Land of Make Believe—Buck’s Fizz
Does Anybody Miss Me—Brenda Soobie
Ever Fallen in Love—Buzzcocks
Anyone who had a Heart—Cilla Black
Runaway—Del Shannon
Story of the Blues—The Mighty Wah
A Little Loving—Dusty Springfield.
This last one was playing when Aunty Anne came in to, as she saw it, rescue me from myself. In she burst. And I was holding down ouzo. My head full of fennel fumes and Timon turning green at my shoulder. Aunty Anne’s face was set. She had been planning this showdown for days. She had carefully planned what she would wear for coming into bars alone, hunting for me. She looked eccentric and determined, in a yellow sheepskin coat and a wide-brimmed green fedora. She looked almost artistic.
This is what Aunty Anne said.
“You’re not doing yourself any favours. You’re spoiling yourself. Isn’t she, Timon? He’s a man, he knows. No man will look at a woman who’s spoiled herself.”
“I know you’re upset about your mam. We all are. But you can take upset too far. You can wallow in it. Look at your sisters. They aren’t sinking into...sinking into...”
“Despondency,” said Timon.
“Thanks,” I snapped.
“They aren’t, though. They’re getting on with it. You just have to get on.”
I asked her, “What am I meant to get on with?”
I asked her again, “Where do I begin?”
At that point I thought I was going to be homeless. Everyone would tootle off to their own, new homes, and they would all forget that I didn’t have one.
Aunty Anne had decided that she was coming to my recue, and taking the situation in hand, she made Timon collude with her.
“You, young lady, are coming with me.”
Our mother’s death made us think about the future and what we should all be doing. As if she had just been a prompt: now it’s your turn. Prove to me. Do something of your own.
The others jumped to it.
But they knew where they were jumping.
How could I plot out the shape of my new life?
I didn’t have any idea of shapes.
Now, of course, I know shapes. I’ve had years and years of shapes.
They’re easy. Live any sort of life and you throw out a shape.
Even if you think you don’t form anything, and that what you’ve lived is insignificant: a shape is still there. Even an inconsistent, collapsible shape. Even a rubbish one.
Y= mx + c. That’s what I found out later.
I wish someone had told me that at the start.
I took O level maths only recently, in these my later, idle, workless years. I learned all this stuff about graphs, about making and plotting one shape into another. Transformations. So maybe if I’d listened in school, early on, geometry would have seen me through.
Fact was, I had no talent, or ambition.
I couldn’t beam and flatter and smear on lip-gloss and make other ladies spend spend spend.
I couldn’t force my eyes to follow print through the thousands of pages of tersely formal, decorous prose that Mandy loved. I could never keep track of the names. Charlotte Elizabeth Jane Sarah Agnes Fanny.
And why would I want to do what my sisters did?
So both a career and a further education were out.
What was I to do?
“First,” said Aunty Anne, “we go to Edinburgh, to your uncle.”
So we travelled north.
EIGHT
Dubious at first, but that doesn’t hurt, does it? A little circumspection never hurt anyone. In his long life Captain Simon had learned a thing or two about not getting his fingers burned. So when he was making new acquaintances, when he went into a fresh situation, he kept his soldierly wits about him.
But which army had he served with? What kind of soldier was he? You and whose army, Captain Simon? Nobody knew.
He wore a yellow coat with shining buttons, braid and epaulettes. His medals were impressive and buffed up, and he had a stainless white moustache, curling up at both ends. He was a bit of a mystery, and he claimed always to have a knife slid down inside one of his boots. He was an expert in jungle warfare, he said.
So Captain Simon was careful. He didn’t go into anything without checking it out first. After some months though, he found that he actually enjoyed going upstairs to visit the top flat. Seeing what the old man and that young lad of his were getting up to. Always something different. Pottery or war games, papier mâché or poker. They became Captain Simon’s main diversion.
Mostly the old man and the young lad sat in their flagstoned attic kitchen, drenched in lovely, clear daylight and, to all appearances, didn’t do much of anything these days. But they talked, and that’s really what the Captain loved to go up there for. The craic, the Irish called it. Blether, the Scots said, and that was more appropriate here, though the old man wasn’t Scottish.
Captain Simon would ascend the staircase with the custard yellow walls and scarlet trim at ten thirty in the morning, knowing that the old man and the young chap would already be sitting at their table. On the scarred table between them would be the ransacked newspapers and the day’s post. They seemed to get more of their fair share of both. The old man’s stringy plants and saplings would be out on the table, under the window, getting their share of the daylight. A pot of the strongest coffee the Captain had ever tasted would sit among dozens of cups. If you listened very carefully, you might hear the cafetière whine. That was something scientific, to do with the pressure of hot, wet air. The young chap had explained it.
Some morning the old man might even have a bottle of red wine open. He drank it from a tumbler, like fruit juice. He sat back on a cosy swivel chair in his scarlet dressing gown that he would wear all day around the house. He went around in bare feet, even though there was no proper carpet in the hallways and the floor was
