TWNS-2-6-Kindle Master

by Alexander, Nick

  Snapshot #3

  110 format, colour, faded. Slightly out of focus. A woman in a pinafore, wearing oversized, lightly tinted glasses, is raising a stemmed glass and smiling broadly. Behind her can be seen a number of yellow Formica wall cabinets and a white electric cooker.

  Sean’s childhood had been pretty loveless, but he had never been aware of the fact until he met Catherine’s mother.

  Sean’s father was a retired RAF officer with a gammy leg, his mother a non-tactile woman whose moods were even less predictable than the British weather.

  His frigid childhood had seemed entirely normal to him, as had his father’s heavy-handed discipline and his mother’s almost constant criticism. And being sent, like his brother before him, to boarding school, had seemed no less than inevitable.

  Similarly, his exposure to those to whom his father referred as “the working classes” had been limited almost entirely to what could be seen on television. So he had grown up with his parents’ prejudices reinforced by occasional glimpses of Coronation Street and Alf Garnett. It all looked pretty sordid, to be honest.

  At college, he’d met people from all over, and his perception had started to change. But what he still hadn’t imagined, until the day he went to Catherine’s house, was, when etiquette and social expectation were cast aside, how relaxed a household could feel. How welcoming. How fun. How loving.

  And as he had sat, feeling “gob-smacked”, eating chips on Wendy’s tatty sofa, he had understood for the first time ever that being born a Patrick (something his mother constantly insisted was akin to winning life’s great lottery) had its downsides as well.

  Cassette #3

  Hello Sean.

  So here, as you can see, is one of the few remaining photos of Mum.

  She’s almost certainly waiting for a batch of those McCain oven chips to be ready. They had only just been invented, as far as I recall, or perhaps we had only just discovered them, but either way, Mum was conducting her own clinical trial to see what would happen if you fed your kids nothing but oven chips and brown sauce. The answer, surprisingly, was “nothing out of the ordinary”. The human body is surprisingly resilient. Then again, look at me now. Could all of this perhaps be the result of all those chips way back when?

  I was so ashamed about taking you to our house, because I could tell that you were posh.

  You had that lovely West Country accent, but you spoke differently from anyone I knew. Back then, I would have said you “spoke different” of course.

  Mum used to call you Sean Leadbetter, after Margo and Jerry in The Good Life. I don’t think you ever knew that.

  So yes, I was terrified. But you begged me to show you where I lived and as we only had that weekend, I took the risk. And amazingly, you loved it there.

  It wasn’t till I got to see a photo of where your parents lived that I realised just how much of a shock our council estate must have been.

  We had that old sofa plonked in the middle of the front garden and when we got there, Mum was sitting on it, still in her dressing gown, smoking.

  Indoors, that horrible Dennis Shelley, her boyfriend-of-the-moment, was watching telly in his underpants.

  But Mum gave you a hug and asked if you were hungry, and when you said “Yes,” she told you to stick some chips in the oven. That was another thing you didn’t know existed: oven chips.

  So we sat and ate chips and drank cans of Stella in front of the telly and then I took you upstairs. I remember you were shocked that I was allowed upstairs with a boy and I remember wondering what sort of rules posh families had to operate by, because Mum had never stopped me doing anything, really.

  You laughed at my ABBA poster and I introduced you to Barnie, my teddy bear. I put the radio on and we sat side by side in that tiny room – I was just gagging for you to kiss me.

  Eventually, I realised that you weren’t going to do it and I worked out that was probably because of some other posh rule I didn’t know about. And so I grabbed you and snogged the face off of you – as we used to say, back then. You didn’t, you’ll remember, resist.

  Now, I know you probably remember all of this, but it does me good to remind myself of it. It cheers me up to record it for infinity. That’s not the word, is it? Infinity. Definitely not right. Ugh. Sometimes words just vanish and no amount of hunting can track them down. Oh, I know: prosperity. That’s what I meant. No, posterity! Record it for all posterity.

  Anyway, once you’d left, Mum said, “Well he’s a bit la-di-da, isn’t he?”

  I told her that you weren’t la-di-da at all.

  “Well I hope you didn’t shag him,” Mum said.

  I told her that of course I hadn’t.

  “Good,” she said. “Because boys like that want a bit of rough for the weekend. But he’ll end up marrying some posh bird from London. You mark my words.”

  I suppose she was telling me that I was a “bit of rough”, but I didn’t even think about it at the time. I just worried in case she was right.

  • • •

  Sean pours the chips into the grill pan, studies the instructions on the packet and then slides it into the oven and sets the timer. He has been craving chips and brown sauce all week, ever since he played last Sunday’s message. But yesterday, Saturday, was the first opportunity he’s had to actually go to buy some and, as April has been visiting, he’s been busy all day.

  He was tempted, twice, to mention the messages to her. She’s missing her mother horribly and the messages might help comfort her, in the same way that their regular, drip, drip into his life is comforting him. But if he lets April know about the messages now, she’ll want to know the contents of every message, every Sunday. And until he knows what they contain, he can’t possibly know if that’s a good idea. For the moment, he feels that by keeping them from her he’s protecting her, even if he’s not sure yet exactly what he’s protecting her from.

  So the box has remained stashed beneath the stairs and they have spent the day wandering around Cambridge. They have walked along the Cam and eaten a pub lunch at The Fort St George. They have done their best to comfort each other, but in truth Sean feels more alone with April present than he does without her, her grief seemingly compounding his own.

  Now that she has returned to London, Sean’s finally able to cook his oven chips, he’s finally free to open his box.

  He retrieves envelope number three and props it against the edge of the box. He puts out a plate, salt, vinegar and the unopened bottle of brown sauce and sets about making himself a cup of tea.

  Twenty minutes later, he tips the chips onto the plate and sits down.

  “This is your fault, Cathy,” he murmurs, addressing the box as he raises the first chip to his lips.

  It’s much too hot to eat for the moment, so he puts it back down and reaches for the cassette instead. He removes last week’s tape from the machine and clips in the new one. He’s been waiting for this all day. He’s been waiting for this all week. He flips over the photo.

  Snapshot #4

  35mm format, colour. The photo is crumpled and scuffed. A man with long hair is slouched on an ugly leather sofa. He is smoking a joint. Behind him is a shelf stacked with records and a turntable with a tinted plastic lid, beside which is an enormous loudspeaker. The grille has been removed to reveal the round black cones of the drivers.

  Wow! Alistair! Sean thinks.

  Alistair had been the first person Sean ever shared a house with once he moved out of halls of residence at the end of the first year. He’d been a heavy dope smoker and had been kicked off his art course at the end of the second year but had been rich enough to stay on and continue making his art – a series of horrific splatter paintings – in the attic.

  Sean hasn’t thought about Alistair for years. He wonders what he’s up to now. Sean bets he’s not an artist anymore. He reckons that he most likely caved in to his father’s wishes at some point. He probably ended up in banking or something.

  Initially, th
ey had bonded for the simple reason that they were both from upper class families, yet had both, each for his own reasons, ended up at Wolverhampton Poly.

  Alistair was there because he knew it would upset his parents. Sean, on the other hand, had forgotten to post his uni applications. They had sat, stamped and addressed and ready to go, in the glove compartment of his father’s car for months and by the time they were found it was too late for Cambridge and too late for Oxford and too late, in fact, for any major university. He had gone onto the reserve list and when a place had come free at Wolves he had jumped at it. They had a decent architecture course, after all. And the far less appealing alternative was staying at home for a year.

  Sean remembers being mortified about the state of their shared house. Alistair had found the house and Alistair had stumped up the hefty security deposit as well. But that’s where his implication had ended. He had certainly never done his share of the housework and this, particularly the piled-high washing up, had been a constant source of discord between them.

  Sean had spent three hours cleaning, the morning Catherine arrived, but the place still looked like it had been turned over by the SAS by the time they got home. Sean wouldn’t have blamed her if she had turned around and walked back out, but she had pretended, he remembers, to love it.

  Cassette #4

  Hi Sean.

  So look at this! A photo of the house you were living in. A photo of Alistair, too.

  We had only spent two days together, our weekend in Margate, mostly mucking around with your college friends, occasionally stealing kisses beneath the sun deck, but on Monday you had to go back. Your train ticket was already booked and you couldn’t afford, you said, to change it. At first, I thought that you’d just had enough of me. I thought you were using the ticket to escape. But then you admitted to working part time in a corner shop and I realised you’d just been too embarrassed to tell me.

  Looking back on it, I’m surprised that you ended up at Poly. I would have thought that someone with your background and education would have gone straight to Oxford or Cambridge. I’m sure you must have explained to me way-back-when how that came about, but I must have forgotten. Maybe your A level results weren’t up to scratch? That sounds familiar, so I expect that’s it.

  Still, back then, the word Wolverhampton meant nothing to me. I was as excited at the idea of going there as I would have been if you’d invited me to Paris or New York. I’d never been anywhere much. Well, I’d been to London a couple of times but only on school trips to the Science Museum and the like. I think I went once with Mum to the January sales as well, but I was really little. The only bit I remember is that we took a black cab to get to the station because we were late. I thought that was really exciting.

  As far as I was concerned, Wolverhampton was quite exotic.

  Mum was outraged. “Why the buggery do you want to go there?” she asked.

  “It’s that Sean fella,” Stinky Dennis chipped in. “Fancies ‘im, don’t she.”

  Train tickets were expensive and complicated (you had to travel across London on the Underground in those days), so I bought a ticket on a National Express coach. I can’t remember how long the journey took, but I do know it seemed like a very, very long way.

  As the bus drove into Wolverhampton, I felt a bit disappointed, to be honest. I never told you that, but it was a grey day and drizzling and the outskirts of the town were these desolate industrial wastelands back then. I remember seeing half-demolished factories. I think industry in the Black Country just sort of died around there during the Thatcher years.

  Anyway, even coming from Margate, everything looked a bit poor and grey and dusty.

  You met me at the bus station and took me to a wine bar, Kipps I think it was called, but I might have got that wrong. It was dark and cavernous and the tables were sticky.

  Once we’d had a drink and shared a plate of cheesy chips, we walked across town to your house. You carried my bag for me and talked all the time in that gentle, thoughtful way of yours. You told me about a party you’d been to at the weekend and about a band who were coming to play at the student union. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but I know I’d never heard of them and as we walked through this scary underpass that went beneath a big roundabout, you sang their hit song to me. You were convinced that I should know it, but I didn’t. I’d spent too much time singing along to ABBA and Buck’s Fizz to know groups like that.

  I think that’s the moment I fell in love with you. Oh, I was already fascinated by you, but when you sang to me, I fell in love properly. You’ve always had a lovely voice, but when you sang, it used to make my heart go all fluttery and you used to sing a lot. I wonder when that stopped and why? I suppose it’s just something that happens when you get older.

  When we got to the house, music was blaring out. It’s funny that I remember this, but I do: Alistair was playing The Pretenders. It was that album with Chrissie Hynde on the cover wearing a red leather jacket. The song that was playing as you opened the front door was Kid.

  I’d heard it on the radio, but I’d never really listened to The Pretenders before and I’d certainly never heard them on a proper hi-fi like the one Alistair had.

  That memory, walking into that messy lounge, seeing Alistair blowing smoke rings into the air; it’s as fresh as if it happened just yesterday.

  You asked him to turn the music down – you had to shout to be heard – and Alistair asked, “Why?”

  He had no intention of turning it down so, to avoid an argument, I told you it was fine. I said that I liked it and, in a way, I did.

  That weekend was so… dense… I suppose you’d say, in new experiences. Alistair played me The Pretenders and Patti Smith and Yazoo. I smoked my first joint and threw up discreetly in that horrible mouldy downstairs toilet. I met more interesting people in those three days than I’d meet in Margate in a year. But the things I remember the most are the conversations you all used to have.

  I suppose, looking back on it, that you students were all a bit up yourselves really, but at the time, sitting up until four in the morning talking about whether God existed or not was a revelation to me. You’ll think I’m overstating it, but the conversations I’d had back home rarely got much further than whether or not Tracey Furlong was up the duff and who the father might be.

  It was hard at first because I realised that I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t used to these kinds of conversations and had nothing, really, to contribute. So I just sat quietly, soaking it all up.

  Your friend Theresa declared that I was a listener. “Anyone can talk,” she said, “but the cleverest people spend their time listening.” And that really pleased me. It provided me with an identity, a sort of camouflage, so that I could sit and listen to you all and not get noticed and not be judged for not saying anything. But the more that I sat and listened, the more that I realised that I didn’t fit in at home, either. It was a real shock when I got back, to suddenly feel so out of it, to suddenly feel such disdain for all the boring chit-chat around me.

  On the Sunday evening, you took me to the student bar and we danced. The music was strange stuff that they never played in discos in Margate. It was all Lloyd Cole and The Smiths and The Cure, and I had to look around me at the other girls to work out how to dance to it. They didn’t really dance at all, actually. They just sort of moved their arms back and forth and shuffled their feet a bit. Margate dancing was Saturday Night Fever by comparison.

  Predictably, by the time we left we were drunk. You were so drunk, you lay down in the middle of the ring road and I yanked on your arms to get you to get up again, but instead you pulled me down on top of you and we snogged, there in the middle of the traffic island.

  The next morning we did the deed for the first time and even that was different from everything that had gone before.

  I’d slept with five boys before you (another thing you never knew) but they’d all wanted just one thing: to get their rocks off as soon as possible.
But as always, you made it about me instead. By the time you’d finished, I’d come – I’d actually come! Oh, I’d managed that before on my own, but no one I had slept with had ever bothered before. I remember thinking on the bus back home that you were definitely what Mum would call “a keeper”.

  • • •

  Another week scrapes by. If he tries really hard, Sean can just about manage to feel a little pride in the fact that he’s surviving, that he’s still functioning: he’s doing his washing, his ironing; he’s making it to work each day. For the moment, there’s not much more he can do. It reminds him of that Tom Hanks film, where Tom just sits waiting to see what the tide will bring each day.

  He feels like he’s in stasis, waiting for Catherine to return. That idea, that she isn’t going to return, is one of the hardest to get his head around and he’s surprised, even though he knows that it’s ridiculous, every time he gets home and rediscovers that she’s not there.

  On Monday, he barely manages to work at all. He sits, instead, staring at his computer screen, his mind lost in the 1980s.

  The recordings are reminding him how it felt to be young: how exciting, how fun, how nerve-wracking everything was back then. He had somehow forgotten that all of those memories were his own, that these were all things he had lived through, not simply stories he had read.

  On Wednesday evening, he bursts into tears while driving home and has to pull over into a lay-by until he can see properly again. He sits with his hands on the steering wheel and searches for the origin of this particular batch of tears. It’s not until he glances over at the grassy traffic island that he realises that he had been remembering kissing Catherine in the middle of the ring road.

  Once again, it’s hard to believe that was he and he wonders about this sense of lost continuity between the young man that he once was and this man in a grey jacket in an Astra, crying at the side of the road. He wonders why his memories feel like a story from a film or a book he once read. Why is it so hard to feel the connection between that drinking, kissing, shagging, singing Sean and this one?