. . . on remembering first loves
HE WAS SITTING behind a sound desk in a smoky pub on the outskirts of Birmingham making the band sound as good as they could under the acoustically challenging circumstances. I looked and kept on looking and then a few moments later he glanced over at me and smiled. As I recall, a butterfly started dancing in my lower belly. I developed a bad case of wobbly legs. The world presented itself in glorious technicolor. This was it. That crazy little thing called first love.
It didn’t work out of course. I had just turned 21. He was a few years younger. Wiser, too, as it turned out. I favoured a guerrilla approach to romance in those days. There were no mobile phones so I found other ways to track his movements, ringing or calling around to his mother’s house to pin him down, insisting he spend every waking moment gazing into my eyes or planning our wedding, which would be in Gretna Green with two strangers as witnesses because we didn’t need anybody else. Our love would keep us company forever.
He was a sensitive soul for someone whose favourite book was about the Kray brothers. We met for the last time as boyfriend and girlfriend in a cafe – a few weeks after our first meeting – where he handed me a letter. It was a response to the dozens I had written him when he mysteriously went missing for a full three days without making contact. He sat and stared sorrowfully at me as I read his words which, to cut a long story short, made the point that he was too young to settle down and that perhaps I needed to find someone who was ready to get married, and pretty much “it’s been fun and you’re lovely but I need to be on my own right now playing Nirvana in my bedroom really, really loud”.
I was, in the true sense of the word, devastated. It took litres of Linden Village cider to even begin to cope with the hole he left in my life. For ages I looked back and quietly sang that lament of all those who loved and lost: “What if?” What if he hadn’t minded being attached to a romantic terrorist? What if we’d gone to Gretna and built a house in the middle of nowhere growing our own vegetables and making a living from selling leeks? Seriously, what if?
I got married within a couple of years, just as he’d suggested. That didn’t work out either. And after the break-up, I tried to find my first love – maybe this would finally be our time. It turned out he was a bluecoat or a yellowcoat in some kind of Spanish resort and even this didn’t put me off. I got his number and told him I might visit. He sounded scared. I stopped brooding over him after a while. Life did that thing where it went on. But I thought of him still.
I thought of him again when I read about Jan Szymczuk, the former police sketch artist currently drawing images of first loves for Rivane Neuenschwander’s exhibition A Day Like Any Other in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. You go along and give him a description of your first love and he creates a pencil sketch, which will hang in the exhibition. I couldn’t resist.
Szymczuk is a funny, sensitive Geordie, a self-taught artist from Northumberland who worked for 40 years in the Met Police in London and New Scotland Yard. In his 30 years as a police sketch artist, he drew images of suspects in high-profile cases such as the Yorkshire Ripper. Now retired, he teaches and paints portraits of people’s pets.
We sit at a desk in a room that doubles as a gallery of the loved and the lost from around the world. In his previous job, when Szymczuk met victims they were naturally reticent and nervous while recounting the faces of their attackers. Here, with first loves, people are revisiting glorious territory. They want to talk, they can’t shut up in fact, they remember things they had completely forgotten, the floodgates of romantic nostalgia burst open.
That’s how it was for me. Szymczuk would be asking about the shape of his eyes or the set of his nose, and I’d go off on a reverie, suddenly remembering the smell of a certain spot behind his ears. He was beautiful, I’d say, in reply to a scientific question such as: “Would you say his forehead was high?”
“Yes, of course he was,” Szymczuk says, bringing me gently back to the job at hand. “But his forehead?”
Incredibly, considering I have spent hours daydreaming about his face, the actual details are hard to recall. He was soft, I tell Szymczuk. He was twinkly. When he smiled my heart stopped.
Szymczuk is a patient man and bats away such irrelevancies with perfect diplomacy. He only has around 40 minutes to get the job done. He looked, I tell him, like a film star, a bit like Orlando Bloom. Szymczuk sighs.
Somehow, based on this cognitive interview, Szymczuk conjures up a pencil image that evokes, if not the exact facsimile of the person, then his essence. It is him but it is not him; but it is, if you know what I mean. I stare at this face and realise for the first time how much more a boy than a man he was at the time. How I must have scared him. How decent it was of him to write a letter and not just run away.
And a funny thing happens. In recounting him in such forensic detail, I seem to have let him go. It’s probably for the best.
To make an appointment to remember your first love, email rivane_firstlove@imma.ie before January 29th. Jan Szymczuk’s book Pencil and Paint is available now from blurb.com.