“Because,” her Aunt sighed, “because you’re already rich, Wendy. You’re surrounded by people who want to have your youth, your time, your looks…”
“Oh, crap.”
“It’s true. I would call that being rich.”
The washing machine was going into its next cycle. Wendy said, over the noise, “If I got the money I’d get right away from all of you. What would you think of me then?”
Aunty Anne shrugged.
“I’d leave you all. And then I’d find some bloke. I’d spend it all on some bloke who would probably be wrong for me. The first bloke who said he loved me for who I am.”
Aunty Anne was shaking her head.
“And I’d blow that million pounds. I’d chuck it away on the first fancy man that came along.”
“How did you get to be so bitter, Wendy?”
“It’s not bitterness.”
“Sounds it to me.”
“I’ve just listened a lot.”
“You should learn from what other people say, but you shouldn’t let it put you off.”
Wendy got up to go.
“We’ll get you that money, Wendy.”
Anne watched her niece go back to her room.
Then she looked up at the suds sliding down the window of the washer and the wet folds of sheets as they pressed themselves on the glass and pulled away.
Anne hugged the pillow from Pat’s bed to her chest. What she had told Wendy was true. Pat was sleeping restfully now, of his own accord.
Last night she had sat with him after his funny turn. The room still smelled of vomit, even after she had scrubbed at the carpet and stripped down the bed as he slumped on one corner of the mattress. To her, the room seemed tainted by his sickness: the smell was in the air, touching every available object and surface. This whole flat was full of sickness, she thought, watching Pat start at last to fall asleep in his clean bed.
When Anne went out to work in the fleamarket and car boot sales, even though she was immaculate and fit as a fiddle, Anne was sure that others, strangers, could smell and detect that lingering hint of sickness, as if it had rubbed off on her.
She listened to his flutey snores. She watched the tiny tremors in his white eyelids.
He hadn’t needed money or prestige or any of the rest of it to make him dignified. He always had that about him. It was natural. She’d recognized that much, the first time she’d seen him, doing a rubbishy magician’s turn on talent night in a Manchester pub. She would say—though not to his face, in case it made him big-headed—that it was a natural aristocracy that Patrick had. He would behave like a gentleman if he lived in a slum.
Tonight she had seen him shivering, calling out in a weak, high voice. She had seen him sitting on the edge of the bed, caked in his own sick and shit and the whole mess smelling of alcohol. She had seen him crying and cursing himself. When she sponged his naked body down she had been crying too. His seemed like a body she had never seen before. She had become just a nurse.
Now he slept.
And she watched him, as she held the pillow to her bosom. She cradled it like she had once cradled Colin, when he was so tiny Pat had hardly dared touch him in case he broke. At the time Anne thought Pat wouldn’t hold the child because he wasn’t his. He was above such things. He’d taken them in, married her, adopted the baby, but he wouldn’t claim him as his own. But Anne had been wrong. Colin was far more Pat’s child than hers.
Pat was never indifferent. He was scared and puzzled. He was bewildered, perhaps, but he was never aloof. He had loved them.
Anne held the pillow out and held it a little way above his face. Silently, silently. She didn’t want to wake him. She wondered what it would feel like. It might be rather nice. All that clean warm white pressing down. Taking you in. She would have to press down hard enough. She would die if there had to be a struggle to the end.
And from down the uncarpeted corridor she could hear the sounds from Wendy’s room. Squeals and panting and muffled thuds.
Did you press it down hard like a surprise or did you lower it gently so the feeling was imperceptible? So the dense weight touched his face and it would be like a slow, everlasting kiss?
She didn’t know.
It was almost dawn.
She had let the dawn creep in.
She didn’t know now, how this had to be done.
For a second though, Anne felt more powerful than she had in years. But she couldn’t do it.
She pulled the pillow back to her breast and cuddled it there, as if to keep it away from Pat’s face.
Then she got up and went heavily to the kitchen to drink, to get drunk, and wait for Wendy.
Aunty Anne watched the skylight turn a bright and fresher shade of blue and the stars go out over the Royal Circus.
She thought: if I’d been a different sort of woman, tonight I could have committed the biggest act of my life.
But if she’d killed Pat, shouldn’t she have killed her sister, too? Wouldn’t she then be guilty of letting Lindsey suffer needlessly?
Anne hadn’t acted in either case and she was glad. Not glad for them, but glad for herself.
None of these things, she told herself, are for me to sort out.
AFTERWORD
Fancy Man was written under the influence of Henry James and Shirley Bassey and Jeremy Hoad, to whom it is dedicated, with love.
With Fancy Man I moved away from Newton Aycliffe, from the town of my growing up, froM the Phoenix Court trilogy.
I went elsewhere, like I did in life, ages ago.
I still want to write about the North.
I’ve lived in and written
