The More You Ignore Me

To
Grandma Maisie

I would like to thank
everyone who’s been a help in the production of this book, which has taken an
enormously long time. Thanks to Martin Fletcher for not shouting at me and
showing patience that was above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks too to
Vivienne Clore, my agent, for reading every chapter as it came out and being so
enthusiastic. Also thanks to Jo Stansall and everyone at Headline. It’s been
the hardest to do but is my favourite so far. Finally thanks to my family who
managed not to be too annoying or absent when 1 was writing it.

1966-9

As a child growing up in a
tiny Herefordshire village, Alice had five personalities. These personalities
were not buried in her subconscious, appearing randomly during explosions of
emotional stress, they were fashioned and refined by her as a response to the
circumstances in which she found herself. They functioned as an aid to her
emotional survival in a family landscape which was harsh, absurd, histrionic,
druggy and unpredictable.

That’s
not to say that Alice was growing up in an environment devoid of love and care.
Love and care were the intention. They just weren’t the result most of the
time. This may have been because the eye of the frequent emotional storms, her
mother Gina, was an unconventional parent whose child-rearing methods were
controlled not so much by her experience and instinct as by her mental state. So
she might praise Alice for the sodden mess of paint-soaked tissue with which
she had attempted to decorate the kitchen, or she might emit a fearful howling
noise and cower in the corner as if she had been stabbed. Either of these was
preferable to her wild temper which, when lost, was not found for what seemed
like hours. China would be smashed, animals kicked, doors acquired gaping
wounds and Alice and her father Keith had either to leave the area or barricade
themselves in the bathroom.

When
Alice was very small, her dad always tried to downplay the situation by
turning it into a fantasy of sorts. Alice wasn’t fooled by these games, though.
For her, the big bad monster wasn’t green and hiding under the bed, it wore
tasteless floral prints, bright scarlet lipstick and sat in the kitchen smoking
and saying ‘bollocks’ a lot.

Instinct
encouraged Alice to attempt to fade into the surrounding domestic background on
these occasions of temper or out-and-out madness and it was because of this
that to her family she appeared secretive, apathetic and surly, even though,
underneath, she was happy, loved fairies and kittens and wanted to be a vet
when she grew up.

Had her
mother realised quite what a normal little girl was flourishing underneath the
miserable alabaster façade, she would have been extremely disappointed. Gina
had always assumed that any child of hers would receive her idiosyncratic
genes and translate them into something unearthly and unique. Alice’s
constitution seemed to have dealt with her mother’s genes by suppressing and
then ejecting them in favour of her father Keith’s. So, despite the madness in
which she existed, underneath lay a fairly well-balanced, unremarkable little
girl who rarely showed her true colours at home for fear of Gina noticing and
washing them away.

Gina
was one of those anomalies occasionally thrown up by the gene pool. She came from
a family of country labourers named, very appropriately, Wildgoose — they were
as aggressive and uncontrolled as geese — and turned out to be extremely
bright. By the age of eleven she began to suffer enormous embarrassment as she
realised she was leaving her family behind on every conceivable level of social
and intellectual achievement. Her father turning up to meet her from school in
corduroys stained with cow’s piss, her mother taking her shopping with the
straps of her enormous bra flapping on her forearms, her two brothers fighting
everyone they came into contact with under the age of fifteen who was not in a
wheelchair — all of this heightened and basted Gina’s feelings of embarrassment
into an angry shame. University was not an option for Gina, not because she
wasn’t bright enough but because, to her family, it was as alien a place as the
moon. Eventually Gina came to the conclusion that the only way she would lift
herself out of her gloomy future would be to find someone to marry who didn’t
have hands the size of shoeboxes and the social graces of a rutting boar.
Gina’s unconventional looks dictated that she could not pin down a potential
husband simply by fluttering her stubby eyelashes or laughing as genuinely as
she could at a wealthy man’s jokes, so she began to stalk the farmyards and
towns of Herefordshire. By her mid-teens this had become a full-time
occupation, much to the disdain of her parents and her feral brothers nicknamed
Wobbly and Bighead, but it was a pursuit made much easier by the advance of
what came to be known as the swinging sixties.

Eventually
Gina came across Keith, a rare bird in the Welsh Marches because he read books
and loved nature. Anyone who has grown up in the country soon comes to realise
that those who make their living from the land tend not to romanticise their
brutal lives and so Keith, basking in the sun on a verge reading Wordsworth and
appreciating the call of the curlew, was unlikely to be from around those
parts. Gina liked the look of Keith’s long hair, his humorous face and his long
fingers capped with nails which were clean and trimmed, not cracked and gnarled
like the talons of a troll. Keith liked Gina’s breasts, the mad look in her
eyes and her forwardness, which seemed to promise him disturbing sex in a
hedge.

Their
first encounter, noted by Gina in her diary, lasted thirteen minutes, during
which time she found out that he came from a suburban estate in Wolverhampton,
he was an only child and he had gone to agricultural college, much to the
despair of his parents, Jennifer and Norman, who had wanted him to be a
surveyor.

Gina
knew her power lay in the rationing of her body for the pleasure of men,
coupled with her sharp wit, and she had decided her strategy for capturing a
partner would consist of these two weapons. It didn’t occur to her that just
because Keith was the only man she had met who seemed sensitive and educated,
there weren’t thousands more like him out there with bigger wallets she could
have. No, he felt like her one opportunity to escape and therefore she knew
she must cling on as tightly as she could, whilst appearing as nonchalant as an
heiress, in order to buy her ticket out of purgatory. She was seized with a
mixture of love, lust and pragmatic planning and her intelligence was put to
work compiling a graded list of encounters which would drive Keith to
distraction and assure his commitment to her.

Meeting
her family lay at the end of this project because she realised, quite
correctly, that however much someone loved her, her cartoon family would
inevitably weaken that love, possibly to the point of extinction. So, as the
months of their relationship passed, she held herself aloof sexually, meting
out just enough physical contact to keep Keith going, fuelling the flames of
his fantasies, and denying access to the rest of the Wildgoose family, despite
repeated requests.

Keith
had no such qualms about introducing Gina to his parents, although he should
have had, and within a year of their relationship beginning, an invitation to
tea was reluctantly extended by Jennifer, whose reaction to her son’s description
of his new love was a lot of shuddering and shaking of her head.

Keith
and Gina’s relationship had become one of snatched meetings in strange places
to ensure her family did not get to know about him. She never took him home and
they could not go into the local pubs because she would have been recognised
and either thrown out or asked to elucidate on her relationship with this
stick-thin, pleasant-looking hippy. So instead, Keith in his battered Ford van
with the customary sacking in the back and Gina on her bicycle would make their
separate ways to the high points of Shropshire and Herefordshire. At Bury
Ditches they would sit holding hands, windblown and cold as they surveyed the countryside
from the Black Mountains to the Long Mynd; or they would race round the
battlements of Clun Castle, laughing and falling over in the long grass; or
stand by Hopton Castle, oppressed by the atmosphere, both temporarily
transported back to the Civil War and the shocking history of the slaughter
that took place there. Keith rather uncharacteristically hoped Gina would get
so upset he could have sex with her. In fact, each time they met, Keith thought
they were going to have sex and each time they didn’t, it had the required
effect: a growing desperation which was not eased by beer or masturbation.
Gina had him exactly where she wanted him.

Then
they went to tea with Jennifer and Norman.

For
Jennifer, a big week was one in which she bought a Mr Kipling’s Battenberg cake
and served it on a silvered cake plate with a cake slice. She constantly
attempted to refine her husband’s utterances and behaviour on these occasions
as Norman was prone to farting loudly and saying things like, ‘Better out than
in,’ oblivious of the presence of guests.

But
when Gina Wildgoose turned up for tea, Jennifer realised that Norman was a
veritable aristocrat in comparison to this country bumpkin, however bright she
may have been.

Jennifer’s
raison d’être immediately became the prevention of her son’s marriage into the
Wildgoose clan, which only served to increase Gina, Keith and Norman’s determination
that it should happen.