When Mandy asked him, Timon readily agreed.
Wendy only shrugged when he said, Come out. Face the world again.
He took her into pubs and they would sit whole afternoons and evenings away. They drank themselves drunk and sober again.
That man over there, look how long his swallows of beer are. He’s really drinking it down. Gollop gollop. His eyes are wide and his eyebrows go up like he’s being forced, but no one’s forcing him. I can see right up through the end of his glass and his mouth opens and shuts in close-up.
What’s Timon saying to me?
They say a child can’t imagine the world going on beyond their own death. That the point of maturity is marked by the realisation that life goes on without you. My own horrid epiphany was that the world went on longer than my mother. I couldn’t believe it.
Ping ping ping.
Snapping the apron strings.
At that time I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t listen to a word Timon tried to tell me. I’m sure he was telling me sensible, supportive stuff. He had lost both his parents. He knew the territory. And I, who by then had spent a year hanging onto every word uttered by this big, beautiful man...ignored him.
In the pubs where we sat smoking the afternoons away I would look at the carpets and think about how they were stiff with bitter. For some reason I found the long, sunny afternoons hardest to get through. I became fascinated with the scarred varnish on the bar and tables, and thought about how, for generations, they had been scoured by spirits. The place was sodden with booze. Its medicinal tang hung in the gloom.
If they asked me, how did I respond to my mother’s death, what would I say? There wasn’t much I could say.
Did I, like Linda, throw myself into my work?
I had no work.
Linda won herself awards for her immaculate service. Got herself promoted. Now she was allowed to do in-store make-overs. Lovely. Shoals of nervous women brought their unmade faces to her counter, and fidgeted there on stools, submitting themselves to her expert fingers.
Her insurance clerk Daniel wanted her to go higher and higher.
Take your beautician’s exams, Linda!
She wanted to be a Doctor of Glamour. A Professor of Beauty.
Because he was good at getting things insured, Daniel was promoted, too. He bought a house on a new estate, out of town, where all the houses were in cul-de-sacs and made of gingerbread. They stood with discreet distances between them. Neither saw any reason why Linda shouldn’t move in straight away. Our mother had died. The family was already broken up.
Mandy, Timon and I helped them to move. Daniel covered their new, barely-dried walls with brown hessian wallpaper. They had Swedish-type furniture, all bought to match. Minimalism, Daniel informed us, was his watch-word. Linda didn’t look so sure. She liked things that would draw the eye. In their new house they didn’t even have a three piece suite. They had bean bags in different colours, and scatter cushions. Aunty Anne wasn’t impressed.
“You show all your drawers, sitting in these,” she said, smoothing her skirt as we all sat in bean bags. It was the evening of their moving in, and we were eating fish and chips, starving after all the lugging around. Linda had fetched them in as a treat for the workers. You could tell by the look on Daniel’s face that he wasn’t keen on us eating in his new front room.
Aunty Anne had come to inspect the place once the work was over. “Am I showing my drawers, Daniel?” she cawed. She loved to find new ways of distressing him. “But look at my lovely legs!” She lifted them in the air, slumping sideways in the orange bean bag.
Mandy’s response to our mother’s death was to plunge herself further into the nineteenth century. Even the way she talked started to change. She talked in whole sentences and would put on all these silly voices, like someone in a book. She was making plans for moving to Manchester, and met a man on one rainy, flat-hunting trip. They had frothy coffee in Meng and Ecker’s after a matinee of Saint Joan at the Royal Exchange. He was in a sky blue plasticky coat and she knew almost immediately that he was the one. His half moon glasses had yellow-tinted lenses and he talked knowledgeably about cubism and modernism and Virginia Woolf and, by degrees, Mandy said, she could feel herself being seduced. “The moment he got onto stream of consciousness...I was lost...”
Meanwhile I was pretending to be of drinking age, and trying out every drink ever invented. Settling on which would be my tipple. My downfall and demon. Campari and lemon. Egg nog. Lemon vodka. Peach Schnapps. Southern Comfort and lemonade. The sicklier and stickier the better. It was as if I was determined to make myself ill. And I was still but a child, with the same sweet tooth. I discovered After Eight flavoured vodka. But I never threw up, not even drinking these ever-sweeter confections. I kept them all in. I made my own self as sweet as could be and, through a dreadful summer of mourning, steadily fermented.
Timon, watchful, matched me drink for drink. Even took the same drinks as me. And he, poor lamb, was violently sick every time. Sick as a dog.
I addicted myself to the juke box. I put on the same old songs. There were to be found in juke boxes in pubs all over Blackpool, their labels coloured yellow, their numbers rubbed away with
