Her real name (not Jolene) was very old fashioned for someone who was 13 in 1988. It was the kind of name you’d expect to find in ‘Up the Junction’ or belonging to one of the school dinner ladies. But, like Jolene in the Dolly Parton song, she too had auburn hair and eyes of green, although her prettiness was tragically inverted somehow, rather like the way soap flakes look dirty when stuck to the sink because they’ve already been used.
The first time I met her, she came flip-flopping across the cul-de-sac all arms folded and hunched forward like a proper neighbour. “Are yooouww mooowvin in?” she asked as if through her nose. Seeing as we were emptying furniture from lorry to flat, my mum thought it was a rather stupid question, but being nearly 13 myself, I understood it was an attempt at ‘having a chat’. She then proceeded to tell us all about how she got bullied so badly at the school I was about to join, she had to be taken out and now she doesn’t go to school.
Other nights I would be invited round to eat anything that entailed margarine i.e. corn on the cob or jacket potatoes. She lived alone with her brother and their flat smelt of dusty gas fires and fat. It was lit by bare overhead light bulbs that seemed to bring all the strewn damp socks and hairs closer to you. It also shone on her brother’s greasy, melted-marge smothered chin as he would smugly exclaim, ‘Lovely,’ or some such at his latest mouthful. It was worse if it was corn because his teeth and the kernels were a bit like spot-the-difference.
After the marge would be the marshmallow wafer sandwiches. Pretty pink and white pretend-food that Jolene would unstick from the kitchen shelf and joyfully share, playing wife.
Over the next few months I had a proximity based relationship with Jolene. She’d come to the door and ask, “Are yooouww allowed ouwt?” Having until then lived in a block of flats full of old people, it was a novelty to have a neighbour playmate and an ‘ouwt’ to go to, so I would always accept despite the fact that she seemed somehow missing. She would bring her ghetto blaster and we’d sit on freezing cold swings in the pitch dark park. Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ was the only song I knew amongst all the country and westerns wheezing on her tapes. Every time one of the titles had the word ‘blue’ in it, she snickered. I was sure that ‘blue’ in those kind of songs meant ‘upset’, so I decided that she must have caught some of the rude ‘Blue Triangle’ films that had been on a few years previous and applied it as ‘horny’. I didn’t argue - she was clearly someone who knew about that sort of thing, what with her and her older half-brother always heavy petting at the bus stop.
But, yet again like her eponymous heroine, she herself was not welcome to share when her brother got an actual girlfriend - one with spots so raw you could taste them. Lots of rows and tears followed, and while I saw less and less of Jolene, the flat was receiving other visits. There were changes afoot.
The last time I saw her, I hadn’t seen her for quite a while and there she was on the cul-de-sac. She was crying and she had a crumb on her face. I stared at it while she told me that she was going to be taken away. For good.