I tossed in surreal moments of Magical Realism. I let my narrator wander between points of view, moving stealthily from house to house, all over Phoenix Court.
“It’s a kind of Magical Realist Queer Working Class Heterotopia,” I told them. “Not a Soap Opera.”
For me, it was about how people can live on a grand scale, even in reduced circumstances. A woman can be a queen in her own council house and in the midst of her own community. And so can a man.
Anyone in the books I write is capable of finding love, and sometimes they find that the things they’re really looking for are quite surprising.
I was working all this out when I was twenty-two and doing my MA. And twenty-four years later I look back and see that I was learning to be my own kind of novelist. I was discovering that dark comedy was my thing. Also, that ensemble casts were my thing. I was finding that I love lots of dialogue and for description to be pared back, and I love flicking swiftly from scene to scene, moving as swiftly as TV movies do. I enjoy swimming from mind to mind and getting my readers to eavesdrop on fascinating characters as we witness them at their very best and their very worst moments.
My basic thesis was - and still is - that everyone has a fascinating life, whoever they are. It just depends on how much of it we are allowed to see, and how much they are willing to let it show.
Paul Magrs Manchester April 2017
PROLOGUE
Penny had always been a bright kid. She was born on the ninth anniversary of the first moon landing. Her father wrenched her from the incubator and ran to the steps outside, by the car park. It was a warm summer’s night.
He held her out to the moon, swaddling clothes draped down to his elbows. ‘You’re going there, Penny,’ he said, face shining. ‘You’re going to the moon, you are.’
And as the nurses came bustling through Reception to retrieve her, Penny glanced up at the moon, then witheringly at her father.
‘Fat chance,’ she said. ‘I know where I’m going.’
ONE
You’re too good to be true, she thought.
He winked at her in the rear-view mirror again.
Jane smiled back. Oh, Christ! It can’t be happening to me. Not on a bus. Not on a Road Ranger.
I think I’ve been reading too many of those books, she thought, straightening her skirt. Those £4.99 romances with the gold foil titles. They were to blame for this. All that passion in the past.
She could read a whole book in a night. Jane read fast. Now that Peter had his regular seven-o’clock bedtime, she could put her feet up with a cup of tea after Coronation Street and read straight through to the early hours. She couldn’t sleep. She was becoming a romantic.
Into the slightest, shiftiest smile from a bus driver’s mirror she could read an entire, torrid romance. It was a good job she’d finished with Jackie Collins. Because the sexy bits in books like those got her going.
Not, she grimaced, that there was anywhere for her to go.
Reading the sexy bits nowadays was like putting warm water into an old vase. Swirl it around to get the bits of dried mould out. It’s still an old vase. And she squirmed at the memory of her husband. He revolted her in retrospect. Words on the page would fade back to being just that: a routine set of instructions, a black and white description of what someone else once got up to.
Those moments at night took her to the bedroom window to watch all the houses. The squat cubes, mustard under the sulphur lights; a cool silence with the occasional insomniac car passing by making the sound of ripping silk. Jane watched and protected the estate from fire, burglary, disaster. Until dawn came, touching the upturned faces of satellite dishes. If she kept still, the morning calm would draw the warmth out of her. Until last night’s romance drained out of her memory.
‘Had a nice day?’
The bus driver’s half-reflection was looking at her. She took him in. Part of a head of soft dark hair. Smiling as if he really wanted to be talking to her. She was the only passenger. His question sounded too familiar for public transport. Jane was more used to the mute conversations held with her own hollowed-out face in the window.
At first she was content to let the question sink in, then stirred herself to answer. Over the sewing machine rattle of the engine she said, ‘Not really. I went to the car-boot sale over at the Equestrian Centre. Six cars and a couple of wallpapering tables. Not many bargains.’
He nodded and grinned. She wondered if he thought she sounded cynical. Surely she never came across as hard like some of the women round here? He must get them all coming on his bus, sitting in their ski pants and anoraks.
Jane concentrated on the real him, the back towards her, steering the vehicle. Did it cost him any effort, guiding this snub-nosed minibus through the estates? She didn’t think so. He seemed ever so relaxed. They should keep the older drivers, the sour old men with their Woodbines and Brylcreem, for these endless roundabout runs. Surely her young driver, arm lolling easily out of his window, felt too confined here? Wouldn’t he prefer the more taxing stretches? Up the scalding motorways in an Express Coach, to Newcastle or Middlesbrough on a limited stop.
‘Are you working all day?’
She thought she better ask
