First Kiss

“I remember like it was only yesterday……” isn’t that how it’s supposed to start?
Strangely, it doesn’t. It starts with deep thoughts, ‘why can’t I remember?’ This might be because I am an older person, but those memories are supposed to stick, right?

I do remember a first kiss, but it wasn’t mine.

At five I was small, round, freckled and ever so slightly dim. I knew I was dim because my girls only, white segregated Elementary school’s teacher, told me so. Since teachers are the font of all knowledge, I knew it must be true.

Fortunately I also knew that I had little pockets of knowledge hidden away, like how to make a Chameleons explode, where to find the fattest tadpoles and how to walk on the top of walls without falling off, often.

There were others things I knew too, like if you weren’t careful with the bread knife you could turn the loaf red, that it was easy to wriggle through a window if you were locked out, accidentally and that girl’s bodies were different from boy’s bodies. My parents were not nudists but neither were they prudes. I knew the difference, of both.

I knew when he approached the chicken wire fence at the back of the school. Play time for 25 unsupervised minutes in the scruffy yard. It was 1965 when children were occasionally seen, but very rarely heard. He didn’t have shifty eyes but he was definitely sheepish, cautious and soft spoken.

He waved to us, beckoned, the universal come hither and we flocked. The candy was a nice touch, a worldwide language of friendship without translation. His English was broken, but more than good enough. His sarong dropped to his ankles, a yellow and orange patterned cotton, slightly soiled on that very hot day in Cape Town, at the foot of Table Mountain, in South Africa.

His image is imprinted on the inside of my skull He pressed his body against the fence with his skinny chicken arms hanging over the top spikes and his equipment through one of the wire diamonds. I stopped watching him. I looked around at my friends. I looked at their faces. No-one was talking. Silent four and five year olds in rose coloured frocks with crispy white collars and buttons. By now I was bored. I wanted to go away and play, but no-one moved. “D’ya wanta com an stroker snake?” he cooed. Statues, every one. Silence and the smell of dried grass. A girl took a step forward, tentative, with an out stretched arm topped with tiny little finger nails, freshly scrubbed. I watched mesmerized.

Surely she wouldn’t?

Surely she couldn’t?

Didn’t she know?

“If yur his frien, ya can kiss im.”

I wanted to shout but what to shout? No-one else was shouting. As she bent down with a pout I shoved her over, sideways. She yelled, did she ever yell, was she ever loud.

When the teacher arrived we were a gaggle of incoherent girls covered in tears, a great deal of snot, a grazed knee and the man was gone. The teacher, never a very happy woman at the best of times, was even less happy than usual at our disgraceful but unspecified behaviour.

I thought about that man as I wrote my lines:-
‘I will not be unkind to other pupils,’ or something like that, as it’s such a long time ago.

As I wrote with a crampt, pudgy hand, I thought:- ‘adults are so deeply dim, indeed!’

First Kiss

http://alien-in-a-foreign-field.blogspot.com/2008/07/first-kiss.html