Another man done gone

As a nine year old, I learnt to play the flute at an after-school music club run at the local Catholic comprehensive school, now doing pretty well I hear but at the time a terrifying place with echo-ey corridors, scarred linoleum and endless teenage pregnancy rumours circulating in rooms with multiple near-identical projects about the Pope stuck on walls of institution green. I was scared. There were some friendly people there though, and one of them was a gentle boy a couple of years older than me, who was better than me but never made a point of it.

Nine years later, we were working together in a restaurant. I was on the bar, he was washing up. We got on. There was a work night out just as acid house hit Blackpool: nightclubs which weeks previously had been playing Whitney Houston and the Timewarp were suddenly home to gurning, sweating hordes in smiley T-shirts with whistles. We were all a bit bemused. We danced together and if I remember rightly he made a gentle pass at me, which I hope I gently rebuffed, though I was not known for my gentleness as a teenager.

I lost track of him for a while, but his mother and mine are great friends, so I heard about him from time to time, bumped into him occasionally in the pub when I went home to visit, and then more often when he started working in the local fishmonger's. The last time I saw him M was buying smoked haddock, and I wandered down the shop to say hello.

On Saturday, he died of meningitis.

I knew he was in hospital, and then I knew he was in intensive care, and then I knew he was on life support, so I at least had some idea, but I arrived in Lytham this weekend to find my mother looking very small and white, and telling me he'd gone. I went out in the evening and found myself telling a whole table full of people who didn't even know he was ill, but who all knew him, who had all known him all their lives. The next day, I found myself telling N&D, who were up for the day with baby C and who knew him too.

He was a lovely guy - quiet, but there in the fabric of the lives of a whole generation of kids who grew up together in a small town. And now gone, too quickly and far too young. It feels like we were all lined up against a wall and one of us taken out at random. It leaves you disoriented, a bit fearful and very, very sad.

joella