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I knew her before she was a virgin, like Doris Day, like Julie Andrews.
I knew her when she was a woman.
Her name then was Ellen Carter, seems a nice enough name doesn't it? Now she's –
Well, she's famous, and that's not her name. I'm still me, though. Jeff Carter, used to be married to –
they say she's big in Hollywood Musicals.
A happy story? No, can't say it is. We met at Glastonbury, 1997.
Raining, of course. I was the wrong side of a bit too much Skunk, she had done something an hour or so before. When I fell over her, and ended up in the mud at her side, she decided to have me.
She'd been sharing a jug of scrumpy with some kids, fifteen-sixteen. They thought Glastonbury, couple of gallons of rough cider, a pretty lady, was a big deal. Me, the guy who was just about to run away with their pretty lady, I was a very old twenty-three. Ellen was a sad twenty-one.
Do I remember much else? No, except there was a band performing called Stars of Stage and Screen. They were playing some heavy metal when Ellen started laughing, and we decided to crawl out of the rain and watch the bands from out the mouth of my tent. No, I don't remember what happened to the kids.
And I fell in love, did I not? Hopelessly, with a love-junky who wanted to be a star, who liked doing it to Kashmir, to Trampled Underfoot.
If it matters, I looked like Robert Plant back then.
There's a fuzzy bit, that week, the next, and a couple where we both came down, started gearing up for nine-to-five land. But some time later I was the bloke down in IT again, in a medium-sized engineering firm in Bristol. Ellen was living in Bath, temping, life on hold she said. She was trying out for singing, dancing, acting roles, prepared to do anything to be a star.
It turned out she really meant it.
Back then, OK I had some hazy times, but I could switch in and out of it. Rather than be a weekend pot-head, I'd leave it for six weeks, two months, take a break and then spend four, maybe five days holed up somewhere with our music and stuff.
Ellen moved in, got a job where I worked and of course it was us, slow leisurely sex, time drifting, a CD on repeat and dreams.
Ellen got pregnant about a week before the audition. We didn't know that then, but she missed her period the week after they said they wanted to see her again. She missed another that was due the day they rang to say, “We're flying four of you to L.A. Pack yer bags.”
She was six, seven, eight weeks gone, getting worried, when she rang to say she was going to be a film star.
"I love you, E," I said.
"You too," she said. "I'll be home Saturday."
I picked her up from Heathrow. They paid for a taxi, but I didn't want to wait. She looked washed out from the flight.
"Home?" I said.
"No," she said.
"Oh," I said, and she said she had to find a chemists.
Seven quid those test packs cost. Is it pink, is it blue, this is a life, what shall you do? She was positive. We drove home in silence.
We got home about mid-day. Ellen went to shower. She tossed me some stuff about the part she'd got. She was to be a nun. A thin nun.
She came through after her shower. I looked up at her, pink, warm, wrapped up in my towelling robe.
I grew up, about ten years the moment she looked in my face.
I knew it was a waste of time, but I had to tell her. I told her. I had always wondered, never really believed it could happen, that I could be a –
She put her finger to my lips. She shook her head.
"No," she said. "Sorry."
They say, eight weeks, nine weeks it's nothing, don't they, certainly
not a person. I never had a view about that stuff then. I don't think I
had a view even as she walked downstairs to the taxi.
I have a view now. I'm bitter. I see her, up there on a screen, an
angel, a mother, a nun, a queen once, a kindly teacher. She's beautiful and she has that rare face, that red-cheeked, prim, English Rose look. Once, she might have sung, "I must have done something good".
Me, I just knock another one back, and if anyone says anything, I say, "Her? I used to know her before she was a virgin."
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