‘I don’t know why I didn’t come sooner,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain, but it just got harder and harder to do.’
‘Ey, none o’ that,’ he said. ‘You’re here, that’s what matters.’
‘I’m so glad you didn’t leave Sheffield.’
‘Me? Where would I go?’
She laughed. ‘Anywhere.’
‘Not me. You’ve been a long way though, by the sound o’ you. What’s that accent?’
‘Australian,’ she said. ‘Adelaide. They all think I have an English accent there. Hey, do you remember Sheila, the letters she used to write?’
He nodded. ‘Parrots and snakes and kangaroos. Did you go looking for her, then? Did you find her?’ No reproach, she thought. Not one hint of reproach.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I can take you to meet her one day, if you want.’
He shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said again. ‘Unless there’s a bus.’
They laughed, and she leaned against his chest again, against the warm, solid reality of him, and he held her and considered all the new feelings that crowded his heart. A nurse, walking briskly towards them, stopped and looked at his damp, dishevelled face and said, ‘All right, Peter? Who’s this then?’
‘My sister,’ he said. ‘Our Alison.’
‘That’s nice. I didn’t know you had a sister.’ She smiled at Ali and said, ‘I’m Dawn, nice to meet you, love. Have you been away?’
‘You could say that,’ Ali said.
‘Aye,’ Peter said, and his face shone with unalloyed pleasure. ‘But she’s back now.’
‘Right,’ Dawn said. ‘Smashing. I’ll let you get on, then.’ She clipped off into the hospital, and somehow her departure seemed a signal to them that they should probably move. When they turned to leave, Alison saw Daniel watching them, standing a respectful distance away, and smiling at her in that way he had that made her feel entirely beloved. They walked towards him, and Peter, who instantly knew who this was, sought no explanation. He’d already witnessed a miracle this morning; that Daniel Lawrence was waiting for them across the car park was almost mundane by comparison.
When Dan went to Salford for his Thursday morning radio gig, Alison and McCulloch stayed in Sheffield and spent the day with Peter, the dog lending some earthy normality to their heightened emotions, their journey into the past. Peter lived in a small flat in a low-rise block near the hospital, a place with an unremitting absence of charm, not helped by the state of disrepair he’d let it get into, and the festering towers of takeaway cartons heaped across the kitchen surfaces like a BritArt installation. He led a solitary life, he said, apart from work and his visits to Bramall Lane to watch every Blades home match he could get to. This was how he liked it. He liked his flat too, just as it was. He wouldn’t let her clean it; he’d do it himself when it got just a little bit worse, he said. McCulloch ate a pizza crust under the table, and then whined and scratched at the door to go out, so they clipped on his lead and took a bus to the botanical gardens, where they lost themselves down the winding pathways and then occupied a wrought-iron bench and talked, in a faltering, careful way, about the things they had on their minds. First thing he asked her was did she drink? Yes, she said, but she had rules: never alone, never when she felt sad, and never vodka. He didn’t drink at all, he said. Teetotal. He’d drunk himself senseless a few times, after he left Brown Bayley’s, and he’d realised he had it in him, the capacity for self-destruction, so he hadn’t touched a drop for thirty years.
Alison said his capacity for self-destruction was as much Martin Baxter’s legacy as Catherine’s; then she told him, without unnecessary detail, what Baxter had done to her before she fled, and Peter’s eyes were black with hatred as he listened, and he told her Martin Baxter was killed in a hit-and-run, no more than a year after she left Sheffield. ‘Nobody ever got done for it, but he was hit full on by a speeding car, a pimped-up Escort. It knocked him down then reversed over him.’
She listened, and frowned. ‘How do you know those details?’
He shrugged.
‘Was it you?’ Ali said.
‘Toddy.’ He couldn’t look at her at the mention of his former lover’s name, just sat stiff-backed and stared ahead at the lawns and late roses.
‘I wish I’d done it,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d killed him.’ Then she asked about Catherine, told him that Sheila had told her about their mother’s death years ago, and that she hadn’t cried, only felt glad that he, Peter, was free of obligation. ‘Were you with her when she died?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘She didn’t know it though, she were in a coma by then. She’d been laid up in hospital for weeks, longest she’d gone for years without a drink.’ That’s how he ended up as a hospital porter, he said; spent so long at the Northern General, he thought he might as well get paid for it.
‘Peter, I’m really sorry I left you alone for so long.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You did right.’
Such economy of language to express a world of meaning. In three words, Peter absolved her of blame, acknowledged his own role in her trauma, addressed the – far greater – damage Martin Baxter had done, and granted his full approval of her choice to go as far away as she was able, until she was ready to come home.
She took his hand and squeezed it, and he squeezed back.
‘Is Toddy still around?’ she asked.
‘No, no, long gone, went to work on an oil rig, got married, a Scottish woman. No kids. They breed dogs, them Rhodesian ridgebacks.’
‘Did he tell you all that?’
‘His mam. I think she wanted me to know he weren’t queer any more.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘A likely story.’
He gave a small laugh. ‘Aye.’
‘Don’t you have anyone, Peter?’
He shook his head, set his mouth in a hard line. She thought about the burdens of his life, the sacrifices he’d made, the fleeting, stolen happiness he’d found with Dave Todd at the back of the Gaumont. His had been a life cauterised by bigotry, ignorance and shame. She’d be forever indebted to Peter, but each time she tried to express this, to thank him, to heap gratitude upon him, he shut her down. All he’d ever wanted was an ordinary life, he said, and to be left alone.
‘That’s not much of an ambition.’
‘Aye, well.’ He shifted his gaze from the flowers, to his feet.
‘Don’t expect me to leave you alone,’ she said, ‘not again, never again, not likely.’ She leaned in and planted a kiss on his cheek, which made him smile. Once upon a time, when she was very young, she’d thought him as handsome and lucky as a prince, tall and fair, funny and brave-hearted. Now he seemed a kind of self-made ruin of a man: his solitary life, his unresolved shame. But still, there was a seam of contentment running through him. She made a silent pledge to help make him as happy as he wished to be, for evermore. ‘You’re stuck with me,’ she said.
They were very happy right now, side by side on a bench in the park, and they stayed there for a long time. He loved listening to her talk about Adelaide, describing her house, her road, the ocean, the parklands. He had no idea she’d written a bestselling book, no idea at all. This pleased her, although she didn’t quite know why. He said he’d read it, if she gave one to him, but he hadn’t read a novel since Stig of the Dump. Ali found this hilarious, and her amusement caught on, so that soon they were both rocking with laughter, defying the miserable ghosts of their past to bring them down.
‘I could live in Sheffield,’ Alison said to Dan. ‘Part of the year, anyway.’ It was Monday evening, a week after they’d arrived. He’d brought her to a backstreet dive with an Irish landlord for Guinness and a packet of Walkers cheese and onion. McCulloch sat at her feet, and she reached down to scratch the top of his head. ‘We could buy a house by the botanical gardens maybe,’ she said.
Dan grimaced. ‘God, Sunday lunch with Mum and Dad, and burnt sausage barbecues with Claire and Marcus.’
‘But I really think I c
ould write here. I could write a book set in Sheffield, about Sheffield people.’
‘It’s still a novelty to you, that’s all.’ If he’d wanted to live in Sheffield, he’d be living here already. He loved his folks, but he loved them most when they were at a distance.
‘You could go and watch the Owls.’ She liked saying ‘the Owls’; it amused her. Crows in Adelaide, Owls in Sheffield.
‘That’s not much incentive, these days.’
‘I could come with you, sing the songs, learn the offside rule.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s true,’ he said. ‘That might work.’ He smiled at her across the table, loving the sight of her smiling at him. He’d live anywhere with this woman, that was the truth of it. ‘But still, if we’re going to live in Sheffield, it won’t be without a fight from me first.’
She folded her arms, pondered for a while, then said, ‘I’ll need to go back to Adelaide soon. Face the music, come to some arrangement with Michael.’
‘I’ll come with you when you go.’ No way was he letting McCormack back in. He’d fight to the death if he had to.
‘I need to see Tahnee and her crew, too, catch her between gigs somewhere.’
He nodded. He knew all about the prodigious talent that was Tahnee Jackson. ‘I’ll come with you when you do that too,’ he said. ‘Wherever you go, there I’ll be.’
‘Fine by me,’ she said.
‘We should take Peter along,’ Dan said. ‘Mind you, he’d need a passport first. And he’d have to be drugged and blindfolded.’
Ali laughed. ‘I wonder if he could be coaxed on to the aeroplane though? I’d love to show him Adelaide.’ It would transform his existence, she thought: jacaranda season, evenings on the beach, the sun warming his bones.
She drained her half of Guinness and thought about how sometimes – and right now – anything and everything seemed possible and happiness buzzed through her like electricity down a wire, then other times her certainties seemed riddled with fault lines. She’d fixed herself up with a new phone, a very necessary move, but the floodgates were open once again to emails, phone calls, texts, and there were days Ali wished she could just fling it into the River Don. Meanwhile Dan’s phone rang nine or ten times a day, and it was usually Katelin, and he was always calm and steady when he spoke to her, whatever she accused him of, however much she raged. He knew he was at fault here; he knew he couldn’t say, as Alison could to Michael, that in the end Katelin had made him unhappy. It was just he belonged with Alison, and always had.
Dan went to the bar for two more, and while he was gone, Ali’s phone chimed with an incoming email, which she opened, then wished she hadn’t. Michael, writing to her from the future. It was tomorrow morning in Adelaide, but still pre-dawn, only 3.12 a.m. – a telling fact, which wasn’t lost on her.
Sleeping beside you these past few months, I had no idea how far from me you really were, so by the time you decided to leave, I had no hope at all of reaching you. I know you believe I lack imagination, and perhaps I do, imagination is rarely required in my world. But my feelings for you are as deep as they are true, and I hope you’ll look closely into your own heart, and then, if you need to, look closer still, and finally know that what you want, and what you need, is what you already had.
Dan had been gone for less than five minutes, but when he came back with their drinks her face was white with distress. ‘What?’ he said. She pushed her phone across to him, and he read Michael’s words, then looked up at her. She waited for him to speak; she counted on his conviction.
‘Yeah,’ Dan said slowly. ‘I know this is tough to read, and he’s really suffering, but look, it’s early days, and everything’s so raw. The extraordinary will eventually become blessedly ordinary, and this storm will blow itself out.’
She nodded. She could cling to those words; his certainty could keep her afloat. But her breath had caught in her throat as she’d read Michael’s message, and she shuddered to think of him, in the small hours of the new day, unable to set his broken world back to rights. He’d written many emails to her since she left but he’d never before expressed his feelings so effectively, although their conversations in the days before she’d left Adelaide had been the most honest and open they’d ever had. He’d wanted to know why, if she’d been so unhappy, she’d waited this long to leave. Because, she said, it was possible to get addicted to a certain kind of sadness. Then he’d said all she was doing by leaving him for Dan Lawrence was exchanging one prop for another, and she hadn’t been able to refute this, except to say Dan had given her back a side of herself she’d long ago forgotten, and anyway, she’d said, wasn’t it true that Michael’s own feelings towards her were altered these days, and born of habit, not emotion? He’d been angry at this, had said she was entitled to decide she didn’t love him, but she didn’t get to decide he didn’t love her. That was just before she left the house, when he told her she didn’t know the meaning of love, and slammed the door, and this memory, she knew, would remain like a bad seed, planted deep in her mind.
She did know the meaning of love, she thought now. She did.
And yet, hadn’t her heart had a bad start? Certainly, Catherine hadn’t known what love meant, and doesn’t a child, on some fundamental level, observe the mother for the blueprint?
So.
Dan was watching her, seeing all the shadows of these thoughts pass over her face, and he knew he had strength for them both, and that he’d need it. She looked at him and said, ‘It’s just, every time I feel totally happy, I remember that soon there’ll be a phone call, a text, whatever, to remind me of the price we’re paying to be together.’
‘Alison,’ he said. ‘There are going to be more emails from Michael, and more phone calls from Katelin, more demands, more explanations, more apologies, more tears. But there’s nothing we can’t deal with, and we’ll find a path through, and love each other, and show our families the way.’
Then the door of the pub swung open, and a blast of cold air made them both look round. An elderly man walked in, short and stocky, bald, with coarse, florid features, and Dan said, ‘Oh shit,’ just as the man said, ‘Ey, Dan Lawrence, I thought you must be dead.’
‘Who’s that?’ Alison whispered.
Dan was standing up now, and he said, ‘Oh, just some geezer who knew somebody who knew Joe Cocker. He got me an interview once, and thinks we’re colleagues now. I’d better have a word, but I’ll spare you the experience. I’ll be right back, OK?’ She nodded. He paused and looked at her, and said, ‘Keep the faith, right?’ as if she might change her mind while his back was turned, then he walked over to where the newcomer stood at the bar, and she could see Dan buying him a drink and giving him the time of day, and from time to time glancing back at Ali, to gauge her state of mind, interpret her expression.
He met her eyes each time he looked, because she kept her steady gaze on him. Oh, she didn’t want to cause him a moment’s concern! She didn’t want him to have to question her belief, not even for a fraction of a second. This was her overriding thought, among all the thoughts she had coursing through her mind: she wanted Daniel to be completely sure of her, to know with cast-iron certainty that he would never, ever again look round and find her gone. She picked up her phone from the table and quickly found a song for him, because that’s how their love had first found a voice, and she needed to affirm it now with something beautiful and peerless, soulful and serious; something to articulate this extraordinary welter of emotions, and her faith in him, and her own resolve.
She watched as he felt the buzz of his phone in the pocket of his jeans, watched him pull it out and take a look, and then – as if he was alone at the bar, not with a friend of a friend of Joe Cocker’s – watched him click on the link to hear Dusty Springfield, ‘I Close My Eyes’: mellow, intimate, perfectly judged. He turned to her, and for a moment they just held each other’s eyes across the room. Then he made some hasty excuse, and walked back to her with Dusty still singing, and when he reache
d Alison, he stooped to kiss her. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She looked up at him looking down at her. ‘You know, you’re everything to me, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Everything.’
‘Good,’ he said, and grinned at her grave expression. ‘Good, because you’re everything to me, too.’
No one should turn their back on happiness such as this, she thought. ‘This is our time, Alison,’ Dan said. ‘We’ll just roll with it, right?’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘But look, you might have to keep telling me it’s all going to work out, because, for a while, I might have to keep asking.’
The pub was busy, the tables all around them occupied, and although people stared when he pulled her up from her seat into his arms, Daniel and Alison were oblivious, alone together in the crowd. ‘Hey,’ he said, tilting her face up to his so she could see he meant it. ‘Listen to me, Alison Connor. Every little thing … gonna be all right.’
She laughed. ‘I know what you did there.’
‘I know you know. I’ll never fox you with a lyric, you’re weird like that.’
Then she sat down again, he did too, next to her this time, and close enough that she felt the solid warmth of his body through the sleeve of her shirt. She finished her drink and then scanned the room for a while, taking a snapshot in her mind of this ordinary, over-lit, backstreet pub; all the men and women it contained, the motley collection of drinkers and talkers and thinkers. And some of them stared back into her frank and open gaze, one or two of them even smiled; but all of them, she thought, whether they knew it or not, were witness to her happiness. When she turned at last to Dan, she found he was already looking at her.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘Never better.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You know what? That’s music to my ears.’
Song Credits
Reference on p.33 to ‘Big, Blonde And Beautiful’ written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.
Mix Tape Page 37