When I egged you on to climb the spiked iron fence, you went, you twined your lean thighs like smiles and climbed it higher than I've seen you. You etched your name beside the old bronze plaque, and we felt new. Your mouth tasted of spikes and nothing but the chokey girlish pride of my tongue. Thursdays in the libraries I sat with open books on the table not doing my essay, and everybody that passed was you. I can no longer stand this waiting, I can't sit here feeling stationery in my hands, nothing but remains of eraser bits tickling my gums. At 2 am as I crouch at my desk I think of you, coming in, sinewy flesh snapping the puny iron hinges, you wrestle the pen away from me and tear me from my essay papers, sweep down my books and files and me onto the floor. In the morning I will go to my tutor's room, buttonless and tired, to sheepishly smile some excuse or other. I can't stand this waiting.
By the time we had reached the border, way past midnight, with Barodin recovering in a small pool of vomit on the floor of the back seat and the radio stuck between channels, endlessly repeating the chorus of Olivia Newton John's early 80s hit 'Xanadu' over a live weather report, we knew that things were going from bad to worse. The border guard eyed us unsympathetically over their half-ash cigarettes, hands calmly on the rifles as we sat in the awkward lampless moonlight waiting for our passports to be returned. Barodin lay, hands sprawled out over the smooth leather , knees bent, yet curiously possessed of the same sense of imperial stature he had always commanded. It was at that time, rather than at the bar before the performance, that Barodin famously intoned, "Don't worry, brothers, we are dead already. It's too late to do anything tonight." The barely visible smile which followed this hoarse, whispered pronouncement, restored him to a figure of calm, rhetorical charm, still holding sway over his audience of two as we stared, transfixed at this bow-tied gentleman who had once been the toast of the entire East Coast literati and a star beloved of television viewers across the globe. Suddenly Pete went out for a Coke.
Me: a name I call myself - 19, black haired, browneyed, almost thin. You : a naturalist could not record you, a botanist would wonder at your fruit - you're tall enough to scale without a ladder, girl enough to wink and whisper, man enough to fool around with me. Me : your servile salivator, your caring Big Brother, your equal when we're in the mood. You give and I take in equal measure, my tail's your victory, your head's my spoils. You: no notion of love has touched you, not till the day of my triumphal entry -- if you have a past it's a poor one, and as for mine, don't ask. It's history, and there's an end of it: here, at this second, we're born.
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