Short Story: The Making Of Marion

Short Story: The Making Of Marion

‘This is the Eight a.m. BBC News report for the Ninth of December Nineteen Eighty.

John Lennon has been shot and killed. Last night as he entered his New York apartment building …’

Lucy didn’t hear, didn’t try to hear any more, not now. She just reached up to switch off the radio and held on tight to the towel rail on the front of the Aga, her eyes tight closed, her back towards the kids so they wouldn’t see.

‘You all right mummy?’ Alice. First, as ever, to know when something seemed to be wrong.

‘They’re always shooting people in America.’ James said through a mouthful of cornflakes.

‘I’m OK, Alice,’ she said, although she clearly was not, ‘and James, please don’t speak with your mouth full. No they don’t … always shoot …’

‘Don’t cry, mummy, it’s my birthday,’ said James, changing tack in that small boy way, ‘Daddy’s coming home for my party, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, that’s what he told us,’ She took a deep breath. Three weeks to the day and it wasn’t getting any better and now - now this … oh, John, what have they done to you!

Lucy forced herself to turn around, and tried a smile.

‘Ten year olds are supposed to be pretty grown up, aren’t they, James? Grown ups don’t talk with their mouths full. Now hurry it up, both of you. I have to get things in for the party.’

Alice stood up, came around the table to give her mother a tip-toed hug, her fast burgeoning young breasts pressing in.

‘I’m sorry, mummy. About daddy and about that about John Lennon. You knew him once, didn’t you? You used to like him.’

Lucy Brothers, kissed her daughter’s up-tilted forehead. Warm, soap-scented, lovely. ‘Yes that’s right. I do - I did. Come on, we don’t want to be late.’

The conversation on their school run was all about James’ birthday party. All she wanted to do was to be alone and run the Beatles tape, to listen and remember. But then she did like to drive. It forced her to think of other things, normal things like road safety and the her beautiful, empty old house. Thank you, ex-husband Willie. Thank you for the big Ford and the bricks and mortar and these two people, not so little any more. Thank you for my broken life, I mean broken heart, empty heart, whatever. She heard again her husband’s words, not meant unkindly, she knew that now.

‘Yes, Lucy, she may not have your looks or your mind but she turns on all the lights for me and - I have to have light. Warmth. It’s tough enough out there, you know?’

He’d seemed on the verge of tears but she’d wanted to hurt him then, badly hurt him, so she’d turned her back.

‘Go on then,’ she’d said. ‘Why don’t you. We’ll be OK. I should have married your friend John. He understood - about me and lights and everything. I could light him up and he could light me up so why couldn’t you?’ It wasn’t the truth of course. Not in that way, the way the magazines said, the way her husband meant. For her it had always been just a duty of love.

‘Here we are then. Have a nice day,’ she said. The kids got out of the car and ran inside the school gates, they were soon absorbed into the general, navy blue mellee.

‘See you at three. Be good,’ Lucy called out.

It was only thirty miles or so to Strawberry Field children’s home, her home. Ex-home. She shuddered, thinking about it, frightened all over again. The nights were frightening, when the lights went out. And sometimes the days, too, especially when it rained and especially when Major called you into his office. You were always frightened then but you weren’t allowed to cry. If you cried, He sighed and shook His grey straggled, shiny bald head and sent for She, Mrs. Major, who would take you downstairs because that’s what He told her to do because He’d given up on you when you wouldn’t do everything He said and do your best to look happy or excited about it. Downstairs was underground without windows and without proper furniture, only a few bits and pieces of broken tables and chairs and rolls of old carpet so when She switched off the light and went out and you heard the key turn in the lock, Please, madam, you would whisper, Please. But it would never be any good. She wouldn’t say anything at all to you and you were there in the blackness, feeling for somewhere to sit down, somewhere that wouldn’t mess up your clothes too much which would make everything worse.

Along the East Lancs it began to rain, spitting at first and then more heavily and the Liverpool bound traffic quickly degenerated into stop-start mode. Thus far she’d resisted the temptation to play the 8-track but now she touched it on and listened, windscreen wipers beating rough time with that strangely beautiful east-west intro, then John with his lovely, nasally scouser’s voice,

‘Let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields … Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout. Strawberry Fields forever.’

She felt the rise of whatever it was that was trying to make the tears, trying its best to turn her breathing into sobs. John, John, John. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ he’d written. Except it wasn’t Strawberry Fields, it was Strawberry Field. Singular. And it wasn’t for ever, was it, John Lennon, aka Robin Hood. Now it’s you that’s gone. Forever.

She’d had this vague plan to park up by the big old gates, closed between massive stone pillars. She and Willie had been by there a few times over the years but only the once since they’d pulled down the old Strawberry Field and built the trio of so-called family units in its place. But she knew they’d left the gates alone, and she knew most of the trees inside the grounds were still there. She thought about how she’d sometimes sneaked out through the kitchen door against all the rules and walked through the copse of trees and bushes until she could see the road outside the iron railings from a safe concealment, could watch the passing cars and cyclists, wondering about where they were going and how it would be where the driver and passengers or the cyclists lived. Like where she had herself once lived? In a small house with a brother and sisters? With a garden and fields at the back to run in and where was daddy and why had mother left her here?

She braked to another stop, windscreen wipers slashing away, dissolving, resolving, dissolving the brake lights of the car in front. She turned off the 8-track and turned on the radio, listened to the reports from New York and some of the interviews then switched off and thought about her own first meeting with John Lennon.

‘Stand and deliver,’ shouted the fat boy with the big stick. He and another one holding a bow and with some arrows in a kind of sling around his neck had sprung out of the undergrowth in front of her. She’d quickly recovered her composure.

‘What are you doing?’ she’d retaliated. ‘You’re not allowed in here.’

‘Neither are you, Strawberries,’ his voice had come from above. ‘You naughty, girl, you. If you go down to the woods today,’ he sang, ‘you’re in for a damn big surprise.’ Then he laughed. She’d looked up and there he was, John Lennon, up in this big old chestnut tree, grinning down on her.

‘Who do you think you are?’ she’d said.

‘Robin ‘ood,’ he’d said, missing out the H, Scouser style, ‘who d’you bloody think?’ He’d dropped suddenly, swung by his fingertips, spindly legs in short trousers pedalling almost directly overhead, then he’d let go and fallen, crouch landing with natural grace in front of her. He’d been chewing gum; she could smell spearmint on his breath.

‘So come on. Tell us your name and what you got for us, OK? We rob the rich and give it all up to us poor, right boys?’

‘Lucy,’ she’d told him. ‘I’m Lucy and I haven’t got anything but if I had you wouldn’t get it, see. I suppose this fat one’s Friar Tuck.’

‘Right, Lucy,’ John had said, ‘how did you guess? And this is Will Scarlett. Willie to you. And Willie’s his real name. Willie Brothers. So come on, what you really got for us then?’

There was such a crowd of people there, some under umbrellas and one of them holding a lighted candle in a kind of lantern, some just standing around in the cold getting wet, so she drove on a bit before stopping. The tape had finished. She switched off the engine then looked up, adjusted the rear view mirror, dabbed on a little lipstick. Mrs. Lucy Brothers, forty, housewife and mother; sometime Mrs. Marion Hood, because Robin had said she had to be Maid Marion and after she’d met up in the wood with the Merry Men. Suddenly and unilaterally announced their engagement and the next day he and she had been married under the greenwood tree, Friar Tuck officiating. Robin had told them all to sing, Here Comes the Bride, with some other rude words of his own infused, and then had told the others to bugger off because he and Maid Marion needed to go to bed now they were married. She recalled the sick misery of that moment in the den underneath the rhododendron after they’d left and he’d grabbed her hand and tried to put it on his thingie, just like Him, Major, and even now she could smell the flowers and feel the danger and see that bad look of strength and all masculinity on the suddenly less kind face of John Lennon.

Now she shivered, reached over into the back of the Zodiac for her sheepskin coat, shrugged herself into it, pulled the hood over her head and got out. She walked back up the pavement, slippery wet with the rain and the last of the fallen leaves. A few more people were coming to swell the crowd, some on foot, others getting out of cars. The man with the lantern was singing Imagine, quite well, too, so was attracting attention, but most stood around in groups talking and more than a few of them were crying and you could feel all the anger, the impotence, the grief. There were all sorts, all ages here. The prosperous and the not so prosperous, some quite obviously grown up flower power children, some of those with their children. All the lonely people, just like her. She turned to look into the wet and wintry trees and undergrowth, taking hold of the railings, tasting with her tongue the iron of them mingled with fresh rain and the salt of her tears.

The voice came from behind.

‘I knew you’d be here,’ Willie said.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to see me ‘til this afternoon, remember?’

‘Come on, love, let’s take a walk, will we?’

How awful she must look, for once not caring. She turned around. He didn’t look too smart himself, seemed older, more lined, unshaven. Still a good looking man though, still very much the businessman beneath the rain-slicked hair and the belted Gannex. She shook her head.

‘Take a walk? With you? What about your lady, then, the one with all the lights?’ she said, but her voice betrayed her and she put up little resistance to the encircling arms.

‘Don’t cry, Mrs. Brothers,’ he said, ‘John wouldn’t want you to … you know, cry? He wouldn’t have himself, not John. At least I never saw him. Come on, there’s a place we can get in. Where we used to, OK?’

She felt dazed, overcome by her maelstrom of conflicting emotion as they walked along and around the corner of the woodland grounds of Strawberry Field. In silence. There didn’t seem to be anything worth the saying. Behind a bus shelter Wille stopped, looked around, saw the coast was clear then took hold of a railing. He lifted it up and out to create a gap.

‘John and me and Alex broke the welds,’ he explained. ‘But somehow I don’t reckon we can get through here, not any more. Not me anyway,’ he grinned, patting his stomach. ‘Didn’t reckon on that.’

She smiled up at him in spite of herself. ‘Put that railing back, Willie,’ she said. If you want to get inside there’s an easier way,’ she led him around the grounds and into the yard behind the new children’s home. Purposefully they skirted the buildings, to all appearances intent on some official mission. But through one of the windows she could see some children at their school work, most heads bent, one or two little faces looking out at them, and then all the old fear was in the beat of her heart. She led him on to the place behind the gardener’s shed, located the rough footpath into the wood. It seemed much as it had been those years ago; almost thirty years ago. So was the chestnut tree but the banks of rhododendrons had considerably enlarged. She thought in quiet desperation about John Lennon and about things then and now and in the years between as the soft rain fell. By now her face must look terrible but she still didn’t care.

‘He were a great tree climber, our Robin Hood,’ Willie said. ‘He’d been right to the top of this conker tree before you come along. There was a missel thrush nest up there, see.’ She looked up through a network of twisting branches, a tracery of lifeless twigs to a low and pregnant cloud base, weeping still.

‘Hey, listen,’ Willie went on. He seemed excited. ‘I remember now. He carved his initials somewhere here.’ He walked around the trunk of the chestnut, examining it closely, good shoes muddied, rainwater from long wet grass spraying his trouser legs. ‘Yeah, it’s here, Lucy, right here; come and see.’

The letters carved into living bark had all but grown over RH then a heart shape then MM. ‘Robin Hood loves Maid Marion,’ he interpreted. He looked at her. ‘And he did that, didn’t he, our John? Loved you, like?’

She looked at her husband’s, ex-husband’s pain-filled face and now came a new kind of tears.

‘Oh Christ, Lucy,’ he whispered. ‘What’s happened to us all? Come here girl. Please?’

The rhodedendrons had grown up and outwards, long ago filling in the old entry to the den, but they’d managed to force a passage anyway and in this hollow centre of the great bush, in amongst the root-like branches it was gloomy dark and the ground was relatively dry. Saying nothing, he took off and spread out his Gannex and she sat down on it. She didn’t care about being wet and cold and when she felt him shivering she took off her own coat to cover them both.

‘‘What’s that hymn?’ she said, ‘When to the days of our childhood returning’? This is crazy. What am I doing here? Forty year old mothers of two shouldn’t … ‘

‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘just shut up and don’t try so hard to rationalise everything. Please?’ he touched her face and she tensed, resisting the automatic recoil. ‘Love me do,’ said her husband, ‘like here with him?’

‘I didn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Here with John. Not like that. I couldn’t.’

‘What?’ he sat up. ‘He told us about it. He said you did it here. Consummated, he said.’

‘Well I don’t care. It wasn’t true,’ Lucy argued.

‘But you told me.’

‘I know but people make stuff up, Willie. John must have. And so did I. You were my first, well … ‘ she turned her rained on face away from him.

‘Well, yeah, I forgot. The old bastard in the Home. You told me about that, just the once. The one that went and hung hisself.’

‘Yes, him.’

‘Good thing, too. But John had something to do with that. You know he kept in touch with me now and then, years back?’

‘Yes - but something to do with Major?’

‘He told me he’d written the guy a letter. Anonymous. About you, what you’d told him. He was always great with words, even back at school.’

‘You think so?’ she rolled back towards him. ‘Oh God. I did tell John … not everything, you know … but he and you were the only ones who knew anything about it - about Him and his … about Her. I don’t want to talk about that or think about it. Not now. Not ever.’

‘But you have to, to someone if not to me. It’s the only way - ‘

‘A bit late for you and me to be telling each other our secrets, Willie, don’t you think? But I wouldn’t be surprised, that about John and a letter to the Home. Who can ever know now? And our mister Robin Hood wasn’t exactly short on imagination,’ she shook her head, cold wet hair sweeping her face.

‘No, he were not. He were one great guy. Another thing you didn’t know, girl, it was him give me a loan to start up the business.’

She sat up then and put her arms around his neck. ‘No, I had no idea. Now will you let me shine a little light for my husband. Please. And I’m not a girl. I’m a woman. Feel me.’ For the first time Lucy Brothers made love to her husband instead of him making love to her, in there amongst the gnarled and twisted branches and the scent of the wet rhododendrons and with the sounds of passing traffic as if from a distance and the man with the lantern who had had started over again with his version of John Lennon’s Imagination. Very good. All of this was very good and she wanted to cry out and to tell him how good it was, but she knew now there would be time for that.

They lay together for a long time afterwards, saying little, content to be with each other and, in thought, with John Lennon. Late in the morning they scrambled their way out of the bushes, brushed each other down as best they might, grinning their guilty, secret child-like grins.

They walked out past the Homes, studiously ignoring the puzzled looks from a couple of adults and a group of children. Back by her car he kissed her and said, ‘So, Maid Marion, will it be all right if I bring my things with me this afternoon?’

‘Why, Will,’ she said, feigning surprise, ‘are you thinking of staying with us then?’ she didn’t want to ask any more about that other she. She knew there wasn’t or wouldn’t be one. Not any more, perhaps not ever.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but can we do Strawberry Fields forever? Please?’ There was dirt on his face along with the grin and he was all over as soaking wet and muddy as she was herself. ‘But, Mrs. Lucy Brothers,’ he added, with unaccustomed gentleness, ‘I do love you, you know that. I know what they say about his son Julian’s school friend Lucy, but it were you. You were his diamond. You are my diamond.’