Catching Up (Part 1)

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Tuesday 22 February 2011. Twelve fifty-five pm. That was when a devastating earthquake hit my home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, after which nothing in this city will ever be the same again. Unbeknown to me at the time, that same moment was also to trigger events after which, in a much happier way, nothing in my life can be the same again either. Not ever. I was one of the many city council and other public service staff who were taken from their normal work and pitched into a myriad of emergency relief jobs. I went to manage a shelter for traumatized and homeless families that had been established in a school, working in an improvised office in a corner of the school library, snatching sleep on a camp-bed beside my desk and making equally snatched visits back to my fortunately undamaged home to see if it was holding up to the aftershocks, to check email, and to have the nearest thing possible to a shower in comfort and privacy. At some stage, I vaguely remembered, a TV camera had been thrust at me and some journo or other had asked me something, but I had no clear memory of when, what or who. It was gone 8pm on Friday the 25th when Lynda Clegg, my immediate boss, came to see how things were going and how I was coping. After taking one look at me she said, in that let’s-not-fuck-around Geordie voice for which she is widely known (and which, incidentally, belies a sweetly loving and caring heart): “Christ, girl, you look a mess. You’ve done enough for now, Jo — go off home. Now! Don’t let me see you till next Monday.” After a token resistance I briefed her on the ongoing stuff I had been responsible for, used one of the Portaloos in the carpark rather than wait to use the hole that my elderly neighbour Fred Curtis had kindly prepared for me in my back garden (the city’s sewerage system having been extensively wrecked), and drove gingerly home, circumnavigating bahis siteleri gaping sinkholes, piles of debris sprawling across roads, and Army checkpoints along the cordon that had closed off the city centre, forcing through-traffic to make long detours. It was 9.30 before I was back home, slumped at my desk with some chicken pot-noodle and an ice-cold beer (thank god the power was on and the fridge still working!) in front of my main computer. I scrolled quickly through scads of are-you-OK emails from friends, relatives, past colleagues, and clients of my part-time translation business. One of my regular clients in Europe, with whom I had been working on a long-term project, and whom I had emailed explaining why I was temporarily unavailable, had taken the time and trouble to write back expressing concern at quite decent length, and I dashed off a quick reply in German. And then, quite suddenly, I felt my stomach tighten and my breath start to quicken. Facebook was telling me that I had a new message, from Fen Hazelhurst – Professor Fenella Hazelhurst, Docteur ès Lettres (Sorbonne), PhD (Berkeley), no less, Head of the School of Language and Culture of our old university. I sat back, my eyes closed, and carefully took a long, deep, slow breath. After releasing it gradually, I could feel that, although my breathing had steadied, my heart had taken on a more urgent pulsing and my stomach muscles were gently but firmly clenching and unclenching, These were disturbing but not in themselves unpleasant sensations. They were accompanied by memories of an old, never-quite-forgotten hunger, of other, long-past sensations, memories more than twenty years old, of lips parting beneath my own, of the scent of her hair and body in the darkness, of the warm, firm softness of her in my arms, of breasts pressing and moving gently against my own through the canlı bahis siteleri fabric of our summer dresses, of our breath and saliva mingling, of her wet, probing tongue, of – yes, yes…and then of the sudden, chill, awkward moment when that sweet body stiffened, the embrace slackened and broke, our bodies parted, and we looked down and away from each other. Oh Fen, Fen… My lips moved involuntarily and I breathed the last line of a sonnet by Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet who had been a favourite of both of us back then: Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! Oh you whom I would have loved, oh you who knew it! Now, decades after that might-have-been moment, Fen was seeking me out. She and I had been language students in the same year at Massey University in Palmerston North, which I still think is the most beautiful campus in New Zealand. I had been studying French and German, she French and Spanish, and our subject overlap had resulted in our spending quite a lot of study time together – time that for me had come to be coloured by sweet torment. I had known since I was seventeen – in fact, since having been gently, caringly, and deliciously seduced by my mother’s younger sister – that it was girls and women that I wanted; and I wanted Fen from the moment I saw her. Trouble was, the attraction was only one-way. Nothing personal about it – it seemed that she just wasn’t into women. Nor, seemingly, much into men either. In fact, during our first two years, except for a couple of rather desultory brushes with male students of my acquaintance, she acquired the reputation of being a sexless wonder as well as a bluestocking. I had reluctantly had to recognize that, if I wanted to keep her friendship (which I very much wanted to do), then I would just have to accept that sex would not be part of our joint agenda, and to canlı bahis seek satisfaction either alone or in other company – both of which I resolutely did. Sex, they say, is like bridge – if you haven’t got a partner than you need a good hand… Fen’s sexless reputation came crashing down in our third year, when to the amazement of all she made a determined and successful bid for the body of an inoffensively nerdish member of our French Lit Hist class, one Dan Scarsdale. Poor Dan didn’t know what had hit him. From the moment they became an “item” Fen not only wore him on her arm like a handbag but, as time went by, it seemed that she was also wearing him out; while she blossomed ever more radiantly he gradually changed from appearing as if all his Christmases had come at once to turning up in class with a look that gave the expression “shagged out” a new dimension of meaning. Then, with only a few weeks to go before finals, it was suddenly over. Dan cut and ran, telling not only his regular mates but all who would listen that she had drained him dry – not only, but especially, sexually – and that he could take or give no more. Fen was distraught by this humiliatingly public rejection , and for a while it looked as it she was close to falling apart. Sisterly solidarity caused Dan to be treated like an unperson by the female side of the student body. And among this wave of sororial support, guess who took on the task of helping Fen pick up the scattered pieces of herself and her self-respect, get her brilliant mind back into gear and her exam preparation back under control – providing solace and counsel at any hour without ever seeking a sexual quid pro quo? Yes, muggins Joanna Solway, that’s who. Of course, this was not without self-interest. I was, I persuaded myself, playing a long game, casting my bread of sympathy on the waters of Fen’s distress in the belief that in the fullness of time it would come back to me as sexual hot buttered toast. And this strategy seemed to be working. It helped that I was in the same hall of residence, and between regular partners at the time.

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