Mix Tape

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by Jane Sanderson


  Dan was scanning the street without any real hope, but there, cresting the summit of the sloping road and heading towards them, was the miraculous yellow light of an available cab, so he flagged it down and picked up the dog.

  ‘He looks happy enough, anyway,’ Duncan said, nodding at McCulloch. ‘So that’s something.’

  Dan gave a small laugh and climbed into the car, slamming shut the door and saluting Duncan through the window as they drove away. But later, on the train, he thought yeah, actually, yeah. He was only an elderly, arthritic Jack Russell, but there was something very welcome, even helpful, about McCulloch’s steady devotion, and his placid acceptance of each new change in circumstances. The little dog’s needs were few, and so easily met, thought Dan; we should all be so lucky.

  29

  LONDON,

  LATER THE SAME DAY

  Dan and McCulloch walked into the Warwick Castle at ten past eight and there was Alison Connor, sitting at the bar like a mirage.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, as if it’d been only yesterday, as if neither of them had crawled over emotional burning coals to get to each other.

  ‘Hey.’ He stood for a while and drank her in, so perfectly at home on that bar stool, yet fundamentally out of context. The disconnect between these two facts made him slow to react, as in a dream, when you want to reach out for what you know you need, but your arms are heavy and won’t obey the signals from your brain. He stared at her, and didn’t move or speak, and she watched him a little uncertainly, then hopped off the stool and hunkered down to scratch the little dog behind his ear. ‘So you’re McCulloch?’ she said. He shuffled closer to her and closed his eyes and gave a small shiver of bliss.

  Dan gave a soft laugh, and all the terrible weight of the day eased by a few small degrees. She stood up and moved towards him, then cradled the back of his neck with one hand while she kissed him with gentle care.

  ‘Alison,’ he said now, and he was closer to tears than he’d been all day, way, way closer, keenly moved by her tenderness. He’d believed he would never see her again, he’d begun the process of hardening his heart against her, he’d tried to think her faithless, weak, insincere. But now the sight of her slayed him all over again, and he felt a jolt of fear, because although he might have underestimated her resolve, how was he ever to trust that she would stay? He stepped back, and she let her arms fall to her side.

  ‘Daniel,’ she said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  He’d forgive this woman anything, he thought. That was the problem.

  ‘I was wrong to leave with Michael that day, I was wrong to let him talk to you that way, and wrong to leave with him. I should’ve listened to my heart and stood by your side. I’m sorry, Daniel. And I’m here now, if you still want me.’

  There was a pause, and all she seemed to be able to hear in the crowded bar was her own heartbeat.

  ‘You used Jim’s phone,’ he said, at last.

  ‘I lost mine,’ she said. ‘I think it got stolen on the way over.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I sent you a song. Two songs in fact, but the first was an accident, too cheerful by half, so then I sent you another, just this morning, so you’d know for sure that I was certifiably insane.’

  ‘Oh! God, Daniel, sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth. ‘I did get Donovan, but I was with Stella in Lisbon, and I’d have replied, I would, I knew what I wanted to send, but then—’

  He placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Hush. Never mind.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m sorry about so many things, and one of them is not replying at once to “Sunshine Superman”.’

  His face remained impassive, unsure, but she gave him a tentative smile, and it tugged at his heart. Seeing her standing there before him with all that anxious love in her eyes – it was golden balm for his soul. He loved her so much. He loved her so much she might never truly know the length, breadth, and depth of his feelings.

  ‘What were you going to send?’ he asked.

  ‘The Cure,’ she said at once. ‘“Lovesong”.’

  He nodded. ‘Whenever I’m alone with you …’

  ‘… you make me feel like I am home again.’

  Now they both smiled. Then she put her head on one side and said, ‘Certifiably insane?’

  ‘Psychotic,’ he said. ‘I never expected to see you again, so you got – or you didn’t get – “I Want You”. Unequivocally deranged.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, God, that song.’

  ‘You put me through hell,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I do know, I do, but never again. I love you now, and I loved you then, and, if you’ll allow me to, I’ll love you for ever.’ She spoke simply, matter-of-factly stating her case, and Dan couldn’t speak, he didn’t know why – and yet he did know why.

  ‘I want you,’ she said. ‘My Sheffield boy.’

  She was so much more on top of this situation than he was. She looked at him, mute and helpless before her. ‘Let’s just go to the boat,’ she said.

  The thing about Crazy Diamond was, you stepped on board and left the real world behind. Perhaps it was being afloat, or being cocooned, or the gauzy, filtered quality of the light inside the cabin. So it was hard to leave it, even knowing – joyous thought – that she could and would come back, but it was Monday morning now, and Dan needed to be in Salford by Thursday, and before then, they had to get to Sheffield.

  Sheffield. It squatted in her memory like a toad, one of those Grimm brothers’ toads, the warty, malevolent kind, embodying evil. Dan said she’d only have to step off the train at the city-centre station to realise that the place itself was innocent of all charges, especially as she wouldn’t recognise it – he could barely navigate those streets himself since the council started beautifying the place. He kept his tone light, but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand what an ordeal this was for her, catching up with the ghosts of her past. But look, they were together, she’d come to him of her own free will, and he couldn’t help being happy, even if this trip north was, for her, a bit like crossing the Styx to the Underworld. Speaking for himself, he felt renewed, rinsed clean of doubt and bitterness and regret, and shagged out, too, in all honesty: a winning combination of her jet lag and his perpetual ardour had kept them awake most of the night, until they both plunged into spectacular unconsciousness at 5 a.m., when daylight was already seeping through the cracks in the curtains. McCulloch woke them three hours later, demanding – not unreasonably – to be let out, and they’d dragged themselves bodily from the sinking sands of sleep to deal with the dog and make plans. Lisa appeared, a ministering angel bearing a Spanish omelette, and they ate it straight from the little black frying pan she’d cooked it in while she sat with them at the towpath table and smoked her French cigarette. Jim joined them too, proud of the role he’d played in their story, keen to retell it whenever he had the chance, but Ali was mostly under the spell of the hippies, warmed by Lisa’s loopy brand of love and entertained by Frank’s amiable wickedness. Lisa was possessed of a total lack of curiosity about the practical detail of other people’s lives, interested only in the wider picture, the rainbow colours of their souls, the generosity of their hearts. Frank, slowing ever closer to the final halt, generally remained in the shadows of Ophelia’s cabin, although yesterday, while Alison had waited for Daniel, Frank had been briefly reinvigorated by the novelty of her arrival, and had told her a long story about the Beatles at the ashram in Rishikesh, and how one incredible day there’d been John and Paul, Ringo and George, Lisa and Frank, all of them cross-legged on the same flat, hot bungalow roof, practising meditation while being scrutinised by little, grey, sceptical monkeys. Best day of his long life, Frank said, then he’d drifted off to sleep again, worn out by his memories, and Lisa and Alison had talked about, oh, a jumble of subjects, Moroccan spices, stars in the southern hemisphere, the power of music to change the course of a life. Lisa’s mind flitted fro
m one big subject to another like a hummingbird at a fuchsia bush, dipping now here, now there, and rarely still. Alison knew this was otherwise known as a lack of concentration, doubtless the legacy of a life on weed, but it was very freeing to listen to her new-age take on life, and comforting too, not least because she’d wrapped Alison in a smoky quilt and given her chai and a bowl of chana dal, because she was frozen, a hothouse flower from Adelaide for whom this so-called summer in London felt no warmer than an early spring dawn in South Australia. By the time Dan hit the scene in Little Venice, Alison and Lisa were forever connected and when they left after breakfast on Monday for the train to Sheffield, Lisa kissed her on her forehead and slipped an engraved silver bangle off her own wrist and on to Ali’s, to keep her safe until she returned. Ali liked this, a talisman was exactly what she needed; that, and the warm body of McCulloch sleeping on her feet, and the level gaze and steady confidence of Dan on the opposite side of the table from her on the northbound train.

  Dan’s phone lay on the table between them. It rang repeatedly, and each time he answered she put on her headphones and listened to music to give him privacy, although she saw the name of each caller bloom on to the screen before he picked it up from the table. Katelin. Katelin. Alex. Katelin. Katelin. Duncan. Katelin. Katelin. Katelin. Not once did he switch it off, and not once did she ask him to. ‘Your life’s in free fall,’ she said at one point, aching with concern. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He leaned across and took hold of her hand. ‘I love you,’ he said, and she said, ‘I love you too,’ and Dan nodded. ‘Then there’s nothing I can’t deal with,’ he said.

  So, at last, the fact had to be faced that she was in Sheffield and Dan was right, up to a point: the landscape of the city wasn’t familiar at all; but the voices were, those accents that were now all around her, the raw, flat, laconic speech patterns of the northern working classes, her people, hard-working, hard-up, hard-faced, and there was something about them she’d missed, she realised now, and they swept her relentlessly back and back over the past three decades far more effectively than the architecture ever could have done. Dan kept her close, shepherding her through the station concourse, but in fact she felt OK so far, she felt fine, with Dan on one side of her, McCulloch on the other, the sturdy little terrier a surprising and enchanting ally. When he looked up at her, his dark eyes seemed full of intelligent feeling, enough to fill a little space in her heart, although she admitted she was probably reading too much into things; he was more than likely just hungry.

  ‘I always wanted a dog,’ she said. She held his lead and he trotted just slightly ahead, as if he was guiding her along the busy pavement. ‘As a kid, I mean. I always wanted a collie like Lassie.’

  ‘I wanted a kangaroo like Skippy,’ Dan said. ‘My mum wouldn’t get me one.’

  He’d rented a car, thinking cabs and buses might let them down if they needed to make a quick getaway. Also, he’d called Marion, told her to sit down and listen. ‘I’m in Sheffield, Mum, with Alison Connor – yes, Alison Connor – and can we come and say hello? No, Katelin’s in Edinburgh. No, it’s complicated. I’ll try and explain later. No, Mum, I told you that, Katelin isn’t here, Alison is though, so we’ll call in, OK? And don’t worry, OK?’

  Listening to his side of this conversation, Ali’s spirits began to sink and she thought, Oh, this is unfeasible, this isn’t fair on anyone other than we two, and when he hung up she blurted out her concern and said, ‘Daniel, how can we ever be happy when we make so many other people sad?’

  ‘Mum’s not sad, she’s just a bit perplexed.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t know what there is to be sad about yet. I bet Katelin’s sad, isn’t she?’

  ‘Katelin’s sodding furious, she’s already packed half my clothes into bin bags and given them to the British Heart Foundation. Duncan’s trying to save my records, but he’ll have to look sharp if he’s going to save them from being car-booted.’

  Ali started to laugh, hard not to, and Dan smiled and said, ‘Look, it might get worse before it gets better, but we’ll power through, me and you. Does this vehicle have Bluetooth?’ He prodded the buttons on the sound system. ‘Hallelujah, yes it does, and I’m about to fulfil my teenage fantasy of driving Alison Connor through our city listening to Reproduction.’

  ‘Ah, the Human League,’ Ali said; then at precisely the same time they both said, ‘Before the girls joined,’ and laughed.

  ‘Badge of honour, seeing them in nineteen seventy-eight,’ she said. ‘Private club for the cognoscenti.’

  ‘Kev Carter still tries to lay claim to these guys, because he accidentally saw them at their first gig.’

  ‘Kev Carter, oh my God. This is so crazy.’

  ‘Crazy bad or crazy good?’

  ‘Crazy both. Do you still see him?’

  ‘No, not for years, but we could. He’d love to check you out, I bet.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Not sure I want to let him, mind you.’

  She shook her head, rolled her eyes at him, then gazed out of the window at twenty-first-century Sheffield, trying to get her bearings, and then the music came on and it was February 1979 again as the car filled with the tick-tock, synthy start of ‘Almost Medieval’ and she raised her arms in a kind of ironic reverence and said, ‘Marsh, Ware, Oakey, we salute you.’

  ‘And that,’ said Dan, whacking up the volume, ‘is why you’ve always been my girl.’

  She said, ‘Let’s bite the bullet and go to Attercliffe,’ but of course the street she’d lived in was long gone, demolished years ago, and Brown Bayley’s was gone too; nothing looked the same, and none of this bothered her at all, she couldn’t mourn the loss of the places where she’d been unhappiest. Still, she thought, putting aside her own feelings, the old neighbourhood had certainly lost a bit of northern heart and soul with the demolition works. Granted, if you grew up with an outside lav and a tin bath, you probably wouldn’t have given two hoots for the historical integrity of nineteenth-century back-to-backs, and nobody saw the industrial chic in a Victorian warehouse in the 1970s. But it was all so very changed, an impoverished landscape, somehow, without the sooty brick and corrugated metal of the old terraced houses and the mighty steelworks. On Attercliffe Road, where they parked to talk strategy, massage parlours seemed to be the boom industry: gaudy, seedy, unapologetic.

  ‘Well,’ Ali said, surveying the view.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Dan replied. ‘I think sex might be the new steel.’

  ‘If these places had been here in Catherine’s heyday …’

  He’d never known her mother, so he didn’t comment, didn’t know how to.

  ‘She’d have sex with a bloke for a glass of port and lemon, Catherine would. Sold herself very cheap.’

  ‘Did you always call her Catherine?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think so. I guess as an infant I might’ve done the “mummy” thing, but she didn’t really put the mothering hours in, so it never stuck, and I think calling her Catherine kind of helped me and Peter to cope. Like, distancing ourselves from her – less disappointing, y’know? It might be called denial now, I suppose. It wasn’t her fault, she was an addict, and she’d been abandoned, she got no help from anyone.’ She stopped and looked at him. ‘You must find this all very dysfunctional?’

  ‘No, no, only very sad.’

  She sighed and stared out of the window, lost in her own thoughts. Then she said, ‘It’s been so wrong, for such a long time.’

  ‘What has?’

  ‘My silence, staying away, my neglect of Peter especially. I mean, it made sense at first, I understood my motives perfectly, but after Thea and Stella were born, that’s when I should’ve come back, made reparations.’

  ‘Alison, you were the victim, not the culprit.’

  ‘I owed my brother such a lot, Daniel. And I left him.’

  ‘You did what he wanted you to do – he packed you off, effectively.’

  She gave a fractional shake of her head, refusing to shed the blame.
‘The onus was on me to come back, because how could he ever find me? But the longer I was away, the harder it was to go back.’ Then she sighed bleakly and looked out of the window again. Without turning to Dan, she said, ‘How on earth are we going to find him?’ and it was almost as though she was speaking to herself.

  Dan had in fact already begun the process, not that she knew this. She’d slept for half an hour on the train, and he’d quickly trawled through the social media sites, knowing this obvious tech-strategy probably wouldn’t have crossed Alison’s mind, it wasn’t her style, and now she’d lost her phone, but he’d saved her the trouble anyway, because unless Peter had changed his name, he wasn’t online.

  ‘Well, we can ask around,’ he said now. ‘Try in the pubs maybe – some old-timer might know where he is. I bet this is still a pretty tight community, and it’s not that big really.’

  ‘It hardly seems possible he’d still be in Attercliffe.’

  ‘Why not? My parents are right where I left them. Folk don’t move far from round here, as a rule, even when their homes are knocked down.’

  There was truth in this, and she acknowledged it with a nod, and said, ‘OK, let’s go walkabout,’ and got out of the car. McCulloch nipped out after her from his chosen place in the footwell, and she clipped on his lead and rubbed his head.

  ‘He suits you, that dog,’ Dan said, joining them. ‘Right, where shall we start? Pubs?’

  ‘Well, he was never a big drinker,’ she said.

  ‘What about that Toddy bloke?’

  ‘His street’s gone, same as mine.’

  ‘Well, look,’ he said. ‘Let’s just ask around. There’s a pub over the road, it’s a start. Wait here.’

  He jogged across and she watched him go into an establishment that you’d swear was closed for business if it wasn’t for the ‘We are open’ sign in a mucky downstairs window. Who’d be in there at midday on a crisp, bright Monday? She imagined a miraculous scenario where Dan emerged, followed by Peter, who in her imagination was unaltered, unaged, and whose face would break into shining happiness at seeing her there, waiting for him. But Dan came out and grimaced, and she smiled ruefully, and waited until he was closer before she said, ‘Were you not tempted to linger for a pint, then?’

 

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