The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  These boys learnt to drive when they were about twelve, in someone’s field or along the one stretch of straight road out by the reservoir. At seventeen, they could do so legally and now that they had jobs, they could afford cars. They would swagger into the pub swinging their key fobs and then slamming them down on the table, like gauntlets. Outside, the lane was full of Heralds and Cortinas – cars with chivalric names, which the boy racers had patched together and souped up. They fitted them with new cassette decks and stereo speakers. After all, what was the point of going fast if you couldn’t make noise?

  The summer I first knew boys with cars was astounding. To leave the village just like that, without having to wait two hours for a bus, and then to travel so fast. Word would go round the pub that there was a party ten miles away and we would cram into someone’s car, two on the passenger seat and three boys in the back with girls on their knees, and we would be there just like that.

  The boy drove fast. He wanted the girls to bounce and scream, and we did. If the other boys said anything at all it was to urge him to drive faster, or to turn off his lights as he crossed a junction, or to take a corner on the wrong side of the road. Two boys died this way, coming round a blind corner into the path of a double-decker bus. We were shocked, but not touched: it seemed no more likely that such a thing could happen to us.

  This swerving through the dark felt like lift-off. The car was a bubble of noise and light that collapsed all the distances and flew through the dark fields that had kept me so marooned. Some nights the driving around became the whole point and we would flit and zip from pub to pub, party to party, wanting to keep moving just because we could.

  Essex, though flat, is not straightforward. To the north, the land has readily submitted to Roman roads, motorways and single fields as broad as the view. Essex is resistant. You see your destination long before you reach it. The back lanes through those fields are all hairpin bends and humpback bridges. Hedgerows tower and trees throw out awkward branches. Roads twist round copses, paths are eroded or overgrown, and fields either brim with crops or erupt under the plough. I felt so perpetually thwarted that if I came across open ground I would run for the sake of it. I never got anywhere even then.

  In the car, we needed music in order to feel how fast we were going and for these boys, that meant heavy metal: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath – all juggernaut bass lines and skidding lead-guitar breaks, the volume turned up so high that a song would lose shape and I would feel rather than hear it. Everything shook – the car, my body and the world outside, as if by sheer force of sound we could make every empty church, closed shop, locked gate and lurking police car rattle and vibrate until they came apart and the world was nothing but parts, all up in the air.

  Too young to bring about change, we brought about disturbance. Heavy metal was our engine noise – it was trucks on the cricket pitch, bulldozers tearing up the green, boots stomping on flowerbeds, cars driven through hedges, the only thing that could tear a hole in the silence of a Sunday afternoon.

  Sometimes the boy driving turned on the radio and we girls would sing along to some anthem from our disco nights, which was crackly and distorted as if it had rushed too fast across space: ‘I can’t li-i-i-i-ve … if living is without yo-oooou …’ Now it was not so much a song as a continuum, a booming tunnel of desire through which we flew like static.

  In the dark, music was our landscape as much as our map. The real daylight map was less interesting than its contortions might suggest. There are no proper hills in Essex and so we were like the Dutch who used to have to climb a church tower in order to see the view. We lived in a world that was two-thirds sky. How to get up in the air? One night Robbie drove us to the top of a multi-storey car park. He turned up Black Sabbath and then raced down the narrow switchback of the exit ramp. He threw the car round each corner as if the ramp were nothing but corners and we swerved and swerved, almost bouncing off the concrete walls. Was I scared? No. I remember it as a moment of pure pleasure driven and held by the blast of that music which had propelled us like a rocket through the exosphere until we broke through gravity and were nothing more than sound in space.

  26

  Spirits

  The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness.

  THOMAS BULFINCH, Mythology: The Age of Fable

  Drinking was another way to swerve through the dark, although the initial reason I drank was to still myself. Here was the larger world I had dreamt of, but just as I had rushed through childhood, the world seemed now to rush through me and kept me in a flutter. I felt too insubstantial to hold my place. The bright loud room had opened its door, but to make my way through that loaded air felt like pushing through waves.

  Cara’s father had a cupboardful of lurid dusty bottles brought back from holidays abroad. Boyish and medicated, he had had two heart attacks before the age of forty and was given to outbursts of fury and subsequent outbursts of love. He did not often drink and routinely accused his children of stealing his alcohol behind his back. (Janey’s mother made notches in the labels of her sherry and vodka bottles, which Janey topped up with water, whereas when my mother noticed the whisky disappearing, she said something so gentle that I never took anything again.)

  ‘He wouldn’t notice if we just took a little of each.’ Cara found an empty medicine bottle which Janey and I helped her fill with all the colours and flavours that the cupboard contained. It settled into a bitter brown syrup much like cough linctus.

  We set off for the youth-club disco but decided to drink the bottle at the recreation ground first. We wanted, needed, to be drunk before we arrived. It must have been spring because I remember being struck by the softness of the evening. We sat on the swings feeling ironic and grown-up, and passing the sticky bottle back and forth, and we sang hard comical versions of the songs of the slow dances – ‘If You Leave Me Now’ and ‘Have You Seen Her?’ – laughing at the very idea of them. I felt grown-up enough to act the child and swung higher than anyone. The darkness rose and fell around me and then concentrated itself into a series of slamming doors as my vision blackened. I hadn’t even noticed myself getting drunk and now I could hardly see.

  The youth club was shockingly well lit but the music was loud and I loved the music and there were my friends, Tina and Julie and Dawn, and I loved them. The room fell away but the music stayed in place and I loved the music so I danced and all the while kept laughing because I had not stopped swinging and falling and was further outside myself than I had ever been and Julie who I wanted so much to be my friend was dancing with me and we stepped towards each other and back and clapped and turned and stepped together again and she was laughing too and I threw my head back and then fell forward into Julie’s smile and when I looked up people frowned and turned away and someone was shouting and my face was wet and I couldn’t see.

  I was led to a bathroom where the woman who ran the youth club held a cloth against my face, which was covered in blood. Julie’s teeth had sliced across my nose. There were voices behind me, ‘Is it broken? Has she broken her nose?’ When I heard that, I looked into the mirror and tried to focus through my drunkenness and shock, sure I would see a monster. My nose was unchanged and the face I saw was mine but this was not a reflection. It was too far away, more like some inner self that had slipped free and looked back at me now with my own fundamental sadness.

  My mother was called and came to take me home. She reacted as she always did to such emergencies, with detached practicality, and I was so grateful that she was neither furious nor
distressed that I didn’t realise till later how much I wanted someone to reassure or punish me. Nor did I think about the possibility that she was simply controlling her feelings. I didn’t yet know that that was something we can do. Nothing was said. If ever anything was said in such situations, it was said once and quietly, and it had more impact than any amount of yelling would have done.

  The bleeding stopped and she explained that I had not broken my nose and would not need stitches. She taped the cut together with what she called a ‘butterfly dressing’ and I stared into the mirror again, amazed that these two thin strips of plaster could hold me together.

  27

  Another ten seconds

  ‘I really neither hate nor like it,’ Ethel told Lou. ‘It just doesn’t seem nearly as jolly as the tunes we had when I was a girl.’

  ‘Mother says we have all the same tunes, but not played so well,’ Lou said.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR, In a Summer Season

  When punk came to town it didn’t take any notice of me and I failed to go out and meet it, but it left behind a sense of disturbance which only affected certain people. It was as if it hit their natural resonant frequency and set something off, the way a car starts to shake when it reaches a particular speed.

  By the summer of 1976, we had heard of punk rock only we hadn’t really heard it. We lived just thirty-five miles outside London, but at that time such news travelled slowly. And then in September, punk turned up and bounced around our town like a stage-fight around a set. Eddie and the Hot Rods, who turned out to be more or less local, played in Chelmsford’s football stadium along with Chelsea and the Damned, only six miles from our school. There was some kind of stand-off, and I think the Damned went home without performing. I didn’t know anyone who went but there was said to have been a riot, and I remember the excitement at school that this thing was out there, close by, possibly dangerous and above all that it was something that might be for us.

  Three months later, I was watching television after school and there was Bill Grundy, presenter of Thames Today, sweatily baiting the Sex Pistols. He behaved like a teacher who had taken the sixth form to the pub and was now punishing them for not being his friends:

  Grundy: Go on, you’ve got another ten seconds. Say something outrageous.

  Steve: You dirty bastard.

  Grundy: Go on, again.

  Steve: You dirty fucker!

  Grundy: What a clever boy.

  Steve: You fucking rotter!

  Grundy (to the camera): Well, that’s it for tonight. I’ll be seeing you soon. I hope I’ll not be seeing you (the band) again. From me though, goodnight.

  Punk did not emerge into an unformed musical world and those making their way towards it were given time to get there. Crowds were a mix of the shaven, spiked, pierced hardcore and those who had just got round to ripping a few holes in their school blazer. The hippies and soul boys, the glam rockers were all still much in evidence, and television captured this too. Look at the audiences. It would take me more than another year to look like anything approaching a punk, and I never looked more than punk-ish. The first thing I did was buy a pair of straight-legged jeans which were so new to Essex that when I wore them to the youth club, I was mocked. I did not have the nerve to do this alone, but had gone into the shop with Janey and Cara and we all three bought them, more or less as a dare. Even so, I was surprised to find that when people laughed at me, I didn’t care. After three years of trying to fit in, I liked the idea of being different.

  The music I was beginning to listen to was giving me a new sense of shape – straight lines, clean lines. I had tried hard to be a girl but it was tiring and often went wrong. In the ten seconds it took to decide to go into that shop, I had made up my mind. Why try any more?

  One night Cara came back with me after a party. We were laughing at the people who’d been there – the giggling girls and posing boys, the terrible music and lack of drink. We didn’t want to be part of all that any more, but for now there was nowhere else to go. The least we could do was try harder to look different. ‘I’m sick of my hair,’ Cara said. It had been cut into a sophisticated bob, which made girls whisper admiringly, and boys who had not noticed her before, whistle and stare. It brought out the strong foreign beauty of her face, and it was very grown-up. ‘Cut it off,’ she said. I had a job in a hairdresser’s on Saturdays and while all I did was shampoo the customers, people thought I now knew something about cutting hair. I didn’t deny it. It was the same being a doctor’s daughter: friends showed me their rashes and told me their symptoms, and I came up with a diagnosis. I went to find the surgical scissors we used for cutting paper (just as we used surgical gloves when washing up, and old pharmacy bottles for storing oil and vinegar).

  Cara opened a bottle of wine that we’d stolen from the party and put a stack of singles on the gramophone. I started to cut, trying to remember the angle at which I’d seen Louise hold her scissors when making layers, how she held a section of hair up with a comb and snipped jerkily at the tips. I cropped Cara’s hair into wisps and spikes, and somehow it worked or at least Cara was beautiful enough to carry it off. We cut my hair between us and stood side by side looking at our open faces. We were eyes and mouths and bones – as simple as that.

  The singles plonked on to the turntable, one after the other, but we took no notice. They were songs we didn’t want to hear any more. Squealing dance numbers such as ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ and theatrical growls, Wild Cherry’s ‘Play that Funky Music’, they seemed as old-fashioned and ornate as Victorian mahogany or rococo gilt. It was glass we wanted, clarity and sharpness. We wanted austerity, and we wanted to be taken seriously.

  A couple of months later, Cara’s hair had grown out so we decided to do it again. I was drunk, careless, over-confident and all of a sudden she had an odd-looking bald patch on one side. I hastily cropped the hair around it, hoping to blend it in. Cara let me keep trying and this time she didn’t look gamine and punky, but mad. She wasn’t angry. We convinced one another that the bald patches weren’t all that noticeable and anyway it would grow out soon.

  At school, girls cackled behind their hands while boys roared. Cara did not react. She didn’t seem upset and she was still not angry. I was horrified. If I had slowed down, taken more care, or even stopped, but I had gone on cutting, getting more careless.

  The next day, Cara didn’t show up. At six o’clock that evening the telephone rang and I answered it, but no one spoke. This happened twice more before I heard the voice of Francesca, Cara’s older sister. She was sorry to have put the phone down before but she hadn’t known what to say. Cara was in hospital. When her father had seen her hair, he had said he would not be seen with her in the street, and that he was ashamed and disgusted. She was never to see me again. And so Cara, who would take lifts from strangers and walk through woods alone in the dark, went upstairs and swallowed all her father’s pills. She had been found unconscious by a bus stop.

  ‘She is in a coma,’ Francesca said. ‘She has a fifty-fifty chance of waking up and a seventy-five per cent chance of brain damage.’ I tried to make sense of these numbers as ‘Maybe’, ‘Probably’ or ‘Perhaps’ but they all became ‘What if? What if?’ How long had she taken to decide to do it? I was told to wait, that there was nothing to do but wait. I walked into the kitchen and told my parents, and they became grave and distant. Perhaps they were responding as doctors, switching into emergency mode. Or they were conditioned by the dramas of this child to respond to her this way. I turned round and walked out without expecting more and wandered through the house, hoping that while the doctors might be taking hold of the situation, someone might take hold of me. I went upstairs and sat on my bed and cried. My sister came in, burst into tears, turned round and went out again. I went downstairs and turned on the television and there was someone singing, then someone talking and then someone singing, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t all stop and gasp and cry.

  28

 
The white room (1)

  Then Home let us hasten, while yet we can see,

  For no Watchman is waiting for you and for me.

  WILLIAM ROSCOE, ‘The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast’

  We liked to swerve through darkness but we had been carried by light and noise, and we had done it together. Now Cara had gone beyond me and while she recovered, I never caught up with her again. We spoke of it once, several months later.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘To see what it was like.’

  After three days, Cara woke up and I was allowed to see her. The signs for Intensive Care led me along a corridor and along a corridor and along … It seemed that her room was not in the hospital at all but somewhere out in space.

  She looked like herself and in my nervousness I behaved as if this room with a bed in it were just another bedroom, a place where we would giggle and conspire. I told her jokes, passed on gossip and recounted something funny from the problem page of a magazine. As she lay there trying to smile, I went on trying to be us.

  She wasn’t us any more. Her eyes were open and she whispered the odd remark, but she was still off in the dark and somehow reluctant to come back. I stopped talking. How often did we sit in silence? Nurses came and went, and I sat there feeling like a child.

  The machines lined up beside Cara’s bed understood her better than I did now. They knew what she wanted and how to behave. I let her go back to sleep, and sat and watched the rise and fall on a screen, hoping it to be the folding and opening of her guarded breath.

  If only I could have turned a switch on one of the machines and had the white room fill with music. Only what music could relieve this? Cara had taken herself off into the deepest possible silence. We knew now that when you tried to move faster and feel more, it could happen just like that. No wonder we turned the music right up.