Calla grew up when there was little of any worth to eat; no fruit for vitamin C and trace elements, no milk and broccoli for calcium, no fresh meat for iron or protein. Enamel never formed on her yellowing teeth and she seemed to catch every popular contagion.

I met her in college, bundled in scarves, a Russian doll, a clasping onion skin of girl. Her mother had died the Summer before, and she resided on a scholarship, eating in the subsidised canteen on the days she could afford it, going without when she couldn’t. She rode an old fashioned bicycle, the kind with a bell and a basket, and the modest little skirts of mudflaps over thun spoked wheels.

She’d ride smiling through the high st and down the oak lined path into the college, lifting her feet from the peddles and carrying forward , letting the incline take the strain, down onto the cobbles of college square.
We’d chat on the warming evening of that first summer, tossing knot of wholemeal bread to the pigeons discussing Dylan and French poetry and our vivid adolescent dreams. One night I dreamt I was the saviour the dead, and flew unfettered in their playground, hugging their sin away like an Indian mystic. Calla had a dream she was invisible and silent, crying out to no avail, existing as a spectre in the world of men.

One evening that Autumn, after a blissful summer spent grape picking in Bordeaux, we went to one of those dreadful jocular college parties we both despised, the kind with velure jacketed aristobrats arguing loudly about Marxism over their single malt whiskeys; and strangely scented groupy chicks sharing baroque hoka’s of Moroccan hashish in dimly lit attics.

Somehow I ended up drunk on Slo-Gin and wrestling topless with the son of the Portugese ambassador. I surfaced next morning with a mouthfull of puke tendrils, eyes refusing to open fully against the onslaught of afternoon light.

I hung a sheepskin rug about my shoulders and stumbled over the evenings casualties, searching for Calla.
At first I didn’t realise it was her, her face seemed different choking on the bulk of Monty Hastings Bradley, whilst Royston Major Wilkinson took her roughly from behind. She looked oddly beautiful like that; milky freckled back arched, flaming mandarin hair recklessly cascading about her boney shoulders.

I joined the que for her mouth, and when the time came, tenderly brushed one glowing cheek as she took the length of me, her eyes sparkling with recognition. It was right then, as Elliot Fraser Darling and I high fived and thrust as one, to a chorus of ragged cheers and somewhere far below a fresh press of the Velvet underground’s ‘There She Goes Again’ hit its crechendo, that I realised. I’d met the girl I’d one day marry.