Mandy sneered. “He sounds like a wanker.”
Daniel the insurance clerk looked out of his depth, the night he came to see Linda at home. He came straight from work in his dark suit, and he had his sleeves rolled and this smell of office sweat and cologne that I quite liked. He had dark curly hair you could see he’d be happier just shaving off, and his shoes were very shiny, which reminded me of what Mandy had shouted at Mam’s one-time fancy man. I wanted to tell our Linda: don’t let him waltz with you.
I suppose we tried to squeeze him out. Not maliciously, not concertedly, but we didn’t put on any airs for this insurance clerk. We acted naturally and, if he couldn’t deal with that: hard lines.
That night the flat was full. As soon as he came in I saw through his eyes how ramshackle and neglected we had let the place become. With Mam being ill the housework had slowed to a standstill and things were no longer immaculate. We dusted the rooms that our mother spent her time in. She hated dust lying on surfaces and ornaments. She thought it would choke her. Little bits of human bodies, she said, going up her nose and into her lungs. She must have watched a movie about a dust monster.
She was watching The Mummy when Daniel was introduced to her. She was very white and you could see she couldn’t be bothered with guests. She made a brief, gallant effort and asked Aunty Anne to turn the telly sound down. It was an exciting moment, with Christopher Lee swaying bandaged-wrapped, emerging from a swamp. But our mother listened carefully to what Daniel had to say for himself. “I liked the way he was very sure of himself,” she said afterwards. “He’s the type you could take anywhere and he’d make himself at home. But he looks the type to always want his own way.”
By then Aunty Anne had well and truly settled in. She was sitting in her peach-coloured slip with her bra straps dangling down when Daniel was shown in. She’d forgotten he was due. “Help!” she mugged, and slipped past him to find a housecoat. She had a polythene shower cap on, waiting for her henna to take. You could see the henna under the cap, like the seamy clods of mud all over Christopher Lee.
Timon and Mandy and me were in the kitchen, and we were next on the list for Daniel to meet. Our kitchen was more cheerful since Timon had helped up to paint every sill, fitting and cupboard door in alternating patches of blue and yellow. We were talking in our bright kitchen and smoking. Smoking was allowed at home again. Our mother had started and she swore blind it had bucked her strength up. Cigarette burns had started to appear in her duvet, like tiny bullet holes.
Daniel came into the kitchen and tried to join in with us. We were just chatting and flipping through magazines. Mandy had Tess of d’Urbervilles open and her legs hooked over the edge of the table. Daniel told her he had read Jude the Obscure for his O levels, but he had thought it was very old-fashioned. People found it much easier, these days, to get themselves educated and rise through the ranks and make a success of themselves, didn’t they? He didn’t think Thomas Hardy was very relevant to their world anymore.
“Personally,” said Mandy, “I hate things being relevant.”
Timon looked up. “Is relevant the same as pertinent?”
Mandy slapped the Hardy face down on the table and rummaged for her ciggies. “Relevant comes with more strings. Relevant means that you have to feel like you’re learning something.”
“I hate to split hairs,” said Daniel, “but...”
“Don’t split hairs then,” said Mandy. “I like your curly hair, by the way.”
“You do?”
“Come on, Daniel,” said Linda, and led him back to the living room, where the volume on The Mummy was back up.
Later Daniel told Linda that he wanted to rescue her from all that. From where she’d come from. Linda gasped. Then she slapped him, then she kissed him. So that was Linda.
Mandy said, “She’s selling herself short to that little creep. Just because she’s a big girl, doesn’t mean she’ll get no more offers.”
“She’s a sexy lady,” said Timon.
We both looked at him.
“Who said you had any say?” asked Mandy.
He spread his palms and gave one of his gawky laughs.
“Don’t ever compare one of us to the others,” said Mandy. “Sisters don’t like it.”
“I wasn’t!” he protested, laughing, refusing to take her seriously, which is why, I think, they never seriously fell out.
We were walking along the prom and Mandy changed the subject and starting asking how many characters a novel should have, and how many chapters. Timon was telling us that the arabic word bab meant both chapter and door. He said, don’t put too many doors in your house or the roof will fall in. And too many people can’t run around. And Mandy was asking, should the shape of a chapter be a dramatic W or a dramatic V and should a whole novel be shaped like a cathedral? She wanted to know all about structure.
“Mandy,” said Timon. “Are you thinking of writing a book?”
“Me?” she said. “Where would I begin?”
I was in Boots with Linda and she was getting all of her perfume samples out. I loved the tiny, coloured bottles and was wondering if I would like to work in that environment, where you got to handle nice things all day. But I was very different to Linda. She loved the shop itself. She loved handling the money, getting her fingers dirty with the smell of money, then dousing them
