When I was 18, I went to live up north from London with all the self-importance of a teenager mixed with the arrogance of being from the capital city. My sexual experiences up until then had tended to be rather lifeless, loveless affairs, usually involving coercian. There was very little I would come back to and fantasise about later on.

I look back on the girl I was then, with a mixture of envy and embarrassment. I wish I still had waist-length hair and that figure now. Drinking heavily to overcome my shyness and add a bit of melodrama to my life, I soon found a clique who I was afraid of, but flattered that they wanted me. Many of them were older than me, and the few attractive young girls were treated like exotic specimens.After meeting a talkative, if not entirely sane girl called Mary one night, I was invited out at the weekend to be formally shown off. I was chatted up by the drug dealer of the group, who gave me free drugs as a inaugural gift. Later, I was invited along with my gay friend Paul back to Mary's house. Whilst she leant over from the front seat to ask me who I fancied (the answer was no-one, really), Amy drove the car. Paul remarked afterwards how good-looking Amy was, and it was true. With her Mary Quant bob, perfect milky skin and exquisite long legs it could not be denied. I had the knee-jerk reaction all girls are trained in however, thinking that if I said she wasn't really all that, I could eliminate the competition. Eyes would follow her around as she danced in a club, and the drug dealer who had approached me had been sending her roses for months, to no response. She was studying engineering, and admitted she was always the butt of crude remarks from her mostly male colleagues. Her desirability made her almost a victim, like a butterfly in a spider's web.Amy left that night after driving us home. She was always involved with some man or other, and it was usually disastrous. Some weeks later, I went to a club with Mary and found her in the toilets with Amy.
"Pete keeps hitting her, look at all the bruises," she said. Amy lifted her suit to reveal bruises scattered up her arms and legs.
I can't forget the horror I felt, an anguish disproportionate to how well I knew her. I didn't see this as out of the ordinary at the time, as that kind of violence against women is sickening and shocking in any case. But later when it brought tears to my drunken eyes,I could not be sure that it wasn't that I felt an injustice had been done, not only to Amy but also to me, that why should this pig have her and treat her so badly, when I...Amy dumped Pete, I found out soon after, and had begun seeing a narcissistic man everyone but me was after. Pete was beaten up by some other boys on the scene. One of these I had a fling with towards the end of that year. We became friends, and Amy often rang me to invite me out with the gang, who I felt quite intimidated by. Once, she called me to tell me about her latest disaster with pretty boy.
"He won't fuck me," she said. Rumour that he was gay, on account of his excessively feminine appearance, were less likely to have caused this failure than his vanity.
"Maybe he's scared he's not good enough, which is why the women he usually goes out with aren't that nice," I said, trying to comfort her.
She said she had confronted him, but it looked as though the "relationship" was over. I was not sorry. I agreed to go out with them all the following Wednesday.
"I've got to go, I've just had a bath, and I'm standing here in just a towel," she giggled.
I felt something, but I didn't yet know what it was. On Wednesday evening, I suppose I progressed through the usual routine if drinking cheap vodka and getting very dressed up. The way we were living always seemed very glamourous and decadent, but it led to many of the group being prescribed anti-depressants at some stage, and then selling them to each other to further furnish the hedonistic lifestyle that had caused a need for them. Amy was wearing a red shift dress, or was it black? I just remember her smile, and her bare arms in it. Her eyes were bright (at least in my memory), and she kept smiling, a nervous, disarming smile. A complicated operation began, starting with Mary and Amy getting into an involved discussion. Feeling paranoid, I went to ask Mary what it was all about. With Amy looking away, her eyelashes brushing her cheek, Mary told me that Amy wanted me. It had to be delicate, because some people are offended by that kind of thing, she said.
I felt an excitment that burned from my belly to my clit. I said I wanted her, too. We were left standing alone together, arms behind our backs, a boy and a girl in the playground. I remember a video was on the wall, and Amy said to me she fancied the woman in it. So did I in that film, and we started kissing. I melted into that cream-coloured face, and her darting tongue teased me into a frenzy. I took each liberty, to touch her hair, her waist, a leg, with relish. I'm sure I was trembling with nerves but I was wet through very quickly. Unlike the sterile sex I had been used to, I was really turned on and full of emotion. We went to the toilet, empty now as it was close to 2am, and covered in mirrors. Hitching up her dress, I found her creamy centre and lost myself in it.The experience was never to be repeated with Amy; like any summer of love, it had its Autumn, and mine came prematurely with the end of term. She started seeing a louche, sarcastic bloke who was a bit of a waster. I started seeing his friend, who was the one who had beaten up Pete that time. Just before I left to go back to London, in fact for the last time, we all went out as a foursome. She went to the toilet at the same time as me, but I didn't wait for her when I came out first. I expect I lost her, to suburbia, to children and a husband, to a less histrionic adulthood. I never stopped looking for her apparition though. I certainly have had fun seeking it out.