by Paul Magrs
a fabulous tangerine.
“I should have seen this coming one day.
Some young fella whisking you off.”
I laughed. “Nobody’s whisking me off!”
But off I went.
I followed the A1 through the Borders,
across wild Northumberland
endless Roman Roads, perilous with sharp
crests and sudden
dips
I settled in Newton Aycliffe
A place called Phoenix Court
And word came that the old man I’d left behind
had become a millionaire.
The Saturday after I left
his six balls,
and
his bonus ball
popped out
in perfect sequence.
And bugger me if I hadn’t
burnt all my boats.
Wendy’s friendships.
I said I wouldn’t do this...nip ahead of the bookmark, as it were...I wouldn’t show off my foreknowledge, but...it has struck me that there are things in common through all the stages of my life. Namely, these extraordinary women I have known. I’ve surrounded myself with these personalities the whole time. Early-learning with my two big sisters, I suppose...so I’ve always needed these big women around me. I pass from friendship to friendship...not that I exactly leave friends behind...but new friendships have a habit of becoming more pertinent, of seeming that way...and there are tHose friends you must let go of for a while. Doing their own, peculiar things. I have found that you can’t keep hold of everyone at once.
If friendships are worth anything, you’ll find some way to keep it all carrying on, under the surface, or away to the side. Then one day... but there will always be lulls. It’s worth being aware of that. At first I found it upsetting, that one day someone is your best mate...you’ll share anything with them...like now, with Aunty Anne divulging the truth of her cankered love and her lost millionaire...at that moment it seemed a promise that we’d always be this intimate. Intimacy always ends up making you think it’s forever. But you have to get wise. Intimacy is a great flatterer. It’s very easy to put on...you simply draw closer, lower those lids, that voice...There would be times to come when Aunty Anne simply wouldn’t dream of telling me what was going on. When she would clam up tight and I could only roughly surmise and rely upon my other friends. Yet it’s bollocks depending on just one person, that’s worth knowing. Anything can happen to them. Limit your damage potential.
So...I’ve spread my affections wide. Concentrated bursts here, here, here, in a largish semi-integrated group. Loosely-held formation. Like sympathetic bombs, setting each other off, should anything happen to me.
You’ve got your friends because, to you, they are extraordinary. But the stuff that makes them like that also makes them sometimes weird, clammed-up, shell-fishy like that. Sometimes hard to get on with.
FIVE
If I was Timon, I’d feel cross about our Mandy. Especially these days. Especially after all her success. I don’t know if he remembers how she grilled him all through that summer. I don’t know if he even knew then that’s what she was doing. I could see what was going on. He knew things she wanted to know and she got them out of him.
“Timon,” she would say, “how do you know what to put in a story?”
“That depends on if that’s a story-story you’re talking about, like a story you tell, or a short story, or a novel.”
She considered. “Say I mean a novel.”
“Well then, a novel. Now you can put anything in a novel.” He looked out across the road. We were sitting with pints on a bench outside a rough pub. I was having shandy. “I suppose you could put anything in a story for telling, and a short story too.” He shrugged. I saw that he was looking at the way the flower baskets hanging from the eaves of the ladies’ toilets were swaying. I liked the way Timon noticed things. I tried to notice things through his eyes.
“So there’s no difference then?” Mandy persisted.
“All the difference in the world.”
She asked, “Is it length?”
I looked at her sharply. She was back on Timon’s dick again. Sometimes she couldn’t leave it out although, as far as I knew, she’d never seen it.
Timon smirked. “Length has something to do with it.”
“How long should one be? A novel?”
“The best novels in my opinion,” he said, “have very particular lengths. My favourites are 187 pages and 328 pages.”
Mandy blinked. “How could anyone write so much?”
“But they do,” said Timon. “Sometimes, once you get started, it’s like, when will you stop? Where will it all end?”
“Is that what it’s really like?” She fluffed up her auburn curls. I hated her when she did the coquettish thing. I was getting too hefty, already, to copy that.
“Sometimes I’m writing and I think it’s a good job I’ve got friends and the fish shop job, just to get me away from the page.”
“It’s your life,” said Mandy. “It’s your vocation.”
This last word hung in the air for a bit. When Mandy sloped off, a little later, I mulled it over. “Where did Mandy learn a word like vocation?” I asked Timon.
He looked at me like he didn’t know what I was on about. He was back to noticing things. The old women waiting for each other outside the ladies’, checking in their bags for their purses.
After that, I started noticing Mandy doing things that were unusual for her. She was reading like a mad thing and I would see her in places I’d never noticed her before, as if she’d sat down and started to read without even knowing where she was. In the shopping arcade she perched on the pensioners’ seats by the rubber plants and the fountains, Sense and Sensibility in her hand. In McDonalds’ front window I saw her as I breezed past and she was sucking a milkshake, coming to the end of Mill on the Floss. Bleak House lay drying out on our bathroom radiator because she’d dropped it in the bath when she’d tried to light a bathtime ciggy. I saw her in the park and she was flipping breathlessly to her place in Madame Bovary and at last I felt courageous enough to go over and ask her what was going on.
She tilted that perfect, sunburned face and shielded her eyes. Maybe it was coming out of the book and into the sunshine, but at first she didn’t seem to recognise me. “I don’t know,” she said in reply to my peeved question. “I suppose these are the books I always wanted to read. I promised myself that when I finished my exams, I’d read the books I always wanted to read.”
I’d forgotten she’d even been doing exams. There had been such a fuss in the family, two years ago, with everyone persuading Mandy to stay on at school to get her A levels. We begged her. She gave in at last as if she was doing us a favour. Now that time had been and gone and her exams were finished with, without their hardly being mentioned.
At that time it was mostly just me, Mandy and Timon. We
walked along the beach in the daytime, sat in the cafes along the front, we went round the Pleasure Beach, though I didn’t go on the wilder rides. The person who was missing was Linda. She was working in Boots all the time. She said she was saving up for her bottom drawer. We would go in to see her, but there’s only so much you can say to someone when they’re working behind a counter. Best to save it till they come home. But we’d go in and try out make-up samples on each other. I saw that Linda actually knew what she was talking about and, when she explained something, about your skin’s ph value or your moisture or whatever, she put on this special, breathy, posh voice.
Linda wasn’t coming out with us at night either. Now she had a bloke. “It’s inevitable,” said Aunty Anne. “They start working and they meet people. They meet up with fellas. That’s how it all starts up. Then you don’t see them for ages.”
Our mother listened to this and I wanted to kick our aunt’s shapely ankles for being so tactless. Mam wanted all of us around her, and here was Linda running about the place with a man.
He was an in
surance clerk. He wasn’t well-paid but he wore a dark-striped suit to work and she said he was bound to rise. He told our Linda that, if he married her, he’d insure every part of her body for a separate, astronomical amount. She meant that much to him. And, if they went in for babies, he’d insure her every time against twins. Linda glowed when she told us this.
Mandy sneered. “He sounds like a wanker.”
Daniel the insurance clerk looked out of his depth, the night he came to see Linda at home. He came straight from work in his dark suit, and he had his sleeves rolled and this smell of office sweat and cologne that I quite liked. He had dark curly hair you could see he’d be happier just shaving off, and his shoes were very shiny, which reminded me of what Mandy had shouted at Mam’s one-time fancy man. I wanted to tell our Linda: don’t let him waltz with you.
I suppose we tried to squeeze him out. Not maliciously, not concertedly, but we didn’t put on any airs for this insurance clerk. We acted naturally and, if he couldn’t deal with that: hard lines.
That night the flat was full. As soon as he came in I saw through his eyes how ramshackle and neglected we had let the place become. With Mam being ill the housework had slowed to a standstill and things were no longer immaculate. We dusted the rooms that our mother spent her time in. She hated dust lying on surfaces and ornaments. She thought it would choke her. Little bits of human bodies, she said, going up her nose and into her lungs. She must have watched a movie about a dust monster.
She was watching The Mummy when Daniel was introduced to her. She was very white and you could see she couldn’t be bothered with guests. She made a brief, gallant effort and asked Aunty Anne to turn the telly sound down. It was an exciting moment, with Christopher Lee swaying bandaged-wrapped, emerging from a swamp. But our mother listened carefully to what Daniel had to say for himself. “I liked the way he was very sure of himself,” she said afterwards. “He’s the type you could take anywhere and he’d make himself at home. But he looks the type to always want his own way.”
By then Aunty Anne had well and truly settled in. She was sitting in her peach-coloured slip with her bra straps dangling down when Daniel was shown in. She’d forgotten he was due. “Help!” she mugged, and slipped past him to find a housecoat. She had a polythene shower cap on, waiting for her henna to take. You could see the henna under the cap, like the seamy clods of mud all over Christopher Lee.
Timon and Mandy and me were in the kitchen, and we were next on the list for Daniel to meet. Our kitchen was more cheerful since Timon had helped up to paint every sill, fitting and cupboard door in alternating patches of blue and yellow. We were talking in our bright kitchen and smoking. Smoking was allowed at home again. Our mother had started and she swore blind it had bucked her strength up. Cigarette burns had started to appear in her duvet, like tiny bullet holes.
Daniel came into the kitchen and tried to join in with us. We were just chatting and flipping through magazines. Mandy had Tess of d’Urbervilles open and her legs hooked over the edge of the table. Daniel told her he had read Jude the Obscure for his O levels, but he had thought it was very old-fashioned. People found it much easier, these days, to get themselves educated and rise through the ranks and make a success of themselves, didn’t they? He didn’t think Thomas Hardy was very relevant to their world anymore.
“Personally,” said Mandy, “I hate things being relevant.”
Timon looked up. “Is relevant the same as pertinent?”
Mandy slapped the Hardy face down on the table and rummaged for her ciggies. “Relevant comes with more strings. Relevant means that you have to feel like you’re learning something.”
“I hate to split hairs,” said Daniel, “but...”
“Don’t split hairs then,” said Mandy. “I like your curly hair, by the way.”
“You do?”
“Come on, Daniel,” said Linda, and led him back to the living room, where the volume on The Mummy was back up.
Later Daniel told Linda that he wanted to rescue her from all that. From where she’d come from. Linda gasped. Then she slapped him, then she kissed him. So that was Linda.
Mandy said, “She’s selling herself short to that little creep. Just because she’s a big girl, doesn’t mean she’ll get no more offers.”
“She’s a sexy lady,” said Timon.
We both looked at him.
“Who said you had any say?” asked Mandy.
He spread his palms and gave one of his gawky laughs.
“Don’t ever compare one of us to the others,” said Mandy. “Sisters don’t like it.”
“I wasn’t!” he protested, laughing, refusing to take her seriously, which is why, I think, they never seriously fell out.
We were walking along the prom and Mandy changed the subject and starting asking how many characters a novel should have, and how many chapters. Timon was telling us that the arabic word bab meant both chapter and door. He said, don’t put too many doors in your house or the roof will fall in. And too many people can’t run around. And Mandy was asking, should the shape of a chapter be a dramatic W or a dramatic V and should a whole novel be shaped like a cathedral? She wanted to know all about structure.
“Mandy,” said Timon. “Are you thinking of writing a book?”
“Me?” she said. “Where would I begin?”
I was in Boots with Linda and she was getting all of her perfume samples out. I loved the tiny, coloured bottles and was wondering if I would like to work in that environment, where you got to handle nice things all day. But I was very different to Linda. She loved the shop itself. She loved handling the money, getting her fingers dirty with the smell of money, then dousing them with perfume and rubbing moisturizer and lipsticks onto the backs of ladies’ hands. She loved the crush and push of the shop’s shiny aisles. I would hate all that. To see a crowd go by and not be in it.
Whenever we tried out the perfume samples I’d get splashes of all kinds of smells up both my arms and round my neck. I’d come out of the shop smelling ridiculous and too flowery or musky. Once when I came home Aunty Anne said I’d have all the cats on the block coming after me. But I tried these things out to kill the time and not look like I was there just to talk to Linda, which I was.
I tried out one of those fragrances that can be used by both sexes and it smelled like watermelons. I held the bottle wrong and, peering at the nozzle over my sunglasses, squirted myself in the eye. I shouted out and Linda shushed me.
Then Mandy was there. She’d dropped her usual cool and was all excited. I was still shouting about my eye. “What’s your problem?” asked Mandy.
“She squirted herself,” said Linda. “What’s that you’ve got?”
Even with both eyes full of tears and my face squinched up, I could see Mandy was waving a green slip of paper.
“Honestly,” she said, “you can hear you two right across the shop.”
“Oh, you can’t, can you?” moaned Linda. She started to straighten up her clinical uniform and to put her testers away.
“You’ll be getting the sack,” said Mandy, mixing it.
“Don’t say that!” said Linda, who was very superstitious. Daniel the insurance clerk was trying to cure her of that.
“I could put a complaint in about you two carrying on,” said Mandy.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Linda. “Tell us your news, anyway.”
Mandy grasped my wrist. “Don’t rub your eyes. You’ll make them worse.”
“Tell us your news!” said Linda, through gritted teeth.
Mandy threw down her green slip of paper. “It’s the day of my exam results!”
We were shocked, and ashamed of ourselves for forgetting.
“A, B, and fucking C!” she crowed.
Linda was hopping up and down and I was hugging our Mandy. “You got them! You got them! Have you told Mam yet?”
“Not yet,” Mandy laughed. “I’ll tell her tonight, when we’re all there.”
“A, B, C,” said Linda, leaving
out the ‘fucking’, because Daniel was trying to train her out of swearing too. “You make it sound so simple!”
Mandy:
What do you call that moment? The moment you realise what you want to be?
This was one of those questions I asked Timon. The many questions I asked Timon that summer. He was a mine of information. He had opinions on everything and I liked to tiptoe through them. He was like beach-combing.
He thought and his eyes lit up. He said, “That’s your epiphany, that. Your moment of realisation, Mandy.” He laughed. “Something new, coming true.”
Wendy was walking along with us. She tutted and repeated it. “Something new, coming true.” She was never very literary.
In the middle of the shopping arcade Timon turned to me. “And what is this epiphany you’re having, hon? Is it gunna change your life?”
“Timon,” I said. “I fucking hope so.”
Then he said we should all go to the top of Blackpool Tower, and I could have my epiphany up there.
He had a sense of occasion, that boy.
The elevator took us up, up, up.
Under the Tower they have ballrooms for the waltzing and tangoing and foxtrotting that Aunty Anne went in for. They had an indoor circus with chimps dressed up for a clarty tea party.
The higher we went up the Tower, the more things crammed into our sight. The waxworks, the piers at either end, the death-defying womanly curves of the rollercoasters. Too much to take in. The higher up you get, the more you end up having to concentrate on just yourself. Else you get dizzy.
“‘So what’s your big surprise?” Wendy asked, and there was that answering-back quality to her voice. She was at that age.
I imagined that in the cramped, perilous space at the pinnacle of the Tower, I was wearing the hooped skirts of a Victorian lady. They ballooned in the breeze above the Tower’s iron gantries. I listened out for the heavy rustle of the silk. I supposed that you’d never get up here in those skirts.
I said, “I want to go off and do nineteenth century literature.”
“I thought so,” Wendy nodded.
“In all those books,” I said, “all I can see is me.”
