The More You Ignore Me

by Jo Brand

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Mark and jumped up, pulling Alice with him.

  He hauled the offending cushion off the settee and turned it over as Alice slowly began to put her clothes on.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ she said, ‘except it was lovely and I have to go.

  Mark said nothing.

  Alice snatched her coat which was lying on the table and let herself out of the door. Her bike lay on the ground like a big metal spider and she picked it up, got on and began the journey down the long, potholed track of the farm. In the distance she saw some car headlights — Mark’s parents heading down the drive. Not wanting to explain what she assumed was her very visible, changed status, she jumped off her bike, threw it into the hedge and then lay on the verge behind a rotting log as the car whooshed past her, spraying her with dirty water from a particularly big pothole. Then she got back on her bike and rode home.

  She woke the next morning and lay, eyes open, for a tiny period of time before the events of the previous night came flooding back and her stomach lurched. She sat up in bed and twisted to get her picture of Morrissey from under the pillow. He looked more disappointed than he did yesterday and she wondered whether she should write to him again, but having just posted the first letter the day before, perhaps it might not be a good idea.

  Alice!’

  Her stomach lurched again. It was her dad calling from downstairs.

  ‘Come on, love, it’s eight o’clock. I’ve put some Sugar Puffs out for you. Come on, they’ll get soggy and you’ll be late for school.’

  ‘Coming!’ Shit, Alice thought. School as well. How am I going to face that?

  She rose slowly, went into the bathroom and turned on the bath taps.

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘Yes?’ she shouted back.

  ‘You haven’t got time for a bath. Come on, hurry up, love.’ I don’t want to go to school with Mark’s sperm inside me, she thought. People will be able to smell me. She let the taps run.

  ‘I’ll be really quick!’ she called down and plunged into the warm bath.

  She really wanted to stay there all day but forced herself to have a cursory wash of all the bits that might present olfactory evidence to her classmates. She pulled on her uniform and slouched down the stairs, her head thumping and her heart beating. Would her dad be able to tell just by looking at her? She felt as though she was glowing like a hot coal but when she sat down at the table, Keith glanced up at her and then back at his breakfast. ‘This Charming Man’ was playing on the radio. Alice’s heartbeat quickened. What did this mean? Surely it couldn’t just be a coincidence? Was it a message? She looked over at her dad to see if it had had any effect on him.

  Strangely, he didn’t even seem to notice it.

  ‘Hardly saw you last night,’ said her dad. ‘Did you have a nice time at Mark’s?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Alice, her mouth full of cereal. ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Still in bed,’ said Keith, a phrase he used every morning and had done since Gina’s first admission to hospital. ‘She’s going out to the shops with Nan Wildgoose later.’

  Gina’s mum often took her to the shops either in Ludlow or Leominster in an attempt to interest her in the surface paraphernalia of the everyday woman, but most of the time Gina dragged listlessly behind her, eyes downcast, not showing the slightest bit of a spark in anything that passed before her.

  Alice must have looked in the mirror twenty times before she left for school to check whether her appearance was in any way changed. She still looked the same, the expression one she had seen on many mornings, and her hair messily drawn back into a fat ponytail. The frayed jumper with its bobbly surface still hung around her small chest like a rag and drooped to her thighs. The shiny, pleated skirt looked nothing like the neat, short mini skirts the other girls in her class hitched up once they got on the school bus, and her make-up-free face had a scrubbed and pink appearance.

  She stood waiting for the school bus at the end of the lane and it drew up on time as usual. The doors wheezed open and she took a deep breath in anticipation of the children on the bus recognising and commenting upon her recently achieved adult status.

  But nothing was different; the low-level buzz, rising in an occasional crescendo, was the same and so she began to look forward to the next ordeal, which was seeing Mark and gauging how their friendship stood.

  She didn’t have to wait very long. As the children were regurgitated off the bus and, as one, started the short walk through the school gates, Mark sailed past on his bike. Normally he stopped and got off his bike and walked in with her and Karen. But there was no sign of Karen this morning and Mark disappeared through the gates without even turning his head towards her. Alice opened her mouth to shout after him but the words faded and came out as a small squeak. Embarrassed by this, she stared hard at the ground and continued to walk.

  She had double French first which Mark didn’t do and so it was at break time that their second encounter occurred.

  On the scruffy patch of grass outside the main block, Alice spotted Mark coming towards her. He seemed outlined by a thick black pencil as he dodged between other figures who immediately faded against his strong outline. Alice saw with some relief that he was grinning at her.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, feeling a raging heat illuminating her face. ‘Mark…’ Alice began but was interrupted by Karen pushing in between them and grabbing them both by the arm.

  ‘All right, you two?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ they said together.

  ‘What did you do last night?’ asked Karen. ‘I nearly phoned for a meet-up but my mum made me help her with clearing out the garage. God, it was fucking boring. Did you go out?’ She looked at Alice.

  What can I say? thought Alice. Should we tell her now? Should I wait until I’m on my own with her?

  As these thoughts ran round her head, she realised Mark had said, ‘She came round to my place, we just watched telly. talked about bloody Morrissey for ages and had some cider.’

  ‘Oh, you lucky buggers,’ said Karen. ‘Wish I’d been there. ‘The bell rang and the crowd in the playground began to move towards the building.

  ‘Can we talk later?’ Alice said to Mark.

  ‘Ooh, what’s this?’ said Karen, sensing something out of the ordinary.

  ‘Oh nothing,’ said Alice. ‘I just want to ask Mark something about my maths.’ This was dull enough to throw Karen off the scent.

  All right,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll see you after school. You can walk back with me if you want.’

  They walked into the building and became consumed by the crowds heading for lessons. Alice sat through geography trying to work out what she would say to Mark. This was difficult because she really had no idea what she thought about it all. The cider they had consumed had given the whole incident a surreal veneer and Alice kept trying to imagine that it hadn’t really happened. But she knew it had and she wanted to establish the old familiarity with Mark before they drifted in different directions and became embarrassed by each other’s presence. Or did she want to do it again? She wasn’t sure. She loved the wild uncontrolled element of it all, because over the years her inner turmoil had disabled her from being what she felt was her true self. To her peer group and teachers she was distracted and monosyllabic, to her friends this layer was peeled off to reveal a sardonic sense of humour and a cynicism unusual in a fifteen-year-old. To her dad she was quiet but sweet, helpful and domesticated, always available to help with work in the house or keep an eye on Gina when her normally controlled mental state wobbled a bit. Alice wanted to be herself with someone and she was on the brink of doing that with Mark or with Morrissey. She didn’t know which.

  Mark seemed the obvious choice but Morrissey was so much safer. He wasn’t liable to criticise her, to harass her, to make her fall in love with him and then leave her. Her head whirred with the possibilities.

  After school,
they met at the gates, Mark with his bike, and walked along the verge, one in front of the other much of the time as cars buzzed past them. This made it hard to talk.

  The broken conversation that they managed to conduct amazed Alice who had gone over in her head what the various possibilities might be. She had predicted that Mark would either wish to be friends, or have a relationship with her, or break off their friendship altogether.

  It seemed that none of these was the reality. Mark told Alice that for some years he had thought he might be gay and that although he had not had any physical relationships with men or boys, it was something that had sat constantly in his head since he was ten.

  Alice thought, then what were you doing with me?

  So she said it.

  Mark thought for some time.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been one of my best friends. I love being with you, you’re so different from all the other girls and you talk sense, you make me laugh, and I suppose I wanted some way of showing you and I got carried away’ He didn’t say that sometimes he thought she was like a boy.

  ‘What was it like?’ said Alice. ‘Did it feel wrong?’

  ‘No, it didn’t feel wrong,’ said Mark. ‘It felt lovely, but also weird.’

  ‘It felt weird to me too,’ said Alice, ‘but I don’t think I’m a lesbian.’

  Mark laughed and the chasm that had existed between them since last night began to close.

  Alice,’ he said, ‘can I ask you something?’

  ‘Go on then,’ said Alice.

  ‘You’re not in love with me, are you?’

  It was Alice’s time to think.

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. Probably not, no, definitely not.’

  Mark looked relieved. ‘I don’t want us to stop being close, ‘he said.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Alice and they shifted with the greatest of ease into their usual piss-taking, giggling relationship, the sort of half flirtation and half deep friendship that exists between two people who feel they are outside the mainstream for one reason or another and have to cling together against the tide of normality that threatens to overwhelm them into living lives controlled by others’ expectations.

  A car beeped behind them. It was Karen being taken home by her parents.

  ‘Want a lift, maths people?’ she said. They got in and were deposited at the tops of their roads, both Mark and Alice feeling relieved and positive.

  Over the next few weeks Alice met the postman every morning in the hope and expectation of a letter from Morrissey She had given him the minimum time to write back and then slavishly awaited Andrew the postman every morning. Still nothing came and the weirdness she felt inside she put down to a fluttering anticipation and a growing obsession with the singer in the Smiths.

  After a month, there was still no word from Morrissey and Alice began to think he wouldn’t bother to write. Normally this wouldn’t really have upset her as her pessimistic outlook at least meant that disappointments were always anticipated, but she found herself tearful at the thought he wasn’t going to write back and spent quite some time lying on her bed crying.

  Keith was concerned about her. He understood that the maelstrom of teenage hormones could produce some strange behaviour but these last few days had been different. She seemed preoccupied with a particular problem and he longed to be able to sit in front of the telly with Gina and discuss their daughter’s welfare. He could not believe that once Gina realised Alice was suffering, she would not join forces with him to make their daughter’s life more bearable. So he tried. That night at ten fifteen, while Alice sobbed quietly upstairs, Keith said to Gina, ‘I think Alice is unhappy Have you noticed anything?’

  Gina turned her face towards his, a good start.

  ‘She seems fine to me,’ she said and turned back towards the television.

  Keith persisted but Gina was unable to come out of her private, strange world in which occasional murmured voices spoke about her, so muffled it wasn’t really possible to hear them clearly but she still managed to pick up the tenor of their discussion which was negative and dismissive.

  Keith tried for half an hour before he gave up, abandoning another piece of their relationship jigsaw, which would eventually tell him he was on his own.

  Morrissey remained incommunicado.

  This threw Alice into a well of sadness. It was, she felt, one of the few possible joys she had to cling on to and she believed that if he didn’t write back to her, there wasn’t much point to anything.

  She wondered if she might be turning into her mother and at what age this might start. Was it normal to spend hours on her bed staring at the ceiling mouthing the few Smiths lyrics that she knew, listening to their music, looking at Morrissey’s picture, stroking it? Was it normal to walk through the fields in the dark, repeating his name over and over like a mantra? Or to withdraw from her friends, feeling slighted by their lack of interest in her obsession?

  Eventually, after spending what seemed like hundreds of nights alone and feeling isolated, she booked an appointment with Marie Henty to see if she could discover whether she was becoming mentally ill. She was so often overwhelmed by such a rush of tears and emotion that she felt she really couldn’t drag herself out of the protective womb of her bedroom. She felt physically ill too. She was so tired, a tiredness which she took to be some sort of depression, having worked out over the years of her mother’s illness that individuals could be virtually brought to a standstill by their depression and remain catatonic and silent for months while they struggled with an all-encompassing blackness inside them.

  Mark and Karen were worried about her too and it was to them that she wanted to take her feelings of despair and longing about Morrissey and her worries about her life and where it might be going. But she was worried about how they might react. She could hear Karen saying, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alice, forget the silly bastard and come out and get pissed with me and the girls,’ or Mark shaking his head and saying, ‘But I don’t really understand.’

  She wondered if she should try and meet Morrissey If she could only stand next to him and let him see the sort of person she was, he might like her, want to be her friend. Perhaps he needed an assistant — she would be good at that. She would be loyal and trustworthy, unlike the arseholes she assumed had ingratiated themselves with him, who wormed around him, stroking his ego, laughing behind his back, not really being his friend, not being normal. Alice could be so normal with him, she knew she could, and he would feel comfortable with her, which was all she wanted. His songs swirled round her head from morning until night.

  Gina sat silently smoking her fags and Keith sat worrying in the kitchen, slightly more stoned than usual. He began to feel desperate to break the deadlock and one evening after each member of the family had spent yet another night apart in separate rooms in the house, he called Alice down.

  She came reluctantly, not wanting to be dragged back to real life, and she, her dad and Gina all sat in the front room feeling uncomfortable about being so close to one another.

  Alice,’ said Keith, ‘you’ve got to sort yourself out, love. You’ve barely been out of your room. What is it? Come on, I’m worried about you. Shall I get Uncle Bighead and Uncle Wobbly round to help?’

  A smile flitted across her face. ‘I wish I could talk to you, Dad,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got enough problems.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that, young lady,’ said Keith in a comedy voice. ‘I hardly dare ask but is it a boy?’

  ‘Oh Dad,’ said Alice. ‘You know I wouldn’t tell you if it was.’ She looked at Gina.

  ‘Sometimes I wish Mum could help.’

  ‘Gina,’ said Keith softly. Alice is feeling down.’

  Gina farted loudly.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Keith. ‘I suppose it’s a start.’

  Alice cancelled the appointment with Marie Henty, angry at herself for even having made it and hoping that Marie Henty would not come and seek
her out. It never occurred to her that a rural doctor’s surgery with its bunions, heart problems, farming accidents, cancers, old age, childhood illnesses and understaffing was just not equipped to pursue absentees who had cancelled their appointment.

  On one of the days when Alice failed to make it into school, Mark and Karen sat together during break and tried to make sense of what was going on. They were aware of the Morrissey sadness and also Alice’s fears about somehow becoming Gina in the next few years. Both had picked up shards of information from Gina’s past, particularly about the incident with the weather forecaster, and although Alice had made them laugh by recounting the events of the day when Gina sat naked on the roof, they realised that Alice’s fears of the illness manifesting itself in her were at the very least genetically possible.

  ‘What can we do?’ said Karen. ‘We can’t make this Morrison write to her.’

  ‘Morrissey,’ Mark corrected her.

  Morrissey’s rise had passed Karen by She was a New Romantic through and through and found succour in the lyrics and performance of such bands as Duran Duran. Karen luxuriated in the words of ‘Rio’ and placed herself in her fantasies squarely on the deck of that yacht crashing through the water, imagining Simon Le Bon giving her a ‘right good seeing-to’ as it carved its way through tropical seas. She thought his almost chubby leonine looks were perfect and could not understand why Alice had allied herself to a fey, quiffed, droopy, bespectacled, miserable git who seemed obsessed with all things sordid and distasteful.

  Mark, on the other hand, could see very easily why Alice’s heart lay squarely in Morrissey’s palm. He could have allowed himself to become pulled into the movement which was gathering pace with every new piece of information and music the Smiths put out. He even admired their name, given his heartfelt socialist views, something unheard of in his house and something that his parents would have been horrified about. So he adopted an attitude of casual disdain for the highly charged lyrics of the man, coupled with a detailed knowledge of the group’s performance dates, chart positions, musical styles, even news items referred to in their songs.