A Trace of Love

A Trace of Love

Before my castration – years before – I fell in love with a girl.

I was fifteen, she was sixteen, a prefect (a short step from perfect, which I thought she was). I was on my way to Biology - I wanted to get there, because I liked Biology - and she stopped me at the top of the Science corridor. She tapped her prefect badge, which sat on the rise of her left breast, and said, “Science corridor's one way now, new rule.”

I looked over her shoulder through the glass of the new double doors. The corridor was empty. We were the same height – she was used to looking down at most boys, like a lot of final year girls, but I was tall for my age. Our eyes met dead on. She was a picture.

“You look scared,” she said through her teeth as she laughed at me through her nose. I was normally scared of girls that looked that steadily at me (I hadn't had many chances to get comfortable with it, hardly any) but I felt myself copying her smile and easing into it.

“Corridor's empty. I'll be late if I have to walk all the way around. I didn't know about this new rule.”

Her eyes narrowed, she pouted and looked at her watch with just a flick of the eyes and a tiny tilt of the wrist. As my eyes followed hers to the watch I saw her skirt was well above her knees. Some girls used to roll them up at the waist to make them shorter, adjusting them south when a teacher was around, and north for someone they wanted to draw the attention of.

She knew I'd looked.

“Go on then,” she whispered.

I had my right hand on the push plate of a door when her right hand made the same action and was pressed into my chest. I tingled all over and froze – played dead – and looked straight ahead.

She whispered in my ear, “Come to Bible study, Thursdays, three thirty, at the school library.” She took her hand away.

I never looked back as I marched to Biology. I knew then I wouldn't need to write the time and location down anywhere.

I had not seen or heard any sign of this 'Bible study' either before or since she'd asked – sorry, ordered – me to go. I'd only seen her once, across the tennis courts during dinner break while I was (trying to) play football. She was smoking with three other girls, doing most of the talking and most of the laughing. I'd tried to 'accidentally' go through the Science corridor the wrong way but there had been no prefect guarding the door on that occasion, just a bold sign that said words to the effect of, Take a hike, and I had.

I headed for the library as soon as class finished on Thursday. I thought as I walked there, Would I sit next to her if the seat was free? Would she save a seat for me? Would she ask me to sit there? No way would I sit next to her if she didn't ask me! Unless she gave me some kind of sign of encouragement.

But hadn't she already given me encouragement by asking me in that charged exchange? Was it charged or was that just me?

I was at the door and took a deep breath before jumping off the cliff.

As I entered the high-ceilinged room I immediately felt this wallop of reality. The strip lights felt cold white and hot and bright all at the same time. I was suddenly very aware of the ground through the soles of my shoes. I slowed and then stopped. The library was empty.

Of course – you dick! - there is no 'Bible study' here and there is no sexy, older girl interested in you. You've been stitched up good and proper. I actually started laughing. I stood there under the lights and laughed just above the drone of the desktop computers. I felt cold but was sweating above the eyes.

Bloody bitch, I thought and was about to repeat the thought out loud when she appeared from one of the aisles, waving a Good News Bible at me, smiling with teeth. She had her hair down, straight and dark and words I hadn't learned yet.

“Where's your Bible then, Michael Jones?”

I should have been tongue-tied, ecstatic, a stuttering wreck, but she made me feel instantly at ease, like we'd known each other for years, maybe secretly. “I thought they'd be provided,” I said.

“You're the one that won the art prize this year, aren't you?” She was still walking toward me, putting the book on a table as she passed without a sound, without looking away from me, so subtle and skilful.

I nodded. It was true.

She stopped about a metre away from me. “How long did it take you to draw that factory?”

It hangs by the main reception of the school, but I doubt many kids have actually looked at it. “A few weeks, on and off.”

“By looking or from photos?”

“Both.”

She took another half step toward me. “I can hear that factory when I look at that picture.”

It was the highest compliment anybody had ever paid me.

“I hear it every night. It sounds a constant, perfect, E. If I open my bedroom window it's just down there, a mile away, by the railway and the canal. It never stops. I had the window open whenever I was working on that drawing.”

That was also true.

We said nothing for a minute. An A sounded from somewhere in the ceiling. I could no longer feel the ground beneath me. She wore a name badge that said 'Hannah'.

“Where's the librarian?” I lowered to a whisper.

She raised her voice and it bounced around the room. “It's work experience week,” and she tapped the middle of her chest with her thumb and flicked her eyebrows at me.

The door creaked and swung, and Hannah grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward a book shelf on wheels. “Very kind of you to come and help. So you want to be a librarian one day? What did you say your name was?” She would not make a great actress.

“Michael,” I said, and followed her like a good dog.

“Everything okay, Hannah?” the teacher asked sternly, her eyes not leaving a pile of exercise books she laid in front of her.

“Yes, Miss Chambers. Michael is interested in becoming a librarian, too. He's come to help me.”

The teacher looked up and frowned and peered over. Her face softened and almost suggested a smile as she focused on me. “Oh it's you. The pianist.”

I nodded. It was true.

Hannah prompted me to begin pushing the trolley shelf (an ugly thing made from veneer wood and hard plastic wheels). As we went along she whispered, “I didn't know you were a pianist, Michael!” She pronounced the word with just two syllables and left off the 't'. Not the first time I'd heard the joke but it tickled me anyway and I stifled a laugh.

She showed me the system of replacing the books – catalogue referencing and then alphabetizing. Every now and then she would hand me a book, our fingers brushing a little, and the titles were always the same theme – Lady Chatterley's Lover, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. I found a book that I loved called, simply, 'A Guide to History'. I'd borrowed it so many times. So much in there and beautifully presented. When I handed it to her I said, plucking the courage from somewhere, “If I could steal one book from here it would be this.”

She winked.

We didn't study the Bible at all that afternoon.

I spoke to mum when I got home. She showed no surprise at all when I said that we hadn't done Bible study after all - that it did not exist – and that I'd spent an hour putting books back on the shelves with the final year girl I didn't really know.

“Do you like her?” Mum asked, removing her glasses and sitting back.

“Yes, she's fascinating.”

“Sounds like she likes you.”

I said nothing.

“Do you want to invite her round for tea next week? She sounds fun.”

“Yes. Let's do it,” I said straight away. I went to do the washing up and Mum went back to her book.

Mum had said Wednesday would be best, either in spite of or because that was the night of her Russian class.

Hannah had said she was vegetarian so we'd made pizza. Mum and I were a good team for that. She made the dough and bases, I made the tomato sauce, grated the cheese and chopped up the olives, mushrooms, whatever it was we were having. That's the way Dad and her had worked it so I'd just stepped into his role when he'd died.

A knock at the door.

Mum looked at me.

I got the fire going, shut the wood burner door, and got up.

“Come in, thanks for coming,” I said as I opened the door.

“Come here often?” she laughed and patted me on the head. I never normally used the same verb twice in the same sentence – I must have been nervous. She didn't seem to be.

Mum stood up. “Hannah, I'm Jill. Good to meet you.”

“Thanks for having me,” Hannah said, pronouncing the words fully but casually. An angel when she wanted to be, clearly.

We ate pizza. It was bloody good – as always – though not many leftovers today (it was even better the next day) but I wasn't complaining, considering the circumstances.

Mum announced she was going out. I saw Hannah's face change – I hadn't told her Mum would be going out all evening. She said she'd be two and a half hours and that she'd drive Hannah home when she got back.

Hannah wanted me to play piano (she actually said she wanted to check out my pianist skills, pronouncing the word in her own special way). I played McDowell's To A Wild Rose. I said it was a version I'd adapted that I'd called, Ode To a Palendrome but I'm not sure she got the joke. Often people didn't get my jokes. Still.

When we went to my room (her pretence for us going up was to hear the factory, which was a pretty good excuse) we sat apart and opened the window. I was on the edge of the bed, she on my chair by the desk. We just listened to the perfect drone of E from a mile away. A sodium streetlamp cast orange light behind my girl, it silhouetted her nose – the outline and curve and fade. We just sat there not saying anything for ten beautiful minutes.

Then, just above the drone, I heard her say, “Michael, I have something for you.” She leaned forward and handed me a big hardback book. It was A Guide To History.

“You stole this?” I said, feeling the weight of the book in my hands and sort of cradling the thing.

She winked.

I told her, if she was interested, how I really liked that the book was modestly titled A Guide....  rather than The Guide.... or A Complete Guide...

“You appreciate modesty?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“Understatement?”

“Yes.”

She looked at the pencils on the desk and back up to me. She was biting her lip a little and the drone of the factory sounded louder and louder, and more and more tuneful.

“Will you draw me, Michael, please?”

I didn't answer because it didn't sound like a question.

I sat 'A Guide to History' on my lap and shuffled nearer the edge of my bed. I sharpened a 2B and then smoothed it with side strokes on a bit of scrap paper. I reached down and opened a drawer under the bed and carefully took one piece of grained paper.

Hannah sat on the desk and removed her jumper.

Then she took her t-shirt off.

I tried to keep a straight, steady face as she removed her bra.

It was the first time I'd ever seen breasts in real life. I must have seen my mum's, I suppose, but I couldn't remember that.

She looked deep into me and stayed completely still. The factory played a soundtrack that was unbroken except for the odd skim of a car in the street, that sounded like a wave. I leaned down on 'A Guide...” and sketched, not what I thought I saw or should see, but what I could see.

I suggested nose, shoulders, breasts, but I didn't draw them. I did it all with that 2B held in my right thumb, index and middle fingers. When the lines were drawn I held the pencil underhand and rotated it as I shaded (left to right across the page, to avoid smudging), keeping the lead round and smooth. Then I hardened some of the lines to define features where the refracted sodium orange died suddenly. I pressed very hard at times and could feel 'A Guide...' yielding underneath. I was fairly vandalizing that book but it seemed a small sacrifice. I'd reckoned at the time that I would read it every few years for my whole life and it's proved true so far. I thought of these hard lines – nose, breast, hip, knee, knuckles - as a tattoo and I thought Hannah would appreciate the idea.

When I told her I'd finished the sketch she didn't put her top back on. She walked to me, put a thumb on each of my temple of mine and said, “How long do we have?”

“Just under an hour,” I said.

“Plenty of time,” she whispered and leaned into me, kissing my mouth softly.

My first kiss.

I think of that night – the moment Mum and I dropped her off back home – as the end of the first half of my life. It did turn out to be too good to be true. I didn't see or speak to her for weeks. I think she'd just wanted to be drawn by me – and to draw me, which she certainly had. I heard that she was due to leave the school at the end of term – that her Mum had changed jobs (again) and they were moving back down south.

I did speak to her one more time. She was prefecting at the top of the Science corridor. Her answers were monosyllabic – 'okay,' 'fine,' 'no,' and her gaze didn't seem to leave the floor where she stood. She pushed the door open for me and handed me a piece of paper. I could see a cold shine in her eyes.

Of course, as I marched the anti-way of the corridor I hoped it would be a letter – a few answers or at least she would say 'love' or even 'Good Bye' would be better than nothing. But I could feel that grain in my fingers and I knew before I unfolded it that I was carrying my drawing of Hannah and my last tie with her had just been cut and fed back to me.

I lit the fire at home and used the drawing as a lighter. I cried as the fire got going. When Mum came home she held me and said, “I know what it's like to lose someone. You can never be prepared.”

Years later I would reflect that my loss at the time was pretty small compared to hers; it being only two years since Dad had been killed at work. But at the time, fifteen and heartbroken, I couldn't stand away from my deep despair. My sadness and hurt were close, deep and real.

Every now and then – especially in the cold, dark times of the year, when the orange lights are shining strong through the windows, and the fire is glowing orange, too, I take 'A Guide to History' from the bookshelf and sit a sheet my thinnest paper on top. I can hear the faint drone of the factory, still going strong. I take a 2B in my backhand and lightly shade.

And there she is: Hannah at sixteen, sitting on my desk, backlit with a street lamp.

I'll never throw that book away.