Prufrock measured out his dreary life with coffee spoons. I measure out my life with records. The past may pulse like a broken metronome, but there’s always something there to remind me. Songs. A jukebox for those of a nervous disposition, cutting into the past like a chainsaw ripping through a cuddly toy. If Proust had owned a walkman, he wouldn’t have filled his face with Medeline cake.

On Hampstead Heath, my lover and I did picnic. I felt like Heathcliff, as breeze burred through emphysemic copses and ruffled her Laura Ashley napkins (it’s doubtful though, whether Heathcliff roamed the Moors amorously with scotch-egg crumbs around his gob).

She spoke fluent French and visited countries I only saw on BBC2. I engineered visits to her office (“Oh hello, thought you may like to try my new stapler. It can staple up to fifty sheets with one staple.”) and left (unread) books on the edge of my desk to impress. She told me K Marx Esq. was “a cute thinker.”

And this is how, one sunny June morning, we were in Highgate Cemetery together. Dialectical materialism had never been so sexy and as she etched gravestones, it felt like necrophilia. Regents Park was the temptress which flamed the affair. The Summer became a surreptitious romp through park and woodland as fingers uncorked the driest fruit; hotels and cotton sheets were passé for affairs of the heart apparently. Woodstock was her favourite festival. Under dusty oaks I looked to Hollywood for my lines and moves: Bogart to her Beacall, Plath to my Hughes, Homer and Marge.

Then, as Autumn’s veins began to peel the heat from the sky, it was over. Hubby returned from his overseas commission and at the precise juncture where their lives met again, my life forked down a cul-de-sac. In feng shui terms, I was the raised toilet seat. De rigueur or non de rigueur? She decided. The heartless bitch still invited me to a Halloween soiree in her decked garden. I got as far as The Spaniards Inn, where under the cold stare of Dick Turpin, I began to drink the affair away. I had the idea to ride into the soiree, guns blazing and asking for my heart back, but it was raining.

In 1999 she was badly hurt in a car crash. Typical. Lady Di had added glitz and glamour to the automobile accident and always one to follow a trend, Miss Woodstock wrapped herself around a steering wheel. The times were certainly changing. If bestiality ever came into vogue, she would be seen at all the right parties with all the right animals.

Rob Marshall hails from Rhyl. He couldn’t say his r’s properly, so he was Wob from Whyl. As a wapscallion student Wob sent scripts to soap operas (Albert Tatlock on ecstasy was a constant theme) and stories to Womans Own & Jackie et al. under the nom de plume Samantha Smith. More rejections than John Merrick at a speed dating night. So he swapped writing for apathy and killed-off Samantha Smith in an organic farm accident. Older (little bit wiser) he’s looking to complete his novel, ‘The Continuous Cremation of a Very, Very, Very Fat Man.’ To read his story, ‘Robbie Bach and I’ on the showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.