Georgia Ruth: Find our way back to the week of pines? - part 3
A blog exploring responses to works from CELF
Tracy’s Car
If I were to start talking about “Tracy’s car” you’d probably assume I was talking about Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, wouldn’t you? But back in the late 90s, in Newtown, I encountered a different - but no less transformative - vehicle.
Tracy worked in my mum’s office, in the whimsically named Straight Lines House on New Road. A few minutes' walk away was another evocative place: Frolic Street, with its hidden history of triple harps and Romany polkas. The streets and buildings in Aberystwyth sounded so boring, so prosaic, after a trip to Newtown, where there's even a Butterfly Lane. Anyway, this was a few years before the fish and chip shop opened up in the space below the office, and so the smell of fish fat hadn’t yet begun to rise through the carpets, coating the clothes, thoughts and dreams of the employees in a haddocky glaze. Back then, if I remember correctly, it smelled like any normal office, with its rows of off-white desktop computers, printers whirring into action every five minutes, the sound of traffic. Today, it's a Domino's. Plus ça change..
I'm not sure how old Tracy would have been. Only that she was one of the young ones in the office. To a ten year old, she was glorious. Neither young nor old, but full of a mischievous energy which seemed to reach the tips of her curly hair. She was fashionable, in a way that suggested she shopped in places other than New Look. But economical, too; there was nothing flashy about Tracy. She was effortless. And she had a car. On at least one occasion, I was allowed to go with her for a drive on her lunch break. In Proust's Memories of Things Past, the protagonist's memory is triggered by the smell of madeleines dipped in lime blossom tea. If you were to magically combine a Calvin Klein perfume with the upholstery of a small hatchback and make me smell it, I might find myself momentarily back in the passenger seat of Tracy's Car. I couldn't tell you what brand or model it was. Only that it was small and (possibly) white and that she drove it like a maniac. It had a tape cassette player, into which Tracy would load dance music compilations. Cream Club Classics. Pacha, that kind of thing. Thudding trance and acid house would fill the vehicle, at odds with the winding rural A roads we'd speed along together, but also somehow deeply appropriate too. It's why Newtown is always musically represented in my mind by dance music. Frolic Street, indeed. As we'd drive, she'd gossip, chat. I always felt like she saw me as a real person, like she respected me, this 10 year old. She never made me feel inferior. In Tracy's Car, I was respected, one of her pals. Where were we going, together? I have no idea. Were these lunch hour trips frequent, or just a one-time thing that my memory has turned into something bigger than it was? Again, no idea. All I know is that I can't think about Newtown without imagining the cackle of her laughter, the synths, the bouncing springs of her hair above the wheel.
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feelin' I could be someone
Be someone, be someone
I've often wondered where she is now. I'm quite a bit older now than she was then. A strange thought. I think subconsciously, when I finally passed my driving test at the grand old age of 36, I was thinking: at last, I'm like Tracy. I bought a small white hatchback. And I load dance music CDs into the player before taking to the A roads. I even drove to Newtown last year, with my new baby in the back. And I took her down Frolic Street, pausing to read the plaque for John Thomas the Romany harpist, and eventually emerging onto New Road where we found ourselves standing in front of Straight Lines House. Which, despite its new branding, still gave off a certain essence of smalltown Americana, complete with a car wash round the back. And where, if I took my mind to the not-so-distant past, I could faintly smell Tracy's perfume and see the small white car parked in the afternoon sun, ready to take me anywhere.
