What the Sky Sees

Iwas seventeen the first time I kissed a girl. She had long dark hair and she took my face in her hands and pushed her mouth on to mine. She seemed to know what she was doing; I certainly didn't. She drew away just as I was beginning to understand what it was that I had been missing, and told me that she would like to see me again in the evening. That we should go somewhere, do something. She vanished inside her house, leaving me to walk away with the taste of her on my wind-cracked lips.

The bus from March, where she lived then, to my father's house in Upwell, where he still lives today, passes down through Wimblington and then swings around to follow the B1098 parallel to Sixteen Foot Drain. It was a journey I made every day, from the school where I was studying for A levels, to my father's house where I helped on the farm in the evenings. The road beside the Sixteen Foot is perfectly straight and lifted above the level of the fields, and looking out of the window on that newly kissed afternoon I felt like we were passing through the sky.

By the time the day had faded to black my father was asleep and ready for another early morning of work. With the taste of her on my lips and the spark she had put in my belly still dancing there, I slipped the car keys from the hook on the wall and took his car. I had driven before, pulling trailers of straw and silage along farm tracks, but I had no licence to be on the road and I knew my father would never give me permission. But she had said she wanted to see me, to go somewhere and do something, and I wasn't about to stay at home with those words in my head and wipe the salt taste of her away. Perhaps, now, I would. But I was seventeen then and things were different.

The drive to her house was easy enough, uneventful. The roads were empty and straight, and the sky was letting in enough moonlight to steer by. But the drive to her house was filled with my questions and her voice and my mouth and her hands and her face and her hair all at once in my head, one after the other, all at once. What had she meant when she said we should go somewhere? And why, when I'd been circling her for months, had she waited until now to show her interest? I didn't understand, but I had her taste and I wanted more.

I soon discovered that she didn't want to go somewhere at all, just to sit beside me in the car and drive through the flatness of the landscape, looking down across the fields from the raised-up road. We drove through Westry, over Twenty Foot Drain, past Whittlesey (and as we passed through Pondersbridge she put her hand on my thigh and kissed my ear). We crossed the Forty Foot Bridge, drove through Ticks and West Moor, the windows open to the damp rich smell of a summer night in the fens (and beside West Moor I put my hand into the length of her hair). We crossed Old Bedford and New Bedford rivers, drove through Ten Mile Bank, Salters Lode and Outwell (and on the edge of Friday Bridge she asked me to stop the car and we kissed for a very long time).

When we finally stopped we looked out across the fields and talked, about the things people talk about when they suddenly come together in that way. Home, and family, and dreams, and awkward silences. Then she turned to me and lifted my thin woollen jumper over my head, the wool snagging against my tingling skin and giving me tiny electric shocks. Starting from a point beneath my belly button she traced a line with her finger, around the edge of my ribcage and over my nipple, down under my chest cavity and up over my other nipple, around the other edge of my ribcage and back down to my belly button—a glorious heart shape burned on to my body by her fingernail. Sometimes, now, I redraw that shape myself, hoping to regain that moment. Sometimes, now, I think of her hair and wonder why I can no longer remember the way it smelled that night.

I remember the way she watched me as I undid the buttons of her shirt and looked at her breasts. I couldn't bring myself to touch them, not then, not so soon, and eventually she took my fingers and placed them there herself. I drew tiny heart shapes around the dark patches around her nipples, and then pulled her close to kiss her again, electrified by her skin on my skin. I can remember the touch of her whisper on my face as we told each other things we had never spoken before and asked for extravagant promises we believed we could keep. And I can remember the way she looked in the rear-view mirror of my father's car when I drove away from her house, knowing that life would be different now and terrified that it would be taken away from me. But I can't remember the way her hair smelled that night, it no longer smells that way.