You were the match, I was the rock

Not quite half your age, I was 15 and you were 29 that summer. It was the first time you ever touched me, arms around my back, outside the staffroom. Take care of yourself, Laura. It was like being kissed by a Priest, tender, gentle. You were my teacher and the object of every desire I had that summer and for a lot of the summers afterwards. I imagined being your wife, your other half, the mother of your children. The whole future lived out in my head before I was even old enough to marry you.

If I could be with you, I knew, just knew, that I would be one of those lucky people who get to be with the one they really should be with. The sexual attraction to you was jolting, a kick in the stomach whenever I saw you, and I had never had sex. I just knew, without doubt, that we were supposed to be together. You wore a blue shirt that day, which prickled with static under my hands, on your back. The electricity made us both jump and I looked at you, so much older than me, with all the trust that I would have for my father, none of the men in my life had taught me not to trust. I longed to touch you. The attraction that punched me in the gut set my skin on fire. I wanted to feel your skin and have you on and near and in me. I had never known an urge so strong, a desire so great. I had never been so compelled to do anything as I was to be close to you.

Six months later, and well on the way to whatever it was, grooming, slow-burn, I sat in my bedroom and stared out at the black of the night, wondering where you were and what you were doing. I wonder, did you ever think about me in those months, before you told me, hand wringingly, that you loved your wife but that you were sure too, that you loved me, and when you thought about the future, really thought hard about being old and having children, it was my hand you were holding- not hers. You must have thought of me. Imagined me. That night, 13 months before it happened, I prayed a silent prayer; that one day I would hold your hand and you would tell me that you loved me.

Be careful what you pray for, little girl.

Missed a beat

"Hello, is Laura there?" I was thrilled, thrilled that you would call me, thrilled that I did not sound like myself. Towel around my head, sick to my stomach, I laid down on my bed with phone in hand. I had seen your number flash up on the phone and I was so scared to answer it, but never for a second would I not have. Nothing as wonderful as this had ever happened to me before. 

"This is Laura." 

"You sound different on the phone." 

"It’s my telephone voice." 

I loved you, I loved you, I loved you. I wanted to tell everyone. He is ringing me on the phone! This is the beginning of it. The beginning of my life. It took seventeen years to get started, but here it is, from Technicolor to monochrome, the opposite to The Wizard of Oz. My life, from now on, I thought, will be in black and white. Black and white with French subtitles and French cigarettes held rakishly between finger and thumb. Pressing problems: where would I buy condoms? Not from the chemist down the end of the road. Someone might tell my mum. And I would have to learn to smoke. 

I knew your life as if I had lived it myself, from your registration in that big book in Somerset House, your name tucked between a Catherine and a Beth, dusty and beautiful, your serial number of birth written down in my diary, to right here and now on the phone to me. I knew the dates and the times, the places, the black and the white and I knew you needed saving. I was the girl who was going to do it, I knew that much. This phone call was the start of all of it, of the drama and the passion, of the marriage and the marriage bed. I had barely had sex and I was terrified and aroused in equal measure when I imagined sex with you. In fact, I couldn’t imagine sex with you, it seemed as mystical an idea as to be otherworldly. You had been elevated to a God-like status in my mind and therefore I couldn’t imagine you as copulation, procreation. And yet to me you were sex, you were the very essence of the word. It oozed from you like it was your blood and my desire was the knife cutting you open. You made me shudder with desire and with bound-up longing. The first time that you touched me, I thought that I would die from it, short fingers along my spine and against my cold skin you burnt me and yet I would have paid every penny I was ever owed for you to scorch me again. When we fucked- and we fucked, we never made love or had sex, we fucked- you killed me a little more each time but I signed my own death warrant a thousand times over. 

We kissed for the first time on a Tuesday, we fucked for the first time on a Wednesday, you told me you loved me for the first time on a Friday and then all those years later you left me on a Sunday. Solomon Grundy, born on Monday said the rhyme in my head. Taken ill on Thursday, worse on Friday, died on Saturday, buried on Sunday, that was the life of Solomon Grundy. Your heart beat in tune with the rhyme as I lay on your chest, ear to the hollow chamber inside. “I can hear your heart” I whispered into the dark and stroking my hair you whispered back, 

“It’s beating for you.” Badoom, badoom, badoom. 

Your heart is still beating inside your chest, still beating for me, and I am not there to hear it. 

Mansfield

I never told you this, of course. I was high on a hill, and could see down towards the town. It had been raining, and I could see from my vantage point that on one side of the town, it still was. That side stood in shadow, but the clouds had parted somewhere above an old church at the bottom of the hill, and on that side there was no cloud, just sunlight and I thin, almost transparent rainbow. Stepping out of the station I could see Mansfield laid out before me. This was where you were from. The accents on the train had been your accent, soft and Midlands with short “a”s that missed out the “r” in “bath” and “path”. I wanted to throw my arms around every person I encountered who spoke like you: one day, I wanted to say, my children will be half this. This was your heritage. It was marvellous; It was grim, and dirty and real and it was beautiful to me that day. I could not imagine not being from London, not being near to greatness. This was near nothing good, and that gave it a charm, not that you would want to grow up here, but it was sweet, this market town with its flagstone square and cobbled borders. I saw hire-purchase shops from the train window and tried, and failed, to imagine a world where you would need such a shop. Not this far into the new century, prospering as we were then, no economic downturn in Essex. I was already storing up my Essex-girl-in-the-north stories for when I got home. I went into a chippy and they asked me if I wanted gravy on my chips. Too cliché. Better was the tale about how I asked for a vodka and tomato juice in a pub and it might as well have been a White Russian. When they located the tomato juice it was past it’s sell by date. I would tell this story in Hoxton with the low chuckle of the Cockney. It was quaint that you were from such a place. I liked it, I wanted to stay.

The hill was steep, and my legs overtook me, used as I was to the flats of the south. As I half ran, half skipped down the pavement on the hill, I saw that the sun was stronger, the rainbow more tangible now, I could make out all of the colours. The sun hit the bottom of the hill in a strange way as I approached it; dark clouds parted to let weak, winter sunlight underneath the black, and it looked for all the world as though the sun really was shining on this market town that had raised you. You told me that you would be at the bottom of the hill and so you were, standing waiting for me in the winter sunshine, smiling and lovely. I threw waved self-consciously, and you waved back. I wished I was the sort of girl who could throw her arms around you, kiss you on the mouth, tell you how glad I was to see you, how happy I was that you were here and that I was here on these streets that were yours but that were ours now. Instead I took your hand and squeezed it, but I know now all these years later that it was not enough, that I didn’t ever tell you how much I loved you and how much you meant to me. It was only there, standing in the lazy winter sunshine that I realised fully for the first time that you had a past, a real and solid past, and that your past was as important as the future I hoped that I was in. Perhaps it would have made no difference in the end, but our whole life together was based on untruths and like a complicated game of chess, and if I could have been honest with you perhaps you would never have left or thought as ill of me as you later did. Certainly I could have made you realise how much I loved you if only I had been less concerned with the game, with the thrill of the chase and the constant need to win. I should have dropped to my knees at the bottom of the hill and made you understand that my love for you was twice as strong as you knew, that it flowed in my blood, that it would transcend death, it would move mountains. Such clichés drip from my pen and would never have tripped off of my tongue, I would never ever have told you how full my heart was of you. 

In the corner of a dream

I have thought of you every single day that you have been absent from my life. Every single day. Sometimes not for long, often not with kindness or tenderness, but I have thought of you. Is that love? Is that enduring love? Do I still love you? Or is it just like a flesh wound that heals into a scar? There is evidence of it, it is indelible, but it is gone, the pain is gone.

The love that I had for you has been replaced and upgraded, someone else took your position and did it better. They put their hands where your hands had been, they put your lips where yours had kissed and those kisses weren't poisoned. In fact, the love that I received in return for my own was a new and startling revelation: the idea that you could love somebody and them not be unpleasant to you in exchange was life changing. And yet still there you still are, in a corner of a dream, appearing when I least expect it.

Sometimes there has been pain, real pain that I can’t get rid of for hours, day and I am left with you in my head all night. Sometimes it is that dream, the old dream, that you are out of reach, just out of grasp, and I have to get to you. Sometimes you just appear at work or in my house and I have to ask you to leave. In waking life when I try and recall you, always your face is fuzzy, your features blurred and I can’t completely recall your voice, but in my dreams you are as real and solid as you were that first night, unchanged, young again.

Windows to the soul

Do you remember that afternoon in the hotel in Brighton? I hated you that afternoon but I wanted you so badly. What a peculiar paradox. I remember the cloud, the remainder of the argument and the fact that I hated you, didn't want you near me and then suddenly I was pinned underneath you, bound by your arms and legs and being fucked by you whether I wanted it or not. But don't worry, my little rapist, I did, I did want it. "This will teach you to fuck me about!" you shouted, breathlessly, as you pounded me with your fists and held me down with your knees. "You say you hate me, you tell me never to come near you ever again and then you look at me with those eyes." What a strange thing to say, I thought, looking at you through the eyes you spoke of as if I had a choice.

My eyes were a problem. One night inside a tent made of sheets and our own condensation, it was black but you told me that you could see the whites of my eyes... "Bewitching" you called them. That word again, like I was a sprite or somehow otherwise otherworldly. You often said that our babies would have beautiful eyes, the green-blue of yours and the ice grey of mine combining in this fantasy child with beautiful green eyes. Sometimes you told me that I had "fuck me" eyes, that my eyes looking over the top of my glasses were irresistible. Sometimes you accused my eyes of being cold, told me that they changed colour depending on my mood and that when I was angry with you they were darker in a reflection of my mood. I was never in control of my eyes, they were far less windows to my soul than they were windows to yours, showing you what you wanted to see.

Gin

It was gloomy in the pub but busy with people of whom we were only two. I sat at a raw wood table stained with fresh beer and old water stains which had seeped deep into the grain. You were at the bar and because of how busy the pub was, I had been sat there alone for a long time when Gin came over. 

"Dya want another one?" He asked, gesturing to the cigarette in my right hand, which I was smoking right down to the filter. The smoking ban was far in the future, no body thought anything of sitting in the fug of a hundred different peoples exhaled smoke all evening. I nodded and in one, smooth and clearly practised move, he placed the white-tipped Silk Cut into my lipsticked mouth and lit it with the click of a heavy metal lighter. I inhaled. 
"Cheers." I said. 
"You're welcome," and he paused, the inflection in his voice clearly asking my name. 
"Laura." I answered. He nodded. My accent was very East next to his, he was clearly from London too, but another part of it. 
"You're not from round here, are you...?" I asked, and again that same pause with the inflection asking him his name.
"Gin." He said. "And no. I'm from South of the River." I nodded.
"Gin, though?" He smiled, big white teeth that were in sharp contrast to his brown skin. "That's more of a drink than a name?" He laughed. 
"You wouldn't be able to pronounce my actual name." I nodded again, blowing smoke over my shoulder and away from his face. "So, Laura. What you doing here with that old man?" he gestured across the pub to your back, now being served at the bar. I laughed, audibly this time and not the chuckle that had passed for polite tittering previously in our conversation.
"You know Gin, I don't know." I stubbed out the end of the now smoked cigarette. He offered me another and the lighter, I took them both.
"Husband?" He said. I shook my head. "Boyfriend?" I exhaled the first smoke of the new cigarette. You hated me smoking and I smoked them quickly in your absences during the evening. I held out my left hand flat so that the palm was facing downwards and shook it from side to side indicating that that was up for debate.
"Of a sort." Gin smiled widely.
"No offence, girl, " he said, pronouncing girl as "gel","but you're far too beautiful for an old man like him." I gazed across the room at you and thought of how beautiful I had once thought you were. 
"He's not so bad." I replied.
"He makes you sad though, doesn't he?" I didn't know how he knew, this stranger, but he did know. You did make me so sad. I looked away and gulped down smoke and looked back at him, nodding. He brushed the hair off of my forehead and I looked down at his hand as he gently cupped my chin. "This isn't a come on." He said softly, his voice quieter than it had been previously. "I was watching you across the room with him and I can see you love him. But life is too short to be sad all the time. Life is too short to do this to yourself." and with that he dropped his hand and slid the remainder of the box of cigarettes across the table to me. He stood up and I looked across to see you walking back towards the table. You raised your eyebrows quizzically and Gin said, loudly, loud enough that you could hear, "look after yourself, girl." and then looking down at me, he quietly added, "he's too old for you." And he walked away, melting into the crowd.

You always were a jealous man, so I wasn't surprised to see the colour rising in your cheeks as you sat down opposite me and slid a glass of red wine across the table.
"Asking strangers for cigarettes again?" you said, shortly. I nodded, miserably. 
"Yeah." I said, not really engaged, still thinking of what Gin had said.
"He fancied you," you continued, "I saw him touching your face." I looked across the room, into the crowd where Gin had gone.
"He didn't." I said, taking another cigarette from the pack and placing it in my mouth, inhaling the smoke at the exact same second that I clicked the flame of the lighter to life. "He specifically said he didn't." 
"So," you replied trying desperately to look as though you didn't care, that this was amusing to you. You didn't want me but you didn't want anyone else to have me, either. "What was he saying to you?"
"We were just talking about cigarettes." You took a sip from your glass and there was a pause, a beat in the conversation where you could have accused me of lying, and I heard the cogs in your brain clatter angrily against one another as you considered whether to tell me that I wasn't telling you the truth. Your green eyes darkened and I saw it happen, the moment you were going to call me a slut and tell me that I was a liar as well, but then you seemed to think better of it and maybe you were considering your own untruths, so the moment passed. You forced you higgledy-piggledy teeth into a smile and a childhood rhyme came unbidden into my head, "never smile at a crocodile". 
"So," you said, a lighter tone in your voice suddenly, "what was the Asian Lothario called?" I took a sip of my own drink.
"Gin." I replied. You laughed, a genuine laugh this time.
"That's more of a drink than a name." I smiled.
"That was what I said, but he said that his real name was too hard for my clumsy English tongue." I drew on the last of the cigarette and smashed the filter and millimetre of remaining cigarette into the ash tray on the table. 
"Please don't smoke any more tonight," you said with disdain, "you know I don't like it." I raised my eyebrows.
"Yeah because I always do everything you like, dad." I exclaimed, sarcastically. 
"Alright, how about if you carry on smoking all night, I won't kiss you later?" I rolled my eyes and lit another cigarette.
"Maybe I don't want you to kiss me later." And I smiled, broadly and genuinely as I leant across the table and kissed your lips, my mouth full of smoke and knowing full well that whatever differences we might have, you definitely would kiss me later, and that I would let you, even if it would be wiser not to. 

Remember this kiss

I wanted you almost immediately that I met you, but never more so than that night under the bridge.

It was raining, but not romantic rain; cold, horrible, black, Romford rain. I was wet and you were wet and my short hair hung in wet clumps around my face that made me look like a boy with tits. It was January and I was still a teenager. I don’t know if you actually said shall we go down here for a kiss? but that is what happened. We slunk, hand in icy hand, into the shadows, and I stood, tall and shivering with the cold and the damp, against the wall. You pressed yourself against me and I felt you, hard and old against my thigh. You pressed your mouth onto mine and I kissed you and kissed you until I wondered if I would suffocate. I realised suddenly that I would remember this forever, whatever happened I would always remember this kiss, in the shadows, opening my eyes and seeing that yours were open too, huge, fat, black pupils up against my own. I grabbed your head in my hands, and pulled at the hair on the back of your head. You pressed the heel of your hands between my legs and I groaned into your mouth. I had never felt longing like this, passion and terror in equal measure. You tasted wonderful, like wine and the future. You pressed me harder against the wall until I thought my bones would crack, and you pushed me up until my feet were lifted from my shoes and I was suspended, high on the wall of the bridge, kept up by your desire, looking for all the world like someone hanged from a noose. You grabbed my hand and pushed it against your crotch, and I was scared and thrilled and more alive than I had ever been, there with dead leaves under my shoes and dark winter wind throwing my wet hair against my face. I loved you and you had never fucked me, never screamed at me, never thrown me, helpless against a wall.

Welcome to the happy ending.

Over

When the shock that we were over, it was over, my whole bloody life, had started to wear off, and all that was left were the faint blue tinges of bruises on my ribs and throat, the weather took a turn for the worst. It was November by then and the frost had started to come, along with the strong winds that ushered in winter.

The days began early, long grey twilights where I would lay in bed and take Valium to watch the dawn with. Everyone in the house would go to work and I would drink, start drinking at about 10, until I couldn’t focus anymore. Then I would sleep. When I woke again it would be dark and I would have a headache and I would remember that I would never see you again. I would join my family, pale and listless, not eat dinner, cry a little and be told that I had to pull myself together. I would go back to bed, take more Valium, sleep until 3 and then wait again for the dawn.

November gave way to December and Christmas, where I sat and watched as our house was shrouded in tinsel and everybody celebrated as though nothing had changed. I spent new years eve, huddled with Dave on the floor of a house in Manchester, high and low at the same time on coke and weed, bawling crying, telling him that I didn’t know how I could carry on with the rest of my life. In the dark he put his arm around me and told me I would get used to it. It would be okay.

Before

I was a child before. During some of it I was a child, too. You were the line in the sand that separated adulthood for childhood. After your absence became what separated the present from the past.

I was smaller, from nothing at all in the winter of 1984 to 5ft 1” when we eventually met in the spring of 1998. You were 13 years old when I was born, and waiting for your life to start 100 miles up the M1. You were what was missing from those first days in Essex.

I was waiting for you: not you specifically, but the worldly, older boyfriend to come and rescue me from the humdrum. By the time I did eventually meet you, I was only 12 but I felt like I had been waiting for you since I was about four.

What there something wrong with me? I remember sitting in assembly and watching with doe eyes my headmaster who was as old as my dad. Was it because my dad himself was older, nearly forty when I was born? I asked myself these questions and never arrived at an answer. All I knew was that you were The One. How fortunate to meet The One at twelve years old. What could go wrong.