In the final part of the Wishbone odyssey (deconstructed into parts a, b & c), we discover a.) what happened when Jane and I met at a reunion 25 years later, b.) what was so important about my primary carers, but more importantly, c.) what happened to Wishbone.
Click here to read Part 3.
Previous Parts can all be found on the main blog page.
(Track 4a – “Errors Of My Way” – Reunion)
There were a few occasions after, outside of school, when Jane and I were in the same room once again. The fateful phone call was never mentioned though. The first reunion was at Susan Szydlowski’s 16th Birthday Party. Sid (or Syd), as she was affectionately known, lived on a Garden Nursery in Nazeing, a village near Harlow where people with money lived. We all traipsed over from Harlow one evening but weren’t allowed in the house with shoes on.
Man Child
Jane was there – with her boyfriend. But he wasn’t a boy from our year. He wasn’t even a boy from our school. In fact, he wasn’t even a boy. He was a man! He looked about 30! This is what I was up against. It was just so unfair. He had his Porsche parked outside (at least I think it was his) and he had stubble and a black roll-neck jumper. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of the Milk Tray advert but even so, he wasn’t allowed to wear shoes either, so he looked as foolish as the rest of us. I didn’t speak to Jane that evening.
Greyhound
The next time we met out of school was a year or two later at a reunion at the Greyhound Pub in Harlow Park. I thought I’d dress up for this event and wore my old Netteswell 1st Team Football shirt which despite being a football shirt had no other redeeming features. It was bottle green, looked as if it had been washed more than once too often and when I matched it up with a brown V-Neck sweater, I was told I looked like a Mint Cracknel chocolate bar.
So, it was clear that even after I’d left school I still had the dubious ability to appear as if I’d dressed in the dark. What I didn’t know about the reunion was that Jane was going to be there. She arrived looking exotic and amazing as usual and I was horrified. So horrified in fact that I didn’t speak to her for the whole night.
Reunion
The last time I saw her was when another girl from our year, Linda Harris, decided to combine her 40th birthday with a school reunion party. Linda is the sister of Steve Harris, who back in Part 1 of this piece, lauded Wishbone Ash as a wonder of modern music.
I went along to the hall and met some friends there. Then, a whole load of others who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen, began to arrive and a friend of mine, Colin Baterip, said to me, “Have you seen Jane yet?” I shook my head.
“Jane who?” I asked.
“Alldridge.” He replied with a knowing smile.
“Which one?”
“Don’t start that nonsense Adams, you know which one. You had a thing for her at school, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t everyone?” I said.
“Yes, but the rest of us weren’t stupid enough to ask her out.”
“Well, nothing ventured… and no, I haven’t seen her,” I replied and started scanning faces. “Well, you need to,” he whistled. “She. Is. Hot.”
Wow!
Yes, Jane was there and she’d brought both L’s with her too. And Colin was right, she was even better looking than I had remembered. She had really blossomed, into the most incredibly beautiful woman. Even further out of my league now. But I did speak to her. I made a point of it. The intervening years had left me feeling less clumsy and less self-conscious than I’d been at school.
I shuffled over to where she was standing. I was fully aware there was no chance she was going to come and look for me. But that didn’t matter. I wasn’t on an ego trip (not much I wasn’t). “Hi Jane, how are you?” I said. She smiled. “Hello,” she said. “How are you?” She didn’t have braces anymore. That was a relief.
We did the pleasantries, she smiled once more, uncomfortably this time, and then she just hit me with it. And I discovered she still had the ability to destroy me with one, ill-considered remark. “I’m really sorry, your face is familiar, but I can’t remember your name.” And Bang! There it was. Belittled again. I resisted the temptation to drift into the mind of a fifteen year-old because now I was made of sterner stuff. This time I was able to bat it away like an annoying fly. And, as I no longer used the silent riffing technique to confuse prospective girlfriends, I had to come back with something else. Then, a totally illogical idea popped into my head and before I’d had a chance to consider the complexities of its cognitive dissonance, off I went.
Jonathan
“It’s Jon,” I said. “My name. Jonathan Clark.” “What on earth are you doing?” I asked myself.
“Oh, so you’re Jonathan,” she said. She studied me closely for a moment. “You’re not, are you.”
“Yes, I am,” I said trying to keep a straight face. I came to your house once, years ago. Remember?”
“Yes, you did! You came with that other boy didn’t you?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Lee. Lee Adams.”
“I remember now. So, what do you do now?”
“I work in IT,” I said, quite proud of the fact I was doing fairly well as a Y2K contractor.
“Why does everyone I speak to work in IT?” she sighed, with an air of frustrated dismay Somewhere in the distance I heard the air slowly being let out of a balloon. No, it wasn’t a balloon, it was my dignity. I ignored it and ploughed on.
“How about you, what have you been up to?”
“Well,” she said, “I was married, now divorced…”
Helen of Troy
I didn’t hear what she said next. Not because I was thinking I had another chance now she was ‘back on the scene’. No, what I was thinking was, “Wow, so you’re not perfect after all. Thank God for that”. And so, I was able to consign that illusion to the dustbin where it belonged. Because to my way of thinking, had she been perfect, as I had always assumed, no one would consider for a moment that divorce could ever be the best option going forward. It was akin to Helen of Troy turning up at your house one evening and you saying, “Look, if all you’re going to do is bang on about Menelaus, Paris and that other mob, I’m having an early night. I suggest you do the same, eh?” And then, shutting the door in her face you go back to reorganising your sock drawer.
Clutches
We talked for a little while longer and I wondered whether to tell her I was really Lee Adams but in the end I didn’t. The moment passed, someone interrupted us and that was it. She left some time later and we never spoke or saw each other again. I hadn’t planned to hoodwink her, it just popped into my head, but when it became clear she didn’t remember me, I felt obliged to continue with the deception, I don’t know why. I hadn’t even known she would be there, at the reunion, perhaps after 25 years I still felt the need to repay her in some way.
But it also felt as if this was the evidence I needed to confirm I’d finally escaped her clutches. The clutches I had erected without her knowledge or consent. The reunion, brief as it was, had served its purpose. I discovered I didn’t need her friendship. And I didn’t need her approval. I didn’t need her to help me be the person I wanted to be. And I didn’t need her at fifteen either, I just thought I did. Or to be more specific, my pre-frontal cortex did.
And that’s where we go next. To meet my pre-frontal cortex. And what a piece of work that is. But, on the flipside, it does have good reason to be a little messed up. Head on over to Part B to find out why.
Part B is here.
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