by Paul Magrs
Pat had said he might try for a little nap during her absence. The sister of his side ward said that, if she really wanted, Anne could stay all afternoon with her husband. But they decided it was best if she went away and came back a little later, refreshed and full of new topics of conversation. What they didn’t want, after all, was to be sat staring at each other while they were on the ward.
At about this time they’d be bringing food round on a trolley. They would give him his two usual cardboard cartons: one of a clear brown soup, the other, a runny, raspberry jelly. Pat said it was a very strange thing, not to feel at all hungry. He was letting the drips in his arms, the snaking tubes that punctured his wrists in tiny bites, do all his feeding for him. Anne watched him take a mouthful of the purple jelly and its tartness surprised and repulsed him. After only a week he was out of the habit of tasting things.
Anne had asked his named-nurse Sandra, a big girl who wore her apron tied too high on her waist, what time opening hours would be finishing tonight. Sandra laughed at her. “Opening hours! Like a shop!” Anne coloured and tried to smile. She was only asking because she would have to catch the store later one. There was nothing to eat in the flat. With the old man gone it had become like a poor person’s flat, with nothing in the fridge and no one willing to phone up delivery services or takeaways to bring them mobile banquets in cardboard packages on the back of motorcycles. “Banquet for six, sir!” These last few weeks Pat had developed a passion for home-delivered Chinese food. He said he liked it because it never took much chewing or digesting. He wouldn’t be getting anything like that in the Infirmary, not sticky spicy ribs or duck in plum sauce. He seemed to be lapping up the attention, though, now that he was on the post-operative ward. The nurse who had seen to him on the previous ward kept on dropping by to see how he was keeping.
They had opened him up and looked around inside for over an hour. His skin was tent-pegged open. Afterwards the surgeon had told Pat and Anne that they had stapled him back together—thirteen aluminium staples—without touching a thing inside. He was sent back to the world like a wrong delivery. They were going to try other methods, the surgeon said.
Anne hated seeing him treated the same as everyone else. When the elderly woman volunteer with the too-even teeth came cackling round with her bread trolley, Anne thought that Pat would be getting steaming, soft rolls from a local bakery. Instead the woman took a slice of brown from a plastic bag and wrapped it in a paper napkin for him. He’s a millionaire! Anne wanted to shout. He doesn’t want your rotten bread.
What had Anne brought him? Flowers once or twice, then the horrible mistake, the first time she visited, of unloading a bagful of sweets on his bed: Rolos, Polos, Curly-Wurlies. They’d been stashed away in a drawer because he couldn’t eat them and he pulled them out for his other, hungry visitors. She’d even brought him an early Christmas Selection Box.
Maybe, she thought, I can pop by Tesco Metro tonight, if I get out early enough. Get a few essentials. She thought of buying Chinese cook-in sauces and spring rolls, giving the kids a treat, so they could eat like they did when Pat was home.
After a while she felt out of place in the café. Her tatty yellow coat was attracting attention from the staff, as was the bag of sharp green cuttings the named-nurse had pruned expertly from the flowers Anne had brought, insisting that they be taken home and planted, to come up good as new next year.
Everyone else in the café was young, good-looking, affluent. Anne felt like an old sheep sat there in her good winter coat. She went back to the Infirmary, determined to ask someone in charge how long before he could come home to wait for their so-called other methods.
“He’s had a mishap,” the nurse, Sandra, told Anne when she returned to the ward. There was no sign of Pat, but she could see the tell-tale snail-trail that went from the side ward to the patient toilet. She had dodged it on the way in and she came hoping that it wasn’t Pat’s. The shit was runny and dark and it smelled like old people’s shit, like something held too long in the body. Years ago Anne had worked in an old people’s Home, just menial business, and this brought it all flooding back.
Very clearly the thought came to her, as she watched the nurse set to work cleaning up the mess, that she was going to lose Pat all over again.
Because she kept thinking this, and because he, scrubbed and wearing crisp new pyjamas, felt abashed after his accident, they took a while finding things to say to each other in this session.
At last she said, “Colin seems to have found some new friends. We don’t see a lot of him in the flat.”
“Good,” said Pat. “He’ll need new friends.”
“Wendy hasn’t seen that boy again. She’s moping about a lot. That Belinda woman depressed her. She depresses me. But Wendy won’t tell her to keep away.”
“Belinda’s heart is in the right place.”
“Did you hear that she thinks the aliens are after her?”
Pat said tiredly, “I heard something like that. It’s good she’s got an interest.”
Aunty Anne rolled her eyes. “That brother of hers is always on about outer space as well. They’re both cracked.”
Pat smiled. “Simon told me that his sister is convinced that he isn’t himself. She’s accused him a couple of times of being a replacement for the old Captain Simon.”
“See? I wouldn’t want to live alone with her.”
“She’s harmless,” Pat grimaced, wanting to slide a little further down the bed. His wife flapped around him as he eased himself painfully into place. “God, that hurts when I move. I asked Simon if Belinda could be right. Do you know what he said?”
Anne shook her head.
“He said, ‘Pat, bugger knows if I’ve been replaced. You’d think I’d be the first to know, wouldn’t you? But Belinda reckons she’s right. She thinks I’m trying so hard to be the real me that I’ve convinced even myself.’ That’s what he said.”
Anne shuddered. “That kind of talk gives me the creeps, I must say.”
“It fits, though, doesn’t it? Do you feel like the same person you’ve always been? I’m not sure I do. I think I’ve got a memory of always being the same, but it takes very little thinking to put doubts into my head.”
“That’s just change. That’s growing old.” She was impatient suddenly. “And anyway, there’s more changes happen to a woman in a woman’s life than happen in a man’s. Captain Simon should shut his trap. He knows nothing.”
Pat said thoughtfully, “Changes go on inside all of us.”
When their time was up she found that it was raining, at first softly, soothingly, then with increasing violence. The plastic bag full of cuttings rattled at her side all the way to Tesco Metro. In an impulse she threw it in the bin outside the shop, neatly turning on her heel and ignoring the Big Issue man by the automatic doors.
She had worked nights, mostly, in that old people’s Home. It made her feel much more vital than she usually was, bustling around the old dears, fetching round the trolley, doling out their greens and their gravy. The night Pat had spent on the High Dependency Ward, following his operation, she had sat with him for hours, and the air of urgent efficiency, the sudden bursts of activity amongst the nurses, the smells and the groans, brought it all back to her. You saw everything, were spared nothing. You saw what people came down to. Their brute, basic functions.
An odd memory: one that made her chuckle, but wasn’t funny really. Of taking an old woman to the toilet. A blind old woman who wore six pairs of knickers. Somehow she’d smuggled extra layers on and Anne had knelt before her, tugging down pair after pair. The last pair refused to budge and Anne tugged and tugged until she realised that she was yanking at the poor thing’s rough old skin.
And Sam, the porter, who’d loved her and taken her out a few times after their shifts ended. Her first and only infidelity. He was Irish and red-headed and she loved his creamy skin. She could picture being back in his Ford Capri in the woods somewhere out of town. He told her the
story, in his slow, lugubrious voice, of his grandfather that worked in the steelworks, who’d fallen into the vat of molten steel. He’d been messing on with his mates and next minute he was gone, sucked down inside the vat. All they found afterwards was his wedding ring. The rest had been boiled away, adulterating the steel. Sam the porter used this story to tell Anne to go back to her husband and her little boy. She needn’t be spending her time in the woods with the likes of him.
She had almost put that whole episode out of her mind. Wheeling her trolley round Tesco’s through the late night rush, it all came back. Pat was of an age and condition to be in that old folk’s home now. Did that mean she was too? When had that happened to her? She went to look at the hair dyes. Maybe blonde again. She didn’t have to age gracefully. She’d be getting no grandkids. That was a blessing. Our Lindsey never had to worry about getting that old. She was out like a light in a couple of months. Anne found herself crying in the haircare aisle.
Then Belinda was there, pushing a trolley and her friend Astrid in her wheelchair.
“Jesus God, what’s the matter?” said Astrid, though Anne barely knew the woman.
“Come with us, doll,” Belinda said. “We’re getting a taxi down to the Royal Circus. We know your man’s sick. You needn’t be out shopping when…”
Anne shrugged her off. “He isn’t my man anymore.”
They drew back from her.
“I’m sorry,” Anne heard herself say. “I will share that taxi, if you don’t mind. Today’s just taken it right out of me.”
By the time they led her through the checkouts Belinda had brightened up. “You’ve no need of buying groceries, Anne. I’m cooking in your kitchen this evening.”
Anne eyed her blearily. “Pardon?”
“I’m laying on a special banquet. You’ve got a new visitor today. My young man is coming to stay.”
Astrid, loading groceries, raised her eyebrows. “Jesus God,” she said.
TWENTY-THREE
Am I ready for new people, new things? Timon wondered. Perhaps he had been too rash, deciding to come to Edinburgh. But he was sick of imagining things, dreaming up what Wendy would be like by now. He was sick of the vagueness with which he pictured Colin and Uncle Pat. And Belinda, of course, though her photo had gone part of the way to solving that mystery.
She was gorgeous. Or had been. The photo seemed to be an old one, a sun-faded Polaroid. He took it out of his book, where it was marking his page. He should be prepared to find a Belinda a little older than this. The face in the photo was flawless, framed by two dark wings of hair. She smiled and held out a brimming cocktail, the umbrella teetering at the glass’s edge.
He watched the slow hills of the borders slide past and tried to let the train’s urgent noise drum his apprehension down.
Of course I’m ready to come up against the new, he thought. There’s nothing left for me in Blackpool. Shit job, no friends. Even Mandy, far away in Lancaster, apparently madly gestating her foetus, had fallen out of touch.
I like new things. I never get nervous.
His butterflies, then, were all from love.
I’m a naïve receptor, he chanted to himself. I soak it all up.
Since Newcastle he had been sitting opposite a couple from the States. The man was almost inactive, staring ahead through shades, wearing a baseball cap, feeding himself yoghurt. He kept wanting to eat things and his wife had a handbag full of chocolates. She confided in Timon that the chocolates in America were bigger. In America, everything was bigger. “When I first left Scotland,” she said, “when I first left my birthplace and went to the States, I craved Cadbury’s. And yet now I’m back it’s the other way round.” She pronounced the names of exotic-sounding American sweets and Timon smiled. Her accent was hybridized. She didn’t know where she wanted to be. She gasped out excitedly at every new view, and pulled on her husband’s arm, calling him ‘Ho-nee’.
Everything excited her: finding the missing teaspoon in her bag, the kind woman across the aisle offering to fetch coffee for them, seeing landmarks on the north coast that she recognised. “Is this Berwick-upon-Tweed? Ho-nee, this is a lovely place where I visited with my grandma, by the ocean. That is the ocean, isn’t it?” She waved her hands, scattering sweet papers. “No, it’s the sea! The German sea!”
The old man asked if it wasn’t the Pacific Ocean. Then he fretted that the kind girl bringing them coffee wouldn’t manage, and would trip up on the way back. His wife said, “She’ll have some kind of tray to bring them on. You’ll see, ho-nee.”
Timon wanted to talk to them some more, but he felt sick with nerves. They were old people and he thought he should get some practice in, talking with old people, since that seemed to be who Wendy was hanging round with these days.
He stared at the woman’s turquoise knitted top and his heart went out to her. Beside her the old man looked affluent and better-dressed. An exercise book came out of the woman’s bag and she slid it under the old man’s nose. “This is our joint journal,” she told Timon. “It’s your turn to write something, ho-nee.”
He waved her away. She persisted, showing him a page of notes. “Did you like what I wrote, ho-nee?”
“I didn’t have time to read it in depth,” he said stiffly. “But it made sense. It was all right.”
“I want to get it down. So we can entertain ourselves later, ho-nee, with all the things we’d usually forget. Like a souvenir. I wanted to write down about that place we visited. About those girls we saw, ho-nee. About the unusualness of the way they were dressed.”
The old man sighed.
They were quiet until the train reached Waverley Station. When the crowd surged up to the window and everyone on board started making for the exits, she flew into a panic again, getting all their things together. Timon helped them, said goodbye, and hoisted his backpack down off the rack. He hated leaving them behind. He wanted to hear what the old American said to his wife when they were alone together.
Then he was on the pale platform, under the dirty, translucent ceiling of the station.
John Menzies, Wendy had told him. We’ll meet you outside the paper stand. Timon breezed along in the crowd, as strangers greeted each other, sought out porters, lit cigarettes. He felt buoyant and wanted to explore.
Wendy’s hair was different, much shorter, and stiff with wax. She was in a purple t-shirt of some velvety material. She was even wearing a dark lipstick. She ran up and almost knocked him over. They clutched each other and it was some moments before Timon saw Colin standing there awkwardly, grinning. He was dressed almost the same as Wendy, both of them too lightly for winter. And yet the air here seemed quite mild.
“Look at you!” Wendy gabbled. “You look gorgeous!”
Timon shrugged, embarrassed.
“Colin, take his bag…”
“I can take it,” Timon protested. Colin looked far too skinny to pick it up. “Where are we going?”
Wendy looked shifty. “We can’t go straight to the flat. They’re cooking and getting ready for you.”
“For me?”
“Belinda’s cooking something special.”
“Is she?”
Wendy took his arm. “So we have to keep out of the way for a couple of hours. Come on. Let’s get a cab to the Scarlet Empress. Get a few pints down us first.”
Timon laughed. “You mean you won’t make me drink martini and liqueurs and god-knows-what flavour vodka anymore?”
“Oh no,” she grinned. “Those days are gone.”
Then, with practiced ease, she got them a cab.
On the way into town Colin had asked his cousin, “Will I fall in love with him?”
“I hope not,” she said. “There’s far too much of that going on.”
“I’m always falling for straight blokes.”
She wondered if he had his sights on David from the record shop. “Timon doesn’t really pay attention to what people think of him. He thinks he’s invisible.”
“He
’s interested in what Belinda thinks.”
“That’s what worries me about this.”
“And Belinda’s got herself all worked up. She’s frazzled about getting the roast potatoes done. And doing the Yorkshire puddings right. She thinks he’ll like them. Belinda seems to think Blackpool is in Yorkshire.”
Wendy thought Colin was being cruel. He was going to enjoy this.
“He’ll write about us, won’t he?” said Colin as they crossed Princess Street, by the great black tower of the Scott memorial. He was making Wendy jittery with his questions.
“Not if I ask him not to.”
“He’ll try, then?”
“Timon writes about everything. He’s obsessed.”
“And you’re still his best mate?”
“He never lets me see what he’s written. I’m not sure I’d want to read what he’s put about me.”
“If he ever mentions me, I’ll want to see it.”
Wendy looked at him. “You’d love someone to write about you, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d find it very flattering, whatever it was. It’s a great compliment.”
“You’ll have to get yourself noticed then,” said Wendy.
Then they were caught up in the flurry of the arriving train. To her Timon looked the same as ever. Blithe bordering on cocky, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Once she’d asked him how he managed to look so composed. He said he hummed little tune to himself, inside his head. A constant soundtrack to everything he observed. That sounded mad to her. But it explained the way he was distant sometimes.
The cab they took got stuck in the traffic round George Street.
“You look immaculate,” Wendy told her visitor. “How is it that when I travel on a train, I come off at the other end looking like a bag of shite?”
He laughed and shrugged. He seemed shy with her. She wondered if that had anything to do with his recent effusions of apparent love. He was trying to talk to Colin.
“You’re not Scottish though, are you?”