Memory

Some Memories Are Best Forgotten Example

I’ve just read one of those short fictions about “The Things I’ve Lost” where some hipster lists a whole lot of objects, missed opportunities and half-forgotten memories. The genre is the personal lie fabricated as wistful memoir. It made me think about things I wished I’d forgotten.

Like rooting Janice on a wooden floor in Carlton while the others drank beer in the garage. I didn’t drink in those days. Jan had a kid who stayed with her mother while she roamed around looking for a good man. One night she found me. I forget how many times we fucked but I remember I liked it a lot, because she was the first.

Or the time I fucked Jan’s best friend Sally, because she was pretty, and skinny, with thick black hair. She said she’d give me a “suck-fuck” which they did in her school days so the girls didn’t get pregnant, but I just got between her legs and did it normally. She was better than Jan and not just because she looked good. She wasn’t so desperate and I felt like she really liked me for myself. Which she probably did for a while. But she was only eighteen and over Xmas started seeing an African student on exchange, who got her pregnant anyway.

I forget whether she stayed with him, and even whether her baby was black or not. I forget how many times we did it, but I remember I liked it a lot because she was young and enthusiastic.

Then there was Susan, a nurse with really big breasts. She always smiled at me and engaged in deep conversation about society and politics, when all I wanted to do was get her buttons undone. I called around one night when I knew her boyfriend was away hiding from the cops. She answered the door in a dressing gown. Her hair was wet, she’d just got out of the bath. I told her to get back in and finish her hair, and I’d make a cup of tea. She did and then called out for me to bring it in, one sugar.

I forget why but I walked into this tiny laminex bathroom with a chip heater flickering on the wall and a small dirty window, and placed the cup carefully on the edge of the bath, stole a look at those beautiful mounds, and walked out again. I wish I could forget that because then I could pretend I stayed in there, took off my clothes and got into that bath with her.

It’s a bit strange that partial memory, because mostly I don’t like big tits. Most of my women have been on the small side. Maybe I actually liked Sue because of her smile, or maybe because she was nice. I can’t remember.

But I do remember the first tits I felt although I forget the girl’s name. It was a warm night in a Hawthorn backyard, beneath the Southern Cross no less. We’d been to a school dance and my mate had his brother’s car. He sat in it with his girl that he later married, while I walked the other one down her driveway to the back door. Her parents were asleep, the house was dark. We kissed for a while then moved to a garden seat and looked at the stars, then started touching and feeling. I got my hand right inside her dress somehow. I forget whether she undid the zip at the back or what. Was there a zip at the back? I can’t remember her bra either, even though bras were fascinating items of clothing to teenage boys in those days.

What I do remember is the smooth firm softness. I don’t know what I expected but god knows I’d thought about it often enough. I sometimes wonder what happened to that girl. She was quiet and nice with sharp features and light brown hair. I would have like her a lot later if we’d met again.

The other tits I remember best belonged to Gaye. She was sort of bossy and her husband had left her. This was years later of course. She went out with my mate for a while and when they broke up I invited myself around to dinner. Played with her kids in the backyard, watched a bit of television, then fucked her after the children were in bed. She’d had a boob job, to make her feel better about herself she said. They felt like two sandstone rocks. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how bad they were, and anyway I preferred small ones.

I remember she was good to fuck and that she came. Or at least I thought she did. I know I did, twice. I left just after dawn and only saw her again once after that. Didn’t return her calls. I don’t know why I treated her that way but that’s how it was, I just didn’t like her that much. And one of her kids had a disability and was a lot of hard work.

I wish I could forget that.

Not all the girls I fucked were that casual. I worked really hard with Judy, I worked at relationship. We did things together and talked a lot. It got very deep and personal, but when she teared up her breath started to smell sweaty and thick. I didn’t mind the tears, that was sort of alluring in a vulnerable kind of way. It was just her breath. So I’d fuck her from behind. I’d never really liked doing it that way but one night in the signal box at Woodend this old Scotsman told me how he always fucked his wife from behind because she couldn’t cross her legs and keep him out.

It was a cold midnight and the wood fire was blazing over to the side. The wheat train from Bendigo was three hours late and I sat there imagining this repulsive old man forcing himself on his wife with her nightgown tangled up between them. And my own lovely wife and little boy were home asleep and I just wanted to be with them.

Anyway that teary breath thing reminds me of little girl smells from years ago. We used to play these games with our cousins. And these two girls from over the road who were a bit older than me and my brother. One day they came over, I forget their names, but the older one said she didn’t have any undies on and we went down the side way and she showed us. I forget what I saw but I can remember the scent. All thick and sweaty with a hint of piss. Not completely unpleasant, and something I’ve smelled many times since. Usually between their legs but sometimes from the throat as well.

It led to a theory that girls with breath like that maybe put their mouth between other pairs of legs, or it could be that they didn’t wash properly. Anyway I’ve never like kissing girls with breath like that, and naturally I didn’t have to kiss Judy when I fucked her from behind. After I’d come I’d kiss her neck and between her shoulders to sort of compensate for not liking her all that much.

I wish I could forget that, too.

I’m not sure which I remember the most, all the fucking or the kissing. I think I remember fucking more girls, but mostly just a few times each.

Mostly with the kissing it’s been the girls I actually did like. But that’s really just a few of them with a lot of kisses, a lot of soft tongue and sweet lips. Finger tips too, and not only kissing their mouth. Nothing’s better than going down on a girl and getting her to come, all wild and warm and wet.

When was the first kiss? There was a girl called Margaret at Primary School that I was “in love” with and I used to follow her home. I might have kissed her, literally behind the shelter shed, but I forget. She was a doctor’s daughter so I never went to her house.

There’s more chance I did kiss Leslie, a redhead in Sixth Grade. I know I wanted to and one day I was leapfrogging over her in the playground, and talked her into leapfrogging over me while I lay on my back on the grass. That way I could see up her dress. She had to jump over several times to get it just right and I remember clearly her off-white undies and the darkness up there. There were several other girls in Primary School but you’re so innocent then it sort of doesn’t count. I do remember staying late at our distant relatives and all the kids were in one big bed, and I was next to a girl cousin and we touched and maybe we kissed.

I wish I could remember that properly, and not have to invent a story around it.

So Leslie was possibly my first kiss, though later the dark girl smiling in the seventh class was the one I remembered best because she had tits pushing out her white woollen jumper. We all watched as she ran up the nineteenth century staircase and then looked back at all the boys staring from the ground floor. I wonder what she thought? I saw her again not long after, or maybe it was a year later. That’s the thing with memories, there’s no reliable timeline, you have to recall other things to make a frame of reference.

Anyway we were training for footy, under 15s, at Rathmines Road. If you had your bike the teachers would let you go home from there rather than going back to school with the class, so I rode around the boundary fence to this smudge of trees and that girl with the tight jumper was there with her dog. I never knew her name or if I did I forgot it long ago. What I remember is a pretty face and a tight school jumper, and that we talked in a disjointed way because all I wanted to do was look at her chest. I don’t know what she wanted.

Part of my memory, the false part, is that we pressed up against each other and I actually felt her up, but the truth is our hands brushed against each other. Then I rode all the way home with an erection.

I quite often think about that girl, she had dark eyebrows and a gap between her front teeth. She’d be old now, and probably quite ugly. But back then I though she was beautiful.

Something I do remember completely was kissing a girl the first time between the legs. She was much younger than me, down by the Maribyrnong River when the flats were covered in chest high dandelion weed. Before all that urban development. We cuddled and kissed for while then she unbuttoned her jeans and pushed my head down there. I didn’t really need instructions, it all came naturally. I even remember her name, Jen. She just expected it, and soon she was writhing and squealing little whimpers and pushing my head down further into the depths. She was still at school and had to be home at what they called a reasonable hour, so I didn’t get to fuck her, not that time.

I did fuck her later, and came in her mouth and in her hair and all over her marvellous firm chest. She wore glasses and one time, I remember, she was playing with my dick in this share house in Fitzroy and I came so suddenly that it shot about three feet into the air and hit her in the face and smeared all over her glasses, and we laughed and laughed. When she left me she started seeing this black activist that I thought was a mate, and I sat in our front room looking to the east. Beautiful white clouds piled up over the far mountains and I stared out the window and cried and cried.

So many of those girls just opened their legs, or their mouths, or reached into your pants, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I never knew if it was or not. Natural.

The one I remember best and most vividly, as if it was yesterday, was impish and elfin and waifish. She had a close relationship with her mum and a strange one with her father. He was fat as, and so was the mother. I remember everything we ever did, the kissing and the fucking and the talking and the laughing. We never argued, well just very slightly. She did amazing things with her fingers, like wet my dick with her tongue then slide her hands slowly around it. Or the figure eight, one wet finger all around one testicle then all around the other. The first time we slept together, after a restaurant meal and a movie, we showered and she soaped me up and rinsed me off, then sucked me then got behind and licked my butt hole while reaching between my legs and playing with my dick. I came like I’d never come before. I’ll never forget it.

I can’t recall the movie.

She wore her black hair very short and trimmed her pubes. One night I came home to find she’d shaved everything off from her cunt to her arse-hole. Oh how I slobbered over that. Then I fucked her arse and told her I loved her. Which I did. We were happy for a while, in a little house in old Kensington. We could hear the trains when we lay in the bath talking about the day that had gone. She taught me a few recipes, but really she wasn’t a great cook and we often ate take-aways. Once I got drunk and fell asleep on top of her when I tried to fuck her after hours at her work.

Another time I fucked her from behind, bent over a cold rock in the warm winter sun on top of the Flinders Ranges.

Another time on a Peninsula beach in summer I rubbed coconut oil all over her back and worked my finger into her arse and she loved it.

Another time, before I left my wife, late at night, I called at her rented flat in my uniform and fucked her standing in the hallway, and came all over my heavy blue coat.

I remember it all.

The bit I wish I could forget was how we met. She was the babysitter.

And the bit that never leaves, that’s always there, is the Labour Day the magpies sang and kids were on the phone, and she never came home from that barbecue.

So that’s why I think we remember too much and some memories are better forgotten.