[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man Page 4

  She swore she wouldn’t leave till all the coins were gone. Her rainy day money pissed away in the dark before dawn. Besides the money, all she had at home were her clothes, which she could cram down into two bin liners. Without the weight of all her capital she’d be free and easy to go, cleared for take-off.

  Still she kept winning on the bandits, buying her more shining time in the gambling hall. A boy stood at the next machine, working through his own hoard of five pences. She could see him watch her working on hers. He pulled his bandit’s arm with more deliberate concentration, as if that could have any effect and he actually did all the holding and nudging and winking you were meant to do. He was filling up his own silver tray with jackpot after jackpot. Mandy was glancing across to him as much as he glanced at her. She took in his belted raincoat, real leather, and his jeans, tight and faded that way, along the proper contours of his crotch. A sexy relief map in shades of blue.

  Cherries Cherries Cherries.

  “That’s you won again,” the sexy boy told her.

  “I always fucking win,” she snapped.

  And Wendy wanted to get out of the flat as well. It had made her claustrophobic before, but her father’s visit actually tainted the place. It wasn’t even a nice place to go at the end of the night.

  She had looked at her father and thought, everything could have been so different, if only you’d wanted it. Their lives could have been any way—better, worse, just different—if his influence had been there. Their mother had influence, but she was inevitable, unquestionable, she was their one constant. He was useless, but he was theirs, and the potential he had for disrupting them made Wendy feel sick. Of course there was no question of her going with him, his new wife and their brats when whatever happened to Mam happened. And that could be years away, anyway.

  She had looked at those two babies asleep on her friend Timon’s lap and thought: that’s a brother and a sister I had and never knew. She didn’t feel related. She felt nothing. A twinge of softness at the sight of babies, the sight of babies nestling onto that man who had moved her of late, but that was all. And that was a proper lesson, too. Someone can have your blood and same heart, their nerves can spring from the same source as yours and you need never know. Alarm bells needn’t ring. She thought, relations of every sort are chance.

  In the kitchen Mandy took me aside. “You’re too young to have a boyfriend.”

  “That’s not what he is.”

  “Maybe that’s not what you’re calling it, but don’t kid yourself. You just be careful.”

  “Mandy, I’m not daft. And he is just my friend.”

  Mandy looked tired. “If Mam was herself, she’d be telling you things. Have you got all your facts straight?”

  “I’m already on the pill for my period. So even if I was...”

  “He could get himself locked up if anyone heard he was touching you.”

  “No he couldn’t and anyway...he’s not!”

  “Our kid. Look at you.”

  I was embarrassed now.

  I went into the living room, where Valley of the Gwangi was playing. My mother hooted with laughter, raucous as she could manage. She wanted her daughters to see she was keeping her spirits up. “All right, love?”

  I nodded, sitting down with her, pulling a corner of the blue duvet over my own knees. I stared at cowboys flinging lassos at a twitchy, animated Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  Mam said, “Your Aunty Anne’s coming.”

  Se lay on the beach with Timon. It was dark, so hopefully no one would see when they walked into town with damp sand caked all down their backs. And she’d thrown herself down without a thought for dog dirt.

  Timon said, “I didn’t know you had any family in Edinburgh.”

  “Aunty Anne’s my mam’s sister,” Wendy said. “I haven’t seen her since I was a baby. She came to my christening and gave Mandy and Linda a budgie in a cardboard box with holes poked in. She didn’t want them to feel left out on my big day. Man said it was a daft present because it cost her a fortune to buy a cage to put it in and then the bird karked it anyway.”

  Timon sighed, watching the clouds slide off the moon. Soon Wendy had exhausted the subject of Aunty Anne’s coming visit. Neither of them could see the sense in it at all. The woman was a stranger to all of them.

  Wendy said, “Mandy asked if I was being sensible...with you.”

  Timon turned to look at her. He had sand in his hair and it looked like soft brown sugar for coffee. “Like how?”

  “She said you could get locked up if you touched me.”

  He smiled. “Just as well I don’t want to touch you, then.”

  “You don’t?”

  “God, no. Well. Yes, I do, I just...oh, you know, Wendy. You’re just a young lass and all.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Legal, anyway.”

  “You’re not much older.”

  “It’s all the difference.”

  She turned away. They listened to the slow noise of the sea. “I wish I hadn’t said anything now.”

  “It’s best not said.” He waited a bit. “Look, Wendy. Give yourself time.”

  “I think things are going to change. I think it’s all going to be different.”

  “Don’t be in a hurry to grow up.”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t want to grow up fast,” she said. “At least then you have a bit of power over your life. You don’t have to be scared of the future not being your own.”

  “You can feel like that at any time, hon.”

  “If I was grown up now, I could do things right.”

  Timon laughed at her and she thought how it took skill to laugh at someone and still make them feel all right.

  FOUR

  All the sisters were sent to welcome Aunty Anne off the coach. It was due to arrive on the seafront late in the afternoon. A dull, warm, May afternoon and the sky was bleeding into the sea. The rocks on the shore looked to Wendy like the expensive, irregular cubes of brown sugar they put out on tables in the better sort of cafes. She watched Mandy resting against the metal rails, stretching her long, brown arms in the sun. She looked unimpressed with the whole idea of their aunt’s visit. Linda, on the other hand, was excited.

  “It’s here, she’s here,” Linda cried, when the coach came round the corner. It eased itself onto the Golden Mile, a full half hour late. “They’ll be getting cooked on board that. It’s got tinted windows.” Linda made herself ready to help their aunt down.

  The coach had brought her across the Pennines and the moors. It had chugged and twisted through endless country lanes all the way from the North Sea. For the third time Linda said that their aunt would have looked at two different seas that very same day.

  Then the doors flew open and they caught their first proper glimpse of Aunty Anne. First they saw a wild headful of white hair, standing almost on end, as she allowed herself to be helped down the steps by the driver. Gregor, his badge said, in his brown nylon suit and his carefully brushed toupee.

  She was fatter and older than their mother. But, when they caught their first full look at her, all three of them thought that Aunty Anne had been made up to look like a comedy version of the woman their mother had been. A gabbling giant of a woman, clutching the sides of her expansive, too-hot coat and laughing at herself as she almost slipped on the coach steps, and seeing her nieces for the first time in ten years. “‘Oh, let’s see my lovely girls. These are my beautiful nieces!”

  Wendy could hear Mandy squirm with embarrassment, hoping no one she knew would come past, or at all, while Aunty Anne was with them.

  She treated her legs like the most precious things she owned. “I may never have been much to look at,” she would say, and then hoist up her skirts a little to show off her tan tights. “But look at these! I’ve been blessed with legs!” She went to the old-time dancing and it was this that had kept her in trim.

  They found that Aunty Anne would repeat this line about her legs as a kind of nervous tic.
Whenever a gap in the conversation needed filling, she’d slide up her skirt and do a modest high kick. “Look at this!” And, “If I really tried, I bet I could kick as high as my head!” And then she would have a go, right there in the living room, with their mother lying down on the settee, watching on.

  That first afternoon of the visit, Aunty Anne looked solemnly at her younger sister. “I’ve still got the legs of a girl!” said Anne, surprising them all. They couldn’t see their mother’s legs because of the duvet. Fifteen to One was on the telly, a ruthless, hectic quiz. Their mother asked them to turn the sound down.

  “She always had incredible legs, your Aunty Anne. Mine were two sticks next to hers. You ask her nicely, she’ll do the splits for you.”

  None of them rushed to ask.

  “I couldn’t anymore,” laughed Aunty Anne. She tried to get them all laughing, and their mother tried, but they couldn’t.

  They were worn down by the heat of the afternoon. It was cooling now, but the heat seemed to stand in the room. Briskly, Aunty Anne said, “And what are we going to eat tonight?”

  Their mother shouted after her, as she went to take over in the kitchen: “It’s a bit of a mess in there. We haven’t got any of the right things in...”

  On their way up to the flat, Aunty Anne had lagged behind as the girls went up with her cases. She stared at the flaky paint of the stairwell, the broken lights. “This is where our Lindsey’s ended up,” she said, then looked shamed because the words carried up the stairwell, so they all heard her. Someone had dropped shampoo down the stone stairs, and it oozed and spread in the heat, making the stairs smell of pine needles and soap. “It must have spilled out of someone’s shopping bags,” said Linda cheerily. “Usually it smells of piddle down here.”

  That first night their aunt did them a fry-up, one of her

  specialties, she told Mandy, who pulled a face. Linda trooped out to the corner shop for the things they needed and their aunt acted shocked by the prices.

  “That’s what you get when you live in a holiday resort!” She turned away from the cooker, to smile at Wendy, who found that she’d been staring. “Do you feel like you’re always on holiday?” asked her aunt.

  “No,” said Wendy, who’d never until that moment thought of living anywhere other than Blackpool.

  She bought me a silver cardboard box filled with chocolate serpents. The box was tied with green ribbon, springing open at the slightest touch as it sat on the cool white table top. Aunty Anne rapped her knuckles on the cafe table. “Real marble. That’s quality that, Wendy.”

  She had brought me out alone for afternoon tea. I went expecting it to be something of a ceremony, but I wasn’t sure why I’d been singled out. She sat me down and presented this box of minty chocolate serpents. We peeled them free of foil and crunched them up, laughing, as we waited for the waitress. Aunty Anne had smudges of milk chocolate round her mouth and I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to tell her. This was three days into her visit and she was still new.

  Already, though, she had dyed her hair a stark, matte black. Same wild style, now a solid black. Our mother shook her head. “She never could make up her mind about things like hair.” Mam had a lot of patience with her sister, maybe because she hadn’t seen much of her over the years.

  One night I heard them talking late. My sisters and I were eating in the kitchen and Timon was my guest. I sat proudly beside him as he wolfed down hot sausage sandwiches. We ate them with a lot of pepper and his eyes moistened when he realised, and Mandy watched him like a hawk for signs of weakness. But he swallowed peppery sausage down without exclaiming or sneezing. Mandy and Linda were drinking him in, all the while.

  Mam and Aunty Anne were supposed to be watching Peter Cushing in The Beast Must Die, but they were talking in quiet, earnest voices. I could hear them through the serving hatch, which we never closed.

  “I found it hard enough bringing just one up,” Aunty Anne was saying. “Though Colin was a worry. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, seeing to three bairns, all by yourself.”

  Mam didn’t seem to want to talk about it. “You just get on with it, don’t you?”

  “I wish I’d come through more to see you, to help out.”

  Mam wasn’t a great one for accepting help though. She was pleased to see her sister on this visit, but every time Aunty Anne did something—swooshing around the living room with the hoover, clattering dishes in the sink, or ironing in front of the telly—our mother’s eyes would burn into her back with envy and resentment.

  Aunty Anne said, “We haven’t talked about this properly, but afterwards...I’ll sort everything out.”

  Mam waved her hand, putting this conversation off.

  Aunty Anne protested, “But we never talk about important things, not until it’s too late. Our family’s always been the same.”

  “I’m tired, Anne.”

  “I’m just saying...”

  “Leave it for now. Not much needs sorting, anyway. I’ve not got much to pick over.”

  “There’s the girls.”

  A pause. I was glad my sisters were busy talking with Timon. I was glad I was the only one listening to this.

  Our mother said, “Only Wendy needs seeing to. Only she needs your help, Anne. The others are old enough now.”

  “She’s just a baby,” said our Aunt.

  And after the silver, chocolate serpents, eaten in defiance of the signs that told us we should not consume our own foods on the premises, we had cinnamon toast, which came in long, ginger fingers, sparkling with crusted, caramelised sugar. Aunty Anne bit into a finger and wrinkled up her eyes with pleasure.

  “We used to come here every Saturday morning, me and your mother,” she said. “When we were girls we thought cinnamon toast was the best thing in the world. We thought it was very continental.”

  I tried to see our mother and aunt in this worn, still luxurious cafe. I imagined them as two giggling girls, already big for their ages, swooning over their Saturday elevenses. I thought she must have been romanticizing: putting the girls they had been into a more genteel era. They seemed a million miles from Mandy, Linda and I, trolling up and down the Golden Mile and nipping in for chips with Timon.

  “You’re very like your mam at that age,” Aunty Anne told me, and I nodded and smiled, knowing very well that I was nothing like her.

  I was in my best going-out frock for that afternoon. It was Mandy’s. I’d wriggled into it, knowing this was an occasion of sorts and, true enough, Aunty Anne had just finished pouring the tea with an elaborate flourish of the dainty, impractical strainer when she started to tell me All About Herself.

  With the glorious indiscretion I was to get used to, she launched directly into the tale of how she and her husband, my Uncle Pat, had stopped loving each other.

  I was agog.

  Aunty Anne:

  That’s how simple it was. I stopped loving him.

  One day I was making him breakfast,

  his and our son’s,

  and all of a sudden, that was it.

  Bang and Pow, like Batman, or the Annunciation.

  I didn’t have to stay.

  The truth was as clear as the toaster before me.

  The toaster you had to whizz bread through

  twice, because it never got hot enough.

  I stopped loving him and it had gone overnight, like germs

  sometimes do.

  Our son was grown up by then, and there was no reason to stay for his sake. I spread the toast with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and I laid out jars of marmalade, plum jam, lime jam, blackcurrant. The sun came through them bright and stickily and I started to dare myself:

  Leave, leave, leave,

  You don’t love him anymore,

  You could go this afternoon,

  After the gasman’s been this morning and had a look at your meter.

  My heart set up a mad tattoo.

  I could go.

  Colin, our
son, was ill, of course, and nothing would change that.

  Did I tell you he was ill, Wendy? We don’t

  really talk about it.

  It was my biggest staying-or-leaving factor, but

  he would never get better.

  What I did would make no odds.

  Colin came into the kitchen, looking so skinny,

  so helpful. No longer a child

  so did he need me?

  Ask him outright:

  If I walked out this afternoon,

  What would you think of me?

  I day-dreamed him

  saying back, Mother,

  get yourself away,

  If you don’t love him...

  Well, then.

  I had a tingling up and down these legs of mine.

  There was a dance going on somewhere,

  somewhere I didn’t know about yet.

  Someone was picking out a tune

  for me, and I

  had a dancing partner

  I had yet to find.

  I just knew Colin would understand his mother.

  I’ve brought him up a clever,

  sensitive boy, a credit

  to me.

  So this is me. I left my family and Scotland

  behind. I moved to the north of England

  where I snared myself

  a lover—yes!—me!

  Well, look at these legs!

  They’re bound to hook new admirers.

  Here’s a picture of me with my new lover.

  Not much to look at, perhaps.

  Not to a young girl like you.

  I go back, every six months, to see my son,

  They live in the centre of old Edinburgh.

  I’m like Mary Queen of whatsit

  Going back.

  I left and first I told my husband I’d fallen

  out of love,

  He took it on the chin.

  “You were a young girl when I took you on,

  and I was already knocking on.”

  He looked me up and down

  still handsome, proud, my hair

  at that stage,