Alaskan Tapes

A story for ye

I wrote this short story last year. There’s an ambient artist I really like called Alaskan Tapes, which I think is such an evocative name – it really got the imagination going. I don’t know why the story starts with a rugby match. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

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‘This is the best bit, isn’t it? The anticipation.’

‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I mean, I always find with rugby that people get super excited about it before, but then the game itself is always so boring.’ Dan frowned at me the way you do when you’re struggling to read a road sign. ‘I just mean, when I watch it, it doesn’t seem to make sense,’ I flailed. ‘Like, what’s the scrum for? They roll the ball underneath and then everyone just collapses.’

‘Yeah, but that’s because the game has changed over the years, and rugby players’ builds are so different now from how they were thirty years ago. Players are almost too big for scrums now.’

‘So why don’t they get rid of scrums?’

‘Nah.’

The players were emerging from the tunnel.

‘Do you want a beer before kick-off?’

I looked down at my almost completely full can. ‘Er, sure yeah.’

He got up from his reclining chair and walked across the immense open plan living room to the kitchen island, where Beth and Gemma were sitting. I eyed them jealously. They were giggling, confiding; at ease in each other’s company. ‘You’ll be alright with Dan, won’t you?’ Beth had asked me that morning. ‘Yeah, sure.’ I’d said, ‘I just don’t really fancy watching rugby.’ ‘Oh God, I hate rugby,’ she’d said. I mean, so do I, I’d said in my head. ‘Can’t I just come and hang out with you two?’ ‘No! You need to bond with Dan!’

‘Here you go.’ Dan had returned with a frothing can.

‘Thanks. How are the girls doing over there?’

‘The thing with rugby is that you need to see it from the stands, it’s like watching a battle, it’s about territory, making small gains – it all makes sense with the bigger picture.’ On the TV was a close up of a rugby player’s thigh, like a shoulder of Iberico ham.

‘I think I find football easier on the eye, it kind of makes more aesthetic sense to me,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Dan.

He started telling a story about a stag do he had been on recently with his rugby club. He had a slow, unenthusiastic kind of delivery as if he was a talking head on a documentary about depressed people. The story seemed to drift in and out of focus, but it involved Jägerbombs and criminal damage. It was difficult to tell whether or not Dan approved of this behaviour. It was more like he was relating it because the memory happened to be running through his mind at the time.

I responded by talking about the last stag do I’d been on, but I realised I couldn’t recall a single notable anecdote about the whole weekend. I ended by saying that the old town of Tallinn was ‘actually really beautiful’, and the word ‘beautiful’ sounded unfathomably posh coming out of my mouth. I gasped for breath when I finished. He said absolutely nothing.

The players were lined up, singing the national anthems. I looked down at the floor. Dan kept a shoeless house so we were both in our socks, which felt like a kind of terrible intimacy.

‘How’s work?’ I asked, then panicked – ‘What is it you do again?’ He winced.

‘It was that memorable, was it? Yeah, same old same old.’

Extremely long pause. I felt like I had to pretend that he’d asked me a question. ‘I’m working on music at the moment. Just stuff for ads.’

‘I used to do a bit of music myself.’

‘Oh really? What kind of thing?’

‘Ambient mainly.’

‘Wow, that seems surprising.’

‘People can like rugby and ambient music, you know.’ Sipping his beer. ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive.’

‘No I didn’t mean that. I just… Tell me about it.’

‘Well… It was a long time ago really. I haven’t done any of that stuff for years. But I was working in Alaska. I had a job in Petersburg in a cannery. I have dual citizenship, you see.’

The game had started but Dan had found a new rhythm. His eyes were fixed on the screen but he continued to speak – mumbling sometimes, like someone talking in their sleep.

‘After university I took a year off before looking for work. My last year of university hadn’t gone well. It sounds trivial, but it was to do with, well, love. She was called Imogen. I fell in love and it was like nothing I had ever experienced, before or since. Anyway, long story short, it was unreciprocated. I thought at one time that something was going to happen but it didn’t. It’s all a blur but I remember coming out of a party and thinking I was going to scream or shout, but I just burst into tears instead. And of course I then fucked up my finals. I nearly left. I should have left. It felt like all around me were versions of this fairy tale relationship that I had thought would be happening to me. Other versions of me, of us, wandering around the campus. And I was inside my room, not living the life that I thought I would be. I actually think, looking back, that it was some kind of breakdown. The fantasy of the other life I was meant to be living was so alluring that I guess I ended up spending more time on the wrong side of the mirror, if that makes sense. What would we be doing tonight if things had worked out? Perhaps the college bar, then a film, or back to a party at Will’s. All imagined from my darkened room. Curtains drawn against the summer sun. Unwashed mugs and dishes everywhere. Dirty laundry. My computer with its great big monitor, switched off and gathering dust.

‘Anyway, like I say, I have dual citizenship and I had just come into a bit of money from an inheritance so I decided to take myself off to America for a while after university. I wanted to cross the country but I ended up spending an evening in a town called Laromie in Wyoming and staying there for a couple of months. It’s a place that people normally go through on their way to somewhere else. I met a girl, Kim, who worked in a bar. I loved saying bar instead of pub. The relationship, if you can call it that, felt like a cheap imitation of the relationship I should have had at uni. I think we both felt we needed an excuse not to drink alone. There was a park that we used to go to, Undine Park, with “40s”, and cheap “liquor” in brown bags – and it felt like a version of the quad at college. Like a mirror image of it. I’d see a group of office workers having lunch and they’d look like Nicole and Rich from college, like their alter-egos or something. Out of the corner of my eye they were me and my friends in our first year – freshers getting drunk at a picnic. I told Kim stories about myself that didn’t quite land – a story about something pretty traumatic that happened to me as a teenager that I realised I was only telling as a way to alleviate some failure to commit to something; just a cheap means to make someone feel sorry for me. And I remembered as I was telling it that I’d told the same story to Imogen but it had had more meaning then. Like if they made a film of my life that bit would have been in the trailer. But I told Kim this story as if I were rehearsing lines. I don’t know why I told her about it.

‘Anyway, Kim had family up in Alaska and kept saying that we should visit. It was beautiful up there, she said. It didn’t even feel like America. The light was different. Before I really knew what I was doing we were on a flight. I had all this money so paid for us both to fly up there. We drank neat vodka in the departure lounge.

‘We were hungover by the time we arrived at Kim’s aunt and uncle’s house even though it was about 3 in the afternoon. She was right about the light. There was a blinding purity to it. Kim’s aunt and uncle were bemused by me and started asking me all these questions about British culture and politics. Her aunt asked me what parliamentary constituency I lived in. I rambled a bit because I didn’t actually know, and I was aware I was sort of slurring my words. Kim patted but actually slapped my arm. We took a nap and reconvened for dinner – which was meatloaf, it tasted pretty good actually. Her uncle was silent, but her aunt kept firing questions at me. She asked me if I’d seen a film that she’d watched on TV last night. It was something fairly arthouse about Irish nuns or something. And I said, “Yeah I think it was on at a party I was at,” which was basically my line whenever someone asked me if I’d seen a film that I’d never heard of. I couldn’t admit to not knowing about stuff back then. I seemed to be inventing my personality as I went along. And she was like, “That sounds like a very strange party.” I don’t think she believed me. She eyed Kim over the meatloaf as if to say, “Who is this strange man?”

‘In her hometown, Kim took me to the places she remembered from childhood. Places that seemed almost comically mundane to me. This is the carpark where we used to hang out. The park where we first got drunk. The abandoned house at the edge of a scrap of common land where I lost my virginity. I suppose the places were reflections of the similarly sacred spots of my teenage years. The weird consecrated ground of benches in the park, the strange prefab terrapins on the edge of the rec. I started telling her about the terrapins actually. I was saying that my Dad used to have meetings in this one terrapin. But whenever I was playing football on the rec it felt like the terrapin was different from the one Dad worked in. Even though it was the same it felt like they existed in different realities. It was a kind of primal place, that field with the terrapins. There was another place like that, I said. There was the phonebox near a lane that intersected two leaf-strewn streets where me and my friends always used to meet. I don’t know why. It was just an ordinary phonebox. And one afternoon we met there and played knock-knock ginger, or ding-dong dash, or knock-a-door run, or whatever you call it. A game now made impossible by Ring Doorbells, by the way. Something else we’ve lost. Anyway, whenever I think of that afternoon… it’s like it’s bathed in golden light. I’d never known happiness like the afternoon when we played knock-knock ginger. Golden light. The light pouring down like gold. There was the phonebox and there was the weird terrapin, or maybe it was a scout hut – but it existed in two realities. Mine when I was playing football, and my Dad’s when he was having meetings. Those were my two places. She said I can barely follow what you’re talking about sometimes.

‘I remember saying, “Sometimes I just want to go outside and walk and walk until I reach the horizon.” She said, “You can’t just walk out here, you know. This place is bigger than Shitfield or wherever you come from. You can walk for days and see no one, did you know that? You’ll fucking freeze to death.”

‘Well, I obviously wasn’t going to actually do that. But I knew it was over. She did too. I think she was relieved to see the back of me. “You never got over Imogen, did you?” She said that to me when we were nestled in her childhood bedroom. “You can’t stop talking about her.” Whispering so as not to wake her aunt. There were posters of Courtney Love on the wall. Stacks of CDs. I said, “Maybe, but what is this, anyway? It’s all so new, we’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks. What am I even doing meeting your family?” “Oh they didn’t give a shit,” she said. “About me?” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

‘I couldn’t sleep most nights so would go downstairs. Her aunt and uncle had a rice cooker (which I’d never seen before) and one of those stove top coffee pots. Kim’s uncle couldn’t sleep either. And we’d stay up talking about films and music. He was a bit shy at first. He played me a lot of the Eno albums then. Quite a strange image, isn’t it? Two blokes who barely know each other sharing a coffee in the middle of the night to the strains of The Plateaux of Mirror. Looking out across the snowy scrubland at the back of the house.

‘But I did leave one morning, eyes scratchy with tiredness. “Where are you going to go?” Kim asked. I said, “I’ll get a bus. I’m not actually going to walk until I reach the horizon.” I think she was glad to see me go anyway. I walked in the grey light. The real cold hadn’t come on yet. But it was still bloody cold. I felt the snot freeze in my nose. And I seemed to lose strength with every step, like I was a character in a computer game, flickering when they receive an injury, the energy bar gradually decreasing

‘I got to the bus depot and bought a ticket to Petersburg. I remember that we were stuck in the depot for a really long time before we got moving. It felt like a version of infinity. Like that would actually be what infinity felt like. In a way I think I’m still there. I managed to sleep by using a scarf as a pillow against the window. A couple murmured behind me. We drove through the awakening town and out into the real snowlands. I woke once or twice. I had a CD walkman. The music I was listening to gave me these dreadful nightmares. I remember I had this dream about a MASK toy I’d had as a kid. MASK was a cartoon that was essentially a big advertising campaign for toys. The toys were a bit like Transformers I guess. Except there were these characters who drove the cars and lorries which then transformed into tanks or “mobile armoured vehicles” or whatever. There were goodies and baddies. I preferred it to Transformers, it made more sense than Transformers. In Transformers the cars themselves are sentient. Anyway one of the toys was just a fucking billboard that opened up and transformed into some kind of rocket launching base. It was so boring. A billboard. Not a car or a motorbike or something exciting that you could actually play with – a billboard. The character’s name was Dusty Hayes. You can look it up. And the guy was just stuck in the billboard. And it was impossible not to think – what’s he thinking in there when the billboard is closed? And I dreamt that I was trapped in the billboard, trapped in the box of toys under my childhood bed.

‘Anyway, when I got to Petersburg I rented a room in a block above a computer repair shop. I knew no one there and no one knew me. It felt like I was living deep in a kind of fantasy role-playing game that all the other participants had forgotten they were playing. What happens if I choose my own adventure and I end up on a completely blank page? I would look out of the window at the gritted street, and the snow blowing sideways. All I had was my bed and my desk. And there was a shared bathroom in the hall, dismal with black mould. I got a job at the cannery and would come home stinking of fish. On days off I would sleep through the ultramarine afternoons. Or I would mooch around the harbour watching the marbled murrelets. The blinding light. The saline air. I saved up my wages and bought a second hand laptop from downstairs. It was an Acer. I downloaded a cracked version of Cubase. I’d been reading about home recording. I found some good soft synth plug-ins. I’d play a chord sequence, smother it in reverb and loop it around and around until it seemed to be part of the snow blowing sideways outside. The sounds all felt too clean so I bought a tape deck on eBay and started recording to cassette and back to digital. The tape hiss filled the room the way silence fills a cathedral. I would spend whole evenings listening to a blank tape with the volume all the way up until I could hear symphonies deep in the texture of the hiss. In the strange half-light of long winter days, the synth pads and the languorous chords, the tape hiss… I lay on my bed as if I was in the womb.

‘After working at the cannery I’d walk maybe 30 minutes to a bar called Richard’s. God, I knew every crack in the pavement on the walk to that bar. Sometimes, to get myself to sleep, I would recreate the walk in my mind – here’s the petrol, sorry gas station, the Salty Pantry bakery, the grill house, the cafe with the stale cannoli, the abandoned lots, the parks. I wondered which sites were consecrated ground for teenagers here. Sometimes when I was walking to Richard’s I couldn’t tell if I was really walking there or if I was lying in my bed and just imagining it. At Richard’s time would stop. I would sit in a booth, or I would sit at the wide, deep bar, staring at the stupid bastard in the mirror. I would try to read but I’d become overcome by beer. Four, five, six pints – and I’d continue to read but nothing would sink it, but I just desperately, desperately didn’t want the moment to end. That’s where I got into sports actually. They’d always show rugby in Richard’s to the miserable expats. And then I’d stumble home and I’d lie awake in the night, half-drunk, half-hungover, feeling the alcohol coursing through me – and I’d listen to the foxes (or maybe they were wolves) shrieking in the night, imagining them out there in the dark street and the dank wood, and eventually dying and decomposing in the snow water and the leaves and the vivid green moss, becoming one with the earth. All those night sounds outside – I started to think that if I could hear all of those noises – the animals, the occasional car, the rain in the distance – then I must be somehow out there too, reaching out from the room into the night. I had this recurring dream to do with affixing a lid on something that couldn’t be contained. And again and again I thought of the computer game character – that I’d depleted my energy bar and it would never get topped up again.’

When he’d finished we sat in silence and watched the TV. It was halftime and the score was 0-0 which was unusual for rugby.

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