31

Though I was never destined for the summits of academia, the older I got the more I enjoyed school. I sought and needed it. But it was not what I learned that I’d remember, it was the proximity of that lesson to the first time I felt a girl’s lips placed upon mine.

Sally Bay, Sal, was in my class. She wore make-up, the pinks and blues of a parakeet, which bestowed upon her an allure the other girls hadn’t yet figured out. Boys liked Sal so much that a playful punch from her was consigned an altogether different meaning. Even if it hurt, it was a pleasure. It was attention. It was everything that I’d wanted but had lost now that Mal’s was being so frequently shared, and that because of him Lou would never give me.

It was a warm spring day, the air swirling with pollen and floating seedlings. We were sitting in the park, me, Sal, Sporty Chris, others, pulling those thick yellow strips of straw from the ground with sharp tugs, the way one might pluck the coarse hair from a pig’s back. People were disappearing, home for tea, for television, other callings, until there were just the two of us left. No boys to say funny things before I’d thought of them. No braggarts, no liars, no better faster stronger runners jumpers or thinkers, just me and her.

We were spread out on the grass, unnaturally, pricklingly close. So close I could hear the short bursts of her quick, crisp breath, and it was exciting.

‘Have you ever kissed someone?’ she said.

‘Ha!’ I snorted. ‘Yes,’ I lied.

The anticipation sawed into my skull, a mouth full of frozen ice cream.

‘Want to kiss me?’ she asked.

I turned to face her, our noses almost Eskimo lips brushing. Her eyes were closed, a thick pastel blue. Her face was warmed by the sun and tiny flies buzzed whirlwinds at her ear. You, I thought, you, are the most normal person I know. And I liked it.

I licked my lips, not too wet, and then padded them together just how girls did to remove the grease of a purple cherry lipstick like the one she was wearing that made her lips look both alive and like plastic. And then I pursed them, like in magazines, and drove them forward slowly, like in soap operas, until the faintest of contact was made.

‘Wait!’ she said, and she pulled the coat she’d been using as a pillow up over our heads, as if to prevent the sun from playing witness to our illicit little tryst. As an added bonus, in the unthinkable event that either of us would open our eyes midway though the act – or, God forbid, both do so at the same time – the terrible embarrassment would be muffled by the dark.

And then she drove forward herself, her hand tentatively resting on my belly so as not to embrace it but to be there, scared and rigid. I repeated the act, mirroring her movement but taking the utmost of care not to accidentally brush her breast. Instead, and much to my instant regret, my hand came to rest on her bony rib cage with the static positioning a sprinter might adopt at the starting blocks. She smelled like teenage woman, sticky in the back of my throat. Her lips, as they came to mine, were slightly open, warm and syrupy. Mine, no saliva, were dried instantly so that we scratched and jarred together until I too was coated in a layer of her balm. And soon we were slipping off each other, our bodies wrought iron but our mouths two eels. Our jaws two engines, pumping away, sliding in and out of each other’s hopeless youthful timing.

I opened my eyes as the cymbals clashed inside my head. This felt wonderful. I looked at her, and though I couldn’t see I forgot very briefly everything else that had ever mattered and enjoyed the moment so completely that tears pretended they might form in the corner of my eyes. It lasted mere seconds.

She pulled away and giggled. I smiled back. And then a blankness caked me. I knew nothing to say. There were no correct noises, nor incorrect ones, to be made. Just the rustle of the long grass and the last dregs of pleasure. But I had to speak, to rescue us both. And so I panicked. I imagined Mal speaking to Lou.

‘Do you want to come to my house?’ I said. But I wasn’t him and she wasn’t her. And I was fifteen. And this was ridiculous.

‘Erm . . . no.’ She said. She was blushing. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go home.’

She climbed to her feet, said goodbye and waded through the long grass circle our supine bodies had carved on the ground. Home. But it had been instinct, nothing more. Drummed into me over all these years, an unease with the real world that only then could I start to abandon. Home had always been safe. Home had always been easy. But I didn’t want easy any more. I wanted to lie in fields, kissing girls.

I watched her leave. I imagined Lou’s back.