go.

  Tonight he suddenly disappeared over the black iron fence into the private gardens along Queen Street. His jeans were a vivid orange in the murky, untouched snow beyond. It was a different world. “It’s not fair that it’s private in here!”

  “We’re free to break in,” Shelley pointed out reasonably, throwing her leg over the fence.

  They lay in the snow and made angel shapes, flapping their arms to brush and make wings. Then they rolled balls of creaking snow larger and larger, to build a snowman.

  “I was thinking about mum,’ Shelley said. Douggie adored her mother, not least when she cooked a meal round her daughter’s flat. Funny greasy little Chinese parcels of wontons, seaweed and tofu. Her mum drank half pints of gin and brayed with laughter. She wore a burgundy rabbit fur jacket from Oxfam and talked at length about tampons and how the last one she used tended to dry up some of her juices as well as the blood and it took some getting out. Katy blanched and made it clear she didn’t approve of Shelley’s mum at all.

  “What’s the matter with you? Hey, leave your boyfriend behind. He’s got an old lady he could be cheering up, here.”

  Simon shrugged helplessly. Wearing his trendy footballer’s top. Katy could have punched him, grinning like that. Shelley’s mum looked her square in the eye. “Hey, I’m not a wicked person. You’ye got to believe that.” She sounded so desperate, but spoiled that by very deliberately fetching one of Katy’s ciggies and taking a long drag. “I’m really not a wicked person.”

  Their snowman is finished. Douggie did a sculpture unit on his art foundation course, so this isn’t your usual three blobs with eyes and buttons. “He’s a bit of a hunk!” says Shelley, stepping back to survey.

  “I hate that phrase,” says Douggie, who can be prissy. He’s taken off his jacket, showing off his muscles and his green checky shirt. “Hunky. Like men were edible.”

  Yet he has made a sexy snowman who, if he were ice cream or sparkling icing sugar, Shelley would have no qualms over eating.

  “Race you,” says Douggie as he turns and runs out of the park. He leaves his sexy snowman, his flatmate, his jacket behind and he vaults the iron fence, back onto Queen Street. He’s pelting towards CC’s.

  She’s used to him running off. Usually on their ad hoc nights out he’s never to be seen again and she knows he’s gone off with some feller.

  Tonight, breathless, she catches up with him at the crowded bar. Karaoke night at CC’s. Two dykes are up doing Meatloaf. ‘Real Dead Ringer For Love.’ “Same old lot in here,” says Shelley, jabbing him in the ribs.

  With a pint each they struggle through the upper floor, the black and white lino, the pressed bodies in denim, plaid, leather and Lycra, through the scents of two dozen aftershaves. Downstairs it’s Step-Back-In-Time night. They dance desultorily — loving it — to the Nolans, Tight Fit, Boney M. Someone shoves poppers under their nose and says she’s “Tanya, from Texas!” Douggie see Tanya in the gents later, handing her little bottle along the blokes at the urinal.

  Past three there’s a new arrival in the sweaty basement.

  He swaggers in wearing Douggie’s abandoned jacket and nothing else. The crush of bodies pulls back when he appears. Startled by his presence, his nakedness. His cool.

  Shelley tries to tell Douggie. The newcomer dances at his shoulder. Breaking into his space.

  I know he’s there, Douggie’s eyes tell her. Hers tell him: You’ve cracked it.

  She draws back to let Douggie flirt.

  Abba is on. Douggie dances with his new man. Soon it is time to go. Shelley tugs his elbow. “You can’t take him home!”

  “Why not?”

  “He isn’t real!”

  “He’s real as anyone else here!”

  “But...he’ll melt!”

  Douggie laughs at her. His new man waits to be propositioned and taken home on the nightbus.

  Shelley gets on the same bus at the top of Leith Walk. She feels like she’s walking three paces behind, so she won’t cramp his style. From the back seat she watches Douggie laugh and joke with his snow man. She stares at their twinned, white, shaved necks. The snowman’s is, of course, the whiter. As the bus slides through the glossy dark Douggie’s arm goes round his new feller’s shoulders. His hand kneads gently at the sexy back of that neck. The pressure and warmth of that gesture, she knows, is melting the snowman already. His flesh is glittering. Shelley stares at the streets going by and knows that next morning she’ll be there to talk it through with Douggie, when there’s nothing left.

  OUT OF SEASON

  “Don’t knock it Robert,” she told him.

  Aunty Jane was getting cross as she clip-clopped across the piazza di San Marco clutching her useless sun hat, swinging her bag and scattering the evil pigeons as she went. “We can’t help the time of year,” she went on. “It’s cheap, all right? That’s all that matters.” Robert took a last look at the towers, domes and scaffolding, and followed her across to the arcade of shops. They were glowing with coloured crystal and glass, beckoning to her through the fog.

  That’s all she wanted to come for, he found himself thinking. The shopping. The shopping and the Italian men. Outside an expensive café a mini orchestra had started to play. ‘We Are the Champions’.

  He hurried after his aunty knowing that, by the time he caught up with her, her mood with him would have changed. It always did. They were best mates really. Otherwise, how could they work together? How could they come on holiday together.

  SANTA’S LITTLE HELPERS

  Back at home in Whitby, they even had rooms next door to each other in the Christmas Hotel. They were high in the attic, far from the paying guests.

  When Robert had been down on his luck and, after a new direction for his pitiful career, it had been Aunty Jane’s suggestion that he join her in the fishing town and become an elf, one of Santa’s happy little helpers in the Christmas Hotel.

  The Edwardian hotel looked out blearily across the wet black rocks of the shore and the crumbling priory. It was filled mainly with pensioners and run by an evil-looking woman with grotesquely swollen legs, whose idea of fun was to celebrate Christmas every day of the year. The ancient visitors lapped her sales gimmicks up.

  All summer Robert had waited on, ran around and been a general kind of servant, all dressed as an elf in a skin-tight green costume and a red hat. The outfit had shown off his packet something chronic: his festive little holly spring, Aunty Jane had laughed, something else to cheer up the old dears.

  Hard work in the Christmas Hotel, pandering and present-wrapping, all summer long. Then came autumn
and meagre, rather begrudged bonuses and the determination in both nephew and aunt alike that they had to get away on holiday. Away from the churning froth of the North Sea and the keening, kamikaze gulls. Time to fly on some cheap airline to Italy and hopefully catch the last of the sun.

  They took the kind of flight where you have to pay up for even a glass of water and the stewardesses sell things like aftershave and bikinis up and down the gangway.

  PEACHY

  They’d been in Venice for a day. It was misty and the drizzle was warm. Like dishwater, as Robert put it: dropping on them slowly as they sat in pavement cafes, traipsed foggy, perplexing alleys, and minded their steps on slippery humpbacked bridges. “Well, I think it’s downright romantic, seeing it off-season and autumnal,” Aunty Jane announced just this morning as they embarked on their exploration of the Left Bank. “When it’s foggy like this, you never know who you might end up bumping into, coming around the next corner.”

  Aunty Jane was coming up to fifty. Robert had to admit she’d kept herself nice. She was slim and still, as she put it, with-it. She’d bought a caseful of patterned summer frocks. She was here, she said, to take in the culture: the music, buildings and paintings. All Robert had seen her looking at was the men.

  Having bruschetta and a glass of the local pink Pinot Grigio in an off-licence last night, she’d told him: “I’ve finished with those chat-and-date phone lines. Never again. All those fellas want to know is what dress size you are, and are you still pretty, have you got your hair done nice. And when it comes to them, they don’t want to tell you anything. Well, then you go to meet them in some godawful wine bar — a place too young for both of you — and he’s sat there waiting and he looks like Wurzel Gummidge. Oh, no. Not for me. No more shooting in the dark.”

  Once she’d thought that she was bound to find someone, working in a big hotel. Some millionaire with a rakish glint in his eye as she brought his fried breakfast. Someone with cash to spend on a smart, mature person like her; who couldn’t believe his luck, meeting her in Whitby, where he’d come to spend an unseasonable Christmas. She wouldn’t mind if he was eccentric.