You’ve got your friends because, to you, they are extraordinary. But the stuff that makes them like that also makes them sometimes weird, clammed-up, shell-fishy like that. Sometimes hard to get on with.
FIVE
If I was Timon, I’d feel cross about our Mandy. Especially these days. Especially after all her success. I don’t know if he remembers how she grilled him all through that summer. I don’t know if he even knew then that’s what she was doing. I could see what was going on. He knew things she wanted to know and she got them out of him.
“Timon,” she would say, “how do you know what to put in a story?”
“That depends on if that’s a story-story you’re talking about, like a story you tell, or a short story, or a novel.”
She considered. “Say I mean a novel.”
“Well then, a novel. Now you can put anything in a novel.” He looked out across the road. We were sitting with pints on a bench outside a rough pub. I was having shandy. “I suppose you could put anything in a story for telling, and a short story too.” He shrugged. I saw that he was looking at the way the flower baskets hanging from the eaves of the ladies’ toilets were swaying. I liked the way Timon noticed things. I tried to notice things through his eyes.
“So there’s no difference then?” Mandy persisted.
“All the difference in the world.”
She asked, “Is it length?”
I looked at her sharply. She was back on Timon’s dick again. Sometimes she couldn’t leave it out although, as far as I knew, she’d never seen it.
Timon smirked. “Length has something to do with it.”
“How long should one be? A novel?”
“The best novels in my opinion,” he said, “have very particular lengths. My favourites are 187 pages and 328 pages.”
Mandy blinked. “How could anyone write so much?”
“But they do,” said Timon. “Sometimes, once you get started, it’s like, when will you stop? Where will it all end?”
“Is that what it’s really like?” She fluffed up her auburn curls. I hated her when she did the coquettish thing. I was getting too hefty, already, to copy that.
“Sometimes I’m writing and I think it’s a good job I’ve got friends and the fish shop job, just to get me away from the page.”
“It’s your life,” said Mandy. “It’s your vocation.”
This last word hung in the air for a bit. When Mandy sloped off, a little later, I mulled it over. “Where did Mandy learn a word like vocation?” I asked Timon.
He looked at me like he didn’t know what I was on about. He was back to noticing things. The old women waiting for each other outside the ladies’, checking in their bags for their purses.
After that, I started noticing Mandy doing things that were unusual for her. She was reading like a mad thing and I would see her in places I’d never noticed her before, as if she’d sat down and started to read without even knowing where she was. In the shopping arcade she perched on the pensioners’ seats by the rubber plants and the fountains, Sense and Sensibility in her hand. In McDonalds’ front window I saw her as I breezed past and she was sucking a milkshake, coming to the end of Mill on the Floss. Bleak House lay drying out on our bathroom radiator because she’d dropped it in the bath when she’d tried to light a bathtime ciggy. I saw her in the park and she was flipping breathlessly to her place in Madame Bovary and at last I felt courageous enough to go over and ask her what was going on.
She tilted that perfect, sunburned face and shielded her eyes. Maybe it was coming out of the book and into the sunshine, but at first she didn’t seem to recognise me. “I don’t know,” she said in reply to my peeved question. “I suppose these are the books I always wanted to read. I promised myself that when I finished my exams, I’d read the books I always wanted to read.”
I’d forgotten she’d even been doing exams. There had been such a fuss in the family, two years ago, with everyone persuading Mandy to stay on at school to get her A levels. We begged her. She gave in at last as if she was doing us a favour. Now that time had been and gone and her exams were finished with, without their hardly being mentioned.
At that time it was mostly just me, Mandy and Timon. We
walked along the beach in the daytime, sat in the cafes along the front, we went round the Pleasure Beach, though I didn’t go on the wilder rides. The person who was missing was Linda. She was working in Boots all the time. She said she was saving up for her bottom drawer. We would go in to see her, but there’s only so much you can say to someone when they’re working behind a counter. Best to save it till they come home. But we’d go in and try out make-up samples on each other. I saw that Linda actually knew what she was talking about and, when she explained something, about your skin’s ph value or your moisture or whatever, she put on this special, breathy, posh voice.
Linda wasn’t coming out with us at night either. Now she had a bloke. “It’s inevitable,” said Aunty Anne. “They start working and they meet people. They meet up with fellas. That’s how it all starts up. Then you don’t see them for ages.”
Our mother listened to this and I wanted to kick our aunt’s shapely ankles for being so tactless. Mam wanted all of us around her, and here was Linda running about the place with a man.
He was an insurance clerk. He wasn’t well-paid but he wore a dark-striped suit to work and she said he was bound to rise. He told our Linda that, if
