Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’ He drew her eyes closed with his fingers and kissed her eyelids softly, and she kept them shut, then reached out and pulled him closer still, so that she could fall asleep, and he stayed with her there and watched her for all the time it took for her to stir and stretch and open her eyes, and then they made love again, but it was very quiet this time, and slow, and healing.

  Two hours later, they were both showered, dressed and drinking gin and tonic, a poor version of it with no ice and no lemon – none to be found – but it was better than no drink at all. They were sitting blamelessly and respectably in the living room, chatting about their worlds and the people they’d known, and there was so much to talk about, so much to say, and Dan was now detailing the current state of his Sheffield family with such spin and colour that Ali felt she still knew them. But he hardly saw his parents, he said, and this weighed on his conscience, not that he did anything about that. ‘Trouble is I don’t like going. It’s a time warp, I’m forever a sullen teenager in Nether Edge. Nothing’s changed in that house, except Mum talks even more, and Dad talks even less.’

  ‘Does he still have his pigeons?’

  Dan shook his head. ‘He had a long spell in hospital ten years ago and Mum couldn’t cope. She sold them all, without telling him.’

  Ali was horror-struck at this. ‘Those beautiful birds,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Marion realise how he loved them?’

  ‘She’d wanted rid for years. Hated the smell of ’em, and she got into gardening and wanted the shed for the usual stuff people keep – y’know, spades and shears and whatnot. He was in hospital for the best part of a year, and he wasn’t himself, he withdrew, and I think she assumed he’d just not notice, but actually, I think she might have unwittingly destroyed his one chance of rehabilitation. He seems to have been sad for a very long time now, my dad.’

  ‘Poor old Bill,’ Ali said. She thought about that pigeon loft. It’d felt a little like sitting in a church, a church with a congregation of birds. It’d had a holy quality to it; at least, that’s what she remembered. Perhaps, she thought, the passing of time had elevated it in her mind.

  ‘When were you last in Sheffield?’ Dan asked, and immediately he wished he hadn’t, because she stared at him with an expression that clearly questioned whether he’d listened to anything at all of what she’d told him.

  ‘OK, right, you’ve never been back?’ he said, trying to keep his voice level, so she couldn’t hear the incredulity. Jesus, he thought, that was one hell of a bolt you did there, girl. Ali still didn’t answer, just looked at him.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you’d have gone back to see Peter … show the girls Sheffield …’ He petered out. ‘I’ll shut the fuck up,’ he said.

  Ali said, ‘No, I never went back. I’ve never even spoken of it, until today. Don’t you understand that?’

  ‘Never told Michael? None of it?’

  ‘Dan, no. Like I said, I’ve never spoken about it until today and I certainly haven’t been back for a magical mystery tour.’

  Dan exhaled, a long, low breath. ‘That’s some serious poison you hung on to there.’

  ‘Least said, soonest mended – isn’t that what they say in Yorkshire?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘But you’re not mended.’

  She was affronted by this, and she gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘What do you know? You know nothing about my life here.’

  ‘I’m not attacking you, Alison, and by the way I know plenty about your life – it looks gilded, from what I’ve seen online. I’m just saying there’s such a thing as—’

  ‘Oh God, please don’t say closure,’ she said, cutting into his unfinished sentence. ‘I can’t bear that word.’ She brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them, making herself small, and tight, and inviolable.

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’ He moved a fraction closer to her, although the language of her body made physical contact seem suddenly inappropriate and he knew he’d have to try to navigate her defences with words. ‘I was going to talk about justice, a kind of justice, for you, for that girl you were, and I was going to say how going back to Sheffield could be a positive move, if that’s what you decide it’s going to be.’

  ‘I don’t need justice.’ She was very pale, and she wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘Not justice as in dragging Baxter through the courts, although it’s not too late for that if you wanted to report the fucking lowlife weasel bastard. I mean justice in a looser sense, I mean justice as in taking back what’s yours, reclaiming the parts of the past you still need.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well – Peter. I suppose I mean Peter.’

  Now her head was resting on her knees, and the very last thing Dan wanted was for her to be miserable; he only wanted to make her happy, and yet, he thought, how had Peter fared? Alison should know the answer to this, and if she didn’t, she ought to find out. He placed his hand very tenderly on her back, and she let it stay there, but she was speechless, because hearing her brother’s name was an agony; he resided in her conscience, and her neglect of him was a terrible cross to bear. She’d never intended this to happen, this severing of all ties with the person who’d once been her most trusted friend and protector; she hadn’t meant to abandon him for ever, but then she hadn’t known what she meant to do – there hadn’t been any kind of plan at all. In Paris, where she’d first stopped running for a while and found a job as a waitress, she’d felt reinvented, as if after all it was possible to sweep away a past life and begin again. She was just Al-ees-on to her Parisian colleagues, a hard-working English girl with decent French, what a find, what an asset when the bistro filled with les Américains, who seemed not to realise any language existed other than their own. She’d rented a chambre de bonne, a former servant’s garret on the sixth floor of an apartment building on the Rue de Courcelles, and from that address she’d written her three letters to Daniel, and one letter to Peter, too, to tell him she was alive, to express her love and gratitude, and to say goodbye. She thought about that letter now, still imprinted on her mind all these many years later. She hadn’t told him about the rape – wouldn’t share that nightmare with anyone and least of all Peter. So, she’d written:

  I saved your life only once, but you saved mine every day, and now I’ve left, I want you to remember, always, that you are beloved to me. But I think you meant me to go far away, so I shall, and I’ll try and live the life you wanted for me. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but I’ll keep you in my heart, and I know you’ll keep me in yours.

  Always and for ever,

  Your Alison xx

  She’d included no address on Peter’s letter, and this was because … well, why was it? She believed now that she’d needed to turn her back on him to survive, and the more time passed, the less she saw a path back to him. Peter had made her escape possible, but he was also an integral part of the horror. While Daniel … well, he’d inhabited higher ground than the Connors, he lived where the air was pure and clear. She’d stayed on in Paris for far longer than she’d intended, in case he should one day knock on her door.

  ‘I saw Peter,’ Dan said. ‘When I went looking for you.’

  If she hadn’t been sitting down, her legs might have given way. Slowly, she turned her head, which still rested on her knees, to look at him.

  ‘He said you weren’t coming back, but he said it kindly.’

  ‘You saw Peter.’

  ‘The day after you disappeared, yeah. He didn’t say why you’d gone, but he didn’t seem to be freaking out, so I figured he knew more than I did.’

  She lifted her head. ‘Peter was my saving grace, for all of my childhood and adolescence.’

  ‘Wonder where he is now?’

  The question was casually asked, and not unreasonable, and Ali knew that not having an answer to it was a disgrace, an abdication of love and duty. She shrugged and looked profoundly unhappy. ‘All I can say is none of
this seemed quite so abysmally dysfunctional until I said it out loud to you. Michael didn’t seem to need to know anything about my past, it was enough for him that I’d pitched up in his life in Spain, and when we went back to Australia together, it felt to me almost like a sort of symbolic flourish, the completion of my disappearing act. I was subsumed by the McCormacks, and I made no protest, put up no resistance. Why would I? It was a relief, on so many levels.’

  Daniel heaved a long sigh, leaned back where he sat, and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘What?’ Ali reached out a hand and took hold of one of his. ‘What is it?’

  He looked at her, and considered her question. What is it? It was Michael McCormack, Spain, Australia, her disappearing act: it was the series of events that had rolled inexorably onward and kept them apart, when they’d been young enough and full enough of love for each other that they could have conquered anything.

  ‘What?’ Ali said again.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I need another drink.’

  They slept in the prayer-flag room – deeply, for eight hours, as if anaesthetised – and in the morning Ali woke with a kind of lightness of spirit that puzzled her, given the intensity of the previous day. Catharsis, Dan said, the calm after the storm. She said yeah, maybe, and then said she was ravenous, so he went off into downtown Quorn and bought provisions: eggs, bread, fresh coffee and milk, and when he got back they were no longer alone. First he noticed a little red Renault parked next to Ali’s Holden, and then as he pushed open the front door he could hear voices, women’s voices. He had an impulse to back away and disappear again until the coast was clear, then realised that if this was Sheila and Dora – and who else was it going to be, realistically? – then they wouldn’t be going anywhere. He walked down the small hallway and into the kitchen, and there was Ali with two much older women, both of whom immediately eyed him up and down like farmers at a stock sale.

  ‘Well, hello,’ one of them said, the shorter of the two, although the taller one didn’t look much over five foot two, and she now approached him with arms stretched wide and said, ‘Welcome, Daniel, welcome. I’m Sheila,’ and she enveloped him in a powerful embrace. Dan looked at Ali over the top of Sheila’s wild grey hair and she grinned at him, and shrugged.

  ‘And I’m Dora,’ said Dora when Sheila released him. They shook hands, and Dora moved in a little closer and looked up at him, staring hard into his eyes. ‘D’you know, I think we’ve met?’ she said.

  Dan said, ‘Really? Seems unlikely, but you might be right.’

  ‘In a previous life, I mean,’ Dora said. ‘You have a very strong aura, and it’s familiar to me.’

  ‘Oh, this is exciting,’ Sheila said, turning to Ali. ‘Dora’s got a sixth sense for this. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, hang on to your hat.’

  Ali laughed and said, ‘Dora, stop staring at Daniel, you’re scaring him,’ and Dora said, ‘Oh shivers, am I?’ and let go of his hand, which she’d hung on to while she examined his soul.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry, I can cope,’ Dan said. ‘And look, if you work out who I was last time you met me, I’d love to know.’

  ‘He’ll be hoping he was Rory Gallagher,’ Ali said.

  ‘I don’t know Rory Gallagher from a bar of soap,’ Dora said, ‘but anyway, darling, it doesn’t work like that, it’s way more abstract.’

  ‘Well, whoever you think he might once have been,’ Sheila said, ‘he’s certainly a good-looking devil now.’

  ‘Give over,’ Dan said, laughing. He was still holding the bag of groceries, and Ali took it off him and began to unpack.

  ‘Like I said before he walked in,’ she said, ‘he’s Daniel Lawrence from Edinburgh, via Sheffield. There’s a lot to tell, but I’m not doing it on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Dora said, and she grabbed a whisk from the utensils jar and waved it at Dan. ‘Got a treat for you, matey. Eggs my way, coming up. They’re the bomb!’

  24

  QUORN,

  5 FEBRUARY 2013

  Later in the day Sheila said, ‘Let’s have a natter,’ hooked an arm through Dan’s and walked him out to the garden, which was small and densely planted, and mercifully part-shaded by the slender arching boughs and foliage of a Chinese tallow.

  Dan liked Sheila enormously: a touch loopy, but well meaning, big-hearted. She was generous with her laughter, and she liked to talk but she could listen, too. She was so colourful, her speech seasoned with idiom, her clothes a layered collection of ethnic prints, garments collected on her travels. Like the flora and fauna around them, Sheila seemed too tropical to hail from the north of England; he found it hard to imagine her enduring a slate-grey winter, even in her youth: she’d surely emerged fully formed from the red earth of Australia, rising like a firebird in the sun-scorched bush. She sat herself down on a swing seat built for two, but he didn’t fancy squeezing into the small space left beside her, so instead he sat opposite her, on a low stone wall, the perimeter border of a desert rockery where miniature cacti and succulents shared their arid patch with amulets from overseas, an evil eye, a silver shamrock, an alligator tooth; they hung from the tips of the plants like earrings. There was a low table in glittering mosaic, and on it she’d placed two jewel-coloured bowls, one bearing hummus, the other baba ganoush, and she scooped up these dips on fingers of pitta bread and shovelled them in as she listened to Dan answering her questions. She wanted to know all about canal life and Crazy Diamond, and then all about his job, and had he been to Australia before? Yes, he said, Sydney, April 1997, when INXS released Elegantly Wasted, and Michael Hutchence gave him an interview, but only after nearly killing him on the back of his motorbike. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen, Sheila said wistfully, and then this, by way of contrast, got her on to her German ex-husband Kalvin – the least beautiful man she’d ever seen – and all the details of their disastrous marriage, and the metamorphosis she’d gone through after she’d left him. Then she said, ‘Now, tell me this – are you free to love Alison as she deserves to be loved?’ and Dan hadn’t seen that coming, not at all.

  ‘No,’ he said, after only the briefest pause, deciding in that instant to be as direct as the question demanded. ‘Not in the sense you mean.’

  ‘And what do you think I mean?’

  ‘You mean, am I single, am I unattached? I’m not. I have a partner at home, and we have a son, just a bit younger than Alison’s Thea.’

  Sheila shook her head. ‘No, I mean, are you emotionally free?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘It’s very important, Daniel,’ Sheila said. ‘I never understood how Michael won that girl – I suppose he caught her at a low ebb or something – but I believe they’re not connected, except materially.’

  Dan looked at her with interest, suddenly warming to her theme. ‘Would she leave him, do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Would you ask her to?’

  He was silent for a while, not certain how best to answer, then he said, ‘Yes, I would, as long as I was sure it was what she really wanted.’

  ‘Don’t you already know it’s what she really wants?’

  He gave a short laugh and said, ‘Well, the early indications are good, Sheila, but we haven’t had time to have this conversation yet.’

  ‘Oh, come on, what does your heart tell you?’ she asked impatiently.

  ‘OK, my heart tells me we belong together,’ Dan said. ‘But my head tells me it’s not that simple.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks. Don’t give me that: it’s so disappointing.’

  He felt a little irritated now: Dora with her sixth sense; Sheila giving him the New Age third degree. ‘You barely know me,’ he said. ‘So I don’t see how I could disappoint you.’

  ‘Sometimes I understand very quickly what makes people tick,’ she said. ‘And I saw right to the heart of you the moment I saw you.’

  ‘OK. So Dora sees an old soul in me, and you saw – what?’

  ‘Well, I could tell you loved her, as
soon as you walked into the kitchen.’

  ‘Right. How?’ Dan didn’t mind the gist of this conversation – he was coming out of it well, after all – but even so he didn’t even try to keep the scepticism out of his voice.

  ‘Look,’ Sheila said, ‘I know this sounds like hokum, but seeing you two in the same room? It’s like walking into a warm house on a winter’s day. Alison hasn’t been within a coo-ee of our place for a long time, but lately I’ve seen her twice in short order and I’m telling you, she’s a different woman with you. There’s something inevitable about you and Alison.’

  And all this was pure gold, but Dan didn’t comment, he only looked away from Sheila’s smile and considered the fact that he and Alison really did need to address exactly where all this was heading. During his solitary sleepless night in Adelaide, he’d contemplated a future without Katelin, and it had been hard, but not impossible; loving Katelin was a habit, but maybe not a necessity – maybe not. She was strong and clever and resourceful, and she’d been a peerless mother to Alex, but he, Dan, had begun to accept, over the past weeks, something that he’d possibly always known: that she wasn’t the one he adored. When Alison had appeared in the bar of the Exeter Hotel, he’d feigned a kind of relaxed, easy pleasure at their reunion, but in truth, she’d bowled him over just like the first time. He was no fool, he knew all about the mirage of greener grass, the siren call of lost youth, but he also knew the pure joy he’d felt when he saw her again, and that the world was wonderful simply because it still contained Alison Connor.

  Then Sheila started up again, a little impatiently, and decisively, as if she’d waited long enough for him to speak and would wait no longer. ‘Two things in life you need to remember,’ she said. ‘One: follow your heart. Two: if you ever hurt her, I’ll have your guts for garters.’

  ‘I never will hurt her,’ Dan said.

  ‘And will you follow your heart?’