Whenever we tried out the perfume samples I’d get splashes of all kinds of smells up both my arms and round my neck. I’d come out of the shop smelling ridiculous and too flowery or musky. Once when I came home Aunty Anne said I’d have all the cats on the block coming after me. But I tried these things out to kill the time and not look like I was there just to talk to Linda, which I was.
I tried out one of those fragrances that can be used by both sexes and it smelled like watermelons. I held the bottle wrong and, peering at the nozzle over my sunglasses, squirted myself in the eye. I shouted out and Linda shushed me.
Then Mandy was there. She’d dropped her usual cool and was all excited. I was still shouting about my eye. “What’s your problem?” asked Mandy.
“She squirted herself,” said Linda. “What’s that you’ve got?”
Even with both eyes full of tears and my face squinched up, I could see Mandy was waving a green slip of paper.
“Honestly,” she said, “you can hear you two right across the shop.”
“Oh, you can’t, can you?” moaned Linda. She started to straighten up her clinical uniform and to put her testers away.
“You’ll be getting the sack,” said Mandy, mixing it.
“Don’t say that!” said Linda, who was very superstitious. Daniel the insurance clerk was trying to cure her of that.
“I could put a complaint in about you two carrying on,” said Mandy.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Linda. “Tell us your news, anyway.”
Mandy grasped my wrist. “Don’t rub your eyes. You’ll make them worse.”
“Tell us your news!” said Linda, through gritted teeth.
Mandy threw down her green slip of paper. “It’s the day of my exam results!”
We were shocked, and ashamed of ourselves for forgetting.
“A, B, and fucking C!” she crowed.
Linda was hopping up and down and I was hugging our Mandy. “You got them! You got them! Have you told Mam yet?”
“Not yet,” Mandy laughed. “I’ll tell her tonight, when we’re all there.”
“A, B, C,” said Linda, leaving out the ‘fucking’, because Daniel was trying to train her out of swearing too. “You make it sound so simple!”
Mandy:
What do you call that moment? The moment you realise what you want to be?
This was one of those questions I asked Timon. The many questions I asked Timon that summer. He was a mine of information. He had opinions on everything and I liked to tiptoe through them. He was like beach-combing.
He thought and his eyes lit up. He said, “That’s your epiphany, that. Your moment of realisation, Mandy.” He laughed. “Something new, coming true.”
Wendy was walking along with us. She tutted and repeated it. “Something new, coming true.” She was never very literary.
In the middle of the shopping arcade Timon turned to me. “And what is this epiphany you’re having, hon? Is it gunna change your life?”
“Timon,” I said. “I fucking hope so.”
Then he said we should all go to the top of Blackpool Tower, and I could have my epiphany up there.
He had a sense of occasion, that boy.
The elevator took us up, up, up.
Under the Tower they have ballrooms for the waltzing and tangoing and foxtrotting that Aunty Anne went in for. They had an indoor circus with chimps dressed up for a clarty tea party.
The higher we went up the Tower, the more things crammed into our sight. The waxworks, the piers at either end, the death-defying womanly curves of the rollercoasters. Too much to take in. The higher up you get, the more you end up having to concentrate on just yourself. Else you get dizzy.
“‘So what’s your big surprise?” Wendy asked, and there was that answering-back quality to her voice. She was at that age.
I imagined that in the cramped, perilous space at the pinnacle of the Tower, I was wearing the hooped skirts of a Victorian lady. They ballooned in the breeze above the Tower’s iron gantries. I listened out for the heavy rustle of the silk. I supposed that you’d never get up here in those skirts.
I said, “I want to go off and do nineteenth century literature.”
“I thought so,” Wendy nodded.
“In all those books,” I said, “all I can see is me.”
They both looked at me funny.
No matter who wrote those books—young or old, male or female—they all wrote about me. A woman of eighteen, stepping into the world, waiting to see what it will bring her.
“A beautiful woman of eighteen,” I added. “It’s all my story.”
“Well,” said Timon. “That’s what you’d call an epiphany.”
Wendy looked suspicious. “So what are you going to do?”
“Literature at Manchester Poly,” I said, “And I start in the autumn.”
SIX
That summer their mother died. She was at home on the sofa, which was just as well. She would have hated to die in hospital. “And you know what us lot are like,” said Aunty Anne. “Something would happen, a whole series of horrible somethings, and none of us would get to her bedside in time. She would pass away all by herself, because we were still waiting for buses.”
As it was, their mother died with her family standing around her.
“All my eggs,” she whispered, and they looked at each other.
Her hair was just growing back, into a tufted, punky style that suited her. But she looked drawn and tired out. They had known for some weeks that this was the last round of her fight.
“You’ve been in and out of this hospital,” said Aunty Anne. “They’ll be sick of the sight of you.”
Their mother smiled. “I had more false alarms when I had our Wendy.” She looked at Wendy. “You were doing the hokey-cokey for a fortnight.”
Wendy nodded. She stood and watched, shocked by how calm everyone was. Their mother was dying and so they
