by Paul Magrs
“In Blackpool, at drear day. The seabirds shout yes-nay yes-nay, yes-nay. Big sky. Small lights. Jackpot garlands of golden coins. All along the Prom, the girls come. All along the Prom, the boys come. Yes-nay. Yes-nay.”
Mandy’s story went on like this for some time.
“My mother had a monster love. Not monstrous, of the morbid, the decadent, confined to the box. That which rose unbidden. Strong Freudian stuff. Whiff of sulphur, of menses, of that which dare not speak. Yes-nay. Steady, sure as the waves on the shingle. We could hear up in the gods at night. We lived in the cheap seats of our flats at night on the Terrace. My mother fed her youngest child. We stared at her tits as she fed our sister sat on the fat, orange settee.”
When she finished, overrunning her three minutes, we all clapped.
I couldn’t get to Mandy for a while after the readers were done with. People were bending her ear. I was stopped by a woman I recognized. She was still in her black sweatshirt with the unicorn on the front. “Hey?” she said. “Remember me?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I wrote something for the anthology? I wrote ‘Manifesto for the Church of the Silver Unicorn?’ Page four hundred and twelve? They seemed to think it was a fantastic story?”
“Is your ectoplasm friend here?”
“She’s at Church, of course? I got permission to come here? Was that your sister up there reading? She looks like you?”
I nodded.
“I see your alien friends are being very successful? When’s his book coming out?”
“Sweetheart!” It was Serena at my elbow. “I knew it was tonight. We missed the reading. Is your sister here?”
Behind her, I saw Joshua and he was wearing scarlet and green tartan. He’d left his face unshaven again and I grinned. Maybe I felt funny after Colin’s warning about him, but he was so reassuring in the flesh. “Serena got us in,” he said. “She knows everyone.”
I was about to introduce the unicorn woman to them, but Serena had burst out squealing and she was dragging on the arm of the man who had written about Fred and Rosemary West.
“Cher’s pulled out,” he glowered. “Now they’re talking about Julia Roberts. And I have to write some fucking songs.”
“I think that was a wicked book you wrote?” said the unicorn woman.
“Oh yes?”
“I think modern fiction has lost all its moral value?”
The man in black velvet curled his lip. “And what do you believe in?”
As the woman opened her mouth to reply, I said to Joshua, “Let’s find Mandy. You haven’t met her yet.”
Mandy said that if she went out to dinner she would be extremely ill. She was very—as they say—near her time, and what she really fancied was chewing on a kebab.
“Your time of confinement,” Josh was saying as we left the party in the shop.
“That what they used to call it,” said Mandy, warming to him. “But I reckon I’ve already had that bit.”
We stood outside a takeaway a few doors down from the bookshop and got our fingers sticky, pulling out ribbons of unidentifiable meat and warm lettuce. We watched the bookshop people leaving and fights breaking out amongst the ninety-seven under thirty. It started to rain and the police came.
We found Josh’s Skoda and Mandy had to sit up front with her bump, of course, so I couldn’t slide my hand under his thigh.
The plan was to drop her in Putney with Aunty Anne. I was meant to be at Serena’s that night, but she had vanished with the man in crushed velvet. I supposed we would discuss where I was going on the way. Things were moving.
In Putney, Aunty Anne was waiting up in her dressing gown.
“Have you seen the news?” she asked us urgently in the hallway. “I suppose you’ve been too busy swanning about.” She saw Joshua, stepping into her house. “So this is your fancy man,” she said to me, raising her eyebrows and wrinkling her cold cream.
“We’ve met before,” said Josh. “Through Serena.”
“I know,” she said.
“What’s the news?” asked Mandy.
“You’ve ruined that maternity dress. What’s that supposed to be? A face?”
“Space Hopper chic,” said Mandy.
“The late news is coming on.”
She led us into the spartan front room.
That was when we learned that, as she was flying back into London, Belinda had managed to make herself vanish into thin air.
THIRTY-SEVEN
If I skip a few years now, it’s like, oh yes, then we had the end of the century.
But we did.
The big humdinger, Colin would call it.
For a long time Timon was inconsolable. No one could tell him where Belinda had gone. There was the usual investigative flurry, interviews and reports. They never even found a hair, not a single wispy silver hair, clinging to the plush of her first class seat. We had to take that well-worn phrase ‘without a trace’ and apply it to the not-inconsiderable substance of someone we knew very well.
When Katy eventually met Timon in the flesh he was almost speechless with grief. He was like a king in exile. On the telly he made pleas to whoever had taken his beloved. There came nothing in reply. The papers blamed her vanishing on everything she knew. Their video footage was shown all over again.
Timon sunk into himself for those next couple of years. He lived in London. Then he drifted back to Blackpool, and then to the Royal Circus in Edinburgh. He was casting about. We even lost touch with each other for a while.
He had lost his manuscript, too. He didn’t kick up a fuss. He secretly imagined that Pieces of Belinda had gone the same way as the whole woman herself. He returned to the north to write his book again. Heart-aching work without Belinda’s help.
Mandy published her novel with Lucifer and Lucifer, who were glad to have something to console and tide themselves over through Timon’s hiatus. They were particularly glad because Me in the Monster Museum partly concerned itself with the early life of someone very much like him. There were connections here, the reviewers muttered. They started to talk about a Blackpool movement. Mandy’s book was fairly well-received. There was some bleating about how magical realism or surrealism didn’t quite wash in books about ordinary, working class people. It was something more appropriate for exotic places. Others praised her for her risks at the level of language. The Professor began appearing in London, begged her to be his lover again, and made it known far and wide that he had ghostwritten her book.
“My book is full of ghosts,” Mandy snapped. “That old lecher is only one of many.”
Then we heard that the Professor had started hanging round with a weird, cultish set. He was distracted by the possibility of actually becoming someone.
Mandy sold about five hundred copies in hardback and went off to write a second. That was harder going. Not least because she had the baby to see to. Lindsey was born early in May 1998. Everyone adored her, of course. She had small, marmalade fluffy curls. Even Katy took to her, Katy who seemed suspicious around the new arrival at first. She was writing a horror novel for children about incubi and succubi. I could never tell the difference. Katy had seen, from her Aunty Mandy’s progress, how simple a process it was, bringing a novel out.
Her Aunty Mandy. Because by then, of course, I had married Joshua. And what a fuss they made about it. Serena, in the end, seemed to have misgivings. Aunty Anne couldn’t see why I didn’t marry someone richer and better connected. I had my pick, she said. Colin buried his qualms, as he always did, and came south for the ceremony and the little party we held in the Greenwich house, where we had decided to live. Colin even conceded that Joshua could make himself quite good company. He went so far as to say that he thought Joshua was probably gay, underneath everything. He couldn’t persuade me of that. Colin hadn’t managed to persuade his erstwhile lover David of anything. His lover had moved to Glasgow to be successful, and that was an end to it.
For the wedding, Joshua filled
the house with orchids.
His sister took an attack of the vapours, fell against the mantelpiece reeling in black satin and swept it clean of most of its objets. She smashed a valuable clock, so that it was stuck forever after at midnight.
Midnight.
We spent the rest of the century, with Katy, on a cruise liner travelling to the most exotic ports in the world and returned just before the New Year.
As fin-de-siecle’s go, it was all right.
They had the Queen Mother installed in her emerald casket in the Greenwich Dome, and this was the spectacle we queued, along with everyone else, to see at the end.
And for a few years after that, life went on pretty quietly.
I was happy.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“No, I don’t want to buy anything. I want to see the manager.”
The woman was holding up the queue. Behind her, teenagers were rapping their empty CD cases on the cash desk. The assistant told her straight. “The manager is incredibly busy. Can I help?”
The woman’s face tightened at this. The assistant winced. You could tell there had been some severe plastic surgery there, the way her skin went tight under her hair. “It is David Moore, isn’t it? Your manager?”
“Yes, but…”
“I want to see him.”
Smiling, the manager let her in. He was in the staff polo shirt, looking slightly older and more careworn since the last she’d seen him. His desk was covered in printout and the fax machine was chattering to itself. “Anne…” he said warmly. “You’ve changed.”
“For the better, I hope,” she said gruffly as she sat down, and poked her legs out before his desk.
“Yes, you look years younger.”
“Good. Now, I heard you were in London these days. Colin told me.”
“Ah yes. Three months nearly.” They had given him the smaller of the Oxford Street shops to manage, and he still couldn’t hide his glee. After Glasgow there had only been one place to move up to. “How is Colin?”
“He’s not too well. Still in Edinburgh.” She gave David a dark look. “But that’s not to be helped. I want you to come by my house for some supper tonight. I need a favour.”
“I can’t, Anne. I’m seeing someone.”
“A man?” she asked bluntly.
“A woman.” He flushed.
“Colin told me about your recapitulation.”
“So I can’t come, anyway.”
“It’s just a small favour,” she said, softening. “I thought, since you were so… successful now, you’d have no trouble fixing it.”
“What is it?”
“My niece’s step-daughter.”
“Wendy’s step-daughter?”
“She needs a job. She’s going wild.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
“Two thousand quid.”
“Anne, I can’t take bribes to…”
“Three.”
“I won’t take your money.”
“Please come, David. Have supper. It’ll be like old times.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Please. For the sake of an old—but still shapely—woman.”
He grinned. “All right.”
Anne jumped up and gave him directions. “Nine o’clock. On the dot. I knew you were a good boy, really, even if you did dash my poor son’s hopes.”
“Anne…”
“I know, I know. I shan’t interfere. Now, be prompt.”
He opened the office door for her and she tugged his ear.
“I knew you were a good’un. Remember, when me and Wendy first went up to Edinburgh together? You were on the same train. Off to find your fortune. Such a roughie-toughie skinhead you looked. I thought you’d go tootling and footling your time away.”
“How is Wendy?”
She sniffed. “As well as can be expected.”
Her rooms were still minimalist, as she still called it, but that was all right because minimalism had recently come back in. In her tucked, trimmed and tautened new body, Aunty Anne was finding herself the height of fashion.
She was an Aunty again, to Lindsey, nearly seven, and Katy, who was sixteen by now and who had left school gladly, against the judgment of her betters. She spent the weekends in Putney with her Aunty Anne, but Anne suspected that because she had friends in the area. Katy was at an age when she soon tired of spending much time with her father and Wendy. They were too intense together, either bickering or clambering all over each other and it turned the girl’s stomach.
“I blame that funny school they had you at,” said Anne that night. “That’s what put you off education. It was all cutting shapes out of paper and dancing around, wasn’t it?”
Katy was bored, tapping at her aunt’s new computer. “Hm.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with dancing. Did you ever see me dance?”
“Yep.”
“But you need to learn more than that at school. That’s your three R’s. Wendy would never learn. That’s how she went the way she did. She left school at sixteen, too.”
“Wendy’s all right.”
“She could have done better for herself.”
Katy went red and didn’t say anything.
Anne thought she might have offended her, and was about to say something else, but was interrupted by the doorbell going and it was Serena. They kissed each other briskly. “Did you get him?” asked Serena.
“Ah-hah,” nodded Anne.
“Get who?” asked Katy, who had come to listen.
Aunty Anne sighed. Katy was in a nylon patterned blouse of red and purple, a miniskirt of green diamonds, and white leather boots. Retro-chic was back in again. Aunty Anne remembered dressing like that to go out dancing at the Troccadero. So she was almost a grandmother after all.
David arrived sweating from work, with a suit jacket pulled over his T shirt. He seemed ready to interview a prospective staff member, but Anne put a gin and tonic in his hand, made him sit, and started working—to Serena’s mortification—on an immense fry-up. David got up to look at the framed photos along one wall.
“Wendy’s wedding?” he called through.
“Yes,” said Serena with a sigh. “It seems so long ago now. You weren’t there, were you?”
“Busy in Scotland,” he said tiredly. “I didn’t even know it was happening.”
He found Colin’s face in a rowdy black and white group picture. He recognised a few other faces. In one picture Anne was hosting up her matron’s dress to show her legs and, beside her, Wendy stood in her vast satin gown and rolled her eyes to heaven, hands on hips.
“He looks like a good-looking fella, her husband,” said David.
“Joshua,” said Serena. “My best friend.”
David stared at one odd photograph. It was of Astrid from the Leith Walk launderette. Her wheelchair was pulled up next to a woman with no arms. They both stared straight out. In biro someone had written on the glossy print, “Jesus God.”
“I heard about Belinda,” said David, sipping his drink. “Wasn’t she here for the wedding?”
“She’d already gone by then,” sighed Serena. “I never knew her. If you ask me, she did a runner. The whole thing was a lousy fake. Her nerve went.”
Anne appeared, along with the aroma of bacon and sausages. “Ready soon. Oh, you’ve seen my little gallery.”
“I should go and see Wendy,” he said. “She’s happy, isn’t she? When I saw you before you sounded ambivalent.”
“I don’t know the meaning of that word,” Anne sniffed. “You know what I’m like. I wanted the best for her.”
“Josh is the best,” put in Serena.
“I suppose you’re happy enough,” Anne conceded.
Serena looked round. “Katy,” she said, startled. The girl had a way of just appearing. “This is an old friend of Anne’s. David Moore.”
He held out his hand and smiled.
Katy looked at him and gave a rare, unexpected grin. She took his
hand. “Something new, coming true,” she said.
So this is a marriage, and what have I learned? That even when he was a long distance away there was stuff still to be learned. That the substance left behind when he went was stuff for me to take on and learn. I learned him. He went away and further on and this was our marriage and I learned.
I learned our marriage like the rule of thumb and the ins and outs of our ups and down started to come easy to me. Even when he was away and I went sniffing round and alone I was suspicious, even then we had ups and down. I never thought we could have ups and downs like that, when we were apart and only one, but we did, we managed it because that was our marriage and we were learning. My aunty said marriage is a thing you work at, look at mine and learn. Oh boy.
This was how Mandy started her second, slim novel. It was about the joys of marriage and togetherness, then apartness and togetherness again. She called it Mardy Cow and it went on in this vein for some time. It lost her many of the readers her first had gained. She wasn’t writing much about funny people or places anymore. Mardy Cow was about relationships. Or rather, ‘the destructive mutuality of the relationship from hell’ as her editor at Lucifer and Lucifer wrote on her inner flap.
I said to Joshua, “What does our Mandy know about marriage anyway?’
“He said, “She’s probably picked up a thing or two here or there.”
Timon sent us a card from Scotland. Older, wiser, widowed Timon had just read Mandy’s second novel.
‘It isn’t funny stories and accidents, hon. She used to put them in to make us laugh or hold our breath. She’s lost it all. She’s just taking risks at the level of language, I think.’
Although there were accidents in our Mandy’s second book, which arrived at the house in Greenwich in a plain white cover, they weren’t happy or funny ones. By then Mandy was living in a flat of her own in Kilburn, around the corner from Serena. She was sharing with a woman she got on well with, a woman who was a production assistant at Pinewood. This friend was working on the new James Bond movie, because they had cast a new Bond, a midget lady called Sheila. Brenda Soobie was singing the theme tune, just as she had back in the Sixties. Brenda Soobie was seventy now and still giving it some. Mandy’s friend had even met her at Pinewood when she shot the title sequence and said she was a cow.
