Excerpt: Flashbacks From A Trip

EWAN

The moment that the crematorium filled with the sound of `Unforgettable` by Nat King Cole was the first time that Ewan had felt any sense of levity since he and Andrea had returned to Ramsleigh. Mrs. Bond, Andrea’s mother, was certainly not easily forgettable, despite his best efforts. She had blamed him for moving her daughter away at the earliest opportunity, she had blamed him for siring a son instead of a daughter and she had constantly made reference to a drunken incident involving her velvet curtains in 1987.
Now she was dead and currently being banished to the furnace. Ewan thought `Going Underground` by The Jam more apt for the occasion, but he kept this to himself and clutched Andrea’s arm supportively. She was not yet forty and already an orphan, Mr. Bond having `left the building` in a dosser’s hostel in Kilburn some twenty years ago. Even that seemed preferable to living with Sarah Bond.
Ewan had never met Andrea’s father. He was long gone by the time they had got to know each other. Andrea had not gone to see her father off to the great beyond; Sarah Bond would never have forgiven her if she had. In fact this was the first funeral either had attended since 1984.
1984. Not quite the dystopian nightmare predicted by Orwell, but a time spent under the yoke of Thatcher, the shadow of apocalypse and having to push pineapples and grind coffee. A year spent laughing and joking in innocent idyll for the first half and crying and hurting in enforced growing pains for the second half.
The half time entertainment being the school trip to Staithes. The death of Sandy Fish being brass band fading to silence.

**

The handful of mourners trudged out of the crematorium. Sarah Bond was not so much unpopular as a non-entity. She was neither pretty, nor ugly enough to be intriguing. Five foot four tall, short dark page boy haircut, underweight and any dreams she had ever harboured were shrouded in cobwebs. She had worked part time from home and apart from a weekly shop at Tesco, she barely saw the daylight. Andrea drove up tri-monthly with their son, Christian, (Mrs. Bond peevishly railed against that too. “You wouldn’t call a child `Jew` or `Muslim` would you?” she`d say) until he reached adolescence and found valid excuses, but Ewan was never tempted to tag along.
Sarah Bond had lost the will to do more than exist a long time before the heart attack killed her. She sat filling envelopes with pre-folded sheets, smoking sixty cigarettes a day, eating frozen microwave meals and using soap stars as surrogate family.
Yes, Ewan sometimes felt partly to blame, on a sensitive day. He had dragooned Andrea far away from her mother, but only to protect her from turning into Sarah or being infected with her morose, bitter countenance. And, yes, he had kept her only grandchild, Christian, two hundred miles away until now, at the age of fourteen, Christian had not seen his grandmother more than fifty times before she died. But Sarah was not somebody you`d cross the road for, never mind undertake a four hundred mile round trip to be misinformedly lectured by.
Sarah Bond was not a very clubbable woman, only, sadly, in the sense of weapon use. She effortlessly did nothing to contribute to the world. Yes, it was lamentable. She did not deserve a fatal heart attack two months before their sixtieth birthday, but she had stopped living long ago.
Sandy Fish, on the other hand, would have had the whole of his life in front of him. Once he’d put his problems behind him. Fourteen years of life and then dead. He didn't even get to leave a good looking corpse. Even after they cleaned him up, he still looked like he could do with a good scrub. He wore the stains of poverty and stigma of uncaring parents like so many bruises.
You see, Ewan would often say to Christian, closer to a `Sarah lecture` than he`d care to admit; parents can smother you with love, they can crush you with hate, but when they grind you slowly with indifference, it might not be a front page `glamour` story, but it`s a long painful, cancerous demise.

**

ANDREA

Andrea shook hands with the half dozen or so distant family members and duty bound neighbours. She had no aunts, no uncles, nothing now except a husband and a son. And that was enough for Andrea. She had never connected to her father, even when he was sober and still resident in the familial home. She had grown to tolerate, rather than love, her mother. When Andrea was young, there was always a `friend` to provide a surrogate family for a while before she used up their goodwill. Then she’d move on to another family unit.
As she grew older, she ran out of girls and parents to inveigle herself with and, as she blossomed into a teenager, there sprang a well of boys only too happy to accommodate her at any time of day. A few of the dads seemed especially pleased to have her around the house.
An almost `absent` father and an unloving home life made a Molotov cocktail of emotional confusion for Andrea. From thirteen she confused the clammy, excitable attentions and testosterone fuelled lust of her peers for true affection and love. Who wouldn’t?
It took too long to realise that after any affectionate cuddle had resulted in some level of fevered sexual behaviour (and almost always in the manifestation of male fulfilment), the boy concerned would be so gratified that he was too embarrassed to speak to Andrea, only about her or make a journal entry on the male toilet wall.
Andrea knew of no other way to get a fix of warmth and tenderness and so kept on kissing the frogs forever hoping for a prince. Besides, she occasionally got some joy from the couplings. If only boys weren’t so proud and macho that they would accept her delicate attempts at redirecting by way of her graceful hip manoeuvres and her gentle hints that they were not opening a packet of crisps.
Andrea had to keep favour with the boys because suddenly most of the girls stopped talking to her. The occasional invites for burgers, ice skating and parties were usually sweeteners for either gossip, sexual advice not given in Bunty or because where there was Andrea, there were also eager boys.
Her mother ignored all signs, verbal and visual, of her daughter’s relative promiscuity. This hurt Andrea to such an extent that she invited Neil Jones around to finally divest her of her virginity on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, whilst Mrs. Bond was watching `Coronation Street`.
The upshot of this was that Neil’s quick, but frenzied and vocally hysterical, deflowering all but drowned out the denouement of the Deidre/Mike Baldwin/Ken Barlow love triangle. That was what caused Andrea to be grounded for two months; not having it off with a smug fourteen year old braggart under her mother’s roof, but spoiling Coronation Street.
Andrea sat in her room every night after school reading Judy Blume novels and listening to Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham! whilst Neil Jones turned a two minute long tryst into a re-enactment of `Caligula` . He sat on the spiders web ride and accepted slugs of Merrydown cider from the older boys on the park, who had not yet sampled the delights of a female, but made a note of the name Andrea Bond.
She consoled herself that at least she would be `released` in time for the school trip to Staithes. Five days away from home and so what if the likes of Mandy Bull and Carly Newman called her a slag? They were just jealous that no one ever fancied them anymore.
Andrea watched all the old neighbours and distant cousins get into their cars, drive from the crematorium to The Fleece and, as she looked back on the summer of 1984, she, not for the first or last time, wished she had indeed been barred from the trip to Staithes.