Where do I begin
to tell the story of
how great a love
can be
the same love story
that is older than the sea
the same love story
of the love he brings to me
Where do I start?
The border of Scotland was marked now, with an enormous archway painted tartan green and red. Katy asked, was it meant to look like a giant in a kilt straddling the mainline?
Bands of bagpipers played at the smaller stations past Berwick-upon-Tweed. They didn’t want you forgetting that you were in a different country now. That was something else Timon was in trouble for, besides his seven years late manuscript: his work visa for Scotland was out of date and he was, to all intents and purposes, a fugitive in Edinburgh, making a dangerous show of himself by getting his face on the news.
“What’s Mandy’s new book like?”
Katy startled me out of it. She was reading Me in the Monster Museum and we must have looked like proper Mandy fans. “Is this really you in this one? The younger sister?”
“No, I said. “And this one is confusing. It’s like eating ten bags of crisps all at once.”
“Is she still taking risks?”
Yes she was. Not necessarily at the level of language. Her book seemed to be about an errant husband who lives in Greenwich, who knows he is orphaned, and in his mid-thirties decides to seek out his birth mother. All the while he is falling out of love with his young wife, who he previously thought he adored. He takes up with all kinds of women, secretly, and tries out the different types. Luckily, Mandy’s characterisation was off, the characters were none of them very distinct and there was no one I could recognise in there. Relief.
The orphaning and birth-mothering business bothered me. Now Mandy knew about Joshua’s disinterest in researching his birth-mother. I had told her once that we had talked it through, and he had even made the preliminary moves towards tracking her down. He got in touch with the adoption agency, all the while unsure, feeling—I think—bullied by me. He was ready to pull out when he decided that he’d gone far enough. I’d talked to him about this, thinking that his disinterest was maybe something do with the despondent moods Josh sometimes fell into. He needed a mother, I thought. I wasn’t going to be it. It disturbed me that neither he nor Katy had a natural mother, but he wouldn’t be drawn on the subject of Katy’s mother.
So he had the interview and I went with him. He shook and gave mumbled responses to the woman who handed him a thick, ancient file of papers. They were his, she said, his birthright and it was up to him, whatever he chose to do now.
We took the file home, sealed up in an envelope and didn’t say a word about it. Josh put it away in his desk. Opening the file would put things in train. He would know where she was then, her name, her last known address. Even letters from her, addressed to him in a name he didn’t know. The woman from the agency said his birth-mother had been writing to him year after year.
Joshua cried and wouldn’t open the file. It would lie on his desk for years. So long as she was there, under the paperclips, the rubber bands and the dried out pens, he knew where she was. Maybe, he thought, he would let her wait for him, for a change. Maybe he just didn’t want to know. The night after we’d picked up the file he wept himself dry and came to bed and wanted to fuck me his favourite way, peering right into my face and licking my ears. He reared all the way up, towering over me, his fine scarred chest and knobbly collarbone all blue in the early light. He rammed into me in tight little squeezes and when we woke our thighs hurt from gripping each other and staying open to each other so long.
In Mandy’s book the man had the file unopened in his desk and, when he hit problems with his young wife, he decided to open it and find out at last. And he couldn’t talk to his young wife about it, she had become so distant. Instead he talked to her sister, somewhat older and much more beautiful. He opened the file with the sister there, and they learned together. There was a name and an address that was fifteen years old. Then he fucked the sister because that was the kind of intimacy they had drawn up between them. Only they two knew what was in the file and, reading it together, there was nothing for them to do but seek consolation in each other. Consolation with her thighs around his waist, his tongue in her ears.
“Wendy,” said Katy. “You look white.”
I closed Mandy’s new book.
“It’s all right,” I said. I put it back in my bag with the other papers and things for Timon.
It couldn’t all be true. It couldn’t be really, because I knew for a fact that Josh had never opened his file. It had stayed in his desk all this time and he had never taken it round anyone’s house, let alone Mandy’s, to crack apart the yellowed tape. It was all in Mandy’s head.
I knew because I had checked the envelope that morning. I had the sealed envelope in my bad now, on the way to Edinburgh. It had never been touched. Joshua had learned nothing yet. I was going to do his learning for him.
In Scotland we skirted the blue coasts and cliffs, the straggling resorts. We skimmed under the busy arms and walkways of a colossal nuclear power station. Then, estates and corporations, football grounds and multiplexes. Finally, Edinburgh again.
FORTY
They had done all these things in Edinburgh in my years away, like
