SHARON-------------by Steve Clayton

Just memories of a girl I once knew. Long ago, in another time: another place.

SHARON

It's strange what evokes the sudden want to put pen to paper in the here-and-now concerning the happenings of a distant way-back-when. Maybe I dreamt of her the other night. Or maybe through some vague recollection her memory flashed through my mind and for a fleeting moment I was back there all those years ago, reliving it all and suddenly feeling this need to capture it in words.  Memories. Some bitter and some sweet. All now somewhat frayed at the edges, but still so vibrant---so real.

Here in the cold present, on reflection, it all seems like from another time: another place. Her and me. Another me! Someone I can no longer remotely recognize or relate to anymore. Occasionally though, those echoes from that time and that place come back a-haunting and although the passing of the years erodes much detail, I find her memory still burns brightly within.

Back, going back. Memories of a girl I once knew, and also of the person I once was.

In the brief space of time that mine and Sharon's lives collided, I got to know her well. I came to like her a lot at a time in my life where I'd taken the proverbial 'rebel' stance---counted on my own invincibility and liked very little in life. At certain moments the flame sparked and flickered between us and that elusive word 'love' was sounded. For a while we found ourselves on that turbulent treadmill of comfort and pain: sex and jealousy: love and hate. All the typical ingredients to that of a lovers scenario.

Sharon. She had this bubbly outgoing zest for life, that my sometimes dark cynicism found wanting. She was so easy to like: so easy to be with. It was, in a lot of respects, where opposites attract. There was never any promised forever between us, only now---while it lasted. On reflection, such irony.

In those pages from a far off younger day, I can see her now sitting next to me as I drove the life out of my beat-up silver Ford Cortina to the heavy strains of Led Zeppelin rocking along to the roar of the engine. Driving deep into the night to be alone like sole entities in our own private universe. Then driving deep into the light of her eyes----naked on the back-seat, as love and lust entwined.

There was the physical side of coarse, but there where so many othersides too. Often we'd simply talk, deep into the darkness of the small hours, with our words touching on all manner of subjects. Coldly expressing our hopes and fears and all that expectation stuff that's so relevant when you're young and looking up at life with open arms. Mostly though, our talk would concern the present and the next 'good time'. Back in those dim and distant days, the future could wait for the future was somewhere else and life was for the now and had ONE and ONLY one reason---for LIVING!

But like I said, the passage of time erodes much of the detail. What I do know is that all this happened through the summer and autumn of 1977, and that one year  later Sharon was dead. She died aged nineteen!

Now I'm not trying to create or portray some whimsical lovers tragedy here. No, nothing as such. I guess this is as much about me as her and how it seemed to challenge that fanciful perception of immortality that I held and left me with this cold daunting realism to the fact of just how fragile we really are.

"You don't die at nineteen!"  That was the irrational sentiment that kept repeating itself in my head, as I drove that same beat-up silver Ford Cortina through the dull drizzle of the afternoon. This time to a far more serene pace---fifth in line in her funeral cortege.

I can see now the parade of wreaths lining the entrance to the crematorium. I can feel its cold forbidding presence-of-being, as it reluctantly welcomes you into its sombre climate. I  can remember  feeling  strangely on the outside of things looking in, as I gathered with the rest of the mourners---all isolated and apart in a kind-of crowded emptiness. All standing silent with our thoughts and deserted expressions, we listened as some grim faced clergyman voiced his well-drilled monologue on life and the there-after. Quoting the bible and then paraphrasing it all in an attempt to perhaps spiritually enhance us. At that moment in time, in all my life, I'd never felt LESS Godly!

My sadness was somewhere else. My thoughts and memories of her where somewhere else. She didn't belong here. All this just didn't seem a fitting farewell to someone so high-spirited: this bare aura of despair and those solemn words---spoken like a thousand times before, by someone who knew her only in death. I listened no-more to his offerings of cold comfort. My thoughts of her were far away.

I began feeling these strange pangs of guilt to things I wished I'd done and said. Also to things I wished that I hadn't. Small things. Things of little or no consequence, that mattered not in life, but laid bare in the finality of death suddenly seemed magnified tenfold.

The finality of death. Coming to terms with the finality of death. Like a starting point to where all this began, I kept hearing over and over the crux to that phone-call from her sister. "Sharon died this afternoon", she stated after some careful deliberation, in a low whispered voice that trembled and shook with emotion.

It was so hard to believe! So hard to embrace and fully take in! I was a total stranger to death. I'd never before felt its shattering repercussion come stabbing at you like a dagger. It was only there at the crematorium as I levelled my gaze out passed  the weepy muffled sobs and sackcloth and ashes, towards her coffin, that it finally sank in. It sank in like a stone. Sharon was really dead!

Like I said before, this is no lovers tragedy. In fact, that initial flame of passion had waned many months prior to her death. We'd remained friends though. She was probably the only ex-girlfriend I could really ever say that of. There'd been very little bitterness or ill-feeling in parting and what bit there was, soon lapsed.

I'd known for a while that she was ill---that something wasn't right. There'd always been the hospital appointments and check-ups, but she'd simply pass them off in obscure medical jargon---making them sound all-but routine. When in ' 78 she endured a lengthy stay  in hospital, I thought it was for one reason---to get better. I thought sick nineteen-year-olds could only get better.

Six months or so later such absurdities as that now seemed to echo back and mock my ignorance, as I tried to understand the cold reality that death is so very indiscriminate. Just as are those words uttered by the clergyman. Those same words which are offered just as indiscriminately as solace, whether they're spoken of the young, the old, the good or the bad! They bore absolutely no relevance to her and failed to touch-on any understanding in me. All I wanted to know was why my hands wouldn't stop shaking throughout the service. Why I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. Why I felt scared and way above all else, why I felt so fucking angry!

I can remember that anger. It simmered and built up inside of me. It was trapped with nowhere for me to channel or vent it, for there was simply no-one to blame!

Sometimes emotions stand out foremost in your mind to the actual event that caused them. Here in the present, my memories of  Sharon are somewhat mixed up and scattered in disarray. Those of both before her death and after it are all a jumbled up kaleidoscope of faded recollections. Odd fragments stand out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that the passage of time has worn, so they no-longer fit together and present the whole picture.

The bad times. Coming to terms with a form of begrudging exceptance. The nights that her ghost would play tricks with my eyes. Stretching the very depths of my imagination---seeing her. Getting drunk and turning the music up so loud that I didn't have to think. Shedding the odd tear and strangely feeling embarrassed in the perverse notion that spiritually she could now bare testament to the fact that I weren't as strong as I thought. Shades there perhaps of that other me.

Then of coarse there were the good times. It's funny, but after her death, any time prior to it instantly become immortalized as a good time. Here in the present, it now seems like looking back through an old photograph album in your mind. Here I am, flicking over page after page of mental snapshots. Back, going back---remembering.

1977. The whole carefree feel of 1977---Jubilee year. Her face, forever no older than nineteen. That old pub in Tamworth on our first date. Her smile. Both working at Carrefour. Turning a quick drink after work at the Boat Inn into an all night session. Bogarts. Babyoil. Bowie's 'Sound & Vision'. The nights spent in my Ford Cortina. Wishaw. Her eighteenth birthday party at her house and my initial embarrassment at seeing the photo of me I gave her pinned to her living room wall. Getting jealous over a stray birthday kiss. Falling out: then making up against her locked bedroom door, while the party raged on down-stairs.

Flicking the pages forward some. That horrible clinically-clean smell of the hospital, on visiting her. Smoking a cigarette by an open window and discreetly passing her a can of beer I'd smuggled in. My flippant and offhand attitude towards her, when she finally expressed her concerns. Back then, words like 'chemotherapy' and 'leukemia' held very little understanding in me. Like I said, I thought sick nineteen-year-olds could only get better. Such is ignorance.

Just memories of a girl I once knew. Long ago, in another time: another place.

----------------------------------------Sharon Jones   1959-1978------------------------------------------------------------------