[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Phoenix Court Series

  COULD IT BE MAGIC? | Paul Magrs

  Introduction

  COULD IT BE MAGIC?

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  JEP

  FOND OF A TREAT

  About the Author

  More by Paul Magrs

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  I sold my first novel and, together with a bunch of friends also in their mid-twenties, ran away to Edinburgh. In the summer of 1995 there was a lot going on. We arrived just as they were filming Trainspotting on Princes Street. It was the time when Cyber-cafes were opening up everywhere. We moved in during festival season, and the annual books jamboree was taking place in leafy Charlotte Square just a few blocks from where we were living. We were at the top of a warehouse, reachable only by umpteen flights of steps up a fire escape, high above the canyons and the restaurants of the New Town. We ran up and down the city all day and night. It was bliss.

  That summer was all about dancing at CC Blooms till dawn, and sitting late at night in the Blue Moon café having Mexican food, or drinking lager and eating Loveheart sweets at Over the Rainbow, where they had a life-sized mannequin of Glinda the Good Witch in their window. Once, when my editor was visiting, we were drinking in there and Glinda’s head fell off spontaneously along with her tiara still attached and it bounced down the length of our table.

  There are so many stories about Edinburgh in the mid-Nineties I could tell you. Some of them would make your hair curl.

  The point is, I wrote a lot. Much of it was in the form of journals. I went to cafes and bars all across the city, writing and drawing all day long. I filled book after book in places like the City Café and Café Kudos. But mostly I was in the Blue Moon. It was the place that every evening began and ended: the magical Queer café that I fictionalised in my stories as The Scarlet Empress.

  I started work on Could it be Magic? and it was a kind of sequel to both Marked for Life and Does it Show? Those two novels were first drafted in 1992 and 1991 respectively and they were linked by being set in the same place and time. I wanted to write a third book to connect and unify them, further developing the ideas and the stories I’d been working on. And so Could it be Magic? began with a party thrown for all the characters from those two previous books. It was a silly literary joke and a bookish knees-up, inviting all those characters to make cameos, updating us with what they’d all been up to. It set up the action for what was to come and it thrust into the spotlight the heroes of the current book.

  I remember thinking a lot about magic and realism and how far magic can impinge upon a grittily realistic, sometimes hostile world. Could magic lead to salvation or just solipsistic madness? In this book I went on to push the surrealism as far as I could take it at that time. You’ll see where it goes when you get into this story. Some of the things I do here still feel pretty audacious to me, and that’s something I’m very glad about.

  I’m not sure what readers knew what to make of it all. Perhaps the mix of elements was too rich and esoteric? Was I ahead of my time? Weren’t people ready for One Hundred Years of Solitude in a town just north of Darlington?

  I was once accused of only writing Freakshow characters. Tattooed men, ancient lesbians, boys covered in leopard-skin spots, ballsy transvestites. Maybe twenty years on the world is more comfortable with a cast as mixed up as this? Maybe genre-mashing and all kinds of ambiguity are more welcome now than they were at the end of the last century? I’m not sure. I hope so.

  Either way, Chatto and Windus and their paperback imprint, Vintage, had been publishing me since my first story came out in 1995. In quick succession they published Marked for Life, Does it Show?, my short story collection, Playing Out and then, in 1998, Could it be Magic? Pretty soon after that they dropped me. My editor left for the US and the incoming editor made it plain she had no interest in Queer Working Class Magical Realism. I was dumped and it felt absolutely terrible.

  By then I had met the man, Jeremy Hoad, who was going to be my partner. I’d had two years in Edinburgh, whizzing around, having adventures, and a great deal had happened. I was in my late twenties and I had published four books. By 1998 I was down South. I had taken up a full time post as a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. I’d moved to Norwich and Jeremy moved south to be with me pretty soon afterwards. At twenty-seven I was teaching the MA course in Novel Writing begun by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson: the course that had produced Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro and a whole host of bookish luminaries. I was teaching with Andrew Motion, who was just about to be crowned Poet Laureate. It was a heady, hectic, over-busy, exhilarating and bizarre period in my life.

  There are stories I could tell you about UEA and Norwich that would make your hair stand on end.

  Anyhow, Could it be Magic? came out and I was teaching people who were older than me on a very prestigious postgraduate course. I had found my genre and completed a trilogy that had answered lots of the questions I had been formulating for myself during the 1990s: about Queerness and magic, storytelling and identity.

  Big questions, it seemed to me. But at the time, despite some nice reviews, the world didn’t give all that much of a fuck, really. I was in a pushy, grabby, noisy, strange campus environment, working with all kinds of very creative people – some of them very nice, others horrible, and some of them completely crackers and a bit of both.

  I was teaching full time and my writing became my secret nocturnal obsession all over again. Busy in the daytime with everyone else’s books I had to find time to concentrate on my own. I had to pick myself up again in order to reinvent myself and write another book, even though I’d been dumped. I got to it and I wrote a novel that would take place chiefly in the city I had loved and recently left.

  I used to think of my first books as a trilogy ending with Could it be Magic? But all these years later I can see that this isn’t quite true. The story went on, telling itself to me, unfolding in different towns and cities, following me both geographically and spiritually wherever I went.

  I went from book to book, at more or less the rate of one a year. Some were published, some went by the wayside. I moved from publisher to publisher, trying to find a home that would last. I’ve been called a ‘cult writer.’ That’s what they say when you have a smallish but fervent following. Well, I’ve been called worse.

  I’m so happy these early books of mine are being brought out again. I’m happy in the knowledge that they aren’t like anyone else’s novels, ever.

  I hope you enjoy this one, and go on to read the rest…

  Paul Magrs

  Manchester

  April 2016.

  ONE

  In the shop the music they were playing was Pan Pipes II. Elsie loved that CD. ‘Everything I Do, I Do It for You.’ Across the cash desk Judith was leaning conspiratorially, messing up the magazines. Her hair was thick with lacquer and black dye, making Elsie shudder. Elsie believed in keeping yourself natural and nice.

  “Number sixteen,” Judith repeated. “The party’s at number sixteen.�
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  Elsie pulled a face. “I wouldn’t want to go somewhere like that. I don’t know them in that house.”

  “Well, you have to go out on New Year’s Eve, Elsie,” Judith insisted. “You can’t stay in and be miserable.” She felt awful saying that, but she’d been talking to someone about this the other day: Elsie needed snapping out of her misery. It was doing her no good.

  “Ay, maybe I’ll go out to this party.”

  Behind her a queue was forming.

  “Good lass!” Judith twinkled through her mascara. “Now, what can I get you?”

  Elsie decided she was drinking again. With Tom gone she had free rein. On the shelf behind Judith’s head there was a row of gin bottles and they were the exact green of Christmas. The colour of the worst Christmas Elsie had ever known. It would be splashing out, buying a bottle of gin, even a smallish one, but it was cheaper than going out to a pub. At least going round someone’s house saved you a bit of money that way.

  “I’ll have the cheapest bottle in the middle size,” she said, “and four cans of Boddies for our Craig, and forty Benson and Hedges.”

  Judith collected them all, loving the clink of the spirits bottles. “Back on the drink then, pet?” she said wickedly.

  “It’s New Year’s, isn’t it?” Elsie snapped.

  Judith hadn’t meant to sound judgmental. With her man away again, Elsie had nothing left but going back on the drink. They had taken him back into the home on Christmas Eve. He went in with his nervous about once a year. He was crackers, but he kept Elsie off the drink. What with him and her son Craig hanging about with a nasty set, Elsie had her plate full. As far as Judith was concerned, she was welcome to her drink.

  “Are you off to this party then?” Elsie asked, softening. “Have you been invited?”

  “There’s no invites, pet. It’s all word of mouth. But yeah. Soon as I shut this place, I’m getting me glad rags on. All of Phoenix Court will be round there, I reckon.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a look in,” Elsie said. She liked it when the whole street got together. As she paid and packed her shopping bag, she missed the look Judith was giving her. The last party round their way had been at Judith’s house. At that do Elsie was smashed, but she was holier-than-thou about alcohol when Tom was about. That night she had said she wasn’t drunk, she’d been touched by a divine hand. Judith hopes she wouldn’t make a show of herself tonight.

  As Elsie bustled out, a spring in her step now as she crossed the scuffed lino, Judith decided that Pan Pipes II was too relaxing for this afternoon. She wanted something boppier in the background, Tina Turner or someone.

  With all this frost the Yellowhouses looked almost beige.

  Icicles clung to eaves and satellite dishes and, as she cut through Sid Chaplin Drive, Elsie wondered that the vibrations from—where? Outer space? Other satellites?—didn’t shake the icicles off.

  It was this time of year on the estates that she loved best. She thought it looked picturesque. The rosehip bushes hemming play parks and car parks were icing-sugared. The dark wooden fences of each garden had frost piped in neat, regular stripes. It wasn’t muddy, either, which meant you could nip across the gaps without getting covered in clarts. The windows in the low-roofed, boxy buildings were warmly lit. She left her own lights on all the time and loved to come back to them. The downstairs windows were pebbled and thick. They made the light inside fuzzy, like a mirage indoors.

  For almost two years she had been snug between the phone box and the main road, at the edge of Phoenix Court. She had managed to move away from the old, broken-down flats across town, behind the precinct. It was rough there and she hadn’t been able to sleep because of the bother. Her doctor stepped in when she applied to the council for a transfer. They saw her right in the end and she landed up here, in the Yellowhouses. And it was a lovely street. They were all friendly round here. It was a pleasure to go visiting round the doors. By rights she should know everyone by now, but houses had been filled and refilled in the past two years. There was always something going on. Jane, the young woman who lived by Elsie, said, “It’s getting rough round here now. They’re moving in the rough types from across town.”

  Elsie looked stung.

  “Oh, not you,” Jane said hastily. “I meant all that lot coming over from the Dandy Cart. The council move them out of there for being trouble and then they shove them on our doorsteps.” Jane scowled. Elsie thought Jane scowled too much. Far too much for a young lass like her. She was what? Twenty-eight? And there wasn’t a drop of joy in her. Everything seemed to get on her nerves. Elsie would think how she’d been at that age. That was the seventies, and she’d got up to all sorts.

  Those were the years before Tom and God, even before Craig. Everyone she knew worked up on the industrial estate, assembling fiddly electrical parts in the Sugar Factory. All the lads and lasses from school were together still, as if, on school leaving day, they had walked out en masse, crossed the town, and walked into the factory together. For work they wore the same plastic hairnets and gloves and blue nylon smocks. They were all in the same boat. The lads kicked a ball about round the side of the factory building and the lasses smoked, standing by the doorways. Gossip and taunts would fly recklessly between parties. Reckless was the word, really. That was exactly how we carried on, Elsie thought. All the laughing on the production line, even the mocking and the bickering, it was all underlaced with a sexiness. It was a joke at the Sugar Factory in those years that everyone had had everyone else. So what if they had? Elsie thought back to all those faces in the early seventies; the lads with hair overgrown, unwashed-looking, big sideburns and tashes; the lasses still wanting to be Twiggy. They’d grown up together in the same small town. In a way it was no wonder they’d all had each other, if that was the way you wanted to put it. They were part of the same litter. Like animals, pulling and nuzzling at each other in unguarded moments. Send them out in a coach on bank holidays with crates of booze, to Redcar or Blackpool, or put them in a nightclub like the Gretna on the A167, and the inevitable happens. Gladly they would lose whatever inhibitions they had with each other. They would communicate everything they could, as quickly and breathlessly as possible.

  There was an urgency about us, Elsie thought, passing through Catherine Cookson Close. At twenty-eight she’d had a list of fellers she still wanted to knock off. Was that wrong? When she told that to Jane, only recently, Jane had looked downright sniffy. She’d also told her that the pinnacle had been, in 1977, finding out on the day of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee that Big Jim Burns, who she’d grown up with, wasn’t called that for nothing.

  Elsie wanted to ask, what was wrong with that? She’d had a lovely time, the day of the Silver Jubilee. Big Jim Burns was a copper and she kissed him patriotically in the town centre and then took him back to her flat and there they fucked wildly for much of that afternoon.

  1977—the very number still glowed with the warmth of that June. She could still feel, if she thought hard, the press of his weight on her stomach and thighs. She could hardly open her mouth wide enough to get this thing in. Elsie wished she hadn’t told Jane that bit. Now Jane looked at her as if she was a filthy old woman. Am I? Elsie thought. Here she was, at forty-something, getting all stirred-up at the thought of a big policeman’s big thing, carrying a shopping bag of drink back from the shops.

  Jane made her feel disgraceful. That was the word. Yet Jane was no virgin. She had a seven-year-old bairn and no husband. What made her so prim? Anyway, they were pals, Elsie and Jane, and she shouldn’t think ill of her.

  Here she was. Turn the corner, where the puddles were frozen over black, and suddenly she was in Phoenix Court. Everyone’s windows were lit up as the teatime gloom stole in. She counted off all the trees in the windows and felt sad that they would be coming down in a few days. She thought there was nothing sadder than Christmas ending. Maybe she’d be glad to see the back of this awful, lonely Christmas.

  She stopped in the play park and loo
ked across to number sixteen. All their lights were on and their tree seemed to be the biggest and most lavish in the street. There were shapes moving about behind the net curtains. They must be getting ready for the party. She could hear music coming faintly from within: ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. It all seemed inviting.

  Before she went home to make some tea, Elsie thought she would check what her Craig was up to. She hadn’t asked him yet, but she felt sure he’d see the New Year in with the lads. She just took it for granted. Most of Christmas he’d been with them. Her Craig, hanging out with the rough lads.

  But look at him, when he was with his mates. If she was a stranger, if she wasn’t his mother at all, then she’d see no difference. Mothers could blind themselves, she knew, when it came to sons. But sons were men. They were full of blood and temper and that had to come out. From her bedroom window at night she could see across the main road, over Woodham Way, and sometimes she could see Craig, part of his gang, hanging around the streets. They would converge on the Forsyths’ house. It was like a squat.

  There was a car propped up, half dismantled, beside the fence of the Forsyths’ house. It was painted scarlet with white flashes, like Starsky and Hutch’s car. The lads were meant to be fixing it up for one of the Forsyth brothers, but Elsie never saw any car-fixing going on. They just stood around with their cans of lager and laughed long and raucously, fighting among themselves and playing the car radio as loud as it would go. Dance music night and day.

  “Hip-hop,” Craig had snapped at her when she asked him, “What sort of music is that?” “Hip-hop,” he said, “it’s the latest thing.” It went right through her, the insistence of it, but she could see how it might appeal to the young. It seemed to go on for ever. Better than those songs that are over in three minutes flat, the ones she was used to. But when Craig said, almost belligerently, that his favourite music was hip-hop, her heart went out to him and he felt like her little lad again. Hip-hop and him with his broken, swollen, unmendable right foot. The one his stupid natural father had run over in a hired Transit van, the day he left them high and dry. Reversing down the street, still shouting at Elsie, he had driven over his only son. It was like a club foot, and the GP said he was lucky not to have needed a new plastic one, like Don off Coronation Street. That was her fault, not taking him for regular checkups. But going to the doctors gave her the heebie-jeebies. Craig would shout if he was in real pain and she would take him then. But then the doctor said there was gangrene and he was within a hair’s breadth of losing the foot altogether. Elsie felt ashamed. When Craig’s foot was unbound in consulting room it was all misshapen. It didn’t even look like a foot. It was like a big lump of gristle. Of course, this whole time, from his father running him over in the van, right until the present day, Craig hotly denied there was something wrong with him. But. he limped, he limped terribly. He was less steady in his feet than Big Sue round corner, or Jane’s stepdad, who had a wooden leg.