Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

  ‘Here I am, ladies,’ he yelled. He’d already opened the window for the fumes.

  ‘What do I think a Cyberman is?’

  Trish had poured herself some coffee from the pot Andrew always kept standing ready. He said it was his only vice. He couldn’t drink any when he was wrapped up and he tried not to look envious as she took a first sip.

  She looked at him fondly. This was their quiet half-hour while he stewed and glinted in his pharaoh’s shroud.

  To me a Cyberman is a friendly thing. Not like they used to be when we were kids, when they went shooting people on Doctor Who, smacking people on the head and that. Coming out of tombs.

  ‘A Cyberman is a perfect man. His suit is silver and gold, he bristles with light, that curious liquid light that proper jewellery takes on. My Cyberman looks bloody expensive. I am proud to be seen with him.

  ‘He’s been custom-built and to the highest standards. Everything they say on adverts about posh cars they could say about him. They could film him running easily, easily, easily, beside a burning field of corn at sunset, playing an Eric Clapton song over the top.

  ‘He has a square jaw, like an old-fashioned hero. His eyes are narrow dark slits. He is suspicious because he is world-wise and because of this he is inured to the world. Sex with him is the safest in the world. He is laminated; his whole body is sheathed.

  ‘Nothing can put my Cyberman off his stroke. Programmed to please, he will let nothing get in the way of his pleasing me. He knows what I expect from my man.

  ‘But he is not a robot, forged to my will. Part of him—a good part—is fleshly still. His electronic body he wears as a shell, an exoskeleton. The underside is sensitive and sheltered. Like a lobster. If I crushed him from behind in a hug, his pliable insides would squirm and ooze through. I love the contrast between the bits of him that are tender and those that are indestructible. Only I know which are which. I see the chinks in his armour. He shows them to me, almost proudly. I can appreciate the way he’s had to cobble himself together.’

  She smiled at Andy.

  ‘That’s what I mean by my Cyberman.’

  ‘Oh.’ He smiled unsurely. ‘Help me out of all this shit, would you?’

  ANEMONES, MY LABRADOR,

  HIS PUPPY

  We all lived, working on our separate, idle little projects, in a slate-grey town that had a history rank with witch burnings and a one-way system of irate traffic as futilely intricate as the patterns inside your ear.

  It rained all the time and especially during that last third of the year when they held there, in our nascent Cultural Studies Department, a ten-week course of papers on witches. Papers were given by a variety of visitors in a duskily lit common room which always looked to me like an airport lounge, although I’ve never flown. An hour of turgid historicism at teatime, Wednesdays; letting somebody’s god-awful academic prose wash heedlessly over you, an hour of questions, drinks, then a meal in town, in the same, cramped, crimson room hung with horse brasses and a single, long table, reserved for a set who disturbed other diners with raucous, entirely theoretical talk of sadomasochism, incest, female circumcision.

  Julian was beginning his MA on father/son incest in Renaissance drama. He sat at one end of the table, his first night at one of these dos, in a home-made linen shirt, cuffs trailing heartbreakingly in his silver platter of garlic mushrooms. The regulation glossy dark hair flopped over this face arrogant with its own half-apprehension of its beauty; lips quite pink and curling now, with a clumsy wit, as he tried to winkle something noticeable into the conversation between his supervisor, Stephen, and the visiting academic, Ivy.

  When Julian laughed it was to draw attention to the Post-vocalic ‘r’ completing each ‘ha’; he was making a feature of a rather cultured dippiness. He was all flannels and affected stammer, groping towards the correct critic’s name, a distracted hand through hair stylishly awry with three days’ grease.

  ‘Yes, my shirt was made for me by my wife,’ he told me when I’d said he had oil up the cuffs but that it was a nice shirt anyway. He added, ‘She makes all of our clothes; mine and my son’s.’

  I was making a point of smoking particularly heavily at the meal’s end, and working through the last cafetiere, defying the puritanical looks I was getting; the modern critic does not abuse his own body. And I pictured Julian and a whole family togged up in clothes too large for them; the thin and young family, cultured and enunciating properly. Dressing up as grown-ups.

  Ivy was the American visiting professor; researching the length and breadth of Britain on instruments of torture used to quieten women. Asked her area of expertise, she would square up her padded shoulders, toss an immaculate Golden Girl perm and declare ‘Scolds.’ She talked and talked that evening and took a group of us for coffee to the house she had borrowed for a month by the castle.

  It was the oldest house I had ever been in, I think, and oddly proportioned; I felt it creak about me as she showed us to a darling little sitting room, and proceeded to slosh coffee onto a milky-coloured carpet. Stephen leaped up to stamp out the stain with J-cloths; all a-sweat now (whereas, minutes earlier, he had been replete with a good meal’s strain and an evening of intellectual chitchat). The old house by the castle belonged to a dear friend of his; he was the agent of its rental and blame for the carpet was something he could see reverting straight to him as the patch widened, darkened, and Ivy flapped about, helpless, pissed, and Julian and I sank deep into a plum sofa and chatted, making up a friendship from bits of shared bibliographies and very coy eye contacts.

  All this while, past midnight, fog came up over, around the squat castle from the marshes. Ivy hadn’t closed her chintz curtains; we were high over the town, quite comfortable, with no need to hide from aggressive passers-by. So the night punched its opacity into the room and I watched Julian’s profile; as the Renaissance people chatted, occasionally jotting down names, references, on the backs of their hands.

  So this was networking. I could feel Julian thrill with the thought of that beside me on the sofa. On nights like these are important contacts made. Before he had to leave—earlier than the rest of us, for his family—Ivy was dropping big hints his way; interest in his as yet unbegun work, for an anthology she was preparing in Texas on Shakespeare’s abusive fathers.

  I am not a Renaissance person, but I’ve read all sorts of things. We came into the early hours talking about the Sitwells. Ivy staggered off to fetch a copy of her last book from her still packed luggage, to show me the cover painting. A young Edith as a captivatingly scarlet woman beside her father.

  Stephen began to make noises that it was time to leave. Already Ivy had dropped off once or twice, but she was narcoleptic and we’d been sure—as she’d exhorted us earlier, over coffee—not to mistake her lapses for heavy-handed hints. Still, Stephen felt we oughtn’t overstay.

  On the pavement outside, beneath the castle still full of condemned men, Ivy told us about the new season at Stratford. Stephen pointed out a hotel’s single yellow light; told us that in that very room Dickens and Wilkie Collins had written a ghost story together; some fevered, fond collaboration, on just such a night.

  It took some doing to shut Ivy up, get her back indoors and the door locked, to get ourselves free. Stephen was still of a mind to be gentle with her; not so when she returned to Texas a month later, having let the shower run a full week inn the empty, ancient house, while she trotted about Scotland Peering at gravestones. The house was wrecked.

  It was that kind of term; friendships struck up, spectacular as the last fag I lit for my long walk home across town, and damped suddenly down; all trust and bravado lost.

  It was a cloying mist that night, coming through bone cold, blue. I said to Stephen, before he turned off towards his swish little place down on the quay, that I thought Julian was very pretty.

  The following Sunday evening we were drinking gin in Stephen’s flat, shouting between rooms as he braised various things for dinner—I could hear th
e carrots screaming and spitting in a dish of boiling honey—and I was reading Susan Sontag by his french windows, way above the river.

  Once I called him out to watch a woman sitting on a bench by the river, spiting the cold and taking off her socks and shoes very methodically, putting them in her shopping bag. I had to smoke out on the balcony; the flat’s distinctly minimalist lines were also supremely health-conscious ones. I took an ashtray decorated with scribbles by Cocteau outside and so missed the young family’s arrival. Julian came in with heaps of brightly coloured bedding; cheerful and scarlet he deposited his son on Stephen’s bed for the evening and ushered me in so he could explain to us all that they had spent the day walking, out in the hills.

  His wife was even younger; some four years younger than me, she was called Elsa and was small, brown, beaming. Yes, she added, they’d been to their church in the country, had lunch with the vicar, and went for a good hard walk afterwards.

  Elsa wrote novels; managing three each year, even though she was a full-time mother and wife. We boys looked shamefaced over our starters. She explained that she handwrote several drafts in neat exercise books. Her works were often autobiographical. Playfully Stephen muttered something about intentionality, textuality; at least something ending in -ality, as most comments did in those heady months of high theory and its intrigues.

  I helped dish up dessert. ‘I think Elsa’s a decadent, really,’ Stephen hissed. ‘Don’t be put off by all the talk of church.’

  ‘They’re whiter than white!’

  ‘She’s a decadent eager to burst out; just listen to her!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He’d made a kind of plum pudding thing; cloying and spiced.

  ‘I think she’s just dying for our Julian to have a man on the side. I think she finds it quite an exciting idea.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah.’

  I picked up dishes to carry, desultorily. But I was piqued.

  When I was doing literary theory research, as I was then, I could never quite get into it. My work was on my contemporaries; other theorists and what they say about other theorists. I was writing about the Subject; subjectivity’s awful wrangle with itself in the context of postmodernity. I would treat the library as a shopping mall; I took a trolley now and then between its shelves and my cavalier research consisted of grabbing books whose covers, titles, reputations preceded them or made me fancy them on the spot. My work was chancy and promiscuous and I spent my time picking up choice cuts of quotation; various notable names writing on the subject of the subject, of the body, of identity; all jeopardised now, all their integrity gone. An exciting time to be writing about such things, as my colleagues—their work more absorbing, hierarchised, historical—commented to me. I often worked at home. Sat on the 1940s settee in a rented house by the canal. There I was shanghaied into watching morning television, smoking too many cigarettes.

  I bumped into Julian in the corridor and he invited me to dinner, suggesting also that I might like to work with him, in our department, in the small room kept quiet for postgraduates, to be company in these darkening afternoons on the slope down to Christmas. Because of course, one could go mad reading tersely academic discourse in complete solitude. Couldn’t we hold each other’s hands?

  He did a full day, nine to five, since he couldn’t work at home, where the Child absorbed hours and love like a doughnut dunked in half-finished coffee. The Postgraduate Room was soundproofed with polystyrene and so he played Stravinsky on an old school-type record player. There was a combination lock on the door; from the jabbing noises made from outside you knew of someone’s arrival well in advance. Sometimes we talked about having oak panelling, a fireplace, smart prints; living our most excessive Brideshead fantasies. Those were the fantasies welling head to head across the desk in the middle of the room as we flipped through books, scribbling notes, glancing up now and then. We could relish the indulgences of the other, play opera and flounce about, so long as we kept our heads down at work; him on incest, myself on transvestism as a metaphor for postmodern subjectivity.

  He took to wearing full linen suits, stripey sailor tops and I—God help me—knotted my paisley scarves as the weather took a colder turn and I bought a long dark coat.

  Our department was in a building cobbled together in 1966 but it had a grassy quad crisscrossed by paving stones and here we could meet in the lowering gloom and hold conversations about nothing, before saying ta-ra till tomorrow morning.

  Well, if not nothing, at least about homoeroticism in Henry V. Remember: ‘A little touch of Harry in the night?’ Harry’s erotic largesse, dispensing himself, his body, about the sleeping troops the night before battle. Oh, that was the kind of thing to be made a meal of, here in Cult Stud. We were Cult Studs all right. I lent him my video of My Own Private Idaho; he was extremely keen on the homoerotic motif. It was the mortar which held Western culture’s tenets in place; even in a fractured modernity. Rome was built solely from men rubbing each other up the wrong way. He evinced a keen, theoretical interest; steam blowing out over his coat collar as we stood in the quad. Gave me a kind of mock punch before running off to fetch the Child from the creche. He carried a daft little suitcase about with him. Once, giving me a lift back one frozen night, he went to a car that looked only a little like his and, mistaking it, tried to force the lock. For hapless things like these I can feel a quirk of fondness; other times ineptness in someone with whom I’ve had odd, difficult scenes just makes me impatient and sick.

  * * *

  Another American woman! At the meal with Julian and Elsa. She was another writer, who lived near Washington in an entirely green farmhouse with a mother who thought she was Miss Lavish from A Room with a View and who, upon reading one of my letters to her daughter, Teri, had declared: ‘He is one of us.’ Things had looked promising for me and Teri, then; almost coaxed into a full-time heterosexuality by the promise of being one of the people who live in a green house in Washington and who understand each other. At weak moments the promise of being understood is enough to tempt me to anything.

  So we’d fucked and had a few nice talks, meals, awkward scenes. The marrieds invited us to coo over their house in the terrace by the park. A piano of blond wood dominated their dining room. There were shelves of bright new hardbacks; Elsa talked of A.S. Byatt, Alan Hollinghurst, how she loved gay fiction and thought she might really adore being a gay man. The Child woke once upstairs as wine was mulling on the open fire and was brought down in a blanket, fierce, warm as cheese on toast, to be inspected. My heart went out, as it always does, to kids, babies, anyone without an ounce of guile.

  I sat across from Teri. She was chewing on fat and bones; we ate pheasant, plucked fresh from the market. Her eyes wide with disgust at its gaminess. ‘It was,’ she told me the following week, ‘the worst thing I have tasted in all my life.’ To me it looked a little raw; those pink, streaming ends of bones. But what did I know? At least one and a half class distinctions away from an understanding of poultry, our birds were always banged in the slammer for four hours a time; we were terrified of salmonella. With knowledge and class comes an insouciant carelessness. That night we sucked slivers of steamed courgette dipped in sour cream and Teri bad fallen quiet, grimacing.

  I stood in the road with Julian, right up on the hill above the town. A fag outside since they, too, were conscious of health, looked at the real smoke coming from his chimney; that inscrutable, solid blue. ‘Signifying everything I protect,’ he said, with a rare flash of earnestness. The arc lamps of the cathedral distorted the plumes’ shapes weirdly; they made an umbrella. He gave me his scarf and leather driving gloves since it had begun to snow and I had a fair way to walk home. And he told me he never drank much because of his mother’s problems with it. His father owned a company in America and lived there now. I heard Julian phone him for free from the room where we worked. He often phoned his wife, too, while she wrote her novels in exercise books at home. And they talked baby talk for minut
es on end. The first time I heard it I went scarlet; a problem I never had with eavesdropping usually. Hearing him babytalk was worse than nudging his foot under the desk with my own, accidentally, as we worked; breaking the braced weight of our tension clean across and patching it with an embarrassed smile. We watched the smoke go up a bit longer and then I had to get home. We didn’t hug good night; we never did. I walked down the middle of the road, as advised, to the bottom of the hill.

  We had a friendship developing which wasn’t bluff, hearty, cruel, as two straight men might seem to us. It wasn’t implicit with use and suspicion like two openly gay men. We were romantic friends.

  ‘We have a very romantic friendship,’ he told me on the phone the following teatime. He’d rung to say Teri was about to become engaged to some Irish bloke and get her dual citizenship.

  ‘We do?’ I was sitting on the top stair at home.

  ‘You’re a very romantic figure in our department,’ he said. ‘Rupert Brooke.’

  ‘Fucking great.’ Then I delivered a short lecture on flirtatiousness. How I thought people ought to take responsibility for the signals they give off. Watch how you signify; it’s all a language. He thanked me, a little warily. ‘You’re a wise man!’ was how he ended the phone call; hearty, bluff, casual. I put the phone down wondering why I’d lectured him on messing about with things he couldn’t carry through. It was a warning in advance, I thought; just in case he got ideas. Bless him; had he an idea in his head? Oh, it was all high theory and his work seemed prohibitively complex, but he had as much sense as a Labrador I’d kept when I was seven who’d been called, incidentally, Julian. The same brown lucidity in his eyes; a careless and distracted fidelity.

  To take my mind off research which had a disturbing knack of creeping up on me every minute of the day and waking me at night with its implications, its references, its myriad, swimming footnotes, I had taken up drawing again. I filled a thick sketchpad each month with scratchy sub-Hockney line drawings. Rooms quivering with poignancy and cluttered everyday use, figures observed from afar in the very act of the humdrum and, more recently, figures and faces of those about me. My fascination with getting their expressions down for all time as if they might suddenly be lost to me in their most ordinary, usual aspects, is apparent now, when I flick through the books, in the way each drawing is labelled and dated. My sketchpads of the time have their own indexed, academic coherence; as if I’d set about cataloguing my friends. I was alert; an old hand at having friends in a town where people do research and come to talk about books; they pass you by. It’s a relay race and the baton is something you can’t afford not to fling away from you, heartlessly, when need be.