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
