By Sophie Parkin.
‘Have you been crying?’, my son Paris said to me, on returning from shopping in Oxford Street. He held in his hand yet another bag from Nike Town full of tracksuit bottoms — he now has 30 pairs, all grey. That fact alone is enough to make me cry these days.
‘No.’ I lie easily. ‘Why? Does it look like I have?’
‘Yes, your eyes are all red.’
I blink. ‘Must be something in the garden I’m allergic to.’ I went to the mirror, almost convincing myself and stared hard at the redness of my eyes. The eyedrops I put in didn’t help.
I looked like I’d been crying, because I had. I’d burst into a spontaneous rush of tears when a man cancelled dinner with me at the last moment to enjoy more time with his wife instead — The Bastard! Just as I was about to go away for a week and I felt let down. I felt that old familiar feeling, it’s like recognising an old tune but you don’t know what it’s called or who it’s by but it’s the same old song, only with a different meaning… I couldn’t trust him and that always makes me cry, that and criticism, rejection and the disappointment of watching others falling from pedestals, so what if I put them there. Where is the witchhazel, garlic, vinegar, anything to bring the swelling down, abait the itch? My disappointment in men evoking tears, as a feeling, is as standard for me as Proust’s madeleines bringing out memories, some best forgotten. Where to lay the dead and enfeebled responses to childhood heartaches? Oh show me the buttons and pulleys to the sodium well that never seems to run dry. Some things I still have to work out, hangovers from my mother and father, doesn’t everyone have them from Larkin onwards?
Was it fathers or mothers that made all those grown men cry in that back street in a Borough pub The Gladstone, the other week? Or, was it the fact that it was an old man croakily singing, forcing them to watch their own mortality rocking before them? Men I know, men I have known have wept that they don’t have enough chances to cry (or eat quiche apparently). The more they were suppressed as babes and the older they get the more blubbery they become — a sentimental puppy and lavatory roll commercial can do it for some, the thought that they’ve left their children, for others or a song with the right cadence. This night it was the songs that did it. James Endeacott from 1965 Records company laid it out to me from the beginning:
‘You’re going to really love this Sophie, it’s going to really make you cry.’
‘Is that what I love?’ I thought. ‘Presumptuous bugger, what does this man know of my happy emotional triggers? It is not, as Noel Coward once said, the sentiment of cheap tunes, that’ll do it for me. Though there was one year, aged 14, and one boy aged 16, and one Stevie Wonder record, that got me bawling at the unfairness of unrequited love and forever more that year I blamed it on the sun that didn’t shine, and everything else in the goddamn universe!
I have never actually had a problem with tears either mine or other people’s, in fact we have a tradition in our family that tears and birthdays go together like a horse and carriage. A fancy cake, some bad presents and too many expectant faces thrusting cards in your face, and tears seem a natural response. As far as I know on this Monday night there were no birthdays to excuse the damp simpering downfall, just Larry Jon Wilson from Louisiana losing his voice. He gravelled and growled his 71-year-old way from stories to songs of acceptance, love forgotten in the Lost and Found, in pain, in a pool hall, as futures lay at the bottom of an empty bottle. There were three songs about whores and his admiration for self employment when everything else has disappeared including the men buggering off and leaving the women to work out how they feed the kids. Often the only way is by joining the oldest profession in the world without a trade union. Now those were songs worth crying over, but they weren’t the ones that bought a pub full of cynical record executives and music journos to their knees. It was the one about the boy and the candy, the rocking chair, the one about growing old and not succeeding, and tears flowed like beer that night, warm and sticky.
None of those songs came near to triggering a liquid response from me, maybe because I never felt betrayed: his songs may have contained clich és of dime-a-fuck girls and drunken feckless men but they were full of truth and the small-town Southern ways of scratching at life through dirt. Maybe I didn’t cry because Larry Jon was one of those rare men for me, a man I could trust (now there’s something I could confide to a therapist) I remained the only enthusiastic dry eye in the house clapping til the end, and the album is even better….
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sophie Parkin has written seven published books. Three grown-up novels (you can’t say adult, otherwise people think they might be pornography): All Grown Up, Take Me Home and Dear Goddess. For teenagers there is French for Kissing, Best of Friends, and Mad, Rich and Famous. She has also contributed to four other books, from short stories, true stories, long stories, to poetry. Mothers by Daughters, Sons and Mothers both published by Virago, Girls Just Want To Have Fun: the Cosmopolitan book of short stories, and POT 05 – Anthology of Poetry edited by Michael Horovitz. Her new book, Bazaar Nights and Camel Bites (Piccadilly Press), a teenage novel set in Tangiers and London, is out now. Sophie Parkin will hold a monthly 3:AM Magazine bash at the Green Carnation in London starting in October.
