Velvet Goldmine

Velvet Goldmine

There was a click as you put the phone down, and then you’d gone. A click that I’ll never forget, followed by indelible silence. A pain-inflicting click; the agony of nothingness bringing moments of despair. You were that friend I could never forget. That’s what I told myself but, like a fool, I didn’t tell you. In an all-or-nothing world, circumstances dictated that we could no longer be friends. Voices in my head became bloodcurdling screams as I pleaded that they try to convince me our emotional wounds would soon heal. Over weeks and months there was little risk of forgetting. But the voices had failed to mention the years, the decades, and worse. As if they knew.

I forgot the sound of your voice. There were no photographs. So I almost forgot the sparkle of the smile that had so often dredged me up from where my mind floundered in the estuary sludge that was visible from every window. Those huge expanses of mud flats separating us from the dirty old river, reminding us that grim office space was less grim than the grim wide-open space outside. At least the office had a tea lady. We would sing a few lines of Siouxsie’s Happy House to annoy the others who thought they were happy but didn’t realise they weren’t. They’ve built flats there now, on the mud flats.

One day sometime between then and today, bright sparks invented the internet. I bought one of their computing machines; they’re everywhere now, you’d hate it. I typed your name on the screen. Nothing happened. I decided to wait. A month later nothing happened again, and again, and again to the power of zillions. I came close to sending back my Google Club membership badge but didn’t because I had to learn about a thing called borderline personality disorder; asking for a friend of a relative.

One sunny Saturday morning, whilst reading on the web about this clinically imprecise mental ailment, I stumbled upon an online Guardian newspaper article from which your picture appeared. An apparition, a miracle or just a dream? For the first time since the days when we were both in our twenties, I saw your face. Your bleach blonde hair, your kohl black eyes and the smile that filled your face immediately whisked me back to the swamplands by the A13. For several minutes I smiled with you and at you. I shouted your name. I felt your warmth radiate from the screen. Then the written words of a journalist changed everything.

This reporter, Jamie Doward, wrote that you were no longer with us. An NHS Foundation Trust had taken you in and taken you away. Dangerous drugs had been wrongly prescribed by mental health practitioners who hadn’t read what it said on the tin, falsely blaming everything on a hereditary heart condition to cover their meandering tracks. Within minutes I had been to both extremes on the emotional spectrum as a deep sadness, temporarily lifted, suddenly plummeted to new depths. 

During private moments of melancholy, I’d rehearsed the words I might say to you when we did eventually meet again. What would you tell me about the path that life had taken you along? Could we be friends again or had the difficult circumstances that had separated us ruined all that? No matter what, I couldn’t wait to see you. I was convinced that I would one day. But I never did, and those countless imaginary conversations would never be more than futile whispers in a secret corner of my brain.

Websites woven together by a thread of comments, articles and poems, all loaded with grief, led me to your book, Waiting for Another Velvet Morning. During those Essex days so long ago I didn’t know you were a writer. At that point I didn’t even know that I might eventually try my own hand at writing. This was one of the many, many things that we never spoke about but should have done. Our mutual interests seemed to be confined to underground music, trips to the Brewery Tap, the miners, the dockers, the Cold War that seemed to be nearing a deadly climax, and a deep loathing of the process of preparation of export shipping documents that kept us out of trouble five days a week and paid our rents.

Your book is a goldmine of incredible detail and emotional extremes from deep within you. Your childhood, your family, your loves, the cruellest of losses, and the darkest of times encountered in a troubled mind and at times in psychiatric care are all covered with unique skill. Its mostly written after the few years in which I knew you, but includes chapters of your turbulent life from long before we met. I learnt that your influences included Sylvia Plath and Siegfried Sassoon; great writers who I knew very little about and whose names were never likely to crop up in conversations on lunch-hour minibus rides to Barking shopping precinct. The thing that brought us together as friends in the first place I found in there too; your humour that never faltered, no matter how great the challenges. Beautifully and cleverly written, it’s a book as precious to me now as your companionship was back then.

Almost forty years after we last met, some things have happened that have changed my life for the better. Buying a copy of your book and exploring the internet to hopefully read more about you, I discovered and joined the ABC Tales creative writing group on whose site some of your work can be seen. People still read it, you know! I’ve read it all many times along with the comments you and other members made. Sometimes I touch the words on my computer screen, thinking our girl wrote this. In all of your writing I can see that you were still the Julia that I knew so long ago; loved by so many.

I’ve written a couple of poems about you myself. Perhaps you can see them on the ABC site. I sense that you still go there to keep an eye on us. I would have loved to have known what you think of them, though the words would be meaningless if you were still with us. Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you. I’d also love to know what you think about the fact that I’ve formed an amazing friendship with a cranky pink-haired, punk-art lady who just happens to be your mother and the link with you that I treasure.

I wish I’d found you on that website while you were writing. I wish I’d found you in real life while you were still alive. I wish there could have been a second volume to your book, with a happy ending. I wish that phone hadn’t clicked when it did in 1986. Oh my dear Julia! I wish, I wish, how I wish…

Mind (the mental health charity) and The Compassionate Friends (a charity supporting bereaved parents and their families) each receive one third of the profit from sales of Julia’s book. If you’re interested in having your own copy, here’s a link…

Julia’s Book

Image:

My own photograph of my own copy of the book Waiting For Another Velvet Morning, by Julia Macpherson.