Free The More You Ignore Me by Jo Brand

him, laughing, and him saying to
her, ‘God, you’re so funny and clever and so beautiful, come here.’ She
couldn’t actually visualise what happened next. Maybe she didn’t want to.
    The NME was frustratingly pedestrian, lots of stuff about the paraphernalia of
creating music, names of instruments, details about musical influences, all the
sort of stuff she didn’t really care about. She just wanted to know about
Morrissey, what he wanted and what he was looking for. His quotes were oblique
and difficult to put in a context she could understand but the underlying sense
of them was loneliness and isolation and misunderstanding, all of which she
knew intimately herself. He seemed accessible and yet so far away Perhaps the
best thing to do was to write and see if he picked something out of her letter
and replied from his heart.
    She
went downstairs and found some scissors in the drawer and took them back up to
her bedroom where she cut Morrissey’s picture out of the NME (a picture
in which he looked proud but damaged) and put it under her pillow. She’d have
liked to place it over her bed like a religious icon, but knew this would
result in some benign teasing from her dad and some not so benign mumbling from
her mum. She decided, against all her instincts, to wait a few days before she
wrote a letter, to allow the feelings whirling round her head to settle into
something more formal than a jumble of ideas and romance. It had to be right or
he would just laugh at her and throw the letter in the bin.

 
     
     

     
     
    Dearest Morrissey,
    I am sure you get absolutely hundreds of
letters from your fans, but I hope you will read this one because I think it’s
very important. I saw you on Top Of The Pops and although you will probably
think this is stupid, I had such a strange feeling about you (I know — just
from seeing you on TV!) that I felt I had to contact you and hopefully arrange
to meet you and talk. The thing is, I can see from the way you looked, the way
you sang and the way you acted that you are a person like me who has had a
weird and hard life and I thought if we could talk maybe we could help each
other to feel better The first words of your song ‘This Charming Man’ seem to
be about my dad Keith whose bicycle was left recently on a hillside with a
puncture in it, and it really struck me that, without realising it, you are
connected to my family in some way. I am a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in
the deepest countryside in Herefordshire and sometimes (well, nearly always!) I
feel like there is nobody here who knows what I am really like or how I feel.
You see, although my dad is a really nice old hippy, I feel I can’t talk to him
because he has so much stress and pain in his life already and I don’t want him
to worry about me. This is because my mum has been ill with a mental problem
for years now and it has really affected my dad and me. She has been in
hospital twice and she has something which the psychiatrists think is de
Clerambault’s syndrome where she thinks she is in love with someone who is not
in love with her. It’s funny, isn’t it, because here I am writing to someone
who doesn’t even know me. I’m not in love with you, by the way! But I do think
you are so different and so intelligent that I straight away felt there was some
sort of bond between us. Lots of nights I cry in my bedroom because I feel so
sorry for my mum and for my dad who has to look after her. You see, my mum has
been on drugs for ages which make her a sort of different person. My dad says
when she was younger she was really good fun and full of energy and mischief,
but now she just sits in the house smoking all day and staring out of the
window.
    I hope you don’t mind me writing this.
    Your greatest fan,
    Alice xxxxxxxx
     
    Alice didn’t know where to
send the letter so she addressed it care of the NME and got on her bike
to go down to the village and post it.
    It was
a wild, windy November day and