Cheryl Wilson

Janice is my friend, May is also my friend and my Polish friend, Julie, lives around the corner in Irvine Street – and months younger than me Julie has to get married.  I learn this after I get home from Pascoe Vale Girls and still in my uniform drop satchel to the floor, reach under my bed for the small packet of ten, and tear round to Julie’s to share a quick smoke at the park.  Her mother opens the door. Julie’s not there. Her mother looks terribly serious.  I gape, as her news has thrown me.  She informs me her daughter will be married in a nice Church, that it may even be Blessed Oliver Plunketts.  I immediately sense that I am not invited to the wedding.  I haven’t a clue as to why, maybe it is because of my age.  Perhaps I might need to be escorted by an adult.  I think Julie’s husband-to-be is also Polish, and is a few years older than she. 

I feel slightly bereft as I trudge toward the park without her.  Puzzled that he, Julie’s loverboy has not been mentioned in our chain-smoking jaunts.  Truth is they were always about our primitive girlish concerns – my constant trivia about totally imaginary boys nicely entwined with Julie’s declarations about how much she loved me – with all of it dispelled by our mutual outbursts of laughter; only now it’s all drifted away in the crisp park air just as if it were smoke.  Dejected that something sweet between us has ended, I wander home; and once there I look forward to the bus in the morning so to join May and Janice back at school.  

Copyright Cheryl Wilson, September 2025. All rights reserved; this intellectual property belongs solely to Cheryl Wilson.

About Cheryl Wilson 

Writing stories may be a way of life or as an escape from real life. I enjoy inventing characters and placing them in surroundings once familiar to me – especially our inner northern suburbs during the seventies. I also write shorter pieces about real people who are closer to my heart.

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