There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d arrived in our lives when the sun shone and everything was new, our first May Queen, she had black ringlet hair and the way she would say his name I can still hear now, the slant of a Portuguese accent, she seemed so knowledgeable. It was gradual, this eating less and less, small additions of things cut out, a concoction every morning that we called gretch; garlic, ginger, vinegar and oil, it was for cleansing the liver. We were all of us scrubbing at something. The farm was a revolving door of answers to the question of how to be happy, bloating was her devil, she brought the candida diet. When my husband left, she and the Carpenter left too, they moved into a house in Brighton. A friend saw her at a gig and it was the first time I heard someone say she was too thin. Not long after that, in the hall of her home, she collapsed and was carried by the man she loved to hospital where she died. Her organs had shut down. News reached the commune on a wave of anger, there was blame and talk of curses, her Wiccan circle decided she had higher intentions. Deaths explained with, This was their path are easy to say once they’ve happened. When is it right to step in? What is the moment when your business becomes mine? She had starved herself to death right under our noses and what made me angry at the time and still does now is not that she chose to do this but that her trauma, acted out with food, was couched in an all-knowing wisdom. She was Wiccan and she was wise but she was also an addict and it killed her. We held meetings, her Wiccan friends came, the commune gathered, there was talk of burying her up at the stones, I made promises I couldn’t keep, in the end we planted a tree which her man wrapped in barbed wire, no one could get near, a shrine to pain and her loss beside the newly finished stone circle. It was many years before he took the barbed wire away and we could breathe again. In hindsight it must have been this which made me go to London for a year. I can’t have been in my right mind. I got it into my head that I wanted to be an actor and found my way to the only drama school in England, or perhaps the world, that turned out to be a cult.
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