by Paul Magrs
The more she thought about it the clearer it seemed. Now she was sure that what Timon saw in Belinda was raw material. She was a slab of pink flesh that had him drooling. Not for your usual reasons, mind you. He saw her as a repository of stories. Of hare-brained, crackpot tales that were all the more delicious for the ardent way Belinda believed every word of them. Wendy remembered how she had felt compelled to listen to Belinda those afternoons in the launderette, with Astrid urging the story on. We’re all in this together, thought Wendy sadly, goading Belinda to make a fool of herself.
As the bus pulled up by the infirmary, the black Victorian, turreted castle in which her uncle was whiling his sickness away, Wendy was thinking that what she really wanted to do was read the twenty-seven letters Belinda had sent Timon. What had she been telling him? All of that flying saucer stuff? Since when was Timon in love with alien stories?
Then she put the whole lot out of her mind as she went off to buy carnations to take to her uncle. She wondered if he’d find Belinda’s doings amusing. It was hard work, filling the two hours with chat every day.
When we took the old man to hospital he was in terrible pain. For weeks he had been covering it up, with his bluff smiles and his mockery at our concern. Eventually we persuaded him we should call him a taxi and get him to Casualty. It was a Saturday morning. Aunty Anne, Colin and I waited in a green waiting room with the chairs bolted into the cement floor. We watched a drama going on for an American family of four. They were only here for a few days and the eldest daughter had clonked her head on a pavement in Teviot Square, rollerblading with the shirtless show-off boys. As they waited to heAr how concussed she was the mother sobbed and their youngest played a bleepy, percussive computer game. Meanwhile the nurses were undressing Uncle Pat, lying him under blankets he said reminded him of baby blankets, they were so blue. They pushed and prodded at his stomach again and he told them he was due to see the consultant next Thursday. He’d been good: he was waiting out his turn. He was only here today because his family had forced him to come. They fret, he said apologetically. The nurses went off to find him a bed on a relevant ward. They told him—and then they told us—that they were keeping him in.
Aunty Anne was thinking, we should have brought him earlier. She was expected to get a good telling off from the doctors when they came to see her. They should know what it’s like, though. Aunty Anne knew: she’d had her own health problems, and she’d put going to the hospital off and off indefinitely. Eventually she’d end up thinking, I’m in too much pain for this to be normal. Do I qualify as an emergency yet? Even when Pat’s pain got that bad—and she could still read him plainly, as if there was still a link between them—he didn’t want to bother the nice people at Accidents and Emergencies. The previous weekend he had queued for his GP, who tutted and hmmed and sympathised like anything. Weeks had been going by. Weeks between tests and more tests. The pain would abate for a while, then return redoubled in the middle of the night. But time flies, doesn’t it? Especially when you’re older. We’ll have you seeing the consultant again in no time. The GP patted the old man’s knee.
How you got used to pain. And you won’t go on about it, because it gets boring. Who wants to hear the gripes and moans of an old man? They’re expected to be like that, and Pat didn’t want to live that out. He kept mum as much as he could about the pain his folded-in, ruinous insides gave him. And I let him do that, thought Aunty Anne, shocked by herself. I let him go about like that, getting worse and worse. We all did.
In Ward ten, where all the patients were waiting for Acute Surgery, the bed sheets were pink like blancmange and the curtains were a streaky green, the same green as the pyjamas given to the man who was meant to be in the bed next to Uncle Pat. He was rarely where the nurses put him. He told Pat that it was when they got you into bed that they had you where they wanted you. This pot-bellied neighbour hobbled around his bed all day, ignoring the nurses and the three old women who came to visit, bringing books about the war. Uncle Pat couldn’t tell which woman was his wife. Still standing, his neighbour listened to the woman gassing and he pointed to the picture of the ship on which he had served. “It’s famous then!” said one of the old women. He went back to looking for things in his bedside locker, and checking the level on his bottle of dilute orange. A tube led out of his pyjama fronts and hooked into a bag of custardy pee, which swayed on a small wheeled rack at his feet. This he tugged along after him carelessly. “Watch your… little bag,” one of the old women warned.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s firmly attached.” To prove the point he gave his bag a sharp kick.
It depressed Uncle Pat looking around the ward too much. The floor had black and white tiles and the room smelled—as he had once gloomily anticipated—of flowers, gravy and shit. “It’s all bums this week,” the sister had informed him happily. “You’re all in for your bowels down this end.” Uncle Pat lay and stared at the ceiling and eavesdropped on the next bed.
Until Wendy arrived with her carnations. She kissed him on his white hair, which looked almost yellow on the pillow.
“You should get me put down. I reckon they should put all old people down when they get to be a burden on the State.”
Wendy thought of the last time she came visiting with Aunty Anne. Her aunt, aghast, standing on the NHS lino, going: “And you a millionaire! A millionaire in a room with twenty other bodies! As far as I can see, a millionaire is obliged to go private!”
Uncle Pat was looking up and down the ward. He hated chuntering on like he was doing now, especially when Wendy was here, giving up her time. Yet he couldn’t help it. She arrived and he started to speak and it all came rushing out. “Look at these old buggers in here. I get this cruel streak, you know, all over me, when I looked at them. That old woman over there, opposite, getting propped up by the male nurse. She can’t even sit up to get her pills. They have to hold her till they go all the way down. I think it’s cruel, keeping her alive. What’s she got to look forward to?”
Wendy wanted to rally him and make him feel more optimistic. Then he blocked her by shifting the subject. He started talking about old people’s Homes. The places you got shoved into when there wasn’t much hope. Wendy tried to say that needn’t worry him now. His money put him out of reach of anyone else. It could save him.
“You could be one of those wily, rich old men. Who own islands and wear silk cravats and sailor caps. The ones who marry bimbos eighty years younger than themselves and get into the papers. With your money you could end up a father again at a hundred and three!”
“That’s just grotesque,” he smiled weakly.
Her uncle was a winner late in life. His millions had come too late to make him comfortable. Getting put away with everyone else was still a fresh fear.
“I’ve got a scheme, you know,” he said with sudden relish. “For a much cheaper old people’s Home. Do you want to hear it?”
She wasn’t sure that she did.
“I reckon that they could save money by cutting their heads off. They could transplant three heads onto one old body. What do they do now? Bicker and do jigsaws. It would save space. I can see the day when they’ll do that. At first the idea appals you, but they’d sell it as a good, modern concept and pretty soon we’d all be saying, ooh, yes, it’s sensible really. Three heads are wiser than one, and all. Three sharing one old body’s pain. And we’ll have old people with three heads. Or maybe three brains in one huge, old skull. Like the Mekon, in a dressing gown.”
“Who’s the Mekon?” Wendy asked.
“Don’t you know who the Mekon is?”
She shook her head.
“Eeh, lass,” he smiled. “What about Dan Dare? Whatever happened to Dan Dare?”
Wendy didn’t know what to say.
“I know, I know. He’s my age, and pulling his pee around after him, in a plastic carton on wheels.”
TWENTY-ONE
Dear Wendy,
I’m having a kiddie. That’s
given you a turn, hasn’t it? I’ve just fiddled on with the litmus test that I bought from Boots, dabbing it in my wee. You’re the first person I’ve told—Aunty Wendy. I want you to be a crazy, maddening Aunty like our Aunty Anne. I’ve decided that’s what you’ll be. By the time you get this I’ll have told Daniel too, so technically, you won’t be the first.
A sprog. A fucking sprog. That’ll put the tin lid on my degree as well.
And I was getting it sorted, too. Maybe next year, starting here, in Women’s Studies. I’ve been getting to know people on campus. I’ve talked to them in the white plastic, smoky luxury of the Nelson Mandela coffee bar. I look at them and think, I can do what you do. I can think the things you think.
I’ve bought this shaggy black coat from Oxfam. I look like a bear in it. I sit on the mini bus and ride through town to campus and hug my secret to me. Really I’ve known for weeks I was going to have this sprog. I feel quite cool about it. I can see me, sitting on that bus in my furry, ratty old coat with a pushchair, a snotty kid on my lap.
There’s a Professor here. I’m making a bit of extra money proofreading his opus. A book on the eighteenth century Gothic. Daniel got me the gig. He knows how finickety I am. I take a chapter at a time from the Professor’s office and at home I go line by line through his patient descriptions of ghosts and ghouls, his tender accounts of eviscerations and beheadings. I pick open his typos and his inconsistencies and mark them all down. A doddle, as you’d say. He’s a shaggy old professor, dark and messy as my new coat.
He’s going to look at my first short story and give me his expert opinion. He promised to. Did I tell you I’d written a story? I’ve caught the bug. It’s very short. Maybe not very good. Don’t tell Timon. He’d rip me to pieces.
My baby is the size of a comma. An errant piece of punctuation, holding my life up. But I reckon I’ll keep it. Let that sentence develop. Give birth to something, at any rate.
Lots of love to you, Aunty Wendy!
For your soon-to-be-fat, fecund and best sister,
Mandy.
While I hadn’t heard a thing from Thistle Street, from my
trendy Megastore boy, David, it turned out that behind my back Colin had been going round there. He and David and the bloke in the funny hat were now firm friends. “I need some straight friends my own age,” Colin told me later. “Life is separatist enough.” I tutted. He blamed me for his seeking friendship elsewhere. While I was talking with Belinda, visiting his father, racking my brains as to Timon’s motives, Colin was clambering up the fire escape in Thistle Street, playing records and eating pasta and pulses with the vegetarian boys. He was telling them, “It’s the fire escape that makes this place. It makes it something special coming here.” On their fourth storey platform they were cultivating herbs and potted flowers. “Normal steps leading up here would make it just like anywhere. The fire escape makes it all into a film.”
Rab looked up from his latest unending sentence and agreed with him, even though he could never catch his breath when he got to the top.
“I’m thinking of moving out to my own place,” Colin told me. “Maybe up a fire escape.” Yet I knew he wouldn’t. He tried to look as if he didn’t care about his father’s illnesss. On the day the old man was due to be opened up and looked at, Colin was waiting there with us for results.
Colin said to me, “David wants to see you. He thinks you hate him for being a lousy shag.”
“He wasn’t!” I said, but I didn’t phone him up. I thought I was going off men. Colin was welcome to them. Maybe he was working on seducing David or Rab. By all accounts they were generally too stoned to notice anything.
And all this while my sister was pregnant. I wanted to go and see her. There was no word yet from her about how Daniel had taken the news. Something told me he wouldn’t be best pleased. He was the selfish sort.
I wanted to go down to Lancaster, to help her buy things in Mothercare. But they were taking Uncle Pat into theatre, drugging him and making him say the alphabet backwards. They said he’d be a right mess inside, all his various scans had disclosed that much. They wanted to see what was in there, what was nestling dark and busily against his bowels. When I imagined him going gently off to sleep, dreaming that they could cut the badness out of him, it was that trustingness that held me in Edinburgh. I had to be there for him. Beneath his bluster and mordant humour, he had far more trust in doctors that I did.
It was cancer-cancer-cancer and I’d already seen that once this year.
I wanted to give Timon the benefit of the doubt. I thought of him as the friend of my youth. That pushed him a long way back in time and to hear that he had turned wicked, had been exploitative all along, really pained me. I decided to believe that he had fallen in love with Belinda. I always wanted to believe the best of my friends.
Belinda certainly believed in him. In those chillier days, when we set about wearing heavier and greater layers of clothes, when the windows each morning were mapped with careful lines of frost, she had apparently lost her anxiety. A new confidence overcame her. Her face shone: winter was her element, I realised. Summer slowed her and in the heat she had to drag herself around the place. November saw her nimble and sure-footed. Her correspondence with my friend went on. And meanwhile, I heard very little from Timon. He wrote me a card for Hallowe’en.
Since when was I in love with alien stories?
Oh, it isn’t that. It isn’t what I love Belinda for. What do you take me for, Wendy?
She writes to me full of trust. She writes as if I don’t even exist. I’m a patient ear listening to her telling me things she’s never told anyone. It isn’t material. I would never consider it that. It’s a gift to me. Given with her whole heart. No one’s ever given me anything like that before. I love Belinda because she’s honest without knowing that’s what she’s doing.
Wendy wondered then if it was Timon who was being taken in. He was being reeled in by Belinda’s easy tale-telling. Wendy didn’t swallow his view of Belinda as honest and trusting. Who knew the woman better? Belinda had the measure of Timon. She was seducing him with an effortless, flattering attention. Thirty-four letters now, he told Wendy. He was in love with Belinda’s imagination, her world-view, her determination to divide the world into replacements and holograms.
And which am I, Belinda? he asked her once.
Her reply came back: ‘Don’t be either, Timon. I don’t want you to be either real-fake or fake-real. Both types spend their energy on seeming genuine. I want you to give me all your energy instead.’
Wendy wrote to him: “But do you believe in her visitors? How can you love a woman you think is mad?”
He said he would believe in whatever her picture of the world was like. He wrote:
‘I always understood that these visitors weren’t absolutely real, in the everyday, measurable, empirical sense. (Sorry, they may yet be real, for all I know, and eventually we could have to get used to the everyday sight of visitors walking up and down the high street. But not yet.) I always understood, I think, that these visitors were the stuff of metaphor, and realised as such by the people who longed for them to come. They were sticky, cobwebby stuff, vaguely associative and from the same source as our collective feelings about things beyond what we can touch. It used to be stars, stars of Hollywood musicals, that we dreamed about, and before that, saints.
‘I don’t know what the difference is between visitors and stars. We use the idea of them to the same ends. At least, I think, Belinda does. It’s why I love her story of being kidnapped with Marlene Dietrich. The visitors taking out Dietrich’s womb and Belinda’s womb and hoarding them in their spacecraft’s freezers. It’s an image that appals and delights me. Belinda has made me see herself and Marlene swishing in white furs up and down the impersonal Escherlike corridors of that visitor craft. I can see them pausing to peer out of a portal, at the permanent twilight of the Polar Cap. Belinda has made it all natural to me.
‘She has this view of the subl
ime—of everything that exists beyond herself—and written herself into it. That woman’s got guts.’
I had never heard before the detail of Belinda’s and Marlene’s twin hysterectomies. With each telling the story became more lurid.
I decided to try common sense. To Timon I scribbled a note:
‘I don’t care if you believe in space men or not. Just lay off Belinda. She’s vulnerable and could do without falling for the likes of you.’
Next morning Belinda came to me looking excited, frightened, and as if she had been crying. She had another of those postcards showing a yellow, almond-eyed alien.
“He’s coming here!” she chattered. “He’s coming to see us all. Writing can only go so far, he says. He wants to see me!”
Timon was about to become Belinda’s visitor.
TWENTY-TWO
If she sat back and enjoyed the later afternoon here, the jazz they were playing over the café speakers, the sun slanting in and lighting up the pink chalices of the lilies on her table, Aunty Anne could almost imagine she was here out of choice. But this was the hundred minutes or so between visiting hours at the Royal Infirmary. She was attending both hours today and so, when the first was up, she had found herself blinking outside the stark black frontage of the hospital, and decided to while her time in the smart café across the road.
She ordered quickly, and was given fat poached eggs on toast soaked through with salty butter. Flecks of parsley had been thrown over the whole lot, over the crisped bacon, too. Looking round at what others were being served, it seemed that this was the habit of the kitchen here: they shook a handful of green bits over everything. She ate hungrily, digging into the soft yellow bulge of her egg. Under the heavy knife is felt like an eye. She mashed a spiky, decorative tomato into the toast, enjoying the spoiling of the dish, reducing it to yellow smears and black crumbs.
