So, soon, I’ll be moving out. Taking baby and going.
His yellow glasses piss me off now. Jaundiced view of the world and all. At first I found a little cynicism sexy. I’ve got to get my act together now.
What other news?
My Professor—remember? The grizzled one who I was proofreading for? Took me to dinner when the book was delivered to his publisher. I got a special thank you in the acknowledgments. He ordered extra bottles of wine. He treated me nice.
He wore a kind of safari suit, wrinkled at the elbows and knees. The best restaurant Lancaster has to offer. Talked to me all night about witch-burnings and magic cults. In another age, he said, he would have been a necromancer. I could have believed him. Paid for it all with his golden card and tried for a fumbling snog in the car park. I put him off.
It was one of those chilly, misty nights we get along the canal. I walked home alone, with only the swans on the black water for company.
I told Daniel his Professor had tried to kiss me. He’d been working all night on his thesis. That bloody old woman of his. I think he’s in love with her. Obsessed with finding her, bringing her back out into the open, out of her seclusion. I said, maybe she’s happy staying at home knitting, watching telly, doing old lady things. That caused a row. Bigger than the row about his hairy, horny old Professor.
“He tried it on with me, too,” said Daniel.
“When?”
“It was a supervision session we had in a pub. He asked me straight out if I swang both ways.”
“Swang? Is that word?”
“Yes. His beard tickled when he kissed me.”
“You let him?”
“I told him to fuck off. I’m changing supervisors.” That was even more pressure on him, he said. Added to what me and the baby are giving him.
Next thing I knew, the Professor was ringing the house daily.
“Are you ok to speak?”
And I kept saying no, and putting the receiver down.
The house kept smelling dusty, cigarettey. I was convinced the floorboards smelled dirty, and were cobwebbed up underneath. In the knotty gaps I could even see the grey webbing. I bleached the boards and they went all patchy.
Then, one day, I let the Professor talk for a little while longer. “It’s about the short story you gave me. Success, Mandy!”
“You what?”
“I sent it to an anthology. An annual collection for new writers. I acted as your… uh, agent. And they took it! That’s a hundred pounds! The beginning of your career! The letter came this morning.”
I met him in the white, fussy Georgian tearooms in town and he showed me the letter on stiff, creamy paper and it was all true. My first story sold and I hadn’t even tried.
So there I am, Wendy. The book comes out in March. I’ll send you a copy. There’s a party in London and the Professor said he’ll come with me. I have to write more stories, he said. He tells me I’m a genius and now he hangs on my every word. He wants to write them down, which is, of course, only flattering.
I mean, all I wrote about was Mam, about Blackpool, the Golden Mile, me, you, our Linda. It was a tiny, tiny, short story, about the fair and Mam dying, what she was like at the end. How she used to watch monster movies. At the finish of it I have her down on the beach, on the wet sand, walking out to sea to catch up with Dracula, who’s turned into a bat and flying home. It took me ages to get it right. Yet it seems to have worked.
Shall I send you a copy?
If I write a novel that sells millions, becomes a movie, I could take the baby anywhere.
I have to think about what I should write next.
The Professor has a room in his attic and I’m moving into it this week. I haven’t told Daniel yet. Leave him alone for Christmas. The Professor thinks I should write a Gothic novel. He would. A ghost story. I remember what you said once: that to see a ghost you have to have suffered. There’s a beginning.
Happy Christmas Wendy—I’ve no money for presents—but all my love, anyway.
Mandy.
That Christmas Wendy thought: I’m surrounded by bastard writers.
Maybe that’s when I decided that one day, I’d get my own back on them all. Eventually I’d learn the skill, the lingo, the patter, and do it myself. With the language and the patience and everything I remember, I could wrest my own life back for myself. Away from the separate me’s in pages by Mandy, in the funny, stolen fragments that Timon produced, even in some of Rab’s endless sub-clauses. Even he managed to smuggle me in. I want to get it all back, and put it in one book.
My eventual husband, Joshua—we’ll get to him soon—he had versions of me. Paintings and drawings of me framed in his exquisite flat. He commissioned people to come and have a look at me. I haven’t got any of those pictures. Didn’t want them. To me, all of those pictures are saying, “Who does this woman think she is?” The artists were coerced into making me their subject. I came out wrong in those, because I never have to be coerced. I slipped into the things that people wrote and no one had to pay for that. Joshua wasn’t happy though, unless he was paying for something. Usually paying over the odds.
Wait for him, anyway. The connections are coming up. Serena visiting was the first palpable link with my eventual husband. The next bit of my life. Aunty Anne was engineering it, without even knowing
