The More You Ignore Me (15 page)

The
Smiths album played continuously for the whole of the next day as Alice lay in
her bedroom suffering the last physical knockings of her loss. Keith had nodded
solemnly to her request to stay home from school. Gina had not returned from
her family, so when Keith went off to work, his van limping up the lane firing
salutes of dirty exhaust, Alice was completely alone with her thoughts and the
music.

She
felt as though the brief consciousness she’d had of being pregnant was surreal,
almost hadn’t happened, and she wondered whether to tell Mark and if it would
ruin their friendship like their sexual encounter nearly had.

Morrissey
looked pretty appalled by her behaviour and condition. Alice suspected he might
not be the best person to comfort her during these desperate few days as he
seemed somehow fastidious and disconnected from the scummy, earthy, bloody
trivia of normal people’s lives.

Nan’s
dead and my baby’s dead, Alice found herself thinking. Who’s going to die next?
In times of misery, shameful thoughts pop into the mind without the barrier of
the superego batting them back into the unconscious because they are just too
painful to contemplate. Alice experienced the words, ‘I wish it was my mum
next,’ being said to her in her head and felt ashamed and shocked that her mind
could come up with this. A tear trickled down her face as she thought of her
unlovable mother, who must at one time have been lovable or Keith would never
have fallen for her. But the drugs, the course of her illness, premature ageing
from what seemed like the hundreds of cigarettes she smoked every day had
combined to produce the pantomime ugly sister she found mumbling in the kitchen
most mornings. Some days Alice wanted to withhold her mum’s drugs just to see
if any of the old Gina lay unchanged underneath, but she was terrified her mum
might lose control altogether and kill her or kill somebody else. Other days
Alice wanted to put her mum in a home where she could sit immobile by a window
and telly all day, until one day she either set fire to herself or died of
boredom. The ill Gina had been with them for so long that Alice had very little
memory of the life force her mother used to be.

That
evening, as these thoughts and others tumbled around in her head, Alice heard a
knock on her bedroom door.

Alice?’
said Keith’s kind, worried voice.

‘Yes,
Dad,’ said Alice, biting back the tears that always came when she had any
kindness directed at her.

‘Can I
come in and talk?’

‘No,
please,’ said Alice. ‘I’m fine, I’ll be better tomorrow. ‘The case of Alice’s
pregnancy and miscarriage was closed.

1985

The season of winter and
the dark cold nights of regret and crying into her pillow whilst the
inscrutable Morrissey looked on turned into spring, summer, autumn and then
winter again. Alice existed in a kind of comfortable numbness which externally
manifested itself in the incompleteness of someone who has had the joyous layer
of living shaved off. Only two people noticed this, Mark and her dad. Everyone
else whose knowledge of Alice was shallow and incomplete saw the same teenager
move through her life, unaware of the emotional ghosts that flitted beneath the
surface. Alice had decided not to tell Mark about what had happened. She
reasoned that there was no point adding pain to his life, given that the
attendant comfort she gained would not amount to much. She went automatically
to school, did her work, chatted to her friends, ate her tea, collected her
NME
religiously from the shop and wrote in her diary every night as she spoke
to Morrissey about the secret areas that no one else had access to.

Alice
felt that she could not have survived the bruising pain of it all had she not
had Morrissey to talk to. Despite what she read about his strangeness,
inscrutability and arrogance, she believed that the face he put on for the
world was a face to keep away the people who wanted to hurt him. She understood
that for someone who is sensitive to the pedestrian gaze of lesser mortals, it
is not possible to reveal one’s true beliefs and thoughts for fear of being
humiliated or ridiculed.

Had she
been able to meet Morrissey, talk to him, share her thoughts with him, she knew
there would have been many moments when their thoughts mirrored each other’s.
She knew he was a kind person, made bitter by circumstance, and she also
understood that many people experience a cynicism which is not in keeping with
their youth because they have been forced to grow up before they wanted to, or
before they should.

As his
voice coloured her bedroom with a warmth that did not match the rather spartan
surroundings of a young woman who has eschewed the pinkness of femininity Alice
lay back on her bed with her eyes closed and imagined the two of them in all
sorts of circumstances.

Her
favourite fantasy was the pair of them together somewhere wild by the sea,
perhaps Cornwall or Ireland during a storm, both wet and cold but both soaking
up the poetry of the scene. They would talk about books, about history, about
all the shit people in the world who make everyone else’s life a misery. She
would say things to him that then appeared in new songs and she would feel a
secret thrill when she heard them or he phoned her and sang them down a
crackling line to her. She could never feel anything sexual in her overwhelming
attraction towards this unearthly creature; in fact he seemed to be slightly
above physical needs, as if the mere pragmatic considerations of the fulfilling
of the male sexual drive were something below him, something that tainted him
and dragged him down.

I
wonder if this is what all those crabby old ladies feel in church when they
pray, thought Alice and then decided it couldn’t be, because they didn’t seem
to have any joy in their lives and surely the object of one’s religious
devotion should make one happy and not grumpy.

Morrissey
made Alice happy by his mere existence. Thinking of him made her feel better,
more secure, and looking at his picture still sent a little shiver of pleasure
through her, even though she must have looked at it hundreds of times. Alice
also tried to examine herself. Was she just a foolish immature fan with something
lacking in her as a person? Was she like those girls who had gone before,
screamed over the Beatles, cried over David Cassidy, exploded over the Bay City
Rollers? She wanted to think that she wasn’t, that her attachment was more
thoughtful. mysterious and spiritual, that it had a meaning above some
adolescent quasi-sexual fantasy But she wasn’t sure. Perhaps everyone was
laughing at her behind her back. Perhaps her dad and Mark thought she was an
idiot, a child — like her mother and the weather forecaster.

But she
didn’t care and she knew that had Morrissey not existed or been taken away, she
would be completely desolate and would have no reason to go on. And she didn’t
think that could be said for a mere Bay City Rollers fan. Alice also felt that
with Morrissey behind her, she could tackle some pain in her life and the lives
of those around her.

1988

Alice looked out of the
window at the grey soggy day and began to plot. Her mum, Gina, had not been
free of so-called ‘therapeutic’ drugs for several years now and she had slumped
into a blank-stared life of going to bed, sitting smoking, sitting looking out
of the window and sitting looking at the wall. For a woman in her thirties who
had been beautiful, formidable and unpredictable, every day of her life now
slid into another with such minute changes in routine, they were not apparent
to the naked eye. The far limits of her illness were contained by a cocktail of
medication which included a monthly injection which ensured her brain had
fogged into a primitive machine capable only of fulfilling her most basic needs
and throwing out conversation that would have sat easily upon the lips of a
five-year-old. Physically her rough and ready beauty had coarsened long ago
behind a blanket of ageing. pallid mediocrity.

That’s
no life. Alice thought to herself, aware of the fact that, as far as her mum
was concerned, she had begun to think in clichés. She longed for excitement for
her mother, even a repeat of the incident when she’d sat in all her naked glory
on the roof and been spirited to hospital in her dad’s crappy old van. The
psychiatric services were able to do nothing for her to increase the quality of
her life and they, too, had fallen into an institutionalised pattern of
containing Gina’s behaviour so that she wasn’t any trouble to anyone, least of
all herself.

Had
Alice examined her life in the intervening four years, she may have come to the
same conclusion about her existence as she did about her mother’s. It all
seemed to have passed in an automatic way, with the rote of the day controlling
what she did. She got up, she went to school if it was a school day and she
didn’t if it wasn’t. Relatives and friends moved around her but she seemed to
be somehow separate from them. On the surface she was still Alice, but inside
she felt as though a different person was beginning to grow and just could not
be allowed out yet. Her life was punctuated by Morrissey albums.
Hatful Of
Hollow
saw her trudging to school surrounded by the unforgiving atmosphere
of November. She hadn’t done well in her GCSEs, apart from English, and Keith
had tried to suppress his disappointment as they looked at her very average
list of achievements. In February the following year, Alice surprised Mark by announcing
to him that she had finally decided to become a vegetarian and she sat
determinedly at home chewing on rubbery omelettes and forcing down chickpeas,
the only motivation to keep this food on her plate coming from
Meat is
Murder.

Keith
persuaded her to stay on for the sixth form even though she had wanted to get a
job and travel round the country pursuing the Smiths.

She
finished her second set of exams around about the time
The Queen Is Dead
came
out and after eight months of waiting, the song ‘There Is A Light That Never
Goes Out’ pervaded every aspect of her life. She played it over and over again
and knew she wanted to experience an all-encompassing, mad affair that would
generate the sentiments expressed in it.

Weight
had fallen from her and she now looked more like Gina. The wildness in her was
more pronounced. Her hair had grown longer and more uncontrollable and boys she
knew at school had begun to include her in their list of possibilities, changed
as she was from the growling, reluctant schoolgirl to a feisty young woman.

Having
produced another set of reasonable but not impressive results in her A levels,
Keith’s attempts to persuade her to go to a university which would have her
fell on deaf ears. Alice just did not know where to go or what to do. She felt
there was so much unfinished business in her family that she needed to deal
with before she moved on. Keith suggested she get a part-time job so she could
pay her way until she decided what to do. Alice scanned the local paper and
managed to find a quiet little bookshop in Hereford that wanted help three days
a week. It was the sanctuary that she needed. Run by an elderly white-haired
man called Ernest who shuffled around, silently smiling and quoting poetry at
her, she found a comfortable quietness there which allowed her to spend happy
days dealing with few customers and reading greedily.