Only that morning Wendy had received another postcard from Timon. He was all enthusiastic about his new philosophy. Oh boy, she thought. A new philosophy: all he needs. Something new, coming true. In his post card Timon declared that he was learning to listen to people properly. He was learning to keep his own mouth shut and to really listen. He had sent Wendy a picture of the Golden Mile at night and written on the back that he was taking up the very thing that she wished she could give up. He wanted, he said, to be a naive receptor. He’d read something some old novelist had said—the very woman that Mandy’s boyfriend was obsessed with: Timon had read of book of her essays while staying there. And this old bird said that a writer had to be ignorant. Purposefully he/she had to unloosen all the great stacks of knowledge in their heads and let it float away downstream. Determinedly, you had to know nothing. Then you had to be a listener. Then you had to be a naive receptor...of sense impressions, of general chit chat. You had to stop being clever-clever.
Wendy rather resented this coming through the post from Timon.
He ended his card with:
‘So I’m not the clever fella I was!
Oh no!
I’m not the clever fella I was!’
Wendy put the letter away with the others. He’s a naive receptor now, she thought. She wondered what that made him before.
Wendy blinked. “Replaced?”
Belinda sighed. “You don’t really want to hear this, do you?”
“No, go on.” Might as well now.
“In this fallen world,” said Belinda. “The survivors fall into two distinct camps. There are holograms and there are replacements. The hologram people have stopped being flesh. They’re what’s-the-word...insubstantial. You could poke our finger right through them if you tried. That’s the hologram people. Your cousin Colin is one of those, poor lad.”
Wendy stared at her.
“And then,” Belinda went on, “there are the replacements. They are fleshly and are built to last longer than mere holograms. And a replacement is what I’ve been given, rather than a brother. Do you understand?”
She looked into Wendy’s eyes as if she was trying to hypnotise her.
“I don’t understand you,” Wendy said. She felt that the grooves in her mind had sealed over and the words that Belinda was talking were gliding right over her, and could find nowhere to lodge and make sense to her.
Belinda groaned. “You think I’m bananas.” She stood up and slapped her knees, as if to get the blood flowing. She brushed her skirt straight. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Then she was gone, back down the spiral staircase.
FOURTEEN
Do you know what that Colin said to me? First of all I thought he was dead cheeky, saying this. I get touchy when people try and say things about my mam. They might mean the best but I get protective. She isn’t here to defend herself, so I’m watchful.
Colin said: “You and I should make the best of ourselves. There’s no way we should waste our lives, you know.”
We were crossing the busy street. Two sets of lights, top of Leith Walk. Spot of breathless jaywalking. “I wasn’t planning on wasting my life,” I said.
“I was just thinking,” he went on, when we got to the pavement. “They were unique, your mum and mine. I mean, women in their position, of their generation, their class. You know, they were unique in human history.”
He stopped to look in windows. Colin was interested in everything. The mauve and pale yellow gerbera in the florist’s window, the six foot cacti, the knobbly bread studded with olives in the front of the deli. Colin walked round with his eyes on stalks. It was the smells I liked.
I thought he was having me on, the way he was talking. I felt alert to satire, and asked him what he meant exactly. And I thought about Aunty Anne and my mam, watching The Blood Beast Terror right at the end, on our old telly. Aunty Anne holding a tassled cushion up to her face to block out the terror. My mam laughing out loud at it. Women unique in human history: Colin was saying it again.
“I mean the Pill,” he said. “They were invented by the Pill, those women, and the time they lived in. They never had to have kids. Me and you, Wendy, we needn’t have existed. They had that whole necessity and obligation removed. And they chose to have us anyway. Your mam had three of you.” He looked at me. We were right outside a second hand record shop. Vinyl Villains. “We got born anyway, against the odds. Our mothers flying in the face of cultural and biological fashion.”
“I suppose so,” I said lamely.
“I feel obliged to make things up to them sometimes,” he said with a sigh. “And not footle and tootle it all away.” Footle-and-tootle was one of Aunty Anne’s phrases. I liked the way Colin used it without thinking.
In the record shop window he saw ‘The Best of Cilla Black’ for two pounds. Cilla in the Sixties, dressed as a cowboy in orange slacks, cravat and black stetson. Big cheesy grin. In went Colin to ask the assistant to fetch the LP off the window display and play him some tracks. Check for scratches.
I stayed out on Leith Walk, thinking. Soon ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ cane drifting out the open door. I knew Colin would buy the record and play it obsessively for a week or more, as he always did. Until he’d driven us all crazy with the same set of songs. It’s what he always did. He loved women singing old-fashioned songs. Poor Colin. He liked things that sounded dated. Everything that once thought itself state-of-the-art and got left behind. Colin said he got a very particular frisson from things that had dated. It was the way those
