Last week I opened a big old-fashioned black suitcase that came from America long ago, and I found a photograph of an American girl inside, leaning against a lamp post in 1973, looking up at the moon.
She was my girlfriend, a phrase in common usage back then. In an innocent, teenage sort of way, we were devoted to each other, playing records of Leonard Cohen in a student flat, with candlelight and beanbags and bottles of Blue Nun. Even now I can still remember how it felt to kiss her.
When she was returning to the US, I agreed to drive her to the airport. I said I could get the loan of a car from the college chaplain, who was a very kind man, although he wore old-fashioned glasses. He said I could pick up the car from outside his house any time in the night.
We planned to spend that last evening in her flat. When I got there, her clothes were all strewn on the floor.
“I can pack later,” she said, and we went to the pub. She was wearing a white coat with fur lining, and a beaded bag from the Dandelion Market was slung across her left shoulder, and she looked so beautiful gazing up at the full moon that I insisted on taking a picture with her camera.
A rug around her shoulders
Back inside the flat she asked me to light the fire while she got into pyjamas, but then she said she was cold, so I took an old rug from the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“I’m freezing,” she said. “But I need to pack.”
She stood beside the kettle until it boiled, and she poured hot water into two glasses of whiskey, with slices of lemon stuffed with cloves.
She lay flat on the carpet beside the fire of turf briquettes, bending her body into yoga positions.
She even turned off the lights and allowed the long shadows from the moon to slip into the room, so that I was certain we might make love.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she wondered.
“No,” I said.
I asked her had she ever heard of Primo Levi. I said he wrote a book about his time in a concentration camp. She said she had never heard of him. But I suppose back then we weren’t supposed to know much, apart from how to kiss. She was great at kissing. I was terrible, and often confused by the proximity of her face, and the way her eyes mesmerised me.
She would bring her face up to my nose, her eyes penetrating me as our lips touched. And in the middle of it she would ask questions that made no sense to me.
“Why do whales make such beautiful noises?”
I never had answers. But on that last night she didn’t want to kiss, because she needed to pack.
I managed to get into the bedroom at one point, where white shelves overflowed with underwear and racks of dresses belonging to three other students hung in open wardrobes like a silent chorus.
“This is like stepping into another world,” I whispered
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
She knew I was referring to the clothes. There was an amber street lamp just outside the window. The light spilled into the room and filled the hanging dresses with an eerie kind of life. I tried again to initiate a kiss, but she held back.
“I really must pack,” she said. So we returned to the sitting room to evaluate our love with instant coffees. When the fire finally went out at about half three, the quality of our voices changed. They became louder and more matter-of-fact, like voices in daylight.
Unpacked case
We gathered up the stained coffee mugs and slept side by side on her bed, amid the haunting chorus of empty dresses, for about an hour before I went off to collect the car. In the end, she never quite managed to pack. She emerged from the bedroom at 5am and poached two eggs.
The big black suitcase lay empty on the floor, it’s metal lock hanging loose. She stuffed all she needed into the shoulder bag and a rucksack. Her excess clothing was left behind for her flatmates or various charity shops.
“What about the suitcase?” I wondered.
“You can have it,” she said. And I still do. It sits in the corner, full of old college notebooks from long-ago lectures, a Polaroid camera, and some intimate letters about the importance of love as a compass for life.