Playing Out

by Paul Magrs

  When you were pissed off with me you’d give the flowers a scrubbing. It was your way.

  In this house there is no tension. Nothing like the sexual atmospherics we’d practise without realising. I need to put my feet up.

  In your smart flat by the acid-green lilies you’d pounce on me from nowhere and fuck me on the carpet. You had your little ways and the physical advantage over me. Once the storm was broken, though, you could turn tender and I see now, when I think back, those hands of yours, cupped like petals about my cock’s stamen. I can’t think about this now. I’m home.

  ‘Plastic flowers know exactly what they are. They aren’t very realistic and they know that. They don’t pretend to be anything different. They’re proud of being bogus.’

  To me that sounded well thought out and impressive. I determined to argue the opposite because that’s what you liked. You didn’t want a toadying lapdog who agreed. You wanted me with a mind of my own. Right.

  ‘I like silk flowers best.’

  You raised that eyebrow, the one that waits, hell-bent on explication.

  ‘Plastic flowers remind me of visiting my aunties in the seventies, when I was a kid. Everything was overcolourful but dusty and tawdry.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ you said. ‘Generation gap opening up.’

  ‘But it’s true!’ I burst out, getting interested now. ‘I’m attracted to the silk flowers out of pathos. They’re not real and they know they don’t look quite real—being too regular and a touch too pastel—but they’re making a pathetic and ultimately doomed show at authenticity.’

  Your head was shaking. ‘How eighties!’

  I wasn’t going to argue. ‘That’s what I am, aren’t I?’

  ‘And I’m seventies.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And that’s some justification for your god-awful taste?’

  ‘Actually—’ and here I grinned—‘I’m a nineties person and so I like real flowers.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off!’ It was quite a shock to hear you swear. You never swore much; it was me who was common. You had massive coffee cups and Cocteau-engraved ashtrays and didn’t even smoke. ‘You can’t have that. Real flowers don’t come into it.’

  These were the things we talked about. And it was fun, wasn’t it? Exploring our relative states. Never blinding ourselves about each other. Early on you said, ‘Vive la difference.’ Even in a same-sex do, you said, there needed to be polarities at work. That was why you liked younger men. My opinions were unconfirmed; I’d just drifted.

  You thought I was a simple narcissist who wanted someone even younger than me. I was your best fantasy. My body was the house of all our desires, it seemed for a time. Well, now.

  ‘Surely you’re everyone’s perfect idea of St Sebastian?’

  Sometimes you’d say things that would put me off, like the above.

  Do you think this is funny? About sea horses, the male of the species. You once said—because we were fond of marine life at one stage, weren’t we?—that they looked as much like ears as horses.

  The shape and curl of the things. Sea-ear-horse.

  We found it was the male who gave birth. When we went to underwater zoos we watched, rapt whole Saturdays, through plate glass. The males, with those gorgeous unblinking blue eyes, slunk off behind the pond weed and then… Well, they had these inflated chests, puffed up proudly, and there was a dilating hole at the top and he would nod his snout to some sure, internal tune, waiting… and then (there really should be suitable musical accompaniment) out popped millions of tiny sea-horse babies, perfectly formed, swirling about in billows like roped silk hankies being yanked from the horse’s belly. It was beautiful, we thought.

  And marmosets and siamangs and arrow-poison frogs and jaçanas and damsel fishes and mouth-breeding bettas and rheas and mallee fowl and phalaropes. See? We’re all at it.

  Don’t you think that’s funny?

  My town is a grim town. You always said that and it’s the one place you will never follow me to. With my mother in Vienna and you scared of the grim north, I have a few weeks’ reprieve. Time to work out, sit in cafes all day long, gestating quietly.

  You used to slink past this town on Intercity as you used to slink past the whole of the north. We lived in our London flat and commuted to Scotland where you’d teach, desultorily. The north was Intercity’s nastiest interlude. When I travelled with you I’d gaze across the north’s fields of rape, thinking about before I knew you.

  But in my grim town I’ve found a cafe even you wouldn’t sniff at. The coffee comes in massive cups and saucers—continental Alice in Wonderland cups, bright yellow—and the waiter is South African and on warm days wears a kilt. In the mornings he brings me Greek yoghurt with fruit, which I crave now, as he helps me up the stairs to my usual table. I need help now, with all my swellings. I’m training less at the gym as my day arrives. For a little while it made an improvement. In the gym I hardened up, from Donatello’s to Michelangelo’s David. You always said men could be divided into those who preferred one or the other. Now I’m neither and ripe and the beautiful man in a kilt struggles to help me up to the cafe.

  I can sit, abstractedly, and I know people wonder why I sit so long and why I look… well, expectant.

  Is the waiter in a kilt younger than me? He says he left the army, ran a bar in Greece three years before coming here. So maybe he’s older. I wonder, is he fit to look after my children?

  Jazz plays; the whitewashed walls show selected paintings from a nearby school. I’m fond of the place. It’s a bit of your precious continent beside Newton Aycliffe.

  On those train rides where you’d duck your head from the north, we’d sit opposite each other and on the table there’d be your Guardian, my Smash Hits. Would people ever believe we were together? You’d fall asleep in your teaching outfit, head lolled back.

  Did I tell you about the young bloke who took the place next to you, who sneered at your snoring and smirked my way, allying us against your complacent, momentary repulsiveness? Did I betray you in that moment? Did the cock crow?

  He fell asleep himself, just out of York. He wore an old purple tracksuit, full of little bobbles from the wash. There was late-afternoon sun, trapping the air like marmalade in the carriage, making sweat stand on us, slick as confidence.

  I watched you both snooze and the bloke in the purple tracksuit got himself a slow, elegant horn on. The thick cotton of his tracksuit caricatured the shape of him and, fascinated, I watched him pulse with the train’s rocking.

  Before he shocked himself awake, he drew a lazy hand down to cover it with a touchingly public caress. He was a pretty young bloke; saw me watching when he woke, didn’t mind. He got off a little later.

  You slept still and I thought about you, white, and the stale smell of you underneath. A kind of brie and decades’ worth of smoke ground up in your pores. Your body, its smell; how inscrutable it all was to me. I could tell the other bloke a mile off, read him plainly as I could that fabulous cock of his. There was no real need for me to follow him off the train. Though I was tempted. And did I really get fucked off him in the train’s bog? Would I tell you? Is this kid—horror of horrors—his? Are you set on being a dad?

  Vive la difference, you said, justifying your love for Donatello’s more boyish David. I use the same to praise your older body. Your flesh hangs heavier and your gestures of privacy are touching in ways youth’s public shows can be. I love you for when you woke on that train and said you had to go to the loo and, too polite to say loo aloud, you nodded in its direction. Was it the same loo I had conceived our child in, minutes before?

  ‘Fabulous kilt,’ I pluck up and say when he brings my coffee.

  ‘Uh…’ he begins, and elects to play it safe. ‘It’s just right for this weather.’

  For today the grim town steams, below the wide wooden blinds of the cafe. It could be stifling to be anywhere other than here. Pm flicking through Maugham’s Summing Up and it’s portentous, deeply miserable under a
ll the epiphanies. Maugham reminds me—forgive me—a bit of you. Loves the sound of his own epiphanies.

  I want to hear this waiter talk.

  ‘Uh… you’re really engrossed then?’ he says.

  I thought he meant with the child!

  ‘Good book?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Uh…’ He’s hovering on these solid wooden boards. Even though the cafe’s empty and we’re mostly inconspicuous, I can feel the humid air is tense with his leg muscles working nervously beneath his skirt, beside me. And me, I’m flopped like a great pregnant lady. Doesn’t he wonder how I can be so fat? Why is he still—is he really? Could he really be chatting me up? I never thought to have another man look my way.

  ‘Uh… I need something not too intellectual to read on my nights off from here.’

  I smile and take a deep breath and start to tell him about Angela Carter. He’s never heard of her before and I tell him that he’s got a treat in store.

  It’s mid-morning and the Greek yoghurt’s not been delivered yet. So he says there’s some home-made peach-and-honey ice cream I could have instead. Would that do? I say it sounds wonderful. He brings it and I can feel our baby give a pang at the sweetness.

  I leave my things, my jacket, leopard-skin rucksack, Maugham, at the table (a risk, I know) and pop downstairs to the loo. He’s in there, skirt hoisted around his hips in the pissoir in the cellar. He turns for a nonchalant smile.

  ‘When’s it due?’ he asks as I take my place. He glances down at the hump of our child; I give his cock the once-over.

  ‘Any day now,’ I say.

  ‘Do you want a boy or a girl?’

  ‘I don’t mind. Just so long as it’s healthy and well.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ He nods approvingly.

  * * *

  Six mornings later he has to ring an ambulance for me and is there at the birth. My mother is due back from the continent the next day and she comes bearing all sorts of baby gifts. The baby has a fine leopard-skin fur. The waiter comes to my hospital bed with real lilies. Life’s looking up. You sent your card and I’m writing this but I don’t reckon I’ll post it.