Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  ‘Kate Howarth?’ he asked, although our name tags had made the question pointless.

  ‘Stephen Miller,’ I smiled, looking down at his badge from my heels.

  ‘I was hoping you’d be here today,’ he said.

  ‘Oh really?’ I smiled brightly.

  ‘Yeah, your name’s crossed my desk a couple of times recently and I’d like a chance to talk. Do you have dinner plans tonight?’

  He didn’t want to screw me. Or, if he did, he wanted to do something else first. He wanted to sound me out about a job.

  I was flattered, and more importantly I knew this gave me leverage at TMC. A vodka brand whose pitch we’d nearly won had apparently been impressed by me and dropped my name to the winning agency – Steven’s company, Elliot & Finch.

  Steven asked me to come in to meet the team the following day, which I did. I wore my new MaxMara coat – the most expensive item I’d ever used my own money to buy – over a black Donna Karan dress and Patrick Cox shoes. I regretted my tiny Fendi Baguette bag as soon as I arrived and was handed a file on the company, which I couldn’t conceal on my way back to TMC and had to dump in a bin.

  I walked in to Elliot & Finch with my head held high, flame hair shining. I wanted the office to seem dull once I had left.

  It worked. On the way back to TMC’s offices in Charlotte Street, my Motorola StarTAC rang with a central London number. Senior account executive, 30 per cent pay rise, bigger bonuses and a better expense allowance.

  I considered it, of course I did.

  That night, I brought home three bottles of rosé and told Lucy.

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked, not giving her a moment for the news to sink in.

  ‘Hmph,’ she said, and pulled a glossy strand of black hair taut before letting it snap back to a curl.

  ‘Hmph indeed,’ I said.

  We talked it through, although it was apparent that Lucy felt a bit sour about the offer, sour it had happened to me, and sour that I could even consider leaving her. ‘Perhaps I’m not doing a good job noisily enough,’ she said when we were into our second bottle.

  I wasn’t ready to burn any bridges but I took it to John Silver, then a senior on my team, nonetheless.

  ‘I’m not going to take it,’ I said. ‘My heart lies with TMC but it has made me think.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, giving me a half-smile.

  ‘Well, I’m ambitious, as you know, and I don’t want to stagnate anywhere. I know I still have plenty to learn and I want to learn it here.’

  ‘Atta girl,’ he said, ‘that’s how you use a job offer. You have been paying attention.’

  I smiled, knowing he’d speak to Andy, the head of client services – our boss.

  I was promoted to account manager, a big leap and a significant salary bump. I let Steven Miller take me out on a couple of dates as a consolation. By the third date, we called each other Red as a nickname. It was fun, but we were too busy to go further with it. To be honest, I forgot to call him.

  Every month throughout university, my father had paid £500 into my bank account for living expenses. He hadn’t stopped when I graduated. When I first got accepted onto the graduate scheme, I thought about calling him and telling him to stop paying it, that I didn’t need it. I was all set to one Sunday night, as I laid my Kookai blouse and River Island skirt out for the next day. And then it dawned on me. He didn’t even know I had a job.

  Fuck it, I thought. Let him pay money into my account and tell himself he’s being a father. Let him salve his guilt that way, and I’d use the money my way. My salary paid my rent, bills and food, my father did not prop me up that way. So that £500 went on clothes and make-up, shoes, handbags. My uniform.

  As I earned more money and bigger bonuses, I started to add my own cash into this clothing allowance I awarded myself. I started to buy more strategically. I bought myself a subscription to Vogue and already bought I-D and The Face every month from Charlotte Street News. When I remembered how I’d pored over months-old copies back in my childhood bedroom, I felt a soaring pride from being at the epicentre of something, living in a city where stuff came out first.

  I’d gone from trainee to a leading account manager in four years. It felt meteoric. I’d earned it, hustled for it, watching and learning from the best. And I didn’t hide my light under a bushel either. I’d like to think I didn’t brag or rub anyone’s nose in it, but I wore it. I wore my success and I dressed for more.

  In advertising, you grab every nugget of gold and you sell it as bullion. I took this to heart.

  I was not the best ideas person, I wasn’t the most attractive woman, no longer the youngest. I had no family ties of any use in the industry. What I had was height, hair and confidence. I exaggerated them all.

  I was slim but shapely. And although I joined in with the tugging of waistbands and inspecting of split ends in the work mirror, really I enjoyed the way I looked. I’d gradually stopped being skinny and become more ‘willowy’. I dressed to look statuesque. I needed to stand out, be remembered. It was a professional strategy.

  But I was also a very hard worker. I still turned up first, left last, and paid attention. I didn’t play politics, I didn’t get sucked into the passive-aggressive blind copying on emails and throwing people under the bus, but I put myself forward time and again. I was hungry.

  Lucy was a hard worker too but work wasn’t her life, her life was her life. She wouldn’t put herself forward, out of self-consciousness, she said, but I started to think, privately, that she just didn’t care as much as I did. She would make barbed comments, and I would think barbed thoughts. That just doing a job well isn’t enough to stand out. Just doing a job well means you don’t get sacked. That’s the bare minimum. That I shouldn’t feel guilty for getting ahead.

  When I got promoted to account manager, it was the final straw. I asked her to come out to celebrate with other colleagues but she went home instead. When I got in that night, she was on the sofa in her pyjamas, scowling at the TV.

  I woke up before her the next day, a Saturday. I bought a bacon sandwich and a mug of builder’s tea from Ozzie’s cafe a few doors down, got a mortgage offer from my bank a couple of streets away, and started to hit the estate agents.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  1987

  Drink had always been around Paul and me. My mum generally had a glass in her hand if she was out of bed and her hangovers were one of the only constants in my childhood. Perhaps I’m naive but I didn’t – I don’t – think she was an alcoholic, I just think she didn’t have much else to do.

  Mick had a few beers most nights and their kitchen often contained a huge plastic bottle of cloudy scrumpy donated from one friend or another. Back then, almost anyone around those parts knew how to make scrumpy. And proper scrumpy was strong, like Snow White’s poisoned apple in juice format. Apple Rock would have held nothing to this.

  At the Loxtons’, we were allowed a few beers or a small glass of something. When I spent New Year’s Eve there – the first New Year’s since the year my mum died – we drank Asti Spumante and they called it ‘champers’. That drove Paul to distraction. He’s still a pedant, refusing to lump prosecco in as champagne, even if it embarrasses whoever is offering it. On the anniversary of my mum’s death just a few days before, I’d drunk at home. A first for me. My father and I had eaten dinner together, the room so quiet I could hear the food squeak on his teeth. We ate salmon, green beans and new potatoes with butter, cooked for us by Mrs Baker.

  My father spent several minutes checking his fish for tiny bones, and teasing them out with his knife and fork while I stared. He found three, and had laid them gently side-by-side on the edge of the plate like bodies dragged from a lake. I barely touched my food but I accepted my father’s offer of some La Scolca Gavi dei Gavi Black Label. I think it was offered on autopilot, but I seized the chance. It probably cost nearly as much as Mick would earn for a winter morning’s work but I didn’t really care, I just pretended to g
ive a shit when I sighed my way through the story the next day, to Paul.

  I drank most of my father’s bottle that night, after he’d finished his food efficiently and gone back to his office. I’d staggered upstairs and tried to fall asleep, somewhat indulgently, on my mum’s bed. I wanted to be found there. I wanted someone to know that I’d tried. But I couldn’t do it. I lay wild-eyed, my thoughts swarming. Eventually I sloped off to my own room around midnight.

  Viv didn’t really like us drinking – she’d known real drinkers in her family – but she turned a blind eye. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Paul can handle a drink. He can remain fairly stable and sound of mind several drinks past most people.

  As the piles of homework we had to do grew taller each week, we started to reward ourselves more and more with a tin here, and a glass there. No different to the middle-class ‘just opening a bottle of wine’ adult habit. Who doesn’t indulge in the commiseration bottle, the celebration bottle, the ‘happy hump day’ middle-of-the-week bottle, the weekend bottle. . .? It’s no different. We blamed the ‘stress’ of schoolwork and nurtured the idea that we were alcohol-dependent because most of our heroes were creative drunks. Neither of us has ever been alcohol-dependent.

  But things were ramping up at school, even if we were overegging the stress to justify the booze. We were to be the first year to take GCSEs rather than O-levels and CSEs. No adults seemed to really understand the new exam system. We tried to explain it to Viv and Mick numerous times but ended up in fits of giggles at Mick’s glazed-over expression whenever the subject of school came up. Viv really wanted to understand, but she hadn’t taken part in formal schooling herself until she was in nursing college, it wasn’t her world.

  What was so hard to understand? we’d say. Instead of two different types of exams, there was just one. Just one general qualification for everyone our age. So Paul and I could both take the same exam and stand the same chance of getting the same grade as each other.

  ‘Your dad could’ve saved all that money, Katie, seeing as you’re doing the same bloody exams our Paul’s doing,’ Mick would say, as if he was genuinely concerned for my father’s financial affairs. Paul saw it differently. He thought Mick was claiming some kind of good sense on his own part by not sending Paul to private school.

  ‘I really don’t think it’s that, Paul,’ I’d laughed.

  By then, Paul’s affection for his parents had been tainted by an increased level of scoffing and eye rolling. After years of his mum praising him for being smarter than everyone else, and his dad playing up his part as family clown, it had gone to Paul’s head. He would recite the lyrics from ‘Nowhere Fast’ by The Smiths, declaring it the best description of his own adolescence. He would quietly sing the lyrics about banal consumer excitement whenever Viv got animated discussing an advert she’d seen on TV.

  Teenagers are always insufferable but, God, we were awful. We weren’t just awful, and sneering, we were embarrassingly late too. Most of our school peers had already done the teen rebellion thing by the time we discovered it. We’d spent our teens with noses in a book. To this day that’s a running joke we have in response to anything edgy. ‘Heroin? Oh, I know lots about heroin, I’ve read William Burroughs.’ ‘Travelling? You don’t need to tell me about travelling. I’ve read On the Road and The Motorcycle Diaries.’ And so on.

  It had been a subdued summer in 1987. It felt like everything was conspiring to scare the country. The darkness started with Ian Brady, that same shadowy photo staring out from every paper. He’d confessed to two murders and then when that got everyone jumping, he’d confessed to five more. Just two decades too late. The Hungerford Massacre, a few counties up the road from us, had split the heart of the summer wide open. An unassuming little town peppered with bullets, sixteen dead at the hands of Michael Ryan, a gun-nut mummy’s boy who had the newspapers pumped with excitement when it turned out he was also a fan of Rambo. And then, like the blackest spectre of all: AIDS. Sticky summer headlines warned that one person a day was dying of AIDS in Britain. One person a day. In a country of 57 million. The maths didn’t matter, we were straight-up petrified.

  The spring had been dominated with documentaries on disease prevention and condom use (we took these as a sign of the certain death that awaited us, before we’d even got to experience the mindless sex available to every other generation).

  We watched agog as the first AIDS public service advert rang out. Paul still refers to the power of that campaign when he works on charity accounts, something he’d love to do more. I can still remember it perfectly. John Hurt’s voice silencing us with: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all’, while nightmarish scenes of pneumatic drills chiselling a huge tombstone took over the telly.

  ‘Put ’em on an island,’ Mick said and Paul’s glare had hardened.

  ‘Oh don’t give me that, Paul. I don’t care what poofters do behind closed doors so long as it don’t affect the rest of us.’

  ‘Give over, Mick,’ Viv had snapped, taking him by surprise.

  ‘No, I won’t, I won’t give over.’ Mick became more animated as he warmed to his own outrage. ‘I’m all for live and let live but they’re risking us all now with this bloody. . . this bloody gay plague.’

  ‘You’re quoting the Sun, Dad!’

  ‘I’m quoting what we’ve just seen and heard! “It’s a danger to us all.”’

  Paul threw his hands up in the air.

  ‘It said not to die of ignorance,’ I said quietly. ‘Everyone’s at risk of AIDS, not just gay men.’

  ‘Are you calling me ignorant, Kate?’ I saw a twist of anger in Mick’s face that I’d only ever seen aimed at Viv before.

  ‘Don’t talk to Katie like that,’ said Viv sharply. ‘Anyway, she’s right. It’s not just gays and you are being ignorant.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s bloody wrong with you lot – it’s a gay disease, and now it’s spreading to normal people like a bloody cold. You can’t touch anything they touch, can’t use public loos in case they’ve been in them, we’re probably going to have to boil all our drinking water—’

  I was still stinging from the sparks of friction with Mick when Viv spoke up.

  ‘I think we’ll let the nurse of the family field this one, Mick.’

  ‘You nurses have refused to treat homos, so you can pipe down, Vivian.’

  ‘Oh shut up, Mick. A handful of ignorant cows said they wouldn’t treat AIDS patients and they were slapped back for it. The rest of us’ll care for anyone that needs us, AIDS or not.’

  She shook her head at her husband, who was rolling his eyes.

  ‘It is bollocks, isn’t it, Mum? You can’t really get it from a toilet seat?’ Paul asked.

  ‘You can’t catch anything from a toilet seat, Paul, unless you’re planning on licking it. And no, you can’t get AIDS from touching things, but you can get other things so wash your bloody hands more often, all of you.’

  I avoided Mick’s gaze after that but when I was about to follow Paul up to bed, Mick had grabbed me and given me a wrestling-style bear hug. ‘Don’t mind me, lovey,’ he said. ‘I just got worked up before.’

  By the spring, no matter how calming Viv’s reassurances were or how many times she changed the subject, we were still convinced AIDS was weeks away from becoming airborne and wiping out all human life.

  Throughout the summer we talked about the time we had left, and our urgent ambitions. ‘Is it even worth bothering with school? Let’s just go travelling.’

  Paul had never gone further than Bristol. I’d been to London and had holidayed in southern France when I was little. Despite this, we felt oddly equipped for a life on the road; less odd was our failure to actually go anywhere.

  The one bullet point on our to-do list far more pressing than travelling the world was losing our virginities. We moped about our lack of love, gloomily listening to ‘How Soon Is Now?’.

  We turned sixteen in September, a pair of melanchol
y, melodramatic virgins. For Paul’s birthday, I spent a good bit of time drawing a pen-and-ink illustrated collage. It had the ‘Smiths to Split’ NME headline reproduced, black and white versions of the album covers, stencilling with Paul’s favourite songs and snippets of lyrics.

  When he opened it and saw it was something handmade, Paul looked flustered. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and put it down carefully on his chest of drawers and then changed the subject. I was hurt, and resolved not to bother next time. The next day when I went to visit, still smarting but having nowhere else to go and missing his company, I saw that the picture had been put in one of those ‘frameless’ clip frames and was hanging above his bed. Neither of us mentioned it, but he’s kept that picture with him his whole life. It’s hanging in our en suite.

  For my birthday that year, the Loxtons gave me a present from all of them. A bracelet chosen by Paul, according to Viv, and wrapped in a little black box from Elizabeth Duke at Argos. I still have it in my jewellery box, I always did, although Paul didn’t believe me until I showed him just before our wedding. ‘My something old?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t wear it,’ he said. ‘I can get you something nicer now. Let me get you something nicer.’

  So yes, we were a pair of virgins at sixteen and it was getting us down. At school, the talk was all about bases reached, boyfriends and gifts. I thought about wearing my bracelet into school, acting coy about which boy gave it to me, but I couldn’t bear the piss-taking over something precious.

  I was called frigid and I didn’t argue. What could I say? I wasn’t frigid, I was frozen out. There was a difference.

  The kids at Paul’s school didn’t call him frigid, they called him gay. The poet-heart in Paul wanted to embrace that, given how many of his heroes were gay. But mostly he was mortified under their spotlight and hurt under their feet. The violence at my school was only dished out by teachers. And that came in the form of teeth-gritted punishments that you only got if you broke the rules. At Paul’s school, violence was just part of daily life, part of the big lumpy organism that the school’s community formed. You got a punch for standing in the wrong place, you got your lunch wrecked for looking like ‘a bummer’ and you got tripped up just for walking in the corridor. Those who swung their fists back then probably look back on all that now as good-natured rough-and-tumble. Paul’s angry to this day. He felt utterly humiliated and he finds humiliation impossible to move past.