Ghost 3

I was in two minds... That marvellous girl, her fringe, her legs, her perfume, smiling at me, close beside me. She had silken brown shampoo-smelling hair sweeping down like a curtain, a red mouth and a vicious grin, a solid body full of dark-clothed promise, varnished nails, a quiet prettiness that sometimes turned aside in gloom.

We met, as usual, in the Art class, me hardly daring to believe my luck, desperate almost. One day she elected to sit beside me and I struggled to keep my heart from pounding as she quietly worked beside me. Ah, her dark brown hair, her blouse, her breasts beneath.

She was a popular girl in school, liked by boys and girls, outgoing, glamorous, sainted in my eyes. I didn't know much about her and was afraid to ask. As we began our conversations, our casual discourses on our likes and dislikes, I could barely restrain my sense of wonder that she would even stoop to talk to me. I hadn't, for any length of time, been so exposed to a girl in school and I let it go to my head, quietly, with a secret sense of rapture.

To me she was all the warmth of autumn embodied, everything pure, a Venus for cold nights. A sixteen-year-old, red-mouthed, in blue nights in the atmosphere of hometime. Her silken skin in bedrooms, her dark jokes. In school, with such dignity and grace, she carried a practical woven bag filled with her essays, everything non-serious and light. She cracked jokes with the teachers, chuckled disgracefully, but always with a drawing-back, an inner reserve, as she leant at stools with her soft skin, exuding a secret, unspeakable perfume.

All enacted in the empty atmosphere of nineteen-ninety one. She was left to empty suburban rooms and duvets, to the humour of streets and wallpapered rooms. Outside the bright yellow lamp-post burning all night long, while she swept about her brown hair, whispering secret joys to herself.