“I like those alien people,” Melissa chuckled, catching up at last. “Especially the big black one. Anytime he liked he could take me into space.”
THIRTY-SIX
He didn’t want to stay in London for longer than an afternoon. He explained, as they sat with ice creams in Russell Square, that he didn’t want to see his mother.
“She’d love to see you, Colin,” Wendy told him. “She’s always asking if you’ve been in touch.”
“I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me alone. You know how she was when I got it together with David.”
The square was teeming with people catching the unseasonal warmth. Pigeons strutted and bickered on the paths, pumping their heads and tidying litter. Colin looked at Wendy and went on. “It’s finished. He got up one morning and decided he wasn’t queer after all. It took him months to figure it out. He got a good deal on it, though. Weeks in a hotel with a miraculous Paris view, getting his cock sucked while he thought it over.”
Colin was white and thinner. He had shaved off his odd little beard and looked even more drawn. His clothes were expensive and hanging off him.
“Where is he now?”
“He went straight off to Scotland, just before the weekend. They’ve offered him a better job in Glasgow, some record shop. He’s doing a management course and moving there.”
“Are you going after him?”
“I want to talk to him. I’m catching the four o’clock. There’s the flat in the Circus to sort out, to air and clean up. We’ve left it empty for ages. We could have squatters.”
“And you’ll talk it through with David?”
“It’s because I’m positive, you know. It’s not just him getting cold feet. He wasn’t faking it. You can’t, can you?”
“When did you tell him you were positive?”
“Oh, he guessed at the start. All the signs. The extra care I took.”
“He’ll deal with it. He’ll realise.”
“I’m not in love with the fella. But… he’s all right. I mean, he wasn’t the love of my life. I don’t believe in that. But we had a good time.”
“You were paying for everything, too. Splashing your money around. Maybe he can’t handle that, either.”
“We’ll see.” He looked at Russell Square. “When I’m here, I think of Virginia Woolf when she was writing Mrs Dalloway. She came running through here at night, going doo-lally and confused, ripping her clothes off. No one to help her.”
“Why is it everyone else I know knows about books and I don’t?”
“I wish I was staying, really. Then I could meet your Mandy at last. We were kids last time. Now she’s going to be a writer.”
“It’s the do, the day after tomorrow.”
“I can’t stay, though. I’ll come down again, maybe soon.”
Wendy sighed. “I miss your dad, Colin.”
“I know.”
“He had sense. He could sort things out.” Wendy wondered whether to ask Colin about Joshua. She found she couldn’t sort out a picture of Josh to describe to him. She couldn’t put him into words.
“What have you done with the money?” he asked.
“Given chunks away. Nothing much. There’s a friend of Serena’s, someone I’ve been seeing—well, not seeing as in seeing, but seeing around—who said he had a few tips for investing it. I’m going to invest it.”
“Who’s this friend?”
“Joshua Black.”
“Oh, god. Him.”
“What’s wrong with Josh?”
“I met him ages ago. When Serena was dragging me and mum around her London social whirl. There was something funny about him.”
“So I shouldn’t invest?”
“Nope. He made all his money in the City in the Eighties and then he gave the working bit up. The money he put into a whole range of ideas. Made a fortune, but it sounded very dodgy to me. And he was such a condescending get, too. You’ve not been doing filthy things with him, have you…?”
“No…”
“You should get away from that Serena. I don’t like her.”
They had coffee and cakes and stopped at a small bookshop. There, in a display, they found early copies of the union-jacketed, brick-thick BritLit Four. Automatically loyal, Wendy flipped to Mandy’s story. She showed Colin.
“’Me in the Monster Museum.’ That sounds about right.” He bought it. “Something to read on the train. She’s five pages long. That’s a page an hour.”
They walked up the bright, leafy streets to King’s Cross.
“There’s five hundred pages of other smart young things in there,” said Wendy.
“All writing about raves and acid and kicking each others’ heads in. Dreary internal monologues about S&M and Welsh football hooligans on joyrides. No thanks.”
“I hope that’s not what Mandy’s story is like,” Wendy said. “She claimed she was writing about our family.”
“Jesus God,” smiled Colin.
SuperBooks was well-lit and user-friendly, open until eleven at night and priding itself on its readings and launches. It was, it proclaimed, the world’s first chain of literary supermarkets. Browsers who’d come in after work to choose something to read on the tube were used to getting startled by faces famous from flyleafs intoning their deathless prose. The do for BritLit Four had the shop full to overflowing, mostly with the ninety-eight contributors and their friends and family members. Editors, agents and British Council people milled about the stands with plastic cups of wine, all knowing each other. The new young writers were in a kind of roped-in paddock, wearing flashy name badges and eyeing each other. The editors of the anthology, Alfie Smart and Lucy Webb, both of whom had been (as their respective blurbs had it) active and seminal since the nineteen-sixties, seemed wary of their paddock of ninety-eight authors under thirty.
“I’m not standing with that lot,” Mandy told her sister, so they kept to one side, nursing their drinks. Only six of the authors had been chosen to read, three minutes each. Mandy was one of them. She felt sick. “I look like a space hopper,” she said. “An orange maternity dress. What was I thinking of? Draw a face
