by Jo Brand
Added to this, as Wobbly so succinctly put it, ‘We are not watching the fucking weather report again. We’ve seen it six times today’
‘Still,’ said Nan Wildgoose, ‘we couldn’t let them think we were giving in easily so your Uncle Bighead stuck his shotgun out of the bedroom window and shouted — what did he shout, Bert?’
‘Get back or I’ll blow your f…’ he thought better of swearing in front of a ten-year-old. ‘Get back or I’ll blow your blooming head off!’
‘He didn’t, though, did he, Nan?’ said Alice, although she knew the answer.
‘Course not, you silly old sausage,’ said Nan Wildgoose. ‘It was only to frighten the buggers.’
‘That social worker dived like a good’un, though, Violet, do you remember?’ said Grandpap. ‘Got a face full of cow shit, as I remember.’
‘Yes, and a couple of big spuds on the ‘ead,’ said Nan, ‘from Wobbly He always was a good shot.’
‘Tell me the end again,’ said Alice.
‘Well, there was a bit of a stand-off,’ said Nan Wildgoose, who spent her time reading a lot of True Crime magazines, ‘and then eventually they surrounded us and we had to give up your mum to them. She wanted to go really We knew she wasn’t right, she knew she wasn’t right, and although we’d thought your dad was being a right scumbag having her locked up, when we saw how she was and what she was saying, we thought it best she had more treatment and went to hospital.’
‘What was she like? What was she saying?’ said Alice, who had never quite managed to elicit this information on previous occasions.
A rare guilty queasiness swept through Nan Wildgoose, who was well aware that Keith had attempted to protect Alice from the worst excesses of the Wildgooses’ behaviour and Gina’s illness.
‘That’s for your dad to tell you, sweetpea,’ she said. ‘But your mum went out waving a white pillowcase of surrender and they carried her off back to St Mary’s where she stayed for the next two months and then came back to us.’
‘But it wasn’t her, was it, Violet?’ said Bert.
‘Was it someone else?’ said Alice, wide-eyed, conjuring up images of gothic plotting in the hospital and Frankensteinian experimentation.
‘No, what he means, love, is your mum was different —quieter, no spark to her any more, all the Wildgoose wild-ness gone.
All for the best,’ said Bert and the conversation turned to more prosaic topics like what was for tea and how Alice was doing at school.
What they had said was true, though. Gina had become a watered-down version of her previous self. Controlled by long-term medication which she received once a month at the hospital, she seemed to have had the sharp edges shaved off. She no longer mentioned Ted Fairfax or watched the weather forecast in her previously agitated way, but sat demurely in the corner of the room, the muttering television a constant backdrop as she smoked, or twisted a piece of string in and out of her fingers, the only part of her body that seemed restless and free now.
Keith could see that some flames had been extinguished on the blazing bonfire but for the most part he was relieved. Gina had not been an easy person to live with and the delightful flashes of anger and excitement he had once loved had become coarse and wearing as her illness had progressed. Now, at least, the family home was peaceful and their lives ticked over, thankfully, with little incident apart from contact with his wife’s family which was always fraught with weirdness and occasional threat.
Keith’s parents had tried to persuade him to leave Gina. They wanted him back near them in a little semi, furnished with a dull and obedient wife and a child who didn’t stand in the corner of the room wordlessly observing them and honouring them with the odd monosyllable.
‘That child is a bit odd,’ Keith’s mum, Jennifer, had tactlessly said to him on a number of occasions. ‘She needs taking in hand. Why can’t she chat nicely and dress prettily like your cousin Lesley’s two?’
Keith thought that cousin Lesley’s pale-skinned, gawky offspring were as dull as they come and that rather than dressing prettily, they both looked like anorexic toilet roll covers. He waved his mother’s comments away with a humorous remark, but her words stayed in his head until eventually he booked an appointment with Marie Henty to talk about Alice.
Keith’s name in the appointments book of the gargantuan receptionist at the surgery where Marie worked lifted her spirits as her eye ran through the usual gamut of varicose veins, chronic coughs and the collected complaints of the over-seventies. She wanted to think that perhaps Keith had just missed her and wanted a chat. Gina’s equilibrium had been fairly well maintained with monthly anti-psychotic injections, with few side effects, apart from a general slowness, some weight gain and a bum like a pin cushion, so Marie had rarely seen Keith over the past five years. Yet she had rejected approaches from a number of unsuitable suitors in the hope that one day, like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, he would rid himself of his mad wife and fall into her arms. But it seemed Keith wanted to talk about Alice. Marie rarely saw Alice but she had noted sadly that her mother’s illness seemed to have turned her in on herself; the once sparky little girl was now a somewhat sullen and unrewarding miniature adult.
‘Should I see someone about her, do you think?’ Keith asked worriedly ‘I mean, how likely is it she’ll get what Gina’s got?’
‘Oh, Keith,’ said Marie, her stomach doing uncontrolled fluttering, ‘it’s so hard to say at this point. Shall I talk to her and let you know what I think?’
‘Would you, please?’ said Keith. ‘I’d be so grateful and perhaps it would put my mind at rest. Just informal like, if you can. I don’t want to bring her here — she wouldn’t want to come anyway.
All right then,’ said Marie. ‘I’ll try and catch her around and about and see what I can do.’
‘Thanks.’ Keith squeezed Marie’s hand and the fluttering dropped lower.
Alice, Mark and Karen were all draped over the broad oak tree at the end of the school lane one evening some days later. They had been talking about building a den which none of the adults could find, to which they could escape whenever high emotion boiled over in any of their households. Alice was at her most happy and verbose with Mark and Karen, both refugees from the seemingly traditional happy nuclear family that populated the Bisto adverts and for which both of them yearned with an intensity that would have shocked their parents.
‘I could ask my uncles to help,’ said Alice, who had very little understanding of the pure unadulterated terror even the mention of their names had on most of the village.
‘Nah, we should do it, then it’s ours.’ Mark tried to say it as nonchalantly as possible to disguise the squeak in his voice that always appeared when he was scared.
‘Yes,’ agreed Karen. ‘It’s got to be only ours and if anyone comes near it we’ll kill them.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘and we’ll cut off their heads and put them on big sticks to scare everyone.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Mark, thinking of Matthew Stephens, who had called him a homo in the playground that day because he wouldn’t play hitting girls’ legs with a stick.
‘Oh look, here comes the doctor,’ said Karen.
Marie Henty was trying to look as if she was strolling up the lane for no other reason than pure enjoyment. She was thirty years old and not bad looking, but little did she know that Mark had put her age at about fifty recently and the others had concurred.
‘Hello, you three,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ they said.
‘Alice,‘ said Marie, ‘I was wondering if we could have a chat.’
Alice began to batten down the social hatches.
‘Why?’ she said suspiciously.
‘Oh, just wanted to see if things are OK.’ said Marie as airily as she could.
‘I’m playing with my friends,’ said Alice stubbornly.
‘Just ten minutes,’ said Marie.
‘All right.’ said Alice. She climbed down from the tree.
‘Let’s walk for a bit,’ said Marie.
They headed up the hill towards the crop of oaks that stood at the top, flushed with mistletoe.
‘How’s your mum?’ said Marie.
‘All right,’ said Alice.
‘And your dad?’
‘He’s all right too,’ said Alice.
‘And what about you?’
‘I’m all right,’ said Alice.
‘School OK?’
‘Yes.’
This monosyllabic torture continued for ten minutes until Marie, exhausted by Alice’s responses, said brightly, ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Shall we go back and find your friends?’
Alice looked enormously relieved. ‘Yes please,’ she said, and they headed back down the hill to where Mark and Karen were still hanging in the branches of the big tree.
Whoops and cheers greeted them and Marie said her goodbyes, thinking to herself that she had no more ability to talk to ten-year-olds than she had to the pigeons that flocked to her bird table and stole the food intended for the smaller birds.
That night, heart slightly aflutter, she phoned Keith.
‘I couldn’t really get anything out of her, I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Keith, slightly disappointed. ‘She’s like that with all of us and I suppose I could hardly have expected her to suddenly open up and tell you her deepest darkest thoughts.’
‘We’ll keep an eye,’ said Marie. ‘She seems fine but there may be stuff going on underneath.’
24 November 1983, aged 15
It was Thursday Fifteen-year-old Alice, languid, miserable, bored, pessimistic and prickly, always felt slightly better on a Thursday because Top Of The Pops was on. She loved her dad very much but his repertoire of Dylan and other American folk singers didn’t say anything to her about the dark thoughts and feelings she carried inside. Most of these she attempted to suppress in the family home because having a mother who was little more than a ghostly figure in the house these days meant that the balance of good-naturedness and optimism was a step away from disintegrating. It only took one of Alice’s fearsome, teenage moods to lay a big black cloud over the place, something Keith with his studied nonchalance and desperate cheeriness could not cope with as’ well as Gina.
These days Keith smoked a bit more dope than he used to, carefully avoiding discovery by Alice, as he somehow felt he owed it to her to normalise her life as much as possible, given that her mother set a skewed example of what a child’s upbringing should be. But Alice always knew when Keith had smoked a joint because his natural befuddledness would become more marked and he would exhibit a fatuousness not normally present. He laughed much more easily at stupid things and wasn’t very good at getting the conundrum at the end of Countdown, a word game that had recently started on the new Channel 4.
Gina didn’t do much apart from smoke cigarettes and drift aimlessly round the house. Every month she continued to have her long-acting injection which dampened down her spirit to the point of her having no spirit at all. Alice watched her helplessly, hoping that one day Gina would throw off the yoke of her medication and go completely bloody mad for a few days. Alice knew this was unreasonable, though. Gina’s psychiatrist had told Keith and Alice that he thought Gina was suffering from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a psychotic condition — ‘A bit like schizophrenia, when someone is out of touch with reality,’ he’d said to them, doing his best to couch his explanation in layman’s terms. He’d also explained that the illness involved Gina being convinced that the weatherman was in love with her and interpreting completely innocent actions on his part as a sign that this was the case.
‘Like what?’ Keith had asked.
‘Well,’ Dr Desmond said, ‘he might make a movement with his hands or look in a particular way and Gina will impose an interpretation all of her own. We call this ideas of reference.’
He’d also told them about some of the other symptoms. He said Gina might hear voices, may become paranoid or might be confused in her thinking.
‘But the drugs will help, won’t they?’ Keith had said hopefully.
‘To an extent,’ he had answered, ‘but really the drugs are just damping down the worst of Gina’s symptoms rather than taking them away, and of course the drugs themselves have side effects that aren’t too pleasant. Gina may slow up, become withdrawn and may get a slight tremor.’
‘And how do we deal with that?’ said Keith.
‘By prescribing another drug, I’m afraid,’ he’d said, aware that the barely hidden look of disdain on Keith’s face was an appropriate response to how little psychiatry had achieved in terms of treating the myriad subtleties that made up the damaged human mind.
So Keith and Alice had had to become resigned over the years to the ravaging of Gina and her personality and to gradually accept that through a combination of the illness and the drugs, the butterfly had turned back into a cocoon.
Keith had tried to explain this as simply as he could to Alice and the oversimplification rested in Alice’s head as the belief that her mother was in love with people who weren’t in love with her and that she was not in love with her dad any more. Alice realised that letting Gina’s demons out of her own personal Pandora’s box would mean they couldn’t be forced back in very easily.
As Alice sat curled up in the rather unpleasant beige armchair in the front room, a vision appeared on the TV screen that sent a frisson of something she had never experienced before through her body A man wearing a necklace and a loose shirt, waving some gladioli about, was singing about not having anything to wear out that night. He was strange-looking, handsome with dark brows and a quiff. He seemed rather androgynous as he moved in a unique way around the small stage as if he owned it. Alice moved closer and turned up the volume.
Keith came into the room to see his daughter just a few feet from the television, transfixed by some oddball who to Keith looked like a skinny Irish Elvis.
Alice,’ he said.
Alice put her hand up to indicate she didn’t want to speak and carried on staring at the screen. She felt as if she had been transported out of her tired and miserable life to a dazzling place of glamour and magic. She edged even closer and unwittingly put her hand out towards the screen to try and touch the man.
Oh bloody hell, thought Keith. This is all too familiar.
Alice watched in a trance, letting herself get lost in the swirling sound, and at the end when Mike Smith said that the band was called the Smiths and the track ‘This Charming Man’, she ran upstairs to get her diary and wrote the date, the name of the band and the name of the song.
At the end of Top Of The Pops, she dialled Karen’s number. Karen’s posh dad answered and rather irritably agreed to get Karen, although he preferred to keep the line free of chattering schoolgirls for more important things like arranging to meet his friends and massacre some animals. He never asked who it was, as teenage girls were all the same to him. Useless, screechy, expensive and a dead weight until some fool agreed to marry them and take them off your hands.
Karen’s voice said, ‘Hello.’
‘It’s me, Alice’, said Alice. ‘Did you see Top Of The Pops?’
‘Sort of,’ said Karen. ‘I was doing my homework at the same time though.’
‘Did you see the Smiths?’ asked Alice, a little touch of excitement running through her as she said their name.
‘Don’t know,’ said Karen. ‘What did they look like?’
‘Well, the singer. I don’t know his name, had a loose shirt, a sort of necklace—’
And a big bunch of flowers. Wanker. Yes, I saw him’
There was a brief hiatus as Karen’s sharp-eared mum spent a few seconds remonstrating with her daughter for her use of the word ‘wanker’.
‘Sorry about that, she’s gone now,’ said Karen. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Oh Karen,’ said Alice. ‘I know this sounds so stupid and I can’t really describe it but as soon as I saw him, it sort of changed
me. He was so wonderful, so odd, so beautiful …‘ She tailed off, embarrassed by the force of her uncharacteristic outburst.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Karen. ‘He’s certainly cast a spell on you but is he fuckable?’
This was typical Karen and normally she made Alice laugh with her outrageous statements. But Alice felt that Karen had somehow made the whole thing dirty and silly.
‘Got to go,’ she said and put the phone down.
With one of her best friends unable to see the unadulterated genius of the Smiths and the unique individual cavorting in front of the band, Alice phoned Mark.
‘He’s not here,’ said Mark’s mum. ‘He’s just gone out in the fields with his dad, giving him a hand.’ Poor bastard, she added to herself as she put the phone down, convinced that her son was made for greater things than being a hulking great son of the soil.
The next day at school, life went on as normal. Alice had expected an excited buzz in the playground about this incomparable new band. But the same old kids she’d known for years were there doing what they always did. What did she expect?
‘Who saw that poof on telly last night?’
Alice turned to see the school’s resident homophobe.
‘Put a fucking sock in it, Stephen,’ she said.
‘Ooh, hark at you, poof lover,’ he said. ‘You’d better watch it round here saying those things.’
‘Leave her alone,’ said Mark, not at all sure what he was defending.
‘So you’re one now an’ all, are you?’ said Stephen with more than a hint of disgust in his voice.
‘I’m a what now?’ said Mark.
‘You know what you are,’ said Stephen. ‘An arse bandit.’ A few teenage boys grinned in a desultory way, sensing a ruck of some sort, and began to move closer to the source of the dispute in case fists started flying.
‘Homo! Homo! Homo!’ one of Stephen’s henchmen began to chant at no one in particular.
The tension was resolved when an unwitting younger boy walked past carrying a lovingly prepared packed lunch artistically wrapped by his mother and a chase began which ended when he was propelled into a scrubby bush, sandwiches sent flying.