by Paul Magrs
Wendy was dreaming of Aunty Anne in the small new town where her lover lived and had wedged his apparently glorious bulk in a council house, where he held rapturous services for the local women who came to hear him praise the Lord. Aunty Anne extolled his charisma as a beacon in a place horribly lacking in beacons. It was an odd town, she had explained, full of little box houses like dolls’ houses and the people she met there she often found surprising. Wendy’s dream brought it to life for her, though she had never been to Newton Aycliffe. Aunty Anne wouldn’t let her: “I don’t want you to see where I’ve been living in recent years. It represents the past. You have to go on.” She was playing the plucky widow, though Uncle Pat had never been to Newton Aycliffe either.
Wendy pictured a place of yellow brick houses and winding miles of estates, satellite dishes and ice cream vans that patrolled night and day, chiming out ‘Lara’s Theme’, the tune from Dr. Zhivago.
“During services in Ralph’s house, it was me who had to run out when we heard the Dr. Zhivago theme and buy his cigarettes and his umpteen bars of chocolate. Ralph would look up from his prayers to take the change and his Bounty bars.”
He was Buddha, stolidly attaining perfection in his council house. Aunty Anne said he lived in a place called Phoenix Court, and she said he had chosen it as the place for his mission just because of the name. Phoenix Court described his purposefully arrested spiritual ascendency with wonderful precision.
Then, even in her dreams, Wendy rushed past the North, and she started to imagine London and everything there.
Serena was still talking when they left King’s Cross and took the tube and the overland to Kilburn. Wendy followed without a word, drugged by the train (“Still vibrating the next day!” she heard Uncle Pat say) and did all the things Serena did, asking for a Travelcard, hurrying through the white, dirty hall, feeding her pink slip into the turnstile. Serena kept up her chat all the way down the busy escalator, hardly noticing her surroundings, as if she was walking down her own staircase. Others were doing the same.
Wendy was looking at those rushing heedlessly down the escalators, at the posters for musicals with wads of chewing gum stuck to them. She was overhearing snatches of hundreds of conversations. A man at the bottom of the escalator was busking Jonathan Richman’s ‘Summer Feeling’. Serena was saying, “I feel drawn to spending my time with those younger than me. Most of my friends are, though you are the youngest now. You must think me ancient. I was born before the Sixties. To you, that must be like being born before the French Revolution.”
On the tube Wendy sat beside Serena and tried not to look at people’s faces. Her face in the window was distorted horribly in the dark and she was embarrassed, realising that everyone else would see the same reflection of her. When someone at the doorway, clambering past, said “Excuse me,” it took her by surprise. She’d heard that Londoners were supposed to be rude.
It was going to be a place where you came home at night and blew black, sooty snot out of your nose. Aunty Anne had told her that. It wasn’t like Edinburgh, where when you walked in town and between buildings, the crags came into view. Edinburgh was a city of trompe l’oeil, with sandy-coloured mountains and castles hugger-mugger with Seventies tower blocks. It was a city you could escape after a few minute’s walk. London wasn’t going to be like that.
“And here,” said Serena, leading Wendy into her home, “is the clutter, the clabber, the pitiful ragbag of accoutrements that constitute me.” She went through the house like someone accustomed to living alone, flicking on all the lights, tossing post aside, making towards the kitchen.
Wendy was taking it all in. The rooms were jam-packed with tasteful objects, hangings and pictures, each placed that bit too close together. Newspapers from before Christmas covered the coffee table. The living room which they passed through, and left untouched, was a homage to William Morris, and the dining room to Robert Mapplethorpe. Serena had her head in the fridge. “Everything has turned sour and stale,” she cursed. She plucked out a bag of coffee beans and spilled them into the grinding machine. “Don’t you hate the flat, bleak smell of a place when it’s been empty?”
Wendy had never live in an empty place. By now, though, she was used to Serena’s extra-sensitive nose. She watched her friend go through the rooms, wrinkling it and opening windows. She played her messages.
“Sweetheart, it’s Joshua. Christmas Eve. I gather you’re away in the frozen north. You’re terribly missed here. We’ll muddle through without you, I’m sure. Phone me when you return.”
“One message,” Serena sighed. “What an empty life. No tortured lovers missing me. Not this Christmas. I’m obviously clapped out.”
“Was that your friend Joshua?”
“We’ll see him soon.” Serena brightened. “Shall we rustle up something to eat?” She yanked open the freezer and started peeling plastic films off pasta and sauces, mussels and dips.
“Well now,” she said, when they sat to eat at the white table. “Aren’t we the lucky ones? Everyone else has to go running around after partners and doing what other people want. Look at us! We can please ourselves.” Serena ate ravenously, with much less ceremony than Wendy had watched her eat before. “I’m glad I brought you, Wendy. There’s so much more for you here, you know.”
Wendy fell asleep in a room decorated by only a few, bright stripes of colour.
“Minimalism, sweetheart,” said Serena before she closed the door on her. “Good for our souls, now and then.”
Wendy succumbed nevertheless to her usual, overcrowded dreams.
For the first few days Serena was morose. Some of the glimmer and glamour had gone out of her and she trod through her house in a tracksuit and kept the washing machine going. She cleaned and ironed everything she could lay her hands on. She had no piano here and she spent the evenings staring at expensive contemporary art books with her face twisted in regret. “I wish I could paint… or be conceptual. The truth is, I haven’t any talent. When other people have ideas and produce things, well then, I’m brilliant. I can see their ideas, see to the heart of them, in a moment. But I’m blowed if I could ever have an idea myself.” She took up another catalogue and laid it on her lap. “Look at this young man. Wonderful. He came from nothing: a backstreet in Blackburn, or somewhere. Now he’s putting Anthills in glass cabinets in the Tate and pouring oils into the soil and letting them soak through the colony in wonderful colours. He calls them things like ‘Ecostructure I’ and ‘Ecostructure II’. And this girl, she takes photographs of herself each morning and documents the highs and lows of her life by the way her face looks when she wakes up. My life is my art, too… but why didn’t I think of doing this? Although I look shocking when I first wake up. I wouldn’t want my morning face hanging in the Tate.” She cast the book in its plastic wrapper aside. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I was meant to be showing you a good time, wasn’t I?”
I had spent the first days knocking about Kilburn, looking in the rows of shops in the High Street. I had pastries and cakes in an Irish baker’s, sat in the window and wrote Carnaby Street postcards to everyone, until I remember that I had very few addresses for my friends. They were all travelling around. On an impulse I bought a drawing book from a newsagent and drew the view from the café, putting myself in as a stick figure, sitting at the bench with the menu and the tomato sauce bottle in the shape of a tomato. Serena had set me off thinking: why shouldn’t I be an artist and draw ludicrous stick figures to record my experiences? I put in a few figures lolloping by, getting about their business. I wished I’d done some drawing in Edinburgh, too, so I would have pictures of everyone. But they wouldn’t look like themselves, of course. On my Kilburn drawing, I didn’t look like me. The way I’d done my eyes, I looked very cross.
On the way back to Serena’s house I passed an old-fashioned launderette called Kleen-as-a-Whistle. What made me go in was the Sooty chained up to the door, in case anyone pinched the money for the blind. Inside I found the woman who ran
the place, sitting on the bench and swinging her legs. She had no arms.
“Can I help you?” she asked suspiciously, in a thick German accent. Glottal stops and narrowed eyes.
“I don’t know why I came in,” I said. “I’m new here. I’m just checking things out. I’m Wendy.”
“Ute,” said the woman and, without thinking, I held out my hand for the poor, armless woman to shake.
“Jesus God,” Ute said. “Pass my cigarettes from the bag and help me light up, would you? And then you can tell me where you have come from.”
“He’s punishing me, of course,” said Serena that night. She had
made an effort today, dressing in black and looking every inch as sophisticated as the first time I saw her.
“Who?” I asked.
“Joshua. He left me that nice message while I was away, and now I’m back in town he won’t reply to a single one of mine. I’ve told him I’m back with a charming companion in tow and he shows not the slightest interest. We shall have to entertain ourselves.” She eyed my sketchpad. “What have you got there?” And she made me show her my drawing. She chuckled. “Oh, dear. Is this how you’re feeling? You look so bereft. I never knew you drew. It’s very northern, isn’t it? You’ve taken Kilburn and made it look as if Lowry was here.” She tossed the book back to me.
“Joshua,” she grumbled. “I didn’t think I’d ever be running after a man like this again. Well, it’s no good. I shan’t leave any more messages. I’ve compromised myself quite enough.”
“Is he your lover?” I asked.
“Goodness, no. Though he is attractive. Rather out of bounds to me.”
“Gay?”
“No, but he’s very curious. He has turned inwards, somewhat, in recent years, which only adds to his allure. He has devoted his life to his work. I call it work, but it would be, for anyone else, a hobby. I think I said before that he collects things. Art objects, installations, pictures and pottery. He has a remarkable eye. He and his daughter subsist on virtually no money. Katy is nine and has become a surly, uncommunicative creature.” Serena shook herself out of her doldrums. “Let’s get you dressed up, Wendy, and we should go out and look at something. Pictures, a play, other people. Anything to get out of this place. Have a look through Time Out and see if you can find us anything.”
Serena went upstairs to change into something more suitable for looking at things.
“My life has become a quagmire,” said Serena, in a cocktail bar in Soho, “and a masquerade.” She didn’t enlarge on that just yet.
They hadn’t looked at anything much tonight, apart from the frosted pitcher of margheritas Serena had called for.
“You must make sure that you are cleverer than I am,” she told Wendy.
In Covent Garden they dodged past crowds watching street performers and Serena made clucking noises. “I despise jugglers. When I see them walking on stilts I long to push them over.”
“On the Royal Mile in the Festival, there were fire-eaters,” said Wendy.
“Now that, I love. I would stop to watch a man eat fire.” She stopped. “Will you come to the opera with me? Your aunt never will. She went once and loathed it. She kept riffling the programme and asking how long until the interval. She made me take her to see Cats and Starlight Express.”
“Aunty Anne would like shows with lots of dancing in,” I said, thinking of her legs and her vaunted high kicks.
“Oh, her and dancing,” said Serena.
That morning, a postcard from Timon.
‘Bed and breakfast in the western isles, hon. Filming the sky. I’m filling tape after tape and I haven’t written a word in days. Snow on the mountains and Belinda tramps around like Julie Andrews. XX.’
And a very short letter from Mandy.
‘Happy New Year and I’m still in the Professor’s house, where he cooks for me and makes me put up my feet while I write page after page. He says I must have a novel ready—even a very short one—by the time my story comes out in BritLit Four, that anthology I’m in. Blackpool has come up very clear in my writing and it worries me that I’ll never go back, or if I do, it won’t be the same. Of course, it’s not the same. Our Linda’s married the insurance man, all very sudden and quick—did you know? They’re in Luxor. Love to you—Mandy.’
“Your sister Mandy has it all sorted out, doesn’t she?” Serena said. “I think she has made some admirable choices.”
“I think she should have stayed in Manchester,” I said. “Done her studies and not got mixed up in the world of men.”
“A woman’s lot,” said Serena. “You have to get mixed up in the world of men. No mistaking it. Mandy can go off, eventually, if she wants to study women’s issues, if that’s what she wants. But she has to have truck with the world of men. Men are fixed in space, you see, Wendy. They are the solid objects women have to negotiate and slink between. A woman has no real place in this world and she has to make a strength out of that. We can fix ourselves anywhere.”
That seemed true of Mandy, of Aunty Anne, of Serena herself. Then I thought of our mam, who stayed most persistently in the same place, in Blackpool, with her kids. In her case it was the fella who moved out, who made a change in his life. Similarly, Timon was the changeable one, who picked up and moved on and threw in his lot with someone he’d just met.
Serena just said, “Gender can be very fickle. People eventually find their roles. It takes money or bravery, or both.” She eyed me. “Maybe you will have both.”
THIRTY-ONE
They were at the Tate looking at an installation called ‘On the Farm’ when Serena first properly broached the subject of her past. The exhibition was of severed animal heads afloat in glass pots of various sizes, ranged in a group on the floor. There were twenty-four of them: the largest a bull’s glaring, neckless head and the smallest, a newly-hatched chicken’s, which looked like a ball of yellow fluff. All of them were being left to deliquesce gently in their columns of glass.
“It’s quite affecting,” said Serna, stalking round the wooden floor. “Seeing the flesh dropping off like this. It makes you want to return again and again to see their progress.”
Wendy said gloomily, “This show will run and run.”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said Serena, realising. “And you in mourning still. This is terrible of me. Let’s go and look at the Rothko’s instead.”
So in a room of canvases that were just slabs of wet-looking paint, Serena began to talk to herself. “I remember being tiny, in a very expensive school and I stuck out like a thumb. A sore thumb, I mean, and I suppose I was too much like you: the under-achiever in my class. I sat at the back and I was staring at the sky while we were talking French. They made us learn French early. Mine is very imperfect. I was staring at the sun, daring myself to stare straight at it, stare it out. I like these Rothkos because they are all one colour, like light. The after-image of looking at a clear, sun-filled sky.”
To Wendy her sky seemed a bit murky.
“And I sat one day and I saw the plane before the rest of the class did. Soon the noise was unmistakable. It was enough of an event, or the lesson was boring enough, to make all of the girls jump up from their desks—the desks were the colour of toffee, I remember, sticky with varnish—and rush to the windows. We watched the small plane circle and circle, as if it could write a message for us. Even our teacher, Mme. Merle, came to see.
“We watched the sun glaring off its windows and wings. It came in lower, passing over us and we even worried that we’d be bombed. Still we watched. Then, incredibly, it brought itself down and landed safely on the neat green fields beyond our windows. It slowed, slowed and stopped. Well, we cheered and clapped and begged to be let out to greet the pilot. Before we could move, or Mme Merle could give in, the door on the small plane opened and the pilot stepped into the sunshine. She was in black, with a leather helmet, goggles, everything. “It’s a woman!” someone shouted and the excitement was, as they say, palpable. Mme. Merle shooed
us out then and we ran out into the field to see this woman.” Serena smiled at Wendy.
“Who was she?” Wendy asked.
“When we ran up to her I stared. It was me. She looked exactly how I would look when I was older. I was sure. That stunning, stunting aviatrix looked exactly as I look now. I am sure of that.”
She led Wendy back through the cool halls of the Tate.
“I suppose you were right,” Serena said. “That exhibit of heads was ghastly. What are those people thinking of?”
“I like paintings,” said Wendy. “I suppose that’s old-fashioned.”
“No, I adore paintings too. Joshua does watercolours sometimes, you know. Perhaps he’ll show you one day, when we eventually get to see him. Now come on, let’s get back home before your aunt arrives. I have dinner to prepare.”
Aunty Anne was due that evening. It was the later train from Darlington. She had left her Buddha, her fat man in the council house. Last night she had phoned and declared herself free of his pious encumbrance (as Serena gladly put it). And… Aunty Anne had news—thrilling news—for Wendy.
As ever, Wendy took news from her aunty with care.
“There’s something in this, though,” Serena said, as they walked along the river towards Pimlico tube station. “I’ve never heard Anne so agitated. She could barely contain herself.”
She came to the door in a taxi, which wasn’t in itself surprising, since she hated the tube. Once she said that when she was underground, her nerves went jangly and made her legs jump up and tremble. The escalators were so much more perilous than those in department stores. Wendy and Serena stood on the doorstep, staring past the leafy garden and what did startle them was the ten pound tip Anne flourished in the air, in the sherbert-coloured street light, before pushing it into the driver’s hand.
