Belinda’s face crumpled. “That’s a good as saying, tell him to take a hike.”
Put him in the picture.
When Wendy left Belinda had an idea. She opened the dark wood dresser and hunted through boxes of letters from other people, magazines, scrapbooks of clippings (about Marlene, about the Visitors) until she unearthed a particular photograph album. Lime green, ring bound, picture of the Mona Lisa looking smug on the front. Old family and friends, mostly Polaroids, which were faded now, given an extra sheen of poignancy by the fact they hadn’t lasted any longer than fifteen years. Half these faces she hardly recognised. A family gathering for the Royal Wedding in 1981. Here she was. Somewhat younger, somewhat slimmer, in a patriotic frock she had stitched from cut-up flags. A painted Union Jack bowler hat on her head. I look deranged on this, she thought. I can’t send him one of me looking like Britannia, pissed and deplorable.
The thought nudged at her, that maybe she oughtn’t feel so bad. Not to be too hard on herself. Timon was a sensitive soul: a careful, beautiful man. Surely, to fall so helplessly in love, he already knew all about her. Her outwardness was just a covering for everything he adored and he would love that too, because that was part of her.
She flipped the thick album pages. Here was cousin Christine at twenty-six. With raven hair about her shoulders and those flashy blue eyes. She was holding an exotic drink up in toast to the photographer. Belinda unpeeled the sticky film, and out came cousin Christine. She hurried to her writing table before she lost her nerve.
On the bus to the infirmary that afternoon Wendy mulled
over the letter she would send to Timon. She would be interfering. Too right she would. She’d be sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
The more she thought about it the clearer it seemed. Now she was sure that what Timon saw in Belinda was raw material. She was a slab of pink flesh that had him drooling. Not for your usual reasons, mind you. He saw her as a repository of stories. Of hare-brained, crackpot tales that were all the more delicious for the ardent way Belinda believed every word of them. Wendy remembered how she had felt compelled to listen to Belinda those afternoons in the launderette, with Astrid urging the story on. We’re all in this together, thought Wendy sadly, goading Belinda to make a fool of herself.
As the bus pulled up by the infirmary, the black Victorian, turreted castle in which her uncle was whiling his sickness away, Wendy was thinking that what she really wanted to do was read the twenty-seven letters Belinda had sent Timon. What had she been telling him? All of that flying saucer stuff? Since when was Timon in love with alien stories?
Then she put the whole lot out of her mind as she went off to buy carnations to take to her uncle. She wondered if he’d find Belinda’s doings amusing. It was hard work, filling the two hours with chat every day.
When we took the old man to hospital he was in terrible pain. For weeks he had been covering it up, with his bluff smiles and his mockery at our concern. Eventually we persuaded him we should call him a taxi and get him to Casualty. It was a Saturday morning. Aunty Anne, Colin and I waited in a green waiting room with the chairs bolted into the cement floor. We watched a drama going on for an American family of four. They were only here for a few days and the eldest daughter had clonked her head on a pavement in Teviot Square, rollerblading with the shirtless show-off boys. As they waited to heAr how concussed she was the mother sobbed and their youngest played a bleepy, percussive computer game. Meanwhile the nurses were undressing Uncle Pat, lying him under blankets he said reminded him of baby blankets, they were so blue. They pushed and prodded at his stomach again and he told them he was due to see the consultant next Thursday. He’d been good: he was waiting out his turn. He was only here today because his family had forced him to come. They fret, he said apologetically. The nurses went off to find him a bed on a relevant ward. They told him—and then they told us—that they were keeping him in.
Aunty Anne was thinking, we should have brought him earlier. She was expected to get a good telling off from the doctors when they came to see her. They should know what it’s like, though. Aunty Anne knew: she’d had her own health problems, and she’d put going to the hospital off and off indefinitely. Eventually she’d end up thinking, I’m in too much pain for this to be normal. Do I qualify as an emergency yet? Even when Pat’s pain got that bad—and she could still read him plainly, as if there was still a link between them—he didn’t want to bother the nice people at Accidents and Emergencies. The previous weekend he had queued for his GP, who tutted and hmmed and sympathised like anything. Weeks had been going by. Weeks between tests and more tests. The pain would abate for a while, then return redoubled in the middle of the night. But time flies, doesn’t it? Especially when you’re older. We’ll have you seeing the consultant again in no time. The GP patted the old man’s knee.
How you got used to pain. And you won’t go on about it, because it gets boring. Who wants to hear the gripes and moans of an old man? They’re expected to be like that, and Pat didn’t want to live that out. He kept mum as much as he could about the pain his folded-in, ruinous insides gave him. And I let him do that, thought Aunty Anne, shocked by herself. I
