So I drag Reet — my chum, my mate, my best fucking pal — and we dance to Pulp doing ‘Common People’ and everyone around us is in silver and leopardskin and tartan. And the detail of which song it was — which year, which fucking date — is important, cause we are fucking common. We’re common as muck the pair of us.
And we go home.
I leave Reet down the top of Leith Walk, by the statue of Sherlock Holmes. Cast in bronze, he always looks a bit humpy-backed. Or as if he’s slyly checking his flies. The town is still throbbing with crowds. Police cars and ambulances force their own lights in competition with everyone’s memory of the fireworks.
We say ta-ra. The bouncer outside Bosie’s, the seedy little club on the corner, is watching us, arms crossed. We went down there once, a couple of weeks ago, for a laugh. It’s men only. I breezed in. Reet got hassled at the door. He had to show some ID. We’ve never been back. Reet went to what he though was the loo and found a PVC settee squeaking in the dark, occupied by he didn’t know how many people and then he stumbled on somebody’s legs and had to feel his way back out.
And I come home. I wander about all over at night and never really think about it. Reet’s the same. He talks about the little town he lived in until this summer. A new town in the north east of England where he said you wouldn’t dream of running about in the early hours. Not unless you were daft. He lived on an estate and to me it sounds a bit rough. He says here he has a false sense of security and perversely he loves it. I reckon I’m the same. This is a city. I have to be out.
Past the Portrait Gallery, which in the dark looks salmon pink, a salmon pink palace wedged between office blocks. Up Queen Street. Restaurants with dark windows. All the places where I wish I could eat. It kills me living on the doorstep of about fifty lovely restaurants. Why does no one I know have money? Is this something we’ve chosen?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL MAGRS lives and writes in Manchester. In a twenty-odd year writing career he has published novels in every genre from Literary to Gothic Mystery to Science Fiction. His most recent books are The Martian Girl (Firefly Press) and Fellowship of Ink (Snowbooks.) He has taught Creative Writing at both the University of East Anglia and Manchester Metropolitan University, and now writes full time.
MORE BY PAUL MAGRS FROM LETHE PRESS
MARKED FOR LIFE
Meet: Mark Kelly – a man tattooed with glorious designs over every inch of his body. He’s married to the slightly unhinged Sam and has a young daughter who’s about to be kidnapped at Christmas by an escaped convict and old flame of our hero’s. Over one snowy festive season the whole family sets off in perilous pursuit… accompanied by Sam’s mother, who’s become a nudist lesbian and her girlfriend, who claims to be a time-transcending novelist known as Iris Wildthyme…
DOES IT SHOW?
Meet: Penny Robinson who’s a sixteen year old with witchy powers and an impossibly glamorous and overbearing mother called Liz. They’ve just moved into the neighbourhood and the friendships they make will start off a bizarre chain of events involving love affairs with hunky bus drivers, people dressing up as dogs, raucous nights out with the ladies and a very surprising revelation on the dance floor during Goth Night in Darlington...
COULD IT BE MAGIC?
Meet: Andy, a young gay man who finds himself quite unexpectedly pregnant. Andy runs away to Edinburgh to sample the delights of the wicked city and to give birth to a child of his own: one covered in golden leopard fur…
*
FANCY MAN
The never-before-published ‘lost’ novel that continues in the same inimitable style of Phoenix Court.
Meet: Wendy, who grows up the youngest of three brash sisters in Blackpool and who leaves home when her mother dies. She moves to Edinburgh under the wing of her vulgar Aunty Anne, whose sights are set on the millions her ex-husband has recently won on the lottery. Wendy spends a happy summer finding herself amongst her new family: Uncle Pat, frail cousin Colin, Captain Simon and Belinda, who believes herself to be an alien abductee.
Published by Lethe Press
lethepressbooks.com
Originally published by Vintage in 1998
Copyright © 1998, 2017 Paul Magrs
Introduction © 2017 Paul Magrs
‘Jep’ previously unpublished
‘Fond of a Treat’ first published in Metropolitan #7
ISBN: 978-1-59021-653-8
No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.
Author photo by
Clair Macnamee
Cover and interior design
by Inkspiral Design
