Blink of an Eye

CHAPTER NINE

Carmel

I walked up to the shops and bought some food. It was the first chore I’d done for days and it had that unreal quality to it, like the first hours home after a foreign holiday. Everything’s familiar but you notice things with a keener eye, an edge of objectivity. The high street looked neglected, everything from the tatty awnings outside the shops to the litter on the pavement and the carcass of a bicycle, its wheels and saddle missing, chained to a metal pole.

After I’d got some fruit and vegetables and bread, I went into the butcher’s for chicken. The butcher was making conversation with the customer ahead of me, talk of the summer weather forecast, complaining how they never got it right.

The door opened and Cynthia Stiller came in. Shit! Her daughter and Naomi had been friends at high school. I wanted to run. To sink from view. I wasn’t ready to face people, brave the topic, accept expressions of sympathy or shock or anything else. But she couldn’t help but see me, and we always stopped to swap the latest news about the girls.

I took a breath, tore my eyes away from the shopping list and turned to greet her. She looked away, studiously staring at the meat behind the glass, her face flushed pink.

Unnerved, I dropped my list, then bent to pick it up, straightened as the woman in front of me left and I ordered my fillets. While the butcher weighed and bagged them, fetched my change, I could feel Cynthia there: her censure, her refusal to acknowledge my presence like a miasma heavy in the air, making my chest tight and my ears whine.

Walking home, I felt hurt and indignant. She’d blanked me; that was the term the girls used when such situations were part of the currency of teenage feuds and alliances. She blanked me, Mum.

What would my mum’s generation call it? Sent to Coventry? Would I have done the same if our positions had been reversed? And how did Cynthia know? Naomi’s name hadn’t been in the newspaper. Who could have told her? It could have been you, I cursed her in my mind. It could happen to anyone.

Of course neighbourhoods like ours are interconnected; people talk to each other, share the gossip and the news. One of Alex and Naomi’s friends or someone Monica knows tells a friend, who tells her brother who mentions it to his wife, who tells the girls at work and soon the whole of south Manchester knows that the twenty-five-year-old driver in the Lily Vasey road death was actually Naomi Baxter.

I told Phil when I got in and he shook his head. ‘Maybe she didn’t know what to say,’ he suggested. ‘She was embarrassed.’

‘Sorry would do,’ I said. ‘Sorry to hear what happened.’

‘Yeah, but you’ve done the training, love.’ He tried to lighten my mood.

I swore at him in jest and began to cook, slicing garlic and ginger, spring onions, carrots and chicken for a stir fry.

‘I’m thinking of going into work tomorrow,’ Phil said. ‘Archie needs some time off.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go in to visit in the afternoon and you can come with me in the evening.’ The last thing we wanted was for the business to go under on top of all our troubles. It had been a long haul – Phil’s life’s work really. In the mid nineties Rock Records was teetering on the brink of insolvency. When his dad, Ian, died after a miserable year fighting cancer, Phil inherited his estate. The house sold very quickly, and once the bills were paid there was just under forty thousand pounds left. A small fortune for us.

At the same time the shop next door to Phil’s, called Dolly’s, which sold wool and haberdashery supplies, ceased trading and the property went up for sale.

Phil was making more money from the musical instruments than from the records and CDs. It made sense to grow that side of the business. If he invested in buying Dolly’s, at least he’d have some capital, and if the business didn’t thrive, he could sell the property and rethink.

Phil closed Rock Records at the end of August, having spent weeks supervising the alterations and improvements for next door, including a sign: Baxter’s Music.

I went with him to help with the move and for a last look around. The upstairs was no longer a flat but was used for storage. There were still things I remembered there, including the ancient red sofa, now only fit for a skip. And when we moved boxes away from the corner of the kitchen, I found one of Petey’s cartoons stuck to the wall: me and Phil in caricature, arms and legs entwined, seeing stars.

Suddenly I was back in those days, giggling with Petey. He was never still. If he wasn’t tapping out percussion rhythm on anything to hand, he was scribbling little cartoons and bits of graffiti. He was left-handed and did that crabby, sloped writing that lefties often have, unless he used print. So most of the time his little phrases or puns or bits of lyrics were in block capitals.

He wrote most of the words for the Blaggards, though they were pretty basic: punk rock songs delivered at breakneck speed with a ravaged vocal style, courtesy of Ged and his forty-a-day fag habit. Petey’s cartoons were caricatures, really funny. At the flat we used the walls like blackboards or canvases. It was all part of the creative DIY ethos. Same as I made my own clothes, touring the second-hand shops for fabrics that I liked, chopping up dresses to make tunics and tops, adding zips or fun fur or strips of neon nylon to jazz up old cardigans and trousers.

Petey was such a sweet guy. If I hadn’t been so in love with Phil, I’d have made a play for him. He took all those drummer jokes in good humour: what do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted. Petey had nothing to fear on the intellectual front. The doodles he did were peppered with quotes from poets and politicians, philosophers and novelists. Sometimes we’d play a game: Petey coming up with a quotation and the rest of us trying to guess the source. Is it one of the Brontë sisters? Martin Luther King? Is it Norman Mailer, John Cooper Clarke, Sylvia Plath?

He resembled a dandelion, his hair golden and curly when he let it grow out. I thought it looked better then than when he shaved the sides and spiked the top.

We became close in the youthful, lively way of our age. Because I was besotted with Phil, there wasn’t any sexual tension between me and the rest of the band. I’d sprawl on Phil’s lap, my feet across Petey as we huddled round the gas fire to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test or Blackadder, or I’d paint Ged’s eyes before a gig.

Petey never talked about his family, I don’t suppose any of us did really: families were something to escape from, to distinguish ourselves from; there were far more exciting topics of conversation. But we were always running into some cousin or nephew or sister of Petey’s. I think he once said he had more than thirty cousins. They’d always be chatty and friendly and eager to talk and be introduced, and there was no indication at all that anything was less than peachy in the clan. Maybe they didn’t know. I’d done enough social work by then to understand how violence and abuse thrive because of the taboo surrounding them. Not something you talked about. Pretend it’s not happening and it’ll go away. Laugh and joke loudly enough and you won’t hear the cries.

I often wonder if Petey was sexually abused as well as beaten. That might account for the fact that he never seemed interested in dating, didn’t have a lover for all the time we knew him. Plenty of girls tried, flirting and buying him drinks, asking him to give them a drumstick as a souvenir, or sign their arms. He’d do a little self-portrait, sticks akimbo, whirring above the drum kit, skull and crossbones and all, and scribble his initials.

Back then the extent of child sexual abuse was still unknown. Domestic life was sacrosanct. Rape in marriage didn’t exist as a crime. This was before ChildLine started and journalists began writing about sexual abuse in families. At the sharp end, in social work, we were trying to comprehend that the greatest threat to children was not from strangers, as we’d all been led to believe, but from those in the family home who had charge of them.

The Blaggards put out two singles, ‘In Your Face’ and ‘The Park in the Dark’, which sold in miserable numbers. No one really expected anything else. Phil kept sending sample tapes in to John Peel, hoping the champion of eclectic new music would play something on the radio, but he never did.

Seeing Petey’s cartoon after fifteen years brought tears to my eyes. Suddenly it felt as if we were destroying a little bit of history.

‘It’s just a shop,’ Phil said.

‘But those times…’ My emotions got the better of me.

‘Hey,’ he tapped his temple, ‘it’s all in here. Good times.’

But it wasn’t all good. Some of it had been terrible.

‘If Baxter’s doesn’t take off,’ I said, ‘and you have to sell the place, we’ll put some towards travelling. Once the girls have left home.’

‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Where to?’

‘Cuba and India and Australia,’ I said.

‘What about the States?’

‘There too, if they’ll let us in.’

He laughed. There was something on US visas at the time about links to communists, and we had friends in the party. ‘You might have to take your earring out,’ I warned him. He still wore a silver sleeper.

But he hadn’t had to sell up and cut his losses. Baxter’s carries on. No two years are the same, but there are enough people in the city still playing music, learning music, to keep the place afloat. And Phil is still happy there.

Naomi

‘I can’t remember,’ I tell them. ‘You said we crashed, but I still can’t remember it. What happened?’

Mum looks peculiar, like I’ve said something offensive, and when I turn to Dad, he’s behaving strangely too. What’s the matter? I don’t say it out loud; maybe I’ve read the signals wrong. But the pause goes on too long and I feel sweat prickle my armpits and round my hairline.

Mum starts speaking very slowly, like I’ve got brain damage not just memory loss. ‘You and Alex were travelling home from the barbecue, at Suzanne’s. Do you still not remember the barbecue?’

The table, groaning with food. That’s all. ‘No,’ I say.

‘You left about eight o’clock,’ she says. I see her lip tremble, like she’s going to cry. I wish she’d just get to the point, but my chest hurts too, like something’s trying to burst out.

‘You turned into Mottram Lane – where the school is.’

I nod. We must have passed that school millions of times, but I’ve never paid much attention to it. It’s on the right, I know that much.

‘The road bends round there…’ She clears her throat, glances at Dad. Shit. He looks like he’s going to cry. I peer at my hands, rub at the sheet even though it’s not creased or anything. ‘… There was a little girl riding her bike. The car swerved on the bend and… you hit her.’

Something gives way inside me, shattering, falling. Is this for real? Mum’s eyes are wet. ‘The car spun round and travelled across the road and hit the gatepost, then it rolled over on to its roof and went back across. The railings by the river stopped you.’

A little girl? We hit a little girl.

‘Alex pulled you out. The car went up in flames.’ She pauses, as if she expects me to agree with her. All of this is news to me.

‘You were… they had to revive you at the scene,’ Dad says quietly.

‘The girl?’ I say.

‘She didn’t survive,’ Mum says.

Oh God, no! Please, no! ‘Who was she?’

‘She was called Lily, Lily Vasey, nine years old. They live in the estate off Mottram Lane. She had two older brothers.’

The shock makes me gasp. It’s unbelievable. If this has really happened, how could I not know it, remember it in every cell, in every pore?

I’m crying and they are touching me and saying stuff to try and calm me down. My heart is going really fast, making it hard to breathe properly, and there is this dark, oily, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I want her to take it back now. All of it. I want them to go. I want the whole world to go away.

‘Was he speeding?’ Everyone does it, now and again. Even if they don’t all get caught. Neither of us has ever had a ticket.

‘Alex wasn’t driving,’ Dad says in a really quiet voice. ‘You were.’

What? Have I heard him wrong? But his face, Mum’s face…

I can’t describe what it’s like. A tearing. A guillotine cutting off everything that has been, severing connections to all the good things in my life. Or like one of those traps, nets that scoop up animals in the jungle, hoist them into the trees.

They stay for ages, insist on sitting with me even though I don’t want to talk. They say Suzanne will come later, but I don’t want her to, I don’t want to see anyone.

The awful thing about it is that I have done this terrible, terrible thing and I can’t remember the tiniest bit about it. How weird is that? It’s like I’m a fraud, a fake, all upset about something even though I’ve no recollection of it. Who am I crying for? My thoughts are churning round and round, probing what they’ve told me. Each time I light on the girl on her bike, or the car flipping, or Alex hurt, it scalds me and I shrink inside, but I can’t stop doing it. I’m hypnotized by it.

Mum keeps saying it was an accident, as if that makes it all right. But if I hadn’t lost control of the car, we wouldn’t have crashed, so it’s pretty clear whose fault it was.

At long last they go.

I’m so sorry. So so so so sorry. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I wish I was dead. I wish I had died instead. Or that Alex had left me in the car.

It can’t be true. How could I forget something that massive? That awful? It dawns on me that everyone knows. The nurses are bound to have heard how I ended up in here. No wonder poker face looked at me like she did, gave me my medicine with a tight little smile, more of a snarl than anything. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame her at all.