by Paul Magrs
Then Jackey asked Esmé something about America, and Esmé told her something about America. Probably about things being bigger and less expensive than here. That was the usual drift.
‘Yes,’ Jackey said. ‘Of course, we’ve heard all this before. Paul used to go out with an American. A lovely boy. It only lasted a month. He’s in Colorado too, now, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said, tight-lipped.
‘It only lasted a month because his boyfriend had to go back after a year,’ Esmé put in, defending me.
‘It was tragic, really,’ Jackey agreed. ‘They only had four brief weeks.’
‘I’ve heard all about it. You were there, weren’t you?’
Jackey nodded solemnly. ‘They made such a lovely couple.’
‘And they were born on exactly the same day. I think there’s something… almost spiritual about that.’
‘The poor things!’ Jackey sighed. ‘And he’s not very happy in Colorado, you know. Taking drugs, the last we heard. I think he’s still missing him. And there was bugger all spiritual about it if you ask me.’
‘I wish I’d been here to see it. I’d like to see Paul happy. He deserves to be, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes. He’s been unlucky in love.’
Mercifully the taxi horn honked out in the street. I stood up, monumentally pissed off. ‘Can we go now?’ I strode out to the car looking, presumably, like an exquisitely petulant corpse.
‘The Butchers, please,’ I commanded, climbing in, and refused to acknowledge the driver’s knowing wink.
The trouble started at the door. Jackey caused a fuss because she refused to say what she ‘identified as’ to the bouncer. I had already signed my name and number in the book and was squinting for a table into the low-ceilinged gloom.
‘You must understand my difficulty,’ the bouncer whined. ‘This is an exclusive club.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ Jackey reared up.
‘I mean, you don’t look like a lesbian—’
She quivered with righteous, politically shit-hot indignation. I stepped in with umbrage—‘She’s my guest!’—and dragged her in, over to the bar.
Esmé joined us, affronted because she hadn’t been in the slightest challenged as to the exhibition of her orientation. Jackey must have been a bit pissed already because she laughed in her face.
Esmé shot me a wounded glance. She must have thought I had spilled the beans about the bisexual butterfly bit. There was nothing to be done but to get massively drunk.
Then, when Esmé went crawling around the crowd’s periphery and did her performance-artiste-on-show dancing, I did spill the butterfly beans and Jackey laughed until she was sobbing into her beer.
‘Michael’s got his hands full there,’ she said. ‘Good. I hope she goes off and fucks some woman. It’ll serve him right.’
‘Hmm.’
‘The trouble is, I can’t help thinking we’ve got unfinished business, me and Michael.’
I couldn’t say too much about this. My own business with him had been fairly surreptitious; an open and shut case swift as the slamming of a well-sprung closet door.
‘We both invested so much in it. It was horrible. Two years of mental torture.’
‘I remember.’ I had been the one unloosening the thumbscrews, sawing holes in the iron maiden.
‘We were Will and Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow. It was all pounding essences and eking out kernels and when it wasn’t it was bloody boring. He’s a manic depressive and she’s welcome to him.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
We were having to shout over the noise of a remixed Doris Day. I didn’t want Jackey to get emotional because she tended to cry quite easily and I’d never hear the outpourings properly in that setting. I tried to change topics.
‘Look at those clones lined up at the bar,’ I said, unwisely pointing. ‘They look like a rack of toothbrushes.’
She tried to smile. ‘I still see them, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Those imaginary cows. From the acid trip in Michael’s home town. They come to haunt me, Paul, mooing and stamping their feet about my eating meat and walking out on Michael.’
‘He threw you out!’
‘I know, but—'‘He threw you out on a Sunday morning and made you hitch back to Leeds.’
‘But betrayal is betrayal, whatever—’
‘Oh, fuck betrayal! Look.’
On the dance floor Esmé had her tongue down some woman’s throat. Jackey smiled bitterly. ‘She’s like Alien fucking Three. What does he see in her?’
I walked back with Esmé and Jackey on either arm. We went past a couple of nightclubs—Thursdays is Ladies' Night! Free Nurses on Saturdays!—past single men walking home alone, baffled by the sight of my two attendant handmaids. They weren’t speaking; Esmé was being upset and disturbed by Jackey’s silence, while Jackey was too drunk to care any more.
The bells gonged twice as we crossed the canal car park. Jackey extricated herself. ‘I’ll leave you before you go up that hill,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my key for Helen’s house.’ Tactfully she had elected to stay at the house of a different old friend. ‘I’m off tomorrow. I’ll be back to see you soon. Give me a hug.’ We embraced with our usual vigour, the bizarre sexual chemistry blunted by alcohol.
Esmé made a big show of giving Jackey a no-hard-feelings-we-are-sisters hug. Jackey complied, although she might as well have been holding a lamppost. We watched her stagger off down a side road.
‘All my friends make beautiful, filmic exits,’ I said as we set off up the hill. ‘It’s one of my few demands; that when they leave, they do it beautifully.’
Esmé remained ominously quiet. Usually she would jump after a snippet like that like a kitten on a sock. Almost home she said, ‘Jackey deserves to be happy. She’s had it hard, too, hasn’t she?’
I nodded. Esmé gave me a sickeningly consoling squeeze.
‘It was such a shame it never worked out for her and Michael. But it wasn’t right for them. Me and Michael are the right thing. He’ll come to America in the end. But I hope Jackey finds someone soon. She needs to. You both do. You both deserve better. I just wish everyone was happy.’
By now we had reached our back door. I unlocked it and she inserted herself, exhausted, into the dark kitchen before I could. The air was heavy with the reek of stale spices.
I am dreaming, I think, about scarlet cows in bomber jackets. They crowd about me in moral indignation and I am dancing to ward them off, like Glenda Jackson in Women in Love.
Just past four in the morning I wake to the sound of screaming. A keening, babyish shriek. She’s slashed her wrists, I think, propelling myself out of bed. On the landing there is Jack from upstairs, panic all over his face and belly hanging over his boxer shorts.
‘She’s screaming—go and see—Michael’s just shot past me—on the stairs—He’s run out of the house—’
As I race up the stairs the others are coming out of their rooms, dazed and frightened. How many people live here? Which room is Michael’s?
The room that is smashed up; the light glaring on. The room is lifeless apart from Esmé sitting up in bed. She is rigid-backed, screaming, eyes like hardboiled eggs. Her wrists are held out; mercifully clean, harmless.
I grab her and she holds me hard, full of a sexless, destructive passion. She screams down my ear, a sound I have never heard so close in real life.
The rest of the house is congregating downstairs. Someone shouts that they are calling an ambulance. They imagine blood dripping from attic walls, sliding down the Schiele prints. Or the empty pill bottles, the slimy syringe. Her body is hard and yellow, naked and bony. Her jaw judders at my neck. Her screaming slows, is torn into ragged sobs. She heaves breath with difficulty.
‘It’s all right,’ I intone, voice stunningly deep and clear. ‘Esmé, Esmé, it’s all right.’
She subsides; her nails loosen their grip on my T-shirt. She is calming down, sl
ipping back into a lucid wakefulness.
‘It was just a bad dream,’ I tell her.
‘Where’s Michael?’ She works at her breathing.
‘Easy, easy.’
I see everything clearly. She is pasty white. Her pupils are still rolled back. I look down and see my balls hanging negligently out of my shorts. We are complicit in an absurd intimacy. The drama is perfect.
Someone pops their head around the door, afraid. ‘Michael’s gone. He’s ran away. The cunt!’
‘Is the ambulance coming?’
‘Jack went out to ring for one. What was it?’
I smoothed her back, urging her to breathe as I would do to a baby. ‘I don’t know if it was drugs or not. She can’t talk. If it was, and the ambulance comes…’
He vanishes. I hear his steps thudding downstairs.
She gags on every word. ‘I was drowning. I couldn’t get up. Michael got frightened.’
‘Calm down. Just calm down.’
She sucks up air in long gulps.
‘Slower.’
‘It’s so sad, so sad,’ she heaves. ‘So sad.’
‘Slower.’
‘So sad!’
And she begins to pant again, faster and faster, and her eyes flip back like a doll’s in their immaculate make-up. She stiffens in my arms. Something cracks and she stops breathing entirely.
‘Esmé!’
For the first time I hear my own panic.
She starts to curl away from me, into a foetal shape. Something is ebbing out of her, or is it just the folding of her limbs away from me, her dull heaviness sinking back on the shabby duvet? She is silent.
And it was then I had to punch her, hard, to bring her back to life.
BARGAINS FOR CHARLOTTE
Each street on our estate of yellow box houses has a smaller box somewhere in it and these are bungalows for old people. They never look happy. In the street just down from us a car tore through the wall of their bungalow because it was right on the main road and they go mad on that corner. The car screamed through the itchyback bushes and bang: killed the old bloke inside on the spot. He’d been sitting watching daytime TV. Those walls must be held up with nothing.
Do the pensioners inside know the sort of danger they inhabit daily? Is their irksomeness excused by that knowledge of the threat of sudden, arbitrary demolishment?
Charlotte lives at the end of the row and she has nothing to complain about. Her bungalow is nowhere near the main road and her garden is smashing, nothing like the poky bits of concrete we’ve all got. You get all the perks if you’re old. They put you on the phone for nothing. She had lovely flowers out all the year round, it seemed. She used to get a man in to do that, but now her garden arrangements have changed. Her garden is, if anything, even more sumptuous.
We always reckoned she must have quite a bit stashed away. Her husband had been someone, they said, and she still had an accent. Not posh but a bit southern, which marked her out. She played hell when the bairns went near her windows.
Think of a tortoise with white, flaccid skin and its shell crowbarred off. Charlotte to a T. You’d see her silhouetted in her french window of a night in her orthopaedic chair that swivelled round and we used to say that was her shell and she’d put herself back in for the night. She had one of those dowager’s humps and we’d think it was wet and adhesive beneath her cardigan, fresh from the shell, lobster pink.
She never had tortoise hands—those are like elephants’, aren’t they? Though her fingers were oddly short, as if she’d worn them to the bone, working. Old, she still worked, in the Spastics Society shop down the precinct. Those short fingers had crossed my palm with copper once, when I was about ten—Hallowe’en 1980. We were running from door to door, wearing bin bags and asking for money. Charlotte made a big show of looking for her purse in all her kitchen drawers and asking me about my family. She seemed genuinely concerned about them, making me worry whether I wasn’t concerned enough. Her questions placed them in peril, I felt. She hoped, she said, that my mummy and daddy would sort out their problems soon and that it wouldn’t affect me too deeply.
Back home, later, I counted up my carrier of coppers and told my mam this in an offhand manner. She went up in a blue light. My dad and she were living in different places—he at one end of the estate and she, with us, at the other—on a social fiddle. The council had given him a single person’s flat by the shop and the Chinky. We went over to hoover and dust every Saturday morning. His shared front door faced the grass at the back of the Chinky and I found heaps of discarded pink shrimps. For a while I thought they’d been rained, the way they said things got rained in The Unexplained, that magazine.
Mam said Charlotte was a nosy bitch.
Charlotte has worked down the Spastics shop for years. In there it always smells of washing powder and sweat. They arrange second-hand clothes on chrome stands in order of colour. In spring everything to the front of the shop is yellow. They fill the window with chickens made out of woolly pompoms. These are made by Charlotte, all winter long. Sits in her orthopaedic shell through the devastating cold days, when she lets the younger volunteer lasses do the earlier shifts, and she runs up furry lemon chickens. I bet it’s a lonely thing being old on our estate. Even if they do put your phone line in free.
They’re all pensioners who work in the Spastics shop down our town. Is this because they have more hours to fill in? When you are old, life has shrunk horribly to nothing and its warp and weft can’t be pulled back to a decent size, no matter how much you tug. Surely in those circumstances you want to wring the best you can out of what’s left? How can giving it all to charity constitute the best? An overflow, if anything, a by-product of pleasure: you can give leftovers to charity, but the main action?
I’d ask Charlotte if she was as selfless as this. Why does she put on that red nylon pinny in the morning to stand behind her counter doling out bargains, oddments, junk, other people’s discarded crap?
Would she admit ‘I get first dibs on the decent stuff’?
My goodness, the bargains!
The things people do away with!
They don’t know when they’re well off!
I tend to be in there quite often. I like to look at the books because they get quite a good, eclectic selection. There’s always somebody literary dying in Aycliffe and their goodies wash up here. I became addicted to checking out the Spastics shop after finding Anna Karenina for fifty pence. But on every stiffened yellow page, can I inhale someone else’s last gasp? It’s a wonder if I can’t. Intellectuals always smoke and these books are preserved with a laminate of nicotine. I think, Was this the book dropped from a dying grasp? This, the last sentence read? Look: I’ve read on further!
I’m educating myself to leave.
You really have to poke about, between Cartlands and Macleans, to find the good stuff. But it’s there. Jane Eyre thirty pence.
I heard Charlotte speak quite sensitively to Ashley, a seven-foot-tall transsexual who models her hair on Liz Taylor in Cleopatra. She’d been hanging on to some special heels for her. They were a kind of present for after Ashley’s op. I was in the day Charlotte produced them from under the counter; but they were lime green. Ashley’s face just dropped and he left the shop without buying anything at all. Charlotte was furious and took a perverse delight in telling the rest of the queue behind that the woman who’d just left had once been a man.
She collected handbags for one daft old wife, Sonja, who always wore a wig, though hers was for cancer, a beehive for ever on a tilt. Sonja said, ‘It’s forty-seven now! Forty-eight with this one, ta very much, Charlotte! And every one a different colour. I’d have a different bag to go with every outfit I could ever have!’ Daft Sonja looked up at Charlotte again and Charlotte blinked those steady, judgemental eyes. ‘Thank you, Charlotte. Would you keep a watch out for one in baby pink?’
Charlotte nodded tersely, regal arbiter of justice for castoffs.
Expert, she sat each morni
ng in the back room of the shop with her pot of tea and barrel of digestives (in the shape of Dougall, the dog from The Magic Roundabout) and for an hour or more she would go through the bags newly hauled in for redistribution. In the dusky half-light she would gut the plastic bin bags. They’d spill and strew like a trawler’s nets. Turning stuff over in her hands, she’d inspect it, unfold and refold garments, giving them a good, careful sniffing. She counted the pieces in jigsaws and, in case one or two were missing, kept a spare, useless one to the side of her to make up the numbers. It all went with her job and her perk was first refusal and the chance to set a price on whatever she didn’t care to offer the public.
She found an earthenware pot of gold coins. At first it looked like somebody’s urn of ashes. Somebody, perhaps, whose treasured books were stacked in boxes close by. But the pot jangled inside and she heaved and grunted at the stuck lid until it popped free and the gold poured out on her lap.
‘How much is here?’ Charlotte cried, although she wasn’t a greedy woman. She was careful and always had been. Her widow’s pension went on the extravagant food she had delivered from Marks and Spencer of a weekend. Their white and green van pulled up beside her bungalow on Saturday mornings and Charlotte laid out a banquet for no one but herself. Seen in silhouette by the rest of our street. All of it would be out, uneaten, in the bottom of her wheely bin by Sunday morning. Sometimes we’d sneak a look: check. Miss Havisham. (Great Expectations forty-five pence.)
Her needs were met. They weren’t always outrageous. But a whole pot of gold! Who’d turn their nose up at that?
‘But what is it worth?’ asked Charlotte of the bags and boxes of detritus, the heaps of semi soiled clothing, the single stuffed rocking donkey. ‘What’s the going rate for gold?’ And she saw, sitting astride the donkey, a human skeleton, bracing its frail weight on the felt saddle, gazing at her with terrible blank sockets. Its skull was disproportionately large. This was a baby’s remains, rocking steadily on the donkey.