The More You Ignore Me (16 page)

At
work, she thought about Gina almost as much as she thought about Morrissey, and
wanted to change her unchanging, hopeless life.

Alice
decided not to discuss her plan with Keith as she was worried that he might be
dubious about unleashing Gina’s illness upon the fusty little cottage. So she
went to the hospital which carried out the so-called management of her mother’s
illness and asked to see Gina’s doctor, still the young Dr Desmond who, having
looked like a child some fourteen years ago, had just about managed to achieve
a greasy adolescence characterised by lank hair and some angry-looking spots
with big white heads.

‘I want
my mother’s drugs to be changed or something, said Alice. Dr Desmond noted that
she looked like her mother but with somehow softer lines.

‘Where
is your dad?’ he asked.

At
work,’ said Alice. ‘He knows I’m here but he’s too busy and has told me to talk
to you about it.’

‘Well,
I can’t do anything without seeing your mum,’ said the doctor, scratching his
head, causing a faint down of dandruff to float on to his shoulders.

‘Shall
I bring her then?’ said Alice.

There
was a pause long enough for Alice almost to read Dr Desmond’s mind and pick up
that he was thinking: Oh fuck, do you have to? He’d been knocked around quite
seriously in the early days of her illness and didn’t want a repeat.
Emotionally and medically he was contracted to maintaining the status quo. But
he managed to bring the falsely cheery smile, more akin to a sex pest’s leer,
back on to his face.

‘Yes,
make an appointment with the receptionist and I’ll see you then,’ he said.

The
receptionist was flicking idly through patients’ notes, the contents of which
she used to entertain the long stream of thuggish men who made their way
drunkenly through her bedroom, a well-trodden sexual thoroughfare. It used to
amaze her that grown men with heads the size of Hallowe’en lanterns could
suddenly become so pathetically fearful of and fascinated by these sad little
mad people who passed her desk.

‘I’d
like to make an appointment for my mum,’ said Alice. ‘Name?’ said the
receptionist without looking up as she was at a particularly interesting climax
in someone’s medical notes, in which they had locked their husband in a
cupboard and run into the street screaming that Jesus was about to land in
their village in a fiery chariot.

‘Gina
Wilson,’ said Alice.

‘Doctor?’
said the receptionist.

‘Dr
Desmond,’ said Alice.

‘Eleven
thirty on the twenty-third,’ said the receptionist after much tutting and
shuffling of paper.

‘OK,’
said Gina, as the receptionist handed her an appointment card.

Alice
walked away marvelling at the lack of social skills possessed by this woman,
which had meant that eye contact hadn’t even been achieved, let alone a smile
or a brief chat. She thought about lonely people who craved a friendly word or
an acknowledgement of their existence from their fellow humans and surmised
that this woman had probably been responsible for the odd suicide attempt.

Alice
sat on the bus bumping through the valley and decided, finally, not to tell her
father what she was doing. She was now nineteen years old and was sure she
could fool the psychiatric services into making decisions based purely on her
and her mother’s say-so without any intervention from Keith.

The
long journey, an hour and a half on the bus with a twenty-minute walk at the
end, gave her ample opportunity to assess her current life and the yawning
chasm between the reality of it and what she really wanted. She hadn’t done
well at school. Although teachers had endlessly told her she was bright and
could catapult herself out of the drab, soulless existence the countryside
offered many young women of her age, a combination of fear, apathy and laziness
had so far prevented her from dreaming about big cities and university.
Besides, every time she thought about moving away from Keith and her distant,
trembling mother, a bolt of terror hit the pit of her stomach and she turned
her thoughts elsewhere. She clung to familiarity as if it was a wrecked ship
floating on the sea near to some rocks. It threatened to send her under but was
also her only chance of survival. Much as her uncles, Bighead and Wobbly
repulsed and frightened her, they were also major figures in her life, towering
menacingly in the foreground but reassuring her somehow with their presence.
She knew that, thuggish as they were, they really cared about Grandpap Bert and
in their own unhygienic, drunken way had steered him through the years since Nan
Wildgoose’s death with some care. By their very existence they protected Alice,
because everyone in the area knew them and therefore no one risked upsetting
her or her dad just in case Bighead and Wobbly came looking for them.

School
had been disappointing ultimately, full of detached teachers who had looked
tired and angry much of the time, loutish boys who seemed to control the course
of the day with their hormonal upheavals, and girls whose skirts ascended
minutely every day and whose thighs, pink and mottled, became a major feature
of their appearance along with their badly made-up faces and witchy laughs.
They spent their time discussing their latest sexual conquests. These were
usually achieved in the woods after a session of the sort of drinking that only
British teenagers go in for, reaching a state of disinhibition that, as well as
placing them in some considerable danger, encouraged testosterone.. fuelled
spotty boys to come hunting in packs from surrounding villages.

Alice
felt like an alien handmaid to these hard-faced girls, who seemed only to be
interested in drinking, cackling and being penetrated so hard they were almost
unable to walk. Alice still sat in her room thinking about the things that
Morrissey said in his songs and feeling that the groups of schoolfriends she
had awkwardly circled during her time there would not have met with his
approval.

Mark
was also somewhat of an outcast although Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on
why Some obvious traits sprang to mind, like his moral stance on the way in
which local farmers conducted themselves and the hunts that took place across
his father’s land. They had remained close friends although for several months
they had been slightly uncomfortable in each other’s company, both feeling the
weight of the air in the room which seemed to be pressing in on them and
demanding some sort of resolution to the distance between two teenagers who
have been in the most intimate of circumstances with each other. Ironically,
neither could remember much about it because of the lubrication alcohol had
afforded them. Alice had wondered for ages afterwards whether it would happen
again and had wanted it to. Mark also wanted it to but was aware of so many
stifling social conventions concerning his family’s relationship with Alice,
their contempt for her ill mother and snobbery towards the gentle but useless
Keith, that he could not bring himself to openly conduct a relationship with
Alice for fear of his bullying father’s often physical disdain for his son’s
life choices. Mark had considered suggesting he and Alice conduct a sexual
relationship secretly but he knew he would eventually have to own up to her
that he was embarrassed by her and so in his ridiculous male way he kept her at
arm’s length. Their friendship settled back into its original pattern but with
a layer of sweetness removed. This puzzled Karen, the third member of the
triad, because neither Mark nor Alice had ever confided in her; something held
them back. Retrospectively they were relieved they had withheld this most
private piece of information as Karen began to look like and move towards the
group of screeching girls that Alice was rather frightened of.

When,
some weeks after her initial visit to Dr Desmond, Alice took Gina from their
house to wait for the bus to Hereford, there was a frisson of scandalous
utterings in the village. The local exchange lit up as the ranks of elderly
curtain twitchers jumped immediately to their phones and began the long round
of passing information to the whole county about the rare appearance in public
of someone who, in their opinion, should long ago have been banged up in some
institution where she couldn’t cause trouble or overturn social conventions.

Gina
was like a docile animal and seemed drained of energy. Alice had got her ready
that morning as you would get a child ready for school, except that she added
some little touches of make-up and wound Gina’s wiry hair into an intricate
bun. Not many of Gina’s clothes had escaped the telltale holes caused by cigarette
burns, but Alice found a very pretty flowered dress in the wardrobe. She
matched it with one of the hundreds of cardigans Nan Wildgoose had knitted
during her life and some leather boots. Alice was surprised how good Gina could
look when she’d been buffed up a bit.

In
fact. Gina had the effect a local celebrity would have had on the village. Many
people came out of their houses on the pretext of going to the village shop so
that they could walk past the bus stop and have a good look. A couple of them.
Annie Wilsher and May Budd, ventured a tentative ‘Hello’. Gina completely
ignored them as she had done most people, including her family, for years. In
fact it was only Wobbly and Bighead’s coarse way of interacting with their
fellow mortals that seemed in any way to penetrate the chemical fog she
inhabited. On the days when she visited the dark little family cottage she
seemed like a real person and her face lit up as Wobbly and Bighead went
through the motions of their thuggish comedy double act.

‘How
have you been then, love?’

The
words cut through Alice’s thoughts as she studied the bus timetable as if it
was really interesting. She turned to May and Annie and the word. ‘Fine,’
slipped out of her mouth before she realised they weren’t talking to her.
‘She’s OK,’ she said, gesturing in Gina’s direction helplessly.

‘What
have you been up to, love?’ said Annie, obviously deciding to persevere.

‘What
the fuck do you think she’s been up to, travelling round the world backwards on
a unicycle?’ Alice wondered if she’d said the words out loud or only thought
them.

‘Piss
off,’ said Gina, out of the blue.

The
arrival of the bus pre-empted any blustering response from the two bewildered
elderly ladies whose colourless lives were only lit on occasions like this.
Alice thankfully stepped on, paid their fares and sat at the back with Gina,
watching the little round figures disappear into the distance, deep in
conversation and planning their next dispersal of information across the county.

Alice
experienced that familiar feeling of sitting next to a stranger as the journey
to Hereford progressed. The motherly smell of Gina which she could sometimes
almost taste when she was a very young child had disappeared, to be replaced by
a mixture of sweat and urine. It wasn’t that Gina was incontinent, it was just
that she didn’t take a bath very often, her face filling with terror whenever
Keith gently mooted the idea, as if he had suggested he slowly baste her on a
spit. He had eventually given up the struggle and was reduced to giving her
something akin to a bed bath every now and again when she was half awake and
least likely to bite or punch him. Alice found herself wondering when Keith had
last had sex with her mum, a distasteful subject at the best of times, and
surmised it must have been years if not decades ago.

As the
bus neared its destination, in his office Dr Desmond glanced anxiously at his
watch. He checked his pulse and found it had speeded up considerably in the
last ten minutes. It always did this when Gina Wildgoose was approaching.

The
phone rang and made him jump. It was the receptionist telling him Gina and
Alice had arrived.

‘Send
them in,’ he said and took a deep breath.

The
pair appeared at the door, Alice lovely in a pair of frayed bell-bottomed jeans
with embroidery running the length of the legs, and Gina better than he had
seen her look for ages, her hair now a tamed and almost respectable mop rather
than the wild, scrubby toilet brush it had been the last time he’d seen her.

‘Well,
what can I do for you?’ he said pleasantly, hating the sound of the patronising
timbre he had adopted for his interactions with patients. It occasionally
slipped out at home with his wife and normally resulted in a raging torrent of
abuse, the content of which invariably included his lack of respect for her and
pity for the poor patients he spoke to in this way.

‘Well,’
Alice said, ‘my mum’s just not really living like a normal human being and I
want to see if there’s anything you can do to bring back some of the enjoyment
she used to have for life.’

This
succinct and poignant sentence had been rehearsed, rehashed and repeated many
times over by Alice in her bedroom and on the bus.

Dr
Desmond had feared this might be the reason for their visit and his body
slumped internally Christ, these people, he thought. You stabilise their family
member so they can function within the family and they’re not happy with that,
oh no, they want some quality of life for the poor cow.

What he
actually said was, ‘Right, so perhaps you are asking for a review of your
mother’s medication.’

Alice
didn’t know what she was asking for. It was hard to put into words the ache she
and Keith felt when they looked at Gina. The loss of any spark, of a quick mind
— of a future. She and her dad tried not to discuss it too much for they were
at odds. Keith, having borne the brunt of the devastating effects of Gina’s
illness, thought that this current damped-down persona was the best they could
hope for. Alice, although she could rationally see his point, wanted more for
the once beautiful Gina and thought that if there was no more, she might as
well be dead. But she didn’t say this to Dr Desmond. She said, ‘I don’t really
know if that’s what I’m asking for because I don’t know enough about how it all
works, but we have to live with my mum and she doesn’t really talk to us, she
just sits there and I don’t think that’s much of a life, do you?’