Table of Contents
Phoenix Court Series
Does It Show? - Paul Magrs
Introduction
Does It Show?
Prologue
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
Nude On The Moon
Bargains For Charlotte
About the Author
More by Paul Magrs
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
I began writing this novel in the summer of 1991, when I was preparing to return to college to start my MA in Creative Writing. It’s quite common for people to do those courses now, but not so much back then. I could hardly believe that such a thing was allowed: that I could get a bursary to spend a further year at university, writing my novel.
That summer I was back at our family’s house in Newton Ayclilfe, on an estate where everything was built of black brick and which I call, in these early books, Phoenix Court. I hadn’t been back for a while and that summer it was good to absorb the sights and sounds of the place again.
There was hardly any room in that house. Certainly not to work and write. I ended up more often than not perching on the back doorstep, reading library books and watching the world go by.
Our house in Guthrum Place was by the main road connecting all the estates. You could watch the minibuses running up down, doing circuits of all the streets and ferrying everyone to the town precinct and back. The precinct looked like Logan’s Run or Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but with pensioners in anoraks, pulling shopping trolleys.
I watched all our neighbours and the way they went from one house to the another. The women would drink tea in each other's kitchens and when the sun came out they would drag their chairs into their front yards and sit smoking and gossiping, their voices drifting over the dark, creosoted fences.
All the kids in our street were little that year. My sister was four and playing out with a whole gang of small kids who would go haring around, holding hands, in the wind and rain and some gloriously hot days.
There was so much going on to keep up with. There was the mother and daughter who were dragged out of their house by the police in the middle of the night, and everyone hurried outside to watch. It was well-known they were running a kind of brothel in their two-up two-down. Then there was talk of someone being held hostage. And there was the gang of rough lads across the main road in the Yellow Houses, who set their pit bull terrier onto the old man who lived next door to them. It was supposed to be a joke, but he fell down dead of shock on the hottest day in August. Everyone was out watching this happen: I remember the dog barking and the appalled silence.
I kept taking notes all summer. I kept writing down the dialogue. I was keeping tabs on everything, just as I always had, since I was a kid.
Gradually I formed a story to do with a woman who once lived in these streets in the Seventies and who was moving back in the Nineties, having reinvented herself out of all recognition. She had a daughter who was starting at the local Comprehensive School. Both women find themselves drawn into new friendships and relationships and the book would be all about huge human emotions and life-changing moments being played out on a seemingly tiny scale. It was going to be a Magical Realist epic on a council estate in the North-East. A phantasmagorical opera set in the midst of concrete brutalism.
Lancaster University was similarly concretized and minimalist. Soon I was back among its dreaming spires of poured cement. I had intended to use my MA year writing a gay bildungsroman, telling the tale of my childhood, my parents’ divorce, my artistic and sexual awakening and all that jazz. Then the course began and I found I was writing about Phoenix Court.
The workshop group was composed mostly of well-to-do lady poets in their forties, returning to education. Some were friendly, some were not. It was all very middle class and polite, with the snarkiness dialed down for the few hours we spent in class each week, then unleashed full force in the vegetarian cafes and coffee bars where we wasted our afternoons. Again, I was agog - watching how all these characters behaved.
For my first submission to this class in the autumn of 1991 I found myself handing in a chapter about Fran and Frank on a hot summer’s day in their yard. I loved the dialogue, that’s why I chose to show it to the workshop, rather than writing a chapter of that Queer Autobiography I’d been planning. It made me laugh. It made some of them laugh, too. Others, though, were mystified.
One of the poets said, ‘Forgive me, but can we really call this literary fiction? And isn’t literary fiction what this course is about? I don’t know what you would call this, actually. These are hardly the kind of characters one would expect to find in a literary novel.’
Someone shot back with an example or two of working class characters in literary fiction. They mentioned Faulkner. ‘But that’s in America. That’s different.’
“And besides… this is much too like a… soap opera, isn’t it? People talking like this in the North?”
“It’s just fiction,” I kept saying, all that term. “I don’t believe in genres. There are two types of fiction. There’s the good type, that you want to read and there’s the bad type, that you don’t want to read. There are books that are crap and sound bogus. And there are books that ring true. Books that are about something. Books where the voices are alive.”
Maybe I didn’t put it as concisely as that at the time. But that’s the position I was trying to articulate, all that year, as I wrote my way into the story. Mostly I just kept quiet and smiled at their comments and wrote my weekly chapter.
As later submissions went in and were photocopied and disseminated I
