by Paul Charles
‘God I needed that,’ he said. He wasn’t a boy prone to exaggeration was our John. He’d hardly spoken a word during the time it had taken him to gulp down his food. I assumed he was finished because he soaked up the last bit of egg yolk and the last few baked beans with his one remaining corner of toast. He belched loudly, ordered another two mugs of tea and lit up his first post-breakfast Player of the day.
‘Me too,’ I replied and we both laughed. I stopped to consider how to best manoeuvre the conversation to where I wanted it to go. Only he beat me to the punch.
‘Heard anything more from the police on Jean?’ he asked.
‘No, have you?’
‘Nagh,’ he replied. Then he did that very disconcerting thing with his eyes, you remember; he rolled them up whenever you looked him in the eye. He only ever looked you directly in the eye accidentally, you know, as he was moving them to avoid looking you in the eye. ‘I went in to see the police,’ he continued. ‘Told them what I knew and that was it really.’
‘You haven’t heard from her since?’
‘Who?’ he asked, looking like he was going to start giggling at any moment. I had to remind myself that this was how he always looked.
‘Why, Jean of course!’
‘Oh Jean, oh no. I mean, she’s probably,’ he paused and looked at me (though being careful to avoid eye contact, of course), as if to ask whether he could tell me a secret, ‘she’s probably run off with one of your friends from the Marquee Club.’
I started to say no, but he immediately cut me off with, ‘Look, the police seem to think that she joined some troop of hippies and she’s happy on grass. What’s it Timothy Leary said? “Drop out and tune in”? Or was it “Tune in and drop out”? Jean’s very gullible, as you well know, and she’ll go with the flow. Look how she stuck to Jean Kerr’s coat-tails for so long. She can’t think for herself. That’s her main problem.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘What, that’s she’s run off with a bunch of hippies or that she’s left me?’
‘Either?’
‘Well, at least she didn’t leave me for you, like Jean Kerr said she would,’ he said, as he rolled his eyes away from me once again. The split-second I caught his eyes, he looked sad, sadder than his words betrayed.
‘Jean Kerr actually said that?’ I asked, thinking that I probably should have denied it first.
‘Yep.’ His reply bordered on smugness.
‘But you know that couldn’t possibly be true?’
‘What, because you’ve taken up with Mary?’
‘No!’ I found myself snarling, ‘because you and Jean are going to get married! Because we, your Jean and I, are just friends, we share an interest in music.’
‘Agh you see, that’s just from your point of view. But take it from my Jean’s perspective. She stole me from Mary, you’re her friend, then you betray her by starting to go out with Mary and so she thinks I’ve stolen one boyfriend from Mary, maybe I can steal another.’
‘You can’t honestly think that – you’re going to marry the girl, for heaven’s sake!’
‘David, David,’ he said, laughing, ‘Jean and I, we’re al…’ he seemed to think better about what he was going to say. He gritted his face up into an exaggerated smile and continued, ‘We’re… we’re okay. How are you and Mary getting on?’
Did he mean they were okay as in it was over and he was dealing with it? Did it mean he knew where she was? And was he asking how Mary and I were getting on because he was thinking of making another move on her?
‘We’re getting on great, you know?’ I said, simply and quickly. I wasn’t going to be caught by starting to justify mine and Mary’s relationship to her ex.
‘Aye, she’s a good girl,’ he said expansively. ‘We’ve been friends a long time. Mary and I were good friends.’
He must have spotted something awkward in my expression because he explained: ‘No, no, David, nothing like that. We really were good friends, long before anything else happened. We’d been friends for years. I just thought we were going to be together forever and ever. That’s the funny thing in all of this; we were like mates, and we discussed everything under the sun with each other. We were the first person each other turned to when the other was feeling down, and now… and now we don’t even… we don’t even talk. I find that bizarre. I mean, I know I hurt her and all of that. But we were friends before our relationship, why couldn’t we have been friends after?’
‘Probably too much baggage, too much pain,’ I replied. Then I paused before adding, ‘When Jean left, you know, when she disappeared, had you been arguing or anything like that?’
‘Not really. She was acting a wee bit strange and all of that, but that was because she was going to leave me for you, according to Jean Kerr.’
‘But no fights?’
‘Nagh,’ he said, before giggling, ‘Jean wasn’t really the fighting type. No not at all, she’d sooner sulk.’
‘Was she sulking just before she left?’ I asked, trying to open up the lid he’d offered.
‘She was always sulking! Jean Kerr had taught Jean Simpson how to deal with a man. It was a pretty rural approach. “Reward rewards,” Jean Kerr would say. Keep the man in his place by keeping control. “Once you lose control, you’ve lost the battle,” she’d say. I’ll tell you, David, she was convinced it was a war out here. “Total war,” she claimed, you know, this thing between men and women, the battle of the sexes. The funny thing about it was that she hadn’t a clue about any of it. Look at her, for heaven’s sake; her love life was a mess, is a mess! It was only when my Jean started to say that you were really okay, that Jean Kerr wanted you back. When she’d heard you’d started dating Mary, well then, that was all it took to make her want you back again. She went absolutely ballistic at that one. I thought she was going to go round there and kill the both of you!’
‘What, with her boots?’
‘Now wasn’t that a hoot?’ John said, and began to laugh, before taking another sip of tea. ‘You know, that battle was raging and all you could do was gawk at the girls’ legs. Both the Jeans laughed about that. They wondered… they wondered, were you the kind of perv who liked to watch girls do it.’
‘Ah, come on now, it was a pretty sight, wasn’t it?’ I was trying desperately hard to make light of my indiscretion.
‘Each to their own, David, that’s what I say. Each to their own.’
‘I was wondering, John, how Jean – your Jean – reacted when she knew I was going out with Mary?’
‘She was surprised you hadn’t mentioned it to her before. She was surprised that you didn’t want to see groups with her any more. Her point was that she had a boyfriend, as in moi, and it was fine for the both of you to see bands together, but then when you got a girlfriend you didn’t want to see my Jean any more as a friend. I must admit, I was surprised as well. I’ve a question for you though, David: Did Mary think it was weird that you went out to the clubs with Jean?’
‘Not really, I think I told her that we both pretty much liked the same kind of music the first time we met, you know before the battle…’
‘Then why did you have to stop taking Jean out? I think that really hurt her, you know. I think that’s the single biggest thing that threw her off kilter.’
‘Sheer demands on my time, John; I was spending all my time with Mary,’ I offered, hoping, praying even, he didn’t notice how much I was squirming in my seat.
‘Yeah, I suppose that’s the other way to do it. Perhaps Jean and I planned things out a bit too much. It was a bit like, okay you’re the one, let’s hang around and save for two years until we can afford to be together and get married. Perhaps your approach would have served Jean and me better. You know, just get it together and then figure out how to make it work.’
That’s the big thing about men and women, isn’t it? Making it work? Trying to make the perfect match, no… make that trying to make a match. Because needs must, and all that. But whe
n we come across an obvious mismatch you can’t help but wonder how they make it work. Do they see something in each other that no one else does? Have they actually discovered the real, secret magic of their partner? Or have they gone beyond physical attractiveness to a deeper, more spiritual attraction, arriving at that point because they needed to find a partner? Or did they really find their partner naturally?
It’s all just so very precarious, so fragile really. Isn’t it all a just a bit too hit and miss? Hit, and you’re with the perfect person for life; miss, and (at least) two people’s lives are a complete disaster. And when you miss, like John Harrison and Jean Simpson did, look what the fallout can produce.
Here we were – Mary, Jean, John and I – all young, all single, all in London in the Swinging Sixties, and instead of us going out searching for that famous free love, we were all actively involved in the politics of long-term relationships. I was about to say something about this, but John cleared the remainder of his tea, rolled his eyes again and asked me his final question.
‘Did Mary know all about you and Jean?’
‘She knew all about me and both Jeans,’ I replied, trying to show that I’d no secrets at all from Mary. I didn’t know what was on his mind, but there was definitely something. It would appear that both of us had been on a bit of a fishing trip that morning.
I had a feeling that our breakfast was nearly over and I’d run out of questions. Well, I hadn’t really run out of questions – I’d a million questions to ask, I just couldn’t find a way of working them into the conversation. Either that or I was lacking the bottle for the more direct approach. You know, something along the lines of, ‘So John, what exactly did you do with Jean’s body?’ I did, however, have one question I felt it important I asked before we departed.
‘When did you first notice that Jean was missing, John?’ I asked, feeling it was somewhat more palatable than, ‘When was the last time you saw Jean alive, John?’
‘Let’s see now, it would have been three weeks ago last Thursday.’
‘And did she seem strange, preoccupied or anything like that?’ I knew I was pushing my luck, but if I could just get him to open up a bit I might be able to get a string of quick questions in and maybe that way he wouldn’t be as calculating with his answers.
‘As I said David, I seem to remember she was sulking. I seem to remember that she was sulking because she couldn’t get her way over something. I mean, if I’d known things were going to turn out like they’d turned out, then maybe, just maybe, I’d have reacted differently. Perhaps I’d have taken more care in remembering the exact details of our last date. But at the time it was just another sulk. The simple answer is: I didn’t know that it was going to become such a momentously important evening for me to remember. We met. She sulked. I drew – I enjoyed drawing her when she was sulking. I know that shows how sad I am. But there was something about her when she was sulking, like she built this wall around herself and she was defying me to try to enter it. I might have one here, actually,’ he said, as he started to search in his pockets. He found his sketchpad and rummaged through the pages for a few seconds. ‘Here it is!’ he almost shouted. ‘I knew it was here somewhere.’
He rolled the dead pages over on the spiral of his book and showed me a sketch. He had managed to catch exactly how pissed off Jean Simpson was with him on their final night together. She’d her head to one side and was looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, eyes that were willing him to leave her alone. He’d drawn her wearing a wedding dress, only in his cartoon version he’d made it not so much a mini-wedding dress but more of a micro-wedding dress that exposed her stocking tops. She’d her lips pursed up under her nose and her hands clasped in front of her knees. She was wearing a pair of black hobnail boots.
So had they been arguing about the wedding?
‘This is brilliant – you’ve caught her perfectly. Are there any more here I can look at?’ I asked, as I was just about to flick through the pages, as you do.
‘No! No,’ John chastised. He reached across and positively snapped the book out of my hand. ‘I’ll find you a few.’
The next sketch he showed me was a head-only view, a few pages into the book, which I had to assume meant it had been drawn sometime after their final meeting. It was a full face and she still looked annoyed. There were two large tears rolling down her left cheek and she was wearing the wedding veil from the previous sketch.
He showed me one final sketch, which was a variation on the very first of John’s caricatures I’d seen. Jean was bending over, picking up something from the floor. Our eagle-eyed artist had caught the scene from the rear and his details were so accurate it was nearly possible to see what she’d had for dinner.
Once again, I feel myself needing to ask you, don’t you think it was funny that a person would do that? I mean, yes, there was a cartoon quality to his work and some of it was quite amusing, but doesn’t it feel like one step away from showing dirty pictures of your girlfriend to another man? I mean, never in a million years could I imagine sharing such private visions of Mary with anyone. The bottom line is, I suppose, that these photos – these dirty pictures that somehow find their way into the hands of dirty men – well, they’re all of someone’s wife or girlfriend or sister or daughter, aren’t they? So I’m just not sure it’s in good taste for a boyfriend to be sharing them, that’s all.
And that was all I got out of John Harrison on that particular Saturday morning.
Chapter Thirty-Four.
Train train, going so fast. Were they the words to a song? Well my train was an hour late en route to Derby, and certainly wasn’t going to break any speed records. Weekend trains you see, they’re so much slower, aren’t they?
I arrived at my destination at around seven o’clock that evening. I’d intended to find a cheap B&B but Jean Simpson’s mum wouldn’t hear of it; I was Jean’s friend and as I was going to the trouble of looking for her daughter (her words), she’d not hear of me spending any of my own money.
Her bloodshot eyes and untidy house betrayed the fact that maybe she’d now started giving herself a hard time over not being more on the case of her daughter’s disappearance. Saying that, she did cook me a great dinner and we spent the evening with her telling me tales about Jean’s childhood. She said that her Jean always looked up to Jean Kerr.
‘I always told her to be careful, David. I mean, I always thought that Jean Kerr – well, don’t get me wrong, she’s a nice girl and all of that, but she was always a wee bit too shaky on her own feet to be trying to prop up someone else at the same time.’
I fully understood what she meant. So I nodded my agreement.
‘I was so happy when they moved to London and our Jean started to come out of her shell a bit. She liked you a lot you know, David. She was always talking about you. In fact, she talked more about you than she did about that John Harrison. I could never work that one out – what was that all about? I told her, when she agrees to marry someone it should be the happiest day of her life. Harrison just seemed to make our Jean miserable.’
‘Yes, it always seemed a bit strange to me as well. Do you think it could have anything to do with the other Jean?’
‘You mean you think that our Jean was trying to stamp a bit more independence on their relationship?’ she asked me, as she wiped her hands in her apron and fetched me another portion of her dangerously delicious Bakewell pudding and hot custard.
‘Possibly,’ I replied. I was trying to be helpful, but my answers were also tempered by the fact that I was talking to Jean’s mum and she’d already suffered enough, what with her daughter missing and all that, so I didn’t want to tell her what I really thought about John Harrison and Jean Kerr and their relationship with her daughter.
The thing is that having children must just be so continuously hard. It just never stops, does it? I mean, take a boy and a girl and they meet, okay? Maybe they met through friends, okay? Let’s say they are shy and bashful and so they s
pend time circling each other until one invites the other out. Then they discover that they’re fond of each other, so now they’re actually dating. Next up, they get engaged and eventually they marry, and I know there’s a ton of painful stuff in the middle of all that, lots of soul-searching and the like, but for one reason or another they eventually get there. Following the wedding (not too soon after the wedding, mind) the wife becomes pregnant and then a child comes along and maybe a year later another one.
And then it’s time for the parenthood phase, and the amount of time, care, love, energy, teaching, chastising, praising, crying, laughing, worrying, beaming, gloating and pride that goes into that phase is incredible. I mean, it really is. Then the fun really begins: ‘I hate carrots!’ and perhaps a bit of ‘Cabbage makes me sick!’ or maybe, ‘I know tomatoes are meant to be good for you, but it’s just like eating blood.’ And what about dressing them? ‘I don’t like socks when they come up to my knees! Jim next door, he just wears them to his ankles!’ And ‘Why can’t I wear my skirt that short? My best pal Georgina wears her skirt much shorter!’
Then think of the grief that schooling brings? And by that point, we’ve nearly completed the cycle, because it’s time for the children to start bringing home their own first boyfriends or girlfriends. Think of all the tears and impromptu counselling sessions the parents encounter during that phase! Mind you, by the time their kids are thinking about boys or girls, they’re already far too old to ask for their parents’ counsel anyway, of course preferring instead to cry on the shoulders of their fellow sufferers.
And then the children are getting married, and the circle is complete. I know it’s only words to a song, but I bet you most people on this great big circle of life probably do cry a river as they travel its circumference.