Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

  It turned out the skating injury was worse than anyone imagined and Marsha and her parents were suing the council for the loss of her artistic arm and her place at art college in Newcastle. In view of that the council was dropping all future schemes. Horrible Ruby filled me in on this gossip beside the community-centre bins while the kids around us blinked, half understanding, fascinated by the trickle of blood coming from Ruby’s nose. Next year seemed so far away. Could they even see a time so far away?

  Things stop being prosaic and normal when it seems that they’re coming to an end. How many more trips on the back of the giant spider?

  Not many. Then I was back on the income support and the kids at school again.

  I’d go past the park every now and then. On the way to the shops, usually; not on the way back. I’d look silly sitting alone on the spider’s back with a bagful of groceries. I’d sit for a while.

  During late Indian summer, through mid-autumn, then the early, circumspect days of winter, the giant spider never felt like travelling anywhere.

  Each time I checked on the spider I’d check on the brick Pavilion too. In the alcove behind the rosehip bushes I’d gather my nerve and bend to peer in through the dark gap.

  Whoever it was still looked out at me each time. By the end of the year I’d started to find that oddly reassuring, actually.

  THOSE IMAGINARY COWS

  Either I stayed where I was and endured another end-of-party 4.00 a.m. showing of Room with a View, or I pursued the repressed Catholic boy I had earlier propositioned to his hiding place upstairs, or I went out into the garden for a smoke with Esmé.

  Outside it was spitting on to rain and the garden furniture glowed like old bones on the lawn.

  Esmé’s stark bald head swayed and bobbed across the table from me. She lit our cigarettes, poured more wine, and launched stridently into complaints about Michael, her new lover. As if the neighbours couldn’t hear, and as if I had known her for years, which I hadn’t.

  I’ve heard all this before, I thought. Maybe I should have told her at the start about Michael.

  She was an American friend. In my experience Americans have made friends with me quite easily and quickly. Often without my being aware of the fact. All it took in Esmé’s case was a quick introduction. She found me suitably acerbic and quaint, and she was flattered by my pointing out that she must be named after a Lolita in a Salinger story or a hyena in one by Saki. After that we were best buddies and almost immediately she began taking liberties.

  One night when the telly wouldn’t come on she got on to talking about sex.

  She was a dancer and general physical performance artiste, so she was sitting on the floor. She propped her recently shaved head on her hands, delicately rested her elbows on my knees and asked if I thought anal intercourse was passé.

  This was the beginning of our period of intimacy. Which ended—in as much as such intimacies can ever end—with my punching her in the mouth in an effort to restore her to life.

  ‘I wouldn’t go in for it again,’ I said, thinking that would be an end to the matter.

  ‘Me neither,’ she said, nodding. ‘It sucks.’ She laughed and stopped abruptly, giving me an appraising stare. ‘I knew you were gay. I was talking to Michael about it, but he wouldn’t say anything. I mean, it isn’t that you’re camp or anything…’

  She let it tail away. She pronounced ‘camp’ with a drawling vowel, as if there were an h in it. Her accent, a sunny Denver-Colorado staccato, was drenched already with mismatched vowel sounds she assumed were English. Eventually she came out of her year abroad sounding, as well as looking, quite deranged.

  Michael, I reflected, certainly wouldn’t say anything about me. Esmé was reaching for my cigarettes with a customary inverse hospitality which enabled her to grab what she required qualm-free.

  So. Anal intercourse sucked. I wondered if she knew yet—I presumed she didn’t—that Michael did too.

  Then came the revelation meant to bond us in complicity. ‘I can tell you this, since I know you’ll understand.’

  I nodded grimly and thought about how much more attractive she had been upon first arriving, when she was all Louise Brooks hair and public-theatre workshops. In one of those workshop sessions she had met Michael. She shaved her head to be like him and nowadays they meditated and Wrestled together in the formation of a performance aesthetic °f their own. I wouldn’t have minded so much if they didn’t Work on it in the room above mine.

  She said, ‘I’m a bisexual butterfly.’

  I was more surprised at the second bit.

  Esmé went to the corner shop for some wine and we christened our complicity and superiority well into the early hours of that night. By the time I stumbled into my room and threw up purple on the carpet, I had told her the ins and outs of everything.

  She had dragged on thirteen of my fags; eyes alive and magnified in her granny glasses at each salacious gem of conversation, starting in genuine interest only once, when I told her that I had fucked Michael too.

  ‘It was over a year ago. I doubt he remembers it.’

  ‘But he does,’ she asserted. ‘He told me about it.’

  ‘What were you on about before, then? You were talking as if Michael was the straightest thing on earth.’

  ‘He is straight,’ she told me, very seriously. ‘But you are a very, very special person.’

  I went to my room and, as I said, threw up on the floor.

  This night, though, in the dark at the cast-iron garden table, with the drizzle diluting our wine and running down our faces, Esmé was showing none of that easy, carefree glamour of our earlier friendship. She was miserable as sin. Our pre-empted intimacy had lost its atmosphere of sophomore slumber party and gained a kind of extravagant despair. Esmé was given to theatricals.

  ‘You must tell me,’ she burst out, ‘how much he still thinks of her.’

  ‘How should I know how much? She’ll still be on his mind—she’s bound to be…’

  ‘She’ was Michael’s last girlfriend, Jackey, another friend of mine. That was a friendship a long time in the making, through much mutual suspicion, circumspection and the added complications of mine and Michael’s goings-on at the time. I wasn’t about to commit myself on anything to do with Jackey for Esmé’s benefit. In this case, I realised, Esmé was expendable. Whatever she showered me with—genuine or not—I didn’t owe her anything.

  She pulled her face into a leering frown. She was very pale and even-featured. There was a calm blankness about her that could, at times, make her seem beautiful. But I had begun to suffer the first symptoms of a falling-out. Esmé was looking more hideous, to my eyes at least, with each passing crisis.

  ‘They had a real Bronte thing going for them,’ I said. ‘It was all passion and tears and banging on windows.’

  ‘Do you think he wants to go back with her?’

  ‘She’s living right across the country now.’

  ‘Catherine Earnshaw was dead. She can catch the train at any time!’

  ‘Jackey has other things to do now. I don’t suppose she would ever want to get wrapped back up in a poisonous affair with Michael. She’s grown out of him.’

  Esmé looked stung and for a moment I was pleased. Then I wondered, how much had I grown up?

  The following teatime I watched Michael cooking. Staring gloomily at the filthy work surfaces, I downed a bottle of Bulgarian red and we talked. His newly sprouting head was nodding deliberately over the chopping board. He hacked his thick-fingered way through yellow peppers, courgettes, onions. Vegetarian cookery depresses me after a while. There are only so many nights a week you can relish your virtuousness; frying up the same old pulpy faces, rearranging your spices for maximum interest.

  Esmé had already arrived home. Today she was moving in, with her luggage in extraordinary hatboxes, her extraordinary hats squashed in a repulsive pile on her head. Michael was serving up a special meal in celebration, but they had argued as soon as her Doc
Martens hit our tea-stained lino. Esmé wanted to commemorate Thanksgiving with us by cooking a special Mexican meal. She had a bagful of ingredients, but Michael had got there first.

  Thanksgiving for what?’ he grunted, square-shouldered, unsure, deep-set eyes wriggling backwards like twin conga eels.

  At first she refused to argue. ‘It’s my culture,’ she said primly, fluffing up the peacock feathers stuck out of her Saks carrier bag. ‘If I’m going to live here, you ought to respect my culture.’

  Michael was making jasmine tea. He turned back savagely to the mugs. ‘Respect the slaughter of an indigenous population?’ His voice was stammering and thick, as if he had eaten four Mars bars on the trot. The tea leaves were in a tiny stainless-steel house on the end of a chain. He swirled this in the mugs, passed me mine. It looked diseased.

  After a significant pause he told Esmé, ‘You can cook what you fucking well like—but I’m not eating it if it means giving thanks to America.’

  She seized her luggage to her. ‘I miss my family!’ she cried brokenly. ‘I’ll miss our turkey this year!’

  We watched her turn, march smartly out of the kitchen, across the dark-brown living room—where the others were watching Countdown—and up the wooden stairs to, presumably, Michael’s bedroom.

  He went back to his cooking. In the end I said, ‘Couldn’t you put some Mexican spices in it, to make her feel better?’

  ‘She isn’t even from Mexico.’

  ‘I know, but it might cheer her up.’

  He deliberated. ‘She’d only say it was too weak.’

  I had already heard about Esmé’s early years in Mexico. Her parents had done a hippy thing. Her father taught creative writing to convicts and they had eventually moved back to Colorado in time for Esmé to do a Goth thing; working in a boutique, selling ‘antique vintage dresswear’ to other Goths.

  On the face of it, Esmé had rather a lot in common with Jackey. Jackey wore black leather and leggings, was six foot two with pomegranate-coloured hair at least half that length and a drop-dead look that teetered in intensity between the Bride of Dracula and Paddington’s Aunt Lucy. She was also piss-your-pants funny, which was why, with head swollen and knocking drunkenly already, I was pleased to answer the door while Michael dunked chilli powder into his wok, to find Jackey framed there, arms flung wide, teeth bared, ready for a surprise visit.

  ‘Ha ha ha ha!’

  Michael groaned, ‘Oh, fuck!’ and by accident dropped the whole jar of cayenne into Esmé’s supper.

  * * *

  I sat with Jackey on the park bench we had along one wall of the living room to watch Top of the Pops, and I explained how it had been easier to steal a bench than to clean the heaps of crap off the other chairs.

  ‘I live with animals,’ I said, and she tutted consolingly.

  Michael and Esmé were arguing behind the shut kitchen door. At first it was about Esmé’s dietary prohibitions—she saw broccoli bobbing in the wok and screeched about an aversion to tree vegetables—but now they were arguing about Jackey’s presence. We did our level best to ignore it, for manners’ sake. The family in the two-bedroom flat behind the wall on the other side were rowing also. We could hear them clearly through the bolted door that segregated us. Esmé had nailed one of her black winding sheets to the door to muffle the sound, but it didn’t work.

  Jackey was telling me about Leeds; about being part of a theatre company that was a Going Concern.

  ‘The bastards won’t give you the bookings. If you haven’t been injured on Casualty or something exotic on Blake's Seven you don’t get so much as a sniff of a stage.’

  The kitchen door banged open and Michael stormed through, glared at us both, shot upstairs.

  ‘He can fuck off as well,’ Jackey muttered and rummaged in her pockets for cigarettes.

  ‘That’s not a vegetarian jacket.’

  ‘I’ve given that stuff up,’ she said. ‘He tortured me over all that. About all the meat I’d eaten before I had my consciousness raised. He really played with my mind, that fucker. That afternoon we dropped acid in his favourite childhood haunt, when I was staying with his family, he really made me paranoid. Until the effects wore off, after twenty hours, I was plagued everywhere I went by imaginary cows. He loves doing that sort of thing to women.’

  I fell silent, deciding not to defend him. We could see Esmé through the half-open kitchen door, sobbing against the freezer unit. We watched some rap artist on Top of the Pops, the third that edition—reiterating herself to a backing track.

  Jackey sighed and changed the subject decisively, exclaiming, ‘I hate that music. I bet she’s a bloody American.’

  I saw Esmé’s back stiffen. Jackey clamped a hand to her mouth. She smudged lipstick all over the place as she suppressed a dangerous cackle.

  After a few tense seconds, a silent Esmé followed Michael upstairs.

  Our bathroom was comprehensively filmed with a fine white powder, impossible to remove. When the shower had leaked through crevices onto the noisy family below, the landlord had seen to it by having a tiled, waist-high wall built next to the bath. We assumed the stubborn coating everywhere had something to do with his grouting. The wall was a talking point. The theatre group had organised a party in its honour, during which it was examined, praised and christened (in semi-digested cheesecake, as I remember).

  Before going out that evening, I was sitting on our wall, having my make-up seen to by Esmé. I pursed everything, intent on the delicate shovelling of mascara.

  ‘It’s a pity Michael looked like Frankenstein.’

  ‘Frankenstein’s monster,’ I corrected, without moving my ‘fuchsia lips.

  ‘He needn’t have washed it off.’ She glanced at the dead colours streaking the sink.

  ‘If you’re going somewhere with the intention of looking conspicuous, you have to look fabulous as well.’

  ‘Be quiet while I retouch your lips.’

  ‘Can I light a fag?’

  ‘No.’ She dabbed me with a handkerchief, face held close, already made up and as lifeless in its concentration as the blunt end of a hammer. ‘Both you and Michael have those funny, pretty rosebud lips. Very twenties. Yours are charming because they’re slightly crooked.’

  ‘That’s where I got punched once.’

  ‘Cheekbones,’ she reminded us and began to dust me vigorously in grey.

  From my room next door there came the muffled thumps and curses of Jackey getting ready. My room had a huge window, three storeys up, overlooking a crossroads on a hill, the whole town spread below it. Jackey would be undressing, flinging clothes around for the benefit of everyone outside. Her motto: If you’ve got it, hang it out the window.

  Esmé’s hand trembled, finding a place for a beauty spot.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Of course I felt hypocritical asking. Ten minutes earlier I had been bursting with silent laughter, with Jackey in my room. We had been taking the piss out of the bald people upstairs. Jackey had made a show of listening to and recognising the sounds of argument; Michael’s gruff incoherence, the shriek of his bookshelves being wrenched out of the wall. The grinding bedsprings of reconciliation had wiped the smile off Jackey’s face and replaced it with an expression of a different kind of memory.

  I put Hatful of Hollow on and, minutes later, Esmé was banging on my door.

  ‘That was quick.’ Jackey was smirking again.

  Esmé came humbly to offer her making-up services. Jackey gave her a sickly smile and I just gave myself up.

  Now here was Esmé, flicking back tears, lip quivering. ‘It’s really hard for me,’ she said, ‘with Jackey here. I find her so difficult. Michael isn’t happy about her coming out with us tonight.’

  I thought about Michael, slumped upstairs in his post-coital squalor. I was never given to retribution, but at that moment I felt like kicking him soundly where he lay. No one like me had been there to watch my lip tremble over him. I thoroughly resented the spectac
le of the three of us as three squabbling ex-shags, even if I didn’t count. Especially when, really, he looked like a burglar’s dog.

  Michael was stubborn, though. Stubborn and squalid as his principles. He found every situation difficult and language jammed in his throat in situations like these. Yet he was hard-bitten, uncompromising. He was a former teenage star who, when appearing on Blockbusters, had taken as his mascot a Cornish pasty and insisted on answering with the most inappropriate words imaginable. Four years on, that subversive glamour had not faded. Recently, during one of Esmé’s first nights in the house, we had watched his video of the show again. Esmé screamed with laughter at the sight of the seventeen-year-old Michael, with blond, already thinning hair, boyish without all his muscles, zapping the buzzer and shouting, ‘Gdansk’, ‘Thighs’, ‘Usurpation’ and ‘Copious’ in a strangely deep voice.

  ‘That was so funny I think I peed in my pants,’ Esmé gasped when it finished.

  Michael frowned at her. He frowned as heavily as he had the night she explained how she and her family stole leftover food from the dumper trucks at the back of supermarkets and gift-wrapped each other rocks for Christmas. There were times when he seemed disgusted by her. But looking at Esmé now, disconsolate on the toilet seat and packing her make-up bag, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that.

  Since, in the end, Michael was too upset and disturbed to leave the house, it was to be me, Jackey and Esmé going together to Butchers. ‘You can both be my fag hags,’ I said and it fell on the stony ground of the littered living room. Esmé went to phone for a taxi because I refused to walk across town in full make-up.

  ‘But you don’t look queer at all. You won’t get beaten up.’ Jackey passed me a hip flask. ‘At most you look like a butch lesbian in drag.’

  I chewed on that for a while, until Esmé came back. The atmosphere between them was strained until they both found something to laugh at. Jackey said that they had to get to like each other, in case I copped off with someone that night and they ended up having to come home together. I submitted to this implausible pleasantry, glad that the ice had at least stopped smoking.