“Benefits?” asked Uncle Pat, peering over a piece of his own morning post. “Are you on benefits?”
“I sent her down the day after we got here,” said Aunty Anne. It was true, it had been the very next day. “She’s left school. She needs to see what her entitlements are.”
“Benefits,” sighed her Uncle, going back to what, by the look of it, was an involved letter of his own. “There’s no need of benefits while the girl’s staying here. There’s plenty of money around the place.” He harrumphed and Aunty Anne slid her hazel eyes into a sidelong glance. Wendy wished she would stop doing this at her, every time money was mentioned.
This was the quiet—or relatively quiet—part of the morning, just before the sun rose directly over their roof and made the whole flat too hot. The post had arrived with its usual crash on the bare hall floor, and they were absorbed in it, half-heartedly feeding themselves breakfast as they went. As usual Aunty Anne was the only one without letters. She commented once more that Wendy seemed to share her Uncle and cousin’s talent and habit of getting lots of mail. They paid her no attention. Glumly Aunty Anne wached the three of them read as she spread marmalade an inch thick on wholemeal toast. She was waiting for the arrival of Captain Simon in his yellow jacket. Just lately she had started to think of him as a very dashing older man and found herself keeping up her side of a gentle flirtation. She bit into satisfyingly hard strips of orange peel, squashing the rind between her teeth. Funny that she should start to fancy an old man under her ex’s nose. However, she thought, such are the mysteries of sex. That’s all there was to it.
Wendy, meanwhile, was starting to dread the idea of Job Party. She remembered Timon once telling her how they’d forced him to go on one of these things. That was before he found the job in the fish shop. He was put in a group with seven others and the teacher-type person had talked to them about things like re-training for The World of Work. Timon had hated the enforced silliness of the whole thing. Sitting round with strangers and discussing what would fulfil them all. Mind, Wendy had thought at the time that Timon was too fussy. He probably thought he was too good for all of them. He said it was very like his experience of Creative Writing workshops—and he’d stopped going to those, too, for the same reasons. At least at Job Party nobody expected you to ‘get’ their poems. And Job Party gave you free stamps and stationary, and they had come in handy for sending SAEs with stories to literary magazines.
All in all Wendy didn’t want to go to Job Party. She imagined being the youngest there, and the one with the least idea about anything. An older man, someone quite repellent that she’d be kind to on the first day, would become fixated on her and maybe he would stalk her, finding out where she stayed and following her home, hanging about in the darker, leafier corners of the Royal Circus...
To get it out of her mind she went for a walk.
She was still exploring Edinburgh, finding new things all the time and coming to the realisation that this now (or for now, at any rate) was the city where she lived. Where some people did nothing but rollerblade across the pavements and squares, where black taxis went darting everywhere, all the time, and every patch of wall was plastered with flyers for night clubs and shows. And what pleased her was that she didn’t know exactly how long she would be here. Up till now she had been tied to school and family—to Blackpool, in fact. Which, while not being boring exactly, was still home. This was the first city of her choice. Well, Aunty Anne’s choice, really. Although Wendy needn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted. She might have stayed in Blackpool alone, or with Linda—or even gone to Manchester with Mandy. She still could. But all this, everything here, felt like her own choice.
She had noticed how, in their time here, how subdued Aunty Anne had become. She was no longer the overbearing figure she had been in Blackpool. Her ex-husband worked on her like an antidote. His placid erudition took the fizz and the sting out of her brashness. Wendy was astonished to see Aunty Anne submit to Uncle Pat, especially when he told her outright to shut up. Aunty Anne was a different person when she was with Uncle Pat and, Wendy thought, that was probably what had made her leave him. Wendy liked to see how people changed, depending on who they were with. Only a very few stayed the same and Colin was one of them. It didn’t matter who he was talking to.
So Wendy was getting to know them all. And she was pleased she wasn’t at all over-attached to Anne. Since arriving, the two women had really gone their separate ways. Her aunt had become self-absorbed and quiet. She had promptly dyed her hair black, then white again, and then a glorious pink. Colin told Wendy: there’s the danger sign. And it struck Wendy for the first time how much Aunty Anne must be missing Wendy’s mother, too. She’d be thinking of the wasted years, when she’d never gone to visit her sister. She’d be wondering how many years she herself had left.
“You’d feel like living it up, wouldn’t you?” Wendy asked Colin. “‘You’d throw caution to the winds.”
He nodded. “Hence the pink.” He did a kind of facial shrug. “She looks like a cockatoo. Isn’t ‘throw caution to the winds’ a very old-fashioned phrase?”
Wendy nodded. “I just like it.”
Colin smiled. “Me too.”
Throw caution to the winds.
