by Paul Magrs
was certain of it. That very night she got the knack of mastering the telescope, its beautiful, brassy complexity: she looked up into the orange-tinged sky and saw exactly what she had been looking for.
All in the eye of the beholder, Wendy might have told her. You were looking at the world with strange-tinted glasses.
Nevertheless, excitably, Belinda stole into the flat above. Everything came right for her that night. The door melted before her. She was a ghost, slipping inside, and up the spiral staircase, to shake Wendy, her accomplice, awake.
Belinda could still see the impression, the blaze of light across her eyes as she watched Wendy stir herself.
“This is your chance,” she told the girl. “To see the proof that they exist. The visitors! And to prove I’m not bananas after all.”
What she really meant, thought Wendy, dressing hurriedly in the curious dark-before-dawn, was that this was her chance, Belinda’s chance, to find the proof in the pudding.
Up Calton Hill in the middle of the night.
They staggered into the creeping dark of the Royal Circus, and found themselves a cab with its yellow light on. The gods are on my side, thought Belinda gleefully.
To the base of the hill. They hopped out at the Scottish Parliament buildings and they set off, up the slow, spiraling path. Belinda led Wendy, sure that the next bend in the rocky, gravelly path would give her evidence. Something had come here tonight. Belinda’s shoes were white with rock dust in the gathering light. All they could hear was the slither of gravel under Wendy’s boots. The light was turning blue.
They could see the observatory, unmanned, staring out over the town, and the docks to the north. A thousand trees bristled round the base of the hill.
Belinda, in hushed tones, started to explain one of her theories.
“It is the reason that the space men were attracted to Marlene. They already knew of her and her luminous beauty. Celebrity travels further, you see. Sound waves, light waves, space waves from our planet, from the television and radio, travel forever, until they encounter the other people, far away. The space people know about our celebrities first, well before they know about ordinary old us. They know nothing about our struggles. But I got gathered up by accident, in a female job-lot with Marlene. I was their only clue to what everyone else in the world is like! And they’re coming back for me.”
They paused for a rest on the terraced path leading down to London Road. Wendy wondered how long she could leave it before telling Belinda that there was absolutely nothing here.
“There are people,” said Belinda suddenly. “Standing against that wall. A line of them, look, with spaces inbetween. Men.”
They both stared and, instinctively clutching each other, started to walk towards the gathering.
“They saw it, too!” said Belinda happily. “See!”
As they drew closer they saw that the men were standing singly. They made for one burly man standing by a lamp. He looked perplexed by them as they approached. Belinda wasn’t shy.
“Are you here for the UFOs too?” she called, saying it all in one word—yoofo’s—like Americans do. The man gave her a sickly smile. He looked straight past the pair of them.
Wendy looked sideways, at the next man along the wall. She saw another join him. And she realised.
“Let’s leave them to it, Belinda,” and started to walk away.
“But...but if they’re having one of them Close Encounters...”
“I don’t think you want to be part of it.”
Wendy led her friend gently but firmly down the hill, and onto London road, through a knot of more men, drifting about in the dawn. She flagged them down another cab.
On the terraced pathway, with his back against the rough wall, an astonished Colin watched his cousin and their neighbour leave the hill behind. Colin was having the erect and oddly tapering cock end of a shy boy called Gary pushed into the hole he’d worn in the crotch of his favourite jeans. The hole hadn’t been worn on purpose, and nor had the jeans: this was an ad hoc al fresco adventure.
Colin, against the wall, hadn’t taken a single breath since he had seen Belinda and Wendy straggling over the grassy brow of the hill, coming towards him. As he realised who they were, he thought, how light and blue the light is becoming, just as Gary’s thin hard cock jammed its whole way into his jeans. And suddenly it was very squashed in there.
Colin imagined that Belinda would come straight over. The boy would yelp, filch himself out of Colin’s jeans, and hare off, down the crunchy gravel decline. Belinda and Wendy would barrel up to him. “Fancy seeing you here! Did we scare your friend off?” Belinda would be huffing and puffing in the dark, disconcerting the other men around them, and causing them to drift off.
But Wendy and Belinda had gone. They had taken one look and hurried away again. They hadn’t even seen me, thought Colin, as Gary suddenly made him spunk up into the dark grass. His come hung amongst the dew like cuckoo spit.
TWENTY
I want a dirty old man
who’ll cover me with his dirty kisses
and his floppy old skin
I’ll soothe his wrinkled brow
and cheeks and arms and legs
I’ll let him shuffle about me
indulge me
let him Lolita me
Captain Simon was hanging about Wendy these days. Even though his pal, the oldest man in the building, was in hospital, the Captain kept coming upstairs for his coffee.
Winter months now and they drank milky coffee laced with whiskey, with Glemorangie from Jenners. They drank it with the stove crackling away in the kitchen and it was acrid and smoky. They watched the snow patter against their window above the dark trees of the Royal Circus.
Captain Simon was paying court to her in a charming, chatty old way. He and Aunty Anne ignored each other and nothing more was said about it. When she stumped into the kitchen in her winter-thickness woolly gown, it was tied tighter and secure and she brushed straight past the Captain. Poured her tea, fried her bacon, lit her first cigarette saying, “Good morning cigarettes, good morning Wendy.” Captain Simon would lower his head until she was gone, singing, down the still bare-boarded hallway into the bathroom. The tiles in there were new. Colin had ordered them and seen them cemented into place, all around their bath. Golden and every one mirrored. Aunty Anne sat herself in a scented, herbal, foamy tub each morning and wiped condensation from each small mirror in turn. She glared into them and told herself she was a handsome and voluptuous woman and never more so than now. Her hair was back in its basic, Liz Taylor black. Challenged, aloofy, queenly: Liz Taylor is who she settled on being.
“Your Aunty despises me,” Captain Simon said.
“You were a bit unfair with her,” Wendy told him.
He looked sheepish. “You know about that then?”
“Aunty Anne tells me everything,” Wendy lied.
Sometimes she would look at the Captain and wonder if anything Belinda said about him was true. If he was indeed a replacement of some sort, and not the genuine article, not the original old man, then perhaps he was something else underneath. But he was a hard nut to crack. He came for coffee, made polite conversation, and looked at her.
All had gone quiet downstairs in the Belinda camp. She hadn’t seen any more lights in the sky. She had even given up looking. Captain Simon said that she’d done something to his prized telescope, had altered its delicate mechanisms, and he wouldn’t let her use it again. Belinda had become somewhat cool towards Wendy, though Wendy couldn’t think what she’d done to offend her.
Then one day Wendy was heading up to the top flat and Belinda poked her head out of her front door. Her face was red, cheeks crazed with broken veins and her white hair stood on end so Wendy knew she’d been running her hands through it, as she did when she was perturbed and thinking furiously. The half can of hairspray she emptied into it each morning would make her hair stick like that, ravelled into a thoughtful knot.
B
elinda had very finely-tuned ears and she could tell who was coming up the stone steps by their individual treads.
“I’ve got something you ought to read,” she told Wendy and led her inside the flat she shared with her brother. Please, Wendy thought, don’t let it be another magazine about UFO sightings. In the past few months Wendy had had newsletters of many dubious sorts pushed under her nose.
Wendy sat herself on the faded chintz, while Belinda rushed off to the kitchen, calling out that she’d prepared some lunch, and would Wendy like some?
The flat was decorated with the kind of ornaments you had to order from the back pages of Sunday colour supplements. Belinda would be paying this lot off in monthly instalments for years to come. Crinolined ladies twirling their brollies and clutching pink roses, plates on special hangers printed with Highland scenes, with Royalty, with the cast of Star Trek. On the dresser there were three china babies, life-sized, slumping in a huddle, eyelids squeezed shut, all three dressed in knitted outfits.
Belinda emerged with a tray of chicken kebabs and urged Wendy to dab them into a peanutty sauce she herself had ‘blended from scratch’. The sauce fizzed with heat. Wendy wasn’t hungry (she never was after a session at Job Party) but she ate them anyway, prising off the sticky meat with her fingers first and making a great show of enjoying it all. When Belinda jumped up and suggested they wash it down with a Martini, Wendy had to say no nicely. She knew to be careful around Belinda. Like many pale people, her thin-skinnedness meant that her feelings rose up easily to the surface. You could see in terrible close up sometimes what was going on inside Belinda and so it wasn’t worth hurting her feelings.
Eventually, finished her own drink, she straightened up and Wendy heard her fat knees give an almighty crack. “Now, read this,” Belinda said, and made her friend put down a half-eaten kebab and gave her a few sheets of paper. A letter.
My dear Belinda,
Our friend Wendy has done us a great service—she’s brought us together by accident—bless her heart. I’ll confess now that I thought she was having me on when her first letters arrived and she told me she was getting you to write to me. And when I got your letters I thought it was a big piss-take. I thought you were a fruit loop and Wendy had set me up. But now I know it was clever young Wendy bringing us together. She must have seen the many points of contact we have! When I read you I can hear your speaking voice. I can hear you in my head. I feel I know everything about you.
So… blessings on Wendy’s head. She’s made an amazing difference to my life. I believe in new things in my life and love the people who bring them to me. I believe in something new coming true.
Today I read all twenty-seven of your letters again and you were as large as life once more. I have your whole life story. When I read you it pans out once more.
Now I have just re-read this letter so far and it’s very urgent, isn’t it? I’ve never written in this tone to you before. I have to let it all out, though. Last night I sat on bench on Blackpool Promenade, read you and thought it through. I sat till late on, till the crowds thinned out and I realised I was falling in love with you.
I never believed in the people who fell in love through letters. I used to laugh at the people who fell for prisoners on Death Row. The granny who made her ten year old granddaughter write to a serial killer and how all three found themselves besotted. I thought those people were deluded. They’d drummed their better sense into submission with their banal, secretive, confessional notes. And yet I believe in writing, don’t I? I always felt you could seduce with writing and that you could be seduced. Why only when it’s folded up between printed covers? Why not when the pages come hand-written, hand-posted and smelling faintly of the sweat of the writer’s brow, fingers, palms? Their saliva swalking the envelope’s gum. I never thought that someone would seduce me like that.
You’ve got me over a barrel. I can’t work. In the fish shop I turn all butter fingers, dropping things and the floor is filthy. I can’t write anything apart from letters to you. I draft them laboriously, waiting to jam-pack them with images of different colours, to send you flashy prose that will ring bells when you slit open my envelopes. What material you send me, what an inner life you have. I copy out your letters and try to insert myself between your lines. I read and wait for your face to come up from beneath the surface of your writing. You must be in there somewhere: the real, bodily you.
When I try to pin you down, you’re gone.
Something in here makes me want to read more and more of you. Devour every scrap of you. Send me your shopping lists, your jottings, your memoranda! I would breakfast on your ephemera, your idle thoughts and sighs. For lunch I would break open your diaries, your considered day-to-dayness. All afternoon I would snack on your poems, keeping a dish of stanzas by my side as I worked. In the evening, however, I would feast myself on your body of prose. Your life’s work would be my rich pickings till dawn: supper and dessert lying heavy on me all night.
Can you believe all this, Belinda?
Girl,
you’ve gone and turned my head.
Tell me the rest now
Tell me what you look like
All my love,
Timon.
Wendy stared at Belinda. “What have you been sending him?”
“Nothing special. He asked about my life, my history. You know, all about the events leading up to my… abduction, and then afterwards. My life now.”
“You’ve made him fall in love with you.” Wendy rattled the paper. “He loves you!”
Belinda shook her head, sighing. “He certainly comes over as keen.”
“Keen!” said Wendy. “He’s gone crackers.”
Belinda took the letter back. “All of that about me. It arrived this morning.” She folded it back up.
Wendy’s mind was racing. “What are you going to do about it?”
“But that’s just it,” said Belinda. “I’m sure he means well. I feel awful.” She sat down carefully. “It’s as if I’ve laid him a trap and the poor boy’s walked into it. And I haven’t laid him a trap! I haven’t.”
“He’s half your age,” said Wendy.
“And look at me. He hasn’t got a clue.”
“He wants to know what you look like. You’ll have to tell him.”
“I can’t. Who can love me when I look like this? All the weight I’ve been putting on. I’m a massive woman now.” Through the winter months Belinda had been eating steadily, as if building herself up to face winter. Wendy felt ashamed of herself, seeing how upset Belinda was. Yet she still wanted to goad the woman into proving the discrepancy between Belinda-here and Belinda-in-the-letters. She couldn’t think what had got into Timon. She had never heard him go on like that before and she couldn’t help feeling suspicious. In the past Timon always claimed he was immune to love. He was the watcher, the sideliner, the self-determined wallflower watching the dancers. Love left him cold, he said: he thought it was a sickness. He claimed never to have entertained a romantic thought. Nothing turned him on. His body was an assemblage of parts that would respond readily to the usual stimuli, but he was rarely inside it. Wendy remembered his detached look. The way that night on the sands at Blackpool he had looked down at himself, at his smooth tight belly and his cock like it was someone else’s as he let Wendy look him over and take him in her hands. She felt jealous, plainly and simply, now that Timon was letting himself out of control.
“He thinks he isn’t deluded,” said Belinda. “And maybe he’s not. But one sight of me would cure him.”
“Don’t make yourself miserable about it.”
“I’ve got to nip it in the bud.”
“Doesn’t he know how old you are? Haven’t you said anything about what you’re like?”
“Of course I have. The letters are all about me.”
“Then maybe he knows what you’re like.”
“I missed things out, of course. There are gaps.”
Wendy realised then that it was these
gaps Timon had fallen for. The holes in Belinda’s story and her account of herself had lured him.
“Do I put a stop to this?”
Wendy felt like saying yes, of course she should. But that would be out of her own selfishness. That would mean she herself would be fighting over Timon. She didn’t want that so she said, “No, write to him again. Tell him the full story. Put him in the picture.”
Belinda’s face crumpled. “That’s a good as saying, tell him to take a hike.”
Put him in the picture.
When Wendy left Belinda had an idea. She opened the dark wood dresser and hunted through boxes of letters from other people, magazines, scrapbooks of clippings (about Marlene, about the Visitors) until she unearthed a particular photograph album. Lime green, ring bound, picture of the Mona Lisa looking smug on the front. Old family and friends, mostly Polaroids, which were faded now, given an extra sheen of poignancy by the fact they hadn’t lasted any longer than fifteen years. Half these faces she hardly recognised. A family gathering for the Royal Wedding in 1981. Here she was. Somewhat younger, somewhat slimmer, in a patriotic frock she had stitched from cut-up flags. A painted Union Jack bowler hat on her head. I look deranged on this, she thought. I can’t send him one of me looking like Britannia, pissed and deplorable.
The thought nudged at her, that maybe she oughtn’t feel so bad. Not to be too hard on herself. Timon was a sensitive soul: a careful, beautiful man. Surely, to fall so helplessly in love, he already knew all about her. Her outwardness was just a covering for everything he adored and he would love that too, because that was part of her.
She flipped the thick album pages. Here was cousin Christine at twenty-six. With raven hair about her shoulders and those flashy blue eyes. She was holding an exotic drink up in toast to the photographer. Belinda unpeeled the sticky film, and out came cousin Christine. She hurried to her writing table before she lost her nerve.
On the bus to the infirmary that afternoon Wendy mulled
over the letter she would send to Timon. She would be interfering. Too right she would. She’d be sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
