“The only thing that doesn’t affect you are the men who fall in love with you. You sail through their influence.”
“What men?”
“The men around you. You’re not susceptible to them.”
“Good. There haven’t been that many, you know.”
“That David, for one. You’re very aloof with him.”
“Maybe I am.” She hated the way that, because of the hothouse exclusivity of his time with Belinda, Timon had become the expert. “Anyway, David will always be all right. He can adapt himself easily to where he is. He’ll always do the right thing for himself. This is exactly the right place for him. He can blend in with everyone.”
It irritated her that Timon was still going on about David. Couldn’t he see he was out of bounds, now? As winter came on they all saw more of David, who joined the rest of them most evenings at the kitchen table, but he wasn’t coming round to look at Wendy. Couldn’t Timon see that? She wanted to tell Timon that he was reading things to suit his own view of the picture. David was coming round to see Colin.
“I wish you weren’t so offhand with David,” Colin complained to her one night. He’d dragged her away from the kitchen, where Uncle Pat was holding court.
“Am I?”
“He thinks you might be homophobic.”
“Oh boy.” She looked at Colin. “Why should that bother him?”
They kept up the pretence that Wendy didn’t know what was going on between them. That was down to David who, a month after the day on the beach, was still hesitant about telling anyone about his coming out. He disliked the phrase. To David it made it sound like if he came out, there was somewhere he couldn’t get back into. He wanted some leeway.
I had a fling at this time that I didn’t tell anyone about, and especially not Timon and Colin. A fling. Like it’s something you casually toss off.
On one of Uncle Pat’s last trips out he took me to the theatre. We both dressed up. We went to the theatre that was built entirely of glass. When we stood on the bridge you could see the whole city reflected in its front, the last gleam of sun on white buildings. The city had been packed up into a box. It was all on purpose, said Uncle Pat, who still liked to find things to point out to me.
We walked very slowly, but he wanted to walk the whole way.
There were Christmas crowds in town. The decorations were up. Argos was heaving with people who were flipping through the laminated pages of catalogues and scribbling down numbers. We had a quick look. He wanted advice about something for Aunty Anne. I was no help with that. It made me feel sad to see Uncle Pat staring at all the pictures of jewellery and not knowing what she’d like. We gave up.
That night were were going to see a comedian. Billy Franks, a veteran who still packed out theatres with his one man show. It was mostly old people who went to see him, remembering a string of records he had out in the Sixties, heart-rending tears-of-a-clown stuff that Uncle Pat played for me before we left that evening. Billy Franks had a reputation for unpredictability, warning the audience that he rambled on for hours and they wouldn’t be getting home until the early hours. He hoped they’d booked taxis, he always said: the manager had locked all the exits and no one would be freed until he’d spent himself. They loved it: they let him go on, avid for what he’d do next. The posters in the theatre’s foyer showed him leering dirtily, his hair wild and thin, and he was clutching a ukulele up to his chin.
“Not the kind of thing you’d usually come to see,” Uncle Pat smiled, while they sat waiting to go in.
She said, “Actually, someone told me once I had to see Billy Franks before he threw it all in. A once-in-a-lifetime chance. He used to come to Blackpool every summer, but we never saw him. Mam did once, I think.”
“Remember when you asked what I did in the war?”
Wendy blushed. It sounded trite, but recently she had actually asked him that. He’d been pleased, though. He told her what it was like to parachute down on enemy trees. His description had shocked her. The old mad had coloured and said that parachuting scared into the unknown had felt to him like an orgasm every time. An orgasm in the fast, empty air.
“Anyway, I spent quite some time in the war with him.” Her uncle nodded at the leering poster. “He hadn’t stared as a comic yet. But he was learning his patter. He could really talk. He chatted on when he was nervous. Making you laugh when you shouldn’t. I had to hit him once to shut him up. He was endangering us.”
“Laughing behind enemy lines,” said Wendy.
“Exactly. I haven’t seen him in thirty years. He became so successful, and…”
The bells were ringing for the start of the show. The other old people rushed nimbly up the stairs for their places, putting down drinks and holding tickets aloft. Some of the pensioners were in tracksuits. Not for the first time Wendy wondered at how fit-looking, how energetic modern pensioners were. They zipped about on saga holidays, they looked tanned and lean, they knew how to enjoy themselves. Gales of laughter broke out as they jostled for their places.
There were long gaps in his rapid bursts of activity and his rattling speech. He had every speech impediment heard of and, during his four hours onstage that night, he stammered terribly. It was part of the act, of course, or had become part, and the audience laughed at his fluffs and tongue-tied pauses as much as
