If I Fall Back Down, Again

Prologue

I never was the Motherly type. I hadn’t planned on ever having kids, but life has a way of laying ruin to any plans you might have. It happens a lot to me, but if you know anything about me and my past you’ll know that already. It had never been in my plans to run away with a punk rocker eleven years my senior when was I was only eighteen. I used to have strong anti-marital views so you can imagine what a surprise it was to me when I found myself hitched at the tender young age of 19. When I was a school girl having that chat everyone is railroaded into having with the visiting career advisor, I didn’t tell that sour faced woman that my plan was to have a half baked flirt with the music business before falling into a less than lucrative career as an alternative glamour model. My aspirations had not gone far beyond a vague interest in graphic design because I’d been sent to a graphics firm on work experience the year before and thought it might be an ok way to make a living. So you see my point. There’s no point in making plans because the world will just keep chucking the unexpected at you, and you’ll never fail to be left reeling at these little surprises. Yeah, little surprises, life is full of them.

I considered getting rid of the kid when I found out I was pregnant (don’t tell the little sod that), but after the fight with Goldie, Tobi was in a bad way and the thought of having a bloody kid seemed to make him so happy so it just sort of stayed, growing like a parasite in my belly over the next nine months as Tobi slowly recovered. It was a messy situation. I hadn’t a frigging clue who the little mites Dad was, and of course there would be no way to find out until it was born. The question of who had fathered this thing played on my mind almost constantly throughout those awful months, but, strangely enough, Tobi didn’t seem to care. As far as he was concerned he was gonna be the kid’s Dad. He wanted it more than I did. Try as I might I could not get exited about the prospect of bringing another screaming mouth into the world. I didn’t relish the thought of being Mum to anyone. It was too soon, I was too young, I still had a life to live. At least Tobi was old and past it, and he had done everything he wanted to do with his life. 

It eventually arrived in July, a week late, and all I felt was relief that it was out of there and I didn’t have to lug it around in my belly any longer. I waited for the maternal instinct that everyone said would come once the baby had arrived but it never materialised. I was strangely indifferent in those first few months towards the tiny wrinkled thing that did nothing but cry and shit. Tobi was besotted from the first second and it drove me crazy. Suddenly I held second place in his affections to this hollering bag of puke and wind. We had planned to have a Jeremy Kyle style DNA test carried out on the kid to find out who he belonged to, however, once it arrived Tobi was so in love he said he didn’t want or need to know, it didn’t matter whose DNA it was carrying it was his son and that was final. He’s four now and I still don’t have a bloody clue whose he is. Sometimes he’ll smile in that crooked way and I’ll think, yeah, definitely Tobi’s, but then when he get’s really angry and tries to punch one of us because he can’t get his own way I think, shit, there’s only one guy I know with a temper like that.

Tobi named him. I was so fed up when he arrived that I really didn’t care what we called it. Postnatal depression the doctors said but I knew that was a load of bollocks, I was just feeling pissed off and cheated because this thing had come along and stole my life. I couldn’t even think of him as a person at first, just some prune like, alien life form, and therefore he was always ‘it’ to me in the early months. That’s how we ended up with Reno Grave. It could have been worse I suppose. He could have called the kid Overdose. I’m still not sure how I feel about having a son with the same name as a city in Nevada to which I’ve never been and which has no relevance to anything. It wasn’t the city, however, he was named after, it was Tobi’s old pal, the original drummer from his band, the one who hung himself years ago. I don’t know why the original Reno was called after a city in Nevada, I never really asked.

He doesn’t live with me anymore. I tried to do the whole single Mother thing but as I was in Edinburgh and Tobi was so far away on the South coast it drove me crazy not having him there to do his share. After that we attempted the whole joint custody deal. I moved down to London because shuttling the kid between Brighton and Edinburgh was not going to be fun for anyone involved. In the end, though, we agreed that it would be best if Reno went to live with his Dad and his new girlfriend full time. I went back to Edinburgh after that.

Are you wondering if it bothers me having someone else raise my child? I guess so. I miss him sometimes, but then I’m a train wreck, a complete tragedy of a person, and I don’t think I’m capable of even looking after myself never mind someone else. Besides, it’s not like he calls Tobi’s new girl Mum or anything, he knows she’s not his Mother, he just calls her Sissy, like everyone else. 

We tried to make something of our wreck of our marriage following the night of the fight outside The Black Bull, but it didn’t last. By the time little Reno was two we were ready to part ways again. The second break up was not nearly as vicious nor as public as the first. There was no bitter name calling, no hatred, no dramatic departures from either party- it just died slowly and quietly like an elderly relative whose time had passed. No body paid much attention to our marriage’s death rattle, it was such a peaceful affair compared to the all singing and dancing spectacle we had created the first time. People are only interested when people are going off the rails, falling apart publicly, staggering out of night clubs off their face, hanging about with racist nazis, telling venues full of fans to go fuck themselves. Everyone loves sensationalism and there is nothing sensational about a love that slinks unnoticed out of the back door when everyone’s backs are turned.

Our story the first time around was worthy of a space in the pages of the rock magazines and in the forums of the online punk community. We were the ultimate urban fairy tale: young girl hooks up with famous punk rock singer eleven years her senior, runs away with him, embarking on a whirlwind romance that spans four years before she runs off with a skinhead while he’s away on tour with the band. Heartbroken, he falls apart in a very public way and then there’s the dramatic climax that brings the pair back together. They fucking loved that didn’t they? The day after the fight the net was full of pictures of me slumped on the street outside The Black Bull, Tobi’s head in my lap, bawling my eyes out while he bled all over the pavement from the stab wound in his stomach. It was a powerful image, I remember that kid with the camera snapping away, he must have made a bit money from those pictures, I guess. They saw it as romantic in a tragic kind of way; their favorite punk rock couple brought together again after he came to her rescue and was nearly killed when he tackled the violent nazi she’d run off with.  

So for a little while all was looking rosy for Tobi and Morven. It seemed the spectators who watched our little lives had got the happy ending they wished for. When will people learn? In life there is no happy ending.