by Paul Magrs
Wait for him, anyway. The connections are coming up. Serena visiting was the first palpable link with my eventual husband. The next bit of my life. Aunty Anne was engineering it, without even knowing what she was doing. Aunty Anne always called Joshua my fancy man. In her own way she was proud she led me to him, even at the end.
Aunty Anne was as good as her word, which she had given on the sands at Yellow Craigs, and stayed with us all Christmas. I heard her talking on the phone to her man at home in Phoenix Court, Newton Aycliffe. Ralph the man with a mission, the obese Lamb of God. He held services in the living room of his council house because he was too fat to leave it very often. “He’s huge!” Aunty Anne told me gleefully. “He has legs wider than both of mine put together.” She seemed to delight in him. “The Lord made me this shape,” he told her. “I’m fat for the plan.” He was wedged on a Chesterfield settee and often slept there. When Aunty Anne told him she was staying in Edinburgh, he turned out not to be very pleased at all. “I thought you were going out on a mission. I thought it was Scarborough for you this Christmas.”
The phone crackled.
“Oh. But I can’t leave, Ralph. He’s very… near the end. It’s our last chance.”
More crackles.
Later that night Aunty Anne told me that we might be getting an extra Christmas visitor. I thought, not Ralph! Then she said Ralph had rung her a friend of hers, and asked her to keep an eye on Aunty Anne. Ralph sounded odious to me.
So we had our Christmas. Even that game where everyone stands in line and passes a balloon along, person to person, without using their arms. Uncle Pat sat it out, laughing in the corner.
Astrid sang us German carols on Christmas Eve.
Colin took a bunch of us out to the Oyster bar, where we had tequila slammers at midnight, mixing salt, lemon juice and wasted booze on the rough wooden tables.
Aunty Anne wanted dancing, so the furniture was pulled back and Colin produced his treasured records. We danced.
Belinda cooked for us once more.
Captain Simon knocked the tree over, carrying chairs in the hall. He became flustered, picking up shards of burst glass baubles. “Watch your feet!” he shouted at us, on his hands and knees. “Put some slippers on! Watch your feet!” We laughed.
“Jesus God!” said Astrid, wheeling past crossly.
“Watch your feet,” Timon smirked at me.
“Don’t lose your elasticity,” I told him back.
Mandy wasn’t losing her elasticity. It didn’t matter that her
GP had told her, had given her stern warning that if she persisted in performing that particular trick of hers—with the golden bangles in her mouth—she would go all bandy-lipped, loose-lipped, and not be able to talk. There was no sign of that happening to Mandy’s perfect, tensile strength. Her mouth moved with perfect shape: she could hold the shape of any vowel or consonant. She would practise, watching herself. Only, she could open her mouth wider than anybody she knew. She was like one of those tribespeople who put plates in their lips, or rings on their necks and slowly graft themselves into some bizarrely cultured, attenuated form.
Daniel, peering over his yellow-tinted glasses, said her stretchable-but-still-pert mouth was like a snake’s. But he would. Odd, for a man who had read, researched and agreed with so much contemporary feminist theory (and whose subject was the great grand-mammy of many of these theorists) that he could be so blithely Freudian, and sexist in his appraisal of Mandy. Carelessly he called her Snake-Woman, Phallic Mother, a loose-lipped swallower of his manly essence. Well.
Our Mandy kept her lips, her vowel-sounds, her talking itself supple by endless practice. Sotto-voce as she sat on the minibus into town, or walked back across the snowy park, or cleaning the cooker, or cooking their tea, she was muttering to herself. She found her syntax was elastic, too: strong and yielding and it could carry a freight of anything she fancied. She started to mutter and come up with her own strings of words the day she stopped reading. She was building up a corpus of work, only very little of it was written down yet. Only this first story, about our mother, our mother dying on the beach at Blackpool at night, watching the strings of lights on the Golden Mile reiterated in the water.
Mandy was roving over old ground, past events, past history. Her muttering took us all in, turned us over, pulled us into her telling. In the snowy park that led from the river to their housing estate, she walked alone in twilight with her Sainsbury’s bag and let her mutters grow louder. Grand loops of improvised words sent out ahead of her. She allowed herself to shout them, call them out like a bat uses its bursting cries to orient itself in the dark. Mandy, testing her voice, liking what she heard.
His attic room was clean and Spartan and he helped her move boxes of her things in during Christmas week. Daniel wasn’t home to see her go. He was off on his travels, hunting down the living, non-practising writer he told everyone he revered. He wanted to tell her: I have your clue. I know the key to uncover your texts. I have seen the figure in your carpet. Mandy hoped the old thing—if he found her—would send him away with a flea in his ear.
No mystery, no essence, no secret. Mandy wanted to tell her Professor: don’t go making me a mystery. What I am doing is very plain. She began her next story and it was a continuation of her first. But she ravelled it back and began a little earlier. She thought: Where do I begin?
With Timon on the Golden Mile. She thought of Timon, a literate, watching, slant-viewed outsider. In his fish shop, busying himself absent-mindedly, stitching white fish in their hot golden cardigans. Then she thought again and wrote from the viewpoint of a younger sister. Me. She thought about me at sixteen and thinking it was time I saw a little of the world around me. How afraid of that world my imagination made me. My sisters were always fearless, I thought, and I could never understand that. Mandy teased this out of me, making me understand why they seemed so brave and why I didn’t feel like that.
That Christmas her room in the Professor’s house was cold, of course, with no heating, no rugs and the hard, dry snow bashing against the clean windows. Cruel and scheming, the Professor chilled her and forced her out of the room he had claimed was hers and she was forced downstairs, to warm her bare feet in front of his fire and watch the Professor indulge himself. He opened the best of his wine and made her drink and watch him burning books, book after book, on his real fire. It was his secret vice, he said, one that nobody knew about, that he bought and rebought and annotated afresh new books and then incinerated them, when he felt the urge.
That Christmas Mandy watched his fire and licked the wine off her lips.
I went to see my bears at Christmas. I hadn’t been in ages. They were still the same, which I found disappointing, rather than reassuring. Father bear, black bear loomed with his forepaws up in supplication, Grizzly mother shambling beside him, and looking sideways. Various cubs were heaped in colours ranging from burnt umber to ginger: there was even a yellow bear with a curious, simian, old man face. Beside them, in a glass case of his own, the great granddaddy: the recovered skull and chipped skeletal revenants of a cave bear. His jaws were like the front of a Volkswagen Beetle. Timon came with me, eager to see the bears I’d told him about. His Christmas present from Belinda—who was usually so frugal, and timid with her sheaf of credit cards—was a very compact video camera, wit which he’d already been filming us. His batteries weren’t very good, and didn’t last long and after each hour of filming he had to switch himself on to recharge. He whizzed through batteries because he liked to cut very fast from shot to shot, composing these bewildering collages of views. His own cut and paste technique, he told us, delighted, showing us some of the results on the telly on Christmas night. By then we were used to him looking at us through his machine. When he cut and pasted, swiftly pressing STANDY-BY and RECORD, he gave a shrill bleep-bleep. He cut into sentences, so that when we watched ourselves eating Christmas dinner, it was a jumbled and punctuated version we got, our sentences running abruptly into ea
ch other’s.
A cracker with me I want someone to pull a sauce there’s more sauce in gravy is too I fetched out the lumps with a strainer that thing isn’t on me the state of me you shouldn’t you again is it me to say? What do you want to me to for posterity I’ll believe that when I see David, he’s filming you pull my cracker with me put that thing down did you know your red light’s flashing? What does that mean? Anne’s in the hall on the phone to that fat Christian charity after all it’s the time of the year it is some music on carols and we went four times a day ten candles all lit all weathers I love you Timon get my good side trifle and I put the hundreds and thousands on not very well I’m afraid Uncle Pat is asleep Uncle Pat? At the table get that bottle down this end of Aye, to you as well best of the compliments of the season.
Timon filmed the bears for a while. He had decided that he was making a proper film. He put me on my bike, in my blue riding helmet and followed me in the oddly quiet streets of the city when we went to the museum.
It was Boxing Day. Uncle Pat was spending the day in bed. Most of the others were taking it easy, sleeping off the too-much they had eaten the day before. Timon and I were full of energy and we came out to film the bears.
“Your uncle,” he said, taking care for it not to come out on the soundtrack. “He didn’t look too good yesterday, hon.”
“He was exhausted by the end of last night,” I said.
These were all the unsayable things, however. We both knew, and so did the others, that Uncle Pat had been waiting for Christmas, he wanted a nice Christmas and then… where would he go from there? Was it over yet? When did Christmas actually end? Epiphany? Our mam always took the decorations down before New Year. They depressed her, she said, once the real day was over.
We walked back to the Royal Circus. I wheeled my bike. Timon said he and Belinda were having dinner together: their own private Christmas tonight. We kissed goodbye on the landing and I still got the urge to ask him outright: was his first reaction to the sight of Belinda the true one? Had this delight been that complete and concealing nothing? I couldn’t ask, though and I left him, going up the last flight of stairs.
Inside, home again, I met Serena Bell for the first time.
Wendy knew someone different was there because they were playing the piano. It was in the living room, which no one used very much. The room was painted blue and faced the dark side of the flat. The piano’s lid was always down, and had become rather dusty. Wendy had lifted it once, giving the cool, yellowed keys an experimental tinkle. She couldn’t play, of course.
She recalled an instance of Mandy’s bravery, her rashness. A school assembly when Mandy was twelve. For some reason the headmistress was asking who could play, who’d like to come out and entertain us? Who’ll give us a rousing chorus of something? I will, called Mandy, and the whole school, an embarrassed Wendy included, watched her walk down the waxed floor and get up on the stage, where the teachers sat in rows. I can play, Mandy assured them and sat herself at the stiff-backed piano. She paused and then plunged her hands onto the keys, launching into the rowdiest nerve-jangling noise she could produce. And she wouldn’t stop. The headmistress had to pull her away from the stool, and was yelling at her while the notes rushed and rumbled away, subsiding while all the school laughed.
This, however, on Boxing day, was perfect. Schubert.
No one else about, it seemed, except the music. It had that odd timbre on the air, stirring the dust, which meant it was real and not from a record. The records she had most often came home to weren’t Schubert. Usually they were Dusty Springfield or Cilla Black.
She went to see who it was and there was a strange woman in a plain black dress. She had come already in mourning, which set Wendy’s teeth on edge right away. Her hair was neat and gracefully grey, cut in a bob. The woman tilted her head to acknowledge Wendy and show her intense, alert, grey eyes. But she played to the end of the piece, holding Wendy there. Wendy could only stare at the woman’s incredibly long fingers. Wasn’t there a story about a boy with long fingers, and the scissor man who came to trim them down?
When the woman was satisfied she was finished, she sank into herself, then stood and gave Wendy an off-putting smile that went up higher on the left side. She held out one large hand for Wendy to shake.
“I’m Serena Bell,” she said in an English accent, as if it was a name Wendy should already know. “I’m a friend of your aunt’s.”
“Oh. She said you were coming, actually. Where is she?”
“With your uncle. He’s sleeping.”
“She’s sitting beside him?”
“They’ve had the doctor out this morning. Your uncle had a rather tricky time. The doctor tells us there isn’t an awful lot they can do.” She closed the piano lid. “Your aunt is sitting with him till he wakes,” she said again.
Wendy turned to go.
“I don’t think they want you to go dashing in, Wendy.”
“I’m not dashing anywhere.”
“You can see your uncle this evening. It’s been discussed. Why don’t we take this time to become better acquainted?” She lowered her voice. “If this really is your uncle’s final few days, then I gather we may be thrown together rather a lot. So we might as well know each other. Let me make a pot of tea. Your aunt showed me where everything is kept.” She started to lead the way into the hall. Wendy overtook her.
“No. I’ll do it. Where’s Colin?”
“He went out with his friend, before Anne decided to call the doctor. They’ve gone to something called the Scarlet Empress.”
Wendy didn’t want be the one to tell Colin what had been going on. Or to explain this new arrival. “Well, why’s no one phoned the café? Told him to come back?”
“I think the emergency is now over, Wendy. Neither your uncle nor your aunt want a fuss, you know.” She smiled that tight, lopsided grin again. “What lovely pictures they’ve chosen for their hall. Horses. When you come to visit me in London, you’ll see all my pictures. I’m quite a collector, you know. Not that I know anything about them. I’m ignorant, really. I’m not like Joshua, who knows everything about the beautiful things he buys.”
Wendy was frowning. She couldn’t take it all in. “Let’s have that tea,” she said.
That night the kitchen table was littered again with the usual things: used knives, dirty plates and ash trays, Rizla papers, shreds of tobacco, the tall red glasses that Anne had bought the flat for Christmas. And two sky blue bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin.
Serena Bell didn’t drink. While the others topped themselves up and talked, much more placidly than on other nights, she gave the distinct impression of waiting for something. Waiting for everyone to wear themselves out, perhaps, and start behaving properly.
How we must have bored her, Wendy thought later. Serena with her friends in high places, and her lofty thoughts. But she sat with Captain Simon, who told us about scuba diving of all things, and Astrid, who wondered aloud whether one day they would invent something that would enable her to dive like that and see the glories of the deep.
“One day they will,” said Captain Simon. “And a whole new world will open up. You will be the little Sea Maid.”
“Jesus God,” she said, shaking with laughter.
Aunty Anne looked white and didn’t say much.
David drank with us, waiting anxiously on Colin, whose turn it was to sit with his father. I hadn’t taken my turn yet. I was dreading it.
When they heard the news—what news? Was anything really going on? It wasn’t like waiting for a baby to be born. An old man was slipping in and out of consciousness, limboing gently—but when they heard the news at any rate, Belinda and Timon abandoned their romantic Boxing Day dinner for two to sit with us. We needed more chairs. Outside it snowed on the Royal Circus. Timon lit the stove and I found myself surprised again, at how practical he could be when he needed to be.
Oh, anyway, and Serena Bell’s eyes were looking at each of us in turn. You could
n’t help but feel judged. She was coolly inspecting us for faults. We all thought that.
“Are you sure now, Serena,” said Aunty Anne, pulling herself out of her reverie, “that you’ve had enough to eat?”
“Quite sure.”
“It wasn’t very good, I’m afraid. Not really a proper welcome.”
“I am glad of a welcome at all in these times,” said Serena, and Aunty Anne smiled. Anne’s speech was crisper, more exact when she talked to her friend. The way she looked at Serena made you think she was studying her.
“I suppose this is the end of Christmas,” Aunty Anne said at midnight. “There’s no name for the day after Boxing Day, is there?”
TWENTY-NINE
“There is a smell here,” said Serena Bell sharply, and stopped, taking a keen lungful of night air. “A kind of national aroma of Scotland.”
Colin and Wendy waited for her.
“Old smoke and hops and sea, I suppose.” Serena sniffed at the wool of her smart black coat. “When I come here, it soaks into me and when I return to London, it’s still there.”
It was the few quiet days before Hogmanay, and they were taking Serena out to CC Bloom’s for a drink after midnight. Wendy was startled that Serena had accepted their offer, and rushed back to her room to change her outfit. She thought Aunty Anne’s friend must have been used to much fancier company. Colin, though, was taking careful note of how the woman had latched onto Wendy, going everywhere she went, watching her every move and reaction. She was definitely sizing Wendy up.
“I’d like to see you at my age, Wendy,” Serena laughed.