Today I read all twenty-seven of your letters again and you were as large as life once more. I have your whole life story. When I read you it pans out once more.
Now I have just re-read this letter so far and it’s very urgent, isn’t it? I’ve never written in this tone to you before. I have to let it all out, though. Last night I sat on bench on Blackpool Promenade, read you and thought it through. I sat till late on, till the crowds thinned out and I realised I was falling in love with you.
I never believed in the people who fell in love through letters. I used to laugh at the people who fell for prisoners on Death Row. The granny who made her ten year old granddaughter write to a serial killer and how all three found themselves besotted. I thought those people were deluded. They’d drummed their better sense into submission with their banal, secretive, confessional notes. And yet I believe in writing, don’t I? I always felt you could seduce with writing and that you could be seduced. Why only when it’s folded up between printed covers? Why not when the pages come hand-written, hand-posted and smelling faintly of the sweat of the writer’s brow, fingers, palms? Their saliva swalking the envelope’s gum. I never thought that someone would seduce me like that.
You’ve got me over a barrel. I can’t work. In the fish shop I turn all butter fingers, dropping things and the floor is filthy. I can’t write anything apart from letters to you. I draft them laboriously, waiting to jam-pack them with images of different colours, to send you flashy prose that will ring bells when you slit open my envelopes. What material you send me, what an inner life you have. I copy out your letters and try to insert myself between your lines. I read and wait for your face to come up from beneath the surface of your writing. You must be in there somewhere: the real, bodily you.
When I try to pin you down, you’re gone.
Something in here makes me want to read more and more of you. Devour every scrap of you. Send me your shopping lists, your jottings, your memoranda! I would breakfast on your ephemera, your idle thoughts and sighs. For lunch I would break open your diaries, your considered day-to-dayness. All afternoon I would snack on your poems, keeping a dish of stanzas by my side as I worked. In the evening, however, I would feast myself on your body of prose. Your life’s work would be my rich pickings till dawn: supper and dessert lying heavy on me all night.
Can you believe all this, Belinda?
Girl,
you’ve gone and turned my head.
Tell me the rest now
Tell me what you look like
All my love,
Timon.
Wendy stared at Belinda. “What have you been sending him?”
“Nothing special. He asked about my life, my history. You know, all about the events leading up to my… abduction, and then afterwards. My life now.”
“You’ve made him fall in love with you.” Wendy rattled the paper. “He loves you!”
Belinda shook her head, sighing. “He certainly comes over as keen.”
“Keen!” said Wendy. “He’s gone crackers.”
Belinda took the letter back. “All of that about me. It arrived this morning.” She folded it back up.
Wendy’s mind was racing. “What are you going to do about it?”
“But that’s just it,” said Belinda. “I’m sure he means well. I feel awful.” She sat down carefully. “It’s as if I’ve laid him a trap and the poor boy’s walked into it. And I haven’t laid him a trap! I haven’t.”
“He’s half your age,” said Wendy.
“And look at me. He hasn’t got a clue.”
“He wants to know what you look like. You’ll have to tell him.”
“I can’t. Who can love me when I look like this? All the weight I’ve been putting on. I’m a massive woman now.” Through the winter months Belinda had been eating steadily, as if building herself up to face winter. Wendy felt ashamed of herself, seeing how upset Belinda was. Yet she still wanted to goad the woman into proving the discrepancy between Belinda-here and Belinda-in-the-letters. She couldn’t think what had got into Timon. She had never heard him go on like that before and she couldn’t help feeling suspicious. In the past Timon always claimed he was immune to love. He was the watcher, the sideliner, the self-determined wallflower watching the dancers. Love left him cold, he said: he thought it was a sickness. He claimed never to have entertained a romantic thought. Nothing turned him on. His body was an assemblage of parts that would respond readily to the usual stimuli, but he was rarely inside it. Wendy remembered his detached look. The way that night on the sands at Blackpool he had looked down at himself, at his smooth tight belly and his cock like it was someone else’s as he let Wendy look him over and take him in her hands. She felt jealous, plainly and simply, now that Timon was letting himself out of control.
“He thinks he isn’t deluded,” said Belinda. “And maybe he’s not. But one sight of me would cure him.”
“Don’t make yourself miserable about it.”
“I’ve got to nip it in the bud.”
“Doesn’t he know how old you are? Haven’t you said anything about what you’re like?”
“Of course I have. The letters are all about me.”
“Then maybe he knows what you’re like.”
“I missed things out, of course. There are gaps.”
Wendy realised then that it was these gaps Timon had fallen for. The holes in Belinda’s story and her account of herself had lured him.
“Do I put a stop to this?”
Wendy felt like saying yes, of course she should. But that would be out of her own selfishness. That would mean she herself would be fighting over Timon. She didn’t want that so she said, “No, write to him again. Tell him
