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 Twelve
It’s all about you, It’s all about you baby (McFly)
~ 2013 ~
It’s all about you, It’s all about you baby (McFly)
~ 2013 ~
A decade later. That phone-call.
‘You’ve been to all the reunions,’ Laura said.
‘So have you,’ I replied.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but only to show those losers…’
‘Whereas I am the loser champion,’ I said, before she got the chance to.
‘Don’t be so touchy, Jane,’ she said. ‘It was more than thirty years ago, for Christ’s sake. We were kids. You had a crush on Billy the Kid, just let it go.’
And I wished I could. But all the while, planning for the 2013 reunion, I was reliving the 1979 one. You remember, the first one that ended up in a fight. And the 2003 one, the last one that ended up in a fight. The one where I finally realised that even happy endings take their toll. When I stopped taking David Soul’s advice and gave up on us all.
~ 2003-2013 ~
When the dust settled from the 2003 reunion, we all went our separate ways. I swore to myself I never wanted to see any of them ever again. The inevitable had happened. Billy and Rachel had ended up together and I couldn’t bear the jealousy eating me up any longer. I thought I was dealing with my own grief as I helped my dad deal with his. I sat for as long as I could bear with him listening to the kind of songs he’d never have given house room to when my mum was alive.
From Lost without your love to Everything I own I learned a lot about the music that my parents had kept in their hearts, as their secret bread and butter, while I was struggling with my own adolescent lyrics. But in the end I couldn’t take any more. I told him I had to go back to work. He accepted it. I lasted a year in Edinburgh and was then called down to London to see the company through the process of demutualisation.
I moved to Canada in 2006, hoping for a fresh start. A new life? In 2012 they closed the operation and I had to make the choice whether to stay in Canada or come back home. I came back home. My dad was ill. He died late in 2012 and I inherited the flat. I put it straight on the market, despite the fact the market was still in the doldrums. I didn’t want to live overlooking my old school. I bought a place in Fife, planning to take early retirement, do a bit of consultancy work, maybe get a dog or a cat. Walk on the beach. Live. Or give up on living.
But like everyone, I’d signed up to Facebook. That’s how Laura found me. She ‘friended’ me and when I accepted the request, I saw she was friends with Rachel McGinley. I refused to torture myself by looking at the happy family pictures and I felt good about myself for not succumbing to the nature of social media surveillance. Or not more than once. A binge, then abstinence. Can you blame me?
So when Laura rang to tell me about the school being pulled down, part of me wanted to say ‘why should I care?’ But the other part of me knew that I’d be there.
~ 2013 ~
‘The last time I saw Billy he was being carted out by the neck charged with assault,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but that was… oh come on Jane, you’ve been to all the reunions…’
And we were off and running. She knew I’d be there.
‘So what have I missed?’
This time I wanted to be well warned in advance.
‘And I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about my life?’ she said.
‘Of course I do,’ I lied.
She told me what Facebook hadn’t, about how Chris and she had split up. Inevitable was the word she used. She was now bringing up four kids on her own.
‘What about the bump?’ I asked.
‘She’s a ten year old girl,’ Laura said. ‘Need I say more?’
Chris had left around the time I went to Canada. Reading between the lines things had been tough for Laura and I did feel sorry for her.
I kept talking.
Fiona, Laura’s eldest, had left home now but the other three were more than enough trouble. It turned out that Fiona had been pals with Heather, Rachel’s third child through primary school but once Chris left in 2006, they’d sort of lost touch. Fiona had become a bit ‘withdrawn’. She’d turned her life around, though, and was now studying nursing. I tried to remember what it was like being nineteen, but I knew I didn’t want to go there.
Even as she was telling me it all, Laura knew this wasn’t what I wanted to hear about, but she also knew I was never going to ask.
‘You’ll never guess what happened to Billy,’ she said.
‘So are you going to tell me?’ I asked.
‘I might,’ she said. ‘If you promise to come to the reunion.’
I promised.
She saved me from Facebook by filling me in on the salient details of the last decade. She told me that Rachel had had something of a tough time until the boys had grown up. Grant kept saying he wanted custody, but then letting them down time after time. Finally, in 2005 he’d gone abroad and pretty much stayed there. Picked up with some Asian ‘bint’ was how Laura described it to me. ‘You know Grant,’ she added.
I wasn’t sure I did. I wasn’t sure I ever did. I said nothing. Thankfully he wasn’t on Facebook.
As for Billy. He’d come out of the navy, helped Rachel bring up Grant’s kids. She was working her way up to deputy head and then head of a Primary school.
‘Imagine,’ Laura said, and I tried to. But I realised I knew nothing at all about Rachel, not the ‘real’ Rachel. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to. She’d ‘got’ Billy. That was all I needed to know. And she didn’t deserve him. I was sure of that. She never loved him like I loved him… oh, no… I’d sworn I wouldn’t go there again…
‘So, Billy stayed home looking after the baby and he took up music again. Rachel gave him the space to become what he really wanted to be. He’s gone professional, been in a band, they’re quite successful and he’s been touring around for the last eight or nine years,’ Laura said. ‘I mean it’s no Runrig, but he makes a living. And he’s so happy.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, trying not to choke on the words. Of course I was happy for him. I just couldn’t be happy that it was Rachel who had given him that happiness.
We got on with planning the reunion. Which took a lot of phone calls back and forth between me and Laura before we met up at Starbucks.
‘One good thing,’ she said, as we drank our coffee.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘At least there won’t be a fight,’ she said.
‘Grant not coming?’ I asked.
‘Why would he?’ she asked. ‘Besides which, he’s not even invited. It wasn’t his school.’
I didn’t know what to say about it. Maybe not, but he’d muscled his way in on all our lives right through them…
‘You’re lucky you never had a brother,’ Laura said. ‘Even though you had mine…’
‘I never…’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Come on, Jane, it’s all water under the bridge, right?’
‘Some troubled water… some bridge…’ was all I could think of to say.
‘Lighten up, it’s going to be great,’ she said. ‘It’ll be like the good old days, one more time.’
And I wanted to believe her. It’s just that when I looked back, not many of those days were really good. But the ones that were, they involved Billy. And I was scared about what I might see. It was why I kept away from Facebook. I couldn’t bear to think of, never mind see, Billy all grown up.
I’d seen the wedding pictures, but I’d stopped at that. I tried not to imagine him as a fifty year old man, but a part of me was really worried that ten years with the love of a good woman would have changed him beyond recognition.
I tell a lie, I tried to go on to Rachel’s Facebook page a couple of weeks before the reunion. But it was down. A big empty space where her virtual life had been. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. People do that from time to time, don’t they – get off Facebook and get back to reality.
And the reality was I knew I would be at the reunion. It was something I had to do. I told myself that whatever happened it would be the last, last time. Pulling the school down was, as Laura said, killing something really vital and it was about time I buried it all, surely. Face up to it and get past it. Leave it all behind. After one more night.
The evening came. I was supposed to be meeting Laura but I was early so I went in to the gym hall on my own. It looked smaller somehow. I guess that’s nostalgia. I was trying to drink it in for one last time.
I heard something, someone, and as I turned around I got the shock of my life. Along the raised walkway which ran the length of the hall, taking you through to the PE block, came Billy. But not Billy aged 52 as I knew him to be, it was Billy aged thirteen as he was in what we might, if we were getting all Muriel Spark about it, call his prime. I thought I was seeing a ghost. I was transfixed.
He was so beautiful. Blond hair, blue eyes, smile to die for. I was twelve all over again. Twelve, fourteen, seventeen, twenty two, thirty seven, forty two…
And then, in came Rachel. Grown up Rachel. She called after Billy: ‘Scott, come straight back.’
At that moment I realised it wasn’t Billy, it was his son – his and Rachel’s son.
You know how they say that when you have a car crash your whole life flashes in front of your eyes in an instant… well that was what it was like seeing Scott. It was a moment that took me out of time, where all the songs that ever were, all the feelings that ever I felt, were crushed into a sublime moment which I guess is what Paul Weller called Beat Surrender.
I looked around for Billy. He wasn’t there.
There was something Laura hadn’t told me. Because she didn’t know either. We both found out that night.
Billy was dead.
He’d been killed in a car crash three weeks before. He’d been on his way back from a gig. His body was still with the Procurator Fiscal so there hadn’t been a funeral. It hadn’t made the news. He was just another statistic on the road death map.
I don’t know how Rachel had the strength to go to the reunion. How she could stand up there in front of us all at 7:42 and twenty seconds and tell us.
‘Billy would have loved to be here. I hope you don’t mind, but we thought it would be good to pay tribute to him by playing his favourite songs tonight.’
I cried. I mean I bawled my head off. It was partly the shock, I suppose.
The first thing I thought, the instant before I started my hysterical crying was, I wonder what song he was listening to when he died?
And then I stopped thinking.
It was that evening I came to know Rachel.
I’d never thought about it, but I’d never really known Rachel. She was always some idealised person, or an obstacle, in the way of my unrequited love. She was always ‘so Stevie Nicks’ to me. I’d never really taken the time to think about life from her perspective. That night I learned that she was real, she’d been real all along the line, it was me who hadn’t realised that because our realities were incompatible.
But as I sat, howling in the hall, it was Rachel, not Laura who sat beside me, comforting me. I don’t even know where Laura was.
‘He really liked you,’ Rachel said.
‘He never even knew I existed,’ I replied.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he did really like you. He wanted to invite you to our wedding. I stopped him.’
A pause while I took that in.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Billy never really saw beyond…’ she started. ‘But I knew what it would mean to you and…’
‘It was the right thing to do,’ I said.
‘I loved him, Jane,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, and for the first time I felt no bitterness in that knowledge.
‘And you made him so happy,’ I said, through tears.
‘I tried,’ she said. ‘Eventually.’
As I sat with Rachel that night, while his son Scott ran the disco in tribute to his dad, she told me that Billy and she had carried on their tradition of buying each other the number one birthday hits every year since they’d got together. It was a formidable collection. She’d brought them all with her. We played them, every one, in memory of Billy.
That was some 70 songs and we were truly lost in music the whole night. It was tough on us all but she was right, there could be no more fitting tribute. No funeral would touch that. And when the funeral came, I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t. I said goodbye to Billy that night, in the Assembly Hall. We were so young together and we had our seasons in the sun there after all, not in some crematorium.
As the night went on and the songs came thick and fast, I sat there, re-living every moment.
The songs of 1975. I couldn’t believe it was nearly 40 years since the time that Billy and Rachel first got off with each other. He was dead and I could still remember every little detail. Jim Capaldi Love Hurts – a one hit wonder but not for us. Roxy Music – the coolest of the cool – Love is the Drug. The Drifters – I remember the boys dancing around like fools to Who Loves You – we were still at the stage where the boys did proto-pogoing and the girls danced round their handbags. The general embarrassment when it came to a slow dance, David Essex crooning Hold Me Close and everyone wishing someone else would do so, but no one wanting to be singled out onto the dance floor.
As we listened, and some even danced, to the soundtrack of our lives I realised it was not just my life. The lyrics pulled us together even as the emotions kept us apart … If I had words. But I don’t. My words have only ever come from the lyrics. They fed the emotions in my ever hopeful, ever broken heart and my reality stemmed from them. I was nothing without them. I had nothing without them. Every single one of them was all I ever knew about Billy.
As that most awful of evenings drew to a close, I realised I didn’t ever want it to end. I knew that I’d have to leave that room for the last time. No more school. No more Billy. No more hopelessly devoted, unrequited love.
I don’t know where I got the courage from but it seemed like all the barriers had been broken down now. Or like it really didn’t matter. And perhaps that’s the only time we can face the truth. When it doesn’t matter any more. So I asked Rachel
‘There’s one thing I don’t get.’
‘What’s that?’ Rachel answered
‘Why the hell did you ever marry Grant?’
I’d always seen her as something unreal, cool, together, sophisticated, the girl, as Abba would have had it ‘with the golden hair’ way out of the league of mousey me. Or Stevie Nicks, a captivating enchantress. In that respect, despite my jealousy, I’d always known that she deserved Billy. I suppose I was normal in seeing love as some kind of competition, but it really isn’t.
To her credit, she answered my question. And what Rachel told me about herself unravelled all my preconceptions. I realised that we are all, in our own ways, stumbling through life, a mass of contradictions and insecurities and that having a pretty smile, a beautiful figure doesn’t essentially change anything. Rachel, for all her Stevie Nicks looks and attitude, was just as lost as I was. And Grant knew that. He manipulated her the same as he manipulated me.
But Rachel fell subject to another great teenage lie. She failed to see, until very late in the day, that exciting isn’t the same as love. That bad boys are bad and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a nice boy who turns into a nice man. Billy was nice. Grant wasn’t. In one respect it’s as simple as that. Though of course none of us saw it then. Like all the important lessons in life (and love) we don’t learn them till it’s far too late.
Rachel was, like the rest of us, a Lifeboat lies lost at sea. These were her lyrics: I've been trying to reach your shore Waves of doubt keep drowning me.
Billy offered her eternal, true love but Grant offered something more appealing – a sense of danger. How do I know that? Because it’s what he offered me. It’s ridiculous but it’s compelling. Ask any woman.
At least in Billy and Rachel’s case they got a second chance. They had ten good years together in the end. They stopped holding on sixteen, became woman and man, broke free from Jack and Diane and became so much more. And I was pleased for them. Finally.
But oh, how I wished I could see Billy one more time. But I had to let go. We all do. Eventually. Time to say thank you for the music and walk on by.
‘You’ve been to all the reunions,’ Laura said.
‘So have you,’ I replied.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but only to show those losers…’
‘Whereas I am the loser champion,’ I said, before she got the chance to.
‘Don’t be so touchy, Jane,’ she said. ‘It was more than thirty years ago, for Christ’s sake. We were kids. You had a crush on Billy the Kid, just let it go.’
And I wished I could. But all the while, planning for the 2013 reunion, I was reliving the 1979 one. You remember, the first one that ended up in a fight. And the 2003 one, the last one that ended up in a fight. The one where I finally realised that even happy endings take their toll. When I stopped taking David Soul’s advice and gave up on us all.
~ 2003-2013 ~
When the dust settled from the 2003 reunion, we all went our separate ways. I swore to myself I never wanted to see any of them ever again. The inevitable had happened. Billy and Rachel had ended up together and I couldn’t bear the jealousy eating me up any longer. I thought I was dealing with my own grief as I helped my dad deal with his. I sat for as long as I could bear with him listening to the kind of songs he’d never have given house room to when my mum was alive.
From Lost without your love to Everything I own I learned a lot about the music that my parents had kept in their hearts, as their secret bread and butter, while I was struggling with my own adolescent lyrics. But in the end I couldn’t take any more. I told him I had to go back to work. He accepted it. I lasted a year in Edinburgh and was then called down to London to see the company through the process of demutualisation.
I moved to Canada in 2006, hoping for a fresh start. A new life? In 2012 they closed the operation and I had to make the choice whether to stay in Canada or come back home. I came back home. My dad was ill. He died late in 2012 and I inherited the flat. I put it straight on the market, despite the fact the market was still in the doldrums. I didn’t want to live overlooking my old school. I bought a place in Fife, planning to take early retirement, do a bit of consultancy work, maybe get a dog or a cat. Walk on the beach. Live. Or give up on living.
But like everyone, I’d signed up to Facebook. That’s how Laura found me. She ‘friended’ me and when I accepted the request, I saw she was friends with Rachel McGinley. I refused to torture myself by looking at the happy family pictures and I felt good about myself for not succumbing to the nature of social media surveillance. Or not more than once. A binge, then abstinence. Can you blame me?
So when Laura rang to tell me about the school being pulled down, part of me wanted to say ‘why should I care?’ But the other part of me knew that I’d be there.
~ 2013 ~
‘The last time I saw Billy he was being carted out by the neck charged with assault,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but that was… oh come on Jane, you’ve been to all the reunions…’
And we were off and running. She knew I’d be there.
‘So what have I missed?’
This time I wanted to be well warned in advance.
‘And I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about my life?’ she said.
‘Of course I do,’ I lied.
She told me what Facebook hadn’t, about how Chris and she had split up. Inevitable was the word she used. She was now bringing up four kids on her own.
‘What about the bump?’ I asked.
‘She’s a ten year old girl,’ Laura said. ‘Need I say more?’
Chris had left around the time I went to Canada. Reading between the lines things had been tough for Laura and I did feel sorry for her.
I kept talking.
Fiona, Laura’s eldest, had left home now but the other three were more than enough trouble. It turned out that Fiona had been pals with Heather, Rachel’s third child through primary school but once Chris left in 2006, they’d sort of lost touch. Fiona had become a bit ‘withdrawn’. She’d turned her life around, though, and was now studying nursing. I tried to remember what it was like being nineteen, but I knew I didn’t want to go there.
Even as she was telling me it all, Laura knew this wasn’t what I wanted to hear about, but she also knew I was never going to ask.
‘You’ll never guess what happened to Billy,’ she said.
‘So are you going to tell me?’ I asked.
‘I might,’ she said. ‘If you promise to come to the reunion.’
I promised.
She saved me from Facebook by filling me in on the salient details of the last decade. She told me that Rachel had had something of a tough time until the boys had grown up. Grant kept saying he wanted custody, but then letting them down time after time. Finally, in 2005 he’d gone abroad and pretty much stayed there. Picked up with some Asian ‘bint’ was how Laura described it to me. ‘You know Grant,’ she added.
I wasn’t sure I did. I wasn’t sure I ever did. I said nothing. Thankfully he wasn’t on Facebook.
As for Billy. He’d come out of the navy, helped Rachel bring up Grant’s kids. She was working her way up to deputy head and then head of a Primary school.
‘Imagine,’ Laura said, and I tried to. But I realised I knew nothing at all about Rachel, not the ‘real’ Rachel. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to. She’d ‘got’ Billy. That was all I needed to know. And she didn’t deserve him. I was sure of that. She never loved him like I loved him… oh, no… I’d sworn I wouldn’t go there again…
‘So, Billy stayed home looking after the baby and he took up music again. Rachel gave him the space to become what he really wanted to be. He’s gone professional, been in a band, they’re quite successful and he’s been touring around for the last eight or nine years,’ Laura said. ‘I mean it’s no Runrig, but he makes a living. And he’s so happy.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, trying not to choke on the words. Of course I was happy for him. I just couldn’t be happy that it was Rachel who had given him that happiness.
We got on with planning the reunion. Which took a lot of phone calls back and forth between me and Laura before we met up at Starbucks.
‘One good thing,’ she said, as we drank our coffee.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘At least there won’t be a fight,’ she said.
‘Grant not coming?’ I asked.
‘Why would he?’ she asked. ‘Besides which, he’s not even invited. It wasn’t his school.’
I didn’t know what to say about it. Maybe not, but he’d muscled his way in on all our lives right through them…
‘You’re lucky you never had a brother,’ Laura said. ‘Even though you had mine…’
‘I never…’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Come on, Jane, it’s all water under the bridge, right?’
‘Some troubled water… some bridge…’ was all I could think of to say.
‘Lighten up, it’s going to be great,’ she said. ‘It’ll be like the good old days, one more time.’
And I wanted to believe her. It’s just that when I looked back, not many of those days were really good. But the ones that were, they involved Billy. And I was scared about what I might see. It was why I kept away from Facebook. I couldn’t bear to think of, never mind see, Billy all grown up.
I’d seen the wedding pictures, but I’d stopped at that. I tried not to imagine him as a fifty year old man, but a part of me was really worried that ten years with the love of a good woman would have changed him beyond recognition.
I tell a lie, I tried to go on to Rachel’s Facebook page a couple of weeks before the reunion. But it was down. A big empty space where her virtual life had been. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. People do that from time to time, don’t they – get off Facebook and get back to reality.
And the reality was I knew I would be at the reunion. It was something I had to do. I told myself that whatever happened it would be the last, last time. Pulling the school down was, as Laura said, killing something really vital and it was about time I buried it all, surely. Face up to it and get past it. Leave it all behind. After one more night.
The evening came. I was supposed to be meeting Laura but I was early so I went in to the gym hall on my own. It looked smaller somehow. I guess that’s nostalgia. I was trying to drink it in for one last time.
I heard something, someone, and as I turned around I got the shock of my life. Along the raised walkway which ran the length of the hall, taking you through to the PE block, came Billy. But not Billy aged 52 as I knew him to be, it was Billy aged thirteen as he was in what we might, if we were getting all Muriel Spark about it, call his prime. I thought I was seeing a ghost. I was transfixed.
He was so beautiful. Blond hair, blue eyes, smile to die for. I was twelve all over again. Twelve, fourteen, seventeen, twenty two, thirty seven, forty two…
And then, in came Rachel. Grown up Rachel. She called after Billy: ‘Scott, come straight back.’
At that moment I realised it wasn’t Billy, it was his son – his and Rachel’s son.
You know how they say that when you have a car crash your whole life flashes in front of your eyes in an instant… well that was what it was like seeing Scott. It was a moment that took me out of time, where all the songs that ever were, all the feelings that ever I felt, were crushed into a sublime moment which I guess is what Paul Weller called Beat Surrender.
I looked around for Billy. He wasn’t there.
There was something Laura hadn’t told me. Because she didn’t know either. We both found out that night.
Billy was dead.
He’d been killed in a car crash three weeks before. He’d been on his way back from a gig. His body was still with the Procurator Fiscal so there hadn’t been a funeral. It hadn’t made the news. He was just another statistic on the road death map.
I don’t know how Rachel had the strength to go to the reunion. How she could stand up there in front of us all at 7:42 and twenty seconds and tell us.
‘Billy would have loved to be here. I hope you don’t mind, but we thought it would be good to pay tribute to him by playing his favourite songs tonight.’
I cried. I mean I bawled my head off. It was partly the shock, I suppose.
The first thing I thought, the instant before I started my hysterical crying was, I wonder what song he was listening to when he died?
And then I stopped thinking.
It was that evening I came to know Rachel.
I’d never thought about it, but I’d never really known Rachel. She was always some idealised person, or an obstacle, in the way of my unrequited love. She was always ‘so Stevie Nicks’ to me. I’d never really taken the time to think about life from her perspective. That night I learned that she was real, she’d been real all along the line, it was me who hadn’t realised that because our realities were incompatible.
But as I sat, howling in the hall, it was Rachel, not Laura who sat beside me, comforting me. I don’t even know where Laura was.
‘He really liked you,’ Rachel said.
‘He never even knew I existed,’ I replied.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he did really like you. He wanted to invite you to our wedding. I stopped him.’
A pause while I took that in.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Billy never really saw beyond…’ she started. ‘But I knew what it would mean to you and…’
‘It was the right thing to do,’ I said.
‘I loved him, Jane,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, and for the first time I felt no bitterness in that knowledge.
‘And you made him so happy,’ I said, through tears.
‘I tried,’ she said. ‘Eventually.’
As I sat with Rachel that night, while his son Scott ran the disco in tribute to his dad, she told me that Billy and she had carried on their tradition of buying each other the number one birthday hits every year since they’d got together. It was a formidable collection. She’d brought them all with her. We played them, every one, in memory of Billy.
That was some 70 songs and we were truly lost in music the whole night. It was tough on us all but she was right, there could be no more fitting tribute. No funeral would touch that. And when the funeral came, I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t. I said goodbye to Billy that night, in the Assembly Hall. We were so young together and we had our seasons in the sun there after all, not in some crematorium.
As the night went on and the songs came thick and fast, I sat there, re-living every moment.
The songs of 1975. I couldn’t believe it was nearly 40 years since the time that Billy and Rachel first got off with each other. He was dead and I could still remember every little detail. Jim Capaldi Love Hurts – a one hit wonder but not for us. Roxy Music – the coolest of the cool – Love is the Drug. The Drifters – I remember the boys dancing around like fools to Who Loves You – we were still at the stage where the boys did proto-pogoing and the girls danced round their handbags. The general embarrassment when it came to a slow dance, David Essex crooning Hold Me Close and everyone wishing someone else would do so, but no one wanting to be singled out onto the dance floor.
As we listened, and some even danced, to the soundtrack of our lives I realised it was not just my life. The lyrics pulled us together even as the emotions kept us apart … If I had words. But I don’t. My words have only ever come from the lyrics. They fed the emotions in my ever hopeful, ever broken heart and my reality stemmed from them. I was nothing without them. I had nothing without them. Every single one of them was all I ever knew about Billy.
As that most awful of evenings drew to a close, I realised I didn’t ever want it to end. I knew that I’d have to leave that room for the last time. No more school. No more Billy. No more hopelessly devoted, unrequited love.
I don’t know where I got the courage from but it seemed like all the barriers had been broken down now. Or like it really didn’t matter. And perhaps that’s the only time we can face the truth. When it doesn’t matter any more. So I asked Rachel
‘There’s one thing I don’t get.’
‘What’s that?’ Rachel answered
‘Why the hell did you ever marry Grant?’
I’d always seen her as something unreal, cool, together, sophisticated, the girl, as Abba would have had it ‘with the golden hair’ way out of the league of mousey me. Or Stevie Nicks, a captivating enchantress. In that respect, despite my jealousy, I’d always known that she deserved Billy. I suppose I was normal in seeing love as some kind of competition, but it really isn’t.
To her credit, she answered my question. And what Rachel told me about herself unravelled all my preconceptions. I realised that we are all, in our own ways, stumbling through life, a mass of contradictions and insecurities and that having a pretty smile, a beautiful figure doesn’t essentially change anything. Rachel, for all her Stevie Nicks looks and attitude, was just as lost as I was. And Grant knew that. He manipulated her the same as he manipulated me.
But Rachel fell subject to another great teenage lie. She failed to see, until very late in the day, that exciting isn’t the same as love. That bad boys are bad and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a nice boy who turns into a nice man. Billy was nice. Grant wasn’t. In one respect it’s as simple as that. Though of course none of us saw it then. Like all the important lessons in life (and love) we don’t learn them till it’s far too late.
Rachel was, like the rest of us, a Lifeboat lies lost at sea. These were her lyrics: I've been trying to reach your shore Waves of doubt keep drowning me.
Billy offered her eternal, true love but Grant offered something more appealing – a sense of danger. How do I know that? Because it’s what he offered me. It’s ridiculous but it’s compelling. Ask any woman.
At least in Billy and Rachel’s case they got a second chance. They had ten good years together in the end. They stopped holding on sixteen, became woman and man, broke free from Jack and Diane and became so much more. And I was pleased for them. Finally.
But oh, how I wished I could see Billy one more time. But I had to let go. We all do. Eventually. Time to say thank you for the music and walk on by.
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.