We are on the solstice day. The longest night the shortest day and house is full of hippies with load of “ Good” acid. I should have known  what was going to happen but I’ve grown stale, apathetic, being incarcerated like this has dulled my senses, I feel old and apathetic. My party days are far behind me and apart from the occasional short symbolic attendance at one of the towns impromptu shin digs, I rarely get out. I’m a has been in this city now, the generation of kids have truly taken over and all the old crew are either in India or California. 
This place has become a retro-womb for me,somewhere I suspect I have  regressed into in one of those self made psychotherapeutic hibernations that’s lasted twenty years too long. 

My pot belly stove has been literally glowing since mid-November heated to a super hot red so that I can cook on. There’s a permanent kettle full of near to boiling water on it ready to dish out my favourite herbal tea, a small comfort I really cherish. The stove’s been stoked constantly with a supply of well seasoned beech and ash logs that I have collected over time from the local beech and ash islands in neighbourhood. Feeding fuel into it is a sort of meditation, a hypnotic ritual that takes me out of myself and lets me forget my sedentary lifestyle.
Gazing through  its mica window I can lose myself in the glow of embers like in nothing else except the night sky. Last month’s huge looming winter moon is well behind us now and tonight’s sky has darkened to an inky blackness so flat that it lacks all perspective, it is free of clouds, no sky bound foreground and the constellations are frozen above me like the lights of a distant country seen from a plane. I am so easily entranced by one and the other in turn, captivated by fleeting memories and thoughts of what the future holds for me that I forget to close the windows and stand there letting the heat out. 

The winter has me hopping with a strange sense of impatience, something about to happen but I don’t have a finger on quite what, there is so much life in this house but it is closed off, sealed in its own environs by the cold. Then I hear it. A guitar, cranked to full, “zzzzzjelangs”, into the intro of Hey Joe in the Hendrix style but less perfect of course. The unmistakable calling card of beautiful Sam. A few unmistakable chords rise to fill every corner of the inner house. I’ve no doubt that every flat, evry nook and cranny, evry bedroom with a sleepy tennant is as full of that noise as mine is but it’s not a cacophony. The only one who could consider it a cacophony is Grace but then I hear the screech of an electric violin following behind the guitar in a roller coaster glissando that seems to follow what the lyrics ought to be. Hey Joe where you going with that gun in your...but now in improvised staccato trills. Their brilliant. A delay and echo pedal kick I and now it seems as if a bank of violins has joined them. Sam’s guitar overlays more chords until they collide and contradict each other. He presses the off button and the angels are with us again. Behind all this I then catch the strains of several voices, a mixed cat’s choir, of youngsters with perfectly preserved vocal chords unlike mine that have been steeped  in alcohol and tobacco for almost forty years. Solstice celebration no doubt. I can guess whose there. Everyone except Theodore. Sure enough. 
Looking down from the upper balcony I can see the complete house, plus lots of anonymous dreadlocked heads. Sam and Grace are playing close to Sam’s flat from where they’re drawing power, a stack of amplifiers behind them. Grace has taken her arm out of the sling and is playing a horizontal violin at the level of her curvaceous belly, Sam is thrashing his guitar and others are tapping tambourines, djembe’s, anything that makes a noise. Maggie even has a penny whistle  even though no one can hear it. Gideon is dancing with Everton, who I haven’t seen since the theft of his stock and a hippy girl in a long red velvet coat, twirling alone in dervish style, one hand up to the roof , the turned down to the lino. The scene is beautiful, almost Star wars like, it a Mo Eisely’s cantina scene. Two dozen people dancing, eating , drinking. All  Together. And as I predicted Theodore is looking down on the scene from his side of the lower balcony.

“ Great isn’t it ?”.
“ Christ”, Harry surprises me.  “Kids living the dream, the dream we had once. Peace man, peace love and friendship, the rainbow warrior of the world dancing for the pure joy of it.”. I didn’t reply. There was something perfect in the vision that transported me back to the early seventies when we put trees through entire houses, caught magic buses and smoked in the Pudding shop. “ It’s not over for some people Stack , they still believe in the ideals that we had. Ban the bomb, flower power, God in the psychedelic experience, the dissolution of the ego.”...” And now ?”, I asked. He fixed me with a look. “ God knows..celebrity?”.
Harry’s  voice trailed away to a nostalgia filled whisper that faded further into a trail of disillusion. We looked down on the dance lost in our own world of empty dreams. “ Come on Stack let’s go down, join them and their vegetarian midwinter Samhain extravaganza. Let’s dance even though this place is a gothic fairy tale and not Goa..” 
So that’s where he was Goa. 

Harry then took me by the hand. I couldn’t resist him. He took me by the hand and led me all the way down to the hall, twisting with me down the staircases until we reach the hall and stepped off the last step together presenting me like a debutant arriving for her first dance. I was in tears. Twenty years ago my fellow house mates were being boxed and buried and today as near as damn it to the anniversary I was dancing to the rebirth of the sun and perhaps even to the rebirth of my own self. The crowed welcomed us both in to their midst as if we were both long lost prodigals.

Rolli passed me a thick joint, Maggie grabbed my arm and flung me in a barn dance swing into Louise who threw me off in another whirl into the embrace of the sweetest little a blue eyed hippy I have ever seen who smiled and rollicked as if she was riding a hobby horse. I passed her the joint and found a beer thrust into my hands. Sam took up the song he was playing something modern by Radiohead or Coldplay who cared. Grace grabbed Harry and hugged him closely and Louise danced away with some kid who looked like a red Indian with a pair of pony tails. Rolli sidled up to me and whispered , “ That acid is  boomer man, absolutely ..the biz” and handed me the vial. “ Don’t do more than two drops or you’ll manifest a third eye and see the place for what it is. “ What the fuck are you on about ..” I asked him, incredulous and slightly peeved that he should suggest something in such a mysterious and  conspiratorial manner. “ Rolli , I live here, I know what it is..”, “ No man..there more to this place than you think..”, with that he danced off leaving me to contemplate his words and as I did , Maggie got hold of me . “ Stack..come on dance and celebrate its solstice..”. 
Rolli’s words had knocked me sideways and as Maggie literally shook me, I looked at the tiny brown vial with the dropper rubber as a lid. “We’re past Samhain  and from now the days get longer, no more dreary nights Stack..” She sang at me, her voice yodeling over the music which was beginning to piss me off. Maggie guessing my mood quickly dumped me and moved on and the young hippy girl with the red velvet coat took on where she had left me, “ I’m Bow, “, I looked at her quizzically because she added “ Short for Rainbow. Rolli’s mate - not his girlfriend just a friend.”, she couldn't have been more than twenty five, a woman but less than half my age or more emphatic about her relationship with the dread locked Rolli. 

“ Rolli told me about you, he thinks you’re a true warrior, in the vanguard of the rainbow people.. a pioneer of the old school.”, I laughed feeling slightly embarrassed to be flirted to by such a beautiful girl. “ Modesty will get you everywhere ..”, she added, squeezing my hand and smiling while holding my gaze. Five hours later we were still in my bed making love on the best acid I’ve  dropped since the Isle of Wight.  
  
                                                                   *******************
Her love making wasn’t faked, I could sense her body quivering with sincerity. She held me so tenderly and so closely that I felt her skin quiver with excitement as it let go of all its stress and doubt. I didn’t disappear in the voracious clutches of a nymphomaniac or become some sort of indulgent, selfish experiment. She was with me, interacting, pulsing, feeding and being fed by my presence. This was for real , I wasn’t a conquest or a trophy fuck. We melted into each other, me closer to sixty almost haggard and desiccated by age, she a mere half or less of my age. In the full flush of summer womanhood. 

It had been a long time since I had had a woman in my bed, longer since I had been affirmed by true feminine presence so intimately, so sensitively. I could have cried with thankfulness but I kept back the tears because I was afraid of seeming too pathetic and scaring her off. I needn't have been afraid of that. She stayed with me all day and all night, lying against my chest and whispering songs and stories of her dreams, where she had been, how she had left home and taken to the road in search of the answers to those great questions that I thought young people didn’t ask anymore. She was twenty five years of age and yet there was so much of her honesty still present that she was still a child. She had escaped that layer of frosty cynicism that seems so common to people nowadays. She still was pristine and pure in all her hopeful and dreamy ways.  

I obliged her first with a compilation of Cat Steven’s on the old hi fi. Incredibly she had never heard of him and I sat upright against the lumber headboard of my legless bed with on lain my chest, her long hair strewn over my thin scraggy old body. Her pure ivory skinned face, unblemished, her eyes clear and bright as they looked into mine as every so often her thick red lips occasionally nipped at my skin making me wince and her laugh. For a more than a few minutes I felt as if I dreaming, transported to a fantastical world of own imagination and wish fulfillment, a Freudian nirvana of male desire. Then she would speak, say something completely sublime to my ears, comment on Cat Steven’s songs or ask where I had been in the early seventies as a young man on the hippy trail, ask me what Afghanistan was like and comment on the war, pointing out the irony I had long been aware of. She hated Blair which was a plus, hated how politics had betrayed the very democracy it was supposed to be upholding. “ The only thing that matters is love just like He said..and love is all He said”.

Then without warning she would playfully grab my cock and tenderly bring him  
to life, coaxing my waning virility to come to the surface and engorge my penis. Gently she would sit on me and push it into her and fall on to my chest letting my phallus rise and nestle into the folds of her inner womanhood, nestle there like a bird in a warm nest. Then as she moved gently taking me further and further in to the fleshy inner curves of her she would kiss me, sometimes brushing away my moustache so as to seal her full and fleshy lips to mine and rise and fall and rise and fall until she orgasmed.  Again and again she gasped at my presence within her as I lay prone, my head pressed against the bed rest gasping as she pushed me on and on into ecstasy.

On the hi-fi the Cat Steven’s compilation was playing Catch a Bull at Four, his voice shrieking jarringly about Freezing Steel but I was furthest from that sentiment a man could ever get as she collapsed on to me panting as she sought my face out and rained little kisses onto me literally showering me in her love. We stayed there immovable for what seemed like years until eventually a simple hunger for food drew us out of the bed and into the slightly chilly air. The chill made her nipples rise and I pulled her to me feeling their hardness press against my abdomen.
Finally after reflecting on her magical presence I let her go . We showered, each taking our time, separately because the shower cubicle was too small to soap each other down but visited to feel her round full buttocks every so often while I cooked to the sound of King Crimson’s classic Court of the crimson King album. 
Then Bow mischievously rummaged through my closets looking for warmer clothes than what she had with her when she suddenly came across my old Afghan. Her face lit up as she realised what it was, she had seen countless photographs of hippies at festivals and on the road I suppose but now she had an actual original Afghan in her hand. A piece of British hippy history. She danced a jig and threw it over her but only after I stopped her and made her put on a shirt.

Now I knew why I had  kept it all these years dragging it like a trail rag from house to house and sofa to sofa like a fool  or a kid with his security blanket. This was the payback for all those times I was thrown out of places after a rain shower because I stank to high heaven. It was just a ragged stinking goat skin coat, with curly  hair hanging from the cuffs complete with the decals I had sewn on to it as a youngster in the very early late 60’s but she was utterly delighted with it. In an instant a gave it to her as a gift. She put it on and danced round the room to Crimson’s Moonchild and as I fried the eggs she had found  I began to weep with happiness at the blessing that had visited me. 

I  knew she would eventually leave she had too but for the moment she was mine to love.  From the same closet she drew out my photo box, my pictorial biography and without asking plunged her hand straight into it and drew out a selection of images from my past. Who was I to stop her plundering my memories, she seemed to treasure my past more than I did so I let her.  I listened chuckling and weeping as she danced about laughing and commenting on how much I had changed. She ambled coquettishly over to me looking like something I had seen over forty years earlier in the bazaars of Aleppo, momentarily transporting me back to Syria.  I fried the eggs while she chuckled like a little girl, waving images and commenting on how lanky and skinny I was back then.
“ Well I haven’t changed much have I  ” ? I teased her trying to butch myself up. “ Just thirty eight years gone by that’s all...”. The poignancy in my voice was palpable and it took the wind out of sails.
“ Come on let’s get the food sorted..”, I interjected into the silence.  

She being vegetarian I made a mushroom pasta spiced with chilli and thickened with tomato and then swopped the cooker for the shower. She finished off the food by brewing herbal teas and toasting some cheese to go with the eggs that she’d found somewhere. Still naked we ate at the table while she hugged herself in my antique coat, that was smelling only a fraction rancid by now having been in my  wardrobe for nigh on twenty years. 
She giggling as she went through the handful of pictures she had with her.. We were about to dive into bed again when there was a tapping at the door but she didn’t want me to tell anyone she was here, so when I answered I batted Rolli’s enquiry away. He left and once again we fell into the bed and pulled the covers over us, this time laughing in mock conspiracy. 
“You looked a bit like a hunky Mick Fleetwood back then Stack..you’re not an old Mac member gone crazy are you. Come on you can tell me I’m not a reporter stalking you...!!”, she laughed, her full breasts bouncing against my arm, her nipples taut and stimulated with the slight chill in the air rubbed against my arm and I felt the twinges of an erection begin. For a moment time stood still and I drank in the sight of  her incredible beauty as she held out a picture of me at one of the early seventies wagon festivals that were organised back then. She showed me it as she curled up her hair and pinned it back with some sort of African hair clip. I grew harder as I felt my cock skim her thigh which rode over mine and rested on it.

I was stood near a farm trailer with straw bales in a row ready for an audience to take seats. To my side Marc Bolan was posing for someone else’s photo’s getting ready for an early Tyrannosaurus–Rex  gig, down south somewhere. True enough I was a gangly twenty year old  with hair down to my waist. I was bare chested with a Stetson perched on my head. A group of roadies were carting amps and guitars behind me. I remembered every detail but to her I had forgotten. Why? Simply so as to avoid telling her how much in love I was the girl who took it. She had died of cancer six months after the photo. The date was 1971, August. I was twenty.
“Can I have it...Please Stack can I keep this to..”, I knew she was going to say “Remember you by..”, so I shushed immediately and yes feeling my heart fall as the first stirrings of our goodbye began to rise in me. I fell silent as she laughed with glorious satisfaction still looking at the photo. Then she threw it to the bottom of the bed and climbed on me again. I felt her moist womanhood literally slip over my thigh and find my semi-erect manhood, tired and lost in its creased folds. She hit my mouth with her lips and sucked the very dregs of my life out me with her kiss as she placed me within her. 

It had been two days since the party downstairs and we had not ventured out even though we were in need of supplies. We stayed huddled close to each other whenever we could find an excuse. For food, Bow threw together all manner of concoctions from the back of the cupboard shouting out the best by dates as if she was reading the dates on gravestones as she made choking noises  and pretending to stagger, poisoned by three year old lentils and out of date Campbell’s soups. 
I played classical music incessantly, Debussy, Brahms,  read her poetry from the Gulags and the Russian classics, Mandelstam Pasternak and told stories of the hippy trail before the Russians closed it off forever which she listened to avidly as if she was taking in the history of a lost tribe. I showed her a series of rare Lebanese hashish seals I had kept from the old days, embossed onto the original packaging from the seventies, which to her were a strange collection of  cultural icons that made her both laugh and literally coo in awe as she imagined the good old days when we could smoke clean hash that was free of diesel and P.V.C. 

I explained the history of hashish, how clean and pure it was and how the high was totally different from the stinking stuff the kids are losing their minds to now.  She held them, smelt them, tasted them. The rich scarlet plastic covers embossed with Arabic, triple zero’s , some with lions and eagle’s. Each one the embossed calling card of a tribe high in the mountains of Bekkaa. Each one  unique and now sadly disappeared. 
We stayed naked. Kicking our clothes and that old coat to the corner of the room, I fed the pot belly with splinters of wood that I found scattered round the place, behind the sofa or in the recesses of the cupboards until eventually it came down to me feeding old books into its ever hungry mouth. A great excuse to get rid of those sci-fi collections that I had grown out of, as well as the alien mysteries or  ancient chemistry books I had picked up from downstairs. 
We lived joyously in a soft warm light behind thick drawn curtains, surrounded by our own dancing shadows, our bodies reduced to silhouettes. She became an erotic shadow play lit by the stoves low volcanic glow that combined with the pearly light of candles I placed here and there. The curve of her buttocks and the rise of her breast picked out like hills with the dying sun behind them. Time seemed to stop and for a while I became the man I once thought myself to be, I regressed to my twenties when Ursula and I were together and as Bow  moved around me, tenderly brushing my flaccid stomach or tweaking my buttocks with her thumb and forefinger all my heartache and loss disappeared until I could stand it’s loss no longer and began to weep. 

It was then that she revealed herself for what she truly was. A soul of immense compassion. She took me in her young arms and held me as I wept uncontrollably. She said nothing, did nothing except hold me until the tears past of their own accord. A sudden shower of emotional release.  

That night, our last night,  I told Bow about Ursula, how we had met in Belgium as we were both hitchhiking and teamed up, fallen in love and followed each other across the world travelling on magic buses from Istanbul to Kabul, swimming in the Indian ocean and hitching rides to Oman on dhows that lasted for a month .  I told her of my crazed European adventures when I had to return to university and how Ursula had followed me back here to move I with me and die suddenly  just six months later leaving me utterly broken. And all the while Bow held me in her arms like a baby occasionally kissing my forehead and sobbing with me as she entered my world of loss.. 

I don’t know how many hours we remained like this, in silence, in utter breathless love and bliss but eventually I had to move. My legs were numb and I howled as I did so breaking that sacred silence we had held like a crystal vase thrown against a wall. Searching for relief she began telling me stories of her life, as she laughed me hopping about trying to alleviate the stab of horrendous pins and needles. She told me stories of long sojourns in the south of France, swimming naked in warm lakes, the occasional squat in Belgravia  and police oppression from around the many festival sites. Battles that she had witnessed as she passed by with fellow travelers or evictions she had served on her as they battled rod development schemes. It was in things like this that she found her source of anger. A second hand anger that I realised was to make up for the lack of anger in the rest of her life. A life which was supremely suburban and predictable and privileged. Bow was a beautiful, soft spoken trustafarian but I didn't love her the less for it. Life moves on and values and beliefs change. Bow was a product of a different time from me but her heart lay in the original hippy movement. Perhaps I was a trophy fuck I thought but didn't dwell on it.  
Eventually she asked me about Operation Lacy and as we supped herbal tea I told her of how I found myself, after the death of Ursula, so totally bereft that I agreed to run some acid across the country for some old university friends and ended up at the center of the biggest bust on the British mainland ever. Something that cost me two years of my freedom and changed my life forever something I have never truly escaped from. No one wants a drug dealer to work them so here I am  thirty five years later aged 59, unemployed and single, living in a fairy castle encased in ice , fixing other people’s meters for a living. She got the self deprecating irony in my voice and laughed just as there was a knock on the door. “ Rolli getting lonely I suppose..” she said searching for a dress or some cover as I walked to the door expecting a sad looking Rolli. Instead I found Louise with Gideon. 

“ Stack ..sorry but Theodore’s gone ape. He banging his head against the wall and talking to himself”. “I’m sorry to ..interrupt you”, she added averting her gaze as Bow came in to view naked. 
“ Alright give us ..me a few minutes Louise 'n I’ll be down in a sec’. Gideon..you ok mate?  Don’t worry dad’ll be fine.”