The rap on Jo Mills's front door seemed familiar to her and, as she opened the door, a wind swept Mark appeared with a rucksack on his back.
"This is a surprise, Mark." Jo observed to her younger son. "But you're very welcome."
"Sorry, mum. I meant to phone but, hey, I'm a carefree student and what with one thing or another, it slipped my mind."
Jo grinned and shut the door behind him as Mark walked ahead to the living room.
Domestic moments like these were a welcome antidote to the day after day hard slog of her job. Today was one of those rare days where she had felt inspired after her interesting conversation with Nikki and now she was scheduled for a pleasant evening with her son.
"I haven't called at a bad time, mum," Mark said politely, a welcome move forward from brattish adolescence.
"No problems, Mark. I'm on my own and between trials so your company is welcome unless you've got friends to go out and see."
"I fancy staying in tonight, mum." Mark announced. This meant home cooking as well, Jo deduced, but it enabled her to catch up with who he was and spend some quality time with him.
Half an hour later, she was stretched out on the settee with a cup of tea at her side when Mark started rooting through some of her DVD's for something to watch when he came across one that sparked his interest.
"Hey, cool, you've got the 'Old Grey Whistle Test' DVD, mum." He exclaimed excitedly.
"I know because you bought it for me last Christmas." Jo replied dryly. She had dutifully played the first few tracks when she had bought it but had lost interest as the music seemed very flat. Mark had bought it as he had vaguely thought that this was music that she might like but he had been off the mark by a mile.
"Did I? Let's listen to it, anyway" Mark urged in a friendly fashion after an initial vagueness at the lack of memory recall.
Sighing patiently, Jo gave up as Mark commandeered the remote control and flipped the buttons. As the options appeared on the screen and mark made an utterly random choice and throbbing bass sounds set to a choppy drum rhythm. A very mannered lead singer playing twelve-string guitar declaimed the following lyrics in a very idiosyncratic fashion and three other musicians slid into view.
"I can't seem to face up to the facts
I'm
tense and nervous and I
Can't relax
I can't sleep 'cause my
bed's on fire
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire
Psycho
Killer
Qu'est Que C'est
Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far
better
Run run run run run run run away…."
Mark's eyes opened wide as a figure came into view well to the back of the stage. A slim woman came into view with neatly cropped blond hair and a serious expression on her face. She held the neck of her bass guitar high and worked intently, pumping out those prominent baselines, which drove the song along.
"Hey mum, that's you on stage. Look there." Mark exclaimed with astonishment.
"Don't be ridiculous, Mark."
"Seriously, mum. You take a look."
And there before her eyes, a younger version of herself appeared before her eyes and really seemed to perform the way she might have done. It wasn't her on stage, of course. She had never played in a group, much less in a TV recording studio. It wasn't her………but it might have been, she reflected as a host of long buried memories started to break loose from where they had been firmly interred for years.
"Are you sure you haven't got some hidden secrets, mum? After all, you were in the sixties or something like it. You couldn't remember it, hey, but you might try." Mark argued with a line of paradoxical reasoning, which came out of nowhere. He clicked the pause button on the DVD remote control and by coincidence froze in mid motion, the figure of the woman whose eyes looked straight into Jo's.
"That was before my time, Mark. I hate to disappoint you but my schooldays were boringly normal and I was considered an unremitting swot, always buried in my books."Jo retorted with a mixture of defiance and amusement, looking away from the TV screen.
"You can't have worked all the time. Weren't you in your school orchestra?" Mark asked, the curiosity in the tone of his voice tailing off into a tinge of regret that he had missed
"Yes, I was," Jo pronounced proudly at the memory. "I used to be shy and retiring when I was younger. I never pushed myself forward, except in class. I ended up in the school orchestra because my music teacher pushed me. I suppose she saw something in me…"
"Go on." Mark said with growing interest. Tonight was very unusual for both of them as Mark, like Tom before him, had drifted away as adolescence took him away to his own interests and circle of friends and university merely completed the process. In a curious fashion, Jo had come round full circle in discovering herself, much as life had opened up her choices as she entered her late teens.
"I had always worked hard at my studies and that gave me some confidence." Jo repeated before continuing in a more reflective tone of voice." I was expected to do well by my parents. My parents didn't really talk too much but I grew up with the expectation that I would always do the right thing in life, to succeed in life but on the right terms. It was in the social scene where I had problems and uncertainties."
Mark blinked at the complexities of the seesawing emotions that he read on his mother's face.
"So playing in the school orchestra was doing something that was the right thing….." began Mark.
"Not exactly," came Jo's hasty reply." It's the creativity, the expressiveness of it all, the feeling of belonging with others to something greater than yourself. It's one thing to sit back and appreciate music, to analyse it, to separate the interplay between various instruments. It's quite another thing to be part of it. Mind you, it takes years of dedication, and constant practice. It's hard work to begin with but I got to really enjoy it."
Jo spoke in a much more animated fashion than her normally more constrained fashion allowed to. Her eyes were aglow with passion and enthusiasm.
"Why did you end up with the cello? Was it your choice?" Mark pursued quietly.
"That's a good question." Jo reflected at length." I think I did get to choose it. I liked the idea of those low, sonorous bass notes. I wasn't show off enough to choose the violin like John plays. I could stay in the background and still be important."
"Like the bass guitar in a rock band. They can just stand back looking cool. You could have been Tina Weymouth." Mark added.
"Who's Tina Weymouth?" Jo asked blankly.
Mark turned to the TV screen which was black except for the DVD logo which was describing a series of diagonal manoeuvres and bouncing off the rectangle it was imprisoned within. He clicked the button and, sure enough the woman looked exactly like her.
"Over there, mum."
Jo nodded and she had to admit to herself that she could have been Tina Weymouth. She and this other woman were alternative projections of who she could have been.
"In your day, rock was cool, none of that boring dance music that every moron listens to. There was so much more individuality."
"Not everyone was wearing bin liners and safety pins you know, Mark?" Jo said in amused tones." Some of us had to make a living."
"So were they, mum, and they had a ball while they were doing it. So what secret dreams and ambitions did you have when you were young? There must have been some, even you."
Mark's eyes were fixed on her intently to probe her depths and eventually it happened. The long buried memories started to give up their secrets, kept down for so long that Jo had forgotten all about them.
"I remember being in the sixth form. The very strict grammar school that I attended considered that by then, we could be safely entrusted with some privileges either on the time honoured basis that either that we were naturally entrusted to be prefects and monitors. Alternatively, there was some shrewd perception that if we were not offered reform, we might seek out revolution in all its forms of various intoxicating substances, indiscriminate sexual promiscuity or the sort of verbal outrage that nimble minded articulate teenage girls could invent. Because of this, our sixth form common room and teaching rooms were in a separate block away from the rest of the school."
"So you were a good girl while all the others rebelled."
"Strange though it may seem since I have joined in with John in battling the forces of the establishment, I was a good girl." Jo recalled to her own amusement and Mark's incredulity. Her mother's street credibility had gone down with a bump but after all, she was his mother.
"I have always made long lasting friendships ….or enemies with little crossover between the two. I have never gone in for indifference." Jo pursued, the line of thought being very uncertain before her manner became more animated.
"When I first started school, I immediately attached myself to my best friend, Mel. She was everything that I wasn't, lively , outgoing, lots of fun and full of mad ideas while I sort of trailed after her. She was even opposite in appearance, with short dark hair. I was serious and dedicated to my work while she was incredibly bright but had a devil may care attitude. She could get through her exams with an intensive bout of last minute cramming. God knows what she saw in me."
Jo paused and sipped at the half full cup of cold tea at her side and continued.
"She used to go out on Saturday nights and rehearse with her group in the local pub while I stayed in and did my homework. It was a real struggle as she was always asking me to come along and watch her perform. For ages, the nearest I ever got to that was going to her parents and looking at that gleaming cherry red Gibson electric guitar of hers and the amplifier that was her pride and joy. Of course, I pretended I wasn't interested but her stories and that guitar exerted a strange fascination of something utterly alien to me but tempting at the same time……………"
All the contradictory emotions were written all over Jo's face as the emotions were relived, not remembered and were all the more vivid for that. Mark said nothing but sat patiently. He was not sure if he should silently be there for her mother or exactly how much she was conscious of him.
"So finally, I was persuaded to go down to the pub to meet her. I told my parents that I was going round to Mel's to do our homework together and sleep over at her house. I remember that feeling of sneaking out in an entirely different direction. I took the bus to the pub which was a right dive and I slunk round the corner to the back room…I was very young at the time, or so I felt….."
Mark nodded. He could feel it.
"I walked into some kind of argument." Jo continued with a shaky laugh." There was Mel, all got up in leathers and a huge drum kit at the back and several large amplifiers and leads snaking everywhere. Mel was having an argument with the bass player."
'If you're going to be a stupid bitch, we don't need you. My best friend Jo is here and she'll play better than you can, any day.'
" 'Who, me?' I remember asking her. I wasn't prepared for this. I thought I was just going to watch the others perform.
'There's four strings and, OK, so it's a different shape and it's amplified. Go on, have a go.' She said with an inviting grin as she pressed this shiny lump of plastic into my hands and this patterned strap round my neck. I remember this feeling of total confusion in me, that I didn't want to let Mel down but what I was doing was somehow wrong. I felt as if I had been dragged into an alien world. Right behind me, I could feel this thumping sound from the drum kit. The whole sound seemed to take me over and I could see this huge smile on Mel's face. I had really been there for her at last. Somehow, I found myself making these shapes on the fretboard, pressing down on the four very thick strings while Mel sang and made this amazing racket on her guitar. Somehow, I could make some sounds on the instrument that the others must have liked as we kept playing. We were off and away and I was transported to some place that I had never been before. It wasn't me who was doing what I was doing but it was me as well. I could forget my cares and leave them at home. I remember that night so well. It felt as if the night would never end and nothing existed outside that room."
Mark could see that rapt school girlish expression on his mother of all people. She was like some other person. It really was true that still waters run deep.
"We were tired out when we came to a finish. It was far later than I thought. I was shown how to take the gear apart and pack the gear into the back of the van. I piled into the back of the van with Mel while the van was driven away. She was so happy that night, I'll never forget the sight of her. We were dropped off at her house, which was totally dark. Mel let us upstairs to her bedroom where we settled down supposedly to sleep but we were too excited. I remember feeling that we had some secret that only the two of us in the world knew about. I finally dropped off to sleep lying next to her."
"I went back to school on Monday. Saturday night was as if I had been dreaming. I was back to responsibilities, my schoolwork, the school orchestra, everything that was pressing me to be back to the woman I had been. I didn't know who I was. I met Mel during the lunchtime break and she was starry eyed, telling me about the gig they had next week and how great it would be. I was in a total panic. I could see what was in front of me would pull me from the straight and narrow of what and who I was supposed to be. Now I look back at it, I felt it attract me, deep down but I couldn't admit it to myself far less to Mel. I stammered out some feeble words and I can remember that look of hurt and betrayal in her and she ran off somewhere else. I felt deeply ashamed as if I had let her down, betrayed her but I was helpless to do anything about it. I stood there and did nothing. I let her go out of my life. and we were never such good friends after that. In fact she avoided me as if I were somehow unclean. We left school and went our separate ways. I've never seen her since then."
"What did you do …………..?"Mark started to say. It wasn't impossible that Jo's schoolfriend had been secretly in love with her mother and perhaps it was striving to be returned, despite herself but he remained silent. Now was not the time to say it.
" I went to the off licence, bought a half bottle of whisky and got drunk on my own for the first time in my life." Jo replied, in a cold bitter tone of voice." It was something I needed to do to forget everything. The only way I could come out of that bad time in my life and somehow make amends was to vow to myself that I would make no more compromises and betrayals. I went into law, met my husband and John and was faithful to myself in my own way. I haven't done so badly, have I, Mark?"
The pleading look in Jo's teary eyes melted Mark.
"I'm sorry I pushed you about the DVD. It really isn't worth all the trouble that I've caused." Mark said apologetically.
"You're wrong there, Mark. It was worth doing. It needed to come out and many times better than trying to bury it." Jo answered firmly and decisively, trying not to look at the drinks cabinet. Now she thought about it, her conversation with Nikki earlier on drifted unaccountably into her mind. It was strange how memories, long dormant, could be unaccountably unlocked by random events. "You play the rest of the DVD. I want to watch myself on the TV screen. I have to agree that I might have been her if I had let myself."
For the first time for what seemed ages, the tension flowed out of her body and she could look at the images without fear anymore. She couldn't have been a rock chick but she could have been Tina Weymouth. She knew that for sure now but it was all too late. It wouldn't do her any good to have too many regrets about what she could have done differently in her life. She hadn't done that badly, she reasoned with an attempt at reassuring herself.