I’d already pointed out to her the young man just up the gangway from us. A sexy skinhead, well filled out. He had been in our Linda’s class at school. Used to hang out with our Mandy and Linda for a while last summer. David. We hadn’t seen him since them. Now here he was, on our train to Edinburgh.
The sun slanted in, lighting him up quite prettily, and I kept looking over. It’s my new habit, this looking at men. Before, I’d only ever bother looking at Timon. Now, I was staring at anything that went drifting by. Or sitting there, swinging his boots up onto the empty seat beside him, wadding up his jacket for a pillow. Staring at a magazine with a nude picture on the cover—that woman from the series about aliens living on our planet and she’s the one who finds them out. She’s never nude in the series. Now he’s falling asleep, looking less and less hard.
Aunty Anne went shunting up the aisle, looking for a payphone. When she was gone I deliberately caught that David’s eye.
“You’ve grown up!” he burst out, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he blushed. I was watching Aunty Anne, still pushing up the train, saying her excuse me’s, and I was thinking what a big behind she had. I had never thought of the size of her bum before, she always drew attention to her special, delectable legs.
I thought about freezing this David out, now I had his attention. I didn’t know how. I said, “I’ve left school, an’ all.”
“You’re Wendy, aren’t you?”
I nodded and we grinned at each other.
“I used to knock about with your sisters. I’m David.”
“I remember.”
For a while—I was just a kid then—he’d come in and watch telly with the family. Even our mother thought he was sexy, but she would never have said that. She called him a skinny little article and he could make her laugh and she would pat the settee cushion next to her, inviting him to sit. “Creature From the Black Lagoon?” she’d announce, and it was like she was offering him a posh drink.
“Our mam died,” I told him.
He looked shocked.
“It was cancer,” I said. “It wasn’t, like, a vampire or a creature from a lagoon or anything.”
He gaped at me like I was weird.
I said, “Remember how she used to watch all them films?”
He nodded. “Look... I’m sorry.”
I shouldn’t have said anything to him. Aunty Anne was right. She said people don’t like it when you bring death in.
Aunty Anne tells me, ‘Stay close by, lovey,’ at the station with everyone milling and knowing where they’re going and of course I don’t. I’m flung the mercies of people I don’t know from Adam. I stick to Aunty Anne as she goes to commandeer a porter... she wants a wheely pushy thing, she can’t think of the right word for them.
“A trolley, madam?” and with a flourish the cheeky monkey pulls one from behind a pillar. Just what she wants. She seizes the handle, tutting. She can’t be doing with cleverness and bright sparks making a monkey out of her. She tells me to load all our bags on the trolley.
I love the way everyone gets off the train and hits the platform, knowing where they want to be and hardly breaking their stride, parading over the white, speckled, shiny ground.
There’s that woman in the smart cut orange woollen suit that Aunty Anne so admired. The woman sounded very posh to me. She had a table and two toddlers, had them cutting coloured papers up and keeping their attention all the way from London, ‘where we live,’ to Edinburgh, ‘where we have a little flat in the New Town.’ A kind of Arabian fella was at their table in his robes and he got roped in, all jolly, to help the kiddies draw and cut up princesses and animals with long, peculiar legs. Ahmed helped the kiddies stick the cut-outs on the carriage window, so the sun shone through and lit up their different colours. “He’s a nice man, Ahmed, isn’t he, mummy?”
“I’m sure he’s a very nice man, darling.”
They were going now and Ahmed was off in his other direction. I found I was staring, just like I’d earwigged all the way up, even though the chat was getting on my nerves.
Then, when Aunty Anne’s back is turned, here’s that David—the skinny skin skinhead—pushing a folded, raggy slip of paper into my palm and I know by touch, by osmosis of some sexy, flirty, successful sort, that it’s got his phone number scrawled on it. He wants me to call him up some time now that we’re both in Edinburgh. And I have nights to fill, nights and nights to fill.
I see him flash by—a streak of sharp, grinning sunlit boy—hoisting an army bag over one shoulder and he’s away. I tuck his note into my pocket. Aunty Anne is flapping her arms at a taxi. It grumbles up and sits ticking at our kerb.
NINE
When they arrived there was the usual flurry and fuss over new guests. Wendy hung back, tired from the six flights of stairs, and watched them behave. Reunions: mother and son (fond, wary), husband and wife (very formal, very wary). Wendy took it all but knew, as the real stranger in their midst, that she was the actual object of scrutiny.
They were urged to set down their bags in the
