Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Patient Iris

  Ariel’s Tasty Dog

  Seven Disenchantments

  Judith’s Do Round Hers

  The Furrier The Better

  Emma’s Situation

  Laminating Ideal Men

  Anemones, My Labrador, His Puppy

  The Lion Vanishes

  Ocarina

  The Giant Spider’s Supervisor

  Those Imaginary Cows

  Bargains For Charlotte

  Cold Companionable Streams

  Will You Stay In Our Lovers’ Story?

  Could It Be Magic?

  Published by Vintage 1997

  Copyright © Paul Magrs 1997

  The right of Paul Magrs to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act, 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by

  Vintage, 1997

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

  Endulini, 5A, Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193,

  South Africa

  Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 973571 7

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

  This book is for my brother, Mark Magrs

  With thanks to…

  (in order of appearance)

  Joy Foster, Charles Foster, Louise Foster, Lynne Heritage, Nicola Cregan, Katherine Williamson, Jane Woodfine, Pete Courtie, Brigid Robinson, Suzi Stephens, Paul Arvidson, Andrea Greenwood, Julia Wiggston, Laura Wood, Steve Jackson, Gene Hult, Jon Rolfe, Antonia Rolfe, Richard Wilson, Lynne Pearce, Alicia Stubbersfield, Siri Hansen, Joan Diamond, Kelly Gerrard, Paul Cornell, David Craig, Gabrielle Rowe, Colin Swallow, Leigh Pain, Bill Penson, Alan Bennett, Mark Walton, Daryl Spears, Sara Maitland, Meg Davis, Amanda Reynolds, Richard Klein, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Burnham, Claire Patterson, Sara Holloway and everyone at Chatto.

  ‘Patient Iris’ was first published in New Writing 4, ‘Anemones, My Labrador, His Puppy’ in New Writing 5, and ‘Emma’s Situation’ in the 1995 Darius anthology, Watchfire.

  PATIENT IRIS

  She has a friend called Patient Iris who lives at the top of the town by the Roman remains.

  Irises take a good while to open. She thinks if you place them by the window they stand a better chance.

  Iris is patient. She watches men reconstructing the Roman remains.

  At the top of the town you can see all of South Shields, the grey flank of North Shields, the blue sash of sea.

  The Romans must have built here for the view.

  Their fort is vast. When they rebuild it, do they use the old stones or do they have all new, cut into shapes they have guessed at? She and Patient Iris watch them working and the stone certainly looks new. Newer and more yellow than even those private estates they’ve been putting up.

  She feels bad about Patient Iris. Who has turned bright yellow and sits by the phone. Who is ready to ring out in case she has an emergency. Her bedsores are a sight to see. She has looked under Patient Iris’s nightgown, at Patient Iris’s bidding. She instructed Patient Iris to sit by her window, to get some air, watch the world outside. Lying down all day does you no good in the end.

  Fat purple welts, all down the back of her. Succulent, like burst fruit.

  Patient Iris can’t quite remember, but didn’t the coast here once freeze entirely?

  It is so high up. The Roman soldiers, with the north wind shushing up their leather skirts, parading on those ramparts, must have had it hard.

  And didn’t it once freeze over?

  Patient Iris lived at the end of a street. When the coast froze up, surely it was before the time they bombed the row’s other end? The houses went down like dominoes, a trail of gunpowder, stopping just short of Iris’s door.

  Patient Iris is a survivor. She survived the freezing-over that winter when, she realises now, she must still have been a child.

  She talks on the phone with her friend. Her friend phones now more often than she visits. They both agree that visiting is not much use. There’s nothing new to see. Although the Roman remains, across the way, grow a little higher every day.

  And these two women don’t need to see each other. They are so accustomed to the sight that the phone is all they need. And it saves Iris’s friend a trip out. Up the hill is arduous work, after all. Yet they used to walk it happily, to get to the Spiritualist church. When calling up your husband was the thing, before bingo.

  Her friend phones to check up on Patient Iris’s back. Both know that her health can’t last this winter.

  And winter is stealing in. When Patient Iris wakes in her chair each morning, the first thing she sees is the Roman remains blanched white with scabs of frost, their outlines etched in by an impossibly blue sky.

  Winters like this, everything turns to jewels. Patient Iris runs her fingers over and round her tender sores as she speaks into the receiver to her oldest living friend. Will they turn to rubies, drop away, make her well again and rich?

  ‘Do you remember -’ she says, breaking into her friend’s flow. ‘Do you remember when the coast froze up?’

  Her friend is thrown for a moment. Then she sees the orange cranes frozen in the docks, useless and wading on ice. The monstrous keels of half-completed ships, abandoned, like wedding dresses on dummies with the arms not on yet and pins sticking out.

  ‘I think so,’ she mumbles. She had been telling Patient Iris about the local women, bonded in a syndicate, who won a million pounds between them on the football pools. They were all supermarket cashiers and had their photos taken by the local press, sitting in shopping trolleys.

  ‘But do you remember the seals on the ice?’ They appeared from nowhere. Came thousands of miles south because it was so cold that winter.

  Her friend doesn’t remember the seals.

  Patient Iris recalls seeing grey sides of beef stranded on ice. She worked in a butchers, running errands. The butcher boys joked about serving up seal chops.

  The seals grew bigger. From the top of the town Patient Iris could hear them bark at night. Not like dogs; grunting coughs like old men in the park. They were getting bigger because they were pregnant. The whiskered seals with large, inscrutable eyes, beached on the useless docks.

  ‘Imagine,’ says Patient Iris suddenly. ‘Imagine giving birth on sheer ice. Imagine being born on sheer ice. You come out of blubbery safety, straight into snow. The seals try to cover each other, but…’

  Her friend decides Iris’s mind is wandering. Tomorrow she will visit her in person. She begins to end the phone call. She wants Iris to put down the phone in case she needs to phone herself an ambulance. She knows Patient Iris all too well and how she likes to do things for herself.

  Patient Iris has been kneading the bedsores as she talks. Down the side of her leg, through stiff white cotton, fresh s
tains of primrose and carmine bloom.

  Patient Iris puts down the phone and thinks.

  One night when the seals were barking out their birth pangs, she left the house in her nightie and slippers and walked down to the docks.

  The dark, slumped shapes, dividing and reproducing, unabashed on the exposed span of gleaming ice. The high pig squeals of baby seals. The mothers rolling over, moist with their own cooling gels, careful not to slip and crush their children.

  Patient Iris met a woman, a hag, really, with great hooped skirts and a basket of herring on her back. She said her name was Dolly. She was a lunatic, screaming the odds at the clock face when it struck the hour. In her basket the fish slipped and goggled their frozen eyes as Dolly jogged about to keep warm.

  ‘I keep sailors inside my skirts. That’s why I wear them so big. So they can hide inside and dodge the draft. They needn’t have to go to sea. Or do what they don’t want.’

  Dolly’s face was like a coconut, the hairs growing thick inside the grooves so she’d never be able to shave them if she tried.

  Tonight Iris’s oldest living friend dreams of Iris turning yellow and sitting by the phone. The moonlight shines off stark Roman walls and drops into her room.

  Patient Iris is still, asleep sitting up, looking dead already. Apart from the slight hiss of breath, which issues as smoke from her open mouth. She is awkward in her chair, doubled up with her precious jumble of ruined organs preserved in that clatter of limbs. She looks just as uncomfortable as those cashiers posing in their shopping trolleys, arms and legs akimbo and waving their champagne glasses and oversized cheques as photographers’ bulbs go off.

  Patient Iris’s friend of many years dreams that this winter will be cold. Colder even than that winter before the town was bombed and Tyne Dock was sheeted over in ice.

  Colder still and the men decide to down tools and abandon the Roman remains till spring. It is so cold that it frightens them. This kind of weather will crystallise fragments of lost souls in the air. They rekindle themselves and brighten jewellike when it comes in dark. Centurions gather on the ramparts in their leather skirts with the wind whistling through them, their eyes dead quartz.

  In the cold imagined by Iris’s friend, the Roman remains can complete themselves.

  Old outlines glisten silver on the air, tugging at each other like a big top going up. They stir the air to recall what once stood there. Moisture freezes, clicks into place and recreates a fabulous ice palace on the reconstructed site at the top of the town above the docks.

  Patient Iris’s window is open and the time is right for irises to open. Unseasonably, perhaps, even dangerously, in midwinter. But what does Patient Iris care for danger now?

  She is open to the elements. Her sores expose her to the harshest that the north can offer.

  The cold of the north heals up Patient Iris for ever. Her gasping, fishlike internal organs stop collapsing and freeze. Her bedsores harden. Iris reaches with one arthritic hand to splash a little scent behind each ear before she allows the cold to come over her entirely.

  Scent catches at each earlobe and dangles there, perfect crystal earrings. And now Patient Iris is sealed for ever. The fate of those at extremes, like here, at the top of the hill.

  She decides to pop out for a walk. It is the first time she has fancied walking in ages. Perhaps Dolly is still out there somewhere, saving sailors, or Roman centurions, under her voluminous skirts.

  Patient Iris stops by the docks to see the seal mothers return and, sure enough, she is rewarded by the sight of their stolid hard-working, bodies.

  She is much braver now that her phone is left off the hook and she can wear her bedsores as jewellery. She will skate over the ice to see how the burgeoning families are doing. She will talk the snorting, whiskered mothers through a difficult night, as their children are slapped out like old shoes onto the bloodied glass.

  ARIEL’S TASTY DOG

  That afternoon he had a bit of a walk down town with Simon and Kerry. He didn’t get down the precinct much. Turned out it hadn’t changed since they used to hang about there, Saturday afternoons. Today they walked down with the pushchair and a shopping list. He didn’t have anything better waiting.

  ‘I bet there’s a lot of shopping you have to get,’ he said, ‘with a baby, ey? I bet there’s loads that the likes of me wouldn’t even think of.’

  Kerry looked at him. They were halfway up Swaledale Avenue. The nunnery had been knocked down and there was a little street of private houses there now. Simon remarked on it. Both he and Ray remembered jumping the wall of the nunnery on the way home from school, and not getting chased.

  ‘She costs a fortune,’ Kerry said and bent to straighten the bairn’s sunhat. Ray was laughing at the bairn’s efforts to yank it off.

  ‘You know that at the outset, though, don’t you? When you have them.’ Ray nodded to himself. ‘When you have kids…’ He tailed off because he’d been about to add, ‘A kid is for life,’ before remembering that was the RSPCA slogan for looking after dogs. He wouldn’t make himself popular saying stuff like that.

  The town clock bonged out the hour and from the industrial estate came the air-raid wailing for coffeetime in the factories.

  ‘I want to go to Boyes,’ Kerry said as they crossed to the arcade. The bairn’s wheels stuck on the tall kerb and Simon had to help.

  ‘What does she need now?’

  ‘Not for her,’ Kerry snapped. Boyes did cheap kids’ clothes—there were real bargains sometimes—and she resented him saying she bought too many things there. She liked keeping the bairn nice. She was a little girl. Simon shouldn’t complain. He should keep that complaining tone out of his voice. They were doing all right. ‘I want to go there for something else.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ray had been quiet since they’d cut through the street where he’d lived when he was about ten. He’d had a birthday party in one of those gloomy houses. Simon had been there, but Kerry hadn’t because even though she’d been in the same class she was never really a friend of either of them at that stage.

  He remembered Simon staying indoors during the party, while the others ran around, out in the back garden. Ray had been embarrassed because, with everyone just running about in the garden, it wasn’t really like a party at all. It was just playing out. He went in and saw that Simon had put his Jungle Book record on the stereo. It was old and Ray had meant to hide all that kid stuff.

  Simon sat looking at the pictures on the record’s sleeve, on the settee next to Ray’s mam. She looked shattered, still wearing her rubber gloves from washing up after the birthday tea.

  ‘This picture of Baloo the Bear,’ Simon was saying to her. ‘See the way he’s standing? At home I have a Roto-Draw set that lets you draw him standing in exactly the same…’ He struggled to find the word. ‘In exactly the same action.’

  Ray’s heart went out to him without his really knowing why. Three years later—when they were thirteen—in the school changing rooms after a rugby game, something struck Ray out of the blue. On the bench beside him Simon sat with elbows on knees, shirtless, picking clods of mud out from between the studs on his boots. Ray said, ‘Position. That was the word you wanted. Baloo the Bear in exactly the same position.’

  Simon looked at him in open-mouthed irritation. ‘You what?’

  In the precinct, under the big ramp, there was a corner made by the front of Boyes and the side of Weigh Your Own. It was all health food and cheap stuff in there, sold loose from drums with see-through lids. Everything was labelled with stencilled lettering because, in the drums, most things looked alike. Stencilled posters covered the windows, telling you how much everything cost per pound.

  ‘SUGAR’ 35p lb

  Ariel 69p lb

  ‘Radion’ 75p lb

  Pasta ‘Twirls’ 29p lb

  Omega ‘Tasty’ dog 72p lb

  ‘Ginger’ cake mix 33p lb

  Herbs ‘n’ Spices ‘Inside’

  They
paused in that corner because part of Kerry’s usual trip down town was buying a quarter of Flying Saucers sweets from Weigh Your Own and sharing them with the bairn, sitting on a bench. They had a few plants out there now and it was quite a gathering place. Everyone talks to you when you have a bonny bairn with you. Many was the half-hour Kerry had spent talking to someone because they wanted to give the bairn ten pence or tickle her under the chin. Pensioners, usually, who liked to sit on the benches in that corner of the precinct.

  Ray and Simon couldn’t find space to sit so they just stood about. A crowd had gathered around some buskers. One had a large roll of paper taped to the flagstones. He was drawing with pastel crayons, a purple sunset and a woman clinging to the back of a unicorn, which was flying. His little basket had quite a few coins in.

  ‘Let’s nick his fucking basket,’ Simon said.

  ‘Ay,’ laughed Ray.

  Amazingly the busker who was drawing still managed to sing. He drew left-handed, on his knees, and in his right hand he had his microphone, which was plugged into the same amplifier as his friend’s mike and guitar. The song they were doing was ‘Unchained Melody’ from that video with the feller from Dirty Dancing in, Ghost. They were doing quite a good job of it.

  ‘They’re bloody flat, aren’t they?’ said Ray.

  ‘Fucking awful. Look at this lot, standing round gawping.’ Simon twirled round on his heel. He saw that Kerry was talking to some old woman. The bairn was out of the chair and being passed from knee to knee. That meant they were hanging about for a while. He read the posters on the windows of Weigh Your Own again and scowled.

  ‘Our lass tried to get us onto that soya mince stuff from there.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Like vegetarian soya.’

  ‘Ay, I’ve seen it on daytime telly, like. What’s it taste like?’

  ‘Tastes like nowt. She put three Oxo cubes in with it an’ all and it tasted nowt like mince. Bloody rubbish!’

  ‘Ay, well, they’d sell you owt, wouldn’t they?’

  When ‘Unchained Melody’ finished everyone clapped. The buskers started ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’. The one with the guitar was a good bit older than the artist. It was as if he was bringing him on. Or as if the younger one was an apprentice and he was learning a trade. But he was so enthusiastic he was learning to do two things at once.