Good Morning Starshine!

Elvira's voice broke the spell and panic set in. "Do I approach Abigail now, or wait until she's changed" I was asking myself. But before I could come to a decision, Abigail had disappeared into the changing room that lead off the Classroom. She had made the decision for me.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get to you during the sitting Jerry, how did you get on? Oh my, I wasn't expecting that!"

Elvira had crept up on me again.

I glanced at Elvira and then at my sketch. It might sound odd to you, but I really had no idea what I'd drawn. Only god knows where my mind had been during that sitting.

On the paper was a rough outline of Abigail's left breast, with just a hint of her right one showing behind it. There was however, plenty of detail in the star that really took centre stage in the sketch. After studying my efforts for about a minute, Elvira turned and looked me right in the eye.

"I would say Jerry, that you are very familiar with that star. Either that or your eyesight is remarkably good for a man of your age."

"I have seen it before, yes." I replied, for want of anything more enlightening to say.

"A long time ago, maybe?"

"I was there where it was done. I paid for it actually, Elvira."

"Then you must be... Oh god, no wonder you were captivated by my sketch of her."

"Obviously you are a much better artist than I realized Elvira. I didn't recognise her in your sketch, well not consciously anyway. But you had captured her soul, her essence."

Christ alone knows where all the arty-farty chat was coming from.

"Oh no, someone else has her soul Jerry. Look you'd better get a move on; Abby will be changed and on her way to the office by now to pick up her money for this evening. She only has a few minutes before they close; that's why she dashes off like she does."

I began to take my sketch down and clear my easel.

"Oh god Jerry, leave that; I'll take care of it for you. Go find your Star young man, she needs you!"

"You know don't you?"

"She has been modelling for me for a long time now Jerry. We've talked about a lot of things during those sittings. Now get going!"

For some inexplicable reason I kissed Elvira on the forehead, making her blush. Then headed for the dressing room door.

But the room was empty except for chair, the gown Abigail had used and a long black wig hanging on hooks on the wall. That wig explained to me one reason why I hadn't realized who she was a lot earlier.

On the far wall was a second door, through which Abigail had obviously exited the room.

There were a few people out in the corridor, but I could see no sign of Abigail. Rushing to the top of the stairs, I looked down the well and spotted a woman dressed in a headscarf, raincoat and sunglasses. Descending the bottom flight, three floors bellow. At that time of night she had to be Abigail, attempting to leave the building incognito.

"Abigail!" I called down the well.

It might have been wishful thinking on my part, but I was sure I noticed Abigail react slightly to my yell; no more than a little jerk of her head. But she didn't break her step and had very soon reached ground level.

Taking the stairs two or three at a time, I chased down after her.

As I did so the thought struck me that Abigail probably had good reason not to stop to see who was calling after her. She's just spent a couple of hours sitting naked in a room with about twenty people she didn't know. It was very possible that some pervert's libido had got the better of him in the past; do I have to enlarge. Obvious when you think about it, isn't it?

By the time I'd got down the stairs and out into the quadrangle; Abigail was the other side of it, about to enter the building that housed the office. Realising that calling Abigail had not done me any good, I changed tack.

"Ursula!" I shouted as loud as I knew how.

This time her step definitely faltered. But only for a second, then she had disappeared through the door of the main building.

Chasing in someway behind her I found there were many more people milling around in the entrance hall and on the stairs. But then I spotted her three quarters of the way up the first flight. Running to the bottom of them, I played my trump card.

"Starshine!"

She took maybe two more steps up and then stopped. Very, very slowly, as if she was reticent to discover who had called after her, she turned around and looked back down at me.

Our eyes met, and she stared at me for what seemed to me an age.

She wasn't the only person staring at me either, my shout had echoed around the hallowed halls and brought me to everyone's attention.

"Pogo is that really you?" She eventually called back.

"Sure is babe!" I replied. Well, what else could I say?

Whatever, it brought a wide grin to Starshine's face. Then we both kind-a made a mistake.

I started up the stairs at the double, at the same time as Starshine started down with equal enthusiasm. If it hadn't been for a couple young lads' very quick reactions, our actual meeting might well have ended tragically.

Look, when someone running down stairs, throws herself into the arms of someone running up stairs... Well I can assure you, that's a recipe for disaster. It was only the auspices and quick thinking of those two young lads, that stopped the both of us from tumbling all the way back down again.

Besides thanking the two lads for their help, Starshine and my conversation for the next half hour or so was not very scintillating. Or probably even comprehensible to anyone who overheard it.

It vaguely consisted of short, often half completed sentences, like. "I've been searching for you forever..." and "I never thought I'd see you again!" or "I thought I'd never find you."

Generally they added nothing we didn't instinctively know, and told us nothing about what either of us had been doing in the intervening years.

Ursula, because the one thing I did learn was that Starshine had returned to using her given name. Anyway she appeared to forget about collecting her wages for the evening, and we kind-a wandered out into the quad where we were no longer the centre of attention.

There we found an old stone bench in a dark corner and sort-a found other things to do, rather than talk, for a while. Later, after we'd kind-a re-familiarised ourselves with each others lips again, we went to a pub and got down to the serious stuff.

I told Ursula about all the hunting for her that Moonbeam and I had done. How once someone had told us that they caught sight of her at Glastonbury and we'd spent the rest of the time running around like blue arsed fly's checking every damned tent there. And how I got a punch on the nose for sticking it in the wrong tent at an inopportune moment.

"You didn't marry Moonbeam?" Ursula eventually asked, changing the subject. "You were obviously together a long time."

"Nope, someone else had that pleasure. Moonbeam is a very... proud and conservative mother of two now. She hooked up with a really nice guy in the end, bit of a stuffed shirt though. Christ, he'd have kittens if he knew what Susan got up to back in the old days." I replied with a grin.

Then I added because I really needed to know

"How about you, is there anyone kicking around that I should be worrying about?"

In the back of my mind was what Elvira had said, about a violent possibly habitual drug-taking husband.

"No, I couldn't find anyone to replace Pogo. Malcolm was keen on us getting hitched at one time, but he was always too unstable for my liking. I didn't want him to be father to my kids."

"Malcolm?" I repeated. Ursula had said the name as if she expected me to know who Malcolm was.

"Oh Apollo, his real name is Malcolm. He still turns up now and again, usually looking for a hand out. I'm afraid he's an alcoholic now and he's losing it. He can turn a bit funny sometimes. You know, violent. I had to call the police the last time; can't have him frightening the children."

"Oh bugger, tough shit. But then he always was a bit of a prat, over-did things all the time. Moonbeam told me she saw you get away from the house with him, but what happened? We looked in all the local communes for you."

It was only as I said that that what Ursula had actually said sank home. "Can't have him frightening the children!" had been the words she'd used.

"Hold on kiddo, whose children would he be frightening?"

I'm not sure how that sounded to Ursula. Come to that I'm not sure how the question sounded to me, or what hoops my emotions were suddenly going through. The question my brain was asking was who had the love of my life hooked up with in the intervening years and was he still a part of Ursula's life. Although she had said that there was no one.

Ursula sat back in her seat and stared at me.

"Oh my of course you don't know do you? But then how could you? But then again I thought you might have figured it out by now. And well, maybe I suspected that was why you'd never found me and I couldn't find you."

"Ursula, can we return to speaking in sentences that actually mean something."

She looked at me and I suppose realized that I had no idea what she had been talking about.

"Pogo, why did I not go into town with you the morning the police raided the house?" "Oh, you can't remember can you?"

"Well things got a little fraught that day Ursula. What with Moonbeam panicking that we were all on the country's most wanted list, and that there was a policeman hiding behind every tree. She had us dashing around like blue arsed flies for the next week or so. Mind, we were looking for you and Apollo, honestly."

"And the medicine you were supposed to be getting for my tummy problem?"

"What medicine? Oh yeah, I remember now; you'd been sick again that morning hadn't you. That guy drove me to the chemist."

"You just said it Pogo. I was sick again that morning. Like I had been the day before and the day before that as well. You're a little older now, what does the term "morning sickness" bring to mind for you today?"

"My god, you weren't; why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was as young and stupid as you were, and I didn't realize it myself. Look hygiene in the kitchen wasn't top priority back then remember? There wasn't many days when someone wasn't either throwing up or had the runs. Actually I didn't figure it out, my mother did when Malcolm took me home that day. I was throwing up all over the place and we couldn't figure out what else to do. Poor Malcolm caught a real earful off my mother; she assumed he was the father, until I put her straight."

"Oh my god you are telling me, I've been a father for what... nearly ten years and I didn't even know. What is it a boy or a girl?"

"It is they, Pogo. Oh shit I've got to remember to call you Jerry. Anyway we had twins. One boy, one girl. They are perfect, except that I'm afraid they both have their father's nose."

Instinctively, my hand must have shot up to my nose. I'm not sure what I was thinking.

"Handy that, in a way, because I always did love that nose of yours!" Ursula grinned at me. "Sorry Jerry, but you were looking so serious; not my Pogo at all!"

"Jesus Ursula, this is serious, you were lumbered looking after my... our offspring all on your own. I know that I did my best to find you, but I obviously didn't look hard enough. I'm pretty disappointed with myself."

"Well don't be, you tell me that you did your best to find me and that's good enough for me. Besides I haven't been on my own, I've had my mums help every step of the way. And Malcolm was quite good until he went off the rail's."

"I'll bet he was."

"And you can cut that out before you start. Malcolm and my relationship was strictly platonic, after we left the commune. He would have liked to have... Well, look he even offered to marry me. But once I discovered that I was pregnant, I had to think of the children and their future. Jerry, I knew that we'd find each other again, one day."

"Sorry, for some inexplicable reason I'm jealous of Ap... Malcolm. Probably because he was around when I should have been."

"You can't be as jealous of Malcolm as he was of you, I can assure you. Now shall we finish these drinks, then go and you can meet our children."

-----

Ursula had been living with her widowed mother, not fifteen minutes from where I'd been living for years. How we'd never run into each other in the intervening period I'll never be able to understand. But London is a vast city and has a good few million people living in it. It is possible not to run into a near neighbour from just a couple of doors away, for years on end.

"About bloody time you showed up! Those little ones were beginning to think that you were a figment of their mother's imagination. Call me Grace or mum, don't you dare call me Gran, or you'll wish you hadn't found my daughter again."

That was the greeting that I received from Ursula's mother after I followed her into the house. I have no idea how Grace instantly knew who I was; Ursula hadn't introduced me.

Ursula insists that it was probably my nose that the children share. 'ere don't go getting the idea I've got a big nose or anything. Ursula used to say, that it was the kind of nose some folks in Hollywood pay plastic surgeons thousands to have. And what's more the gene that controls it appears to be pretty strong, it's certainly taking preference in our descendants.

Whatever besides the odd humorous dig, Grace never again chastised me over my long absence from her daughter and grandchildren's lives.

We didn't wake the children that evening, they were in bed asleep by time we arrived at the house. Ursula and Grace took me upstairs, where we crept into their rooms so I could see them for the first time. I had a little trouble controlling my emotions, and tried to hide the fact that the sight of them made me weep a little.

"The room at the end is my bedroom and this is yours and Ursula's domain." Grace said opening the door to the bedroom opposite my daughters.

I've got to admit that Grace kind-a caught me a little off-guard.

Of course I was hoping that Ursula and I were going to pick-up where we left off. But a bloody lot of water had gone under the bridge since we'd last been together. But then again when I'd taken her in my arms in the college quad, all those years just seemed to melt away.

When I looked into the room, much to my surprise my old guitar was hung on the wall over the bed-head. I looked at Ursula in wonderment. She explained that several times she'd returned to the old commune looking for news of me. Something I'd never thought to do during my search for her. Anyway she'd picked up my guitar on her first visit back there.

Later all three of us sat around the kitchen table drinking tea and talking, Ursula never letting go of my hand. Come to think of it she'd rarely let go of my hand all evening, except when I was driving. Although then again I was probably hanging onto her hand just as hard as she was hanging onto mine.

Well to be honest, mostly I was answering Grace's questions. I think we... I covered just about everything, to Grace's satisfaction. Mind you, I could understand her inquisition; she really only knew me second-hand from what Ursula had told her.

Things got a little sticky later, when Ursula suddenly announced that it was about time we went to bed.

"We'd better make it an early night Jerry, the children are going to be excited and they'll going to wear you out in the morning. I think you should get a good rest."

Ursula had taken me a little by surprise again. I really hadn't thought that far ahead; I hadn't had time to. Not that I didn't like the idea of diving into bed with Ursula, but well I've voiced my concerns earlier.

"Ah well, I'm afraid I haven't got any pyjama's with me." Was my idiotic reply.

"Pogo never wore pyjamas, so I can't see any reason that Jerry should need them now." Ursula grinned at me. "And besides, you spent a good hour and half staring at my nakedness earlier this evening. Now it's my turn to get my own back."

"Ah, but you carry your years a damned sight better that I carry mine darling!"

"I think I'll go to bed and leave you two to argue this one out on your own. Oh how do you like your eggs Jerry? Give up my boy there's only one bed you're going to sleep in tonight and you know it as well as I do."

Very shortly after Grace went up the stairs, Ursula and I followed. I awoke quite early the next morning fully convinced that I would have to do something about our creaky bed, very quickly! It wasn't long before I discovered that I wasn't the only person in the house who'd come to the same conclusion.

"Good morning Starshine. You know, I've missed being able to say that to you?" I said, kissing Ursula on the lips

"Do you remember what happens next?" She grinned back up at me.

Quite a few creaks later, I staggered into the en-suit bathroom, where I took a shower and cursed myself for not having the foresight to carry an emergency travel bag in the car. Look, I was going to be meeting my children for the first time and I looked like bloody tramp.

But then there was a gentle tap on the door and it opened just a little. Then Grace's arm appeared holding an electric razor travelling case.

"It's old, but it should still work. I'd only bought it for him it a few weeks before he died; when he couldn't manage to wet shave himself anymore."

It was obvious Grace was handing me her husband's razor. I thanked her and proceeded to try turning myself back into someone who looked a little civilised. That didn't quite come off though, because when I exited the bathroom -- still only wrapped in a towel – I found that the bed by then had three occupants. Well Ursula was in the bed, the children were on top of duvet one either side of her.

Ursula sat there grinning; the two children eyed me with a little suspicion in their expressions. There-followed, the ubiquitous pregnant pause.

"What happened to your moustache?" my daughter eventually asked me, breaking the silence.

"Your hair's very short as well." My son commented, probably not wanting to be out-done by his sister.

"Hi kids, this isn't quite the way I expected to meet you." Was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.

"We couldn't wait any longer, we knew you had to be here when we heard the..." My daughter suddenly decided she might be saying the wrong thing and stopped mid sentence.

A look of horror came over Ursula's face and a big smile came over mine.

You know they say that one thing you can always be sure of, is that the truth will out from the mouths of innocent children. My daughter's comment about me having to be there because she'd heard the bed creaking, assured me that no other had trespassed where I had that night. Well not for a very long time anyway.

Suddenly my son jumped to his feet, took down my old guitar and held it out to me.

"Play something!" he demanded, quite sternly.

"God son, it's years since I've picked out a tune on that old thing, and I weren't too clever with it anyway."

"Please?" My daughter insisted.

Ursula just sat there grinning.

After a lot of tuning I gave them a short rendition of "Where have all the flowers gone." Or rather, croaked as I picked it out; Ursula joined in and sang along.

"Okay fine, I believe that you are my father. But why did you have all your hair cut off?" My son asked after I'd stopped playing.

"They've only seen pictures of you from the house." Ursula informed me.

I can only assume that Ursula picked those up at the same time she recovered my guitar. I... we hadn't had a chance to grab anything the day of the raid. I also became conscious that Ursula had not called it a commune; she'd referred to it as "the house." I figured she was thinking ahead and did not wish our children to try the same experiments that we had.