by Paul Magrs
globules of me and specially
of you, rubbed off
and like slow confetti
revolving
all about us.
“I have to talk to you,” Captain Simon said, stopping Aunty Anne on the stairwell that morning.
She drew in a breath. “Right,” she said.
“It’s about...affairs of the heart,” he told her.
And they made a date and a time, a place.
TWELVE
Wendy got on with Colin in the first instance because they discovered that, sometimes, there was nothing that both of them liked more than to go out of a night and talk about nothing. About bums and tits and to have a giggle. It was a relief to find this out. All the conversations Wendy had been having (for ages, it seemed like) were about the future, and death, and what to do now. Oh, give me some space. Give me a drink and a fag...and a pal to go on daft with.
She was off the sickly sweet liqueurs. That turned out to be a passing phase. “Liqueurs!” Colin laughed. “Lick your own!” Her coached her in drinking bitters, lagers, stouts. Something with some body and gall. Drinks that were fizzy and dark, which had volume and daring, that were heady and fulsome. And that were never, never sweet. “Face it,” he told Wendy. “When you’re young and pretty like we are, you can’t afford to order anything sweet. We have to temper our native sweetness with...” He shrugged. “Bitter, mostly. And gall.”
Lately, even when there wasn’t a disaster, or things to sort out, it had seemed to Wendy that some people just adored raking up trouble. They stirred around for it in the mire. They itched away at it, like they would at a scabby wound. They can’t be content. Neither Wendy nor Colin wanted to be made to think or dwell particularly heavily on anything just then. They wanted time to enjoy each other’s company.
It was the next act of a gentle comedy. The settling down period. Everyone starts to enjoy each other. Wendy was getting to know her gay boy cousin: a lovely boy. He’s a lovely boy, my Colin, said a tipsy Aunty Anne one night. Not been out much, not seen much of the world. Just this town. He flung himself on the mercy of this town. Its...nightlife. Aunty Anne couldn’t bring herself to say the phrase ‘gay scene’, or even say in so many words that Colin was gay. She said that he wasn’t the marrying kind.
Colin had found his own niche, his own coterie, in a very cosmopolitan and—you’d think—a very permissive, sophisticated city. Come midnight, Colin would be out on the scene, somewhere in town, up the East End. His father and now his mother, turning a blind eye to his absence at the late night kitchen table, where the grown-ups (the grown-ups! The pensioners, really!)—Uncle Pat, Aunty Anne, Captain Simon and Belinda, all sat about, stewed to the gills, on a variety of wines and spirits.
What time did Colin slink home in the morning? Well, that depended. But when Wendy was about and she was his companion on his jaunts (and they weren’t only weekends—oh no! Tuesday, he claimed, was the best night of the week. So bang went the old working class Friday-on-my-mind crap. Tuesday was king!) When Wendy went with Colin, he came back earlier. Dragging in over the threshold at two, maybe, to see the dregs of the party in the kitchen. With his young cousin to watch over, Colin got up to less mischief. Which was a good thing, they all decided.
And Wendy...
It had just hit her that she was in the loveliest city she had ever visited. It was late summer: a summer that seemed to be lasting forever. The wide streets were full of standing heat, of air that barely moved and quivered to the touch. And crowds, crowds dashing to plays and bars and places to pleasure themselves in the afternoons.
It has just hit Wendy that she has nothing in particular to accomplish. Wendy the chronic under-achiever has nowt to do! Somehow it isn’t fair, she thinks...but dispels that thought. If I just stand my ground, and refuse to decide anything (about my future—oh boy) then I can just about enjoy this trip.
She was already skiving off from Job Party.
Wendy knew that at the back of her mind Aunty Anne would be worrying. (Oh, but what new preoccuptations must Aunty Anne have now? Her hair was yellow—triumphant, near-gold, like stalks of corn, or rape in a field in May.) Despite what went on in Aunty Anne’s life, with the back of her mind she’d be fretting that Wendy was footling and tootling her time away. And actually, in the end, was going out to bars and cafes with Colin—queer bars at that!—any different to the desultory pubbing and clubbing she’d got up to with Timon immediately after her mother’s death? Was she just going back to drinking her afternoons away? She was, wasn’t she? Was Colin any better an influence than Timon?
Wendy hated comparing her friends, one to another.
All my life, she thinks, my friends have been the most important thing.
Of course Aunty Anne would think that Colin was a better influence than Timon. She was bound to. Colin was her son, and perfect, and all...
(But a bum bandit! A delicious bugger! And diseased and all ..!)
And yet...and yet...this isn’t the same as spending all her time in dingy, seedy Blackpool pubs. It isn’t the same at all. Wendy knew this was because Anne had grown up in Blackpool too. Everything there was backward for her.
Wendy’s efforts here in Edinburgh were towards a goal. Getting that money. Getting that money.
No, says Wendy weakly, sadly. I never thought that.
Oh, pish, laughs her aunt.
Wendy tried to ignore her. She concentrated on her friends. Friends are what help you pass difficult time. She lavished her time upon beautiful, frail Colin.
It was Colin who helped his mother to dye her hair gold. When he suggested it she was pleased that someone was taking notice of her hair. The sun had begun to fade the pink out of her and she needed something new to perk her up. She knelt on the bathroom mat with her head over the bath and let Colin pour jugfuls of warm water over her head.
“You’ve got long, gentle fingers, Colin. You could have been a hairdresser. Did you ever think of that?”
“Hm,” he said. Over the years his mother had kept urging three different careers on him. For her he cut the very model of a hairdresser, a priest, and a doctor in a hospital. And he hadn’t grown up to be any of those things.
The packet said twenty minutes for the bleachy dye stuff to take. They both knew from experience that the longer you left it, the better the chance of achieving that burnished gold effect you were after. “Nothing more disheartening,” Anne sniffed, “than taking off your shower cap, rinsing it all out, and discovering that nothing has changed at all.” She proposed to sit in her shower cap and let her hair ferment for a good hour. They went into the living room to watch something, anything, on cable. A TV movie—something tragic and/or uplifting—that would be perfect. Anne draped a towel around her shoulders, in case a trickle of bleach should escape and get onto the regency-striped settee. She knew that by leaving her hair cooking so long she was dicing with the possibility of it all dropping out...but these were the chances you took. She desired golden hair.
They settled down to the film, which was confusing. It was about domestic violence, as far as Anne could make out.
“Where’s Wendy today?” she asked her son during the adverts.
He shrugged. “Out and about somewhere. Making friends.”
“Don’t you feel left out?”
He didn’t rise to the bait. His mother was a great one for teasing. “Not at all. I’m glad of the rest. She’s exhausting to be with. Always asking questions.”
“Is she?” Anne frowned. “She doesn’t ask me many questions. In fact, she gives the impression of being a proper miss-know-it-all.”
“Not at all,” Colin shook his head.
“Oh well,” said his mother airily. “So long as she’s learning something...from someone.”
“What does that mean?”
Now it was her turn to shrug.
He asked, “What’s the point, mum? How come you brought her here?” This was very direct for Colin. He took his mother off her gua
rd.
“You know,” she said. “I explained. She’s a poor orphan now, is Wendy. Her mother dying only a matter of weeks ago, and all...and her two sisters are selfish, really: one pursuing her career, the other her education...and both of them are more interested in the fellas they’ve managed to hook for themselves...”
“It seems to me,” said Colin, fixing his gaze on the creamy ointment inside his mother’s plastic hairnet, “that you’re trying to mould Wendy into something. To educate her and bring her on.”
“Mould her!” laughed Anne. “Into what? My own image, I suppose.”
“Yes!” he said. “That’s what I think you’d like.”
She looked irritated suddenly. “As if I could! She’s got a strong will on her. Oh no, Colin. You talk like she’s...I don’t know, a bit of old cloth I was going to run up and make into something new. But Wendy will do exactly what she wants to do with herself. She’s already let me in on that little secret.”
He laughed, turning back to the film. He’d lost track now, of what was going on, who was who. “Has our Wendy given you a telling off, Mum?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “But I know full well that the girl has got a mind of her own.”
“She’s very frank, and you’re very frank,” he said. “So you know just what to expect of each other.”
“I suppose so,” said Aunty Anne. “Little minx.”
“You’re both very natural,” Colin smirked. “Shall we see if that gold has worked out?”
She felt her covered scalp with one careful hand, as if she could tell the new colour that way.
He took Wendy to a bar where everyone looked up when you walked in. It used to be an ordinary pub, but they’d festooned fairy lights here and there and put Bacardi on special offer and tried to make it gay. Upstairs a transvestite in a scarlet frock was in charge of the records and kept putting on songs from the shows. Oliver! of all things. Colin and Wendy were the only ones upstairs. They sat and the DJ pulled down a giant TV screen, apparently from the ceiling. She zapped it with a futuristic remote. A weather woman twice life-sized filled that end of the dance floor.
Wendy was saying, “I suppose I like your mum, because...because...”
“Ah, we never know why.”
“I always know why,” Wendy said. She stared at the transvestite, who was staring balefully in turn at the giant weather woman. “It’s because Aunty Anne doesn’t expect you to like her. She doesn’t care. Everything she says is like high-kicks, like doing the splits. In your face.”
Colin was sceptical. “Do you really think so?”
“All that business about her legs,” said Wendy. “All that ‘Look at me! I’m fantastic!’ It’s all so defiant. It’s all not-giving-a-fuck.”
“Maybe.”
They walked back home across the New Town. Wendy was just getting used to how the nights here went on later. It seemed ordinary now to start the evening off just before midnight.
“The town’s full of ghosts, you know,” Colin said. They were passing the trees at the bottom of Calton Hill. “If you come by here in the early hours, sometimes you can hear them rustling about...”
“It seems a very haunted place,” said Wendy, still feeling like a tourist. “All the history.”
“Of course,” said Colin, “You have to have suffered in your life to see a ghost. To really see a ghost.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Wendy, “What are you...like an expert?”
“In ghosts or in suffering?” He looked at her. “I’m only teasing. I don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”
“I don’t believe in suffering,” she said.
“No?”
“I don’t believe in showing it,” she said. “Best thing you can do is grit your teeth and keep your gob shut.”
“Sometimes it’s not as easy as that.”
“If you can, though, it’s worth doing. Mind,” she said thoughtfully, “if it looks like you’ve never suffered, then no one bothers with you. You look as if you’re too hard.”
“Is that what you think you look like?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“No, you don’t look too hard.”
They walked on and decided to stop for chips. “The main thing,” said Colin, “Is to try and be as happy as possible.”
Wendy looked at the whole lit up front of the chip shop. Its papier mache octopi and mermaids. “That’s what I came here for,” she said.
THIRTEEN
I don’t think I can be a very nice person...because I can’t always see the best in people. I look at them sometimes and they just seem awful. Their bodies seem awful.
I watch Aunty Anne on the phone in the hallway, gassing away to one of her cronies. Or maybe someone she’s doing business with. Wheeling and dealing Aunty Anne, ducking and diving. She’s breaking off nubs of crusty bread and feeding herself as she talks, mumbling and swallowing as she rabbits on...num num num...and I can’t bear the thought of her warm spit mushing the bread down.
I look at people and think what a bad design they are. Aunty Anne here has to eat and talk and breathe out of the same bit...the same hole in her head (she’s a mouth-breather, of course, and a very noisy eater) and how easy, I think, it would be for her to choke. And I look and I can’t help thinking I’d like to write to a glossy magazine and ask if my...antipathy is natural.
Am I alone in imagining the people I know sitting on the toilet? Doesn’t everyone do this? I picture my uncle, my aunt...when they shuffle off down the hall to the loo (and wasn’t it the French who called it loo not because of l’eau, but rather le oo, for the two holes of oo being eyeholes in the wc door for cheeky peekers?) They lock themselves in and you can hear the thunk of the seat going down, then the rattle of them farting down the pan...It’s become like a mania: I can see them in my head. I do it with the people I see on the street. See flabby pale thighs and skirts hawked up, knickers and trousers dropped round ankles, turned inside out, exposing all their innermost secrets.
Sometimes you can see too much.
Maybe part of Wendy’s general disgust was her finding that she attracted people to her. She was coming of age (what an old-fashioned phrase!) and what people saw in her was nothing less than a fine pair of listening ears. People latch onto me! she moaned, tossing in her white feathery bed.
I get people telling me all sorts of things, bizarre things...and they all think I’m interested. And, of course, usually I am. Sometimes it wears you out. All these new friends.
And I still get letters from my sisters and Timon, and they just make me sad. These people who know what I’m really like aren’t here to corroborate me and the new things I’m doing. Cycling, for Christ’s sake. A new place gives you freedom to become unsettled and turn into what you want. But how do you really know what’s happening to you? Can your identity outride your circumstances? Can I mould myself? Or will others impinge on me?
Aunty Anne’s had a stab. Uncle Pat has taken to me and treats me like a frilly little girl. That meal we had out, he made such a fuss. When I’m with him, I horrify myself, turning all frilly. Colin has made me into his best pal—his fag hag, as he says—and I wonder if I like that name. He’s expecting me to fully-fledge into a grown-up drinking pal and he expects innocence and sophistication all at the same time. He expects me to amuse and console him.
In a way I need to depend on Aunty Anne and her knowledge of what it was like in Blackpool. But Aunty Anne has lost interest in me, I think. She has got her own plans.
So I concentrate on new people. Colin...and now Belinda, Captain Simon’s dappy sister from downstairs, who has decided to be my friend.
It seemed to Wendy that no one had ever been able to tell Belinda that she could be dressing nicer to suit her shape. Maybe she had never had anyone close enough or brave enough to tell her. She was fat and in her fifties and forever squashed into tight polyester mini-dresses. The day she decided to befriend Wendy and came up the spiral staircase to Wendy’s room, s
he was huffling and all asweat. She clanged up the iron rungs and poked her head into the yellow room. That day she was in swirled green nylon. Wendy felt instantly sorry for her, as she always did for people who didn’t make the best of themselves.
Wendy had been taking a nap. It was too tempting not to: the long afternoons in all that yellow, with the sunlight cramming in. How scarlet and tousled the woman from downstairs looked, coming in to spoil Wendy’s peace.
“They said that you’d done this place up nice,” said Belinda. As she spoke she never quite met Wendy’s eye. Wendy had noticed this before. She thought the woman must be profoundly shy. Whenever she came to visit she brought presents and offerings, almost like paying a toll. Most often she brought pink sugar mice, which she would empty from a paper bag onto the table. This place was used to stroppier visitors than that, who saw no need to make excuses for their presences: Aunty Anne, who treated her ex-husband’s flat curiously as her own, and Captain Simon, who seemed a regular, if dull-ish fixture. Especially in these cable TV days. Recent afternoons had seen Aunty Anne watching with Captain Simon. Wendy had seen them in the windowless living room and their afternoon raptures put Wendy in mind of her mother and all those gaudy horror movies. (But, Wendy nagged herself, Aunty Anne and Captain Simon...were they really just watching the telly? Was all that sitting about just them having an excuse to sit for hours, tight together? Uncle Pat kept out of their way. To Wendy’s eye something seemed to be brewing there. Maybe that’s what Belinda was here for: ‘Tell your Aunty to get her hands off my lovely brother!’).
“The others said you’d got your room nice,” Belinda said again, gazing with approval at the nick-nacks along Wendy’s original mantlepiece. Bits she’d picked up in the junk shops of the Old Town: Seventies kitsch, mostly, and a few ethnic artefacts. A beaten tin toucan from a Mexican shop. Wendy sat up, pleased with her new things. Belinda plonked herself down on the end of the bed. Now here it comes, thought Wendy. The woman’s come to talk All About Herself.
