An odd memory: one that made her chuckle, but wasn’t funny really. Of taking an old woman to the toilet. A blind old woman who wore six pairs of knickers. Somehow she’d smuggled extra layers on and Anne had knelt before her, tugging down pair after pair. The last pair refused to budge and Anne tugged and tugged until she realised that she was yanking at the poor thing’s rough old skin.
And Sam, the porter, who’d loved her and taken her out a few times after their shifts ended. Her first and only infidelity. He was Irish and red-headed and she loved his creamy skin. She could picture being back in his Ford Capri in the woods somewhere out of town. He told her the story, in his slow, lugubrious voice, of his grandfather that worked in the steelworks, who’d fallen into the vat of molten steel. He’d been messing on with his mates and next minute he was gone, sucked down inside the vat. All they found afterwards was his wedding ring. The rest had been boiled away, adulterating the steel. Sam the porter used this story to tell Anne to go back to her husband and her little boy. She needn’t be spending her time in the woods with the likes of him.
She had almost put that whole episode out of her mind. Wheeling her trolley round Tesco’s through the late night rush, it all came back. Pat was of an age and condition to be in that old folk’s home now. Did that mean she was too? When had that happened to her? She went to look at the hair dyes. Maybe blonde again. She didn’t have to age gracefully. She’d be getting no grandkids. That was a blessing. Our Lindsey never had to worry about getting that old. She was out like a light in a couple of months. Anne found herself crying in the haircare aisle.
Then Belinda was there, pushing a trolley and her friend Astrid in her wheelchair.
“Jesus God, what’s the matter?” said Astrid, though Anne barely knew the woman.
“Come with us, doll,” Belinda said. “We’re getting a taxi down to the Royal Circus. We know your man’s sick. You needn’t be out shopping when…”
Anne shrugged her off. “He isn’t my man anymore.”
They drew back from her.
“I’m sorry,” Anne heard herself say. “I will share that taxi, if you don’t mind. Today’s just taken it right out of me.”
By the time they led her through the checkouts Belinda had brightened up. “You’ve no need of buying groceries, Anne. I’m cooking in your kitchen this evening.”
Anne eyed her blearily. “Pardon?”
“I’m laying on a special banquet. You’ve got a new visitor today. My young man is coming to stay.”
Astrid, loading groceries, raised her eyebrows. “Jesus God,” she said.
TWENTY-THREE
Am I ready for new people, new things? Timon wondered. Perhaps he had been too rash, deciding to come to Edinburgh. But he was sick of imagining things, dreaming up what Wendy would be like by now. He was sick of the vagueness with which he pictured Colin and Uncle Pat. And Belinda, of course, though her photo had gone part of the way to solving that mystery.
She was gorgeous. Or had been. The photo seemed to be an old one, a sun-faded Polaroid. He took it out of his book, where it was marking his page. He should be prepared to find a Belinda a little older than this. The face in the photo was flawless, framed by two dark wings of hair. She smiled and held out a brimming cocktail, the umbrella teetering at the glass’s edge.
He watched the slow hills of the borders slide past and tried to let the train’s urgent noise drum his apprehension down.
Of course I’m ready to come up against the new, he thought. There’s nothing left for me in Blackpool. Shit job, no friends. Even Mandy, far away in Lancaster, apparently madly gestating her foetus, had fallen out of touch.
I like new things. I never get nervous.
His butterflies, then, were all from love.
I’m a naïve receptor, he chanted to himself. I soak it all up.
Since Newcastle he had been sitting opposite a couple from the States. The man was almost inactive, staring ahead through shades, wearing a baseball cap, feeding himself yoghurt. He kept wanting to eat things and his wife had a handbag full of chocolates. She confided in Timon that the chocolates in America were bigger. In America, everything was bigger. “When I first left Scotland,” she said, “when I first left my birthplace and went to the States, I craved Cadbury’s. And yet now I’m back it’s the other way round.” She pronounced the names of exotic-sounding American sweets and Timon smiled. Her accent was hybridized. She didn’t know where she wanted to be. She gasped out excitedly at every new view, and pulled on her husband’s arm, calling him ‘Ho-nee’.
Everything excited her: finding the missing teaspoon in her bag, the kind woman across the aisle offering to fetch coffee for them, seeing landmarks on the north coast that she recognised. “Is this Berwick-upon-Tweed? Ho-nee, this is a lovely place where I visited with my grandma, by the ocean. That is the ocean, isn’t it?” She waved her hands, scattering sweet papers. “No, it’s the sea! The German sea!”
The old man asked if it wasn’t the Pacific Ocean. Then he fretted that the kind girl bringing them coffee wouldn’t manage, and would trip up on the way back. His wife said, “She’ll have some kind of tray to bring them on. You’ll see, ho-nee.”
Timon wanted to talk to them some more, but he felt sick with nerves. They were old people and he thought he should get some practice in, talking with old people, since that seemed to be who Wendy was hanging round with these days.
He stared at the woman’s turquoise knitted top and his heart went out to her. Beside her the old man looked affluent
