Innocents (13 page)

‘Oh, you're beautiful,’ you'd say.

‘No, I'm not.’

This was a strange, inverted lie: my tone was coquettish, daring you to sustain your compliment. But I knew perfectly well, without a second's thought, that of course I was not ‘beautiful’ in any real sense. I thought of myself as a sort of cold pale slug, inside my skin. I was never beautiful except when your attention made me so.

Your eyes would become wet and luminescent. ‘Yes, you are.’

Rejoicing at the strange blindness which had bewitched you, I'd kiss your forehead with my beautiful lips.

D

‘Do I look all right?’ I'd ask, sucking in my stomach and turning my palms towards you in appeal.

‘You look gorgeous!’ you told me, and the sincerity in your voice made it true.

So I became gorgeous.

I rejoiced in every step I took. I darted along on tiptoe, letting the world run its eyes over me. I knew the air itself worshipped me, because you did.

I thought sometimes, in an obscure way, that you were lucky to have me.

I transformed you. I made you passionate and desperate and blissfully happy and obscenely anxious just by being five minutes late home from school.

I didn't exactly suffer from agonies of conscience. But when I needed to justify my actions to myself, I decided vaguely that my presence allowed you a chance at nobility and grace that might not have otherwise come to your life.

I don't mean that I possessed those qualities myself. I mean it in the sense that religion provides a chance at grace; not because it is real, but because it is believed to be real.

You're a saint, my darling; but even a saint is lost without a god of one sort or another. Equally, if you worship something ardently enough, it might as well be divine. And I was surprised to find how easy it was to create a divinity out of myself.

You rang Mr Harrison up for a date, a few nights before I started school.

You just
did
it, on the spur of the moment.

‘He lives alone,’ you explained to me as you dialled. ‘I thought we might go out to dinner.’

‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘Are you gonna just leave me at home?’

‘No!’ you said, falsely jovial. You'd been planning just to go with him.

‘I'll need a babysitter,’ I said. ‘I'll get lonely.’

‘Oh …’ you said ‘—the three of us, I mean.’

I was annoyed, but I couldn't afford to show you.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Cool.’

I thought that perhaps I could make polite conversation all night, and then give you a guilt-trip for making me hang around with boring old men instead of with cool young people. (You'd expressed promising worry, a few times, about isolating me from my peers.)

You were childishly excited. You changed your tie twice. You thought I didn't notice.

‘I haven't spoken to him properly since college,’ you told me when you'd made the restaurant booking.

‘Haven't you?’

‘We were quite good friends, actually.’ You were like the school nerd casually—oh, so casually—mentioning that the toughest boy of all is his best mate.

‘Were you?’

‘You remember …’ you asked me cautiously, sucking in your lips, ‘he thinks you're my niece?’ With your eyes, you begged me to lie for you.

‘It's fine,’ I said, kissing you on the neck.

You pushed me to a distance, held my eyes.

‘It's just,’ you said, ‘it could be awkward. If…’

I curled my arm in between your coat and your shirt, cuddling into your jacket with you. ‘It's all right,’ I said.

In the car, you told me, ‘He had the room next to the bathroom. It was always flooded. Always! You'd go in and his notes would float past your ankles. He had to wear gumboots to study in.’

I thought that you sounded as though you were quoting an official book of college anecdotes.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Piper's. I told you. We've been there before.’

‘But it's down the other street.’

‘We have to pick him up.’

‘Aren't we meeting him there?’

‘He doesn't have a car.’

Stupid man, I thought. Doesn't even have a car. But being sulky wasn't part of my game plan for the evening, so I just stroked the knuckles of your hand as it lay on the gearstick.

‘Stop that!’ you said, groaning. ‘I can't go into a restaurant with …
you know
.’

‘I didn't
mean
to!’ I protested, delighted. ‘I was just
patting
you!’

‘Sometimes you don't even have to do that!’ you confessed. ‘I just sit at my desk and remember your
name
and I can't get up to get a coffee or the secretary will see.’

‘It's not my fault.’ I pouted.

‘Of course it's not!’ you said paternally. ‘It's me.’

And then we pulled up outside a red-brick house, and you tooted the horn.

‘Hop into the back,’ you told me, as Mr Harrison came jogging up the pathway.

Seething, I did as I was told.

I hated sitting in the back. It was like being a child again, listening to the grown-ups talk about things I'd never heard of.

Harrison made jokes and laughed loudly.

I stared out the window and imagined what we'd do afterwards, in bed.

You told more anecdotes, reminiscing, half-turning towards Harrison. You gestured shallowly with one hand, unconsciously mimicking his mannerism.

As we dipped through a roundabout, a ute beeped angrily at us.

‘Careful!’ shouted Mr Harrison, and his voice wasn't professional and booming as it usually was. ‘Jesus!’ He sounded high-pitched and adolescent.

A moment later, he tried to make amends, to recover his public face. ‘It was his fault.’

‘Crazy idiot,’ you said, hardly ruffled at all, and plunged back into your story.

We put on a good show, you and I.

I said, when we got home, that we should take up dancing and become a famous double-act.

You told me to finish my vegetables. You showed me which cutlery to use, though we'd been here three or four times before.

I asked, cutely, for wine. ‘C'mon!’ I said, jiggling my glass. ‘Just a
taste
?’

‘No!’ you told me firmly. ‘Drink your lemonade.’

But I did think I noticed, once or twice, Mr Harrison watching my face with a kind of alert curiosity.

It didn't faze me. I was beautiful, now. What did one more pair of eyes matter?

Outside the restaurant, as we were leaving, I saw a woman sitting on a bench, snivelling. Her boyfriend sat by her, hunched with discomfort. He was holding her hand but his body was angled away from her.

‘I just want to spend more time together,’ she said, and her voice trembled. Her cheeks were starred with red. Her eyes were huge, like saucers, trying to suck him inside with the force of her gaze.

He rubbed his lips together distractedly. He didn't want to be there. He was embarrassed. She was flaunting her weakness desperately, displaying the great gaping hole where her innards should be, and begging him to plug it.

Amateur
, I thought.

I found that I'd been placed in one of the English classes Mr Harrison taught.

On the first day, I arrived at the classroom early. I didn't know any of the people milling around in the playground.

‘So,’ said Mr Harrison, fishing in his pockets for plastic trinkets, ‘how are you enjoying life with your guardian?’

I said, ‘He's my uncle.’

Mr Harrison watched my face for a long moment.

I was sure there was something showing; that the untruth stained me like a piece of food clinging to my cheek. I held his gaze.

‘On your mother's side?’ he asked politely, lining the little toys up along the desk. ‘Or your father's?’

‘My mother's,’ I said it too fast, too firmly. He must see. He must know. He must.

‘Oh, right.’ And he tossed me a little gnome, garishly painted. ‘Present for your first day,’ he said, grinning.

Oh, this catalogue of detachments can't hope to give any inkling of what you are! You are
instinctively human
. This came sometimes as a balm and sometimes as an irritant against my strange alien sensibilities.

I remember us driving down a wide suburban street. We saw a man straining with a leash, dragging a reluctant puppy. The little dog sat, determined, and curled all its legs together underneath itself. The man, fat and surly in a tracksuit, wrenched it, bumping, over the concrete.

‘Oh, the poor little thing!’ you exclaimed, and your sincerity was childlike. ‘The poor little pup!’

It was this intensity of passion, this easy pity, which attracted me to you. ‘You poor little thing!’ you'd say to me if I stubbed my toe. ‘You poor little girl!’

*

‘You're so
soft
,’ you explained. ‘Look at this.’ You rubbed a fine spray of hair between your fingers, letting it fall strand by strand onto my cheek.

‘Horrible colour,’ I demurred. ‘Stupid, gutless, yellowy-brown. Yuck!’

‘No!’ Lovely sandstone colour.’ You ran a finger along the curve of my neck. ‘Soft skin. I could sit here and stroke your cheek for
hours
. You
glow in the dark
, my darling.’

‘Everyone at school said I must be anaemic.’ This was an exaggeration. Rachel had once suggested that I get a tan.

‘They were just jealous. Because they weren't as soft.’

Thinking of the hard cruel knot at my centre, I laughed.

‘You're beautiful,’ you insisted. Poor thing.

Softness is a quality which more properly belongs to you. You loved anything small, anything weak, with your whole soul. I mocked you for it. I basked in it.

I felt like a debauched gentleman of the nineteenth century, who comes back to his home town in a frenzy of remorse and chooses the most chaste and pious maiden to be his bride, hoping that her goodness will somehow be enough for two.

When you told me earnestly that you loved children, I pretended to be offended. ‘Why? Who else is there? You're not doing some twelve-year-old on the sly, are you?’

‘Don't joke,’ you begged. ‘I get so guilty sometimes.’

I offered you mechanical comfort, like one throwing a rope to a fugitive wanted for interrogation. I cupped your cheeks with my hands. ‘Hey,’ I said gently, my soft lips beside your ear. ‘If I didn't want you, I'd say.’

‘I know, baby.’ You did not sound convinced.

‘I'm not a baby. I'm very clever.’

‘I know, but you're not very old, are you?’

‘You don't have to be old to be clever. I know the capital of Laos.’

You humoured me, you shared the joke, but your eyes remained clouded with distant adult sorrows. ‘Do you? You
must
be a grown-up, my darling.’

I chewed my lips in dissatisfaction: a little girl who was not being taken seriously. ‘Vientiane,’ I insisted.

‘Is it?’

‘And I know the political system.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. It's a communist state.’

‘Did you learn that from Mr Harrison?’

‘No. I'm just clever. I just know things.’ I was a sophisticated child now, speaking your language, but with charming, unjaded conviction. ‘I know you're a lovely, lovely man.’ I kissed your forehead. ‘And if murderers came I'd hide you under the couch and stand in front of it.’

‘No, you would not, young lady!’ You tickled me gently. ‘I'd sit on you, so they'd think you were a throw-pillow.’

I gloried in myself, because you gloried in me.

On the way to school, strangers whispered to each other about my beauty, pointing as I passed. The grass under my feet rejoiced to have me tread on it. At school, the thronging boys and girls saw me and knew that I was the best of them all.

I spoke rarely. I was drunk on the perfection you had made of me. But when I spoke, my classmates were alert for grander things than my opinions of pop music in the playground or English literature in the classroom. Heads cocked, they were straining to hear the music of the spheres. My gestures conducted the world in its turning.

It was calculated, yes. I choreographed myself. My face never fell into any expression innocently. I knew where every tiny muscle was, every moment. But it was a magnificent, elegant discipline, like ballet.

I'd watch the television, faking absorption, my mouth half-open as though in complete, unconscious preoccupation.

I wasn't listening. I wasn't watching. All my attention was focussed on my peripheral awareness of your eyes. I felt you drink me in, survey my face over and over, the smooth cheeks, the wispy hair, the wide eyes, the expression of earnest concentration.

The intensity of your gaze was like a drug to me.

Occasionally, you'd be overcome. You'd lean in and press your lips fleetingly against my cheekbone, or the top of my head. I counted these kisses as little victories.

‘What?’ I'd say, turning to you, startled, my smile half-embarrassed. I was adorably uncertain.

‘Nothing,’ you'd say, and kiss me again.