by Rachel McCarron
The first time I saw Abbie, she was doing stand-up at a monthly open mic night for folk singers and poets at the Blue Angel. Her hair was blue then, and she wore an electric blue, satin cocktail dress with burgundy Doc Martens. Her routine was chaotic and, as she would later confide, largely unprepared. But the audience clearly thought she was funny, and something stirred a desire in me to get to know her.
‘You were brilliant,’ I said.
‘I know!’ she said – not in an arrogant way. ‘Can you believe it?’
I could believe it. She was completely believable in the most fantastic way.
I offered her a drink, and she asked for Bombay Sapphire. The pale blue gin matched her eyes exactly, although I suspected she wore tinted contacts. I told her she was my favourite colour.
‘Don’t you mean blue is your favourite colour?’
‘No, you are.’
‘You’re strange,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ I said for I felt very strange indeed. I began to wonder if I was in love, although I had no idea what that should feel like.
We couldn’t talk then because more singers and poets were taking their turns, and we had to pretend to be interested in them. When I was called to the stage, I played my dulcimer and sang a Lucinda Williams song called Blue in a private dedication to my new crush.
‘Your voice is sweet, but the song was sad,’ she said afterwards.
‘All the best songs are sad,’ I said. ‘And there are more songs about blue than any other colour.’
‘Is that right?’
I thought it was obvious. ‘It’s the same with comedy,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of blue jokes, but I never heard a red or yellow one.’
She frowned as though considering this, and I wondered how someone so hilarious onstage could be so serious away from the microphone.
She kissed me goodnight outside the pub but didn’t give me her phone number.
I thought about that kiss every day. I didn’t know what kind of kiss it was or what it meant, if it meant anything at all. It seemed both momentous and utterly casual. For Abbie, as far as I knew, it might have been the sort of thing she did as a matter of course. But I felt the weight of that kiss even with nothing to compare it to.
I took my guitar to the open mic night the following month, intending to sing a Joni Mitchell song. The place was packed, and I added my name to an already too-long running-order. Abbie was pacing the corridor beside the ladies. Her hair was a darker shade of blue-black, and the blue contacts were absent, revealing green eyes which were just as arresting. She wore the most beautiful blue velvet jacket over a long, black dress. I felt shabby by comparison, and I coveted that jacket.
‘I’m on fourth,’ she said. ‘It’s way too early. I always come too early.’ She grinned, waiting for me to laugh. ‘No?’ she said. ‘That joke too blue for you?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I should’ve warned you. I’m a terrible prude.’ I hoped my smile would show I didn’t mean it, but there was more than a pinch of truth, and she could probably tell.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said last time, and I’m going for all blue gags tonight,’ she said. ‘You had better cover your ears.’
The idea that anyone would pay attention to anything I said was enough to make me blush without the anxiety of watching this woman tell rude jokes to a not-quite-drunk-enough-yet crowd of people who were only waiting for their own turns on stage. ‘Are you nervous?’ I asked.
‘Nah. They’ll either laugh, or they won’t. I don’t give a shit, really. If I die, I’ll live another day.’
We listened to a Dylan fan murdering It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, and then a girl with a poem about something undefinable. ‘I think maybe that’s the point,’ I said to Abbie when she grumbled about it.
Next, a teenage boy sang a George Formby song with his banjolele. ‘Is he being ironic or is this some kind of unbroken Lancashire tradition?’ Abbie pondered aloud. He went down a storm regardless. ‘How the fuck do I follow that?’ she said.
I tried to wish her luck, but she was away and ready to leap onto the stage as the MC announced her name.
‘Me and my boyfriend recently split up,’ said Abbie from the stage. There were some sympathetic aahs, and somewhere at the back a woman cheered. Abbie acknowledged this with thanks and a raised open hand gesture. ‘We had some issues in the bedroom.’ She unclipped the mic from its stand and wandered the stage, relaxed as though chatting to friends. ‘Not lack of chemistry – we got fired-up alright – but we fought because that fastidious neat-freak couldn’t stand my mess.’ She expounded on the man’s meticulous hygiene – an image of perfection contrasted with her own slovenly ways. I found myself jealous and wondered who this squeaky-clean boyfriend was. I wanted to break his shiny face. But someone like me could never compete with a man like that.
‘How can you live like this? How can you find anything?’ Abbie mimicked the boyfriend. ‘I know exactly where everything is, thank you very much. Which is more than could be said for him.’ She gave a knowing smile, and the audience laughed.
I thought this gag was about an untidy bedroom, to which I could readily relate, but now it seemed to be about something else entirely. In my naivety, it was lost on me. But it wasn’t lost on anyone else. Abbie wasn’t dying; she was killing.
‘So, do you know what I did?’ said Abbie.
‘What?’ But she wasn’t talking to me.
‘I tidied up. Just for him.’ She discarded the gorgeous jacket, flinging it to the floor in a careless gesture of littering. She paced the stage like a caged cat, long-limbed, arched back, all in black as she recounted the ways she had cleaned up her act. She stopped centre-stage as though waiting to pounce. ‘…I even tidied myself.’
What does that mean?
Returning the microphone to the stand, hands free to gesticulate, Abbie related the boyfriend’s admiration for her newly cleansed surfaces and clutter-free crevices.
‘…but even after all that buffing and polishing…’ Her hands moved down her torso like pointing arrows as the audience howled. The slow penny began to drop, and I saw what everyone else had known from the start. ‘…even after all that effort…’
Pause.
‘…even with a map and a compass, he still couldn’t find it.’
Raucous laughter.
‘So, I’m through with him. Maybe I’m through with men.’
Cheers from the women.
‘Let’s face it, what’s the point in tidying up when none of them have a fucking clue anyway.’ She allowed the laughter to settle and said, ‘Girls are alright, though. No matter how messy it gets down there, women know where it’s at.’
I thought for a moment she had lost them – the laughter muted, almost embarrassed. And she had me frozen in her headlights.
‘So, for now, it’s just me and my plastic pal.’ She recovered and sighed for effect. ‘Positive vibes, and there are no complaints about the mess.’
My confusion returned as the room erupted around my ears. I watched as Abbie, triumphant, hopped down from the stage and came to claim the glass of Bombay Sapphire I held for her.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. She downed her drink and grabbed my guitar case, heading for the door.
‘But I haven’t sung yet.’
‘Come back to mine. You can sing for me there.’
I hurried to catch up after rescuing the blue velvet jacket from where it lay at the edge of the stage. Out in the cool air, she let me wear it and linked my arm to pull me down badly lit streets strewn with litter, eerily quiet until she said, ‘You didn’t laugh.’
‘I think I did.’
‘Maybe, but not like the rest of them.’
‘I’m not like the rest of them,’ I said. ‘And I was thinking about it.’
‘About what?’
‘What you were saying. And not saying. Trying to understand you.’
‘Oh, don’t try to understand me. That would be a mistake.’
‘I didn’t realise you’d just split up with someone,’ I said.
‘I haven’t.’
‘But you said…’
‘It was just a story. Like any story. Like Goldilocks, or King Lear, or Two Girls, Fat and Thin.’
‘Two Girls…?’
‘Yeah,’ said Abbie. ‘Mary Gaitskill.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve read it. More than once.’
‘Good. Then you know where I’m coming from.’
‘Do I?’
‘I knew from the off that you got me.’
But the more time I spent with her, the less I understood. She had me completely bewildered.
‘You aren’t really through with men, then?’
‘It all depends on who you meet, doesn’t it?’
Maybe it did.
Abbie’s place was a two-up-one-down she shared with another girl who she said was working nights.
‘But it’s so tidy,’ I said.
‘I’m not an animal,’ said Abbie as she grabbed two beers from the fridge. ‘Go on then. Get your guitar out.’
‘You don’t really want me to sing, do you?’
‘You were going to do a Joni Mitchell song. I want to hear Blue.’
‘I wasn’t going to sing that.’
‘But you’re my Blue Angel. You’ve got to sing it.’
I sang Turbulent Indigo instead, feeling ridiculous in front of an audience of one but thrilled by her attention, nonetheless.
She laughed afterwards, not at my singing, but because of the line about pissing in the rich people’s fireplace. ‘I’d like to do that,’ she said. ‘A big fuck you to the bourgeoisie.’
She took me to bed, and I marvelled at the softness which her hard exterior belied. I let her hold me and didn’t go looking for anything I might not be able to find. From that first night and for the next eight months, Abbie always took the lead.
She took me in her stride and never promised to call. But she regularly showed up outside the hospital when I was coming off duty. She knew where to find me and often did. We tried going to my place sometimes, but my rented attic room with a family downstairs was too untidy for her, and she found it difficult to keep the noise down. I waited for her to suggest we move in together, but it never happened.
The last time I saw Abbie, she told me she’d had it with blue.
‘Blue what?’ I asked.
‘Blue everything,’ she said.
‘You mean the colour blue?’
She nodded. ‘It’s overused. I’m opting out of all things blue.’ She had come to meet me after my early shift, and she gestured to the NHS Blue signs all around us.
‘I thought it was your favourite colour,’ I said.
‘It’s everybody’s favourite colour. But I won’t have it anymore. I’m getting rid of everything blue. I don’t want to look at that colour ever again.’
I stared down at the clothes I was wearing. I’d just changed out of blue scrubs into indigo denim jeans with navy Skechers, and there were three shades of azure in the stripes of my t-shirt. It seemed an overblown way for Abbie to hint at never wanting to see me again.
‘I realise some blues are beyond my control,’ she said, ‘but I’m saying no to blueberries, blue cheese, bluetits, Blu Tack, bluebells and blue Bols. I’ve always said fuck off to the Tories. And maybe the sky will do me a favour and stay grey.’
‘But you live by the sea,’ I said. ‘You can’t ignore it.’
‘I think I can. And anyway, the Irish Sea is brown, let’s face it.’
‘What about Everton?’
‘What about them?’
‘You told me they’ve been your team since you were a nipper.’
‘Not anymore. Footie’s dead. And if I miss it, there’s always the Tangerine Army.’
I considered her hair. She’d given up dyeing the ginger away. Today she wore a bright orange raincoat unfastened over a yellow mini-dress and green tights with her burgundy DMs. I don’t think she owned another pair of shoes.
Now she was through with blue – through with me.
‘Can I have your velvet jacket?’ I asked.
‘I already gave it to Oxfam.’
‘You knew I wanted that jacket.’
‘Yes, but it didn’t suit you.’
‘I suppose I’ll go home and change then,’ I said.
‘Go home,’ she said. ‘But don’t ever change.’
Everything changes, so why shouldn’t I?
If I ever saw Abbie again, I’d tell her that I did change – over time. But I wouldn’t tell her that I didn’t go home that day. I would never admit that I went straight to Oxfam to buy that wonderful, blue, velvet jacket. Now it hangs in my wardrobe, unworn, because she was right; it really didn’t suit me.
Rachel McCarron is an emerging writer who lives on the Northwest coast of England. She writes fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Her work has been published in Mslexia magazine, and she is a forum moderator at Litopia.com – the world’s oldest online writers’ group. She blogs here: litopia.com/rachel-mccarron/
Photo by Luis Quintero: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-haired-woman-facing-metal-fence-1510542/
