by Paul Magrs
“We’ve just been talking about Belinda’s new young man,” said Pat.
“It’s her first real boyfriend,” said Captain Simon.
“She’s running about like a young girl,” said Aunty Anne. “There were out dancing last night. He’s certainly very taken with her. He says it was instantaneous: as soon as he clapped eyes on her. He would have known her anywhere, he said.”
“They’ve gone mad,” the Captain tutted.
“It’s nice to see people in love,” snapped Anne. “I believe in true love, don’t you?”
The Captain glared at her.
“It’s very odd being out of the ward,” said Pat suddenly, gazing out of the window. “I was thinking all the way here in the taxi. Whenever do you spend two whole weeks indoors without even stepping over the door? Never. It was like the rest of the world had stopped existing.”
“Well, it hadn’t,” said Anne brusquely. “Quite a lot has been going on.”
“Good,” he said. “Now I think I could do with a little siesta, before Colin and Wendy come in. I’ll need some strength for talking with the young’uns and catching up with their gossip.”
Anne helped him down the hall to his room.
It wasn’t the same. Whenever Wendy managed to get Timon to herself and Belinda wasn’t tagging along, they still never talked the way they used to. He was holding something back and she wanted to tackle him about this. He admitted that when he was with people, all he was thinking about was Belinda. About her grand, brave, soft white body. “She envelops me! She covers me! She takes me in and won’t let go.”
“That’s more than I need to know,” said Wendy.
“You’ve never had this,” said Timon. “You can’t appreciate it.”
She scowled. “And you used to be so cynical about all that.” She couldn’t believe that Timon was hankering after someone other than himself. That he no longer felt free to roam about and take things in, lose track of the time in his explorations. She’d been looking forward to showing him what she had discovered in Edinburgh: all the things she knew he’d love, the places where people talked and carried on, the colours. She had discovered the paintings of rooms and flowers by Anne Redpath, an artist who had once lived in the Royal Circle. Now Wendy was seeing the town through the smeary brilliance of Redpath’s colours: midnight blues, salmon pinks, crimsons and buttery yellows. She had searched her new city and realised it was for sights and places she could show off to Timon. Now he was here the impulse to drag him off to see the chained Sooty outside the launderette, the slabs of granite across the brown Waters of Leith, where you could sit in the sun between the overhanging mesh of branches. She wanted to buy him the cakes in the French patisserie that she imagined were flown fresh overnight from the continent: the chill of night-flight still on the cream and dusty icing sugar, in the raspberries crammed between pale layers of pastry. She had the textures and smells of the place to offer him. The Timon of old would have relished them, would have followed her anywhere, but now he looked as if he was humouring her. She could see by his face that he was just eager to get back to Belinda, who seemed to leave her bed only rarely now that winter was settling in. Wendy had hardly seen her, just heard the odd, disquieting detail from Timon. It was hard to picture Belinda as quite the sexpot Timon described. He made her over into a chuckling odalisque, an ample, wombless Olympia, welcoming home her Nubian slave. Whatever Nubian meant, added Timon. All Wendy could see was Belinda wrapped up under her duvet, hugging her polar bear girth in a colossal hug, congratulating herself on a wonderful catch.
When Timon actually found the time to go out into town with Wendy, they found it easiest to talk on neutral subjects and on those they still might agree about. Both hated the idea of anything coming in the way of their friendship. Yet Wendy couldn’t find Timon anything but changed.
They were walking up Queen Street, past the iron railings which hemmed the trees in the private park. All the black wood and metal was rimed with frost and the pavement was perilous with dirty ice.
“Did Mandy tell you what her Daniel said about the baby?”
Wendy shook her head. She hadn’t heard a thing from Mandy since she’d sent her a congratulations card.
“The first thing he said was, of course they had to get rid of it. They couldn’t afford it. It was ridiculous. And how could she let it happen.”
“I always thought he sounded like an arsehole. She’s not listening to him, is she?”
“Last I heard, she’d told him where to get off. They aren’t happy bunnies, anyway. He’s just thinking about his PhD, and where the next lot of funding’s coming from.”
“Mandy really wants the kid,” said Wendy. “It’s funny. I never imagined her being like that. In her letter, though, she sounded really happy. Excited. It’s a long time since she’s been like that.”
“She’s got a fight on her hands with Daniel. I met him, you know. Didn’t like him much. Not much chat in him. And he said he couldn’t see the point in anyone ever thinking they should write fiction. All the great fiction has already been written. We don’t need any more, cluttering the place up.”
Wendy plunged her hands into her thick coat pockets. “Mandy should come here! Stay with us!”
“You’re building up quite a little colony here,” he laughed. “What would your uncle think of you inviting all and sundry?”
“She’s our Mandy.”
“Inviting an unmarried pregnant woman for Christmas! We could have a whole nativity. I could be a Wise Man.”
“Why not?” She made to cross the road. She wanted to take back some fresh bread from Hendersons’. Colin was making soup this afternoon, his new passion and pastime this winter. “I like having everyone around me,” said Wendy. “And why shouldn’t I?”
Hands over my eyes in Hendersons’ deli. I hate that, even from people who think they have the right. I’m a touchy-feely person, I think, I mean, I have no problem with proximity and people showing their affection. I wasn’t in the habit of rebuffing my nearest and dearest, no, but I always found being taken by surprise rather difficult. Like I said before, life has too many surprises in store.
So: hands placed coolly over my eyes when I’m looking at the wooden racks of bread and I’m deciding between poppy seeds, nutty malt or a milk loaf. I liked the ones that shed bits and grains and seeds on the table, but that was to do with the pleasure of wiping down the table after the meal. I always liked wiping down surfaces, and shaking out tablecloths. I shook out tablecloths over the Royal Circus, hanging from the kitchen window, and watched the seagulls get aerated.
I’m wondering, anyway, what Colin would want me to bring for his carrot and coriander soup, which he was, at that moment, threshing and pulping in his brand new blender. Hands over my eyes and I whirl around with a shout—drawing glances, because the shop is packed—and it’s David standing there, in a navy polo shirt, his work uniform. He looks pale and unshaven, but you can see the strong lines of his bones and I think, despite myself, that he is extremely good-looking. I haven’t seen him in months. He’s clutching two cartons of semi-skimmed milk to his narrow chest. I loved his chest: the tightness of it, the little collection of hairs that sprang in different directions.
“I’m on a break,” he said. “Come and have coffee with me.”
I looked across the shop and Timon was staring at the salads, the olives and slivers of feta cheese adrift in oil. He was at the stage of romance in which he was finding everything delightful. Getting on my nerves, actually. I caught his eye. They looked red from lack of sleep.
“Can I bring my friend?” I asked David.
“Is that who you’re seeing now?” It sounded so juvenile, as if he wouldn’t let Timon come along if he was my lover. David realised what he sounded like. “You’re buying expensive bread!” he said. “I can’t afford that stuff, even though this is my corner shop.” Of course, I thought, the flat up the fire escape was at the back of this alley. That hadn’t even clicked wit
h me.
When we sat at the metallic green table in the café next door, Timon was telling David how he’d known me for years. He was giving the whole spiel: how wonderful I was, his best friend, a loyal and true companion. Timon thought he was helping out: throwing salt on the fire of David’s affections, making grand sparking flames lap up. But David looked shifty. He wanted to ask why I had never phoned him. As we sat there, I didn’t know. Something about his flat, maybe. The narrowness of his bed, the cramped floorspace taken up with laundry, the unwashed sheets. I couldn’t imagine he’d been waiting on my call.
“Do you think I should be on the Net?” Timon asked. He looked at the punters at their consoles, all along the café’s front window. “Maybe that’s my true form. Not a big, cohesive narrative. Snippets, fragments, cryptic bits sent out for free on the web, or whatever they call it…”
“I had a go on that, me and Colin. We looked at nude lesbian Barbie dolls with their rude bits blacked out and censored.”
“I thought it might put me in touch with someone, with people,” said Timon. “I’d probably do it all wrong.”
“I like your letters,” I said. “Even the short, crappy ones.”
“You can’t beat instant connection,” said David.
“I don’t suppose you can.” I looked at him. “You’ve become very pally with Colin, haven’t you?”
“He’s a great fella,” David smiled. “He knows what it’s all about.”
“He does?”
“He tells me about you sometimes. He said you were right, though. We’d never have worked out together.”
Colin had been mixing it. Wendy felt that he’d been shoving his oar in and telling David these things if not out of malicious spite, then out of some odd desire to explain. She didn’t see why he should bother. She didn’t want her doings explained to David. And she never said, to Colin or anyone, that she and David ‘weren’t right together’. That was a cliché for Colin’s collection and she was insulted he’d put it in her mouth.
All these men and the things they said to each other. Like a load of maiden aunts.
She left the café with Timon shortly after this. She finished her frothy coffee in one hot glug and told him they were going.
“So I’ll see you, anyway,” said David, “on the outing.”
There was to be a minibusful of them going to the beach that weekend. Everyone. It was Aunty Anne’s plan. Wendy wanted to ask David where he came into this, but he pre-empted the question. “Colin’s roped me in. I come with the mini-bus, you see. It belongs to a friend of Rab’s. And I’ve got the special thing on my license. So I’m taking you all to the beach.”
“Good,” she said. “Come on, Timon.”
That night they ate Colin’s soup, which hadn’t turned out quite right: it was a chunky brown and orange broth. He thought that his father—only a few days out of hospital—should be eating easy things like this, but Pat was craving his takeaways. He wanted to phone his favourite Chinese in Toll Cross to send out one of their motorbike boys. It was his favourite Chinese in town because he found the handwritten notice in their window poignant: ‘Carry Outs Are Welcome’.
Gamely they ate their soup. Captain Simon had joined them once more, evading the lovers downstairs and their noisy, ravenous supper. They still made him sick.
“What’s all this about a trip to the beach?” Wendy asked.
Aunty Anne dropped her spoon with a clatter. “That’s a surprise! Or it was meant to be!” There was still sticky soup on her spoon and lips.
“What?” asked Uncle Pat.
“We might as well tell them now,” said Colin, with a sigh. Colin and his mother had been plotting together. It was evidence of a closeness between them that might have pleased Wendy, if she hadn’t already been cross with her cousin.
“Well, whatever it is, I can’t go anyway,” said Pat decisively. “How can I go sitting on a beach in November? It’s ridiculous! I’ll be a frozen old man on the beach. They’ll take me away.”
Briskly, Aunty Anne sad, “We’re taking advantage of the warm spell. You need some colour in your cheeks.”
“Where are we going?” he asked weakly.
“Up to Yellow Craigs. It’s only half an hour. Lovely, empty beach.”
“You’ll love it, Pat,” said Captain Simon.
“Are you in on this?”
“First I’ve heard of it.”
For devilment, Aunty Anne said: “We’ve asked Timon and Belinda, too.”
Captain Simon grunted. “I’ll have to see how I’m fixed.”
“We’ve even asked Astrid,” smiled Colin. “’Jesus God’,” he said, pulling his face.
“It’ll be a right bloody circus,” said Pat. “Us lot turning up.”
Yet he looked pleased.
TWENTY-SIX
Eventually Timon would tell her it was true: she was affected by everything. She took whatever materials, the substances she found about her, crumbled them and used them like—he shrugged—one of those earthy, gritty skin moisturisers from the Body Shop. Granules got into her pores, replenishing and altering her.
“I went for a job interview in that shop,” Wendy told him, smiling. “When I was looking for a job. Did I tell you? They had twelve interviews all at the same time, in the cellar store room. They made us play silly games with each other and that’s how they decided who they wanted. They had a big flip chart to tell us what qualities they were looking for. They didn’t want me.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Timon said.
“Sorry.”
She knew he was going to come up with one of his analogies. She knew this and, really, she didn’t want to hear it. Her experiences as a body and facial scrub. What flavour, she wanted to ask.
“The only thing that doesn’t affect you are the men who fall in love with you. You sail through their influence.”
“What men?”
“The men around you. You’re not susceptible to them.”
“Good. There haven’t been that many, you know.”
“That David, for one. You’re very aloof with him.”
“Maybe I am.” She hated the way that, because of the hothouse exclusivity of his time with Belinda, Timon had become the expert. “Anyway, David will always be all right. He can adapt himself easily to where he is. He’ll always do the right thing for himself. This is exactly the right place for him. He can blend in with everyone.”
It irritated her that Timon was still going on about David. Couldn’t he see he was out of bounds, now? As winter came on they all saw more of David, who joined the rest of them most evenings at the kitchen table, but he wasn’t coming round to look at Wendy. Couldn’t Timon see that? She wanted to tell Timon that he was reading things to suit his own view of the picture. David was coming round to see Colin.
“I wish you weren’t so offhand with David,” Colin complained to her one night. He’d dragged her away from the kitchen, where Uncle Pat was holding court.
“Am I?”
“He thinks you might be homophobic.”
“Oh boy.” She looked at Colin. “Why should that bother him?”
They kept up the pretence that Wendy didn’t know what was going on between them. That was down to David who, a month after the day on the beach, was still hesitant about telling anyone about his coming out. He disliked the phrase. To David it made it sound like if he came out, there was somewhere he couldn’t get back into. He wanted some leeway.
I had a fling at this time that I didn’t tell anyone about, and especially not Timon and Colin. A fling. Like it’s something you casually toss off.
On one of Uncle Pat’s last trips out he took me to the theatre. We both dressed up. We went to the theatre that was built entirely of glass. When we stood on the bridge you could see the whole city reflected in its front, the last gleam of sun on white buildings. The city had been packed up into a box. It was all on purpose, said Uncle Pat, who still liked to find things to point out to me.
<
br /> We walked very slowly, but he wanted to walk the whole way.
There were Christmas crowds in town. The decorations were up. Argos was heaving with people who were flipping through the laminated pages of catalogues and scribbling down numbers. We had a quick look. He wanted advice about something for Aunty Anne. I was no help with that. It made me feel sad to see Uncle Pat staring at all the pictures of jewellery and not knowing what she’d like. We gave up.
That night were were going to see a comedian. Billy Franks, a veteran who still packed out theatres with his one man show. It was mostly old people who went to see him, remembering a string of records he had out in the Sixties, heart-rending tears-of-a-clown stuff that Uncle Pat played for me before we left that evening. Billy Franks had a reputation for unpredictability, warning the audience that he rambled on for hours and they wouldn’t be getting home until the early hours. He hoped they’d booked taxis, he always said: the manager had locked all the exits and no one would be freed until he’d spent himself. They loved it: they let him go on, avid for what he’d do next. The posters in the theatre’s foyer showed him leering dirtily, his hair wild and thin, and he was clutching a ukulele up to his chin.
“Not the kind of thing you’d usually come to see,” Uncle Pat smiled, while they sat waiting to go in.
She said, “Actually, someone told me once I had to see Billy Franks before he threw it all in. A once-in-a-lifetime chance. He used to come to Blackpool every summer, but we never saw him. Mam did once, I think.”
“Remember when you asked what I did in the war?”
Wendy blushed. It sounded trite, but recently she had actually asked him that. He’d been pleased, though. He told her what it was like to parachute down on enemy trees. His description had shocked her. The old mad had coloured and said that parachuting scared into the unknown had felt to him like an orgasm every time. An orgasm in the fast, empty air.
