Touching From a Distance (16 page)

I recall the events of that final weekend and it’s as if I am watching a video that someone else had produced in my absence. I have run it through so many times, looking for a point to break and insert some other sequence of events. I do know I am not the only person to feel like this, to spend time thinking ‘if only’, making the mistake of believing there was one single action which could have saved Ian’s life. Now I am grateful he died at home and not while he was on tour in America. Tony Wilson was quoted in
Select
magazine as saying, ‘Ian Curtis’s death was the worst thing that ever happened to us. If only he’d survived for another thirty-six hours and got to America.’ In reality, Ian looked towards that particular trip with some trepidation. He feared the American reaction to his epilepsy in certain States and he was terrified of flying. He longed to travel by ship, but mentioned it to no one but me, as he knew this was an illogical and impossible idea. I don’t believe he had any intention of going to America. If he had, I doubt if ‘being there’ would have prevented his suicide.

That weekend was particularly busy for me. There was the usual disco on Friday night, a wedding reception on Saturday afternoon and a further disco for the wedding in the evening. I was pleased to have the opportunity to earn more money. Then Ian rang unexpectedly and announced he would be coming ‘home’ on Saturday before flying on Monday. Sunday was to be the only day I had free that weekend and although I was apprehensive about seeing him again, I thought perhaps his visit indicated a desire to talk. I’m not sure Ian understood why I was working as a barmaid and waitress. Rock stars jetting to the States to make a living was far removed from the existence I had led for the previous year.

I was behind the bar until after midnight on Friday 16 May and also worked the lunchtime bar on Saturday. I slept at my mother’s house because Natalie was staying there. During my afternoon break I rested and then went down to see Ian before starting work again for the evening. I explained to him what my work situation was and that Natalie would be sleeping at my parents’ house that night. ‘Why don’t you bring her here?’ he said, ‘She’ll be OK with me.’ I tried to reason with him. It seemed such a simple request, but I didn’t trust him. Eventually, my mother helped me by making the decision for me and we kept Natalie away. Ian said he wanted to talk to me and I promised to go back after work.

A friend’s sister was married that day, so there were people I knew at the wedding reception who asked me how Ian and I were. I nodded and smiled: everything was fine; yes, everything was just wonderful. I was eager to keep up the charade, not wanting to tell a wedding party that my own marriage had failed. I collected glasses, stepped over extended legs and dodged waving arms, with my own limbs aching and my head pounding.

In the early hours of the morning in Barton Street, Ian had been watching the Werner Herzog film. When I arrived he had almost finished a large jar of coffee and was helping himself to another mug of the thick, black mixture. He asked me to drop the divorce and I argued that he would have changed his mind by morning. There was no talk of love that night – the last time it had been mentioned was when he told me that he didn’t think he loved me. He told me he had spoken to Annik earlier that evening. Their relationship was still very much alive and I began to feel extremely weary – our conversation was going around in circles.

Ian was afraid I would meet another man while he was away. As he became more unreasonable I was convinced he was going to work himself up into a fit, so I offered to spend the night with him. I drove to my parents to tell them what I was doing, but when I returned to Ian he had changed his mind again. This time he wanted me to stay away altogether. I could tell by his face that the fit wasn’t going to surface. He made me promise not to return to the house before 10
a.m. as he was catching the train to Manchester then. Any other night and I might have stayed to argue with him, but I was exhausted and relieved that I was allowed to leave.

I drove the Morris Traveller along Bond Street. Ian would be OK; he always was. I had spent too many nights sitting up with him. It was time to look after Number One.

After I had gone, Ian made himself still more coffee. In the pantry was the all-but-empty whisky bottle from which he squeezed every last drop. He listened to Iggy Pop’s
The
Idiot.
He took Natalie’s photograph down from the wall, retrieved our wedding picture from the drawer and sat down to write me a letter. It was a long, very intimate letter in the same sprawling capitals he used to write his songs. He did say he wished he was dead, but didn’t actually say that it was his intention to kill himself. He talked of our life together, romance and passion; his love for me, his love for Natalie and his hate for Annik. He couldn’t have hated Annik. I never heard him say he hated anyone. I think he wrote that to try to please me. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to be so cruel as to tell her he didn’t want to see her again, even to save his marriage. The pages were full of contradictions. He asked me not to get in touch for a while as it was hard for him to talk to me. By the time he had finished writing, he told me, it was dawn and he could hear the birds singing.

I crept into my parent’s house without waking anyone and was asleep within seconds of my head touching the pillow. The next sound I heard was: ‘This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again … ’ Surprised at hearing ‘the Doors’ ‘The End’, I struggled to rouse myself. Even as I slept I knew that was an unlikely song for Radio One on a Sunday morning. But there was no radio – it was all a dream.

As it was well past 10 a.m., nearly midday, I dressed and prepared to take Natalie home. My mother offered to come with me, but I refused, confident that Ian would not be there. The curtains were closed. I could see the light bulb shining through the unlined fabric. Thinking Ian might still be asleep, I left Natalie in the car and waved
to Pam Wood cleaning her windows. He could have overslept – a chance to talk in the daylight, when I wasn’t tired, when he was calm. Yet, as I stood in the hall somehow I knew he had never gone to bed.

I didn’t call his name or go upstairs. At first I thought he had left because the house smelled strangely fresh. The familiar clinging stench of tobacco wasn’t there. He must have caught the train after all. There was an envelope on the living-room mantelpiece. My heart jumped when I realized that he had left a note for me. I bent forward to pick it up and out of the corner of my eye I saw him. He was kneeling in the kitchen. I was relieved – glad he was still there ‘Now what are you up to?’ I took a step towards him, about to speak. His head was bowed, his hands resting on the washing machine. I stared at him, he was so still. Then the rope – I hadn’t notice the rope. The rope from the clothes rack was around his neck. I ran through to the sitting room and picked up the telephone. No, supposing I was wrong – another false alarm. I ran back to the kitchen and looked at his face – a long string of saliva hung from his mouth. Yes, he really had done it. What to do next? I looked around the room expecting to see Ian standing in a corner watching my reaction. My instinct that he was playing a cruel trick. I had to tell someone. I opened the front door and saw Mr Pomfret going through his back gate. My lips opened and I mouthed his name but the words wouldn’t come. I turned to Pam and Kevin – they were still outside. Pam heard the urgency in my voice and ran to me, but I couldn’t tell her. What if it hadn’t really happened? Supposing I had imagined it? Kevin pushed past me to the kitchen and back again. In slow motion Pam lifted Natalie from the car, handed her to me and ushered us both along the road to their house.

The police asked me to formally identify the body, but eventually my father was allowed to do it instead. I regret that very much. I sat in the car and waited – still too shocked to cry, but able to notice that, yes, like the old cliché, the sun was still shining and the breeze was still blowing. It was a beautiful day. The green leaves above Barton Street buffeted against a blue, blue sky. For the last time Ian and I
were driven in opposite directions. I was to hear later at the inquest that Kevin Wood and another young man from the street had tried to cut Ian down before the police arrived. This had been a harrowing experience – there wasn’t a sharp knife in the house.

Pat O’Connor was by then head porter at Macclesfield District and General Hospital. When he was called in to book in the latest corpse he was shocked to see his old friend Ian Curtis. It was his job to escort Ian’s body and the police down to the morgue. A few days later my parents and I returned to the house to collect a few clothes and toys. My father dismantled the clothes rack and chopped it into tiny pieces. I noticed the record player was switched on and, lifting the lid, I saw
The
Idiot
still turning. While I was there, it struck me that Ian had brought none of his usual medication which had been essential to his well-being. I did find a Dictaphone which the band had given Ian to hum his melodies into. There was only the tape that was in it – it was blank.

It was some time before I was allowed to go to the police station to read the letter which Ian had left for me. I was handed the original and despite the private nature of the letter, my mother was handed a typed transcript to read. I was a little surprised at this, but didn’t feel as uncomfortable as she did.

Rob Gretton rang me before the funeral to ask when he could arrange for Annik to visit the Chapel of Rest to see Ian’s body. I was upset, but we did come to an arrangement and Tony Wilson took it upon himself to make sure Annik didn’t appear at the funeral and cause a scene. Even after his death we were jostling for possession, importance, affection – call it what you will. Rumour has it that Annik was already wending her way back up north before she knew of Ian’s death.

Annik stayed with Tony Wilson and Lindsay Reade for a week, sleeping in the same room where Ian had slept. She sat on their floor, crying and playing Joy Division records for twenty hours of every day she was there. Annik showed Lindsay a letter that Ian had written to her. It began ‘Dear Annik, It was really painful hanging there’. Presumably he meant on the other end of the telephone.

They took Annik with their floral tributes to the Chapel of Rest before the funeral. Tony’s car was a Peugeot estate and had always been known to Lindsay, ironically, as ‘the hearse’. Once in the Chapel of Rest, they were able to see the marks on Ian’s neck. Alan Erasmus leaned forward and moved Ian’s clothing to cover the marks before his parents came to view the body. Tony’s words to Ian’s corpse were, ‘You daft bugger!’ He said to me later, ‘I’ve always felt a friendly annoyance that he fucked off.’

Tony Wilson also took Paul Morley to the Chapel of Rest, but Paul declined to go in. He felt his relationship with Ian had not been close enough to be able to view his body. The event also must have dredged up overwhelming emotions as his own father had committed suicide. Tony Wilson’s main reason for inviting Paul Morley was Tony’s intention that Paul write ‘the book’, but he was affronted and turned down the offer.

Factory Records held their own wake for Ian and spent it smoking dope and watching the film
The
Great
Rock’n’Roll
Swindle.

Ian was cremated on 23 May 1980. I remember the rawness in his mother’s voice and the blank, staring faces of the remaining band members. I felt the shame of failure and the bitterness of seeing them all there, sharing my grief when it was too late. Only the family and our friend Kelvin Briggs were invited back to my parents’ house. Kelvin took care of me that day, just as he had taken care of Ian on our wedding day. After a couple of whiskies my nerve cracked. As I began to laugh with embarrassing hysteria, I looked up at Kelvin’s face to see the tears rolling silently down his cheeks.

The inquest was scheduled for Friday 13 June in Macclesfield. The delay was caused by the hospital being slow in getting together various pieces of information. There were a couple of journalists, Ian’s parents, the remaining band members except for Bernard, two police officers, my family and myself. I had already met with the coroner and explained the various self-inflicted weals on Ian’s body, but was surprised to be questioned on the amount of whisky in the house at the time of Ian’s death. I held up my fingers to reveal less than half an inch. My father had the indignity of having to stand up and say he didn’t know Ian particularly well. Anyone who had known them both would be well aware that they had only myself in common. Pete Hook remembers my father saying that Ian was ‘on another plane’:

I felt Rob Gretton expected some kind of concrete conclusion from the inquest; that we would be shown the light and suddenly understand why Ian had done what he did. However, the cause of death was recorded as: ‘a. Asphyxia b. Ligature around the neck. The deceased killed himself.’ As we left the court room, Peter Hook squeezed my arm and said he was sorry. This was one of the few expressions of sympathy shown to me by Ian’s music-business friends and meant a great deal.

As far as I know, I was the last person to see or speak to Ian. The
affection held for him by everyone who knew him is obvious by the look on their faces when they tell me they still don’t understand why he took his life. His death wasn’t simple by any means. Hanging himself was only the final act in his plot of self-destruction. Unknown to Joy Division and their crew, he had talked about suicide since his early teens. If I ever mentioned his early yearnings to die young after our marriage, my questions would be met with neither denial nor explanation. Enlisting the loyal help of those around him to cover his affair with a Belgian woman served to distance me further from events and ensured a total breakdown in communication. Ian’s stories about how bad our marriage was caused the rest of Joy Division to underestimate grossly the depth of our relationship. Also, maligning my character would have provided Ian with the means to justify his affair to himself and for a short time allay the guilt he would ultimately feel.

In retrospect we should have all sat around a table in Ian’s absence and compared notes. I’m sure we would have realized how much he needed help. Annik’s tenacity was astounding – she continued to ring our number long after Ian was dead. The fatal combination of such a lover and a mentor who, on his own admission, could not only justify infidelity but also organize it, compounded lan’s confusion. It would seem that Ian’s earlier view on life after the age of twenty-five never really changed. All he needed was the excuse to follow his idols into immortality and being part of Joy Division gave him the tools to build the heart-rending reasons.

Ian’s pale blue-green eyes linger on in our daughter and when those familiar long fingers twine themselves unwittingly into those inherited mannerisms, I remember how warm and loved I felt when he and I were sixteen.

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ / ‘These Days’ was released in June 1980 amid jokes about Factory’s five-year plan. The powers that be were still unaware that they had been part of Ian’s own plan. While some people worried about the myth Tony Wilson was trying to create, no one realized that Ian had been busy myth-making himself. Ian crooned his way through ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ after Tony Wilson gave him Frank Sinatra’s
Forty
Great
Songs
to listen to. When the band were unable to decide which vocal should be used they released both – one on each side of the seven-inch single.

Understandably, the lyrics were interpreted by the press as being about a love affair gone wrong, but as the last to know that our love affair had ‘gone wrong’, I had taken Ian’s infidelity as being part of his illness. Although I hadn’t heard the lyrical content, Ian did go to great lengths to explain to me the process by which the image on the sleeve was achieved. The words were etched on a sheet of metal which was then weathered with acid before being left out in the elements. Ian told me that the effect would be to make the metal look like a piece of stone. However, I didn’t comprehend that the result would be something resembling a grave stone. His insistence on explaining all this at a time when he could hardly be bothered to look at me makes me think that he was already well ahead with his plans for his demise. I remember being amused by his assumption that I could possibly be interested in a band that I was no longer allowed to see or hear.

Rob Gretton was stunned when I told him the wording I had chosen for the stone in the crematorium, but there seemed little point in changing it as it seemed to encapsulate all I wanted it to say. ‘Love will tear us apart’ was pretty well how we all felt. The single reached No. 13 in the national chart, but an ongoing union dispute meant that the video was not shown on
Top
of
the
Pops.

The release of
Closer
brought with it a burst of realization for many of those already close to Ian. His intentions and feelings were all there within the lyrics. While he lived they were equivocal, but with hindsight all was disclosed when it was too late for anything to be done. Such a sensitive composition could not have happened by accident. For me,
Closer
was Ian’s valediction and Joy Division’s finest work.

He cajoled us, nurtured us with his promises of success. After showing us what it looked like, he offered us a mere sip before he abandoned us on the precipice.