The old boyfriend
Karen had braces cemented to bad teeth in the throes of a fix, and acne scars that attempted to disfigure her face but never quite succeeded. She towered above us all by a ruler’s length, had long legs that won every athletic contest, and a mane of blonde hair she tied in a top knot, with long curly tendrils that fell on either side of her face. Studying was not her raison d’etre, and she wallowed at the lower end of class results every year I knew her. She was 17 in her final year of school and her boyfriend was 42. In class she was silent, nervously looking everywhere except her work, and forever avoiding the teacher’s eye so it wouldn’t land on her to answer a question. Outside class, she was a contender for the Olympic speaking team, if there was such a thing, and we heard every last detail of the wonderful Cliff, even if we had something else we wanted to discuss. We couldn’t win so we gave in to hearing about the minute details of her budding relationship. We’d been hearing about Cliff for a long time, so long in fact that he had become a kind of spectre, an impossibility none of us quite believed existed. Monday mornings were awash with endless descriptions of the weekend’s adventures. We heard about his car, his kisses, how they shopped together, his kisses, how they kept their relationship secret, his generosity and his kisses.
‘So when are we going to meet this guy?’ someone asked.
‘Yeh, bring him to school so we can see he really exists,’ added someone else.
Bringing someone to school, especially a male, was highly forbidden. We weren’t allowed to leave the school grounds, have any visitors except those sanctified and purified by the law of the school hierarchy. But that was another thing about Karen. She didn’t follow any rules. Every day in the week leading up to ‘the date’, we would get an instalment of the latest news — he was coming, then not coming, then he could come but not into the school grounds, then he was. The day arrived and the atmosphere was tense. Any time a teacher passed during Cliff discussions, we would shut down the conversation and talk about algebra, a surefire way of the teacher knowing something was amiss.
And soon it was lunchtime. The whole year gathered on the balcony of the common room as Karen disappeared with a ‘He’s here!’. She grabbed her backpack and ran down the stairs hurtling down the path to the school gate. Someone called out, ‘There he is!’ as we swamped the small balcony all gasping for a look at the old man walking towards us, arm around Karen with heads tilted together.
It wasn’t long after that we no longer heard about Cliff. We didn’t find out who ended it but we rallied around her as girls do. Soon her stories about Cliff turned from undying love to eternal hate, loyalty to infidelity. We all agreed to hate him equally. The monster. There were no new stories and no more kisses. Until next time.
