by Paul Magrs
‘I liked your work tonight,’ I said.
She looked at me long and hard. At first I thought she had a suspicious look about her. But she was just thoughtful and on something for her nerves. Then she smiled.
‘It was from my erotic sequence,’ she told us. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to give it an airing tonight.’
‘I think you made the right decision.’
‘I think so, too. Did I tell you I’ve been put into an anthology of erotica?’
She raised her voice to tell us this. Some of the poets nearby must have heard. They nudged each other and, in her deck chair, the poet in her own right briefly stopped waggling her hand.
‘I know I look old now,’ Margaret said to me. She had one of those disconcerting glimmers in her eyes. The young at heart addressing callow youth and hoping to shock. ‘But I’ve had a surprisingly rich erotic life in my time.’
‘Have you now?’ I lit a cigarette and noticed you had started talking to Chelsea and her friend. My filter had fuchsia lipstick on it, which surprised me. I thought it would have rubbed off already. I had come dressed as one of Genet’s sailors, which seemed quite a flash thing to do in Darlington.
Someone had changed the record, prompting Margaret to say, ‘Prokofiev. Listen. Nothing like woodwind to get me going.’ She used her cane to bang time on the flagstones.
You and Chelsea and the rugby player were pissing yourselves about something. The poet in the deck chair had gone back to crying.
‘Do you know, there’s nothing as seductive as a man who can play a clarinet well.’
I said, ‘I’ve got an uncle who plays clarinet. He’s a dentist.’
‘I fell in love with a clarinet player when he was playing. He seduced me utterly and he wasn’t even aware of my presence. My existence, even. I watched him all night. Black hair slicked down with wax so it looked painted on an egg. Serious expression. Lovely evening dress. And strong, strong hands with veins that worked, magic fingers that ran up and down his slender instrument.
‘I was at the concert with my first husband. We’d been having a rough patch. Our last rough patch. He was buying me back with trips out—concerts, meals, theatres. For this concert I was sitting there with a whole heap of arum lilies. I’d been feeling a bit daft with them. They’re not the sort of thing you can carry discreetly at a swish function. I’d even thought about going to the ladies’ in the interval to get shut. Imagine going to the loo and finding arum lilies sprouting out!
‘But I forgot all about them when the clarinet man came out and started to play. They lay limp on my lap and my chest rose and fell in time with him pursing his lips to blow. I think my husband just thought I was enjoying his company. He was like that.’
You were laughing harder now, I noticed. Chelsea had a cherry up each of her boyfriend’s nostrils and whipped cream shaped into a beard for him. Everyone was a bit tiddly so they were laughing. So was he and trying to lick it off. Everyone was glad Chelsea had decided to see a nice policeman. He was obviously good-natured. We were pleased—although we wouldn’t dare say so—because she had packed in a long-running do with a patient of hers. He had vanished.
‘When the concert ended, my clarinet man had to play the last few notes. He was the star of the show. I forget what the piece was. Usually I never know when a piece ends. How do people tell? On the radio it always takes me by surprise. The audiences sound very well informed. I’d be scared I’d jump up too early, clapping and making a show of myself. But this time there was no doubt. My man had put the most exquisite finishing touches on the whole extravaganza and, all at once, we all jumped to our feet to applaud and applaud.
‘And suddenly I knew exactly what I was to do with my arum lilies. It came to me in a flash. I’d seen the type of thing on the telly with ballerinas and opera singers. I hoisted up my armful of flowers, pushed past my husband and along the aisle. Everyone still clapping, some of them watching me with eyebrows raised as I pelted down the steps towards the orchestra pit.
‘It obviously wasn’t the done thing. But I didn’t care. The last thing I saw was my clarinet man, taking in the applause with a modest grin. He bowed, rose up, and looked stunned to see me heading his way. I must have been shocking, I suppose. But when I put my mind to it I can be impetuous.
‘I slipped. I flew down half the aisle’s steps. Arum lilies everywhere, pattering down on musicians’ heads.
‘I hit the pit with a sickening crash.
‘Silence. And then pandemonium. Everyone came running, my husband among them. In my daze I could hear him shouting, even above all the noise. But it was my lovely clarinetist who reached down for me first, setting his shining instrument aside. I had broken both my legs in numerous places. The agony was considerable.’
She fell quiet for a moment and watched this sink in.
What do you say? You want to ask if that’s why she has a cane now, but you can’t. And meanwhile she rested both plump hands on her stick, looked away and smugly inspected the rest of the party before going on.
‘I was in plaster for months and months. Right up to my navel and I’m still not right. You wouldn’t believe the itches. And how clammy you get when it isn’t even warm out. Have you ever been in plaster?’
I was thinking that she couldn’t possibly have been in up to her navel. I mean, how did she…? How could she manage to…? Yet people get their whole bodies put in plaster sometimes. They must have to work something out. It’s not as if you can suspend all bodily functions until you’re on the mend. The body doesn’t work like that, surely. Anyway, no, I told her, I’d never broken anything.
‘Then you’re very lucky. Although for me it was a blessing in disguise. My first visitor, after my husband—who just about said in as many words that it was all my own stupid fault—was the clarinetist. I lay back in traction, amazed. I could hardly say a word to him. He was charming, charming. The perfect bedside manner. He was under obligation, he said, to visit me on the orchestra’s behalf and it was a pleasure, he added, a personal pleasure, to check up on the wellbeing of my legs. And he brought me some arum lilies. I was in heaven.
‘After that he came every week. Until they went on tour and then it was every month and he would phone up from whichever concert hall he was appearing at. Sometimes, if he had his instrument with him, he would tootle a few notes down the line at me.’
She sighed.
‘Eventually I was allowed to go home. I knew something was up when my husband never showed up on the Monday morning with the car. I stood in the foyer by the hospital flower shop and realised that he wasn’t going to come at all. In a flash I saw that my husband had taken the opportunity to leave me. Well, I didn’t mind really. The spark had long gone out of it and when he had visited me recently I was obviously elsewhere. I had been thinking about my clarinet man and where he would ring from next, even though he’d given me a tour itinerary and I knew where he would be until he returned. I called a taxi and went home by myself.
‘Sure enough, my husband had taken everything of his out of the house. It looked very clean with half the pictures off the walls. I sat down and cried for a bit. Not for my husband. Not really. But because… because I had no one to write on my clean, clean plaster and because underneath it all I itched so terribly. I itched so much I could have bitten all the plaster away with my teeth just to be free. It felt so sticky and wet and yet, at the same time, dry and flaking too. As if my flesh underneath was turning to jelly, losing its form since it wasn’t getting sunlight and exposure. In the narrow dark it was flaking apart and when they cut me loose I’d just fall to bits. Like those giant puffy fungus balls you find in the darkest corners of forests. Kick them and they explode into grey, slimy powder. So I cried in frustration and quite a bit of pain.
‘Hang on.’
And suddenly Margaret was gone. She had noticed that the poet in her own right had left her deck chair. Some of the other poets had noticed this too and were looking about in consternation. There was
to be a special presentation and they thought their leader had left before she could be given her crystal goblets and book voucher. The orange deck chair and glass looked sad and lost. I scratched my knee and shuffled on the concrete. It was starting to feel a bit clammy out. You came back.
‘Jennifer’s disappeared. They want to give her the presentation but they think she’s slipped away without a fuss.’
I said, ‘She’s been crying all night.’
‘She does this at the end of every term. After each reading.’ You rolled your eyes. ‘We’re her ladies and we mightn’t re-subscribe for the next course. Or if we do, it’s never quite the same experience twice.’
‘No.’
‘We have to go quite soon.’
‘Our coats will be under that big heap.’
‘That’s a point. Jennifer can’t just have slunk off. She’d never find her mac without someone’s help. Not in her state.’
Margaret appeared at the french windows. She resumed her place on the wall. ‘They’ve found her. She’d passed out in the bathroom.’
‘Oh, God!’ you said. ‘Well, we can’t go until they’ve done the presentation. There was hell on when I left early last year. We’re meant to be a group'
Margaret said, ‘I’m sure she won’t take long to come round.’ She said it just the way Chelsea had said the gateaux would soon defrost.
‘Where was I?’ asked Margaret.
‘Up to your navel in plaster of Paris.’
You raised an eyebrow.
‘Right. When his tour finished he came to see me. Armfuls of lilies. Chocolates and champagne aplenty.’
‘He’d fallen in love with you, too.’
‘That’s quite right. It’s very rare, in my experience, that a fairy tale comes quite so true. But in this one instance it certainly looked that way and every one of my feelings turned out to be mutual. Broken legs, ha! I’d have crawled over broken glass and he said he would as well. It’s a rare thing, I’m telling you, and I’ll tell you something else. When you get it, grab hold with both hands and don’t you let go.’
‘No,’ I said, looking down.
‘He gave me personal recitals,’ said Margaret.
You turned away, your shoulders shaking with laughter. ‘I’d sit with my aching heart and my itching lower body and legs in the swivel armchair he’d bought for my convenience and comfort and he’d play. All sorts of wonderful, haunting pieces. He’d play so long we wouldn’t notice the dark steal in around us. It’d be night-time in a flash. He would exhaust the repetoire of everything he knew by heart and he’d sit back, clutching that clarinet of his, puffed out.
‘And my skin, plastered or otherwise, would always be thrilled.
‘This went on for some time. I never got tired of the same old pieces. Well, you don’t, do you? I did once ask if he played any other instrument. And he fixed me with that charismatic grin. God, he was too good to be true, that man. Too good for this world, he was.
‘It turned out he played anything and everything in the woodwind section. He had a natural gift. A real knack. Anything with holes and a place to blow down.
‘It got so that he’d bring a different instrument round each night and we’d have the same tunes. But each time sounding slightly different through something new. Piccolos, recorders, saxophones, even, on one memorable occasion, a kazoo. Which between his lips sounded heavenly.
‘When he played I would weep. Out of love and pleasure and—I think he must have realised—frustration. I’d lose myself in music and, without realising, thrash about on my swivel chair. He’d play even harder, with greater gusto, more beautifully than ever and then I would sob much deeper.
Then one night he came and he took out of his carrying case something I didn’t recognise as a musical instrument at all. I watched dumbfounded as he set it up, with a little smile. Unwound a flex. Plugged it in.’
At this point the poet in her own right reappeared on the Tuscany patio. Back on her feet and surrounded by friends, Chelsea most prominent among them, clutching goblet-shaped parcels. Jennifer’s hair was stuck down wetly on her forehead. She’d had her face splashed with cold water. It was down the front of her blouse.
‘Speech! Speech!’ the poets cried and everyone clapped.
As Jennifer struggled for a few words with which to end the current term of workshops and round off the whole evening, you were poking in your handbag for your car keys, hoping for a quick getaway. Margaret hissed the rest of the story.
‘A Black and Decker drill. He’d had to buy it new. My husband took ours with him.’
‘What did the clarinetist want with one? What did he do with it?’
‘A fair-sized hole at the end of my big toe on the left foot. Then thirty smaller, at regular intervals, all the way up to my navel.
‘Then he lay on the floor beneath me and I sat back on my swivel chair and waited.
‘Sheer bloody poetry he gave me and it’s honestly worth the itching if you can get it scratched by a virtuoso.’
THE GIANT SPIDER’S SUPERVISOR
As usual we were playing on the back of the giant spider. One of those games where your feet can’t touch the ground. You’re dead if your feet touch tarmac. Imagine the sizzle, scalded rubber, of plimsolls on hot, pink playground tarmac.
Mind, lots of the kids turn up barefoot, or in sandals. Unsuitably attired. The parents send them any old how, just getting them off their hands. Sending babies, too. We get kids bringing younger ones in pushchairs. Of course we have to send them back.
But I’m starting at the point with us all on the giant spider’s back. Each of its—how many? Six—legs was a ladder to the thick red abdomen I was straddling, shouting, ‘Quick, run! Quick! So the spider can take off!’ And the kids were screaming, scrambling aboard, because they didn’t want to be left behind.
You have to make all sorts of stuff up. This giant spider can fly anywhere if I say so. They look up to me, even when I’m not towering above them, straddling the red abdomen of the giant spider in my cut-off jeans, my white cotton shirt knotted at my waist, a paisley scarf keeping my hair out of my eyes while I work. Though at its best it’s hardly work. I don’t wear sunglasses, although we’ve had some lovely days already this summer, because they tend to alienate the bairns. I think that’s what put them off Marsha, actually.
Marsha’s leaving put me in charge, made me sole supervisor. So we come here, most days, to sit on the giant spider with the six laddered legs. When I say so it can take us where we like.
Some of my kids stayed on the swings. Wedged in truck tyres, heaving themselves high as they could go. Refusing to give up their precious places even for a go on the spider.
When we’re in the park they all enjoy themselves and fling themselves into it. Our enjoyment this summer is headlong and reckless. But each has one ear open, waiting for me to yell that the spider is powering up, readying to leave without us. They are tensed to catch up, these bairns.
‘Where’s he going today, the giant spider?’ I ask.
Jackie answers, a girl who’s so white she looks like a skeleton and has purple rings around her eyes. They can’t be bruises unless terrible trouble has been taken to make them in that shape. She goes, ‘I think the spider’s going to Jurassic Park.’
All the other kids go ‘Yeah!’ and there’s an excitement as everyone realises what she’s said, punching of shoulders, kids pretending to be dinosaurs.
‘What do you want to go there for?’
‘I don’t,’ Jackie goes. ‘It’s just where the spider’s going today.’
I decide I don’t want to go to Jurassic Park today, actually. We’ve had three weeks on this play scheme and not a day’s gone by without dinosaurs in some form. Me, I like the giant spider, its thick red abdomen, the splayed green, laddered legs. That blistered paintwork with writing gouged in by house keys. I wonder who here is of reading age and, if so, whether they can read the Lara's a Slag, Stew's Ugly as Fuck, Michael Summers Sucks Cock and
We Did an E Here 93 on the skin of the spider that’s meant to carry them to Jurassic Park.
I go, ‘I know.’ (I slipped into prefacing everything I say with ‘I know’ weeks ago, as if everything was spontaneous.) ‘Why doesn’t the giant spider take a swim under the ocean?’
‘Like in The Little Mermaid,’ Susan coos. She wants to be the Little Mermaid because she’s ginger. She sings all the songs in this chilling, raspy voice and it makes me sad for her. Don’t know why; probably because she’s so ugly, poor bairn. That prized red hair looks like it’s been washed and clotted up with house soap.
‘Crap!’ This is Daniel, who looks at me narrowly because the giant spider wants to go under the ocean again. As sole interpreter of the giant spider’s wishes, suddenly I’m under Daniel’s suspicions.
When the giant spider is under the ocean I lie on my back and make everyone pretend to be a fish or a starfish for an hour or more. It’s dead relaxing. Daniel isn’t the only dissenter. There were a few tuts when I said the bottom of the ocean again. They’re getting bored, I see. I no longer have them in the palm of my hand. With this tide turning maybe it’ll be Jurassic Park after all.
Susan can switch from Little Mermaid simper to vitriol in seconds flat. ‘I bet Daniel wants to go to Tracey Island really,’ she spat. Awkward on the spider’s laddered legs, she was showing her knickers as she tried to get her balance. ‘Yeh. Go to Tracey Island, Daniel. To be with the… Thunderbirds!’ She shrieks with laughter.
Daniel colours and the other kids are laughing now. It’s true, I realise, he does look like a puppet and the cruel little buggers have picked up on this. ‘I don’t! I don’t want to fuckin’ be a Thunderbird!’
There’s a sharp ‘Eeee!’ from most of the group. I decided at the start not even to blink should ‘fuck’ get said on this scheme. You just can’t stop it. A blind eye costs nothing, but I draw the line at ‘cunt’ and there has been one or two of those.
To start with, Marsha was our leader this summer. She’s gone now and good riddance, I say. She was much too busy for me. Small wonder the council made her play-scheme supervisor. They recognised something in her, a restless and commandeering energy. Bossy, I call it. She always had to be up and at ‘em. It was something new every five minutes. Never a moment’s rest and it got on my nerves, me starting this job and thinking I was on to a cushy number. Even the poor bairns were going home knackered by teatime.