by Jo Brand
‘Did you see the Smiths on Top Of The Pops?’ Alice asked Mark. ‘God, I wish I could put it into words the effect they had on me.
‘I did,’ said Mark. ‘They were certainly unusual.’
Alice grinned.
‘What?’ said Mark.
‘You sound like your dad,’ she said.
‘Not quite,’ said Mark. ‘What my dad actually said was, “Look at that limp-wristed little faggot. Turn over, son, there must be something decent on.”’
They laughed.
Alice found it hard to concentrate for the rest of the day Her mind kept replaying the image of the elfin Morrissey moving through a landscape of light and sound. She let herself be swooshed around in this world and it was only when a harsh voice said, Alice, repeat back to me what I’ve just said,’ that she was propelled back into the reality of a very boring geography lesson.
‘I don’t know, Mrs Hurst,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.
‘Well, perhaps a little extra work would help sort out your lack of concentration,’ said Mrs Hurst. ‘Come and see me at the end of the lesson.’
Nobody really understands how I feel, Alice thought to herself, along with lonely, unloved teenagers the length and breadth of Britain who were all beginning to fall in love with Morrissey.
‘Dad,’ Alice said some days later when they were settled having their tea in front of the telly while Gina smoked furiously in the kitchen and flicked through a magazine full of fashion she would never have any access to.
‘Yes, dear,’ said Keith, slightly stoned.
‘Where would I find out more about some pop group I like?’ She tried to say this as nonchalantly as possible because she didn’t want her dad getting involved in his dad-like way.
‘Who do you mean?’ said Keith, trying to scrape the accumulation of several days’ worth of grit off a piece of toast he had dropped butter side down on the carpet.
‘Oh, just someone I saw on Top Of The Pops,’ she said.
‘Well, you could get a magazine and see if they’re in there,’ said Keith. ‘Melody Maker or New Musical Express. Try Doug in the shop.’
Alice didn’t want to try Doug in the shop. He would definitely take the piss. She could hear him now.
‘Ooh, little Alice, you’re growing up, look at you, you’re nearly a woman.’
Although Alice knew that Doug wasn’t really like those pervy men who remarked on budding breasts and tight shirt buttons, she still couldn’t face his attempts at a cheeky remark.
So the next morning she cycled to a further village where Mrs Akers, who looked eighty and had the lack of sight and hearing to match, stood guard over a vastly depleted little shop selling sweets and newspapers. Mrs Akers had a face like a flesh-coloured piece of crumpled paper. It was difficult to discern an expression on it but as she appeared to have only one mood, grumpy, the issue of how she was feeling on any particular day never arose.
Alice waited outside the shop until there was no one in there, embarrassed that she might make some sort of faux pas, like getting the name of the magazine wrong. Finally an elderly couple who had deliberated for what seemed hours over the relative merits of Ginger Nuts over Bourbons, came out and got into their old Morris Minor and bunny-hopped off down the road.
‘Hello, young Alice, and what can I do for you?’ asked Mrs Akers rather too loudly.
Alice began to scan the rows of papers and magazines and was presented with a blur of People’s Friend, The Lady and Bunty.
‘Do you have a New Musical Express, Mrs Akers?’ she asked.
‘Eh, what’s that? Speak up,’ said Mrs Akers.
‘New Musical Express,’ said Alice, flushing brightly.
‘New Musical Express?’ said Mrs Akers. ‘What’s that then? About musicals, is it?’
‘No, it’s a pop paper.’ said Alice. ‘You know, with pop groups in it.’
A tinkling sound heralded the arrival of another customer and there in the door like a gangly, spotty John Wayne stood Stephen Matthews.
Oh shit, thought Alice. The worst person possible.
‘After you,’ said Alice to Stephen. ‘I’m still deciding,’ willing Mrs Akers to keep her mouth shut.
‘No, after you,’ said Stephen. Age before beauty, ha. ha.’ Mrs Akers observed this exchange in silence. She had a short-term memory that rivalled a goldfish’s so the New Musical Express was not mentioned.
‘It’s all right,’ said Alice, ‘you go.’
‘No,’ said Stephen, with an air of desperation in his voice. ‘I said you first.’
‘Forget it.’ said Alice, angry at herself for being so weedy ‘I’ll come back later.’
The door shut behind her.
‘Ten Number Six,’ said Stephen in as manly and unquavering a voice as he could muster. ‘They’re for me dad.’
Alice returned to Mrs Akers’ shop three days later, having rehearsed over and over again in her head the speech she would make. Of course Mrs Akers’ shop had never been graced by the New Musical Express, but eventually, after a few false starts and a potted history of the musicals Mrs Akers had seen in her youth, it was ordered and Alice was instructed to return in several days to pick it up. Finally, by the next weekend, it was in her hands and, breathless with anticipation, she cycled home, ran straight up to her bedroom and began to go through it slowly and methodically, looking for any mention of the Smiths. Several pages in, there he was.
The object of her intense feelings was called Steven Morrissey, he was from Manchester and to Alice he looked like a combination of Keith and an angel. Alice knew that she wanted to write to this unhappy-looking person, to reassure him that his uneasy passage through the world thus far was mirrored by her own.
I wonder if his mum’s ill like mine? she found herself thinking. Or perhaps his family is like the Wildgooses.
She looked at a picture of him and felt she was going to faint. She had to lie down on her bed. She’d spent so long trying to deny that she had any feelings, even to her family and friends, that she didn’t really know what this was all about and why it had happened. Was she getting ill like her mum did with the weather forecaster? She shuddered at the thought.
‘Do I love him?’ she said out loud and then laughed at the sound of her words which were desperate and comical all at the same time. She could see herself reflected in the mirror as she spoke and she felt three years old. But she wasn’t. She was fifteen years old. Two years older than Shakespeare’s Juliet, as Mr Winston the mildly sadistic English teacher had been at pains to point out in a thoroughly unpleasant way.
Do I want to have sex with him? she thought shamefully to herself and imagined herself alone in a flat in Manchester with him, laughing, and him saying to her, ‘God, you’re so funny and clever and so beautiful, come here.’ She couldn’t actually visualise what happened next. Maybe she didn’t want to.
The NME was frustratingly pedestrian, lots of stuff about the paraphernalia of creating music, names of instruments, details about musical influences, all the sort of stuff she didn’t really care about. She just wanted to know about Morrissey, what he wanted and what he was looking for. His quotes were oblique and difficult to put in a context she could understand but the underlying sense of them was loneliness and isolation and misunderstanding, all of which she knew intimately herself. He seemed accessible and yet so far away Perhaps the best thing to do was to write and see if he picked something out of her letter and replied from his heart.
She went downstairs and found some scissors in the drawer and took them back up to her bedroom where she cut Morrissey’s picture out of the NME (a picture in which he looked proud but damaged) and put it under her pillow. She’d have liked to place it over her bed like a religious icon, but knew this would result in some benign teasing from her dad and some not so benign mumbling from her mum. She decided, against all her instincts, to wait a few days before she wrote a letter, to allow the feelings whirling round her head to settle into something more formal than a jumble
of ideas and romance. It had to be right or he would just laugh at her and throw the letter in the bin.
Dearest Morrissey,
I am sure you get absolutely hundreds of letters from your fans, but I hope you will read this one because I think it’s very important. I saw you on Top Of The Pops and although you will probably think this is stupid, I had such a strange feeling about you (I know — just from seeing you on TV!) that I felt I had to contact you and hopefully arrange to meet you and talk. The thing is, I can see from the way you looked, the way you sang and the way you acted that you are a person like me who has had a weird and hard life and I thought if we could talk maybe we could help each other to feel better The first words of your song ‘This Charming Man’ seem to be about my dad Keith whose bicycle was left recently on a hillside with a puncture in it, and it really struck me that, without realising it, you are connected to my family in some way. I am a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in the deepest countryside in Herefordshire and sometimes (well, nearly always!) I feel like there is nobody here who knows what I am really like or how I feel. You see, although my dad is a really nice old hippy, I feel I can’t talk to him because he has so much stress and pain in his life already and I don’t want him to worry about me. This is because my mum has been ill with a mental problem for years now and it has really affected my dad and me. She has been in hospital twice and she has something which the psychiatrists think is de Clerambault’s syndrome where she thinks she is in love with someone who is not in love with her. It’s funny, isn’t it, because here I am writing to someone who doesn’t even know me. I’m not in love with you, by the way! But I do think you are so different and so intelligent that I straight away felt there was some sort of bond between us. Lots of nights I cry in my bedroom because I feel so sorry for my mum and for my dad who has to look after her. You see, my mum has been on drugs for ages which make her a sort of different person. My dad says when she was younger she was really good fun and full of energy and mischief, but now she just sits in the house smoking all day and staring out of the window.
I hope you don’t mind me writing this.
Your greatest fan,
Alice xxxxxxxx
Alice didn’t know where to send the letter so she addressed it care of the NME and got on her bike to go down to the village and post it.
It was a wild, windy November day and she had to toil quite hard against the wind going up the hill. As she entered the village, she saw Mark.
‘Hi, Alice,’ he called. ‘Where are you off to?’
Alice was no good at lying on the spot, even though she didn’t really want Mark or anybody to know she was writing to a pop singer she had seen on television.
‘I’m going to post a letter,’ she said.
‘Oh. Who to?’ said Mark.
Alice reddened.
‘Not your boyfriend?’ Mark said.
‘Fuck off,’ said Alice.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Mark. ‘I’m only teasing, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.’
For the first time almost, Alice decided to trust Mark. Looking down at the front wheel of her bike, she mumbled, ‘It’s a letter to Morrissey from the Smiths.’
Mark was astonished. Alice had never seemed to be the type of person who would get weird about a pop singer. She rumbled about in her permanent semi-angry way with her thick mane of hair constantly out of control, falling out of a ponytail or escaping from a plait, with a frown on her face that was already starting to produce two lines in her forehead at the top of her nose.
‘Do you think he will write back?’
‘I really hope so,’ said Alice with a determined look on her face. ‘It’s very important to me.’
Mark was slightly perturbed by the strength of feeling in her voice and steered things away.
‘My mum and dad are going to the theatre in Birmingham tonight,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come over? I’ll get a bottle of Woodpecker in the shop.’
‘I’ll ask Dad,’ said Alice, although she knew Keith would say yes because he seemed so desperate for her to have friends that the spectre of drink, drugs or underage sex never even occurred to him in his eagerness to normalise his withdrawn and unhappy daughter.
Alice cycled up to Mark’s at about seven o’clock. It was cold and wet and had been dark for some time. But she didn’t mind. This was her favourite sort of weather and she felt the darkness and rain hid her from the prying gaze of the locals, who she knew called her ‘the madwoman’s daughter’. Stephen Matthews had been only too happy to inform her of this, another weapon in his depleted armoury of taunts and village gossip.
An owl sat in the middle of the lane, eyeing her nonchalantly, and only flew away with a huge flap of its impressive wings as she nearly ran it over. Despite talk in the village of a large cat that roamed the local countryside at night, she felt at her happiest. Mark had told her that his dad had discussed this local beast with fellow drinkers in the tiny pub in the village. He’d not been impressed when Andrew Overy, a local farmer prone to exaggeration, had said he’d found a savaged sheep on his land, the throat torn out.
‘Could have been anything,’ said Mark’s dad scornfully.
‘Yeah, but not halfway up a fucking oak tree,’, Andrew Overy had replied triumphantly ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
Mark answered the big front door and led the way into the rather dilapidated interior, a shameful sight to Mark’s mum who spent hours poring over Homes and Gardens in the hairdresser, dreaming of the day when her husband would let her tackle this rural jumble of styles.
They sat in the front room and Mark produced the bottle of Woodpecker which they drank from Manchester United mugs, a nod to the fact that Mark’s dad still half-heartedly followed the romantic team of his youth.
Alice very rarely had any alcohol and to her it was a bit like taking medicine. The sweet sickly taste had to be ignored, Mark had assured her, to eventually feel the benefits of a warmth that couldn’t be achieved in any other way After a couple of mugs, she began to understand what he meant.
Their conversation, initially strangely stilted as if they hardly knew each other, became more relaxed and giggly.
Mark said, ‘Can I ask you something about your mum?’
Alice never discussed Gina with anyone because she simply could not be bothered to battle the ignorance and hyper-interest that surrounded Gina and her illness.
‘All right,’ she said warily.
‘Do you have to lock her up at night?’
It was an innocent question asked with no hint of a sadistic undertow, but it still made Alice really sad to hear it because it was the sort of question one would ask about an animal.
A tear rolled down her face.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘I know,’ said Alice, ‘but she’s not a fucking chimpanzee, you know.’
Mark looked in pain and it didn’t take long before Alice realised he was using every muscle in his face to try and stop himself laughing.
This didn’t make her angry, it made her laugh as well and before long the two of them were helpless on the settee, with tears cascading down their cheeks.
She had known Mark for years, from when he was an awkward five-year-old in ridiculously large jumpers to this gangly teenager with limbs that seemed as if they came from a rubber bendy man toy, and Alice finally realised that she had been holding back the personal areas of her life for far too long.
Her experiences with her mother flew out of her like one huge, cleansing vomit and Mark sat listening, occasionally laughing, like during the story of her mum on the roof, but not teasing or judging, both of which she’d feared.
‘Thanks, Mark,’ said Alice about an hour later and she raised her cup towards his to chink it. ‘You’re a good friend.’
Mark took the cup out of her hand and put it on the floor. He grasped her shoulders, his face looming towards her, and clamped his mouth on to hers.
Normally I wouldn’t like this probing tongue thing, she thought to herself, but it’s all right, it’s nice even, and she responded, so that their two tongues wriggled around, encased by their mouths in a wet drunken dance. Mark pressed closer to her so that his entire weight seemed to be on top of her. He took her hand and guided it towards his trousers, and almost without thinking Alice started to undo his zip. She’d never seen a penis before and was surprised at how big, benign and funny it looked. She’d have been quite happy just to sit and stare at it for a while, but Mark pushed her back and with the instinctive skill necessary at these moments managed to remove all the clothes on her bottom half in one move. As he slid on top of her, Alice realised she was going to lose her virginity and an unwanted image of Morrissey came into her head.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, not realising it was out loud.
Mark hesitated.
Oh Christ, he found himself thinking uncharitably. Is she nuts like her mum?
But Alice said no more and lay still, waiting for Mark to happen to her.
It didn’t hurt, it was like being in a deep, hot well, out of which she looked up to see his face, an expression on it she had never seen before and wasn’t sure she liked. She closed her eyes and images whirled in her head — Mark’s parents arriving home and finding them, people gossiping in the village shop, Wobbly and Bighead grinning, Morrissey on a cross, her dad crying, a bull mounting a cow, trees being thrashed by the wind, her mother shouting and running naked through the garden, Marie Henty smiling shyly… and then with one great heave Mark seemed to collapse into himself and lay panting on her chest.
And then it was quiet. A voice on the television said, ‘And now for the weather,’ and they looked at each other and moved slowly apart until they were both sitting up on the huge settee. They shifted along to create what seemed like a mile-wide gap between them and looked down at the same time to behold an enormous patch of wetness between them on the sofa.