by Paul Magrs
I’m saying it all past tense. Tense is so cruel. I can’t believe I’ll never fuck him again. Dogs are fickle, you know.
Joshua came back the next afternoon as if nothing was strange and I said nothing about the book I had found. I slipped it back between the bed settee cushions as if I had never seen it. I would decide what to do about it after my little trip. Katy and I were going away together for a few days.
“What do you mean you forgot?”
“You told me you were going to Scotland. I forgot it was this week.” He looked affronted that we were packing when he finally showed up at home. Katy gave her father a quick peck, as she wandered from room to room with armfuls of ironed clothes. She still had a faint green tinge. Neither of us had mentioned David Moore. Katy had enough sense not to bring him up.
I didn’t know what to think about finding Timon’s book. I went on packing. Joshua sat himself in his study, beside his pickled horse’s head and read the paper, eating cherry tomatoes. He’d be there for hours.
“Look,” I said at last. “We can stay here a couple of extra days. We don’t have to meet Timon till then. We’ll stay a little longer.”
He cheered up. “I wanted to take you both out to dinner, for Katy’s birthday.” He was out of his chair and clutching me. “I thought you were leaving me alone out of revenge!”
“This has been planned for weeks, Josh.”
“I know. You know what I’m like.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll do anything. I won’t stay out anymore. I’ll even chuck away that bloody horrible horse’s head.”
“Whatever, Joshua.”
“Why are you calling me by my full name?” He stared at me. “You only do that when there’s something wrong.”
“Do I?”
“I listen to you.”
“But there is something wrong, isn’t there?”
So we went out to dinner, two nights running. Joshua pushing the boat out, delighted with our company, showing off.
“Shame your young man couldn’t be here,” Josh said to Katy, who scowled. David hadn’t been invited. Josh must have been talking to Serena, I thought.
“Tell me again,” he said brightly. “Tell me what this trip is all about. Should I be coming with you?”
We were in an old, converted, high-domed bank. Our table seemed a hundred miles from all the others. We had potted palms secluding us, dangling their lush fingers over our plates. On a platform a woman was singing breathily into a microphone, Burt Bacharach songs.
“We’re going to Edinburgh to meet up with Timon,” said Katy eagerly. This was a pilgrimage for her, because she was still a fan. I’d seen her pressing and packing her old Strange Matter T shirt, even though it was faded and tight. “Then we head out into the Highlands. Across to Argyle.”
“And then,” Josh knocked back his brandy. “You watch the sky.”
Katy pulled a face.
Hang on. Josh knocked back the golden brandy remains in one practised gulp. And Josh who didn’t drink ordered another. For the first time in ages it came back to me, Belinda’s sombre convictions, that when you least expected it, your friends and family got replaced.
This wasn’t my Josh. I sat back from the table.
In the Nineties the telephone company ran this scheme where you got discounts on your phone calls if you listed your most frequent callees. You listed your ten family and friends who you called the most. What if, I wondered, those lists got into the wrong hands? Someone could have a hit-list. Maybe someone had mine.
Then I remembered Mandy’s short story, ‘Friends and Family’, which was published in her collection ‘Women in Gloves’. In that, a woman whose flatmate moves out wins the phone company competition that sends her on holiday with her ten most-phoned pals and relations. This South American carnival jamboree is filmed for the phone company advertisements. Most people would be pleased to go, to become an advert, but in Mandy’s story it turned out that the absent flatmate made all the most frequent calls. Mandy’s heroine is sent abroad, to be joyous in public with a bunch of strangers. I laughed, thinking about it, and Josh and Katy both looked at me.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.” I gave him a look. If he really was a replacement, would I ever know? Besides drinking like a fish, was he really doing anything that went against continuity? That hidden book, perhaps. Bluebearded away down the settee cushions. But I’d found before, years before, Joshua’s dirty books. Salty, crinkled, eighteenth century tomes of turgid and unsettling prose, describing acts that the woodcuts painstakingly filled out. He was a fan, it turned out, of other people’s sex. And that wasn’t such a strange preoccupation. He’d collected up Timon’s book for the sexy bits. Yet he knew, he must have known, what he had in that book: all of Timon’s past and future bound up in one. Timon’s life was thwarted and cracked in two, as much by the loss of his manuscript as by Belinda’s.
“You don’t seriously expect her to come back, do you?” he asked me.
I was startled. “Who?”
“Belinda. That’s who all this is for, isn’t it?”
Of course it was. On the news that night there was a tiny
segment, the weirdy-obsessive, it’s-a-funny-old-world, slice-of-life story at the end of the nine o’clock news. “Followers of the infamous Church of the Silver Unicorn are gathering in Glencoe in the west of Scotland to mark the seventh anniversary of the disappearance of Belinda Simon. Ms Simon was the UFO enthusiast who, in 1997, produced footage of what appeared to be evidence of visitor incursion and caused a brief scandal and flurry of fin-de-siecle excitement. Just as soon however, it was all over and Belinda Simon vanished for her seat on Concorde, en route to Heathrow from New York.”
All through this item they showed the footage again, like an old friend, a favourite B movie clip. We saw the Silver Unicorn people assembling, we saw Timon’s talking head. It was saying: “We aren’t spotting lights in the sky this time. That’s not what it’s about. We’re marking the passing and celebrating the life of a remarkable woman.”
Then we saw the unicorn people pitching tents on the glen. They looked like hippy protestors, and they had a number of exhausted-looking horses with them, with fake horns glued to their foreheads. And, worst of all, they were represented by a new leader, or High Priest, as the caption said.
“It’s Mandy’s Professor!” I shouted over his first few words. “That horrible man she lived with in Lancaster!” And it was. Her professor had left the academy for unicorns in the Highlands. He looked zealous and bright.
“She will come again!” he was ranting. “Belinda’s story isn’t over yet! She has been sending her scrambled interstitial messages to my herd!”
My herd, I tutted. But he looked very impressive, the Professor, with his sultan’s beard oiled and curled. This was a head-and-shoulders shot too, and you could almost imagine that he would rear up at any moment with a great big whinny, revealing the torso, flanks and shining hooves of a centaur. But the news team cut back to the studio.
“Jesus God,” said Josh. “Are you really going to hang out with the likes of him?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a trip out, isn’t it?”
Katy looked distant. “I really think something will happen. If not now, soon anyway. Belinda couldn’t just have vanished.”
“People disappear, sweetheart,” said Josh. “They leave important things behind. They start a new life for themselves.”
This was Josh the orphan speaking and my heart went out to him then.
“They don’t just vanish on Concorde,” she said angrily. “Belinda wouldn’t leave us in the lurch like that.”
I had to admit, it was very strange, even by Belinda’s terms of seeing the world. To leave and not even send a hologram or a replacement to keep her place.
In the morning’s post came Mandy’s new book and it was time to go. King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley and I read all the way there. It was the first time I’d been ba
ck to Scotland since Uncle Pat had died. I’d been to Athens, to Rome, New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, Tibet, but not there. This felt like my first journey all over again. I read the first line of Mardy Cow and kept reading it until we were clear of North London and the South started to fall back behind me.
Her first line took me ages to get beyond. It fell in, as these things do when you’re tired and perplexed, with the train’s dependable rhythm:
Where do I begin
to tell the story of
how great a love
can be
the same love story
that is older than the sea
the same love story
of the love he brings to me
Where do I start?
The border of Scotland was marked now, with an enormous archway painted tartan green and red. Katy asked, was it meant to look like a giant in a kilt straddling the mainline?
Bands of bagpipers played at the smaller stations past Berwick-upon-Tweed. They didn’t want you forgetting that you were in a different country now. That was something else Timon was in trouble for, besides his seven years late manuscript: his work visa for Scotland was out of date and he was, to all intents and purposes, a fugitive in Edinburgh, making a dangerous show of himself by getting his face on the news.
“What’s Mandy’s new book like?”
Katy startled me out of it. She was reading Me in the Monster Museum and we must have looked like proper Mandy fans. “Is this really you in this one? The younger sister?”
“No, I said. “And this one is confusing. It’s like eating ten bags of crisps all at once.”
“Is she still taking risks?”
Yes she was. Not necessarily at the level of language. Her book seemed to be about an errant husband who lives in Greenwich, who knows he is orphaned, and in his mid-thirties decides to seek out his birth mother. All the while he is falling out of love with his young wife, who he previously thought he adored. He takes up with all kinds of women, secretly, and tries out the different types. Luckily, Mandy’s characterisation was off, the characters were none of them very distinct and there was no one I could recognise in there. Relief.
The orphaning and birth-mothering business bothered me. Now Mandy knew about Joshua’s disinterest in researching his birth-mother. I had told her once that we had talked it through, and he had even made the preliminary moves towards tracking her down. He got in touch with the adoption agency, all the while unsure, feeling—I think—bullied by me. He was ready to pull out when he decided that he’d gone far enough. I’d talked to him about this, thinking that his disinterest was maybe something do with the despondent moods Josh sometimes fell into. He needed a mother, I thought. I wasn’t going to be it. It disturbed me that neither he nor Katy had a natural mother, but he wouldn’t be drawn on the subject of Katy’s mother.
So he had the interview and I went with him. He shook and gave mumbled responses to the woman who handed him a thick, ancient file of papers. They were his, she said, his birthright and it was up to him, whatever he chose to do now.
We took the file home, sealed up in an envelope and didn’t say a word about it. Josh put it away in his desk. Opening the file would put things in train. He would know where she was then, her name, her last known address. Even letters from her, addressed to him in a name he didn’t know. The woman from the agency said his birth-mother had been writing to him year after year.
Joshua cried and wouldn’t open the file. It would lie on his desk for years. So long as she was there, under the paperclips, the rubber bands and the dried out pens, he knew where she was. Maybe, he thought, he would let her wait for him, for a change. Maybe he just didn’t want to know. The night after we’d picked up the file he wept himself dry and came to bed and wanted to fuck me his favourite way, peering right into my face and licking my ears. He reared all the way up, towering over me, his fine scarred chest and knobbly collarbone all blue in the early light. He rammed into me in tight little squeezes and when we woke our thighs hurt from gripping each other and staying open to each other so long.
In Mandy’s book the man had the file unopened in his desk and, when he hit problems with his young wife, he decided to open it and find out at last. And he couldn’t talk to his young wife about it, she had become so distant. Instead he talked to her sister, somewhat older and much more beautiful. He opened the file with the sister there, and they learned together. There was a name and an address that was fifteen years old. Then he fucked the sister because that was the kind of intimacy they had drawn up between them. Only they two knew what was in the file and, reading it together, there was nothing for them to do but seek consolation in each other. Consolation with her thighs around his waist, his tongue in her ears.
“Wendy,” said Katy. “You look white.”
I closed Mandy’s new book.
“It’s all right,” I said. I put it back in my bag with the other papers and things for Timon.
It couldn’t all be true. It couldn’t be really, because I knew for a fact that Josh had never opened his file. It had stayed in his desk all this time and he had never taken it round anyone’s house, let alone Mandy’s, to crack apart the yellowed tape. It was all in Mandy’s head.
I knew because I had checked the envelope that morning. I had the sealed envelope in my bad now, on the way to Edinburgh. It had never been touched. Joshua had learned nothing yet. I was going to do his learning for him.
In Scotland we skirted the blue coasts and cliffs, the straggling resorts. We skimmed under the busy arms and walkways of a colossal nuclear power station. Then, estates and corporations, football grounds and multiplexes. Finally, Edinburgh again.
FORTY
They had done all these things in Edinburgh in my years away, like landscaping over the dirty grey glass ceilings of the railway station and building a new shopping mall under Princes Street gardens. Timon said you could sit in John Lewis’ coffee rooms now and look up out of the window to see the castle a terrifying and sheer two hundred metres above. It seemed that they had built under and above everything they could find. Levels everywhere.
I knew things would have changed, of course. In the time I’d been living in London, we’d seen a fin-de-millennium built and dismantled. This was all a new start now.
The change to the Royal Circus was the biggest shock. We were only staying one night before going out to Glencoe, but it was long enough to take in what had become of the place. It had turned rough. The Georgian splendour, the gracious living, the monument to Appollonian culture as Serena put it, all of it had become tawdry and over-used. Gone, in short, to the bad. The old building where I had lived those months in the late Nineties, seemed to be swarming with ragged children. They sat on the stars with unwashed hair and catcalled us as we went up. The doors to the dark flats were open and you could glimpse the rot and the horror within. The entire place had let itself go. Cobwebs mapped the vertical spaces between banisters.
Timon didn’t prepare us for any of this. He was pleased to see us, and talkative, but everything he talked about was Belinda this and Belinda that. He was obsessed with the vigil tomorrow night, with making it a right-and-proper memorial to his lost beloved. “And if that bastard Professor mucks and fucks it up,” he said, with unusual vehemence, “I’ll rip his heart out.”
Timon, who took books very seriously of course, thought he had extra info on the Professor, because he had read Mandy’s first novel, which ends with her Scheherezading the Professor to sleep. To Timon’s mind, the Professor had always been a villain. Muscling in on Mandy and now on the memory of Belinda.
“I wish we could have all had quiet lives,” said Timon, as he led the way to Colin’s flat above.
Katy said very little. She was still awe-struck by Timon in the flesh, even though she had seen him before. He was too preoccupied to notice her silence or my dismay at how the custardy walls of the stairwell had turned to streaky brown.
“I haven’t aired the rooms yet,” sa
id Colin, sitting heavily down at the table. “I forgot. And it’s so hot in here.”
The flat felt as if no one had opened the windows or doors in months. Colin looked terrible. He was in a dressing gown, a purple one much too large for him, and he wore nothing on his feet. When he’d let us in and walked down the hall, you could see his soles were black from soot, fag ash and dirt.
“Are you alone here?” I asked, knowing the answer.
He laughed. “Me and Timon are alone together in our two flats. We both go drifting around and sometimes we have a drink together.” He opened a couple of bottles of wine. “Drink. I won’t, though.” He rubbed his face. “Wendy, remember when I said that you see ghosts only if you’ve suffered?”
I didn’t want him to go into this now. I must really have felt like a parent to Katy, because I wanted all the talk around her to be pleasant and distracting. Nothing like this.
“It must have been you who suffered in the end, Wendy. Because me and Timon are the ghosts, aren’t we? We became the ghosts in the end.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
Colin turned on Katy then. “You’ve got a new young man, haven’t you?”
Oh god, I thought. He’s heard.
But all Colin said was, “Look after him. He’s a good fella.”
Katy nodded, her eyes wide. Nervously she fiddled with her overfull glass of wine.
Colin asked, “I’ve not thought properly about entertaining you all on your brief stay. Is there anything you’d like to do tonight in Edinburgh? Anything special?
But there wasn’t. We wanted an early night, so we could be up in time to drive to Glencoe. Timon had a car, an unreliable old thing. We had to pick up Astrid from the launderette’s back door at half past five in the morning. Timon made easy work of strapping her wheelchair to the roof rack.
“Wendy,” said Astrid as we watched him work. “I have been praying for your happiness, but I have got the feeling that you are not, and am I right?”
