sinister list, i have missed you. it has been nine months since my last confession. i remember standing in a chip shop in east langerston, the small village in yorkshire where i was brought up, and watching the fish floating in the vat of oil. i talked to you about a gypsy i once met, and how she told me that life moved in spirals. and then i left town. i left for somewhere bigger, and more exciting. i left for a lot of reasons. one of them was an embarassing crush on my ex-boyfriend. an ex-boyfriend who now had ex-boyfriends of his own. and now.. now i'm standing in a chip shop in east langerston, the small village in yorkshire where i was brought up. i'm watching the fish float in a vat of oil. margaret, my adopted mother, is 'taking a rest' upstairs, something she has to do on a regular basis right now. frank, my adopted father, is in the pub. the new pub. east langerston now has two pubs, a chip shop and a woman who goes from house to house, cutting and combing the hair of old ladies. i used to stand here and listen to my belle and sebastian records on a little radio. these days, the chip shop has a television. margaret watches a lot of television at the moment. she says the noise comforts her. i think it helped to contribute to her break-down, but have not yet found a way to say this. the television plays hits from mtv. the customers complain if i switch it off. they have become used to it. it is familiar. i am the unfamiliar element in this chip shop. gone for six months, returning to feel more like a stranger here than ever. if i show you an ink polaroid, you must promise not to laugh. this is me, in sheffield, with my girlfriend. she's the one on the right, with her arm around me. we were together for three months. i left her last week. i am asked to turn up the television. a girl who is too young to be this drunk wants to hear the song. atomic kitten look like the girls everyone was scared of at school, only older, with babies of their own now. i suppose those girls, the ones that were the bullies, now have babies of their own too, and they clutch their babies close to them, scared that somebody will hurt the child in the way their mothers hurt the rest of us. the women on the television are singing about it being okay that their lover has left. i wonder if this is ever true. i don't recognise the drunken girl in the chip shop, and she doesn't look at me as she dances around, humming the words of a song that i hope she is too young to understand and stroking her stomach. i am an unimportant audience.. this is not a performance for me. this song says everything she'd like to be able to say right now. it bores me, but it comforts her. and she'll need comfort, as her belly grows. when i hand her pie over, i am suprised to find my eyes are moist at the corners. she looks at me as if i am insane. you're not here, but its okay maggie. her name was maggie. my girlfriend. and, looking back, i admired her, and wanted to love her. she has long, black hair and she lectures at the college where i spent two weeks. media studies. i didn't want to study media really, i was quite happy just listening to records, but an 'a' level in english literature would have felt lonely on its own. maggie's first lecture was about musical television. i can't remember much of what she said. i just remember that she stood in the middle of the little room and sang to us. i don't think it had anything to do with the lecture, i think she'd just decided singing 'somewhere over the rainbow' to a class of young adults might be a fun thing to do. sometimes i wonder if it was because she had forgotten her lecture notes. i told myself i had fallen in love right then. i left a note on her desk, telling her where i lived and giving her my telephone number. and then i left college. two weeks later, i got a letter saying i should go to the administrators and explain my absence. when i got there, she was waiting outside the room. she told me i shouldn't have left. and she took me to the nearest pub. two months later, sick of visiting me in my mouldy room, she asked me to move in with her. and i did it. and i told myself it would feel right, because there had to be a reason i'd never managed to have sex with a man, and when she played the velvet underground, and lit an incense burner above her silk sheets, it seemd like i'd found the reason. i remember, the words about shiney boots of leather echoing around my head, as maggie taught me a lot about life. but something was wrong. but you must forgive me, sinister list, because this is not what i meant to tell you. maybe i'll tell you the rest of this story another day. the chip shop closed half an hour ago. i am listening to my songs as i type. somebody is staggering home from the Bull, attempting to sing 'love me tender' with the aid of several pints of beer. it covers up the words of what i'm trying to listen to, but it feels real. another performance. a public one, but the emotion behind it is private. and i am trying not to cry again. my cds lie, unpacked, in the corner. i have been looking forward to playing my old records, the ones i couldn't take with me. i can hear margaret's television through the wall, she is watching a violent film, something about vampires, and i can hear keys in the back door downstairs. i will leave the cds, and the records. once, i would have hidden within them, but now the hiding is not so easy. too many of them are old friends, with stories to tell. stories where people are broken. there is not a suitable hiding place right now. guilt is too hard to escape. i can't tell my parents why i'm unhappy. i don't want to explain that i'm upset because i couldn't make myself be gay. it isn't something they would want to hear. and they have their own problems. sinister list, i wanted to give you a performance like maggie's, that first day in class. i wanted to tell you that way up high, there was a land that i'd dreamed of. but it all comes out like an mtv song. distant, unreal, impossible to connect with. somebody else's life. i will send this tomorrow. now, i shall go and make frank a cup of coffee. it sounds like he could do with it. and we'll play his records, the ones i remember from my childhood. and we'll try and hide in cliff richard. perhaps we'll hide together. i think that if you can hide together, you might be able to find each other again. eileen __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+