by Sam Taylor
Sometimes the feeling would sneak up on me over a number of days: friendliness, tenderness, slowly growing in the hothouse of my introspection, swelling into something more beautiful and dangerous: a kind of euphoric enchantment. Sadly, this state never lasted more than a couple of days. Because pretty soon, hope - that sly, insinuating monster - would creep into my heart. I would maybe smile at the girl in question and she would smile back, and I would speculate obsessively over the meaning of that smile. I would construct immense, elaborate fantasies of our future life together . . . and then I would see the girl the next day and she would blank me, or flirt with someone else. And thus would begin the third stage in the process: the fear.
Sometimes I would do inadvisable things during this stage of the process. One time, I remember, I began staring at the girl in question. Her name was Judith, I think. Or Judy, Julie . . . something like that. She was a chunky, black-haired girl, always in trouble with the teachers; alluring in a surly, rebellious way. Anyway, I used to stand a safe distance away from her at breaks and lunchtimes, in the queue for the chip shop or the bus, and stare. That was all: I wouldn’t smile, I wouldn’t speak. All I would do is stare. Normally the stage of fear lasted a week at most, before it gave way to disillusion, anger, despair, self-loathing, resignation, denial, and, eventually, amnesia. With this Judith girl, however, the fear went on for ages. Literally weeks, I think. In fact it had gone beyond fear by now; it had become something else. A kind of doomed, irrational defiance. Day after day I would stand twenty or thirty feet away from her and bore my eyes into her face or her blouse or the vertical seam at the back of her skirt. God knows what the expression on my face looked like - somewhere between melancholy and psychosis, I would guess - or what I imagined I might achieve by this; but nevertheless that was what I did. It came to a head one day, out in the playing fields around the school. These were grassy and hilly. I remember standing on one of those hills and staring at Judith. She was with a group of other girls, and as often happened she would become aware of my gaze and begin talking with her friends, each of whom would take turns to gawp at me, hostile or curious or amused. This time, however, she broke off from them and began walking towards me, a determined expression on her face. I felt strangely calm. As she walked up the hill, my eyes followed her: that vision of voluptuousness in tight pale blue blouse and short dark blue skirt and thick shiny black tights, her eyes on mine, her body moving ever closer. When she reached the summit of the hill she stood in front of me, looking suddenly pale and worried, and said, in a quiet voice, ‘Well . . .’ Before she could say anything more, my face assumed an expression of annoyance and boredom and I said, ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’
So there were other girls . . . dozens, scores, of them. But the one unchanging thread in this pattern was my love and desire for Jane Lipscombe. In some ways I wonder if all the other girls were not half-conscious attempts to exorcise her ghost, to escape my deepest obsession. As I have said, between those two flowerings of love, at fourteen and seventeen, my desire for Jane remained under control. I fancied her, and she liked the fact that I fancied her. We flirted. Oh God . . . for years, we flirted, cuddled, played footsie. I do wonder now if Jane’s teasing of me wasn’t some kind of punishment: a long, drawn-out revenge for the years of indifference she had suffered at my hands when we were young. But on balance I don’t think that’s true. I never had the sense that she hated me or wanted to hurt me. It was more that school bored her - the juvenility of it, the dryness - and I was her one source of amusement during those long hours. I kept her distracted, kept her titillated, until she got home and Trev fucked her brains out.
I tried not to think about Trev, and for the most part I was successful. It wasn’t too difficult, as I never saw him (I didn’t even know what he looked like, although I thought I could probably guess) and Jane rarely mentioned him. It was only when we entered the sixth form that I began to realise that there was more to their relationship than I’d imagined; that it was not quite as perfect or permanent as it had always seemed.
One morning she came to school with a black eye. Other times I would notice peculiar little round bruises on her arms. And, now I think about it, it was quite rare to see Jane’s skin at all. In the spring and summer, on fine days, those of us with free periods would take chairs to the flagstoned square outside the sixth-form block and sunbathe while drinking coffee and studying. Most of the girls would wear vest tops and short skirts on days like these, but Jane never did. She wore, almost always, a denim jacket over a T-shirt, and long, flowing, satiny skirts in mauve or orange or black. Looking back at this now, the pattern of clues seems obvious, the solution unavoidable, but for some reason I never put it together like that at the time. In my defence, I had several distractions, one of which was the fact that, though I never saw Jane’s bare flesh, I certainly felt it often enough.
Our physical flirting had never really ceased and, now we were in the sixth form, it grew steadily more daring and intense. We sat together in English four times a week, and each class lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. So for five hours a week Jane and I were close enough to hear each other breathe, and our legs were closer still. What I remember most vividly are the moments before contact: the held breath; the uncertainty; the suspense. Steadily, however, inch by inch and week by week, we grew more and more deeply entwined. We must both have had to make some strange-lookingcontortions during these classes, and I have no idea how we managed to answer any questions about The Merchant of Venice or Hardy’s poetry, but the fact remains that we were never discovered. Or, at least, not until I began using my hand.
It seemed a natural progression. I used my right hand to hold my biro, while my left slipped under the desk and on to the skirted thigh of Jane Lipscombe. Sometime later, stroking, caressing, it had moved beneath the satin and was touching the skin of her knee, her long inner thigh, feeling the warmth of the blood there. Further and further upward it crept, over tightened tendons and stray hairs, and my little finger had just touched the warm damp cotton of her underwear when she said suddenly in a loud, mock-innocent voice, ‘James, what is your hand doing on my leg?’ Embarrassed and angry, I removed it, and our legs separated under the table. Strangely, there was no big inquisition about this; the rest of the class seemed to ignore Jane’s outburst and returned to their discussion. But I did not forgive her so easily. For the rest of the year, I sat next to Clare Budd instead. And pretty soon it was her legs that were touching mine under the table.
Naturally, I fell in love with her. Clare Budd. I don’t remember too much about her now. Her face, which, though tanned and quite regular, was actually rather ugly. Her calves, which, presumably because of some special wax or cream she used, were astonishingly shiny and smooth. And, most vividly of all, her car - a metallic-green Mini which she would park outside the main entrance every day and the sight of which, when my desire for her was at its peak, would make my insides tingle with excitement.
But anyway, I mention Clare Budd only as an example of the kind of distraction that caused me to be blind to the signs of abuse in Jane’s relationship with Trev. I was also wallowing in melancholy at the time, because all my friends seemed to have paired off (Clare, too, had an older boyfriend), and I was the last one alone: the final freak on the shelf. I remember going out drinking with that gang, and feeling stale, bored, lonely, yearning for a life with new friends in a new place. Often I dreamed of going abroad. I remember talking about this with Clare, and her saying that she too wanted to live in Spain or Greece. I was disappointed (but not surprised) when she turned up one day and announced that she’d got a job at the TSB. So much for hiking around the Pelopponese; she didn’t even bother finishing her A-levels. She wasn’t the only one either. It was a time of encroaching reality, and I was shocked by how easily most of my friends surrendered their hopes and ideals to such pragmatism; how happily they embraced dreary adulthood and rejected the poetry, politics and dreams of freedom which we had shared for the pas
t few years. In that sense at least, I regarded my aloneness, my differentness, in a positive light. I was not going to sell out. I was not going to give in.
This determination was gloriously confirmed one day during the Easter holidays in the lower sixth. We were on a Geography field trip in Cornwall, a group of about twelve people. The teacher split us into twos that morning and gave each pair an O/S map marked with our final, common destination. We were then deposited at various equidistant points in the surrounding countryside. I was paired with a boy called Adam Draycott. I felt slightly nervous about this at first; of all the people in the group, he was the one I knew least well. He was also the only boy in the sixth form who didn’t come from the middle-class estate in which I had grown up: his dad had been a miner and was now unemployed; his mum worked as a cleaner; he never came out drinking with us because he didn’t have enough money. I had always tried to be kind and friendly towards him but, because of this gulf in our backgrounds, the kindness always came out as condescension, and Adam, I felt sure, was aware of this.
The two of us studied the map, then looked around. It was a beautiful spring morning, very early. The sky was yellowish pink over the horizon and a few last stars were still visible. Birds were singing in some trees nearby. The road on which we stood, a narrow country lane, wound vaguely north-south through fields of sheep and cattle. We decided, after a few minutes’ discussion, to follow the road for a mile or so and then cut across the fields, due west. As we walked, I wondered what we could talk about. I had never had a proper conversation with Adam. I remembered, the first time I had met him, asking about his politics; what he thought of Thatcher and the miners’ strike. I had imagined, with his dad having been made redundant, that he was bound to have strong opinions on the issue. But he had disconcerted me by shrugging his shoulders and saying he wasn’t really interested in politics. Over the year that followed, I had formed the impression that Adam wasn’t really interested in anything. He was that kind of boy: strangely inert and passionless. Physically he looked like a long-distance runner: tall, thin, wirily muscular. Though not blessed with good looks - his face was narrow and chinless, and already, at eighteen, his hairline was receding - he did at least look healthy. He was, I imagined, one of those hardy, stoical souls whom age would barely touch.
My memories of that morning are mostly still images. I had forgotten to take my camera, and Adam didn’t own one, so I can be certain that the memories are not plagiarised from photographs, but they have that kind of feel about them all the same: as though I had mentally framed each scene - a cat drowsing on top of a stone wall in the morning sunshine; three full milk bottles standing in shade outside a front door; a pretty, dark-eyed schoolgirl at a bus stop watching us walk past - and released the shutter, freezing the image forever inside my mind. I also remember how I felt when I saw these pictures, these realities, for the first time: as though I had discovered a new world.
I don’t remember what we spoke about as we walked up that country lane, but I do remember that the conversation came easily, and that he was as captivated by our surroundings as I was. It was the first time I had ever seen enthusiasm, never mind wonder, on Adam’s face, and it moved me. Suddenly all the petty barriers between us seemed to melt away, and we talked as friends. I have a vague recollection that I told him about my dreams of travelling around Europe: how I wanted to get away from the big cities, the tourist centres, and hike an untrodden path through rural villages like this one, to sleep beneath the stars, to swim in rivers, to swap greetings with strangers over breakfast in lonely cafés . . . I think I even suggested he come with me, and that he grinned in response, though deep down we both knew he would never do such a thing.
Anyway, we followed the path, walking slowly and savouring the beauty of the land and the sky, then cut through a field to the right. But the field did not take us out where we thought it would, or the map was wrong . . . I don’t know. Whatever, we were lost; the day was growing hot; we were sweating and hungry. There were no houses around, and no people in the fields. After standing helplessly in the road for a while, we noticed a small dog trotting towards us. It stopped and barked, and we began to talk to it.
‘Have you come to show us the way, little dog?’
‘Woof!’
‘Is it this way or that way?’
‘Woof woof!’
‘That way? Are you sure?’
‘Woof!’
‘All right, then. Let’s go. Do you want to come with us, little dog?’
‘Woof!’
And off he went, ahead of us, in precisely the direction we had indicated. We were laughing, but twenty minutes later, following the dog across fields and up narrow, winding paths, we found the teacher’s minibus parked ahead of us, outside a pub. This was our destination. Adam and I turned to each other with astonished grins. We went inside the pub, to tell the others what had happened, but we were told to buy the next round and order ourselves some food and, by the time we got to the table and waited for a gap in the conversation, a good ten minutes had passed. I told the story, Adam nodding as I did so, but somehow it sounded less amazing in the telling than it had felt to us both at the time. The others laughed sceptically. ‘Let’s see this dog, then,’ said one of them. We took them outside, but the dog had disappeared. After that, the story was dropped and I never talked to anyone else about our strange and magical day. Even with Adam, the subjectnever came up again, but it was a comfort to know that we had experienced those moments together; that there was someone else in the world who had witnessed the same wonders as I. And even though Adam and I were not close friends, even though we barely spoke to one another, I always felt that day was a kind of bond between us; something defining and unbreakable.
The Geography group went back to Cornwall the following year for another field trip, but by then Adam Draycott had got a job in an accountancy firm, and somehow it wasn’t the same. We didn’t go back to the place with the milk bottles and the dog, but even if we had, I felt sure the magic would have gone. It was a moment only that we had loved, not the place itself. And Adam had been part of that moment.
It came as a shock when I heard that he had died. A fast-spreading cancer, they said. One day he was perfectly fine; three weeks later he was dead. I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t cry either, and would have felt guilty if I had. After all, my sadness was almost entirely selfish: I mourned his death because it left me alone. With Adam gone, I was the only one who remembered that day in Cornwall. My memories, in an instant, had become doubly precious - and doubly fragile. If I lost them, the world would lose them too. The miracle day would disappear into oblivion. It is a relief, now, to write this down; to remember. And to know that, as you read this, whoever you are, the day is being resurrected, if only imperfectly and momentarily. After all, the past is dead - it does not exist - but through words or images or music, some tiny part of it may still live on, like a particle of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight.
According to my diary I found out about Adam’s death in late April, but in my memory it feels like part of that final, momentous week in early June when we sat our A-levels and the temperature soared. It was too hot to concentrate on anything other than keeping cool, and I had long since given up trying to memorise facts and essays. A feeling of overpowering lassitude descended, stripping me of determination, ambition, even of nerves. I felt a rush of adrenalin only on the morning of the first exam; after that, I entered the exam room each day with the slow, resigned footsteps of a condemned prisoner. I don’t have individual memories of any of the tests, only a vague compound memory of the room itself: a small, boxy place with windows on either side, through which I saw achingly bright fields and buildings; the creaky hum of the electric fan on the invigilator’s desk, spraying warm air around the room, lifting the papers on each desk in turn, like a Mexican wave; and the silhouetted shape of Jane Lipscombe, sitting by the window. Each time I looked up at her, she was staring outside, apparently in a daydream. I never
saw her write a word.
I was deeply in love with her again by this time. The feeling had been growing in me for months. I think part of it was a poignant sense that our time together was coming to an end; that a friendship, a desire, a closeness that had begun thirteen years before was approaching its final moments. I had, for a while, still held out the hope that Jane and I would go to the same university, that we would, after all, end up married. But when the heatwave began, I knew suddenly that this was impossible; a childish dream. I knew she would fail and I would pass, and that our paths would diverge and never recross. I became intensely nostalgic about the times we had shared - and the times we were sharing now. Nostalgia for the present, fired by the sad knowledge that it will soon be past: a strange emotion, but not, I think, an uncommon one. A new tenderness had entered our flirtations and our talks. We would stroke each other’s cheeks, suck each other’s fingertips, sometimes even hold hands. She never talked about Trev any more. I thought her silence was only to spare my feelings. I didn’t notice that she no longer had those bruises. And I never asked.
I am sure that the depth of my feelings was partly, too, a reflection of a more general uncertainty. As long and as intently as I had yearned to escape these people, this place, the reality of leaving, as it drew nearer, also filled me with panic. I would be going to a place where I knew no one, and where no one knew me. In more honest moments, I acknowledged the truth that I was desperately young and naïve, hopeless at communicating with other people, that I had lived my childhood and adolescence inside the bubble of a daydream, and that I feared what would happen when that bubble finally burst. Jane, in some sense, was both bubble and daydream: the thing that protected and the thing I wished to protect. But my love for her was also linked, in a more obscure, barely articulable way, to Adam Draycott’s death. He had gone, leaving me with fading memories, and now she was about to go too. I clung to her out of fear . . . fear that the past was disappearing before my eyes.