Playing Out by Paul Magrs (free biff chip and kipper ebooks TXT) 📗

She gave me Lawrence’s poems for my birthday with a nice message about friendship. And invited Clara round for a meal to celebrate my twenty-third.

I bided my time, thinking that, just in the nick, somebody else would arrive to drag me out for an alternative. Somebody else would leave a man with his own house and a sunken bath. Somebody else would be catching a train, knowing it was my birthday.

But Clara came and I heard Emma whisper to her on the doorstep the reason for tonight’s meal.

By midnight Clara was sobbing on the settee; Emma was clutching her hand. Next year Clara had nobody to live with, her friends had all made other arrangements and she was consequently feeling—quite justifiably, I thought—isolated.

Emma glanced at me as if asking, Can’t she stay here?

As it happens she did stay that night.

It got so late and Clara had been so upset, we decided that it would be a good thing for her to stay.

It got so late because they were discussing their parts. Clara had been offered Sally Bowles—I was surprised, too—and to ease Emma’s rancour, she had been given Ophelia in Clara’s Hamlet.

‘Aren’t we incestuous?’ Clara grinned, her make-up smudged to frightening effect.

In Sainsbury’s that afternoon Emma had confided to me that she thought Clara had lesbian tendencies.

‘My God!’ I said, picking out mushrooms.

‘I don’t know how to handle it.’

I tried not to laugh. I tossed the mushrooms into the trolley and dusted my hands down my jeans. ‘Handle what, exactly?’

I once made the mistake of using the word ‘cunt’ in its literal sense in a conversation with Emma. In the kitchen where, at night, our wide window was like a mirror. Looking past me, she was pouting at herself and tilting those cheekbones and when I said ‘cunt’ she very nearly stopped sucking in her cheeks.

When Clara stayed that night I agreed to take Emma’s room and lend them mine. Straitened on her self-assembled pine single bed, I heard them giggling. For a moment I thought they had actually decided to contribute to the lesbian continuum. I went for a pee and saw, through my opened door, that they were removing an Athena poster of a naked man from my wall. It had been there as a joke, really, that had played itself out.

‘We couldn’t sleep under that,’ Clara told me, balancing on my bed, rolling him up.

The light came in brighter into Emma’s room and kept me awake all night. In the morning they had already gone, to begin sitting in on each other’s rehearsals.

After I made my bed I found that my letters had been read and strewn across the floor, along with several items of my more androgynous clothing.

There was fresh vomit in the bathroom and the coffee machine had been left ready to go, the morning’s post propped up beside it.

Over breakfast I thought about what to cook that night and how to tell Emma we had to find new living arrangements. I have a good memory for situations, and most of those I have had and still remember are ones I am glad to have over and done with.

The difficult thing about breaking up the happy home would be explaining it to our landlord, the dwarf, who thought he had us on lease for three years. Until, as he saw it, Emma became as big as Lulu. In his eyes stardom and long residency were linked. He took Lulu as his model and saw that sticking at a situation resulted in success. And Lulu had been a star for more years than either Emma or I had been alive.

LAMINATING IDEAL MEN

She’d never felt safe behind a desk and look! Here she was.

She was running a gym, it was the job she’d always wanted, but the irony of it all, honestly! Behind a desk again, with the gym shipshape under her command, its rigging creaking in the salty breeze from the rowing machines and the step machines. Mid-morning saw her fiddling with a paperclip. The desk was empty apart from the phone and a little plant.

Trish gave a covert glance across the reception area to check herself in the mirror behind the coffee things. Andrew liked to offer coffee to customers. They were meant to pay, really, and there was a sign up but, he said, let them think they’re getting something for nothing. They’ll remember and come back. What we want is a nice regular clientele in our pockets. Butter them up with coffee, with free goes on the sun beds, anything.

She was checking her hair in the mirrored panels. It was a problem. Being in reception all day meant she did her own training at odd moments when they got slack. Sweating at intervals like that tended to make her hair go limp.

‘It looks fine.’ Helen was getting them two plastic cups of coffee. She bent to stir her sugar in, leaning over the wickerwork table. Some youth was poring over the bodybuilding magazines and Trish watched him stare at Helen’s body. She was all in Lycra again, a glossy indigo, and she looked just like one of those female body builders, one of the famous ones who still manage to be feminine, as they say. This physique of hers had crept up on Helen. She used to be plump, if anything, when she first started work here. Then—bang—one day she walks in in Lycra and she’s like this, all toned and fabulous. Behind her back Andrew had scowled. ‘That’s all on my time, that, I’ve paid for her bloody body.’

‘Your hair looks fine.’ Helen gave her the coffee. ‘Am I still making this too weak?’

‘I think you’ve got the hang of it.’

‘It’s different to instant.’ They sipped and Trish tested the potted plant on her desk for dust. Helen added, ‘It’s nice.’

‘I think I should talk to the cleaners.’

Helen looked blank. ‘When do we have cleaners?’

‘First thing. Before you arrive.’

‘Do you know, I never thought about cleaners before. I suppose it stands to