The Soundtrack of Our Lives
A Double Album in Prose
by Annie Christie
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Disc Two
Side One
Things Can Only Get Better
There are many things
that I would like to say to you
But I don’t know how (Oasis)
Side One
Things Can Only Get Better
There are many things
that I would like to say to you
But I don’t know how (Oasis)
Track One
Oh I can show you, I can show you some of the people in my life
It's driving me mad, just another way of passing the day (Genesis)
~ 1980-81 ~
Oh I can show you, I can show you some of the people in my life
It's driving me mad, just another way of passing the day (Genesis)
~ 1980-81 ~
Come 1980 the world was a completely different place. We’d all left school. Moved on. It was Thatcher’s Britain. It was hard to hang on to what we had. We were all headed in different directions, though I didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I was stuck in a dead end. One of my mum’s favourite songs was ‘Windmills of your mind’ and that more or less summed it up for me.
Billy and I had one thing in common and that was that neither of us went to University. Laura went to join Rachel at St Andrews. I had a job which meant I had a pay packet, though I was still living at home. My parents wouldn’t take more than a basic rent, so I certainly had more money than the likes of Laura and Rachel at University. And I didn’t have to buy books! Billy was working in a garage. He wasn’t an apprentice so much as a grease monkey, changing tyres and exhausts but he got to drive some really cool cars.
I kept my eyes open for Billy driving around. It should have been a good situation. He and I were in Edinburgh while Laura and Rachel were in St Andrews. Divided by the Firth of Forth. There were hundreds of thousands of people in Edinburgh and even though you could still not walk down Princes Street without bumping into someone you knew, for me, that someone was never Billy. So I took the only action I could. I kept in touch with Grant.
Grant and Billy were gigging a lot with their own band, playing ceilidh music mostly for parties and weddings and retirement do’s. I had very little going on outside work. It’s not that I stalked them, and most of the gigs I couldn’t have blagged my way into if I’d tried, but from a distance I kept a keen eye on what they were up to.
I was like an addict. When I needed a fix I contacted Grant. And he usually responded. It wasn’t a relationship as such, but we had (I thought) a set of unwritten rules. Looking back, I’m not sure we had the same rules, although we were both just using each other to get something entirely different. Grant was simply my dealer, the addiction was Billy. So maybe you think I was using him. And Laura. That I was the lowest of the low. But it wasn’t like that. As far as Laura was concerned, it wasn’t that she cut me off, or I cut her off, so much as I couldn’t bear to go to St Andrews and see them all being students. I’m not saying their life was exactly carefree, but it was a world away from the ‘real’ world of work I went to regularly nine to five.
Laura and Rachel seemed to have fallen on their feet and me, well, I fell as I always did, flat on my face. The best I could hope for was that Billy might pick me up rather than step over me.
As for Grant, well, I had no idea what his real motives were then – certainly I had no idea what was really going on. I’d have made a lousy spy however much time I spent Watching the Detectives with Elvis Costello.
Political unrest was the backdrop for the time but for me music was more important than politics. I got right into Two Tone and the mod revival. I knew Billy preferred it to Disco and I wanted him to notice me, so being into his music was the best way to do it, surely? I spent my money on clothes and music which put me in danger of becoming a normal teenager. My mum still tried to hijack me and my purse into M&S but I had my own money and could go down Cockburn Street if I preferred! –
In February when Rachel’s birthday came around I watched the charts, trying to work out which single Billy would send her. I was All out of love with Air Supply, though I knew it didn’t really apply to me I'm all out of love, what am I without you, I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong because that Christmas dance from 1976 hadn’t meant any more than the kiss I never told anyone about in 1972, when Billy kissed me outside the swimming pool in exchange for a finger of fudge. It’s pitiful that a decade, even two decades later, I held on to that secret as if it gave me first rights on Billy’s heart. But I did.
I don’t know now and I didn’t know then what single Billy sent Rachel for her birthday. I do remember spending an inordinate amount of time looking at the charts trying to work it out when I should have been filing. Working in insurance, I thought I was learning something about managing risk. In truth though, I was still risk averse. And I don’t believe I learned anything useful all the time I was there. Apart from how to put up with boredom and the daily grind. I’m sure I’m not unusual in that respect. But everyone has dreams don’t they? Something to make it worth getting up in the morning and facing another eight hours of unremitting tedium. I had my vicarious life. Music and Billy.
Amid rumours that Rachel was putting it about at university, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sent her any of the top three singles for her birthday that year; they all seemed appropriate to his position. Number one was Kenny Rodgers, Coward of the County, which offered him free licence to go and punch out his opposition – something he didn’t do till quite a bit later – obviously remembering the refrain: Sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man". But country wasn’t Billy’s style. The Specials may have said it better with their ‘you’ve done too much, much too young’ but that would only have put Rachel’s back up. The strongest contender, if he’d been wanting to win her back would be The Nolan’s ‘I’m in the mood for dancing.’ I bet that’s what he sent her. He was still pretty desperate in those days.
But the reality of the situation was probably best summed up by Madness’ My Girl. Remember we were in the days long before mobile phones, but Billy tried to keep in touch with Rachel by calling her. It rarely worked. I suspect that most of the time the phonebox rang out. But he kept on trying. Every time I heard ‘My girl’ I thought of him. He was trying to convince himself that Rachel still was ‘his girl’ but in reality we all knew different. What looks like a trite wee ditty from the distance of the decades, was poignant as hell when it was happening: My girl's mad at me, Been on the telephone for an hour, We hardly said a word. I tried and tried but I could not be heard, Why can't I explain? Why do I feel this pain? 'Cause everything I say, She doesn't understand, She doesn't realise, She takes it all the wrong way’
Billy wasn’t the only one. Looking back, taking things the wrong way seems to be the stock in trade of those emerging from teenage years. You think you’re so grown up, but your emotions are still way out of your own control. I don’t think any of us ever knew what we were doing. Add to that the ready availability of alcohol and it’s amazing any of us ever survived. If, indeed, we did.
Easter was at the beginning of April that year and Laura was back home on holiday. There was no sign of Rachel. We had planned a night out, and then Billy and Grant got a gig, so we went to support them. It was the first of many for me – that summer I became something of a ‘groupie.’ In a very understated way of course. While the cool kids were head-banging to Rainbow’s ‘All Night Long,’ I just did what I did best, stood on the side-lines tapping my feet to the rhythm of the reels. After the gigs I helped carry things to the car, if Billy had scored one from work, but it wasn’t exactly rock chick glamour; I wasn’t man-handling drum kits or anything. And mostly it was a bus ride home, Billy and Grant on the seat behind and me sitting next to a couple of fiddles. A decade on, I was still catching up with The Carpenters ‘Close to you’. I kept it quiet, of course I did. No one in their right mind admitted to liking The Carpenters, or Abba, or John Denver in those days. I loved all three. But then I had a lot of time to spend lying around my bedroom wishing and hoping and dreaming that something gotta change. Lyrics were my bible.
In May 1980 Billy’s Birthday number 1 single was Call me, by Blondie. I sent him the single through the post. Part of me knew that he’d probably think it was from Rachel. I didn’t have the nerve to put my name to a card and I used a typed label to address it – which was as close as I could get to suggesting she hadn’t sent it. I never heard anything about what happened. The way I looked at it, either I was doing Billy a favour, or Rachel would put him out of his misery, or he’d wake up to the fact that I was there. None of these seemed to happen. Life just went on. Except that Grant bought Billy a cassette for his birthday. It was The Beat, I just can’t stop it. When Billy had scored a car ‘on loan’ from work with a cassette player, they used to play it on the way back and forth from gigs. It always struck me as a bit weird. But there was more than a subliminal message being passed across. They used to let their hair down after gigs by both sitting there, bopping reggae style and playing the album to death.
The Walkman had just been launched, but we couldn’t afford it. At risk of sounding like an old fogey, we didn’t have instant access to all the music in the world. We made our own entertainment! I can still repeat the lyrics of ‘Best Friend’ verbatim: ‘I just found out the name of your best friend, You been talkin' about yourself again, And no one seems to share your views, Why doesn't anybody listen to you kid?
And it is like reviving the old Bohemian Rhapsody days, thinking of Billy and Grant sitting in the car revving the engine and shouting ‘Hand’s off she’s mine’ to each other. It made me feel, just for a moment, like they were fighting over me. Though I knew that they had both probably forgotten I was even sitting in the back seat. It was all the back seat action I ever saw, that’s for sure. I was left with ‘Can’t get used to losing you,’ even though, as I said, I’ve no right to claim the lyrics personally.
What we might call ‘the whole gang’, though we were miles away from the Happy Days crew, met up at the Italian café that summer once or twice. Once Rachel came. Only once. So of course I remember that time particularly. The juke box had moved on to another generation and we struggled to find ‘our’ songs. I remember she played Turn it on again. I’m guessing playing Genesis was her way of showing she was ‘progressing’ while we were all still stuck ‘in the city’ or ‘in the modern world’ with The Jam. She certainly never went to one of Grant and Billy’s gigs.
Most particularly I remember that Grant put on The Beat ‘Hands Off She’s mine,’ which, retrospectively was less weird than it seemed. Talk about subtext. I remember Rachel blushed. I didn’t know why. But I knew they weren’t talking about me!
We had a couple of girls’ nights out that summer. I tried to avoid the feeling that Laura had substituted Rachel for me, which was perhaps not so much a substitute as an upgrade, but on our nights out I invariably felt like the odd one out. I tried not to think about it but there was always a part of me that felt they hooked up with me mostly because I had more ‘disposable income’ for buying the drinks on our nights out.
In October they went back to Uni. I remember Billy ‘borrowed’ a new Mark 3 Escort from the garage he worked in to take them back. Rachel wasn’t above travelling in style, even if she was prepared to leave Billy hanging on the telephone when she was back at Uni.
That autumn the gigging continued. You have to remember this was in the infancy of bands like Runrig and Capercailie. Billy and Grant were covering songs from Corries and Battlefield Band as well as the old ‘classics’ from Andy Stewart and way back when. If they’d have sung they might have been the Proclaimers before the Proclaimers were, but they weren’t. I didn’t know that Billy was writing songs then, and I didn’t have any idea what direction music might take him in. Imagine was still an old song in those days until John Lennon was shot dead that December. Out with the old and in with the new. We’d not really missed a beat when Elvis died, and the Beatles were over before we got into music, it was our parents’ generation, but Lennon’s death was the biggest news out in December 1980 and his music filled the airwaves so that even we weren’t immune to his lyrics.
I went to my work’s Christmas party with Grant. Of course it wasn’t that simple, I got Billy and Grant a gig. In retrospect it was a big mistake. Especially after John Lennon’s death, no one wanted to listen to fiddle music. They wanted pure, unadulterated pop. So at the last minute I had to cancel the live gig – I couldn’t believe I had done that to Billy. It wasn’t the money, it was the principle. I felt like Brutus in Julius Caesar (or I would have done if I’d ever read the play). To be more accurate the emotion came from Madness. Grant fairly rubbed my nose in it. He came along to do the DJ’ing, put on the track and said ‘this one’s to Jane, from Billy.’ As I listened to it, the words This is a serious matter, Too late to reconsider, No one's gonna want to know ya! You’re an embarrassment’ really hit home. That Christmas was a really low point. I couldn’t face Billy. I hated Grant. But most of all I hated myself.
I still didn’t get the whole story of course. I was majorly surprised when Grant said that for a Christmas present he would teach me to drive. Yes, I do remember him saying something like ‘it’s a way to make it up to Billy’ and not much more. The ‘deal’ was that I’d be able to drive them to and from gigs – which meant that they could drink.
The only fly in that ointment was that no one owned a car. They put that right in the New Year. Billy sourced me a clapped out old Mark 2 Escort. And I became a sort of chauffeur before I’d even passed my test. I didn’t care. Then, once I passed my test I could drive around on my own playing and singing along to The Carpenters Close to you but I made sure I hid the cassettes in the glove box when the boys were getting driven around. I bought a selection of The Jam and the other ‘cool’ songs of the day. ‘Sorted’ as they said in those days. Anything but.
Having the car was probably the only reason I got invited to Rachel’s 21st. It was a car crash of an event. Forget ‘Disco Crap’ it was the meanest thing I’ve ever seen. The party was at a hotel just outside of St Andrews. Grant was supplying the music. Billy had saved up all his wages and bought Rachel a Walkman, complete with mixed tape. And the single of the week which was Woman by John Lennon. The world was still in mourning.
We all went there with high hopes. The others were all tanked up. Perhaps that’s why it hit me so hard. I was stone cold sober.
~2013~
I repeated my thoughts that it was the meanest thing I ever saw during a phone call to Laura when we were in the final stages of fixing up the reunion.
‘I don’t know what you’re bitching about, you had your chance,’ Laura said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the early 1980’s when you were hanging around their gigs. If you’d stopped making eyes at Grant you might have stood a chance with Billy.’
I didn’t know if she was being intentionally cruel, or just stupid.
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said, ‘I never stood a chance with Billy. And for the record, your brother was using me much more than I was ever using him.’
‘It’s all water under the bridge now,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying. We all had our chance. If you didn’t take yours that’s your problem.’
‘Whereas you?’ I asked.
‘Me what?’
‘When did you take your chance?’ However much it hurt, I wanted my suspicions confirmed.
‘Was it in the seventies or did you wait till the eighties?’
‘Some kind of a best friend you are,’ she said, and put the phone down on me.
And she took the words right out of my mouth as Meatloaf might have said.
It took me a week before I caved. Of course it was me caved in, it always was. We had the reunion to organise after all – and despite all my misgivings – I wanted to see Billy again. It had been far, far too long.
~1981~
That 21st party was simply carnage. Rachel threw a Stevie Nicks and very, very publicly dumped Billy. I should have been pleased I suppose but I’ve never been able to stomach public humiliation. I was pretty used to it being directed at me over the years and thought I was well able to handle it, but to see Billy being subjected to it was more than I could bear.
After it happened… I still can’t bring myself to write it down, even now I feel that would be disloyal… Billy came over to me, grabbed me by the hand and said ‘Let’s get out of here.’
He and I left the rest of them to it, and drove home to Edinburgh alone. No music. No talking. Nothing. Just him and me, together alone. What might have been my proudest moment was one of the saddest of my entire life.
The next day he went up the Lothian Road and signed up to join the Navy. She did that. Rachel. How could I ever forgive her? For his birthday in May 1981 he was away, far away and we never even noticed Bucks Fizz give way to Adam Ant. Who cared about making your mind up or stand and deliver when the entire world had just collapsed. Can’t get used to losing you…
Billy and I had one thing in common and that was that neither of us went to University. Laura went to join Rachel at St Andrews. I had a job which meant I had a pay packet, though I was still living at home. My parents wouldn’t take more than a basic rent, so I certainly had more money than the likes of Laura and Rachel at University. And I didn’t have to buy books! Billy was working in a garage. He wasn’t an apprentice so much as a grease monkey, changing tyres and exhausts but he got to drive some really cool cars.
I kept my eyes open for Billy driving around. It should have been a good situation. He and I were in Edinburgh while Laura and Rachel were in St Andrews. Divided by the Firth of Forth. There were hundreds of thousands of people in Edinburgh and even though you could still not walk down Princes Street without bumping into someone you knew, for me, that someone was never Billy. So I took the only action I could. I kept in touch with Grant.
Grant and Billy were gigging a lot with their own band, playing ceilidh music mostly for parties and weddings and retirement do’s. I had very little going on outside work. It’s not that I stalked them, and most of the gigs I couldn’t have blagged my way into if I’d tried, but from a distance I kept a keen eye on what they were up to.
I was like an addict. When I needed a fix I contacted Grant. And he usually responded. It wasn’t a relationship as such, but we had (I thought) a set of unwritten rules. Looking back, I’m not sure we had the same rules, although we were both just using each other to get something entirely different. Grant was simply my dealer, the addiction was Billy. So maybe you think I was using him. And Laura. That I was the lowest of the low. But it wasn’t like that. As far as Laura was concerned, it wasn’t that she cut me off, or I cut her off, so much as I couldn’t bear to go to St Andrews and see them all being students. I’m not saying their life was exactly carefree, but it was a world away from the ‘real’ world of work I went to regularly nine to five.
Laura and Rachel seemed to have fallen on their feet and me, well, I fell as I always did, flat on my face. The best I could hope for was that Billy might pick me up rather than step over me.
As for Grant, well, I had no idea what his real motives were then – certainly I had no idea what was really going on. I’d have made a lousy spy however much time I spent Watching the Detectives with Elvis Costello.
Political unrest was the backdrop for the time but for me music was more important than politics. I got right into Two Tone and the mod revival. I knew Billy preferred it to Disco and I wanted him to notice me, so being into his music was the best way to do it, surely? I spent my money on clothes and music which put me in danger of becoming a normal teenager. My mum still tried to hijack me and my purse into M&S but I had my own money and could go down Cockburn Street if I preferred! –
In February when Rachel’s birthday came around I watched the charts, trying to work out which single Billy would send her. I was All out of love with Air Supply, though I knew it didn’t really apply to me I'm all out of love, what am I without you, I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong because that Christmas dance from 1976 hadn’t meant any more than the kiss I never told anyone about in 1972, when Billy kissed me outside the swimming pool in exchange for a finger of fudge. It’s pitiful that a decade, even two decades later, I held on to that secret as if it gave me first rights on Billy’s heart. But I did.
I don’t know now and I didn’t know then what single Billy sent Rachel for her birthday. I do remember spending an inordinate amount of time looking at the charts trying to work it out when I should have been filing. Working in insurance, I thought I was learning something about managing risk. In truth though, I was still risk averse. And I don’t believe I learned anything useful all the time I was there. Apart from how to put up with boredom and the daily grind. I’m sure I’m not unusual in that respect. But everyone has dreams don’t they? Something to make it worth getting up in the morning and facing another eight hours of unremitting tedium. I had my vicarious life. Music and Billy.
Amid rumours that Rachel was putting it about at university, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sent her any of the top three singles for her birthday that year; they all seemed appropriate to his position. Number one was Kenny Rodgers, Coward of the County, which offered him free licence to go and punch out his opposition – something he didn’t do till quite a bit later – obviously remembering the refrain: Sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man". But country wasn’t Billy’s style. The Specials may have said it better with their ‘you’ve done too much, much too young’ but that would only have put Rachel’s back up. The strongest contender, if he’d been wanting to win her back would be The Nolan’s ‘I’m in the mood for dancing.’ I bet that’s what he sent her. He was still pretty desperate in those days.
But the reality of the situation was probably best summed up by Madness’ My Girl. Remember we were in the days long before mobile phones, but Billy tried to keep in touch with Rachel by calling her. It rarely worked. I suspect that most of the time the phonebox rang out. But he kept on trying. Every time I heard ‘My girl’ I thought of him. He was trying to convince himself that Rachel still was ‘his girl’ but in reality we all knew different. What looks like a trite wee ditty from the distance of the decades, was poignant as hell when it was happening: My girl's mad at me, Been on the telephone for an hour, We hardly said a word. I tried and tried but I could not be heard, Why can't I explain? Why do I feel this pain? 'Cause everything I say, She doesn't understand, She doesn't realise, She takes it all the wrong way’
Billy wasn’t the only one. Looking back, taking things the wrong way seems to be the stock in trade of those emerging from teenage years. You think you’re so grown up, but your emotions are still way out of your own control. I don’t think any of us ever knew what we were doing. Add to that the ready availability of alcohol and it’s amazing any of us ever survived. If, indeed, we did.
Easter was at the beginning of April that year and Laura was back home on holiday. There was no sign of Rachel. We had planned a night out, and then Billy and Grant got a gig, so we went to support them. It was the first of many for me – that summer I became something of a ‘groupie.’ In a very understated way of course. While the cool kids were head-banging to Rainbow’s ‘All Night Long,’ I just did what I did best, stood on the side-lines tapping my feet to the rhythm of the reels. After the gigs I helped carry things to the car, if Billy had scored one from work, but it wasn’t exactly rock chick glamour; I wasn’t man-handling drum kits or anything. And mostly it was a bus ride home, Billy and Grant on the seat behind and me sitting next to a couple of fiddles. A decade on, I was still catching up with The Carpenters ‘Close to you’. I kept it quiet, of course I did. No one in their right mind admitted to liking The Carpenters, or Abba, or John Denver in those days. I loved all three. But then I had a lot of time to spend lying around my bedroom wishing and hoping and dreaming that something gotta change. Lyrics were my bible.
In May 1980 Billy’s Birthday number 1 single was Call me, by Blondie. I sent him the single through the post. Part of me knew that he’d probably think it was from Rachel. I didn’t have the nerve to put my name to a card and I used a typed label to address it – which was as close as I could get to suggesting she hadn’t sent it. I never heard anything about what happened. The way I looked at it, either I was doing Billy a favour, or Rachel would put him out of his misery, or he’d wake up to the fact that I was there. None of these seemed to happen. Life just went on. Except that Grant bought Billy a cassette for his birthday. It was The Beat, I just can’t stop it. When Billy had scored a car ‘on loan’ from work with a cassette player, they used to play it on the way back and forth from gigs. It always struck me as a bit weird. But there was more than a subliminal message being passed across. They used to let their hair down after gigs by both sitting there, bopping reggae style and playing the album to death.
The Walkman had just been launched, but we couldn’t afford it. At risk of sounding like an old fogey, we didn’t have instant access to all the music in the world. We made our own entertainment! I can still repeat the lyrics of ‘Best Friend’ verbatim: ‘I just found out the name of your best friend, You been talkin' about yourself again, And no one seems to share your views, Why doesn't anybody listen to you kid?
And it is like reviving the old Bohemian Rhapsody days, thinking of Billy and Grant sitting in the car revving the engine and shouting ‘Hand’s off she’s mine’ to each other. It made me feel, just for a moment, like they were fighting over me. Though I knew that they had both probably forgotten I was even sitting in the back seat. It was all the back seat action I ever saw, that’s for sure. I was left with ‘Can’t get used to losing you,’ even though, as I said, I’ve no right to claim the lyrics personally.
What we might call ‘the whole gang’, though we were miles away from the Happy Days crew, met up at the Italian café that summer once or twice. Once Rachel came. Only once. So of course I remember that time particularly. The juke box had moved on to another generation and we struggled to find ‘our’ songs. I remember she played Turn it on again. I’m guessing playing Genesis was her way of showing she was ‘progressing’ while we were all still stuck ‘in the city’ or ‘in the modern world’ with The Jam. She certainly never went to one of Grant and Billy’s gigs.
Most particularly I remember that Grant put on The Beat ‘Hands Off She’s mine,’ which, retrospectively was less weird than it seemed. Talk about subtext. I remember Rachel blushed. I didn’t know why. But I knew they weren’t talking about me!
We had a couple of girls’ nights out that summer. I tried to avoid the feeling that Laura had substituted Rachel for me, which was perhaps not so much a substitute as an upgrade, but on our nights out I invariably felt like the odd one out. I tried not to think about it but there was always a part of me that felt they hooked up with me mostly because I had more ‘disposable income’ for buying the drinks on our nights out.
In October they went back to Uni. I remember Billy ‘borrowed’ a new Mark 3 Escort from the garage he worked in to take them back. Rachel wasn’t above travelling in style, even if she was prepared to leave Billy hanging on the telephone when she was back at Uni.
That autumn the gigging continued. You have to remember this was in the infancy of bands like Runrig and Capercailie. Billy and Grant were covering songs from Corries and Battlefield Band as well as the old ‘classics’ from Andy Stewart and way back when. If they’d have sung they might have been the Proclaimers before the Proclaimers were, but they weren’t. I didn’t know that Billy was writing songs then, and I didn’t have any idea what direction music might take him in. Imagine was still an old song in those days until John Lennon was shot dead that December. Out with the old and in with the new. We’d not really missed a beat when Elvis died, and the Beatles were over before we got into music, it was our parents’ generation, but Lennon’s death was the biggest news out in December 1980 and his music filled the airwaves so that even we weren’t immune to his lyrics.
I went to my work’s Christmas party with Grant. Of course it wasn’t that simple, I got Billy and Grant a gig. In retrospect it was a big mistake. Especially after John Lennon’s death, no one wanted to listen to fiddle music. They wanted pure, unadulterated pop. So at the last minute I had to cancel the live gig – I couldn’t believe I had done that to Billy. It wasn’t the money, it was the principle. I felt like Brutus in Julius Caesar (or I would have done if I’d ever read the play). To be more accurate the emotion came from Madness. Grant fairly rubbed my nose in it. He came along to do the DJ’ing, put on the track and said ‘this one’s to Jane, from Billy.’ As I listened to it, the words This is a serious matter, Too late to reconsider, No one's gonna want to know ya! You’re an embarrassment’ really hit home. That Christmas was a really low point. I couldn’t face Billy. I hated Grant. But most of all I hated myself.
I still didn’t get the whole story of course. I was majorly surprised when Grant said that for a Christmas present he would teach me to drive. Yes, I do remember him saying something like ‘it’s a way to make it up to Billy’ and not much more. The ‘deal’ was that I’d be able to drive them to and from gigs – which meant that they could drink.
The only fly in that ointment was that no one owned a car. They put that right in the New Year. Billy sourced me a clapped out old Mark 2 Escort. And I became a sort of chauffeur before I’d even passed my test. I didn’t care. Then, once I passed my test I could drive around on my own playing and singing along to The Carpenters Close to you but I made sure I hid the cassettes in the glove box when the boys were getting driven around. I bought a selection of The Jam and the other ‘cool’ songs of the day. ‘Sorted’ as they said in those days. Anything but.
Having the car was probably the only reason I got invited to Rachel’s 21st. It was a car crash of an event. Forget ‘Disco Crap’ it was the meanest thing I’ve ever seen. The party was at a hotel just outside of St Andrews. Grant was supplying the music. Billy had saved up all his wages and bought Rachel a Walkman, complete with mixed tape. And the single of the week which was Woman by John Lennon. The world was still in mourning.
We all went there with high hopes. The others were all tanked up. Perhaps that’s why it hit me so hard. I was stone cold sober.
~2013~
I repeated my thoughts that it was the meanest thing I ever saw during a phone call to Laura when we were in the final stages of fixing up the reunion.
‘I don’t know what you’re bitching about, you had your chance,’ Laura said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the early 1980’s when you were hanging around their gigs. If you’d stopped making eyes at Grant you might have stood a chance with Billy.’
I didn’t know if she was being intentionally cruel, or just stupid.
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said, ‘I never stood a chance with Billy. And for the record, your brother was using me much more than I was ever using him.’
‘It’s all water under the bridge now,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying. We all had our chance. If you didn’t take yours that’s your problem.’
‘Whereas you?’ I asked.
‘Me what?’
‘When did you take your chance?’ However much it hurt, I wanted my suspicions confirmed.
‘Was it in the seventies or did you wait till the eighties?’
‘Some kind of a best friend you are,’ she said, and put the phone down on me.
And she took the words right out of my mouth as Meatloaf might have said.
It took me a week before I caved. Of course it was me caved in, it always was. We had the reunion to organise after all – and despite all my misgivings – I wanted to see Billy again. It had been far, far too long.
~1981~
That 21st party was simply carnage. Rachel threw a Stevie Nicks and very, very publicly dumped Billy. I should have been pleased I suppose but I’ve never been able to stomach public humiliation. I was pretty used to it being directed at me over the years and thought I was well able to handle it, but to see Billy being subjected to it was more than I could bear.
After it happened… I still can’t bring myself to write it down, even now I feel that would be disloyal… Billy came over to me, grabbed me by the hand and said ‘Let’s get out of here.’
He and I left the rest of them to it, and drove home to Edinburgh alone. No music. No talking. Nothing. Just him and me, together alone. What might have been my proudest moment was one of the saddest of my entire life.
The next day he went up the Lothian Road and signed up to join the Navy. She did that. Rachel. How could I ever forgive her? For his birthday in May 1981 he was away, far away and we never even noticed Bucks Fizz give way to Adam Ant. Who cared about making your mind up or stand and deliver when the entire world had just collapsed. Can’t get used to losing you…
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.