November 1971 (part 1)

I want to stay here in this warm, crowded library forever, and tell you about the best year of my life. A year which in my frozen memories is a tornado of chaos and pleasure. Except I can't, because firstly I'm positive that the people involved in my story wouldn't like to be named and shamed, and secondly because I'm not entirely sure it was the best year of my life. So instead, I am going to tell you about Amelia, and the best year of her life. This feels cathartic enough. Amelia was always an unusual child- she spent her days alone playing in the outdoors with nothing but her imagination to keep her company, and she could never sleep because her mind didn't understand how to be quiet. As an adult, she was much the same. She could find magic and beauty in anything, and partly this was because she had no choice. She grew up in our bland home town in the late 1960s, surrounded by socio-political unrest, and life was hard. Her father was an absentee and her mother's presence dominated the everyday world she was forced to live in. But the world that she chose to live in was full of light and vibrancy- until the year she turned twenty. That year, she forgot about the imaginary world which she had always called home, because the real world burst into colour. If you know me, and when you inevitably find out who I am, you will notice that Amelia and I have parallel lives. This is why I have always valued her- she is my mirror and makes sure that I am never alone. She, like I, left school with an ambition: Amelia wanted to become a veterinary surgeon. She was so determined- until she started working at a run down cinema in her home town of Belfast, and she somehow became demotivated. She fell into a quiet and mundane routine, spending her days selling a pitiful amount of tickets to see censored films, and then going home with Arthur and Eileen for bland food before a dark journey home to her mother. But then Arthur left, and took the normality that she mistook for a heart with him. And everything changed.