Clique

1.

When I try to make these memories come to the surface, it's as if I'm looking at a picture only half developed. Even the feelings are lost, fragmented, blurry around the edges. Nothing is sharp any more. Nothing has tangibility. Solidarity.

Even faces sometimes elude me, drifting in and out of my consciousness like visions from dreams, occasionally definable but never for very long. After a while the past becomes a faded image, we forget what was once so important, what was once so beautiful, or so ugly.

With the movement of time everything about ourselves we once loved, we lose. We become new people with every day, setting new standards, judging the world with foreign eyes, and the way it once was isn't the way it is any more.

So as hard as I try to remember, I can't do it. I can't capture the taste and the sound and the sight of things just as they were to me. As they were to all of us.

But for the sake of you, the reader, I shall put my pen to paper and my mind to the depths of my sordid imagination. I shall try to the best of my ability to recapture these feelings that once consumed me so completely and to bring to your mind the faces of people who made up the entirety of my world.

I remember most the way the sun rolled across the wide fields of neatly cut grass on the school oval. It seemed to beam up from each individual strand with a shiny glossiness foreign to the realms of my own world. Sometimes I stood at the window of my room and looked down upon this rolling lawn, down past the chipped stone of the boarding house exterior to the masses of girls and boys casting sly glances upon each other, giggling with their tilted lips and wide, youthful eyes. This image was fresh with perfection. To become a part of it would be to mar it, and so I never did. I stayed away from the boys in their rugby tops and small shorts, and equally so away from the petite young girls with pert breasts and smooth hair. I was constantly separated from their clean, alive quality by the sheet of cool glass in my window.

I hated them just as much as I loved them. Loathed them as much as I wanted to be a part of them.

I pretended that I didn't need them, didn't subconsciously seek their adoration or acceptance, and tried instead to cause them pain through my sullen scowls and narrowed eyes as I moved sleekly between them in the school corridors. But inside I felt a part of me dying every time they sniggered behind cupped hands. I was slipping away from myself as the years moved forwards into nothingness, as the monotony of their exclusion became normal. The disfigurement they saw me as became the disfigurement I believed myself to be. An accident of birth. An aberration on the surface of our planet. Incomplete. Flawed.

There were so many of them against me that it hurt. I turned fifteen, I turned sixteen. I soon came to be eighteen and I continued to hurt from their insensitivity, their cruel conniving remarks and exclusivity. I envied their place on those miles of green grass as I nursed my pain from behind the window.

I had only one respite, one place that was truly and totally mine.

Beneath the theatre there was an old school room turned storage space. Decades of memorabilia were pushed roughly inside into a dark, dusty heap of forgotten images, and amongst the ache of their neglect I placed my own. I came there after the bell resounded down the hollow, unfriendly hallways, burying myself between some plastic chairs and leaning back into the velvet banners of sports teams long gone. They used to have volleyball here, and badminton, but these novelties gave way to those perfect masses and their need for conformity. Rugby ate them up, as did cheerleading, and yearbook and all the neat, perfect, engendered societies.

Here in this one, damp smelling room I carved out a piece of ground which was wholly my own. The pictures upon the egg-coloured walls modelled the faces of my friends. The names written in bold black script beneath them were the names I associated with myself, the names I wrote down in my notebooks inside the palpitating halves of curling love hearts. Inside the confines of this little room I was theirs and they were mine. They stood behind me with impassive faces as I peeled away part of the newspaper covering a long horizontal slat of windows and looked down onto one of the main thoroughfares of the school. I pressed my knees deep into a gas valve and looked through the ragged hole I had made.

I sighed against the glass, frosting it up with my emotions, then turned back to those black and white faces and forgot I had ever made such a pathetic sound, let alone felt such emotion.

I spent hours there, sealed away like a monk, contained by my uniform and by my irregularity. I blocked my ears to the shrill voices of teenagers as they moved all around me in other areas of the building. I closed my eyes to the love they shared with everyone but me, their elusive affections which never touched upon my cold skin or even imagined it could find refuge there. I turned inwards, I found strength in my own solitude. I found peace in my own separation from society.

In my final year of boarding school a new teacher arrived. He seemed to shield his eyes and his words with the same distancing exterior that rested like a shroud upon my own slender form. But now and then, when speaking of some romantic poet or magnificent play of this or that era, the guard would slip a little and the class would sit in stunned silence as his voice rose with passion, as his cheeks flushed and his sandy brown hair flopped boyishly across his forehead. As if the beast inside was being released by the own depth of his passion for the subject matter, he would remove his coat and cross that impassable distance between his desk and our own. He'd stand in front of us, his tan skin alive with sensitivity, and he'd recite these deliciously long odes about love and about sex. I'd marvel at the glimmer in his pupils as he described the mound of a woman's sex, the scent of her secretions, the flush of her cheeks during climax. I'd shiver in my skin. I'd be alive with it. I'd see myself as an invisible spectre reaching out to him in all his infinite unbridled beauty.

But as soon as it was opened, it's petals unfolded out to us, it curled upon itself and imploded. He became just another teacher, giving us that many more assignments, causing us that much tedious boredom with the monotone level of his voice and the dispassionate way in which he described correct grammar usage in our essays.

'This is me', I thought as I followed him down the corridors. 'This is what I'm doing to myself, holding in my passion, blocking off my life, secreting away all the things which could possible make me beautiful, which could possibly make me loved'.

At night I wrote volumes about him, describing in intricate detail the measure of his passion, the combustibility of it, the suddenness at which it appeared. I couldn't understand how such magnificent adoration could only be released in these impotent bursts. Why couldn't it be constant? Why couldn't such life and vitality burn in his flesh every time he passed us in the corridor, every time he stopped to pick up a book? Why couldn't he force this sexual energy into the movement of his hands when he wiped clean the black board, or when he ruled a page? Why couldn't his limbs move with the grace of humanity, of existence, of body, when he pushed his hair from his forehead or opened the door to find us waiting for him?

What stopped it up? What was blocking it off? Why was it happening to me too?

All this time, as I scrutinised him with my narrow blue eyes, I never knew that his gaze was also upon me, or that he could see the mirror we held up to each other. I never knew he shared the plea for help silently sent each time our paths crossed, our gazes met, or our fingers fleetingly touched. I was so innocent then, I hadn't kissed a boy, hadn't known anything of human contact and all its limitless pleasures. I knew words, I knew spaces, I knew time. I knew what it was like to disappear into things, to study people from a distance. I knew what it was to observe life but not be a part of it. I didn't know that I actually existed. That I had legs and arms, eyes and a nose. I didn't know that I had a face, a mouth that smiled, eyebrows that arched dramatically. I didn't know that I could be beautiful to people, could be capable of forcing attraction.

What beauty was there in this pale, milk-coloured skin, these empty eyes? What gorgeous thing was there in the words that ran around my head or drifted over my hands through splotches of ink from botchy pens.

I had never looked at my face til he forced me to look at it. I had never known my body could feel until he made me touch it. I had never known I even breathed.

For all I knew I was just a picture on a wall. A nothing. A no one. A non-entity.

He followed me to my room beneath the theatre, his hand touched my arm lightly and I turned to him, looking up through lowered lashes into his dark chocolate coloured eyes. He pushed me backwards, closing the door with a quiet click so that suddenly my whole life seemed to go in slow motion. Every breath he took seemed to take an age to raise, an era to exhale and the moments which passed as he brought his body up against mine were timeless. So long they could not be measured. So alive with electricity they could not be expressed as thoughts of space and time. Of being real at all.

And yet that's exactly what it was. It was real. Suddenly, irreversibly I had been thrust into the knowledge of my own existence. I had been recognised as a being something. Of having substance. Of having matter.

He put one callused palm to my cheek and the bangs of hair on his forehead fell forward. I put my hands on his forearms, rolling down the fabric of his light blue shirt to expose his forearms, thin and sinewy, smooth and tan, with this enticing dust of dark hairs leading up to his pale elbows. I held on to him and he pressed me against the wall, the corner of a picture scraped my cheek but I didn't move. I was captured by that look in his eyes. I couldn't tell him with words or with expressions how much it meant to be needed, or to be noticed, or to be touched as he touched me.

As his hands moved down my body over the rough-hewn material of my school dress it was as if every part he caressed he discovered, he brought to life. I felt as if these facets of my body hadn't been there before, as if he was my creator and the brush of his fingertips drew me to perfection, shaped me to look like every other girl I had watched from my secret room and coveted the curves and lines of.

The afternoon light cut blindingly through the hole I had made in the newspapers, illuminating one side of his face and leaving the other in shadow. The image was as if two people pressed their body into me, eyes of differing shadows, brows of differing slope, and lips of differing texture. He kissed me, breaking bonds of authority and of morality with that first touch of his warm mouth on mine, and even then I could feel it, this idea of two people. Being kissed by two people at the same time.

He unbuttoned my white shirt, peeling away fabric that had for so many years been a layer of skin. I had worn this red and black skirt, this itchy blouse, and these thick brown stockings, day after day until soon they became armour. They became a shell to close myself up in, blocking out everyone and everything. I had carefully built up the fabrication in my mind of being perfectly protected by cotton and wool weave and sharply inserted buttons. I had worked meticulously to form a routine of layering myself in these garments, of hiding my flesh from prying eyes, laboured over tying knots and pulling zips so that they were tight, impenetrable except for my own hands. And yet now, under the warm, slightly moist fingers and palms of my teacher, I found this armour was as thin as spider web, netted over my flesh in some mock form of protection, but not really covering my skin at all. The layers seemed to fall away in silver tatters about my feet.

'Touch me', I whispered against his thumb as he slipped it into my mouth. I bit down on his knuckle just as his hand moved between my legs and as I experienced that first invasion into my body his blood trickled upon my tongue. The salty, intoxicating taste of it was instantly associated with my sex, the two became intertwined. Blood and desire, desire and blood, bleeding into each other to become one and the same thing. An element of life, the fact of life itself. 'We are born', I thought, 'to bleed and to desire. To touch and to wound. To prove our mortality and to endanger it.'

Never, never was I beautiful until he whispered it into my ear.

'Beautiful'.

Stirring strands of honey blonde hair around my ear lobe and pushing the skin on my neck into tight pin pricks of anticipation. His tongue ran over and over the striated length of my slender throat, down to the dip where his kisses pooled, but his eyes looked up at me, never wavering from my own and thus, never breaking the spell. I saw once again in those dark irises the passion, the vitality and vibrancy of the man who read and adored so many poetic works, who stood before rows of pupils and forced into them empathy with his adoration, understanding of it, through his infallible belief in it. I saw the man who revelled in pushing lascivious thoughts into innocent minds not through pornography, but poetry. He related beauty with sexuality. Lust with the saints. Desire with ethereality. All of this was in his eyes; his primeval equation forced into me so that I would never be like him. So that somehow I would stop myself from shutting down, from closing off, from severing my body to its passions.

He gave me my chance to embrace life with the offer of his form.

I curled my legs around his waist and gasped into his shoulder as he thrust inside me. My back slapped against the wall, my neck cracked backwards, I felt heavy with the weight of his erection between my legs penetrating my slick folds.

My breasts seemed to grow and pinken under his suckling mouth. My slender hips became beautiful under the careful guidance of his hands steering me into a natural rhythm.

I found such awe inspiring elegance in that slight rise of my belly once it had been pressed into his abdomen and unimagined pride in my collar bone, my inner arm, my inner thigh, just by having his eyes on it, and later his hands, and much sooner his mouth.

He lay me down on the velvet banners just as the last rays of afternoon sunlight filtered down between a rivered crack and reached us where we chose to lay. It picked up the sheen of his saliva on my pink nipples and the gleam of sweat between my breasts. It swam languidly through my hair coiled about my head in an innocent halo. All of that sunlight centred on my body, entering me in much the same way as did he. It forced life into me; lighting a fire in my heart so that with a sudden burst of flames and glitter I was burning my way into the world.

He put his mouth between my legs and his tongue moved against me. My eyes flashed open and my back arched into some catlike position of divine exultation, scrunching my fingers in his hair, spreading my legs wide, opening myself, cracking the shell, cracking myself into two people.

The pictures on the wall stared down at me, sneered at my naked body with its subtle curves and snow-white skin. They seemed to laugh when just the dip of his tongue in my belly button forced spasms to grasp at my insides, and I could not deny the cruelty in their black eyes as I twisted and turned beneath insistent kisses and mortal thrusts. But the eyes through which I stared back were warm and impassioned; the heart which had once so embraced them now pushed them away with the force of my desire.

My teacher stood by the doorway, wiping sweat from his brow and looking at me in silent pride as I continued to rub at my swollen breasts and clitoris, as I searched for more and licked my lips over and over in an effort to find it. The smile was knowing, self content, and I turned my back on the painted pictures and rolled on my stomach towards it. Waves of soft buttery hair fell over my shoulders, heaving up and down like an ocean over my sweat-slicked skin and gently ridged spine. As I pressed myself against the wooden floor, trying to steal life even from its dead, dark grain he spoke softly, insistently.

'Burn, little candle,' he murmured, soft as the thud of my heart on the floorboards. 'Burn.'