love to you....
Timon.
Timon’s letters would always come like this. No real information in them. Nothing like the ordinary stuff people put in letters.
Usually it would just be a postcard’s worth of stuff like the above. And...he’d probably made it up anyway. Had Mandy really started to lose the elasticity in her lips because of a trick she did with bangles? Mandy had always pulled faces... She loved to turn her beauty grotesque. But was she actually hanging and flapping open? In Lancaster? And had she really gone to the doctor? Timon, I wish you would write me sensible stuff.
Whatever Timon wrote, it was never the product of a tidy mind. Wendy sighed and went off with her helmet on, to ride around the city.
Aunty Anne and Captain Simon Sing a Sexy Duet About
Collisions in Space.
Or...Aunty Anne wishes this was a duet.
She bursts into spontaneous:
Singing songs at our age,
Old man, we must be fools...
Ah, you rotten devil, Captain Simon
did you do something valorous once?
or maybe repetitively some times?
These days...
I’m bumping into you on the stairs
the echoing stairwell between these flats
where I stay with my ex-fella
and your best friend,
and the pigsty where you live
with your funny
fat-kneed sister: how can you bear her?
hanging around all the time...
Strange old thing, as obsessed with
space as you are, I’ve heard.
We bump each day nose to nose on the steps
I hold in my breath as we pass...
hold my hand in your skinny old hand
like holding a handful of spam
you need someone warming you up...
ships squashing by in the night
or fuel ships, fuel ships that go
colliding with Russian space stations
(I thought you’d appreciate
a racy, spacey turn of phrase)
Oh, Captain, I’m thinking of us in no gravity
of us in no clothes
in no gravity
turning and turning
head over heels, tit over bum
cock over clit over
coiffure...
do I shock you my silly old darling
old man?
I feel I can take this liberty,
say, I want to be the first to
fuck
an old man
in outer space
(how kind no gravity will be on
brittle old bones! And nothing will
sag!)
I want to shunt our station out of its
worldly orbit by
shagging
What a word!
A word I’ve not used before...
but one that makes me think
of...rumbunctious, woolly-arsed humping
in zero atmosphere
our faces all flushed up...
old goat, have you really
got a hairy bottom?
In my mind I can see it
And it’s like the full moon
And all that comes from our bodies
all that will float free...
will slide weightless and loose in
the absence of air...
globules of me and specially
of you, rubbed off
and like slow confetti
revolving
all about us.
“I have to talk to you,” Captain Simon said, stopping Aunty Anne on the stairwell that morning.
She drew in a breath. “Right,” she said.
“It’s about...affairs of the heart,” he told her.
And they made a date and a time, a place.
TWELVE
Wendy got on with Colin in the first instance because they discovered that, sometimes, there was nothing that both of them liked more than to go out of a night and talk about nothing. About bums and tits and to have a giggle. It was a relief to find this out. All the conversations Wendy had been having (for ages, it seemed like) were about the future, and death, and what to do now. Oh, give me some space. Give me a drink and a fag...and a pal to go on daft with.
She was off the sickly sweet liqueurs. That turned out to be a passing phase. “Liqueurs!” Colin laughed. “Lick your own!” Her coached her in drinking bitters, lagers, stouts. Something with some body and gall. Drinks that were fizzy and dark, which had volume and daring, that were heady and fulsome. And that were never, never sweet. “Face it,” he told Wendy. “When you’re young and pretty like we are, you can’t afford to order anything sweet. We have to temper our native sweetness with...” He shrugged. “Bitter, mostly. And gall.”
Lately, even when there wasn’t a disaster, or things to sort out, it had seemed to Wendy that some people just adored raking up trouble. They stirred around for it in the mire. They itched away at it, like they would at a scabby wound. They can’t be content. Neither Wendy nor Colin wanted to be made to think or dwell particularly heavily on anything just then. They wanted time to enjoy each other’s company.
It was the next act of a gentle comedy. The settling down period. Everyone starts to enjoy each other. Wendy was getting to know her gay boy cousin: a lovely boy. He’s a lovely boy, my Colin, said a tipsy Aunty Anne one night. Not been out much, not seen much of the world. Just this town. He flung himself on the mercy of this town. Its...nightlife. Aunty Anne couldn’t bring herself to say the phrase ‘gay scene’, or even say in so many words that Colin was gay. She said that he wasn’t the marrying kind.
Colin had found his own niche, his own coterie, in a very cosmopolitan and—you’d think—a very permissive, sophisticated city. Come midnight, Colin would be out on the scene, somewhere in town, up the East End. His father and now his mother, turning a blind eye to his absence at the late night kitchen table, where the grown-ups (the grown-ups! The pensioners, really!)—Uncle Pat, Aunty Anne, Captain Simon and Belinda, all sat about, stewed to the gills, on a variety of wines and spirits.
What time did Colin slink home in the morning? Well, that depended. But when Wendy was about and she was his companion on his jaunts (and they weren’t only weekends—oh no! Tuesday, he claimed, was the best night of the week. So bang went the old working class Friday-on-my-mind crap. Tuesday was king!) When Wendy went with Colin, he came back earlier. Dragging in over the threshold at two, maybe, to see the dregs of the party in the kitchen. With his young cousin to watch over, Colin got up to less mischief. Which was a good thing, they all decided.
And Wendy...
It had just
