The Three Alisons

What is taken from us

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There were three of us in Mrs McBride’s class - Alison Orr, Alison Smith and me. We weren’t friends exactly, but we were friendly enough. And at St Conval’s, where your enemies might try to tear the hair from your roots on a bad day, that was good enough for me.

Alison Orr had fabulous red ringlets and metallic blue boots that were the envy of all the girls. She somehow kept cramming her toes into those boots for years. I begged my mother to put ringlets in my hair like Alison Orr, but she said she couldn’t  as she didn’t have the skill of it — and perhaps that was even true.

Mrs Orr was a bit of a glamourpuss, and wore fake fur jackets. The Orrs moved away for posher climes before Secondary School, and I heard that Alison went into the entertainment industry; good health to her, I hope she did well.

Alison Smith had white-blonde hair gifted by a Nordic ancestor, and a merry, wholesome laugh; the sort of bubbling laughter that begs you to join.

Only once do I remember her laughing at me. The ice was frozen solid on the tiled steps outside the infant's department, and my legs flew out from underneath me and I went down hard on my wee bum. I don’t doubt I looked quite a sight as I flew into the air. She chortled helplessly, but all the while apologising and trying to guide me to my feet.

At one point, when we were all in Secondary School, it became fashionable amongst the young teenage girls of Holyrood to have their hair streaked white blonde. I relegated that notion to things I couldn’t have afforded in a month of Sundays, and probably just as well really when I consider some of the outcomes.

But Ali went and had her hair tipped with the regulation white blonde streaks, and we found it very amusing because you could barely see them, so blonde already was her straight, silky hair.

A down to earth girl, and kind, with wide blue eyes and a ringing laugh was Alison Smith.

I recall Jane being annoyed with her once. She turned up for a night on the razzle, and the girls were under strict instructions to glam themselves up so we could pass as 18. I didn’t go, having literally nothing to wear (literally nothing appropriate anyway).

Ali, as a fresh faced 16, apparently turned up in her pinstripe faded jeans and a nice T Shirt — quite the fashion statement at the time but not what Jane had in mind. But it was hard to stay angry with Ali for long, she was a sweet girl.

She was afraid of Jane’s many cats, who seemed to adore her by the same measure, and went out of their way to greet her when we were hanging in Jane’s living room, illicitly escaping school.

Once, Jane dragged her back out of the way of an oncoming lorry, as we crossed Victoria Road heading for school, chattering as teenagers do; paying more attention to one another’s terribly important personal problems than impending death by automobile.

They say she didn’t die immediately.

Georgina McGlynn was in the hospital, and Ali had gone to visit her. Coming back, it was getting late as she crossed over at a hellish part of Pollokshaws Road, near the garage, where the traffic was known for its ferocity. The boys who were racing had been drinking. I heard that she flew the height of a double-decker bus, in the mawkish way of rumours. It was 1983.

I wore a black skirt patterned with pale blue squares, and a black duffel coat of some kind, and I met Jane down at the clock, which is all that remains of the old town hall in Pleasance Street.

We walked up the hill to St Mary’s together and stood in the same courtyard where our class had lined up some 8 years before, the girls in our delicate white dresses, for our First Holy Communion.

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We tried to honour Alison as our forebears honoured our lost, by giving the priest a donation and asking him to sign the mass card. But we were too timid to take it to Mrs Smith as we all stood around waiting outside the church. So Jane and I asked my poor mother, who did not want to disturb Betty in her grief, but did so at our pleading.

I remember Alison’s boyfriend, Ronnie, standing at the top of the steps outside the church, his face red and raw with grief that I found difficult to contemplate.

St Mary’s was packed that morning. As they brought the coffin in, a sigh unlike anything I have heard before or since, moaned through the mourners. Sobbing girls displaying their socially approved sorrow and their stoic paramours were silenced in genuine shock. Pew upon pew of children, flanked by their distraught parents. Every one of them thinking, my God this could be mine.

For many months afterwards, it failed to take hold. My heart never really understood it.

Even now sometimes, all these long years later, it seems it must have happened to someone else. Every time I hit a milestone, turning 18, 21, having children, when I turned 50 — I wonder how her sister Audrey is doing, how her mum and dad coped; hoping always they found a way back from the horrifying agony that one drunken lad caused them, in a cruel and pointless instant in time.

I am 55 now and have travelled, and suffered, and borne children, and been loved.

And Alison has slept alone in the dark earth for 39 long years.

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