Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Do you remember this, baby?’ Lisa said to him. She sang on, unfurling herself from the floor like a snake charmed out of its basket, swaying from the hips and weaving shapes with her arms.

  ‘Lisa, you’re so fucking awesome,’ Dan said. She sang like Janis Joplin: soulful, wicked, a smoker’s voice, slightly ruined and all the better for that. Frank watched from his supine position and tapped his gnarly toes against the wooden wall in time to the beat.

  ‘Hey, I know what, play all the list,’ Lisa said when it ended. ‘Play all your songs, like a total celebration of love,’ but Dan shook his head.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Half of those songs are hers.’

  ‘No, man,’ Frank said. ‘Songs belong to the universe.’ He’d hauled himself up into a sitting position, and was ferreting about in his stash tin, rubbing it into smaller crumbs for a new spliff. His fingers were too stiff these days to tie a half-hitch or a slip knot, but he was still a craftsman with a heap of weed and a cigarette paper. He seemed to smoke rather than eat. One day, he said, he wanted to wake up dead.

  ‘It’s too private,’ Dan said, ‘like reading her diary out loud.’

  ‘No way, man,’ Frank said again, spaced out, still sleepy. ‘They’re, like, out there, those songs, like fireflies: you can trap ’em and they’re yours until you release ’em again.’

  ‘They are, they are,’ Lisa said, excited by this idea. ‘You just trapped “Sunshine Superman” in a jar for me.’

  Frank held out the newly rolled, newly lit spliff and said, ‘A gift for you, my friend Dan Lawrence. Join me on cloud nine,’ and there was something very appealing about this, because nothing soothed a troubled heart so well as Frank’s home-grown. Dan took it. Lisa smiled. The world contracted further still into this enclosed, enchanted space, and he took a long, long drag to pull the mind-altering medication into his lungs, through his bloodstream, up to the agitated, overworked neurons and synapses of his brain. He felt himself soften, lighten, loosen.

  ‘Play us the very last one she sent you,’ Lisa said. ‘Just that.’

  Joni, thought Dan, fondly, as if the singer was a girl he used to know. Well, OK, he thought, why not channel those groovy Laurel Canyon blues? With his free hand, he scrolled up the screen to Ali’s final link, and Lisa said, ‘See, Frank, look here, the tune’s all captured in those blue letters,’ but Frank just smiled and said, ‘Lay it on me,’ so Dan opened the song and Joni Mitchell played her guitar for them, and sang them her lonely love song, and Dan felt incredibly good, incredibly happy, and when the track played itself out to its last plaintive chords, Lisa was very still, very contemplative for a while, listening to the silence left by Joni, then she said, ‘No way did Ali choose the other guy, no way.’

  Dan looked at her. He was on the cusp of being heroically high, and this made him slow to process her words.

  ‘She chose you, Dan,’ she said, simplifying things. ‘She chose you.’

  Dan shook his head. ‘I saw her walk right out the door with him,’ he said. ‘Saw her with my own two eyes.’

  ‘Send her “Sunshine Superman”,’ Lisa said, taking the phone from his hand and making random stabs at the screen with her finger. ‘She’ll love it, you’ll be spreading love and happiness. Come on, release Donovan, let him fly across the world.’

  ‘No. Nope. No way, José,’ said Dan. He was dimly aware of regretting the spliff, but only in a stoned, half-hearted way, and only very briefly. ‘That horse has bolted,’ he said. ‘That train has left the station. That toke’s been smoked.’

  This seemed completely hilarious to Dan and Frank, and they dissolved into a festival of damp-eyed, wheezing, crazy mirth, so Lisa had to wait for quite some time before she was able to say, ‘Well, anyway, I’m not totally sure, but I think I might have just sent it.’ She held the phone in front of Dan’s face to show him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, peering myopically at the screen in the candlelight. ‘Yep. It’s gone, man, solid gone.’

  Frank raised an arm in a kind of slow salute to the magnificent forces of the universe. ‘Follow the bliss,’ he said. ‘Bring it home, daddy-o.’

  There was the smallest grain of anxiety somewhere in Dan’s melted consciousness, a dim sense that there might be trouble afoot, a storm blowing in; but like a crescent moon in a cloudy sky it slipped out of range and was instantly forgotten. Lisa said, ‘She might be listening to that right now,’ and because the world was currently suffused in a gorgeous honey glow, Dan only smiled and said, ‘I’ll pick up her hand and slowly … blow her little mind.’

  28

  EVERYWHERE,

  21 JULY 2013

  The boys were drinking a fancy pale ale, the girls were on prosecco. Sketches of Spain had ended and had now been replaced by Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, Katelin’s favourite album, and not a terrible choice as musical wallpaper, although Dan had never been a fan of Art Garfunkel and he couldn’t stand ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, playing now, bloated and over-produced. He discreetly turned down the volume, and grimaced at Duncan, who grinned.

  They were in the front room, the living room, which was immaculately tidy for the occasion, all the usual trappings of their lives – magazines, books, sample albums, remote controls – stashed away in the cupboard on which the television stood. The doors were buckling under the strain, and whoever opened them would start an avalanche. It was only Duncan and Rose-Ann for Sunday lunch, but Katelin had lately decided she was restyling their home into a calmer, more neutral space – Rose-Ann’s words, coming out of Katelin’s mouth – and as well as tidying away the clutter, she was also redecorating, by degrees. The walls in here were Old White now, apparently, which wasn’t white at all, but grey, or greenish, depending where you stood, and how the light fell. The new curtains seemed to Dan to have been fashioned out of antique grain sacks, but it was organic hemp, Katelin said, sustainable, biodegradable. Rose-Ann was cooing over the changes, which ‘opened up the room’ (how?) and ‘turned the focus from the general to the specific’ (why?). Dan, keeping his counsel, could already picture his mother’s face when she next visited. ‘It’s a bit drab,’ she’d say, then: ‘I always think yellow’s a lovely cheerful colour for a lounge.’ Anyway, at least his records were still where they belonged.

  In the centre of the room, on the new glass coffee table, were two bowls: one of silvery marinated anchovies, and another of roasted almonds washed in lemon juice. These elegant offerings from the local deli were in lieu of a starter, and Katelin had bought new Turkish-made ceramic dishes for them, from the same shop. Very pretty, turquoise and orange, the colours of the Mediterranean. Duncan dangled an anchovy by the tail and dropped it into his open mouth like a seal.

  ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when a bag of Golden Wonder cheese and onion was all we had as a snack?’

  ‘All we needed,’ Dan said.

  ‘Will I nip out to the corner shop?’ said Katelin. ‘Get you something more downmarket?’

  She was a little tetchy today. She’d been very pleased with the bowls, and Rose-Ann, who had a great influence on Katelin’s buying decisions, had noticed them immediately and said, ‘Sweet bowls, Katelin, gorgeous colours, they really pop against the neutrals,’ and Dan had glanced at them, puzzled, because he could’ve sworn he’d seen them before, and said, ‘Haven’t we had these ages?’ then remembered Sheila’s bowls of baba ganoush and hummus on the mosaic table in her back garden. Probably not identical, but near as damn it, and he’d thought, Jesus, the perils of a parallel life. Katelin had said she didn’t know why she bothered, which had a lot less to do with the new crockery than with the fact that he’d been far too quiet for her liking that morning, far too self-absorbed, and when she’d finally asked him what – or rather, who – he was thinking about, he’d said Donovan, and she’d held his gaze as if she had more to say, then tutted and walked away.

  She’d been right though. He had been too quiet and self-absorbed, because although he really was thinking
about Donovan, it was only in the context of Alison, who hadn’t responded to the song. Granted, he hadn’t in fact sent it; Lisa had done the deed, and then only by accident. But Alison didn’t know that; as far as she was concerned this might be him trying to make her turn her head and notice him again. It maddened and depressed him that her lack of response to a song he hadn’t meant to send could ambush his mood in this way, so that all his careful defences were suddenly in jeopardy, but anyway it only underlined what he already believed: Ali Connor would never leave Michael McCormack. More than this, he told himself he’d perhaps read her all wrong and she hadn’t ever wanted anything more than the frisson but relative safety of a long-distance, phone-based love affair, and that the perfect union of Alison and Daniel had never been any more tangible to her than a fairy tale.

  The other thing that had got to him – and this had been needling him pretty much all the time – was that if he had meant to send her one last song, it wouldn’t have been ‘Sunshine Superman’, with its jaunty, confident, upbeat refrain. It would’ve been something dark and brooding, something wounded, something writhing in pain. And he’d sat there in the Sunday-morning calm of the newly neutral living room, thought for a while about this theme, then sent her another song, a definitively final track that best reflected his state of mind: ‘I Want You’, Elvis Costello’s seething anthem to that fine line between love and hate, a dark hymn for the heartbroken, a study in obsessive longing. There was a jagged seam of pure truth in it, and if these songs they’d shared meant anything at all, they had to be honest.

  He’d felt better after he watched it go. He hoped it’d send a shiver of regret down her lovely, supple spine. He hoped, too, she’d understand the synchronicity, the Costello full-circle thing, which had started with nostalgia and ended with a demonic ballad about what happens to your head and heart when your favourite girl goes off with another bloke. That’s that then, he’d thought. Then he’d gone down the hall to the kitchen, to make batter for the Yorkshire puddings.

  Rose-Ann chimed a knife against her glass and said, ‘A toast,’ and Dan’s heart sank a fraction. She raised her Rioja. ‘To survivors in choppy waters,’ she said, classic Rose-Ann, speaking out loud what she believed everyone thought but no one other than her was brave enough to say.

  ‘Och, Rose-Ann, bugger that,’ Duncan said, bold man, probably the pale ale talking. ‘To happy days,’ he said, and his wife was immediately overruled by the others. ‘Happy days,’ they said, and clinked glasses, then the conversation round the table fell into its familiar, comfortable groove, roving between those well-trodden subjects that old friends like to revisit, not because there’s anything new to add, but only to affirm and reaffirm what they already know. Music was supposed to be out of bounds when they were a foursome – it was tedious (Katelin) and excluding (Rose-Ann) – but you might as well tell the parish priest to quit mentioning God. It was Dan and Duncan’s world, it was why they were mates, it was what got them out of bed in the mornings. Plus, Duncan had news. Jeanie and the Kat had four of their original tracks on Spotify, and now they were going gangbusters in Norway and Sweden, like, seriously big. And yesterday he’d heard their music playing in a café in Cockburn Street.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ he said. ‘I was queuing for a coffee, and I said to the guy, “Hang on, what’s this that’s playing?” and he said, “It’s a Spotify playlist, why?” I said, “No, this track, it’s Jeanie and the Kat, right?” and the guy just shrugged and passed me the iPhone, and they’re on this, like, curated Spotify playlist, Scottish Indie Rock or something, and I said, “I discovered these girls! I launched ’em!”’

  ‘The wonders of the modern world,’ Dan said.

  ‘I rang Katriona straight away, she was on a bloody ferry to Stockholm!’

  ‘Who’s Katriona?’ Rose-Ann asked, newly alert.

  ‘The Kat, in Jeanie and the Kat,’ Dan said. ‘Duncan’s protégées.’

  ‘They’re playing a string of gigs – Stockholm, Gothenburg, Oslo, some other places in the frozen north – and it’s all being managed from his laptop by a guy called Gavin, some bod from a music company who’s looking after the royalties and whatnot.’

  ‘I told you, Dunc,’ Dan said. ‘It’s all there for the taking these days, easy as pie.’

  ‘Sweden and Norway,’ Katelin said. ‘Why’s that good?’

  ‘It hardly matters where you catch your break,’ Duncan said. ‘These streaming services, they don’t recognise international borders, there’s this ripple-out effect, it can just spread like a forest fire, and boom, you’re a global indie sensation,’ and Dan smiled and said, ‘Hark at you, Duncan Lomax.’

  ‘Hey, are we going to make some money outta these girls?’ Rose-Ann asked, perking up, but Duncan said no, no, they were, the two girls. ‘They’re already picking up royalties, this company collects them, keeps twenty per cent, shoves the rest into Kat’s bank account. They’re cock-a-hoop.’

  ‘So when you say you launched them,’ Rose-Ann said, ‘it was more that you didn’t launch them?’

  There was a brief, uncertain silence, then, ‘Anyone want more beef?’ Katelin asked. She was bored by this conversation, and so, in truth, was Rose-Ann, now she knew they weren’t in fact invested in the career of these cat girls, or whatever they were. Rose-Ann looked at Duncan with a flat, dull gaze, and he didn’t answer.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Dan said. ‘I wish it could’ve been. What about the other dude, the fisherman? And Aztec Camera-take-two?’

  ‘More beef, anyone?’ Katelin was determined now to wrest the subject away from these tiresome men, who never knew when to stop. ‘More carrots? Potatoes?’

  ‘Not for me,’ Dan said. ‘But more wine, I think.’ He topped up everyone’s glasses, no one said no to that, then he refilled his own and sat back in his chair surveying the faces around him, none of which looked especially happy. He felt a sudden, unusual detachment and, with it, a disorientating feeling of instability that descended upon him like a short bout of vertigo so that he laid his palms flat on the table to steady himself, and ever after he’d remember this moment as a kind of premonition, his subconscious self one step ahead of the hard facts, because there was the bright ‘ting’ of an incoming message, and Rose-Ann delved into her handbag on the floor. ‘Nope, not me,’ she said, slipping her phone back down into the dark interior. Katelin, on her feet now, still offering cold meat and vegetables to her unwilling guests, saw Dan’s phone in among the clutter of the Sunday-lunch worktop, tilted her head to read the screen, frowned, looked closer; then in a fluid, furious, extraordinary movement she raised the large oval platter of meat up high and threw it violently down so that it smashed and bled – a terrible sound, a terrible sight, like a grenade attack in their suburban kitchen – on to the tiles of the kitchen floor. Rose-Ann screamed and clutched at her chest and Duncan spun round, thinking Katelin must’ve fallen or fainted, but she was standing, strung taut like a wire, ready to snap, directing a deep black stare at Dan, who leapt up and seized his phone, then stalked out of the kitchen to read what Katelin had already seen.

  Ali was on the move. She’d left Michael as honestly and compassionately as she could, but her honesty and compassion were futile in the face of his implacable disbelief. She told him it was over, and he told her it wasn’t. She told him she was leaving and he told her she wasn’t. She told him she loved him still, but that she loved Dan differently, and more, and he told her she wasn’t thinking straight and didn’t know her own mind. Even as he watched her pack a rucksack, find her passport, ring for a taxi to the airport, he’d devoutly believed she wouldn’t possess the courage or the cruelty to walk out of the door and away from their life, and when finally he had to accept that she was capable of this, he’d raged at her, dry-eyed and damning.

  ‘You’re a fantasist, chasing a bloody teenage dream,’ he’d said, maddened and bewildered by the stoicism of her resistance.

  ‘Michael,’ Ali said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  �
�Is this Cass’s idea? Has she talked you into it?’

  Ali shook her head and stared at him aghast. ‘Do you think I haven’t a mind of my own? That I do either what you say, or what Cass says?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, in many ways I do think that about you. You’re generally compliant and suggestible, and the way you’re behaving now isn’t like you, so it’s either Cass’s idea or you’ve lost your mind.’

  Every word he said worked against him, she thought; every opinion he expressed diminished his case. She felt very calm. She was beyond his influence now. ‘This is me,’ she said. ‘This is all me, and I’m sane and steady and single-minded.’

  ‘Ali, this is madness. It’s beyond my comprehension.’ He ran his hands through his hair and over his face in distress and frustration, and she felt a pull of sympathy at his utter confusion, because nothing in his easy path through life had prepared him for failure on a scale such as this.

  ‘Look,’ she said as gently as possible. ‘There are other things too. I’ve tried to explain how being with Dan made me feel closer to my past?’

  ‘Yeah, and you use that against me, don’t you? My supposed lack of interest in your bad beginnings. What do you think I am, a mind reader? Was I supposed to know your deepest secrets without you telling me about them?’

  ‘No. I know I kept a lot from you because I couldn’t deal with it myself. But rediscovering Dan has made me—’

  He cut into her words with a bark of laughter. ‘Oh, right, “rediscovering” – is that what we’re calling it now? Don’t try to elevate what you did, Ali, it was only a covert shag.’

  She started to shake, and for a moment she looked at her hands, inwardly cursing them for betraying her when she was trying so hard to be calm, and careful, and kind. But she was leaving him, and she knew, in truth, that there wasn’t a kind way of doing this, only the usual one, the cruel one. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve hurt you so much.’