Some events are overwhelming – we’re on call for major incidents as well, and I was there in the aftermath of the Manchester bomb. That’s with you for ever, too.
So, no foreigner to emergencies, the tears that appear without warning in the fabric of life, the cracks in the road, and the way we act to try and cope with sudden trauma. But it is a completely different thing to be on the receiving end. No doubt some of my experience and expertise kicked in, but I was powerless to act, powerless to influence. I had no role. Naomi’s health was in the hands of doctors and nurses. They were the experts. There was nothing for me to arrange or fix up, no calls to make, no referrals to agree upon. I was a bystander; I was ‘the family’.
That night I dreamt vividly. We were running, Phil and me and the kids. Naomi and Suzanne were still children. We were running and the wave of water was behind us, enormous, slate blue and foaming, howling at our heels. We had to reach higher ground; none of us could swim. I was yelling, screaming at the girls to run faster, tugging their hands. The wave rose above us, high as a house, a wall of water suspended for a moment before it came crashing down, wrenching our hands apart. I was tumbling over and over under the weight of it. When I surfaced, the water was littered with debris: metal and wood, tree branches. I couldn’t see the others. Phil called my name. He was up on the bank. On the turf, above the raw clay that had been eroded by the sea. The girls beside him. I waded to the edge, cold and breathless, hauled myself up and on to dry land. Suzanne, now an adult, stared at me, horrified. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘where’s Ollie? You’ve left Ollie!’
And the fear flooded through me like acid.
CHAPTER FIVE
Carmel
Thank God Phil was there, going through it all with me. I don’t know how I would have borne it without him. We’d been together thirty-one years by then. God – thirty-one years! Phil was playing support at the PSV Club in Hulme when I first saw him with his band, the Blaggards. They were punk pirates, all black leather and zips and red stripes. A skull and crossbones on the drum kit.
I was revising for finals at the time and trying to get my dissertation written: ‘Unmarried Mothers – Slatterns and Scapegoats’. Renting a room in a shared house in Fallowfield that was permanently damp and cold.
My housemates Karen and Gillian and I had hooked up with other friends and gone en masse to the gig.
The club was called the PSV because it was owned by a load of bus drivers and a PSV was the type of licence required to drive a bus. It was south of the city centre and meant we could walk home, unless someone felt flush enough to pay for a taxi. The door prices were reasonable, the toilets were a disgrace. Hold-your-breath-and-straddle-the-bowl kind of thing.
It wasn’t a massive club, small enough to spot people you knew in the crowd. The stage was raised; the dance floor was ringed with a scattering of tables and chairs at the fringes, some of them dropping to bits.
I remember dancing as soon as they started playing, pogo-ing up and down to keep warm more than anything. They were loud and strident; I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics that Ged, the front man, was snarling. I was single at the time. Gasping for breath in between numbers, I’d already scanned the crowd and worked out that the only good-looking blokes were already taken. So I turned my attention to the band. The bassist was a woman, Lorraine. Ged didn’t do anything for me. The drummer was a possible: nice face, but the Mohican hair dyed lurid orange and spikes pushed through his ears suggested he might be too outgoing for me. I wasn’t after a clown. Phil I thought was shy; he spent most of the set looking down, not connecting with the audience. He was skinny, bony, his shoulders sharply defined under a torn black T-shirt, tight black pants with zips, black Doc Marten boots on his feet. He had been at the hair gel, or sugar and water or beer or something, to stiffen his choppy black hair into a spiky fringe.
I watched him play, moved to the left through the crowd so he might notice me when he looked up. But he never did. He didn’t seem interested. Maybe he was gay? I went home unattached and drunk.
It must have been a month or so later, at another club-cum-boozer called the Cyprus Tavern, on Princess Street, not far from the BBC buildings, when I saw him again, drinking with Ged and a couple of other lads. The shyness was gone. We must have spent an hour doing the glance dance, matching gazes then looking away, over and away.
‘Go and ask him out,’ Karen told me. ‘Put him out of his misery.’
‘No!’ I objected. If I was going to risk making a fool of myself, risk rejection, I wasn’t going to do it in front of an audience.
Time went on, Karen started talking about going for the bus, but I didn’t want to leave while he was still there. While there was still a chance.
Then his group got up, all of them, and pulled on jackets and coats. His was an ancient black leather bomber jacket. I swore, lit a cigarette, nervous, knowing they would pass us on their way to the door.
He was last in line. Karen nudged me with her knee as they got closer. I nudged her back, hissed, ‘Leave it!’
I decided to play it cool, pretend indifference in some last-ditch attempt at flirting. But I could sense him getting closer with every hair on my body, with each beat of my pulse. As he reached our table, I swung my eyes up, took a drag of my cigarette. Aiming no doubt for some vamp-like appeal. I was wearing a tight-fitting green leopard-print dress, black tights, black Docs, half a wand of mascara, a slash of red lipstick, most of which was now on my fag end. My hair was dyed black with fuchsia-pink tips. All topped off with an acid-green beret. I thought I was drop-dead gorgeous.
He had blue eyes, dark blue with a black rim. Merriment in them as he slid on to the stool opposite us. ‘Got a spare smoke?’ His romantic first words. I pushed the packet over.
‘Thank you.’ He smiled. I laughed. He made me laugh. This popping feeling inside, mirth, excitement. He wasn’t shy at all. I found out later that the reason he appeared like that at the gig was because he was only just learning the chords, was petrified of playing a bum note. Though whether anyone could have told the difference . . .
‘I’m Phil,’ he said as he lit a cigarette. He had a Zippo.
‘Carmel, and this is Karen.’
‘Want to go on somewhere?’ He addressed us both.
My throat grew tight. Karen winked at me. ‘Thing is, Karen needs to get the bus. Said I’d walk her.’
‘I’ll come too,’ he suggested.
We ambled along Princess Street and through to Oxford Road, talking about his band and seeing them at the PSV and where they were playing next. I was coherent and outwardly calm, but inside there was a little kid, arms raised in triumph, jumping up and down on a bed yelling, I got him! I got him! I got him!
We didn’t touch.
We saw Karen on to the bus. Phil had already suggested we get a late drink, and we walked down to Rusholme, to a little place hidden away off Moss Lane East. A shebeen, I guess. People knew him, let us in. It was smoky, crowded; most of them were West Indian, just a sprinkling of white faces. He nodded greetings and we squeezed through the couples who were dancing up close to rocksteady songs. There were huge towers of speakers with the bass set high, thudding through the floor; the dancers pulsed almost as if the beat itself was physically shifting them.
Phil led me to a table where shots of rum and cans of Red Stripe lager were all that was on offer. I had no money left but he had enough for a lager, which we shared, taking turns sipping from the can.
Someone passed a joint to Phil, who toked on it three times before offering me some. It was pure grass, seeds in it spitting as I took a long draw. I held the smoke in deep and passed the reefer on, resisting the reflex to cough. The buzz overlaid the loose, fuzzy feeling from the drinks and soon we were dancing. Not touching, but dancing. Maybe an hour later, we left. Outside it was dark, not cold. My ears were hissing from the music.
‘I’m not far, just down the road,’ Phil said. ‘Or I could walk you home.’
I didn’t usu
ally go back with men I met on a first encounter. But I trusted Phil. He felt safe.
‘Whereabouts?’ I asked him.
‘Just on Platt Lane.’
We meandered along. I was still walking when he called, ‘Hey, Carmel.’
I swung back; he had halted outside a building.
‘You live in a shop?’
‘Upstairs.’
I read the sign Rock Records, saw the display of record sleeves (several I owned: Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Slits, X-Ray Spex) and the top twenty record charts through the grille over the window. There were other notices there: Musical accessories sold here and Blank tapes best prices.
‘Who has downstairs?’
‘Me.’ He smiled; he had a dimple, just one on the left, and a chipped front tooth.
‘No, really?’
‘True.’
I stared at him. It seemed so grown-up.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Brilliant!’ I said.
We had to go through the shop to reach the flat. He was careful about locking up; there were bolts and padlocks all over the place. ‘Got robbed three times last year,’ he said, flipping the lights on.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Four years, started when I left school.’
‘Do you make enough to live on?’
‘Long as I can bum cigs off someone like you,’ he joked.
He did all sorts to get by: sold records and cassette tapes, as well as accessories for guitars and drums and percussion. He had a PA to hire out for small events. And decks, too. Then there were the gigs the Blaggards played, though they probably spent more on drugs and alcohol at those than they ever got paid.
‘This way.’ He took me up the stairs at the back, rickety wooden steps, no carpet. Posters on the walls covering up the mottled paint: Iggy Pop, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Che Guevara, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
At the top of the stairs there was a bathroom and the narrow hallway doubled back leading to two rooms: a kitchen/diner at the back and a bedroom-cum-living-room at the front. There were records everywhere, music papers and piles of books. The place was messy but not dirty. Not damp like mine.
I felt suddenly shy seeing his bed, a mattress on the floor covered in a brightly patterned blanket. And wondered where to sit, what to say.
‘Tea?’ he offered.
I agreed, and he put a tape on and left me. The music was lovers’ rock, similar to the stuff on the sound system at the shebeen. The sofa looked like an antique, an enormous squashy pile of red velvet that I fell back into.
He brought mugs and a plate of biscuits, then bummed another cigarette off me and skinned up. We smoked it, finished the tea. We still hadn’t touched. Was I reading the situation wrong? Only one way to find out. ‘You want to dance?’ I said.
He stood up, reached out a hand and pulled me up. Long, bony fingers, nicotine stains. His hand was cool and dry. He pulled me close so my breasts and belly were pressed against him, angled his hips so there was pressure there. Bump and grind. I closed my eyes, the music swirling through me, passion growing.
As the track faded out, he stopped moving and I opened my eyes. He had a warm, sleepy look on his face and nudged closer to me. We were kissing, slow-kissing, tasting of tea and tobacco and dope. He gave a little groan and broke it off. But I pulled him back, kissed him hard and started to take his clothes off.
He woke me at one-thirty the following afternoon with tea and fried-egg sandwiches, and the Sunday papers. We ate and swapped sections of the newspaper. He started the cryptic crossword, something I never even attempted.
He talked to me about my course and what I was going to do next. ‘Apply for jobs, go wherever I can get something.’ A pang as I said it, thinking that this might just last a few weeks then.
We watched a black-and-white western on television. His reception was rubbish; the picture kept fizzing over. We got high again using my last cigarette and made love.
I had to go. I’d still more to do on my dissertation and I hadn’t been to the launderette yet, either. One of the few places open on a Sunday in Manchester.
Would I see him again? Would he say anything? Did he like me as much as I liked him?
‘You busy Friday?’ he said as I laced up my shoes.
‘No.’ A spurt of pleasure, warm inside.
‘There’s a do on, the West Indian centre. Go for a curry first?’
‘What time?’ Feeling giddy.
‘’Bout eight.’ He named one of the curry houses. He offered to walk me home then, but I said there was no need.
We kissed outside the shop.
It was sunny, sunny and warm. The streets were busy with people going to the park opposite. I grinned all the way home. It could have been hailing stones and hurling lightning. I wouldn’t have minded.
By summer, I’d moved in.
* * *
Wandering into the kitchen, I saw the little girl’s photograph on the front of the paper, dark hair in plaits, a plump face, chubby arms. Dumpy. Overweight. Sucked in the accompanying headline – TRAGIC GIRL ROAD DEATH – before I had a chance to censor myself. Felt a rush of heat, of nausea as I understood what I was looking at. ‘What on earth did you buy that for?’ I rounded on Phil.
‘Don’t you want to know what they’re saying about it?’ he said, sounding puzzled, a little irate.
I gave a laugh. ‘No, obviously not.’ Perhaps she was wobbling on that bike, lost her balance, veered too close. My mind whispering things I’d not dare to voice aloud. Sneaky things. She was wearing a polo shirt; a school photo, perhaps. An uncertainty in the smile.
I moved to go and he caught my wrist. ‘Carmel, we don’t deal with this by pretending it’s not happening. By sticking our heads in the sand.’
‘So we rub our noses in it?’ My voice broke. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘We can’t help Naomi if we’re ignorant, blinkered.’
I looked at him, his frank blue eyes, his beard already growing in. I closed my eyes, wanting to be blinkered; more than that, wanting to be blind and deaf and dumb to all of it.
He hugged me and we stood like that, the heat of him warming through me, his hand moving to stroke my head.
He was right, I knew it intellectually, but my heart was lagging behind, my instincts were off kilter. At work, with any other family, I’d have been saying something similar: face the facts, accept the truth, only then can you act on the situation. Gather all the relevant information, analyse, understand, develop a strategy, a plan.
‘I’ll read it,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d rather not have an audience, though.’
‘Hey,’ he said softly, ‘you sure about that?’
Why was he so fucking understanding? Tears burned at the back of my eyes. I nodded miserably.
When he left the room, I made a cup of tea and sat down at the table. Pulled the newspaper close. Stared at the photo again. Was it recent? Must be. Had she turned nine by then? The smile was small, slightly false, no teeth showing.
I steeled myself to read the article, aware of all the questions crowding in my head, insistent and intrusive: was she the eldest, the youngest, what was her family like, what was her name, where had she been going on her bike, who broke the news to her mother?
My eyes slid over the type, the two short columns, reading it like some foreign language, trying not to translate it into meaning and empathy and understanding. A barrier around me like a concrete wall, unyielding.
The nine-year-old girl tragically killed in a road accident in Sale yesterday has been named as Lily Vasey. Lily was riding her bike on Mottram Lane near the family home when she was hit by a car. Her parents Simon (37) and Tina (35) and brothers Nicholas (16) and Robin (14) are reported to be devastated. Police are currently investigating the circumstances of the accident. The two occupants of the Honda Civic, a twenty-six-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old woman, were both injured in the collision and are undergoing treatment at Wythenshawe
Hospital. Sgt John Leland of Greater Manchester Police said, ‘This is a tragic incident that has resulted in the death of a young girl and our sympathies are with her family. We would ask anybody who may have witnessed the collision to contact the police.’
I let out my breath. A twenty-five-year-old woman. That was Naomi.
She was the baby, Lily. Two big brothers. An afterthought? A miracle? A mistake?
Nine years old.
At nine, Naomi had been a determined tomboy, refusing to wear girlie clothes, best pals with Anthony at school and Usman down the road. She had a BMX bike and we’d rigged up a basketball hoop on the drive. She liked to show off break-dancing moves and play Tomb Raider on the computer. I’d wondered then if she’d turn out to be a lesbian.
Now I was scared about her waking up, as she came through the pain and physical healing of the operation and the injuries, and remembering it all: the barbecue, the drive home, the split second before impact when it was too late to act. She’d have seen the child, the bicycle, knowing in her bones that it was too late to stop, too late to avoid hitting her. The slow-motion last moments as the car flew closer.
Until she woke, there was this weird limbo, a breathing space. The sudden silence before the storm breaks, before the earth shakes. Though in fact the damage was already done. When Naomi sat up and remembered it all, it would be an aftershock. The rest of us were already experiencing them, on waking, and in between, all those little tremors when the mind and body forgets for a moment and then stumbles over the memory.
The girl’s family – they’d be doing it too, like being at sea among waves the size of houses, each one cresting, slapping the truth at them. And all their nine years’ worth of memories rising up on hind legs like shadows, like ghosts hungry for grief.
Blink of an Eye (2013) Page 5