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
