by Paul Magrs
My Cyberman! She smiled, almost letting the bar go.
‘Morning, love,’ he called out.
‘How’s Sedgefield?’
Andrew was disappearing into his office with its mirrored windows and the prospective member was caught in his and Trish’s crossfire.
‘Just wonderful. On its feet and running itself. That’s Phase Two under way!’
Trish said, slightly out of breath, ‘He’s just opened our second branch in Sedgefield this morning.’
‘Really?’
‘So if you drive—do you?—you can go there, too. We alternate days for saunas, so you could have one every day, but I don’t think that would do you much good. Yes, Andrew’s very enterprising.’
‘I had no idea it was such big business, this game.’
‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded, working on the bar again. ‘It is.’ The prospective member was watching a woman exercising her legs across the way, sitting down and slamming her knees together, stretching them apart again, her expression rapt, then startled.
‘That’s an abductor for your inner thighs,’ explained Trish. ‘Not very elegant, is it?’
Every time the woman opened her legs he could see what her T-shirt said. ‘Thrill Me.’
‘Keep going, Joanne!’ Trish yelled. ‘Think about being in the sun in a fortnight and getting that bum off!’
A surprise is always a good thing. It always does the giver good too, and so Dave decided to repaint their Laura’s room. Pink. There was some left over from doing the downstairs hall. It was under the sink. He made the decision waiting outside playschool. He could have it finished by tonight. All finished, clean and ready for Laura’s bedtime.
‘Hiya again.’
One of the mums. She was fifty if she was a day, with hair bleached so hard, so mercilessly it looked made of seaside rock. He might stretch out a hand and just break a piece off. Her face was papery from a good few decades of smoking. When she smiled, that paperiness made her eyes look cruel. Trish had cured Dave. She tore up two hundred duty-frees once, after returning from Spain. She kept him locked indoors fagless one whole bank-holiday weekend.
The bleached mum grinned at him. ‘Don’t you wish they kept them all afternoon, too?’
He never liked to get into conversations here. It made him look too involved. He was here doing a favour, picking up the bairn. It wasn’t a routine, he was just here every dinnertime. He wasn’t part of the mums’ set. Their fleet of candy-striped, dirt-mottled pushchairs, their squawling brats, their hissing at each other, their sucking on fags in all weathers. Dave didn’t want to be drawn into their orbit and yet he invariably was.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Especially when you’ve got things to do.’
‘Have you got things to do this afternoon?’ Her voice had dropped a note, she looked side to side.
God, he thought, I know what’s coming. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m doing up our Laura’s room. Pink.’ Sugar-and-spice pink. But the bleached mum’s surreptitious glance was switching about again, as if she was gearing up to something outrageous. He knew what. That glance took in a certain gaggle of mums all too familiar to Dave, a set studiously ignoring him today. A set with whom he’d had doings in the past. They ignored him, but they were talking about him, he knew. Hiss hiss hiss. He sighed.
‘I’ve been saving up the child allowance,’ the bleached mum said.
They’re late letting the kids out, he thought. It’s gone right chilly. Shit, she looks her age! Guess what’s coming next!
‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘What are you planning to do with it? Go somewhere nice?’
‘I hope so.’ She was looking sly again, carrying on really shifty. Probably didn’t know what to say or do next. Well, he wasn’t about to help her out. He had stuff to do anyway. A room to strip and paint, a thousand stuffed toys to relocate and protect under sheets from spattered pink drops. He had plenty on today, thank you. Dave was a busy boy. First he had to find somewhere for Laura to spend her afternoon…
The bleached mum had gathered up her nerve. ‘Them lasses.’ She nodded at the group standing to one side, now giggling among themselves, clutching at each other. ‘Them lasses were on about summat yesterday… summat you do… that you’ve done for each of them… a service you offer…’
Dave tensed. Fuck! Word’s getting about. A one-off first and then it snowballed. He’d never meant to let the numbers mount. This one was the oldest yet. ‘Yeah?’
‘Twenty quid?’
Five more than he’d got off the last one. He frowned.
‘That’s for an hour, so long as it’s now and that you baby-sit our Laura till five as well, no charge.’
These negotiations over, the skills they could offer hung for a moment in the damp air. Right now! she thought. She hadn’t been expecting right now, yet it made her feel sexy, really.
‘All right,’ she said.
Pull the curtains on the daylight, he thought. Do it quickly, as you’d rip off a plaster. Get it over with, then get onto the chores. You want to paint, paint, paint, paint, paint till teatime at least.
The shack’s doors flew open and there was an eruption of energy, of small bodies pulling on anoraks, waving arms and crumpled, still-wet finger paintings. The kids tumbled out, sure of being gathered up, knowing whereabouts those who waited stood. Dinnertime. Dave hoped the bleached mum had something decent in to eat.
A big expense, of course, had been putting twelve TVs in the gym. Same thing in Sedgefield. Andrew never skimped. MTV was on continuously. Music all day, pounding in every room; it helped to get people addicted to the adrenaline rush. Andrew explained, ‘We grease their chemical reactions with cheap music. It’s all very scientific, it’s all very primal and sexual, actually,’ and he raised an eyebrow.
At his urging Trish had taken an access course in science. He had let her go part time to do it. It was all about nutrition and, as he saw it, a vital part of her job. She thought he was very kind.
‘Sound’s off in the main reception area.’ Helen looked red in the face and cross. She’d been stretched up on her swollen, exercised calves to reach the suspended screens.
‘What?’ asked Trish and went to look.
Andrew had asked her if she wanted to go to university to do a science degree. Her! The best course was in Leeds, he reckoned. But it was part time. A hell of a run out. She’d have to think about it. What would it mean, what impact would it have on her job, on her family life? And was she brainy enough?
‘There’s no volume knobs.’ Helen jabbed at one of the TVs. Trish had to agree. The volume must be controlled from some central point. Funny they’d never noticed before. The things just came on, busy and loud, each morning, went off again at closing. Neither she nor Helen was gifted on the technical side. It was people and bodies that they worked with. On the four TVs hung from the ceiling in the reception area Take That were dancing, spinning and flexing their torsos to silence. They didn’t half look queer, Trish thought, dancing with no music on.
‘I’ll go and ask Andrew.’
These were Andrew’s quiet hours in his mirror-windowed office. Helen tried to point out she’d already had a word, but Trish had vanished in his direction.
She grunted ‘Harder!’ as if by rote, thinking it the thing to say in the circumstances. Still, Dave complied and found himself concentrating only on fucking harder. There was nothing sexy in it any more, he was just fucking harder because he’d been told to. He was putting his back into it. Her back was rigid beneath him and each time he fucked their bellies clashed, then came apart with a fat sucking noise. Her rough hands were on his arse cheeks, stretching and pulling him, making him go harder, and his balls, he realised with a shock, were almost senseless and cool with nonchalance.
Fucking, he thought (and the thought was an old one he’d not had since his first time) was like being ironed. As if you’re a crumpled white shirt. Imagine being ironed immaculately but someone leaves the collar bent up and rumpled. The shirt is
taken down from its hanger and although mostly neat it feels vaguely dissatisfied and will do so until that collar is sorted. Now imagine the collar set upon by a scalding iron; crushing down on the errant spot, drenching the fibres with steam. This hotness plied around his cock, the focus of her body as a means to slip his foreskin wetly back and forth, trawling him closer to orgasm, all that was just like doing the ironing. And when he came it was with a brief, shuddering sigh like that given by the upended finished-with iron.
As he settled back, withdrawn, tugging the condom away and fiddling with himself, she stole one kiss. With the smoking she tasted like iron, like earth, and the used condom was cold on his shin.
She locked his office door from the inside and, sure enough, found him face down on his expansive, empty desk.
‘I don’t know how to turn the sound up on the bloody tellies!’ he sobbed. ‘It’s usually automatic!’
‘That’s all right.’ Trish sat down opposite him, patting his hands. ‘We’ll get someone in.’
‘But Helen was looking at me like I was meant to know! Like I needed to know!’
‘Never mind her. She never knew either.’
‘But I should know! I should know how to turn up the volume on my own tellies in my own gym!’
‘That’s what you employ others for, Andrew. You’re becoming a mogul. Especially with Sedgefield underway and everything. It’s time for you to relax.’
He raised his head from the desk, his eyes gone puffy, to see Trish putting on her rubber gloves. Time for… ?’ Andrew’s body was what he liked to call the male-model look. He used himself as an advert for prospective members: this is the look we can aim to give you if it’s the male model you’re after. There was no spare fat on him. He had the sucked-in stomach and pendulous wide tits everyone was after these days. He looked alert, almost rodenty with alertness, and his streaked, thinning hair was slicked back for ease.
Every couple of days Trish would lay this cultivated form out naked on his empty desk. He would trust no one else with the job. From a small locker she produced unlabelled bottles of exotic muds and unguents that smelled foul but were packed with marvellous nutrients. And rolls and rolls of clingfilm. They were testing out this treatment for members, they told themselves. As the weeks had gone by, however, they’d decided that it was much too good for all and sundry.
She was very used to his body by now. Working here together, they were bound to get used to the sight of each other. The final revelation, flushed pink, toned up and still embarrassed, hadn’t fazed her much. Still she hadn’t touched him directly. She let him smear the first layer of greenish mud on himself. She was no masseuse. It was with that taut, squeaking winding sheet of clingfilm that Trish really came into her own. Lifting one limb at a time, she wound and wound the plastic about him, tighter and tighter. She could feel the heat trapped inside, squirming in his lathering of jellies. Andrew remained silent throughout the operation. There was the odd soft moan, maybe a supressed curse when she tweaked a leg hair.
Slowly, slowly, every inch was covered and he was a good 25 per cent bigger all over, layered like a lasagne. When he was immobile in the glistening, shifting crust of plastic and gels, Trish would examine her handiwork. His head stuck out at one end of the package wearing a curious expression. His face was scarlet but the inches-thick overcoat was a dull silver.
‘My Cyberman!’ She smiled at him, allowing them both their first show of affection this whole session.
Only once had she tried to persuade him. ‘You might as well. You’d get it all for free.’
Dave supposed his eyes were beseeching. His Bambi look, she called it. He loathed it because he couldn’t help himself.
‘I can’t do it,’ he said. And he knew she thought he’d let himself go.
‘We might as well take advantage of a free offer.’
Still nagging on, she came up behind him as he swabbed down the kitchen sink and the draining board. Dave threw down the rag. ‘Look, I can’t do it. I just can’t.’
Later, calmer, he offered the excuse that he’d find it difficult, working out among other men who were eyeing up his wife.
‘It’s not like that—’
I know it’s not like that, he told her, but even so, I’d be looking at you and that’d be no good for you working or me working out, now would it?
Trish shrugged. She only wanted him to get out of the house a bit. She thought he looked cooped up. He always looked as if he’d just woken up. She had suggested training as an alternative because that was what she knew. That’s how you got out of a rut, and she knew that because it was her job. He resented her bringing this work home.
‘I’ll take the bairn up to bed.’
‘Right. Dave?’
He looked at her. Laura’s head lay curled over his shoulder as he hoisted her up asleep.
‘You don’t have to shape up for me, you know. It’s for you, really. For your own peace of mind and health. I love you, you know, as you are.’
‘Yeah, right.’
The truth was, and he thought it over later that afternoon as he started in earnest with the emulsion and white spirit, the truth was that he was unnerved. Other men unnerved him and they always had. He had never worked out why. It wasn’t that he spent much more time with women, either, mind. So he put it down to his being a loner. Did the thought that everyone unnerved him make him feel any better?
When there were no women about, men were odd together. There were rituals of brashness and Dave felt excluded from these and therefore from whatever greater confidences were later tendered.
As he mixed his paint in Laura’s room, Dave asked aloud, ‘What do men say to each other when they’re alone?’ The words bounced off half-stripped walls. Curls of cartooned paper rustled round his feet. He’d spent three hours stripping already. Fucking therapeutic, mind. Drips of pink up his forearms from stirring too hard. He could still smell the bleached mum on him.
So what was it? What put him off the company of other men? What made him prefer hanging round women?
Yet he was like a stranger outside playschool. His were brief excursions into the world of women and, of late, they had been paid for. The women showed him plainly he was no honorary member. He was still Other and the battle lines were drawn. What was the centre of the female world? Dave was at home in it whether it was the furled wetness of a ready cunt or just chatting over tea, when women opened up confidences, their unstitched wounds. He knew the kinds of things women said together, he could imagine those. Men frightened him because his imagination ground to a halt with them.
He took a cloth, soaked in the tang of white spirit, and thoughtfully dabbed off the paint spots on his arms. Paint splattered in the wrong place looks so alarming, so permanent.
Spending so much time at home made Dave competent there. At home he could deal with things. Actually, he should have his own mid-morning TV show, telling others how to do their houses up, keep things looking nice. He thought if he could only bring the world into his own domestic space, then that would make it safe.
Oh, right, he thought, dipping his brush. Safe. Yeah.
One wall left to strip, two to paint, one was complete and pink. Already it was dark outside, a smoky blue night. He’d have to go fetch Laura soon. What had he been thinking of? He didn’t even know the bleached mum’s name. Hang on—Joanne. He knew the way back to her door by remembering his own steps away: no address. This impersonality shocked him. To think, only hours before he’d shot his load there, left his daughter there and if there was an accident he wouldn’t be able to say where he’d been. Somewhere out across this estate, a stranger was sitting with his bairn.
He recalled Laura at about two, speech welling up in her, giving names to her favourite things about her.
Trish she called ‘Mimi’, which Dave had thought was sweet, but Trish didn’t like much. ‘Makes me sound like a stripper. Get her to stop.’
His hands were gloved in slick pink. He smeared it on empty
patches of wall, leaving prints that looked as if someone had slipped down. The carpet was a right mess. Shit! Pink on blue carpet; they’d been after a boy. He hadn’t cleared the squirls of old torn paper before painting, and now they were trodden to mush everywhere. Laura’s bed, her belongings, her toys were huddled in the centre. It looked as if there was going to be a jumble sale.
The paint was old, tainted with the tin’s rust, and the colour came out patchy. The obstinate shreds of wallpaper he’d left were showing through. It was all a disaster.
Bon Jovi had been playing the whole time on the little cassette player on the floor in the hall.
Could he rely on the woman with the seaside rock wingtip hairdo? Would she think for herself and bring his daughter back to him? Would she think to spare him the trip out?
Dave had decided already, some time ago, he was the type to whom nothing was spared. His was the life all the hard knocks got to. If he was coming downstairs with armfuls of laundry piled above his head, he would be sure to slip down the stairs on dropped socks. He would be the one banging his elbows on hard doorframes.
And look, he couldn’t even paint straight. The room echoed dully about him. It was all pink now, wet and streaked in patches. With the dark coming in from the uncurtained window the room looked desolate.
In the past few weeks of his exciting new, secret career move, Dave had seen so many bedrooms. And, in the dark tonight, peering out of the window with no curtains or nets to obstruct him, he thought all the gaps between houses seemed futile. Oughtn’t we to pool intimacies more? Shouldn’t all these identical little box houses be interconnecting? If they did, Laura wouldn’t seem lost to him now, stuck in someone else’s world, half an estate away.
Down in the dark street, here was the bleached mum now, bringing his daughter. They were clanging the gate, chatting pleasantly. And up the street came the other mums, like a calm procession, streaming up the tarmac paths, over the scrubby grass. All the mums from outside playgroup with their stained pushchairs and their musical silk roses on their bedside tables and their electric blankets. Each of them coming to his door. Some of them looked up to the lighted window where he stood with his paint roller. An ideal husband.