Good Morning Starshine!

I must admit I was still adding little finishing touches to my sketch from memory during the short break, and taking little notice of what anyone else was doing, or what was happening in the room.

Eventually I was brought back to the present with a jolt when Elvira asked, "Are you ready, Jerry?"

"Yes, sorry!" I blustered, hurriedly changing the paper on my easel.

Looking at the model Abigail again, I was somewhat surprised to see that the Chaise longue had been turned around on the small dais in the middle of the room. Actually it's quite possible that the whole damned dais had been rotated whilst I hadn't been watching.

Whatever, I was now viewing Abigail from the front. And what's more, she'd divested herself of that dressing gown again. That long dark, no her jet black hair hung down and still covered more than half of what looked to me like an exquisite face. However maybe because I was so inexplicably aware of Abigail's embarrassment, I didn't ask her to brush the hair aside.

Someone else did however. And then well... then time kind-a stopped for me. Abigail moved the hair from her face with a gentle sweep of her hand, not only did my jaw drop almost to the floor, but the piece of charcoal I was holding actually did; where it shattered into a thousand pieces.

I really could not believe what I was seeing. "It can't be!" A little voice shouted in my head. Then, very slowly, I lowered my sight line until it fell upon Abigail's left breast. Sure enough there it was, by then no longer hidden by her hair. A tattoo in the shape of a five-pointed star, it had the five delicate lines emanating from the spaces between those points.

"Holy mother of god, Starshine! What the heavens name, are you doing here?" That voice demanded in my mind somewhere.

At the same instant, I found that I was having trouble breathing. Well to be honest, possibly I'd had such a shock, that I'd forgotten to breath. That does happen you know. I believe that's how some folks have come to die of shock, or fear.

I think I almost keeled over myself, before I got my emotions, under some semblance of control again. Placing one hand on the easel to help hold myself upright, I struggled to get a grip on my thoughts and emotions.

There was no doubt in my mind that Abigail, wasn't Abigail at all. She was in fact Ursula... er, shit, well I had never known her surname. To be honest I'd only discovered that her real name was Ursula by chance. Back in those days Abigail went by the name of Starshine.

Hold on, not even that is true. She had been just plain Star, until I paid to have a birthmark she was so conscious of, covered with that tattoo of a shining star.

From that day onwards, she'd become Starshine to me. You know, like the line in the song from Hair. Every morning when we woke in the same bed together, I would greet her with the words "Good Morning Starshine!" And then we'd... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

You got to understand what it was like back then, Starshine and I were... Well, bugger it, we were Hippies and soul mates. Hey no, not your usual British weekend type hippies, but the real thing. Well, as close as you could get to being a hippie back then, and still live in the UK.

Along with a crowd of other hippie friends, we lived in commune down in Dorsett. Actually the place belonged to some titled bloke, who'd been left it by his old man. Still, he was a believer and hippie at heart; Lord, or whatever he was or not, he kind-a fitted in with the rest of us just fine. Besides, he owned the gaff.

And, possibly because he was getting laid regularly, he never did ask for any rent from anyone. I guess he must have laid nearly all the females there at one time or another, even Star.

It was a bit of an odd set-up really, even for a hippie community. The guy who owned the place kind-a run like it was a religious sect or something. Thinking about it, he was probably trying to find his way around taxes. Religious organisations in the UK can register as charities, and then get themselves some tasty tax breaks.

I know you might have trouble understanding this, but we all believed in, and practised, free love back then. If you fancied a female and she fancied you... well, you just got on with it and did the dead; anytime and almost anywhere you felt like it. That was it a whole different world to anything that had gone before or has existed since.

Yeah well, that was alright until Starshine -- or Star as she was back then -- and I got together. Bells rang and sparks flew that first evening we... um yeah. Anyway instantly we both knew that we were destined to be together. After that night the two of us kind-a withdrew from the free love bit most of the time. But if there was a party going on, then sometimes, with each other's nod of approval that is, we'd let loose. It was the sixties afterall.

Actually with hindsight, that was probably most weekends, when visitors, or part-time hippies turned up, with some decent weed, or maybe something a little stronger. Even in those days, it was all down to how much cash you had.

Don't go turning your nose up, I told you earlier that it was a different world back then. Starshine and I were living in a hippie society that believed in free love. I fear that the world will never be able to see the likes of those times again.

I feel I need to point out here, that convention has drawn an unnatural correlation between sex act and love, or being in-love with another person. That isn't actually the case in nature. The sex act releases certain endorphins into the participants systems that gives them pleasure. Unfortunately, all too often, that happening can be mistaken for love; it isn't, it's just the natural result of two people having sex.

When you are "in love" with someone, just their very presence, and/or touching them, will give you the same feeling of pleasure those endorphins produce. In consequence, when the two of you do have sex with each other, you get double (or even more) the pleasure for your money, so to speak.

Close observation of people will nearly always tell you whether they are truly in love. Very often, they will defy convention by touching each other at regular intervals; not in a sexual way, they just have a need to touch when they are close to each other. They very often hold hands etcetera, when out walking. They will by choice sit very close and they are always making eye contact with each other. Actually they are having private little conversations with their eyes.

I can explain no further, if you've never been there then I doubt you will understand. But take it from me "Sex" and "Love" are not the same thing. They have been tied together by convention though. In part -- for those of us who took part -- the hippie era was an experiment in discarding that convention and many others.

Where was I, I've wander off the subject a little. Oh year, the commune. Well it will probably sound like a strange place to most people nowadays. Everyone there was equal. You entered with no history, who you had been was of no interest to anyone. It was how you related to the rest of commune family that counted. Everyone had their one name, no surnames and most didn't even use the given name they'd been born with. I've got to admit that once you entered our particular community full time, most folk's kind-a became estranged from their birth families.

I think that was possibly a result of the sect mentality the guy who owned the place tried to promote. Although he did own the place, he didn't really run the community, although possibly because he did own the place, often his wishes were... I don't know how to put it. Maybe his wishes acquiesced to by the majority a little more than most of the other members were.

-----

Starshine and I had been together for about a year I'd say, when disaster struck the commune.

Some visitor guy, who I vaguely knew, had given me a lift into town early that morning. For a long time I thought possibly to collect my dole, I just couldn't remember. For the life of me, I couldn't remember why Starshine hadn't come along with us that day either.

Anyway, we were on the return journey, when Moonbeam ran out into the road and flagged us down. Climbing into the car she gave us the news that the police had turned up in force to raid the commune.

I suppose I'd better explain that some members of the commune weren't averse to doing a little illicit gardening. If it had mind-bending properties, and it could be grown in the UK, (or one of the greenhouses in the walled kitchen garden) then some bugger with green fingers was sure to be growing it.

Moonbeam told us, that she'd been in the woods picking mushrooms -- yeah those mushrooms -- when she had spotted the police arriving. Moonbeam had hidden amongst the trees and watched as everyone in the house had been arrested, and then carted away by the police. Moonbeam also informed us that more policemen were hanging around place waiting to nab anyone who returned to the house.

"Starshine?" I'd asked.

"She got away, I think. She went over the back wall, before the police had spotted her. I don't think they got her, anyway. They certainly never got Apollo; I saw him riding off on that motorbike he keeps hidden in the woods and I'm sure it was Star on the back of it with him."

Like everyone else in the commune I'd known about Apollo's motorcycle. Not everyone in the place embraced the ideal, that what belonged to one, belonged to all. I for instance was very protective of my old, and very much battered, guitar. No one, except Starshine, whom I was teaching to play, ever dared lay finger upon the hallowed instrument.

Of course Moonbeam had no idea where Star and Apollo had gone. You know we had never discussed -- or even contemplated -- that the police would raid our commune. So Starshine and I had never made any plans about what we would do in that eventuality.

Well, the "upper crusts" mansions didn't often get raided back in those days. Having a handle to your name kind-a raised most of them above the law. Well that was the way most people saw it back then.

We hadn't taken into account that the establishment was more than a little frightened of the Hippie movement, and it had decided to do its best to crush it, and the lifestyle.

It was pretty obvious that Moonbeam and myself could not return to the commune, or we'd both be arrested as well. So we abandoned our gear in the house, including my beloved guitar. The guy drove us to another commune we knew of, about thirty miles away. I thought that there might be a chance that Star and Apollo could have gone there.

No one at that commune had seen either Star or Apollo, but they able to suggest several other groups that they might have headed for. The next morning our driver, buggered if I can even remember his commune name now, drove on to the next nearest one. Then he had to return to life in... well, in the real world I suppose.

I suppose I'd better explain commune names to you. Well the powers that be had been giving us all a little strife by that time. Using hippie names, or aliases sort-of made it harder for the police to keep track of us. Well, the guys who grew all the mind-bending substances that were part of the life style. The rest of us used them... because we liked them. And the weirdo guy who owned that particular house was very keen on them.

Moonbeam and I spent the next six months to a year, touring every commune in the south of the country; but no one reported having seen neither hide nor hair of Starshine or Apollo. It was as if they had dropped off the face of the earth. Well, hippie earth anyway.

Of course there was the chance they had changed their names, but I somehow doubted they'd do that. Apollo and Starshine had done nothing illegal themselves, that I knew of. Except maybe participating in the odd hallucinogenic happening. All that they could possibly be arrested for was possession, and only then if they actually had something on them when they were picked up.

My search though went on for a couple of years or so.

I don't know exactly when the fun went out of living the hippie lifestyle, for me. Maybe I got fed-up with being broke all the time. It cost Moonbeam and I nearly every penny we could lay our hands on, travelling around the country trying to find Starshine. Maybe the fun went out of it for Moonbeam first, because it was she who got the job at the caravan site.

It was Moonbeam's job to clean the caravans and prepare them for the next influx of holidaymakers. The job came with a caravan for Moonbeam to live and... I, kind-a came along with Moonbeam. Mind you, it wasn't long before I was roped-in and on the payroll. I was very quickly conned into watching the amusement hall. Basically 'Lord it' over a lot of little shit school kids, and make sure they behaved themselves.

To be honest the laid-back hippie persona served me very well, most of the kids were frightened stiff of me. God alone knows what kind of stories their parents had been feeding them.

At the end of that summer, Moonbeam and I moved into a cheap flat together. You'll gather that Moonbeam and I had become a sort-of couple by then.

Only it was nothing that you might describe as a heavy relationship, more a kind of very small two-person commune. We were two very close friends who happened to live together and share the same bed. It didn't strike either Moonbeam or myself as out of the ordinary at the time. Especially after how we had been living for the previous few years.

During that winter cash became a real bind, so eventually I got myself a proper job. That job was to lead to us moving back to the city. Once we had moved, Moonbeam also got herself a permanent job and reverted calling herself by her legal name, Susan Wilson. Later still Susan reconciled with her family, something I never did get around to doing; well not, for many years anyway.

Susan and I lived together in that flat for nearly three years, and for almost all of that time, her parents were pushing us to get hitched. That was something we both knew would never happen, because Susan and I didn't feel that way about each other. We were, what are nowadays sometimes termed, "friends with benefits!"

Eventually though the day came. The wheel of life always keeps turning.

"Jerry, are you awake?" Susan asked quietly, after a particularly energetic session in bed one night.

"Knackered, but certainty awake. I think I need a little more rest before we go again Susan."

"No, it's not that, I was thinking. You remember John, the new guy in the office I told you about?"

Now sometimes I'm not as dumb as I look. Taking into consideration exactly where Susan and I were, and what we had just been doing; there could only be one reason that Susan would bring up the subject of the new guy at her office.

"Has he asked you out yet?"

"No, but he's showing all the right signs. You know he gets all flustered whenever he has to talk to me. I think he's building up the courage to."

"We'd better move all your gear into the other bedroom a bit sharpish then."

"I love you Jerry, you're so sweet to me."

"And I love you Sue; you're my best friend in the world."

"It's such a damn shame that we just love each other and are not in love with each other, isn't it? You know I would marry you tomorrow if it weren't for Star, you've been in love with her ever since I've known you."

"Yeah, I guess I am; I wonder if I'll ever find her again. Anyway, I hope it works out for you with this John geezer, Susan."

"Well if it doesn't, I know who I can rely on to lend me a shoulder to cry on."

"I'll always be here for you Moonbeam, you were there for me. We'll move your gear first thing."

"No leave it until the weekend, I don't think he's ready to ask me out just yet."

-----

I never did work out whether Susan's husband, John Phelps, worked out how close a relationship Susan and I had had; or what our living arrangements had been. An un-related mixed gender couple sharing a flat, was unusual back in those days. But John appeared happy to accept the fact that we had separate bedrooms with locks on the doors.

What the poor bugger made of it later, when his loving and extremely conservative wife, insisted that their daughter was christened Cynthia, Moonbeam, Starshine, Phelps; I have no idea. And, I really would love to have been a fly on the wall, when she told him that their son was going to be named Grif, Pogo, Phelps.

Whatever, Susan obviously won that argument.

-----

I suppose I was at a bit of a loose end, once Susan had got married to John. I'd been out of the dating game for so long... Hey come on, I hadn't dated a woman since my teenage years. Once I turned Hippie... well we didn't date actually. We just had "Happenings" where you got high and kind of circulated, when you got the inclination. I'd never actually dated Starshine in my life; we kind-a gravitated towards each other until we were one.

Anyway I made a few mistakes. Probably the biggest one was Clair. I think I told you earlier she was a real looker and we were fantastic in bed together. But outside the sack we were like chalk and cheese. Susan saw it from the beginning and tried to warn me. But I'm afraid my little brain was probably doing most of the thinking by then. I was missing Moonbeam's company remember.

Odd when you think about it, at that time in my life the longest relationship I'd had was with a woman I had nothing in common with. And I certainly couldn't have been in love with, well not by the end anyway. It was ordained, that it was going to fall apart eventually.

I wonder how many other people find themselves in that situation?

-----

Anyway back to that art studio, where I had suddenly found myself staring at that tattoo on the side of Stashine's... sorry Abigail's -- she was Abigail in that studio -- left breast.

When I looked at Abigail's eyes again, I saw that her gaze was firmly fixed on some point high on the wall. Having recognised her, I suppose my first thought was, "Why hasn't she recognised me?"

But then I realized that Abigail had not actually looked at me, or any of the other students in that class. She'd kept her eyes down before she took up her first pose, and had probably locked them on some point on the wall during the session, as she had done during her second. So she'd probably not even seen that I was there.

And of course, I had changed a lot since my hippie days when we were together. In the smart business suit I then wore, I bore little or no physical relationship to the guy that Starshine had lived with all those years ago. Long gone was the shoulder length hair, the long droopy moustache, the ragged jeans and flowered shirts; not forgetting the bandana, bangles and beads, etcetera.

Damn-it, if Abigail had happened to glance my way, then there was very little chance she'd have recognised me, straight off.

Instinct was telling me to forget my sketching and walk over to her. Stand in front of her until she looked at me and recognised me. But that was completely out of the question; Abigail as she was calling herself, was already uncomfortable about sitting naked before all of these strangers. How she would react to my sudden appearance was unpredictable; it could only embarrass her more.

Instead I stood there and stared at her unbelievably beautiful body. I caressed those wonderful eyes with my eyes, and those immaculate breasts as well. My gaze lingered long and hard on that tattooed star, with the delicate rays spreading from it.

"Thank you Abigail. I'm sorry people, times up for this evening. I'm sure you'll all join me in thanking our lovely Abigail for sitting for us this evening."