Spectator Sport

The year I was to begin High School, we moved. All of about a mile, but it may just as well have been a hundred. Everyone I knew in the world, all my friends, were gone. My brother and sister were closer to their school, and their friends were closer to them, but for one reason or another, I didn't go to the same school as them. I went to a private school, that took an hour or more to get to each morning. There was never any issue with my siblings about this, they didn't seem to care in the least, though I wonder now if I shouldn't have put in a little more effort, academically at some point to compensate for the privilege.

So I now lived in an isolated world, very much. None of my old primary school friends were around, they had all gone to new schools. None of the other students from my school lived anywhere near me, and even if they had, I was always getting the impression that geographic location was not the only thing separating me from them. The parties I occasionally got invited to, and the houses they lived in, and the clothes they wore on free dress day - they were residents of a completely foreign country to me.

It was a long time before I made friends, really. I would go to school and talk with people and socialise, and get the buses and trains there and back. I was interacting with people all day every day. But they weren't really friends. Not really. No one I felt I could confide in. No one to be stupid with in a relaxed way. Sure there was a lot of showing off, and bravado, and all manner of ridiculous adolescent behaviour. But I was never really at ease with anyone. It was the beginning of what I think of as my life as a spectator.

I felt often, as though I was just observing the world move around me. I understood it, and I observed it, and in some ways I interacted with it. But I never really felt a part of it. I remember even now thinking that sometimes when I would get a sensation of ringing in my ears that it was some kind of signal I couldn't comprehend, that it marked me in some way to be separated from the events and lives around me. I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with that kind of delusion.

But it is a result, I think, of spending so much time alone. I had sisters, and a brother, and yet, I recall more time spent on my own than interacting with anyone, much. I would read, I would play solitary games, I would build things, or pull them apart to see how they worked, then reassemble them so as to avoid the resulting punishment for being destructive. But often, more often than not, I was alone. Alone on the walk to school, alone on the bus to the station, alone on the train, alone on the bus to school, at least until a few stops in, when it would begin to fill up. Not that anyone I really knew got on the bus that early on. And then a reverse process on the way home. Often arriving home to an empty house, because the parents were at work, the siblings were all at friends' houses, and I was home, alone.

I don't think I was lonely, I was, and still am, quite happy with my own company. I could always occupy my time on my own. In fact, i don't think I even missed the companionship of having friends around all the time. My social interactions at school were in retrospect, a kind of calculated performance for effect. I suppose everyone does this to some extent, but the outcome was never quite in focus, the goal not clearly defined. Was I trying to be popular? Not really. The popular kids bored me, for the most part. I was never attracted to whatever it was they liked. Sport, Top 40 radio songs, clothes I couldn't afford...

I know I loved it when I got the attention of the girls, though. I was always nice to them, always polite to them, always listening, always understanding, always trying to get the inside edge with the ones I liked, and ultimately learned the hard way that this resigned a player to being only a spectator. It results, more often than not, in that single statement that turns a boy's blood cold in his veins when it comes from the object of his desire. A simple phrase, innocuous on the surface, but effectively excluding all other relationship possibilities for the future, handed down as a judgmental sentence so many times:

"I like you as a friend"

Better to have loved and lost

I remember the day she walked into the classroom. She was new. Pretty much everyone else in the class had come all the way from the first day of the first year of school with me. None of them had ever lived more than about ten minutes walk from the school their entire lives. I was an exception, and there were a few others, but for the most part the class had stayed the same since the first day our mum's had walked us into the room, hands on our shoulders, and that's the way it had been ever since. Just us kids. Just this class. Until she walked in.

She had hair so blonde it shone in the morning sun that streamed through the windows of the grade six classroom. Her eyes were blue, but so pale they were mesmermising, and even her eyelashes were blonde. Her skin so pale and flawless it was as if she was not even real. Her clothes were odd, as she had literally just got into town this very weekend past, and her mother had not even had time to get to the shops to buy the regulation school dress and shoes, so she wore jeans and a blouse, and sneakers. Her name was Natasha, we were told, Natasha Eden. And I was in paradise.

Being only an eleven year old boy, I had no idea what it meant when my heart beat faster. Maybe I was sick. Maybe I was going to deposit my breakfast into my old fashioned desk. Maybe I had eaten a bad packet of Twisties at morning recess. I didn't have any idea. All I knew for sure was this pure angel was walking toward me. Toward my desk. How I had ended up with a desk of my own was a matter of pure executive decision making on the part of the teacher. Anyone and everyone I had been put next to, I had begun to talk to all day. From the moment we arrived in the morning, until the last bell rang at 3.30 in the afternoon, I would talk. And my mouth had got me moved, finally to a desk of exile. But some would argue (obviously not I) that this was fate. I was supposed to have the only desk in the room with a spare place, so she could sit next to me.

As we had the same desks every day, I sat next to this angel every day. Yes, of course, as an eleven year old boy, I copped a hell of a lot of flak for being the only boy in grade six who sat next to a girl, but I am pretty sure it was all motivated by jealousy. She was simply the most perfect creature I had ever laid my eyes upon. Which would have been a massive problem, had I even suspected I was completely besotted with her. But I didn't, because I was a dumb kid with nary an ounce of hormone in my whole entire body to start a fire with. So instead, we became friends.

My inability to sit next to another human being in a quiet room and not talk to them became an ally of the greatest value. I won her trust, I earned her friendship, I made her laugh, I took it upon myself to be an ambassador to our new arrival and show her the ins and outs of the complex public school system in the suburbs of the mid 1980s. And she was grateful, I think. She eventually made friends with the rest of the class, with the other girls, and just melded into the general melting pot of pre-pubescent school life that we had all been a part of since day one. But we had something. That year, we sat together every day.

Then, as the end of the year approached, I received a shock. Just as she had come, she was leaving. I was never quite sure what it was her father did for a living, but whatever it was, she was leaving again as it was taking him, and the rest of her family, to some new city in some other part of the world. There was so much I should have said to her, so much I wanted to let her know, a strength of emotion that I couldn't quite express in words, because I had no point of reference by which to navigate. No way to interpret the sense of loss I felt when I knew she would never again be sitting next to me in that fifty year old wood and steel desk in that prefab chipboard classroom.

The last day she was to be there, I made an effort to make her laugh, I tried my best to make her smile, I didn't even get told off by the teacher for chatting to her the whole day. Then it was time for her to go. It was time for us all to go, it was the end of school for the year, and the day was long, and hot. We were all going off to start something new. Next year we would all go to high school. For some reason, I had been kissed by a girl at camp, which wasn't her, as she wasn't there. And any chance we had to be alone was interrupted for some reason or another. It was on the last day I took her aside, and told her what I needed to tell her. I took all the emotion I had pent up in my awkward young body and I made it quite clear to her what she meant to me, and how I felt. How much of a loss it would be to know I would probably never see her again.

I walked her to the gate, we were alone. I stopped as we reached the gate, her mum's Volvo just waiting outside the fence.

"Natasha" I said, and she stopped and looked at me

"Hmm?" she hummed, looking into my eyes with those blue white rays

"Bye. I'll miss you"

Ain't no cure for the summertime blues

Summer holidays when I was at school meant many things. It meant no school, obviously, it meant long, long, long hot dry days, stretching out to two, three, four days in a row of temperatures that would literally cook you alive. As was the cycle of weather where I grew up, these long hot spells would, almost without exception, be brought to an end by spectacular summer storms. Heralded by towering black clouds stretching high into the stratosphere, tumbling ominously across the bleached blue summer sky. As they engulfed the sun itself, distant flashes of pure white light in the darkened sky, with their sound waves trailing lazily behind, them announced the approach of a storm. We would count between the light and the sound to see how close the storm was: Flash! One cat and dog. Two cat and dog. Three cat and dog. Fou... BOOM Rumble Rumble Rumble...

When all became dark, and the ragged spikes of lightning fissured the sky, followed by peals of thunder like a nuclear detonations overhead, then the rain would start. The first drops would hit the ground with an audible "splat"; huge, cool handfuls of water, and steam would rise from the baking ground where they landed. It was apocalyptic, and primally exciting. Dogs would bark in defiance, or hide under houses, and cats were not to be seen at all after the first stampede of thunder galloped across the blackening sky. Instincts that serve well when evolving in a jungle full of creatures much larger than oneself may yet give the appearance of cowardice at the onset of a thunderstorm. Babies and toddlers crying and hiding, children braving the fear to dance in the falling drops, adults opening all the doors and windows to bring in the change.

I remember once, swimming all day in a friends pool on a hot, dry day at the end of a week of hot, dry days when just such a storm rolled in. Though it was a school vacation, it was late in the summer, and most of our parents had returned to work. It was pretty unusual where I grew up for anyone to have a parent who didn't have a job, so there were many, many houses with no adult supervison during business hours. It was in one of these, that happened to have an inground pool and spa, where I found myself, and some friends stranded by the storm. Our flimsy swimming togs were reasonably dry, and most of us had little to put on in the way of real clothes. So we did what any young teens would have done who were looking for the excuse to do so. We huddled together under blankets to "keep warm".

Being that there were at least eight people there, it was probably sheer coincidence that there were an even number of boys and girls present, and yet, that is the hand fate had dealt us. Or it was some careful planning by one of the girls who wanted to "get with" one of my friends. I never gave it much thought before. Of course, none of the boys wished to share a blanket with another, so we managed to split ourselves amicably into mixed pairs to share our assorted rugs. I only vaguely remember the girl with which I shared an afternoon under a blanket in that storm. She was the friend or maybe even the cousin of one of the other girls there, who was "in town" for the summer holidays, her parents staying at the house of the girl I knew.

She was cute enough I guess, straw blonde hair, freckly face, kind of bean polish in shape, even though she was at least a year older than me. I wasn't particularly attracted to her, I know that. But being a thirteen year old boy, I don't think that really entered into anything much. It wasn't long before the lightning faded into the distance, and the rain set in, apparently for the night, even though it was still only mid afternoon, it was unfeasibly dark, and a cold wind had blown up. We were plainly not going to swim again, "We might get wet" one of my friends obligingly joked. So we opted for videos in the louge. Under blankets.

As every good teenage tough guy knows, when you are sharing a blanket with a girl in her bathing suit, the best thing to do is watch a horror movie. And this is just what we did. I believe "The Evil Dead" was what we put on. A scratchy VHS pirated copy of an R rated movie that someone's brother had lent to him so we could see it. I have to admit, it was pretty scary. Not that any of us boys would have let on. And to watch it now, it's actually hilarious, though still could give me a fright in the right circumstances, I'll bet.

The best thing about watching horror movies with girls is, they get scared. When they get scared, they hold on, tight. The aim of the game is to get them to hold on tight to you, and I suppose, try to cop a feel when they press themselves up against you. As the movie worked its way toward the inevitable attack of the living dead, the girl I was snuggled up with some how had worked her way right up close to me, and I was sitting in an awkward fashion to accomodate her holding on to me in the scarier moments of suspense and bad latex. She had worked her way around so that one of her legs was underneath me, and her other knee was just resting between my thighs. I had an arm around her shoulders, taking my cue from the more officially "going" couples, who had been at least pashing since New Year's Eve.

I looked over and saw that two of them had lost interest in the movie altogether, and were engaged in apparently checking each others gums with their tongues for signs of early erupting wisdom teeth. I looked at the girl next to me, and saw that she was still forcing herself to watch the movie. The square jawed main character had just managed to calm everyone down, and was being pleaded with by a girl he had apparently mistakenly chained in the cellar of the old log cabin. I was just working up to pulling in for the pash, and as I rolled forward to give myself better access to her mouth, the girl in the cellar screamed and turned into a living corpse. The girl in the beanbag screamed and jerked her uppermost knee swiftly into the slightly tenty area between my legs. The boy with two testicles in his throat screamed and turned into a quivering glob of trifle on the carpet.

The front door opened, and the parents were home. The rain had stopped, and the sun had returned for a last ditch effort. I decided the best thing was to head out to the pool for another swim. The chlorine would at least be an excuse for the tears in my eyes and there's no better way to hide a bruised... ego, than under water.

It's a big ask

It's pretty obvious that the opportunities to fall in love, and act on those strange feelings are extremely limited for pubescent halflings. The fact that you have to live at home, have little or no disposable income, are basically dependent on parents for pretty much everything and getting from A to B is entirely reliant on public transport, cycle power or walking, can make it very difficult to invite girls out on dates. Well, that and the minor detail that, of all the things you would rather have to endure, asking a girl out is slightly less inviting than being dacked in front of the entire school assembly.

Of course it's not the actual task itself that brings the fear. The simple act of asking a girl you like if she would be interested in spending some of her time with you is not in the least bit taxing or strenuous. It's the possible responses that chill the blood, dry the throat and scramble the brain. Oh, yes, there are those who will tell you all through your life "The worst that can happen is she will say 'No'". These people are WRONG!!!!!!! Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. People who tell you that is the worst that can happen have no imagination. They clearly have not given any real thought to how much worse things could be than someone just saying 'No'.

The best thing that could happen, clearly, is that she will say 'yes'. The second best thing that can happen is she could say 'No'. Then we start the long downhill slide into blackness and despair, toward the 'worst thing that could happen'. The next thing on the list of worse outcomes is she could just stare blankly. This suggests she is incredulous you even asked her. She can't even believe you, of all people, would even consider asking her, a far better class of person, on a date. Of course, she may actually have a secret crush on you and have been hoping you would ask her out, and the shock of actualisation renders her speechless. But you're a thirteen year old boy, you will assume it's a bad sign.

Next stop on the train of rejection is the laugh. Rather than respond with a simple answer, or even an awkward silence, she could laugh at you. And not a friendly giggle as if she had just remembered an amusing episode of Happy Days, a real laugh, that escapes when you see someone do something incredibly stupid, or embarrassing. The kind of laugh that leaves you wondering what on earth made you think of even approaching this girl. A laugh that makes you realise for the first time that you are quite simply the most ridiculous looking male ever to have walked the earth, and that you would definitely die alone. Of course, I have never even seen this happen, but the hormone addled mind of a thirteen year old boy would have him believe this at least as likely as the sun coming up every morning.

The train now runs express to public embarrassment. Because in the "worst case scenario" of a young boys mind, she could not only laugh, but immediately find a friend to relate the story to. Which, of course, she will find equally hilarious, and continue to spread the sorry tale throughout the grapevine until all around are sniggers behind hands, knowing sad looks from other rejects, and mid-class smartarse remarks every time there is any attention focussed on you, the hapless romantic. This may get even worse, with first the cleaners, tipped off by some particularly detailed graffiti begin to give you knowing looks and shaking their heads. Then, the teachers become aware of the outrageous proposition you have laid before this poor, innocent girl, who is clearly far too good for you. In the end, of course, they have no choice but to inform your hardworking and loving parents of your unacceptable schoolyard behaviour, which results, when taken along with your increasingly poor academic performance, in expulsion from school. This downward spiral of rejection inevitably leads to the only career path available to one so hopeless: a night shift job pasting on loose labels in the packing room at the pickle factory. And this is where you live your final days, before being crushed by a reversing vinegar tanker when your hearing aid goes on the fritz.

The combination of hormonally triggered mental imbalance, a spastically erratic libido, and a vivid imagination are a cruel threesome to inflict upon a growing lad.

Not all pigtails and inkwells

I suppose it seems the whole history of my introduction to the world of love came from school. This is not the case. Being the well rounded individual I am, I spent time going to church, though it seemed somewhat wrong to be wondering what it would be like to kiss the prettiest girl in Sunday school; and also spent time in the Scouts, though, in those days it was boys only, and even if I was that way inclined, the troop leaders were not unknown to my parents, shall we say.

But in the summer, my family would pack up and go on holiday. And as most folks are inclined to do because of some innate lemming-like compulsion, we often headed for remote forest areas far from civilisation at the height of the summer bushfire season. Okay, they were usually near large bodies of water, often the ocean, and, living on an island, it's not really difficult to find somewhere isolated in such an unpopulated country. However the intelligence of such behaviour remains questionable.

Sometimes we would go with other families, and I recall the year between primary school and high school, the whole family went and camped at some kind of Christian Fellowship summer camp, full of other happy hippie Christian families. My father was friends with more than one minister of progressive, modern christian churches. I suppose being a Vietnam veteran he had particular reason to seek out assurances of some kind. And they were the kind of churches where you were more likely to find bearded man strumming a guitar singing a folky hymn on a Sunday morning rather than a furrowed brow with kinetic eyebrows preaching about hellfire and punishment. They were good people, I suppose, and a safer environment I can't imagine, really.

So this was where I met the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was Dutch, her surname was Van Der... something with only one syllable I can't quite recall. She was tall, taller than me by a head, though it didn't take much back then at age twelve. She was slim, but not skinny, "lithe" I suppose is the word I would use now, though I was unaware of its existence at the time. Her eyes were strikingly pale blue, and her nose was pointy, but not big, and slightly upturned, which somehow made her almost unreal, like a fairytale picture. She had tanned, smooth skin, a golden brown colour like the filling of a Caramello koala, and tiny hairs on her arms and legs bleached blonde from hours in the sun with her outdoorsy family. They were often driving in their Land Cruiser four wheel drive, camping and hiking, with her brother, who was a little less than my age, and a little more than my height; her mother, a weathered woman with smiling eyes, who clearly once was as beautiful as her daughter; and her father, a scruffy ball of whiskers and hair, who wore sandals and socks, and fixed you with hard grey eyes, even as he laughed and joked.

But she captured my attention. She held it the whole two weeks of that camp. Almost. Each day there were organised activities as well as ample opportunity for free time to wander the beach, or the bush trails through the dunes, or the small brackish lakes behind them. One day I signed up for a photography group, because she was going along, only to slink out, embarrassed when I discovered to my horror everyone had been expected to bring their own camera. I didn't even have an instamatic, while everyone else had professional looking SLR cameras with interchangeable lenses and straps for their neck and cases and gadgets. She didn't see me slip out the back of the meeting hall where they were getting their introductory talk. I was glad, because my face so red it was as though I'd been sunburnt. Not that I had any reason to feel as foolish as I did, there was no way I could have known, and I realised later, no way my parents would have encouraged me to go, had they realised.

So, I spent the rest of the day scuffing around the edge of the camps, going for walks, swimming with my brother, who had become friends with the Dutch girl's brother, and generally trying not to think too much about the mornings events. Eventually she came down to the lake where our brothers were jumping off rocks into a deep section of the lake and spread out her towel. Even the way she moved was graceful and self assured, nothing like the gangly girls I knew at school. She was older than us, I was twelve, my brother thirteen, hers at the tail end of eleven. But she was fifteen, which seemed a lifetime away to me. And like a queen, she was distant and untouchable. But I suppose I was infatuated with her. Though I wanted to just watch her all afternoon until dinner time, I realised even then how creepy that would have been. So I wandered off.

I saw her at dinner, she was with her family, and my brother was eating with them in the communal dining hall that also functioned as a recreation hall, emergency shelter, theatre, indoor sport centre, and any other large roof, as required. I sat with my family, my younger sister babbling incessantly with some equally cherubic seven year old girl I had learned to ignore; my older sister eating quietly and reading, she was about the same age as the Dutch princess; and my parents, who were chatting to a friendly couple seated at the next table with their kids.

After dinner, the kids all ran off playing some chaotic game of "hide and seek and destroy", depending who you asked, while the parents settled in for a few drinks as the sky began to darken. I was caught up in the game, and running around hiding and seeking and sometimes destroying when I ran down a trail toward the lake. The game seemed to have no set boundary, and while it was light, most kids over ten or so were allowed to go where they pleased. I found my way back to the rocks at the lake we had been at that afternoon, and began to climb over them, wondering where the Dutch girl had gone, I hadn't seen her since just after dinner.

I picked my way almost to the top of the rocks and heard a low voice. I didn't think it was a word, more of a muffled sound like someone would make with their mouth closed. A strange kind of groaning hum. I looked over the rocks down to a small beach on the other side, and saw my brother and the Dutch girl laying on the sand, mouths pressed against each other. My eyes widened. I felt suddenly sick. I thought I was going to lose my dinner as I climbed back down the rock and walked back in a kind of daze to where my tent was. He couldn't have known, I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, why would I?

It was just a crush, after all. Now I knew why they called it that.

Kisses far from home

The school camp is the nexus of adolescent romance. There is something inherently liberating about being away from parental supervision while being surrounded by friends. That and the increased chance of seeing girls without their clothes on gives the air of a school camp a particular sexual charge which I have never experienced since. And it all starts when everyone boards the coach on the first day.

Coach seats are the perfect places for relatively innocent petting, kissing, and wandering hands. Especially the back seat, though this is almost always reserved for the cool kids. Playing corners, where the inertia from each bend in the road or turn is wildly exaggerated by the players, is an indisputably valid excuse to press up against the object of one's affection. And it encourages them to return the favour at the next opposing corner.

After disembarking, the game of getting the top bunk in a cabin sets the pecking order for each group, then the far more serious business of sneaking into others' rooms can begin. This is where many a first kiss and fumbling grope have been initiated, and certainly far more advanced activities attempted, or at least suggested, and usually denied.

One day while swimming, the brown eyed girl said she wanted to ask me a question. She wouldn't say what it was, just that it contained five words. Looking back, I realise how naive I always have been. I had been laughing and talking and unwittingly flirting and generally spending far more time than usual with her over the course of the camp. But I wracked my brain to figure out what the question might be. Through the camp concert with me and my friends re-enacting with geektastic precision our favourite scenes from The Young Ones, I tried to figure it out. And I was still thinking about it as I lay in bed awaiting sleep. Despite their plans to stay awake until the teachers were all asleep, no one left the cabin for extra curricular activities that night.

After breakfast the next day, I asked the brown eyed girl's best friend what it might be. She rolled her eyes and told me I was an idiot. We went swimming before lunch, and the brown eyed girl swam right up next to me in the lake and grabbed me around the waist. She stood up in the chest deep water facing me, and kissed me with a soft, long, wet kiss, and I felt her tongue against mine, and moving around my mouth. I was surprised but I kissed back, and put my arms around her. Then she pulled away and dived back under the water. I swam after her, but she got to the shore first, and to protect my modesty I couldn't walk straight out of the water until my excitement had subsided.

She caught me after lunch and asked if I'd worked out what her question was. I said I hadn't, and she basically told me to forget it. She seemed pretty angry at me, and I didn't understand why. I suppose she thought I was playing dumb, when in actuality, I just was dumb. She stormed off, and I was left chasing her curly haired friend to obtain some intelligence. I was an idiot, apparently. Her question was "Will you go with me".

Unfortunately, my failure at code breaking had prevented me from having my first girlfriend. I stayed friends with her for years afterwards, but the spark of passion was gone from her eyes, and eventually, my own feelings drained away. My understanding of human behaviour was suddenly a lot less solid than I had thought.

Everybody loves a clown

I have to admit, not a lot happened on the "me and girls" front after that kiss on camp. In fact, it wasn't until some months later, after I had finished primary school and gone on to High School that I even came close to repeating it. The girl who had kissed me had pretty much abandoned the idea of hanging out with me, as soon as the other boys could walk with some kind of dignity again. But that was okay. Kissing was, it seemed both exciting and pretty disgusting at the same time. Especially if there were, as I had heard tell, tongues involved. I didn't really know why I did it, I didn't even like that girl particularly. It just seemed like the thing to do. Like on TV.

So high school arrived. A completely different life to the one I had known up until this point. I think primary school takes toddlers and turns them into individuals. High school takes children and turns them into adults. Mostly. The first thing to note about high school is that I knew all of one person there on the first day. It was both a curse and a blessing. I didn't have to be the same person I had been for the previous seven years, I could be whomever I wanted. Unfortunately, I turned out to be pretty much the same person, regardless. I once again found my own gang of misfits, and the one girl I knew found her way into the popular crowd.

Not that I minded. I had about as much attraction to her as I would have for a cousin or other such wallpaper person. There were plenty of attractive girls for me to try my luck at wooing. Of course, I had no idea how I got my first kiss, so could hardly improve on my technique. The only thing I was sure of was that I could make them laugh. Though I wasn't completely typecast by my earlier school experience as a class clown, I was familiar with the thrill of inspiring laughter in the class. Make 'em laugh, they leave you alone, for the most part. Of course, you don't want to take that too far and become the butt of the joke, you have to balance the clowning with some self respect. And there's nothing for your cred like being sent to the principals office.

So, I'd sit near the girls I liked, make them laugh from time to time, but not too much they got annoyed when they were trying to concentrate. Obviously, I was, along with pretty much every other guy in the place, attracted to the "hot" girls. The overdeveloped young ladies who were embarrassed at the attention their newly blooming bodies drew from the boys, and quietly hurt by the bitchiness of the girls still waiting to begin their own journey into womanhood. Still, despite my fantasies, the girls I chose to focus my attention on were not those popular types, but the quietly pretty ones, who did their homework on time, put their hands up to speak, knew all the answers. The nerdy girls.

And one in particular. She had long dark hair, always pulled back tight in a pony tail and big straight teeth and deep, brown eyes that flashed when she smiled at my jokes. She had exotically olive skin, despite being as Angloriginal as the First Fleet, and the most endearing dimples that appeared before her lips parted to talk or laugh. Not too tall, not too short, not skinny, not overdeveloped, not fat, not too sporty, not too dull, not too nasty. Just twelve years old, pretty much. But she was the first one I actually felt something for.

One day, I recall sitting in class and something changed, after which making her laugh and smile became more important than anything else. One grey wintery afternoon, waiting for a teacher to arrive for class, I made a joke quietly, leaning in to speak into her ear then sitting back on my chair. She laughed honestly, opening her mouth and rocking gently, as her musical laugh began loudly and tapered off. While a smile hung on her face, her gaze caught my eye and held it tightly. For the first time ever my stomach dropped away below ground level, and was dragged back up full of a swirling flock of starlings. I broke a sudden sweat, and my throat went dry as her smile flattened to nothing, but her eyes were still locked on mine when the teacher's voice broke the spell.

I had no idea what that meant. I was sick, but the sickness made me happy. I did not know what to do with that feeling except I knew I wanted more of it. I needn't have worried.

The beginning

I suppose it was in Primary School. But it must have been, of course. There was a lot of "girls chasing boys" back then, I definitely recall wanting to be caught, but not wishing to appear that way to the others. Of course, who wouldn't have wanted to be caught and kissed by the soft-skinned, sweet-smelling girls. I guess I was never much of a sportsman, even then, and it was easy enough to make a good effort of avoiding capture, yet still manage to stumble at just the right point they could catch and hold me down and kiss me, and claim their victory, while I had to feign defeat and endure the jeers of the other boys. Then I suppose they might have done the same, and kept it secret as I did. Hard to know, when all they ever talked about was cricket, football, and whatever new toy, or fad was winning favour in the schoolyard of the day.

I wasn't quiet, but I would have rather spent my time in the library than chasing a ball around a paddock with the purpose of removing it from the grip of someone twice my size, then running away from them. Why bother, when I could save a lot of time and injury by simply staying from them in the first place? They could have the ball. This activity was favoured amongst the boys for half the year, until the days grew longer, and then it was time for standing around in whites in an open field in the remote possibility someone would hit something round and hard in my direction at flesh-bruising speed. Not my idea of a good time, but I never begrudged anyone for it. Some of my best friends were sport obsessed, just like their dads, I suppose. And maybe as their own sons are now. But making up games was a more likely way for me to be spending my time, along with the rest of the misfits I managed to find, no matter what school I found myself in.

But there were other times. I remember on particular school camp, on which the main attraction was trail riding through the surrounds of the camp, up around the goldfields not too far from Ballarat. That was where I learned that not only is it not a natural talent to be able to ride a horse, but that not picking up the trick by the end of a single day gave one the gait of a slow moving duck. I found, to my surprise, that the hip movements required to keep one's arse clear of the saddle came quite instinctively to me, and was spared the giggles of the girls, when the rest of the boys showed up for our "barn dance" in the evening. I also discovered two important pieces of information.

1. Girls like boys who dance (even if they aren't very good at it)
2. Most boys don't like to dance (especially when they can hardly walk)

I had my first real kiss that night. A proper open mouthed kiss. Maybe because I could actually sit down on a hay bale and talk face to face, or maybe as a result of watching Countdown every Sunday night with my older sister since she was old enough to babysit. Thankyou, Village People, and your YMCA. Whatever the reason this girl, with frizzy, tightly curled hair and translucent skin, decided to kiss me. Of course, I wasn't in love with her, that's just crazy talk. But I was on the road.