Tapes
She says there’s no room in the
flat for the box.
She doesn’t say it with words, of
course. Just looks at me with my huge
cellotaped together washing machine box and her expression, her stance, the
sheer force of her gaze signifies that this isn’t going to go as far as an
argument. Not if I want the evening to end with white wine and sex.
The box is full of cassettes.
I’ve collected these over the
last twenty years. First cassette I ever bought with my own money was Let’s
Dance by David Bowie. Three for a fiver from some bootlegger outside
Woolworths. I bought that and a Queen one and a Eurythmics one because I wasn’t
cool yet. I didn’t know about the world outside of the charts. I was 12. If it
wasn’t on Top of the Pops on a Thursday I wouldn’t know about it, it didn’t
exist.
As I grew, the collection grew.
First kiss, first drink, first fist fight, first pay cheque, first love, first
affair. All of it was in there in those tapes. The compilations Ie made for
women are the sounds of my mistakes about them and their mistakes about me. My first band. Swimming In Belgium. Me and my mates wrote about four songs when we
were 16 and thought we were fucking it. The songs were shit but I had the tape,
I used to drag it out every now and then and listen to it alone, the amateur
enthusiasm of the din shaking me back to a time where everything seemed to
matter and yet nothing did at all.
First kiss. Rowena. She came up
to me in the park and showed me her tits. Summer evening. She walked on to the
football pitch and whapped them out whilst I was in goal and she had her back
to the other boys. She waited around till we finished playing and then stuck
her tongue down my throat. I remember thinking this was an important moment.
That my life was different now. But what I remember more is that I went home
and listened to Wonderful Life by Black, having taped it off the charts the
week before. I listened to it over and over again. High on life. Rowena never
kissed me again. She’s in a wheelchair now. Rolled her car off a hill road up
by Strata Florida. Same place her brother died.
First drink, not long after. Me
and the boys went to this holiday park out by Aberaeron way. Sunday night
thinking we look like holiday makers and nobody will suss we are only 16. All
dressed up like. Worked a fucking treat. I had a fiver and got wankered. First
go. Picked up by my mate’s big brother and he’s got Erasure on the stereo and
it sounds perfect. Euphoric even. I ask my mate’s big brother to tape it for me
and he does, fair play, like he’s happy that someone else likes it and he drops
it round the next day.
First fist fight. Me and the boys
went back to that holiday park and there’s a load of yoyo’s over from
Wolverhampton. We called em yoyo’s because that’s what they sounded like.
Anyway, I can’t remember how it goes but there’s an altercation, some girl
involved and the next thing there’s nine yoyos battering six local boys
including me. It doesn’t hurt much because I’ve had four pints. It’s not too
bad. Bit of bruising round the cheeks like but they weren’t hard boys, they
were just more of them. That night, my dad goes mental. He’s really upset.
Wants to go over there and dish out some whooping on my behalf. I go to my room
and I put on a compilation tape this girl made me. Her name is Sioned and she’s
fucking weird but funny. I really fancy her but sadly she is spending most of
her days getting ridden by my mate Matthew. Matthew is alright but at that time
I was consumed by jealousy.
I’m not sure why she’s made me a
tape. I know I can’t tell Matthew though because the compilation is called DO
NOT EVER LET MATTHEW SEE THIS. Anyway, first song is The Housemartins, The
People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. I’ve not heard this before and it’s
fucking excellent. I see every song on this tape as a secret instruction to me
to wait, bide my time, let Matthew fuck this up in his own sweet way and soon I
shall be the victor.
Of course, it doesn’t happen.
They’re still together now. Fuck sake. I did love that tape though.
First pay cheque. Shit Saturday
job at Woolworths. Money was crap but I was brilliant at nicking stuff. First
pay cheque was something like 30 quid and I bought Surfer Rosa from Andy’s
because I asked him to recommend me a tape. I stuck it on my battered Walkman,
not a proper Walkman, a shit Bush or Alba rip off with crap foam orange
headphones for the bus back from Aberystwyth and it was perfect, noisy and
strange and sunny and weird. The sun dipping in and out of the clouds on the
coast road and old Black Francis yelping and whooping about Japanese lovers and
riding tigers.
First love, well you know about
her. We were young and intense and did a lot of things that young, intense
people do when their hormones have suddenly kicked in. Ended up with a baby and
a bedsit. I taped our son trying to say “mama”. Got about 90 seconds of him
trying to make that noise and the pair of us laughing and crying and just being
so fucking happy. It’s a nice sound, that. A baby and his parents laughing
together. It was something to listen to after we split, at first it was so
hard. I would put it on late at night, back at my parents house, the shame of
it, me back in my childhood bed at 23, fucking silently sobbing to the sound of
not having fucked up just yet.
I spend the next few years sofa
surfing, then flat surfing, job surfing. Girlfriend surfing. I can’t be arsed
to get my life together because I don’t know what that would mean. The jobs
begin to pay slightly more, the flats slightly more expensive. I trade up in
girlfriends, I start having discussions about careers and mortgages and pension
plans. All the while, the tapes amass.
Compilation tapes for girls that
I never ever give them, dozens of them. All that genuinely heartfelt attention
to detail and then I’m like Oh Christ, she’s not going to want this. She
doesn’t even know who I am. Ask her out for coffee or something. Christ don’t
give her a musical manifesto. This one tape I made I ended up keeping for
myself because it was absolutely the nearest thing I’d ever get to writing a
love letter and that was too intense. I can’t remember what else was on it but
it started with Holes by Mercury Rev.
Birthday tapes for friends. I
used to give them horrendous titles so people would be too embarrassed to have
them out. “The Sound of King Spastic”, “My Deep Nappy Shame.” You’ve got to
amuse yourself sometimes. Anyway, the tapes were fucking everywhere until I got
a new washing machine and the box seemed a good way of storing them now I’d
succumbed to a bastard CD player years after everyone else.
But I couldn’t be parted with
those tapes. And now me and this girl were moving in together. A new flat. A nice one, big
bay windows, amazing light coming through off the mountains. All her nice
things from her nice past. And me with a bin liner of clothes, two boxes of
books and a washing machine box full of obsolescent hiss and clatter.
There’s no room, she says. Like I
said, not with her mouth but with a look that said this is a crunch moment in
our relationship and I will prevail.
She buys me an iPod as a moving
in present a few days later. It’s beautiful and when I open it, I realise that
the box of tapes is no longer in the hallway. I tell myself it’s okay, that
she’s right, I never listen to them, they’re just in the way, and now I can
have every song I’ve ever loved in a small white beautiful brick.
And it’s got headphones which
means she never has to listen to any of it.
A few weeks later, my son got
sick. It has nothing to do with the tapes going, this isn’t that sort of story
but I suddenly remembered that one tape of his sweet baby voice. And now it was
gone. And if I could lose that, I could lose everything. We went to the
hospital in my new girlfriend’s car. She’d wait outside and smoke cigarettes.
I’d pace the floor like they do in movies. Through a window I could see my ex
holding my son’s hand as he lay there unconscious, some sort of allergic
reaction to something, no one seemed to know what had happened. I wanted to
walk in, to be part of that love and concern, to feel something other than
this. But that tape had ended and was gone.
