Little Star

First off my apologies for the lateness of this post. It was supposed to follow-on quite closely from the last but I’m sorry to report that the ‘Hand of Shite’ has intruded into my world again and I have been quite unwell for a while. I’m on treatment and better now; more of this another time.

(I touched on this night in the post FRIENDS, now is the time for more detail.)

January 2021.

It’s Saturday night and I’m sat here in the creeping darkness of this brightly lit room. A room that over several decades has been witness to the best and worst there possibly can be of me. Or has it?

Right now even the familiarity of my surroundings is lost on me, but then I’m all but lost now anyway. I feel hollow, empty, if indeed I’m feeling anything at all and I know this is only the start of it. It won’t be any easier tomorrow, “A good night’s sleep and you’ll feel better in the morning” has no meaning here.

The darkness lurking in this room, congregating patiently in the furthest corners, does not belong to the room; it belongs to me. It has life because of me and because of what’s happened.

Elaine my wife and love of the last thirty years is dead. She died at the start of the month, and save for two cats I’m home alone. Right now I can’t see anything, any hope any future, beyond the confines of these shrinking walls.

For many years now we always made an extra effort of a Saturday night. Prepare and cook a bit more of an elaborate meal than usual, open a bottle maybe and just enjoy being together, something we’d gotten really good at.

Though she’s gone I’m trying to carry on this tradition, a way of keeping her close perhaps, but it’s a forlorn hope. No matter how hard I try she’s just not here. There’s no comfort this night in the familiar, and I’m afraid.

(As I write this nearly three years later sitting in the same room, the edge of that fear is still too intimate to make easy memories.)

Why afraid? I guess its fear of the unknown, of what’s waiting ahead for me and knowing I’ve to face it alone. I’m afraid of tonight too, I might just give-up. All sorts of mad ideas are now offering themselves as rational solutions to my situation.

Yes there are friends I could call. Mike, my best pal, will always have my back and be there for me. There’s Julie or Bob and others too; our friend Paula lives only a short distance away, I know I’m always welcome and there is reassurance in this. But to contact anybody now, is to me, admitting that I cannot cope, that I need a shoulder or two to cry on. I do feel that I need some form of help but I just can’t face the admission and a darker part of me is disturbingly suggesting “Give-up to the grief.”

Anyway all these friends knew Elaine. I don’t mind talking about her, in fact I want to, but it would be preaching to the converted, they know it and have heard it all before. Sitting here even hope is rapidly deserting me. At least Pandora had that left in the box, right now I haven’t even got a sodding box. 

And then the phone rings.

8.45pm-“Who the fucks that?” Do I really want to talk? Yes I do, even if it’s a wrong number just to hear another voice, even that of a stranger right now at least that would mean I’m not entirely alone in the world.

But the voice that answers my “Hello” is far from strange to me.

“Hello? Hi Mark It’s me Marilyn. Tony told me what’s happened-about Elaine I mean I’m so sorry Mark, I really am. I was just sitting here wondering how you are.”

Her words tumble out like she’s been practising them and needs to say them all at once in case she’s cut off.

Marilyn is one of my longest running friends ever. It has been a while now since we met or spoke but I’d know that voice anywhere. Tumbling down the phone line with it comes over four decades of my past. But to try and explain this we’ll have to travel back now to 1981.

                                                                           ***

Early summer, a Thursday evening, and my friend Ian and I head into the most popular pub/restaurant in town-The Dormers. But it’s quiet tonight and as we push through the front door a near empty bar stretches in front of us. Stood behind it is a young woman who looks to be in her mid-twenties or so and who smiles warmly at us as we approach her. She’s very petite with brown eyes and short cut hair which is the deepest shade of auburn/ chestnut red imaginable, an unmissable feature as it’s burnished in the glow of the powerful overhead lights.

Ian knows her, I don’t but I have seen her around town on many occasions and remember her from school where, a few years older than me she wore that deep red hair down to her waist. It suits her stature so much better now cut short. I soon learn her name, Marilyn.

She serves us our drinks and we stay at the bar and, as it is a quiet night she stays around and chats with us in between serving an occasional customer.

I always have remembered that Thursday night because although we’d never met properly before Marilyn and I soon found common ground between us.

Her favourite aunt and uncle lived in the road next to the house where I spent my first ten years. When visiting she’d prop her bike against our garden wall and wonder who the children were playing behind it. In the mid-70’s her younger sister Pauline and my sister Sue worked alongside each other in the same Wimborne office, and Marilyn remembered my dad from childhood visits to the livestock market then situated in the town.

That night passed quickly with little clue as to its significance for a future as yet so far away.

Weeks passed, my work frequently took me away but not so weekends. A group of us started to meet early on a Saturday evening with a view to go on later to a pub or club out of town. The Stable bar at the back of the Dormers was the chosen place to meet.

 It was Marilyn who opened that bar at 7pm and usually worked it alone.

I never have liked being late so would arrive early and often Marilyn and myself would be the only ones there until others drifted in around 7.30ish.

I can’t explain it any better but it was during this time that a real bond of friendship began forming between us. We would talk about everything and nothing, make each other laugh and share a silly secret or two. I soon came to admire her quick wit, obvious intelligence, and the (misplaced) self- depreciating sense of humour.

I learned too that she was married with a young son.

Having seemingly been born with a taste for alcohol I started going into town more often, alone and with friends, and inevitably would meet or run into Marilyn either working or out with her friends. We soon became an integrated part of each other’s social lives, were pleased to encounter one another and always got on well in each other’s company.

I eventually met her son Simon and husband Jeff too. Jerry, a workmate of mine, often came to Wimborne to play darts at the Smiths Arms pub where I would meet him for a drink or two. It was a place Jeff visited also and we too became friends.

I think of those years with great affection. There were lots of happy times. I met new people, many through Marilyn, some of the friendships formed still standing firm today.

But change is inevitable and time moves on. The Dormers closed for long-term refurbishment. Marilyn went to work in the Albion pub around the corner. I called in occasionally but never really liked the place (or many of those who frequented it!) Later still she went to work at a venue outside of town and as my work now meant my often being away in London we saw less and less of each other.

But if we ever did meet up it was as though no time had passed. The friendship endured.

                                                                        ***

Summer 1990, I’ve changed jobs and fate brings me one ordinary Tuesday morning to my first meeting with Elaine.

Strange, but as it had been years earlier with Marilyn, we just started talking and laughing and found common ground. If you’ve been following the blog and/or read the book you know the rest.

I didn’t encounter Marilyn very often now as I went out and about less and less, even more so after Ian died in November ’91; and as Elaine was still with her first husband during our initial couple of years or so together we didn’t go anywhere where we were likely to be seen, so Wimborne and the immediate areas were all strictly no-go.

Here I’m going to pause as I’ve a point to make.

I’m no saint but neither am I a total sinner, Elaine was the same. But life is life and we all have choices though you can’t always keep control of those choices or the consequences thereof.

 Yes, I knew she was married, so too did she, but we couldn’t help our feelings for each other and the affair started between us and continued.

I don’t make a habit of moralising at others and hope that no one wastes effort doing it to me. We’re all human and there are skeletons in every cupboard, I don’t give a fuck about the ones’ in yours so leave mine to rattle in peace.

 I am not a particularly biblical person but I do love the words…”Let he who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone” says it all; more people should heed its meaning today.

Of course close friends knew about Elaine and myself, including Marilyn, though when the bubble eventually burst and the truth came out it was a blessed relief to us both. We could at least now be seen together and even go out with friends.

The first time Elaine and Marilyn met was when Elaine and I were out one night with friends Paula and Martin and we called into the Oddfellows pub in Wimborne. They were interested to meet one another but as we never really socialised much in town they never did get the opportunity to know each other to any great extent. They probably met on no more than a dozen occasions or so, sometimes with me present sometimes not.

And it’s this simple fact that made all the difference when Marilyn rang that Saturday night.

She did not know Elaine.

It was so good to be able to talk freely and openly about my wife to someone who listened with genuine interest, who could question as a stranger would, but who retained the standing of a trusted friend. In turn, Marilyn began to tell me of how her life had been since losing Jeff some seven years previously to cancer.

Our conversation that night afforded me an opportunity not available through just about anyone else I knew. The call couldn’t have been better timed. I gather she had put off making it on a number of occasions unsure as to what my mood may be or as to what reception she would get, until her son had said, “Oh for goodness sake mum just call him.”

I’m bloody glad she did.

We spoke for well over an hour and at the end she promised to call again.

When we hung-up I sat and looked around the room. The shadows were still there, in the corners, against the blinds but something had lifted, they were no longer quite so menacing. They were to gather again and return with a vengeance in the near future, but this was tonight and I was only capable of living then a short spell at a time.

I realised then too how quiet it had become and in that quiet Elaine’s words to me, spoken in this very room shortly before she went into the Hospice, came drifting clearly back.

“Mark, I want you to do something for me.”

“Anything, what?”

“I want you to contact Marilyn and tell her what’s happening here.”

“Why? I can’t really see much point to that.”

“I can, when this happens (meaning her death) you’re going to need all the help you can get. Please do it for me.”

I said I would but to my shame I never got around to it. Everything began to move so fast as the fears and the shadows that had haunted Elaine and I for almost three decades suddenly became real and solid.

Elaine never explained any more or mentioned Marilyn again. Why she saw it as so important to make that contact I do not know- at least I didn’t then.

I couldn’t see any future that Saturday night and the present was a bloody bleak place to be. But somehow with that phone call the past stepped forward to fill the gap and stand ally with me, shoulder to shoulder, at least for that night.

At the time I thought it was just for that night or maybe another odd occasion or two to come; but I was wrong.

On the television once, a guy stated that in the unobstructed darkness of space, the human eye should be capable of detecting the light of a single candle flame at a distance of one million miles. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know now, that night, a long distance away in my world a tiny light- a little star if you like- flared up, flickered a time or two, caught its breath and began to burn steadily.

Gradually, slowly but surely that little star has pulled closer and closer to me, and me to it.

That night I was not capable of realising the significance to it.

 But then, like you, I’m only human, aren’t I.

I didn’t grasp the significance, at the time, of a simple Thursday night drink, early summer, 1981.

                                                                              ***

Given to the memory of Colleen, who was there for Elaine shoulder to shoulder throughout some of the darkest most difficult times xx.