Wild Horses by Dominique Defforest

 
     
1
    A song always accompanied my passions. With
Gina, my first love I guess, it had been the song playing in the
background as we rode in the school bus to some lamentable
excursion – ‘So Long’ by some now forgotten 1980’s new wave group.
I remembered that song because I remembered her. Short, curvaceous,
brown eyes, and long black hair. Italian. How hopelessly I fell for
her. How painfully I was humiliated when she (quite rightly) called
me a “jerk” for leering at her, and trying to impress her, with
long and much embellished descriptions of my wild weekends as I
positioned myself near her at the back of the bus. Even that hadn't
put me off! I had gone back or more – more “what a cool weekend we
had” crap, more playing around like a clown with my mates, more
humiliation. Even now, more than twenty years later, whenever I
hear that song, I can see her – in tight stonewash jeans on free
dress day, or an overly short school dress. It didn’t need to be a
girl either! London, the first time! Of course, I’ve been back many
times since, but the first time comes back to me every time I hear
it, for as I emerged from the tube station onto busy Marylebone
Road, passed the bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes on the corner,
and made my way down Baker Street, trundling my luggage behind me,
in my mind I was hearing that saxophone solo, and Gerry Rafferty
singing “winding your way down Baker Street, light in your head and
dead on your feet.” The second part was true! More than twenty
hours on a plane from Down Under will do that to you, followed by
an hour or more in the queue at Heathrow, then another hour on the
tube. But to be here, for the first time, having thought about it,
and dreamed about it, and spoken about it, for so long – whenever I
hear that song, that memory comes flooding back instantaneously –
of me, with what must have been a stupid smile on my face, passing
the Barclays Bank on the corner as I neared the B&B I had
booked months in advance, with the commuters, and the workers on
lunch break, streaming around me. I should have known then, a
decade ago, as Paula and I sat in some restaurant planning our
wedding – or more accurately, as I assented to her plans for the
wedding and when nothing seemed to suggest itself for the first
dance - I should have known then, it should have rung warning
bells, but strangely it hadn't. There was no song to accompany the
passion, and that almost certainly meant there was no passion. It
was just the next, logical step, in the relationship. To get
married. We had ended up with ‘True Colors’ (Cyndi Lauper). I
didn't even like the song. My mother liked to say, perhaps sensing
that I feared I had made a mistake, that “in marriage, the passion
will come, later.” But she was an optimist – God bless her soul.
For Paula and I it had not come. We were still together, but living
separate lives. The one thing we shared with equal resolve being
the school fees for our only child, who was nearing the end of her
education, and that, I anticipated, would coincide almost certainly
with the formal end of the marriage. And we still didn't have a
song, there was still not “our song.” It had been years – more than
twenty years in fact – since I had associated a song with a person,
and when it happened, it was unexpected, somewhat seedy, quite
bizarre, and totally wrong – all in equal measure.
     
2
    I was drunk of course. I worse was worse than
drunk – I was totally hammered. It was nearing 4am in the morning,
a Sunday morning, and the computer screen was blurring in my
vision. Paula would ask me in a few hours time why I had come to
bed so late, and I was already rehearsing my story about falling
asleep watching a replay of the day’s football game on the sofa.
That was when I saw her. I didn't cruise the site much, but I had
an account. I found most of the girls average in appearance, and
their eagerness to be dirtier, nastier, and to do more