The More You Ignore Me (9 page)

A
tinkling sound heralded the arrival of another customer and there in the door
like a gangly, spotty John Wayne stood Stephen Matthews.

Oh
shit, thought Alice. The worst person possible.

‘After
you,’ said Alice to Stephen. ‘I’m still deciding,’ willing Mrs Akers to keep
her mouth shut.

‘No,
after you,’ said Stephen. Age before beauty, ha. ha.’ Mrs Akers observed this
exchange in silence. She had a short-term memory that rivalled a goldfish’s so
the
New Musical Express
was not mentioned.

‘It’s
all right,’ said Alice, ‘you go.’

‘No,’
said Stephen, with an air of desperation in his voice. ‘I said you first.’

‘Forget
it.’ said Alice, angry at herself for being so weedy ‘I’ll come back later.’

The
door shut behind her.

‘Ten
Number Six,’ said Stephen in as manly and unquavering a voice as he could
muster. ‘They’re for me dad.’

Alice
returned to Mrs Akers’ shop three days later, having rehearsed over and over
again in her head the speech she would make. Of course Mrs Akers’ shop had
never been graced by the
New Musical Express,
but eventually, after a
few false starts and a potted history of the musicals Mrs Akers had seen in her
youth, it was ordered and Alice was instructed to return in several days to
pick it up. Finally, by the next weekend, it was in her hands and, breathless
with anticipation, she cycled home, ran straight up to her bedroom and began to
go through it slowly and methodically, looking for any mention of the Smiths.
Several pages in, there he was.

The object
of her intense feelings was called Steven Morrissey, he was from Manchester and
to Alice he looked like a combination of Keith and an angel. Alice knew that
she wanted to write to this unhappy-looking person, to reassure him that his
uneasy passage through the world thus far was mirrored by her own.

I
wonder if his mum’s ill like mine? she found herself thinking. Or perhaps his
family is like the Wildgooses.

She
looked at a picture of him and felt she was going to faint. She had to lie down
on her bed. She’d spent so long trying to deny that she had any feelings, even
to her family and friends, that she didn’t really know what this was all about
and why it had happened. Was she getting ill like her mum did with the weather
forecaster? She shuddered at the thought.

‘Do I
love him?’ she said out loud and then laughed at the sound of her words which
were desperate and comical all at the same time. She could see herself
reflected in the mirror as she spoke and she felt three years old. But she
wasn’t. She was fifteen years old. Two years older than Shakespeare’s Juliet,
as Mr Winston the mildly sadistic English teacher had been at pains to point
out in a thoroughly unpleasant way.

Do I
want to have sex with him? she thought shamefully to herself and imagined
herself alone in a flat in Manchester with him, laughing, and him saying to
her, ‘God, you’re so funny and clever and so beautiful, come here.’ She
couldn’t actually visualise what happened next. Maybe she didn’t want to.

The
NME
was frustratingly pedestrian, lots of stuff about the paraphernalia of
creating music, names of instruments, details about musical influences, all the
sort of stuff she didn’t really care about. She just wanted to know about
Morrissey, what he wanted and what he was looking for. His quotes were oblique
and difficult to put in a context she could understand but the underlying sense
of them was loneliness and isolation and misunderstanding, all of which she
knew intimately herself. He seemed accessible and yet so far away Perhaps the
best thing to do was to write and see if he picked something out of her letter
and replied from his heart.

She
went downstairs and found some scissors in the drawer and took them back up to
her bedroom where she cut Morrissey’s picture out of the
NME
(a picture
in which he looked proud but damaged) and put it under her pillow. She’d have
liked to place it over her bed like a religious icon, but knew this would
result in some benign teasing from her dad and some not so benign mumbling from
her mum. She decided, against all her instincts, to wait a few days before she
wrote a letter, to allow the feelings whirling round her head to settle into
something more formal than a jumble of ideas and romance. It had to be right or
he would just laugh at her and throw the letter in the bin.

Dearest Morrissey,

I am sure you get absolutely hundreds of
letters from your fans, but I hope you will read this one because I think it’s
very important. I saw you on Top Of The Pops and although you will probably
think this is stupid, I had such a strange feeling about you (I know — just
from seeing you on TV!) that I felt I had to contact you and hopefully arrange
to meet you and talk. The thing is, I can see from the way you looked, the way
you sang and the way you acted that you are a person like me who has had a
weird and hard life and I thought if we could talk maybe we could help each
other to feel better The first words of your song ‘This Charming Man’ seem to
be about my dad Keith whose bicycle was left recently on a hillside with a
puncture in it, and it really struck me that, without realising it, you are
connected to my family in some way. I am a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in
the deepest countryside in Herefordshire and sometimes (well, nearly always!) I
feel like there is nobody here who knows what I am really like or how I feel.
You see, although my dad is a really nice old hippy, I feel I can’t talk to him
because he has so much stress and pain in his life already and I don’t want him
to worry about me. This is because my mum has been ill with a mental problem
for years now and it has really affected my dad and me. She has been in
hospital twice and she has something which the psychiatrists think is de
Clerambault’s syndrome where she thinks she is in love with someone who is not
in love with her. It’s funny, isn’t it, because here I am writing to someone
who doesn’t even know me. I’m not in love with you, by the way! But I do think
you are so different and so intelligent that I straight away felt there was some
sort of bond between us. Lots of nights I cry in my bedroom because I feel so
sorry for my mum and for my dad who has to look after her. You see, my mum has
been on drugs for ages which make her a sort of different person. My dad says
when she was younger she was really good fun and full of energy and mischief,
but now she just sits in the house smoking all day and staring out of the
window.

I hope you don’t mind me writing this.

Your greatest fan,

Alice xxxxxxxx

Alice didn’t know where to
send the letter so she addressed it care of the
NME
and got on her bike
to go down to the village and post it.

It was
a wild, windy November day and she had to toil quite hard against the wind
going up the hill. As she entered the village, she saw Mark.

‘Hi,
Alice,’ he called. ‘Where are you off to?’

Alice
was no good at lying on the spot, even though she didn’t really want Mark or
anybody to know she was writing to a pop singer she had seen on television.

‘I’m
going to post a letter,’ she said.

‘Oh.
Who to?’ said Mark.

Alice
reddened.

‘Not
your boyfriend?’ Mark said.

‘Fuck
off,’ said Alice.

‘Oh,
come on,’ said Mark. ‘I’m only teasing, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t
want.’

For the
first time almost, Alice decided to trust Mark. Looking down at the front wheel
of her bike, she mumbled, ‘It’s a letter to Morrissey from the Smiths.’

Mark
was astonished. Alice had never seemed to be the type of person who would get
weird about a pop singer. She rumbled about in her permanent semi-angry way
with her thick mane of hair constantly out of control, falling out of a
ponytail or escaping from a plait, with a frown on her face that was already
starting to produce two lines in her forehead at the top of her nose.

‘Do you
think he will write back?’

‘I
really hope so,’ said Alice with a determined look on her face. ‘It’s very
important to me.’

Mark
was slightly perturbed by the strength of feeling in her voice and steered
things away.

‘My mum
and dad are going to the theatre in Birmingham tonight,’ he said. ‘Do you want
to come over? I’ll get a bottle of Woodpecker in the shop.’

‘I’ll
ask Dad,’ said Alice, although she knew Keith would say yes because he seemed
so desperate for her to have friends that the spectre of drink, drugs or
underage sex never even occurred to him in his eagerness to normalise his withdrawn
and unhappy daughter.

Alice
cycled up to Mark’s at about seven o’clock. It was cold and wet and had been
dark for some time. But she didn’t mind. This was her favourite sort of weather
and she felt the darkness and rain hid her from the prying gaze of the locals,
who she knew called her ‘the madwoman’s daughter’. Stephen Matthews had been
only too happy to inform her of this, another weapon in his depleted armoury of
taunts and village gossip.

An owl
sat in the middle of the lane, eyeing her nonchalantly, and only flew away with
a huge flap of its impressive wings as she nearly ran it over. Despite talk in
the village of a large cat that roamed the local countryside at night, she felt
at her happiest. Mark had told her that his dad had discussed this local beast
with fellow drinkers in the tiny pub in the village. He’d not been impressed
when Andrew Overy, a local farmer prone to exaggeration, had said he’d found a
savaged sheep on his land, the throat torn out.

‘Could
have been anything,’ said Mark’s dad scornfully.

‘Yeah,
but not halfway up a fucking oak tree,’, Andrew Overy had replied triumphantly
‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

Mark
answered the big front door and led the way into the rather dilapidated
interior, a shameful sight to Mark’s mum who spent hours poring over
Homes
and Gardens
in the hairdresser, dreaming of the day when her husband would
let her tackle this rural jumble of styles.

They
sat in the front room and Mark produced the bottle of Woodpecker which they
drank from Manchester United mugs, a nod to the fact that Mark’s dad still
half-heartedly followed the romantic team of his youth.

Alice
very rarely had any alcohol and to her it was a bit like taking medicine. The
sweet sickly taste had to be ignored, Mark had assured her, to eventually feel
the benefits of a warmth that couldn’t be achieved in any other way After a
couple of mugs, she began to understand what he meant.

Their
conversation, initially strangely stilted as if they hardly knew each other,
became more relaxed and giggly.

Mark
said, ‘Can I ask you something about your mum?’

Alice
never discussed Gina with anyone because she simply could not be bothered to
battle the ignorance and hyper-interest that surrounded Gina and her illness.

‘All
right,’ she said warily.

‘Do you
have to lock her up at night?’

It was
an innocent question asked with no hint of a sadistic undertow, but it still
made Alice really sad to hear it because it was the sort of question one would
ask about an animal.

A tear
rolled down her face.

‘Oh,
I’m sorry,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘I
know,’ said Alice, ‘but she’s not a fucking chimpanzee, you know.’

Mark
looked in pain and it didn’t take long before Alice realised he was using every
muscle in his face to try and stop himself laughing.

This
didn’t make her angry, it made her laugh as well and before long the two of
them were helpless on the settee, with tears cascading down their cheeks.

She had
known Mark for years, from when he was an awkward five-year-old in ridiculously
large jumpers to this gangly teenager with limbs that seemed as if they came
from a rubber bendy man toy, and Alice finally realised that she had been
holding back the personal areas of her life for far too long.