by Paul Magrs
“What has Belinda been telling you this week?” asked Astrid. She looked amused. “She’s always telling someone something.”
Wendy looked from Astrid to Belinda, who was wedging her silver coins into the machines. Maybe everything Belinda said, she said for a joke, or a dare. Maybe she and Astrid were having everyone on.
“She’s been telling me all sorts,” said Wendy, feeling out of her depth. “All of her stories.”
“All her stories,” laughed Astrid, deep in her throat. “Jesus God, not all her stories. The woman is a menace.” She raised her smoky voice. “Have you been corrupting the ears and youthful innocence of this child with your tales? Belinda?”
Belinda barked with laughter. “Of course I haven’t!”
Wendy said, “She told me that the world can be boiled down to two types of people: holograms and replacements. That’s what she said.”
Astrid turned to Wendy. “Did she tell you she thinks her brother is a replacement brother?”
“Oh yes.” Wendy had thought it was a secret.
“You will scare the girl,” said Astrid.
“It wouldn’t harm people to know what’s going on,” said Belinda, gazing at her washing.
“So now you’re in the know,” said Astrid.
They all settled back then to watch Captain Simon’s things go round. Slap slap slap.
Astrid said, “What Belinda hates...can I speak for you on this, Belinda?”
“Go ahead.”
“What Belinda hates is the trivialisation of the situation...of these holograms and replacements. You know, like in that TV series that everyone was going mad about. All of them cash in, they rush to cash in on the situation. And it’s a serious situation! Jesus God, is it serious! To have a brother replaced like that!” Astrid stopped her folding and glanced at Belinda. “How am I doing so far?”
“Very good,” said Belinda.
“So all this replacing and these holograms...where are they coming from? Who’s doing this?”
Belinda said, “Do you want to know what happened to me?”
Wendy gulped. “I think so.”
The shadows in the narrow launderette seemed to squash in, drawing the three of them closer. They knew it was only the sun going in over dowdy Leith Walk, but the effect was remarkable. “Jesus God,” whispered Astrid, over the shunt and squelch of the washer.
“It was l964. Edinburgh Airport. Picture the scene.”
Astrid and Wendy concentrated. They put their imaginations to work. Wendy pictured a generic airport. She could see Belinda there, decades younger, not an ounce slimmer, in a mini dress of course, and dashing about, excited about her first trip abroad. It was quite a trek, down to Spain.
It was chilly in the waiting lounge, her thick arms and thighs were mottled red. Still she wore sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, and already she had blown up her beach ball.
“And we were delayed and delayed all of an afternoon...and all for a private jet, buggering up the schedules. So we knew it was someone famous coming in.”
“Who was it?” asked Wendy.
“Yes, who?” chimed Astrid, though she already knew.
“It was Marlene Dietrich,” said Belinda, smacking her lips on the name. “And I met her on the runway, when the press went out to greet her and she came down off the little staircase from her jet, holding onto the arm of her swanky beau, and clutching her hat onto her head and her bag to her side. I had been dragged along with the press because my boyfriend at the time—Alastair, a pimply boy who was taking me to Spain—worked at The Scotsman, and he threw caution to the winds, wanting a few words from Ms Dietrich.”
“You met her!” said Wendy.
“More than that,” said Astrid, pursing her lips, knowing what was coming.
Belinda took a deep breath. “Marlene and I were kidnapped. The two of us, together, taken against our not inconsiderable wills. I was in my holiday clothes...and Marlene was in baby pink Chanel. And she had on a wig of the brightest, tackiest yellow nylon. Which came as a surprise. She had on shades so dark you couldn’t see those famous eyes. She howled and yammered like nothing on earth when...when they insisted that she removed them.”
“When who insisted?” said Wendy.
“Just wait,” said Belinda.
“Jesus,” said Astrid.
“The men from space,” said Belinda.
Astrid gave a small cry. She pointed at Belinda’s washer. The door hadn’t been properly closed and glistening soap was spilling out onto the floor. Wendy dashed over to jam it shut.
“Well done!” called Astrid.
Belinda looked piqued that her story had been stalled.
Wendy wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear any more. She couldn’t believe her ears. The calm, easy way Belinda was telling them this. She herself felt responsible, as if she’d pushed Belinda into a corner and demanded the full story. She’d only done it to call Belinda’s bluff. Now here was Belinda apparently believing herself. It was a shame.
“Shall I go on?” Belinda asked. It was dark again in the launderette. Rain had started up on the Walk. “There was, of course, a ban and a hush-up in the Edinburgh press and then the world-wide press. It was, potentially, a very big story. Imagine telling the whole world in l964 that a nice Edinburgh lady and the world-famous movie star Ms Dietrich had been taken off together in a terrible flash of unearthly...”
‘”I believe,” said Astrid, “that the word they use in the world of today is ‘abducted’.”
“This wasn’t the world of today,” said Belinda ominously. “This was back even before man walked on the moon.”
“You’re saying you were kidnapped, with Marlene, by aliens?” asked Wendy.
“I was amongst the gentlemen of the Scottish press and the people who worked at the airport and who were looking after Ms Dietrich. We clustered round her. One minute she is saying, in her ever-so famous tones: ‘I am here to make a movie! I am to be Mary Queen of Scots! I love Scotland! I have always loved Scotland!’ Next thing we all know a great big black shadow rolls over all of us, obscuring the brilliant sunshine. We all look up. Everyone gasps. Big space craft overhead. Shouts. Yells. Then a big flash of light. Like the space men are taking a gigantic Polaroid of us. But they weren’t. They were kidnapping—abducting—Marlene and me. The only ladies present. When the glaring light died down and everyone could see straight again...we were well and truly gone. And so was the space craft.”
“I don’t believe this,” said Wendy.
“Every word she says,” said Astrid, “is gospel.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Astrid came with me to Paris,” said Belinda.
“What’s Paris got to do with it?”
“In l990 I went to Paris,” said Belinda. “To catch Marlene before she died. I had to see her one last time. Astrid came with me.”
“You went with her?”
“It was marvellous. Jesus God, it was a life’s ambition realised. She had fallen on...what you call it...hard times, old Marlene...but she was a remarkable woman still and nevertheless.”
“And you believe all this story?” asked Wendy.
“All of it is true!” cried Belinda. “True true true!”
Dear Timon,
I’ve passed your address on to someone I’ve met here. Today she told me a real humdinger of a story. I said, write and tell it to my friend Timon, because he’s a famous writer, or he will be one day, and he can tell the story to the whole world. So now she’s very keen. She’s called Belinda and now she lives downstairs, but she says that in l964 she was held captive at the North Pole by...well, I’ll let you hear from the lady herself. She wants you to ghost-write her autobiography.
Colin said that you only see ghosts—by the way—if you have suffered. I thought anyone could see them. You won’t have suffered enough, not with your easy life.
Get in touch and write me a sensible letter. No more of this nonsense about Mandy’s lips and how she’s
stretched them. I didn’t believe a word of that.
One more thing—do you think you’re a replacement or a hologram? Holograms are people you can walk through. So insincere they hardly exist. Replacements, on the other hand, are real: I mean, you can touch them, but they aren’t the people they think they are. They mean well, but they’re still replacements. Which are you, Timon? All of the above is TM copyright Belinda-from-downstairs. All her ideas are about how the world has been infiltrated by replacement people and none of us is real anymore. The invasion has already happened and we aren’t who we should be. That’s what she reckons, anyway. Maybe she’ll explain it all to you on a postcard. Belinda, her theories and her stories (which she believes...!) are my present to you, Timon.
Don’t say I never give you owt.
PS Don’t lose your elasticity! Whatever you do.
love,
Wendy.
SIXTEEN
He wasn’t a skinhead anymore. Wendy didn’t know it yet, but she wouldn’t be getting him as a skinhead. In the few weeks since she’d seen him on the train and he’d slipped his number to her on the platform at Waverley, David had been letting his hair grow out. Now he looked (or so he’d been told) tufty and sweet and, at first, Wendy would miss him when he walked into the club where they were supposed to meet. She was still looking for her skinny skin skinhead.
David had been working in a record store in the West End. He was one of twenty who took turns behind the tills, easing the neverending stream of customers with their clingfilm-wrapped CDs. CDs slapped on counters made such a brittle, satisfying sound. He loved the noises of this summer’s work. The crashing of the tills and all the electronic white noise. He knew all the music. Surrounded by music, he would remember what was in the charts this summer for the rest of his life. Edinburgh had been his chance to make himself trendy and he had taken to the city happily, growing in his thick, dark sideburns, buying tartan Doc Martens and a range of trendy tops in different colours. He saw bands in pubs and bigger bands on tour, drank lager, ate nachos most nights, dabbed crunchy granules of speed on one finger and brushed his teeth with them, so he could dance and still get up to work on the till next morning, his hair sticking up funny where it was growing back.
He socialised with the people from work. Early on there had been a few nights with Heather, who was part of the extra staff they took on for the sales season, but that had stopped. “I used to have a vampire fixation,” Heather had told him, “but that fizzled out.” She was one of those people to whom everything in their life was just another fad. David decided he wasn’t prepared to be that.
He moved into a flat with a bloke from work, in Thistle Street, an alley of warehouse flats above the auction rooms. He was just two streets down from the shop on Princes Street. Now he was living in the centre of town, four storeys up a fire escape. He moved all his things into the flat in only five trips up the clanging fire escape. His flat mate Rab had much more stuff. Thousands of dog-eared records and rather startling books in cardboard boxes. David only hoped they didn’t choose to move out on the same day. Or that Rab didn’t move out first. He’d hate to have to offer to help Rab move his stuff.
In late August Wendy gave David a call and he blinked three times before realising who she meant she was.
“I didn’t think you were going to bother!”
“Oh,” said Wendy. “You shouldn’t lose faith so easily. I’m around.”
They made a plan to go out later that week. Wendy put the
phone down. The phone was still on the bare boards in the hall. You’d think Uncle Pat would buy a phone table or something. Then she thought, maybe this is what I’m missing—talking to and seeing someone closer to my own age. Everyone I know here is older. Even Colin is. He’s nearly thirty. David sounded so young.
The sun was back out. This week was the hottest so far. Today Aunty Anne made and effort and said, “Let’s get some sun-bathing in—up at the Botanical Gardens.” She had been slightly friendlier the last few days and these trips to the park had become the thing that aunt and niece did together, upon which no one else—and certainly no male person—impinged. Wendy had duly gone with her aunt and lay on the grass, on a prickly tartan blanket.
Anne lay back, fleshy and unashamed in skimpy shorts, baring her marvellous pins to the numinous sky, and anybody else who went passing by. Spreadeagled beside Aunty Anne, Wendy felt overshadowed and wanted to slink off to the cover of the trees. The new Chinese Garden lay over the brow of the next rise and she longed to go and sit in the simple wooden pagoda in the shade. Not waiting for Aunty Anne to fix her with a look, as she could at any moment, and ask: “Have you met a nice boy yet?” or, “Aren’t you wondering why my eyes are twinkling?” (She really asked this and yes, indeed, her eyes were twinkling merrily. To her shame Wendy pretended not to hear her aunt’s question. Though, of course, she was dying to know what had put that twinkle there.)
Oh, to be like her sister Mandy and her Aunty Anne and not give a tuppence ha’penny for anyone’s opinion. Wendy would try to make herself brave and work herself up to a certain pitch of brassy nonchalance, but then her nerve would snap at its tautest and she’d be left dangling and all self-conscious. Today she was amazed at herself, how coolly she had talked to David on the phone. “Yeah, I’ll come out dancing. Only somewhere where there’s actual songs to dance to, with gaps between them...and so long as they’re songs that I recognise.” David had been only too pleased to let her have her own way. Maybe she’d blown her summer’s worth of cool on that one phone call.
For some reason she was reacting badly to the sun. When she was little she’d been able to run around the beach and about the streets all day in the brightest sun. These days, each time she came home from bearing her arms, legs, stomach and the top of her head in the Botanical Gardens, she would end the day feeling sick with a splitting headache.
“I’ve never been cursed with sun-stroke,” said Aunty Anne, advancing with a cold compress and asprins. “You’re like your mother. You’ll be peely-wally all your life.”
Wendy flushed, hearing her mother called like this.
Aunty Anne was turning a fine, glossy mahogany. Those legs of hers were lacquered and finely turned like something off one of the precious antiques she saw being sold each morning in the auctions she was still attending. She was still patiently picking up bargains and tips about the selling game. “I’m an exquisite antique!” Aunty Anne would call out, strutting about the flat, showing off her tan. “And just look at these gorgeous legs! Couldn’t you eat them?”
“For God’s sake,” said her ex-husband. “Put all that flesh away. You’ll shame us all. Next to you, we look like we’re wasting away.” It was true. The more gloriously robust Anne became that summer, the worse her son and his father looked. Anne would emerge each morning from her purple satin-lined room in ever-skimpier and garish and daring outfits and the two men would still be shuffling about in their dressing gowns. Only Colin sometimes flung himself down on the grass in Gayfield Square, onto his old Spiderman duvet cover. Father and son were declining together and Anne’s ebullient health was a rebuke to them: get out there and enjoy it!
Her advice—about anything—was always the same, thought Wendy. You’ve got to go for it! Seize the day! You’ve got to go and get out there!
But they wouldn’t. The old man had taken a turn for the worse. And mostly Colin didn’t leave the flat till after eleven at night, when the sun had safely slunk away past the conservatory on Calton Hill, which looked to him like a baleful nipple on a single tit.
This afternoon Wendy lay next to her dozing, basting aunt and wondered once again if she was footling and tootling her time away. Colin might well have been more help and support to her in her quest for something meaningful to do. (Meaningful? When did that come about? The word had never occurred to her before. All she needed was something to take her mind off loss and displacement, to give her a propping up and a structure for the things she got up to. Jesus
God! (How infectious Astrid was) she was seventeen and meaning wasn’t really that high on her list of priorities.)
Colin was no help? No, I wouldn’t say that exactly. He was good to me. A very maternal boy, I think he was at that age, with the mothering instinct thwarted in him and coming out and splurging over his few friends when he and they would let it. He could be crowding and oppressive with his care and his wheedling the truth of the matter out of you...Right from my first days in their luxury rooftop pad, he wanted all the truth out of me.
Maybe, I thought, he’s a naive receptor, like Timon.
Belinda said he was a hologram, and therefore not to be trusted. But Belinda’s world-view was just bizarre and although I liked her idea of splitting everyone in the world into two categories (how convenient!) I wasn’t convinced. And, as yet, I certainly wasn’t convinced that she and Marlene had been experimented upon at the North Pole.
Colin’s problem, I would say now, and perhaps it was my problem too, was that he couldn’t think of anything more delightful than being a seventeen year old girl. And he told me this, he told me this himself. This good old reductionist version of a gay man’s sensibility came straight from the horse’s mouth—so don’t write in! If I’m being reductionist about queers, about Colin himself, then so was he and, in that unguarded moment, he was happy to be. He actually said, ‘To be you and pretty and seventeen and have it so easy and not be queer and have fellas chasing you! Lovely! You’re so lucky! So ordinary!’
It was my...situation he adored, more than me myself. I imagined that he was sneaking up on me, ready to pounce...not to seduce me, of course, but to oust me. He wanted to know why I wasn’t having a better time than I appeared to be having. And he lost no time in suggesting that if he was me, why then he’d...have a humdinger of a time. Humdinger was his word. I’d started using it too, I’d noticed, along with doll, along with Jesus God! Along with telling people not to lose their elasticity. I always picked up things like this. Verbal tics cling to me.
“Time to get back,” said Aunty Anne, peeling herself off the grass. Shreds of green were sticking to her darkened underside.
