The More You Ignore Me (28 page)

‘Some
bloke felt up my bum,’ said Mark.

Alice
could not help laughing. Mark’s expression was one of hurt outrage and Alice
scolded herself for not taking something seriously that she would want taken
seriously if it happened to her.

‘I’m
sorry, Mark,’ she said. ‘It’s just such a surreal place compared to what we’re used
to. I didn’t mean to be horrible. All right, let’s drink these quickly and go
then.’

Molly
seemed highly disappointed by their intention to leave.

‘Come
on, luvvie,’ he said to Mark, stroking his hair. ‘Stay and have a few more, it
might relax you.

Mark
didn’t want to be relaxed. He stood up.

‘Let’s
go,’ he said to Alice.

Alice
downed the dregs of her half and they nodded a goodbye to Molly and exited with
some speed.

‘Thank
Christ we’re out of there,’ said Mark as the cold air hit them. ‘Can we go
home? I know we said we were going to stay but I don’t know if I can.

‘I’m
sorry it’s been hard for you, Mark,’ said Alice. ‘Please can we just pop down
to Morrissey’s mum’s house, do one last drive past the Salford Lads’ Club and
then go?’

She
fixed him with such an imploring gaze that it made his heart jump a little.

‘All
right,’ he said wearily ‘Let’s do that, but I don’t like this place, it’s too
big, too weird and too frightening.’

They
got in the car and Alice directed him to the house where Morrissey had grown
up, a surprisingly suburban street, not the scene of decay desperation and
splintered dreams that Alice had expected. Again, there were a couple of groups
of student types standing quietly outside. The curtains in the house were drawn
for the night and the containment of light and warmth inside the house served
only to underline the isolation and frustration of the few hopeful fans lurking
there. This time there was no friendly woman to approach so Alice decided
against asking any of them about Gina, a foolish decision as Gina had left the
place with Dunk some ten minutes before.

It was
now nearing eleven and a brief sail past the Salford Lads’ Club completed their
unsuccessful search for Alice’s mother. Alice stepped briefly into a call box
to let Keith know that the search had thrown up no leads and they were on their
way home.

‘Never
mind, sweetheart,’ said Keith down the line. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see…
and I’ve got a nice surprise for you.

The
little car made its way out to the west of Manchester and eventually they hit
the A49 and headed south, skirting Whitchurch and Shrewsbury.

The
pair realised they were hungry and pulled into a service station to buy
something to sustain them until they got home.

‘Where
do you think she is?’ Alice said to Mark, not really wanting to think too
deeply about this question herself but just wanting to hear some reassurance.

Mark
was not hopeful. He knew enough about Gina to understand just how vulnerable
she was and even though his sheltered, reasonably wealthy lifestyle had
cocooned him to a certain extent, he was well aware that there were plenty of
men out there prepared to take advantage of Gina’s inability to make sound
judgements. But he knew Alice didn’t want to hear this.

‘I
reckon she’s all right, you know,’ he said. ‘I think she’s found herself
somewhere warm and cosy and she’s OK.’

Alice
smiled and patted Mark’s knee in the dark. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

Gina was snoring soundly,
tucked up in bed with Dunk in his grubby little flat on the outskirts of
Chester. Having lived on his own for so long, free from the shackles of being
compelled to order his life in the pristine way his wife wanted him to, he
revelled in the most enormous mess imaginable. Washing-up sometimes stood for
weeks, the carpet was a chequered memorial to all the snacks he had consumed
over the last few months, and the neglect in the bedroom bore witness to the
fact that it was a place used purely to lie down in then leave until the next
time it was required.

After
their tour round the Morrissey monuments of Manchester, Dunk had managed to
persuade Gina she needed sleep and food. He felt an immense fondness for her
already; she was the antithesis of his departed wife, whose primary purpose in
life in the few years before her death seemed to be to berate him about
everything. Gina was totally non-judgemental, it seemed. Life just flowed past
her, without her in any way wanting to alter its course, apart from satisfying
her passion for this Morrissey person.

Sure,
he thought to himself, she probably is a bit cracked with this pop singer
business but she’s no trouble and I like her. She hadn’t even complained about
the long row of empty beer bottles decorating the perimeter of the kitchen but
had just fetched herself a glass and began to examine the bottles one by one,
adding their contents to her glass to create a flat beer cocktail as a prelude
to bed.

Mark and Alice reached
Alice’s house at two thirty in the morning, both exhausted.

‘You
might as well stay here,’ said Alice, ‘seeing as you’re so knackered.’

‘Where
shall I sleep?’ said Mark, wondering whether a night on a settee would really
offer him the opportunity for a decent night.

‘With
me or my dad,’ said Alice cheerily ‘Your choice.’

‘Tempted
as I am by a night with your dad,’ said Mark, ‘I choose you.’

A
curled cheese sandwich was waiting for Alice in the kitchen and they shared it
between them with a glass of milk each. After that, they climbed the stairs,
divested themselves of the outer layers of their clothes and lay down together
under the blankets in the cold room. Within seconds they were asleep in each other’s
arms for practical reasons rather than romantic ones.

The
next morning, having sneaked Marie out of the house like a teenager, Keith
shouted up the stairs, ‘Breakfast!’ and Alice padded down in her dressing gown
to inform him of Mark’s presence in her bedroom.

‘Well,
I hope you didn’t get up to anything,’ he said with a grin.

Karen
would have said, ‘I fucked his brains out,’ thought Alice, but she just said,
‘Oh Dad,’ and smiled.

Over
breakfast with a tousle-haired Mark, who felt like a condemned man even though
there was no reason to, Keith produced his surprise.

A
Morrissey T-shirt,’ said Alice. ‘Thanks, Dad. Lovely’

‘Not
just a Morrissey T-shirt,’ said Keith with a flourish of the tea towel. ‘This
will get you into his gig in Wolverhampton in five days, on the twenty-second.’

‘Oh my
God!’ she said. ‘I’ll finally get to see him. How incredible.’ She jumped up
and hugged her dad.

‘And
I’ve arranged for you to stay the night with Grandma and Grandad,’ said Keith.

This
was a bit of a depressing thought, but she would have stayed with Wobbly and
Bighead in a haunted house if it meant she could see Morrissey. She was flooded
with happiness and all her worries about her mum suddenly seemed lighter. Alice
lay awake in bed that night, with Morrissey crooning on her record player, and
blissfully contemplated the transcendental experience of being in the same room
as the lovely man.

Keith found himself
thinking about Gina many times during the days that followed her exit from his
and Alice’s life. He didn’t know whether to trust his instincts that all was
well and that somewhere Gina was safe and being cared for by a good, patient
person. In his mind’s eye he saw some nuns in a small rundown city convent
ministering to Gina in a cosy cell-like room while she recovered. He knew this
was solely a result of his fervent wishes rather than reality but the strong
feeling still existed that somehow everything was fine for Gina.

One day
without even thinking about it, Keith sank to his knees in the little sitting room
and found his hands touching each other in the manner of a prayer.

‘Please
keep Gina safe, God,’ he found himself saying. His own voice sounded very
strange to him in the empty room.

He
laughed. ‘Sorry, God, for laughing. I’m not really used to this and I’m sure
you’re mighty fed up with those of us who experience a little tragedy in our
lives and turn to you because we can’t think of anything else to do.’

Keith
had always thought God was fundamentally a good bloke who had a sense of humour
and was pretty laid-back about human weakness. This he had gleaned from an
upbringing in the Church of England and the inability of the vicar in his local
church to be anything other than a charming and feckless libertarian. His
unspoken acknowledgement to the children of the parish, whom he saw mainly at
weddings and harvest festival, that church services were meaningless and dull
for anyone under the age of ninety had endeared him to all the local children,
whilst simultaneously making a few elderly matrons suspicious of his motives.
But, to Keith, the vicar had always sat in his head as the representative of a
benign institution to which he could turn in times of crisis and from which he
could receive some sort of spiritual relief.

Gina,
meanwhile, remained with Dunk in his crummy little abode outside Chester.

Gina’s
mental condition was not something Dunk was particularly uncomfortable with.
His own mother had been prone to what the rest of his family had called ‘funny
little turns’, when she took herself off to bed and refused to come out.
Sometimes this would last a couple of days and at other times as long as three
weeks. She would emerge only to go to the toilet or poke around in the cupboard
in the kitchen in a desperate search for something she actually wanted to eat.
Dunk’s railwayman father had accepted these trips to a parallel universe
without fuss, and his relaxed approach to the strangeness of their family life
had engendered in Dunk and his sister Joy an altruistic and easy-going
temperament.

In his
tiny shambolic home, Dunk surveyed Gina as she stared at the loud television
which was his constant companion.

‘Tell
me something about yourself, love,’ he said to her. ‘Where do you come from?
Have you got family? What am I going to do with you?’

Gina
never liked these verbal excursions other people tried to take into her life.
She grunted something unintelligible in reply but Dunk was not to be put off.

‘Come
on, Gina,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to give me something. I’ve got to know a bit
of who you are. You can’t just stay here if I don’t know nothing about you.’

‘I
don’t want to talk about Gina,’ said Gina. ‘She’s a person who’s fucked. Let me
stay here, please. I like it.’

She
genuinely did like it. For the first time, she felt she could truly be at ease.
In this grubby little place, with this big lump of an old man, she felt
protected and relaxed. Sexual favours seemed a small price to pay for using him
as a stepping stone to greater glory with Morrissey Although she could not
really articulate it in her muddled brain, somewhere down deep she was well
aware that she could be lying in a dark wood with a ligature round her throat
or floating face down in some dank canal.

‘Please,
Dunk, I like it here,’ she said again.

Dunk
grinned. It was a compliment and one he couldn’t really understand. Why did
this much younger, albeit weird woman want to be here in this neglected hovel?
Perhaps she really liked him.

‘Well,
let’s play it by ear then, you funny girl,’ he said fondly He looked her up and
down and took in the shabby stained skirt, the over-large, nylon cardigan and
the dirty slippers.’

‘Listen,’
he said. ‘We’ll take you to the shops and get you some new clothes tomorrow and
see how things go, shall we?’

Gina
got as near to a smile as she could.

‘Yeah,’
she said and turned back to the telly.

Later
that night, Dunk bathed Gina as if she was a child. Gina sat in the scummy bath
quite contentedly as Dunk lathered up an old flannel and ran it over her back.
He put shampoo on her hair and massaged it into her scalp, rinsing it with
water poured from an old plastic jug his wife had used for cooking.