Timon looked guilty. He thought he and Belinda had caused the deaths. You couldn’t get it through to him that there’ll always be people to hang their suffering and needs on something you’ve done. They used you, Timon, I tried to say. He wouldn’t have it. He drove us back to Edinburgh a couple of days later, once all the circus around the cult had died down. We had to answer questions. Timon was conspicuous, was known to the media and the police, but they also knew the reason he was in Argyle. His relative fame protected him. He was treated carefully, as the surviving partner of a woman worshipped by a suicide cult. We were given counselling, emergency support talks in the lounge at the back of the hotel. I couldn’t say much about it really, and I don’t suppose Katy or Astrid did either. They had seen less than we had.
All the sombre way back to Edinburgh, I wondered about the Professor. He thought he was protecting his church, his herd. In the videotapes they had made in their London headquarters—and sent, in advance, to the BBC and ITN—you could see his love for his people, how they believed they were going on to something better. While we stayed on in Argyle the tapes were broadcast, full of dire warnings of what they intended to do to themselves. The members looked certain and delirious with anticipation. Of one last rabble-rousing festival and then… off with the visitors. They were getting what they wanted. They knew the non-church world would never approve or understand. They sent messages explaining to their individual families, and those people had to watch their children changed, visionary, thinner, posthumous on the nine o’clock news, days after the event, saying that they were happy and sure.
The Professor loved his herd. You could see that much. And he was protecting them in the only way he could think of.
Since all my friends were split up by then and living in different cities, many of the fantasies we spun out when we talked on the phone was that we could all get together and stay that way, just for a while. Deadlines would come up, events for us to gather round. My wedding had been one and we seemed nearly complete then. The century’s end was another: one of those turning points you wouldn’t want to go through without seeing everyone, like it’s your last day on earth. But that New Year, and all the ones since, have seen everyone in separate places they wanted to be.
The Professor got all of his people together.
He managed it, for one final bash.
At school—I must have been thirteen—we had a kindly biology teacher who was coming up for retirement, but he hadn’t lost the knack of talking to people our age. Nothing creepy or too pally in the way he went on with us. He was a smiling, sandy-coloured man and he pulled no punches, spared us no silly jokes when he told us, as he had to that year, all the facts of life. When he said about crabs ‘in your hair down below’ and about your monthly periods and the way you might feel, there was always this very proper sympathy coming from him. He died and there was a special assembly and lots of us cried. We didn’t know him well, but it seemed like we had.
Once he’d done some elementary physics with us. He made one girl hold my upper arm in front of the whole class. “Now, what do you think,” he asked us, “if she kept hold of Wendy’s arm like that for a thousand years, would her arm wear away eventually? Or…” and he instructed the girl to rub my arm gently in one spot, like she was swabbing me for an injection. “Would it wear away in less than a thousand years like this?”
I always thought of that lesson in friction when Josh held me in one of his doggy hugs and when he decided it was time to break apart he would rub my upper arms briskly as a signal. Usually it was me pulling away first, wriggling and impatient. But the time he rubbed my arms I thought: in less than a thousand years he’ll wear me down to nothing, and then I won’t have to look after everyone.
So it was true that if you held on tight to someone and didn’t move at all, they lasted longer.
Now I knew that wasn’t true, but my implacable thirteen year old self would still occasionally remind me.
We said goodbye to Timon and Astrid at Waverley station and we were bound for London again. I waved at Timon, who’d held still inside of me, as if friction was the last thing he’d wanted to cause.
Within a year Timon published his book at last, a slim, narrow, rewritten hardback with photographs, which sold shitloads. It sold on the back of the cultists’ suicides and there were rumours that Timon had sorted the whole thing. The whole kit-kaboodle, said Aunty Anne, who turned out to be one of the murmurers . She read the book and thought it was disgusting. In this version of the book Timon made heavier use of the letters that had flown between Belinda and himself before their first meeting. He admitted to me later that they were there to fill up space.
“And now everyone thinks they know Belinda,” he said. “They can’t see the difference between knowing someone in the flesh, and having read about them.”
I thought
