Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  He’d got home at half past two in the morning and let himself into the still, silent front hall with the exaggerated caution of the mildly drunk, but he’d still woken up McCulloch, the doughty little Jack Russell, who’d then left his basket with the resigned air of an elderly retainer and followed Dan all the way to his office in the eaves, at the top of the house. It was an awkward room really, with sloping ceilings and only one small window, but it faced west, so on a cloudless evening it poured a gentle stream of sunshine on to the dark wooden floorboards. The room contained a chipped and scarred industrial desk and an old brass anglepoise lamp from the offices of an Edinburgh mill; an original Eames chair, black leather, metal frame; a turntable, a CD player and an iPod dock; three specially built steel cabinets for LPs and singles, and a fourth for CDs. He’d kept his cassette tapes too, hundreds of them, but they were in plastic crates in the basement. One wall was given over to books, another to a vast world map, and a third was plastered with memories, every one of which had a hold on Dan’s heart. A signed black and white shot of himself with Siouxsie Sioux after a gig in Manchester in 1984. An official framed photograph of the Sheffield Wednesday League Cup winning team of 1991. A publicity poster for Echo and the Bunnymen’s Evergreen album tour of the States – the tour he’d been on with them, like, really with them, researching and writing their authorised story. Photos of Alex, felt-tip and crayon pictures by Alex, and a densely illustrated poem by Alex, aged eight, for Father’s Day:

  He plays guitar and drives our car and makes me chips for tea.

  He plays football, he’s good in goal and his favourite person’s ME!

  Photos of Katelin, holding Alex, pushing him on a swing, holding his feet while he stood on his head. A photo of the three of them wide-eyed with happiness the night Alex got his stellar Highers results. And there in the centre of them all, a snap of Dan and Katelin, looking like children, standing against a backdrop of bougainvillea in a shady alley in Cartagena, smiling not at the camera but at each other, like two people with a secret joke. They’d hardly known each other then. Dan couldn’t remember who took it.

  From behind his desk, he let his eyes roam over his past. It told the story of his life, that wall; it kept him steady in this house in Stockbridge, with its long back garden, its shed for the bikes, its front door painted Sheffield Wednesday blue. He and Katelin had been itinerants at first: moved five times in as many years. Then he’d written a brilliantly precocious and obsessive history of the NME and got a half-decent advance, the like of which didn’t happen any more in music publishing, and suddenly gone were the days of dossing, the mattresses on the floor, the mildew on the ceiling, the naked light bulbs, the kilims nailed to their bedroom windows creating a permanent, seedy gloaming. God, though, those days were something else. She was studying Spanish at the university, and Dan spent his nights at gigs and his days writing unsolicited music reviews for the Scotsman. They’d lived on Katelin’s grant and the occasional tenner that Dan made for his writing. They’d met in Colombia, a bar in Bogotá. Katelin was plucky, an intrepid, red-haired, sturdy girl from Coleraine, with skin as pale as milk, even after two months travelling in South America. She spoke fluent Spanish, drank like a navvy, and sang raunchy Irish ballads – folk filth, she called it – when she was hammered. For the first time since arriving in the country, Dan had started having a good time.

  They stuck together. She’d gone back to university to finish her degree in the September, and Dan had called on his folks in Sheffield to fill them in on his future, then hitched and walked, with a rucksack and his guitar, all the long way to Edinburgh. By the time he knocked on the door of Katelin’s Marchmont Road flat, he had holes in his trainers, blisters on the soles of his feet, and he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. He waited on the doorstep, light-headed, half-starved, and for the few minutes it took her to answer, he considered the possibility that she’d be horrified to see him, or – worse – that she didn’t really exist. But then the door opened and Katelin was there, all the flesh and blood of her, assembled exactly as Dan remembered. She’d smiled and said, ‘You took your feckin’ time,’ and that was that.

  Long time ago now: long, long time. Dan sat at his desk, up in the eyrie, just a few minutes before 3 a.m., and allowed whisky-fuelled thoughts to cascade through his mind about the passing of time and its heedless, terrible speed. It was a shortcut to melancholy, but in the nick of time he remembered Willie Dundas, and he pulled the disc out of his jacket pocket and slid it into the CD player so that immediately his office was flooded with a guitar intro that made Dan smile: first, a single chord that hung in the air like a promise, then a quick-fingered bluesy riff and then Willie’s voice, low, mellow, impressionistic, laying down his lyrics with careless flair, as if he might be drunk, or barely had the energy to articulate them. It was a kind of genius, but Dan had been here before with Duncan’s finds; so full of artistic integrity that you couldn’t winkle them out of their fishing smacks, or their bedrooms, or their garden sheds. Dan let the music roll while he booted up the Mac for a quick, dutiful surf across Twitter, and he thought about Willie Dundas, singing on his herring boat in the North Sea, and wondered if he could be persuaded to sing in front of a room full of strangers at a place like Whistle Binkies.

  Twitter bloomed bright blue on the screen in front of him, and a stream of tweets appeared in the feed, in all their self-referential glory. Twenty-eight notifications from people to whom Dan was barely connected. Seven direct messages from people he actually knew, but nothing that had to be dealt with at 3 a.m. You had to be careful not to appear unhinged, leaving replies in the small hours, under the influence of Laphroaig. He scrolled idly through the morass, with that glazed disengagement that Twitter always induced in him, and he was about to shut down and go to bed, when a new notification pulsed on to the screen. Kev Carter. Always worth reading Kev’s messages, whatever the time of day or night. Dan leaned in closer to the screen, then immediately retreated, as if he’d been slapped.

  Ey up @DanLawrenceMusic remember Alison Connor? Look what’s she’s up to … only bloody famous!

  @CarterK9

  @AliConnorWriter

  Alison Connor. Jesus. Dan stared at her image.

  Alison Connor.

  Alison Connor.

  @AliConnorWriter.

  It was the first time he’d laid eyes on her for, what, thirty years? God Almighty. She looked the same: older, obviously, but the same. He clicked on her name, and the screen changed to her page, then he clicked on her picture, and it filled the screen. His mouth went dry, and this astonished him, because he’d made himself get over Alison Connor three decades ago. But she looked so lovely still, so intelligent, so vulnerable somehow. God Almighty. He studied her face. Yeah; she looked fucking incredible. He clicked back to her profile page:

  Dan sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and contemplated the world he lived in: the same world as Alison Connor, who unbeknown to him had moved to South Australia and forged a career as a novelist. A bestselling novelist, if those stats were anything to go by.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, Dan, what do you need to do on your laptop at this hour?’

  Katelin had left their bed, walked upstairs, opened the door and was now leaning on the frame watching him, evidently disgruntled, and he hadn’t heard a thing. He felt obscurely guilty, then immediately defensive.

  ‘All sorts,’ he said. ‘You might be sleeping but half the world’s awake.’

  ‘I’m not sleeping, Dan. Your music filtered into my dreams.’

  ‘Ah, sorry, did it wake you?’

  She shrugged, relenting slightly. ‘Well, no, I needed the loo, but then once I was awake, I could hear it through the floor.’ She ran a hand through her hair and it stuck out at all angles, so that she looked comical standing there, slightly grumpy, in tartan pyjamas.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Willie Dundas, fisherman from the East Neuk.’

  ‘Great. Well, can you switch him off and come to bed?
’

  ‘You got it.’ He looked at her and smiled, but he didn’t switch off his Mac. ‘Just doing some notes on Billy.’ Jesus, he thought. Why am I lying?

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Now? Really? Can it not wait?’

  ‘I promise I’ll be with you in five.’

  ‘God, McCulloch’s up here too.’

  ‘He followed me. I’ll put him back when I come down.’

  ‘In five.’

  ‘Yep.’

  She looked at him as though he was a lost cause, and turned away, padding barefoot back downstairs. He really must go; there were no notes to be written on Billy. There was nothing to keep him up here, and he was dead beat. But he hung back anyway, considered @AliConnorWriter for a while, for just one more minute – two minutes – three minutes. She was hard to leave, so soon after finding her. For almost ten minutes, in the end, he looked at her face, scrolled through her tweets, then googled her name and saw a whole world of information on the rise and rise of Ali Connor. Then he thought: Fuck it. He went back to her Twitter profile, clicked on the ‘Follow’ icon, snapped the lid of his laptop shut, silenced Willie Dundas, and went downstairs with McCulloch.

  3

  ADELAIDE,

  12 OCTOBER 2012

  Alison Connor’s mum’s friend was a Ten Pound Pom called Sheila; with that name, she used to say, she’d fitted right in in Australia. She’d sailed to Adelaide from Southampton in 1967 on one of those dirt-cheap assisted passages, following the promise of a new life in Elizabeth and a job at the Holden car plant, and there, she’d met and married Kalvin Schumer, an engineer, a real Australian, born and bred in Adelaide to German parents and as fine and strapping a man as Sheila had ever laid eyes on. At weekends, he’d wooed her on long trips north out of town to the desert, shooting big red roos to feed to his dogs, and snatching up snakes from the red earth, cracking them to death on a rock, like a whip.

  All this was in her letters, which for a while after she emigrated came about once a month, a conscientious and lyrical correspondence that really got on Catherine’s wick. She’d known Sheila Baillie when they were girls in the same street, but then the Baillie family moved to Liverpool, and Catherine only saw Sheila once more, at her own wedding to Geoff Connor, but Sheila hung on to the friendship, never quite grasping either the extent of Catherine’s indifference, or her relationship with the bottle, so she didn’t know that her letters from South Australia, chock full of verve and immigrant zeal, only shovelled further misery and bitterness into Catherine’s soul by flaunting a vivid picture of the world, so different to her own drab orbit.

  There was nothing drab about Sheila’s letters, oh no. She detailed her adventures in a looping, gregarious hand and peppered the words and phrases with exclamation marks, as if the tropical climate and lethal spiders and vast horizons weren’t exotic and surprising enough; as if she had to flag them up for her audience in case they missed the best bits. Her traveller’s tales were read aloud to little Alison when the pale-blue, tissue-thin airmail letters arrived addressed to Catherine. If Catherine had ever written back to Sheila, doubtless the tales of life down under would’ve continued, but Alison’s mum was a drinker, not a reader or a writer. She’d only paid any attention to the first letter, and it had made her very cross; Alison didn’t know why. After that, she’d pick them up from the mat and flap them disparagingly, like used Kleenex, and say sour things such as, ‘Heat and dust and bloody spiders. Does she think we’re interested?’ Then she’d drop the unopened envelope in the kitchen bin and later, when the coast was clear, Alison’s brother Peter – older than her by six years – would fish it out from among the tea leaves and peelings, slice a knife though the seal with a piratical flourish, and hold ‘story time’ in his bedroom, reading the letter aloud to his sister, both cross-legged on his bed.

  Sheila’s letters filled Alison with a kind of courage and resolve. She kept them as totems, slipping each new one between the base of her bed and the mattress, and when the letters stopped coming, when Sheila stopped writing to Catherine, Alison felt bereft. It never occurred to her that she could have written back herself; well, she was so young, she didn’t have the know-how or the confidence or the money for a stamp, and she was growing up with Catherine for a mother. But she treasured the letters, read and reread them until all the best parts were memorised, so that even when Catherine found the stash one day and put them on the fire to punish her for treachery and deceit, Alison still had them in her mind and could recite whole paragraphs, reverentially, as if they were sonnets or psalms.

  There are cockatoos in the trees here, white with yellow crests, and noisy devils! They eat the plums from our garden and stare at us with bold, black eyes. Koalas, sweet as pie, curl up in the boughs of giant gums, endlessly sleeping, like old men after Sunday dinner. The spiders are as big as a man’s hand, spread out flat. Imagine that! But they’re not the ones to worry about – the killers are the redbacks, much, much smaller, but lethal when rattled. Kalvin says always look in the mailbox before putting your hand in!

  As for the heat! The grass in our back yard steams in the mornings as the sun comes up and sometimes the road starts to melt! We grow flowers, though. Poinciana do well, but so do petunias and humble pansies, if they get plenty to drink. But the dust puffs up round my feet when I’m gardening and even though the desert’s a long drive away, somehow it looms, hot and red, and I never forget it’s there.

  This is a wonderful country, Catherine, a lucky country, and you’ll know what I mean when you come to visit. Do come!

  Those words lived with Alison, once she’d heard Peter read them. And you’ll know what I mean when you come to visit. Did this person, Sheila, expect them? Might Alison and Peter be given the chance to grow up in a faraway place called Elizabeth, instead of Attercliffe? Peter didn’t know, and their mother couldn’t be asked: not this, nor anything else. Catherine Connor had no patience for questions. They reminded her of her responsibilities.

  So these memories, all of them, the pleasure and the pain, bloomed in Ali Connor’s mind every time a journalist, interviewing her about her new success, asked what had brought her to Adelaide. The climate, she’d say. The Adelaide Hills, the gracious city, the infinite ocean, the food, the rainbow-coloured parrots, the luminous sun-flooded early mornings, the inky nights, the space to write. And all these things were reasons she’d stayed, but none of them were why she’d come. She’d always kept those to herself, hadn’t told her husband, hadn’t even told Cass Delaney, who thought she knew every secret skeleton in Ali’s closet. They were sitting together in a café in North Adelaide, reunited after Cass’s working week in Sydney, and she’d heard Ali three times today already, twice on the telly on News Breakfast and Sunrise, and once on the radio, and soon Ali’d be back at the ABC studios for a pre-record with the BBC. Cass was buzzing from it all, getting a huge vicarious kick from her friend’s moment under the media gaze – but why, she wanted to know, did Ali always sound so bloody cagey?

  ‘All those platitudes!’ Cass said now. ‘Just quit the crap about the scenery, it makes you sound pretentious.’

  ‘Don’t listen then,’ Ali said. ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t anyway, to be honest. It makes me anxious.’

  ‘You sound all uptight, like you don’t wanna be there. You’re an Aussie, girl! Behave like one, hang loose, spill the beans. Tell ’em about how you picked up Michael in Spain, and he followed you for weeks, like a sad puppy, before you caved in and crossed the globe with him.’

  Ali laughed, then sipped her coffee. ‘Honestly, Cass, I’m just being myself, and if it was up to me, I’d say no to all this publicity. I’m only doing it for that nice girl Jade at the publishers. She’s making all this effort, I feel I have to turn up.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon, you gotta bask in the spotlight while it’s still on you.’

  ‘I wish you could do it for me instead. You’d be so much better at it.’

  ‘I’ve never been known to shrink from attention, this i
s true.’

  ‘I just like sitting alone at a desk, making up stories and not having to get dressed or wash my hair if I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘You gotta wise up,’ Cass said. ‘You’re famous now, whether you like it or not, and if you don’t start coming over as a warm human being with a story to tell, people might take against you. You don’t want the tide to turn.’

  ‘Rubbish. I’m not famous at all,’ Ali said. She looked about her, at all the oblivious people around them, eating and talking and ordering food. ‘See? Nobody cares. My book’s quite well known, but I bet half the people who’ve read it couldn’t name the author, and thank God for that.’ She leaned forwards, elbows on the table, resting her chin in two cupped hands. ‘So, how was your week?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, so-so,’ Cass said. ‘Mad busy, as usual. Wrote a big piece for the magazine, “Greed as the new economic orthodoxy”, if you’re interested.’

  Ali shook her head. ‘Nah, not really.’

  Cass laughed, and winked at her. ‘Hey, are you coming to Sydney any time soon? I’ve got a new squeeze, Chinese-Australian guy, a bit short for me, but they’re all tall enough when they’re lying down.’

  ‘Oooh, what’s his name?’

  Cass pretended to think for a while. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It escapes me.’

  Ali laughed and said, ‘Good-looking, though?’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t set Sydney Harbour on fire, but he’s quite cute. Come and see for yourself, but come soon before he gets the flick.’

  ‘Well, I might just do that. My editor’s on at me for a date, she wants me to meet her boss and talk next book.’

  ‘And is there a next book yet?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Still no ideas?’

  ‘Plenty, but none that relate to Tell the Story, Sing the Song.’

  ‘Ah, gotcha, they want more of the same?’

  ‘Precisely. I haven’t yet decided whether I’m willing to bend enough to keep them happy.’