Kissing Games

He still has bits of cheese and onion crisps in his mouth; my first kiss. We’re behind the industrial units, on a piece of waste grass; dry and tickly. Our hair stinks of chlorine; squeaky, damp, stringy hair – mine all knotty and tied up with a bobble. His face is red and shiny and his hair is black and his eyes green. It’s a bet for 50p. I win; I buy a Mars and keep the change. We bus it home. I think my best friend is proud of me; she got her money’s worth when I told her how far he pushed his tongue down my throat; his tongue and the piece of crisp.

Now that I’ve taken the plunge, behind the industrial units, there is no stopping me. When fog settles over the school playing fields, I take boys with me to the far corner, where no one can see, and press our rubbery lips together; lips that taste of mashed potato or chewed pencil ends. I make each of them think we are sharing something special and, of course, that they are the best. Trophies of various kinds follow the kissing. I’ve been given sweets, large pieces of a grandmother’s rhinestone jewellery that feel heavy and move like chain-mail and party invitations. There was an invitation to tea at Robert’s. His dad’s warehouse is full of children’s ‘novelties’ wrapped in pungent cellophane – like the things you get free in cereal packets. We play with action men in his funny-way-round house.

The other girls think it’s really odd that I go to boys’ houses to play. I like to hear the hysteria in my best friend’s voice when she says things like,

‘You’re so weird, playing with boys. Do you LOVE Robert?’

Love never enters my head when it comes to kissing boys. I just do it for the dares.

It’s almost dark and I haven’t been home from school very long - one of those short days in winter. Anthony calls on me – he’s got a torch and asks me if I want to go up to the allotments with him. I’m happy to have a reason to go out.

We go along a narrow lane with high hedges, the path divided into two thin trails by a grass Mohican. When we come to where the lane meets the stream we continue via our secret route, keeping going until we reach the place where someone once built a dam, and then we pick our way across the stones; we both know how icy the water is. You can tell the dam has been there a while now, lots of debris has been stopped from its journey downstream, and people keep adding more stones. It never looks quite the same. Even as we cross, the smaller stones wobble and settle slightly differently. It makes me think of an ancient backbone bearing up against the weight of the world. It can’t hold up forever; one day, when it’s been raining really hard, a deluge will wash it all away.

On the other side we have to edge along a short distance where it’s always really muddy, until the break in the fence – just a couple of panels that have been loosened and pushed off – that’s where we get through.

The site is steep, and edged with woodland. We sometimes sit in our tree up there, spy on teenagers scrambling, and watch people walking their dogs. A bit ago, in the woods, we started collecting the small rectangles of gold foil from the tops of new packs of cigarettes. If they are really fresh they smell of tobacco, but they have to have literally just wafted down to the ground for that. If you rub them and make them warm, you get the gentle metallic scent. With a torch, any shiny litter shines out like cat’s eyes. I don’t like seeing rubbish around though. We’ve got a place where we always stash the foils - between the stones of the high wall that divides the woods from the road. I won’t leave them there forever, they won’t biodegrade (something my Dad told me about man made stuff). I might burn them all one day. Maybe I'll take them with me to the bonfire next week.

Except the odd bit that has been thrown over, there isn’t a lot of litter on the allotments because it’s mostly fenced in. Other kinds of discarded things lie about; broken plant pots, old buckets, bottles and tins, pegs, old twine and rope, canes, wooden tool handles mottled with red or green paint, seed packets. Anthony is good at finding our way along with the torch. The moon is bright tonight too; that kind of sharp brightness that you look at through your bedroom curtains and wonder if it is manmade.

Sometimes Anthony takes bits of the discarded things to use in games at home, that’s why there is always mud in his coat pockets, dried mud that gets pulled out with the loose sweets and biscuits and coins that he stashes away. If he buys chews from the shop with the odd pennies he’s got, he sucks the pennies first to clean them and rubs them on his trousers because he thinks Mr Thompson won’t take dirty pennies. I think it’s horrible, but boys just do things like that without caring. He takes the taste away with Black Jacks or Anglo Bubblies.

Mr Thompson is weird and his daughter bribes people with sweets she steals from the shop, because it’s the only way she can make friends – but they aren’t real friends. Her mum and dad’s ambition is to have the biggest house on the estate. We’ve got the biggest garden of anyone I know, but she says she’s going to have a bigger one, one day.

We sit against one of the disused sheds and Anthony rests the torch at an angle pointing towards us. The shed is dilapidated, but it’s still got roughly four sides. I don’t like the idea of what might be under the fallen planks. Anthony’s nose is dirty, but I don’t tell him, I just try not to look at it. I tighten my loose shoe lace mainly by feel, because I can’t really see my feet.

‘What shall we do?’

Anthony rummages around in his anorak pockets without taking his eyes off me – black eyes. I notice how his eyelashes are also black, lit up from underneath he looks spooky and funny at the same time. His face is pale and a bit girlish. He smells of wet wood; probably where we squeezed through the fence. I wonder if I smell the same.

‘I’ve got these’ his eyes widen towards me, looking for my reaction.

‘Matches?’

‘Yeah.’

He picks up a bit of dirty old string from the ground beside him.

‘Wonder how this’ll burn?’

‘Try it,’ I say, ‘light it’.

He picks out a thin stick from the box of Bryant and May. He strikes it against the side of the box as though it’s something he does all the time, and the yellow wisp comes to life. It must be alive because it dances a cheeky dance, flicking about. But then it seems to be sucked away into nowhere, but where? This is what ‘extinguished’ means.

Anthony gives me the box.

‘I’ll hold the string ready, you strike the match.’

‘Ok’.

I slide the box open and take out the match – I love the neat box, but the printing on the top looks like things look when you go bozz-eyed. I strike, it’s so easy! The flame is alive so close to my fingers that I’m put in a sort of trance by the amazing heat and light as it moves up the stick. Anthony keeps the end of the string in the flame until I drop the match. It falls down between my legs and I watch the red glow peter out, lifeless in the mud. The end of the string glows red for a few seconds then blackens, and a thin, weak trail of ghostly smoke lingers for a second. Anthony drops it on the ground and presses his shoe onto it.

‘Must have been a bit damp.’

I am feeling really daring now, so I give Anthony the box of matches back and suggest we go and sit in our tree. We’ve never been up there in the dark before, but I think I can still get up without daylight. We’ve climbed the tree so often now; I know where each branch is by heart and I’ve drawn it over and over with a 6B pencil on the other side of my mum’s waste cartridge paper that she brings back from work.

We make our way back out of the allotments and up to the woods. Anthony goes first with the torch. Everything seems so much closer in the dark; I recognise familiar tree roots and hollows, places where there is long grass and places where no grass has ever been. The ground is smooth, cool, dry mud where so many people come through, either on motorbikes or horses or just walking like us. We stop and shine the torch up into a bare beech tree trying to find the source of a cracking noise in the branches. The tree seems starker in the torchlight - lifeless, as if it was made of stone and the night sky above it makes my heart miss a beat. Looking back down at the path, the streak of torchlight seems pathetic against the amazing moon. We follow its moving circle on the ground again.

Anthony points the torch up into the tree for me to climb. It’s harder than I thought to get up there in the dark. I find myself feeling around the branches and pressing myself much closer to the trunk, but I make it. I feel a bit unbalanced and, when Anthony throws the torch up for me to catch, I nearly fall and I see the torch light almost disappear into a tangle of brambles.

‘Brilliant catch’, Anthony says, retrieving it, probably pulling holes in his anorak on the thorns. He puts it upside down in his top zip-up pocket so that it shines upwards while he climbs. He doesn’t do much better than me and the torchlight bobs all over the place while he tries to get his feet and hands on the right branches. I don’t like the look of some of the insects caught in the light.

We finally get settled, even though I still feel a bit dizzy in the dark. I start to think I would quite like to set off back home, now I’ve proved to myself that I dare to get up into the tree in the dark. Then Anthony switches the torch off.

‘Oh my God, that’s so scary,’ I say.

‘Yeah’.

We sit there for a few minutes taking it in; the massive moon, the branches stretching up above us as though into nowhere, and the complete darkness below. We really can’t make out anything on the ground except the odd tiny glint of something unidentifiable a few feet away. Anthony rummages in his pocket with one hand and I hang on to my branch so that he doesn’t make me lose my balance while he wriggles about.

‘What are you doing? Sit still.’

‘Just seeing if I’ve got any chews.’

For some reason we have started whispering. I get a whiff of a Black Jack that Anthony must have just unwrapped and popped in his mouth, then I grip his arm to alert him to a noise, but he has already heard what I have heard. There are voices coming towards us; gradually I make out the odd word. It sounds like teenagers, maybe some lads. But then I hear a girl giggling, then she lets out a shrill cry and starts laughing again. I am terrified as they stop just below us. I can feel my heart beating so hard in my chest.

‘Come here you’. It sounds like a boy from Secondary School – a bit cocky and annoying.

The girl giggles again, and I feel sick at the thought that they might be snogging, right there underneath us. Anthony is so still, I realise he must be as scared as me. I’ve still got a grip on his arm.

‘I don’t half fancy you’. This time he has made an effort to soften his voice. The thought that they might be touching each other in the dark makes me feel really dizzy and I seriously think I might fall out of the tree. The girl giggles again; girls are so annoying when they become teenagers; their breasts grow and they start to smell a slightly unpleasant, fuzzy, warm kind of smell, intense like the inside of a greenhouse in summer, and they use perfumes and deodorant to hide it. There was a girl at my school in the top juniors who started her periods really young. She sat in the cloakroom waving her sanitary towels around as though it meant she was better than any of the rest of us. I can remember how the smell of her changed.

‘Get your knickers off.’

‘Oi, cheeky, give us a minute.’

‘I can’t wait, come on.’

‘You have got one, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah, ‘course I have.’

The realisation that they are planning to have sex, right there on the ground below us creeps over me like a hot rash and I start shaking. Anthony moves my hand off his arm and shifts his weight a bit – I’m scared he might choke on his Black Jack and give us away. I alter my grip on the branch beside me; my arms are aching like mad. I start to visualise bits of the film they showed us at school for sex education, and my imagination runs riot. Will she bleed all over the mud?

Her giggles become deeper and slower. I feel like I want to close my eyes, but I can’t see anything anyway.

‘Get down’.

‘Hang on, it’s mucky down here, and I’m bloody frozen.’

‘Feel how hard I am, Kim.’

A few seconds silence then a burst of laughter.

‘Bloody hell, you kinky bugger.’

‘You ready for this?’

He starts making noises like he’s being tickled or something. Then they are both moaning like mad. It seems to get so crazy I can hardly bear it. Then it suddenly stops.

‘God, fucking hell that was so fucking good.’

‘I’m bloody freezing here Dave, where are my knickers.’

They start laughing, and I don't know how I manage to stay still until we finally hear them walking away. I can hardly feel my arms and legs and I realise I have been biting my bottom lip really hard.

We barely speak to each other on the way home, but every so often Anthony starts a sort of nervous laugh that sounds more like crying until I hear him covering his mouth and forcing himself to stop. He doesn't come to the door of my house and he doesn't say he'll be round tomorrow.