by Paul Magrs
Belinda, however, talked mostly about her brother, the gallant, the valorous, the magnificent Captain Simon. She had cared for him and loved him all her life. Only she had known him back before he’d grown those white, twiddly mustachios, before he’d turned bald as a coot, before he’d started to wear a yellow uniform jacket. She adored him: he was her Don Quixote. She had seen to him and protected him, and naturally, their brotherly-sisterly bond was barnacle-strong. He was like the moon in eclipse to her and she could see nothing of the sunlit world around him.
“I know my brother like nobody knows him,” she told Wendy.
“That’s good,” said Wendy. She kept her voice neutral. She was pleased they had each other.
“Yes, it’s good,” said Belinda impatiently. “It’s always been good. It’s always been fine.” She stopped and chewed the inside of her mouth. Holding something back.
Ah, thought Wendy. Here comes the real coming-clean. The woman is jealous. Jealous as all hell. She knows someone’s been yanking her brother off her.
And it’s you, Aunty Anne, isn’t it?
You’ve got your purple steel-tipped talons
into this poor woman’s brother...
Oh, Aunty Anne
why can’t you be honest about things?
why not do things out in the open?
The sun was at its hottest now. Wendy wanted to stop talking with Belinda and hang her head out of the skylight, stand on her mussed-up bed and look out over the streets. Pant with her tongue out like a dog on a long car journey. She fought down a yawn.
“He’s not the same person,” said Belinda at last.
“Do you think he’s spending too much time up here in this flat?” asked Wendy. “Too much time with my uncle? Does that bother you?”
The woman looked stung. “I couldn’t begrudge the lad his afternoons out with his pals,” she said. Wendy shivered at the way she called a man in her sixties a lad. It made Belinda seem suddenly huge and schoolgirlish.
“But you do mind really, don’t you?”
Belinda sagged down. “He’s not the same man.”
“You mean he’s changed. He’s changed a little bit.”
Fiercely Belinda shook her head. “He’s not the same man at all. You’ve got to listen to me, doll. What I’m saying is very simple, but no one would believe me...and I’m going out of my head. Now, I live with the man and I know him better than everyone, right? And what I’m saying is, these past few months, he’s not been the same man. He looks the same and does most of the same things. But...but but but.” For the first time since coming up into that room, Belinda looked Wendy straight in the eye. “My brother has been replaced.”
Only that morning Wendy had received another postcard from Timon. He was all enthusiastic about his new philosophy. Oh boy, she thought. A new philosophy: all he needs. Something new, coming true. In his post card Timon declared that he was learning to listen to people properly. He was learning to keep his own mouth shut and to really listen. He had sent Wendy a picture of the Golden Mile at night and written on the back that he was taking up the very thing that she wished she could give up. He wanted, he said, to be a naive receptor. He’d read something some old novelist had said—the very woman that Mandy’s boyfriend was obsessed with: Timon had read of book of her essays while staying there. And this old bird said that a writer had to be ignorant. Purposefully he/she had to unloosen all the great stacks of knowledge in their heads and let it float away downstream. Determinedly, you had to know nothing. Then you had to be a listener. Then you had to be a naive receptor...of sense impressions, of general chit chat. You had to stop being clever-clever.
Wendy rather resented this coming through the post from Timon.
He ended his card with:
‘So I’m not the clever fella I was!
Oh no!
I’m not the clever fella I was!’
Wendy put the letter away with the others. He’s a naive receptor now, she thought. She wondered what that made him before.
Wendy blinked. “Replaced?”
Belinda sighed. “You don’t really want to hear this, do you?”
“No, go on.” Might as well now.
“In this fallen world,” said Belinda. “The survivors fall into two distinct camps. There are holograms and there are replacements. The hologram people have stopped being flesh. They’re what’s-the-word...insubstantial. You could poke our finger right through them if you tried. That’s the hologram people. Your cousin Colin is one of those, poor lad.”
Wendy stared at her.
“And then,” Belinda went on, “there are the replacements. They are fleshly and are built to last longer than mere holograms. And a replacement is what I’ve been given, rather than a brother. Do you understand?”
She looked into Wendy’s eyes as if she was trying to hypnotise her.
“I don’t understand you,” Wendy said. She felt that the grooves in her mind had sealed over and the words that Belinda was talking were gliding right over her, and could find nowhere to lodge and make sense to her.
Belinda groaned. “You think I’m bananas.” She stood up and slapped her knees, as if to get the blood flowing. She brushed her skirt straight. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Then she was gone, back down the spiral staircase.
FOURTEEN
Do you know what that Colin said to me? First of all I thought he was dead cheeky, saying this. I get touchy when people try and say things about my mam. They might mean the best but I get protective. She isn’t here to defend herself, so I’m watchful.
Colin said: “You and I should make the best of ourselves. There’s no way we should waste our lives, you know.”
We were crossing the busy street. Two sets of lights, top of Leith Walk. Spot of breathless jaywalking. “I wasn’t planning on wasting my life,” I said.
“I was just thinking,” he went on, when we got to the pavement. “They were unique, your mum and mine. I mean, women in their position, of their generation, their class. You know, they were unique in human history.”
He stopped to look in windows. Colin was interested in everything. The mauve and pale yellow gerbera in the florist’s window, the six foot cacti, the knobbly bread studded with olives in the front of the deli. Colin walked round with his eyes on stalks. It was the smells I liked.
I thought he was having me on, the way he was talking. I felt alert to satire, and asked him what he meant exactly. And I thought about Aunty Anne and my mam, watching The Blood Beast Terror right at the end, on our old telly. Aunty Anne holding a tassled cushion up to her face to block out the terror. My mam laughing out loud at it. Women unique in human history: Colin was saying it again.
“I mean the Pill,” he said. “They were invented by the Pill, those women, and the time they lived in. They never had to have kids. Me and you, Wendy, we needn’t have existed. They had that whole necessity and obligation removed. And they chose to have us anyway. Your mam had three of you.” He looked at me. We were right outside a second hand record shop. Vinyl Villains. “We got born anyway, against the odds. Our mothers flying in the face of cultural and biological fashion.”
“I suppose so,” I said lamely.
“I feel obliged to make things up to them sometimes,” he said with a sigh. “And not footle and tootle it all away.” Footle-and-tootle was one of Aunty Anne’s phrases. I liked the way Colin used it without thinking.
In the record shop window he saw ‘The Best of Cilla Black’ for two pounds. Cilla in the Sixties, dressed as a cowboy in orange slacks, cravat and black stetson. Big cheesy grin. In went Colin to ask the assistant to fetch the LP off the window display and play him some tracks. Check for scratches.
I stayed out on Leith Walk, thinking. Soon ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ cane drifting out the open door. I knew Colin would buy the record and play it obsessively for a week or more, as he always did. Until he’d driven us all crazy with the same set of songs. It’s what he always did. He loved wome
n singing old-fashioned songs. Poor Colin. He liked things that sounded dated. Everything that once thought itself state-of-the-art and got left behind. Colin said he got a very particular frisson from things that had dated. It was the way those things kept hopefully in view, wanting to come back.
Colin wished he could slow down all of time. If time was slow enough for me, he said, I might do something with my life. I might slow down the changing colours in my blood cells.
When he said that I would picture his arteries and veins and cells like the moving blobs in a lava lamp.
On Leith Walk I listened to Cilla Black—‘Step Inside, Love’—and watched Colin, rapt, indoors.
Colin told me he was ashamed of himself, of his younger, treacherous self, who had wanted to belong to a different family. He lay in the sun on Gayfield Square and explained how, at eleven, he’d developed a crush on the whole Familie Schaudi from his Longmann’s basic German book at school. It was a purple paperback, all floppy with use. Each lesson came in the form of a comic strip about the Familie Schaudi, each week getting up to something new (never anything very exciting), each time involving new items of vocabulary that the class would be tested on after the weekend. Ten words a week. It sounded like a doddle to me. That was the old O level, Colin said. I myself am a product of he National Curriculum, of GCSE’s. How much broader is my knowledge base! I told Colin how much harder we’d had it compared with his lot. They made it all so much more difficult. I left school without a single qualification. That, mind you, was meant to be well-nigh impossible.
Lying there in the patches of shadow from the trees that ringed the park, Colin gave me a funny look. He’d pulled off his top and he had shorts on. He’d brought an old duvet cover from the airing cupboard to lie on. How grey he looked amongst the still-livid reds and blues of Spiderman. My cousin lay spreadeagled on Spiderman, who seemed unperturbed, still shooting out his webs. Colin’s skin didn’t look very healthy at all.
He went on about his crush some more. How he wanted to belong to that family and not his own. To run about the town with lanky, blonde, clean-living Hans and the pig-tailed Lieselotte and Lumpi the daschund. Calling out Gruss Gott! to the shopkeeper (and learning, one by one, the German names for the shops they kept). When one week’s story was about Hans’ English penfriend coming to stay, Colin said he’d been bitterly jealous.
“Did you have any crushes when you were at school?” he asked me.
“Can’t really remember...” I said. But I do. Cool, aristocratic Lalla Ward. The willowy Time Lady Romana, swishing about on Doctor Who.
“I was an awful, precious, queeny child,” he said. “Most of my teachers loved me, except one, Mrs Thompson, who decided she was my deadliest enemy. Once when I was about eight we had this row, this heated row, in front of the whole class. I’d written about my weekend and she tore a strip off me—she denied there was any such thing as chilli con carne.”
Colin drifted off then, thinking.
He remembered that same teacher telling him off in gym class, when they were all sat round cross-legged. He was stroking the tiny fair hairs on the legs of the boy sitting next to him. Mrs Thompson called out angrily: “I don’t think you want to be doing that, Colin.”
But why not? he wanted to know, but didn’t say anything at the time. The boy with the legs wasn’t complaining.
Wendy looked at the titchy, tickly hairs of his goatee beard, lit up in the sun. Golden and red filaments. The red ones were, if you peered right close, pink. “Get away!” he said, opening his eyes to see her looming over. “Don’t look in my face!” She was blocking out his light. He liked the inside of his eyelids to stay bright red. He imagined it was healthy, all good for him. Vitamin D or something, flooding straight into his head through his eyes.
She asked him how long he’d had his little beard.
“Why, don’t you like it?”
“They’ve all got little beards,” she said. “All the gay men here.”
He shrugged, still lying down. “They think it makes their faces longer.”
“You’ve already got a long face.”
Now she’d set him off wondering if he really wanted to have a beard. All through growing up he’d never imagined having one. He never thought of beards as having anything to do with him. The metal work teachers at school, all three of them, had beards. So did Obi Wan Kenobi. Now here he was. This was the person he’d turned out to be. He said, “It doesn’t take much to set me off thinking about the different ways I might have turned out.”
Wendy was taking off her shirt, bunching it into a pillow and lying down. Showing off her little bra top from Flip to the whole of Gayfield square. From one shirt pocket fluttered a sliver of paper. A phone number on it. That David, the skinhead on the train. It was only barely legible after the wash. She hadn’t phoned him yet. Maybe now was the time.
Colin hadn’t noticed her staring at the number.
“This is how I’ll be now,” he was saying. “This has got to be my prime. Twenty-three. As prime as I’ll ever get. This is my ultimate incarnation.”
“Incarnation,” she muttered.
When they were out and about together these were the things that Wendy was apt to forget. Those three things would come back with a little jolt sometimes. Not a major shock, just an odd reminder, like getting her change back in John Lewis’ and staring at the exotic Scottish pound notes.
She would remember that Colin was queer, that he was going to die, and that he was a millionaire. These separate facts would push themselves into her view, where she would quietly marvel at them.
The queer part of it wasn’t that unusual any more. The disease wasn’t either, after the year she’d been having. It seemed that everyone she knew was busy making the best of their time, even the ones without a time limit. The hardest, strangest, unswallowable fact of her cousin’s life was his money. She didn’t believe in it. True, if they were in town and miles away from home when it rained or he came over tired, he didn’t think twice about flagging down a taxi. But he never exactly threw money around. And he never carried more than twenty pounds on him. “Just like the queen,” Wendy said.
“Someone’s going to get their shins kicked,” he muttered.
“Oh, I’m sorry if...” Wendy didn’t know yet how far she could push the jokes about queens.
“I’m having you on, doll,” he said. “You can call me what you want.”
She liked the way they called each other doll here. The gay boys and girls used the term a lot. In the Scarlet Empress they had flyers and posters for nightclubs with pictures of Barbies and Action Men in drag. She wondering if the doll-calling had anything to do with that, or vice versa.
Call me what you want, Colin said, and looked like he meant it. He felt like her best friend these days and that made her feel guilty for squeezing along some of the others. Wendy was always having to ask the objects of her affection to breathe in and squeeze along. There always had to be room for one more and she was always falling in love, these days.
15
On Leith Walk she found some of her favourite places...
With Uncle Pat she went to the bookies, the cafeterias and the charity shops. She loved to look in the windows of the boutiques that sold material for saris. Gold and green fabric dotted with millions of sequins. Swatches of multi-coloured cloth wrapped on headless dummies. The glitziest of fabrics drapped on those dummies in the dowdiest fashion.
Soon Uncle Pat stopped coming out with her. He spent the days indoors. With each day it was getting hotter and it was too much for him. He was ailing. Wendy asked Aunty Anne about his health, but her aunt brushed aside the suggestion that Pat was getting worse.
Four storeys of flats lay on top of the shops down Leith Walk, so that there was a great concentration of life. There was a lot going on and this made Wendy feel at home. You could see the windows of flat upon flat, with paper lanterns, cheese plants and Chinese wall-hangings on display. When you walked down the street in the mor
ning, there were always bin bags stacked at each lamp post for the bin lorry, and there would always be at least one exhausted three piece suite waiting with its cushions burst apart. It was as if the people here were forever chucking out their old tat and buying new.
She started going with Belinda to the launderette where Belinda always took the Captain’s dirty things in a vast pink wash bag. Belinda propped it in an old pushchair and they walked gently across town. Outside the launderette was a life-sized orange Sooty bear, with a slot in his head, collecting money for the blind. He was chained to the front door and the links were as thick as Wendy’s wrists. Wendy would stare at Sooty as she chatted to Astrid, the German woman who ran the launderette. Belinda got on with her washing. She wouldn’t say a word until her washing was underway.
Until then Wendy was left with Astrid, who fascinated her because she looked like a film star, all dusky skin and bright eyes, and she had no legs. Astrid would be sitting on the bench between two full Ali Baba baskets, shaking out and folding other people’s newly-dried washing. You could smell the static cling on the various clean bits and pieces. Astrid wouldn’t be sitting really, of course, nor kneeling, or squatting. She was propped on the bench: folds of rich, glittering cloth gathered under her, protecting her stumps. To Wendy she looked sufficient to herself, busily folding and it didn’t seem incongruous that there weren’t two legs coming down off the bench from the truck of her body, that her golden sari just tapered away, nothing coming out of it, not even a mermaid’s tail.
Astrid had one of those red dots on her forehead. Like a religious red dot on her forehead. Oh, I’m ignorant, thought Wendy. I should know all about these things. Other cultures. I know nothing. I don’t even know about my own.
She stopped staring at the chained up Sooty and gazed at Astrid once more, who hummed unidentifiable songs as she dealt with skirts, babies’ romper suits, men’s workshirts. Her hair fell in two black plaits that hung down lower than her stumps.
