Eve

Eve came to us from a different school. She was pretty, large brown eyes and a wide, open face. I noticed how quick she was to laugh. Good natured, fine-limbed. She would never become my friend. She would be a friend to the pretty girls, the popular girls.

I had taken to sitting on my own at lunch times. I had a notebook, which I covered with pictures of my sci-fi heroes. I drew elves and goblins in the margins. I wrote my stories around the pencil drawings. There were a group of characters returning to the pages of my notebook every day. They were my friends. At lunchtime I would gather them and we would fly together into the outer reaches of the universe. I loved each one of them for different reasons, one for her beauty, one for her fieriness, one for his kindness and another because he was an outsider, prickly and argumentative as I could be, tolerated by the rest of the crew. I liked this character particularly and often he would crawl out of the pages of my exercise book and lie with me as I went to sleep, his arms wrapped around my itchy shoulders, whispering his secrets into my ear. Sometimes I touched myself and thought about this scratchy loner and brought myself to orgasm. My phantom lover.

I was old enough then to know that this was love, even though I didn’t know about the mechanics of the act. My fantasies were all touching and holding and all about my own body. His was clothed and sketchy. He was thin, weedy even, not conventionally attractive. I had a clear image of his lopsided smile and his clear intelligent eyes.

I imagined that he was sitting beside me on this particular lunchtime break. There was the sound of children playing, shrieks and giggles and little gaggles of girls whispering their secrets. Eve sat down in the place where I imagined my invisible friend to be sitting. I glanced at her and closed my notebook. I didn’t want this pretty new girl to be looking over my shoulder, reporting back to all the other whispery girls at the other side of the playground.

She unwrapped her lunch without comment, offered me some of her sandwich as if this was the kind of thing that we did every day. I refused politely. I had been taught not to accept food offered to me by others. ‘You never know what they put in it’, ‘they might have touched it with dirty fingers’, ‘there might be saliva on it and saliva carries germs, you might get sick’. And so I shook my head and sat nervously. She didn’t ask me what I had been writing. She took great joyous bites of her sandwich and told me that she believed in ghosts. I wasn’t sure if I believed in ghosts but I liked the idea of them. She told me about a séance that she had conducted at her last school. She told me that she had contacted a girl who had fallen off the monkey bars and died. She said that she would like to conduct a séance here. She began to plan it, including me in her scheme as if we were friends.

We became friends. The next day she brought her own exercise book and sat where my invisible friend might sit and asked me for the beginning of a story. We wrote it together, discussing the characters and the plot, and when the bell clanged we raced to finish it, breathless and flushed with the effort as if we were racing to finish an exam before the teacher could collect the papers.

I gave her my invisible friends in the weeks that followed. She choose a different name and we all climbed aboard my old familiar spacecraft, which was prone to leaks and creaks and unaccountable mechanical failures.

Sometimes, at night, just before sleep, I thought about Eve and she was there in the bed beside me. Her fragrant hair fanned out on the pillow, her gentle laugh tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. Sometimes her hands would stray under my pajama top and then I would turn to her and give myself completely, which meant a kind of pressing together of the idea of her and the edges of myself. She gave me a lavender notebook and I began a diary. ‘There is something I dare not tell anyone’, I wrote in it, ‘something I feel, a terrible thing. Something I shouldn’t feel’. In this way, secretly I felt the force of our intimacy.

I was wracked by guilt. She would touch me on the arm and laugh and I would vibrate with the joy of this kind of contact. I drew pictures of myself with my lips sewn together with thick thread. There were no words to describe the thing I felt for her. I could call it love, but it was not as pure or as innocent as the kind of love you could read about in Enid Blyton books. I found Wuthering Heights at the back of a bookshelf and I knew that the Katherine / Heathcliffe kind of love was the only way to describe it. I knew also that this was the kind of love that could destroy friendships. I felt the force of it threatening to tear me apart. I was disemboweled by this kind of love. I lost myself to it. I would have followed her like a lemming, leaping to my death on her passing whim.

She stayed at our school for a year, and when she moved away I was inconsolable. We hid at the side of the school and cut into our skin with broken glass and pressed our flesh together. For her it was a game to play. For me it was a pact with the devil and I had given up my self-respect for her, the first of my intimate relationships.

I wrote to her every day, great wads of paper with the tiniest scrawl of writing traveling up the margins of each page. I told her everything except the thing that I couldn’t exorcise from the front of my mind, that I was in love with her, a far from innocent love, a deeply physical need that plagued every waking moment, an addiction. A terrible frightening fog of need suffocating everything in its path.

I was 13 years old and I thought that I might die from the want of her.