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 Five
Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies ( Fleetwood Mac)
~ 1985 ~
Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies ( Fleetwood Mac)
~ 1985 ~
I kind of assumed that it would be a Bryan Adams style one night thing love affair with Mark. It wasn’t.
I have to be fair to him, he didn’t really lie to me. He had something of a hectic lifestyle. He told me straight out about Sonette and the girls. He wasn’t married, he didn’t live with her or anything, but he did spend time with ‘the girls’ and he wasn’t going to let me in to that part of his life. As Stevie would have said, he was kind of semi-detached. In all respects.
But he wanted me to be part of his story. I suppose it suited me, to an extent. I was in well over my head, but I couldn’t have committed full time. I was still doing the Monday to Friday nine to five, though the hours usually stretched from eight till six. Work hard, play hard, right? The mantra of the mid-80s.
Mark’s life was a lot more interesting than mine. And I reckoned it was worth being even a small part of. As far as ‘getting a life’ is concerned, you may think it was pitiful. Looking back, okay, I admit I was really just latching on to another life vicariously, like I’d done during school. But at the time, believe me, it felt different. As Fiction Factory and Bryan Adams both reminded me from time to time it feels like heaven. They were two different styles but the emotion was the same. I tried to convince myself that this was love, though Howard Jones kept ringing through my head does anybody love anybody anyway, still rang out from a couple of years before.
Years after I’d been doing singalonga Queen Find me somebody to love, I told myself I’d found someone. Of course at the time I didn’t realise how much of a time-share it was. I thought I was sharing only with a couple of girls under ten. I didn’t realise Sonette was still in the picture. Not till it was far too late.
Mark was around a lot that summer. I saw him every other weekend and a couple of evenings during the week. Burning a lot of midnight oil. I perhaps mistook exhaustion for happiness. I’m sure I’m not the only one. And yes, it was exciting. He used to turn up, with training kit bags, like the ones the boys took to school in the 70s, stuffed with cash from the tee shirts he’d sold at the latest gig. We used to sit down and count them out before he banked them for the organisation. It was mad. I got a good line in tour tee shirts as well. It’s about as rock chic as I was ever likely to get, let’s be real, and I revelled in it. I felt part, not just of his life, but of a really big thing – the music scene. It was all vicarious of course. It always was. Welcome to my life…
In September Mark baled out to go on the Lloyd Cole tour. My new Best Friend disappeared for a month. He’d obviously got the bug because he was hardly back than come October, he went on the Elton John Ice on Fire tour for a month. I thought it would be longer but he turned up again at the end of November with his bags of money to count.
‘Couldn’t stand listening to that every night,’ he said.
As a treat, he took me to Lloyd Cole at the Hammersmith Odeon in December 1985. And we had our own ‘lost weekend’ in Amsterdam just before Christmas. It was to make up for the fact that he would spend Christmas itself with ‘the girls’. I pretended I didn’t mind.
My parents invited me back up to Edinburgh, but I declined. I spent the day alone in Surbiton pretending it wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t anything special after all. Nothing really mattered – oh yeah, life goes on. I wasn’t into Barry Manilow, well not actively, and it wasn’t music but lyrics that were my first love… but I confess I spent the day playing old records and trying not to think about the past.
After a ten hour stint of nostalgia, with not a few tears, I made a decision. I didn’t exactly burn the past, but I put it away in record cases and made my new year resolution for 1986. I was so over them all. Laura, Grant, Rachel and of course Billy. Time for a fresh start. Look to the future now it’s only just begun. Time to really grow up.
Out with the old and in with the new. But whoever keeps their resolutions?
~ 2013 ~
I told you at the beginning that this was Billy and Rachel’s story so now you’ll be wondering where it’s going, since I cut them out at Christmas 1985. They never noticed at the time, of course, but when we were planning the 2013 reunion Laura came right out and said,
‘So what the hell was up with you then?’
It got me thinking. And once you start thinking about the past, you see it in a whole different light. I’d consigned my records to the attic, but I was moving in the world of CDs. I couldn’t stop the music. I was still lost in the lyrics. I was still making page entries in that lonely diary.
~ 1986 ~
Talking of diaries, it was hard to keep up with Mark’s. I couldn’t work out (and still can’t) how he managed to keep up his ‘real’ job of Quantity Surveying with the life on the road. He just told me QS was so understaffed, and he was so good at it, that he could work when he liked and no one would dare to question when he was busy elsewhere. It was my introduction to the notion of contract work. A mile away from what was now becoming a 7-7 job for me in the City.
He worked Sting’s Blue Turtle European leg either side of Christmas – I tried not to think of him having Christmas in Paris with Sonette and ‘the girls’. And then he was back for a few days before heading off to Japan with Rick Springfield. It was unspoken between us where and with whom he’d actually spent Christmas. To be fair to him, he’d probably have told me had I asked. But somehow, I couldn’t bear to. He was the life raft of my future and I was hanging on to it. When he was there he was totally ‘present’, as you might say. It was just that most of the time he wasn’t there.
February was tough. I buried myself in work. I didn’t see Mark again till March. I kept my resolution. Life went on. I wasn’t watching the charts (or the detectives) any more. I hardly even noticed Rachel’s birthday song in 1986 which was When the going gets tough the tough get going.
I thought I was doing so well. Billy’s birthday song in 1986 was Rock Me Amadeus. I never even thought of sending it to him. I had no idea where he was, of course, so the option wasn’t there, but I didn’t even buy a copy myself.
I told myself I preferred Level 42, who were at number three at the time, giving us all Lessons in Love. It was Mark’s taste. I tried to adopt it. He took me to one of the gigs in December 86, and was out on tour with them in the spring of 87.
Back then I tried hard not to understand the lyrics which felt like pre-destination: All the dreams that we were building, We never fulfilled them. I didn’t want to realise that all the hopes I ever had Fade like footprints in the sand. Some things were too hard to admit. Level 42 was Mark’s life really. I never really understood Running in the Family
So instead, I developed an interest in musical theatre. The big new thing was Chess, the Musical. I went in May – while Mark was away and I was trying to be me. I had enough disposable income to do pretty much what I wanted. If only I wanted the simple things. We all know that money can’t buy you love!
Had I allowed myself to look at the relationship between me and Mark properly… but of course I just told myself every relationship has rough patches. So when he let me down at the last minute, or when he admitted he was spending the weekend with ‘the girls’, I did the usual thing. Denial in the form of retail therapy.
I knew the album, of course, though it had been consigned to the cupboard along with all the rest, and as I remember, I told myself I’d booked Chess to try and spark a conversation with Mark about the complexities of relationships. But he cancelled at the last moment. I went on my own anyway. I told myself I was there to think about one relationship and wham, I got hit by the past. I told myself to accept that No one in your life is with you constantly, No one is completely on your side. I allowed myself to feel aggrieved that though I move my world to be with him, Still the gap between him is too wide. But the reality was it wasn’t Mark I was thinking about, was it?
There were other lines that really told me what I was doing there: Looking back I could have played it differently, One a few more moments who can tell, and however much I told myself I was ever so much younger then, the only consolation I could have was: Now at least I know I know him well.
But of course I didn’t know either of them well. I didn’t even really know myself.
Looking back, it strikes me (as I expect it’s already struck you) that Mark, like Grant before him, was just another Billy substitute. I realise that now. I should have given myself a proper chance, but I never really wanted a relationship that would work, I just wanted Billy. The one man I knew I could never have.
Instead, in answer to Laura’s 2013 question; in the mid-1980s I defined my life through Mark and his tour dates. It was a different record perhaps but it was stuck just the same.
In the summer of ‘86, he spent a month in Canada on the Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi tour and I spent the rest of the year Living on a Prayer.
It felt entirely like Back to the Future as he left for the Huey Lewis and the News tour to the throes of The Power of Love in October. It was the eighties remember and we were all making money in financial services. But the lyrics; it don’t take money, and it don’t take fame, don’t need no credit card to ride this train; were too close to the knuckle. I tried to avoid reading too much into how the power of love allegedly could make a bad one good, make a wrong one right and determined it wouldn’t be true that it was the power of love that keeps you home at night.
But all the same, I didn’t go out much if it wasn’t with Mark. I told myself it was because I was too busy. Too busy to go back and see my parents in Edinburgh. Too busy even to go on holiday. Who was I going to go on holiday with? A night at the theatre alone was one thing but a solo week in Spain? I don’t think so.
I was busy at work. Stupidly busy. The Big Bang was really good for me workwise. There was plenty of money, but you had to keep your wits about you, and most of all you had to ‘be there’ to capitalise on the new wild west of the deregularised markets. I was all there at work.
As autumn went into winter I was still half way there, living on a prayer in my personal life, trying to make Mark what I wanted him to be. Still failing. Mark was rocking it all over Europe with Bon Jovi but when he was back he phoned me with tickets to the Hammersmith Odeon shows. We met up on the 16th. After… well, of course it was after… you know… he told me that he was working the concessions so he wouldn’t actually be ‘with’ me in the auditorium, but I could take a friend. I spat the dummy – or came as close to it as I could. I told him I’d got tickets to Suzanne Vega at the Royal Albert Hall on the 17th. I invited him along.
‘Can’t go, Jane, got to work,’ was the inevitable reply.
It struck me that he worked how and when he liked, and saw me how and when he liked. And I was half way there to breaking up with him.
I went to Suzanne Vega. I heard her when she told me I was still only in the outskirts, And in the fringes looking in on other people’s lives and I really meant to do something about it. Marlene on the Wall looked down on me and the lyrics seared into my heart. I felt her mocking smile, I knew I was fighting things I couldn’t see and I determined that I’d tell Mark it was over. It was my firm intention when I headed out to the Hammersmith Odeon on the 18th. I walked in to the foyer. He was there. What can I say that Suzanne and Marlene never said: I tried so hard to resist When you held me in your handsome fist And reminded me of the night we kissed And of why I should be leaving.
As Charlotte Bronte might have said, reader, I couldn’t do it.
So come Christmas 1986, I sat at home alone with Bon Jovi, both of us telling ourselves: we've got to hold on to what we've got, It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not We've got each other and that's a lot for love. We'll give it a shot, whereas in reality, I should have been listening to the old Gilbert O Sullivan classic because I was alone again, naturally.
~ 1987 ~
The semi-detached joke of a relationship somehow struggled on, perhaps simply because it didn’t suit Mark to end it and I didn’t have the nerve. Predictably, Mark wasn’t there for Valentine’s Day. I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t look at the charts. So I missed the battle between George Michael and Aretha Franklin on one side and Pepsi and Shirley on the other. I bet Billy would have been tempted to send Rachel the latter. I was certainly in denial about being Consumed by shadows, I was crippled emotionally and didn’t have the confidence to keep the faith and not falter, and I had plenty of buried regrets. How could I compare my feelings for Billy with his feelings for Rachel though? Like Pepsi and Shirley I couldn’t forget the way it started, but I wasn’t the perfect girl left behind…
And then the wheels really came off. When Mark came back, he bought me the CD of Fleetwood Mac – Tango in the Night. He couldn’t know what he’d done, could he? But my period of cold turkey was over. Forget the rumours of you can go your own way, I couldn’t resist looking back when I wanna be with you everywhere was filling my mind. As ever, of course I missed the main chart topping lyrics. Little lies was far too appropriate. I closed my eyes alright while Mark was away with Emily and Jo Running in the Family.
It was a strange year. Billy’s birthday song was Starship’s Nothing’s gonna stop us now. The lyrics pumped out: Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that
Put your hand in my hand baby, Don't ever look back, Let the world around us just fall apart which, looking back, seem presciently appropriate. Kiss had it right, they were crazy,crazy,crazy,crazy nights. Even those who hated the heavy metal genre might have said ‘we’re all heavy metal now.’
And it was in that context that Margaret Thatcher got back in to power in June with a third landslide victory. I guess it just showed that I wasn’t alone in not being able to see beyond what I thought was my own narrow best interests… or that everyone in the 80s not only wanted to rule the world but to follow the money.
I got promoted at work and then I got head hunted and ended up in the new Lloyd’s building in the city. It was a fast and furious time in the financial sector and I found myself working long, long hours in the reinsurance department. Taking a risk, at least in business terms, was becoming a way of life, and the money was good. Like all good things, though, it didn’t last.
Looking back, that year it seems I was mostly either at work or at home waiting to hear from Mark. I amassed a huge library of videos, including all the cheesy American 1980s Brat Pack movies. I could recite St Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink in my sleep. Talk about escapism. How I managed to convince myself that this was as real as our own teenage years in Edinburgh I’ll never know, but it’s amazing how one can weave fantasy into the narrative of a real life – if you’re trying to avoid painful truths.
But as Chess reminded me nothing is so good it lasts eternally and if perfect situations can go wrong, how much more those real, imperfect lives we live?
Come the autumn of 1987 everything was in chaos. There was a massive hurricane in October, just before a bigger, financial hurricane. I was, unusually, spending the weekend with Mark that weekend. He was due to join the Bryan Adams tour on the Monday – with the best part of a week at Wembley before heading up to Birmingham and beyond, so we were having some ‘quality time’ before he left.
His car was parked outside my house in Surbiton and a falling tree just missed it. We didn’t get up early on the Sunday, and had intended going out for a carvery at the local Beefeaters (or whatever it was in those days, I really can’t remember) but when he saw his car’s near miss, he lost the plot and took off – like it was my fault. I spent the Sunday feeling sorry for myself – not nearly as sorry as I would come the following day. We had planned that I’d come to the first night at Wembley, but when I got into work that day I was confronted with more than the debris of fallen trees. The day became known as Black Monday. The stock market crashed. I really thought I was going to lose my job – teach me for taking a risk. I won’t bore you with the in’s and out’s of ‘reinsurance to close’ policies or the workings of syndicates – suffice it to say, they were turbulent times.
That Christmas I made something of a change, though. I moved from Surbiton closer to work. I took advantage of preferential mortgage options and moved into a new build in South East London just across from the developing Canary Wharf. If I’d known that interest rates would hike from 8 to 14 percent over the next couple of years of course I wouldn’t have done it. But I did. No one can predict the future, in markets or in life, however much they learn (or don’t) from the past. One thing life, and working in insurance, taught me is that there is no real security. Nowhere and with no one.
That Christmas, idealism gave way to cynicism, not just for me. John Lennon’s Imagine and War is Over were old hat in the face of the Pogue Fairy Tale of New York, as I let the Bells ring out for Christmas Day once again on my own. But I told myself I had something new to look forward to. A new house, a new life. As we used to say in Edinburgh, ‘Mark got his jotters.’ I was finally free. So I poured myself a large gin and tonic and replayed I could have been someone, Well so could anyone.
I have to be fair to him, he didn’t really lie to me. He had something of a hectic lifestyle. He told me straight out about Sonette and the girls. He wasn’t married, he didn’t live with her or anything, but he did spend time with ‘the girls’ and he wasn’t going to let me in to that part of his life. As Stevie would have said, he was kind of semi-detached. In all respects.
But he wanted me to be part of his story. I suppose it suited me, to an extent. I was in well over my head, but I couldn’t have committed full time. I was still doing the Monday to Friday nine to five, though the hours usually stretched from eight till six. Work hard, play hard, right? The mantra of the mid-80s.
Mark’s life was a lot more interesting than mine. And I reckoned it was worth being even a small part of. As far as ‘getting a life’ is concerned, you may think it was pitiful. Looking back, okay, I admit I was really just latching on to another life vicariously, like I’d done during school. But at the time, believe me, it felt different. As Fiction Factory and Bryan Adams both reminded me from time to time it feels like heaven. They were two different styles but the emotion was the same. I tried to convince myself that this was love, though Howard Jones kept ringing through my head does anybody love anybody anyway, still rang out from a couple of years before.
Years after I’d been doing singalonga Queen Find me somebody to love, I told myself I’d found someone. Of course at the time I didn’t realise how much of a time-share it was. I thought I was sharing only with a couple of girls under ten. I didn’t realise Sonette was still in the picture. Not till it was far too late.
Mark was around a lot that summer. I saw him every other weekend and a couple of evenings during the week. Burning a lot of midnight oil. I perhaps mistook exhaustion for happiness. I’m sure I’m not the only one. And yes, it was exciting. He used to turn up, with training kit bags, like the ones the boys took to school in the 70s, stuffed with cash from the tee shirts he’d sold at the latest gig. We used to sit down and count them out before he banked them for the organisation. It was mad. I got a good line in tour tee shirts as well. It’s about as rock chic as I was ever likely to get, let’s be real, and I revelled in it. I felt part, not just of his life, but of a really big thing – the music scene. It was all vicarious of course. It always was. Welcome to my life…
In September Mark baled out to go on the Lloyd Cole tour. My new Best Friend disappeared for a month. He’d obviously got the bug because he was hardly back than come October, he went on the Elton John Ice on Fire tour for a month. I thought it would be longer but he turned up again at the end of November with his bags of money to count.
‘Couldn’t stand listening to that every night,’ he said.
As a treat, he took me to Lloyd Cole at the Hammersmith Odeon in December 1985. And we had our own ‘lost weekend’ in Amsterdam just before Christmas. It was to make up for the fact that he would spend Christmas itself with ‘the girls’. I pretended I didn’t mind.
My parents invited me back up to Edinburgh, but I declined. I spent the day alone in Surbiton pretending it wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t anything special after all. Nothing really mattered – oh yeah, life goes on. I wasn’t into Barry Manilow, well not actively, and it wasn’t music but lyrics that were my first love… but I confess I spent the day playing old records and trying not to think about the past.
After a ten hour stint of nostalgia, with not a few tears, I made a decision. I didn’t exactly burn the past, but I put it away in record cases and made my new year resolution for 1986. I was so over them all. Laura, Grant, Rachel and of course Billy. Time for a fresh start. Look to the future now it’s only just begun. Time to really grow up.
Out with the old and in with the new. But whoever keeps their resolutions?
~ 2013 ~
I told you at the beginning that this was Billy and Rachel’s story so now you’ll be wondering where it’s going, since I cut them out at Christmas 1985. They never noticed at the time, of course, but when we were planning the 2013 reunion Laura came right out and said,
‘So what the hell was up with you then?’
It got me thinking. And once you start thinking about the past, you see it in a whole different light. I’d consigned my records to the attic, but I was moving in the world of CDs. I couldn’t stop the music. I was still lost in the lyrics. I was still making page entries in that lonely diary.
~ 1986 ~
Talking of diaries, it was hard to keep up with Mark’s. I couldn’t work out (and still can’t) how he managed to keep up his ‘real’ job of Quantity Surveying with the life on the road. He just told me QS was so understaffed, and he was so good at it, that he could work when he liked and no one would dare to question when he was busy elsewhere. It was my introduction to the notion of contract work. A mile away from what was now becoming a 7-7 job for me in the City.
He worked Sting’s Blue Turtle European leg either side of Christmas – I tried not to think of him having Christmas in Paris with Sonette and ‘the girls’. And then he was back for a few days before heading off to Japan with Rick Springfield. It was unspoken between us where and with whom he’d actually spent Christmas. To be fair to him, he’d probably have told me had I asked. But somehow, I couldn’t bear to. He was the life raft of my future and I was hanging on to it. When he was there he was totally ‘present’, as you might say. It was just that most of the time he wasn’t there.
February was tough. I buried myself in work. I didn’t see Mark again till March. I kept my resolution. Life went on. I wasn’t watching the charts (or the detectives) any more. I hardly even noticed Rachel’s birthday song in 1986 which was When the going gets tough the tough get going.
I thought I was doing so well. Billy’s birthday song in 1986 was Rock Me Amadeus. I never even thought of sending it to him. I had no idea where he was, of course, so the option wasn’t there, but I didn’t even buy a copy myself.
I told myself I preferred Level 42, who were at number three at the time, giving us all Lessons in Love. It was Mark’s taste. I tried to adopt it. He took me to one of the gigs in December 86, and was out on tour with them in the spring of 87.
Back then I tried hard not to understand the lyrics which felt like pre-destination: All the dreams that we were building, We never fulfilled them. I didn’t want to realise that all the hopes I ever had Fade like footprints in the sand. Some things were too hard to admit. Level 42 was Mark’s life really. I never really understood Running in the Family
So instead, I developed an interest in musical theatre. The big new thing was Chess, the Musical. I went in May – while Mark was away and I was trying to be me. I had enough disposable income to do pretty much what I wanted. If only I wanted the simple things. We all know that money can’t buy you love!
Had I allowed myself to look at the relationship between me and Mark properly… but of course I just told myself every relationship has rough patches. So when he let me down at the last minute, or when he admitted he was spending the weekend with ‘the girls’, I did the usual thing. Denial in the form of retail therapy.
I knew the album, of course, though it had been consigned to the cupboard along with all the rest, and as I remember, I told myself I’d booked Chess to try and spark a conversation with Mark about the complexities of relationships. But he cancelled at the last moment. I went on my own anyway. I told myself I was there to think about one relationship and wham, I got hit by the past. I told myself to accept that No one in your life is with you constantly, No one is completely on your side. I allowed myself to feel aggrieved that though I move my world to be with him, Still the gap between him is too wide. But the reality was it wasn’t Mark I was thinking about, was it?
There were other lines that really told me what I was doing there: Looking back I could have played it differently, One a few more moments who can tell, and however much I told myself I was ever so much younger then, the only consolation I could have was: Now at least I know I know him well.
But of course I didn’t know either of them well. I didn’t even really know myself.
Looking back, it strikes me (as I expect it’s already struck you) that Mark, like Grant before him, was just another Billy substitute. I realise that now. I should have given myself a proper chance, but I never really wanted a relationship that would work, I just wanted Billy. The one man I knew I could never have.
Instead, in answer to Laura’s 2013 question; in the mid-1980s I defined my life through Mark and his tour dates. It was a different record perhaps but it was stuck just the same.
In the summer of ‘86, he spent a month in Canada on the Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi tour and I spent the rest of the year Living on a Prayer.
It felt entirely like Back to the Future as he left for the Huey Lewis and the News tour to the throes of The Power of Love in October. It was the eighties remember and we were all making money in financial services. But the lyrics; it don’t take money, and it don’t take fame, don’t need no credit card to ride this train; were too close to the knuckle. I tried to avoid reading too much into how the power of love allegedly could make a bad one good, make a wrong one right and determined it wouldn’t be true that it was the power of love that keeps you home at night.
But all the same, I didn’t go out much if it wasn’t with Mark. I told myself it was because I was too busy. Too busy to go back and see my parents in Edinburgh. Too busy even to go on holiday. Who was I going to go on holiday with? A night at the theatre alone was one thing but a solo week in Spain? I don’t think so.
I was busy at work. Stupidly busy. The Big Bang was really good for me workwise. There was plenty of money, but you had to keep your wits about you, and most of all you had to ‘be there’ to capitalise on the new wild west of the deregularised markets. I was all there at work.
As autumn went into winter I was still half way there, living on a prayer in my personal life, trying to make Mark what I wanted him to be. Still failing. Mark was rocking it all over Europe with Bon Jovi but when he was back he phoned me with tickets to the Hammersmith Odeon shows. We met up on the 16th. After… well, of course it was after… you know… he told me that he was working the concessions so he wouldn’t actually be ‘with’ me in the auditorium, but I could take a friend. I spat the dummy – or came as close to it as I could. I told him I’d got tickets to Suzanne Vega at the Royal Albert Hall on the 17th. I invited him along.
‘Can’t go, Jane, got to work,’ was the inevitable reply.
It struck me that he worked how and when he liked, and saw me how and when he liked. And I was half way there to breaking up with him.
I went to Suzanne Vega. I heard her when she told me I was still only in the outskirts, And in the fringes looking in on other people’s lives and I really meant to do something about it. Marlene on the Wall looked down on me and the lyrics seared into my heart. I felt her mocking smile, I knew I was fighting things I couldn’t see and I determined that I’d tell Mark it was over. It was my firm intention when I headed out to the Hammersmith Odeon on the 18th. I walked in to the foyer. He was there. What can I say that Suzanne and Marlene never said: I tried so hard to resist When you held me in your handsome fist And reminded me of the night we kissed And of why I should be leaving.
As Charlotte Bronte might have said, reader, I couldn’t do it.
So come Christmas 1986, I sat at home alone with Bon Jovi, both of us telling ourselves: we've got to hold on to what we've got, It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not We've got each other and that's a lot for love. We'll give it a shot, whereas in reality, I should have been listening to the old Gilbert O Sullivan classic because I was alone again, naturally.
~ 1987 ~
The semi-detached joke of a relationship somehow struggled on, perhaps simply because it didn’t suit Mark to end it and I didn’t have the nerve. Predictably, Mark wasn’t there for Valentine’s Day. I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t look at the charts. So I missed the battle between George Michael and Aretha Franklin on one side and Pepsi and Shirley on the other. I bet Billy would have been tempted to send Rachel the latter. I was certainly in denial about being Consumed by shadows, I was crippled emotionally and didn’t have the confidence to keep the faith and not falter, and I had plenty of buried regrets. How could I compare my feelings for Billy with his feelings for Rachel though? Like Pepsi and Shirley I couldn’t forget the way it started, but I wasn’t the perfect girl left behind…
And then the wheels really came off. When Mark came back, he bought me the CD of Fleetwood Mac – Tango in the Night. He couldn’t know what he’d done, could he? But my period of cold turkey was over. Forget the rumours of you can go your own way, I couldn’t resist looking back when I wanna be with you everywhere was filling my mind. As ever, of course I missed the main chart topping lyrics. Little lies was far too appropriate. I closed my eyes alright while Mark was away with Emily and Jo Running in the Family.
It was a strange year. Billy’s birthday song was Starship’s Nothing’s gonna stop us now. The lyrics pumped out: Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that
Put your hand in my hand baby, Don't ever look back, Let the world around us just fall apart which, looking back, seem presciently appropriate. Kiss had it right, they were crazy,crazy,crazy,crazy nights. Even those who hated the heavy metal genre might have said ‘we’re all heavy metal now.’
And it was in that context that Margaret Thatcher got back in to power in June with a third landslide victory. I guess it just showed that I wasn’t alone in not being able to see beyond what I thought was my own narrow best interests… or that everyone in the 80s not only wanted to rule the world but to follow the money.
I got promoted at work and then I got head hunted and ended up in the new Lloyd’s building in the city. It was a fast and furious time in the financial sector and I found myself working long, long hours in the reinsurance department. Taking a risk, at least in business terms, was becoming a way of life, and the money was good. Like all good things, though, it didn’t last.
Looking back, that year it seems I was mostly either at work or at home waiting to hear from Mark. I amassed a huge library of videos, including all the cheesy American 1980s Brat Pack movies. I could recite St Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink in my sleep. Talk about escapism. How I managed to convince myself that this was as real as our own teenage years in Edinburgh I’ll never know, but it’s amazing how one can weave fantasy into the narrative of a real life – if you’re trying to avoid painful truths.
But as Chess reminded me nothing is so good it lasts eternally and if perfect situations can go wrong, how much more those real, imperfect lives we live?
Come the autumn of 1987 everything was in chaos. There was a massive hurricane in October, just before a bigger, financial hurricane. I was, unusually, spending the weekend with Mark that weekend. He was due to join the Bryan Adams tour on the Monday – with the best part of a week at Wembley before heading up to Birmingham and beyond, so we were having some ‘quality time’ before he left.
His car was parked outside my house in Surbiton and a falling tree just missed it. We didn’t get up early on the Sunday, and had intended going out for a carvery at the local Beefeaters (or whatever it was in those days, I really can’t remember) but when he saw his car’s near miss, he lost the plot and took off – like it was my fault. I spent the Sunday feeling sorry for myself – not nearly as sorry as I would come the following day. We had planned that I’d come to the first night at Wembley, but when I got into work that day I was confronted with more than the debris of fallen trees. The day became known as Black Monday. The stock market crashed. I really thought I was going to lose my job – teach me for taking a risk. I won’t bore you with the in’s and out’s of ‘reinsurance to close’ policies or the workings of syndicates – suffice it to say, they were turbulent times.
That Christmas I made something of a change, though. I moved from Surbiton closer to work. I took advantage of preferential mortgage options and moved into a new build in South East London just across from the developing Canary Wharf. If I’d known that interest rates would hike from 8 to 14 percent over the next couple of years of course I wouldn’t have done it. But I did. No one can predict the future, in markets or in life, however much they learn (or don’t) from the past. One thing life, and working in insurance, taught me is that there is no real security. Nowhere and with no one.
That Christmas, idealism gave way to cynicism, not just for me. John Lennon’s Imagine and War is Over were old hat in the face of the Pogue Fairy Tale of New York, as I let the Bells ring out for Christmas Day once again on my own. But I told myself I had something new to look forward to. A new house, a new life. As we used to say in Edinburgh, ‘Mark got his jotters.’ I was finally free. So I poured myself a large gin and tonic and replayed I could have been someone, Well so could anyone.
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.