Aunty Anne was as good as her word, which she had given on the sands at Yellow Craigs, and stayed with us all Christmas. I heard her talking on the phone to her man at home in Phoenix Court, Newton Aycliffe. Ralph the man with a mission, the obese Lamb of God. He held services in the living room of his council house because he was too fat to leave it very often. “He’s huge!” Aunty Anne told me gleefully. “He has legs wider than both of mine put together.” She seemed to delight in him. “The Lord made me this shape,” he told her. “I’m fat for the plan.” He was wedged on a Chesterfield settee and often slept there. When Aunty Anne told him she was staying in Edinburgh, he turned out not to be very pleased at all. “I thought you were going out on a mission. I thought it was Scarborough for you this Christmas.”
The phone crackled.
“Oh. But I can’t leave, Ralph. He’s very… near the end. It’s our last chance.”
More crackles.
Later that night Aunty Anne told me that we might be getting an extra Christmas visitor. I thought, not Ralph! Then she said Ralph had rung her a friend of hers, and asked her to keep an eye on Aunty Anne. Ralph sounded odious to me.
So we had our Christmas. Even that game where everyone stands in line and passes a balloon along, person to person, without using their arms. Uncle Pat sat it out, laughing in the corner.
Astrid sang us German carols on Christmas Eve.
Colin took a bunch of us out to the Oyster bar, where we had tequila slammers at midnight, mixing salt, lemon juice and wasted booze on the rough wooden tables.
Aunty Anne wanted dancing, so the furniture was pulled back and Colin produced his treasured records. We danced.
Belinda cooked for us once more.
Captain Simon knocked the tree over, carrying chairs in the hall. He became flustered, picking up shards of burst glass baubles. “Watch your feet!” he shouted at us, on his hands and knees. “Put some slippers on! Watch your feet!” We laughed.
“Jesus God!” said Astrid, wheeling past crossly.
“Watch your feet,” Timon smirked at me.
“Don’t lose your elasticity,” I told him back.
Mandy wasn’t losing her elasticity. It didn’t matter that her
GP had told her, had given her stern warning that if she persisted in performing that particular trick of hers—with the golden bangles in her mouth—she would go all bandy-lipped, loose-lipped, and not be able to talk. There was no sign of that happening to Mandy’s perfect, tensile strength. Her mouth moved with perfect shape: she could hold the shape of any vowel or consonant. She would practise, watching herself. Only, she could open her mouth wider than anybody she knew. She was like one of those tribespeople who put plates in their lips, or rings on their necks and slowly graft themselves into some bizarrely cultured, attenuated form.
Daniel, peering over his yellow-tinted glasses, said her stretchable-but-still-pert mouth was like a snake’s. But he would. Odd, for a man who had read, researched and agreed with so much contemporary feminist theory (and whose subject was the great grand-mammy of many of these theorists) that he could be so blithely Freudian, and sexist in his appraisal of Mandy. Carelessly he called her Snake-Woman, Phallic Mother, a loose-lipped swallower of his manly essence. Well.
Our Mandy kept her lips, her vowel-sounds, her talking itself supple by endless practice. Sotto-voce as she sat on the minibus into town, or walked back across the snowy park, or cleaning the cooker, or cooking their tea, she was muttering to herself. She found her syntax was elastic, too: strong and yielding and it could carry a freight of anything she fancied. She started to mutter and come up with her own strings of words the day she stopped reading. She was building up a corpus of work, only very little of it was written down yet. Only this first story, about our mother, our mother dying on the beach at Blackpool at night, watching the strings of lights on the Golden Mile reiterated in the water.
Mandy was roving over old ground, past events, past history. Her muttering took us all in, turned us over, pulled us into her telling. In the snowy park that led from the river to their housing estate, she walked alone in twilight with her Sainsbury’s bag and let her mutters grow louder. Grand loops of improvised words sent out ahead of her. She allowed herself to shout them, call them out like a bat uses its bursting cries to orient itself in the dark. Mandy, testing her voice, liking what she heard.
His attic room was clean and Spartan and he helped her move boxes of her things in during Christmas week. Daniel wasn’t home to see her go. He was off on his travels, hunting down the living, non-practising writer he told everyone he revered. He wanted to tell her: I have your clue. I know the key to uncover your texts. I have seen the figure in your carpet. Mandy hoped the old thing—if he found her—would send him away with a flea in his ear.
No mystery, no essence, no secret. Mandy wanted to tell her Professor: don’t go making me a mystery. What I am doing is very plain. She began her next story and it was a continuation of her first. But she ravelled it back and began a little earlier. She thought: Where do I begin?
With Timon on the Golden Mile. She thought of Timon, a literate, watching, slant-viewed outsider. In his fish shop, busying himself absent-mindedly, stitching white fish in their hot golden cardigans. Then she thought again and wrote from the viewpoint of a younger sister. Me. She thought about me at sixteen and thinking it was time
