I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  She shook her head slowly for a few seconds before picking up her bag and softly saying; ‘I will call you tomorrow.’ Wiping tears from her cheek, she turned and shuffled out of the pub, just as Ian Curtis was completing his paean to lost love. I smiled wryly, or as wryly as you can when the sobbing has taken hold.

  After finishing my pint, I went to the bar with my tear stained specs making seeing where I was walking pretty difficult. I sat back at the table with my refilled glass, gazing into space and stayed there for an hour, until someone put The Levellers on the jukebox, thus signalling that it was time for me to leave. As evening descended, I wandered the still sun drenched streets of Cambridge, back to the train station and headed home. I needed to get back to Peterborough, where I had people that cared about me, people that would lend me a shoulder to cry on and, in Doody’s case, give me his stock advice; “It will all be ok mate”.

  Unfortunately, the first person that I came across when I got back to our house was my mum.

  Mum – ‘Jay, is that you?’

  Me – ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  Mum – walking out of the living room to cast her eyes on me: ‘Are you drunk?’

  Me – ‘Amy’s left me.’

  Mum – ‘Left you where?’

  Me – ‘She’s left me, dumped me, told me it’s over between us.’

  As my words hung in the air, I wondered for a second if she’d heard me. Then her hyperventilating informed me that she had definitely heard. Through anguished sobs, she comforted me by growling:

  ‘I knew it, I knew you would drive that beautiful girl away. That lovely girl, you drove her away. I said you would, didn’t I say that Kevin? KEVIN!”

  Dad, who upon hearing his name being shouted had wandered in from the kitchen, understandably asked; “What’s happening?”

  Mum – “Amy has left your son, that’s what. She couldn’t put up with his miserable, moaning, meanness anymore.”

  Me – “Eh? I didn’t say any of that…..”

  Dad – like the Father from a bad 1970’s sitcom, announced; “I’ll be in the garage if anyone needs me…” and quickly walked away, offering me nothing more than a consoling pat on the shoulder.

  I walked up the stairs, leaving Mum in a crumpled heap on the bottom step. I could still hear her sobbing as I laid on my bed and watched old episodes of Porridge on video before drifting into a dreamless sleep.

  As the clock reached 6am, I woke up and had 5 glorious seconds where I’d forgotten about the events of the previous day and felt that life was sweet(ish), before reality hit home. I laid there for an hour with my ever trusty friend “Vauxhall & I” on the Discman, hoping that the day would just pass me by. I stayed there until Dad wandered in with a cup of tea to bluntly remind me that:

  ‘Just because your girlfriend’s left you, it doesn’t mean you can have a day off work. Come on, get up and get on with it.’

  I went to work in a blank eyed daze and sat for 8 hours completing my mundane set of tasks whilst grunting occasional pleasantries to my workmates. That was my routine for the next week.

  When I wasn’t at work, I sought solace with Morrissey. I would wallow for hours at a time and at weekends for whole days. I didn’t want to eat, go out, do anything but listen to Moz and miss Amy. I was determined to wear my heartbreak as a badge of honour. He had everything that I required within the albums that had defined the last 5 years of my life. I didn’t see the humour in his words anymore, just the seeping pain of crushed love in songs like “Seasick, Yet Still Docked”, “Jack The Ripper” and, most poignantly, “Speedway”.’ He was my counsellor, my friend at the end of a set of headphones and all that I needed in order to sink ever lower in my own estimations.

  This was me, a broken young man who would never find love again.

  Over the course of the next fortnight, Amy and I would talk a lot on the phone, usually with me ringing in tears, or close to it. We played the endlessly futile game of me asking “Why?, What can I do? I will change, I promise”, with her replying “It’s not you, it’s me, it’s not your fault”. I would go, on my own, to the pub after work and call her from the nearest phone box. I could hear the resignation in her voice as she realised it was me on the other end of the line. I would tell her repeatedly that I would change, that I would put her above Morrissey, above The Posh, that she would be my priority. She didn’t believe what I was saying any more than I did.

  As distinguished as Morrissey was at providing balm to the chapped lips of my heartbreak, I also sought periods of solace with “Seamonsters” by The Wedding Present. I played it every day as summer became autumn, whilst taking refuge in the space under my desk in our spare room. It was an album that had quiet moments that would explode in an instant into ravaged guitar noise that could blow a hole in your eardrum if you didn’t get to the volume dial in time. This, coupled with some intense lyrics from Gedge, ticked all the boxes for my heartbreak. I don’t think it was written as a concept album but, for me it told the story of a couple battered by love and the mistakes they’d made. From the glorious opening track, “Dalliance”, through the look back at lost youth that was “Corduroy” to the desolate heart-shredding scene depicted in “Heather”. It could move me to tears and then make me wildly jerk around the room screaming along to the words. I bloody loved that album. I would go to sleep listening to it, with Gedge growling away about betrayal and lost love as Amy invaded my dreamscape for yet another night.

  I decided that Amy needed to hear it, to know exactly how I felt. I taped it for her and posted it with a note that simply read; “This album sums up how I feel….”

  She wrote back a few days later with:

  “No wonder you are depressed listening to that rubbish. I got as far as the 2nd track, which seems to be about a bloke having an affair with a woman called Dani. Are you trying to tell me you are seeing someone else?

  If you are seeing someone, it’s your life, so go for it. I hope you end up being happy again! Like we used to be!!!!!

  X”

  My first thought wasn’t, ‘Oh no she’s missed the point of me sending her the album’, it was, “She hasn’t listened to that bloody song properly”. In the 2nd song on the album, “Dare”, Dani is the protagonists’ girlfriend, not the woman he is trying to tempt into bed. That annoyed me.

  By the end of the month, Amy and I had reached an uneasy truce. We’d agreed to be “great friends” and that we “had been through too much to not always be mates”. Being a man, I thought that the truce meant that it was only a matter of time before we got back together. She was very clear that she didn’t want me to leave her life, so I figured that one day soon she would realise that we should be reunited and live happily ever after. This way of thinking meant that my mood improved dramatically. I stopped listening to music under my desk and went back to jumping around the room. I would listen to tracks like The Smiths “Never Had No One Ever” and gleefully think that the song no longer applied to me. At least it wouldn’t in the next few weeks when Amy would have her epiphany and insist on us getting back together.

  She had given me absolutely no encouragement to think this way but I was desperate. The reality of the situation was that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.

  On a slate grey Sunday afternoon in October, I went to visit Amy in Cambridge as part of our new truce. She wanted to prove to us both that we could sit down, have lunch together and be friends. In our determination not to talk about our relationship, we ended up in Pizza Express discussing every other subject known to mankind, including her asking for the first time ever how The Posh were doing “in the league thing they play in”. At one point she mentioned that she really wanted to go on another National Trust working holiday that autumn but didn’t have enough money. I seized on the opportunity to show her that I really had changed by immediately offering to lend her the £250 that she needed. She looked shocked, as it was the first time that I had ever offered to lend or give her more than a
pound, before insisting that wasn’t what she’d meant and that she didn’t want to borrow money from me. I was pretty sure she was just being polite so, when she went up to pay the bill (we had gone Dutch), I snuck out to the cashpoint across the road and withdrew £250. I silently thanked my £4 an hour job for helping me win my girlfriend back. Lending her this money would wipe out the pain of the house full of slugs in Cardiff, the drunken V Festival and the Paris trip. As I placed the small bundle of notes on the table in front of her, she made some mumblings about not being able to accept it. I wasn’t having any of it and even opened her bag in an attempt to force the money inside. After a moment’s hesitation, as she looked into my maniacal eyes, she thanked me, gave me a hug for the first time in 47 days and promised to pay the money back “ASAP”.

  That evening, as we went our separate ways at Cambridge station, she hugged me tightly, ruffled the back of my hair, kissed me on the cheek and whispered into my ear; “You’re an amazing friend, Jay. I don’t know what I’d do without you”. I skipped onto the train, thinking, “I won’t be just your friend for long…” I bounded to my seat and was asleep before the train had even left the station, falling into my first contented rest for weeks.

  I spent the next fortnight convinced that life was going my way again. Every day was just one closer to Amy coming back to me. I even decided that when we got back together I would offer to move to Cambridge. If she loved me she would turn down such a gallant offer as she knew I didn’t like the place, but my offer would be the important thing. I even went as far as looking in our local paper at flats to rent in places like Huntingdon and St Ives, which were halfway between our respective home cities. Never let it be said that I was a man that couldn’t compromise.

  I just had to be patient and wait for her to come back to me.

  A couple of days after she got back from the National Trust jolly-up, Amy rang and asked if I fancied meeting up for a coffee that weekend? This is it, I thought, she has been away and seen that other people don’t compare to me and is now ready to give our relationship another try.

  What actually happened was that she sat me down in The Boxers and well and truly burst my bubble. She explained, with an inconsiderate smile on her face, that on the holiday she had met, ‘This guy who I really connected with.’ Before I had even finished the first hearty glug of my pint in a bid to buy myself some time to figure how to react, she ploughed on like an out of control piece of farming machinery.

  ‘We slept together….more than once.’

  I really didn’t need to know how many times they had done it but she seemed determined to tell me. She felt that I “had a right to know”, that she was going to see him again and that he lived locally. Of course he bloody well did. My prophecy had been self-fulfilling. She had eventually managed to find a nice Cambridge gentleman to replace her Peterborough ruffian.

  As I struggled to hold my emotions in check, all I could hear her saying, almost on repeat was; ‘I just want to have some fun… I just want to have some fun”.

  With a voice that now resembled a bowl of half set jelly, I forced out;

  ‘That’s fine. I want to have fun too. It’s all fine, really. It’s really fine.’

  It wasn’t fine. I didn’t want to go and have fun, not without her, ever again.

  I stumbled up from my seat, seeking out my traditional escape route from such situations, the bar and the jukebox. Three songs for a quid, three songs to make a point. As I took our drinks back to the table, The Buzzcocks – “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)” came booming out of the pub speakers.

  ‘Great song choice! I didn’t say I loved him, did I?’

  ‘I was thinking more that I fell in love with someone I shouldn’t have three years ago.’

  That was a cheap shot which struck her almost visibly in the chest and I regretted it straight away.

  We drank in silence, me forcing the cold yellow liquid down my throat in an attempt to get drunk in world record time. As I drained the last dregs of my pint, I got up and said, as I’d done a thousand times before; ‘Same again, yeah?’

  This time though, I got a new answer to that rhetorical question.

  She glanced at her watch and without looking at me muttered;

  ‘Errrrr… Don’t get me another one, Jay, I’m really busy today and I have to be somewhere in ten minutes.’

  I knew her well enough to realise the darting eyes and the nibbling of the knuckle on her right hand meant that she was going to meet her new bloke.

  I had been petty, selfish and childish for the last year (at least), and sat there struggling to take in what was becoming of my life. I knew one thing for sure and that was that I didn’t want to cause her any more pain and upset. So, despite the devil inside screaming at me to tell her, “I know where you’re going”, I said nothing. As we said our goodbyes with a stilted, awkward hug the likes of which you give to your 2nd cousin that you’ve meet for the first time at a family function, I knew she was desperate to get away.

  The stupid, almost funny, thing was that she had arranged to meet her new fella in a pub less than 100 yards away. So, as I gazed wistfully after her as she walked out of the door, I saw her cross the road and head to The Heir Apparent. I should have finished my drink, chuckled dryly at the ridiculousness of the scene, walked back to the train station and got on with my life. I should have done that but I didn’t.

  I downed my pint, pulled on my headphones and left the pub. With the sound of “Seamonsters” filling my ears, I crept into a narrow alleyway, the likes of which Cambridge is full of, just opposite The Heir Apparent and, with a jolt to the heart, realised that I could see Amy and her new man sat at a table talking. I could see them but I knew that, thanks to my cunning positioning, they couldn’t see me. I stood there in a daze with Gedge growling in my ears, watching them. She looked so happy as she laughed along to something he was saying. As she pushed her hair behind her left ear she looked just how I remembered her in 1995.

  This was her life now, sharing a bottle of wine and a bowl of olives, in a fancy pub with someone who made her smile. Which, in fairness, seemed a much better option than I had been offering lately: a pint of cider and a packet of dry roasted peanuts in an old man’s pub with someone who made her cry.

  I would have stayed there all afternoon, if a woman in a mobility scooter hadn’t come up behind me, rammed into the back of my legs and urged me to ‘Move please, I’ve been shouting you but you were listening to your bloody headphones.’ That broke the spell and realising that, to the authorities, it might look like I was stalking my ex-girlfriend, I walked down the alleyway, took the long route back to the station and home.

  I spent the next couple of weeks listening to a lot of Morrissey and The Wedding Present whilst attempting to take stock of my life. I was living at home with my mum and dad, working as a temp at a life assurance firm, with a degree that wasn’t even enabling me to get interviews for graduate schemes let alone actually gain employment. The only graduate scheme pre-interview I’d had was for HMV, where I proceeded to tell the assessor how they didn’t give Morrissey/The Smiths albums enough space in their Peterborough store. On my assessment form, he wrote “Shows good product knowledge but gave little indication of his commitment to a career in retail”. I wasn’t asked back to the next stage of the selection process.

  I didn’t have any solutions to the emotional rut I had fallen into. Instead I concentrated on trying to be ‘normal’. Like every other 22 year old I knew, I went to work during the week before going out on Friday and Saturday nights to get drunk in crap nightclubs with my mates. The difference between me and my peers was that they were getting smashed and talking to members of the opposite sex. I would find myself in the darkened corners of Rinaldos, clutching a warm, overpriced bottle of lager while newly formed couples ground their hips against each other to songs like “Everybody – Backstreets Back”. Invariably it would get to 1am and, with a stomach full of lager and a head full
of dreams of Amy; I would walk out of the club without telling my mates and walk the two miles home, often in the pouring rain. Me going ‘missing in action’ as Doody and Jacko would call it, infuriated them but I knew that if I’d told them I was planning to leave early, they would have bought me another beer and forced me to stay. As it was, the long walk home was my favourite part of the night. I was all alone, wandering through the deserted streets and that was excellent thinking time. Or if I I’d had one too many, I would sing out loud, usually Morrissey tunes, much to the bemusement of any tramps that were kipping down for the night around Cathedral Square.

  Come Back To What You Know

  IT was on an alcohol fuelled Saturday night in November that I bumped into Jess. I hadn’t spoken to her since the day she’d pushed me over in the park. If I’d caught sight of her in the club that night I would have, not for the first time, avoided her and left as quickly as possible. The last thing I needed was an argument and a drink tipped over my head. As it was though, I turned around from the bar with 3 bottles of foaming Budweiser in my hands and bumped straight into her, spilling the contents all over her top. She looked up to see who had committed such a crime and I braced myself for impact. Instead, she burst out laughing. I said a silent thanks to a god I didn’t believe in and began to apologise.

  Me: ‘Shit, Jess, I’m really sorry, here let me clear that up.’

  Jess: ‘Errrr, as great as it is to see you again Jay, I don’t really think you should be trying to mop lager out of my cleavage with a tissue do you?’

  Me: ‘Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to…’

  Jess: still laughing ‘It’s fine, it’s fine. I was wondering why I’d never bumped into you since you left me in the park that day. I didn’t expect to get a faceful of beer when I next saw you though. I imagined that I would be the one throwing the drinks! Don’t just stand there gawping at my wet chest, get me a Moscow Mule and then you can apologise some more for the mess you made, tonight and back then.’