In a way I need to depend on Aunty Anne and her knowledge of what it was like in Blackpool. But Aunty Anne has lost interest in me, I think. She has got her own plans.
So I concentrate on new people. Colin...and now Belinda, Captain Simon’s dappy sister from downstairs, who has decided to be my friend.
It seemed to Wendy that no one had ever been able to tell Belinda that she could be dressing nicer to suit her shape. Maybe she had never had anyone close enough or brave enough to tell her. She was fat and in her fifties and forever squashed into tight polyester mini-dresses. The day she decided to befriend Wendy and came up the spiral staircase to Wendy’s room, she was huffling and all asweat. She clanged up the iron rungs and poked her head into the yellow room. That day she was in swirled green nylon. Wendy felt instantly sorry for her, as she always did for people who didn’t make the best of themselves.
Wendy had been taking a nap. It was too tempting not to: the long afternoons in all that yellow, with the sunlight cramming in. How scarlet and tousled the woman from downstairs looked, coming in to spoil Wendy’s peace.
“They said that you’d done this place up nice,” said Belinda. As she spoke she never quite met Wendy’s eye. Wendy had noticed this before. She thought the woman must be profoundly shy. Whenever she came to visit she brought presents and offerings, almost like paying a toll. Most often she brought pink sugar mice, which she would empty from a paper bag onto the table. This place was used to stroppier visitors than that, who saw no need to make excuses for their presences: Aunty Anne, who treated her ex-husband’s flat curiously as her own, and Captain Simon, who seemed a regular, if dull-ish fixture. Especially in these cable TV days. Recent afternoons had seen Aunty Anne watching with Captain Simon. Wendy had seen them in the windowless living room and their afternoon raptures put Wendy in mind of her mother and all those gaudy horror movies. (But, Wendy nagged herself, Aunty Anne and Captain Simon...were they really just watching the telly? Was all that sitting about just them having an excuse to sit for hours, tight together? Uncle Pat kept out of their way. To Wendy’s eye something seemed to be brewing there. Maybe that’s what Belinda was here for: ‘Tell your Aunty to get her hands off my lovely brother!’).
“The others said you’d got your room nice,” Belinda said again, gazing with approval at the nick-nacks along Wendy’s original mantlepiece. Bits she’d picked up in the junk shops of the Old Town: Seventies kitsch, mostly, and a few ethnic artefacts. A beaten tin toucan from a Mexican shop. Wendy sat up, pleased with her new things. Belinda plonked herself down on the end of the bed. Now here it comes, thought Wendy. The woman’s come to talk All About Herself.
Belinda, however, talked mostly about her brother, the gallant, the valorous, the magnificent Captain Simon. She had cared for him and loved him all her life. Only she had known him back before he’d grown those white, twiddly mustachios, before he’d turned bald as a coot, before he’d started to wear a yellow uniform jacket. She adored him: he was her Don Quixote. She had seen to him and protected him, and naturally, their brotherly-sisterly bond was barnacle-strong. He was like the moon in eclipse to her and she could see nothing of the sunlit world around him.
“I know my brother like nobody knows him,” she told Wendy.
“That’s good,” said Wendy. She kept her voice neutral. She was pleased they had each other.
“Yes, it’s good,” said Belinda impatiently. “It’s always been good. It’s always been fine.” She stopped and chewed the inside of her mouth. Holding something back.
Ah, thought Wendy. Here comes the real coming-clean. The woman is jealous. Jealous as all hell. She knows someone’s been yanking her brother off her.
And it’s you, Aunty Anne, isn’t it?
You’ve got your purple steel-tipped talons
into this poor woman’s brother...
Oh, Aunty Anne
why can’t you be honest about things?
why not do things out in the open?
The sun was at its hottest now. Wendy wanted to stop talking with Belinda and hang her head out of the skylight, stand on her mussed-up bed and look out over the streets. Pant with her tongue out like a dog on a long car journey. She fought down a yawn.
“He’s not the same person,” said Belinda at last.
“Do you think he’s spending too much time up here in this flat?” asked Wendy. “Too much time with my uncle? Does that bother you?”
The woman looked stung. “I couldn’t begrudge the lad his afternoons out with his pals,” she said. Wendy shivered at the way she called a man in her sixties a lad. It made Belinda seem suddenly huge and schoolgirlish.
“But you do mind really, don’t you?”
Belinda sagged down. “He’s not the same man.”
“You mean he’s changed. He’s changed a little bit.”
Fiercely Belinda shook her head. “He’s not the same man at all. You’ve got to listen to me, doll. What I’m saying is very simple, but no one would believe me...and I’m going out of my head. Now, I live with the man and I know him better than everyone, right? And what I’m saying is, these past few months, he’s not been the same man. He looks the same and does most of the same things. But...but but but.” For the first
