Sometimes I run into the sunset arms wide like a scarecrow, thinking I can jump off the side of the world into the fiery furnace and be burned up in you. I would like to wrap my body in the blazing streaks of bloodshot sky.

All other colours are absorbed. The dull tinges of the day never penetrate my blackened skull. I live in four blank walls like an anchorite. You were a brightly lit room and I shut the door. You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.

Do you see me in my blood-soaked world? Green-eyed girl, eyes wide apart like almonds, come in tongues of flame and restore my sight.

March. Elgin had promised to write to me in March.

I counted the days like someone under house arrest. It was bitter cold and the woods were filled with wild white daffodils. I tried to take comfort from the flowers, from the steady budding of the trees. This was new life, surely some of it would rub off on me?

The wine bar, otherwise known as ‘A Touch of Southern Comfort’, was staging a spring festival to attract back customers whose overdrafts still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas festival. For us who worked there, this meant dressing in lime-green body stockings with a simple crown of artificial crocuses about our heads. The drinks had a spring theme: March Hare Punch, Wild Oat Sling, Blue Tit. It didn’t matter what you ordered, the ingredients were the same apart from the liquor base. I mixed cheap cooking brandy, Japanese whisky, something that called itself gin and the occasional filthy sherry with pulp orange juice, thin cream, cubes of white sugar and various kitchen colourings. Soda water to top up and at £5.00 a couple (we only served couples at Southern Comfort) cheap at the price during Happy Hour.

The management ordered a March pianist and told him to make his way at his own speed through the Simon and Garfunkel songbook. For some reason he became autistically stuck at ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Whenever I arrived for work at 5 o’clock the silver girl was sailing by on words supplied by a tearful crowd of already tipsy punters. Against the lush chords and the aching tremeloes of our guests, we Spring Greens leapt from table to table, dropping food parcels of pizza and jugs of consolation. I began to despise my fellow man.

Still no word from Elgin. Work harder, mix more cocktails, stay up late, don’t sleep, don’t think. I might have taken to the bottle had there been anything fit to drink.

‘I’d like to see where you live.’

I was behind the bar grimly jigging a few pints of Lethal Extra when Gail Right made it clear that she was coming home with me. At two in the morning when the last of our night birds had been tipped from their sodden nest, she locked up and put my push bike in the hatch of her car. She had a Tammy Wynette tape on the cassette.