𝕃𝕖𝕥 𝕀𝕥 𝔹𝕖 | 𝕁𝕠𝕙𝕟 𝕃𝕖𝕟𝕟𝕠𝕟 ✅

1

26th September, 2021

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And in my hour of darkness there is still a light that shines on me,

Speaking words of wisdom...

Let It Be

Ruby hummed along to the familiar song as she swung her legs against the wall, the sound of the Mersey lapping at the bricks underneath her breaking through her earphones. It was dark and it was cold, and there were definitely safer places to be, but it was her first night in Liverpool, and she wanted to walk in the footsteps of her heroes, The Beatles.

She imagined a teenaged John Lennon sitting here long before she had. Perhaps he had had his guitar strung across his chest, quietly picking away a tune to play for Paul the next time the two of them met.

And then she imagined a slightly younger Paul McCartney and her heart soared.

She loved thinking of her grandfather. She loved everything about him, actually. She loved his music; solo and with The Beatles and Wings, she loved how he joked in interviews, and how he reminisced about 'the good old days' - or the days with the band. What she didn't like was when he was asked about John in interviews because she could see that it upset him from the way that his bottom lip twitched and his pupils shrunk. She doubted that anybody other than her could notice what the questions did to him, and she only knew because she had exactly the same tells when she was upset.

Ruby Pauline Baker was the illegitimate granddaughter of Sir Paul McCartney, international legend, but she didn't really tell anybody about it these days. When she had been eleven and had first found out about who she was descended from, she had told all of her friends - and had had to explain the significance of the man as they had not known - but then she had been laughed at. She had been called a liar. She had been ostracised, and none of her friends had wanted to talk to her after that.

She wished that Paul knew about her and she wished that Paul knew about her mother, who unfortunately was no longer around.

She wished that one day, she would have a chance to know Paul and to speak with him not as a starstruck fan, as she imagined she would upon their first meeting, but rather as a granddaughter talking to her grandfather.

Ruby looked across the Mersey and gasped. It looked like something was streaking across the water, rippling against the waves, but as she looked up she saw that it was only a shooting star.

She had never seen one of those before.

Feeling foolish, she closed her eyes and made a wish, as her grandmother had always told her to do if you saw a shooting star.

"Star light, star bright," she whispered, pausing her music briefly whilst she spoke, "I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I make tonight." Ruby paused, "I wish that tomorrow will be okay, and that I'll fit in. I wish that one day, my grandfather will know me and love me as much as I love him."

Her words, she thought, were ridiculously cheesy, and she felt like a child for wishing on a star, but neither she nor her mum had ever seen one before - her grandmother had, and had told Ruby the story many times.

Ruby recounted the story to herself in the darkness of the Liverpool night, interrupted every twenty metres or so by streetlights which were much too dim. She imagined that her grandmother, Caroline, was next to her in the darkness, whispering to her only grandchild about the night that her life had begun, as she had so often put it.

"I remember that it was Christmas Eve, and I'd just come out of the performance at the Hammersmith Odeon. I'd been right at the front, screaming my head off and trying to grab at the lads' ankles like the other girls, even though we knew that it was all pointless because they were too far back. We'd barely been able to hear them - I doubted, in fact, that they could even hear themselves. Anyway, after the show, I went to the stage door. There were so many girls there, I knew that I had no chance of getting near to the front, so I went for a walk in the nearby park which was just across the road and down the next street. It was freezing - I couldn't feel my hands - but I didn't care. I didn't feel ready to go home yet because I had had such an amazing evening. I sat on the park bench and hummed my favourite Beatles song, and somebody joined in from behind, harmonising over the top. I screamed and the voice laughed. I recognised it straight away without having to turn around, but when I did, I saw Paul McCartney standing in the darkness, doubled over in fits of giggles. I felt so embarrassed because there I was singing his song, and he'd walked in on me doing it! But he was nice, and didn't mind, and he sat down next to me and we talked. I told him that I had been at the show, and that I'd really enjoyed it. Anyway, we got on like a house on fire, and decided to go for a walk along the Thames, which he said reminded him of being back home because he and John used to spend all night walking along the Mersey, sometimes."

Ruby remembered that she would then beg her grandma to get to the gross part. Her grandmother would chuckle and take the hairbrush from the drawer beside the armchair where Ruby would be sitting in her lap, and she'd brush her granddaughter's hair as she continued her story.

"Paul and I ended up talking and walking until the early hours of Christmas Day. Eventually, we got tired, and decided to sit on a bench by the Thames. He joined his hand with mine and rested his head on my shoulder, yawning. I wondered if it was playing the show which had worn him out or if it was spending all night with me. I had opened my mouth to ask him when there was a streak against the water. Paul pointed to the sky, excitedly yelling about a shooting star. As I looked up, my jaw dropped. The star had been the most gorgeous thing that I had ever seen, and it was the night that my life began. As we watched the star, Paul kissed me, and then I kissed him back. We went back to some expensive hotel that he paid for, and we spent all of Christmas Day in bed together."

Ruby had asked her grandmother what they had done in bed, and when she had been a very little girl, her grandmother had told her that they had spent all day watching Disney films and eating takeaway pizza... it was only as Ruby had learnt how babies were made and what sex was that she had surmised that her grandmother and grandfather had probably not spent all of Christmas Day 1964 eating pizza.

Ruby looked at her watch and gasped at the time. Where did the hours go? She decided that she had better head back to her flat, or she wouldn't get enough sleep before tomorrow and then she'd be in a bad mood. She rushed back to her new home, not realising that she had come back with less than what she had left with, and quickly undressed before climbing into her bed. She closed her eyes and thought about what the next day would hold for her.