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 Two
A Little Ditty
Oh, yeah, life goes on,
Long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
Side Two
A Little Ditty
Oh, yeah, life goes on,
Long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
Track Eleven
That’s what I go to school for (Busted)
~ 2003 ~
That’s what I go to school for (Busted)
~ 2003 ~
‘A twenty five year reunion?’
‘We have to, Jane, we just have to.’
I wanted to tell an insistent Laura that actually it wasn’t our twenty fifth reunion. To point out that we were still held in thrall to Rachel and the girls from the year above but I couldn’t.
‘We’ve lost touch and I really regret that,’ she said.
At that moment I bought it. She caught me when I was at my weakest, I suppose. I thought I’d got over it all and moved on, even if I didn’t have a life. I’d never had a life, even when I was in the City of London earning a packet. And for the past couple of years I’d been on what might be called ‘sabbatical’ or ‘garden leave’ but was really just a career change from insurance to full time carer. Not that I’m knocking it as a career choice. There wasn’t a lot of satisfaction to be had from either role. I was just going through the motions. Like I never deserved a life anyway. Perhaps if I went back one more time I’d give myself the boost I needed to wake up, smell the coffee and finally step out of the shadows of the teenage me. I was forty two, for goodness sake.
While I was heading for middle age, a new crop of boy and girl bands were coming up through the ranks. And this year’s Donny Osmond was David Sneddon. He was a bit street smart, in that he stepped out of the manufacturing plasticity of success to point out that his ‘overnight’ success via TV was the result of seven years – ten weeks hard work. Fame Academy had been on the TV in our house, as in so many others in 2002 during the time my mum was determined never to have any silence in advance of that final silence. But it had been very much in the background for me. I had learned more or less to zone out music. It was never about the sound for me, it was always the words.
It was a bit scary to note that David Sneddon was born the summer Rachel left school. And there he was. He was telling us all to stop living the lie, twenty five years later. I didn’t listen. He was there and thereabouts on the charts but he didn’t make number one for either Rachel or Billy’s birthday. In February Stop Living the Lie was slipping down the charts in favour of All the Things she Said by Tatu – which was too fast paced for me – but the lyrics I keep asking myself, wondering how I keep closing my eyes but I can't block you out Want to fly to a place where it's just you and me were every bit as appropriate as
I can't believe that you pull on a sleeve when you cry, You stick in the knife then give the kiss of life live a lie at least for me. I should have listened.
Busted’s You Said No had been number three for Billy’s birthday the year before, higher than David Sneddon who was there again in May 2003 with Don’t Let Go while Robbie Williams was busy coming undone further down the charts.
I have to admit both Busted and David Sneddon gave me a huge dose of the nostalgia factor. They almost kidded me that I didn’t know what day it was when I walked into the room – thank you Rod Stewart – you’re in my heart and in my soul. Billy’s birthday number one that year was the hideously ridiculous dance track Loneliness. Best blotted from the memory. Even Busted was better than that. I wondered if, somewhere, Billy was listening to the words The whole world was watching and laughing On the day that I crashed and burned At your feet and remembering the time Rachel did the meanest thing ever… at her 21st party.
Springsteen might have been born in the USA with a hungry heart but he was right when he said ‘the past is always with us, for it feeds the present’. Certainly for me, the past, in the music, has never left me, however hard I’ve tried to blot it out. And I have tried. I know it was the same for Billy. It’s what we went to school for!
So, I walked back into the school Assembly hall at exactly 7:32 on Friday July 4th 2003. Independence Day. The first person I saw was Billy.
And, without a word of a lie, the music playing was Busted ‘That’s what I go to school for.’ Of course it was. Billy wasn’t dancing. Of course he wasn’t.
I looked around to see who I recognised. There was Scooby. He was dancing wildly, with Mrs Scooby. I was pleased to see they were still together. Then I saw Doobs and Stevie, aping it up along with the song I could see that you want it more when you told me that I'm what you go to school for, I'm what you go to school for, in front of some poor middle aged woman who I took to be the wife of one or other of them, but who, yes, could have been a teacher from our own school days.
It was like being back in 1975.
Except it wasn’t. I hoped I didn’t look that old. I knew I did.
Then the music changed. Enter Rachel. And time stood still. Stands still. She kisses Billy. They dance. Proof, if ever you needed it, of the relativity of time. And something else besides. Never gonna say goodbye…
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
The song was by Evanescence – a modern day Wuthering Heights. The best I could say is that it’s better than Beyonce. It was a real Rachel song. Not a real Billy song.
Standing there, I couldn’t believe my eyes or my ears, or indeed my heart. As they say these days WTF? Wake me up inside… save me from the nothing I’ve become… Heathcliff, it’s me I’m Cathy I’ve come home… I knew a happy ending when I saw one. And this was it. It just wasn’t my happy ending.
There was never going to be a good place to insert the next pieces of the jigsaw of my life. So here goes.
Remember I’d been suspicious of some kind of affair. When Laura was rubbing the bump that became Angus, at her wedding. I was wrong and I was right. Laura wasn’t implicated. Not this time. It was Billy and Rachel.
Way back in 1994 I remember cynically laughing my way through Four Weddings and a Funeral. In 2000 ‘our gang’ did our own cover version of it. Shades of Robbie and Nicole doing their Frank and Nancy. But perhaps it would be better labelled Two Divorces and a Baby.
Here’s what I’d missed when I walked back into the Assembly Hall in 2003. Remember that awful 1998 reunion? The one where I drove Billy home? The Carrs. The Corrs. Well, it obviously sparked something because it wasn’t long after that that Billy and Rachel met up.
I don’t know the details and I won’t make them up for dramatic effect and suggest it was at the Italian Café. She may have got the guy, she’s not getting my own private fantasy ending. After all, it’s enough to bear that it may well have been largely down to me that they ever rekindled their relationship. Like Dreams… thunder only happens when it’s raining and I keep my visions to myself.
In 2003 it was almost too hard to bear, but lately I’ve taken to thinking that it was an inevitable happy ending, and that it shouldn’t be me to begrudge Billy a happy ending just because I wasn’t central to it. I was with Suzanne Vega in the fringes after all. I waited, like U2 with or without you, while he gave himself away time after time. All the music melds into one and the years slip away as the lyrics find themselves working together to make one big track – the soundtrack of my life.
When we were young, it seemed that life had just begun… and ‘my pal wants to know if your pal fancies her and will they go out together’ turned into the maelstrom of unrequited love. I should have gone beyond the Logical Song’s please tell me who I am and realised it wasn’t just me who was living the lyrics. I didn’t have the copyright on unrequited love. It wasn’t just my melody that was unchained. The rivers ran deep for everyone, in their own special way.
So how could I blame them? It’s hard to blame Rachel, given what I knew about Grant. And how could I blame Billy if he saw more in Robbie Williams She’s the One than I did in The Carpenters You’re the one. We all have our secret soundtracks. Me, you, even Rachel. And the soundtracks make us who we are. There’s a part of our identity, albeit our juvenile identity, that is always tied up in the songs. And some of us never leave that behind. Some of us can’t.
The bones of this story are that Billy and Rachel bust out of being Jack and Diane. They started down a path which became a fully fledged affair in 1999. While I finally managed to call time on my relationship with Mark, they were heading, inevitably, towards the moment we all knew was coming for ever, through every song they ever shared.
Billy left the navy. And Steph? Well, she was never really part of the picture anyway, was she? Like they say in all good fairy stories, she was never seen again. Billy wasn’t her handsome Prince in the end. Never going to be.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on her. It could have been me. And if it had been, we all know the same would have happened. Billy and Rachel were always destined to be together. In fact, in fiction, in the words and the music, there was no other ending possible. Theirs was a never ending chorus. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow…
I’m guessing that 40th birthday celebrations were thin on the ground for Rachel and Billy. Between her 40th in February 2000 and his 40th in May 2001 they had other things on their minds.
Some time that year Rachel left Grant and took their kids with her. He deserved that. And at Christmas 2000 Billy and Rachel had their own son. While Robbie Williams was swinging while he was winning, talk about living the lie? S Club 7’s never had a dream come true, which was just a cheesy pop song to the rest of us, had a deeper significance for them. It was the number one song when Scott McGinley came into the world. And he would always be their baby. The baby who came out of the fact that, in the end, they couldn’t either of them ever let the other one go, or ever forget their first love.
The rest of us were just bit part players in their love affair ever. We sometimes got too close, sometimes got in the way. Sometimes knocked them off course. That our dreams were dashed by their love, well, I guess we should all have expected that too. We were just fallout.
2001 was the year of divorces. First Rachel, then Billy. And this was what I’d missed out on when I walked back into our 2003 reunion. John Lennon was right – beautiful boy – Life is what happens to you, While you're busy making other plans. But John Cougar was right too. Life goes on…
~ 2003 ~
‘They got married last year.’ Laura finally filled me in.
‘You might have warned me,’ I said as I sank myself into a second gin and tonic.
‘You’d never have believed me,’ she said.
‘Oh yes I would,’ I replied.
‘Well, you’d never have come,’ she said.
I had no response to that.
But you think this was a happy ever after? Haven’t you been paying attention. It’s still 2003, there’s still a long long way to go for all of us, not just Phil Collins.
First, I had to go over and congratulate them. That took another gin and tonic.
And all that was in my mind as I went towards them was to ask what song they played at their wedding. But I knew. Or I thought I did. I was wrong.
I didn’t ask them then, of course. I managed to blurt out something like ‘congratulations’.
‘Surprised?’ Rachel asked.
‘Never doubted it for a minute,’ I responded.
‘It’s all thanks to you,’ Billy said.
‘The Cars?’
He shook his head
‘The Corrs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What?’ Rachel asked.
‘Ah, babe, let me and Janie keep one little secret, won’t you?’ he teased.
She smiled. Kissed him. Turned the knife that little bit further on me, like only Rachel could.
And someone put on Hold me Close.
‘Your song, I believe,’ Rachel said and literally handed Billy to me.
She was wrong, of course. If she’d forgotten, I hadn’t.
‘So you forgive me for the Italian café?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing to forgive, Jane,’ she said. ‘We’ve all had our moments. We were just kids.’
I didn’t even know where to start responding to those statements. So I didn’t. I just danced. I shut my eyes. I lost myself in the music. I told myself it was the last time before I let him go. But life’s never that straightforward, is it? We were dancing to David Essex but I was hearing The Beat: Can’t get used to losing you, no matter what I try to do, gonna spend my whole life through… you know the rest.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the evening. Until the end.
In came Grant. They were playing just want to dance the night away. It was about as light as you could imagine and then suddenly it was dark, really dark.
He went straight up to Billy and launched out at him. Billy went down. For a moment I thought Grant had pulled a knife on him. Rachel was frozen to the spot. Laura held me back as I tried to intervene. In the end it was Scooby and Doobs who grappled Grant to the floor. At which point Billy got up. Stupid Scooby and Doobs, who doubtless thought they were doing the right thing, let Grant go. And Billy decked him. He didn’t stop until the police came. I don’t know who called them. One of the ‘girls’ on the organising committee, I expect. All I remember is that the police sirens drowned out Darius’ Colourblind. Some idiot had thought that keeping the disco music playing would make things better, I suppose. It wasn’t the song I’d have chosen to go along with the fight.
Billy was dragged out of the room to the inappropriate strains of Brian Ferry’s Dance Away and charged with grievous bodily harm. The rest of us were detained as witnesses. It put me in mind of the disco of 1979 but the consequences were all grown up. I think it was the combination of the fact that Billy had a military background, and that it was essentially a ‘domestic’ situation and that most of us all told the police that Grant had started it anyway that meant he only got a suspended sentence. And Rachel kept custody of the kids. Which the police thought was the root of the argument. We knew it was a much, much bigger story than that.
‘We have to, Jane, we just have to.’
I wanted to tell an insistent Laura that actually it wasn’t our twenty fifth reunion. To point out that we were still held in thrall to Rachel and the girls from the year above but I couldn’t.
‘We’ve lost touch and I really regret that,’ she said.
At that moment I bought it. She caught me when I was at my weakest, I suppose. I thought I’d got over it all and moved on, even if I didn’t have a life. I’d never had a life, even when I was in the City of London earning a packet. And for the past couple of years I’d been on what might be called ‘sabbatical’ or ‘garden leave’ but was really just a career change from insurance to full time carer. Not that I’m knocking it as a career choice. There wasn’t a lot of satisfaction to be had from either role. I was just going through the motions. Like I never deserved a life anyway. Perhaps if I went back one more time I’d give myself the boost I needed to wake up, smell the coffee and finally step out of the shadows of the teenage me. I was forty two, for goodness sake.
While I was heading for middle age, a new crop of boy and girl bands were coming up through the ranks. And this year’s Donny Osmond was David Sneddon. He was a bit street smart, in that he stepped out of the manufacturing plasticity of success to point out that his ‘overnight’ success via TV was the result of seven years – ten weeks hard work. Fame Academy had been on the TV in our house, as in so many others in 2002 during the time my mum was determined never to have any silence in advance of that final silence. But it had been very much in the background for me. I had learned more or less to zone out music. It was never about the sound for me, it was always the words.
It was a bit scary to note that David Sneddon was born the summer Rachel left school. And there he was. He was telling us all to stop living the lie, twenty five years later. I didn’t listen. He was there and thereabouts on the charts but he didn’t make number one for either Rachel or Billy’s birthday. In February Stop Living the Lie was slipping down the charts in favour of All the Things she Said by Tatu – which was too fast paced for me – but the lyrics I keep asking myself, wondering how I keep closing my eyes but I can't block you out Want to fly to a place where it's just you and me were every bit as appropriate as
I can't believe that you pull on a sleeve when you cry, You stick in the knife then give the kiss of life live a lie at least for me. I should have listened.
Busted’s You Said No had been number three for Billy’s birthday the year before, higher than David Sneddon who was there again in May 2003 with Don’t Let Go while Robbie Williams was busy coming undone further down the charts.
I have to admit both Busted and David Sneddon gave me a huge dose of the nostalgia factor. They almost kidded me that I didn’t know what day it was when I walked into the room – thank you Rod Stewart – you’re in my heart and in my soul. Billy’s birthday number one that year was the hideously ridiculous dance track Loneliness. Best blotted from the memory. Even Busted was better than that. I wondered if, somewhere, Billy was listening to the words The whole world was watching and laughing On the day that I crashed and burned At your feet and remembering the time Rachel did the meanest thing ever… at her 21st party.
Springsteen might have been born in the USA with a hungry heart but he was right when he said ‘the past is always with us, for it feeds the present’. Certainly for me, the past, in the music, has never left me, however hard I’ve tried to blot it out. And I have tried. I know it was the same for Billy. It’s what we went to school for!
So, I walked back into the school Assembly hall at exactly 7:32 on Friday July 4th 2003. Independence Day. The first person I saw was Billy.
And, without a word of a lie, the music playing was Busted ‘That’s what I go to school for.’ Of course it was. Billy wasn’t dancing. Of course he wasn’t.
I looked around to see who I recognised. There was Scooby. He was dancing wildly, with Mrs Scooby. I was pleased to see they were still together. Then I saw Doobs and Stevie, aping it up along with the song I could see that you want it more when you told me that I'm what you go to school for, I'm what you go to school for, in front of some poor middle aged woman who I took to be the wife of one or other of them, but who, yes, could have been a teacher from our own school days.
It was like being back in 1975.
Except it wasn’t. I hoped I didn’t look that old. I knew I did.
Then the music changed. Enter Rachel. And time stood still. Stands still. She kisses Billy. They dance. Proof, if ever you needed it, of the relativity of time. And something else besides. Never gonna say goodbye…
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
The song was by Evanescence – a modern day Wuthering Heights. The best I could say is that it’s better than Beyonce. It was a real Rachel song. Not a real Billy song.
Standing there, I couldn’t believe my eyes or my ears, or indeed my heart. As they say these days WTF? Wake me up inside… save me from the nothing I’ve become… Heathcliff, it’s me I’m Cathy I’ve come home… I knew a happy ending when I saw one. And this was it. It just wasn’t my happy ending.
There was never going to be a good place to insert the next pieces of the jigsaw of my life. So here goes.
Remember I’d been suspicious of some kind of affair. When Laura was rubbing the bump that became Angus, at her wedding. I was wrong and I was right. Laura wasn’t implicated. Not this time. It was Billy and Rachel.
Way back in 1994 I remember cynically laughing my way through Four Weddings and a Funeral. In 2000 ‘our gang’ did our own cover version of it. Shades of Robbie and Nicole doing their Frank and Nancy. But perhaps it would be better labelled Two Divorces and a Baby.
Here’s what I’d missed when I walked back into the Assembly Hall in 2003. Remember that awful 1998 reunion? The one where I drove Billy home? The Carrs. The Corrs. Well, it obviously sparked something because it wasn’t long after that that Billy and Rachel met up.
I don’t know the details and I won’t make them up for dramatic effect and suggest it was at the Italian Café. She may have got the guy, she’s not getting my own private fantasy ending. After all, it’s enough to bear that it may well have been largely down to me that they ever rekindled their relationship. Like Dreams… thunder only happens when it’s raining and I keep my visions to myself.
In 2003 it was almost too hard to bear, but lately I’ve taken to thinking that it was an inevitable happy ending, and that it shouldn’t be me to begrudge Billy a happy ending just because I wasn’t central to it. I was with Suzanne Vega in the fringes after all. I waited, like U2 with or without you, while he gave himself away time after time. All the music melds into one and the years slip away as the lyrics find themselves working together to make one big track – the soundtrack of my life.
When we were young, it seemed that life had just begun… and ‘my pal wants to know if your pal fancies her and will they go out together’ turned into the maelstrom of unrequited love. I should have gone beyond the Logical Song’s please tell me who I am and realised it wasn’t just me who was living the lyrics. I didn’t have the copyright on unrequited love. It wasn’t just my melody that was unchained. The rivers ran deep for everyone, in their own special way.
So how could I blame them? It’s hard to blame Rachel, given what I knew about Grant. And how could I blame Billy if he saw more in Robbie Williams She’s the One than I did in The Carpenters You’re the one. We all have our secret soundtracks. Me, you, even Rachel. And the soundtracks make us who we are. There’s a part of our identity, albeit our juvenile identity, that is always tied up in the songs. And some of us never leave that behind. Some of us can’t.
The bones of this story are that Billy and Rachel bust out of being Jack and Diane. They started down a path which became a fully fledged affair in 1999. While I finally managed to call time on my relationship with Mark, they were heading, inevitably, towards the moment we all knew was coming for ever, through every song they ever shared.
Billy left the navy. And Steph? Well, she was never really part of the picture anyway, was she? Like they say in all good fairy stories, she was never seen again. Billy wasn’t her handsome Prince in the end. Never going to be.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on her. It could have been me. And if it had been, we all know the same would have happened. Billy and Rachel were always destined to be together. In fact, in fiction, in the words and the music, there was no other ending possible. Theirs was a never ending chorus. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow…
I’m guessing that 40th birthday celebrations were thin on the ground for Rachel and Billy. Between her 40th in February 2000 and his 40th in May 2001 they had other things on their minds.
Some time that year Rachel left Grant and took their kids with her. He deserved that. And at Christmas 2000 Billy and Rachel had their own son. While Robbie Williams was swinging while he was winning, talk about living the lie? S Club 7’s never had a dream come true, which was just a cheesy pop song to the rest of us, had a deeper significance for them. It was the number one song when Scott McGinley came into the world. And he would always be their baby. The baby who came out of the fact that, in the end, they couldn’t either of them ever let the other one go, or ever forget their first love.
The rest of us were just bit part players in their love affair ever. We sometimes got too close, sometimes got in the way. Sometimes knocked them off course. That our dreams were dashed by their love, well, I guess we should all have expected that too. We were just fallout.
2001 was the year of divorces. First Rachel, then Billy. And this was what I’d missed out on when I walked back into our 2003 reunion. John Lennon was right – beautiful boy – Life is what happens to you, While you're busy making other plans. But John Cougar was right too. Life goes on…
~ 2003 ~
‘They got married last year.’ Laura finally filled me in.
‘You might have warned me,’ I said as I sank myself into a second gin and tonic.
‘You’d never have believed me,’ she said.
‘Oh yes I would,’ I replied.
‘Well, you’d never have come,’ she said.
I had no response to that.
But you think this was a happy ever after? Haven’t you been paying attention. It’s still 2003, there’s still a long long way to go for all of us, not just Phil Collins.
First, I had to go over and congratulate them. That took another gin and tonic.
And all that was in my mind as I went towards them was to ask what song they played at their wedding. But I knew. Or I thought I did. I was wrong.
I didn’t ask them then, of course. I managed to blurt out something like ‘congratulations’.
‘Surprised?’ Rachel asked.
‘Never doubted it for a minute,’ I responded.
‘It’s all thanks to you,’ Billy said.
‘The Cars?’
He shook his head
‘The Corrs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What?’ Rachel asked.
‘Ah, babe, let me and Janie keep one little secret, won’t you?’ he teased.
She smiled. Kissed him. Turned the knife that little bit further on me, like only Rachel could.
And someone put on Hold me Close.
‘Your song, I believe,’ Rachel said and literally handed Billy to me.
She was wrong, of course. If she’d forgotten, I hadn’t.
‘So you forgive me for the Italian café?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing to forgive, Jane,’ she said. ‘We’ve all had our moments. We were just kids.’
I didn’t even know where to start responding to those statements. So I didn’t. I just danced. I shut my eyes. I lost myself in the music. I told myself it was the last time before I let him go. But life’s never that straightforward, is it? We were dancing to David Essex but I was hearing The Beat: Can’t get used to losing you, no matter what I try to do, gonna spend my whole life through… you know the rest.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the evening. Until the end.
In came Grant. They were playing just want to dance the night away. It was about as light as you could imagine and then suddenly it was dark, really dark.
He went straight up to Billy and launched out at him. Billy went down. For a moment I thought Grant had pulled a knife on him. Rachel was frozen to the spot. Laura held me back as I tried to intervene. In the end it was Scooby and Doobs who grappled Grant to the floor. At which point Billy got up. Stupid Scooby and Doobs, who doubtless thought they were doing the right thing, let Grant go. And Billy decked him. He didn’t stop until the police came. I don’t know who called them. One of the ‘girls’ on the organising committee, I expect. All I remember is that the police sirens drowned out Darius’ Colourblind. Some idiot had thought that keeping the disco music playing would make things better, I suppose. It wasn’t the song I’d have chosen to go along with the fight.
Billy was dragged out of the room to the inappropriate strains of Brian Ferry’s Dance Away and charged with grievous bodily harm. The rest of us were detained as witnesses. It put me in mind of the disco of 1979 but the consequences were all grown up. I think it was the combination of the fact that Billy had a military background, and that it was essentially a ‘domestic’ situation and that most of us all told the police that Grant had started it anyway that meant he only got a suspended sentence. And Rachel kept custody of the kids. Which the police thought was the root of the argument. We knew it was a much, much bigger story than that.
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.