TWENTY
I want a dirty old man
who’ll cover me with his dirty kisses
and his floppy old skin
I’ll soothe his wrinkled brow
and cheeks and arms and legs
I’ll let him shuffle about me
indulge me
let him Lolita me
Captain Simon was hanging about Wendy these days. Even though his pal, the oldest man in the building, was in hospital, the Captain kept coming upstairs for his coffee.
Winter months now and they drank milky coffee laced with whiskey, with Glemorangie from Jenners. They drank it with the stove crackling away in the kitchen and it was acrid and smoky. They watched the snow patter against their window above the dark trees of the Royal Circus.
Captain Simon was paying court to her in a charming, chatty old way. He and Aunty Anne ignored each other and nothing more was said about it. When she stumped into the kitchen in her winter-thickness woolly gown, it was tied tighter and secure and she brushed straight past the Captain. Poured her tea, fried her bacon, lit her first cigarette saying, “Good morning cigarettes, good morning Wendy.” Captain Simon would lower his head until she was gone, singing, down the still bare-boarded hallway into the bathroom. The tiles in there were new. Colin had ordered them and seen them cemented into place, all around their bath. Golden and every one mirrored. Aunty Anne sat herself in a scented, herbal, foamy tub each morning and wiped condensation from each small mirror in turn. She glared into them and told herself she was a handsome and voluptuous woman and never more so than now. Her hair was back in its basic, Liz Taylor black. Challenged, aloofy, queenly: Liz Taylor is who she settled on being.
“Your Aunty despises me,” Captain Simon said.
“You were a bit unfair with her,” Wendy told him.
He looked sheepish. “You know about that then?”
“Aunty Anne tells me everything,” Wendy lied.
Sometimes she would look at the Captain and wonder if anything Belinda said about him was true. If he was indeed a replacement of some sort, and not the genuine article, not the original old man, then perhaps he was something else underneath. But he was a hard nut to crack. He came for coffee, made polite conversation, and looked at her.
All had gone quiet downstairs in the Belinda camp. She hadn’t seen any more lights in the sky. She had even given up looking. Captain Simon said that she’d done something to his prized telescope, had altered its delicate mechanisms, and he wouldn’t let her use it again. Belinda had become somewhat cool towards Wendy, though Wendy couldn’t think what she’d done to offend her.
Then one day Wendy was heading up to the top flat and Belinda poked her head out of her front door. Her face was red, cheeks crazed with broken veins and her white hair stood on end so Wendy knew she’d been running her hands through it, as she did when she was perturbed and thinking furiously. The half can of hairspray she emptied into it each morning would make her hair stick like that, ravelled into a thoughtful knot.
Belinda had very finely-tuned ears and she could tell who was coming up the stone steps by their individual treads.
“I’ve got something you ought to read,” she told Wendy and led her inside the flat she shared with her brother. Please, Wendy thought, don’t let it be another magazine about UFO sightings. In the past few months Wendy had had newsletters of many dubious sorts pushed under her nose.
Wendy sat herself on the faded chintz, while Belinda rushed off to the kitchen, calling out that she’d prepared some lunch, and would Wendy like some?
The flat was decorated with the kind of ornaments you had to order from the back pages of Sunday colour supplements. Belinda would be paying this lot off in monthly instalments for years to come. Crinolined ladies twirling their brollies and clutching pink roses, plates on special hangers printed with Highland scenes, with Royalty, with the cast of Star Trek. On the dresser there were three china babies, life-sized, slumping in a huddle, eyelids squeezed shut, all three dressed in knitted outfits.
Belinda emerged with a tray of chicken kebabs and urged Wendy to dab them into a peanutty sauce she herself had ‘blended from scratch’. The sauce fizzed with heat. Wendy wasn’t hungry (she never was after a session at Job Party) but she ate them anyway, prising off the sticky meat with her fingers first and making a great show of enjoying it all. When Belinda jumped up and suggested they wash it down with a Martini, Wendy had to say no nicely. She knew to be careful around Belinda. Like many pale people, her thin-skinnedness meant that her feelings rose up easily to the surface. You could see in terrible close up sometimes what was going on inside Belinda and so it wasn’t worth hurting her feelings.
Eventually, finished her own drink, she straightened up and Wendy heard her fat knees give an almighty crack. “Now, read this,” Belinda said, and made her friend put down a half-eaten kebab and gave her a few sheets of paper. A letter.
My dear Belinda,
Our friend Wendy has done us a great service—she’s brought us together by accident—bless her heart. I’ll confess now that I thought she was having me on when her first letters arrived and she told me she was getting you to write to me. And when I got your letters I thought it was a big piss-take. I thought you were a fruit loop and Wendy had set me up. But now I know it was clever young Wendy bringing us together. She must have seen the many points of contact we have! When I read you I can hear your speaking voice. I can hear you in my head. I feel I know everything about you.
So… blessings on Wendy’s head. She’s made an amazing difference to my life. I believe in new things in my life and
