Marillion

You, glassy eyed and teenage tonight, are excited. This band mean everything to you and they suddenly mean everything to me in the heat of the Astoria on a Sunday night in July when you have told your wife you are somewhere else. We face the stage before the band even come on and you wrap your hands around my waist. I love you so much. I tell you this, my neck twisted so that my mouth is next to your ear. I love you too, you reply. The band play old hits through the PA system before they come on stage and men of your age and older mill around with pints of ale in hand. I am one of the only women in the room and I am ten years younger than the youngest of them. We giggle conspiratorially and chink plastic pint glasses of gin and tonic and cloudy ale with no head. Oh, nobody else is as lucky as us, my darling you. Nobody else is as in love as we are tonight. We are us in the Astoria, touching each other and kissing each other and knowing each other and I can scarcely believe that it has only been eighteen months since we first kissed, touched, professed our love, because it has been my whole life. You are my whole life.

The lights fall and dry ice fills my cavities with a dusty anticipation. With the opening chords of The Invisible Man, there they are: these dodgy 80s prog-rockers that you have been listening to since you were younger than I am and who should have given up years ago, who you should have given up on longer ago. We kiss and you lock your hands over my belly, teenagers in our very own 1989. I tip the gin down my throat and you smell my hair. You are not very tall and so you can only just see over the top of my head. I watch a pregnant woman in front of me who is holding her husbands hand. I look at her and long for your baby inside of me so that I can share your blood. I think of this for fleeting seconds, of my immune system resisting you, of hot, holy semen and of the child we could have and that would link us forever and ever. More permanent than marriage, we would be on some unborn genealogists family tree in hundreds of years, together. An unborn genealogist with your mothers eyes and my fathers nose. I put my hand to my pelvis and will it. The pregnant woman laughs at her husband as he dances to the music with closed eyes. You whisper to me, that’s you in  a few years, that is and I smile. She sings along and looks on at her foolish lover with adoration and I hope, oh I hope that one day that will be me: I am filled with more love than even dry ice and on this night nothing seems impossible, I feel immortal. Home and her and everything keeping us apart are far away from our kisses under the strobe lights of another decade.

But something bothers me about that couple, the woman who looks on with a baby in her belly and the father who dances. Something sudden and stark and undeniable. They are maybe ten, fifteen years older than me, and they wear wedding rings on carefree hands. Neither of them have been married before, I think. She has not known what it is to be someone’s mistress. I have been scarred, my hands have been scarred, I won’t ever look as nice in a diamond ring as she does. That cold thought runs through all of my veins, something I hadn’t ever considered until now. I might be your wife one day, you are forever telling me I will be, that I should have always been your wife, that it was just an accident of time that made her your wife, that I am your true wife. But I am only your true wife to you, my only love. You will be completely my husband, my only husband. I will be your second wife. At our wedding people will say second time round the block, traded in the old one for a younger model. I am temporary. Wives are lost and found for you, that is what people will say and think. Perhaps that is even what I think. Second wife implies there was a first and that they may be a third, too. I think myself into a state of despair about the future in less time than it takes the band to move into their next song.

By the time they play Neverland the band, older than most who play this stage, are a sweating mess and tears are dripping openly off of my chin as I sing along, so loud that my voice breaks: stay beside me, whisper to me, here I am. And the loneliness fades….. You sing into my ear and I know with a sudden certainty that you will go one day and it is too terrible to contemplate. I squeeze your hands, still fastened around me and I want to turn to you and cry “never go will you?” I don’t. I just keep swaying under the green lights. Your voice echos in my head; you’ll miss me when I’m dead. You’ll miss when I’m dead. You shouted that at me once and I shouted back that of course I would miss you, I love you, I would miss you if you went anywhere. The tears don’t dry up, they drip off of my cheeks and down onto your hands, still clasped over my stomach and I know that they won’t be there for very long. And then I realise suddenly that it is the gin, gin makes me cry, gin makes everyone cry. It is mothers ruin. I slosh more down my throat, trying to believe that the emotions aren’t to do with the knowledge that you will one day leave me but part of the fermentation process. You press your mouth to my ear and I think for a second that you might be about to reassure me that you won’t go anywhere, that you have read my thoughts, that you will put a ring on my finger here, today as proof of your permanence. Instead you ask if I want another drink and I just nod, dumbly, knowing that if I am going to keep crying I want to feel numb for it.

You turn and dissolve into the crowd and it is a metaphor for everything that will come after. But as I stand in the crowd watching a band that were the soundtrack to your past loves, love that was made and unmade in the decades before you even knew I was alive, I know that you will come back and find me tonight.