The More You Ignore Me

by Jo Brand

  Alice arrived in Birmingham some hours later and changed buses at the grimy bus station, feeling a little bit apprehensive as she drew nearer to her destination.

  She arrived at about six o’clock, with an hour or so to go until the event began.

  To come from her silent and solo adoration of Morrissey to a huge crowd who absorbed and analysed his every word and felt that he spoke only to them was traumatic and inspiring all at the same time. The streets were teeming with an army of people under the age of twenty, all of whom seemed to be dressed in a uniform specified by Morrissey himself. Quiffs, cardigans and NHS glasses were everywhere, scuffles were breaking out between groups of excited people and Alice felt frightened by it all rather than borne aloft on the sheer uncontrolled exuberance that filled the air like drugged oxygen.

  There were obviously far too many people to fit into the civic hall and Alice wondered what would happen. It was clear from the atmosphere that things could turn nasty at any time and Alice wondered how best to deal with it.

  As she was tossed about in the sea of people, catching odd snippets of conversation from what were mainly young men, she decided to find somewhere to get herself together, remove her jumper and head on into the show. She wandered around looking for a toilet where she could stow her jumper in her bag, have a pee and check her appearance, but the only one she could find had a long, snaking queue of young girls chattering excitedly.

  Alice decided to find a quieter place off the beaten track. In a quietish street and despite the cold, she lifted her jumper over her head, opened her rucksack and started to stuff her jumper into it.

  As she was doing this, she failed to notice a group of young men, two of them skinheads, heading towards her down the narrow street. They stared at her.

  ‘Look, Mac,’ said one. ‘She’s got a fucking Moz T-shirt. That’s what you need, mate, or you won’t get in,’

  The Mac in question looked her up and down.

  ‘Give us your T-shirt, love,’ he said in an emotionless voice.

  Alice’s heart thudded.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I need it to get in.’

  He continued to stare at her while the others looked at the ground and laughed nervously.

  ‘Look, I’ve asked nicely,’ he said, ‘and now I’m getting angry.’

  How on earth, thought Alice, do I get this monster to leave me alone?

  She barely had long enough to articulate this thought before she heard Mac say, ‘Hold her, lads,’ and he pounced on her like an animal, pulling, grabbing, grunting until she felt the T-shirt tear and lift over her head. She could hear her own voice, weak and pleading, saying to him, ‘Oh please don’t, please don’t.’

  Two men let go of her arms, someone giggled and one of them at the back caught her eye and looked ashamed to be part of this assault.

  Alice fixed her eyes on him but there was nothing he could do. Mac held her T-shirt triumphantly aloft for a second and then began to pull it over his own head.

  The one she’d been staring at spoke.

  ‘Mac, for fuck’s sake, she’s only a girl, give it back, mate.’

  Mac turned to him. ‘What did you say?’

  The boy looked back at him for a brief second, then his gaze dropped to the ground.

  ‘You fucking tosser,’ said Mac. He grabbed the boy’s ears and head-butted him with huge force on the bridge of his nose. The boy fell to the ground and Mac kicked him in the back, laughing, before the group turned and headed away, joke-punching each other and singing, ‘Morrissey, Morrissey, Morrissey’ like a football chant.

  Alice looked up from her foetal position on the wet ground and began to cover herself up with her jumper. Then she noticed the bleeding boy leaning against the wall.

  Are you all right?’ she said and, without thinking, put her hand out to touch him.

  He propelled himself away from her and scrambled to his feet.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he cried over his shoulder as he ran. ‘Fuck off, you stupid cow.’

  Alice sat on the pavement for about five minutes. She felt she should cry but couldn’t because she was so angry. Angry that she could be bullied like that, angry that she was too weak to fight back, angry that the so-called genius, vegetarian, fucking Morrissey allowed his fans to behave like that.

  She decided to do her best to get into the civic hall. She would not be cheated again, especially by scumbags who were no more fans of Morrissey than Wobbly and Bighead. Oh, how she wished they were here, with their huge fists and their pit-bull temperaments. She could almost have enjoyed watching those boys get beaten to a bloody pulp.

  Alice followed the crowds and the noise until she stood outside the entrance to the civic hall. It was ten minutes from the start of the show and she could see that hundreds of people outside were not going to get in. She manoeuvred herself through the throng until she stood staring up at the face of a security guard.

  ‘Someone mugged me and nicked my Morrissey T-shirt,’ she shouted above the noise.

  ‘Good one, love,’ said the guard. ‘You’re only about the four hundredth person to try that on me tonight.’

  ‘But it’s true,’ shouted Alice.

  ‘Out the way or you’re going to get hurt,’ said the guard. ‘You’re not getting in, all right?’

  Alice could not believe her night had turned to dust. Tears began to sneak out of the corners of her eyes and blurred the angry and ridiculous scene in front of her. She tried to see if there was a path through the madness when a face appeared in the crowd that made her whole body react as if a wave of electricity had run through it.

  ‘Mum!’ she shouted. ‘Bloody hell! Jesus Christ! Fuck! Mum.’

  It was Gina, cutting a swathe through the crowd with a look of determination on her face. Alice stepped towards her and above the noise shouted, ‘Mum! It’s me, Alice. What are you doing here?’

  Gina looked at Alice as if she didn’t really know her and then an expression of recognition flitted across her face.

  ‘Alice,’ she said. ‘Have you come to see Morrissey?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘but some boys took my T-shirt and they won’t let me in.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Gina. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  She headed towards the same security guard who had just turned Alice away and pointed at her chest. Until that point, Alice hadn’t even realised she was wearing a Morrissey T-shirt.

  The security man nodded curtly and ushered her through.

  ‘Mum!’ shouted Alice. ‘Come back, I need to talk to you.

  Gina shot her a look then turned round and entered the hall with all the other fortunate people who had a passport to their hero.

  Alice was at a loss. Should she call the police? Her dad? Mark?

  She moved away from the crowd and tried to find a phone box. After walking around for a few minutes, she eventually spotted one of the familiar red boxes and found some change in her pocket. She opened the door. There was an overwhelming stench of urine, not something she was familiar with in the local call boxes at home. She lifted the receiver to listen for a dialling tone. There was nothing. Alice banged the receiver on the side of the box. Still nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ she said aloud to herself. ‘I’ll have to sort it out on my own.

  She wandered back to the front of the civic hall. There were still crowds of rowdy, angry people who hadn’t been able to get in, although some realised there was no point in hanging about and started to drift away.

  Mercifully Morrissey did a rather short set and it didn’t seem very long before the people inside started to pour out.

  Alice had positioned herself in the middle of the doors so that she had a reasonable view of every single person exiting the building. Eventually carried along by the crowd, she saw Gina coming towards her.

  ‘Mum.’ Alice grabbed her mother’s arm. She could tell immediately that her mother was somewhere between sedation and wild-eyed madness.

  ‘Mum, you’ve got to come home. We
’ll help you sort things out.’

  Gina looked at her daughter. ‘I don’t want to come home. I’m happy where I am.

  ‘Where is that?’ said Alice desperately ‘And who with?’

  ‘Got to go,’ said Gina breezily and headed up the road more jauntily than Alice had ever seen her.

  ‘Mum.’ Alice tried to hold her by the arm.

  Gina shook her off. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said dangerously.

  ‘Please, Mum,’ said Alice. ‘Please.’

  They reached a huge lorry. Gina banged on the door and the driver leaned across and opened it. Gina began to climb up.

  Alice craned her neck to see who the driver was. Inside the lorry, Gina turned to Dunk and said, ‘Let’s go, I’m starving.’

  ‘Righto,’ said Dunk. He could see a young woman trying to peer in. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘My daughter,’ said Gina. ‘Come on, Dunk, I want to go. Bye,’ she said to Alice, motioning her to move away from the door.

  Alice stepped back, Gina slammed the door and the huge lorry wheezed away.

  Keith was pottering around in the kitchen, putting the kettle on and making toast. The phone jingled in the corner.

  ‘Dad, I just saw Mum at the Morrissey gig,’ Alice had said in a voice thick with distress. ‘She’s gone, she went off in a big lorry with someone. I didn’t see who. Dad, I …’ Her words stopped and after a short pause, a man’s voice came on the line.

  ‘Keith, it’s your dad. I was worried about your Alice getting to our house so late at night, so I came over to Wolverhampton to look for her and I found the poor girl in a right state.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ said Keith. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Well,’ said Norman, ‘from what I can tell, she didn’t get into the show because some thugs nicked her T-shirt off her and they wouldn’t let her in, but she saw Gina getting in there and waited for her to come out. I think they spoke briefly but then Gina ran off and jumped in a lorry and that was it, gone like a puff of smoke, who knows where.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Keith. ‘Shall I come and get Alice?’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ said Norman. ‘I’ll take her home to me and your mum’s and drop her over tomorrow. Is that OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Keith. ‘Thanks, Dad. I’ll see you in the morning. ‘An exhausted Alice arrived the next morning, looking like a tearful ghost. Keith managed to glean a few more details of the previous night’s events and then sent her up to bed for the day.

  He called Marie Henty.

  ‘I’ll come over straight away’ she said, ‘and we’ll discuss what to do.’

  They sat in the little front room with a cup of instant coffee and talked.

  ‘She must be OK,’ said Marie. ‘She can’t be being held against her will by someone or why on earth would she be running around Wolverhampton with a Morrissey T-shirt on to get her into the concert?’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ said Keith, thinking how sweet the word ‘concert’ was coming from Marie’s lips. ‘What shall we do? Should we call the police? What?’

  Marie put her hand on his. ‘We could try the police. And I could ring the hospital, see if there were any patients on the ward that might be the man in the lorry, or anyone who knew him.’

  Keith nodded. He would speak to the police and Marie to the hospital. Neither held out much hope, but it was all they could do.

  The hospital threw up no clues and Keith felt even more hopeless after he had visited the police station and given some details to a bored young female constable. He felt there was no point going to Wolverhampton, Gina could be anywhere by now. But in a little corner of his mind he was slightly reassured by the circumstances of Alice’s meeting with her chaotic mother, although he worried that this feeling was mainly due to his strong wish for Gina to be safe.

  Wobbly and Bighead didn’t seem surprised by what was going on and Keith’s news was met with a curt yet strangely friendly nod when he drove up to their cottage to tell them. Keith refused their offer of a cup of tea and managed to escape back home, thinking to himself that this was the most solicitous exchange they’d had for ages.

  Mark listened with a serious expression to Alice’s description of the events of 22 December. He felt so sorry for her; it seemed so unfair that her difficult life had not been somehow briefly put on hold by her trip to see Morrissey He suspected Gina would never come home and that this would leave Alice suspended in her guilt-filled universe, where only her dependency on and obligation to her lovely father were important.

  Marie hoped Gina would never come home but she knew this was a rather adolescent hope and that there could be no conclusion to Keith and Gina’s marriage if she did not. And marriage was Marie Henty’s aim. She had tried to deny this fact to herself but couldn’t banish the feelings of longing from her mind any more. She sat agitated and despondent in her home and wondered if anything would ever change.

  Alice tried to make herself believe that Morrissey and she were destined never to be close and this thought made her feel very sad. Despite the traumatic events that had occurred in Wolverhampton, she had been enveloped in the magical anticipation of being close to him and that feeling had been so strong and so exciting that she couldn’t help wanting to feel it again. She asked herself if actually seeing Morrissey would be an anti-climax but she had no way of telling. She thought it was like trying to give up a lover who was denied to her. Although his presence in her life both delighted and tortured her, she wondered if she would ever lead a normal existence with a normal job, a normal partner and a normal family For some time she had wondered if she was a lesbian. So many of the men and boys she had contact with seemed brutish and utterly insensitive. She looked at her peer group and could almost physically experience them fading into the middle distance, because compared to Morrissey they seemed grey dull and had nothing to teach her. She and Karen still saw each other from time to time but they were no longer close. Alice could not tolerate the group of young farmers Karen aspired to connect herself to and she was beginning to resign herself to the fact that she would live a life as strange and isolated as her mother’s.

  She and Mark met often and spent a lot of time together talking about their lives and where they might be going. Mark’s relationship with his family had begun to get better, thanks to his mother’s efforts. Mark still did not want to move back home from his mean bedsit, because at least there he had some independence, choice and freedom. He had very little but what he had was his and this was important to him. It also meant there was very little to tidy up and the challenge this presented was minimal. ‘Whenever he saw his mother, she always asked him two things: was he getting enough to eat? Was he wearing a vest? Even in the height of summer he expected her to ask about the vest. It seemed to reassure his mum that he had not allowed his life to descend into the anarchy that she constantly visualised when she was on her own at home in front of the television.

  Mark responded to Alice’s disastrous night as if it was his own experience and could almost physically feel her pain. Karen, however, caught in a world of make-up, evil-smelling hair spray short skirts and longing, could not understand the finer feelings this strange person had aroused in her friend. One night at a party in the home of an old school friend called Sally, they all sat together talking as Duran Duran blasted out in the background. Karen surveyed the scene for likely partnerings later on. It was a typical mix, a few posh boys, the sons of local farmers whose life at private school had been interrupted by a downturn in their fathers ‘fortunes and who had returned to the local state school, and some ‘useless yobs’, as Mark’s father called them, feral, unfeeling troublemakers in the mould of Wobbly and Bighead. Most were average young men and women, some still at home, many living a slightly desperate existence in tatty rented accommodation.

  Stephen Matthews was there too with a couple of what could be loosely termed ‘his friends’, although in reality they were two boys whose suggestibility and complete lack of s
ocial skills meant they were destined to play second fiddle to a bully.

  Karen had pretty much exhausted the supply of available males in the vicinity, either by sleeping with them or frightening them so much they avoided her at all costs. Her well-defined hips and huge chest had ensured that one or two of the boys she had attempted to engage in private fumbling wondered whether they were heterosexual at all, such fear struck at the core of them when they saw her approaching.

  Alice and Mark knew the real Karen, slightly desperate and rather lonely having been brought up in an emotionally cold home where hugs and jokes were in short supply and more attention was paid to good manners and acceptable behaviour than it was to having fun and being close.

  Stephen Matthews, despite his black heart and malevolent intent, had grown up into a handsome man. Quite a few girls threw themselves into his path, willing victims, who were then discarded after one night of very bad sex. This furthered the myth within Stephen’s head that he was a desirable member of the male sex and, as he said to himself, ‘I could have any fucking bird I want.’

  This wasn’t quite true. There were a few girls in the neighbourhood who didn’t want to have anything to do with him because they remembered his behaviour at school towards them or one of their siblings. Stephen Matthews had set himself the task of gradually working his way through them until he had satisfied himself that this self-image was accurate. So over the past couple of years he had got Debbie Sibson so drunk at a party that she could hardly have even known what was happening to her as he dragged her into the garden as if she were a large sack of vegetables and pushed himself upon her. He had ignored the weak protests of Elaine Spry in a friend’s bedroom and carried on, convincing himself that because she had gone quiet she was enjoying herself. And he had given Joy Weston ten pounds, calculating that because her family were poor, this would secure him what he wanted. And it did.

  The only two girls in his immediate social sphere whom he had not managed to perforate were Karen and Alice.