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Chapter 479
The Brown Eyed Girl

I put a seashell against my ear, and it all comes back to me. Well, yes, that’s one way. But sometimes the strangest thing can set off memories. And not always when and where and how you want it to happen. Like yesterday. I was passing the local branch of Woolworths. In our high street. Just about surviving. I saw they were practically giving away CDs of Van Morrison’s early solo works. The Bert Berns stuff. Going for a song. The sort of thing that provokes such mixed reactions. On one hand it seems so wrong that something so special is being treated so lightly. Yet, on the other, perhaps just perhaps someone will buy the CD with their last few pennies, taking a chance, curious, and will have their life turned around by Van singing about TB Sheets and Joe Harper and a Spanish Rose. It could easily happen. The first song on the CD I noticed was Van singing about his Brown Eyed Girl. A song that’s so often played on the radio. Still. A song that still sounds fantastic. But a song that breaks my heart. Still.

You see one day. Aagh. It still hurts to think about it. Let’s approach this in another way. Soul Sister Number One. You’ll have heard me mention her. Our Fair One’s sibling. His smarter, brighter, better half. The love of our lives. We worshipped her from afar. Her beauty. Her insouciance. Her daring. Her caring. Her, oh, you name it. She worked in the city. Something strictly confidential. For one of the Far East banking corporations. People who were perfectly polite and scarily sinister and totally determined and disciplined. And she fitted right in, though none of them had the idea she was the biggest anarchist and underminer under the sun. She had fun, in her way. She was our Motorcycle Boy. Totally out of our league. The one we looked up to. And then one day. A road accident. Soul Sister Number One was crossing a road one evening. A car came out of nowhere. Ran straight into her. Didn’t even stop. Horrible.

If anyone has to be in an accident then it should be anyone but Soul Sister Number One. It really was horrible. Joyriders, said the police. Taking and driving away. There’d been a spate of it. Kids. Boyracers. Ramraiders. Teenage Dean Moriarty types who had got this one horribly wrong. Drunk. Or worse. Panicked. Left Soul Sister Number One for dead. Except she was tougher than tough. She was a mess, sure, but she was alive. In a critical condition. Destined to survive, but touch and go there for a while. Intensive care. Coma. The works. I hurt even now thinking about it. What might have happened. We were all of us in a mess. Saying prayers and everything. I like to think we may have helped in a way.

Once the worst was over the Far East banking guys stepped in and were rather wonderful. Demonstrated that they really valued her in their way. Paid for her to be moved to a private nursing home. Nice place. Bit sinister I suppose. Bit unethical. But hey nothing was too good for our Soul Sister Number One. She deserved special treatment if anyone did. And thankfully it wasn’t too far away, so we could go regularly and do our bit to help the healing process, pass the time, helping her through the dark days, at least in our own minds, which helped us. And, boy, did we need some help. We tried to be brave, but we were sick, scared, angry. Very, very angry. Maybe more angry that we didn’t know what to do.

What could we do? Our Fair One, naturally, was affected most. He wanted to kill someone. He yearned for vengeance. He was twisted with hate. If only he could catch the scum who were in that car. Over and over and over again he said that he wanted to kill someone. We wanted to kill someone too, but what could we do? It was dark. It was almost definitely a stolen car. One later found abandoned, and set alight, burning on wasteland. We had few leads. We didn’t know where to go. We couldn’t find a release for our hate and hurt. We felt useless. Worse than useless.

Useless. That was what we were called at the time. Our Redhead’s little sister, the Red Pepper, was firmly of the view we were worse than useless. Look at you, she said. Standing around like a line of washing in a wet week of Sundays, she added. Beating your chests like wounded gorillas, the macho response, she spat. What are you going to do? Go out and lynch somebody? Break a few legs? Burn a few cars? Petrol bomb garages? Oh great, that’s really going to help your princess isn’t it? Bring some more grief to more families why don’t you? Why don’t you get your sad behinds down to the nursing home and do something practical. Something that might actually help. Might be better than all this gnashing and wailing. The Red Pepper had a point. And she was the best friend and closest confidante of Soul Sister Number One after all.

So over the next few months we started in, doing our bit to help Soul Sister Number One’s recuperation, rehabilitation, and all that. It still makes me ache. It was horrible seeing the mess she was in. But she was so determined to get back to full fitness. Just to spite the scum, she told us lately. Well the surgeons and physios had their part to play in restoring her to life, but we were there too. The Red Pepper had urged us onwards. What do you value most, she asked? What did you talk to her most about, she continued? Music and words, she said. So go there, read to her, play her some songs, she urged. You lot have always said they’re the great healers. Go ahead and prove it, she challenged. And she was right.

I know the others did their bit. I did my bit, oh yes. For my part, I thought carefully about the common ground I’d had with Soul Sister Number One. The times she’d made me feel just about ten miles high because she shared one of my passions. Loved one of the same books as me. Swore by one of the same songs as me. I kept thinking of the gift she had for making people feel special when they shared their enthusiasms. I made my list and set about getting the things together. Passages from books. Cassettes compiled of special songs. I’d sit by her bedside reading a bit of George Eliot. I was thinking of that recently when reading Felix Holt, The Radical. Although it was The Mill On The Floss and Middlemarch I read from. Then there was a bit of Salinger and stuff. And the records. Maxine Brown and Mary Wells. The old soul and the Faces. The Byrds and The Kinks. But most of all Van Morrison. Our real shared passion. Some songs in particular. Listen To The Lion and Into The Mystic. Earlier stuff. Richard Cory. Mystic Eyes. Ones we’d heard first on an old cassette of the rock roots of Them. Mighty Like A Rose and Friday’s Angel, I think. But especially the best known which may have been best known because they were the best. All of Astral Weeks. Here Comes The Night. And Brown Eyed Girl. Her favourite song of all time. I played that to her over and over again. Watching those brown eyes of hers. Praying privately. I remember how they’d watch me. How they gradually regained their sparkle. How one day sometime later when she heard Brown Eyed Girl on the radio she said how much it helped hearing that song when she was lying in that hospital bed. Ah.

There was a danger of Soul Sister Number One’s case becoming a cause celebre. A stick to beat the youth with. Newspaper columns on feral youths roaming estates, venturing out only to steal your cars and break into your shops. That’s what comes of society’s fabric unravelling. The collapse of the family unit. Immigration. The disintegration of parental guidance. The absence of fathers. All of which made us mad. Some of us were from homes as broken as could be. Some of us were from families as poor as church mice. Some of us were from families where the accents spoken were far from native. But were we out there looting and a shooting? Were we heck!

And then one day the police advised there had been a car smashed. Overturned at speed. Burst into flames. The occupants killed outright. The car had been identified as stolen. The modus operandi the same as the car that hit Soul Sister Number One. The occupants were kids. Schoolboys still. From good schools. Private schools. Kids. Good prospects. Good homes. Well-off parents. Good jobs. Totally devastated. Their poor mites fallen in with a bad crowd. The parents. Pictured in the local paper at the scene of the crash laying bouquets of flowers. Just goes to show.

© 2008 John Carney
Illustration © 2008 Alistair Fitchett