The More You Ignore Me

by Jo Brand

  ‘Send her home then we can talk.’

  They came up with some spurious reason why Gina couldn’t stay She went along with this, if rather disgruntled by the fact that neither of them was prepared to discuss the centre of her universe with her. Wobbly walked with her down to the gate.

  ‘Do you think I’ve got a chance with him?’ she asked, turning to face Wobbly.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Wobbly disinterestedly, but inside he was saying, ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ He realised he preferred the damped down Gina, whose sole ambition in life, it seemed, was to make her fingers yellower with nicotine.

  The brothers’ discussion consisted of saying to each other, ‘She’s mental,’ a few times.

  Finally Wobbly said, ‘Shall we talk to Keithy boy?’

  ‘Do we have to?’ replied Bighead. ‘Let’s leave it a few weeks and see what happens.’

  ‘All right,’ replied his brother. ‘Shall we go to the pub then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ came the reply.

  Similar turmoil was occurring in Mark’s life. He had lasted three nights in the open and finally been defeated by sheer boredom. Visiting him on the third day Alice noticed a considerable downturn in his mood.

  ‘You can’t stay here, Mark,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Mark honestly didn’t know. He was fed up with having to even think about his situation and just wished he could turn back the clock and slip once more into the uneasy dishonest relationship with his father, protected most of the time by his mum. He wondered whether he should leave college and get a job. Mark had fantasised about walking into an army recruiting office in Hereford and being immediately accepted by the SAS as it would be apparent to them straight away that he was a fine specimen, rugged and capable. He knew the reality was different, though, and someone who was sensitive, liked reading and could only last three days on his own in the woods probably wasn’t what they were looking for. The only thing he was sure about was that he didn’t want to go crawling back home like a guilty dog to be further abused by his master.

  ‘Come round to our place for a decent meal,’ urged Alice, ‘and then you can stay tonight and we can sit and discuss a plan.’

  ‘What about my dad?’ said Mark. ‘Isn’t he likely to turn up?’

  ‘He’s not been round since my mum scared him off,’ said Alice with a rueful laugh. ‘I think you’re safe.’

  So they tidied up Mark’s makeshift camp and headed down the hill towards Alice’s house. Keith was still out at work and Gina was not there. Strolling round the countryside talking her nonsense to anyone who will listen, thought Alice.

  ‘It’s really weird,’ she said as they sat down with a cup of tea. ‘My mum has really got into Morrissey since she came off her drugs,’

  ‘Does that make her madder or saner?’ said Mark, hoping that Gina would stay out all evening and he wouldn’t have to face this woman about whom he’d heard so much.

  ‘Saner in my book,’ said Alice. ‘She’s still a bit odd but since she stopped her injections she’s got some of her old self back, though she sometimes talks rubbish and does weird things.’

  ‘What sort of weird things?’ said Mark, not really wanting to know but at the same time fascinated.

  ‘Well, she keeps trying to hide her Morrissey crush from me.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s embarrassed,’ said Mark.

  Alice made a snorting noise. ‘My fucking mother has never been embarrassed in her entire life,’ she said. ‘I have my suspicions that maybe it’s something going on inside, you know…’ She pointed to her head.

  Mark was on shaky ground here. He didn’t know anything about mental illness, let alone any specifics about schizophrenia; like most people he thought schizophrenia was a multiple personality condition.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll get better,’ he said, more in hope than anything else.

  ‘Fucking hell, Mark,’ said Alice bitterly ‘She’ll never get better. People with this never do. I’ve read about it. The best we can hope for is to find some sort of happy medium between her being a fucking blob and a maniac.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mark. ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about. ‘‘I’m sorry too,’ said Alice. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. I don’t think most people are ever going to understand because they’re too scared or uninterested. Anyway, let’s talk about what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going back home,’ said Mark. ‘That would mean I have to be the sort of person my dad wants me to be and I just don’t know if I can live like that, listening to all the shit he talks about politics, about women — about everything.’

  ‘You’ll have to get a job then,’ said Alice. ‘You’ll have to give up college.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘For now anyway A friend of my mum’s runs a shop in Ludlow, they’re always looking for people to help out there.’

  ‘So we’ll have to work out a way for you to get hold of your mum,’ said Alice.

  Alice waited outside the village shop the following morning and when she saw Mark’s mum’s little blue car approaching, she steeled herself because she didn’t have any idea what reaction she’d get. The car drew to a halt and Mark’s mum got out. Normally she was immaculately turned out with spotless clothes and a face which had had at least half an hour spent on it. But that veneer had vanished in the three days Mark had been away, for not only was she mourning the loss of her son but she’d had to weather the unpredictable rages of her husband as he oscillated between ‘leaving the bastard to get on with it’ or ‘calling that fucking useless excuse for a policeman to go and look for him.

  ‘Hello,’ said Alice.

  ‘Oh Alice.’ She began to cry. ‘Have you seen him? Is he OK? Where is he? What’s he doing?’ The desperate questions spewed out almost in relief.

  ‘He’s OK,’ said Alice. ‘I need to talk to you. Shall we walk?’

  Alice went through what she had agreed she would say. By the end of the conversation, Mark’s mother had agreed she would talk to the friend in Ludlow, not tell Mark’s father and drop off some cash for Mark to survive in a cheap B and B for a couple of weeks until he found a job.

  ‘Can’t he come home?’ she asked sadly.

  Alice shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I’m sorry.

  ‘His dad’s not as bad as you think, you know,’ said Mark’s mum. But they both knew that wasn’t really true.

  Alice agreed she would call Mark’s mum as soon as Mark was settled and at that point they could negotiate between themselves as to whether they might meet.

  Mark and Alice went to Ludlow that weekend and met the friend of Mark’s mum, who predictably offered him a part-time job in the little shop. The two then sat in a cafe with the local paper and ringed all the possibles in the accommodation section.

  Within two days a very small, grimy room had been found; it was the kind of room that would make Mark’s mother burst into tears but it was affordable.

  Alice spent Mark’s first day at his new accommodation with him to try and banish the gloom and grime. She bought scented candles and covered the walls with a few Morrissey posters, despite Mark’s protests. After cooking him a celebratory vegetarian breakfast of scrambled eggs and beans, they decided to head forth into the nice bit of Ludlow and browse around the market. As they approached, they heard laughter and noticed a large crowd gathered round someone.

  ‘Oh God, please don’t let it be a juggler,’ said Mark in mock alarm.

  Alice smiled and the pair squeezed in between the laughing, fascinated crowd to see what the attraction was.

  The attraction was Gina, who had somehow acquired a guitar from somewhere and was sitting on a stool dressed in a loose white shirt, NHS glasses, a bunch of gladioli stuffed into the back of a pair of Keith’s trousers, and her hair in a pretty bad attempt at a quiff. She was making a very bad fist of ‘William It Was Really Nothing’ and Alice was put in mind of stories she had read in history books of mental hospitals where the public
paid to go and look at the mentally ill for entertainment.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ whispered Mark.

  ‘Just disappear,’ Alice said hoping that no one in the crowd had made the connection between herself and the obviously disturbed woman on the stool with the guitar. But it was too late. A face she knew well from school turned with a sneer towards her. Stephen Matthews, the school’s most accomplished bully looked at her with a mixture of sadism and amusement.

  ‘Still cracked, I see,’ he said and the group round him joined in with his loud laugh.

  Mark threw a punch at Stephen and Stephen’s yobby friends attempted to make short work of Mark in return. Alice got stuck in and put herself between Mark and the group of evil-smelling ne’er-do-wells that Stephen counted as his friends, in the expectation that they would not hit a girl. Either they were blinded by excitement or less moral than Alice had hoped because a fist hit her in the stomach and another one caught the side of her face. A few stallholders decided that a girl being used as a punchbag by a gang of youths was socially reprehensible and joined in and, hey presto, a fully fledged fight began.

  For once Alice hoped for the appearance of Bighead and Wobbly who were remarkably accomplished at this sort of thing. Unfortunately they were still in bed at home following a night out in the pub and both snored on, oblivious of the distressed maiden Alice felt herself to be.

  Eventually a few languid policemen spilled out of a car on the fringes of the scene and peace was restored. During the fight, Gina had managed to slip away unnoticed. As policemen turned to various culprits to ask them what had started it all, they pointed vainly around, trying to locate the strangely dressed woman. Some policemen began to think she may have been a figment of their imagination. Gina slunk through the alley beside the Butter Cross building, divesting herself of the more extreme elements of her costume, realising even in her disturbed state that it was advisable perhaps to merge into the background of shoppers and traders.

  Eventually Stephen and his friends were cautioned after Alice and Mark said they didn’t want to press charges, and their departure from the scene was supervised by an overweight policeman with a stubby beard just in case ill feeling caused another outbreak of belligerence. An old woman coming out of the chemist’s jumped and let out a little squeak as she nearly stepped on what she thought was an injured kitten. She bent down to take a closer look and realised it was an inanimate object. She held it up to her bespectacled eyes, wondering how on earth an Elvis wig could possibly have found its way to this sliver of pavement in the centre of Ludlow.

  Mark and Alice wandered back to the grimy room, feeling shocked and hurting. Alice bore the beginnings of a black eye and Mark was feeling distinctly put out that he had been beaten twice in a couple of weeks. But as they sat in front of the small black and white portable TV that Alice had brought from her bedroom, Gina was the sole topic of conversation.

  ‘Where do you think she’s gone?’ said Mark eventually after they had sat staring at the local news for some minutes.

  ‘Christ knows,’ said Alice, ‘but we’d better find her soon because I’ve made a mistake and she’s really ill again.’ She started to cry. ‘All I wanted to do was give her a taste of real life,’ she said through her tears. ‘Oh God, Mark, I must have been mad.’

  ‘Well, she definitely is,’ said Mark, trying to lighten the situation. It only made Alice cry harder.

  That night, under a full moon, a woman called Grace was driving through the Shropshire countryside on her way from London to see her parents for a few days. She’d had a stressful week. Her job as a social worker in child protection had left a trail of unfinished work, angry clients and even angrier bosses. But as her car struggled up Clee Hill in the moonlight, her spirits began to lift. She knew that once she crested the hill, she would freewheel down into an area which to her was untouched by modern life. She could leave her burning, negative thoughts at the top of the hill and soak up the therapeutic rustic rhythms of the countryside down in the sheltered valley.

  Sheep stood dead-eyed along the road and she slowed to make sure she didn’t hit one as it ambled across the deserted ribbon of tarmac in search of more interesting grass. She passed through the sprawling village noting the landmarks, the viewing point, the chippie, the high-set Edwardian villas which gazed towards the Black Mountains. She often arrived at this very late hour in an attempt to avoid sitting in traffic on the beleaguered motorway She became aware of some movement ahead of her. She blinked her tired eyes, having forgotten her driving glasses, and wondered if she was so exhausted she was hallucinating. She wasn’t hallucinating. A seated figure appeared to be bouncing towards her in the middle of the road. An invisible hand clutched her heart and a welter of fear shot through her. Almost unconsciously she pressed the little button on the car door, locking herself in, in case her progress was somehow halted by this strange apparition. As the figure bounced closer, she realised it was a woman, wild hair streaming out behind her, dressed in men’s clothes. Impossible to tell her age, though. She dropped her speed down to twenty and as she drew almost level, she realised the laughing figure was sitting on a space-hopper, one of those big, orange, rubber, bouncy balls with ears to hold on to, something she’d had when she and her brothers were younger.

  And then she was past it. She checked her mirror, but even with the help of the moon, it revealed nothing but a black rectangle, with no clue that she had passed anything alive.

  Bloody hell, what the fuck was that? she said to herself, in an attempt to steady and comfort her nerves.

  She then began a dialogue in her head as to what action she should take. What on earth was someone like that doing out at this time of night, let alone dressed in men’s clothes and on a spacehopper, for Christ’s sake? Was she pissed or mad? Pissed probably, found a spacehopper in the garden at a party and decided to have a bit of a laugh. Yes, that was it.

  Still, as she drove on, her thoughts began to niggle at her, making her feel anxious. There hadn’t been any evidence of a party all the houses seemed to be sleeping with their occupants. What if the woman was ill? What if one of those massive trucks that thundered down that road in the middle of the night didn’t see her and hit her? She had a vision of the woman and the spacehopper flying up in the air. A phone box approached on the side of the road. She found herself pulling in. ‘Better let the cops know,’ she said aloud and her voice frightened her. It was now very dark, as the moon had concealed itself behind some cloud, and her childhood imagination took root and began to flower. She saw herself trapped in the phone box by a murderer, a werewolf… Anything could be out there.

  She pressed down on the accelerator and pulled away, trying to still the guilty voice inside her that accused her of not giving a shit.

  Keith sat huddled in front of the television and glanced at the clock. Two a.m. and still no sign of Gina. Alice had phoned him from a call box in Ludlow and told him what had happened in the market square and how worried she was. Keith had driven over there in his van and scoured the environs of Ludlow, touching the many areas he knew Gina loved, High Vinnalls, the castle, Ludlow racecourse and Clee Hill, but there had been no sign of her. He wondered if he should call the police. Perhaps he should call Marie Henty. Maybe even Wobbly and Bighead. He shuddered at the thought of getting those two great wanton behemoths out of their beds. He was worried that the police would laugh at him, Marie Henty would see it as a come-on and Wobbly and Bighead would hit him. But he was so desperate for someone to talk to, eventually he plumped for Marie and bugger the consequences.

  ‘Keith,’ a sleepy voice said in response to his initial apology about waking her.

  ‘I’m worried about Gina,’ he said.

  Marie had been dreaming about being kissed by Simon Le Bon, not someone she’d ever really taken any notice of, and was glad to be pulled away from this slobbery and unpleasant experience.

  ‘Shall I come over?’ she said.

  ‘Well, she’s not here so the
re’s no point really’ said Keith.

  There’s every point, thought Marie Henty but didn’t say it.

  They chatted for several minutes, running over recent events, the improvements and yet concurrent deterioration in Gina’s mental state, and agreed that they would meet the next day and work out a plan of action to get Gina back into hospital and stabilised.

  As Keith put the phone down, he realised that talking to Marie had made him experience a mixture of good emotions: reassured, less anxious, happy even. He sat for half an hour longer in the chair, running images of her and their encounters through his mind until, smiling, he fell asleep with the television on and the applewood in the grate still fizzing and crackling.

  Gina lay in a barn just off the A49, covered with sacking and shivering. An owl hooted and seemed to say ‘Go home.’ The voices in her head became more animated. ‘She doesn’t want to go home,’ one said. ‘They hate her there.’ ‘Tell her to stay away from home,’ said the other voice. ‘They want to lock her up.’

  For once Gina didn’t have to push her hands over her ears and scream at them to shut up. Exhaustion and hunger were blessedly snuffed out together as she dropped into a sleep which carried her through a few more painful hours on earth.

  In the morning when she woke, stiff and cold, her uppermost feelings were physical. She had a pee in the corner of the barn and set off towards the village, desperate for something to eat.

  It will have to be Doug’s shop, she thought grimly to herself. It’s the nearest.

  The two voices set up a little round of singing in her head. ‘She’s going to Doug’s shop,’ they sang tunelessly ‘Silly bitch! Silly bitch!’

  It was seven o’clock in the morning and Doug was laying out the papers in neat rows along the shelf.

  The door opened to reveal Gina in a state of disarray.

  With his practised eye, Doug did not see just a mad, scary woman, he saw an emotionally disturbed, frightened unmedicated outpatient who desperately needed to be an inpatient.