In the picture I am laughing, and Davey’s eyes, perhaps startled by all of the flashes, have opened for the first time.
And that photograph is still in my purse.
The First and Only Kiss of Lenni Pettersson
KLIMT’S THE KISS was lying in poster form on our table in the Rose Room. I’d seen it before somewhere, at school probably, but this was the first time I’d really seen it. Even though the poster print wasn’t shiny, the gold was so warm it seemed like light was shining out of it. Pippa told us about Klimt’s scandals with his earlier works, and how this was by contrast very well received. It depicts a romantic embrace, she said.
But I disagree entirely and I can’t believe nobody else could see it. The woman in the painting is dead.
She has flowers in her hair and her eyes are closed, and while the man is kissing her and pulling her to him, her face is blank. The leaves at her feet are vining around her ankles, pulling her into the flowers of the earth, where she now belongs. The earth is reclaiming her to bury and he is desperate for her not to go. His kiss is a wish. A wish that she still be alive for him to love.
So, thinking about kisses, I began drawing, using felt tip pens because they had looked so irresistible in their pot, and I told Margot the story while I drew.
Abbey Field Secondary School, Glasgow, 2011
Lenni Pettersson is Fourteen Years Old
I had an English Literature teacher who, school legend has it, kissed a pupil at prom. I took these rumours with a pinch of salt, because another rumour at a neighbouring school told that there was a science teacher who’d had sex with a pupil in the biology supply cupboard. While the teaching skeleton watched. I could never get the picture out of my mind – the two passionate lovers frantically cavorting beneath the hollow, shocked grin of the skeleton.
If I had had any suspicions about our English teacher, they were instantly increased when, in the middle of a class on Romeo and Juliet, he sat on the edge of the desk I shared with a girl I didn’t know, and in a faux casual manner asked the class, ‘How do you know when it’s okay to kiss someone?’ This was met by baffled silence.
‘How do you know when it’s okay to kiss someone?’ he kept asking throughout the year, as though he had some resentment about a long-passed assessment of the appropriateness of a kiss. Every time he asked it, my face would burn. Partly because I found it funny that the rumours might be true, but mostly because I didn’t know. I had never kissed anyone in my life.
I think everyone has ideas about what their first kiss will be like. For some reason, I always imagined mine would take place under a tree with a boy whose face and hair and appearance didn’t matter. The tree was always green and lush and the grass beneath us was dewy and wet and I was always barefoot.
Even though I had this vivid image of how it would be, I never actually tried to make the vision come true; I didn’t hang around in lush parks searching for boys to kiss.
So I was surprised when my first （and only） kiss didn’t happen like it did in my imagination. There were no trees or lush green grass.
Walking home from a house party that had ended when the neighbours called the police, the group of girls who let me hang around with them, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, thought it would be fun to break into the school grounds. The very place we could never wait to escape, we now – in our free time, and drunk on spiced rum stolen from a father’s alcohol cabinet – decided we wanted to visit. A party took place under the fire escape （if you can call twelve drunk teenagers playing drum and bass through a phone’s external speakers a ‘party’ – which we did）。
I had no interest in him. He didn’t repel me, but I was about as attracted to him as I am to, say, a chair or a table. But when my friends and I were dancing, he danced behind me, put his hands on my hips and asked me if I wanted to go with him somewhere, so I followed him. Outside the science classroom, away from the friends whose tinny music we could still hear, he put his wet mouth on mine and I tried my best to keep up.
I walked home from the ‘party’ barefoot. One of the girls had lent me some high-heeled shoes and I couldn’t walk in them. I heard some of them laughing about it. When the kissing was over, I took the heels off and handed them to her. ‘You could just give them to me at school on Monday,’ she said, but I told her she might as well have them back now because I’d be walking home barefoot anyway. I made my way home alone along the gravelly pavement with nothing between my feet and the concrete. The cold of the ground was nice, actually. Soothing.