Baildon Moor - Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Bradford, 1990s to the Present Day

I stumbled through the 1990s – a hazy blur of years that I don’t really remember. Sullivan and I bumped into each other occasionally in town but always ignored each other. Mutual friends had long since cleaved down the middle into his and mine. But Bradford was a small town, and Sullivan still lived there when the band wasn’t on tour. I heard on the grapevine that he blamed me for the break up, although opinion was split as to why it was my fault – some said it was because he’d cheated on me; others that I had driven him away with my nagging and insecurities. For my part I hated him for running away, for not being there when I needed him the most. It was easier for me to hate him than admit I had any feelings left.

The late 90s and early 2000s were Sydenham Poyntz’s glory years: huge European and American tours, five star album reviews in Q and Mojo and the headline slot at Reading Festival at the turn of the new millennium. They even had a handful of top ten hits in Germany.

I carried on working at the tattoo studio and spent five years waiting for the knock at the door that never came. Gary moved away to Manchester at the end of the 90s and let me take over the lease on the shop; he didn’t blink when I paid him in cash. I transformed it into the Yellow Room - Bradford’s first and uniquely women-only tattoo studio; I quickly recruited an assistant, Esme, who had turned up one day in a cloud of ambition and unruly hair and asked me for a job. I’d hired her almost on the spot: like me she was a Fine Art graduate from the university, which I took to be a good omen. She had an uncanny ability to design tattoos that our customers needed, rather than what they though they wanted. We hit it off straight away.

Around the same time I moved from the basement flat to a one-up, two-down terraced cottage in a quiet cobbled backstreet; the irony of its location in Airedale Crescent next to the cemetery did not escape me. The nightmares never went away.

Although the police quietly dropped the case of Rudy’s disappearance, every year his family popped up in the newspapers and called the police’s failure to find him a national disgrace. With every interview they held with the media Rudy became more of a saint; more perfect than ever, and poor Billy was made out to be the bad guy, the dealer and maybe even Rudy’s killer – although they were careful not to say that in so many words. On the fifth anniversary of his disappearance they held a moonlight vigil in the centre of Bradford and handed out yellow ribbons to passers-by. It made me feel sick.

Billy remained in the mental hospital. I visited him a couple of times in the months after Sullivan left but he didn’t recognise me and I could barely recognise the young skinny kid that I’d known since he was thirteen: the drugs had made Billy fat and sluggishly bloated, and when he talked he slurred as if his tongue was too large for his mouth. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and the prognosis was not a positive one.

On the day of my final visit, Billy was mute and withdrawn. I asked a carer – a fifty-something man with the grey flowing locks and beard of a superannuated Jesus – whether he had any chance of recovery.

‘There’s always hope,’ he replied in a tone of voice that meant there was none.

I never went back. I couldn’t face what I had done to him.

I saw Marie once in the High Street with three grubby kids in tow. She looked harassed and pinched with her hair scraped back into a ponytail: prematurely aged at twenty-five. She looked straight through me.