First Meeting

I've often thought our lives are full of connections and coincidences we will never know . . .

Julie and Dave met at university in Sheffield. He fancied her immediately. She saw him as a ‘potential boyfriend’ as soon as she would allow herself to think such thoughts. “He really makes me laugh,” she told her friends, unable to wipe the grin from her face, “he has a real wicked sense of humour.” But Dave was already seeing someone else, Clara by name, and was with her for another four months. By which time Julie had taken up with Rob, with whom she went to Canada one summer. However, the pair fell out while they were over there, and spent the last week hardly speaking to each other. Dave made his move about a month after that. “She really knows who she is and what she wants,” he said to his future Best Man, Peter, “she’s just fascinating, and I can’t get enough of her.”

A year after graduation, Julie and Dave were married. Ten years on, they have three children - Mark (nine), Sarah (six), and Michelle (four). The youngsters are staying with their grandparents right now, while Julie and Dave celebrate their tenth anniversary alone with a weekend in Scarborough. They chose Scarborough because it’s a place they both visited during childhood holidays, and so somewhere for thinking of the past and how far they have come. They’ve been up to the Castle, where Dave and his brothers and friends played hide-and-seek. Now they’re strolling hand in hand beside the Old Harbour, past the West Pier, and along Foreshore Road overlooking the beach in the South Bay. It’s early evening, but it is warm and sunny, and there are still a lot of people on the beach to watch as the donkeys are led away. Across the road are the amusement arcades: there's a smattering of teenagers inside, inaudible beneath the usual cacophony of bleeps and bells and the roars of invisible speeding cars. There are the hamburger and hot dog stalls, bathed in the smell of fried onions. There are the souvenir shops, treasure houses if you’re a child but full-on tackiness if you’re Julie or Dave. And there are the candyfloss stalls.

“I used to love candyfloss when I was little,” Julie says. “I’ve not had any for ages. Let’s go and get some.”

The couple stand, absorbed, as a man in a white coat waves a giant matchstick around the sides of a hissing cauldron. It gathers strands of pink cotton riding on the current of air. Then the man begins to rotate the stick. Round and round goes the burgeoning woolly sphere of candyfloss, till it is the size of a collar-length wig. “It’s like magic,” Julie smiles, squeezing Dave’s hand.

“We’re being kids again for a day,” Dave tells the stallholder as they pay for their fluffy balls of sweet grainy nothingness.

As the couple resume their gentle stroll, Julie is stirred by a few pinpricks of memory salvaged from the vast amnesia that is her childhood. These events took place on a family holiday one hot summer, when she was six or seven maybe. It must have been quite late, because she was running like her life depended on it to the only candyfloss stall still open. The stallholder was giving a huge sugary pink cotton ball to a boy as she drew up, breathless. The sight of it excited her even more. But the man told her he had run out of candyfloss, he had just sold the last of it . . .

Little Julie began to sob. She heard the stallholder talking, and she heard the boys giggling. There were four or five of them, all about her age probably, though she can’t form an image of them now. They were laughing at her, dancing on the pavement in front of her and waving their candyfloss in her face. “Oi!” said the stallholder, “leave her alone!” He offered Julie a toffee apple, but that only made her weep more: she didn’t want a toffee apple at all.

Then one of the boys, the one who had taken the last candyfloss, seemed to feel sorry for her. “Don’t cry,” he said, soothingly, as he approached. “Look, here’s a flower.” Julie peered at the plastic flower in his shirt pocket. Then she winced as a squirt of water hit her in the eye. The boy darted back to a chorus of raucous, cruel laughter.

Julie snapped. “I hate boys! I hate boys! I hate boys!” she screamed, banging the air with her little fists.

“Eh you lot, what are you up to?” came a woman’s voice. “David, what are you up to?” The boys scampered off.

But Julie does not remember what the woman said. If she did, it might give her a clue. For it is a fact that her first meeting with her future husband took place in Scarborough in August 1976, not in Sheffield in November 1988. It is something she is destined never to know, nor even suspect. One of those many invisible facts which come into being regularly throughout our lives and which have no mathematical or metaphysical significance, but yet which – if brought to light – would snag our hearts, appeal to our sense of poetry, mesmerise our tingling brains.

Such reflections are of course far from Julie and Dave’s minds as they wander, hand in hand, down Foreshore Road. Some boys are kicking a football about on the beach. One strike stings past its intended recipient and slams into the side of a parked car just ahead of them. The boys cup their hands over their mouths, giggling.

“Oi! Watch it!” Dave calls out. He gives the striker a good long stare: the boy eyes him back impertinently. “Little sod!”

“Boys will be boys,” Julie hums. Something in her voice draws Dave back from the footballers. Long before they reach their hotel, he is smiling again.