Colin said that you only see ghosts—by the way—if you have suffered. I thought anyone could see them. You won’t have suffered enough, not with your easy life.
Get in touch and write me a sensible letter. No more of this nonsense about Mandy’s lips and how she’s stretched them. I didn’t believe a word of that.
One more thing—do you think you’re a replacement or a hologram? Holograms are people you can walk through. So insincere they hardly exist. Replacements, on the other hand, are real: I mean, you can touch them, but they aren’t the people they think they are. They mean well, but they’re still replacements. Which are you, Timon? All of the above is TM copyright Belinda-from-downstairs. All her ideas are about how the world has been infiltrated by replacement people and none of us is real anymore. The invasion has already happened and we aren’t who we should be. That’s what she reckons, anyway. Maybe she’ll explain it all to you on a postcard. Belinda, her theories and her stories (which she believes...!) are my present to you, Timon.
Don’t say I never give you owt.
PS Don’t lose your elasticity! Whatever you do.
love,
Wendy.
SIXTEEN
He wasn’t a skinhead anymore. Wendy didn’t know it yet, but she wouldn’t be getting him as a skinhead. In the few weeks since she’d seen him on the train and he’d slipped his number to her on the platform at Waverley, David had been letting his hair grow out. Now he looked (or so he’d been told) tufty and sweet and, at first, Wendy would miss him when he walked into the club where they were supposed to meet. She was still looking for her skinny skin skinhead.
David had been working in a record store in the West End. He was one of twenty who took turns behind the tills, easing the neverending stream of customers with their clingfilm-wrapped CDs. CDs slapped on counters made such a brittle, satisfying sound. He loved the noises of this summer’s work. The crashing of the tills and all the electronic white noise. He knew all the music. Surrounded by music, he would remember what was in the charts this summer for the rest of his life. Edinburgh had been his chance to make himself trendy and he had taken to the city happily, growing in his thick, dark sideburns, buying tartan Doc Martens and a range of trendy tops in different colours. He saw bands in pubs and bigger bands on tour, drank lager, ate nachos most nights, dabbed crunchy granules of speed on one finger and brushed his teeth with them, so he could dance and still get up to work on the till next morning, his hair sticking up funny where it was growing back.
He socialised with the people from work. Early on there had been a few nights with Heather, who was part of the extra staff they took on for the sales season, but that had stopped. “I used to have a vampire fixation,” Heather had told him, “but that fizzled out.” She was one of those people to whom everything in their life was just another fad. David decided he wasn’t prepared to be that.
He moved into a flat with a bloke from work, in Thistle Street, an alley of warehouse flats above the auction rooms. He was just two streets down from the shop on Princes Street. Now he was living in the centre of town, four storeys up a fire escape. He moved all his things into the flat in only five trips up the clanging fire escape. His flat mate Rab had much more stuff. Thousands of dog-eared records and rather startling books in cardboard boxes. David only hoped they didn’t choose to move out on the same day. Or that Rab didn’t move out first. He’d hate to have to offer to help Rab move his stuff.
In late August Wendy gave David a call and he blinked three times before realising who she meant she was.
“I didn’t think you were going to bother!”
“Oh,” said Wendy. “You shouldn’t lose faith so easily. I’m around.”
They made a plan to go out later that week. Wendy put the
phone down. The phone was still on the bare boards in the hall. You’d think Uncle Pat would buy a phone table or something. Then she thought, maybe this is what I’m missing—talking to and seeing someone closer to my own age. Everyone I know here is older. Even Colin is. He’s nearly thirty. David sounded so young.
The sun was back out. This week was the hottest so far. Today Aunty Anne made and effort and said, “Let’s get some sun-bathing in—up at the Botanical Gardens.” She had been slightly friendlier the last few days and these trips to the park had become the thing that aunt and niece did together, upon which no one else—and certainly no male person—impinged. Wendy had duly gone with her aunt and lay on the grass, on a prickly tartan blanket.
Anne lay back, fleshy and unashamed in skimpy shorts, baring her marvellous pins to the numinous sky, and anybody else who went passing by. Spreadeagled beside Aunty Anne, Wendy felt overshadowed and wanted to slink off to the cover of the trees. The new Chinese Garden lay over the brow of the next rise and she longed to go and sit in the simple wooden pagoda in the shade. Not waiting for Aunty Anne to fix her with a look, as she could at any moment, and ask: “Have you met a nice boy yet?” or, “Aren’t you wondering why my eyes are twinkling?” (She really asked this and yes, indeed, her eyes were twinkling merrily. To her shame Wendy pretended not to hear her aunt’s question. Though, of course, she was dying to know what had put that twinkle there.)
Oh,
