Page 13 of Things We Never Said
Sean pours the chips into the grill pan, studies the instructions on the packet and then slides the pan into the oven and sets the timer. He has been craving chips and brown sauce all week, ever since he played last Sunday’s message. But yesterday, Saturday, was the first opportunity he’s had to actually go to buy some, and as April has been visiting, he’s been busy all day.
He was tempted, twice, to mention the messages to her. She’s missing her mother horribly and the messages might help comfort her, in the same way that their regular drip, drip into his life is comforting him. But if he tells April about the messages now, she’ll want to know the contents of every message, every Sunday. And until he understands what they contain, he can’t possibly decide if that’s a good idea. For the moment, he feels that by keeping them from her he’s protecting her, even if he’s not sure yet exactly what he’s protecting her from.
So the box has remained stashed beneath the stairs and they have spent the day wandering around Cambridge. They have walked along the Cam and eaten a pub lunch at the Fort StGeorge. They have done their best to comfort each other, but in truth Sean feels more alone with April present than he does without her, her grief seemingly compounding his own.
Now that she has returned to London, Sean’s finally able to cook his oven chips; he’s finally free to open his box.
He retrieves envelope number four and props it against the edge of the box. He puts out a plate, salt, vinegar and the unopened bottle of brown sauce, and sets about making himself a cup of tea.
Twenty minutes later, he tips the chips onto the plate and sits down.
‘This is your fault, Cathy,’ he murmurs, addressing the box as he raises the first chip to his lips.
It’s much too hot to eat for the moment, so he puts it back down and reaches for the cassette instead. He removes last week’s tape from the machine and clips in the new one. He’s been waiting for this all day. He’s been waiting for this all week. He flips over the photo.
Snapshot #4
35mm format, colour. The photo is crumpled and scuffed. A man with long hair is slouched on an ugly leather sofa. He is smoking a joint. Behind him is a shelf stacked with records and a turntable with a tinted plastic lid, beside which is an enormous loudspeaker. The grille has been removed to reveal the round black cones of the drivers.
Wow! Alistair!Sean thinks.
Alistair was the first person Sean had ever shared a house with, once he moved out of halls of residence at the end of the first year. He’d been a heavy dope smoker and was kicked off his art course at the end of the second year, but had been rich enough to stay on in Wolverhampton and continue making his art – a series of horrific splatter paintings – in the attic.
Sean hasn’t thought about Alistair for years. He wonders what he’s up to now. Sean bets he’s not an artist anymore. He reckons that he most likely caved in to his father’s wishes at some point. He probably ended up in banking or something.
Initially, they had bonded for the simple reason that they were both from upper-class families, yet had both, each for his own reasons, ended up at Wolverhampton Poly.
Alistair was there because he knew it would upset his parents. Sean, on the other hand, had forgotten to post his uni applications. They had sat, stamped and addressed and ready to go, in the glove compartment of his father’s car for months, and by the time they were found it was too late for Cambridge and too late for Oxford and too late, in fact, for any major university. He had gone onto the reserve list, and when a place had become free at Wolves he had jumped at it. They had a decent architecture course, after all. And the far less appealing alternative was staying at home for a year.
Sean remembers being mortified about the state of their shared house. Alistair had found the house and Alistair had stumped up the hefty security deposit as well. But that’s where his involvement had ended. He had certainly never done his share of the housework, and this, particularly the piled-high washing-up, had been a constant source of discord between them.
Before meeting Catherine at the station, Sean had spent three hours cleaning. But the place still looked like it had been turned over by the SAS by the time they got home. Sean wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d turned around and walked back out, but she had pretended, he remembers, to love it.
Cassette #4
Hi Sean.
So look at this! A photo of the house you were living in. A photo of Alistair, too.
We had only spent two days together, our weekend in Margate, mostly mucking around with your college friends, occasionally stealing kisses beneath the sun deck, but on Monday you had to go back. Your train ticket was already booked, and you couldn’t afford, you said, to change it. At first, I thought that you’d just had enough of me. I thought you were using the ticket to escape. But then you admitted to working part-time in a corner shop and I realised you’d just been too embarrassed to tell me.
Looking back on it, I’m surprised that you ended up at poly. I would have thought that someone with your background and education would have gone straight to Oxford or Cambridge. I’m sure you must have explained to me, way back when, how that came about, but I must have forgotten. Maybe your A-level results weren’t up to scratch? That sounds familiar, so I expect that’s it.
Still, back then, the word ‘Wolverhampton’ meant nothing to me. I was as excited at the idea of going there as I would have been if you’d invited me to Paris or New York. I’d never been anywhere much. Well, I’d been to London a couple of times but only on school trips to the Science Museum and the like. I think I went once with Mum to the January sales as well, but I was really little. The only bit I remember is that we took a black cab to get to the station because we were late. I thought that was really exciting.
As far as I was concerned, Wolverhampton was quite exotic.
Mum was outraged. ‘Why the buggery do you want to go there?’ she asked.
‘It’s that Sean fella,’ Stinky Dennis chipped in. ‘Fancies ’im, don’t she?’
Train tickets were expensive, and the journey was complicated (you had to travel across London on the Underground in those days), so I bought a ticket on a National Express coach. I can’t remember how long it took, but I do know it seemed like a very, very long way.
As the bus drove into Wolverhampton, I felt a bit disappointed, to be honest. I never told you that, but it was a grey day and drizzling and the outskirts of the town were these desolate industrial wastelands back then. I remember seeing half-demolished factories. I think industry in the Black Country just sort of died around there during the Thatcher years.
Anyway, even coming from Margate, everything looked a bit poor and grey and dusty.
You met me at the bus station and took me to a wine bar – Kipps, I think it was called, but I might have got that wrong. It was dark and cavernous and the tables were sticky.
