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 Six
Who’s going to drive you home? (The Cars)
~ 1988 ~
Who’s going to drive you home? (The Cars)
~ 1988 ~
1988 started with the Pet Shop Boys butchering the Elvis classic Always on My Mind and Belinda Carlisle trying to convince us that Heaven was a place on Earth. Not for me it wasn’t.
In the days before Girl Power became a thing, Kylie and Tiffany were supposedly representing empowered women, but the neediness was all too evident. And I was still doing Tango in the Night with Fleetwood Mac.
I’m ashamed to say that I got back together with Mark. Thanks to Tiffany. He came round and I succumbed. It was all, you put your arms around me, And we tumble to the ground And then you say I think we're alone now, There doesn't seem to be anyone around I think we're alone now, The beating of our hearts is the only sound
I don’t know how he convinced me. But he did. I should be so lucky indeed.
I had no idea what was going on in those days. Like Dead or Alive, Mark was still spinning me right round like a record, baby.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst, as always, was still to come.
Billy’s birthday record was some hideous electronic dance music – the theme from S-Express holding off the challenge of Perfect – which of course nothing ever really would be, whatever Fairground Attraction said.
And then I got a phone call.
~ 2013 ~
‘How’d you get my number?’
‘Your parents, you tube. How’d you think?’
‘Oh. Of course.’
It was obvious. But I never asked the obvious questions. In 1988 it had come right out of the blue and I hadn’t even thought to ask how or why.
~ 1988 ~
So, Laura rang me. Let’s just say it was inconvenient timing. Mark was about (literally) to leave for the European leg of the Tango in the Night tour and we were having our own One More Night moment, re-living our first big night together from 1985. So I may have been both out of breath and less than focussed when she called. It had been more than three years after all. We’d all moved on.
But I agreed to come up for the school reunion. The Ten year reunion. I mean, how could I not? I even got Mark to say he’d come with me. Which of course he didn’t. What I didn’t do was ‘catch up’ with Laura properly then and there. Being otherwise preoccupied, I just said,
‘Yeah, I’ll be there, send me the details’ and left it at that.
So I deprived her of the opportunity to fill me in on what had happened since I was last paying attention. Stupid of me, of course. But we all do it, don’t we? Even those of us on the fringes find ourselves the centre of our own worlds and don’t imagine that others have been living their own lives while we weren’t there.
The Tango tour kicked off in Birmingham on 12th May, so Mark must have been with me on the 11th when Laura rang. He then came back to London for a week. I saw him once, but the invitation from Laura hadn’t arrived so I couldn’t firm up the date. He did say he’d come up with me, even seemed to be looking forward to it. But all I knew was that it would be some date in June, it was hard to plan. Mark’s diary governed our lives. He was committed in Germany and Rotterdam between the 4th and 15th, after which it was London, Dublin and Manchester. It looked well starred. And I was not a little proud (though nervous) of having a partner to show off. I mean, none of them would know the background. And Mark was good-looking, give him that. Perhaps one might go as far as to say charismatic. He certainly had stacks of confidence. No one would have expected plain Jane to ‘end up’ with him. And of course they would all be right, but they didn’t need to know that I was time-sharing.
In the end, when it came to it, the reunion was on Saturday 25th, not Friday 24th as I’d hoped. And Mark was in Dublin. I’m sure he could have said no to them, but he told me he couldn’t get free. Someone else had baled and… the usual crap.
So in the end, I drove up to Edinburgh on my own after work, arriving home in the early morning. My parents, who had stayed up late to greet me, tried their best to be enthusiastic. I’d told them Mark was coming with me, because I thought he was. I thought that my dad was a bit relieved when he said ‘you might have spared your mum the effort of making the spare bed up’, but my mum seemed sad that she wasn’t going, at last, to see my first ‘real’ boyfriend. Grant hadn’t counted with her. Either way, I slept alone in my old room and it was like nothing had ever changed.
~ 2013 ~
‘You never told him?’
‘I thought Grant had told him,’ Laura replied.
‘What?’
In the pre-2013 reunion ‘time for truth’ conversation I was trying to fathom out how it was that Billy had turned up at that tenth reunion in an even more ignorant state than me.
‘How was I to get in touch with him?’ she added.
There was a pregnant pause.
‘You’re telling me you never knew where Billy was from 1983 to 1988?’
Another pause.
‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you.’
I bit back the childish ‘don’t believe you’ that was rising.
‘These things happen.’
Oh boy did these things happen.
~ 1988 ~
Billy and I had one thing in common when we walked into that tenth reunion. We had been out of the loop. We didn’t know the ‘hot news’. Which was that six months earlier Rachel and Grant had got married. It was little consolation to think that it happened when pop was at its cheesiest. I hate to think what song they danced to at their wedding.
Let’s just say I was conflicted in my position. On the one hand, their wedding potentially cleared a lot of ground. On the other hand, if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to any of our lives – imagine the impact. The consequences. The fallout.
Walls came tumbling down that June all right. It was the song playing when I first saw Billy come into the room. Governments crack and systems fall Cause unity is powerful Lights go out, walls come tumbling down.
The reunion was in the sports hall at school. So there shouldn’t have been alcohol involved. But the ‘organising’ committee had managed to smuggle in a fair amount – I’m sure the school administrators would have gone off on one if they’d known, but hey, whoever followed the rules at school? Why change now. So, the point is, there was alcohol. By the time I got there, which was before Billy, Laura had had rather too much of it.
‘I thought you had a boyfriend coming?’ she said, slightly slurred.
‘Couldn’t make it,’ I replied, trying to sound blasé, ‘He’s on tour with Fleetwood Mac.’
She laughed. I tried to pretend it was the drink.
‘Sure he is,’ she replied.
And before I had time to get to grips with the thought – and that was my best friend? she floored me again.
‘Rachel not here?’ I asked.
‘Looking after the baby,’ she said.
‘Baby?’
‘You don’t know?’
Of course I couldn’t have known. Who would have told me but Laura?
‘Know what?’
‘Grant and Rachel got married in January,’ she said.
‘Wh…’ I started.
‘Do the maths,’ she said, ‘they have a two month old baby girl.’
‘She… they…’
I hadn’t meant to ask why, I was on the way to asking what… but now I was simply flailing around like someone had switched off my oxygen supply.
It was about then that the Style Council came on. You don't have to take this crap You don't have to sit back and relax. I looked over to the DJ deck, it was such a Billy song. And then I saw Grant.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked.
I hadn’t touched a drop, I was driving and I’ve always been strict on that front, but I felt the world spinning right round baby.
‘Get over it,’ Laura said. ‘He’s promised to do the disco.’
Ignoring the words Grant and promise in the same sentence as they seemed ridiculously juxtaposed, I tried to breathe deeply.
‘Does…’ I spluttered… ‘Does… Does Billy know?’
And then Billy walked in.
The music changed from The Style Council to Aztec Camera’s How Men Are. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a total car crash. It's no mystery, What you don't know always gets you, It will hurt you and desert you.
Billy went straight up to Grant. I thought he was going to punch him. But he didn’t. They fist bumped instead. And that’s when I thought… he doesn’t know. He still doesn’t know.
I felt like I used to when I watched the Daleks on TV from behind my fingers when I was a child. I couldn’t believe what I was about to witness. And I couldn’t believe Laura could be so cruel. Unless… of course… and then…
Laura was right by Billy’s side and dragged him off to dance. She was in for the kill. She was going to be the one to tell him and then she was going to make her move. It was so crass. It was so Laura. And it might just work.
I stood there, transfixed by the chorus: Why should it take the tears of a woman
To see how men are?
To give him his due, Billy reacted a lot better than I expected. I guess it was the military training. It was clear that Laura was filling him in. And by the time we’d all endured Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror; I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways the deed was done. The truth was told.
He barely flinched. But I knew he was hurting. I knew by the way that he extracted himself from Laura, who was making quite a show of herself – she had really drunk too much to be in this situation – and came across to talk to me.
‘Hi, Janie,’ he said.
‘Hi, Billy,’ I replied. I wanted to say ‘I didn’t know either,’ but I found myself speechless.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
‘Not so bad,’ I replied, cautiously. ‘You?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s…’
I was waiting for him to break.
‘D’you want to get out of here?’ he said.
‘You bet,’ I replied.
‘One minute,’ he said.
He went to the make-shift bar. He poured himself the hugest shot of vodka I’ve ever seen. He downed it in what seemed like one gulp. He crossed the room to Grant. I was waiting for the punch. He put his hand out. He shook hands with Grant.
I could see him saying ‘Congratulations, mate,’ and Grant replying ‘No hard feelings…’ by which time Billy was back with me, taking me by the arm and saying,
‘Come on. Janie, I can’t do this.’
We went outside. I suppose in one way it should have been my proudest moment. If I’d ever thought that Billy and I would leave a school disco together I’d have given up anything and everything I had or was going to have… but it was just the most painful thing in the world.
The way I saw it, he’d returned, like Heathcliff, hoping to win her back. But this was 20th century Edinburgh, not 19th century Yorkshire. It was real life, not a story. We were victims not characters. And we hurt.
‘Thanks,’ he said as we stood on the pavement.
And I didn’t need to ask what he was thanking me for. I knew. Like Aztec Camera sang Cause love is a giving with no need of return.
We stopped by my spiffy sporty red Astra. Perk of my high paid job.
‘Cool car,’ he said.
‘You still in the Navy?’ I asked.
‘You for real?’ he said and rubbed his oh, so short hair.
‘Yeah, I guess that was obvious,’ I said.
‘Got another two years,’ he said, ‘but I might just sign up again.’
‘Do you like it?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Life goes on,’ he said.
Suddenly into my head popped Elvis Costello. It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so, and I took a chance bigger than Abba ever did.
‘Who’s going to drive you home?’ I sang.
There was a pause.
‘Tonight,’ he replied.
Another pause.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘Thanks, Janie,’ he said.
Yet another pause as I fumbled with the door and he got in the passenger seat.
‘What tunes you got, Janie?’ he asked. Like this was something we did every day.
‘Oh, you know,’ I said and added, ‘Where are we driving?’
‘Just drive,’ he said. And smiled.
So I did.
He rooted through all my CDs. He seemed relatively impressed with my taste. He should be. It was the history of his taste after all. It was our lives.
He found The Cars. He stuck it on loud. Good times Roll, followed by My Best Friend’s Girl, followed by Just what I needed…
‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound sophisticated, ‘do you remember 1978?’
‘I try not to,’ he said.
‘I remember it all,’ I said.
‘Really?’ he looked at me like he was maybe seeing me for the first time.
‘But why?
‘It’s our life,’ I replied.
He shook his head.
‘Nah,’ he said ‘it’s all just stories.’
It’s all just stories. That sentence stuck with me. In a way he was right. For me it was stories of other people’s lives. But it was also a moment of heart-breaking reality. Even though I knew that his pain was because he still loved Rachel, I wanted to do something to comfort him. But I didn’t know what to do. Accidents will happen.
He picked up two CDs. One was Queen Greatest Hits and the other was Yazoo You and me both.
‘Your choice,’ he said.
That was a hard one. Queen was the obvious direct link back… but I’d wanted to play him Yazoo ever since it came out. Nobodies Diary had been his birthday record in 1983. There’s a fine line between unrequited love and being a stalker. And I didn’t want to cross it. So I knew it wasn’t the time to say it, but I said it anyway,
‘It’s got your 1983 birthday record on it.’
He looked at me, puzzled.
‘How’d you…?’ he started.
‘The Italian Café incident,’ I replied, and I swear I blushed.
‘Oh, that’, he said. ‘We were just kids.’
And I wanted to believe him.
He put Yazoo on. And by that time I was willing him not to. This was way beyond my comfort zone.
‘Which track?’ he asked me.
‘Uh, just put it on… the first one,’ I gulped.
On it came. And we listened to it in total silence.
He took it off after it finished and simply said ‘Good chorus.’
For the times we've had I don't want to be, a page in your diary babe.
‘Uh, so where am I driving you?’ I asked.
The temptation must have been to reply Highway to Hell but since only Doobs had been into AC/DC I was spared that.
He was looking at the Cars CD cover again.
‘I thought ‘That song,’ would be on it,’ he said as he read the CD cover.
‘What song?’ I asked.
‘Who’s going to drive you home,’ he said.
‘No, it’s later…’ I replied.
‘Yeah, of course,’ he said. ‘I remember.’
‘Take the next left,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind driving me back to Rosyth.
‘Not a problem,’ I said.
The silence left by the lack of musical accompaniment was deafening.
‘It was the background to the Live Aid appeal,’ he said.
And then the bombshell.
‘I was there.’
‘Me too,’ I said. And cursed myself to eternity.
‘Great day, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘One of the best,’ I lied.
‘I see a little sillhouetto of a man…’ he began. And smiled. He remembered. Our lives were always going to be tied up in some way. I was always going to be part of his past. But I so wanted to be a part of his future. But for now, all I could do was to be a page in his diary, and to drive him home – safely.
When I dropped him off, he gave me a peck on the cheek.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I said.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ he replied. ‘And you?’
‘Me?’
‘I always thought you’d end up marrying Grant,’ he said.
‘Me, never,’ I said. Though at that moment I kind of wished I had. If only to stop Rachel having done it.
‘No, got much more sense,’ he said. And got out of the car.
I drove off. I drove off to the park, turned Yazoo on full blast and cried my eyes out. For all of us. But most of all for Billy.
Perhaps if I held you I could win again, I could take your hands we'd talk and maybe then, That look in your eyes I always recognize, Would tell me everything is gonna be fine, You're gonna be mine For a long time.
But life isn’t like that, is it? Lyrics aren’t real life. Not then, not now, not ever.
In the days before Girl Power became a thing, Kylie and Tiffany were supposedly representing empowered women, but the neediness was all too evident. And I was still doing Tango in the Night with Fleetwood Mac.
I’m ashamed to say that I got back together with Mark. Thanks to Tiffany. He came round and I succumbed. It was all, you put your arms around me, And we tumble to the ground And then you say I think we're alone now, There doesn't seem to be anyone around I think we're alone now, The beating of our hearts is the only sound
I don’t know how he convinced me. But he did. I should be so lucky indeed.
I had no idea what was going on in those days. Like Dead or Alive, Mark was still spinning me right round like a record, baby.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst, as always, was still to come.
Billy’s birthday record was some hideous electronic dance music – the theme from S-Express holding off the challenge of Perfect – which of course nothing ever really would be, whatever Fairground Attraction said.
And then I got a phone call.
~ 2013 ~
‘How’d you get my number?’
‘Your parents, you tube. How’d you think?’
‘Oh. Of course.’
It was obvious. But I never asked the obvious questions. In 1988 it had come right out of the blue and I hadn’t even thought to ask how or why.
~ 1988 ~
So, Laura rang me. Let’s just say it was inconvenient timing. Mark was about (literally) to leave for the European leg of the Tango in the Night tour and we were having our own One More Night moment, re-living our first big night together from 1985. So I may have been both out of breath and less than focussed when she called. It had been more than three years after all. We’d all moved on.
But I agreed to come up for the school reunion. The Ten year reunion. I mean, how could I not? I even got Mark to say he’d come with me. Which of course he didn’t. What I didn’t do was ‘catch up’ with Laura properly then and there. Being otherwise preoccupied, I just said,
‘Yeah, I’ll be there, send me the details’ and left it at that.
So I deprived her of the opportunity to fill me in on what had happened since I was last paying attention. Stupid of me, of course. But we all do it, don’t we? Even those of us on the fringes find ourselves the centre of our own worlds and don’t imagine that others have been living their own lives while we weren’t there.
The Tango tour kicked off in Birmingham on 12th May, so Mark must have been with me on the 11th when Laura rang. He then came back to London for a week. I saw him once, but the invitation from Laura hadn’t arrived so I couldn’t firm up the date. He did say he’d come up with me, even seemed to be looking forward to it. But all I knew was that it would be some date in June, it was hard to plan. Mark’s diary governed our lives. He was committed in Germany and Rotterdam between the 4th and 15th, after which it was London, Dublin and Manchester. It looked well starred. And I was not a little proud (though nervous) of having a partner to show off. I mean, none of them would know the background. And Mark was good-looking, give him that. Perhaps one might go as far as to say charismatic. He certainly had stacks of confidence. No one would have expected plain Jane to ‘end up’ with him. And of course they would all be right, but they didn’t need to know that I was time-sharing.
In the end, when it came to it, the reunion was on Saturday 25th, not Friday 24th as I’d hoped. And Mark was in Dublin. I’m sure he could have said no to them, but he told me he couldn’t get free. Someone else had baled and… the usual crap.
So in the end, I drove up to Edinburgh on my own after work, arriving home in the early morning. My parents, who had stayed up late to greet me, tried their best to be enthusiastic. I’d told them Mark was coming with me, because I thought he was. I thought that my dad was a bit relieved when he said ‘you might have spared your mum the effort of making the spare bed up’, but my mum seemed sad that she wasn’t going, at last, to see my first ‘real’ boyfriend. Grant hadn’t counted with her. Either way, I slept alone in my old room and it was like nothing had ever changed.
~ 2013 ~
‘You never told him?’
‘I thought Grant had told him,’ Laura replied.
‘What?’
In the pre-2013 reunion ‘time for truth’ conversation I was trying to fathom out how it was that Billy had turned up at that tenth reunion in an even more ignorant state than me.
‘How was I to get in touch with him?’ she added.
There was a pregnant pause.
‘You’re telling me you never knew where Billy was from 1983 to 1988?’
Another pause.
‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you.’
I bit back the childish ‘don’t believe you’ that was rising.
‘These things happen.’
Oh boy did these things happen.
~ 1988 ~
Billy and I had one thing in common when we walked into that tenth reunion. We had been out of the loop. We didn’t know the ‘hot news’. Which was that six months earlier Rachel and Grant had got married. It was little consolation to think that it happened when pop was at its cheesiest. I hate to think what song they danced to at their wedding.
Let’s just say I was conflicted in my position. On the one hand, their wedding potentially cleared a lot of ground. On the other hand, if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to any of our lives – imagine the impact. The consequences. The fallout.
Walls came tumbling down that June all right. It was the song playing when I first saw Billy come into the room. Governments crack and systems fall Cause unity is powerful Lights go out, walls come tumbling down.
The reunion was in the sports hall at school. So there shouldn’t have been alcohol involved. But the ‘organising’ committee had managed to smuggle in a fair amount – I’m sure the school administrators would have gone off on one if they’d known, but hey, whoever followed the rules at school? Why change now. So, the point is, there was alcohol. By the time I got there, which was before Billy, Laura had had rather too much of it.
‘I thought you had a boyfriend coming?’ she said, slightly slurred.
‘Couldn’t make it,’ I replied, trying to sound blasé, ‘He’s on tour with Fleetwood Mac.’
She laughed. I tried to pretend it was the drink.
‘Sure he is,’ she replied.
And before I had time to get to grips with the thought – and that was my best friend? she floored me again.
‘Rachel not here?’ I asked.
‘Looking after the baby,’ she said.
‘Baby?’
‘You don’t know?’
Of course I couldn’t have known. Who would have told me but Laura?
‘Know what?’
‘Grant and Rachel got married in January,’ she said.
‘Wh…’ I started.
‘Do the maths,’ she said, ‘they have a two month old baby girl.’
‘She… they…’
I hadn’t meant to ask why, I was on the way to asking what… but now I was simply flailing around like someone had switched off my oxygen supply.
It was about then that the Style Council came on. You don't have to take this crap You don't have to sit back and relax. I looked over to the DJ deck, it was such a Billy song. And then I saw Grant.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked.
I hadn’t touched a drop, I was driving and I’ve always been strict on that front, but I felt the world spinning right round baby.
‘Get over it,’ Laura said. ‘He’s promised to do the disco.’
Ignoring the words Grant and promise in the same sentence as they seemed ridiculously juxtaposed, I tried to breathe deeply.
‘Does…’ I spluttered… ‘Does… Does Billy know?’
And then Billy walked in.
The music changed from The Style Council to Aztec Camera’s How Men Are. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a total car crash. It's no mystery, What you don't know always gets you, It will hurt you and desert you.
Billy went straight up to Grant. I thought he was going to punch him. But he didn’t. They fist bumped instead. And that’s when I thought… he doesn’t know. He still doesn’t know.
I felt like I used to when I watched the Daleks on TV from behind my fingers when I was a child. I couldn’t believe what I was about to witness. And I couldn’t believe Laura could be so cruel. Unless… of course… and then…
Laura was right by Billy’s side and dragged him off to dance. She was in for the kill. She was going to be the one to tell him and then she was going to make her move. It was so crass. It was so Laura. And it might just work.
I stood there, transfixed by the chorus: Why should it take the tears of a woman
To see how men are?
To give him his due, Billy reacted a lot better than I expected. I guess it was the military training. It was clear that Laura was filling him in. And by the time we’d all endured Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror; I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways the deed was done. The truth was told.
He barely flinched. But I knew he was hurting. I knew by the way that he extracted himself from Laura, who was making quite a show of herself – she had really drunk too much to be in this situation – and came across to talk to me.
‘Hi, Janie,’ he said.
‘Hi, Billy,’ I replied. I wanted to say ‘I didn’t know either,’ but I found myself speechless.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
‘Not so bad,’ I replied, cautiously. ‘You?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s…’
I was waiting for him to break.
‘D’you want to get out of here?’ he said.
‘You bet,’ I replied.
‘One minute,’ he said.
He went to the make-shift bar. He poured himself the hugest shot of vodka I’ve ever seen. He downed it in what seemed like one gulp. He crossed the room to Grant. I was waiting for the punch. He put his hand out. He shook hands with Grant.
I could see him saying ‘Congratulations, mate,’ and Grant replying ‘No hard feelings…’ by which time Billy was back with me, taking me by the arm and saying,
‘Come on. Janie, I can’t do this.’
We went outside. I suppose in one way it should have been my proudest moment. If I’d ever thought that Billy and I would leave a school disco together I’d have given up anything and everything I had or was going to have… but it was just the most painful thing in the world.
The way I saw it, he’d returned, like Heathcliff, hoping to win her back. But this was 20th century Edinburgh, not 19th century Yorkshire. It was real life, not a story. We were victims not characters. And we hurt.
‘Thanks,’ he said as we stood on the pavement.
And I didn’t need to ask what he was thanking me for. I knew. Like Aztec Camera sang Cause love is a giving with no need of return.
We stopped by my spiffy sporty red Astra. Perk of my high paid job.
‘Cool car,’ he said.
‘You still in the Navy?’ I asked.
‘You for real?’ he said and rubbed his oh, so short hair.
‘Yeah, I guess that was obvious,’ I said.
‘Got another two years,’ he said, ‘but I might just sign up again.’
‘Do you like it?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Life goes on,’ he said.
Suddenly into my head popped Elvis Costello. It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so, and I took a chance bigger than Abba ever did.
‘Who’s going to drive you home?’ I sang.
There was a pause.
‘Tonight,’ he replied.
Another pause.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘Thanks, Janie,’ he said.
Yet another pause as I fumbled with the door and he got in the passenger seat.
‘What tunes you got, Janie?’ he asked. Like this was something we did every day.
‘Oh, you know,’ I said and added, ‘Where are we driving?’
‘Just drive,’ he said. And smiled.
So I did.
He rooted through all my CDs. He seemed relatively impressed with my taste. He should be. It was the history of his taste after all. It was our lives.
He found The Cars. He stuck it on loud. Good times Roll, followed by My Best Friend’s Girl, followed by Just what I needed…
‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound sophisticated, ‘do you remember 1978?’
‘I try not to,’ he said.
‘I remember it all,’ I said.
‘Really?’ he looked at me like he was maybe seeing me for the first time.
‘But why?
‘It’s our life,’ I replied.
He shook his head.
‘Nah,’ he said ‘it’s all just stories.’
It’s all just stories. That sentence stuck with me. In a way he was right. For me it was stories of other people’s lives. But it was also a moment of heart-breaking reality. Even though I knew that his pain was because he still loved Rachel, I wanted to do something to comfort him. But I didn’t know what to do. Accidents will happen.
He picked up two CDs. One was Queen Greatest Hits and the other was Yazoo You and me both.
‘Your choice,’ he said.
That was a hard one. Queen was the obvious direct link back… but I’d wanted to play him Yazoo ever since it came out. Nobodies Diary had been his birthday record in 1983. There’s a fine line between unrequited love and being a stalker. And I didn’t want to cross it. So I knew it wasn’t the time to say it, but I said it anyway,
‘It’s got your 1983 birthday record on it.’
He looked at me, puzzled.
‘How’d you…?’ he started.
‘The Italian Café incident,’ I replied, and I swear I blushed.
‘Oh, that’, he said. ‘We were just kids.’
And I wanted to believe him.
He put Yazoo on. And by that time I was willing him not to. This was way beyond my comfort zone.
‘Which track?’ he asked me.
‘Uh, just put it on… the first one,’ I gulped.
On it came. And we listened to it in total silence.
He took it off after it finished and simply said ‘Good chorus.’
For the times we've had I don't want to be, a page in your diary babe.
‘Uh, so where am I driving you?’ I asked.
The temptation must have been to reply Highway to Hell but since only Doobs had been into AC/DC I was spared that.
He was looking at the Cars CD cover again.
‘I thought ‘That song,’ would be on it,’ he said as he read the CD cover.
‘What song?’ I asked.
‘Who’s going to drive you home,’ he said.
‘No, it’s later…’ I replied.
‘Yeah, of course,’ he said. ‘I remember.’
‘Take the next left,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind driving me back to Rosyth.
‘Not a problem,’ I said.
The silence left by the lack of musical accompaniment was deafening.
‘It was the background to the Live Aid appeal,’ he said.
And then the bombshell.
‘I was there.’
‘Me too,’ I said. And cursed myself to eternity.
‘Great day, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘One of the best,’ I lied.
‘I see a little sillhouetto of a man…’ he began. And smiled. He remembered. Our lives were always going to be tied up in some way. I was always going to be part of his past. But I so wanted to be a part of his future. But for now, all I could do was to be a page in his diary, and to drive him home – safely.
When I dropped him off, he gave me a peck on the cheek.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I said.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ he replied. ‘And you?’
‘Me?’
‘I always thought you’d end up marrying Grant,’ he said.
‘Me, never,’ I said. Though at that moment I kind of wished I had. If only to stop Rachel having done it.
‘No, got much more sense,’ he said. And got out of the car.
I drove off. I drove off to the park, turned Yazoo on full blast and cried my eyes out. For all of us. But most of all for Billy.
Perhaps if I held you I could win again, I could take your hands we'd talk and maybe then, That look in your eyes I always recognize, Would tell me everything is gonna be fine, You're gonna be mine For a long time.
But life isn’t like that, is it? Lyrics aren’t real life. Not then, not now, not ever.
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.