by Gill Hornby
The only person who wasn’t about 120 was the girl in the wheelchair. She must be the same age, or thereabouts, as the kids taking the piss over on the war memorial, but that was where the similarities ended. While she was singing out with uninhibited enthusiasm, the others were heckling at the tops of their voices. And while she could only dance along with her arms and rock in her seat, their long, nimble bodies were thrashing around in exuberant mockery. Tracey shook her head. Life: even for an irony fan like her good self, sometimes it went way too far.
The number came to an end and, in the absence of any immediate audience response, the Choir clapped themselves. For a happy moment it looked like they might have finished; sadly, they had even more to share. Tracey wound down the window to have a listen–
Sing, sing a song
Make it simple…
–and wound it up again quickly. Criminal, that was. It should be on ‘News from Your Neighbourhood’. Forget the superstore; here was the real story. She should call in, do an on-the-spot: This is Tracey Leckford, with an eye-witness report, live from the High Street, where right now The Carpenters are being MURDERED on the pavement outside Budgens…
It was time for their showstopper. They often discussed how it might be better to open with ‘The Rhythm of Life’, but the choreography was pretty ambitious and some of the older members–Lynn, Pat and the like–needed to warm up to it first, especially this winter with the rush of joint replacements. Only the other day, Dr Khan had said to Annie there was more titanium than calcium in the altos these days. They did have to be careful, but it was worth it. The audience–when they had one–always loved the actions, all the swimming and the crawling and the flying. It was an absolute scream.
Yes, the rhythm of life is a powerful beat.
However, it was always a bit nerve-racking for the sopranos, because at least two of them had to stand next to Katie’s dad, and while Lewis was indisputably one of the finest human beings on the planet, he was not one of the finest dancers.
They click-click-clicked, did a shimmy and a shake…
The 6.42 came and went and another delivery of people started to pour down the station steps. This was lucky timing: they were just hitting the ‘swim to Daddy’ verse. Two basses broke through the ranks and did the crawl across the front. Katie, positioned right in the middle, was doing the breast-stroke. They knew their joy to be infectious when they did this one; they had been told exactly that a million times. And what was this? A smartly dressed chap was heading straight for them. This could be the breakthrough. Annie felt a prickle of optimism. He might be a whole new tenor…
Rhythm in your bedroom, rhythm in the street
He took some change out of his pocket and looked around Katie for a collection box. Then he stepped forward, gave her an encouraging nod, smiled at the rest of them and placed the money on the blanket in her lap.
Tracey swung off the busy road straight into her garage, turned off the ignition and sat for a second. That girl in the wheelchair, the raw pain in her poor dad’s face–she couldn’t get any of it out of her mind. Why did she always feel things so much more when she saw them reflected through a parent? It was the same watching all those talent shows on the telly: when acts got through, they were always pleased, but their families were ecstatic; when they got thrown out, well… the visceral agony of those mums had Tracey all choked up every time. The girl herself made a joke of it when that bloke threw his change at her–she tugged at her forelock, thanked him for noticing her, promised not to spend it on booze–but the dad… He looked like a man having his heart torn out. She wouldn’t be telling Billy about the belters now; they wouldn’t be having a right laugh; the joke had gone clean out of it.
Music was thumping through the building as she got out of the car. Keys between her teeth, carrier bags hanging from both hands, she kicked the door to and closed the garage by flicking the switch down with her nose. With this much shopping, she always had to take a sideways approach up the internal stairs to the living room. Space was at something of a premium in their housing development, but even with just the two of them, it was certainly cosy.
Billy was deep in the sofa, holding a half-gallon of milk in his lap, his feet perched up in front of him on a kitchen chair. The music was pretty loud up there. Tracey crossed in front of the TV, forcing him to pivot in his seat.
‘Hey, Mum.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the game. ‘How was work?’
‘Yeah. Brilliant, ta.’ She stopped to take in what was going on. Billy was controlling a heavily armed figure walking down a burnt-out street in some post-apocalyptic horrorscape and playing against one of his little cyber-mates from the other side of the world–Japan by the looks of it.
‘Sorry, love.’ She stepped over a pizza box on her way through to the kitchen, dumped the shopping on the table and went back in to pick it up. ‘Haven’t heard this before,’ she shouted, putting the crusts in the box and closing the lid. The song–a string of expletives with a bass undertone–was pounding somewhere in her solar plexus. ‘Who’s it by?’
It was a matter of pride to Tracey that not only did she listen to the same music as Billy, they listened to it together. Music was for sharing. They didn’t have many house rules, but one of them was No headphones–the iPod stayed in its dock. Billy never disappeared into his own audio bubble as all the other kids did, and Tracey never screamed, ‘Turn that bloody racket down’, as her parents had done. She was not that sort of mother. She wanted, needed, to know what her son was listening to. She liked to embrace his choices.
‘WHO’S IT BY?’ she shouted again, more loudly.
‘THE BLOODSHITTERS,’ he roared over his shoulder, and swigged some milk. ‘NEW BAND. NOT BAD.’
‘COOL.’ She put the rubbish in the bin and started to unload the shopping. ‘WHAT DO YOU FANCY FOR SUPPER?’ she bellowed, her head in the fridge.
‘NOTHING.’ Billy rose, turned the volume down a notch and hitched his trousers a little closer to his buttocks. ‘Got a job. Start tonight.’
Tracey span out into the room, astonished. ‘A job?’
‘Yeah,’ he sniffed. ‘Look, Mum–I can’t live off Dad’s money for ever, you know.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Finally. Thank Christ. ‘What? Where? When? How? That’s so great, Bills!’
‘All right. Calm it. It’s no big deal. Me, Curly and Squat are taking over the bar down at the Square.’ He grabbed his jacket off the table and in two strides was through the door. ‘I’ll be late.’
‘Hey. Good lu—‘
But he was already down the stairs, through the garage and out in the street.
Tracey picked up the milk, screwed on the lid, turned off the TV and silenced the music. To be totally honest, she wasn’t really in the mood for The Bloodshitters right now. Billy’s career path so far had been paved with disappointment and Tracey knew, from long experience of his various job opportunities, that this one was unlikely to last beyond the week. Still, she must hope for the best. ‘My son, the barman…’ It had a certain ring to it. And even if it didn’t turn out to be his thing, she did at least have the place to herself for the evening.
She looked around her. The L-shaped kitchen/lounge was nowhere near big enough for both of them now there was so much more of Billy than there used to be. She picked up one cereal bowl from the floor, stepped over a games console and reached down for a second. Of course, it would be much easier to live in if it were actually tidy. When you looked at these places–ground-floor garage beneath first-floor living area, with two beds and a bath on the second–they were a masterclass in space management: such a small footprint on the earth, yet just enough room for living crammed up above. No doubt they had neighbours who were even rattling around, but as they had never spoken to any, they couldn’t possibly know. She balanced a third bowl on top of the others and picked her way back to the kitchen.
There was more cereal detritus in there. She poured herself a glass of wine, took a hearty swig and starte
d to potter around the work surfaces.
La, la, la, la-la
Le la la le la-la
She picked up two knives caked in butter with crumbs stuck on, removed the spoon poking out of the peanut butter and put them in the dishwasher.
La, la, la, la-la, le
An unfamiliar sense of contentment began to creep over her while she wiped down the counter. Of course, her relationship with Billy was about the best between mother and son since… since… Her memory scanned through the respectable amount of history and literature that she had taught herself, but came up with no positive example. Surely there must be one famous one where they didn’t end up either shagging or killing each other? Anyway–she squirted neat washing-up liquid on to the filthy frying-pan–the thought of an evening at home without him was not an entirely unpleasant one. Her wine glass was unaccountably empty; she poured herself some more.
Tum tum ti tum tum
Tracey became aware that, rather than the raspy, throaty one that she used when she was singing along with Billy, she was using her chest voice for once, and she could feel the calming, anti-depressant effect of it on her stressed-out body. But it wasn’t until she was back in the living room, tucked up with her glass and the bottle on the sofa, that she realised exactly what it was she was singing. Christ almighty. Those bloody belters had wormed into her ear, through to her brain, down to her lungs. They had regressed her. She was regressing. For the first time in nearly thirty years, she was spending the night in alone pretending to be Karen bloody Carpenter. How sad was that?
Tragic, she thought, as she bounded out of her seat. The one great thing about being Tracey Leckford was that she was so much cooler in her thirties and forties than she ever had been in her youth. She opened the cupboard under the iPod and rootled around in the back. Billy had no idea about her past, and she was determined it would stay that way. Aha, there they were. Their unit–such a depressing little word, ‘family’; she never used it–was founded on rock and metal, hard and heavy; strong, firm, reliable. And that was how they both liked it.
She pulled out the ghetto blaster with the box of her old cassettes and blew off the dust. The sense of recognition and familiarity was almost overpowering–like being reunited with an amputated limb. The music of her youth had been so hard-won, looking back on it. All that saving up and borrowing and hanging out in record shops; all that transferring and organising and arranging her day around airplays on the radio. Tracey would never say it out loud–she had an Old Fart Warning signal hard-wired into her brain now to stop her saying anything like that out loud–but she wasn’t sure, in this click-click-download world, if songs had quite the same value that they used to. So much care had gone into the making of the tapes in this box, so often were they played, that Tracey still knew immediately what was on them, just by looking. The ones labelled TOP OF THE POPS, for example, probably did not bear revisiting. She had made those herself with the mic pressed up to the screen and the quality wasn’t marvellous: one ABBA performance, which might have been rather precious, was ruined at the point where her mum asked her dad for a cup of tea. But it was the mix tapes she was after tonight, and one in particular. She took it out. GIRLS’ NITE IN, it said, in pink felt pen. Wow, so she was that lame? She looked around, nipped over to the kitchen window and snapped shut the Venetian blinds, opened the garage door to check the coast was clear… No one need ever know. Dimming the lights just in case, she put the tape on, stood stock-still in the middle of the carpet, gave a smile and a nod in the direction of Richard on guitar–or, in this particular instance, the bookcase–and began:
I’ll say goodbye to love…
All Tracey had ever wanted, for her interminable teenage years, was to be Karen Carpenter: to sing to, to be heard by, to sway beneath the gaze of the whole world out there. In her more realistic moments she was prepared to settle for being a mere slice of Bananarama, such was the measure of her determination and–at times–desperation. But, no. Even her most humble aspirations were to be denied her. Fate, it turned out, had other plans. She waited, as she sang, for that familiar stab of grief, disappointment, humiliation; to be shocked once more by the way her story had ended; to be derailed by one of her interminable enquiries of ‘What if…?’ But, much to her surprise, nothing happened. She was just having too good a time: lying on the sofa being Sheena Easton, making cheese on toast doing her best Bonnie Tyler. She was actually up, barefoot, on the dining table singing ‘Theme from Mahogany’ into yet another wine bottle–Do you know where you’re going to?–when the doorbell rang.
It had been many years since anyone had rung their doorbell, and it took Tracey a few moments to identify the sound. She heard it again. Her first response was to ignore it, until she realised that for once Billy was actually out. She climbed down from the table and tottered over to the cassette player. Supposing something had happened to him? She turned off the music and looked over the window sill. Was it a policeman down there, come to play out her very worst fears?
Tracey couldn’t even remember the last time she had used the front door. They had a mailbox fixed to the outside wall. She, Billy and Billy’s mates always came through the garage, and nobody else ever turned up, ever. As a consequence, the stairs down to it had become, over time, jam-packed with all the stuff they didn’t quite have room for and had never quite got round to chucking out. She stood at the top and peered down, over old bicycles, a rowing machine, a mini-fridge that didn’t smell too healthy, a guitar, a lava lamp, a rucksack, a lot of Warhammer, bin bags full of indeterminate cast-offs, a keyboard, a train set and finally, at the bottom, a pram. There was definitely a man down there, she could tell by the silhouette on the frosted glass. He rang again. Better get this over with. She picked her way through, like a warden in the Blitz. Eventually, she found and opened the door. It was him. The dad. Of that girl. The one in the wheelchair. Admittedly, she felt quite pissed now she was standing up and having to communicate with someone, but still, she was sure. It was him.
‘Evening. Sorry to bother you,’ he said, although he didn’t sound it. ‘Only I couldn’t help overhearing—’
‘Overhearing?’
‘Yes. Sorry’–he put his hand to his chest–‘I’m Lewis. We’re neighbours and—’
‘Hi. Tracey. You listen to us?’ She was starting to get, in Billy parlance, weirded out. This bloke was like one of those Stasi officers who spent their lives bugging East German homes. Tracey had never seen him before and suddenly there he was, twice in a night. Was she under surveillance?
‘Well, no. Of course not. We don’t have a glass to the wall, or anything. We live across there,’ he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, ‘on the corner. We can’t help but hear your music and—’
‘All our music?’ Oops. She pressed her forehead to edge of the door. The Bloodshitters. He’d come to complain about The Bloodshitters…
‘No. Really.’ He held out his hand. ‘You don’t understand. This isn’t a complaint. I’m just here because, well, you were playing different songs tonight. And you were singing. I’ve never heard you sing before.’
OK. This was quite weird…
‘And you sounded brilliant.’
… but, you know, not that weird.
‘Thanks.’ They stood there looking at one another. Tracey felt rather at sea. She had never knowingly met a neighbour before and certainly never gone in for any of that neighbourly chit-chat stuff. ‘Very kind.’ But, much to her own surprise, she found that she did want to be friendly, just this once. After all, she’d watched this one with his daughter; she’d witnessed how much he cared; she’d seen him make a total arse of himself dad-dancing outside Budgens. Even Tracey Leckford couldn’t shut a door in a face after all that. She smiled, while racking her brains for something to say. ‘Anyway.’ What was it people talked about? Compost bins… Rubbish collection… Gutter-clearing… Surely this was a bloke who could bang on for hours about gutter-clearing… As it turned out, he was a bloke with his own a
genda.
‘Actually, I have come to ask you a favour.’
‘Um. Yeah. Of course.’ Neighbours? Favours? Now she was seriously out of her depth.
‘We would like you,’ he pressed a leaflet at her, ‘to join our choir.’ She looked down at the leaflet, made a snorty noise, looked back up at his face, all ready for a good old laugh… and was struck, instantly, by the absence of a sense of joke where really, under normal circumstances, she would expect some sense of joke to be. ‘We have a competition to win.’
She straightened her face. ‘Yes,’ she said through a cough. ‘I heard it on the local news.’ Amazingly, for once she actually had.
Lewis was not as amazed as he should have been. ‘Yup.’ He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, rocked on his heels, paused for a bit of teeth-sucking. ‘It is a pre-tty big deal.’ Tracey couldn’t reply to that; if she did, she would only get the giggles. ‘And you are exactly what Bridgeford needs.’
‘Yes… but… you see…’
He pulled back his shoulders, raised his voice a bit. ‘Can all the voices of this town at last unite?’
‘Um… well… haven’t got a clue… I doubt it… Christ… sound bloody awful… but I’m afraid…’
‘Are we better together or are we better apart?’
Apart, on the whole, obviously, thought Tracey–though she could see it wasn’t the moment to bring it up. Instead, she kept quiet and watched the spectacle unfold on her own doorstep. He was well away now, this Lewis–rather fancied himself as quite the inspirational public speaker, if she was not mistaken.
‘Can we go to the County Championships and bring back our pride?’
Tracey studied him as he blathered on with his fists clenched and his eyes shining. A funny thing, the power of the human voice, she thought: not just for the effect it had on others, but for the effect it could have on ourselves. Tracey was entirely unmoved by Lewis’ rhetoric, but clearly he was under the impression he was transformed.