Sometimes, on the ward, within the shell of my outer silence I imagine I'm going back home. The place has been abandoned since the late '60s. As I approach I see that while everything has changed nothing really has. It's just the veneer of destruction, the scorched pumps and the broken glass of the kiosk, the café and the flat above it burnt to a skeletal frame.  It was in that flat that my father listened to his music: Erik Satie evoking the empty salons of long ago Paris, or Vaughn Williams celebrating the overripe English countryside somewhere beyond the endless verges by the side of the dual carriageway.

During the day he sat in the kiosk glaring out as each car approached, forcing him to scuttle out to man the petrol pumps. I'd be in the café with the radio on. The Stones, the Who, Cream. I dreamed of meeting them and running away, becoming a muse. It didn't feel totally unlikely because there were always musicians in the café. They stopped on the way to their gigs. Flirting with me as I served up egg and chips and frothy coffee. I liked them. The Boswell Incident, the Gazelles. They'd sign a photo and we'd stick it behind the counter of the café. I think that's how our little garage got to be such a regular stop.

"Who's he?" I asked Big Dave of the Gazelles.

There was a slim boy sat at one of the far tables, his hair flounced half way over his eyes. He was scribbling furiously in a notebook hardly stopping to sip his coffee.

"Oh him," said Dave, "he's going be a big star. Or so he says. Calls himself Richie Vanilla."

As though by some magic he turned his head and looked over at me and for a moment his bright green eyes were all I could see.

I wiped my hands on a tea-towel and picked up a tray. I went over to the table. It didn't matter that there wasn't anything to collect. I was confident like that back then.

"What you writing?" I said standing over him.

He looked up and smiled. "My first number one hit," he said.

"You're flash."

And we both began to laugh.

"What's it called?" I asked.

He told me. Another song with love in the title. I thought it sounded a bit lame. A few weeks later I heard it on the radio.         

The strange thing to me was not that Richie Vanilla got into the charts but that when he did, when he started to become sort of famous, he still came back to our garage. By then the Gazelles were supporting him in places like Mothers in Birmingham and the teaching training college in Coventry.

"I think he likes you," Dave said winking.

"Shut up."

"Well he don't come here for the chips."

It was true. I'd never seen Richie eat anything. Just drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. I'd sit opposite him while he scratched away in his notebook looking up occasionally to smile.

Around us the band members and roadies were at the pinball machine or tucking into their food. But when I was next to Richie we were in a halo of calm, nothing else around us mattered, nothing could touch us.

Or so I thought until father was standing at the door.

"What you doing, Carol? Get on with some work."

People were looking at him as he stood there. Thin and unkempt, his face without any nameable expression.

Later that night in our flat I lay on my bed. Father's music drifted in from the front room. That sweeping movement that I knew was from Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead. He'd explained it to me once, showing me the cover of the LP with its distant island, the cypress trees and the stone gates of the mausoleum built into the cliff. The waves of the music carry you onwards towards that island from where there can be no return.

Then within the music father's voice came, as clear as if he was next to me in my bedroom, as though he were knelt down and whispering his sneers into my ear.

"You think he will take you away from here, take you away into another life. But as soon as he drives off he forgets this place exists, forgets that you exist. He goes to his life of frivolity, that excrescence he calls music. It isn't music at all…"

"I will get away," I said.

"You'll be here forever."

"I won't." I shouted.

"What? What?" and now father's voice was from where he sat in the front room.

"Nothing."

The last time I saw Richie Vanilla was just after the third single came out. He'd moved from being the guy with the guitar on his own to having the Gazelles as his backing band. Music was beginning to change, there was something heavier and darker moving into it as the summer approached.

He sat like he always did. Coffee cup, notebook. An unlit cigarette dangled in his mouth. For the first time I felt nervous about going over.

"What can I get you, sir?" I said, but I was giving him my best wry smile.

When he looked at me it took a moment for him to come back from somewhere else entirely.

"How you been?" I said, sitting down. "It's all going pretty well for you isn't it?"

"I suppose," he said.

"You want a light for that?" I nodded at the cigarette in his mouth and handed him my matches. I took one of his cigarettes for myself. Around the café the band members and the roadies were shouting, laughing. Once again we were detached from all that, caught in each other's presence. Smoke drifting around to shelter us. I wished it could stay like that forever.

"Perhaps I should write a song about you," he said.

"Sure," I laughed.

It was a joke, he was teasing me. I wanted it more than anything.

"What would you call it? The Waitress? The Garage Girl? The Petrol Station Waif?"

But he didn't laugh. His green eyes took me in and his thoughts seemed to stray somewhere I couldn't go.

They all stayed too long that afternoon. Someone had been drinking who shouldn't have been. Just outside of Birmingham, the van left the road and turned over as it tumbled down a verge. I imagined myself next to him, cradling him as he died. As the light goes out.

"What's a matter with you?" Father snapped.

I was standing at the counter.

"Nothing."

"Why you blubbing, girl?"

"It's just…"

"Oh yes. I heard that on the wireless. That nancy boy of yours. Mashed up on the side of the road. Well they will drive like that won't they?"

"Shut up."

He began to laugh, the sound of it echoing in an empty place inside of me. Echoing that night on the deserted forecourt where I wandered. Lingering as I went towards the pumps feeling for the matches in my apron pocket.

There never was a song written for me, although sometimes I think there must have been. They say it is part of my delusional belief system. They tried to help me with that back when I used to talk about it. Back when I used to talk. I believed it so much that I felt I could evoke another world where Richie Vanilla wrote a song about the garage girl. Yes, I like to believe that. It would begin with drums beating a fast rapid beat, moving everything on towards the dark climax of the decade's end. Then as the guitar and bass come in, Richie begins to sing.