“He looks like a good-looking fella, her husband,” said David.
“Joshua,” said Serena. “My best friend.”
David stared at one odd photograph. It was of Astrid from the Leith Walk launderette. Her wheelchair was pulled up next to a woman with no arms. They both stared straight out. In biro someone had written on the glossy print, “Jesus God.”
“I heard about Belinda,” said David, sipping his drink. “Wasn’t she here for the wedding?”
“She’d already gone by then,” sighed Serena. “I never knew her. If you ask me, she did a runner. The whole thing was a lousy fake. Her nerve went.”
Anne appeared, along with the aroma of bacon and sausages. “Ready soon. Oh, you’ve seen my little gallery.”
“I should go and see Wendy,” he said. “She’s happy, isn’t she? When I saw you before you sounded ambivalent.”
“I don’t know the meaning of that word,” Anne sniffed. “You know what I’m like. I wanted the best for her.”
“Josh is the best,” put in Serena.
“I suppose you’re happy enough,” Anne conceded.
Serena looked round. “Katy,” she said, startled. The girl had a way of just appearing. “This is an old friend of Anne’s. David Moore.”
He held out his hand and smiled.
Katy looked at him and gave a rare, unexpected grin. She took his hand. “Something new, coming true,” she said.
So this is a marriage, and what have I learned? That even when he was a long distance away there was stuff still to be learned. That the substance left behind when he went was stuff for me to take on and learn. I learned him. He went away and further on and this was our marriage and I learned.
I learned our marriage like the rule of thumb and the ins and outs of our ups and down started to come easy to me. Even when he was away and I went sniffing round and alone I was suspicious, even then we had ups and down. I never thought we could have ups and downs like that, when we were apart and only one, but we did, we managed it because that was our marriage and we were learning. My aunty said marriage is a thing you work at, look at mine and learn. Oh boy.
This was how Mandy started her second, slim novel. It was about the joys of marriage and togetherness, then apartness and togetherness again. She called it Mardy Cow and it went on in this vein for some time. It lost her many of the readers her first had gained. She wasn’t writing much about funny people or places anymore. Mardy Cow was about relationships. Or rather, ‘the destructive mutuality of the relationship from hell’ as her editor at Lucifer and Lucifer wrote on her inner flap.
I said to Joshua, “What does our Mandy know about marriage anyway?’
“He said, “She’s probably picked up a thing or two here or there.”
Timon sent us a card from Scotland. Older, wiser, widowed Timon had just read Mandy’s second novel.
‘It isn’t funny stories and accidents, hon. She used to put them in to make us laugh or hold our breath. She’s lost it all. She’s just taking risks at the level of language, I think.’
Although there were accidents in our Mandy’s second book, which arrived at the house in Greenwich in a plain white cover, they weren’t happy or funny ones. By then Mandy was living in a flat of her own in Kilburn, around the corner from Serena. She was sharing with a woman she got on well with, a woman who was a production assistant at Pinewood. This friend was working on the new James Bond movie, because they had cast a new Bond, a midget lady called Sheila. Brenda Soobie was singing the theme tune, just as she had back in the Sixties. Brenda Soobie was seventy now and still giving it some. Mandy’s friend had even met her at Pinewood when she shot the title sequence and said she was a cow.
I met Mandy’s flatmate when Serena held a Seven Deadly Sins party, uncharacteristically throwing open her house. It was our Katy’s sixteenth birthday and Serena had taken control. Serena was Madame Whiplash, the wicked hostess, in her little-light-bondage outfit. Mandy came as a Space Hopper again, because she couldn’t decide and her friend came as the kid out of the Exorcist, in a baby doll nightie which she covered in green spew and hung a tinfoil crucifix around her neck. Late that night we ended up in Mandy’s flat, in her friend’s attic room, watching her cook up carrot and coriander soup on a tiny stove. It made me feel terrifically sick. I thought, surely the handmaiden to the new James Bond could afford a nicer flat than this.
That party was the last time I saw Mandy before Mardy Cow arrived in the post. Funny, but living in London made us keep in touch less frequently than ever. She had her own life, I suppose. At the Seven Deadly Sins party I saw her telling Katy that now she would give her copies of her books. “You’re old enough to read the dirty bits now.”
Katy, who had painted herself head to toe in bright green paint and come as envy, tutted. “Well, it’s nice of you anyway. But I wasn’t a kid before.”
“Yes, you were,” Mandy smiled.
“I’ll read them.”
“You might find out all about this family of ours.”
“Whoopee.”
Serena brought the cake in then, which she’d had a friend design, construct and deliver. It was a monstrous pink cock, with a flaming bristle of pubic hair, which poor Katy had to blow out in front of everyone. She pulled back her own long hair in case the pubes set it alight. It was a lurid, nasty cake, really, and I didn’t fancy my bit—a frosted slice of helmet—at all.
Katy had with her a new beau. This was a recent thing and very hush-hush. We weren’t to say a word until we met him. That she’d discovered this man through work,
