7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  Instead of worrying about my damned future, I put all my efforts into going to the Haçienda. In order to hang out there on a regular basis, I decided I needed something to bolster my confidence, something unforgettable and interesting. I went to a toy shop and bought a battery-powered train set, a hobby-horse and, inspired by the inclusion of a duck in a Sylvia Plath poem, I bought a yellow duck on a stick with wheels. I set up the train set on the counter of the cocktail bar, and my duck or horse was always at my side like a comedy partner. Drinking made me feel as sparkly as Dorothy Parker as I made acidic comments until my tongue began to snake into some stranger’s mouth.

  ‘You’re incorrigible,’ said the barmaid. I made her write the word down for me and when I found the scrap of paper in my bag sometime later, I looked it up in my dictionary: Beyond correction or reform. I liked that. The idea of being beyond anything was interesting. Very interesting.

  The main things on my mind when I got down to the club every night, was who I could have an intelligent conversation with and who I would shag. Boy or girl. It felt like power, as though I could own the world that way. I especially liked it when I hooked an important person – someone that managed a band, or was in a band, or who ran a record label. I hoped that a little bit of them would rub off on me.

  Often I would wake up with people that I didn’t remember meeting the night before, and other times I would find myself curled up alone in a shop doorway, my mind heavy and pitted. Once I woke up upright in a cupboard, a curve of a wire coat hanger poking into my back and a sliver of memory of the fattest woman I had ever seen with my fingers inside of her.

  I began to wonder what all the fuss was about women charging for sex. Why was it such a bad thing to do? It was something I decided I was good at, so it would be an easy way to make money.

  One thing I was sure of. Alcohol was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  Things happen. Memories ease up and slip away.

  Once, I overheard Mum say that Dad never drank because he was afraid that he might never stop, that he might become an alcoholic.

  But perhaps it could have saved his life.

  It might have stripped his nerves right off.

  *

  Even though I was getting drunk as much as possible and hoping to meet someone who would make me famous, I was still looking for other ways to get a different life. I enrolled at Rochdale College of Art to do a pre-foundation course and an A-level in Art History. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do Art, but it was something you could study without qualifications, so was somewhere to go. I’d chosen Rochdale over Stockport College, because soon after Ian Curtis died the remaining members of Joy Division had played a gig at Rochdale College before going on to name themselves New Order. Rochdale felt the right place to be, even though it was over an hour away on the bus.

  In an Art History lesson we were asked to write about the Dada movement for twenty minutes. Everyone around me moaned that they had never heard of Dada and had no idea what to write.

  ‘Write anything that comes into your head,’ Pam, the teacher who insisted we called by her first name, said.

  Luckily, Dada was something I had heard about. Thanks to Gordon, the barman from the Haçienda cocktail bar who had an Art degree, I knew it was the French word for hobby-horse as well as an art movement originating in Zurich. I recalled everything Gordon had told me as I wrote about anti-art, and Marcel Duchamp and the horrors of the First World War that the Dadaists were reacting to. I felt sure Pam would end up reading what I had written out loud to the class. I was the only one that seemed to be writing very much and it wouldn’t be the first time my work had been read out loud by a teacher. In my first year at secondary school my English teacher had read my story to the class. It was about a girl of my age, living next door to an old man who she had become friends with, who’d won the pools. He died and left the girl his pool winnings, but she didn’t care, as all she wanted was the man back. There’d been a few sniggers from a particular boy in the class, and all in all it was a humiliating experience. I put that story to the back of my mind, sure that this time my words would be met with nothing but admiration.

  Pam collected our work and returned to her desk. She tore all our pages into pieces and threw them into the bin.

  ‘There you go. That’s Dada,’ she said.

  I’d only been at college a few months, but I left after that lesson and took up permanent residence again at the Haçienda, where things still made more sense to me than anywhere else. I was always welcome there. The doormen let me sneak in for free and I managed somehow never to pay for a drink.

  One night in the cocktail bar, I was drinking something called Death in the Afternoon that Gordon the barman had given me and began an argument with a woman about Ian Curtis. She was claiming that Ian’s suicide was a cowardly way out.

  ‘But it’s heroic!’ I shouted. ‘It’s a brave thing to do.’

  Even though at other times I wasn’t sure, at that moment I believed without a doubt that suicide was brave. I wasn’t having anything said against Dad.

  ‘That’s ludicrous,’ she said. ‘Why go around romanticising something so weak and stupid?’

  The thought of my father being weak and stupid made me so angry that I threw my cocktail in her face, watching as it slapped her, for a second forming a watery, glassy veil. People around us stopped and looked and didn’t bother to whisper what they thought.

  ‘Fucking nightmare that girl.’

  ‘She should be barred.’

  ‘She’ll come to grief.’

  Fuck her, fuck them, I thought. I’m not getting barred. The only person who’d ever been barred from the Haçienda was one of the owners’ dads, who’d stripped naked and tried to have sex with a bollard that was used to section off the dance floor.

  Instead, I headed for the upstairs bar, the argument still raging in my head. Why had I not been more articulate and said that life was all that we had and we could either see it as a curse or a blessing or somewhere in between, but our lives were ours to do what we wanted with? Why hadn’t I said that killing yourself was not an act of cowardice but of common sense?

  At the top of the stairs I stumbled into the bar manager, Sam. He was forty-two, married with kids, did weight lifting as a hobby, and always gave me free drinks.

  ‘Hello Smiley,’ he said.

  I felt terrible, but I grinned, not wanting to let him down.

  ‘Fancy a private tour? Behind the scenes of the Hac and all that?’ he asked.

  As Sam showed me around the dressing rooms and the offices and the empty spaces that he said had been used for building boats, I began to consider how I would kill myself. I was certain I would one day, it was just a matter of when. I had not worked up the guts to do it yet. To me, this proved that it wasn’t a cowardly act, not if you needed so much courage to do it.

  But what was really stopping me was not knowing what happened afterwards, after you’d done it. I’d got it into my head that the way you feel when you kill yourself, which must be terrible, obviously, was the mood that would stay with you throughout eternity, if eternity did exist. I had a sneaking suspicion that all the suicides of history were writhing around on some astral plane, in a state of limbo, their minds still tortured by what had made them take their own lives in the first place.

  Was Dad in that awful state of limbo? I hated to think of him caught, on an incomplete journey, endlessly feeling the same pain. I didn’t want to think that he was being punished, but I couldn’t help thinking, well, maybe he was. There was no way of knowing until you did it yourself, and I couldn’t face taking that risk yet.

  Sam shone his torch into a dank, airless room and led me across it. I could feel water under my feet. We reached a dry part of the floor, and then he did what seemed to be inevitable these days with men and me. It was what I’d taken to doing without a thought, but right now I didn’t want to. Sam took his jacket off and laid it on the ground and placed the torch upright nex
t to it. He circled his arms around me, pulled me close and kissed me, his full lips overlapping mine. I dropped my hobby-horse and listened to it clatter and bounce on the concrete floor.

  He pulled me down next to him. He fumbled with his zip and I heard the rip of a condom packet. He pushed my dress up and my knickers down. He was on top of me and inside me. I wished I was drunker. I watched the focused white light from the torch, hard circles spilling out on the ceiling, and imagined that it was the tunnel of light I was going to see on my death. I let him do it to me even though I didn’t want to; it was better than letting him down. It was something I could be useful for. Some kind of purpose. I wondered if he was disappointed that I was quiet and still. He groaned and gave his last thrust.

  ‘Okay, Smiley?’ Sam asked.

  I smiled.

  Afterwards he led me back to the cocktail bar and took a full bottle of whisky from behind the counter and gave it to me like an award. The woman who I had thrown a drink at had gone and I wished that she was there to see that I was being presented with free booze. I unscrewed the metal lid and poured the amber heat into my mouth straight from the bottle and dived into the blackness.

  *

  From the moment you are born, I realised, you start to die, but from the moment that I turned sixteen I could actually feel myself dying. I knew now that I wanted to leave this world I was in more than anything else. I bought some aspirin. The instructions on the packet said not to take more than eight tablets in a day. I managed fifteen in one go, but I couldn’t swallow any more. Whatever it took, I did not have it in me.

  Later I vomited strange, bright green strings of bile. I made my mind up that the next time that I tried to kill myself it wouldn’t be with pills. They were too hard to swallow. I thought of all the ways that you could kill yourself and decided that maybe Dad chose the best option, and that gassing yourself was the easiest way of all.

  the wind under the door

  One day I came back home to find our tenants in the front room, circling Mum, furiously shouting at her. They were accusing her of overcharging them for their share of the bills. Mum had her arms wrapped tightly around herself, and looked defiant, but I could tell she was on the brink of crying, or screaming. I wondered if I should phone the police, or even the Samaritans. In the end, I phoned my brother.

  Rob answered and I tried to explain what was happening. I knew there was nothing he could do from London and that it was impossible for him to swoop in and solve anything, but I badly wanted him to. I held the phone in the direction of the lounge so that Rob could hear the mutiny.

  ‘Put her on the phone,’ Rob said.

  I plucked Mum from the circle of irate lodgers and dragged her into the hallway. I jammed the receiver to her ear and watched her becoming calmer. Whatever Rob was saying seemed to work.

  None of the tenants talked to Mum after the fight. They withheld their rents, took her to county court for what she owed them and moved out when it suited them, but at least I got my bedroom back.

  *

  Rob visited. He had left his model girlfriend and had a new, shorter one with him called Lori. She gave Mum hyacinths and told her they were ‘a sign of rebirth’, which we thought was a very London thing to say. She had black hair cut like Louise Brooks, exquisite make-up, a sunny disposition and said ‘bolshie’ a lot, even though she didn’t seem to be very bolshie herself. Lori, who came from a well-off family that had made money in old-time Hollywood, seemed to me to have stepped straight out of the pages of The Great Gatsby and into our front room. She said her dad kept offering her an allowance but she turned it down because she valued her independence, which impressed me. She had a Scrabble set with her and we settled down to play a game while Mum was in the kitchen cooking baked potatoes and pizza. It was like we were a proper family and I wanted to hug her for bringing us all together and encouraging us to play games.

  ‘I’m winning yer,’ I said to Rob.

  ‘No, you’re beating me,’ he corrected.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said, making a note of the difference.

  *

  I handed Mum the stiff, blue envelope I had been examining. She held it at a distance and squinted at the postmark, before finally ripping it open and unfolding a single sheet of paper. Her eyes scanned the page.

  ‘She died, she went and died, and he never even told me,’ she said.

  ‘Who? Who died?’

  ‘I sent her a birthday card and our address.’

  ‘Who, Mum? Please. Who?’

  ‘I thought it was time to get in touch.’

  The letter fluttered from Mum’s grip. I snatched it up and read it. Dad’s sister had died, my Auntie Vera. Vera’s husband had written to tell Mum that she had passed away from cancer six months before.

  ‘He could have told me when it happened,’ Mum said.

  ‘He didn’t know where we lived.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop being so reasonable. It wouldn’t have been hard to find out where we were. Other people have, especially when they’re after money.’

  My dad’s sister was dead. None of Dad’s family were left now. His father had died and his mother, and now his sister.

  Vera had spoken with the same Kentish accent as Dad and now she was gone. Mum’s sister-in-law had died. Undoing the past was out of reach. Mum had left it too long. We had not seen Vera since Dad had died, as though his death had churned up so much blame nobody could meet again. I often blamed myself for what he did, so I imagine everybody had done something or not done something that they regretted and considered might have saved him. I would never forget the kiss I avoided him giving me, even though I tried not to linger over the memory.

  Mum was crying over Vera, so I went to make her a cup of tea. I put the kettle on and thought of knocks on doors and letters arriving out of the blue. It made me never want to read another letter or open another front door again.

  *

  The bank repossessed the house.

  In the lounge, I looked out of the bay window and said goodbye to the main road, the same road my dad had driven me along the final time I saw him. I remembered how Frank, the guest who had sex in the back room with our neighbour Rita, had described it as the spine of England. And so I thought of it now as the central part of a body that was soon to disappear from my life.

  A song came to me, or at least part of one. It drummed away in my head. It had been a verse I’d learnt in junior school. Our second year class teacher Mr Ramsbottom believed in hanging and thought tramps were despicable because they didn’t pay taxes. He gave me a speech to learn on the Colt 45, part of a school assembly he prepared for our class to deliver on guns, though I never performed it. He told us, with an angry punch of his fist in the air, that the headmaster had asked him to change the subject, so we had to do it on cars instead. Afterwards, I remember standing on the stage with a group of us singing:

  ‘Oh you’ll never get to heaven

  (Oh you’ll never get to heaven)

  In an old Ford car

  (In an old Ford car)

  ’Cause an old Ford car

  (’Cause an old Ford car)

  Won’t get that far

  (Won’t get that far)’

  That was the song playing in my head, as though it was the soundtrack to my life. I stared at the dark grey dust that striped the entire outside of the window. I realised it was probably from the smoke that blew out from exhaust pipes, and I thought about the invisible stain of carbon monoxide.

  Far from being upset about losing the house, Mum was flushed with excitement at the prospect of moving again. She stood next to me in the living room, rubbing her hands together and smiling.

  ‘We’re seven miles out,’ she said.

  ‘From what?’ I asked.

  ‘Seven miles out from where we’re going of course,’ she replied.

  It didn’t seem much of a distance.

  *

  We moved to a red-bricked terraced house in Rusholme that
Mum had bought at a bargain price, managing to get a mortgage despite our last house being possessed. She didn’t explain the details, but I imagined that Rob must have helped her out with the deposit the bank required.

  We unpacked our cardboard boxes, straightened out our possessions and realised that we owned a lot of continental quilts. We got the telly working and sat down on the settee to watch, both of us wrapped in a quilt, as we didn’t have any gas yet. The nearby road was lined with curry restaurants and sari shops, and Mum called it ‘Little Bombay’ and soon developed a taste for onion bhajis.

  brynn

  She had kept the letter, for some reason, and once they had unpacked the boxes in the house, she read it again, alone in her bedroom. She looks at the letter and wonders what it all means. Ronald had been too young to die, and now his sister was dead at fifty.

  Dear Brynn,

  Thank you very much for Vera’s birthday card but I just thought I should let you know that Vera passed away of pancreatic cancer six months ago. She died as peacefully as possible. I hope life is treating you and the kids well.

  Love from,

  Jim

  She decides there is no real point in keeping the letter. She’ll never write to Jim again, or see him again. He means nothing to her. She thinks of Vera, of the time she first met her, and how she had felt the bite of her disapproval. But now Vera is well and truly dead, and why did she even care what Vera thought of her in the first place – or anyone else for that matter? She realises with a jolt that she no longer gives a damn about what anyone thinks of her. She is free. She rips the letter up into tiny pieces and drops it from a height, watching with satisfaction as it flutters to the carpet like snow.

  walk the street

  ‘I forgot,’ Mum said.