[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

by Paul Magrs

  “I’ve not been on a train before,” said Wendy, and realised it was true.

  The flat seemed to smell of veggie burgers, coffee and cigarettes. It seemed to Wendy a funny place for a couple of millionaires to live.

  The cousin, Colin, hadn’t said a word yet. He was so skinny and not what she’d expected at all. Aunty Anne hadn’t said much to prepare her, but somehow Wendy had pictured a strapping lad in a polo shirt, hairs sprouting out on his chest.

  They were ushered into the kitchen, a bright, stone-flagged room with an old-fashioned range, potted plants resting everywhere and a sloping ceiling. The old man dashed over to the cooker and was busily turning over veggie burgers on the grill. It was like walking into an indoor barbecue: there were already guests at the kitchen table that Wendy didn’t recognise. Aunty Anne was looking daggers at the interlopers.

  “Ah,” said Uncle Pat. “These are our downstairs neighbours. Captain Simon, and his captivating sister, Belinda.”

  They nodded hellos at the curious couple. Colin was finding them chairs to go round the cluttered table. Belinda was a very fat woman in a candy-striped mini-dress. She had white hair kept back with slides, and very broad, white knees. She shook out a bag of sugar mice onto the table. ‘I’ve been saving these until you came,’ she said, in a very broad, posh-Edinburgh accent, the first that Wendy had heard.

  Her brother next to her was in some kind of uniform. “Are you back for long, Anne?” he asked, Aunty Anne, thought, very forwardly.

  “We don’t know as yet,” she told him.

  Wendy saw her uncle and cousin Colin exchange a look.

  Her room was beside the kitchen and so she could hear them talking when she went to bed, or first thing in the morning. Sometimes she lay awake with excitement, full of the idea of herself in a new place.

  The girl she’d been would never let herself get het up about a change in circumstances. The girl she used to be would have been sickened. She wasn’t used to excessive enthusiasm. But the moment Uncle Pat had shown her the green spiral staircase up to her own room, she knew this would be different. She had her own space, with walls freshly painted an eggy yellow, and a skylight wider than she could spread her arms. This was directly above her bed and, when she lay staring up, she seemed to be lifted up to the sky. Smashing.

  That first morning, when Uncle Pat had showed her to the spiral staircase, just beside the kitchen, he had said: “For as long as you stay with us, this will be yours.” His battered face flushed with pleasure as she tested her feet on the iron rungs. She was starting to warm to him. The skin of his face was shiny like the bottoms of her mother’s old, worn moccasin slippers.

  This was the first uncle-y thing that he did for her: showing her this room and saying that it was hers, letting her try it out for herself alone.

  She poked her head into the gorgeous yellow of the new room and gasped. She looked down at him again, this foreshortened old man in the crimson silk of his overlarge dressing gown. He gave her a small wave and walked away. He didn’t seem Aunty Anne’s type at all.

  Mostly Colin was in charge of Wendy. He knew all about

  nothing, he admitted, but he liked lovely days out and Uncle Pat had decided that Wendy would have to learn all about the city on a series of lovely days out. When Colin and Wendy went out alone, they generally ignored the history and legends and the buildings, all the things they ought to pay attention to, and sought out the shops that were so swish they displayed only two or three items in their windows, or the cafes that offered the sickliest looking cakes.

  When Uncle Pat came out with them he thought that Wendy would like to hear all his memories of the city. How much it had all changed. How, nowadays, everything was geared to pleasure and he was sure that was a marvellous thing, a positive thing. He talked to Wendy as if she was considering Edinburgh as the place to spend the rest of her life.

  One day that first week they had a late, lazy lunch in the Scarlet Empress, Colin’s favourite cafe. They took the window table at the back and looked out at the cramped, green garden.

  “Mark you,” said Uncle Pat, “I talk about pleasure, but all the jazz clubs and the cinemas down this end of town appear to have vanished. They’ve whistled off to those multiplex places, haven’t they? People find they like different things, I suppose. They’ve gone off old picture houses, full of honest vulgarity. There was one with long steps, like a draw-bridge down to a hut where you bought your tickets. It was like going up into a castle, the castle where all your dreams played out. They had wooden Corinthian columns that were rotting away inside...” He looked up to see Wendy smiling. “Oh, I feel about a hundred and six explaining this to you. Yet I still feel six years old inside. I do, you know. That’s never left me.”

  Colin was playing with a salad. “I wish I did.”

  “I like hearing about what it was like before,” said Wendy. “You must have lived here for years.”

  “Years,” agreed Uncle Pat. “But now that you’re here...” he paused. “I’m sure you’ll find plenty to keep yourself busy now that you’re here.”

  They were finding out the kinds of things she liked to do, and trying their best to please her. She didn’t know herself what she liked anymore. She was happy to let them lead her around. Colin took her to the galleries: on the long, leafy walk along the Waters of Leith to the Museum of Modern Art. He was silent much of the way as they crossed and re-crossed the river and dams and ducked the overhanging trees. In the cafes they visited Colin liked to read or simply watch the people at other tables. Wendy took this time to write letters to her sisters or Timon. She found that she wanted to read, too, which was a novelty for her. She begged Timon to send her some stories he had finished, and wished that he would hurry and get on with that novel of his. But he was so precious with the things he wrote. He said it made him feel too vulnerable, showing even someone he trusted his unfinished work. And all his work was unfinished. He could tinker on with stories forever. There was always something to correct. To a perfectionist like him, Timon wrote, the words he wrote never quite chimed in with real life. They slid off the surface and spilled away. He preferred just telling her the stories he thought up or heard. In fact, he thought, he would never publish anything in his lifetime. Let them find it when he was dead in a gutter. And anyway, he told her, she should be immersing herself in new things, not his old stuff. Wendy considered what he said. “Something new, coming true,” she reminded herself.

  When Uncle Pat took her out it was so he could talk to her. She got the feeling he didn’t get much of a chance usually, and he was a right old gas-bag. Colin was by nature quiet, it seemed, and Captain Simon was chatty, but not very forthcoming or, actually, that interested in what anyone else had to say. Wendy could tell her Uncle was pleased that she listened to him going on. He took her peculiar places, too, that she would never think of. With him she went to dingy but cosy cafetierias down the rougher end of Leith Walk, where they watched the racing on a portable TV. He took her to the launderette to meet some of his cronies, who greeted him and her with a certain dry-lipped jocularity. She realised that he was showing her off. “See this? This is my long-lost niece.”

  She even started going out places with Belinda, the big woman from downstairs. Belinda must have been fifty, but she dressed much younger and liked to think of herself as closer to Wendy’s generation. She wanted to know whether Wendy would be a pal of hers, and come out clubbing and dancing in the evening. Why not, Wendy shrugged.

  The only person not to make an effort going out with her and showing her round was Aunty Anne. Now that they were here and settling into the flat in the Royal Circus, Anne seemed to have lost a certain amount of interest in her niece. She spent her time at the car boot sales held in multi-storey car parks around the city, picking up bits of old tat—pictures and ornaments mostly—for a few bob at a time. These she would sell in the auctions held down the Thistle Street warehouses on weekday mornings. She was making a bit of extra pocket money, s
he said. Colin raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I think she’s making a fortune. She says she discovered this latent talent for flogging things. When did she find that out?”

  “Ah,” said Wendy. “That was when our mother died.” She explained the situation with the collection of horses.

  “That’s awful!” said Colin. “Fancy just getting rid like that.” He sighed. “My mother hasn’t got a sentimental bone in her body.” They were having coffee in the sculpture park at the Musuem of Modern Art. It was one of Wendy’s favourite things so far, sitting amongst the distended, silvery bodies sporting on the lawn. She wasn’t sure she agreed with Colin about her Aunty. She must have something sentimental in her, or sympathetic at least, to have brought Wendy here in the first place.

  She noticed how green it was. They liked to have lots of trees in this city. It made the place seem fresh to her. You could be in the thick of the busiest street, diesel fumes lining your throat as you squeezed past the queue at the bus stop, and all you’d have to do is turn the next corner. Bound to be a bit of green there. Trees lush with leaves held in clusters, in long, fat fingers. Bunches of bright greenish bananas in their thousands. She knew from the little biology she’d studied that what trees breathe out, she breathed in. The whole city seemed to breathe. At least, it seemed that way to Wendy, who lived in a yellow room at the top of a tall house and she could leave the skylight open. Let the breeze into her room, let it pick up and whirl her few belongings about: the lightest of them anyway, her letters. She loved to let the wind push its careless paws into her room through the gap in the ceiling.

  After a fortnight or so Wendy was sent a letter, printed green on green notepaper, asking if she would like to join something called Job Party. It was a club that met three times a week in an airless office behind the DHSS. If she attended three times a week, they would pay her benefits no bother, the letter said. She read this out at the kitchen table.

  “Benefits?” asked Uncle Pat, peering over a piece of his own morning post. “Are you on benefits?”

  “I sent her down the day after we got here,” said Aunty Anne. It was true, it had been the very next day. “She’s left school. She needs to see what her entitlements are.”

  “Benefits,” sighed her Uncle, going back to what, by the look of it, was an involved letter of his own. “There’s no need of benefits while the girl’s staying here. There’s plenty of money around the place.” He harrumphed and Aunty Anne slid her hazel eyes into a sidelong glance. Wendy wished she would stop doing this at her, every time money was mentioned.

  This was the quiet—or relatively quiet—part of the morning, just before the sun rose directly over their roof and made the whole flat too hot. The post had arrived with its usual crash on the bare hall floor, and they were absorbed in it, half-heartedly feeding themselves breakfast as they went. As usual Aunty Anne was the only one without letters. She commented once more that Wendy seemed to share her Uncle and cousin’s talent and habit of getting lots of mail. They paid her no attention. Glumly Aunty Anne wached the three of them read as she spread marmalade an inch thick on wholemeal toast. She was waiting for the arrival of Captain Simon in his yellow jacket. Just lately she had started to think of him as a very dashing older man and found herself keeping up her side of a gentle flirtation. She bit into satisfyingly hard strips of orange peel, squashing the rind between her teeth. Funny that she should start to fancy an old man under her ex’s nose. However, she thought, such are the mysteries of sex. That’s all there was to it.

  Wendy, meanwhile, was starting to dread the idea of Job Party. She remembered Timon once telling her how they’d forced him to go on one of these things. That was before he found the job in the fish shop. He was put in a group with seven others and the teacher-type person had talked to them about things like re-training for The World of Work. Timon had hated the enforced silliness of the whole thing. Sitting round with strangers and discussing what would fulfil them all. Mind, Wendy had thought at the time that Timon was too fussy. He probably thought he was too good for all of them. He said it was very like his experience of Creative Writing workshops—and he’d stopped going to those, too, for the same reasons. At least at Job Party nobody expected you to ‘get’ their poems. And Job Party gave you free stamps and stationary, and they had come in handy for sending SAEs with stories to literary magazines.

  All in all Wendy didn’t want to go to Job Party. She imagined being the youngest there, and the one with the least idea about anything. An older man, someone quite repellent that she’d be kind to on the first day, would become fixated on her and maybe he would stalk her, finding out where she stayed and following her home, hanging about in the darker, leafier corners of the Royal Circus...

  To get it out of her mind she went for a walk.

  She was still exploring Edinburgh, finding new things all the time and coming to the realisation that this now (or for now, at any rate) was the city where she lived. Where some people did nothing but rollerblade across the pavements and squares, where black taxis went darting everywhere, all the time, and every patch of wall was plastered with flyers for night clubs and shows. And what pleased her was that she didn’t know exactly how long she would be here. Up till now she had been tied to school and family—to Blackpool, in fact. Which, while not being boring exactly, was still home. This was the first city of her choice. Well, Aunty Anne’s choice, really. Although Wendy needn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted. She might have stayed in Blackpool alone, or with Linda—or even gone to Manchester with Mandy. She still could. But all this, everything here, felt like her own choice.

  She had noticed how, in their time here, how subdued Aunty Anne had become. She was no longer the overbearing figure she had been in Blackpool. Her ex-husband worked on her like an antidote. His placid erudition took the fizz and the sting out of her brashness. Wendy was astonished to see Aunty Anne submit to Uncle Pat, especially when he told her outright to shut up. Aunty Anne was a different person when she was with Uncle Pat and, Wendy thought, that was probably what had made her leave him. Wendy liked to see how people changed, depending on who they were with. Only a very few stayed the same and Colin was one of them. It didn’t matter who he was talking to.

  So Wendy was getting to know them all. And she was pleased she wasn’t at all over-attached to Anne. Since arriving, the two women had really gone their separate ways. Her aunt had become self-absorbed and quiet. She had promptly dyed her hair black, then white again, and then a glorious pink. Colin told Wendy: there’s the danger sign. And it struck Wendy for the first time how much Aunty Anne must be missing Wendy’s mother, too. She’d be thinking of the wasted years, when she’d never gone to visit her sister. She’d be wondering how many years she herself had left.

  “You’d feel like living it up, wouldn’t you?” Wendy asked Colin. “‘You’d throw caution to the winds.”

  He nodded. “Hence the pink.” He did a kind of facial shrug. “She looks like a cockatoo. Isn’t ‘throw caution to the winds’ a very old-fashioned phrase?”

  Wendy nodded. “I just like it.”

  Colin smiled. “Me too.”

  Throw caution to the winds. And here Wendy was, getting butterflies over starting Job Party.

  She crossed Princes Street, which was furiously busy at this time in the morning, and she resisted visiting any of the shops. She passed the galleries—the National with its sphinxes lying sentinel on every corner and dossers propped against pillars, petting their scrawny dogs. Up the several dozen steps of the Mound, and into the Old Town. She was getting to know her way about.

  What would be the worst thing they could do to her at Job Party? Ask what she intended to do with her life? She could make something up. She wasn’t daft. She could tell them a downright lie—or pretend to be her sisters or Timon. Borrow someone else’s intentions for a while. Or they could make her take a rubbish job for a while. They had that power.

  She went to the museum. In the vast and airy entrance hall they had
a proper totem pole, several storeys high. Vases and teapots and earrings. She imagined how expensive everything must be. In the stuffed animal department she sat down to stare at a glass case the size of their old kitchen. It was crammed with specimens of almost every kind of bear on the planet. Some standing, some rearing, some curled supine. All of them were growling out of the corner of their mouths.

  “A scene like this,” she said, gazing at them, “would never happen in nature.”

  So she looked at this display for an hour or more.

  It was the way they looked so companionable she liked.

  All snarling.

  TEN

  Aunty Anne decided that we were going out shopping together. We were going to do Princes Street: all of the department stores I hadn’t seen yet. Princes Street reminded me of the Golden Mile, only with no sea and no illuminations.

  I couldn’t go until I’d read that morning’s post.

  You haven’t told us anything yet about what’s going on. You know you’ve still got a home here. With us. We’ve got a spare bedroom. Daniel has booked us up to go to Tunisia, which is the desert. Two weeks in July we could do with the rest. We’ll have to remember and take lots of sun block and all the right stuff for our pale skins. I’ll look silly on my counter if my skin burns, won’t I? Anyway you take care of yourself Wendy. We have a lawn now, Daniel laid it last Sunday.

  Lots of love,

  Linda.

  Dear Wendy,

  We’ve buggered it all up. Wasn’t it me who was supposed to be going off to the big city? You were the little’un. You were sitting put, while I found adventure. Yet there you are.

  I want to know all about it.

  Are they treating you nicely? Are you settling in? I don’t remember much about Uncle Pat. We never saw much of them, really. All I remember is me being tiny and Uncle Pat telling me—it was at somebody’s christening—that chickens are so stupid that they commit suicide every time it rains. The rain taps them on the head, they look up and it falls down the holes in their beaks and then they drown. Rubbish. So I think of him as a daft old man telling bairns rubbish. Is Aunty Anne behaving herself? Is she spending all his money? Are you living in the lap of luxury?