“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 back 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
