As she stared into his face he started humming again, all by himself, ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’. Penny almost dropped him in surprise. I’ve watched her with those powers of hers: she’s not always sure she’s using them. She set Santa back down on the windowsill.
“Hasn’t he got a creepy-looking face?” I said, and he stopped dead once more. Never to go again.
I was going downtown that afternoon and Penny asked me to take Santa to get him changed for another. I said no — there was no way I’d carry that thing down the town. I said it reminded me of that bloody Chucky, the devil doll in Child’s Play III. I felt guilty, afterwards, about not changing Santa that afternoon, because when Penny took him herself the next day, they had all sold out. Maybe I’d have been in time.
“They were all faulty, probably,” I said, trying to make her feel better.
Penny scowled at me. I thought it was a real shame about her Santa, because when he was glowing, humming tunes, his candle lit up, she said that really cheered her up.
And what has made me feel better recently? What has been my consolation in Edinburgh?
Cameron did, at first. At the end of my first month here. He was around me for a week or two, a very blond boy from just out of town, who claimed to work in computers. He said he packed salads for Marks and Spencer, just part time for pocket money.
In the middle of one of the first nights he came back here, he said, “I think you’re like me. You’re a naturally happy person, aren’t you?” And I could have laughed in his face. I wanted to say, I’m really working at it. Can’t you see how much effort I’m putting in?
I’d met him off the train on Friday night. Waverley Station was mad with rugby fans dashing about drunk. They’d come, like my boy, for the weekend, and they wore tartan hats with fake ginger hair hanging out of the back. Cameron was the last one off the train, his white head bobbing through the crowd towards me. He was in last weekend’s outfit: the cream jeans and, hanging over them, the blue check shirt. Both items were Calvin Klein, he’d told me, and they both cost seventy pounds. Cameron bought all his clothes from Jennes, saving up week by week the money he made putting mayonnaise in the potato salad at the factory.
He came up to me and I thought, This is when I’m happy. When someone’s coming here just for me. He’d phoned me twice that night, making sure I’d come to meet him. Through the week we’d had hour-long chats at lunchtimes. He worked nights; lunchtimes found him alone in the family house and he told me he was sitting in the kitchen naked. He played dance CDs as we talked about nothing in particular. He said we’d dance to all this music when he came on Friday night.
His eyes were so blue. They fixed on me in my long black coat I’d bought cheap for the cooler nights. “Oh no,” he said, swinging by me, “that doesn’t suit you at all.” He passed me a bottle of Stella. He’d opened one for himself and lit a cigarette the moment he’d stepped onto the platform. “Come on then!” he said. “We’re going to yours!”
And that’s what cheers me up now. Someone who will drag me bodily into their nights out.
This is the patisserie in Stockbridge. Everything is painted
yellow and there is a sunflower motif. Look at how dear everything is. The waitress has recommended guava juice.
My new GP down here at the Stockbridge surgery says I’ve got tonsils like nothing on earth, black and ulcerated. I’ve spent a few days in flushes and burning up, waking each morning with my teeth black and my mouth full of fresh blood. The doctor even thinks the thing at the back of my throat is bleeding.
Tactfully he never mentioned my leopard spots. He looked in my mouth, nowhere else.
For days now I’ve been lying down in the afternoon, needing that extra rest. I thought I was just being lazy. I was just making it up. And you think about it and think about it and you can’t remember what normal felt like. But that plunger of blood taken out of my arm this afternoon has set the seal on my having a real ailment. I’ve fretted for days and in the miserable, early hours, I’ve tried to decide what to do. Get myself seen to. Get a doctor.
My guava juice has arrived in a tall clear glass. It looks just like bloody piss.
Someone told me they had sex with a feller and, when they were really going for it, they snapped his cock right back. It bent and sprang back again. He couldn’t touch it for days. The next morning he pissed blood. I’ve been getting that feeling, too, like a kicking in the balls. Spreading up from my swollen left calf muscle, the pain nuzzling at my groin. That horribly swollen leg was something else I didn’t let the doctor look at, or comment on.
Poor Cameron, visiting me this last weekend. I wasn’t at my best or my most inviting. I lay on the settee and shivered and sweated. He held me as we watched videos. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cabaret, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Before he knew me, he would come into town on the train after work each Friday and go straight to the bars, not returning to his family home till Sunday. He was always so sure of going home with someone. I feel he’s been tamed, having him here on the settee, apparently content not to go out at all. As if being in the middle of the town and with me is enough for him.
So we were having less sex, too. On Saturday afternoon I lay under
