by Jo Brand
It took hours and she knew that Keith would be worrying. Torchlight flickered beneath her at the bottom of the hill and she heard a voice calling her from below. It was her dad. More than ever she wished for a nice, comfy, all-enveloping mother but she knew that it was her dad who would always be the one to rescue her from the depths.
She stood up, her jeans soaked in blood, and wondered if she could hide it from him.
‘Dad, I’m here!’ she called and stumbled through the undergrowth towards him.
His worried face broke into a smile.
‘Bloody hell. Alice.’ he said, ‘I thought it was going to be a short walk. It’s half eleven.’
‘Sorry,’ said Alice. ‘Can I not talk about it?’
Are you sure?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Alice.
‘All right.’ he said and he put his arm round her. They descended slowly, neither of them saying a word, although Keith was humming a Bob Dylan song that Alice really liked and she began to sing the words as they got nearer the house.
He turned to her. Are you tangled up in blue?’ he said.
‘I’m tangled up in black at the moment,’ she said.
In her room she took off her blood-soaked jeans and pants and put them in a carrier bag under her bed, not wanting to lose what remained of her first experience of motherhood. Then she put on her pyjamas over some big pants stuffed with a big wodge of folded toilet paper and went down at midnight to eat her dinner.
The Smiths album played continuously for the whole of the next day as Alice lay in her bedroom suffering the last physical knockings of her loss. Keith had nodded solemnly to her request to stay home from school. Gina had not returned from her family, so when Keith went off to work, his van limping up the lane firing salutes of dirty exhaust, Alice was completely alone with her thoughts and the music.
She felt as though the brief consciousness she’d had of being pregnant was surreal, almost hadn’t happened, and she wondered whether to tell Mark and if it would ruin their friendship like their sexual encounter nearly had.
Morrissey looked pretty appalled by her behaviour and condition. Alice suspected he might not be the best person to comfort her during these desperate few days as he seemed somehow fastidious and disconnected from the scummy, earthy, bloody trivia of normal people’s lives.
Nan’s dead and my baby’s dead, Alice found herself thinking. Who’s going to die next? In times of misery, shameful thoughts pop into the mind without the barrier of the superego batting them back into the unconscious because they are just too painful to contemplate. Alice experienced the words, ‘I wish it was my mum next,’ being said to her in her head and felt ashamed and shocked that her mind could come up with this. A tear trickled down her face as she thought of her unlovable mother, who must at one time have been lovable or Keith would never have fallen for her. But the drugs, the course of her illness, premature ageing from what seemed like the hundreds of cigarettes she smoked every day had combined to produce the pantomime ugly sister she found mumbling in the kitchen most mornings. Some days Alice wanted to withhold her mum’s drugs just to see if any of the old Gina lay unchanged underneath, but she was terrified her mum might lose control altogether and kill her or kill somebody else. Other days Alice wanted to put her mum in a home where she could sit immobile by a window and telly all day, until one day she either set fire to herself or died of boredom. The ill Gina had been with them for so long that Alice had very little memory of the life force her mother used to be.
That evening, as these thoughts and others tumbled around in her head, Alice heard a knock on her bedroom door.
Alice?’ said Keith’s kind, worried voice.
‘Yes, Dad,’ said Alice, biting back the tears that always came when she had any kindness directed at her.
‘Can I come in and talk?’
‘No, please,’ said Alice. ‘I’m fine, I’ll be better tomorrow. ‘The case of Alice’s pregnancy and miscarriage was closed.
1985
The season of winter and the dark cold nights of regret and crying into her pillow whilst the inscrutable Morrissey looked on turned into spring, summer, autumn and then winter again. Alice existed in a kind of comfortable numbness which externally manifested itself in the incompleteness of someone who has had the joyous layer of living shaved off. Only two people noticed this, Mark and her dad. Everyone else whose knowledge of Alice was shallow and incomplete saw the same teenager move through her life, unaware of the emotional ghosts that flitted beneath the surface. Alice had decided not to tell Mark about what had happened. She reasoned that there was no point adding pain to his life, given that the attendant comfort she gained would not amount to much. She went automatically to school, did her work, chatted to her friends, ate her tea, collected her NME religiously from the shop and wrote in her diary every night as she spoke to Morrissey about the secret areas that no one else had access to.
Alice felt that she could not have survived the bruising pain of it all had she not had Morrissey to talk to. Despite what she read about his strangeness, inscrutability and arrogance, she believed that the face he put on for the world was a face to keep away the people who wanted to hurt him. She understood that for someone who is sensitive to the pedestrian gaze of lesser mortals, it is not possible to reveal one’s true beliefs and thoughts for fear of being humiliated or ridiculed.
Had she been able to meet Morrissey, talk to him, share her thoughts with him, she knew there would have been many moments when their thoughts mirrored each other’s. She knew he was a kind person, made bitter by circumstance, and she also understood that many people experience a cynicism which is not in keeping with their youth because they have been forced to grow up before they wanted to, or before they should.
As his voice coloured her bedroom with a warmth that did not match the rather spartan surroundings of a young woman who has eschewed the pinkness of femininity Alice lay back on her bed with her eyes closed and imagined the two of them in all sorts of circumstances.
Her favourite fantasy was the pair of them together somewhere wild by the sea, perhaps Cornwall or Ireland during a storm, both wet and cold but both soaking up the poetry of the scene. They would talk about books, about history, about all the shit people in the world who make everyone else’s life a misery. She would say things to him that then appeared in new songs and she would feel a secret thrill when she heard them or he phoned her and sang them down a crackling line to her. She could never feel anything sexual in her overwhelming attraction towards this unearthly creature; in fact he seemed to be slightly above physical needs, as if the mere pragmatic considerations of the fulfilling of the male sexual drive were something below him, something that tainted him and dragged him down.
I wonder if this is what all those crabby old ladies feel in church when they pray, thought Alice and then decided it couldn’t be, because they didn’t seem to have any joy in their lives and surely the object of one’s religious devotion should make one happy and not grumpy.
Morrissey made Alice happy by his mere existence. Thinking of him made her feel better, more secure, and looking at his picture still sent a little shiver of pleasure through her, even though she must have looked at it hundreds of times. Alice also tried to examine herself. Was she just a foolish immature fan with something lacking in her as a person? Was she like those girls who had gone before, screamed over the Beatles, cried over David Cassidy, exploded over the Bay City Rollers? She wanted to think that she wasn’t, that her attachment was more thoughtful. mysterious and spiritual, that it had a meaning above some adolescent quasi-sexual fantasy But she wasn’t sure. Perhaps everyone was laughing at her behind her back. Perhaps her dad and Mark thought she was an idiot, a child — like her mother and the weather forecaster.
But she didn’t care and she knew that had Morrissey not existed or been taken away, she would be completely desolate and would have no reason to go on. And she didn’t think that could be said for a mere Bay City Rollers fan
. Alice also felt that with Morrissey behind her, she could tackle some pain in her life and the lives of those around her.
1988
Alice looked out of the window at the grey soggy day and began to plot. Her mum, Gina, had not been free of so-called ‘therapeutic’ drugs for several years now and she had slumped into a blank-stared life of going to bed, sitting smoking, sitting looking out of the window and sitting looking at the wall. For a woman in her thirties who had been beautiful, formidable and unpredictable, every day of her life now slid into another with such minute changes in routine, they were not apparent to the naked eye. The far limits of her illness were contained by a cocktail of medication which included a monthly injection which ensured her brain had fogged into a primitive machine capable only of fulfilling her most basic needs and throwing out conversation that would have sat easily upon the lips of a five-year-old. Physically her rough and ready beauty had coarsened long ago behind a blanket of ageing. pallid mediocrity.
That’s no life. Alice thought to herself, aware of the fact that, as far as her mum was concerned, she had begun to think in clichés. She longed for excitement for her mother, even a repeat of the incident when she’d sat in all her naked glory on the roof and been spirited to hospital in her dad’s crappy old van. The psychiatric services were able to do nothing for her to increase the quality of her life and they, too, had fallen into an institutionalised pattern of containing Gina’s behaviour so that she wasn’t any trouble to anyone, least of all herself.
Had Alice examined her life in the intervening four years, she may have come to the same conclusion about her existence as she did about her mother’s. It all seemed to have passed in an automatic way, with the rote of the day controlling what she did. She got up, she went to school if it was a school day and she didn’t if it wasn’t. Relatives and friends moved around her but she seemed to be somehow separate from them. On the surface she was still Alice, but inside she felt as though a different person was beginning to grow and just could not be allowed out yet. Her life was punctuated by Morrissey albums. Hatful Of Hollow saw her trudging to school surrounded by the unforgiving atmosphere of November. She hadn’t done well in her GCSEs, apart from English, and Keith had tried to suppress his disappointment as they looked at her very average list of achievements. In February the following year, Alice surprised Mark by announcing to him that she had finally decided to become a vegetarian and she sat determinedly at home chewing on rubbery omelettes and forcing down chickpeas, the only motivation to keep this food on her plate coming from Meat is Murder.
Keith persuaded her to stay on for the sixth form even though she had wanted to get a job and travel round the country pursuing the Smiths.
She finished her second set of exams around about the time The Queen Is Dead came out and after eight months of waiting, the song ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ pervaded every aspect of her life. She played it over and over again and knew she wanted to experience an all-encompassing, mad affair that would generate the sentiments expressed in it.
Weight had fallen from her and she now looked more like Gina. The wildness in her was more pronounced. Her hair had grown longer and more uncontrollable and boys she knew at school had begun to include her in their list of possibilities, changed as she was from the growling, reluctant schoolgirl to a feisty young woman.
Having produced another set of reasonable but not impressive results in her A levels, Keith’s attempts to persuade her to go to a university which would have her fell on deaf ears. Alice just did not know where to go or what to do. She felt there was so much unfinished business in her family that she needed to deal with before she moved on. Keith suggested she get a part-time job so she could pay her way until she decided what to do. Alice scanned the local paper and managed to find a quiet little bookshop in Hereford that wanted help three days a week. It was the sanctuary that she needed. Run by an elderly white-haired man called Ernest who shuffled around, silently smiling and quoting poetry at her, she found a comfortable quietness there which allowed her to spend happy days dealing with few customers and reading greedily.
At work, she thought about Gina almost as much as she thought about Morrissey, and wanted to change her unchanging, hopeless life.
Alice decided not to discuss her plan with Keith as she was worried that he might be dubious about unleashing Gina’s illness upon the fusty little cottage. So she went to the hospital which carried out the so-called management of her mother’s illness and asked to see Gina’s doctor, still the young Dr Desmond who, having looked like a child some fourteen years ago, had just about managed to achieve a greasy adolescence characterised by lank hair and some angry-looking spots with big white heads.
‘I want my mother’s drugs to be changed or something, said Alice. Dr Desmond noted that she looked like her mother but with somehow softer lines.
‘Where is your dad?’ he asked.
At work,’ said Alice. ‘He knows I’m here but he’s too busy and has told me to talk to you about it.’
‘Well, I can’t do anything without seeing your mum,’ said the doctor, scratching his head, causing a faint down of dandruff to float on to his shoulders.
‘Shall I bring her then?’ said Alice.
There was a pause long enough for Alice almost to read Dr Desmond’s mind and pick up that he was thinking: Oh fuck, do you have to? He’d been knocked around quite seriously in the early days of her illness and didn’t want a repeat. Emotionally and medically he was contracted to maintaining the status quo. But he managed to bring the falsely cheery smile, more akin to a sex pest’s leer, back on to his face.
‘Yes, make an appointment with the receptionist and I’ll see you then,’ he said.
The receptionist was flicking idly through patients’ notes, the contents of which she used to entertain the long stream of thuggish men who made their way drunkenly through her bedroom, a well-trodden sexual thoroughfare. It used to amaze her that grown men with heads the size of Hallowe’en lanterns could suddenly become so pathetically fearful of and fascinated by these sad little mad people who passed her desk.
‘I’d like to make an appointment for my mum,’ said Alice. ‘Name?’ said the receptionist without looking up as she was at a particularly interesting climax in someone’s medical notes, in which they had locked their husband in a cupboard and run into the street screaming that Jesus was about to land in their village in a fiery chariot.
‘Gina Wilson,’ said Alice.
‘Doctor?’ said the receptionist.
‘Dr Desmond,’ said Alice.
‘Eleven thirty on the twenty-third,’ said the receptionist after much tutting and shuffling of paper.
‘OK,’ said Gina, as the receptionist handed her an appointment card.
Alice walked away marvelling at the lack of social skills possessed by this woman, which had meant that eye contact hadn’t even been achieved, let alone a smile or a brief chat. She thought about lonely people who craved a friendly word or an acknowledgement of their existence from their fellow humans and surmised that this woman had probably been responsible for the odd suicide attempt.
Alice sat on the bus bumping through the valley and decided, finally, not to tell her father what she was doing. She was now nineteen years old and was sure she could fool the psychiatric services into making decisions based purely on her and her mother’s say-so without any intervention from Keith.
The long journey, an hour and a half on the bus with a twenty-minute walk at the end, gave her ample opportunity to assess her current life and the yawning chasm between the reality of it and what she really wanted. She hadn’t done well at school. Although teachers had endlessly told her she was bright and could catapult herself out of the drab, soulless existence the countryside offered many young women of her age, a combination of fear, apathy and laziness had so far prevented her from dreaming about big cities and university. Besides, every time she thought about moving away from Keith and her distant, trembling mother,
a bolt of terror hit the pit of her stomach and she turned her thoughts elsewhere. She clung to familiarity as if it was a wrecked ship floating on the sea near to some rocks. It threatened to send her under but was also her only chance of survival. Much as her uncles, Bighead and Wobbly repulsed and frightened her, they were also major figures in her life, towering menacingly in the foreground but reassuring her somehow with their presence. She knew that, thuggish as they were, they really cared about Grandpap Bert and in their own unhygienic, drunken way had steered him through the years since Nan Wildgoose’s death with some care. By their very existence they protected Alice, because everyone in the area knew them and therefore no one risked upsetting her or her dad just in case Bighead and Wobbly came looking for them.
School had been disappointing ultimately, full of detached teachers who had looked tired and angry much of the time, loutish boys who seemed to control the course of the day with their hormonal upheavals, and girls whose skirts ascended minutely every day and whose thighs, pink and mottled, became a major feature of their appearance along with their badly made-up faces and witchy laughs. They spent their time discussing their latest sexual conquests. These were usually achieved in the woods after a session of the sort of drinking that only British teenagers go in for, reaching a state of disinhibition that, as well as placing them in some considerable danger, encouraged testosterone.. fuelled spotty boys to come hunting in packs from surrounding villages.