by Paul Magrs
“How come so early?”
“Your Uncle Pat gets back from the consultant soon.”
I must have looked blank.
“Don’t you remember? He was at the hospital today.”
I’d forgotten.
“About his...problems.” With a downward glance Aunty Anne alluded to his general area of discomfort. She shook out her blankets.
I couldn’t believe it had slipped my mind. And, a month ago, when the appointment had been given him, I’d solemnly promised to go with him and hold his hand. He hated hospitals. He hated anything that smelled of an institution. “Institutions smell,” he told me, “of gravy, flowers and fresh excrement.”
“Who’s gone with him?” I asked.
“Colin did,” said Aunty Anne, leading the way back to the path. “Even though he hates those places too. They depress him, and I’m not surprised.” She sighed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew!”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I hardly think that’s proper. I’m his ex-wife. They’re poking on with all his insides.”
Sometimes I just didn’t understand Aunty Anne.
When we got back to the flat it was empty.
There was a postcard on the met from Timon. It showed a picture of an egg-headed alien, glowing yellow.
Wendy, who are these people you’re knocking about with? What are you doing, telling them they can write to me? I’ve never met any of them in my life. Are you giving out my address to just anyone? This Belinda woman is obviously bananas. And lonely. I got a card from her the same day I got your note. A kind of preface to telling me what she calls, ‘the whole shazam shebang and kit kaboodle.’ She thinks I’ll write a story about her. I dreamed last night that it was me being abducted. You know I hate that shit.
love (even so)
Timon.
SEVENTEEN
They didn’t know what was wrong with Uncle Pat. He came back late that afternoon and how we fussed around him.
“I can sit my own self down!” he grumbled, heading for his favourite swivel chair, in the brightest patch of light. It was strange seeing him in clothes. He was wearing a tweedy suit with a beautiful silk tie, loosely knotted, a peacock green and blue. He tilted his head back, sighed and closed his eyes. “Serious things don’t seem so serious once you get home,” he said. “Once you step through that door, it’s like they all fall away.”
Aunty Anne said, “Hush now and get some rest. Do you want something to eat? There’s some bacon I could fry.” I could see her big hands twitching, keen to do something practical, which for her usually meant one of her slapdash fry-ups.
For a moment Uncle Pat looked vexed. Then the strength drained out of him. “No, I’m all right. Colin fetched a...muffin, I think the word was, from the stall outside the hospital. I ate it in the waiting room. Do you know, the whole business of being looked at has tired me out.”
We all sat down and watched him. I don’t know why. If I’d come back from something serious—the acute surgical out-patients’ consultancy, no less—I wouldn’t want faces peering at me afterwards. But we were waiting for him to tell us that everything was all right. It made you realise how thin he’d become, seeing him in his best suit like this. We were too used to him swishing about like Prospero in his voluminous scarlet gown.
Colin said, “They were very nice to us. They let me go in with him.”
Uncle Pat opened his eyes. “In case I forgot to tell them anything, or didn’t listen properly to what they told me.”
“I didn’t have to do anything. He was great,” said Colin. Then he turned and gave me a distinctly funny look. I blushed.
“What did they say?” asked Aunty Anne. She went to put the kettle on, her feet shuffling impatiently on the flags, wanting to dance.
“They felt all over my abdomen,” said Uncle Pat. “All my skinny old stomach. It was a very nice, very young Canadian girl with cool fingers and a very lucid way of talking. She said there’s very definitely a mass down there.”
“A mass?” said Aunty Anne.
“Something inflamed, she thought,” said Colin. “They don’t know. They want to do emergency scans.”
The phone rang in the hall. There was no answer phone. Or rather there was, but it was faulty and only recorded actual phone conversations and played them back to the next person who called. Not very useful. I dashed into the hall, straining to hear about Uncle Pat’s scans.
“Wendy? It’s David.”
“It’s a really bad time,” I said.
“What?” He was at work and the shop noise was fierce behind him.
“It’s a really bad time to talk,” I shouted. Behind me I could hear Colin counting things off on his fingers.
“He’s got to go back for an X ray, a barium drink...”
“A barium meal,” his father corrected him.
“Whatever. It’s where they light you up inside and video everything swishing about. And an ultrasound, too.”
“That’s what they give pregnant women!” cried Aunty Anne.
“Maybe it’s twins,” said Uncle Pat gloomily.
“Wendy, listen,” David was saying. I could tell he was serving someone at the till at the same time. “Right. If I could just ask you to sign where it says ‘signature’...”
“What? David...”
“Going Places on Friday night, Wendy. It’s a club.”
“I can’t do this now, David.”
“You can’t come out?”
“Yes I can come out, but...”
“I can’t stay on long...Seven o’clock at the Assembly Rooms on George Street. Friday at seven! Dress up retro! See you then!” The shop phone went dead.
“They say that the barium meal tastes disgusting,” I heard Uncle Pat say. “For some reason I picture sitting down to this funny, lumpy plate of chemicals, forcing it down with a knife and fork. Or the foaming jug of poison that Dr Jeckyll swigs down.”
“Oh god,” said Aunty Anne, sitting herself down as I came back into the kitchen. “This is just awful.”
I looked at the three of them. For the first time they properly felt like my new family. At the back of my mind I could hear that voice of Mandy’s singing, as she had of our mother: ‘It’s cancer-cancer-cancer.’ Mandy demystifying everything as usual. Mandy saying the unsayable, singing the unsingable. I was gripped by the need to say the word myself. Say aloud to the luxury kitchen: It’s cancer-cancer-cancer. Just to get the word out. Sure that it would make it easier.
Yet the word was already there. It might as well have been written on each of our foreheads, as we all looked at each other, stuck for the next thing to say. Like in the Rizla game, where everyone writes a famous person’s name on a thin cigarette paper, licks and sticks it on their neighbour’s forehead. You can’t read how you’ve been labelled and, by asking questions, you have to guess.
“I’ll come with you next time, Uncle Pat. Your next scan. What is it, this barium meal? I’ll eat it for you, if you like.”
He smiled.
I let the smells of the launderette waft about me and I heard Belinda’s drowsy voice go on, today describing in fine, wonderfully recalled detail, about the surgical instruments—specialized, gleaming—that had been used on her thirty something years ago. Beside me Astrid gasped and oohed, though she must have heard the story countless times before. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the clean smell of detergent, and of fabric conditioner, rich and pink, sloshed into the tubs by the handy capful. You could smell old fish and chips too, in the rumpled balls of old newspaper under the benches. Astrid had some difficulty picking up after her messier customers.
“A lovely, funny woman.” Belinda was, on request, mistily recalling Marlene. “Rather harsh, of course, and odd. She never looked anything less than immaculate.” She sniffed, rubbing her knees. “Even in her late, bed-ridden years.”
Astrid pitched in. “Even then. That was the only time
I ever saw her, in that down-heel Paris apartment and I thought Jesus, that woman is still every inch the superstar.”
I said, “Tell me about the Paris trip.”
“1990,” said Belinda. “Picture the scene. Astrid and I went for a long weekend.”
“We had planned for months,” said Astrid. “Scrimping our pennies together.”
“I was going for a Chanel frock...”
“But that’s a whole other story,” said Astrid.
“The real purpose,” said Belinda, “was to see Marlene again, all those years after we were kidnapped. Five days we were in that strange craft together, high above the icy wastes of the North Pole. She must remember me, I thought, even though were hadn’t been in touch for over twenty-five years. In the five days we shared each other’s company we poured out our hearts to each other. Now, the memory had faded a little at the edges. It seemed to me, by then, like a curious dream.”
Astrid said, “So we presented ourselves at the buzzer downstairs from Ms Dietrich’s apartment. A shabby green door. It wasn’t hard to find. I was like you, Wendy. I thought that Belinda’s story was all film-fan flim-flam and fabrications. So we buzzed...and...”
“We buzzed the intercom,” said Belinda, “and Marlene could hardly say go away, bugger off, don’t disturb me. Not to the woman she’d been held captive with all those years ago. Who’d suffered the same weird indignities.”
What indignities? I was dying to know. Belinda was going to tell me that she’d made love with a man from outer space. I was waiting for it.
Astrid’s marvellous eyes lit up. “The intercom crackled. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ went the voice and, Jesus God! Even on something as mundane as an intercom that voice was suffused with...what is the phrase?”
“Jaded tristesse,” said Belinda.
“And Marlene, I swear, she said: ‘Hullo Belinda...come on up, old girl.’”
Because Astrid was in her chair, they couldn’t take the umpteen, winding, creaking steps. They had to wait instead for the antiquated lift. In the lift Belinda trod on a mouse. The place was a horrible mausoleum, and as they were winched to the top Belinda felt sadness panging in her ample breast. In the hallway at the top, the carpet had lost its pattern and colour.
“Oh, I wish we hadn’t come.”
But Astrid was excited. “Why on earth?”
“Poor Marlene, putting up with us in her twilight years.”
And Belinda thought of her own, lovely spacious flat in the New Town, in Edinburgh: of its perfection, even if it was cluttered by that brother of hers. At that moment she didn’t feel well disposed towards Captain Simon. Wasn’t he, after all, the real reason for this peculiar, peremptory reunion? For Marlene, out of everyone on the planet, would surely believe Belinda when she said that her brother, Captain Simon had been replaced...
Marlene was sitting up in her bed, under a dowdy duvet. An uneaten lunch of clear soup was on a tray to one side, a vase of pink carnations turning brown at the edges stood by it. A Baby Belling was plugged into the wall beside her. She wore an expensive headscarf and dark glasses.
“Belinda! Sit yourself down, girl! Pull up a pew...” Then she glared at Astrid. “Jesus God, that woman has no legs.”
Astrid looked stung and didn’t say anything.
Marlene scrabbled at her bedside table for her ciggies. Lit one. Oh, thought Belinda mournfully. Where were the Black Sobranies of your glory years? And the gold tipped holder and Zippo Noel gave you? She remembered the two of them smoking like schoolgirls in their cell on the weird craft, using up the last few delicious cigarettes (and the oxygen). Watching the lilac smoke unfurl as they wondered what would become of them. “Fame does not matter here,” Marlene had told Belinda. “Up here in the stratosphere we are equals.”
And Belinda’s heart glowed with pride.
The story was interrupted by the man from the place next door. Tom, in his tracksuit bottoms, was one of Astrid’s other regulars. Wendy had already heard about him. At the back of the launderette you could smell the chlorine from the footbaths next door. Wendy had asked Astrid: is there a swimming baths next door? Or in the basement? And she had imagined a subterranean pool, leaf-fronded and tiled in blue and gold and steamed mirrors, the ceilings dappled and crazed with watery reflections. Astrid smiled and explained that next door it was a gentleman’s club and it extended underneath the launderette. A special gentleman’s club where the gentlemen paid their money to take off all their clothes to sit in the underground pools together, or in small wooden cabinets, partly dressed in old towels as the temperature rose...
All this underneath the launderette! And Poundstretcher!
Wendy was enchanted by the thought of all this beneath her feet. Gloomy dripping caverns full of naked men, beneath the black and white tiled lino. They weren’t specific nude men she saw, just an undifferentiated mass of male flesh. Nobody she would have to talk to.
She stared out at Leith Walk: the push chairs getting shunted past, the dogs, the granddames, the pensioners and pissheads. She wondered if they knew what was going on beneath their feet: the underground men.
Belinda had gone back to talking about the surgical implements with which she had been examined. “They were spotless, mind.”
The man from next door was pulling up to Astrid’s bench a hamper full of—he flung open to lid to reveal—soiled and dampened towels. Astrid winked at Wendy. “Tom and I do a roaring trade from the gentlemen who wish to take off their clothes and sit in the heat of our shared basement.” The man in the vest top and tracksuit bottoms smiled at Wendy.
“It must be nice,” said Wendy. “Lolling about down there.”
Tom grinned. “Spending languorous summer afternoons in the hot timeless dark of someone else’s cellar. Forget your cares!”
Astrid said, “Doesn’t he talk funny!”
“It would be like being a mushroom,” said Wendy, and made Tom laugh.
On Friday night I decided I would take Colin along with me for support. He didn’t have any other plans. I wasn’t about to go and meet a man I hardly knew without back-up. I wanted to know what Colin thought of him.
Colin didn’t know what to wear. He tried on a few outfits and they all looked much the same. Different T shirts to hang off his skinny frame. Three pairs of immaculate, probably new jeans, in navy, white and black, to be winched in tight around his waist. I sat on the end of his bed and watched him try things on and I was amazed by his waist. He made me feel colossal. I could fit his waist between the span of my two hands. He jumped out of one outfit, into the next, into another, like jumping through hoops, revealing between each one his pale boy’s body, his white Calvin Klein’s.
In the end he settled on a green T shirt and, in the pub round the corner, he tipped the first drink of the night over his white jeans. That night we spilled more alcohol down the pair of us than either of us drank. It was the night of wasted booze. We were nervous.
We walked up from the Royal Circus. I was in a T shirt and jeans, too. It was too hot a night to go dressing up and clarting on and I wasn’t sure, anyway, if I was that serious about making an impression on David. Dress retro, he’d said. Whatever that meant. The club he’d suggested was a monthly one, that moved venue each time and played old-fashioned music: tunes from twenty year old adverts and TV shows. The whole point of this, Colin warned me, was that it was an...ironic disco. You danced between inverted commas to easy-listening music.
“And I’m not sure if it’s really on at the Assembly Rooms,” he said. “I think your boyfriend’s got it wrong.” Colin was peeved because of the gin stained down his crotch.
We had cocktails in a piano bar on Frederick Street. A horrible pianist sang Stevie Wonder songs at us. This was a street full of restaurants and we struggled through a well-fed crowd and smells of garlic, ginger and spices. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast time, when all the talk of bowel problems had put me off.
Colin was right. The Assembly Rooms on George Street wer
e silent. The windows at the front of that imposing building were dark. No David.
We saw a poster that said the club had been moved at the last minute to a marquee on Princes Street.
“We’re already an hour late,” I said. “Let’s just go home.”
“No way!” said Colin. “I want to get a look at your fella.”
“He’s probably seen this is empty and gone home,” I said feebly.
“He can read the signs as well as we can. Come on!”
David was phoning Aunty Anne. He’d been in the marquee tent on Princes Street since the start of the evening. Aunty Anne said that it sounded hellish at his end of the phone.
“Wendy’s gone to the Assembly Rooms,” Anne shouted to this voice who said he was David. She was dubious about giving out information like this.
“I got the venue wrong,” said David. He was crushed into a corner of the bar. The club was far too full. He doubted that Wendy would get in now, even if she’d found the place.
“Well,” said Aunty Anne. “It looks as if you’ve spoiled her evening.”
The phone went dead. David put the receiver back.
Everyone around him seemed to be in gaggles, all of them wearing ludicrous, outmoded outfits. They must have raided Oxfam: the men had groomed and smarmed themselves into lounge lizards from Martini adverts. Many of the women had come in evening gowns and gloves up to their elbows with fingers so tight they could barely bend at the knuckles. There was a great many feather boas.
David drank alone at the bar, unsure if he should stay. He could feel the slightly dizzying effect of the speed starting up, but that might have been the noise level, crackling against his eardrums. He imagined granules of speed tootling through his veins...off to who knows where. His brain, maybe, dissolving and busying along.
Being here wasn’t the same experience when you were alone. It wasn’t the sort of place where you came to cruise around. He had come dressed in a plum velvet smoking jacket, and a frilled blue shirt. They hadn’t come from Oxfam: he’d paid a fair bit of money to get the retro right. He felt the comforting nap of his velvet sleeve as a few songs went by...
