Let me tell you about my best friend, Melanie. Her full name was Melanie Vernon, and she died of breast cancer two years ago. I know I’m jumping way ahead now, and maybe it’s nothing to do with what you want to know, but her early death hit me hard and brought back a lot of memories from that Blackpool holiday, the only holiday we ever shared. And it tells you something of the cost to me of what happened. We hadn’t been in touch often over the years, but we had met up on a few occasions for drinks and dinner and we always had a good laugh. She was flabbergasted that I had become a “poet” and confessed that poetry was like a foreign language to her. In turn, I was surprised to find that she had married a local electrician’s apprentice while I was at university and had two children in quick succession, then two more, never pursuing a career of her own. Secretly, I had always expected Melanie to become a model or an actress. She was attractive, no doubt about it. People said we both were, and we made quite a contrast. Back then she had wavy dark hair and looked a bit Italian, with almond brown eyes and the smoothest olive complexion I had ever seen. Chemo took care of the hair, eventually, her skin turned into cracked parchment and her beautiful eyes became red-rimmed, hollowed and frightened, underlined with shadows like bruises. The last time I got seriously drunk and cried was at her funeral. Her husband read Christina Rossetti’s “Remember” and that just did me in like a gut punch. Do you know it? You probably haven’t got to the late nineteenth century yet unless you’ve cheated. It ends:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

But we do remember, and we are sad. As another poet said, “Every man’s death diminishes me.” Sorry about that flight of fancy, but it’s what I do.

After Melanie died, I wished so much that I had told her what happened to me on that holiday right then and there. Not telling her meant the end of something. The secret stood between us from then on like a wall. After that holiday, we were never as close as we used to be, and we drifted apart. I regret that. It was only later, when we were grown-ups, that we could tentatively breach the wall, but we were never as close as we had been that summer. We were never so innocent again, either.