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 Nine
You know I love you, I always will (Wet, Wet, Wet)
~ 1999 ~
You know I love you, I always will (Wet, Wet, Wet)
~ 1999 ~
The reunion was history. Was closure achieved for anyone? I don’t think so. But we all went back to our lives, but though I lived alone I still had Crowded House for company… Hey now, hey now, Don't dream it's over. I went back to London Life and tried to forget all about it.
Talk about parallel lives. I was invited up to Laura and Chris’s wedding in the spring of 1999. I wasn’t going to go. But my parents said they wanted to see me – something important – so I went. Grant and Rachel were there, large as life, as were Billy and Steph. I suppose perhaps I should have noticed some tension in the air. Looking back, it wasn’t quite as ‘civilised’ as the reunion the summer before.
Laura was trying to underplay the whole wedding thing. It was not surprising given that she had two small children and a very large bump. It wasn’t a fancy do, just a registry office and a reception in a local hotel. I found myself wondering why they were even bothering after all this time.
‘There’s things you don’t know,’ Laura said enigmatically.
She hadn’t done the ‘maid of honour’ thing, but when she knew I was coming she talked me into turning up early and helping her ‘prepare’ for the event.
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘I’m always the last to know.’ The Del Amitri song could have been written for me.
‘But like what?’
She shrugged. ‘Reasons,’ she said.
Later she told me that Billy was going to leave the Navy. I can’t even think how it came up. It was at the wedding. Looking back on it, she was stroking her bump at the time and I remember wondering if… but I dismissed it.
~ 2013 ~
‘So why did you ever marry him?’ I asked her.
‘Start with the easy questions,’ she replied.
‘Oh, come on, Laura,’ I said. ‘You’d lived together for five years already. You had two kids, for Christ’s sake. Why then?’
‘Why do you think?’ she asked.
She was an expert at that, Laura, throwing it back at you.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking,’ I said.
‘Why have you never married?’ she asked.
I couldn’t, or didn’t want to answer that question. So there was a long silence.
‘Same reason,’ she said.
I’d known that, of course I had. But it was too hard a conversation to have.
She laughed it off. ‘Nah, Chris wanted to make an honest woman of me,’ she said.
She was on a roll, before I could come up with required witty response she got in first.
‘No chance, eh?’ she laughed.
‘And when did you know…’ I started.
‘When do we ever know?’ she replied, once more enigmatic.
‘Well, me, I know that I’m always the last to know,’ I said.
‘Ask Elvis,’ she laughed.
We may well have been talking at cross purposes, but I don’t think so. Remember, accidents will happen.
~ 1999 ~
The registry office wedding passed off without incident. The reception was like a re-run of the last reunion, different venue, different people but pretty much the same. Round tables instead of rectangular. Other people’s school mates instead of my own. Chris had a reasonably large circle of friends. All of them twats, as I recall. He moved in ‘different circles’ to us. They talked about art and opera and… I zoned out. I was stuck on a table with the other left-over folk. Someone had taken a good deal of trouble with the table plan. Grant and Rachel were sandwiched between Chris’s friends, and Billy and Steph were stuck with Laura and Chris’s kids and one of Chris’s brothers. I pretty much cursed my parents for having persuaded me to come back up for it. I reckoned, not for the first time, that perhaps there comes a time when you need to leave your teenage self behind. Approaching forty we were none of us half the people we had been as we entered our twenties. How did that happen? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
I suppose weddings are pretty much torture for most people who attend. Unless you are newlyweds, seeing it all with rose-tinted specs, or hoping to pick up a partner by capitalising on the attendant manufactured schmaltzy emotion of for ever and ever, it’s really not the way you’d want to spend an evening. Pretty much on a par with a school reunion, I suppose, but more expensive and without the scope for nostalgia. I guess I’m just not a big one for rites of passage events. You won’t believe me, I know that, because as Laura has never let me forget, despite what I say, I’m first in the line to attend the reunions. But that’s only ever been about one thing. One person. If only he knew. If only I could have been more than a page in his diary. Or even a page in his diary. If only.
But back to the wedding. We’d finished the meal and the inevitably toe curling toasts. Laura’s father’s speech was interminable and as I listened to him I got something of a sense of where Grant got his character from. Then, speeches over, it was time for the dancing. And, of course, that first dance as married couple.
For some ridiculous reason they picked the current number one which was Westlife’s Swear it again. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing sophisticated Chris would choose, but I couldn’t believe Laura would pick it. Except as some kind of joke. If so, it went right over my head.
Grant was, as ever, in charge of the music. Laura and Chris took to the floor and danced the first verse together.
I want to know, Who ever told you I was letting go, Of the only joy that I have ever known, Girl, they're lying.
Others joined them on the dance floor as the song continued. I remember thinking how deeply inappropriate the words were to the occasion. But what did I know?
Just look around, And all of the people that we used to know, Have just given up, they want to let it go, But we're still trying.
It was then I looked up to see that Billy and Rachel were dancing together. How’d that happen? I looked around. Steph was busy wrangling Rachel and Laura’s combined brood of kids, most of whom were getting fractious due to it being past their bedtimes. She didn’t seem bothered, so why should I be? Grant didn’t seem bothered either. Or at least he was distracted because he had his eldest boy (Callum, aged twelve) ‘helping’ him with the turntable. As for me, I hated myself for feeling jealous of Rachel – for about the millionth time.
I stood, as I always did, on the side lines. Some woman spoke to me. I don’t even remember her name. She was one of Chris’s invitees – I nearly said one of his ‘side’ because it was one of those weddings that was horribly like that. She didn’t say anything specific, but I was left with the distinct impression that there had been an affair going on. And joining the dots, I was left to assume that the ‘guilty’ parties were Laura and Billy. Which made me sick on so many levels that I didn’t want to know any more about it.
So even though I could see Billy and Rachel in front of my eyes, and hear Westlife crooning: I'm never gonna say goodbye, 'Cause I never want to see you cry, I swore to you my love would remain, And I swear it all over again; I thought nothing of it. No, I didn’t want to see if he was holding her just that bit too close in his arms. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see. And I was diverted immediately because the next song came on. And Laura pushed Chris away and grabbed Billy. It was Twisting by the Pool. Not the sort of song a heavily pregnant woman should be dancing to, was it? It segued into Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet with its oh so pregnant lyrics: steps out of the shade, says something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?"
They kept dancing. No one seemed to notice: You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?
I looked over at Rachel. To see if she was trying not to look at Billy.
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
But she was good, she just sat there, with her daughter Heather on one side and Laura’s daughter Fiona on the other, as if none of it meant anything.
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah, Now you just say "oh, Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him."
Then Chris grabbed me up for the following song, the Kinks Come Dancing and I lost sight of what was going on.
The evening rumbled on and I was just waiting for Grant to put on Fleetwood Mac. But he didn’t. I guess it was Laura’s wedding, after all, and Fleetwood Mac wasn’t really her cup of tea. So we were treated to the usual wedding fodder, the pop sound of Robbie Williams, Boyzone, though late on he threw in The Beautiful South’s Perfect 10, but by that time no one was paying attention to the lyrics any more. Except me.
At some point during the evening, Laura actually admitted defeat and sat down. I suppose I should say she was ‘glowing’ but really, it was nothing so flattering.
‘When’s it due?’ I asked.
‘Any time soon,’ she said.
‘So you’ll have three kids under five at home,’ I said. ‘That’ll be a handful.’
‘Fiona’s off to school in August,’ she said, ‘it won’t be so bad.’
She didn’t sound convinced.
I looked around. The combined child count from our ‘gang’ was five. Rachel and Grant had twelve year old Callum, eight year old Moray and six year old Heather. Laura and Chris had the nearly five year old Fiona and two year old Drew. I had none. Letting the side down?
But I had an excuse, I was single, though of course you’ll point out that hadn’t stopped Laura. Billy and Steph, on the other hand, also had none. And they’d been married for a decade. What was that all about?
‘He’s leaving the Navy, you know,’ Laura said.
She must have seen me looking at Billy.
‘Who, Billy?’ I asked. Like it would be anyone else.
She stroked her bump. The bump that would become Angus, known as Gus, just a couple of weeks later. I remember that ‘stroke’ most distinctly. I’ve always been a bit squeamish about that sort of thing and I remember hoping against hope she wouldn’t ask me to ‘feel’ it.
So after that conversation – I told you it earlier, remember – I pressed a bit further than perhaps I should have.
‘So why don’t Billy and Steph have kids?’
Laura laughed. ‘You really don’t know?’
I felt myself blushing. I wished I hadn’t started.
‘I mean, she seems to like them. Can she not?’
‘Like I said, he’s leaving the Navy,’ was Laura’s response.
I took it to mean that there were some issues of stability. That Steph wasn’t keen on being a mother on her own while Billy spent the best part of six months of every year under the sea, incommunicado.
‘What’s he going to do?’ I asked her.
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I know?’
I can’t say I ever tried to like Steph. I didn’t. And I can’t say I ever felt sorry for her. But the closest I came was that evening. Watching her playing with the assorted kids. Seeing that her life hadn’t panned out the way she’d imagined it a decade ago. Join the club, I thought.
And when Laura opined, ‘Who’d be a Navy wife?’
I didn’t answer. I’d have bitten his hand off if he’d asked me.
‘But then, if he’d married the right person, he wouldn’t have run away to sea, now, would he,’ she added.
I didn’t want to go there. I’m not alone, tell me you feel it too!
With that Laura had got her wind back. Grant put on A Million Love Songs and off she went. To dance, I was somewhat relieved to see, with Chris. If not the love of her life, he was, after all, the father of her children and as of the last few hours, her husband. It should count for something. Especially on their wedding day. At least on that day.
I tried not to look at Billy and Steph as they danced together. It so wasn’t his kind of song. Though it could have been worse; it could have been 10CC, The things we do for love.
I sat out the rest of the evening, Suzanne Vega like, keeping her lyrics in my head When they ask me "What are you looking at?" I always answer "Nothing much" (not much) I think they know that I'm looking at them I think they think I must be out of touch against the onslaught of asinine pop Grant deemed suitable for his little sister’s wedding. The guy needed shooting.
The evening ended with Oasis Don’t Go Away and finally Wonderwall. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Say that you'll stay, Forever and a day in the time of my life – really I just didn’t like their whining tone. But then, I thought, perhaps none of them hear the lyrics the way I did. Apart from Billy. He saw the writing on the Wonderwall. But who was gonna be the one saving who? I didn’t have an answer to that question. It just looked like everyone was lost. And not all of them in the music.
I didn’t have time to think about it all too much, though.
The next morning, before I was due to head off down South, my parents told me their news. My mum had cancer.
I went back to London. Their lives went on without me.
Talk about parallel lives. I was invited up to Laura and Chris’s wedding in the spring of 1999. I wasn’t going to go. But my parents said they wanted to see me – something important – so I went. Grant and Rachel were there, large as life, as were Billy and Steph. I suppose perhaps I should have noticed some tension in the air. Looking back, it wasn’t quite as ‘civilised’ as the reunion the summer before.
Laura was trying to underplay the whole wedding thing. It was not surprising given that she had two small children and a very large bump. It wasn’t a fancy do, just a registry office and a reception in a local hotel. I found myself wondering why they were even bothering after all this time.
‘There’s things you don’t know,’ Laura said enigmatically.
She hadn’t done the ‘maid of honour’ thing, but when she knew I was coming she talked me into turning up early and helping her ‘prepare’ for the event.
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘I’m always the last to know.’ The Del Amitri song could have been written for me.
‘But like what?’
She shrugged. ‘Reasons,’ she said.
Later she told me that Billy was going to leave the Navy. I can’t even think how it came up. It was at the wedding. Looking back on it, she was stroking her bump at the time and I remember wondering if… but I dismissed it.
~ 2013 ~
‘So why did you ever marry him?’ I asked her.
‘Start with the easy questions,’ she replied.
‘Oh, come on, Laura,’ I said. ‘You’d lived together for five years already. You had two kids, for Christ’s sake. Why then?’
‘Why do you think?’ she asked.
She was an expert at that, Laura, throwing it back at you.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking,’ I said.
‘Why have you never married?’ she asked.
I couldn’t, or didn’t want to answer that question. So there was a long silence.
‘Same reason,’ she said.
I’d known that, of course I had. But it was too hard a conversation to have.
She laughed it off. ‘Nah, Chris wanted to make an honest woman of me,’ she said.
She was on a roll, before I could come up with required witty response she got in first.
‘No chance, eh?’ she laughed.
‘And when did you know…’ I started.
‘When do we ever know?’ she replied, once more enigmatic.
‘Well, me, I know that I’m always the last to know,’ I said.
‘Ask Elvis,’ she laughed.
We may well have been talking at cross purposes, but I don’t think so. Remember, accidents will happen.
~ 1999 ~
The registry office wedding passed off without incident. The reception was like a re-run of the last reunion, different venue, different people but pretty much the same. Round tables instead of rectangular. Other people’s school mates instead of my own. Chris had a reasonably large circle of friends. All of them twats, as I recall. He moved in ‘different circles’ to us. They talked about art and opera and… I zoned out. I was stuck on a table with the other left-over folk. Someone had taken a good deal of trouble with the table plan. Grant and Rachel were sandwiched between Chris’s friends, and Billy and Steph were stuck with Laura and Chris’s kids and one of Chris’s brothers. I pretty much cursed my parents for having persuaded me to come back up for it. I reckoned, not for the first time, that perhaps there comes a time when you need to leave your teenage self behind. Approaching forty we were none of us half the people we had been as we entered our twenties. How did that happen? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
I suppose weddings are pretty much torture for most people who attend. Unless you are newlyweds, seeing it all with rose-tinted specs, or hoping to pick up a partner by capitalising on the attendant manufactured schmaltzy emotion of for ever and ever, it’s really not the way you’d want to spend an evening. Pretty much on a par with a school reunion, I suppose, but more expensive and without the scope for nostalgia. I guess I’m just not a big one for rites of passage events. You won’t believe me, I know that, because as Laura has never let me forget, despite what I say, I’m first in the line to attend the reunions. But that’s only ever been about one thing. One person. If only he knew. If only I could have been more than a page in his diary. Or even a page in his diary. If only.
But back to the wedding. We’d finished the meal and the inevitably toe curling toasts. Laura’s father’s speech was interminable and as I listened to him I got something of a sense of where Grant got his character from. Then, speeches over, it was time for the dancing. And, of course, that first dance as married couple.
For some ridiculous reason they picked the current number one which was Westlife’s Swear it again. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing sophisticated Chris would choose, but I couldn’t believe Laura would pick it. Except as some kind of joke. If so, it went right over my head.
Grant was, as ever, in charge of the music. Laura and Chris took to the floor and danced the first verse together.
I want to know, Who ever told you I was letting go, Of the only joy that I have ever known, Girl, they're lying.
Others joined them on the dance floor as the song continued. I remember thinking how deeply inappropriate the words were to the occasion. But what did I know?
Just look around, And all of the people that we used to know, Have just given up, they want to let it go, But we're still trying.
It was then I looked up to see that Billy and Rachel were dancing together. How’d that happen? I looked around. Steph was busy wrangling Rachel and Laura’s combined brood of kids, most of whom were getting fractious due to it being past their bedtimes. She didn’t seem bothered, so why should I be? Grant didn’t seem bothered either. Or at least he was distracted because he had his eldest boy (Callum, aged twelve) ‘helping’ him with the turntable. As for me, I hated myself for feeling jealous of Rachel – for about the millionth time.
I stood, as I always did, on the side lines. Some woman spoke to me. I don’t even remember her name. She was one of Chris’s invitees – I nearly said one of his ‘side’ because it was one of those weddings that was horribly like that. She didn’t say anything specific, but I was left with the distinct impression that there had been an affair going on. And joining the dots, I was left to assume that the ‘guilty’ parties were Laura and Billy. Which made me sick on so many levels that I didn’t want to know any more about it.
So even though I could see Billy and Rachel in front of my eyes, and hear Westlife crooning: I'm never gonna say goodbye, 'Cause I never want to see you cry, I swore to you my love would remain, And I swear it all over again; I thought nothing of it. No, I didn’t want to see if he was holding her just that bit too close in his arms. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see. And I was diverted immediately because the next song came on. And Laura pushed Chris away and grabbed Billy. It was Twisting by the Pool. Not the sort of song a heavily pregnant woman should be dancing to, was it? It segued into Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet with its oh so pregnant lyrics: steps out of the shade, says something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?"
They kept dancing. No one seemed to notice: You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?
I looked over at Rachel. To see if she was trying not to look at Billy.
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
But she was good, she just sat there, with her daughter Heather on one side and Laura’s daughter Fiona on the other, as if none of it meant anything.
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah, Now you just say "oh, Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him."
Then Chris grabbed me up for the following song, the Kinks Come Dancing and I lost sight of what was going on.
The evening rumbled on and I was just waiting for Grant to put on Fleetwood Mac. But he didn’t. I guess it was Laura’s wedding, after all, and Fleetwood Mac wasn’t really her cup of tea. So we were treated to the usual wedding fodder, the pop sound of Robbie Williams, Boyzone, though late on he threw in The Beautiful South’s Perfect 10, but by that time no one was paying attention to the lyrics any more. Except me.
At some point during the evening, Laura actually admitted defeat and sat down. I suppose I should say she was ‘glowing’ but really, it was nothing so flattering.
‘When’s it due?’ I asked.
‘Any time soon,’ she said.
‘So you’ll have three kids under five at home,’ I said. ‘That’ll be a handful.’
‘Fiona’s off to school in August,’ she said, ‘it won’t be so bad.’
She didn’t sound convinced.
I looked around. The combined child count from our ‘gang’ was five. Rachel and Grant had twelve year old Callum, eight year old Moray and six year old Heather. Laura and Chris had the nearly five year old Fiona and two year old Drew. I had none. Letting the side down?
But I had an excuse, I was single, though of course you’ll point out that hadn’t stopped Laura. Billy and Steph, on the other hand, also had none. And they’d been married for a decade. What was that all about?
‘He’s leaving the Navy, you know,’ Laura said.
She must have seen me looking at Billy.
‘Who, Billy?’ I asked. Like it would be anyone else.
She stroked her bump. The bump that would become Angus, known as Gus, just a couple of weeks later. I remember that ‘stroke’ most distinctly. I’ve always been a bit squeamish about that sort of thing and I remember hoping against hope she wouldn’t ask me to ‘feel’ it.
So after that conversation – I told you it earlier, remember – I pressed a bit further than perhaps I should have.
‘So why don’t Billy and Steph have kids?’
Laura laughed. ‘You really don’t know?’
I felt myself blushing. I wished I hadn’t started.
‘I mean, she seems to like them. Can she not?’
‘Like I said, he’s leaving the Navy,’ was Laura’s response.
I took it to mean that there were some issues of stability. That Steph wasn’t keen on being a mother on her own while Billy spent the best part of six months of every year under the sea, incommunicado.
‘What’s he going to do?’ I asked her.
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Why would I know?’
I can’t say I ever tried to like Steph. I didn’t. And I can’t say I ever felt sorry for her. But the closest I came was that evening. Watching her playing with the assorted kids. Seeing that her life hadn’t panned out the way she’d imagined it a decade ago. Join the club, I thought.
And when Laura opined, ‘Who’d be a Navy wife?’
I didn’t answer. I’d have bitten his hand off if he’d asked me.
‘But then, if he’d married the right person, he wouldn’t have run away to sea, now, would he,’ she added.
I didn’t want to go there. I’m not alone, tell me you feel it too!
With that Laura had got her wind back. Grant put on A Million Love Songs and off she went. To dance, I was somewhat relieved to see, with Chris. If not the love of her life, he was, after all, the father of her children and as of the last few hours, her husband. It should count for something. Especially on their wedding day. At least on that day.
I tried not to look at Billy and Steph as they danced together. It so wasn’t his kind of song. Though it could have been worse; it could have been 10CC, The things we do for love.
I sat out the rest of the evening, Suzanne Vega like, keeping her lyrics in my head When they ask me "What are you looking at?" I always answer "Nothing much" (not much) I think they know that I'm looking at them I think they think I must be out of touch against the onslaught of asinine pop Grant deemed suitable for his little sister’s wedding. The guy needed shooting.
The evening ended with Oasis Don’t Go Away and finally Wonderwall. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Say that you'll stay, Forever and a day in the time of my life – really I just didn’t like their whining tone. But then, I thought, perhaps none of them hear the lyrics the way I did. Apart from Billy. He saw the writing on the Wonderwall. But who was gonna be the one saving who? I didn’t have an answer to that question. It just looked like everyone was lost. And not all of them in the music.
I didn’t have time to think about it all too much, though.
The next morning, before I was due to head off down South, my parents told me their news. My mum had cancer.
I went back to London. Their lives went on without me.
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.