The More You Ignore Me (11 page)

‘What
was it like?’ said Alice. ‘Did it feel wrong?’

‘No, it
didn’t feel wrong,’ said Mark. ‘It felt lovely, but also weird.’

‘It
felt weird to me too,’ said Alice, ‘but I don’t think I’m a lesbian.’

Mark
laughed and the chasm that had existed between them since last night began to
close.

Alice,’
he said, ‘can I ask you something?’

‘Go on
then,’ said Alice.

‘You’re
not in love with me, are you?’

It was Alice’s
time to think.

‘I
don’t think so. I don’t know. Probably not, no, definitely not.’

Mark
looked relieved. ‘I don’t want us to stop being close, ‘he said.

‘Nor
me,’ said Alice and they shifted with the greatest of ease into their usual
piss-taking, giggling relationship, the sort of half flirtation and half deep
friendship that exists between two people who feel they are outside the mainstream
for one reason or another and have to cling together against the tide of
normality that threatens to overwhelm them into living lives controlled by
others’ expectations.

A car
beeped behind them. It was Karen being taken home by her parents.

‘Want a
lift, maths people?’ she said. They got in and were deposited at the tops of
their roads, both Mark and Alice feeling relieved and positive.

Over
the next few weeks Alice met the postman every morning in the hope and
expectation of a letter from Morrissey She had given him the minimum time to
write back and then slavishly awaited Andrew the postman every morning. Still
nothing came and the weirdness she felt inside she put down to a fluttering
anticipation and a growing obsession with the singer in the Smiths.

After a
month, there was still no word from Morrissey and Alice began to think he
wouldn’t bother to write. Normally this wouldn’t really have upset her as her
pessimistic outlook at least meant that disappointments were always
anticipated, but she found herself tearful at the thought he wasn’t going to
write back and spent quite some time lying on her bed crying.

Keith
was concerned about her. He understood that the maelstrom of teenage hormones
could produce some strange behaviour but these last few days had been
different. She seemed preoccupied with a particular problem and he longed to be
able to sit in front of the telly with Gina and discuss their daughter’s
welfare. He could not believe that once Gina realised Alice was suffering, she
would not join forces with him to make their daughter’s life more bearable. So
he tried. That night at ten fifteen, while Alice sobbed quietly upstairs, Keith
said to Gina, ‘I think Alice is unhappy Have you noticed anything?’

Gina
turned her face towards his, a good start.

‘She
seems fine to me,’ she said and turned back towards the television.

Keith
persisted but Gina was unable to come out of her private, strange world in
which occasional murmured voices spoke about her, so muffled it wasn’t really
possible to hear them clearly but she still managed to pick up the tenor of
their discussion which was negative and dismissive.

Keith
tried for half an hour before he gave up, abandoning another piece of their
relationship jigsaw, which would eventually tell him he was on his own.

Morrissey remained
incommunicado.

This
threw Alice into a well of sadness. It was, she felt, one of the few possible
joys she had to cling on to and she believed that if he didn’t write back to
her, there wasn’t much point to anything.

She
wondered if she might be turning into her mother and at what age this might
start. Was it normal to spend hours on her bed staring at the ceiling mouthing
the few Smiths lyrics that she knew, listening to their music, looking at
Morrissey’s picture, stroking it? Was it normal to walk through the fields in
the dark, repeating his name over and over like a mantra? Or to withdraw from
her friends, feeling slighted by their lack of interest in her obsession?

Eventually,
after spending what seemed like hundreds of nights alone and feeling isolated,
she booked an appointment with Marie Henty to see if she could discover whether
she was becoming mentally ill. She was so often overwhelmed by such a rush of
tears and emotion that she felt she really couldn’t drag herself out of the
protective womb of her bedroom. She felt physically ill too. She was so tired,
a tiredness which she took to be some sort of depression, having worked out
over the years of her mother’s illness that individuals could be virtually
brought to a standstill by their depression and remain catatonic and silent for
months while they struggled with an all-encompassing blackness inside them.

Mark
and Karen were worried about her too and it was to them that she wanted to take
her feelings of despair and longing about Morrissey and her worries about her
life and where it might be going. But she was worried about how they might
react. She could hear Karen saying, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alice, forget the
silly bastard and come out and get pissed with me and the girls,’ or Mark
shaking his head and saying, ‘But I don’t really understand.’

She
wondered if she should try and meet Morrissey If she could only stand next to
him and let him see the sort of person she was, he might like her, want to be
her friend. Perhaps he needed an assistant — she would be good at that. She
would be loyal and trustworthy, unlike the arseholes she assumed had
ingratiated themselves with him, who wormed around him, stroking his ego,
laughing behind his back, not really being his friend, not being normal. Alice
could be so normal with him, she knew she could, and he would feel comfortable
with her, which was all she wanted. His songs swirled round her head from
morning until night.

Gina
sat silently smoking her fags and Keith sat worrying in the kitchen, slightly
more stoned than usual. He began to feel desperate to break the deadlock and
one evening after each member of the family had spent yet another night apart
in separate rooms in the house, he called Alice down.

She
came reluctantly, not wanting to be dragged back to real life, and she, her dad
and Gina all sat in the front room feeling uncomfortable about being so close
to one another.

Alice,’
said Keith, ‘you’ve got to sort yourself out, love. You’ve barely been out of
your room. What is it? Come on, I’m worried about you. Shall I get Uncle
Bighead and Uncle Wobbly round to help?’

A smile
flitted across her face. ‘I wish I could talk to you, Dad,’ she said. ‘But
you’ve got enough problems.’

‘I’ll
be the judge of that, young lady,’ said Keith in a comedy voice. ‘I hardly dare
ask but is it a boy?’

‘Oh
Dad,’ said Alice. ‘You know I wouldn’t tell you if it was.’ She looked at Gina.

‘Sometimes
I wish Mum could help.’

‘Gina,’
said Keith softly. Alice is feeling down.’

Gina
farted loudly.

‘Oh
well,’ said Keith. ‘I suppose it’s a start.’

Alice
cancelled the appointment with Marie Henty, angry at herself for even having
made it and hoping that Marie Henty would not come and seek her out. It never
occurred to her that a rural doctor’s surgery with its bunions, heart problems,
farming accidents, cancers, old age, childhood illnesses and understaffing was
just not equipped to pursue absentees who had cancelled their appointment.

On one
of the days when Alice failed to make it into school, Mark and Karen sat
together during break and tried to make sense of what was going on. They were
aware of the Morrissey sadness and also Alice’s fears about somehow becoming
Gina in the next few years. Both had picked up shards of information from
Gina’s past, particularly about the incident with the weather forecaster, and
although Alice had made them laugh by recounting the events of the day when
Gina sat naked on the roof, they realised that Alice’s fears of the illness
manifesting itself in her were at the very least genetically possible.

‘What
can we do?’ said Karen. ‘We can’t
make
this Morrison write to her.’

‘Morrissey,’
Mark corrected her.

Morrissey’s
rise had passed Karen by She was a New Romantic through and through and found
succour in the lyrics and performance of such bands as Duran Duran. Karen
luxuriated in the words of ‘Rio’ and placed herself in her fantasies squarely
on the deck of that yacht crashing through the water, imagining Simon Le Bon
giving her a ‘right good seeing-to’ as it carved its way through tropical seas.
She thought his almost chubby leonine looks were perfect and could not
understand why Alice had allied herself to a fey, quiffed, droopy,
bespectacled, miserable git who seemed obsessed with all things sordid and
distasteful.

Mark,
on the other hand, could see very easily why Alice’s heart lay squarely in
Morrissey’s palm. He could have allowed himself to become pulled into the
movement which was gathering pace with every new piece of information and music
the Smiths put out. He even admired their name, given his heartfelt socialist
views, something unheard of in his house and something that his parents would
have been horrified about. So he adopted an attitude of casual disdain for the
highly charged lyrics of the man, coupled with a detailed knowledge of the
group’s performance dates, chart positions, musical styles, even news items referred
to in their songs.

‘What
are we going to do then?’ said Karen, who always wanted to do things to make
people’s lives better, not content with just allowing herself to be a steadfast
support to friends.

‘Not
much we can do,’ said Mark, ‘except hope she comes through it and Morrissey
writes to her.’

‘Duran
Duran are playing in Birmingham soon,’ said Karen. ‘Shall we take her?’

‘Oh
Jesus, no, that’ll finish her off,’ said Mark. ‘No, let’s just wait and see how
things are.’

All
right,’ said Karen, frustrated.

Three
days later, while Alice lay in bed on a Saturday morning staring at the ceiling
and listening to the blather of a Radio 1 DJ who was playing rubbish, her dad
shouted, ‘There’s a letter for you!’

Her
heart leapt then plummeted. It would be from Grandma or school or something.
She dragged down the stairs. It was just a typical envelope but the postmark
was Manchester. She felt as if her head was going to explode. Not wanting her
dad to see her weep any more, she ran up the stairs, two at a time, slamming
her bedroom door behind her. She threw herself on to the bed and as delicately
as possible, because she didn’t want to lose even the tiniest atom of it if it
was from Morrissey, she ripped the corner very gently and slid her finger into
the hole, tearing along the crease.

It was
one sheet of paper. She removed it from the envelope and opened it out.

It was
from Morrissey.

She put
it down, not even wanting to read it in case it disappointed her. She got up
from her bed, went downstairs, through the door and out on to the lane from the
scrubby front garden and began to walk.

It was
a mild day with an all-enveloping light drizzle which tickled her face. All she
could think of was
him
and that at some point in the last few days his
dear hand had taken up a pen and written words to her. Her! It was astounding
that someone like him should spend even a second thinking about her. He,
Morrissey, had taken the time to write to her, Alice, a fifteen-year-old from
Herefordshire with a mad mother. She then spent a delicious half an hour
speculating what the letter might say ‘I am so happy,’ she said out loud,
looking round her at the familiar landscape, the big oak with its cargo of
mistletoe, the hills with their shaven mottled look and the enormous dove-grey
sky, and began to cry. Then she turned and started to run home.

Finally,
in her bedroom, she unfolded the letter and looked at it.

The
writing was big and had an old-fashioned look to it. All the letters were big
and not joined together, childlike but so old, she thought.

There
were two sentences.

Dear Alice (not just a photocopied fob-off letter sent to many
then).