Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  Later though, downstairs, waiting for the funeral director to come and take Beatriz’s body away from the house, Ali said, ‘Michael, I have this terrible feeling that this is my doing.’ She was unburdening herself of her darkest fear, trusting him to dismiss it as nonsense. ‘Her death, I mean. I’m afraid I somehow caused it.’

  She longed for him to speak, to contradict her, but he was silent for a while after she spoke and then he said, ‘She knew she was deeply loved, that’s all that really matters,’ and this wasn’t a contradiction at all, didn’t even address the point, but was merely an assertion of something they already knew. Ali took a deep breath and stepped away from him. A dense quiet descended, circling around and between them, a menacing third presence in the room.

  ‘I’ll call Thea,’ she said suddenly, moving to the phone on the kitchen wall. ‘And we need to tell Stella, and you need to ring Rory and Rob.’

  ‘Thank you, I know what I need to do.’

  ‘Sorry, Michael, I suppose I’m just trying to fill this dreadful silence.’

  ‘I’d be more than grateful if you didn’t,’ Michael said.

  She stared at him. He sounded like his mother, killingly and meaninglessly courteous. ‘Michael, do you blame me for this, too?’ she asked.

  He looked at her. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not entirely. But you’re implicated, aren’t you?’

  ‘And are you implicated too?’

  ‘Me? I’m innocent, Ali. My conscience is clear, and Beatriz knew that, and probably knows it still, wherever she is now.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Ali said, wondering if her husband, the esteemed doctor, was quietly having a nervous breakdown. ‘Her days of having an opinion are over.’

  ‘Just call Thea,’ he said, and he stood up. ‘I’ll ring my brothers from my office,’ and he left her there, where she held the back of a chair for support, feeling momentarily shipwrecked. But she did ring Thea, who took the news gravely but clinically, like the med student she was; then she rang Stella, who cried and cried in her hostel dorm in Seville, and they stayed together on the line until she’d stopped, until she’d promised Ali that she’d be fine and until she’d further reassured her mother by putting another person on the line – Karin, from Dusseldorf – who said yes, she knew Stella, in fact Stella was her friend, although a very recent one, but certainly she’d spend the rest of the day with her, and she’d call Ali at once if it seemed necessary. Then Ali scooped up her car keys, grabbed her bag and drove to Cass’s flat, where she cried over Beatriz who had died thinking ill of her, and Cass listened to her woes for a long while then said, ‘Enough, enough, I have the antidote to what ails you,’ and together they ate salty crackers with Brie, and watched Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias; something they could laugh at as well as cry, Cass said, and anyway she believed there was no sadness in this world that couldn’t be at least fractionally eased by Shirley MacLaine.

  When Cass fell asleep, Ali lay awake for a long time, feeling maudlin, far too unhappy to switch off, but it wasn’t Beatriz on her mind, it was that other loss, far greater and more devastating, entirely self-inflicted. When she’d chosen Michael over Dan in that terrible confrontation, she’d told herself afterwards that she’d made a courageous decision, and a selfless, generous one, essentially to preserve the equilibrium of their daughters’ lives, and to spare all of them from crisis. But she’d been wrong, she understood that now: badly, epically wrong. She’d been shown a bold, brilliant alternative future for herself, and then rejected it. She lay on the king-sized bed beside a softly snoring Cass, and she wept self-pitying tears for the loss of the life she might have had with Daniel, who, in the melodrama of her grief, she felt was her heart’s home, her magnetic north, the darling of her soul. It was only later, when she woke from a fitful few hours’ sleep, that she thought, OK, Ali, so quit whingeing and do something.

  27

  EDINBURGH,

  19 JULY 2013

  For months after he told her, Katelin’s pain raged like fire or flood through every facet of their lives. The house was infected by sadness; it clotted the air they breathed so that sometimes he had to walk outside into the night to fill his lungs with unsullied oxygen. Dan’s infidelity had twisted and warped their past and their future as well as their present and briefly, in those first terrible days, Katelin became unrecognisable: savage, vengeful, obsessive. She wanted every single detail of his affair, every single secret, because until she knew exactly – exactly – what Ali Connor knew, she couldn’t rest. She rang him on the train to ask him what she was wearing when they met in Adelaide, and then again, immediately afterwards, to ask what she wore in bed. What, she demanded, did Ali Connor have that was so irresistible he’d risked everything by fucking her? He couldn’t answer truthfully, so he tried saying, ‘Nothing, she has nothing irresistible, I was a fool,’ and the words were meaningless to them both. She woke him in the night with questions about sex – how often, when, how – and when Dan refused to respond, off they would go on a different tack, new questions coming at him like bullets from a Gatling gun. Other times, Dan would be startled from sleep by the depth of the silence and find her awake beside him, staring at the ceiling with dry wide eyes. At these times, she seemed stronger: resilient, independent, rejecting his offered love in favour of her own inner resources. But they were skin deep, and barely that: her pain was just under the surface, and it stayed there for many weeks, unpredictable, undiminished, unstoppable.

  And Dan tried to keep things together, and hear her out, and answer her questions, while still telling her as little as possible, because it felt like a different kind of betrayal to lay bare the facts and his feelings for Alison, to expose her to Katelin’s fury with no right of reply. He didn’t mention the songs, couldn’t expose them to her contempt, so he held them close and treasured what they’d meant to him, although he couldn’t listen to them now.

  Two months in, Katelin rang Alex and told him everything, and this was hard to excuse. She’d drunk too much one evening, alone in the house, when the damage was still fresh, and after a few hours with only her rage and pain for company, she’d concluded that their son should know the truth about his father. By the time Dan got home, she was a shivering wreck of profound regret, because Alex had been terribly, uncharacteristically quiet, had asked no questions, none at all, just listened for a couple of minutes to her slurred account of the Australian adventure, then said, ‘Shit, Mum, sorry, I can’t do this,’ and hung up.

  ‘I didn’t mean to tell him!’ she wailed later, pummelling her fists against Dan’s chest. ‘You made me do it. He hates me now, and I wanted him to hate you.’

  ‘He doesn’t hate you,’ Dan said. ‘He adores you. He just doesn’t need to hear about any of this. I’ll talk to him. It’s going to be fine.’

  ‘Why are you so fucking calm?’ she screamed.

  ‘One of us has to be,’ he said, and he held her for as long as it took for her to remember the world hadn’t ended, it had only changed for ever.

  He knew beyond doubt now that he shouldn’t have told her, and he couldn’t remember why he had, only that perhaps in his wretchedness he’d needed to smash something, and his own life with Katelin had been the first thing to hand. But then she’d pronounced his fate, which was to remain together, building something new from the ashes, and although his heart was bruised and his soul defeated, and although many were the times he wanted to pack his old holdall and walk away, he knew the very least he could do for Katelin now was to let her have her way, dictate her terms. So he took his punishment. He listened to her again (and again and again), and when she asked was it over, were they in touch, did he still have feelings for Ali Connor, Dan said yes, and no, and no, and only this last answer was a lie, but he hoped that as the silence between him and Alison lengthened, the certainty that he would always love her might begin to diminish. The angry disappointment he’d once felt towards her – always a rather manufactured thing – had dissipated entirely a long time
ago, to make way for something more dreadful: a kind of bleak acceptance that perfect happiness was now beyond his reach.

  ‘So, you’re the walking cliché,’ Katelin said in a bistro in New Town in June, on the anniversary of the date they’d first met in Bogotá; her idea, not his. ‘And I’m the original one in this partnership, because I’ve refused to revert to stereotype and make you leave. I’ll always think you’re a selfish bastard to do as you did, but I’m keeping you, for better or for worse.’

  A strange toast with which to affirm their Brave New Partnership, but Dan kept his expression neutral, and wondered if Michael McCormack was as relentless as Katelin at turning acceptance into a cruel and unusual form of punishment. He probably was, if his lone email four months ago was anything to go by, his absurd Victorian posturing at the assault on his property. Your contemptible and predatory attempt at plundering my life has ended in abject failure, and although my marriage has been wounded, I will never give you the satisfaction of letting it fail. Find another online playmate – my wife has permanently withdrawn from your toxic influence. Dan had typed Fuck you, McCormack but hadn’t sent it, just left it there as a draft, gathering cyber dust, while he decided whether no response was more annoying and effective than an offensive one.

  ‘I didn’t want to marry you, for exactly this reason,’ Katelin went on. ‘I never wanted us to be held together only by paperwork and by not being able to face the hassle and expense of divorce.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Dan said. ‘I know you never wanted that. I was there at the start too, remember?’ He thought of emails and deadlines, a multitude of professional obligations, which all this time later were still playing second fiddle to Katelin’s need to affirm the facts of the case, and declare herself master of them.

  ‘I hate what you did,’ she went on, ‘and I hate her too, and I’m happy to say my defaced copy of her book’s still on the shelf in the charity shop, unwanted by anyone in Stockbridge, but I’m giving you credit, at least, for having told me before I found out, and I would’ve done, oh, I would have done, in fact I think on one level I already knew. But you told me, and that counts for something.’

  Dan regretted every day – deeply regretted – that he’d succumbed to that impulse to tell her; regretted, too, the near-visceral pain he’d inflicted on Katelin, which she was now recycling into a bullish, post-feminist power trip; but even so, he felt no remorse about what he’d done, not a scrap, because he couldn’t ever consider the time he’d spent with Ali Connor to be anything other than essential.

  ‘You love me, I know you do,’ Katelin said. She paused here, and waited for him to respond. It was six months since he’d told her, and she’d talked so much about what he’d done and why that it was beginning to feel as though he was the sole audience member at a dreary stage play, so over-rehearsed that all life had been leached from the lines, and the words merely tumbled from Katelin’s moving lips like a collection of Scrabble tiles, arranging themselves into flat, dull patterns on the floor. But he knew his cue, never missed it, and he looked at Katelin now with a kind of ironic resignation. Yesss, he confirmed; he loved her.

  This was not a lie. He did love her. He did. And yet.

  ‘We’re going to stay open with each other,’ Katelin said. ‘Stay honest, because that’s our commitment to each other.’

  Ah, honesty, thought Dan: of all the human virtues, the joker in the pack.

  Katelin said let’s not tell anyone else, and for a long time Dan agreed, but then, on a hazy, lazy night in London in July, he poured out the story and all his woes to Frank and Lisa, in the onion and turmeric fug of Ophelia’s cabin. He knew this was essentially a self-indulgent confession; they were hardly going to judge him, these two ageing hippies, relics from the free-love sixties. But in fact Lisa shook her head sadly as he spoke, and Frank, looking across at her, said, ‘Yeah, bad news, right?’

  ‘What?’ Dan said, stopping at once. ‘You’re not telling me you disapprove?’

  Lisa blew smoke from her sensual mouth. She was smoking a Gitanes through a silver holder, sitting opposite him on the floor, and her legs were folded with comfortable ease into a half-lotus. Tin lanterns hanging from the ceiling cast a trellis of light on to the walls. ‘You should’ve told her, Dan,’ she said.

  ‘I did tell her! I just said that I did, that’s my whole point.’

  She shook her head again. ‘No, before you went,’ she said. ‘You should’ve told her your plans.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Bad news, man,’ Frank said. He was ageing by the day, it seemed, and doing it stoned. Lisa had given up weed for a while, because Frank – she said – needed her ration as well as his own. He was stretched out on a narrow bunk in a vest and baggy Y-fronts, his legs – nut-brown and almost fleshless – extending along the length of the mattress, and he looked at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘Uncool.’

  Dan felt briefly devastated to be chastised by this pair, whose own lives on the very margins of society had been so unconventional, so unfettered.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘When did anyone ever ask permission to have an affair?’

  Lisa and Frank looked at each other. ‘Nineteen seventy-two, nineteen eighty,’ Frank said, oddly alert for a moment, using his fingers as counters, and Lisa nodded, and added, ‘Nineteen eighty-five, -seven and -nine,’ and then they each turned their benign brown eyes on Dan.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. He couldn’t ever remember them being quite so succinct. ‘You’re talking about each other, right? Well, look, you guys are very special people, but I know for sure and certain that that wouldn’t work for Katelin. She’s no good at sharing.’

  ‘But your conscience would be clear. You’d have told her,’ Lisa said. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘Share your choices, man,’ Frank said. ‘It’ll blow your mind.’

  Dan closed his eyes and said, ‘I can only imagine,’ and resolved, in that moment, to give up on them for anything other than their memories and their marijuana, but Lisa wasn’t finished. She reached across the narrow space that divided her from Dan and rested a hand on his knee.

  ‘We love you, Dan,’ she said. ‘Be happy.’

  He opened his eyes and she was looking at him, bathing him in one of her smiles. She was possessed of a warm and generous spirit, and this was part of what made her beautiful still. When Lisa looked in your eyes, when she concentrated on you alone, it was a special feeling, like having essential oils massaged into your temples. If it wasn’t for the fact that it meant he’d now be an old man, he wouldn’t have minded finding Lisa himself when she was twenty, and hitching his horse to the same wagon. Frank had struck gold, back there in that ashram. He might have strayed, but it couldn’t have been very far, or for very long.

  ‘Tell me about Alison,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything you can about her.’

  Oh, this was kind, and unexpected, and for a few moments Dan felt in embarrassing danger of crying with gratitude at her question, which was so simple, yet so bloody welcome. To talk about Alison, who she was, what she looked like, how she’d made him feel, what she’d meant to him, how they’d connected: this was what he needed, because the longer he went without being able to do so, the harder it was to trust his own judgement. He talked a torrent, and Frank didn’t even feign interest, just fell asleep, but Lisa listened closely and when Dan stopped she said, ‘You really miss her,’ and it was a statement of fact not a question, but Dan gave a low groan and said, ‘Like I’d miss my limbs.’

  ‘Show me how on earth you send a song to Australia,’ she said, and he laughed and reached for his phone, opening Twitter to show her the ropes, and she watched with a vaguely concerned expression as if there might be a test at the end of the demo. Because he knew she’d remember Donovan, he found ‘Sunshine Superman’, copied the link and pasted it on to the thread he and Ali had made, which was still there, intact, untouched. He hadn’t been asked by Katelin to delete anything, and he wouldn’t have agreed to it i
f he had. One thing to be said about shopping himself before discovery, he reckoned, was a continued right to a decent level of privacy. He was no longer in touch with Ali Connor; this was all he’d felt obliged to say to Katelin, who knew nothing about these songs, anyway. Lisa stared at the screen and the links looked like a form of algebra to her, unconnected in any comprehensible way to what she understood a song to be.

  ‘Has she got it now, then?’ she asked.

  ‘No, my God, no, I didn’t send it. See, there’s send there, but we’re not doing that any more, it’s all over, she chose the other guy. Christ knows why, he’s a pompous dickhead. But look, I can still play this for you, even though it hasn’t been sent,’ and he opened the new link and when the string of words and jumbled letters bloomed into music, Lisa gazed around the cabin in awe as if she had no idea where the sound was coming from.

  ‘Oh man, I love this tune,’ she said, and she leaned forward and gave Frank’s bony foot a shove to bring him back to consciousness, and sang ‘when you’ve made your mind up’ along with Donovan and his sweet sixties sound. Frank stirred and blinked and rolled his head as he slowly returned to them.