Memory and Loss Pt. 04

The waiter decided that we were in love, and must have spoken to the owner, for he came out of the kitchen, chef's trousers black checked and white, with a complimentary dessert "pour la belle femme avec les beaux yeux." Clio blessed him with her beautiful smile.

"Monsieur, vous etes un homme chanceux."

Yes, I was, for a little while.

"Take me home," she said.

At my house, Clio greeted cat, who chirruped at her, his little conversation welcoming this woman once again.

"I want..." she said, "oh fuck, I don't know what I want. I do, but I don't. Just take me to bed. I can't keep you, but I want to. Shit."

I knew how she felt. There was a sense of the unreal about us, neither of us wanting time to pass, and no time left for us. Life would get in the way, again.

Undressing was a slow reveal. Clio slipped off her heels, and was the slim slender girl who had to tilt her head up to my lips. Her hand caressed the back of my hair and held me to her lips, and her other hand touched my cheek, light fingers a delicate trace. I reached behind her, and found the long zipper down her back, and slid it down.

The black sheath of cloth fell from her shoulders to a dark puddle on the floor, and the darkness of her nipples thrust tight from her slight, conical breasts, firm and high. She wore a simple garter, clipped to black stockings, and a froth of lace was about her hips, sexy and black. Her olive skin was rich and dark, her belly a lovely small mound.

My hands fell to the curve of her ass, and held her close. She flung her arms around my neck and clutched me tight to her small body. And then pushed back from me and fell to the bed, pushing herself high onto the pillows, her dark hair touching the bed head.

"What are you doing with clothes on?" She smiled, "hurry, I'm getting cold, I need your heat on my skin."

Eager to oblige, I pulled my shirt over my head, no time for buttons, and swiftly dropped my trousers, tripping over the legs as I pulled socks from my feet.

"Look at you," she whispered, "but you've lost your long blond hair."

"Yes, three year's growth cut, the week before I started work. Mum hated the length it got the year they were overseas, coz I only cut it once that year."

"Yes, I do remember seeing you from a distance, that second year."

Wistful and soft, seeing me from a distance, seeing me in the past.

I stood beside the bed and gazed down upon Clio, who lay there nude and naked for me, open and giving herself up to my eyes. This was her, Clio unadorned, a feast for my eyes. I drank her down, knowing even then this cup must last a lifetime. She was my grail and Guinevere combined, unobtainable and impossible, and in this moment, just for me. Just for her.

I find, looking back now, that I continue in wonder that this happened to me, that Clio was like a phoenix for me. But I always remember too, that she saw me as her beautiful boy. I don't know if I had the most beautiful smile in the world for her, but my solace from all of this, from what came first and what stopped later, is Clio did it too. She was there, with me, like I was with her.

She wanted me as much as I wanted her, is the conclusion I give myself, when I consider this. And God help me, every year, I do. It is always this time, creeping to winter when the last warmth is in the air but the first chill, too. Clio is my dark winter, and then spring comes.

Clio in my bed, her arms open for me, beckoning me to her flesh, to her lips, to her breasts, that little dark flick of hair by her eye that I would move from her lashes with my finger. The dark hollow in her throat where her pulse beat, a faint trail of veins under the skin upon her breast. A soft down of dark hairs on her forearm, fading to her wrist, that was small, encircled by my fingers.

A scar on her upper arm, some child's accident from a tree, falling, or from a tumble, running. Shadows and light on her ribs, tickled when I run my fingers slowly over them, in wonder at her skin, and her gasp of breath, my touch is too light. My lips are upon her navel, my tongue touching into the whorl, her lost connection to her mother's womb.

My fingers tug at her nipple, which tightens firm and into my mouth, and I suck her breast, my tongue swirling that rippled length, and she holds her hand to my head and keeps me there, her fingers slowly combing through my hair to my skull, her nails digging as I lightly bite the bud of her breast, and she sighs.

Clio's heart beat is steady and quick when I rest my head on her chest, my fingers laced through hers, and I listen to the river of her blood. As I lie cradled on her breast, her fingers trail down my ribs and side, and to my hip, and she curls her hand nearer to my belly and grips the shaft of me.

Her hand is slow up and down my length, and I look up to her eyes and they are steady on mine, her pupils huge and black, and she lowers her head and kisses my forehead and touches fingers to my eyes, closing them.

"Your look, I can't bear your look, I get lost in your look."

Her voice is low, the words barely heard, and I wonder if they are for me, or for her.

Her hand leaves my cock, and I feel her thighs part, and her hand on my head pushes me down.

"Kiss me there, like you did that day and tasted my blood."

Her hand on my head is insistent, and she pushed me down her body, until I lie between her thighs and take her sweet succulent sex into my mouth, my tongue inside her and then I take one lip into my hot mouth and suck it. She gasps, and pushes her centre up to me so that her lips are between mine. My tongue is a long curl through her slickness, up over her clitoris, and she gasps.

Clio holds me to her centre, and her thighs spread wide, then her knees are high above my head, and I suckle her sweet ass hole, and up again, my tongue slippering through her lips. My hand travels high to her breast and she presses it against her heart, and she sighs.

Her hand glides down over her belly, and her forefinger slides into her own wetness, circling the rising purple pearl at her own special pace. She gasps, "move up higher, come into me."

She places her hands up against the wall and pushes her body down onto my cock, and between her movement and my thrust I am deep inside her in one long, slow movement. Her thighs wrap around my waist and I am held tight. My sway into her is slow and steady, and I hold her hands tight together above her head, stretching her beneath me. She sighs, and we rise into our orgasm, together.

Her tightness clenches upon me, and she urges me inside her. I arch my head and neck back, and look down to her beautiful face, and her smile is the most beautiful smile in the world, ma belle femme. Her black, black eyes are huge and intense, and as I rise to my own orgasm she holds my look, and wills my eyes to remain open, falling into hers. I surge my come into her, pushing that svelte body up against the wall, and she pushes back so I am as deep inside her as is ever possible.

Our orgasms peak around each other's, and we come together, each a loud cry, and I pulse two, three, four times, and she clutches my back and digs her nails deep as she ripples into her own climax.

"Oh my God, I'm home, I've come home," she sobs into the air and I collapse onto her, our sweat cooling on our heated skin.

We roll to our sides, and I stay inside her for five minutes, even after I have softened, and her legs are clenched tight around me, holding me inside her. We are silent, and our eyes lock and neither can look away. My emotions for this woman swirl and tangle, and I think oh my sweetness, after nine years she wants this, this impossible thing.

As our hearts drop and slow, we shift down into the bed and pull covers over ourselves and we are warm together. Clio eases herself off my softened cock, and she turns her back to my front and I spoon her smallness against my chest and thighs. She holds my hands like a prayer against her breast, and is still.

"Thank you A, for wanting me, for waiting all this time. But I can't, I can't."

"Clio, darling Clio, I know. I know." I didn't want to know. But I did.

And she silently cried in my arms, her love for me spilling in silver threads down her cheeks, and all I could do was hold her tight to me, as our hearts broke, quietly. She slept, just a little, this confused and confusing woman. Ahh Christ, how I loved her then, and God help me, how I love her now.

But she went, that night. I insisted on driving her home in the cold and the whole way there her hand was threaded through my hair, holding me to the last. Seeing her shut that car door gently, and bending down to touch her fingers to the glass, and seeing her last sad smile, watching her go, my eyes blurred. Her two fingers flicked horizontal, riffling her coat. Always her farewell as she walked away.

Clio, the girl with most beautiful smile in the world.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

The next months for me were a turmoil. As is often the way, people tell me, one's life during grieving tends to turn upside down. That is certainly what happened in the six months after my father died, suddenly. In that time, Cathy and Clio spent their short times, for their own reasons, in my bed.

After Clio left that night, a week or so later I took several weeks' leave and spent time in my home town with my mother, collecting together some of my dad's books and packing them in the car to be with me. When I returned to work there was a new girl there, lace stockings with her foot high on a desk, curvaceous and vivacious. She found out from the other women in the section what they knew about Rosie, who was still away. That was in the middle of June.

This girl turned up on my doorstep one night, the second night after I invited her home, with a few belongings in a wicker basket, and stayed for three weeks. Rosie returned, and the girl said, one day down by the lake, yes, I'm willing to be there for you.

So I left Rosie one night, my belongings in my car, and never saw cat again. I saw Rosie several times after I left, and she finally realised that I would not always be there for her, waiting.

She made her own way, later, and I think is mostly happy. I hope so, because she was with me seven years, and that's a long time. My sister saw Rosie five years ago, and said she talked about me. But I don't know what she said. My sister can be frustratingly vague, sometimes.

Nine years was longer, though, and I needed to know if Clio would break her marriage for me. If she hadn't been married, I have no doubt my children would have a different mother.

I met her in a bar later that July, possibly early August. I told her about the girl, and asked her about N. She was still, subdued, and later I found out why.

But she said, "no, I'm married. Go to her, you're a good man, you deserve something good. And N is a good man, too."

I moved away from that city a year later, and married the girl.

I came back to that city a year after that and asked a school girl if she knew Mrs C. The girl did, and delivered a note to Clio, who met me outside the school fence, on her lunchtime.

"I don't have long. Lucky you chose Amy as your messenger. She's a good kid."

We went to a small bistro situated in the small shopping centre just down the hill from my old house. We both tacitly agreed we could not go back to that larger place, where the people parted in the square that day, and we met.

"I'm a mother now," Clio revealed, "he's two this year. He's his father's son." She looked at me. "It's OK. He's not yours. He's not got blue eyes."

And her restlessness and unease the last time we had met, some three months after those two nights together, that tension hurtled into focus and her bravery shamed me. Clio was far stronger than I could ever be. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it tight.

"Fucking hell, Clio. Fuck. I don't know what to say."

She had carried her first child, not knowing who the father was? That's braver than I'll ever be.

"I knew you had gone, too. I've a friend who knew of you at your work. I knew you'd gone away from this city."

"The job was too good not to take. But it solved my other problem too. I knew that if I stayed in this place, I'd destroy two marriages. I couldn't do that. Not to someone I loved."

I've not seen Clio since that day. As she walked from my car back into the school yard, two fingers tilted away from her hip, in a farewell. A quick flash of flesh against the fall of her coat, she always did it, walking away from me.

She walks in my dreams, regularly, the girl with the most beautiful smile in the world. Sometimes I see women in the street, and their smile reminds me of Clio, just a little. But nobody ever comes close.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

Later, the internet became a miraculous thing, and every now and then I see what Clio is doing. And that is where I discovered something about her that explained a lot, a huge, huge amount, really. It explained a whole lot about her story. And why her story is perhaps more important than the little one I have recounted here.

One of the great shames of this great southern nation is what the "benevolent white man" did to the aboriginal people. We have a stolen generation who were removed from their parents, dispossessed and a diaspora.

One of the dreadful consequences of this theft of children was a breakdown of marriage within the aboriginal people. Because the children had been removed from parents, they might never know who their kin might be. And this meant they could never take the risk of marrying another aboriginal person, for that person might be kin, and marrying within kin is the biggest taboo.

Their solution, this tragic generation, was to marry outside their people, marry into the white man. That way, they could never accidentally marry their kin, their cousin, their sister, their brother.

Clio had always said she was half Italian. It was her explanation for her darkness, her dark skin, her black eyes. She may have been half Italian, but I discovered later, so much later, that she has aboriginal blood in her. I don't know how much, she never ever told me, I never knew.

Clio's story is so much more complicated than mine. Her parents were from the stolen generation, and her mother truly had lived a long and hard life, and maybe her husband was Italian. I don't know.

It is an indictment of this country, that even in the late seventies, a little koori girl from a small country town would be scared of the stigma of her race, and would never say who she really was. She never told me, I never knew. The girl with the most beautiful smile in the world.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

In my father's testament to his family, he wrote of Osip Mandelstam, and through him I learned of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. I bought a translation of her poems by D.M.Thomas, a favourite writer of mine at that time. There is a poem in that volume, "In Imitatation of Annensky" which finish this story far better than I ever could. Akhmatova was a writer and a poet, I'm just a scribe.

[Unfortunately, Lit's copyright respect rules prevent me reproducing the whole poem here. Since a fragment of a poem is not the poem, I have only shown a few essential phrases below.]

There is a scan of the page from that collection on my tumblr blog - same name as here on Lit. The faded yellow page is my proof to anyone who has read this story and doubts what they have read. You may see for yourself, if you choose. And if any reader has indulged me this far, and has got to this page, then I thank you. I thank you for your belief, or your disbelief. I thank you for your indulgence.

I do not really know why I have written this story of B (it was always about B, even if I gave her another name in this tale) and published it here. Perhaps it is because we remain apart, she and me, but as the impossible coincidence proves, we had a long way to go, way back then, and she follows me in dreams and I am haunted still. And perhaps we still have a long way to go.

I think of B the same time every year, and the haunting deepens.

Perhaps by writing of it, and having others read it, it makes it real, it keeps it true. I cannot tell anyone near to me, for I remain married to that girl by the lake. I dare not go back to that city, for B is there still, and I dare not. Her name is in my daughter's name, and I dare not. I am my own tragedy, yet I know whose smile I shall see when I die.

I wait.

--- ooo OOO ooo ---

Imitation of Annensky

... first stanza not reproduced ...

Rise and set, the other faces,
Dear today, and tomorrow gone.
Why is it that at this page
Alone the corner is turned down?

... third stanza not reproduced ...

O, the heart is not made of stone
As I said, it's made of flame...
I'll never understand it, are you close
To me, or did you simply love me?

Anna Akhmatova
tr. D.M.Thomas