Memory and Loss Pt. 01

The mail room would be a lifeline, letters sent and read and re-read, keeping connections back home and later, as people moved to other states, keeping contact as the distances became longer. The dining room fed two hundred fifty of us, first years through to post-grads. A privileged, isolated community, a little microcosm of a bigger world, small enough to be intimate, but still big enough to meet strangers down through the years.

I lugged my bag through the doors to a courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by two storey buildings: East and West Wings, South Wing, and the dining room on the north side. My room was on the second floor of East Wing, looking down the long line of poplars, the Avenue.

Split by a central corridor, rooms on each side - the blocks were for both sexes, all years together. When the college was first built, sexes were segregated floor by floor, but now, all mixed. Free for some, freedom for all of us.

Each room was basic - a single bed to the left or right of the door, a built-in cupboard to the ceiling, a small sink with shelves and a mirror, a single window opposite the door, a desk and chair, and a simple lounge chair. Comfortable though, and centrally heated against the cold winters with sub-zero winds blowing in over the snow covered mountains.

It was dinner time, and I made my way to the servery and then through to the dining room with my tray. Only a handful of people were in the room, the early arrivers, like me. A guy with long curly hair gestured to me, hi, and I sat with him and an Asian girl.

Introductions were made, and it turned out that Steve was in third year, Chun starting her second year. That was handy, they offered to show me a quick tour of the campus and the city, so I would know the place a little by Sunday, when the rest of the first years arrived. That would give me a head start.

Steve's brother Dave was starting his first year too, arriving on the Saturday, doing the same subjects as me. He had a mate staying with him for the first week, dossing down on the floor, a pair of heads from the west. Good, I had some northern weed, the remains of a last deal done in my home town, so had found some smokers already. That would ease things, as I didn't really like big groups of people. I was from a small town.

The next day Steve and Chun showed me around the city centre and the campus, and we shared a joint down by the lake. This early familiarity with the place gave me more confidence, and meant that I would be established in the hall by the Sunday. Cool.

Dave and his mate Ken turned up, and I clicked with Dave straight away, but found Ken to be an arrogant prick, cocky and full of himself. He'd gone to a private school with daddy's money paying the bills, and looked down at state school kids like me with scorn. What a prick, glad he's not coming here. But I smoked his dope, so maybe he wasn't so bad. Naah, he was still a tosser.

Then, on the Sunday, the hall started to fill, with new people to meet, new cliques forming with a dance of personalities and types, weaving and wandering. Because of the extra few days I had been here, I was established in the hall, and if not the expert, I at least knew my way around. People thought I was in second year.

It turned out that the hall had a new enrolment policy that year, and a much higher percentage of the first years were girls, to get the numbers of women in the college up. Of the hundred new students, seventy or so were girls. I was in paradise.

Dave and I started to scope out who was around, and he laid eyes on a pretty brown haired girl from a little town in a southern state. Easy on the eye but, Christ, couldn't she just shut her mouth and stop talking? Fuck, I had never heard such drivel.

But then, the next day, she introduced us to her friend from the same town, Clio. Her girlfriend wasn't staying in hall but was sleeping on a floor so she could be closer to things going on during the orientation week - O week.

Clio was quiet, but with a dark, sultry sexuality about her. She was about about five four, five five, a slim build with dark brown, almost black hair, cut shoulder length. Her skin deeply tanned at the end of summer, one of those girls who go a deep olive brown in the sun.

I later discovered that she was half Italian, hence her dark beauty. Her eyes were dark and huge, sculpted cheek bones and big full lips.

When she smiled, fuck, I died and went to heaven, right there. And I don't even believe in that place. Clio was fucking gorgeous. A beautiful smile.

She was wearing a plain tee top, her breasts nippled and softly swinging under it. She wasn't big, but her breasts were a gorgeous shape. She didn't need a bra, and was comfortable without one. Her waist was slender, her belly flat, and her legs were sprayed into a pair of jeans that clung to her ass and thighs. She was one of those girls with a space at the top of her thighs, may be an inch wide. I looked, I'll admit that.

She looked up at me and her smile was radiant. "Hi, I'm Clio."

"Hey, I'm Alex, good to meet you."

We continued chatting, and I discovered that she was doing a couple of subjects the same as me, which meant lectures together at least twice a week.

"If we get our act together, we could get ourselves in the same tutes, we should get our names down on the board."

Course work started the next week, so there would be admin stuff to get done.

Meanwhile, we established that we both liked a bit of a smoke, and then started shitting on about favourite bands and movies. She was easy to talk to, and I've always preferred one-on-ones rather than being part of a big group making small talk. I'm a loner, really, and so was she.

We were both from rural towns, and not yet used to the bigger flow of people in a city. Her town was way smaller than mine, so she was even more out of place with lots of people. Plus she was about six months younger than me, only just turned eighteen. So younger than most around her.

But we hit it off, fair to say.

"Will you be here for the party they've organised for tomorrow night?" I wasn't sure where she was staying that night.

"Wasn't going to go, coz Sheree and Dave are going somewhere and I don't really know anyone else. But hey, if you're going to be there, that'd be good."

"OK, so I'll see you then, yeah?"

That was good, Clio was good to talk to, and knowing she would be there meant it was OK for me to rock up, whatever time. I never liked being first to any kind of gathering, my preference was always to give it some time to get going, and I could make a judgement call whether to stay or go. I wasn't a social butterfly. I preferred to land on a beautiful flower and stay for a while.

In the event, a couple of my tapes became the sound track for the party, which was held in a small room at the junction of two corridors. I reckon Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" must have played twenty or thirty times that night.

People who didn't even go to the party came down to the dining room the next morning going, "doo de doo, doo de doo doo, coloured girls go..." like some kind of spaced out zombies.

I got there around nine, and thirty or so people were drunk and stoned, loud voices bouncing around the room, people crapping on about this and that, saving the world, that kind of thing. But Clio was sitting with her head in her hands, alone in a chair in the corner of the room.

"Is she OK?" I asked someone who knew her.

"I think she's having a bad stone, she was off her face when she got here, and she's had another number to herself since."

Fuck, that wasn't good. I needed to get her out of there, get her to a quiet place and talk her down from her stone.

"Clio, can you hear me? It's Alex. I've come to look after you."

I touched her gently on the shoulder, not wanting to startle her.

Clio looked up at me from behind her hands, her cheeks pale and her eyes bloodshot.

"Alex?"

"Yes, come on, let me help you. I think you need to be somewhere quiet, not here."

I was worried for her. I didn't know how much she had smoked. A lot, from what I could see, and I was uneasy for her. I didn't want her freaking out.

"Can you stand up?"

She could, just, and she leaned on my arm. I steered her to the door and down the corridor.

"I need the toilet," she croaked, and I helped her to the women's door, half way down the hall.

"I'll wait for you outside."

Clio was a couple of minutes inside, and then the door banged and she was leaning against the wall.

"Fuck, I'm ripped," she said, her voice small.

Down the end of the corridor, in the dark, I knew that someone had dragged a small couch from somewhere, and I figured she needed to lie down as soon as she could. I helped her to it, and sat down at one end, and she crept on to the cushions and lay her head in my lap. I gently stroked her hair and started to talk softly to her.

I have no idea now what I said, but it didn't matter. Clio just needed to hear a calming voice and to know that she was being looked after. She was slight and pale and small there. Every now and then she would open her big brown bloodshot eyes and gaze up at me, her lids heavy, and then they would drop.

Clio reached down and found my other hand, and brought it up to her chest and clutched it between both her hands, clinging on, her smaller hands gripping mine. I continued to stroke her hair, gently, and massaged her temples, and she clung to my hand at her breast.

"I think I had too much tonight." Her voice was quiet, a whisper. "I smoke too much, sometimes, I need to slow down."

"It's OK, you've got someone to look out for you now."

"I've not had that before. Thank you."

We must have sat on that couch a couple of hours, Clio and I, as she slowly came down from her high. At one stage she slept and her face became peaceful. It was dark, and her features were blurred, but she was peaceful. A number of people came past.

"How is she?"

"Yeah, she's better, she'll be OK."

All was still, and Clio looked up at me with her stoned, stoned eyes. And arrived in my life. Clio, the stoned girl. I told her she had a beautiful smile, and there it was, sleepy, her smile, just for me. I touched my finger to her lips, and she kissed it.

"Thanks for looking after me, thanks so much. I don't deserve it."

Oh yes, Clio, you do.

Later, I took her for a walk around the courtyard, to get some fresh air into her lungs, and to shake the dope driven cobwebs from her head. I wanted to get her to a bed and sleep, now that I knew she was down from her stone and feeling more together.

But the do-gooders, those who had left her to herself earlier in the evening, decided that they knew best now, and insisted that Clio go back to Sheree's room, and crash on the floor. I was too tired to argue - it had been hard enough looking after her all that time, and I thought it best just to let her go.

The next morning, though, Clio came to find me, to thank me once again for looking after her. We spent the morning sitting under the shade of a tree, just liking being together. She told me some more about herself, and I was disappointed to hear that she had a boyfriend back in her home town, an older guy she had been with almost the whole year. So it seemed pretty much hopeless for me.

As the term started up and course work began, Clio and I did get ourselves into the same tutorial group, and met twice a week for lectures. After two weeks it was always me she sat with in the lecture halls, and we spent more time together. But we remained within the boundaries set by her loyalty to her guy back home, and for several weeks, nothing happened between us.

Clio didn't live on campus, and was house-sitting in a suburb on the other side of the mountain. She had access to a car, which gave her more flexibility, and she would drive to the hall and spend time with me, and after a time I gave her the spare key to my room, so she could stay on campus if she had a couple of hours between lectures. But still nothing happened, even though I would wait for hours, sometimes, but would still miss her.

Slowly, I think my heart started to break. Clio was going, even before she had really arrived.

Then, one day, I had finished the long walk up the avenue and was just about to cross the road to the hall, when a blue car pulled up beside me.

"Hey Alex, get in, come out with me."

Clio leaned across and unlocked the car door, and I climbed in.

"That was good timing, I hoped I'd find you. The others are away from the house today, so I've got the car."

She was a fast driver, and in five or six minutes we were speeding up the freeway around the back of the mountain, heading to the tree lined streets of her suburb, roads curving loops up the slopes of the hill. She almost got us killed, accelerating fast in front of on-coming cars as she turned into the long, curved road that was the main artery of the suburb.

"Jesus, Clee, could you cut it a bit closer, next time? Fucking hell, that was close."

I think her heart rate had shot up - just as well the car was responsive.

She pulled into the drive of the place she was staying in, and invited me in. But even here, there was still a reserve about her, and when she showed me her room and the spectacular view over the hills, nothing happened. There was a sense that she was edging closer to something. But still the boyfriend was there between us, distant yet there. I'm not sure she really knew why she had brought me back to this place.

Later in the term Clio moved into some communal student accommodation on the other side of the city centre, maybe half an hour or so from the hall where I was staying. We would spend a lot of our time together, but still nothing further was happening between us, and I was reconciling myself to just keeping Clio as a close friend, even a confidant, but nothing more.

And maybe best that way, as I was finding out that she had a lot of mixed up stuff going on in her young life, and maybe I just wasn't old enough to manage it all. I could see that she valued my friendship, though, and maybe she was keeping herself from becoming too close. I don't know, and I don't think Clio did, either. I was lost with her, really, and lost without her.

Then there was one spellbound Saturday morning, around eleven, when she knocked on my door at the hall. The sun was streaming in, warm, the rays reaching over to the bed, and the day was slow and still. I made Clee a mug of coffee, sweet with two sugars, and then, and to this day I don't know how, we ended up on the bed together, just kissing.

And then it wasn't just kissing, for her fingers were at the buttons of my shirt and she was peeling the sleeves from my body and my chest was warm in the sun and her dark hair a fan as she rested her head against my shoulder.

"Alex, your heart beat is so strong and steady, mine's always fluttering and changing its speed. God, your's is like a wave breaking on a beach, it's so regular. It's soothing."

And her fingers were at the buttons and fly of my jeans and she peeled them down. Clio sat on the edge of the bed, and just looked at my nude body lying there. The sun light was warm against my naked skin, and her huge brown eyes were deep and dark. She had decided something, clearly, for she was taking a lead here.

"We can't make love, because I've got my period, but I want you close to me."

Hindsight is an exact science, and looking back now I see that her timing was quite deliberate. She wanted intimacy, but needed a reason, an excuse, for not being able to let herself, or me, betray her loyalty to her man back home. Or she just wasn't ready for me. Or herself.

I don't know if I was able to rationalise that at the time, but to be honest, I didn't much care, for Clio turned away from me and pulled her tee shirt over her head. Her bare back was dark skinned and slender, the ridges of her ribs and the bumps of her backbone a pattern under her dark skin.

I reached my fingers to touch her, but she stood, still facing away from me, and peeled her own jeans and panties down together, in one smooth movement, bending at the waist and revealing the small curves of her ass.

"Don't look, I'm shy," she said, as she lay beside me, with one hand covering her pubes and the other her small breasts.

Don't look? Fuck, Clee, I've been aching to see you naked for weeks, and you say don't look? So I solved the immediate problem by gazing at her face, losing myself into the darkness of her eyes and the radiance of her smile.

"Just hold me close, let me feel you against me. I don't know what's happening here."

Clio was small and confused, and confusing. But the heat of the sun was glorious upon us, and slowly she relaxed onto the bed and against me, my hardness hot against her side. I realised that she was a ball of tension, and even in my heated, ignorant youth, I had the sense to realise that Clio was lost in herself, and so young.

I was also too young to know what to do: hell, Pam and I had only been together three times, and this was my first time naked with a girl since then. And I was way out of my depth with Clio's complexities, her moods. We were both so young.

Clio was more experienced though, having lost her virginity a couple of years earlier; but as we talked, and I have no idea what we really talked about, she revealed that she didn't think she had ever had an orgasm. Jesus, I was no help there, then, because I had no idea yet how to pleasure a girl. But I suppose her revealing that to me, was something of a sharing and a trust, a reaching out. But I didn't know what to do. I certainly didn't know how to make her come.

Slowly though, she let me gaze on more of her. Her breasts were small and conical, with full areola dark and round, peaked up to long nipples. She had four or five glossy black hairs around each nipple, each may be an inch long, and as I ran my fingers around the rippling peaks of flesh, she whispered,

"I'm embarrassed about those hairs."

"Don't be, they're you, they're real."

"I love the gap at the top of your legs," I told her, and cupped my hand between her thighs, her thick black pubic hair a cushion to the palm of my hand.

"You don't mind that I'm bleeding?" she asked, and I don't think she knew just how intimate and sharing that was.

Or maybe she did, but it was still her protection. Again, I think back, and wonder if Clio offered me something precious, something special, a gift, her blood.

She parted her legs, and let me smooth back the dark hair from her lips with my fingers, and there was the white string of her tampon a contrast against her black curls. She was so still, and one hand lay upon one of her breasts, and the other slightly held the length of my cock, not moving on my flesh, just holding me, as I touched my own lips to the lips of her sex, and tasted the tang of her blood.

I licked over the slick wetness of her clit, but she didn't want me to stay there. Perhaps it was then she said she had never had an orgasm, and was afraid to experience that feeling, but she wanted my lips kissing her own, our tongues tentative.

That small moment on the sun soaked bed was, for me, the centre of that time with Clio, my Clio for just a moment. Time spiralled into that time as, without a stroke or a clench, I silently came on her belly, the white cream of my semen a contrast to the darkness of Clio's flesh, the pulse of my cock held silently between her palm and her fingers, her eyes a darkness pulling my soul into her being as my cream spilled onto her skin.

I did not know it then, but our time spiralled away from that moment, outwards and away, and it was fragmentary and our innocence was lost. Sweet God, her smile, her beautiful smile.

But we were too young, and at that time there was nothing to replace that innocence. We didn't know how, back then, but it took me a long, long time to see that.