The More You Ignore Me (8 page)

24 November 1983, aged
15

It was Thursday
Fifteen-year-old Alice, languid, miserable, bored, pessimistic and prickly,
always felt slightly better on a Thursday because
Top Of The Pops
was
on. She loved her dad very much but his repertoire of Dylan and other American
folk singers didn’t say anything to her about the dark thoughts and feelings
she carried inside. Most of these she attempted to suppress in the family home
because having a mother who was little more than a ghostly figure in the house
these days meant that the balance of good-naturedness and optimism was a step
away from disintegrating. It only took one of Alice’s fearsome, teenage moods
to lay a big black cloud over the place, something Keith with his studied nonchalance
and desperate cheeriness could not cope with as’ well as Gina.

These
days Keith smoked a bit more dope than he used to, carefully avoiding discovery
by Alice, as he somehow felt he owed it to her to normalise her life as much as
possible, given that her mother set a skewed example of what a child’s
upbringing should be. But Alice always knew when Keith had smoked a joint
because his natural befuddledness would become more marked and he would exhibit
a fatuousness not normally present. He laughed much more easily at stupid
things and wasn’t very good at getting the conundrum at the end of
Countdown,
a word game that had recently started on the new Channel 4.

Gina
didn’t do much apart from smoke cigarettes and drift aimlessly round the house.
Every month she continued to have her long-acting injection which dampened down
her spirit to the point of her having no spirit at all. Alice watched her
helplessly, hoping that one day Gina would throw off the yoke of her medication
and go completely bloody mad for a few days. Alice knew this was unreasonable,
though. Gina’s psychiatrist had told Keith and Alice that he thought Gina was
suffering from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a psychotic condition — ‘A bit like
schizophrenia, when someone is out of touch with reality,’ he’d said to them,
doing his best to couch his explanation in layman’s terms. He’d also explained
that the illness involved Gina being convinced that the weatherman was in love
with her and interpreting completely innocent actions on his part as a sign
that this was the case.

‘Like
what?’ Keith had asked.

‘Well,’
Dr Desmond said, ‘he might make a movement with his hands or look in a
particular way and Gina will impose an interpretation all of her own. We call this
ideas of reference.’

He’d
also told them about some of the other symptoms. He said Gina might hear
voices, may become paranoid or might be confused in her thinking.

‘But
the drugs will help, won’t they?’ Keith had said hopefully.

‘To an
extent,’ he had answered, ‘but really the drugs are just damping down the worst
of Gina’s symptoms rather than taking them away, and of course the drugs
themselves have side effects that aren’t too pleasant. Gina may slow up, become
withdrawn and may get a slight tremor.’

‘And
how do we deal with that?’ said Keith.

‘By
prescribing another drug, I’m afraid,’ he’d said, aware that the barely hidden
look of disdain on Keith’s face was an appropriate response to how little
psychiatry had achieved in terms of treating the myriad subtleties that made up
the damaged human mind.

So
Keith and Alice had had to become resigned over the years to the ravaging of
Gina and her personality and to gradually accept that through a combination of
the illness and the drugs, the butterfly had turned back into a cocoon.

Keith
had tried to explain this as simply as he could to Alice and the
oversimplification rested in Alice’s head as the belief that her mother was in
love with people who weren’t in love with her and that she was not in love with
her dad any more. Alice realised that letting Gina’s demons out of her own
personal Pandora’s box would mean they couldn’t be forced back in very easily.

As
Alice sat curled up in the rather unpleasant beige armchair in the front room,
a vision appeared on the TV screen that sent a frisson of something she had
never experienced before through her body A man wearing a necklace and a loose
shirt, waving some gladioli about, was singing about not having anything to
wear out that night. He was strange-looking, handsome with dark brows and a
quiff. He seemed rather androgynous as he moved in a unique way around the
small stage as if he owned it. Alice moved closer and turned up the volume.

Keith
came into the room to see his daughter just a few feet from the television,
transfixed by some oddball who to Keith looked like a skinny Irish Elvis.

Alice,’
he said.

Alice
put her hand up to indicate she didn’t want to speak and carried on staring at
the screen. She felt as if she had been transported out of her tired and
miserable life to a dazzling place of glamour and magic. She edged even closer
and unwittingly put her hand out towards the screen to try and touch the man.

Oh
bloody hell, thought Keith. This is all too familiar.

Alice
watched in a trance, letting herself get lost in the swirling sound, and at the
end when Mike Smith said that the band was called the Smiths and the track
‘This Charming Man’, she ran upstairs to get her diary and wrote the date, the
name of the band and the name of the song.

At the
end of
Top Of The Pops,
she dialled Karen’s number. Karen’s posh dad
answered and rather irritably agreed to get Karen, although he preferred to
keep the line free of chattering schoolgirls for more important things like
arranging to meet his friends and massacre some animals. He never asked who it
was, as teenage girls were all the same to him. Useless, screechy, expensive
and a dead weight until some fool agreed to marry them and take them off your
hands.

Karen’s
voice said, ‘Hello.’

‘It’s
me, Alice’, said Alice. ‘Did you see
Top Of The Pops?’

‘Sort
of,’ said Karen. ‘I was doing my homework at the same time though.’

‘Did
you see the Smiths?’ asked Alice, a little touch of excitement running through
her as she said their name.

‘Don’t
know,’ said Karen. ‘What did they look like?’

‘Well,
the singer. I don’t know his name, had a loose shirt, a sort of necklace—’

And a
big bunch of flowers. Wanker. Yes, I saw him’

There
was a brief hiatus as Karen’s sharp-eared mum spent a few seconds remonstrating
with her daughter for her use of the word ‘wanker’.

‘Sorry
about that, she’s gone now,’ said Karen. ‘What were you saying?’

‘Oh
Karen,’ said Alice. ‘I know this sounds so stupid and I can’t really describe
it but as soon as I saw him, it sort of changed me. He was so wonderful, so
odd, so beautiful …‘ She tailed off, embarrassed by the force of her
uncharacteristic outburst.

‘Bloody
hell,’ said Karen. ‘He’s certainly cast a spell on you but is he fuckable?’

This
was typical Karen and normally she made Alice laugh with her outrageous
statements. But Alice felt that Karen had somehow made the whole thing dirty
and silly.

‘Got to
go,’ she said and put the phone down.

With
one of her best friends unable to see the unadulterated genius of the Smiths
and the unique individual cavorting in front of the band, Alice phoned Mark.

‘He’s
not here,’ said Mark’s mum. ‘He’s just gone out in the fields with his dad,
giving him a hand.’ Poor bastard, she added to herself as she put the phone
down, convinced that her son was made for greater things than being a hulking
great son of the soil.

The
next day at school, life went on as normal. Alice had expected an excited buzz
in the playground about this incomparable new band. But the same old kids
she’d known for years were there doing what they always did. What did she
expect?

‘Who
saw that poof on telly last night?’

Alice
turned to see the school’s resident homophobe.

‘Put a
fucking sock in it, Stephen,’ she said.

‘Ooh,
hark at you, poof lover,’ he said. ‘You’d better watch it round here saying
those things.’

‘Leave
her alone,’ said Mark, not at all sure what he was defending.

‘So
you’re one now an’ all, are you?’ said Stephen with more than a hint of disgust
in his voice.

‘I’m a
what now?’ said Mark.

‘You
know what you are,’ said Stephen. ‘An arse bandit.’ A few teenage boys grinned
in a desultory way, sensing a ruck of some sort, and began to move closer to
the source of the dispute in case fists started flying.

‘Homo!
Homo! Homo!’ one of Stephen’s henchmen began to chant at no one in particular.

The
tension was resolved when an unwitting younger boy walked past carrying a
lovingly prepared packed lunch artistically wrapped by his mother and a chase
began which ended when he was propelled into a scrubby bush, sandwiches sent
flying.

‘Did
you see the Smiths on
Top Of The Pops?’
Alice asked Mark. ‘God, I wish I
could put it into words the effect they had on me.

‘I
did,’ said Mark. ‘They were certainly unusual.’

Alice
grinned.

‘What?’
said Mark.

‘You
sound like your dad,’ she said.

‘Not
quite,’ said Mark. ‘What my dad actually said was, “Look at that limp-wristed
little faggot. Turn over, son, there must be something decent on.”’

They
laughed.

Alice
found it hard to concentrate for the rest of the day Her mind kept replaying
the image of the elfin Morrissey moving through a landscape of light and sound.
She let herself be swooshed around in this world and it was only when a harsh
voice said, Alice, repeat back to me what I’ve just said,’ that she was
propelled back into the reality of a very boring geography lesson.

‘I
don’t know, Mrs Hurst,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.

‘Well,
perhaps a little extra work would help sort out your lack of concentration,’
said Mrs Hurst. ‘Come and see me at the end of the lesson.’

Nobody
really understands how I feel, Alice thought to herself, along with lonely,
unloved teenagers the length and breadth of Britain who were all beginning to
fall in love with Morrissey.

‘Dad,’
Alice said some days later when they were settled having their tea in front of
the telly while Gina smoked furiously in the kitchen and flicked through a
magazine full of fashion she would never have any access to.

‘Yes,
dear,’ said Keith, slightly stoned.

‘Where
would I find out more about some pop group I like?’ She tried to say this as
nonchalantly as possible because she didn’t want her dad getting involved in
his dad-like way.

‘Who do
you mean?’ said Keith, trying to scrape the accumulation of several days’
worth of grit off a piece of toast he had dropped butter side down on the
carpet.

‘Oh,
just someone I saw on
Top Of The Pops,’
she said.

‘Well,
you could get a magazine and see if they’re in there,’ said Keith.
‘Melody
Maker
or
New Musical Express.
Try Doug in the shop.’

Alice
didn’t want to try Doug in the shop. He would definitely take the piss. She
could hear him now.

‘Ooh,
little Alice, you’re growing up, look at you, you’re nearly a woman.’

Although
Alice knew that Doug wasn’t really like those pervy men who remarked on budding
breasts and tight shirt buttons, she still couldn’t face his attempts at a
cheeky remark.

So the
next morning she cycled to a further village where Mrs Akers, who looked eighty
and had the lack of sight and hearing to match, stood guard over a vastly
depleted little shop selling sweets and newspapers. Mrs Akers had a face like a
flesh-coloured piece of crumpled paper. It was difficult to discern an
expression on it but as she appeared to have only one mood, grumpy, the issue
of how she was feeling on any particular day never arose.

Alice
waited outside the shop until there was no one in there, embarrassed that she
might make some sort of faux pas, like getting the name of the magazine wrong.
Finally an elderly couple who had deliberated for what seemed hours over the
relative merits of Ginger Nuts over Bourbons, came out and got into their old
Morris Minor and bunny-hopped off down the road.

‘Hello,
young Alice, and what can I do for you?’ asked Mrs Akers rather too loudly.

Alice
began to scan the rows of papers and magazines and was presented with a blur of
People’s Friend, The Lady
and
Bunty.

‘Do you
have a
New Musical Express,
Mrs Akers?’ she asked.

‘Eh,
what’s that? Speak up,’ said Mrs Akers.

‘New
Musical Express,’
said Alice, flushing brightly.

‘New
Musical Express?’
said Mrs Akers. ‘What’s that
then? About musicals, is it?’

‘No,
it’s a pop paper.’ said Alice. ‘You know, with pop groups in it.’