by Paul Magrs
I met Mandy’s flatmate when Serena held a Seven Deadly Sins party, uncharacteristically throwing open her house. It was our Katy’s sixteenth birthday and Serena had taken control. Serena was Madame Whiplash, the wicked hostess, in her little-light-bondage outfit. Mandy came as a Space Hopper again, because she couldn’t decide and her friend came as the kid out of the Exorcist, in a baby doll nightie which she covered in green spew and hung a tinfoil crucifix around her neck. Late that night we ended up in Mandy’s flat, in her friend’s attic room, watching her cook up carrot and coriander soup on a tiny stove. It made me feel terrifically sick. I thought, surely the handmaiden to the new James Bond could afford a nicer flat than this.
That party was the last time I saw Mandy before Mardy Cow arrived in the post. Funny, but living in London made us keep in touch less frequently than ever. She had her own life, I suppose. At the Seven Deadly Sins party I saw her telling Katy that now she would give her copies of her books. “You’re old enough to read the dirty bits now.”
Katy, who had painted herself head to toe in bright green paint and come as envy, tutted. “Well, it’s nice of you anyway. But I wasn’t a kid before.”
“Yes, you were,” Mandy smiled.
“I’ll read them.”
“You might find out all about this family of ours.”
“Whoopee.”
Serena brought the cake in then, which she’d had a friend design, construct and deliver. It was a monstrous pink cock, with a flaming bristle of pubic hair, which poor Katy had to blow out in front of everyone. She pulled back her own long hair in case the pubes set it alight. It was a lurid, nasty cake, really, and I didn’t fancy my bit—a frosted slice of helmet—at all.
Katy had with her a new beau. This was a recent thing and very hush-hush. We weren’t to say a word until we met him. That she’d discovered this man through work, her new work at the Megastore on Oxford Street, should have rang alarm bells for me. I should known they were all—Aunty Anne, Serena, Katy—cooking up something else beside this phallic confection.
Lo and behold and dressed as, for some reason, a McDonalds employee, David came tripping into the party. Just before I caught sight of him Katy tried to prepare me. “He’s very nervous about meeting you, Wendy.”
“Why? I’m not…”
“Because you already know him.”
I stared at her, at her glaring white eyes in all that green paint.
“It’s David Moore. Aunt Anne said that…”
“What’s he doing here? What are you doing with him?”
“Nothing yet. He’s managing the store I’m working at, and…”
Then, coming through the crush of people, was David.
“This is kind of embarrassing for me, Wendy,” he said.
Even in a stripy apron and a baseball hat he looked wonderful.
“Fuck you!” Suddenly everyone was listening. “What are you planning to do, David? Sleep with everyone in my family?”
“Wendy,” hissed Katy.
“I don’t care. He’s outrageous.”
“It’s not like that,” he mumbled.
“Like shite it’s not. You’ve been manoeuvred into this, you dope. Who’s put you up to this?”
David shook his head. “No one, Wendy. I just met Katy recently. Coincidentally.”
“She’s a child!”
Katy was furious now. “You can be such a bloody old puritan, Wendy.”
“No, I can’t!”
“Who was it wouldn’t let me read Aunty Mandy’s book when it came out?”
I turned on my heel and went looking for Aunty Anne and Serena.
I hunted through every floor of Serena’s house, and every room was brimming with her arty friends, most of whom I didn’t know. The bathroom had been turned into Cleopatra’s, a sign on the door said so, and I stormed into find all these men standing around another man, who lay in an enamel bath filled with milk.
“I’m looking for Serena,” I said, trying not to notice they all had their knobs hanging out.
“She’s not here,” said the man in the bath. I’m teling you, Michael—you piss on me and you’ll curdle the milk. I’ll never speak to you again.”
I left them to it.
I wished Joshua was there. When we first got the invitation he’d bolted upright and said he couldn’t make it.
“It’s your daughter’s sixteenth birthday party!” I couldn’t believe him, but this was the way he was going. Forgetting things and sloping off. Danger signs.
“It’s not her actual birthday,” he said crossly.
“No—but it’s the day Serena—your brilliant mate Serena—has organised her bash. You’ve got to be there.”
“I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Business.”
Usually I would leave it at that. His funny business had caused ructions before. There was meant to be a truce now, because last time we argued, he said his business connections, all his investments and the money they brought, were all that gave him a sense of self-respect. I shut up and listened to him. For the sake of his own bruised self respect in these days of being kept by his heiress wife, I listened and maybe I shouldn’t have. It was all too easy for him to make me feel guilty for supporting us. I had to let him go away from time to time, to fix his shady connections.
“Katy’s going to be disappointed.”
“I’ll take her out to dinner for her actual day. Just me and her.”
“What about me?”
“Do you want to come?” he asked, looking blank.
Oh, I’ve made it sound as though we were in one of those rough patches just then. Bits of it were, in fact, rough as a bear’s arse, but it wasn’t all like that. We were lasting, we were. But he was forgetting things and sloping off.
And then Mandy’s new book appeared, with a perfunctory note and a ‘For Wendy’ in a plain white wrapper and, it turned out, it was all about a marriage and a woman whose husband starts forgetting things and sloping off.
Aunty Anne and Serena were sitting on the top stairs at the very top of the house. Serena was dangling the woollen strands she had taped on her homemade cat o’ nine tails and was listening to Aunty Anne going on.
“Hey, Wendy. I was telling Serena about the fortune I made out of all those horse ornaments that belonged to your mother. We dined out on that, remember? Horses everywhere, she had.”
I said, “Tell me you didn’t set it up.”
“Here it comes,” said Serena.
“Katy with David. Tell me you didn’t set that up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you fucking smirk,” I shouted at Serena. “I’m sick of you poking your beak in.”
“No, you look here,” said Aunty Anne.
“Yes?”
“I got Katy that job. I set it up. And yes, I did call on David because I knew he was here.” She looked at me levelly out of eyes which were now quite slanted and narrow. “There’s nothing wrong with calling in old favours.”
“What favours did you ever do him?”
“Leave them alone, Wendy,” said Aunty Anne. “If you interfere with Katy’s life, she’ll hate you forever.”
I glared at them.
Aunty Anne went on. “Anyway, what does it matter to you? Why are you so bothered about David?”
Serena shoved her oar in then. “Everything’s all right between you and Josh, isn’t it?”
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? To get your teeth into Josh after all this time.”
“Go home, Wendy,” said Serena. “If you can’t get into the party mood, you should never have come out tonight.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m fucking going.” Then I said, “And you do know, don’t you, that you’ve got four hairy blokes in leather harnesses getting into your bath and pissing on each other?”
Serena barked with laughter. “Good!”
So I ended up over the road at Mandy’s fla
t, with her and her mate, the production assistant to the new, midget James Bond. While she cooked up her carrot soup, Mandy and me sat on her bare mattress on the floor.
“I’m up at five tomorrow to go to Pinewood!” said the friend dismally. Then she found us a photo of the new James Bond.
“She looks like a proper bull dyke,’ said Mandy. “Fantastic.” Then she started on about her new book again and how I’d be getting my copy very soon. She said she was nervous about it.
“I had a good time tonight,” Mandy said, lying back. “I don’t get out much, what with the kid and everything.”
“Ah, Lindsey,” said the friend, stirring her soup.
“Do you know what this reminds me of, Wendy?” said Mandy. “It’s like when we used to sit up all night in the kitchen in Blackpool, entertaining Timon, and Timon entertaining us.”
“Does it?” I thought back. “That seems hundreds of years ago now.”
“What’s new and coming true for Timon now?”
“I think he’s given up on Belinda at last.”
“Has he written the book again?”
“A little bit. He says it isn’t the same.”
“Poor Timon.”
“He’s the only one,” said the strange friend, “who isn’t tied down.”
I walked home. I don’t know how I found the way. It was dawn by the time I came back to Greenwich. I walked miles that night and I could have been anywhere. Walking in any of the places where I’d walked through the night.
The Millennium Dome was gone by then. There was nothing to look at but wasteground out of his windows.
In the tender light I traipsed around our house. I looked for the first time, properly, at all the things Josh had been buying. He’d been branching out, spending more, making his collecting a more expensive hobby. Whole rooms were turned over to odd contraptions in silver, bronze and tin. Assorted TVs played video installations around the clock. I looked at his study and he had more things in there, with more books he had never read.
He had the horse’s head on his desk. One of the farmyard pieces in a tube of glass from the Tate, which I’d seen, years before with Serena. That artist had hit hard times, his installations were broken up and sold off, and Josh had snapped up this little beauty, and that had caused a row again. I looked into the horse’s eyes.
I dozed on the bed settee for a while, gazing at the horse’s eyes. And, down amongst the cushions, I found a hardbacked book wedged right in there. It had a cracked red cover and, handwritten inside, I discovered:
Pieces of Belinda. By Timon.
And she was in there, piece by piece, lovingly detailed.
THIRTY-NINE
He’s clingy, isn’t he? I never thought you would tie yourself down with a clingy man. This was Aunty Anne. It doesn’t do to let them get too clingy, you know.
Girl, I’ve got something to tell you.
So listen up and pay attention
to a woman
who knows her way around a man or two.
It doesn’t pay to
let them hang on
to let them hang about your neck
like a trophy a garland of
idle male flesh
medallion
man
because he’ll depend on you
he’ll ride out your wishes
your
I cut Aunty Anne short. I wasn’t buying this. Josh wasn’t clingy.
He wants to be with me
wants my every iota
Oh yes, she said, kicking up her legs
oh yes, I remember that
and dancing
with the men who promised
their all and pledged
their all and worshipped
every scrap of me
and Anne still had this fixation about not living her life to the utmost. In later life utmost was Aunty Anne’s word and she reckoned she was just about getting it now, on her own. Well, good luck to her, I thought, but she shouldn’t criticise Josh.
She had this thing about the Marianne Faithfull song about the woman who never got her utmost. About Lucy Jordan, who at the age of thirty-seven realises that she’ll never drive in a sports car through Paris with ‘the warm wind in her hair’. Aunty Anne would say: listen and weep, and I said, Aunty Anne you’ve been to Paris again and again and you’ve been in sports cars galore. You’ve had that warm wind.
Don’t be funny, she said. And the Paris I’m thinking of is a place I’ll never ever go now.
I said, anyway, riding through Paris in sports cars will never be the same thing again, it’s not the same thing after Diana died. Riding through Paris in sports cars at the age of thirty-seven is no longer just a dream of the utmost, it means closure now, it means—
She said, don’t give me your analysis
girl, don’t give me your Open
University view on the world
because by then I’d started studying
and I was reading things
in a hundred different ways
maybe more like Timon and Mandy read
Aunty Anne would never listen to me
but I was trying to warn her
and tell her I was happy
and I couldn’t live inside her experience
of the things that would make only her
happier and I could never be in that sports car
underpass-bound.
“Hey,” said Mandy recently. “There are these funny bits in your text.”
We were talking again. This was quite recently: our rift was sealed. I even let her read my work-in-progress.
“Don’t you like them?”
Mandy was doing her Womens’ Studies degree at last, she was reading the French feminists at last, she was graduating next July.
“It’s like Kristevan Woman’s Time. It’s like Babble. It’s like a Wild Zone.”
“Oh boy. Is that good?”
“Because woman is eternal and part of nature…”
“Yeah?”
“She exists, at times, in her own time and space. You’re opening up your text to allow her that space. These are like songs in an old MGM musical. When the woman gets to bear her soul.”
I thought about that. “I just set I out how I fancied it.” Then I thought some more. “But it isn’t just a woman’s space. Look at Captain Simon as Uncle Pat’s deathbed. He sings, too.”
“Oh,” said Mandy. “Then maybe you’re confounding blithe assumptions about gender. Men have Women’s Time, too.”
“Don’t men have Men’s Time?”
“Yes, that’s what they have.”
“And is it different to Women’s Time?”
“Oh, yes,” nodded Mandy.
I used to wonder if dogs, cats, insects had a different experience of time to us. Did their minds and eyes move slower to compensate for a shorter, faster life? I hated it that there was no way we could ever know this. And those things, like butterflies and wasps, that only lasted a day or so. They’d have to have a different experience of time altogether, otherwise tragedy, what we understand of tragedy, ending too soon, would to them be as much of a condition of living as flight.
Joshua would do his dog thing. He would come padding and
panting up to me, usually when I was busy and pin me to the chair, the bed, the floor, and lick at me. He would lick my ears to be sexy, but he made them wet. He would fall in my lap. And for some reason he would sniff the back of my neck, which smelled of me, he said, he didn’t know why, but it did and he liked it. He sometimes forgot himself and sniffed my neck when we were in company, coming up behind me and taking in great lungfuls in short little sniffs. Maybe it was to do with heat. Aunty Anne used to say you had to wear a woolly hat in winter, because your body heat escaped out of your head and if that got cold you were done for. For someone who wanted to keep glamorous, Aunty Anne was full of old lady wisdom. She thought that was the best combination of qualities. I thought maybe my heat escaped out of the na
pe of my neck and for Josh it was perfumed, and coded with my essence.
He did his dog things. He even made dog noises. Not barking like barking mad. Odd whines when he was wanting something, queer dipthongs from low in his throat. Woofs of pleasure, sometimes. This was what drove Katy away, seeing her only natural parent revert like this. We embarrassed her. I embarrassed her by giving in to her father’s tender, dogged ministrations.
Serena thought she had housetrained my husband years before.
You have to leave spread newspaper at each door for a puppy. Josh would come in, pick it up, read it. You have to listen for them scratching at the door and telling you when they want to be out. A puppy doesn’t really want to foul his own basket, so you have to be alert to scratches. Joshua took to going out at strange hours. You have to tap a puppy on the nose sometimes to tell them no. Joshua perfected hurt, puppy eyes. And they get frisky, puppies, and try to hump your leg. They’d hump anyone’s leg, their little cocks easing out like lipstick. They’d do the conga with you if they could. Sometimes you have to brush them off, or they’ll keep you all the time. And they can’t see past the next five minutes.
Was Joshua living in doggy time?
Odd thing was, he never preferred taking me in what is embarrassingly called doggy fashion. Sometimes I like it, to feel him inside me in a different way, swivelled all the way round like that—versatile as a Kenwood chef. He liked to fuck me with my legs over his shoulders and him looking right into my face and he’d lick my ears when he knew I couldn’t do much more than twist underneath him and sometimes that would make me laugh and sometimes it wouldn’t. He had a flair for fucking, did Joshua, and came over all abashed when I told him so. But he did and it isn’t everyone. He was just right. He could be snug and pounding and gentle and slow and frantic in all the right combinations. I think he listened to my body. A retriever in the long grass with his head cocked. Let the dog see the rabbit.
