Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Oh!’ Sky said, jumping up, reddening furiously. She held out a hand. Each slender finger was adorned with a bulky metal ring in the shape of skulls and snakes, and her fingernails were painted black, but her manners were those of a 1930s debutante. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for your time.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said. ‘Best of luck with it.’ He shook her heavy little hand, then walked to the door.

  ‘Dan,’ she said urgently. He turned.

  ‘Limp Bizkit,’ she said. He looked at her, thinking: What the fuck?

  ‘My obsession,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘Ah, right, yeah, good one. So, you have five seconds to defend them.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Well, the way they mix musicianship with aggression, I think that’s unique, and they … they define the scope of what metal can do when it’s fused with hip-hop and pop.’

  ‘Ha!’ Dan said, nodding, pleasantly surprised. ‘Excellent. Really, excellent. You’ll go far.’

  She beamed. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Comsat Angels,’ he said. ‘Look ’em up.’ And he swung out of the café into Cockburn Street and headed down the hill to the station.

  So, he was on the London-bound train, his mobile office, a place without distractions where all he could do was listen to music or write. Twice a month these days, sometimes three, he’d make this journey, and years ago, when he was young and hungry for work, he’d disappear down there for days and days, dossing in Kentish Town with Rocco and Kim, who freelanced at the NME, Rocco a writer, Kim a photographer, and between them they got the occasional subbing shift for Dan, although writing was what he wanted: a picture byline, a staff job. He’d dropped out of Durham University after only a year there, and he was lost for a while, drinking and smoking with Rocco and Kim and their sketchy friends. There was a big, friendly guy who ran a Jamaican restaurant just off Kentish Town Road, with a sign on the wall that said ‘A Friend with Weed is a Friend Indeed’, and he kept them in cannabis and fed them rice and peas when the post-high hunger descended. But that was then; these days he had meetings to attend, gigs to see, deadlines to meet. He had a narrowboat home, too: a permanent mooring on the Regent’s Canal, a rock ’n’ roll solution to the crazy cost of bricks and mortar in the capital. Nothing nicer than sitting on the towpath with a beer, nodding at the neighbours whose boats were nose to tail with his own.

  He had three nights ahead of him on this trip. Three meetings, two gigs, one pressing deadline. But as usual he’d managed to build in some loafing time, keeping tomorrow night free to hang out with his friends Frank and Lisa on their boat before bed. So, one gig tonight, another Saturday, then home on the slow Sunday train, King’s Cross to Waverley, working all the way; he never took the overnight sleeper, hated those narrow bunks and the sway of the carriage, and arriving in Edinburgh at half past seven, feeling like shit. What he liked was a daytime journey, a table to himself, a seat facing the direction of travel, a power point to charge his laptop, and a – admittedly patchy – stream of free wireless connection to the internet.

  He had all these conditions in place now, as the train plunged south through the soft green lowlands of border country, but he’d done nothing yet other than consider Ali Connor, who once was Alison. She’d made him smile with ‘Picture This’, hit the nail on the head, and he’d realised when it came that he’d have been disappointed if she hadn’t picked that very track to reply. Not that he’d been testing her in any way, or at least not consciously, but it was … what was it? A validation, perhaps, of a bank of memories so distant they’d almost morphed into myth; one of those glittering pieces of the mosaic that he’d forgotten, but still carried around with him anyway, waiting for the right time to rediscover it. And he found, to his great fascination, that what he meant to do now was send another song, back to Adelaide, and that the choice of song was a matter of utmost importance. Since he sat down on this train he’d been scrolling through the many hundreds of contenders on his iPod, playing some of them, enjoying all of them, but none of them was what he was looking for. He didn’t know, of course, what he was looking for. He wouldn’t know, until he found it.

  ‘Is anyone sitting here?’

  Oh fuck. Dan glanced up, and there was a man smiling at him, sliding sideways into the seat opposite, which was patently free.

  ‘Nope,’ Dan said. ‘All yours.’

  He turned his attention back to the library of music. Stevie Wonder, Patty Griffin, the National. More Blondie? John Martyn? The Killers? Jesus, so much fucking music. And what was it he wanted to say to Ali Connor, after all these years?

  ‘Erm … Daniel Lawrence?’

  Oh fuck, fuck. He looked up and the man opposite was smiling again – grinning, actually – and staring. He looked about Dan’s age. Not Scottish. Slim build, dark hair, short back and sides, blue eyes. He wore a Harrington jacket and a T-shirt that looked as if it might have an image of Bob Marley on it. Dan couldn’t stand grown men with T-shirts bearing music legends, or tour dates.

  ‘Sorry?’ Dan said.

  The man opposite offered a hand, which Dan took, and shook, still mystified, although there was something about this guy that rang a dim bell. Meanwhile the fellow himself was very much enjoying himself.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell.’

  Dan said, ‘Look, I’m sorry …’ and the man laughed and said, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, it’s been thirty-odd years. Dave Marsden. Rob’s brother. I once put a tent peg through your thumb?’

  ‘Christ Almighty!’

  Dave nodded. ‘Insane,’ he said.

  ‘Dave Marsden!’

  ‘That’s me. I knew you straight away. Mind you, I see your mug in the music pages.’

  ‘Dave Marsden,’ Dan said again. ‘Oh my God. How are you?’

  ‘Yeah, all right, you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said. He raised his right thumb to show a short, jagged white scar running from the base of the nail all the way round to the fleshy pad at the back. ‘Apart from this disfigurement, obviously,’ and they both laughed. Reighton Gap, 1974, and Rob and Daniel had only been allowed to go camping there if Dave went with them. Dave, sixteen to their fourteen, and all he’d done by way of supervision was put up the tent, which was when he’d driven a metal peg through Dan’s thumb. It’d needed stitches really, but there was a woman in a caravan with a first-aid kit. She’d swabbed the wound and poured Dettol over it, then bound it in a series of pink Elastoplasts, one on top of another, until the blood stopped seeping through.

  ‘I blame you for my failure to make it as a lead guitarist,’ Dan said. ‘Couldn’t use my strumming thumb for months.’

  ‘Reighton Gap,’ Dave said. ‘What a fucking dump. I lost my virginity there though.’

  Dan laughed. ‘Easily done, I should think.’

  ‘Wendy, her name was. I think it was anyway. Might have been Wanda. I was clueless, but she seemed to know what she was doing.’

  ‘No wonder we never saw you.’

  ‘She opened my eyes, that girl.’

  ‘Is Rob doing OK?’

  Dave’s smile faded. ‘No. No, he’s not. He’s a drinker.’

  Dan said, ‘Ah, right.’

  ‘We all drink, us Marsdens, but our Rob doesn’t stop. He started when he got made redundant.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Steel. Darnall Works.’

  ‘Oh, but Rob was …’ Dan hesitated, not wanting to offend.

  ‘Brainy? Yep, he was. Is. Cleverest lad in our family anyway. He went in on a management scheme, but brains didn’t save you from the chop in the steel industry.’ Dave sniffed, and gazed for a moment out of the window, then turned back to Dan. ‘You did all right though.’

  ‘That’s tough, about Rob,’ Dan said, and he thought about the passing of time and the lad he’d known, a steady kind of individual, thoughtful and quiet. At Reighton Gap, Rob had sea
rched for fossils on the beach – ammonites, belemnites, crinoids – while Dan had stared at the girls in the sea and imagined them naked. He sat back in his seat and regarded Dave. ‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘You, on this train. It’s like back to the bloody future.’

  ‘I know, right? You look the same, sort of. Good-looking bastard.’

  ‘Why were you in Edinburgh?’

  ‘Checking out a new site for a bar. This company I work for, they take over derelict buildings and turn ’em into artisan gin palaces.’ He put speech marks around ‘artisan’ with his index fingers.

  Dan raised his eyebrows. ‘In Edinburgh?’

  ‘Leith, believe it or not. By the waterfront.’

  ‘Is that Bob Marley on your T-shirt, by the way?’

  ‘One of the Wailers, I think,’ Dave said. ‘Got it in Oxfam. Do you see anybody? Y’know, anybody from Sheffield?’

  Ali’s face formed in Dan’s mind like a portrait in smoke, there and gone, too ephemeral to trust. Dave Marsden was real; Alison Connor was a memory. Ali Connor could be a figment.

  ‘No,’ Dan said. ‘Well, I saw Kev Carter about four years ago. We talk online, now and again. D’you still live in Sheffield?’ he asked.

  ‘No bloody chance,’ Dave said. ‘I married a posh lass, we live in Guildford.’ He laughed. ‘Mind you, everybody seemed posh when I went down south.’

  ‘I went further north,’ Dan said. ‘Not south. Followed an Irish girl, settled in Scotland.’

  ‘Oh, I know all about you,’ Dave said. ‘Read your column, read your reviews, read that book about the Bunnymen an’ all.’

  ‘Right,’ Dan said. ‘You always did like your music.’

  ‘Do you remember that gig in Donny?’

  ‘Which gig?’

  ‘Comsat Angels. Chuffing hell, you were like a bloody groupie.’

  Astonishing, thought Dan. He stared at Dave. ‘Astonishing,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Comsat Angels. Second time they’ve come up in the past half-hour. Were you there, then? I know Rob was.’

  Dave nodded. ‘Me and Rob were nearer the bar than the stage, but you were stood up front about two feet from that lead singer, staring at him like it was the second coming.’

  Dan shook his head, smiling; he’d told that girl, Sky, all about Prince and the Revolution at the First Avenue Club, but for truly pivotal moments – those times in his life when destiny showed up and made him consider his future – he couldn’t top Doncaster Sports Club, 1979, a Monday night in June. Dan and his crew of mates had come in somebody’s Ford Transit, and there were about fifty people in the club to see the band, but only Dan was up front, transfixed in front of a smoke-filled stage. He could still hear in his head now exactly what he’d heard then, all the layers of sound that kept him rooted to the floor, made him feel stunned and lucky and clever to have come here. The wailing guitar, an aching, suspended, searing chord; drums coming in with the relentless momentum of a train on the tracks; a hypnotic bass, then soaring keyboards; and a frontman, Stephen Fellows, dark-haired, chisel-featured, sharp-suited, delivering tense, sparse lyrics like a disillusioned urban poet. Daniel had thought: That could be me. That should be me. What he is, up there: that is what I am.

  ‘You followed ’em about after that,’ Dave said, bringing him back to the here and now.

  ‘I went to their gigs, you mean,’ Dan said. ‘You make me sound like a sodding stalker.’ He had, in fact, almost stalked them – the Fusion Club in Chesterfield, a hotel in Sheffield two days later, Rotherham a week after that. He’d even watched them rehearse, in a room above a café in Division Street. But hey, he’d been nurturing a fledgling obsession, and at the time it seemed like these boys were gilded: glittering with nascent success. The future pulsed with fame and glory for them, for Dan, and for anyone who wanted to come with him for the ride. Alison saw them with him at the Rotherham gig. But by then, she was slipping through his fingers, not that he’d known it.

  Dave nodded at Dan’s iPod, lying abandoned on the table in front of them. ‘What you listening to these days then?’

  ‘Everything,’ Dan said. ‘As usual.’

  ‘But what’re you liking?’

  ‘Oh, I spend a lot of time in the past,’ Dan said. ‘In my own time, I mean.’

  ‘What’s the last thing you reviewed?’

  Jesus, thought Dan; it was great to see Dave but this could be tiresome, all the way to London. ‘BadBadNotGood,’ Dan said. ‘That’s their name, not my review. Canadian boys, jazzy-bluesy.’

  Dave sniffed and pulled a face. ‘Sounds lame to me.’

  ‘It’s good. Probably even better if you’re stoned. Look, do you want a coffee? I’m off to the buffet car, shall I bring you something back?’

  ‘Oh yeah, thanks, mate. White, one sugar. And a KitKat? Split one with you.’

  ‘Is it your birthday?’

  ‘Feels like it,’ Dave said. ‘Bumping into the legendary Dan Lawrence.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Dan said, ‘don’t push your luck.’ He left his seat, and as he walked down the carriage he pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and opened Safari, then typed Comsat Angels into the search box, and there was the band, young men captured in black and white in a series of moody shots from the early days. At the buffet counter, he joined a small queue, and tapped on ‘Songs’, which led him to a long string of Comsat tracks. Any of them would do, but he scrolled on down, taking his time. Hovered over ‘Missing In Action’, which had opened the set, back in Doncaster in 1979, but then he hesitated, and continued. Down, down, down. There. This one. Twenty-five songs into the list. ‘Waiting For A Miracle’. He didn’t play it: didn’t need to. Instead he copied the link, sprinted with his thumb on to Twitter, on to messages, on to @AliConnorWriter and the short thread of two songs that they’d already shared, then he pasted the link and pressed send.

  Done. A seminal piece of post-punk genius on its way to Adelaide. And a seminal piece of Daniel Lawrence too.

  ‘Aye-aye, what you up to, texting an old flame?’

  Dan looked up, startled, and the woman behind the counter laughed at him.

  ‘Och, only teasing, my love, what can I get for you?’

  Dan smiled and put his phone away, to prove how very trivial his business with it was, compared to the matter in hand – coffee, KitKat, a bottle of water. He ordered in a steady voice, and engaged in mild banter as his heart rate slowed to normal. But God almighty, he thought when the woman turned her back to deal with his order, what would Katelin think? And what’s the game here? And why was it so fucking important, so paramount, that Alison Connor didn’t slip away from him for a second time?

  9

  ADELAIDE,

  16 NOVEMBER 2012

  It was all wrong, really: Ali, Michael, Thea and Beatriz downstairs, Stella upstairs in her room. But she wasn’t speaking to any of them, so this unhappy domestic apartheid was difficult to avoid. Thea had flown home from med school in Melbourne, adding to the atmosphere of extreme crisis. Ali wouldn’t have told her – at least, not yet, not so soon, not if it implied she was somehow needed at home – but Michael had made the call, clued her in, and sent her airfare when she insisted, in spite of looming exams, on joining them for a weekend of unhappiness. Thea was her father’s daughter, a McCormack through and through: possessed of an inherited, unshakable belief in her own indispensability. The pair of them had yet to face a problem that couldn’t be solved by the application of good sense, hard cash or sheer strength of will. But here was Stella, not quite eighteen, furious with everyone, fiercely defensive, and eight weeks pregnant by a boy she wouldn’t name. She was determined, she said, to keep the baby.

  ‘Well, she’s not in her right mind,’ Thea said now. ‘Or she’s just being provocative.’

  They were in the kitchen, gathered around Beatriz, who was peeling potatoes with steady hands and a peaceful expression. She was the calm, still centre of their lives, thought Ali. She gave the impression t
hat nothing in the world was more urgent right now than this simple task of preparing dinner. It was an illusion; they all knew that. Still, the smell of onions caramelising over a low heat was comforting, in its way.

  ‘You need to book a termination, and tell her it’s a done deal.’

  ‘Thea, be quiet,’ Ali said.

  ‘Mum, get real. Dad agrees, don’t you, Dad?’

  ‘I certainly don’t want her to continue with this pregnancy,’ Michael said, and looked at Ali, who looked away.

  ‘Well then.’ Thea held out her palms, as if the issue was resolved, easy as pie. She was brisk and bright and organised; never in a million years would she have got herself in this pickle, thought Ali.

  ‘It’s not a question of whether Dad agrees with you,’ she said, trying to be patient, trying not to snap. ‘It’s a question of listening to Stella and respecting her views.’

  Thea made a small sound, almost a laugh, but not quite. ‘She won’t thank you, a year down the line, when she’s stuck here with a kid and her friends have all gone off to uni.’

  ‘Oh good God, give me strength.’ This was Michael, his voice raised in a sort of frustrated anguish. He brought a fist down hard on the worktop and a potato rolled over the edge and on to the tiled floor. Beatriz stopped peeling and looked at him.

  ‘God is good,’ she said.

  Michael groaned. ‘Beatriz …’

  ‘No,’ she said, pointing the sharp end of the peeler at him. ‘You should remember that God is good, Michael. You all should.’

  There was silence, because no one was much in the mood to tackle Beatriz on the subject of her faith. Upstairs, there were footsteps on the landing and everyone looked at the ceiling. The bathroom door slammed shut.

  ‘Listen,’ Ali said. ‘If Stella says no, what can we do? We can’t drag her to the clinic by the hair, can we?’

  ‘No,’ Michael said. ‘But we can talk sense into her, instead of pussyfooting around and “respecting her views”.’