LIP SYNCH

I’m just going to come out and admit it. I don’t remember my first kiss.

It was a bleak midwinter of writer’s block when I admitted to someone – another blogger, someone I’ll probably never meet – that I had writer’s block. Real life had intruded with some serious subject matter, interrupting the flow of heartfelt trivia which usually finds expression on my blog. ‘Why not write about your first kiss, or your favourite journey, or a photograph which means something to you,’ he suggested. At first I felt mildly insulted by the suggestions, setting my phone aside in some disgust and feeling they were just the generic stuff of the suburban writers’ group. Then I started to think about it. After all, the first kiss is supposed to be one of those rites of passage… one of those key moments in the growing up experience which marks one out for life. And yet I couldn’t remember mine, and the more I thought about it the more emphatic this realisation became. It felt odd. If I couldn’t remember what was meant to be such a defining moment of the growing up experience, was I somehow lacking in my adult life?

Funny things, anyway, kisses. I remember, as a teenager, worrying a lot about them. There was endless scope. I worried that everyone else seemed to be being kissed except me, that consequently I wasn’t picking up the required expertise in case the day once came when somebody might want to kiss me, and – worst of all – that such a day might never actually arrive. I was good at French at school but all my expertise at verb conjugation wasn’t enough to stop my blood turning to ice when I heard more confident classmates giggling about their exploits of French kissing during Monday morning gossip. Not even my grasp of the French subjunctive could prepare me for the possibilities of these seemingly unreal or imaginary conditions ever taking place in my life. My classmates’ terminology horrified me and their apparent expertise was terrifying. They made it sound like some sort of intimidating clinical procedure – these hockey-playing girls with their laughter about what they called ‘tonsil hockey’. I took refuge in my books and my music and pretended not to care, all the while becoming more terrified that my refuge would remain a solitary one until I was much too old to care. I’d be tottering down the street to collect my pension, I’d imagine, one day in a faraway future of flying cars, and an old man – a handsome widower perhaps – would raise an eyebrow in the pension queue and invite me for tea and scones in the café next door. A kiss would finally hover in the air between us… but would he have dentures, or would I, and would I know what to do, even then, and would it make me forget to collect my pension, leading to a dotage of penury? How I laughed when, years later, my vision almost seemed to come true in those frightening ads for denture fixatives, where the old people are kissing in the car as the rain pours down outside…

And yet, aged nine, I was engaged. It was a brief engagement. A mere few weeks. No kissing was involved. The engagement was a civilised arrangement based on an agreed cessation of playground insults, sharing of a few packets of crisps – oh the salty embrace of small fingers! – and a habit of smiling at one another across the tables full of reading books and poster paints. He gave me a ring from a 10p lucky bag. I might still have it somewhere: he wanted me to keep it, afterwards. Things all ended so suddenly when he started showing off, using American clichés from children’s TV, one lunchtime, and I told him I was never going to speak to him again. He went quiet. I felt like crying. I haven’t seen him for years now, but once, when we were both about 15, we exchanged an unexpected sign of peace in church and it somehow felt as though old sins had been forgiven.

An adolescence of feeling at odds with everyone - with everything - meant that battles of wit were more my style than embraces. My best male friends were the ones I traded insults with, or talked to about music or books or films. These were the boys I trusted and cared about, but they were the last ones I was ever going to kiss because they knew too much… they knew the weak points and the secrets and the eccentricities. There was no way they were ever going to be attracted to me. I made sure I didn’t get hurt – in all the certainty of my own hideousness and undesirability – by building a high wall of cynicism and irony. My words had all the spikiness of the ubiquitous barbed wire of 1980s Belfast overgrown by the hundred-year forest of a fairy tale. I developed the usual ridiculous crushes. Politicians, singers, actors, characters from fiction, distant sixth formers… a half-smile in a crowded corridor, an over-interpreted song lyric, these were the things I clung to, not the fumbles out the back of local youth clubs which only ever seemed to happen to someone else. It’s not as though I sat at home all the time: granted I didn’t go to youth clubs, with their proferred table-tennis and tonsil hockey training, but I did face my fears and attend, nervously, a few teenage discos, hovering at the edge of the floor, listening to the songs, pretending to know the words, pretending to feel cool and bored and feigning amused indifference when almost all the other girls were asked to dance or offered a coke or asked ‘outside’. If I were a teenager nowadays, I’d be the one in the corner of the club or disco, tapping away at an iPhone, posting pretentious cynical nonsense on Twitter while everybody else gyrated and embraced.

But I suppose, sometime in the summer between the two sixth form years, the first kiss must have happened. I’m pretty sure it had happened by the time I went to university, but it’s shameful to consider that I can’t remember who he was, this boy who kissed me – all the more so when you consider that I wasn’t a teenage drinker! It must have been one of those boys I met in my mis-spent youth of music lessons: a clarinettist perfecting an embouchure, perhaps, or more likely a viola player, the butt of every musician’s jokes. All I can say is that I can remember going back for my final year at school feeling a bit more worldly wise. A bit more confident. More acceptable – accepted. The things I remember about boys, though, even from that year of being 18 and feeling just a tiny bit less hideous, the encounters I have never forgotten – none of them involve kissing. The moments I remember were the half-hours spent talking to male friends about what we imagined it’d be like to be grown up, or about what we were reading or what we were listening to or how we’d suddenly developed a taste for coffee. Lunchtimes, breaktimes, free classes… those rambling talks are clear enough that I can still remember what was playing on the Common Room stereo when they happened. But no. I can’t remember that first kiss.

And now, years later, much later than I care to think about, I’m married and I’m superstitious about last kisses, not first ones. I’m superstitious in the way my parents were, in 1980s Belfast with its car-bombs and letter-bombs and incendiary devices, about parting on bad terms with someone you might turn out never to see again. I’m superstitious about the casual goodbyes which end up being last ones, so it’s the quick, often rushed or half- perfunctory hugs, the rapid kisses on the cheek of friend or partner or family member, which mean the most to me. I’m still not expert in the conjugation of the tongue – the French thing. But I don’t think it matters any more: what feels most vital now is the feeling of closeness and understanding which might be marked by the lightest of touch, less by feelings acted out and commemorated than by a sincerity of look or word. There are so many clichés about this that one reflection couldn’t contain them all: I’m sure my old primary school companion knows them all. If he’s now married too, perhaps he’s going to write them on his wife’s Valentine’s card next week. Too many people think I’m cold – unfeeling. And maybe someone who can’t remember their first kiss is just that: a closed book, a grammar of definitions and discourse markers without any hint of the human emotion which brings these things to life. I’m still the most reluctant participant in the group hug or the Christmas party dance-floor or the communal squealing over the new baby or the engagement or the juicy gossip about the night before. I don’t adorn my over-frequent texts or emails or Twitter messages much with kisses or embellishments of endearment. But the words that pass between me and those people I really care about – those passing observations or complicities of laughter shared or common enjoyment of this book or that music or that TV programme – those things mean everything.

Those things, years on in a faraway future of flying cars, will be the things I won’t forget.