Three things my girlfriend gave me

A short essay

This article was written as a contribution to the Soaring Twenties (STSC) Symposium. September’s Symposium theme is “flight”. The STSC is a group of creatives who write, paint, versify and experiment their way through life. Join us!

Annabelle, my first serious girlfriend, gave me three things I remember to this day. One was the boot, just a few months before my ‘A’ Levels. These are important qualifications that act as a gateway to university or a decent job. The one good thing that came out of that was my encountering a cast-iron will I never knew I had: I was determined to not allow her behaviour to affect my grades, and I didn’t. Yes, I was upset, but I had the presence of mind to think,

“There will come a time when I’m no longer shattered into a million pieces. But my examination results, and their possible impact on my university career, will remain for much longer.”

This image was generated in Seeart AI. It bears an uncanny resemblance to Annabelle.

Another thing Annabelle gave me was a book called Listen To The Warm, a collection of poems by Rod McKuen. I read it whenever I feel like wallowing in grief and loss, which isn’t often. Don’t get me wrong: the poems are beautiful, and two in particular – A Cat Called Sloopy and Song Without Words – are heart-rending. They are about losing something precious but, interestingly, because of the inattention of the protagonist. You might think that it was very prescient of Annabelle to furnish me with such literature, but I was attentive, perhaps too much for my own good.

As I say, these are beautiful, but the effect of reading them is much the same as the one I experienced in my youth. A group of us had gone to to see Santana at the Hammersmith Odeon in, er, Hammersmith, in London. We’d met these girls and so we all piled back to their place for a coffee and chat. One of the girls had the bright idea of putting on a Leonard Cohen record. The effect of this, especially coming as it did directly after an evening with Santana, was to cause the mood to plunge to the depths of existential affair. 

Annabelle also gave me an album of Eddie Cochrane’s songs. Now there was a guy who understood the important things in life to a teenager. In C’mon Everybody he invites all his friends to a party while his parents are away. It displays astonishing self-awareness too:

“we'll really have a party, but we gotta put a guard outside

If the folks come home, I'm afraid they're gonna have my hide

There'll be no more movies for a week or two

No more runnin' 'round with the usual crew

Who cares? C'mon everybody”

Then there was Weekend, about living it up on a Friday night:

"Hey, you guys, you gotta wear ties on the weekend!"

But my absolute favourite on the album is Twenty Flight Rock, which conveys teen angst in spades. The song concerns a young man (Cochrane) who loves going to see his girlfriend in her apartment, where they rock. This refers to the dancing version of rocking, not the blues version, which has an entirely different meaning:

“Rock me, baby, all night long,

Come on and rock me, baby, till my back ain’t got no bone.”

Unfortunately, her apartment is on the twentieth floor, and the elevator has broken down. Thus, by the time he reaches the top,

“I’m too tired to rock.”

She phones him to ask him to come over, as she’s feeling lonely, but he can’t. Why not? Because,

“I’m in bed with the achin’ feet.”

He gives in in the end, but issues the warning that,

“You’ll find my corpse draped over a rail.”

You could never say that Eddie Cochrane was guilty of understatement!

Here is Twenty Flight Rock. Enjoy!

You might be interested to know that this story, excluding the title and the introductory blurb and the picture caption, and this postscript, is exactly 600 words long, which is what I was aiming for. I don’t think there’s a special term for 600 word stories, but a trabble is a story of 300 words so perhaps this could be viewed as a double trabble!