“I think that was a wicked book you wrote?” said the unicorn woman.
“Oh yes?”
“I think modern fiction has lost all its moral value?”
The man in black velvet curled his lip. “And what do you believe in?”
As the woman opened her mouth to reply, I said to Joshua, “Let’s find Mandy. You haven’t met her yet.”
Mandy said that if she went out to dinner she would be extremely ill. She was very—as they say—near her time, and what she really fancied was chewing on a kebab.
“Your time of confinement,” Josh was saying as we left the party in the shop.
“That what they used to call it,” said Mandy, warming to him. “But I reckon I’ve already had that bit.”
We stood outside a takeaway a few doors down from the bookshop and got our fingers sticky, pulling out ribbons of unidentifiable meat and warm lettuce. We watched the bookshop people leaving and fights breaking out amongst the ninety-seven under thirty. It started to rain and the police came.
We found Josh’s Skoda and Mandy had to sit up front with her bump, of course, so I couldn’t slide my hand under his thigh.
The plan was to drop her in Putney with Aunty Anne. I was meant to be at Serena’s that night, but she had vanished with the man in crushed velvet. I supposed we would discuss where I was going on the way. Things were moving.
In Putney, Aunty Anne was waiting up in her dressing gown.
“Have you seen the news?” she asked us urgently in the hallway. “I suppose you’ve been too busy swanning about.” She saw Joshua, stepping into her house. “So this is your fancy man,” she said to me, raising her eyebrows and wrinkling her cold cream.
“We’ve met before,” said Josh. “Through Serena.”
“I know,” she said.
“What’s the news?” asked Mandy.
“You’ve ruined that maternity dress. What’s that supposed to be? A face?”
“Space Hopper chic,” said Mandy.
“The late news is coming on.”
She led us into the spartan front room.
That was when we learned that, as she was flying back into London, Belinda had managed to make herself vanish into thin air.
THIRTY-SEVEN
If I skip a few years now, it’s like, oh yes, then we had the end of the century.
But we did.
The big humdinger, Colin would call it.
For a long time Timon was inconsolable. No one could tell him where Belinda had gone. There was the usual investigative flurry, interviews and reports. They never even found a hair, not a single wispy silver hair, clinging to the plush of her first class seat. We had to take that well-worn phrase ‘without a trace’ and apply it to the not-inconsiderable substance of someone we knew very well.
When Katy eventually met Timon in the flesh he was almost speechless with grief. He was like a king in exile. On the telly he made pleas to whoever had taken his beloved. There came nothing in reply. The papers blamed her vanishing on everything she knew. Their video footage was shown all over again.
Timon sunk into himself for those next couple of years. He lived in London. Then he drifted back to Blackpool, and then to the Royal Circus in Edinburgh. He was casting about. We even lost touch with each other for a while.
He had lost his manuscript, too. He didn’t kick up a fuss. He secretly imagined that Pieces of Belinda had gone the same way as the whole woman herself. He returned to the north to write his book again. Heart-aching work without Belinda’s help.
Mandy published her novel with Lucifer and Lucifer, who were glad to have something to console and tide themselves over through Timon’s hiatus. They were particularly glad because Me in the Monster Museum partly concerned itself with the early life of someone very much like him. There were connections here, the reviewers muttered. They started to talk about a Blackpool movement. Mandy’s book was fairly well-received. There was some bleating about how magical realism or surrealism didn’t quite wash in books about ordinary, working class people. It was something more appropriate for exotic places. Others praised her for her risks at the level of language. The Professor began appearing in London, begged her to be his lover again, and made it known far and wide that he had ghostwritten her book.
“My book is full of ghosts,” Mandy snapped. “That old lecher is only one of many.”
Then we heard that the Professor had started hanging round with a weird, cultish set. He was distracted by the possibility of actually becoming someone.
Mandy sold about five hundred copies in hardback and went off to write a second. That was harder going. Not least because she had the baby to see to. Lindsey was born early in May 1998. Everyone adored her, of course. She had small, marmalade fluffy curls. Even Katy took to her, Katy who seemed suspicious around the new arrival at first. She was writing a horror novel for children about incubi and succubi. I could never tell the difference. Katy had seen, from her Aunty Mandy’s progress, how simple a process it was, bringing a novel out.
Her Aunty Mandy. Because by then, of course, I had married Joshua. And what a fuss they made about it. Serena, in the end, seemed to have misgivings. Aunty Anne couldn’t see why I didn’t marry someone richer and better connected. I had my pick, she said. Colin buried his qualms, as he always did, and came south for the ceremony and the little party we held in the Greenwich house, where we had decided to live. Colin even conceded that Joshua could make himself quite good company. He went so far as to say that he thought Joshua was probably gay, underneath everything. He couldn’t persuade me of that. Colin hadn’t managed to persuade his erstwhile lover David of anything. His lover had moved to Glasgow to be successful, and that was an end to
