Rachel Love was the name of the first girl he kissed. Seriously. She was twelve years old and he had tipped thirteen. It was summer term in the stale and dusty stockroom at the back of class six. He kissed her as she passed him clean lined exercise books. Her breasts were unblossomed but his kiss spread across her shoulders and gave her a warm wet tingle between her legs and she pressed her thighs together. His hands on her thin hips were hot , he imagined the softness of her skin beneath seersucker and his heart raced in a disparate way. They spent the summer holidays at the Rec, palming sticky skin and play fighting until they both felt tight with excitement.
When he was fifteen he loved Sally Jones. She was small with full breasts and a corflick. Her skin was oily and smelt of earth. On Saturdays when her parents were out they would lie on her bed and talk about the people they knew . Sometimes she would let him lie with his head on her breasts and he would close his eyes as his hand crept down her belly, her nipple hardening against his cheek. His dreams were full of her flesh and her fringe. There she was eager and lush. Her fingers would trail a lightness over him until he felt he would scream ‘touch me touch me touch me’ as he strained his hips against the soft swell of her stomach.
At nineteen Lucy Coldwell captivated him. Her earnestness made up for her lack of physical passion and he spent countless nights alone in his bed with her in his mind. He defiled her in ways which would have enraged her and the image of her mouth, wet and open in indignation spurred him on. He listened puppy like as she dissected the poetry of William Carlos Williams in clipped tones, her pale hands inert in her lap until they fluttered paper thin and birdlike. He watched her mouth as she spoke and when she said , ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ , he looked to her lap and imagined lacing his fingers into the spring of her hair and lapping with eyes closed to magnify the smell of her.
By the age of twenty five Lucy was a smirk on his face while his heart belonged to Kate Earnshaw. She had a furious temper and he relished fucking her after one of their boiled rows when her cheeks were flushed and anger had tenderised her flesh making her sobs mute and broken. Her laughter was gelogenic and often in the darkest hour when she was sunk in sleep he heard her low giggle and he would curl around her. His ear pressed against her back to hear far away laughter, distant like the sea inside a shell. But her happiness had its nemesis and she would plummet for weeks on end. Her disconnection made him impotent. Her eyes were too deep for him and she could not forget herself. He daydreamed about lighter girls and hated the weight of her loneliness. She was weary before her time. Yet in rare clear blue moments her playfulness was all and everything he needed.
And so it was. There were others too and on most days , prompted by a song on the radio or the tilt of a head or because of countless other tiny things, he thought of some of all the girls he ever loved.
.
I slept well last night apart from the nightmares.
I dreamt I was old and pregnant, a swollen belly and creped skin, hands like my mothers. And then as if by magic I was in a rocky place as people jumped from low crags. I had a special cushion, I was supposed to jump and put the cushion underneath me as I hit the ground. There were cruel boys who laughed because I didn’t realise my cushion had a secret zip which you had to undo to allow a sort of mini parachute to open to make landing easier. Even though their laughter cut and my eyes burned I laughed along with them. I woke myself up laughing. It was most odd.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to love girls. For the feel of them. For their sameness and lack of fear. I imagine myself old with my oldest friend, creased and cuddled in bed after sex has died. I would tuck her hair behind her ears and kiss her cheeks and when I told her I loved her I would really mean it. I would understand.
The songs he sends me make up for his lack of words, they are inextricably linked. To feelings of isolation and lack of control. To emptiness and the urge to run.
My mum had a magnet on the fridge when I was small. It was a wooden elephant with a sign on his side which read ‘Think Thin’. I hated it. I hated the capitol ‘T’s’ , they reminded me of spitting and I wondered why we couldn’t have magnet which read ‘think fly’ or ‘think invisible’. Lower case but with loftier aspirations.
When you are in love with someone everything about them is interesting.Their minutiae is colossal . I want to lap his tears.
When you love someone their idiosyncrasies taste commonplace. He makes me cry.
.
Blue since the first time, a fulsome woman suckled by a child , a blue Charlotte with smoking eyes and fingertips to thrill. A soot blurred space velvet wrapped and thickened into soupy clarity. An altered place where life becomes a draft, a draft for imagination to take prussian blue-dark flights and breathe life into thin times. Watch my lips as I make rings of smoke, the j , the u , the a , swollen against each other, bouldering thoughts and wandering sense. A high-wire funambulist rope walking expanses of elysian blue through and through.
.
When my voice won’t work, when the words won’t form into sounds and spew from my mouth dirty like a drain or iced like a mountain spring, my mind barks ‘write it out’. I wonder how many of these write-it-outs I have done over the years ? Some were resurrected from the backs of shopping lists or the endpapers of books, given a second chance onto a page of type, pieced together with stitches added like the flourish of an embroidered flower. Others met death by fire or lie crumpled still in the bottom of bags, pushed into old suitcases stuffed with life’s detritus. In a limbo world between photographs seldom looked at, alongside diaries of another life they rub themselves dry against spent tickets. I would save non of them. If push came to shove. When the shit hits the fan.
I contemplate all this as I leave graceless corridors. Visiting time is over, another afternoon spent in antiseptic hell where I attempt brave faces and swallow huge doses of helplessness.
Before I open the shop I walk down the narrow pavement to the ice cream place for takeout coffee. A retro palace, it’s a haven for ladies who lunch. Not Nottinghill mummies or Knightsbridge pussies, we’re talking provincial women in country casual or pre-school mums plump and freshly swollen, their whole world defined by baby. As I order coffee that familiar sense of detachment overtakes me and I birds eye the scene. I’m ashamed their lightness angers me. I hate their able limbs and dripfree veins. I want to shout into their made-up faces and punch full bellies free from stoma. I want to be offensive, to wipe smug smiles with the back of my hand, to empty oversized bags and scatter organisation as if I’m feeding chickens. But I take my drink and swallow resentment silently, feel it curdle in my stomach. Mixed with the lead weight of helplessness I’m beginning to feel poisoned.
The street’s a better place and the drizzle springs my hair. I could do without work today.
I’d rather be walking Monmartre cobbles towards an afternoons debauchery like a Parisian whore where baby louis are kicked off and stockings are rent. When frustration hits me in the face I respond with a dull and building ache. Perhaps it’s a defence mechanism, a way of coping but I want those fantasy hours locked in dusty hotel rooms sealed from real life concerns. I want the simplicity of anothers body and the warm spread of wine slugged from the bottle. I want to feel violated and controlled until the sense of helplessness is nothing to do with hospitals and loss but purely a physical thread hanging upon anothers whim. To be taken in coarse abandonement and then soothed and rocked like a baby. Until I know of nothing other than skin and heat and pain and pleasure. Until I can stand bare and stretch languid as eyes feast on me while I pull back weighted drapes to reveal that familiar skyline. Until the heaviness in my limbs is not born of anxiety but made in dirty work, in the physical bloodied fight of a sated need. Until the taste in my mouth is anothers sweet release.
