Cassette #3
Hello Sean.
So here, as you can see, is one of the few remaining photos of Mum.
She’s almost certainly waiting for a batch of those McCain oven chips to be ready. They had only just been invented, as far as I recall, or perhaps we had only just discovered them, but either way, Mum was conducting her own clinical trial to see what would happen if you fed your kids nothing but oven chips and brown sauce. The answer, surprisingly, was “nothing out of the ordinary”. The human body is surprisingly resilient. Then again, look at me now. Could all of this perhaps be the result of all those chips way back when?
I was so ashamed about taking you to our house, because I could tell that you were posh.
You had that lovely West Country accent, but you spoke differently from anyone I knew. Back then, I would have said you “spoke different” of course.
Mum used to call you Sean Leadbetter, after Margo and Jerry in The Good Life. I don’t think you ever knew that.
So yes, I was terrified. But you begged me to show you where I lived and as we only had that weekend, I took the risk. And amazingly, you loved it there.
It wasn’t till I got to see a photo of where your parents lived that I realised just how much of a shock our council estate must have been.
We had that old sofa plonked in the middle of the front garden and when we got there, Mum was sitting on it, still in her dressing gown, smoking.
Indoors, that horrible Dennis Shelley, her boyfriend-of-the-moment, was watching telly in his underpants.
But Mum gave you a hug and asked if you were hungry, and when you said “Yes,” she told you to stick some chips in the oven. That was another thing you didn’t know existed: oven chips.
So we sat and ate chips and drank cans of Stella in front of the telly and then I took you upstairs. I remember you were shocked that I was allowed upstairs with a boy and I remember wondering what sort of rules posh families had to operate by, because Mum had never stopped me doing anything, really.
You laughed at my ABBA poster and I introduced you to Barnie, my teddy bear. I put the radio on and we sat side by side in that tiny room – I was just gagging for you to kiss me.
Eventually, I realised that you weren’t going to do it and I worked out that was probably because of some other posh rule I didn’t know about. And so I grabbed you and snogged the face off of you – as we used to say, back then. You didn’t, you’ll remember, resist.
Now, I know you probably remember all of this, but it does me good to remind myself of it. It cheers me up to record it for infinity. That’s not the word, is it? Infinity. Definitely not right. Ugh. Sometimes words just vanish and no amount of hunting can track them down. Oh, I know: prosperity. That’s what I meant. No, posterity! Record it for all posterity.
Anyway, once you’d left, Mum said, “Well he’s a bit la-di-da, isn’t he?”
I told her that you weren’t la-di-da at all.
“Well I hope you didn’t shag him,” Mum said.
I told her that of course I hadn’t.
“Good,” she said. “Because boys like that want a bit of rough for the weekend. But he’ll end up marrying some posh bird from London. You mark my words.”
I suppose she was telling me that I was a “bit of rough”, but I didn’t even think about it at the time. I just worried in case she was right.
• • •
Sean pours the chips into the grill pan, studies the instructions on the packet and then slides it into the oven and sets the timer. He has been craving chips and brown sauce all week, ever since he played last Sunday’s message. But yesterday, Saturday, was the first opportunity he’s had to actually go to buy some and, as April has been visiting, he’s been busy all day.
He was tempted, twice, to mention the messages to her. She’s missing her mother horribly and the messages might help comfort her, in the same way that their regular, drip, drip into his life is comforting him. But if he lets April know about the messages now, she’ll want to know the contents of every message, every Sunday. And until he knows what they contain, he can’t possibly know if that’s a good idea. For the moment, he feels that by keeping them from her he’s protecting her, even if he’s not sure yet exactly what he’s protecting her from.
So the box has remained stashed beneath the stairs and they have spent the day wandering around Cambridge. They have walked along the Cam and eaten a pub lunch at The Fort St George. They have done their best to comfort each other, but in truth Sean feels more alone with April present than he does without her, her grief seemingly compounding his own.
Now that she has returned to London, Sean’s finally able to cook his oven chips, he’s finally free to open his box.
He retrieves envelope number three and props it against the edge of the box. He puts out a plate, salt, vinegar and the unopened bottle of brown sauce and sets about making himself a cup of tea.
Twenty minutes later, he tips the chips onto the plate and sits down.
“This is your fault, Cathy,” he murmurs, addressing the box as he raises the first chip to his lips.
It’s much too hot to eat for the moment, so he puts it back down and reaches for the cassette instead. He removes last week’s tape from the machine and clips in the new one. He’s been waiting for this all day. He’s been waiting for this all week. He flips over the photo.