I am a ‘hole in one.’ So the back of my boyfriend’s jacket says. Alexa's a hole in one, written in chalk on the khaki coat that’s from an army surplus shop and has Marlboro reds in its pockets and a Zippo lighter that will spark a flame in 100-mph winds. So my boyfriend says anyway.
I am not what you would call a sporty girl. My only claim to athleticism is that I live a ball’s bounce from Centre Court. But I only really enjoy the Wimbledon fortnight for the little cake stand that pops up in the church field which Iris’s mum stocks with rock cakes, chocolate biscuits and fat wedges of homemade jam sponge.
I suppose I do know that a ‘hole in one’ is a golfing term, but I assume malfeasance. I am surely an object of ridicule, mocked – here, in unforgiving daylight – for my chubby knees and spotty chin, and my thin hair that hangs beside my orbiculate face like wisps of toilet paper.
The church field and abutting graveyard are where we head as soon as school lets out, and when the excruciations of home life have us squirming from our teenage skins. It is where we smoke and where we snog, where we down instant coffee jars of rubbing alcohol + Ribena plundered from parental booze banks, and score our boyfriends’ initials into our forearms like fevered monumental masons.
Some of us (me) have our first kiss here – our backs pressed to the notches of old, cold gravestones by boys whose tongues taste of mint and metal. Some of us (me) get so utterly wasted in the uncut summer grass that we don’t really know, couldn’t really tell, if it was our virginity we lost or the £5 note we had in our pocket. Sex and death in that Elysian field were inextricably (a little creepily) entwined.
We rove this stomping ground like a band of randy monkeys. We pay no heed to reverence for the dead whose crypts we hide (to drink) in, whose tombs we sit (to smoke) on. And no heed whatsoever to Old Derek the Verger who is just trying to do his job about the grounds. In fact, fucking him off (not hard) becomes an end in itself, a motivating force that has us hiding his tools in the bushes and moving his wheelbarrow a few feet while he’s bum-up in the flower beds. And then, Derek doubting the soundness of his mind, becomes a Tintin-ian cartoon of fist-wielding frustration. So we do it all the more.
But Alexa’s a hole in one. Back to that puzzler which, to this day, remains so. It was surely to do with sex, since that and the Pythagorean Theorem were all we were thinking about in those days. And my boyfriend was the first to say he was a whizz at both. This was half true; he sucked at maths and he sucked at me.
But in any event, that boy of mine fine-tunes cool. He wears 501 Levi's and crimson Converse. He listens to The Who and keeps his Marlboros at his (bulging) bicep which he uses to lift his Mini Cooper into snug parking spots. He calls me Lex and I believe he means it when he says he loves me. Sometimes, Lex didn’t want to have sex. Sometimes, I just wanted to spend time with his mum because I couldn’t get over her – her Bridget Bardot cheekbones, her grass green Deux Chevaux prepped for the road with parcel tape, and the cigarettes she rolled in sweet brown licorice papers. She taught me how to roll, too. And then, when we were driving about together in that gorgeous green rattletrap, I’d roll cigarettes for us both, licking my tongue expertly along the sweet edge and handing it across to her.
More important, though, than rolling fags was that she offered me – over the course of those critical teenage years – a different blueprint for ‘woman’ and a different blueprint for ‘mother.’ It was true; I couldn’t get enough of her. But I realized quite recently that I did; that my tablet was, still is, etched with her kaleidoscopic influence.
AB - 2.12.22
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Beautiful.