Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  So Beatriz had quietly cared for Ali and made her pots of tea the way she liked it (brown and strong) and rubbed oils into her bare feet and ankles when she was pregnant with Thea, then Stella, and sewn cool linen dresses the shape of small tepees to accommodate the growing bumps. She’d made her miraculous canja de galinha when Ali was sick, or sad, or just plain hungry, and in return Ali made Beatriz delicately lacy English pancakes on Sunday mornings, watched Ealing comedies with her, and old episodes of Coronation Street, and taught her to sing ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at’, which Beatriz liked to perform at the sink, or at the sewing machine, with all the mournful fire of fado, in a passable Yorkshire accent.

  Today, Beatriz was sitting in her usual spot in the kitchen, directly below the whirring wooden paddles of the old ceiling fan, where the stirred air cooled her face and head. The sleeves of her pink and purple housecoat were rolled up, her bony elbows resting on the counter, a cup of strong, black Portuguese coffee between her hands. She was listening hard, to the silence. Nothing wrong with silence; nothing at all. In fact, Beatriz enjoyed silence if it was the right kind, the quiet, restful, easy kind: the holy silence of an empty church, say. But the silence now, in the McCormack house, was heavy and potent, and Beatriz knew that Ali was right at the centre of it. The girl – Beatriz always thought of Ali as a girl: as her girl – was in the room above the kitchen, the room the family had always called the study, although until Michael brought Ali here, it had been largely unused – at least since James McCormack’s death in 1983 – by any of them. Now it was filled with Ali’s reference books and novels – the novels she liked to read, not the novels she’d written, which Beatriz had seen were of no interest at all to Ali after they were published, even this latest one, the one that had started this fuss and fandango with the newspapers, the television, the radio.

  Beatriz cocked her head, wondering what it was that had brought the girl to this standstill. When Ali was working in that room above there was always music, and until perhaps fifteen minutes ago, there had been: the ‘boom-boom’ beat of the kind of songs Beatriz only tolerated and Ali dearly loved, thrumming down through the floor, just as usual; then, abruptly, nothing. Quarter of an hour of silence. Not so very long, really, but Beatriz remembered this phenomenon from other times over the years, when the onset of deep quiet from the study had proved to be a portent of sorrow, an unwelcome nudge from Ali’s clouded, untold past, appearing like a fault line in the perfect surface of her everyday happiness. She was a storyteller, thought Beatriz, but Ali Connor kept her own tales to herself.

  ‘Ali, my girl,’ Beatriz called, cupping a hand to her mouth to send her voice up through the ceiling.

  Nothing.

  ‘Ali?’

  Nothing.

  This, undoubtedly, was a cause for concern. Beatriz hauled herself off the stool and rubbed her left hip – a reflex action as much as a remedy – as she walked carefully to the foot of the staircase, where she saw that Ali was in fact at the top, on her way down, popping her earphones in, her iPod tucked into the band on her arm. She was wearing shorts and a vest, and had a faded Crows cap jammed on her head and trainers in her hand. Beatriz tutted, immediately reassured, immediately displeased. The girl needed more meat on her bones, not less.

  Ali smiled and said, ‘Oh hey, Beatriz,’ pulling the buds from her ears, ‘you OK?’ and Beatriz just folded her arms, her habitual outward sign of disapproval.

  ‘I’m word blind,’ Ali said. ‘Stuck in a rut. Thought I’d jog it out.’

  ‘Running, running, running,’ Beatriz said, rolling her eyes, ‘all that toil for nothing at all,’ but Ali just shrugged and said, as she always did, ‘I like it, it helps me think. I won’t be long.’ Ali sat down on the bottom step to put her trainers on. ‘How’s that hip?’ she said.

  Beatriz rubbed her bones and heaved a sigh. ‘Can’t complain,’ she said mournfully. ‘Not at the great age I am.’

  ‘Michael says with a new hip you could come running with me.’

  Beatriz blew a short, sceptical puff of breath. ‘You’d never find me chasing my own shadow in the parklands.’

  Ali stood up and gave Beatriz a kiss on the cheek. ‘See you later then,’ she said.

  ‘You be careful,’ Beatriz said. ‘It’s hot enough to cook eggs in that sun.’

  Ali patted her hat. ‘Precautions taken,’ she said.

  ‘And mind those horses,’ Beatriz said. ‘Kick from a horse, you’ll know about it.’

  ‘Honestly, Beatriz, give it a rest,’ Ali said, but she blew a kiss at the old lady as she closed the door on her, and Beatriz, reassured that one of her favourite people was in good spirits, took herself back to the kitchen, where her coffee was still warm but she herself would be cool, on her comfortable stool, sitting under the fan.

  Outside, Ali sat for a while on a wall and took a few moments to collect herself. She’d done a sterling job of foxing Beatriz, but man, she was in a spin. The cause of this turmoil? Daniel Lawrence – Dan Lawrence, @DanLawrenceMusic – had landed boldly and with perfect pitch into her peaceful day, delivering to her a beautifully judged slice of 1978, a song – no, not just a song, the song, the very one – that had sent her spiralling back in time. She’d been dealing with a crowded inbox – so many emails, so few of import – when she’d seen the Twitter notification, seen his name, opened the link (with a lurching, pitching sensation of the heart) and had immediately fetched up back in the past, at Kev Carter’s party, for God’s sake; the party where she’d dropped into a sort of Costello-inspired trance, then opened her eyes at the closing chords and realised everyone in the room had been watching her dance. She’d looked immediately for Daniel, and there he’d been: dark-eyed, intense, his gaze locked on her face, and then he’d crossed the room, taken her hand, and led her upstairs. ‘Pump It Up’: a track of tracks. She’d played it, in a mesmerised state, perhaps five or six times. Such a familiar song to her, but this morning, strangely and acutely new because – and she couldn’t explain this either; couldn’t understand why it should make a difference – it had been sent to her by Daniel Lawrence, from across the world. Daniel, who’d been everything to her for a short while, but whose place in her life had long been relegated to a part of her past she was careful not to visit. But this morning, from out of the clear blue sky, there he’d been, and he’d felled her with his good taste and judgement, and the pared-down genius of sending only the song, with all its new-wave attitude, its post-punk resonance.

  She hadn’t dithered, this time, or panicked or prevaricated, as she had for a few weeks when she’d first seen his name. This time she’d replied in kind, very decisively, without a moment’s pause: sent a link back to him, Blondie – of course – ‘Picture This’.

  She’d propelled it through cyberspace to Dan in Edinburgh, to show him she understood, she remembered too, she believed their shared past was worthy of homage and what better than another nostalgic high point in Kev Carter’s mix tape? For a while she became as obsessed with this as she’d been with ‘Pump It Up’: pressed play each time the song ended, entirely drawn in by Debbie Harry’s fallen-angel face and unmatched magnetism, her astonishing allure in a demure yellow frock. She played it four times, then played it once again, just for Clem Burke’s drumming, and then, mid-listen, she’d suddenly been poleaxed by a seismic shift in mood, a violent landslide into a melee of regret and sorrow and dry-mouthed anxiety. Ghosts and shadows filled her head: a mother, a brother, a household loaded with shame.

  She’d stopped the music at once, snapped shut the lid of her laptop, and sat for a while, steeling herself against the ancient grief, and then, because she knew Beatriz could sniff out sadness like a bloodhound after quarry, she’d got herself into her running gear and made it to the top of the stairs – just in time, as luck would have it – to head her off with a display of cheerful nonchalance, pulling out her earphones and smiling, batting away Beatriz’s doomy warnings in the way she always did, the way Beatriz expected.


  A run was a good idea though, a great idea, her go-to antidote. Pounding it out through the parklands, it was a kind of meditation that stopped her thoughts from running amok; it tamed and contained them if all she could hear was music in her ears and her own steady breathing. She put the earphones in and the iPod on shuffle, and first up, there was Lynyrd Skynyrd with ‘Free Bird’, and her heart lifted at once because here was her all-time favourite running track, not for the glory of the build-up or the epic guitar solo – although there were those things, too – but for Ronnie Van Zant’s voice, which Ali loved beyond all reason. She sang as she ran, and she didn’t care who heard her, because this was all the therapy she needed, and it didn’t cost 250 dollars an hour. She was already two minutes into the ripping solo, picking up her pace to match the guitars, when, in her peripheral vision, she saw there was someone steaming up at a right angle to her on her left-hand side, bearing down on her fast, so she flinched, braked, and then processed the fact that this sweaty stranger chasing her down through the gums was her husband, Michael.

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘You’re hard to catch.’ He wore a button-down Oxford shirt, blue chinos, shiny tan loafers, and beads of sweat bloomed on his brow. He bent over, hands on his knees, to recover his breathing.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Ali held a calming hand to her pounding heart. She pulled the music from her ears with a stab of regret. ‘I thought you were a mugger. What’re you doing here?’

  ‘I rang your mobile,’ he said, as if this was an answer.

  ‘Well, I didn’t bring it with me,’ Ali said. ‘So, what’s up? Are you running away from work?’

  ‘I rang you, two or three times, about an hour ago,’ Michael said with a distinct hint of reproach. ‘I kept getting voicemail, so I came home and Beatriz sent me after you.’

  ‘Right,’ Ali said, thinking: Jesus, an hour ago – did the phone ring? All she’d heard was Elvis Costello; all she’d seen was Daniel Lawrence. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘go on then – what’s the urgency?’

  Then Michael said, ‘Ali, listen,’ in a grave voice that instantly flooded her guts with fear.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘It’s Stella, she rang me at work.’

  ‘Hang on – what? Stella rang you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I saw her before she left for school.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Michael said.

  ‘To say what?’ Ali thought about Stella this morning. Moody and uncommunicative. She hadn’t eaten anything, Ali remembered. She’d said she wasn’t hungry, and Beatriz had thrown her hands to the heavens and asked why nobody ate in this household, and Ali had laughed, because she herself was eating a bowl of porridge, right there and then, in front of Beatriz. But Stella hadn’t laughed. Instead she’d drunk a glass of water, slung her schoolbag over her shoulder and left the house. Had she said goodbye? Possibly not.

  ‘Right, don’t freak out,’ Michael said, and Ali felt a flash of irritation at his momentary advantage: of knowing already what she should know herself, if Stella would only talk to her as she’d apparently talked to Michael.

  ‘Michael, just tell me!’ A string of scenarios rushed through her mind. Stella was being bullied. She wanted to leave school. She’d lost her mobile again. She’d got a tattoo; pierced her navel; pierced a nipple.

  He exhaled, a long outward breath, as if he was steeling himself. Then, ‘She’s pregnant,’ he said.

  Ali stared at him. She felt stupid; stupid, naïve, devastated – all these things, all at once. She sat down heavily on the scrubby grass and put her head in her hands. Stella. Her beautiful girl.

  Michael dropped down next to Ali and said, ‘Hey, it’s a shock, isn’t it?’

  Ali looked at him, stricken. ‘I didn’t even know she was having sex,’ she said. ‘I had no idea. How could I not know?’

  ‘It’s Stella, Ali. The family clam.’

  ‘She told you. Why didn’t she tell me?’

  ‘Who knows? She rang me in the office and maybe that felt … I dunno … neutral.’

  ‘I knew there was something she wanted to say. I knew weeks ago.’ Ali suddenly grabbed Michael’s arm. ‘How pregnant is she?’

  ‘Six weeks, she thinks.’

  ‘Shit. Shit!’ Ali lay down now, and moaned into her hands. ‘That weekend with a crowd at Victor Harbor in September? She was weird when she came home from that, wasn’t she? Ran upstairs, laid low for the rest of the evening. Ah, God. Why didn’t I make her talk to me?’ She lay still for a while, seeing Stella in her mind, the girl’s expression this morning as she left the house, a kind of resigned sullenness, and herself, Ali, dealing with emails, organising her diary to fit in a flight to Sydney, barely looking up from the screen of her phone as her daughter left the house. She sat up. Michael waited, watching her.

  ‘OK, I’m putting all work on hold,’ she said. ‘This book, it’s taking up too much headspace, and the publisher’s always on at me to do this or that, and meanwhile there was Stella, getting pregnant, and I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Um … she doesn’t,’ Michael said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a one-off,’ Michael said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me the boy’s name, said it didn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, good God. I need to talk to her.’ Ali got to her feet. ‘Where was she when she rang?’

  ‘No,’ Michael said, patting the air between them as if this way he could quell her urgency. ‘I’ve told her we’ll see her later, at home, sort it all out then. There’s no point rushing headlong into it, Ali. I’m going back to the hospital now, you do whatever you’d planned to do today, and we’ll deal with it later.’

  He smiled at her with a kind of studied empathy, and she saw he was using his bedside manner on her, calming her ragged nerves with professional kindness. She felt a sudden wild impulse to push him over, dirty his chinos, but instead she said, ‘No, I reckon I’ll go find her now,’ and before he could object again she set off at a clip, cutting a diagonal line towards home across the sun-baked parklands, and Michael could only stand and watch her go.

  7

  SHEFFIELD,

  6 JANUARY 1979

  Peter said it was a waking nightmare at Brown Bayley’s, said the open furnaces were like staring into the mouth of hell, and that it was a miracle men didn’t die every day, given that the only protection most of them had against harm were the hard hats on their heads and steel caps on their boots. Catherine Connor’s boyfriend Martin worked there too – well, who didn’t? Attercliffe seemed to breed menfolk purely to feed the steel industry – and that was another reason why Peter hated it, knowing he might turn a corner and see Martin’s beefy mug leering at him, poking fun, raising a laugh from the other men who thought you were a killjoy if you couldn’t take a joke. Peter went to the steelworks at sixteen, because somebody had to bring money into the household and Catherine was drinking too much by then to hold down a job. He went as an apprentice and was put to work burning off twisted metal misshapes from ingots as they came off the rolling mills, or welding and repairing those parts of the furnaces no one else wanted to go near. When he came home from his shift in those days he smelled of burning metal and his overalls were black where they’d caught fire. Now though, he worked a crane, shifting steel around the factory, and his main complaint was the cold, up there in the gods, where his donkey jacket suddenly didn’t seem so thick and his hands could freeze on the levers if he forgot his gloves.

  But it was Saturday morning, he had the weekend off, and he was letting Alison look after him, watching her make him beans on toast, six slices of white bread, margarine, and a pile of baked beans sliding about the plate like molten lava. Dave Lee Travis was on in the kitchen, Catherine was in her bed, dead to the world, and Martin was gone, back to his own house more than likely, where he periodically retreated to feed the miserable whippet he kept on a long chain in the back yard. This was as good as it got in the Connor household.

  ‘So anyway,�
�� Alison said, sitting opposite Peter to watch him eat. ‘Don’t be mad, but I’m not just going out this afternoon, I’m going to Hillsborough.’

  He looked at her over the top of a forkful of beans.

  ‘He’s a Wednesday fan?’ he said.

  ‘Die-hard,’ Alison says. ‘It’s in his blood, apparently.’

  ‘Thought you were a Blade.’

  ‘No, Peter, I’m the sister of a Blade, as you well know. My interest in football is about as keen as your interest in, oh, I don’t know, origami.’

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘why go at all?’