Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

‘I don’t know what they give for gold,’ said the child. ‘These days.’ Charlotte blinked, for now it was a fully fleshed child, chubby and brown, its head full of tangled curls. ‘But think, Charlotte: if you bought this pot and took it home, wouldn’t you lie awake and worry?’

  She never worried. It was a point of honour with her. Her face clouded. ‘Worry about what?’

  ‘Even though your garden is wonderful, your bungalow is still ever so delicate. How easy for somebody to huff and puff and blow it in! How easy to take away your crock of gold! They leave rainbows behind, you know, for thieves to follow.’

  Lips pursed, Charlotte was writing out a tiny label for the pot, ‘20p’, and sticking it to the lid, which she had replaced. Really, it was an ugly thing. Ethnic-looking. No pattern on it or anything, no flowers. She shrugged, not to be put off.

  ‘I’m not one of these silly old women who keep money and valuables vulnerable in the home and get murdered in their beds for it. My mattress isn’t stuffed with fivers. I’d get these gold coins down to the bank at the first opportunity.’

  The child had small wings flapping, but these were featherless and thin: dead sycamore leaves. ‘You might lose the gold coins on your way to the bank.’ The child smiled. ‘Wouldn’t you fret that the gold shone through your pocket or your bag and everyone would know what you were carrying? Would you feel exposed?’

  Charlotte was quick. She’d been a junior-school teacher once. She knew something about answering children back. ‘Then I’d carry my gold in the urn. You can’t see it shine through the urn, can you?’

  She held up the nondescript pot in the meagre light of the room’s flyblown lamp. The child squinted. ‘I can,’ he said. ‘And what if the bank tricks you, gives you only half the gold’s worth?’

  ‘I can check the exchange rate,’ said the old woman vaguely.

  ‘Did you look at the coins? Aren’t they strange and old? Perhaps, for all they may look like gold, they are useless here and now? Mightn’t they excite suspicion and cause the bank people to point their fingers at you and jab at their alarm buttons?’

  Charlotte had heard enough. She left the storeroom clutching her new pot and paid for it down in the shop, wrapping it and putting it away in her bag before anyone could inspect it.

  But that night she walked home nervously across the Burn. She imagined that every stranger she passed could see through her shopping bag and knew about her treasure.

  The next day was Saturday; there was no going to the bank. She had her usual banquet and the only person she saw all day was the cheery delivery boy from Marksies in his green and white van. He came up the garden path with her usual boxes of luxury items. Charlotte startled him this time with a tip. He careered off in the van a little wildly, she thought, dangerously.

  She sat down to her feast with a heavy heart. The pot was in pride of place like a centrepiece at Christmas dinner, surrounded by cakes and dips and asparagus tips, flans and chicken drumsticks and salads busy with colour, stiff with dressings. The urn of gold seemed to exert its own dull pressure on her spirits. ‘Get rid of me,’ it urged tonelessly; ‘I’ll bring you nothing but ill fortune. Why didn’t my last owner cash me in? Have you thought about that?’

  ‘That’s a point,’ the infant clucked, fleshly again and sitting across the table from Charlotte. ‘One simply doesn’t get lucky like this. Gold coins! It doesn’t happen! Not to people like us!’

  ‘Why are you going on at me like this? What do you want?’ She was a touch distraught.

  The child looked solemn. ‘Allow me to do your garden. I’d like that.’

  Overcome, Charlotte stood shakily and went to embrace the child, but she tripped on the rug beneath the table, fell and hit her head.

  She came to, feeling dreadful, quite early on Sunday morning. With a throbbing headache she emptied the ruined party food into her wheely bin. While out there she took in her garden. It was looking unkempt by now. Her little man hadn’t been round in a while.

  She went to bed for the rest of the day, leaving Classic FM playing on the Teasmade by her bed. She mulled over the course her life was taking.

  All Sunday she dreamed listlessly of when she was married to a soldier and taught children and had a garden with roses in the south.

  Monday morning she was late in at the Spastics shop. She’d stopped down the Burn on her way and, in a little ceremony on the wooden bridge, dropped the pot in the water. It hit with a ker-plunk. The water looked exactly like morning sun coming through her full cafetiere. She went to work.

  Monday morning meant a good deal of new belongings ln the back room. Charlotte put on her rubber gloves. This Monday was a little below par, she thought. Or maybe she was disgruntled, throwing a fortune away. She almost wished she was religious; couldn’t she have felt virtuous, performing a sacrifice like that?

  She struggled with the clasp of a battered blue suitcase. Picturing the gold scattered on the rocks in the Burn. Those stunted fish nosing at the abandoned coins. There was definitely something inside the case; she had to check.

  Not many books this week. Not many bargains for me, she was afraid. (Though she was wrong, I found. Lady Chatterley twenty pence. But it was my own copy, donated out of spite by my sister.) And inside the case: heaps of crumbling newspaper. It came onto her fingers like grey pollen and went up her nose. The pages were dated 1933 and a heavy stench came out after all that time: rotten fish and chips. The papers were bundled around some light, solid object and she worked into this parcel, soon discovering the child’s skeleton.

  Silhouetted that evening in the matte blue window of her yellow brick of a bungalow we could see Charlotte slumped in her swivelling tortoise shell. She watched, rapt, while the child sat up at the smallest of her nest of tables and ravenously ate a meal she had cooked him. His bones were faintly yellowed, slick with plaque.

  At last the child finished his first supper for many years, belched, and began:

  ‘I was a child who menaced an old man who lived down our lane. He worked in his garden and I would stand in his gateway, aping his every action in order to annoy him. Cutting grass, pruning hedges, pressing saplings into the earth. I’d take him off for badness’ sake. I was only a child. Only learning. And one day he must have had enough because he brought out a sharp knife and I thought, This is it! I’ve pushed my luck!

  ‘Yet he came nowhere near me. He simply mimed, for my benefit, slashing his own throat, there and then in his garden. Then he went in for his tea, still furious, leaving the knife on the lawn.

  ‘When he returned for a last go at his beds, there he found me, white and slashed in a gleaming pool on his garden path.’

  ‘There, there,’ Charlotte consoled him.

  An emaciated cupid, a stripeless buzzing bumblebee has supplanted Charlotte’s young man in the garden. You can see the skeletal child hovering about her shrubs in the very middle of the night, if you’re coming in late, sneaking round the houses. The child will have secateurs in hand, being business-like, wearing its ineluctable maniac’s grin. But the child is glad of the work. He’s handy, too, because his spiritual powers and know-how ward off disasters. So Charlotte hopes she’ll never get a van or a lorry through her front-room wall, like that old bloke did. She exists within an enchanted circle of the child’s deceit and sups contentedly alone still, on Saturday nights.

  COLD COMPANIONABLE STREAMS

  ‘Look!’

  My mother, Hilde, pointed out to sea. We were walking across the scrubby headland. It was a treat; the place I used to walk with Father. In this evening’s lowering gloom, however, we found there was no more enjoyment to be squeezed from this place. Things had changed.

  ‘Eliza, look!’

  She dug me in the ribs, and I was forced—rather sulkily; I was, with good reason, I think, an uncommunicative adolescent—to glance across the bay. The sun was setting; sky, land and water had acquiesced to the colour and texture of raw, streaky bacon. Eleven wild swans ruffled this calm.
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br />   ‘Eleven!’ Hilde sighed. I shall call her Hilde; she was never my real mother.

  ‘So?’

  Her face twisted itself into one of those pitying leers. My slow-wittedness was, she claimed, the bane of her life. Already it had caused me endless trouble. Surely even I ought to see the prudence in learning to think for myself?

  ‘So?’ I stubbornly reiterated.

  ‘Where there is eleven, or any odd number, there will dissatisfaction be,’ she pronounced with infinite patience and just a hint of martyrdom. She was, you will remember, the most famous widow in the land. ‘One of that number is doomed to have no mate. Which do you suppose it is?’

  This was a test of my burgeoning maturity and wisdom, I felt sure. Some ominous decision pended on my reply. I was used to the entire armoury of Damocles suspended above my head, every moment of the day. Hilde liked to set intellectual traps for me, with the penance of my being sent away if I failed them. Traps and testings were sprung from every niche of the domestic environment: What does one do with spilt sugar? Where does the Spirit of the Hearth sleep? It was all very wearing.

  I stared at the swans gliding seemingly purposelessly in a neat V formation. They seemed to be identical. ‘I have no idea,’ I breathed, giving myself up to her scorn.

  ‘Quite right,’ she murmured, shielding her eyes as she gazed at their spectacle. ‘Dissatisfaction is a difficult thing to locate at first glance. You were wise not to hazard a guess. I suggest you stay here until dawn before you divine your true opinion of which of the eleven is the—shall we say—odd one out. I’m heading home for a rendezvous with the archbishop and will send him in the car for you tomorrow at dawn. If your answer does not tally with mine, I shall have you sent to St Tuoni’s School for Errant Girls, and you will not be allowed to return to your dear departed father’s house until, at least, my death. Good night, my dear.’

  Stunned, I watched her traipse her soggy way back across the colour-bleached headland. Then I found a rock and sat on it as the horizon’s curtains began to gather in darkening folds, the light hushing into anonymity like a theatre audience as the performance seems ready to begin. And I watched the eleven swans still circling the bay.

  In Australia it was once believed that the black swans had been people. People who, when menaced by flood, learned to grow feathers—and extra long, supple necks, presumably to enable them to see round the future’s corner for further natural disasters.

  But people become swans for all sorts of reasons. The Valkyries disguised themselves—oh, dear, this is complicated—as swan-maidens; that is, women who had turned themselves into swans, in order to enable the warriors whose military successes they had invisibly controlled while up in the ether, to fall in love with them. A lovely display of wiles and power, I think: the Valkyrie laying down her wings by the poolside while she bathes, allowing the warrior to think he has come upon her by chance. Perhaps the masochistic dear thinks he has found another Diana; anticipates being torn to shreds by her hounds. But she has led him, as she led him unwittingly into battle, to fall at her feet and believe he has the upper hand simply because he has possession of her wings—her false wings. The Valkyrie’s wings are optional accessories.

  So it was these thoughts I turned over, with the water-smoothed pebbles between my toes, sitting among the reeds on the bank. I admit I entertained the odd Leda-inspired fantasy. What if the dissatisfied swan, the ‘odd one out’, popped down earthwards, brought his brute-blood to bear upon… But I was getting too old for that kind of speculation. Violation fantasies held none of the appeal that they might have in my earlier, politically less informed days. Looking back, I really don’t know what I had been dreaming about. But, like the Valkyrie’s wings, none of our dreams are natural, are they? They are accessories bought for us by other hands, stocking fillers that we have to walk around with in the waking dream of our lives. And we wonder why we feel foot-bound, why we hobble, when we wear these Christmas stockings and think them roller-skates.

  My brothers, before they went, supplied me with all sorts of impedimenta. Impedimenta for the feet… high-heeled shoes, my mother’s, my ‘real’ mother’s shoes, which were left in the cupboard underneath the marble staircase. Red stilettos fished out of the drab garbage one day by my youngest brother. My brothers tortured me, I think it fair to say. Yes, there were eleven of them, and in their attic room I stood in the centre of the gapless circle they made and I had to parade naked in those shoes.

  Their impedimenta were mental accoutrements, the bric-a-brac of their fantasies that hindered our waking lives in our chilly, motherless home like overfilled backpacks hamper an army’s progress.

  I had an army of brothers, an alert rank of male peers, their bodies and faces seemingly identical, impersonal, intent on merely the violation of myself. I was the other, I was the strange one. When they stood in their circle, who defied their difference with her very different being?

  And downstairs paced my stepmother Hilde, holding at bay our father, who in turn believed himself master of her. He thought he had her Valkyrie wings locked in the armoury. But he didn’t. She held the keys; especially the keys to the attic where, one by one, my brothers stretched across and pestled sputum and spunk into me.

  But I was merely the cabaret; a diversion. I was the healthy reclamation of their appetites; my gender symbolised the recuperation of their heterosexuality for, when I was lifeless, limp, a tattered rag that bled and disgusted them on that wooden floor the colour of gruyere cheese… they would return to the task in hand and fuck each other, as one swift and efficient body of men.

  When the sun came down and it was almost dark, the swans alighted on the beach, a little distance from me. And, indeed, they shed their feathers, for at night my stepmother’s magic could hold no sway over them. In a heap of white pillow stuffings my eleven brothers looked exhausted and relieved. They clasped each other and gazed at their sun-reddened bodies. I still felt a certain fondness, I must admit. From where I sat, fingers clenching pebbles in shock, they looked quite harmless. They were thin with tiredness and a diet of fish, their hair was lank and long and their inert genitalia useless and pale as the eyes of potatoes. I stood up and waved to them.

  One by one my brothers embraced me. Their flesh was rubbery, worn lifeless in the wind. The youngest explained that, cursed as they were, they must fly all day in the shape of swans, in the face of the sun, and never set their feet on earth or water. When night came, since they reverted so swiftly, they must find land—or fall, like Icarus, in a shower of useless feathers.

  We sat on the shore, softened and white in the moonlight, in silence for a while. Their plumage, all around us, was warm and fluffed out with air. It looked very much as if we were in the wreckage of their attic room, in pleasanter, more innocent times, after an enthusiastic pillow fight.

  But there never were innocent times. Now, as then, my brothers were animals. They were pornographers of the vilest kind; desire had no context for them. It was a raison d'etre, having nothing to do with identity. The pillow fights then would end as this feather shower was now ending: two or three were ignoring my presence entirely, were sprawled upon the bracken, one slipping another a length of his grubby cock, happy to be human again.

  My youngest brother talked me through the night.

  ‘We do not usually come here. Today has been an unusual day, to return so close to our place of origin. We rest at night, in human form, on a little rock in the sea, far from here. We must huddle together. If the sea is rough, the foam spurts over us, but we cling on for dear life.’

  ‘Why did you come back here?’ I asked.

  ‘Twice a year are the days long enough for us to fly as far as this place. We come to see you, Eliza. We watch over you, and then we return to our rock.’

  My guardian angels! Gabriels all, though you would hardly credit it. Most of them seemed vastly unimpressed by the business of the night, fingering and pulling at each other in the most desultory fashion.

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nbsp; ‘We have been wrongly punished, our sister. You must break this spell.’

  I let this settle in, implications coaxing their way through the deceptive silence. The surf’s gloating throb and boom, the grunting of the lovers on the freckled shore. I let him stew for a while. I owed them nothing.

  But before dawn came I realised that I had no answer for Hilde. Which was the odd one out? There was no way of telling. The boys were set out like a debauched football team, smeared in each other’s juices. The youngest had left me still deciding whether to help their cause, while he submitted to a swift and surly fuck from another whose name, I am pleased to relate, I had forgotten. But they left me alone. Obviously they needed me.

  So it was because I was none the wiser that I went with them. That morning, as the sunlight eased into the gloom and their silhouettes were broken up, smoothed out in its casual wash, I told them I would come with them to their rock in the sea for that day. Their torsos constricted, became round and pregnant bird breasts, their sculpted necks stretching painfully into white serpents. They howled as their faces were broken off into stubby beaks, their feet splayed into clumsy webs, their cocks reared up into their bodies. My brothers made a raft of their wings and closed about me in tight formation, carrying me surely into morning.

  Justice? I’m not so sure what it is. When Valkyries succeeded in getting a chosen warrior to fall in love with them, there were always problems. They weren’t blind, those girls. Why, by the watersides as they were doing their fan dances with assumed swan’s wings and enticing old Ethelred or whoever, they were always aware of a certain niggling doubt. Odin would bring them to justice for attempting to articulate their desires. It isn’t fair, none of it is fair. Is Ethelred or whoever punished? No, but neither is he fairly exercising his desires. He has been hoodwinked by the feathered Salome from the skies. Odin was, in those cases, absolute. His not so tender mercies came like the thunderbolts that shattered the poor and virtuous Justine in de Sade’s tale. As I grow older I wonder about de Sade; was he such a monster after all? He opposed, with every perverted fibre of his being, the likes of Odin. It was on Odin’s instructions that the Valkyries would alter the course of great battles. Unseen they would stab, slaughter and whisper in the ears of their victims. But if a Valkyrie fell for a member of the away team, the team that Odin had decreed must fall… well, then there was a ruckus. Justice, you see, is a moot point. Who am I to say what my brothers deserved? Or Hilde for that matter. All I can relate, and not wholly impartially, is what they got.