[Phoenix Court 01] - Marked for Life Read online

  Table of Contents

  Phoenix Court Series

  MARKED FOR LIFE Paul Magrs

  Introduction

  Patient Iris

  Marked For Life

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Judith's Do Round Hers

  About the Author

  More by Paul Magrs

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  I WAS BUILDING THIS PLACE CALLED PHOENIX COURT IN MY HEAD.

  When I started writing novels I invented a town in the North East of England, an industrial New Town, some miles south of the magical, Medieval city of Durham. It was a town rather like the one I was brought up in, full of promise and intricately-arranged estates of council-owned houses. Like the estate where I grew up, Phoenix Court was composed of blocky houses, terraces and maisonettes that looked like Toy Town. It was a minimalist, postmodern Utopia where a cast of thousands lived cheek by jowl in intermittent harmony.

  Into this setting I plonked the characters of my early stories and novels. Some were based on real life gossip and hearsay, others were drawn from urban legend and scandalous news stories. Others came imported from nineteenth century novels or folk tales from faraway countries. All of these elements were transposed onto 1990s Northern Britain, where they found a noisy and vivid home. Phoenix Court was a grand jigsaw made of many bright, shiny pieces.

  I drew the strands of these stories together and I’m amazed now, looking back, and seeing the way that people—reviewers, readers, peers, librarians, booksellers—sometimes threw up their hands in horror. What a freakshow! Poor people! Common people! Northerners! Queers and transvestites! Goths and monsters! Tattooed men and elderly lesbians!

  I got told quite a few times by folk at readings: ‘Your books are more like soap operas than real literary fiction. One finds in your books the type of character more usually found on television…’

  As well as class, there would also be a certain snobbery about Magical Realism. My fantastic effects would sometimes push people too far. ‘Oh, heavens, he’s already taken us out of our safety zone, into the wild and poverty-stricken cultural wasteland he hails from…and now he wants us to buy into all this magical stuff as well..?’

  I had read the South American Magical Realists. I knew my Marquez and Borges. I had also read my Kafka, my Calvino, my Angela Carter. To me, Magical Realism was the genre of the underdog. Magic was the revenge of peasant literature upon cosy Realism…. And so it was natural to me to have all kinds of queer goings-on in my novels.

  In 1992 I completed my MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. I wrote Does it Show? that year, which would turn out to be my second published novel. By 1992 I was studying for my PhD on the books of Angela Carter, in an all-gay household by the old canal, with boats going up and down all day, a piano and a chandelier in our living room, and a cat called Oscar. I was teaching the old ladies in an Edwardian Hotel by the sea how to write their novels and also teaching postmodern and feminist fiction to the undergraduates on campus. I set about writing Marked for Life thinking, this one I have to sell!

  I remember writing it quite vividly, especially that initial burst of sixty pages: a first act in which I set up all the characters and their twisted back-stories and their world of queer melodrama. I was confident enough to show it to a whole bunch of friends at that stage. I was lucky to have friends who encouraged me to finish it—to keep going, to keep pushing the story to see how baroque, extravagant and outrageous it could get. I loved the juxtaposition of council estate streets with phantasmagoria. I loved writing about characters who could reinvent their own worlds through sheer force of personality and imagination. Our hero had turned himself into an illustrated man. One of his ex lovers was so neglected he had become completely invisible. I dropped into the proceedings a lesbian who turned out to be centuries old, a nudist who fancied herself a Valkyrie from the old north country myths…

  I set the whole thing during a tumultuous Christmas period, with the snow falling endlessly and blurring and mystifying all barriers…and I turned a screwball farce into something darker, and more decadent and strange, I hope.

  I was making up my own genre. I called it Queer Working Class Magical Realism.

  I remember, about that time, going to stay with my maternal grandmother—my Big Nanna, Glad—on Tyneside for a long weekend. It was spring and I was about halfway through my book. We had one particular day out in South Shields, where ancient Hadrian’s Wall ends by the shore of the North Sea and the remains of the Roman fort were being restored that year.

  My Big Nanna and I explored the site and looked down from the grand hill to the whole of Tyneside and the steely sea and the docks and the terraced houses. She had a lot of history in that town, going back to the 1940s (she had arrived on the train with her new husband, in the middle of an air raid!) That day she told me a lot of stories about the intertwined lives of those who lived by the docks and about those few characters she knew still living in South Shields. We visited the town’s museum, where they had reconstructed a terraced street just like the one she had lived in, so long ago.

  I wrote a short story that night, ‘Patient Iris’ and it incorporated the images of that day, as well as fragments of family history I’d picked up from listening to my Big Nanna. It was a tiny story, just a couple of pages long. I wrote it for hours, in one continuous flourish: almost one sentence. It was a spiraling, dreamlike thing and when I had finished it, I knew I had written my best story yet. It fed into the mythology of ‘Marked for Life’ and it felt very much like a gateway into the rest of the novels I was hoping to write.

  When I returned to my house in Lancaster I finished ‘Marked for Life’, full of new energy and attack. I really luxuriated in the magic and the strangeness and set my characters into the very heart of a mysterious adventure, and a wilderness of snow. I realized that I loved novels in which everyone is turned completely upside down and must reinvent their lives by the end of the story.

  I decided that my books would always be about people learning to reinvent themselves. All my heroes would come to the conclusion that their life is for living their way, and they can remake themselves into anything they want. That’s what I learned from writing that story and that novel that year.

  At some point I sent my story off to an open submissions call for New Writing, an annual anthology sponsored by the British Council and published by Vintage Books. That year’s edition was being edited by AS Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst. As you once always had to do with these things, I sent off my manilla envelope with my story plus a stamped self-addressed envelope inside, and I promptly forgot all about it.

  Then, almost a year later, I returned alone to Newton Aycliffe, to house-sit while my family was abroad. The place had been untenanted long enough for a pile of post to build up in the hallway. When I arrived with my crates of books and belongings the heap (of bills, mostly) was about as high as the letterbox itself. I spent a whole evening sifting them and there, right at the bottom, was an envelope bearing the British Council logo. A gra
nd-sounding lady called Dr Harriet Harvey Wood was keen to tell me how the editors had loved ‘Patient Iris’ and how they would pay me a hundred pounds for my story. My very first published story!

  This triumph was enough to keep me going—spiritually, creatively—through another year of writing and teaching and finishing ‘Marked for Life.’ It was another year again before New Writing 4 was published and there was to be a party in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London celebrating the anthology’s release. Luckily, that very day there was a rather large review of the book in the Guardian by James Wood, who seemed like a very clever and percipient critic indeed in that he spent quite a long time praising ‘Patient Iris’ extravagantly.

  I was, as we say in the north, chuffed as muck.

  And it made going to a launch party with lots of fancy and literary types knocking around, all knowing each other, wittering away, glugging Frascati, somewhat easier. Knowing that, even though everyone else was already published and exceedingly well known, mine was the story that the reviewer had singled out that very same day—I felt fantastic.

  It must be added, I felt fantastic for the first and last time at one of those kinds of parties. I had my secret identity, as author of the story that everyone ought to read first and admire for its bravery, vividness, etc, and if anyone asked who I was, I could tell them my name and they’d know who I was. I’d just have to add—as ever—the right way to pronounce my name (It’s a silent G—Mars. It’s misspelled Irish from 1898…)

  Anyhow, as I saw, this was the first and last time I felt fantastic at such a party. (Though there was that do, two years later, in Waterstones in Islington, for New Writing 6, when the writer chosen to bore us with reading her story out loud went on for so long, I had time to quietly chat up the wine waiter, find the bookshop staff room, have a clumsy snog with him and return in time to applaud and pick up the wine glass my agent had been holding for me. But that had nothing to do with feeling good about my writing…)

  Also at that first book party, I talked to a publicity lady from Random House, and she had read Marked for Life. How was that even possible? I asked. So habituated was I to sealing up envelopes and sending them into the void, I couldn’t even remember mailing off my novel, last year’s draft, to her boss, the chief editor at Chatto and Windus. This lady from publicity had read it and loved it, and today’s review in the Guardian gave her the impetus to tell her boss, and to come to this party organized by her colleagues at Vintage in order to ask me: did I have an agent? Had I sold the book? Would I be interested in Marked for Life being published by Chatto and Windus...?

  And that’s where it was all happening, in a bookshop—long gone, ‘Books, etc’ it was called—on Charing Cross Road. In the heart of London, a long way from Phoenix Court. On the day of my first ever review in March 1995. Many things have gone right and wrong with my writing career since then and there are a lot of things I might, in retrospect change…but that first evening out as a published author was one of the best ever times. It was a real coming out moment.

  Within eight months Marked for Life was out in hardback. But it wasn’t publication that changed my life forever—fat chance!

  My life was already changed and I’d done it for myself in the first place. I’d done it by creating this imaginary world for my stories to happen in. Whatever happened after that, I’d always have Phoenix Court to go back to.

  Paul Magrs

  Manchester

  April 2016.

  PATIENT IRIS

  SHE HAS A FRIEND CALLED PATIENT IRIS WHO LIVES AT THE TOP OF THE town by the Roman remains.

  Irises take a good while to open. She thinks if you place them by the window they stand a better chance.

  Iris is patient. She watches men reconstructing the Roman remains.

  At the top of the town you can see all of South Shields, the grey flank of North Shields, the blue sash of sea.

  The Romans must have built here for the view.

  Their fort is vast. When they rebuild it, do they use the old stones or do they have all new, cut into shapes they have guessed at? She and Patient Iris watch them working and the stone certainly looks new. Newer and more yellow than even those private estates they’ve been putting up.

  She feels bad about Patient Iris. Who has turned bright yellow and sits by the phone. Who is ready to ring out in case she has an emergency. Her bedsores are a sight to see. She has looked under Patient Iris’s nightgown, at Patient Iris’s bidding. She instructed Patient Iris to sit by her window, to get some air, watch the world outside. Lying down all day does you no good, in the end.

  Fat purple welts, all down the back of her. Succulent, like burst fruit.

  PATIENT IRIS CAN’T QUITE REMEMBER, BUT DIDN’T THE COAST HERE ONCE freeze entirely?

  It is so high up. The Roman soldiers, with the north wind shushing up their leather skirts, parading on those ramparts, must have had it hard.

  And didn’t it once freeze over?

  Patient Iris lived at the end of a street. When the coast froze up, surely it was before the time they bombed the row’s other end? The houses went down like dominoes, a trail of gunpowder, stopping just short of Iris’s door.

  Patient Iris is a survivor. She survived the freezing-over that winter when, she realises now, she must still have been a child.

  SHE TALKS ON THE PHONE WITH HER FRIEND. HER FRIEND PHONES NOW more often than she visits. There’s nothing new to see. Although the Roman remains, across the way, grow a little higher every day.

  And these two women don’t need to see each other. They are so accustomed to the sight that the phone is all they need. And it saves Iris’s friend a trip out. Up the hill is arduous work, after all. Yet they used to walk it happily, to get to the Spiritualist church. When calling up your husband was the thing, before bingo.

  Her friend phones to check up on Patient Iris’s back. Both know that her health can’t last this winter.

  And winter is stealing in. When Patient Iris wakes in her chair each morning, the first thing she sees is the Roman remains blanched white with scabs of frost, their outlines etched in by an impossibly blue sky.

  Winters like this, everything turns to jewels. Patient Iris runs her fingers round her tender sores as she speaks into the receiver to her oldest living friend. Will they turn to rubies, drop away, make her well again and rich?

  “Do you remember—” she says, breaking into her friend’s flow. “Do you remember when the coast froze up?”

  Her friend is thrown for a moment. Then she sees the orange cranes frozen in the docks, useless and wading on ice. The monstrous keels of half-completed ships, abandoned, like wedding dresses on dummies with the arms not on yet and pins sticking out.

  “I think so,” she mumbles. She had been telling Patient Iris about the local women, bonded in syndicate, who won a million pounds between them on the football pools. They were all supermarket cashiers and had their photos taken by the local press, sitting in shopping trolleys.

  “But do you remember the seals on the ice?” They appeared from nowhere. Came thousands of miles south because it was so cold that winter.

  Her friend doesn’t remember the seals.

  Patient Iris recalls seeing grey sides of beef stranded on ice. She worked in a butchers, running errands. The butcher boys joked about serving up seal chops.

  The seals grew bigger. From the top of the town Patient Iris could hear them bark at night. Not like dogs; grunting coughs like old men in the park. They were getting bigger because they were pregnant. The whiskered seals with large, inscrutable eyes, beached on the useless docks.

  “Imagine,” says Patient Iris suddenly. “Imagine giving birth on sheer ice. Imagine being born on sheer ice. You come out of blubbery safety, straight into snow. The seals try to cover each other, but…”

  Her friend decides Iris’s mind is wandering. Tomorrow she will visit her in person. She begins to end the phone call. She wants Iris to put down the phone in case she needs to phone herse
lf an ambulance. She knows Patient Iris all too well and how she likes to do things for herself.

  Patient Iris has been kneading the bedsores as she talks. Down the side of her leg, through stiff white cotton, fresh stains of primrose and carmine bloom.

  PATIENT IRIS PUTS DOWN THE PHONE AND THINKS.

  One night when the seals were barking out their birth pangs, she left the house in her nightie and slippers and walked down to the docks.

  The dark, slumped shapes, dividing and reproducing, unabashed on the exposed span of gleaming ice. The high pig squeals of baby seals. The mothers rolling over, moist with their own cooling gels, careful not to slip and crush their children.

  Patient Iris met a woman, a hag, really, with great hooped skirts and a basket of herring on her back. She said her name was Dolly. She was a lunatic, screaming the odds at the clock face when it struck the hour. In her basket the fish slipped and goggled their frozen eyes as Dolly jogged about to keep warm.

  “I keep sailors inside my skirts. That’s why I wear them so big. So they can hide inside and dodge the draft. They needn’t have to go to sea. Or do what they don’t want.”

  Dolly’s face was like a coconut, the hairs growing thick inside the grooves so she’d never be able to shave them if she tried.

  TONIGHT IRIS’S OLDEST LIVING FRIEND DREAMS OF IRIS TURNING YELLOW and sitting by the phone. The moonlight shines off stark Roman walls and drops into her room.

  Patient Iris is still, asleep sitting up, looking dead already. Apart from the slight hiss of breath, which issues as smoke from her open mouth. She is awkward in her chair, doubled up with her precious jumble of ruined organs preserved in that clatter of limbs. She looks just as uncomfortable as those cashiers posing in their shopping trolleys, arms and legs akimbo and waving their champagne glasses and oversized cheques as photographers’ bulbs go off.

  Patient Iris’s friend of many years dreams that this winter will be cold. Colder even than that winter before the town was bombed and Tyne Dock was sheeted over in ice.