Colin wished he could slow down all of time. If time was slow enough for me, he said, I might do something with my life. I might slow down the changing colours in my blood cells.
When he said that I would picture his arteries and veins and cells like the moving blobs in a lava lamp.
On Leith Walk I listened to Cilla Black—‘Step Inside, Love’—and watched Colin, rapt, indoors.
Colin told me he was ashamed of himself, of his younger, treacherous self, who had wanted to belong to a different family. He lay in the sun on Gayfield Square and explained how, at eleven, he’d developed a crush on the whole Familie Schaudi from his Longmann’s basic German book at school. It was a purple paperback, all floppy with use. Each lesson came in the form of a comic strip about the Familie Schaudi, each week getting up to something new (never anything very exciting), each time involving new items of vocabulary that the class would be tested on after the weekend. Ten words a week. It sounded like a doddle to me. That was the old O level, Colin said. I myself am a product of he National Curriculum, of GCSE’s. How much broader is my knowledge base! I told Colin how much harder we’d had it compared with his lot. They made it all so much more difficult. I left school without a single qualification. That, mind you, was meant to be well-nigh impossible.
Lying there in the patches of shadow from the trees that ringed the park, Colin gave me a funny look. He’d pulled off his top and he had shorts on. He’d brought an old duvet cover from the airing cupboard to lie on. How grey he looked amongst the still-livid reds and blues of Spiderman. My cousin lay spreadeagled on Spiderman, who seemed unperturbed, still shooting out his webs. Colin’s skin didn’t look very healthy at all.
He went on about his crush some more. How he wanted to belong to that family and not his own. To run about the town with lanky, blonde, clean-living Hans and the pig-tailed Lieselotte and Lumpi the daschund. Calling out Gruss Gott! to the shopkeeper (and learning, one by one, the German names for the shops they kept). When one week’s story was about Hans’ English penfriend coming to stay, Colin said he’d been bitterly jealous.
“Did you have any crushes when you were at school?” he asked me.
“Can’t really remember...” I said. But I do. Cool, aristocratic Lalla Ward. The willowy Time Lady Romana, swishing about on Doctor Who.
“I was an awful, precious, queeny child,” he said. “Most of my teachers loved me, except one, Mrs Thompson, who decided she was my deadliest enemy. Once when I was about eight we had this row, this heated row, in front of the whole class. I’d written about my weekend and she tore a strip off me—she denied there was any such thing as chilli con carne.”
Colin drifted off then, thinking.
He remembered that same teacher telling him off in gym class, when they were all sat round cross-legged. He was stroking the tiny fair hairs on the legs of the boy sitting next to him. Mrs Thompson called out angrily: “I don’t think you want to be doing that, Colin.”
But why not? he wanted to know, but didn’t say anything at the time. The boy with the legs wasn’t complaining.
Wendy looked at the titchy, tickly hairs of his goatee beard, lit up in the sun. Golden and red filaments. The red ones were, if you peered right close, pink. “Get away!” he said, opening his eyes to see her looming over. “Don’t look in my face!” She was blocking out his light. He liked the inside of his eyelids to stay bright red. He imagined it was healthy, all good for him. Vitamin D or something, flooding straight into his head through his eyes.
She asked him how long he’d had his little beard.
“Why, don’t you like it?”
“They’ve all got little beards,” she said. “All the gay men here.”
He shrugged, still lying down. “They think it makes their faces longer.”
“You’ve already got a long face.”
Now she’d set him off wondering if he really wanted to have a beard. All through growing up he’d never imagined having one. He never thought of beards as having anything to do with him. The metal work teachers at school, all three of them, had beards. So did Obi Wan Kenobi. Now here he was. This was the person he’d turned out to be. He said, “It doesn’t take much to set me off thinking about the different ways I might have turned out.”
Wendy was taking off her shirt, bunching it into a pillow and lying down. Showing off her little bra top from Flip to the whole of Gayfield square. From one shirt pocket fluttered a sliver of paper. A phone number on it. That David, the skinhead on the train. It was only barely legible after the wash. She hadn’t phoned him yet. Maybe now was the time.
Colin hadn’t noticed her staring at the number.
“This is how I’ll be now,” he was saying. “This has got to be my prime. Twenty-three. As prime as I’ll ever get. This is my ultimate incarnation.”
“Incarnation,” she muttered.
When they were out and about together these were the things that Wendy was apt to forget. Those three things would come back with a little jolt sometimes. Not a major shock, just an odd reminder, like getting her change back in John Lewis’ and staring at the exotic Scottish pound notes.
She would remember that Colin was queer, that he was going to die, and that he was a millionaire. These separate facts would push themselves into her view, where she would quietly marvel at them.
The queer part of it wasn’t that unusual any more. The disease wasn’t either, after the year she’d been having. It seemed that everyone she knew was busy making the
