by Paul Magrs
Timon, watchful, matched me drink for drink. Even took the same drinks as me. And he, poor lamb, was violently sick every time. Sick as a dog.
I addicted myself to the juke box. I put on the same old songs. There were to be found in juke boxes in pubs all over Blackpool, their labels coloured yellow, their numbers rubbed away with use. These are the songs I can’t listen to now:
Land of Make Believe—Buck’s Fizz
Does Anybody Miss Me—Brenda Soobie
Ever Fallen in Love—Buzzcocks
Anyone who had a Heart—Cilla Black
Runaway—Del Shannon
Story of the Blues—The Mighty Wah
A Little Loving—Dusty Springfield.
This last one was playing when Aunty Anne came in to, as she saw it, rescue me from myself. In she burst. And I was holding down ouzo. My head full of fennel fumes and Timon turning green at my shoulder. Aunty Anne’s face was set. She had been planning this showdown for days. She had carefully planned what she would wear for coming into bars alone, hunting for me. She looked eccentric and determined, in a yellow sheepskin coat and a wide-brimmed green fedora. She looked almost artistic.
This is what Aunty Anne said.
“You’re not doing yourself any favours. You’re spoiling yourself. Isn’t she, Timon? He’s a man, he knows. No man will look at a woman who’s spoiled herself.”
“I know you’re upset about your mam. We all are. But you can take upset too far. You can wallow in it. Look at your sisters. They aren’t sinking into...sinking into...”
“Despondency,” said Timon.
“Thanks,” I snapped.
“They aren’t, though. They’re getting on with it. You just have to get on.”
I asked her, “What am I meant to get on with?”
I asked her again, “Where do I begin?”
At that point I thought I was going to be homeless. Everyone would tootle off to their own, new homes, and they would all forget that I didn’t have one.
Aunty Anne had decided that she was coming to my recue, and taking the situation in hand, she made Timon collude with her.
“You, young lady, are coming with me.”
Our mother’s death made us think about the future and what we should all be doing. As if she had just been a prompt: now it’s your turn. Prove to me. Do something of your own.
The others jumped to it.
But they knew where they were jumping.
How could I plot out the shape of my new life?
I didn’t have any idea of shapes.
Now, of course, I know shapes. I’ve had years and years of shapes.
They’re easy. Live any sort of life and you throw out a shape.
Even if you think you don’t form anything, and that what you’ve lived is insignificant: a shape is still there. Even an inconsistent, collapsible shape. Even a rubbish one.
Y= mx + c. That’s what I found out later.
I wish someone had told me that at the start.
I took O level maths only recently, in these my later, idle, workless years. I learned all this stuff about graphs, about making and plotting one shape into another. Transformations. So maybe if I’d listened in school, early on, geometry would have seen me through.
Fact was, I had no talent, or ambition.
I couldn’t beam and flatter and smear on lip-gloss and make other ladies spend spend spend.
I couldn’t force my eyes to follow print through the thousands of pages of tersely formal, decorous prose that Mandy loved. I could never keep track of the names. Charlotte Elizabeth Jane Sarah Agnes Fanny.
And why would I want to do what my sisters did?
So both a career and a further education were out.
What was I to do?
“First,” said Aunty Anne, “we go to Edinburgh, to your uncle.”
So we travelled north.
EIGHT
Dubious at first, but that doesn’t hurt, does it? A little circumspection never hurt anyone. In his long life Captain Simon had learned a thing or two about not getting his fingers burned. So when he was making new acquaintances, when he went into a fresh situation, he kept his soldierly wits about him.
But which army had he served with? What kind of soldier was he? You and whose army, Captain Simon? Nobody knew.
He wore a yellow coat with shining buttons, braid and epaulettes. His medals were impressive and buffed up, and he had a stainless white moustache, curling up at both ends. He was a bit of a mystery, and he claimed always to have a knife slid down inside one of his boots. He was an expert in jungle warfare, he said.
So Captain Simon was careful. He didn’t go into anything without checking it out first. After some months though, he found that he actually enjoyed going upstairs to visit the top flat. Seeing what the old man and that young lad of his were getting up to. Always something different. Pottery or war games, papier mâché or poker. They became Captain Simon’s main diversion.
Mostly the old man and the young lad sat in their flagstoned attic kitchen, drenched in lovely, clear daylight and, to all appearances, didn’t do much of anything these days. But they talked, and that’s really what the Captain loved to go up there for. The craic, the Irish called it. Blether, the Scots said, and that was more appropriate here, though the old man wasn’t Scottish.
Captain Simon would ascend the staircase with the custard yellow walls and scarlet trim at ten thirty in the morning, knowing that the old man and the young chap would already be sitting at their table. On the scarred table between them would be the ransacked newspapers and the day’s post. They seemed to get more of their fair share of both. The old man’s stringy plants and saplings would be out on the table, under the window, getting their share of the daylight. A pot of the strongest coffee the Captain had ever tasted would sit among dozens of cups. If you listened very carefully, you might hear the cafetière whine. That was something scientific, to do with the pressure of hot, wet air. The young chap had explained it.
Some morning the old man might even have a bottle of red wine open. He drank it from a tumbler, like fruit juice. He sat back on a cosy swivel chair in his scarlet dressing gown that he would wear all day around the house. He went around in bare feet, even though there was no proper carpet in the hallways and the floor was covered with spelks. These late-in-life-millionaires, Captain Simon would marvel. How they made him smile. Taking a flat in the Royal Circus, filling it with not-very-luxurious nor outlandish belongings. Living quite simply and not filling the place with yachts and sports cars and dolly birds. Thinking they could just move into the Captain’s life like this.
At first the soldier had guessed that the old man and the boy were lovers. They boy bustled about, chivvying round the rather donnish gentleman. The Captain assumed that their contented flirtatiousness with each other meant they were partners. But they weren’t. The son, Colin, put him right on that count. Colin had laughed fit to burst. “Hear that, dad! He’s got us down as an old married couple!”
The father glanced over his ‘Scotsman’ and said something to the effect that it was often the way, when the child was stuck at home with the remaining parent. Captain Simon thought about this. It made it seem as if Colin was there seeing to his ailing father. If anything, though, it was the other way around. The boy was thin and white, wore a little goatee beard, and he was so obviously ill with that horrible disease.
Their bleary, brilliant camaraderie pleased Captain Simon and day after day he kept coming back to smoke with them. He found that he could roll a joint better than either of his neighbours, and he hoped his skills might bring him into their little gang. It had been a long time since Captain Simon was part of a gang.
One morning they sat drinking wine in the kitchen, placidly listening to the sounds in the hallway as the men laid the cable for fifty new TV channels. The old man was flipping through the satellite TV magazine, marking in red felt tip the things he couldn’t miss. Juggling the fifty channels.
‘‘You’
ve got a new toy,” said his son, trying to read the listings upside down.
“You should be glad,” his father said gruffly. “So many new multi-millionaires go completely off the rails.”
“They get their heads turned,” smirked Colin, who loved clichés of every sort, and collected them.
“It’s true!” said the old man, whose own reason for loving clichés was that they were true. “You should be relieved I can still get pleasure out of simple things. Like having fifty TV channels to choose from.”
His son looked at the shows he had ticked in red. “And getting all hot and bothered over Charlie’s Angels.”
‘I’ll do no such thing!’ His mobile phone gave a trill. Captain Simon really liked that noise and often thought of asking how you went about getting yourself one of those phones. He knew it was something to do with subscribing to, belonging to, a web of some sort. He’d have liked to carry his phone in his inside pocket, to have that noise going close to his heart. Captain Simon enjoyed only the very nicest things.
The old man was impatient with whoever had called him. “You’re breaking up. This is useless. You sound demented, woman.” He sighed. ‘Your signal is nothing like strong enough.’ He switched her off and tossed the phone back onto the table. “Anne’s still on the train. And I couldn’t hear a word she was saying.”
Colin looked up sharply. ‘But she’s still on the way?’
“More’s the pity,” the old man said. He prodded the very last little bit of the joint at Captain Simon. “You haven’t met my darling ex-wife, have you?”
The Captain gulped. In the year he had come visiting he had never heard such a person mentioned.
“She’s a harridan,” said the old man. “A gorgon, a siren, a terrible monkfish of a woman. But, as she’ll no doubt tell you, she has the legs of an angel. What does she dance like, Colin?”
Colin said dutifully, “Like nothing on earth.”
“She’s coming here?” asked Captain Simon.
The old man harrumphed. “If she bets you that she can still do the splits, don’t take her up on her bet.” He went to fetch a fresh bottle from the cupboard under the eaves. ‘She’ll do herself an injury, showing off one day.” He straightened up suddenly. “Colin, could you fetch that for me?” The boy tutted and did as he was told. “The other thing, of course, is that she’s bringing your cousin with her.”
“Which one?” asked Colin.
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re all the same to me.”
Instinctively Captain Simon had taken out his handkerchief, flapped it once briskly in the air, and set about polishing up the brass of his buttons and epaulettes.
You can’t go anywhere without bumping someone you know. Mandy warned me once that the world was smaller than you ever thought.
When I was small my mother took me to department stores and we’d go up and down in escalators and all the lifts and the departments looked the same. She drilled me on what to do if we were split up. Especially in the Sales, which were ferocious. Sometimes Mam was easily distracted. She said, stand right still. Don’t go haring round and round and shouting after me. If you stay in one place, I’ll do the moving round. I’ll go to every floor every corner every nook every cranny. Soon I’ll be there. Soon I will find you.
So I’m not to worry about meeting new people. About going to new and bigger towns. Committing myself to brand new stuff doesn’t mean I’ll never get the old again. Everything but everything comes back.
On the train with Aunty Anne. Past Carlisle, I’m further north than I’ve ever been before. What am I expecting? To drop off the frozen crust of the world? The countryside looks the same. Brownish cows or horses grazing.
I feel jumpy jumpy. Not like me at all. You can take the girl out of Blackpool...You can take the girl out of Blackpool.
Aunty Anne picks up my small world theme.
“One of the reasons I had to get out of Scotland was that it’s smaller than you think, the bits that people live in. You see the same old Scottish faces everywhere you go. Now don’t get me wrong, I liked living there and I won’t hear a word against it, but it got ridiculous. I went on a walking holiday to the Western Isles and left, right and centre I was bumping into faces I knew. In lonesome spot hotels they’d seek me out to play dominoes or make up a foursome for tennis. You can get enough of friendly faces gathering round.” She fiddled with the aluminium strip of the teabag in her plastic cup.
I’d already pointed out to her the young man just up the gangway from us. A sexy skinhead, well filled out. He had been in our Linda’s class at school. Used to hang out with our Mandy and Linda for a while last summer. David. We hadn’t seen him since them. Now here he was, on our train to Edinburgh.
The sun slanted in, lighting him up quite prettily, and I kept looking over. It’s my new habit, this looking at men. Before, I’d only ever bother looking at Timon. Now, I was staring at anything that went drifting by. Or sitting there, swinging his boots up onto the empty seat beside him, wadding up his jacket for a pillow. Staring at a magazine with a nude picture on the cover—that woman from the series about aliens living on our planet and she’s the one who finds them out. She’s never nude in the series. Now he’s falling asleep, looking less and less hard.
Aunty Anne went shunting up the aisle, looking for a payphone. When she was gone I deliberately caught that David’s eye.
“You’ve grown up!” he burst out, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he blushed. I was watching Aunty Anne, still pushing up the train, saying her excuse me’s, and I was thinking what a big behind she had. I had never thought of the size of her bum before, she always drew attention to her special, delectable legs.
I thought about freezing this David out, now I had his attention. I didn’t know how. I said, “I’ve left school, an’ all.”
“You’re Wendy, aren’t you?”
I nodded and we grinned at each other.
“I used to knock about with your sisters. I’m David.”
“I remember.”
For a while—I was just a kid then—he’d come in and watch telly with the family. Even our mother thought he was sexy, but she would never have said that. She called him a skinny little article and he could make her laugh and she would pat the settee cushion next to her, inviting him to sit. “Creature From the Black Lagoon?” she’d announce, and it was like she was offering him a posh drink.
“Our mam died,” I told him.
He looked shocked.
“It was cancer,” I said. “It wasn’t, like, a vampire or a creature from a lagoon or anything.”
He gaped at me like I was weird.
I said, “Remember how she used to watch all them films?”
He nodded. “Look... I’m sorry.”
I shouldn’t have said anything to him. Aunty Anne was right. She said people don’t like it when you bring death in.
Aunty Anne tells me, ‘Stay close by, lovey,’ at the station with everyone milling and knowing where they’re going and of course I don’t. I’m flung the mercies of people I don’t know from Adam. I stick to Aunty Anne as she goes to commandeer a porter... she wants a wheely pushy thing, she can’t think of the right word for them.
“A trolley, madam?” and with a flourish the cheeky monkey pulls one from behind a pillar. Just what she wants. She seizes the handle, tutting. She can’t be doing with cleverness and bright sparks making a monkey out of her. She tells me to load all our bags on the trolley.
I love the way everyone gets off the train and hits the platform, knowing where they want to be and hardly breaking their stride, parading over the white, speckled, shiny ground.
There’s that woman in the smart cut orange woollen suit that Aunty Anne so admired. The woman sounded very posh to me. She had a table and two toddlers, had them cutting coloured papers up and keeping their attention all the way from London, ‘where we live,’ to Edinburgh, ‘where we have a little flat in the New Town.’ A kind of Arabian fella was at their table
in his robes and he got roped in, all jolly, to help the kiddies draw and cut up princesses and animals with long, peculiar legs. Ahmed helped the kiddies stick the cut-outs on the carriage window, so the sun shone through and lit up their different colours. “He’s a nice man, Ahmed, isn’t he, mummy?”
“I’m sure he’s a very nice man, darling.”
They were going now and Ahmed was off in his other direction. I found I was staring, just like I’d earwigged all the way up, even though the chat was getting on my nerves.
Then, when Aunty Anne’s back is turned, here’s that David—the skinny skin skinhead—pushing a folded, raggy slip of paper into my palm and I know by touch, by osmosis of some sexy, flirty, successful sort, that it’s got his phone number scrawled on it. He wants me to call him up some time now that we’re both in Edinburgh. And I have nights to fill, nights and nights to fill.
I see him flash by—a streak of sharp, grinning sunlit boy—hoisting an army bag over one shoulder and he’s away. I tuck his note into my pocket. Aunty Anne is flapping her arms at a taxi. It grumbles up and sits ticking at our kerb.
NINE
When they arrived there was the usual flurry and fuss over new guests. Wendy hung back, tired from the six flights of stairs, and watched them behave. Reunions: mother and son (fond, wary), husband and wife (very formal, very wary). Wendy took it all but knew, as the real stranger in their midst, that she was the actual object of scrutiny.
They were urged to set down their bags in the hallway—the carpetless, messy hallway—and leave off putting things in their rightful places until they had a cup of tea and settled themselves. “We don’t care if the place is a state!” cried Uncle Pat. He flapped the sleeves of a voluminous scarlet dressing gown. “Come into the kitchen!”
Wendy followed them down the passage. It certainly was a state, as if it had been half done-up and then abandoned during redecorations. Bits of old carpet and newspaper partly covered the old boards. The phone and the Yellow Pages had been slung in the corner. “Don’t you feel,” the old man called out to Wendy, “when you get off the train that you’re still vibrating and shunting along? I feel like that for a whole day afterwards.”
