Dungarees, she thought. It’s bound to be muddy.
Mam was walking slowly. She was withdrawing again. Les put his arm around her waist and helped her along. Mandy watched them, sitting in the passenger seat of Les’s car. He had parked at the edge of a brown lake. She didn’t want to see the flamingos, but Mam did. Les was practically pulling her to the edge of the water. Mandy put the radio on.
They had already driven through the bits with the lions and the rhinos running wild. It wasn’t very scary because they all looked tired.
Mandy didn’t want to watch. Les holding Mam up on the gravelly shore, pointing at the big pink turkeys on their spindly legs. The birds waded awkwardly, shot into and out of the air, skimmed over the calm surface. Mam was craning her neck about to see. Mandy watched.
Les had left the keys in the ignition. They swung there and Mandy wished she could drive. She locked the car doors and rolled the windows up. The radio got on her nerves so she switched it off and listened to herself breathe. She misted up the windscreen and wiped it away with her cardigan sleeve, misted it again.
Two men had appeared and were talking to Mam and Les. Mandy frowned because they seemed to be arguing. I bet we’re not supposed to park here, she thought. Then she saw that the men had silver hair like Les, and folded wings hanging out of the back of their dresses. They took Mam’s arms and held her between them. Mam looked wildly about her and Mandy could hear Les shouting, even with the windows rolled up. He was throwing a tantrum, as the great white wings began to beat.
And then Mam seemed to calm down. The men with wings were digging into the pockets of their frocks and producing handfuls of sweets; Smarties, M and M’s. They pushed them into Mam’s face and she swallowed and seemed to sag between them. Mam’s sandalled feet left the beach’s shingle.
Les came running back to the car. He tried to open the door. But Mandy had locked it.
‘Mand! Open this door!’ he yelled, pulling at the handle. He wanted to drag Mam back into the car, whisk them back home, shove her back under the duvet and read her Catherine Cookson.
‘Mand! Mandy!’
Mandy wiped the rest of the fog from the window. Mam had been lifted right off the ground and she was struggling only slightly now. The angels had stopped feeding her and they let the Smarties drop in a fine rainbow shower beneath them. It drummed and rattled on the car roof for a while. Mandy saw multicoloured capsules bouncing off the bonnet, off Les’s coat, sticking in his silvery hair. Then the shower finished.
The flamingos, who had raised their horned beaks to watch the flight, looked back at the water now that the show was finished and dredged the lake bottom for sweets.
COULD IT BE MAGIC?
I kept on at you with a fierce, perverse love, didn’t I?
Things like this were the reason.
We sat somewhere public, bottle of yellow wine between us—you were getting me into wine and I admitted preferring being pissed on wine to being pissed on lager—and you started fingering the petals of the silk freesias they’d stuck in a mineral-water bottle.
They were so purple and realistic-looking, I waited to see pollen smudging your skin.
You said you loathed silk flowers. That loud, admonishing tone you’d take on often in my presence. Never about me, but about things close to me. The accoutrements to our little scenes.
I asked why you hated them.
‘Because they aren’t plastic flowers.’
This morning I’m back in my own town. Far from your presence and your influence.
‘Out from under that man’s skin,’ came a postcard from Vienna, from my mother, in the post this morning. Nothing from you, urging me back to our flat. She thinks I’m well shot of you. She never liked you and she’s dying to return from singing in Vienna to see how her darling son’s getting on by himself. She asks in her postcard if I’ve signed myself up with the doctors here.
I had an appointment straight away. They’ve had it all done up and Dr Jones’s office is a cosy orange. An atmosphere of slightly overdone toast which lulls you (well, me, at any rate), and he had me up on the bench starkers in minutes giving me the once-over. Those cool utensils.
We talked about depression. Pills will sap me and he says he’s loath to do that just yet. Shit. So I’m thrown back on my own resources and he clapped his fat hands with glee to hear me resolve that I would somehow pull my own self together. He asked about you and I said there’d be no counting on you.
‘Have you ever thought of doing harm to yourself?’ he asked solemnly and I almost laughed. The cleaner nosed in to empty his bins. Crumpled yellow papers and dead syringes. He looked at me expectantly while she fussed on.
All I could say was, ‘No more than any other incipient artist and homosexual living in Newton Aycliffe.’
So we closed with a chuckle and he promised to see me soon.
I still didn’t have any proper answers. I went straight to the gym to work off my frustrations. There I take special advice about how much iron I ought to be pumping. In my condition. I don’t want to hurt the baby.
Your smart flat—which you encouraged me to think of as our smart flat—was crammed with plastic flowers.
In this house I have real flowers. Here I wait for the opera queen back from the continent, periodically dusting the furniture’s blank patches which I can feel ache for Venetian glass. Do I hear the chinking and chiming of approaching maternal baggage?
You had pink tulips and ice-blue arum lilies. I can see you even
