The More You Ignore Me (2 page)

The
teatime debacle that took place in Jennifer’s pristine home with its beige
Dralon furniture and the routinely twitched net curtains was something akin to
a badly performed West End farce in which people forgot their lines, began to
laugh or fell over.

When
Keith and Gina arrived, Jennifer was sitting in the front room toying with her
freshly laid and polished hostess trolley, hoping against hope that the front
door would open to reveal, attached to Keith’s arm, a smartly dressed
fresh-faced graduate with a talent for modesty and deference, and child-bearing
hips.

The
child-bearing hips arrived satisfactorily, but above them sat a wild-haired
temptress who appeared slightly grubby and out of the pages of one of those
dreadful magazines Jennifer occasionally found in Keith’s toolbox or bedside
cabinet, which revealed a series of catalogue model types dressed in very
little, breasts primed and pointing straight at the camera, and on the odd,
truly shocking occasion — for Jennifer at least — legs wide open and what she
called their ‘foo-foos’ on show to all. To Jennifer, Gina looked like a porn
queen.

Norman,
who had been instructed to turn off
Grandstand,
his favourite sports
programme and sanctuary from Jennifer’s constant monologue on his shortcomings,
felt an unmistakable stirring in his loins and a wave of pure jealousy at his
son’s good fortune.

The
hostess trolley groaned with a traditional suburban tea of egg and cress
sandwiches, a salad consisting of the truly banal trio of lettuce, cucumber and
tomato, and of course the Battenberg cake.

Despite
Gina’s appearance, she had made what she considered to be a gargantuan effort
for Keith, who had begged her to bury her cleavage and watch her language. She
was clad in a green nylon cardigan, tweed skirt and some shoes she had bought
at the local jumble sale for a pound, which were too high for her and caused
her gait to become a totter, resulting in her moving into the lounge like a cut-price
geisha with Parkinson’s disease. As she swayed forward to shake Norman and
Jennifer by the hand, a fixed, determined gurn on her face, the heel of one of
her shoes gave way, propelling her forward at quite some speed and depositing
her on top of the hostess trolley which collapsed under her weight and sent her
sprawling to the ground on top of it, her skirt flying up to reveal stocking
tops and no knickers, a state which she had planned to employ in the van later
to make Keith implode. The final nail in the coffin of Jennifer’s support for
Keith’s union was Gina’s response to this accident. She turned and said, ‘Oh
fuck, oh shit, sorry, Keith, oh bollocks, sorry Mr and Mrs Wilson.’

‘They
think it’s all over… it is now,’ said Norman to himself quietly.

As most
adults of a certain class and age would in this situation, Jennifer and Norman
tried to pretend nothing had happened, but it had destroyed their suburban
idyll and the visit was curtailed almost immediately.

Keith
sat, mortified, in the van, running the incident over and over again in his
head. The closing scene of the horrified face of his mother and the slightly
horrified (combined with more than slightly aroused) face of his father refused
to subside, and he wondered to himself why a serially unremarkable person such
as himself should have fallen in love with an uncontrolled, mobile wrecking
machine such as Gina.

But
Keith was remarkable. He was intelligent, humorous, kind, altruistic, warm and
very funny and these qualities together, unsullied by any negative
accompaniments, were rare in most men as they often came with the initially
hidden price of moodiness, drunkenness and laziness to puncture the woman’s joy
at having found the man of her dreams.

Within
a few days, however, Keith found that the image of Gina’s disgrace in his
parents’ front room, which had initially gnawed at his entrails ceaselessly,
had faded completely and he and Gina continued their courtship, with Gina safe
in the knowledge that the blip that had occurred in Wolverhampton had not
ruined her chances of snaring Keith. Paradoxically, it had the opposite effect
and it gave Keith more impetus in his journey away from his parents towards
independence and Gina.

Gina
realised a proposal was close. If it was possible, Keith was more attentive,
more dreamy-eyed and more sexually charged than ever. And so it happened that
one day, as they lay squinting at the late-afternoon sun in a field very close
to the Welsh border, looking up at a hill where King Caractacus was rumoured to
have fought his final battle, the much-awaited moment arrived. Despite
appearances, Keith was uncomfortable. Gina’s head lay on his arm, which had
gone to sleep; she looked so peaceful, he couldn’t bear to disturb her but he
had to do something to shift his paralysed arm from under her big, heavy head.

‘Do you
want to get married?’ he said almost inaudibly, so that Gina, with her eyes
closed, listening to the breeze, thought it was an auditory hallucination.

‘What
did you say?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’
said Keith.

Gina
quickly became agitated. She was sure she had heard a proposal but didn’t know
if it was bad form to ask him to repeat it. Would he be offended that she’d
missed the proposal? Even worse, what if he hadn’t proposed and she started to
badger him, insisting he had? She heard a low chuckling and looked across at
Keith who seemed highly entertained by her pain.

‘You
fucking bastard,’ she said. ‘You did propose.’

‘I’m
afraid you’re too late,’ said Keith. ‘You should have answered straight away.’

‘So
what does that mean?’ said Gina.

‘Well,
you’ll have to wait and see if I ask again,’ said Keith, ‘and pay attention
next time.’

Gina
felt tears pricking at her eyes.

‘Keith…’
she said falteringly.

Keith
was smiling broadly ‘You silly bag,’ he said. ‘What’s your answer?’

And
that was probably the last time Keith had the upper hand in their relationship.

Their wedding took place
in a small chapel in a neighbouring village, although the minister took some
persuading before he let the Wildgoose family across the threshold of his territory;
long hours spent asking God if it was all right to hate an entire family
produced little encouragement.

There
had been a serious threat to Keith and Gina’s relationship arising from Keith’s
introduction to the Wildgoose family. But this mountain had been climbed and
everyone had safely coasted down the other side. An uneasy camaraderie existed
between Keith and Gina’s brothers Wobbly and Bighead but Jennifer and Norman
kept their distance during and after the wedding for fear of some breach in
social etiquette that would force them to cut the lines of communication
completely. Keith was terrified of his mother-in-law-to-be and found himself
taking seriously the idea that one’s wife’s mother is what one’s wife will
become eventually. This horrifying reverie overtook him during the ceremony
and when the kindly elderly minister asked Keith if he took ‘this woman’, his
mouth formed the word, ‘No.’

Something
akin to snarling emanated from the back of the chapel and Keith, waking from
his strange depersonalised state, realised what he had said and quickly
converted the ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.

The
reception in the village hall was a rather subdued affair because the legendary
stag night the previous evening in Hereford had left the major players in the
drama virtually blinded by hangovers. Keith, knowing that vast amounts of
alcohol would be poured down his throat before some kind of rustic humiliation
was visited upon him, had attempted to water down or spit out his drinks during
the evening, thus ensuring that when he was finally dragged into a fight and
then tied naked and protesting to the back of a milk float, the suffering was
doubled by his relative sobriety.

Still,
he and Gina were happy at last and, with what many of the older relatives
considered to be slightly bad-mannered haste, headed off for their honeymoon in
Aberystwyth. The elderly relatives had little idea just how unseemly the haste
was; had they processed behind the couple in Keith’s old van, decorated with a
few old cans and some badly spelled obscenities, they would have seen the van
swerve into the first field it encountered and within a very short time begin
to rock to the accompanying sounds of Gina’s shrieks and Keith’s low, mournful
whoops.

‘And
that was ‘ow you came to be, littl’un,’ Nan Wildgoose would often say to Alice
as she sat her on her bony knee and talked her through the post-nuptial
encounter.

‘Mum,
for Chrissakes,’ Gina would say, even she baulking at the idea of a
three-year-old being regaled with her parents ‘first sexual encounter in place
of a bedtime story.

‘Shall
I tell ‘er ‘bout the stag night instead then?’ asked Nan Wildgoose.

‘Jesus,’
said Gina, her eyes swivelling towards the ceiling.

1974, aged 5

As Alice began to grow
into a little girl, she realised she would have to go out into a world
populated with even more people like her grandma, grandpap and disturbed
uncles, and for this, at the unsophisticated age of five, she would need to
develop a persona which would charm yet protect her from the unwanted
approaches of the county’s overbearing people. She was a sweet-looking child
whose dirty blonde curls immediately put one in mind of a sad little orphan; consequently
people, especially middle-aged women, wanted to pick her up and hug her to
their cushiony ample bosoms, a berth she did not particularly want to occupy So
she developed an outward ambivalence towards the rest of the human race, which
made it hard for them to judge whether she was in desperate need of their care
or too disturbed to warrant it.

She
learned from her uncles Wobbly and Bighead how to effect socially unacceptable
behaviour and on occasions would dribble whilst clasped to a fervent do-gooder.
This resulted in an immediate loosening of the hug and on one or two occasions
a swift plummet to the ground, accompanied by an exclamation of disgust. Word
quickly went round that ‘the Wilson child’s a bit simple’, and this meant that
people were wary of her, which, to Alice, was a good thing.

When
Alice started at the local primary school, she quickly became known as the
problem child by the teaching staff. This was not because she was a problem but
because her mother Gina was. Teachers would hold their breath most mornings
until they saw Keith amble into view, because on the rare days when Gina
appeared with Alice in tow, it would be like negotiating with a hostage-taker.
Some mornings Gina was all right but her unpredictability only served to increase
the frisson of fear amongst the small group of teachers.

This
stemmed from an incident when Gina had thrown a tantrum following a slight
disagreement between herself and the headmaster, John Jarvis, who found it
absolutely inconceivable that anyone would challenge his authority On a frosty
February morning, as he stood at the gates redefining the meaning of welcoming
children to school, given that his face disagreed so violently with his relaxed
posture, he threw out a remark to Gina as she passed, on the inappropriateness
of her daughter wearing short socks in such cold weather. Gina, who had spent
some twenty minutes trying to find any socks at all that remotely resembled
each other in colour, let alone a pair of long ones, was in no mood for this
rebuke and turned, still holding Alice’s hand, to face Mr Jarvis.

‘Pardon,’
she said, with a homicidal glint in her eye.

John
Jarvis, who was incapable of either predicting impending human storms or indeed
preventing them, blithely repeated his statement.

He
could not quite believe he had heard the words, ‘Mind your own fucking
business, fat arse,’ and launched into a speech concerning the use of bad
language in front of children. This was curtailed by a sharp pain in his
stomach and he realised that the child’s mother had hit him.

The
altercation began to catch the notice of the other parents and John Jarvis
escalated it tenfold by attempting to restrain Gina with what he would describe
as ‘a firm hand’ and she ‘a pervert’s clamp’. Had not one of the teachers, a
little bird-like creature called Miss Mount, intervened at this point, serious
injury might have occurred. Miss Mount knew Gina Wilson of old and her instinct
to steer John Jarvis away from her proved to be the saving of his reputation,
as his anger at being challenged was rising so ferociously that he was about to
slap her.