Cath Staincliffe - Blink of an Eye

I want to see Alex. I want to kiss him. Though the furry teeth need a deep clean first. I want to be better and go home and get on with everything. Looking for a flat or rooms in a shared house. And he’ll need to get some clothes: shirts and suits. God, sounding a bit Suze-ish there (she hates being called Suze). She chooses Jonty’s clothes, you know. Buys stuff for him.

Alex doesn’t understand it when I talk about Suzanne. He thinks she’s fine – maybe a bit scary, I got him to admit that much. He reckons I’m exaggerating the way she has to control everything and boss me about. He’s never experienced anything like that because he’s an only child. He only had his mum to quarrel with and they actually get on really well. She’s so proud of him and she worked and brought him up pretty much on her own, though her mother looked after him when Monica was away.

Alex thinks Suzanne’s funny, the way she criticizes people, and she can sometimes be very arch, dripping with sarcasm, though it’s not such a laugh if you’re the target.

It’ll be so cool to be on our own again. I hope I get a job; I’ll do anything really. I wouldn’t want to be stuck at home while he’s out in the world doing stuff.

I wonder who crashed into us?

Carmel

I walked up to the shops and bought some food. It was the first chore I’d done for days and it had that unreal quality to it, like the first hours home after a foreign holiday. Everything’s familiar but you notice things with a keener eye, an edge of objectivity. The high street looked neglected, everything from the tatty awnings outside the shops to the litter on the pavement and the carcass of a bicycle, its wheels and saddle missing, chained to a metal pole.

After I’d got some fruit and vegetables and bread, I went into the butcher’s for chicken. The butcher was making conversation with the customer ahead of me, talk of the summer weather forecast, complaining how they never got it right.

The door opened and Cynthia Stiller came in. Shit! Her daughter and Naomi had been friends at high school. I wanted to run. To sink from view. I wasn’t ready to face people, brave the topic, accept expressions of sympathy or shock or anything else. But she couldn’t help but see me, and we always stopped to swap the latest news about the girls.

I took a breath, tore my eyes away from the shopping list and turned to greet her. She looked away, studiously staring at the meat behind the glass, her face flushed pink.

Unnerved, I dropped my list, then bent to pick it up, straightened as the woman in front of me left and I ordered my fillets. While the butcher weighed and bagged them, fetched my change, I could feel Cynthia there: her censure, her refusal to acknowledge my presence like a miasma heavy in the air, making my chest tight and my ears whine.

Walking home, I felt hurt and indignant. She’d blanked me; that was the term the girls used when such situations were part of the currency of teenage feuds and alliances. She blanked me, Mum.

What would my mum’s generation call it? Sent to Coventry? Would I have done the same if our positions had been reversed? And how did Cynthia know? Naomi’s name hadn’t been in the newspaper. Who could have told her? It could have been you , I cursed her in my mind. It could happen to anyone.

Of course neighbourhoods like ours are interconnected; people talk to each other, share the gossip and the news. One of Alex and Naomi’s friends or someone Monica knows tells a friend, who tells her brother who mentions it to his wife, who tells the girls at work and soon the whole of south Manchester knows that the twenty-five-year-old driver in the Lily Vasey road death was actually Naomi Baxter.

I told Phil when I got in and he shook his head. ‘Maybe she didn’t know what to say,’ he suggested. ‘She was embarrassed.’

‘ Sorry would do,’ I said. ‘ Sorry to hear what happened .’

‘Yeah, but you’ve done the training, love.’ He tried to lighten my mood.

I swore at him in jest and began to cook, slicing garlic and ginger, spring onions, carrots and chicken for a stir fry.

‘I’m thinking of going into work tomorrow,’ Phil said. ‘Archie needs some time off.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go in to visit in the afternoon and you can come with me in the evening.’ The last thing we wanted was for the business to go under on top of all our troubles. It had been a long haul – Phil’s life’s work really. In the mid nineties Rock Records was teetering on the brink of insolvency. When his dad, Ian, died after a miserable year fighting cancer, Phil inherited his estate. The house sold very quickly, and once the bills were paid there was just under forty thousand pounds left. A small fortune for us.

At the same time the shop next door to Phil’s, called Dolly’s, which sold wool and haberdashery supplies, ceased trading and the property went up for sale.

Phil was making more money from the musical instruments than from the records and CDs. It made sense to grow that side of the business. If he invested in buying Dolly’s, at least he’d have some capital, and if the business didn’t thrive, he could sell the property and rethink.

Phil closed Rock Records at the end of August, having spent weeks supervising the alterations and improvements for next door, including a sign: Baxter’s Music.

I went with him to help with the move and for a last look around. The upstairs was no longer a flat but was used for storage. There were still things I remembered there, including the ancient red sofa, now only fit for a skip. And when we moved boxes away from the corner of the kitchen, I found one of Petey’s cartoons stuck to the wall: me and Phil in caricature, arms and legs entwined, seeing stars.

Suddenly I was back in those days, giggling with Petey. He was never still. If he wasn’t tapping out percussion rhythm on anything to hand, he was scribbling little cartoons and bits of graffiti. He was left-handed and did that crabby, sloped writing that lefties often have, unless he used print. So most of the time his little phrases or puns or bits of lyrics were in block capitals.

He wrote most of the words for the Blaggards, though they were pretty basic: punk rock songs delivered at breakneck speed with a ravaged vocal style, courtesy of Ged and his forty-a-day fag habit. Petey’s cartoons were caricatures, really funny. At the flat we used the walls like blackboards or canvases. It was all part of the creative DIY ethos. Same as I made my own clothes, touring the second-hand shops for fabrics that I liked, chopping up dresses to make tunics and tops, adding zips or fun fur or strips of neon nylon to jazz up old cardigans and trousers.

Petey was such a sweet guy. If I hadn’t been so in love with Phil, I’d have made a play for him. He took all those drummer jokes in good humour: what do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted. Petey had nothing to fear on the intellectual front. The doodles he did were peppered with quotes from poets and politicians, philosophers and novelists. Sometimes we’d play a game: Petey coming up with a quotation and the rest of us trying to guess the source. Is it one of the Brontë sisters? Martin Luther King? Is it Norman Mailer, John Cooper Clarke, Sylvia Plath?

He resembled a dandelion, his hair golden and curly when he let it grow out. I thought it looked better then than when he shaved the sides and spiked the top.

We became close in the youthful, lively way of our age. Because I was besotted with Phil, there wasn’t any sexual tension between me and the rest of the band. I’d sprawl on Phil’s lap, my feet across Petey as we huddled round the gas fire to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test or Blackadder , or I’d paint Ged’s eyes before a gig.