Page 14 of Things We Never Said
Once we’d had a drink and shared a plate of cheesy chips, we walked across town to your house. You carried my bag for me and talked all the time in that gentle, thoughtful way of yours. You told me about a party you’d been to at the weekend and about a band who were coming to play at the student union. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but I know I’d never heard of them and as we walked through this scary underpass that went beneath a big roundabout, you sang their hit song to me. You were convinced that I should know it, but I didn’t. I’d spent too much time singing along to ABBA and Bucks Fizz to know groups like that.
I think that’s the moment I fell in love with you. Oh, I was already fascinated by you, but when you sang to me, I fell in love properly. You’ve always had a lovely voice, but when you sang, it used to make my heart go all fluttery and you used to sing a lot. I wonder when that stopped and why? I suppose it’s just something that happens when you get older.
When we got to the house, music was blaring out. It’s funny that I remember this, but I do: Alistair was playing The Pretenders. It was that album with Chrissie Hynde on the cover wearing a red leather jacket. The song that was playing as you opened the front door was ‘Kid’.
I’d heard it on the radio, but I’d never really listened to The Pretenders before and I’d certainly never heard them on a proper hi-fi like the one Alistair had.
That memory, walking into that messy lounge, seeing Alistair blowing smoke rings into the air; it’s as fresh as if it happened just yesterday.
You asked him to turn the music down – you had to shout to be heard – and Alistair asked, ‘Why?’
He had no intention of turning it down, so to avoid an argument, I told you it was fine. I said that I liked it and, in a way, I did.
That weekend was so ... dense, I suppose you’d say, in new experiences. Alistair played me The Pretenders and Patti Smith and Yazoo. I smoked my first joint and threw up discreetly in that horrible mouldy downstairs toilet. I met more interesting people in those three days than I’d meet in Margate in a year. But the things I remember the most are the conversations you all used to have.
I suppose, looking back on it, that you students were all a bit up yourselves really, but at the time, sitting up until four in the morning talking about whether God existed or not was a revelation to me. You’ll think I’m overstating it, but the conversations I’d had back home rarely got much further than whether or not Tracey Furlong was up the duff and who the father might be.
It was hard at first because I realised that I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t used to these kinds of conversations and had nothing, really, to contribute. So I just sat quietly, soaking it all up.
Your friend Theresa declared that I was a listener. ‘Anyone can talk,’ she said, ‘but the cleverest people spend their time listening.’ And that really pleased me. It provided me with an identity, a sort of camouflage, so I could sit and listen to you all and not get noticed and not be judged for not saying anything. But the more that I sat and listened, the more I realised that I didn’t fit in at home, either. It was a real shock when I got back, to suddenly feel so out of it, to suddenly feel such disdain for all the boring chit-chat around me.
On the Sunday evening, you took me to the student bar and we danced. The music was strange stuff that they never played in discos in Margate. It was all Lloyd Cole and The Smiths and The Cure, and I had to look around me at the other girls to work out how to dance to it. They didn’t really dance at all, actually. They just sort of moved their arms back and forth and shuffled their feet a bit. Margate dancing wasSaturday Night Feverby comparison.
Predictably, by the time we left we were drunk. You were so drunk, you lay down in the middle of the ring road and I yanked on your arms to get you to get up again, but instead you pulled me down on top of you and we snogged, there in the middle of the traffic island.
The next morning we did the deed for the first time and even that was different from everything that had gone before.
I’d slept with five boys before you (another thing you never knew) but they’d all wanted just one thing: to get their rocks off as soon as possible. But, as always, you made it about me instead. By the time you’d finished, I’d come – I’d actually come! Oh, I’d managed that before on my own, but no one I had slept with had ever bothered before. I remember thinking on the bus back home that you were definitely what Mum would call a ‘keeper’.
Another week begins. If he tries really hard, Sean can just about manage to feel a little pride in the fact that he’s surviving, that he’s still functioning: he’s doing his washing, his ironing; he’s making it to work each day. For the moment, there’s not much more he can do. It reminds him of that Tom Hanks film, where Tom just sits waiting to see what the tide will bring.
He feels like he’s in stasis, waiting for Catherine to return. That idea, that she isn’t going to return, is one of the hardest to get his head around and he’s surprised, even though he knows that it’s ridiculous, every time he gets home and rediscovers that she’s not there.
On Monday, he barely manages to work at all. He sits, instead, staring at his computer screen, his mind lost in the eighties.
The recordings are reminding him how it felt to be young: how exciting, how fun, how nerve-racking everything was back then. He had somehow forgotten that all of those memories were his own, that these were all things he had lived through, not simply stories he had read.
On Wednesday evening, he bursts into tears while driving home and has to pull over into a lay-by until he can see properly again. He sits with his hands on the steering wheel and searches for the origin of this particular batch of tears. It’s not until he glances over at the grassy traffic island that he realises he had been remembering kissing Catherine in the middle of the ring road.
Once again, it’s hard to believe that was him, and he wonders about this sense of lost continuity between the young man that he once was and this man in a grey jacket in an Astra, crying at the side of the road. He wonders why his memories feel like a story from a film or a book he once read. Why is it so hard to feel the connection between that drinking, kissing, shagging, singing Sean and this one?
He feels closer to the Sean he was before he met Catherine – and that, after all, isn’t so illogical. Those old, adolescent sensations of being scared and alone, of not being able to imagine the future, are returning.
In an attempt at trying to work out who he is now that she’s gone, he’s lapsing into old ways; in some cases, very old ways. It’s as if he perhaps needs to remember that he changed when he met Catherine, that he did exist before he met her.
So he’s buying oven chips and he’s drinking cans of beer. He’s smoking the occasional cigarette (after a twenty-year break), and on weekends he’s slobbing around in a tracksuit until lunchtime.
On Friday evening, he leaves work early and swings by a hi-fi store on Hills Road.
He has been thinking about what Catherine said, that he has stopped singing. He’s been trying to work out when and why that happened and has realised that he’s even stopped listening to music.
As far as he can work out, this musical hiatus seems to have sneaked up on him in the mid-2000s, which would make sense because that’s when he converted all of his CDs into MP3 files and stacked them in the loft with his records. It’s perhaps no surprise that the moment he stopped listening to albums is the moment they quite literally dematerialised.
And now it is Sunday morning and he has just finished wiring the new turntable into the TV’s surround sound speakers. He doesn’t even have a proper amplifier anymore.
He opens the trap to the attic and lowers the stepladder. He rummages around until he finds the box of vinyl.
He looks through the records, one by one, each album cover provoking a flood of memories. He finally selects Pink Floyd’sAnimals, and the record is so dirty that he has to wash it under the tap before he dares to play it.
