For some reason she was reacting badly to the sun. When she was little she’d been able to run around the beach and about the streets all day in the brightest sun. These days, each time she came home from bearing her arms, legs, stomach and the top of her head in the Botanical Gardens, she would end the day feeling sick with a splitting headache.
“I’ve never been cursed with sun-stroke,” said Aunty Anne, advancing with a cold compress and asprins. “You’re like your mother. You’ll be peely-wally all your life.”
Wendy flushed, hearing her mother called like this.
Aunty Anne was turning a fine, glossy mahogany. Those legs of hers were lacquered and finely turned like something off one of the precious antiques she saw being sold each morning in the auctions she was still attending. She was still patiently picking up bargains and tips about the selling game. “I’m an exquisite antique!” Aunty Anne would call out, strutting about the flat, showing off her tan. “And just look at these gorgeous legs! Couldn’t you eat them?”
“For God’s sake,” said her ex-husband. “Put all that flesh away. You’ll shame us all. Next to you, we look like we’re wasting away.” It was true. The more gloriously robust Anne became that summer, the worse her son and his father looked. Anne would emerge each morning from her purple satin-lined room in ever-skimpier and garish and daring outfits and the two men would still be shuffling about in their dressing gowns. Only Colin sometimes flung himself down on the grass in Gayfield Square, onto his old Spiderman duvet cover. Father and son were declining together and Anne’s ebullient health was a rebuke to them: get out there and enjoy it!
Her advice—about anything—was always the same, thought Wendy. You’ve got to go for it! Seize the day! You’ve got to go and get out there!
But they wouldn’t. The old man had taken a turn for the worse. And mostly Colin didn’t leave the flat till after eleven at night, when the sun had safely slunk away past the conservatory on Calton Hill, which looked to him like a baleful nipple on a single tit.
This afternoon Wendy lay next to her dozing, basting aunt and wondered once again if she was footling and tootling her time away. Colin might well have been more help and support to her in her quest for something meaningful to do. (Meaningful? When did that come about? The word had never occurred to her before. All she needed was something to take her mind off loss and displacement, to give her a propping up and a structure for the things she got up to. Jesus God! (How infectious Astrid was) she was seventeen and meaning wasn’t really that high on her list of priorities.)
Colin was no help? No, I wouldn’t say that exactly. He was good to me. A very maternal boy, I think he was at that age, with the mothering instinct thwarted in him and coming out and splurging over his few friends when he and they would let it. He could be crowding and oppressive with his care and his wheedling the truth of the matter out of you...Right from my first days in their luxury rooftop pad, he wanted all the truth out of me.
Maybe, I thought, he’s a naive receptor, like Timon.
Belinda said he was a hologram, and therefore not to be trusted. But Belinda’s world-view was just bizarre and although I liked her idea of splitting everyone in the world into two categories (how convenient!) I wasn’t convinced. And, as yet, I certainly wasn’t convinced that she and Marlene had been experimented upon at the North Pole.
Colin’s problem, I would say now, and perhaps it was my problem too, was that he couldn’t think of anything more delightful than being a seventeen year old girl. And he told me this, he told me this himself. This good old reductionist version of a gay man’s sensibility came straight from the horse’s mouth—so don’t write in! If I’m being reductionist about queers, about Colin himself, then so was he and, in that unguarded moment, he was happy to be. He actually said, ‘To be you and pretty and seventeen and have it so easy and not be queer and have fellas chasing you! Lovely! You’re so lucky! So ordinary!’
It was my...situation he adored, more than me myself. I imagined that he was sneaking up on me, ready to pounce...not to seduce me, of course, but to oust me. He wanted to know why I wasn’t having a better time than I appeared to be having. And he lost no time in suggesting that if he was me, why then he’d...have a humdinger of a time. Humdinger was his word. I’d started using it too, I’d noticed, along with doll, along with Jesus God! Along with telling people not to lose their elasticity. I always picked up things like this. Verbal tics cling to me.
“Time to get back,” said Aunty Anne, peeling herself off the grass. Shreds of green were sticking to her darkened underside.
“How come so early?”
“Your Uncle Pat gets back from the consultant soon.”
I must have looked blank.
“Don’t you remember? He was at the hospital today.”
I’d forgotten.
“About his...problems.” With a downward glance Aunty Anne
