Sinister: all the girlfriends I haven't had pt.II: an A-Z

[Gordon]

*** off topic alert (as per my last post: apologies) ***
*** self-indulgent alert -this man should keep quiet***

end of disclaimers


A is for Abigail, the girl at the top of the class in primary school. We had
the sort of mutual admiration of competitors, except I think she won. A is
also for Anna who I went to the pictures with. She had perhaps this passing
resemblance to Glenn Close and I remarked at the beginning of *Dangerous
Liaisons* that I found this Close woman rather ugly. This didn't go down
well. There is another more recent Anna. 'Whatever you do, *don't* flush the
loo in the middle of the night because the woman who owns this place really
hates noise at night!'. I flushed the loo.
Angie, who opens the door to her cabin dressed only in a towel. 'Hi there!'
She says with a grin and a wink. She had a higher degree from the Irish
Catholic Girls College of Flirting.

B is for Bonnie. However, I don't think Bonnie was her real name. She wanted
me to take the day off work so that we could go walking in the Hackney
Marshes. I went to work.

C is for Charlotte. I enjoyed the slight pleasure of wiping some chocolate
off her lips in a Turkish ravine, but she was going out with another. She
also fancied this mad Estonian bloke, who I suppose had a sort of dangerous
charm, especially in caves. I remember this guy enthusiastically explaining
to me how he was designing a dairy back home to look like two big tits.
C is also for Catriona, who was from the year below but we shared a higher
art class. It was reasonably well known that I fancied her but was too shy
to ask her out. Still, she indulged my flirting with a sweetness that was
fanciable in its own right.
Another C is Ceren, who I insisted upon snogging in Belgium. I'd been on a
bit of a spree that week and thought I was invincible. We later traded long
letters. Long, not as in the number of words but as in extreme length to
width ratio.
Claudia, who took my arm on the way into Ronnie Scott's, assumed I owned a
castle back home and generally made me feel like a movie star.
C is also for Catherine. We were at a meeting. I made some comment. She
added something vaguely opposite in meaning and we glowered across at one
another. For some reason, later that evening, in a bar in the bowels of a
converted coal barge, something clicked. The walk home involved a doorway,
the middle of the street and some shocked old men as we sat in a late night
cafe doing things that didn't have much to do with the croque monsieur and
two coffees we'd ordered.

D is for Debbie. Two, actually. One was the kind of girl who hung around in
different circles in High School but then you meet again, years later, and
it's a surprise for each other to discover that, well, she doesn't even mind
fiddling with my smelly socks. I always had a bit of a crush on her from a
distance, I suppose, and it's not that anything happened on the latter
occasion either, apart from the socks bit, and we were both rather pished
at the time. Still, it was enough to make one wonder.
The other Debbie I've got written down in red biro capitals in a diary entry
marked 7th January 1998. I'd obviously written this as I'd suddenly
remembered a name from earlier. In another diary I've got a leaf from a
willow tree pasted to the page. The leaf is still green and here's her name
written down again, with no explanation. Just the name, in the middle of the
previous and otherwise blank page. The tree was her favourite one. It's in
Islington, just at Duncan Street by the entrance to the canal. I made sure
to pick a recently fallen leaf, as it would have seemed to be vaguely
violent to pick a leaf off the living stalk. She used to go out with a
drummer in a well known rock band. She had a younger sister who was called
Hannah, I think, who was equally cute. We all went down to see Shane McGowan
at the Water Rats once. Debbie walked me home and we kissed on her doorstep.

E is for Elita and Esther. Elita was terribly cool, and Esther was the 10
out of 10 looking violinist in the orchestra. I never got close to either,
except
for when the former yawned at my camera as I took a group shot in Canada.
Last I heard she was going out with a chef . E is also Eli from Bergen, who
I whiled away some time with in Brussels Airport which is, otherwise, an
extraordinarily boring place to be. And for Eva, but I'm still in touch with
her. She is now married to a German.

F is for Fiona. There are three Fionas. One of them called me a sex object
after I went skinny dipping in the Atlantic one night,
but then it was rather embarrassing because I decided to visit her at her
flat one day and she offered me a mug of tea. It was valentine's day and her
boyfriend was coming round. I hung around long enough to say hello to him
then made my excuses. I went shopping for hotpants in Istanbul with another
of the Fionas, 'Oh, what do you think?' she says, ripping the changing room
curtains back and swivelling her hips. 'Erm... nice.'

G is for Georgina. One of my best friends from school knew her family, so
the three of us went to the cinema once. She was a boy's sort of a girl;
wore pass-me down rugby shirts trophy-style, and was extremely popular all
round. G is also for Gillian, who asked me out once. I declined. I was still
getting over...

Helen. I was the new kid in town, circa primary seven and one day an
emissary was dispatched to ask me if I'd go out with her. I didn't really
know what 'going out' with someone actually meant, but said ok anyway,
because she was one of the prettiest girls in the class. At this time I
turned down all the invitations to discos I used to get, until my mum found
some of them and suggested it was rude of me to simply ignore them. So after
that I accepted the invitations, but Helen rarely came along, so I snogged
whoever else was around instead. Finding out the facts of life in first year
of High School ('Oh *please* let us be the externally fertilised sort!' went
my prayer to God, in biology class) put a traumatic end to innocent French
kissing because, after all, it was all leading *there*. It also spelled the
demise of my relationship with Helen, who found an Older Boy. After this, we
both went on a weekend to the seaside with a Sunday School youth group and I
spent my time pining over what I'd lost.

I is for Ilaria, from Genoa. To be honest I'm struggling with the I's but
she appears in two separate occasions in an old address book.

J is for Jenny, from Sweden. We sat up all night at the edge of the woods,
discussing life, the universe and everything, keeping each other warm 'till
the sun rose. We wrote to each other for years after that. I got a garbled
message once about her being in London and wanting to meet up, but I got the
message too late or something, so I've never seen her again. I've kept all
her letters though.
J is also for Jane. We were standing outside her digs. She shared a room and
it was about 1am. She says 'Shall I walk you back to your room?' 'Oh,
but you're just home now, it would put you too much out of your way...'
Idiot-moi, it never even occurred to me what she meant.
J is also for Jennifer, with whom I was supposed to be organising a softball
match amongst some Clerkenwell architecture firms. She was a girl with an
attitude and a decidedly weird edge. Perhaps she cultivated it to make her
appear more interesting than she actually was, but I still found her rather
fascinating, not that I pursued the matter. However, she did seem to go
along with me some way, you know when everyone in a group has noticed that
two of their party have been in deep conversation with each other for a
whole evening, oblivious to everyone else; nod nod, wink wink they go as we
get up to leave.

K is for Kate, who I was secretly in lust with while I was going out with
Helen. We used to walk home from school with each other, along with Helen
and Claire and Jill.
K is also for Katy. We'd lie on the floor of her apartment, listening to
Rachmaninov's Vespers whilst leafing through the pages of a large book of
Durer etchings she'd stolen from the Royal College of Art. 'Now Gordon, L***
is coming over. She's an artist and is having some trouble leaving her
boyfriend. I'd like you to set her straight, ok?' 'Ok.' Or walking down Dean
St. at 11.30am 'Now if you were a normal boy we'd be thinking about going
for lunch somewhere like that place over there. But as it is, there's
someone in this bar here I want to catch up with anyway, so come this way.'
I
was flunking work again, but the woman understood. Katy was a goddess.
Karen is, I think, the name of the girl I lost my virginity to. She offered
me sex lessons in the afternoons after our initial encounter, but I was
scared of getting beaten up by her boyfriend who, I suspected, was a bit of
a bruiser.

L is for Leigh. Back in primary school, she introduced me to the word 'boob
tube', which I though was vaguely naughty. She was also cute. L is also for
Lauras. High School Laura left for Australia. She returned to the UK for a
week and arranged via Jill that I meet her in a certain coffee shop on
Monday. I made some excuses and said maybe Tuesday. She waited in the coffee
shop on Wednesday, Thursday and on Friday morning Jill passed on the message
that Laura was now returning to Australia, hated my guts and never wanted to
see me again. I was simply too shy to turn up to what I regarded as a date.
It was a pity, being shy like that. Because If I hadn't been, I'd have met
her at the coffee shop and I might have turned out a normal adult. The other
Laura I never really fancied, but I made more passes at her than practically
any other girl, mainly because I was desperate for some holiday sex. We were
standing in a group getting our photo taken and she squeezed my hand
tightly, which was subtly sexy in a secret sign kind of a way, but by then
it was too late and I was no longer interested.
L is also for Laetitia from Portland, Oregon. You don't quickly forget girls
when you remember them riding beside you on a camel. 'What?' I say, looking
at her rather quizzically. 'Nothing' she mutters, shaking her head and
grinning.

M is for Michelle, who had a gay boyfriend who propositioned me one
afternoon as I sat drinking cocktails at the end of an empty Atlantic Bar
and Grill in Piccadilly. He invited me over to their sofa. 'Sorry I'm not
that way inclined but I wouldn't mind [I turn my gaze to her] ...having sex
with you.' 'Ok.' Ah, nice and simple. She worked in the box office of a
theatre in the West End.

N is for Natalie. The first day she arrived at my primary school she sat at
the opposite end of the table. She was gorgeous, with long blonde hair and
the biggest, most cheerful smile I've ever seen, flashing her blue eyes all
the while; the only girl who's eye colour I've ever actually noticed, apart
from Catriona's (her's were hazelish). I was out for a walk with my mum one
Sunday afternoon and there was Natalie, riding around on her bike. She
smiled over, put both her legs up on top of the handle bars, and carried on
her way free-wheeling acrobatically down the cul-de-sac. Whoar.
There is also Nathalie the French au-pair, which would have been nice in
theory.
N is also for Nameless. I wouldn't say that just because I can't remember
their names at the moment that they are somehow less important. It's maybe
even the
opposite, in a certain way, like in the passage from the *Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie* which I'll paraphrase into 'The only reason you keep referring to
her by name is because it's the only way you can remember who she is'.
Still, for these purposes I'll carry on with the named, 'though I'm banging
my head against the wall trying to retrieve certain persons from this
nameless
category.

O is for Orlaith, pronounced Orla. She was a bit of a team with Angie, and
had this way of breathing out cigarette smoke (Menthols) so that it would
drift slowly past her large, dark eyes, at which point she reminded me of
Sean Young in Blade Runner. A bunch of us had gone for a sauna, armed with a
litre-sized bottle of vodka. Most of us didn't have any clothes on but she,
coyly, kept a towel wrapped around under her arms. Until she got into the
shower, however. Then she just had to smile. Somehow then she lost her
glacially cool facade and looked nothing so much like a girl that you wanted
to hug. However under the circumstances, such a move might have seemed like
something of a liberty, so I just smiled sheepishly back.

P is for Patricia. Tricia played second violin. Along with Catriona,
she was my big crush in the latter High School years. She had the kind
of face that I literally couldn't drag my eyes away from. She looked just,
so,
right somehow. I was completely in love and in lust in that overwhelming way
only adolescents seem to be, when everything like that is happening for the
first time. I only ever mustered the courage to talk to her once, even
though practically everyone in the orchestra considered my supposedly
private yearnings as fair gossip after a 'will he? won't he?' fashion,
either helped or not by friends trying to 'arrange' things on my behalf. I
asked her for a dance. It was one of these slow, cheek-to-cheek dances... I
am blustering hopelessly into a conversation about what we've eaten for
dinner
(she's a vegetarian). 'Argh! My gaucherie oh Lord save me from my
ineptitude,
I love this girl, make, oh please make my conversation skills improve!' But
it was not to be and I never got over my embarrassment. Traumatising,
traumatising.

Q is for... I draw a blank at Q.

Rachael was the daughter of an Australian professor who decided to make
money for herself in a daringly controversial way for a girl of her station.
Great conversation and wow, she was good at her job.

S is for Susann, from Berlin. I leaned over to kiss her goodbye and her lips
slipped from my cheek to my mouth but although I liked her a lot, I couldn't
say that I fancied her, so I quickly twisted my head up and round to end up
smiling at her, then we hugged and I was off.
I'm staring at a photograph taken in a restaurant which had a resident
storyteller much in the same way that some restaurants have house bands. It
is in downtown Teheran, and three girls are posed around a 'hubbabubba'
tobacco smoking device. I'm sure one or two of them have names beginning
with 'S', but once one starts trying to wrack one's brains it seems as if
the mists blow over with ever more soaking density, obscuring the view and
blurring the ink. Smiling straight at the camera, very beautiful, with the
kind of beauty everyone acknowledges with a mixture of awe and sheer
pleasure since it is so clearly beyond that of the common lot... I think her
name is Sabadeh, or something sounding like that. Next to her is a girl I
actually worked with and knew better, who has the kind of beauty a painter
would see, because the bone structure and the eyes and intelligent mouth are
all there once one starts to look. She may have been called Shirin, and yet
it doesn't seem quite right. Damnit, I've been trying to remember this name
for the past half hour. I thought it would come back to me once I'd found
the photograph here, but no.

T is for Tamara, who later styled herself as Vesna. She sent me a new year's
card featuring lots of cigarettes once. Nothing in it beyond that, but she
did have style.

No, I've never met anyone called Ulla or Ulrika, even if there's a fine
Sillustrator going by the former name.

V is for Victoria, the first girl I ever kissed. It was in primary two, on
Monday morning. I'd seen a film the previous afternoon starring Errol Flynn
and had used it as a learning exercise in how to handle women. So Victoria
gets up from her desk to hand in her homework. I quickly get up to do
like-wise and catch her up about two-thirds of the way to the teacher's
desk. I grab her around the waist and shoulders and plant my lips on hers
for a lingering embrace. Then I detach myself and continue towards the
teacher, who is too shocked to say anything much. At playtime my Action Man
arranges to marry her Cindy Doll.

Xenia, Warrior Princess,Yvonne and Zoe don't feature in my personal list,
yet.



Gordon

A tree has sheltered one from the storm, but one had better depart swiftly
after, lest it start to drip.





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