Elsie let out a yelp of outrage. “Fancy you saying that, Nesta Dixon! It’s not over a year ago you had everyone out searching for your dead body and there you were having saddo-masokinky sex with that young lad God bless his soul — him who liked to dress up as an Alsatian!”
This turned a few heads, but most people already knew the tale. Nesta coloured and said that she was going round to see if Big Sue was all right.
“Honestly,” Fran muttered. “People don’t let you forget anything, do they?”
“Try this,”’ Jane said. “It’s a Monkey Gland.” It was bright pink, with too much Pernod.
“Do you know what you’re like?”
Andy, standing framed in the doorway of Penny’s bedroom, startled her as she was putting on mascara. She had never learned the trick of mascara, feeling it weigh too heavy and claggy on her lids. She wished Liz hadn’t left without explaining the technique.
Penny was seated at Liz’s dressing table with all the drawers open, the tins and boxes and tubes spread wide. Everything was mother-of-pearl: a gentler version of the colour of oil spillage on beaches. “What am I like?” she asked Andy, amused by the way he slouched there with his bottle of alcoholic lemonade. He looked like he was at the saloon door. And that made her the bar-room belle, but she was in a minidress of peppermint green which crinkled and felt, to the touch, like sweet wrappers. She loved being in this dress, inside its several layers, like a chocolate lime.
Andy had already forgotten his first question to her and the reply took him by surprise. He shrugged and went, “I don’t know! I’m pissed!” Really, he just wanted to talk to her and say, Come downstairs. When he looked it seemed he could see every detail of the beautiful unguents and powders and pastes on the dresser. He licked his own lips as Penny applied a last smarmy, brilliant dash of lippy. To him she looked like...who was it? Snow White? No, Cinderella, in the Disney version, when she has birds and animals dressing her up and she never has to lift a finger. He imagined that this was how Penny was made ready, all the little creatures vanishing in a miraculous cartoon puff just as he came up the stairs and stood here to look.
Penny surveyed her finished self in the mirror that stood wide and high as the doorway itself. It was fringed with postcards from all over the place. There were cards from people who had lived at the house and moved away, cards from Liz and Cliff, from the resorts they had visited and, though Andy didn’t know this, cards from Vince. Vince sent Miros, Matisses and Chagalls and Penny had alternated them with Liz’s various ‘Greetings from Morecambe!’ or ‘Sunny Scarborough!’
More than a wrapped sweet or a bar-room belle, Penny looked like a mermaid. Her newly hennaed hair was piled loosely on top of her head and the scarlet tendrils over her face looked plastered as if she had risen from the depths. Liking the effect, she dabbed her face with a bit of glitter and reached onto the window sill, plucking up the six dried starfish she had bought in Whitby. They were smaller than her palm and easy to pin into the soft mass of her hair. She stood and showed off to Andy.
“You’re fucking mad!” He laughed. “Starfish woman!”
She took his drink off him.
“Any fights yet?”
“No proper fist fights. Maybe a few sharp words. Some nasty looks. Mostly they’re having a laugh.”
Penny went to look out of the window, at the whole of Phoenix Court being steeped ever more deeply in snow.
“Here’s two more,” she laughed. “They’ve come all dressed up, look.”
Andy saw his uncle Ethan and his new wife Rose struggling across the car park dressed as pirates.
Uncle Ethan was capitalising on his wooden leg, wielding it with aplomb, shouldering his navy greatcoat which had, for the evening, a gaudy stuffed parrot stitched to one epaulette. It must have been a parrot saved from the stock he’d given away when the taxidermist’s closed. Andy was glad to see it come in handy. Or maybe his uncle had always harboured some desire to be a pirate. Maybe he was secretly pleased with having a leg like his. You could hear him now, throwing back his great, grizzled head and going “Harr-ham Jim lad,” and flicking up his eye-patch to make Rose laugh. Rose was dressed as Jim lad. Her navy breeks and striped Breton top seemed stretched to over-flowing. That she was in her sixties was something Andy often found hard to believe. She was a bright, brassy, infectious person. Even he could see how sexy she was. Her humour was all tits and bums and sauce and what made him laugh most was the way it mortified Jane, her rather uptight daughter. Rose was a scandalous presence whenever she came round Phoenix Court. Andy thought she’d done his uncle a lot of good.
“Who told them it was fancy dress?” Penny asked.
“We’ve all got to come dressed as something,” Andy said. “Anyway. Maybe they’ve come as themselves. We have.”
There was a swift knock at the door and they realised that the party had spread upstairs, too. Mark’s head popped round the door, startling them with its sudden inky blue.
“Uh,” he went. “The phone for you, Andy. You better hurry, it’s coming long-distance.”
Andy shrugged, on his way. “Who do I know..?”
As he left the room, Penny got one of Mark’s too-bright grins. “I’ve got a starfish on my right shoulder blade,” he said.
Silhouettes went darting by the windows. The curtains in the Forsyths’ house hung in tatters, partially blocking the bright lights within. Dark figures massed, broke apart and loomed recklessly close to the glass.
Nesta watched for a moment from the street and then hurried on. The Phoenix Court party seemed almost sedate compared with the lads over the road. They
