It should never have happened.

I recently recovered this snippet of a story from a crashed hard drive. It was originally intended to be the opening chapter of a novel, based on my recollections of the Rock and Heavy Metal scene in the late '80s and early 90's. Most of the novel was plotted out, but this is all I actually wrote. Raking over old memories simply touched one too many raw nerves.

It should never have happened.

She hadn’t even turned sixteen for Christ’s sake. I had just turned twenty. These days you would be locked up as a paedophile. Hell, I could still be locked up as paedophile. I must be mad writing it all down. The judge would view it as a written confession. Open and shut case. Bang! Five years in the clink. Bang! My name on the sexual offenders register for life. Bang! My life ruined, with no chance of restitution.

As if my life wasn’t already ruined. It was destroyed from the moment I met her. Before I touched her. Before I felt her breath on my skin. Before my chapped lips touched her luscious, succulent ones. The moment Ellie Lynch walked into my life I was doomed. Condemned to a life of tortured longing, of forever striving to regain a lost moment of bliss in my life.

We met and fell in love, and for a brief time life was more wonderful than I had ever thought possible. As it happens I fell in love a bit more than she did. But I guess that’s what happens when you fall for a fifteen year old. Oh, she thought she was in love at first. I remember her telling me afterwards that she had thought I was the one. It sounds so ridiculous now. When you’re a teenager every person you get off with seems like they might be the one.

When you are twenty you are supposed to know better. As soon as you pass the magical number of eighteen all immature thoughts and feelings are supposed to end. On your eighteenth birthday you instantly stop being a child and become an adult. There’s no in between stage. Going out with a fifteen year old is not something an adult would do. It’s not being in love. It’s not a serious relationship. These days it’s called being a sexual predator. It’s called grooming a child for sex.

It didn’t seem like that at the time though. When I was twenty I wasn’t an adult. Sure I was at University, living away from home for the first time. Pretending to be all grown up and intellectual. Or more often than not getting pissed, smoking dope and generally dossing about the way proper students did in those days. Yes I was supposed to be an adult, one of the intellectual elite and destined for a life as a high flyer. But I was still a kid. Hanging around with my mates, getting pissed or stoned. Shagging any girl who would have me. This wasn’t as many as I would have liked, despite the fact that I was in a band, and therefore a bona fide rock god and god’s gift to women.

As I said before, it should never have happened. The day we hooked up I was trying to score with her best friend. It was a Saturday, and as usual I was in The Sanguinarium with the guys. The Sanguinarium was a rock bar where all the coolest people on the rock scene would hang out. People like us. We would turn up at 11am, opening time, and nurse the hangovers we’d picked up the night before at the Majestic Rock Club. My head must have been particularly bad, because I couldn’t face beer. Instead I had smuggled a bottle of vodka into the pub, secreted down the side of my cowboy boots. I spent the rest of the day buying orange juice at the bar and mixing sly screwdrivers under the table.

This naturally made me a target for attention from the younger kids. Partly because they thought I was daring, and partly because they could plague me for a shot of vodka. Most of them were underage and didn’t have the bollocks to go to the bar for their own drinks.

This day there were about a dozen of us in the pub. Four or five of us hardened drinkers, who would stay until closing time before heading back to the Majestic, for the Saturday Rock Club. Then there were the younger guys, who were not old enough to drink legally. They would go home for tea about four o’clock. One or two might turn up at the Majestic later, if they had any pocket money left, and they could find a friend whose house they could crash at for the night.

This day we were joined by a few girls who were not part of the usual crowd. That is to say, they were part of the local heavy metal scene, so our circles had crossed a few times, but they weren’t part of my regular clique. Quite honestly, I don’t remember who most of them were apart from Claire Palmer and Ellie of course.

I’d seen Claire at the Majestic a few times. She was sixteen, tall and quite pretty. She had shortish, curly brown hair which wasn’t really my thing, but I was a horny young man, and she was looking well fit in a figure hugging purple velour mini dress. This was the late eighties scene remember, when glam metal was in, and purple velour and gypsy style skirts were standard uniform for rock chicks.

The guys found it funny to refer to Claire as Farmer Palmer, after the character in the Viz. Not very original, but it amused us at the time. I liked Claire. She was bubbly and intelligent and basically a good girl at the time. That all changed a few months later, when she and another girl became groupies, hitched a ride on a tour bus and spent four days on the road with a well known cock rock band. Afterwards she became a bit of a whore and didn’t mix with our crowd much anymore.

Anyway, this day I thought Claire looked hot so I was doing my best to chat her up. Seemed to be working as well I might add, as Claire hung on my every word and laughed at all my sarcastic witticisms. I think she was particularly impressed by the bottle of Smirnoff stuffed down my distressed jeans.

Thinking back, I realise that Ellie was sitting at my right hand side for most of the afternoon. For some reason she just didn’t register on my radar. She was just some girl chatting to one of my mates. I was engrossed in Claire, thinking we would probably end up snuggled up in a quiet corner of the Majestic, snogging and playing fingerpie. Hell, I might even be able to persuade her to come back to my student digs for a night of lurve.

Sensing victory was near, I decided to get us a couple of glasses of Jack Daniels. Nothing impresses a rock chick more than a guy who plays in a band and drinks JD. Except maybe a guy who plays in a band, drinks JD and rides a Harley. I didn’t ride a Harley, but today that didn’t seem to be holding me back. I lurched off towards the bar, and that’s when everything changed.

And that is sadly where it ends for now. It's a story I'd like to tell one day, but for the moment the time is not right.