Marianne! ~ a Journey Round a Golden Sun

 Chapter One

I’m leaving him this time Simon – I really am.”

I looked at Marianne in horror as she stood bedraggled at my door. At the black eye the bastard had given her. At the tears and mascara streaming down her face, curdling with the rain. It was over two miles from her house to mine and she had walked without a coat.

“In that case darling, come in and start doing your cold turkey.”

I ushered her in, helped her out of most of her clothes, and dried her off with a towel. Our relationship being what it was, she kept her bra and knickers on while I used a hairdryer on them to melt away the damp. I turned the heating on full, and brought her one of my shirts and a jumper. She made them look magical. If I’d brought her a potato sack she'd have made that look good too. She was that sort of girl.

She and Craig had been on fire the past eight months. Some affairs are so wild and uncontrolled that excess steam and lava eventually block the channels through which the love can flow, and make it all explode. Putting it another way, the two of them had conspired in one of those acts of mutual madness most of us will never know.

But that night there was only the pain on view, not the dizzying glory. The bruises on her arms and thighs were, she assured me, matched as well as she could manage by deep scratches on his face.

“Good,” I said.

“My pleasure,” she replied.

I didn’t expect her decision to return to this cold planet to last more than a day or two. After all, none of her previous resolutions had ever done so. But, using me and all her other friends as a crutch, this time she somehow held on through the agony. I have never watched cold turkey before, and hope I never do again. Drugs, alcohol, love – they writhe in the blood like howling medieval demons, desperate not to be cast out. Poor Marianne was eating the walls out of her need for Craig. He might be a thug and a bully, but he was also every colour of her rainbow. She had lost the fabulous sex, the thrilling nights out, the aura of his money and career, the sense that life was an adventure not a chore. Instead of dancing perilously on the top of his volcano, she was now sitting cross-legged in a mudflat looking at the pond life.

One night, a few weeks later, she made an observation:-

“So at least I don’t get hit anymore. Whay. Whoopee. Let’s all light the fireworks and clap our hands together.”

The caustic burn in her voice was clear. Without the urgent application of handcuffs and a straitjacket she might easily reach out for the phone and undo everything. I phrased an answer with my usual charm, but in effect I told her to put a sock in it and keep eating the turkey sandwiches.

“Yum yum,” she said flatly.

If there were words to describe how intoxicating Marianne was, how bewitching and beguiling and impossible, then I’d use them. But there aren’t, so I’ll just say she was a woman. Suitors came, panting with excitement, and suitors left, sadder and wiser. A couple of them were even lucky enough to chalk up a one-night stand, and I bet they didn’t forget the taste and touch of her too quickly. A few months later still, she even saw the same bloke twice, and then three times, until it developed into a pallid affair of sorts.

“Yeah, he’s nice. He’s sweet. He’s funny and considerate and kind and all the rest of it. I really like being with him, but compared to what I had with Craig, it’s nothing Simon, it's absolutely nothing…”

She and Mr Nice kept adding damp kindling to the fire for weeks, but it never lit the sky and burned her house down like she wanted. And much the same happened with another few guys in the year that followed.

“Hey? What kind of Princess are you?” I asked her one night. “You don’t like the ogre and you don’t like Prince Charming. Get out of this fairy story at once and make room for someone else.”

She hit me.

She laughed, but she still hit me.

Then one day she rang my doorbell and I could tell at once something had happened. Her pupils were all big and shiny, and the smile she was wearing just shouldn’t be allowed out – way too naughty, too happy and excited. And as for that magnetic shimmer of hers, which normally only radiated about ten feet from her body, it was more than any man who couldn’t make love to her should have to bear. But as ever, I was the lucky victim of her beauty.

Of course I knew she must have met a man, so I duly waited to be rocked back on my heels by this astounding news. Marianne always had a sense of drama about her, and before she spilled a single bean, she insisted I fetch her the exact same shirt I had given her that wet and dreadful night some eighteen months before. She also wanted the same CD playing in the background. And so, to the theme of Roxy Music’s dance away she slowly dance-peeled to her bra and panties, superslow and superslinky, before putting on my shirt for the second time in her life. This time she was twenty-three, and managed the unthinkable by being even lovelier.

“He’s called Mark,” she said smiling, knowing that I already knew everything. Well, everything except his name and who he was and what he was like.

“And is he the ogre or Prince Charming?”

“Oh Simon! That’s just it! He’s both!”

“Oh dear, a mutant. What rotten luck.”

She hit me again. It had long been an unfortunate habit of hers.

If you ever see a donkey dragging itself along manfully with just its two front legs, you’ll know it must have got caught up in conversation with Marianne at some stage. She told me about Mark without mercy, and every time I yawned or my eyes glazed over, she'd incrementally hitch her skirt to show me ever more of her phenomenal legs, adding progressively more of her panties to the mix as well, as she knew this was the simplest way to lead me down her road. When even this didn’t work and I threatened to go to bed, she was so keen to keep me that she stopped all pretence at subtlety and openly used her polyester trump card.

Rolling onto her tummy, she hitched the tails of my shirt right above her waist and let me feast my eyes on her. What can I say? Had I been both drugged and hit with a hammer, she would still have had my full attention until the sun came up. Fact is, knights of old had the holy grail: something elusive, magical, and impossibly lovely to chase after all their lives. I, on the other hand, had the unattainable perfection of her bottom as both my agony and bliss.

After all these years, I naturally can’t remember exactly how she described Mark, but it's fair to say the knees of bees, the pyjamas of cats and private parts of canis lupus familiaris were all heavily involved. In the patches through the mists of time though, I do recall a couple of things:-

“He sends electric shivers down me whenever he’s even close, just like the way you feel about me, and when we actually touch or kiss or make love, it’s not like anything I’ve ever known before. All I’d like now, to make things absolutely perfect, is to have Craig crawl back and beg for me so I could laugh in his face and show him Mark.”

And also...

“Mark’s got every good, decent civilized quality a girl could ever want, just like my recent blokes but ten times more so. But he’s also got that raw male firepower and bullishness that I’ve been missing ever since Craig. Lots of men can satisfy parts of me – like you, for instance – but Mark’s a complete match for me, he challenges me and wakes up every inch of who I am.”

I asked her whether Mark was yet aware that as well as being ravishing and sexy and wonderful, she was also contrary, maddening and totally impossible.

“Yup! We only met a week ago, but he already knows the whole sad story. Poor sod even says he’s going to straighten out my bad points and keep the rest, and who am I to stop a man from dreaming, eh?”

She winked at me, and to my astonishment, proceeded to tuck an inch or so of her panties in towards the middle.

“Oy? - what’s that for, darling?” I asked plaintively.

“Honey - that’s because it’s gone two in the morning and I don’t want you falling asleep on me, okay?”

“Done deal. What’s the prize for staying up till four?”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait and find out, won’t you sweetie!”

But in the event I never did discover, as she crashed out half an hour later. I carried her upstairs to my bed, rewarded by sleepy little nuzzles to my neck as we went, and after tucking my drunken angel in all snug and warm, I went back down with an armful of duvet and expired unpeaceful on the sofa.

For the next fortnight she was too busy having fun to see me, but I did get loads of extremely affectionate phone-calls. The girl was born too late to work for the Spanish Inquisition, but in her own way she really did love me. And then one evening the doorbell rang and I had what I believe is called déjà vu all over again. The only thing missing was the black eye, as rain, girl and heartbreak were all present and correct.

“Triple vodka?” I asked her.

“Not tonight Si. Just bring the bottle.”

“Don’t suppose you fancy wearing my shirt again, do you?”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

She went on to tell me Mark had done something unspeakable, something far worse than Craig had ever done, and if she ever saw the evil little toad again she would either spit in his face or jump on his grave or preferably both. These considered verdicts were the opening trumpets of a force ten Marianne tirade, in which Mark's arrogance was analysed in depth and found unsatisfactory, as were his nerve and cheek. His failings in these areas were assessed not just as merely sheer, but unbelievable and bloody fucking. On the plus side though, I learned to my relief that Mark was not in fact her father.

I was told which year we lived in and, still more redundantly I felt, the century itself. I wondered whether he was insisting that she join the Amish or man the rigging in an arctic whaler. She regretted his gall, and could find no silver lining in his outrageousness. Above all else, she talked of her intense curiosity to learn who he considered himself to be. I tell you straight: I never got a single chance to get a word in edgeways. About nineteen hours later she stopped for breath, and wept.

“The love of my life is a pervert and a monster and a bully,” she sobbed, holding me as close as she possibly could.

“Yes - but what's he actually done, my poor sweet darling?” I asked, deeply concerned as you can imagine.

“Oh Simon, just let me hold you, okay? Work that soothing magic on me that you always do, and if and when I’m drunk enough, I’ll tell you what that bastard just did to me.”