24 :

Her hair smells of strawberries.

Every woman’s hair smells different. It’s as individual a smell as the musky tang of her cunt.

After she had left I’d be victim to an intense craving. A desire stronger than anything whenever that smell haunted me. Sometimes I’d be stood in the kitchen and a vague trace of it would come back.

I was a victim anyway. A victim of her. A victim of cruelty. But a victim also of loneliness. A victim of desire.

Instantly if I closed my eyes, she’d be there in the same room as me again. It doesn’t matter how long it had been. Years sometimes. When I was a different person, living a different life. But it only took one moment, one odour, to bring it all back.

It came at the strangest times. Sitting at work. Walking past girls in supermarkets. The brush of bodies against each other in Woolworths. Suddenly I’d be as hard as a rock.

I’d be 19 again. I wouldn’t be a thirty something trying to pick a path through debt to the future. Improvising his way to a future.

Her smell was unique. No-one else in the world had it. And yet, it was just a combination of shampoos and conditioners from the High Street. And that’s why I had a strange compulsion when walking past a girl in the frozen food section, to curl my arms around her and nuzzle her neck the way that Samantha used to like me doing.

Helen’s hair was a new thing for me to get used to. A new smell. A new style. It was difficult. It was what I wanted, but difficult. Something new. Something different. Something I was scared of.

Wasn’t that just really fucking weird?

Intimacy is a weapon. I was scared of being hurt. I breathed deeply in her hair when it was freshly washed. It smelt like strawberries.

All of us grasp for hope. In our lovelessness, our greyness, our boredom, we hope for more. We grasp at straws. We hope for more.

More than this. More than life. More of a life worth living, of a life where one experiences what it is like to be alive, not merely surviving.

With her, I felt a glimpse of that life. I felt the heat in the sunshine, not the cold of the wind. I felt that the whole was more than the sum of the parts.

I wanted to make love again. I wanted not just to make the physical act, but to build love, create love, make love, out of a world where there was no love. To fill the world with joy, with optimism, with something more than the void there was before. Make the whole of our lives more than the sum of the parts : for there to no longe rbe merely a me or a you, but an us, a love.

To not fill the world with love where one can is almost a moral crime. To not bring happiness into the world where there is so little of it seems, to me to be wrong. We can make love, make happiness, so easily. All we need is someone to react against. In the same way as Styrofoam is a neutral ingredient, all you need to do is mix it with 1/8th gasoline oil to make napalm.

All a fire needs is a spark. All love needs is a kiss. All I need is something more.

I was really very nervous on our fourth date. It was a Friday evening. Deliberate even, making it a Friday. I took her to see a film. We sat in the darkness. Our hands moved within each others. I studied her when she wasn’t looking. When she was engrossed in the film.

The choice of film can make all the difference. I wasn’t about to take her to some skin flick like Robert DeNiro. I chose something funny, literate, romantic, and yet exciting. A difficult combination. Especially as the majority of films on the cinema are Hollywood shit – mass produced rubbish to gather money and advertise toys.

Afterwards, we came out squinting into the harsh light of an early summer evening. Like an animal brought to air after weeks underground, the light hurt our corneas. Conversation was small – her arm crooked inside mine, her head tilted into my mouth, and we debated the meaning of the film. What did you think of it? Ah, it was alright. I liked the bit when…. Really? Hmm. I thought the effects were a bit shit.

This is, of course, the best part of seeing any film. The talking afterwards. The discussion. The debate. She was my intellectual equal – able to see the film in a similar but different light to myself. Offering alternative interpretations of events and imagery. As I said, reality is only the hallucination of the majority. Shivering in the cold as the wind from outside came through the lobby doors as the huddled masses braved the elements.

We exited the airlock of the cinema into the cold. She shivered, and I wrapped my coat around her. The cinema was not far from her flat, her rented, hired room in the outskirts of the Urbanopolis, where she shared with a girl she went to school with and one she didn’t really know. She must have left her old relationship in a hurry. She must have left behind her clothes, her furniture, her hopes, her dreams, to escape him when the abuse had got too much.

Some people externalise themselves. Some people abuse others and claim that they are the ones that have been abused. The circle of abuse goes on.

But she? She was a victim. I wanted to repair that fear. I wanted to heal those scars.

I wanted to make her my lover. And in slow steps, we were becoming so much more than friends. Inside her hurt soul was a trusting, loving girl, wanting to get out. And I wanted inside there, inside that beautiful soul.

Late at night, we went up the steps of her flat, she unlocked the door, and she spirited me past the two girls, both of whom were smoking in front of the television. They muttered something and returned to the bottle of wine they were nursing. It was, after all, the end of the month, and there was too much month at the end of their money. Sadly, this was not some chickflick cliché. This flat was the last resort of the twenty something spinster. It smelt…. Unloved.

She hung up my coat and her leather jacket, before offering me a drink from the kitchen. Under the striplight, the harsh exposed neon set in the ceiling, I could see every flaw in her skin, every crinkle in her white shirt, every strand of her sweet hair. The white outline of stray, soft keratin cells glinting against the 60watt bulb.

I took her offer of a drink – a flaky, bitty pure fruit juice.

She didn’t offer for us to sit in the living room. There was no point. I would end up being mentally examined by the two girls. They would sit there stuffing me full of passive nicotine distracting me from Helen and her hypnotic eyes. I would be grilled. Questioned. Interrogated. I could do without that bullshit.

Is this the man I became? Sat in a strange house, and far far too late to get home safely, surrounded by people I didn‘t know, hoping for some form of salvation. Maybe I could find it inside someone else, because salvation, happiness, was not inside me. Apparently so.

In her room, a cramped, harshly lit box, we sat. And talked. She sat cross legged on the bed, her back against the wall, the flesh of her legs glinting in the light of a overhead lamp made by a leading Scandanavian company.

The time was growing short. The unspoken rule made it clear what the future held. But first, we would talk. We would talk of anything, of everything, Of all the things in the world. Except the fact that as surely as night follows day, as surely as sunrise follows sunset, we would fuck. Except it wasn’t fucking, it wasn’t sex, it was something else… something more that that something that wasn’t quite love. But it could be.

It feels weird to talk about the woman I could love in such base terms. There’s more to us than that – there’s something beyond the meeting of flesh. The meeting of the flesh is a connection, a way of achieving some deeper intimacy.

Sometimes the only connection is a mutual fear of loneliness. That’s not enough for any relationship to last. Making love should be the ultimate expression of trust and affection between two people. Not a weapon. Not a leisure option to stave off boredom, shave off moments of time.

There’s more to us than fucking. More to us than making love. More to us than just flesh grinding against flesh, trying to fuck our way out of the grim palette that life gives us.

To Helen, making love was more than just physical, it was metaphysical. Beyond flesh. True lovemaking only came from a mental connection – the place where two souls meet made real through the body.

Yes, I’ve fucked people. But its not the same – its just an imitation of love – a Xerox, a photocopy, a ghost of what love could be. Physicality without the spirit.

I could see her feet. I wanted to kiss those. But patience is a virtue. And I knew I must wait and let it mature.

Careful. Careful. Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t say anything that may possibly stop this. I need this. I need this the way a fish needs water, the way humans need oxygen, the way a junkie needs a hit.

Between us there would shortly be the connection. Two souls in one form, with the blinding white aura pouring forth from our souls, into each other, from each other, of each other.

With talk like that I was starting to think that perhaps I’d drunk a little too much in the pub earlier.

In the meantime, I had to talk with her for just long enough to convince her that I was worthy of her. I knew I was, but did she?

We edged closer on the bed. She was tired. It was after all, after midnight. And I was in danger of turning into a pumpkin at this late hour. Slumped under the half-light, she spoke of her youth. Not of the tedious, sweaty fumblings. Not of the abusive shadow that hovered over her. But of her hopes, of her dreams. Of how life has cheated us, but despite it all, we believe, we hope, we strive for love. For the better things life keeps just around the corner from all of us. Of how she had wanted to a poet or an artist, or a musician, or something, anything more than she feared she would be.

Her lips taste like heaven.