Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘The landlady looks like an all-in wrestler, and she didn’t like the look of me either, I could tell.’

  ‘No joy then.’

  ‘None whatsoever. Two old fellas propping up the bar but no vital signs that I could identify, and bloody Captain and Tennille warbling out of the speakers. Jesus.’

  She laughed, and he dipped his head and stole a kiss and saw in her face a kind of glow, an unmistakable golden warmth, and he thought, Well, look at that, isn’t this something?

  He held her by the shoulders and said, ‘Ever since the day I met you, baby, I’ll believe I had a hold on you,’ and she said, ‘Is that a test?’

  He smiled and said, ‘Might be,’ and she said, ‘Dr Feelgood, “Because You’re Mine”. You’ll never fox me with lyrics, Daniel Lawrence, I’m weird like that.’

  ‘My favourite kind of weird,’ Dan said, and he lifted her chin and kissed her again. ‘My all-time favourite weirdo. So, c’mon, let’s go find Peter Connor.’

  They asked in another pub, then a pharmacy, a tattoo studio, a barber’s, a shop selling exotic pets – he might keep snakes, Dan said – the post office, a couple of Indian restaurants, an offlicence and a newsagent’s. People were kind, but Peter Connor meant nothing to them. In the old John Banners building they asked at a little café, and their question was passed from one person to another until someone looked up from a steaming meat pie and said, ‘Go to Mr Rashid’s. Everybody round here goes there,’ so away they went, following directions to an Aladdin’s cave of household merchandise, where the owner, a venerable Pakistani man with a proud and handsome face, couldn’t place the name, but threw himself into their task with surprising energy, blowing the dust off a phone book and making them ring every P. Connor in there from his own landline.

  ‘Facebook? Twitter? Instagram?’ he said when the old-fashioned method drew a long string of blanks. ‘This is where lost people can be found this day and age.’ He had a white, one-hundred-watt smile, and his willingness to help was heroic.

  ‘Tried all those,’ Dan said, and Ali looked at him, puzzled, and said, ‘Have we? I haven’t.’

  ‘Nothing doing?’ said Mr Rashid to Dan. ‘Then let’s put on our thinking caps,’ and immediately went on to tell them about his granddaughter and grandson, twins, both studying medicine at Manchester University, clever, clever children, working hard to honour their family. His wife had joined them now, but she stayed in the shadows and didn’t speak, only watched.

  ‘My wife is scared of your dog,’ Mr Rashid said, and they all looked at McCulloch, who yawned. ‘Forty years in Sheffield, and Raiqa is still homesick for Islamabad,’ he added. Ali smiled at Raiqa, but the woman only dipped her head modestly in return.

  ‘So shy,’ Mr Rashid said. ‘And she doesn’t speak English, never bothered to learn.’ He shook his head as if gravely disappointed, although he clearly relished speaking for them both, and at nineteen to the dozen. They lived above the premises, he told them, and still sent half their income back to Pakistan, where a worrying number of relatives were depending upon it, and if he could go back himself, he would, just for a holiday mind you, because this was home, Attercliffe was home.

  Dan, aware of the march of time, said with some finality, ‘Well, thanks for everything, Mr Rashid,’ and they started to move towards the door, saying their goodbyes, but then an elderly man came into the shop, blocking their exit. He was wheezing and thumping his chest, but managed an ‘Ey up’ to Mr Rashid, who said, ‘Ah, right, now this is Mr Higgins, and he knows everybody, don’t you, Mr Higgins?’

  ‘Postman,’ Mr Higgins said economically, preserving his rationed breath. ‘Retired.’

  ‘And a local councillor,’ Mr Rashid said, as if this was a matter of personal pride. ‘Very esteemed.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ Mr Higgins accepted the compliment with a grim smile. ‘Darnall ward, for my sins.’

  ‘We’re looking for my brother,’ Ali said to him, more from politeness than any real hope. ‘Peter Connor. He used to work at Brown Bayley’s, but that’s probably no help.’

  ‘Long gone, that,’ Mr Higgins said. ‘There’s no steelworks here any more.’

  ‘No, we know that. Well, thanks anyway,’ Dan said, and he held open the door so Ali and the dog could beat a retreat, but Mr Higgins wasn’t finished.

  ‘There’s a Pete Connor runs a chippy not far off, over Tinsley way.’ He paused and took a shallow gulp of air. ‘Big fat lad wi’ a lazy eye, tha can never tell if he’s serving thee or t’next bugger.’

  Ali said, ‘Peter wasn’t fat, although I suppose he might be now, but he didn’t have a lazy eye.’ She wouldn’t look at Dan; she didn’t want to laugh. She edged towards the open door. Mr Higgins breathed, preparing to speak again.

  ‘And there’s a Peter Connor, not Pete, he’s always Peter, up at Northern General,’ he said. ‘Up at hospital, tha knows?’

  ‘No,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t a medical man.’

  ‘Porter. Hospital porter.’ He thumped his chest again furiously, frustrated by the inadequacy of his lungs.

  Mr Rashid leaned across his counter to join the conversation without leaving his station. ‘Asthma clinic, you see,’ he said. ‘Respiratory problems. Mr Higgins is a regular,’ and Mr Higgins, ready to speak again, said, ‘Peter Connor’s pushed me on them gurneys more’n once, when I’ve not been able to breathe enough to walk. Grand lad. No sister though.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ali said, her first slim hope dashed. A hospital porter – she could see that; it made sense. Peter’s loving, giving, caring nature. His lack of qualifications. His humility.

  ‘Well,’ said Dan. ‘How do you know he doesn’t have a sister?’

  ‘He hasn’t got anybody,’ Mr Higgins replied. ‘He told me he’s on his own.’

  Ali and Dan exchanged a look. Her heart began to beat a little faster, and she told herself to be calm, be realistic. ‘Where does he live?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Oh, please, why not?’ Ali asked, a little desperate, and too long absent from Sheffield to understand his meaning.

  ‘Because I don’t know, lass. I’ve never asked.’

  His chest rose painfully with each laboured breath, and Mr Rashid’s quiet wife brought out a chair and offered it, tentatively, giving McCulloch a very wide berth. Mr Higgins dropped heavily on to the seat. ‘Thank you, love,’ he said. ‘I’m right out of puff.’ Ali gave him a regretful backward glance as they left. She felt somehow responsible for his discomfort.

  ‘Just suppose he’s here?’ Ali said.

  They were in the unforgiving glare of the hospital’s reception area, waiting for a member of staff to find time for their trivial enquiry. Disinfectant masking sickness: the smell of hospitals was the same the world over, she thought, and this made her think of Michael. She shivered imperceptibly, and reached for Dan’s hand, and he took hold of hers and squeezed it.

  ‘If Peter’s here,’ he said, ‘then we’ll be forever grateful that poor old Mr Higgins has asthma that’s bad enough to need hospital treatment.’

  He caught the eye of the woman Ali had spoken to when they first arrived. She’d been answering the phone and signing forms and giving directions to patients and visitors, whose labyrinthine course through this vast building was just another ordeal on top of whatever it was that had brought them here in the first place. Now, she looked at Dan and remembered she’d forgotten all about them. She made no apology, however, just said, ‘Now then, who was it you were after?’

  ‘Peter Connor,’ Ali said. ‘He’s a porter here, and I just wondered …’

  ‘Hang on, love, I’ll check.’

  She picked up the phone and dialled an internal number. Ali felt her heart going at it again, extraordinary how it pounded, just because this kind stranger was asking a colleague if Peter Connor was on the rota today. In all honesty, at this moment Ali didn’t know what outcome she wished for.

  ‘Right you are, Angie. Thanks
, love.’ She looked at Ali. ‘Night shift,’ she said. ‘Eight while eight.’

  ‘Right,’ Ali said, thinking. Dan waited. She looked at him. ‘I don’t even know if it’s him,’ she said; then, to the receptionist, ‘I don’t suppose you have a photo of him I could look at? Or can you tell me his date of birth?’

  ‘No, love, I don’t, and I can’t,’ she said. One of the phones was ringing again, and it was evident she needed to get on. ‘You can leave a note if you want, to say you called?’

  And this seemed a decent idea. A note saying are you my Peter Connor, in which case, I’m your Alison. If it wasn’t him, no harm done. If it was, he’d have some warning, time to prepare – or to flee, because that might happen too. But, yes, it would be sensible to give him this breathing space so he wouldn’t be floored by the sight of her, unannounced, in his place of work. She took a notepad and pen from her bag, and wrote:

  Dear Peter, forgive the intrusion out of the blue, but my name is Alison Connor and I left Attercliffe in 1979, and now I’m back, looking for my brother, whom I hope – and believe – might be you. I’ll be back here, at A & E, by eight o’clock tomorrow morning, when you finish your night shift.

  ‘We could come back this evening, for eight?’ Dan said, but she shook her head.

  ‘I’m dead beat, and that’s the start of his shift, better to catch him the other end.’

  If it was him.

  And it might be him.

  Let it be him.

  She added ‘Alison x’ to her note, then folded it and wrote ‘For Peter Connor’ on the blank side. ‘Thank you,’ she said, to the woman, who placed a finger on the note and slid it towards herself without really looking at Ali, just glancing up and vaguely nodding. She was in conversation again now on the telephone, and Ali saw her note go on to a moderate pile of paperwork, where soon it would doubtless be joined by more. The chance of that slip of paper making it to Peter Connor tonight seemed even slimmer than the chance of him being the Peter Connor, her brother, the Peter she knew now that she longed for him to be.

  30

  SHEFFIELD,

  22 JULY 2013

  So that Dan had some privacy with Marion and Bill, Ali insisted he drop her and McCulloch at a café in Nether Edge, just a short walk from his house. She’d give him half an hour or so to explain their situation, then she’d walk round with the dog and knock on the door. Dan hadn’t wanted to agree to this, he wanted her by his side when he went in, but Ali said, ‘No, you owe them an explanation without me standing there, the homewrecker.’ He wasn’t having that, he said; he’d take full responsibility for his own wrecked home, but could he be sure she’d turn up, and not bolt?

  ‘Bolt where?’ Ali asked. ‘I’ve already bolted here, there’s nowhere else for me to run. Just go,’ so he did, and he knew her instinct had been right when he let himself into number forty-two with the key he’d always kept, and Marion had run at him, stricken, saying, ‘Daniel, how could you? How could you?’ because Katelin had been on the phone, blowing their minds with his treachery. Blowing Marion’s mind, anyway – not much reached Bill these days.

  Dan didn’t go into the emotions of the case, only the hard facts, and he could see from his mother’s face, her searching eyes, that she wanted to be reassured, she wanted to know he knew what he was doing. She had always, always, taken her children’s side in adversity, and she wanted to now. She’d been the sort of mother who would march along to school and demand to know from the headmaster why Joe had been caned, or why Claire was left out of the hockey team, or why Dan – the youngest, the pet – didn’t have a speaking part in the Christmas play. Embarrassing, but they’d known as they grew up that they’d never be alone in their corner, there’d always be Marion, believing they were champions, watching their backs. But this: this was a lot for her to take in, and it carried with it the tinge of disgrace. Already she was imagining saying to her friends the dread words that, oh dear, yes, Daniel and Katelin had separated. Even as she listened to her son, she was dimly aware of – and, now, sorry for – the complacency she’d felt over the passing years when she’d heard similar tales from others in her circle, the underlying smug satisfaction that yes, life together was a challenge, but her own offspring understood loyalty and decency. Well, Joe never married. But Claire and Daniel had made their choices, and hadn’t they seen her stick with Bill despite everything? You don’t just bin somebody, do you? But now, Daniel had binned Katelin, and Marion didn’t know what to think. Granted, she was a prickly girl, so easy to offend, so difficult to please, and why she wouldn’t ever marry Daniel, Marion had no earthly clue. But it had been a marriage, in the end, hadn’t it? As good as, anyway, in all but name. And it was going to be very difficult for Marion to condone and support her dear boy, now that he’d walked away from Katelin, for Alison Connor, of all people. She wondered, had she started all this herself, by buying that book for Katelin last Christmas? Oh, how she shuddered and recoiled from this idea. She certainly hadn’t meant any harm, and if she’d known who the author was, she’d have put it straight down. Trouble with a capital T, that girl, the upset she’d caused! Daniel sad for months and months, dropping out of university, taking up with any girl who gave him the eye, travelling around after his blessed pop groups like a lost soul. These wounds, inflicted by Alison, ran deep and everlasting in the tender centre of Marion’s being. She’d never forgotten, and rarely forgiven, a single slight against any of her children, even the playground spats, so she’d certainly never forgiven Alison Connor. Certainly not.

  But, look now, here she was, knocking on the front door, coming into the house with Daniel’s dog on a lead, and there was something about this incidental detail – Alison’s easy, familiar stewardship of the little terrier – that struck Marion as comfortably intimate, as if everything was now settled between them. She was surprised. She’d expected blushes and awkwardness and averted gazes. But then Alison Connor had been only seventeen last time she laid eyes on her … only seventeen, and in considerable distress. She remembered watching her run away down their road. She remembered thinking maybe it’d be for the best if Alison never came back, and then she hadn’t come back, but it hadn’t been for the best, not really; not for Daniel.

  ‘Hello,’ Ali said, and gave her such a lovely, full, ingenuous smile that Marion found herself immediately faltering in her resolutions. Ali stepped forward and gave Marion a hug, which she returned, a little hesitantly. ‘I’m determined to call you Marion,’ Ali said, ‘even though I really feel you’ll be Mrs Lawrence for ever and a day.’

  Australian accent. Slim as a girl. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, pale face, pretty – oh, very pretty. She always was.

  ‘Well, Alison, you’ve not altered much,’ Marion said, stepping back and giving her a full appraisal. ‘I can’t say this isn’t a shock, love, you turning up here, but it’s nice to see you. It’s like going back in time, looking at you!’

  ‘It’s really nice to see you too.’ Ali wasn’t going to apologise, for either the past or the present. She was here, and that was that. ‘Is Mr Lawrence here?’ she said, and then she laughed. ‘I can’t call him Bill, I just can’t.’

  ‘Dad’s gone upstairs,’ Dan said. He tried to communicate with only his eyes that he was so fucking proud of her, of everything about her, the way she was, the way she’d handled that arrival, the way she looked. Christ, even the dog was besotted. McCulloch had never had much time for women, but he was all Alison’s now.

  ‘May I go up and see him?’

  Marion and Dan exchanged a look. He’d been shocked himself at how reduced his dad was, how much he’d deteriorated since he last saw him, which – to his shame – had been last Christmas.

  ‘Sure,’ he said now. ‘But he’s … well, he’s sort of retreated right into himself. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking any more.’

  ‘No, I know, but I’d really like to go and sit with him, if that’s OK?’

  ‘Of course, love,’ Marion said. ‘H
e’s in our bedroom. He likes to sit looking out of the window. I’ll bring some tea up, when it’s mashed.’ Anyway, she thought, she’d value a few minutes more on her own with Daniel. She was full of questions she didn’t want to ask in front of Alison.

  Sometimes, if he waited long enough in front of the glass, pigeons would land on the sill outside and look in at him with black diamond eyes. None of these birds were his. There were house martins too; they’d made a mud nest in the eaves, but they’d be gone soon, off on their travels, and anyway they were never still, and not bold enough to study him like the pigeons did. He saw other things as well, although, oddly, his eyes seemed only able to see what was very close or very distant; the middle ground was grey matter, as if a permanent blanket of low-lying fog had settled on the street. Marion said he couldn’t be long- and short-sighted, but all he knew was what he saw. Birds at the window, and other things, very far away, such as the weather changing in the sky, way over north-west; he knew what was coming and when it would come, and if Marion said, ‘Oh blast, it’s raining on my washing,’ he always thought, I could’ve told you that would happen, though he never said it out loud. You could fall out of the habit of speaking, he’d found, and if you did, you had a job to start again. Marion chirruped like a noisy budgie, saying everything, anything. He wanted to say hush, just hush.

  So, Daniel was here; that was nice. Marion had somebody to talk to now, other than Claire. Joe didn’t come. He hadn’t seen Joe since, oh, since all them months in hospital, when nobody knew what was up. Joe came then, sat by his bed, watched him breathe, then after that he stayed away; maybe he saw too much of himself in the silent, sad old man in the hospital bed. Joe liked his own company; he wasn’t a family man. Lived in the mountains, in France, a long way from where he started.