The music turned out to be a routine blast of low-grade punk, with a particularly nasty vocal over the top. That sort of thing sets my teeth on edge, I must say. The B-side was even worse, because there wasn’t even any accompaniment apart from a drumbeat. I half expected Tina to come out from her room and tell me to turn it down; but, as usual, my only communication with Tina that morning was via a note:
Dear W, I may see you this evening because I feel awful and won’t be going into work. Sorry about the bathroom I’ll clean it up. I’ve pulled the plug on the answering machine if that’s all right because I don’t want any messages. Please be quiet in the morning. Love T.
This note, so different in tone from her usual cheerful messages, left me very unsettled. Even the handwriting seemed shaky and untidy. I read it through a couple of times but couldn’t concentrate very well because of the awful screeching that was coming from my bedroom; so I ran inside and turned the record off. In the ensuing silence, I re-read the note and it seemed more disturbing than ever. Was Tina all right? Should I go into her room and see? No, surely not. Perhaps I would get a chance to find out if I spoke to her that evening: but I didn’t want to stay in that evening. I wanted to meet Harry and go to The White Goat, so I could show him the record, and (of course) see Karla. Should I put this visit off, and stay in with Tina instead?
I decided against it and set off for work, taking the single with me in a plastic carrier-bag. As an afterthought, I plugged the answering machine in again. I wasn’t going to let Tina’s whims spoil my chances of getting a job.
*
At lunchtime I phoned Harry and arranged to meet him for a drink that evening; and I read the rest of Derek’s letter.
Nothing much has happened up here that will appear exciting to a big-city dweller like yourself. I’m still working down at Harper’s and there’s talk of me becoming deputy shop-steward next year. The job is fairly safe but you have to keep your ear to the ground round here as you never know who is going to get the chop next. Meanwhile I’m always on the look-out for jobs with bigger firms, and I even had an interview in Manchester a couple of months ago, but it didn’t come to anything. Too many people chasing too few jobs, as usual.
The music business seems to be in as shocking a state as ever, with accountants and stock-brokers holding sway and post-modernist pirates rifling through old record collections looking for anything half-way decent from the sixties that can be plundered and decked out in 1980s fashions. I trust this will all be put to rights when the biscuit factory or whatever you’re called gets its act together and takes the charts by storm. My only advice is this: for God’s sake find yourselves a good hairdresser.
That’s it for now and I hope maybe to hear from you sometime in the next ten years. Keep on rocking, and all that, and look after yourself.
Regards,
Derek.
P.S. I’ve seen Stacey a few times recently and she’s looking happy and as well as ever. In fact I saw her last night and told her I’d had your letter and asked if there was any message. She said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’ — D.
I smiled at this message, which I recognized as being at once a rebuke and a coded intimacy. It was one of those not particularly witty or original jokes which you will always find in the private language of lovers. I couldn’t even remember when we first started using it. It must have been after I had become a student, I suppose: when I was at Leeds.
The funny thing about me and Stacey, it seems to me now, is that we never really split up. We broke off the engagement, yes, but we didn’t actually stop seeing each other. My memory of the order in which things happened starts to get very confused here. Feelings ran deep between Stacey and me but they were never overt. Decisions were taken, often quite major decisions, without either of us realizing it, sometimes, and certainly without a lot of discussion or heart-searching. I can remember telling her that I had decided to leave Boots and go to university in Leeds, and she accepted the idea without a murmur of disagreement. I suppose it wasn’t as if I was going to be far away. Perhaps that was the first time, round about then, that she said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’
If I were to call Stacey down to earth, it wouldn’t be because she was unglamorous. On the contrary, with her cropped but slightly curly black hair, her wide shoulders and slender hips, she was always attracting attention from men. And if I were to call her uncomplaining, I wouldn’t want it to sound as though she was weak, or had no mind of her own. Maybe a better word would be ‘unflappable’. A slightly worrying theory occurs to me, which is that she saw right into the heart of me from day one, knew me through and through, knew exactly what to expect from me and so was never surprised when I behaved badly or put a difficult decision before her. In all my floundering, all my efforts to carve out a life for myself up there, she was always one step ahead of me. I dare say she’d already worked out for herself that it would be a good idea if I went to university, and was just waiting for me to realize it too.
We were engaged by then, but perhaps even so she saw it as the beginning of the end of our relationship, and accepted the fact, as readily as she accepted the prospect of my frequent absences. We continued to see each other, most weekends — sometimes in Leeds but more usually in Sheffield, where we would stay either with her family or mine, taking pleasure in being under the same roof even though provincial proprieties would not allow us to share a bed. Every Sunday, if it was a reasonable day, we would go walking up on the dales. Our favourite was to take a bus out to The Fox House, and then walk down the valley to Grindleford railway station, just by the Totley tunnel. It was a walk which could change dramatically with every season, and we did it in deep snow and bright sunshine; the leaves brilliant with the colours of spring or turning to copper against blue, autumnal skies.
That was how things were for the first couple of terms, anyway. When did it start to go wrong? When did we realize — long after the event, presumably — that we had become no more than a habit to one another, that the freshness and the admiration which we had taken for granted had faded into mere tolerance? To a sort of lazy familiarity, in fact, which was worse than indifference. I can’t even remember which of us suggested breaking off the engagement; what I can remember (and it seems peculiar, at this distance) is that we were more affectionate towards each other, that evening, than we had been for months. After that, there was a gradual drifting apart. Maybe she was seeing somebody else, or maybe she thought I was. I went back to Leeds to start my second year, continued to write to her occasionally, even saw her once or twice at weekends. We weren’t in each other’s thoughts much, for a while.
The last time I really spoke to her was the weekend I came down to Sheffield to say goodbye to my parents. We went on the same walk again, even though it was a grey and misty morning, and as we sat beside the edge of the stream, eating the sandwiches which Stacey’s mother had made for us, I told her: