“They were glad to see the back of us,” I said.
“Who paid for all that?’
“I did.”
“Oh, Wendy… you can’t.”
I shrugged. Raised my arms. I was drunk. “I’m a big heiress now, aren’t I? A big fucking humdinger of a rich heiress!” Using Colin’s favourite word made me miss him suddenly. I imagined his reaction to tonight.
“Hey, hon,” said Timon, becoming himself again. “That reminds me.” From his wallet he produced the cheque I’d written them and he started to rip it up.
“Don’t do that!” I made a grab and rescued it.
“Don’t fight, you two,” said Belinda, looking round. “That lot are still behind us, watching.”
It was true. Astrology Annie had dashed off ages ago, to write the whole thing up for her spooky column in the Telegraph. But behind us the Unicorn woman was helping Lizzie along. The ectoplasm woman had her handbag held up over her chin.
“Oh, let’s get out of here, kids,” said Timon. “I’m thinking of a nice goose-down bed.”
“I want you to have this money,” I said.
“We don’t want it.”
“I didn’t want it, either!” I shouted. “Uncle Pat gave me no choice!”
“He loved you, Wendy,” said Belinda.
“He loved you fellas as well,” I yelled. “Jesus God. Just go and spend it, will you? For me?”
“Well….”
“I don’t want the responsibility for all that money.”
“I’ll make money anyway,” said Timon blithely. “I’m going to publish my book. Pieces of Belinda will make us a fortune.”
Belinda glowed.
“Is that what you’ve called it?”
He nodded, watching out for a cab. Then he told me, “You can’t please everyone, you know. You’ll try to, but you can’t.”
Our taxi came.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I can try, can’t I?” A thought struck me as we clambered aboard. “You do have a copy of that tape, don’t you? I mean, we haven’t left the only one back there?”
“We’ve got copies,” he grinned. “Plympton Road, please. The pictures are out in the world now, anyway, hon. You’ll see. By tomorrow they’ll be in everyone’s eyes.”
The cabbie asked us, “Did you see the telly tonight?”
“We saw.”
“Fakkin aliens! The fakkers’ve landed! And they looked just like fakkin ordinary people!”
“We know.”
The papers next morning gave their covers to Timon and Belinda. Almost all of them used Belinda’s chosen word ‘visitors’ and this word was repeated in bold across all the front pages.
Imagine an old film at this point. That thing they used to do, spinning the front pages, one after another, up to the camera.
The pictures they took from the video stills came out rather badly. Dark fuzz with tiddly figures. It was disappointing, so the papers mostly elected to use shots of Timon and Belinda themselves, stepping out of the BBC’s side entrance.
I was first up next morning. The phone was already ringing and it never stopped all that day. I checked the answerphone was on and let it be. Belinda and Timon lay in, under their goose down, and I could hear Belinda sneezing in her sleep. No sign of Aunty Anne, and Serena’s bedroom door was open, her bed untouched.
I went out for a walk down Kilburn High Street and bought all the papers.
I went to the launderette to see what Ute thought. I arrived just in time to turn the page for her. Please turn to page two and three for full story.
“Jesus God,” said Ute. “The aliens come and they look like this fat woman and black man.”
“They’re just the people who saw them,” I explained. “Those two aren’t the visitors.”
“That’s not what the Sun is saying,” said Ute.
“It was true. Their banner read: visitors go home and underneath it, Belinda and Timon’s faces looking startled, almost affronted.
THIRTY-FOUR
All this time Mandy was pregnant in the north. And she was getting huge, she wrote. She wrote and told me she was like the swans on the canal by the Professor’s house, where he walked each morning to clear her head from writing through the night. She wrote at night to keep the Professor from seducing her.
She felt like the swans, full-breasted, heavy-bodied, on the frozen canal. They had nowhere to swim and Mandy said she laughed when she saw them skidding from bank to bank, trying to crack the ice. If they cracked the ice with their weight they’d still have nowhere to swim, she said.
She wrote and asked what I meant by sending her money. That was the beginning and end of her qualms about accepting it and she cashed the cheque, put it to good use. She stored it up for her escape from the Professor, the learned, bearded Sultan who kept her all that winter and sometimes, she said, he tried to get his end away with her. He knew she never wanted him really and he turned glum and folded in upon himself. He carried his years and learning heavily that winter. When she read—her voice getting stronger and surer—chapter by inevitable chapter, he sometimes played with himself surreptitiously in the firelight and she didn’t mind.
She wrote and asked what was all this fuss about Timon and Belinda. No TV in the Professor’s house. That was how he kept himself free from the pernicious hold of the everyday. He didn’t know anything he didn’t want to know: he had no inadvertent knowledge. Only Mandy could surprise him, or he permitted her to. But they both read the papers when they knew Timon and Belinda were in them.
Had the world gone mad? Mandy wanted to know. Listening as it was to Timon and his funny, old girlfriend. They had been on telly again and again those early months of the year. And there was talk of Timon having a book out, the literary companion to his short film. The papers talked about the book being published soon, though Timon held them off. An artist, such an artist, Mandy said. He’ll be finicking the details and holding his publication off. Booting
