I guess what was remarkable and startling was seeing the name of your friend on the roster for that days cremation services.
‘Julie Stephenson – 3pm’
Rather blunt and to the point for an event so poignant but there you have it: your old friend was having her dead remains burned to ashes at three o’clock and there was very little one could do about it.
Preston Crematorium she would not have liked. “Just as well she’s dead” I mused while strolling around the little manicured gardens. Everything here was manicured, even the trees, lining as they did the long, solemn driveway into the business part of the place. Julie who craved a certain type of conformity but led a ramshackle life would have hated the seriousness of this place and occasion. She’d have wanted to ‘fun it up’ with a few mad people and maybe a juggling clown or two (and, believe me, she would have known where to find juggling clowns). She’d certainly have hated the quietude.
Her poor old body (fifty-four but took a wee bit of a pummelling on the way) was being black-motored up from London where a celebration service had taken place the previous Saturday in St John’s Church in the centre of her beloved Leytonstone. Three hundred had attended and it had even made the front page of the local rag – the Waltham Forest Guardian - “Local Good Samaritan – A Life Celebrated”. She’d have loved that: the final validation of her life in Leytonstone and outer confines. Pity indeed, that it had had to be won in death.
I miss her now more than I missed her that day of her cremation.
She’d have castigated me for not attending the London gig and the pub party afterwards. I facilitate the excuse that I live in Edinburgh and can only really be expected to bumble down to Preston for the burning, but this isn’t true. She didn’t even come from Preston; she came from the far more atmospheric Lancaster which has the spectacularly gloomy River Lune running through it.
Julie was either bi-polar or just plain crazy: I suspect some mixture of the two. When she was down she was down and when she was up…? Well, let’s just say she could have run the country better and much more colourfully than any incumbent since Lloyd George deliberately slowed down the proceedings at Versailles the more to expedite his amorous shenanigans.
My very first week as a mature student at Liverpool Polytechnic she turns up in the student bar having driven up from London in a hired car. In her giant red cardigan she looks like some Sephardic colossus striding across to the small bar. Folk stopped what they were doing as this fiery vision swept by them. Strangely, I was not surprised to see her.
Neither was I surprised when she whisked me and my new-found drinking buddy off on a bender to Lancaster where she was house-sitting for a holidaying sister-in-law and her family. She took us to the Midland Hotel in nearby Morecambe. The bay shimmered in the mid-September sun, a late lash of heat. A Lancashire, Indian summer. My friend and I laughed at the frivolity of it all. One minute drunk and happy in Liverpool, the next drunker and even happier sitting outside an Art Deco hotel looking out to sea. Mad Julie happy to see us happy (in all honesty, I think she was more than chuffed at the exotica that was my friend; a tall, gangly, dread-locked Londoner with a sly, toothsome grin), had become firm friends with roughly half of the hotel staff in not-but half an hour. Drinks and snacks were served to us like we were minor Royals just popped in unexpectedly, be-cardiganed Julie perhaps some head lady-in-waiting.
The air smelled chlorine fresh. Dogs were unleashed by their owners on the vast beach to run and scramble after balls and sticks. Humans could learn a lot from dogs; they knew how to be happy with simple things, and how to pine for love.
What did Julie chatter about? Nothing and everything. Now that I think, she would have been enamoured with Gary as he was later to be somewhat enamoured by one of her friends (he was also lured by a temptress from a religious sect at an after-hours disco they’d organised only to escape through a window and return to base at about three in the morning). Instead, she was stuck with my own drunken self, playing her brothers’ records on her brother’s super-loud sound system until all hours of the dark morning. We also drank all his booze.
Julie spoke in her native tongue when up north which was slightly distinct from the ‘ready to fit in’ accent she had become used to in London where she had trained as a social worker. Yet, she was not comfortable in her home town; it seemed to constrain her and she longed for the comparative social anarchy of the capital. The north judged her, the south not so much so.
Julie was at the same time grounded and soaring like a kite let loose on the wind. For others; grounded: for herself; hardly at all. She seemed not to care much for herself and deemed anyone that cared for her somehow more flawed than even she.
“Like the old Groucho Marx joke” she’d often say “I wouldn’t like to be a member and all that…” She never did seem to learn the rest of the quote but the gist was clear. One man who seemed to care for her rather deeply, she tended to treat abominably and then hate herself even more for doing so, though, perversely, he was the one she had the utmost respect for the rest of her life. She seemed to be attracted by men who treated her quite shabbily, like that was what she really deserved. Men who, somehow, wouldn’t stay.
She’d lived in Turkey for some time with a Muslim soldier. She liked Muslim men and would die in the arms of one at the end.
“She’s looking for an angel
But, she’s not looking at the sky
She’s looking for an angel in your eyes”
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