“She’s very frank, and you’re very frank,” he said. “So you know just what to expect of each other.”
“I suppose so,” said Aunty Anne. “Little minx.”
“You’re both very natural,” Colin smirked. “Shall we see if that gold has worked out?”
She felt her covered scalp with one careful hand, as if she could tell the new colour that way.
He took Wendy to a bar where everyone looked up when you walked in. It used to be an ordinary pub, but they’d festooned fairy lights here and there and put Bacardi on special offer and tried to make it gay. Upstairs a transvestite in a scarlet frock was in charge of the records and kept putting on songs from the shows. Oliver! of all things. Colin and Wendy were the only ones upstairs. They sat and the DJ pulled down a giant TV screen, apparently from the ceiling. She zapped it with a futuristic remote. A weather woman twice life-sized filled that end of the dance floor.
Wendy was saying, “I suppose I like your mum, because...because...”
“Ah, we never know why.”
“I always know why,” Wendy said. She stared at the transvestite, who was staring balefully in turn at the giant weather woman. “It’s because Aunty Anne doesn’t expect you to like her. She doesn’t care. Everything she says is like high-kicks, like doing the splits. In your face.”
Colin was sceptical. “Do you really think so?”
“All that business about her legs,” said Wendy. “All that ‘Look at me! I’m fantastic!’ It’s all so defiant. It’s all not-giving-a-fuck.”
“Maybe.”
They walked back home across the New Town. Wendy was just getting used to how the nights here went on later. It seemed ordinary now to start the evening off just before midnight.
“The town’s full of ghosts, you know,” Colin said. They were passing the trees at the bottom of Calton Hill. “If you come by here in the early hours, sometimes you can hear them rustling about...”
“It seems a very haunted place,” said Wendy, still feeling like a tourist. “All the history.”
“Of course,” said Colin, “You have to have suffered in your life to see a ghost. To really see a ghost.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Wendy, “What are you...like an expert?”
“In ghosts or in suffering?” He looked at her. “I’m only teasing. I don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”
“I don’t believe in suffering,” she said.
“No?”
“I don’t believe in showing it,” she said. “Best thing you can do is grit your teeth and keep your gob shut.”
“Sometimes it’s not as easy as that.”
“If you can, though, it’s worth doing. Mind,” she said thoughtfully, “if it looks like you’ve never suffered, then no one bothers with you. You look as if you’re too hard.”
“Is that what you think you look like?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“No, you don’t look too hard.”
They walked on and decided to stop for chips. “The main thing,” said Colin, “Is to try and be as happy as possible.”
Wendy looked at the whole lit up front of the chip shop. Its papier mache octopi and mermaids. “That’s what I came here for,” she said.
THIRTEEN
I don’t think I can be a very nice person...because I can’t always see the best in people. I look at them sometimes and they just seem awful. Their bodies seem awful.
I watch Aunty Anne on the phone in the hallway, gassing away to one of her cronies. Or maybe someone she’s doing business with. Wheeling and dealing Aunty Anne, ducking and diving. She’s breaking off nubs of crusty bread and feeding herself as she talks, mumbling and swallowing as she rabbits on...num num num...and I can’t bear the thought of her warm spit mushing the bread down.
I look at people and think what a bad design they are. Aunty Anne here has to eat and talk and breathe out of the same bit...the same hole in her head (she’s a mouth-breather, of course, and a very noisy eater) and how easy, I think, it would be for her to choke. And I look and I can’t help thinking I’d like to write to a glossy magazine and ask if my...antipathy is natural.
Am I alone in imagining the people I know sitting on the toilet? Doesn’t everyone do this? I picture my uncle, my aunt...when they shuffle off down the hall to the loo (and wasn’t it the French who called it loo not because of l’eau, but rather le oo, for the two holes of oo being eyeholes in the wc door for cheeky peekers?) They lock themselves in and you can hear the thunk of the seat going down, then the rattle of them farting down the pan...It’s become like a mania: I can see them in my head. I do it with the people I see on the street. See flabby pale thighs and skirts hawked up, knickers and trousers dropped round ankles, turned inside out, exposing all their innermost secrets.
Sometimes you can see too much.
Maybe part of Wendy’s general disgust was her finding that she attracted people to her. She was coming of age (what an old-fashioned phrase!) and what people saw in her was nothing less than a fine pair of listening ears. People latch onto me! she moaned, tossing in her white feathery bed.
I get people telling me all sorts of things, bizarre things...and they all think I’m interested. And, of course, usually I am. Sometimes it wears you out. All these new friends.
And I still get letters from my sisters and Timon, and they just make me sad. These people who know what I’m really like aren’t here to corroborate me and the new things I’m doing. Cycling, for Christ’s sake. A new place gives you freedom to become unsettled and turn into what you want. But how do you really know what’s happening to you? Can your identity outride your circumstances? Can I mould myself? Or will others impinge on me?
Aunty Anne’s had a stab. Uncle Pat has taken to me and
