Alison! He calls her name silently, frequently. It’s a wonder he doesn’t forget sometimes and shout Alison! out loud in the middle of Tesco, or at work. He has to keep shouting her name, otherwise, how will he ever find her? He has something important to tell her, but where the hell is she? And what is he going to tell her? Something, something lodged in his throat right now. She is somewhere right now, or her body is. Things change, but nothing disappears completely. She could be eating chips and watching telly somewhere right now. Or she is not eating chips and watching telly, she is dead, in the firth. Chips for some other living thing. Incorporated into the body of some grey fish. It’s very possible, indeed probable, he will never see Alison again.
The dishwasher is turned on now; it emits a rhythmic liquid swishing noise, which Neal quite likes. It’s soothing. Almost as good as Rogie Falls, the Skiach, the waves at Rosemarkie. He sighs, wonders if he is going insane.
He remembers the winter Alison moved in. It’d all happened quite suddenly – one day she was the landlord’s daughter, motherless single mum, distant and glowering, and the next day she was at his door with a black bin bag in one hand and her other hand dragging her weeping five-year-old son. Neal had just stood there, staring at her.
‘Look, Neal, would you mind if I bide here a whiles, I can use the spare wee room at the back. My dad’s being a cunt, to be honest. Not having it anymore. Calum will no wake you, he’s quiet in the mornings, honest, he’s only whinging now cause he’s tired, aren’t you, pet? There, there, we’ll go to bed now, and hey – I’m sure you could use having a lassie round the place, hey? Not that I’ll be doing your washing up or anything.’
‘Okay.’
She’d laughed harshly. Stepped past him into the hall.
‘So that’s great, right, well good, that’s settled.’
Calum, who’d paused his whinging, recommenced in a higher decibel. Like a dying cow. Snot was running into his mouth, he was completely beyond caring. Neal had watched her drag Calum into the room that only contained an old mattress on the floor and an even more ancient quilt and pillow. No sheet. She’d turned her head just once to nod and mouth thank you, over the howls. Smiled briefly, then the door was shut, and Neal could clearly hear the sound of two crying voices behind the closed door. But he wasn’t alarmed or angry. No. He was bewildered. And embarrassed, because the place was a tip. And excited, because Alison was sexy, in a young, buxom, jaded way.
Then much later that night, she’d emerged. Offered Neal a joint, laughed about her situation. The nagging uptight dad, the bedwetting Calum, her boring job in the paper shop. It was nice to have her there. Everything about the house felt warmer.
That night Alison crawled into Neal’s bed for the first time, woke him and didn’t say anything. Just crawled under the blankets, curled up away from him, and he’d held her silently till she’d fallen asleep. Watched her face, her pale eyelids twitching in some dream, her plump breasts and dark nipples plainly outlined in her white cotton t-shirt. He could have wept with longing.
And that was that. She didn’t like to sleep alone, but she obviously didn’t fancy Neal at all.
‘You dinna mind, do you? Only it’s just lovely to sleep with you some nights. Let me know if you start minding, or get a girlfriend or something.’
‘Aye. Alright.’
Alison brought a whole social world with her, and the house was often full of young women in Indian print skirts with sequins, or faded jeans with dozens of patches. Air thick with patchouli and sandalwood. And unlike the girls who on the surface embraced feminism but spent all day making tea for their long-haired lovers and effacing their selves, Ali and her friends were a rambunctious, confident lot. Giggling and chattering and getting high, always leaving the sink full of cups and mugs.
Did Neal mind? He did not. Not one bit. But when all those young men started visiting Alison, well, that was a different matter.
Neal sighs. Sally is ironing in the sitting room so she can watch EastEnders. Neal watches with her for a few minutes, then gets up and stretches self-consciously. He doesn’t really need a stretch, but wants to camouflage the importance of this question:
‘Where’s that old box of photos and things?’
‘What? What old box?’
Phil is shouting his cockney rage in Albert Square, while Pat heaves her bosom and sweeps her front steps.
‘You know.’ He yawns artificially. ‘From when I moved in. You put it somewhere. My old stuff.’
A lull on Albert Square and Sally turns to focus on Neal.
‘When you moved here? You mean, seventeen years ago?’
‘Aye. Remember? It had my stuff in it. From the old days.’
‘Ah.’
‘Do you remember? You must, Sally. I think it was the box that said Spanish Oranges on it. White, with green letters. I can see it.’
Sally is the archivist of all domestic articles; their whereabouts and state of repair are at her mental fingertips. A pair of garden shears bought in 1987? His own P60s? The TCP? Neal relies on her utterly.
‘Let me think, Neal. Wait a minute.’ She closes her eyes and visualises their less used storage spaces. Under the stairs, the small crawl space loft, the garden shed.
‘Why are you wanting it, anyway?’ Opening her eyes. Does she sense something?
‘Oh, just, you know. Curious. Been so long. Thought I recognised some of the faces at the funeral. Got me to thinking.’
‘Oh, Neal. As if you’d ever look any of them up. What are you like? You only knew them a little while, and never gave them a second thought, after.’
‘Still … that box had some records in it, too, I think. Stackridge. Al Stewart. Hawkwind. Lothar and the Hand People. Tubular Bells.’
‘As if we still had a record player! Heavens, Neal, are you having a mid-life crisis? I’ve been reading about that, in Cosmo, it says all men get this menopause thingie too, and what you …’
‘I think it had my Furry Freak Brothers comics too.’
Sally sighs. ‘Whatever, Neal.’
‘Look Sally, do you know where the box is or not?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Gone. I chucked the lot years and years ago.’
‘You what?’
‘I probably even asked you. You were never bothered about old rubbish like that, Neal, or I would have saved it. How was I to know you’d have this … this urge now?’
‘It had photographs and old address books, and things. It had my bellbottoms with the paisley insert.’ He is whining, much to his humiliation.
‘So? What are you wanting those things for? You can buy bellbottoms now, it’s all come round again. If you can get them in your waist size. You can probably even get Stackridge on CD.’ She narrows her eyes at him, gives him her wifely x-ray. ‘Honestly, look at you. I’m sorry, I am, but what is your problem, Neal? What exactly is on your mind?’
Neal flinches – his mind is full of Alison – but Sally suddenly zooms back into EastEnders. Frank is kissing Pat, even though they’re divorced and he tried to kill her a few hundred episodes ago. It’s been a particularly wearing day at the returns counter. If she hears one more woman insist she has never worn that party dress, she will scream. She is too tired to think, too tired to talk. She needs television, and especially she needs to see if Grant Mitchell will get caught this time.
‘Nothing, I just …’
‘Shhh, Neal. Go put the kettle on, if you don’t want to watch.’
‘Jesus, Sally. You threw my stuff away. That was my stuff.’
But he puts the kettle on, and because he’s cheated on his wife, he’s not even angry by the time it boils. Guilt removes his entitlement to anger. On the fridge, held by a magnet, is the latest postcard from his father. The photo is of a man’s hand clutching another bum. Orange skin with white bikini line. ‘Hey You! Waiting for you to visit! It ain’t the Rivibloodiera, but it’d be a change from Dingle Dell. Hurry! xxx, the twa lovebirds.’
Lovebirds indeed. Nothing is more vomit-inducing, thinks Neal, than a parent in love. He makes two cups of tea, grabs the biscuits, and carries them through.
‘Thanks,’ says Sally.
Neal sighs and drinks his tea. It has to travel past a painful lump on its way to his stomach. He can feel the shape and weight of this swelling. It is Ali-anxiety, and a sudden acute yearning for things he never thought he’d yearn for. Like the second track on the first side of Songs for Beginners, Graham Nash. And Sally is right, he might even have given permission to chuck out the box. The only reason the box had existed was because he’d been too lazy to sort through his stuff when he moved. Easier just to bung it all in a box. But now? Everything has changed. The amount of money he’d pay to see that box again is astronomical. Would make Sally consider booking him with a shrink on the sly, never mind what the article said in Cosmopolitan.
He sips his tea, half a mind on the prattle of the Albert Square residents, and the other half visualising the contents of the missing box. Sometimes it worries him a bit that he can’t really remember how it felt to be young in the sixties, the seventies. When he sees hippies portrayed on television or movies, they always seem such an uncomfortable mixture of naivety and self-indulgence. Naff! But right now, with nostalgia pouring into him, he does remember. What had it been like?
For Neal, after his particular adolescence, it had simply been a relief to be with people who didn’t make him feel apart. Maybe that was what it all boiled down to. Not just a common cause or rebelliousness, not just that pushing away of a whole generation of war-bred parents, but a sense of not-aloneness. Even now, visualising them all, his hippie friends from the seventies, from Brae Farm Cottage days, seem more charismatic and beautiful than any group of A-list Hollywood stars. He cannot recall feeling bored with any of them. Had they really been so beautiful, so interesting? Yes, he thinks now. Yes, oh yes. They’d been that lovely.
Were all young people beautiful to themselves? Probably, he admits to himself. But there’d been something different, he still feels, about that period – it had been like a party everyone had been invited to, no matter what your accent, religion, appearance. No matter if you had hair the colour of flaming carrots. The only ticket you needed was to be between fifteen and twenty-five. A huge, messy, loud, anarchic, tolerant gang and no one under thirty ever went to festivals or concerts. From a historian’s point of view (which is to say Neal’s), hippies had been a quirk – their sheer numbers gave them clout, and the times had handed them the common denominators of Viet Nam, economic ease (Nigg!), the Pill and marijuana. A heady cocktail, and even though it’s sad getting older, he feels sorry for everyone born after the fifties. Then instantly feels ashamed, for wasn’t it typical of his generation to think they’d invented something special?
He remembers some square black and white photos, stuffed into an old envelope. Some faded colour Polaroids too. Calum as a kid, in his too-long flares, skinny arms dangling from a too-small t-shirt. Ted and Mick with their strange Burmese cat, posed in the doorway to the one-roomed bothy they had altered into two rooms, with an arched doorway. Half-blind Eddie with his lopsided smile and squinting into the sun, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt. Mandy, rolling a joint on the Tea for the Tillerman album cover, with king-size Rizla rolling papers and bits of card rolled into filters. Mary and Jen, shirtless in the garden on a hot afternoon; it was the summer everyone decided to lose their modesty. Alison between them with no shirt on either, her pillow breasts round and perfect, nipples like, uh, well, a bit like pink round jelly sweets. A joint in her hand, and her eyes on the photo taker, himself. No big smile, but such a haze of relaxation. So what, her eyes said. Here we are, and this is us. Here. Now. Want a hit?
Another photo – Calum sitting by himself in the corner by the fire, reading a Beano. Above him, a poster advertising Glastonbury. A peace-sign sticker in the corner.
Memories of photographs are like a silent film, and Neal supplies the soundtrack. Dylan, Lennon, Nick Drake, John Martyn.
Then, unbidden and unwanted, come memories not recorded on film. He remembers scary moments, when he wondered what he was going to do with his life. The nights he lay awake miserable, certain he would remain chaste till he died, an old wanker. If he ever got the hang of masturbation. Other men seemed to regard a daily wank as normal as brushing their teeth. They all got off with pretty girls, but he never even got off with himself. Oh, those girls with long straight hair and fringes that fell over their eyes, so they were always shaking their heads to see! Why did they never fancy him? He was a freak (not the cool kind), idealising his group of friends, never really belonging.
And what about those hours he used to spend trying to get lifts? Hitching to Dingwall in the pouring rain, car after car passing, drivers not even looking. And the times before he found the confidence to stop accepting every joint, times of getting too stoned, not being able to talk, having to go lie down till his mind quietened. Times when even the music seemed discordant and scary. Not always a happy-go-lucky party, then. Not for everyone, not all the time.
Still, if he wrote a Twenty Years Ago Today column based on his own life, it wouldn’t list those bouts of getting soaked at round abouts, those nights of insecurity, like the lists of war casualties and lost grey kid gloves. He wouldn’t want anyone to read about those bits. No, he’d write a column listing the loveliness of his friends instead.
But where are they all now? He’s been as careless with them as he’s been with the box. Like Alison, they’re probably all still around, but dispersed, disguised. A tribe in hiding. Maybe they’ll re-emerge in their eighties, stop getting haircuts, taking baths, drive the staff in old folks homes demented with their loud music and demands for stronger drugs. They’ll be so annoying!
‘Sorry, Sally.’ He’s fond of his wife. She sits in the chair that has been her chair since it entered the house. Her eyes are tired and kind. In fact, he feels a surge of fondness break through his disappointment and exhaustion. It floods through his veins. Or is that the sweet tea raising his blood-sugar level? So hard to tell metabolic changes from love.
‘What about?’ EastEnders has finished, and she turns her attention to him.
‘For shouting at you. About the box.’
‘It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.’
She’s like his oldest favourite pair of shoes, the ones he hasn’t the heart to get rid of even though they let the water in. They’re so soft, maybe one day he’ll wear them again. They used to feel like a second skin.
‘How was work?’ she asks.
‘Fine. Did Fifty-Four Years Ago Today. Tail end of War. Ads for Servants. Tonics for baldness and general torpor.’
‘Tonics for torpor, eh? Fancy a bedtime drink? Glass of Baileys?’ In the old days, a code for imminent sexual advances, but usually from him, not her. Coming from her, it might not be a code for anything.
‘Uh, sure, Sal.’
She gets the drinks from the kitchen, and Neal wonders when they did it last. Not that long ago, a week, and then he wonders how many times they’ve done it altogether and what the average per year is. He tries and fails to remember any specific time. Not even the first kiss. He can remember it occurring – in his old Renault, her apologising for her breath smelling of garlic. He remembers feeling grateful. He’d clung to her, felt rescued. But what had the first kiss felt like? Had the surface of the earth become unstable? Had ordinary objects altered, become unrecognisable? No. All their amorous activities blurred into one sufficiently passionate but unmemorable act.
And then he thinks about time and how it used to go so slow, and events did not blur together. That last summer with Ali lasted about twelve years, yet Neal has trouble accounting for entire decades now, which makes his life feel, well, it feels blurry. At this rate, he’ll be old and dead by tomorrow afternoon, latest. And his entire life flashing before his eyes will take no more than three seconds. Phwet!!! Gone.
Sally is not back yet – thoughts about time seem to take up
no time whatsoever. She’s just opened the bottle. Neal tells himself the reason he has so many vivid memories of those early days is because he’d been happy then. Ah, now, watch him closely – here comes another summer memory, pulled out of some sentimental file. A day before the sun was cancer-giving scary; a date-less day of doing nothing much. Drinking tea out of a tea-stained mug on the front steps of the cottage; barefoot, and hardly any clothes at all. No shirt, and a pair of cut-off jeans. The way his skin felt baked right through to the bone, and his muscles felt fluid and powerful, even in repose like this. Doing nothing. Killing an endless July afternoon. Ali just pottering in the garden. Calum pushing his Britain’s combine harvester through some dandelions. Neal’s entire being had been tingly with untapped possibilities. He should think about the past more often, it improves his looks. More relaxed, dreamy, a slight smile tugging at his lips, and a certain promising light in his half-closed eyes.
Sally brings the drinks – generous dollops slosh around in thick short glasses, ready to do the business, and Neal snaps out of his handsome-making trance. He drinks his Baileys.
‘Come here, you,’ he says and pulls Sally onto his lap.
A wife! How extraordinary to have a wife. Even more extraordinary that he can act like the kind of man who pulls his wife onto his lap. Like he’s finally overcome his ginger hair and joined the mainstream human experience. This is good.
They brush the Baileys off their teeth and get into bed. He lays a hand on her thigh, slides her nightie up a bit, moves his mouth towards her mouth, but then she says she’s tired, maybe in the morning, maybe some other night. He considers nagging her a bit, reminding her she quite likes it once they get going, but decides against it. Anyway, he’s not that keen after all, as it turns out. Goodness, he’s actually relieved! Is he tired of all this? They roll away from each other, bum to bum, and Neal’s last thought is that he hasn’t a clue what his wife’s last thought is.
If I Touched the Earth Page 10