There’s a Professor here. I’m making a bit of extra money proofreading his opus. A book on the eighteenth century Gothic. Daniel got me the gig. He knows how finickety I am. I take a chapter at a time from the Professor’s office and at home I go line by line through his patient descriptions of ghosts and ghouls, his tender accounts of eviscerations and beheadings. I pick open his typos and his inconsistencies and mark them all down. A doddle, as you’d say. He’s a shaggy old professor, dark and messy as my new coat.
He’s going to look at my first short story and give me his expert opinion. He promised to. Did I tell you I’d written a story? I’ve caught the bug. It’s very short. Maybe not very good. Don’t tell Timon. He’d rip me to pieces.
My baby is the size of a comma. An errant piece of punctuation, holding my life up. But I reckon I’ll keep it. Let that sentence develop. Give birth to something, at any rate.
Lots of love to you, Aunty Wendy!
For your soon-to-be-fat, fecund and best sister,
Mandy.
While I hadn’t heard a thing from Thistle Street, from my
trendy Megastore boy, David, it turned out that behind my back Colin had been going round there. He and David and the bloke in the funny hat were now firm friends. “I need some straight friends my own age,” Colin told me later. “Life is separatist enough.” I tutted. He blamed me for his seeking friendship elsewhere. While I was talking with Belinda, visiting his father, racking my brains as to Timon’s motives, Colin was clambering up the fire escape in Thistle Street, playing records and eating pasta and pulses with the vegetarian boys. He was telling them, “It’s the fire escape that makes this place. It makes it something special coming here.” On their fourth storey platform they were cultivating herbs and potted flowers. “Normal steps leading up here would make it just like anywhere. The fire escape makes it all into a film.”
Rab looked up from his latest unending sentence and agreed with him, even though he could never catch his breath when he got to the top.
“I’m thinking of moving out to my own place,” Colin told me. “Maybe up a fire escape.” Yet I knew he wouldn’t. He tried to look as if he didn’t care about his father’s illnesss. On the day the old man was due to be opened up and looked at, Colin was waiting there with us for results.
Colin said to me, “David wants to see you. He thinks you hate him for being a lousy shag.”
“He wasn’t!” I said, but I didn’t phone him up. I thought I was going off men. Colin was welcome to them. Maybe he was working on seducing David or Rab. By all accounts they were generally too stoned to notice anything.
And all this while my sister was pregnant. I wanted to go and see her. There was no word yet from her about how Daniel had taken the news. Something told me he wouldn’t be best pleased. He was the selfish sort.
I wanted to go down to Lancaster, to help her buy things in Mothercare. But they were taking Uncle Pat into theatre, drugging him and making him say the alphabet backwards. They said he’d be a right mess inside, all his various scans had disclosed that much. They wanted to see what was in there, what was nestling dark and busily against his bowels. When I imagined him going gently off to sleep, dreaming that they could cut the badness out of him, it was that trustingness that held me in Edinburgh. I had to be there for him. Beneath his bluster and mordant humour, he had far more trust in doctors that I did.
It was cancer-cancer-cancer and I’d already seen that once this year.
I wanted to give Timon the benefit of the doubt. I thought of him as the friend of my youth. That pushed him a long way back in time and to hear that he had turned wicked, had been exploitative all along, really pained me. I decided to believe that he had fallen in love with Belinda. I always wanted to believe the best of my friends.
Belinda certainly believed in him. In those chillier days, when we set about wearing heavier and greater layers of clothes, when the windows each morning were mapped with careful lines of frost, she had apparently lost her anxiety. A new confidence overcame her. Her face shone: winter was her element, I realised. Summer slowed her and in the heat she had to drag herself around the place. November saw her nimble and sure-footed. Her correspondence with my friend went on. And meanwhile, I heard very little from Timon. He wrote me a card for Hallowe’en.
Since when was I in love with alien stories?
Oh, it isn’t that. It isn’t what I love Belinda for. What do you take me for, Wendy?
She writes to me full of trust. She writes as if I don’t even exist. I’m a patient ear listening to her telling me things she’s never told anyone. It isn’t material. I would never consider it that. It’s a gift to me. Given with her whole heart. No one’s ever given me anything like that before. I love Belinda because she’s honest without knowing that’s what she’s doing.
Wendy wondered then if it was Timon who was being taken in. He was being reeled in by Belinda’s easy tale-telling. Wendy didn’t swallow his view of Belinda as honest and trusting. Who knew the woman better? Belinda had the measure of Timon. She was seducing him with an effortless, flattering attention. Thirty-four letters now,
