Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  Daniel said, ‘You know what, Alison, I’m getting on your bus with you tonight. I’m seeing you home. I’m worried about you.’

  ‘No!’ she said, backing away towards the gate. ‘No, please,’ but he had his coat on now, and he’d closed the front door behind him and followed her down the path, so she started to run, and he jogged after her, saying her name, trying not to shout. When she ran straight past her own bus stop as if she meant to flee on foot all the way to Attercliffe, he slowed to a walk, ended the chase, and called out to her.

  ‘OK, Alison, I’m not coming with you,’ he shouted. She ignored him, though, flying down the pavement with her coat sailing open and her school bag thumping against her hip.

  ‘Alison, please stop!’

  There was a catch of distress in his voice, and it was this that she couldn’t ignore, so she stopped and turned, and looked at him from the distance between them, her chest heaving.

  ‘Please,’ Daniel said. ‘Come back, wait for your bus. I’m going home.’

  She came back towards him and together they walked in silence the short distance back to her bus stop; then she said, ‘I’m really sorry, Daniel. I can’t really explain how I feel.’

  He was silent, head down, hands thrust into his pockets.

  ‘I don’t have a house like yours or a family like yours,’ she said.

  ‘Right, well, I don’t care a toss about that,’ he said.

  ‘No, I know, but, oh, I do care, and I … Daniel, please, just leave things be, will you?’

  He looked at her and nodded. ‘You bet,’ he said; then he kissed her dryly on the cheek, and walked away without looking back, towards home, where he knew his mother would be at the window, waiting for him with her questioning, sympathetic face.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow though?’ Alison called with a rising note of insecurity in her voice, so he raised a hand to show her he’d heard, and that yes, she’d see him tomorrow, but he didn’t turn and smile, because he was hurt, and bewildered, and if she was going to hide her feelings, then so was he.

  His mother was standing in the hallway when he got in.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Mum, I don’t know.’ He felt a failure for not knowing, and she could see this so she didn’t push. He started to climb the stairs.

  ‘There’s crumble,’ she said, but without conviction. If she could, if he’d listen, she’d tell him to go carefully with Alison, she’d tell him not to lose his heart to a girl who fled at the mention of her own mother. But when he went into his bedroom and closed the door, she only sighed and let him be.

  The bus lumbered towards Attercliffe, and when it finally stopped for her, Alison walked briskly through the short network of streets to her house. She knew she could mend things with Daniel tomorrow, but there was a cold knot of anxiety in her belly now, as she opened the door and braced herself for whatever lay in wait. All was quiet. No chaos, no mess, no Martin. There was a smell of stale urine, but that wasn’t a mystery because there was a pile of Catherine’s underwear on the floor by the sink, waiting to be washed.

  ‘Peter?’ she called.

  ‘Upstairs,’ he shouted back.

  She was flooded with gratitude that he was in, he was here, when she’d been at Daniel’s for all those hours, pleasing herself. She shed her coat, put her mother’s tights and knickers in a bucket of cold water to soak, then trudged up to Peter’s room, to be with him.

  11

  LONDON,

  16 NOVEMBER 2012

  Dan’s immediate neighbours on the canal were Lisa and Frank at the stern end, capable Jim at the bow. Lisa and Frank were old hippies, summer-of-love originals who claimed to have stayed on an ashram with the Beatles, but it was probably just the pot talking. Jim was lonely, a retired merchant seaman who couldn’t live in a house, needed the gentle wash of water to rock him to sleep at night, missed his crew and the force-nine gales round the Bay of Biscay and the sardine sandwiches on the ten o’clock watch. He was also a first-rate handyman, always in a boiler suit, tinkering with his pristine narrowboat, Veronica Ann, rubbing down her paintwork, greasing her innards. Lisa and Frank’s Ophelia was going to rack and ruin. She peeled and rusted with quiet grace while they cooked aloo gobi in the galley and ate it cross-legged on the flat roof, then lay on their backs and shared a joint. Jim battened down his hatch on this nefarious activity but many a time Dan joined them, although never if Katelin was with him. Student counsellors couldn’t smoke pot, she said, and she wouldn’t bend, even for Frank’s home-grown cannabis, which – as Lisa said, without irony – was full of goodness, organically grown. But Katelin rarely came to London anyway; this was Dan’s orbit, Dan’s world. This city, these streets, this boat; her name was Crazy Diamond, the choice of a previous owner, but what a choice! Shine on, he’d thought when he saw her for the first time, a for-sale notice taped to her side, a phone number and ‘Call Paddy’ scrawled underneath in biro, like an instruction for Dan alone. So he’d called Paddy, and within two weeks he’d had a key to the boat and another to the towpath gate, and a licence from the Canal & River Trust to say, yes, Crazy Diamond was his. This was ten years ago, and Katelin had liked the idea very much at first, but then discovered she felt too confined to relax here, and the whole cassette-toilet thing freaked her out, so the boat had shifted, over time, from the notion of joint ownership to being only Dan’s, his lair in London, and here, among this canal-dwelling crowd, he felt off-grid, cut loose. His stuff was all over the cabin and the place was a tip, a comfortable tip, on his own terms, and smoking pot with Frank and Lisa was just part of the same scene. They weren’t reckless about it, or irresponsible; sometimes they burned bushy sprigs of rosemary on a barbecue on the towpath to mask the smell.

  Tonight, the conversation meandered with the smoke from the fat joint, spiralling aimlessly into the sky. Frank and Lisa often spoke in riddles. Their minds had been expanded, back in 1967 on the ashram in Rishikesh, and now they couldn’t think straight. Instead, they scattered observations or ideas into the beautiful chaos of the universe, without responsibility or ownership.

  ‘Lisa, baby,’ Frank said in his Haight-Ashbury hippy drawl. ‘Awesome weed.’

  Dan nodded. ‘Compliments to the chef,’ he said.

  ‘We’re a long way from finished,’ Lisa said.

  ‘The weed?’ It was Dan’s function, on nights like this, to weave something real from the loose threads.

  ‘The journey,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Right,’ said Dan. She held out the joint and he shook his head, so she passed it to Frank. Dan was done: already high, already happy. A couple or three drags were generally enough to loosen him up to a level where Frank and Lisa’s conversation seemed half-cogent. He had his phone in his pocket, with Belle and Sebastian on it, from Ali. He felt warm, warm thoughts about Alison Connor as he lay here on the forgiving bulk of Ophelia. He’d smiled at her choice; he didn’t mind a bit of Belle and Sebastian. He’d written enough about them in the late nineties, when they were taking off, a savvy bunch of students, just signed up with Jeepster. He wondered, did Ali know they were Scottish? She would, yeah, course she would. She wouldn’t know that their drummer used to sell pies on match days outside Celtic Park, though.

  ‘Hey,’ he said now. ‘You want to listen to a song?’

  ‘Sweet, sweet music,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Yep,’ Dan said. ‘So let’s give it a listen.’

  He fished his phone out of the pocket of his jacket, and clicked on to Ali’s link, so that the weightless beauty of Sarah Martin’s voice drifted around them in the night. Frank, stoned, thinking any song was his song, started to sing ‘Waterloo Sunset’ over the top of it and Lisa spluttered with merriment in that crazy way she had: unhinged, machine-gun laughter. But then, by some miracle, they both fell silent and let the song play out, and when it ended Lisa sighed feelingly and said, ‘It’s a bummer, getting old, bei
ng old.’

  Dan smiled at her. No point denying it, she was getting on; the lines on her face and the backs of her hands told that story. But she’d dip-dyed her long grey hair into every shade of pink and she was still thin and loose-limbed, still wore her denim flares and cheesecloth shirts with panache. ‘You’re fucking amazing,’ he said. ‘Look at you.’ She dipped her head modestly, and Frank raised the joint, what was left of it, in a sort of vague salute to Lisa’s lasting beauty. Frank was older than her; he was really old, pushing eighty, not that he cared, the incorrigible old goat; he still watched women with a connoisseur’s eye, as if he was a player, as if he stood a chance.

  ‘So,’ Frank said now, after a few beats of silence. ‘What was that ephemeral shit we just heard?’

  Dan laughed.

  ‘It was the very young,’ said Lisa. ‘Singing a song.’

  Dan said, ‘Sweet song, sent to me by a sweet girl.’

  He hadn’t meant to say this, hadn’t meant to say anything about Ali to anyone, ever, but there were no questions from Frank and Lisa. Sometimes, they were perfect company, thought Dan. With this pair, you could say anything at all, and still be safe.

  ‘Familiar arms,’ Lisa said. ‘Make me dance.’

  Frank turned his head towards her and studied her face, as if he was trying to remember who she was. ‘Ell oh ell ay, Lola,’ he said. ‘You really got me. Give me the Kinks, every time.’

  Lisa looked up at the stars, doing their thing as best they could in the over-lit London sky. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think I could just die of happiness.’

  ‘Don’t do that, baby,’ Frank said. ‘Don’t do that.’

  The pub in Camden Town was decorated with Día de los Muertos skulls and a big neon crucifix, and was rammed with rockers by the time Dan got there for the gig the following night. The venue was upstairs: 150 capacity, and a high-end PA system that allowed the rock, punk and metal bands that played here to go all the way. It was heaving tonight and Dan found his spot at the back of the room, leaned against the wall, and listened to the set. He had a lot of time for Lionize, their energy, their personality, the nod to Led Zep and Deep Purple, dusty vocals, great guitars, gorgeous melodies, some soaring psychedelia, a crazy dose of Hammond organ. It took him back to boyhood, but still ducked and weaved in the here-and-now. Clever guys. After the gig he switched on his phone, and found three missed calls from Katelin and two from Duncan. Shit. Duncan probably wanted to borrow some money, but Katelin only ever rang when there really was something to say. He stood in the late-night squalor of Greenland Place and called her back, and she picked up at once.

  ‘Tell me that Duncan’s not having an affair,’ she said. Her voice was brittle.

  Dan gave a small, surprised laugh. ‘Gladly,’ he said. ‘Duncan’s not having an affair.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘What? What the hell, Katelin?’

  ‘Duncan’s having an affair, and you’re covering for him.’

  ‘Hey, Katelin, steady on, what is this?’

  The violent siren wail of a speeding police car suddenly cut through the conversation and drowned her reply, and then another followed hard on the wheels of the first, so that Dan had to wait for a full thirty seconds before he spoke again.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said finally. ‘Couldn’t hear for the sirens. Look, just tell me what you think’s happening.’

  ‘Don’t you take his side,’ Katelin said.

  ‘Katelin! I’m not taking his side. I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  She started to speak but stopped immediately, as if suddenly struck by a new thought. Then, ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘He tells you everything, it’s just not possible that you don’t already know what he’s been up to.’

  He felt a pulse of anger now; this was Katelin with a few glasses of wine inside her, ready to take him on. She’d have spent the evening with Rose-Ann, and turned against him on the grounds of his gender, his friendship with the accused, his socks on the bedroom floor. He lowered the phone from his ear and allowed himself a couple of seconds to fume silently while Camden life teemed all around him; the pubs were kicking people out and a drunkard took a piss against the wall not two feet from where he was standing. He moved away, towards the entrance of the tube station, and when he spoke to Katelin again, he kept his voice level, steady, reasonable.

  ‘Look, just tell me what’s happened,’ he said.

  ‘Lindsay Miller, that’s what’s happened. She’s a singer in a band, but you probably already know that.’

  ‘Right, fuck this,’ Dan said. ‘I’m ringing Duncan,’ and he hung up, filled with righteous indignation at the rank unfairness, her us-against-them affectation. He found Duncan’s number and hit it, then waited, backed against a wall on Camden High Street, the phone pressed to his ear. There was the usual mayhem all around him. Cars in gridlock on the roads, cyclists jumping lights, too many people on pavements too narrow to contain them. Also there was a sickly smell: popcorn or candied peanuts, the wares of a street vendor somewhere nearby. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Duncan took his time, but he answered in the end.

  ‘The universe as we know it,’ he said with a sort of doleful humour, ‘is officially over. It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

  ‘Right,’ Dan said. ‘So I gather. A singer in a band?’

  ‘Yeah, lovely Lindsay.’

  ‘Fuck, man,’ Dan said. ‘Rose-Ann!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s shite. She’s mad as a sack of snakes, and fair enough.’

  ‘Tell me she’s not twenty.’

  ‘She’s not twenty.’

  ‘Is she twenty?’

  Duncan sighed. ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Christ, Duncan, I thought you’d finally become the original Steady Eddie.’

  ‘Turns out there’s life in the old dog yet.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘In the fucking doghouse, where else would the old dog be?’

  Dan laughed, glad – oh, beyond glad – that Katelin wasn’t party to this conversation.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.

  ‘She played a gig in Dundee a year or so ago, and I watched her and we got chatting afterwards, and it was like: Oh hello, here you are at last.’

  ‘Fucking hell, a year ago?’

  ‘No, no, nothing happened, and I never would’ve chased her. But then I saw her again in a bar in Glasgow three weeks ago, and she recognised me, grabbed my arse and kissed me hard.’

  ‘Bloody hell, she came on to you?’

  ‘Cheers, pal.’

  ‘So you can’t be that involved if it was only three weeks ago.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel that way to me right now.’

  ‘Oh God, Duncan, I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Course I fucking don’t,’ Duncan said. ‘Course I don’t.’ His voice cracked, and for one appalling moment Dan thought his friend was going to cry. But when he spoke again, he sounded almost cheerful. ‘Hey, but look,’ he said, ‘she’s someone you should meet.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Lindsay.’

  ‘Christ, Duncan, Katelin thinks I colluded in all this as it is.’

  ‘She’s magic,’ Duncan said.

  ‘You said that to me ten years ago, when you met Rose-Ann.’

  ‘Shit, did I?’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Sat on the steps of Mick’s building.’

  ‘Christ, what you doing there? Look, come down to London tomorrow, you can have the boat for a while if you need some space.’

  ‘Ah no,’ Duncan said. ‘I need to be up here.’

  ‘Mick’s a tosser, Duncan. Why’d you go there?’

  ‘Lindsay’s here.’

  ‘Where, at Mick’s?’

  ‘In Glasgow. She’s in Laurieston.’

  Dan sighed, already nostalgic for the simple life. ‘When I saw your missed calls,’ he said, ‘I thought it was just about money, or your singers.’

  �
��Yeah,’ Duncan said. ‘I’d like to talk about that. Could do with clawing back some normality.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When you back?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Dan said.

  ‘Who’ve you seen?’

  ‘Lionize.’

  ‘Oh yeah, any good?’

  ‘Sure, very.’

  There was a pause, a kind of short, respectful silence to honour the old days, then Duncan said, ‘Come and see me, Dan. Mick’s a cretin, and when I ring Rose-Ann, she either cries or spits venom. I need some sanity.’ He sounded sad now, as sad as Dan had ever heard him.

  ‘You bet, I’ll come on the way home, tomorrow. Meet me on Gordon Street though, I’m not coming to Mick’s. I’ll be there by two.’

  ‘Thanks, pal.’ The line went dead. Dan stood for a while, picturing Duncan, out in the cold, in the stairwell of Mick Hastie’s tenement building. He considered calling Katelin back, but decided against it; too late and anyway, it could wait; let her wait. He patted his pockets to make sure he hadn’t been robbed as he’d stood talking on the phone, then descended into the rank warmth of the tube station.

  Half past midnight at Warwick Avenue, and Dan was the only person to step off an almost-empty train. He loped up the towering escalator, and again up the steps to the exit, then walked quickly up and along to the Blomfield Road moorings, where he let himself through the gate on to the towpath and negotiated his way through the folded wooden chairs, coiled ropes, dead and dying potted plants and other detritus of towpath life. Crazy Diamond was waiting steadfastly for him on the black water. All was quiet. At either end, Ophelia and Veronica Ann were both dark and still. Frank and Lisa would be solid gone, curled on their bunks, sleeping the sleep of the seriously stoned, but Jim had the vigilant soul of a nightwatchman, he could be up and out of the cabin at the creak of a board, sweeping the vicinity with a flashlight, so Dan stepped gingerly on to the foredeck of his own vessel and turned the key carefully, silently, in the lock.