Innocents (14 page)

‘
What!
’ With my eyes, I accused you of mocking me.

‘I think you're wonderful,’ you said simply.

In my mind I notched up another few points.

Nestling into the crook of your arm, I'd disconcert you effortlessly.

‘Can I give you a blow-job?’ was a good one.

I felt you snort with silent, perplexed laughter as you realised the absurdity of your situation. How many men, sitting down to watch mid-evening current affairs programs, find a nubile schoolgirl casually asking if it's okay to suck them off? There were whole Internet sites devoted to this fantasy. There were whole Acts of Parliament designed to stop people who were devoted to this fantasy.

‘If you want to.’

‘Yep!’ I pawed at your fly, trying to gauge where your penis was at. Had I succeeded in giving you an erection yet? I'd lose points if you were still quiescent when I undid your fly.

Usually, however, the thought was enough to send you rock-hard.

Stretching out on my stomach, kicking my legs in the air, I closed my lips around your penis. ‘Is that nice?’ I'd look up at you, as though concerned by your silence, as though afraid I was doing something wrong.

Head thrown back, eyes closed, you reassured me heartily: ‘You have
no idea
.’

The first time it had happened, in our dark bedroom, you couldn't believe I was willing to take your penis in my mouth.

‘You don't have to do
that
!’ you whispered, solemnly aghast.

I popped my head up, so that you could see my face over your stomach. ‘I
want
to.’

Experimenting, I asked, ‘Is that nice?’

You made no reply. I said, ‘Sorry … I'm sort of making it up as I go along.’

‘Come here.’ You held out your arms to me.

Feigning ingenuousness, I asked, ‘What's wrong? Don't you like it?’

Overcome with my artlessness, my charming frankness, you stretched loving arms down to me, over the straining bulge at your groin. ‘Come here, you dear, sweet, lovely girl.’

With affected concern, I took refuge up by your chest, curling myself round your heart. ‘Was that wrong?’

‘No!’

I rushed my words, trying to explain. ‘It's just I've never done that before! I don't know what to do!’

Stroking my hair, holding my waist, you said, ‘Oh, my love.’ With an air of the pedagogue who must explain the wickedness of the world to his angelic charge, you said, ‘It was lovely, honestly … the most … exquisite thing I've ever … The fact that a little—
goddess
like you would even
consider
doing something like that for
me
…’ A disbelieving shake of the head.

‘So it was okay?’ I knew perfectly well that it was ‘okay’. More than ‘okay’.

‘Yes.
Yes
! I just … I'd hate to think that you were doing that because you felt obliged to.’

I raised myself onto one elbow, looking down at you. You were a dusky shadow against the white bedlinen.

‘Is that all? You stupid man.’ I did my unsophisticated-candour act. ‘As if I'd bother doing it, if I didn't want to!’

When we'd expired our lovemaking—when I feigned deep sleep, though only three-quarters groggy—you kissed my insensible cheek with fairylike delicacy, and whispered to the air, ‘I love you so much, my darling.’

My darling, I so much loved the look and the sound of you. But I missed the essence completely.

I lived inside a series of tableaux, flickering from moment to all-important moment like an old stopframe animation.

I learned how to keep several realities concurrently true in your mind, and take the best from each as the occasion suggested. Certain things in the picture I made of myself came to be almost completely contradictory, but this, to my delight, only served to strengthen my image in your mind. It gave me depth.

I cultivated a woman-of-the-world attitude at times.

‘Of course I'm on the pill, darling, have been since I was fifteen,’ I lied matter-of-factly when you asked.

I invented ex-boyfriends. I made up fleeting holiday encounters.

I wove these fabricated men into conversations:

‘Oh, I was going out with this guy that…’

‘Yeah, I knew a boy who…’

You weren't to know that my previous sexual experience, to date, consisted of one dribble-jawed snog with Melissa Aldiss' older brother at a party three months before I met you. He had freckles and he tasted of sweet coke and sour rum.

You'd nod, when these boys appeared in the conversation, and say with determined evenness, ‘Did you? Were you? Oh, okay.’

I invoked the sense of cold, social transaction which characterised these invented adolescent relationships, but it did nothing to destroy your idea of me as essentially naive and virginal.

I woke your jealously with these pin-pricks, and then had the pleasure of soothing it once again.

I'd withdraw my lips from yours, to tell you: ‘You're the best kisser I've ever known!’

Embarrassed but proud, you'd dart forward and kiss me again.

And all the time, in your eyes, I was also untutored, completely guileless.

I seemed to know everything, or nothing, depending on the time of day and the pattern of the conversation and what we were doing.

I could know whatever it suited me to know.

Kisses were the first point of contact, for me. There was no dialogue except the physical. All my speech was just to bring you close. All my listening attitudes were just poses calculated to turn you on. You could have been talking about anything, anything at all. I had nothing to say to you, except with my body.

But now, any lightest token of your affection would seem like the highest blessing to me. To think I've had all of you, safe in the crook of my finger, and I thought nothing of it. To think you've come nuzzling to me, craven, for any morsel of love, and I fed you shreds of plastic. It turns my stomach.

As the spring grew warmer, we embarked on endless picnics.

Behind our new house, there was a little bit of a back garden, enclosed by high walls on all sides. All the walls trapped the drops of rain and shreds of shadow. Towards the edges of the lawn, moss mingled with the grass. In the corners, slime and lichens spread across the bald surface of the earth. Buzzing things hovered there. Strongly perfumed flowers wrestled with each other, day to day.

The very centre of the garden was the only place you could rely on. It was the only place that was safe. The meagre sun-light sucked the water out once a day and made it dry enough to sit on.

We had our picnics there, under the big spreading tree. We sat on a tartan rug that you'd bought specially. You made me fairy bread and fed me chocolate, square by square.

In Mr Harrison's English class one week, we studied the significance of landscape.

He held up a picture of trees and grass and rocks, all yellow-brown under the relentless sun.

‘What does this make you think of?’

‘Swaggies.’

‘Sheep.’

‘Bodies,’ I said, and instantly regretted it.

He paused in my direction, and waited till everyone else was looking at me. ‘Why's that?’

I fought to keep from going red. I spoke casually, to hide my creeping horror. I didn't want to seem macabre. ‘Y'know,’ I said. ‘Newspaper stories. Girls who go missing along the highway.’

‘Oh, right,’ he said, his words a little quick. ‘The media association. Good.’ And laughing through his nose, dismissively, he put the picture face down on the desk. He reached into his pocket for a plastic figurine. ‘Have a Kermit the Frog.’

Mr Harrison was a very easy case indeed. At first, as you know, I worried that he might understand the real situation between you and me. He had a way of fixing me in his gaze and asking pointed questions which made me sweat.

But then certain weaknesses of his became glaringly apparent.

He once asked me to fetch some whiteboard markers from his office.

‘Top drawer,’ he said.

His office was small and cramped and busy. There were letters scattered all over the desk. Photographs of school plays and picnics crowded the walls. Brash trinkets sat jumbled together on a shelf—the source of his endless supply of classroom rewards.

I found the pens immediately, behind some bottles of Voltaren pills.

At home, I asked you, ‘What's Voltaren for?’

You answered, ‘Pain.’

After that, his loud laugh seemed less instinctive, more forced. His enthusiasm seemed more like obligation, duty. I saw his powerful strides tinged with a kind of stiffness in the joints. Once or twice, I saw him adjust his ridiculous cloth cap to a jauntier angle.

Sometimes, I flirted with the truth. I don't know why.

You told me, ‘I was so nervous of you, when I first met you…’

‘I know!’ I said. Your forehead creased into lines of inquiry. With an eyebrow, you questioned me.

‘I found your diary,’ I explained.

‘You read my papers?’ You were hurt; faintly outraged. ‘You read my personal writing?’

That diary was only the half of it. I found everything, in the end.

I nodded. ‘Well, how else am I supposed to know what you think?’

An exhalation of dumbfounded amazement broke from between your lips. You shook your head slowly, looking past me at the wall.

‘You could just
ask
me.’

Ask you? The idea was ludicrous. What if you were playing the same sort of convoluted game I was? Or—a more potent fear still—what if all this was some obscure adult game, some grown-ups' affair about which I was too naive to know anything? My mind pulsed with the half-shadowed range of possibilities. Clues like your diary were of vital importance.

With an effort, you conquered your instinctive little-boy, you-looked-at-my-stuff anger. Taking my hand in yours, leaning across the table, appealing, for the sake of communication, of mutual understanding, of your holy, all-encompassing love, you wanted to know: ‘Don't you
trust
me?’

I realised then that no, I didn't.

I didn't trust anyone. A hot fear came coursing through me, tingling my nerves and speeding up my heart. What if you found out that I didn't trust you? Would you call me a bitch? Would you understand, suddenly, that I lived in your house, occupied a paramount place in your mind, on false pretences? The idea of you withdrawing yourself, leaving me in a solitude where I could not help but be constantly aware of my own defiled state of mind, was too terrible to bear.

But I was an expert in thinking on my feet. I calculated rapidly, and decided on my next move without the faintest hesitation.

Composing my features into the most apologetic, rueful smile possible, and squeezing your hand with an appropriate urgency, I said, ‘Of
course
I trust you.’ Looking sheepish, looking shy, pouting a little, as though forced to admit something I found slightly embarrassing, I added, ‘I
love
you.’

Fatherly forgiveness won an easy victory over your sense of outrage.

‘I know,’ you said. Your face creased into a sad, loving smile. ‘I love you too, little angel.’

You stood up and came around behind me, keeping my hand in yours, twirling my arm like a dancer. You leant over, enveloping me in your arms, seatbelting me to your body. You buried your face in my hair and inhaled deeply. You covered my neck with kisses. I gripped your hands tightly, as though I were terrified you would ever release your grasp.

I thought,
Phew
! But I didn't stop reading your diary.

My occasional nightmares couldn't give me away. Rather, they were tools I wielded deftly.

I came slowly,
dreadfully
, to awareness.

‘Oh, baby, baby, baby. Don't cry.’

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, blearily remembered myself—the existence of my body, my life, my lover. ‘What's…?’

We were sitting up in bed, in our moonlight-silvered upstairs room. You leant against the bedhead. I leant against you. A recollection of some keen caustic sorrow was dimly evoked in me, as if by a wafting smell.

‘It's all right.’ Your arms were smooth around my body, your chest slippery under my cheek.

‘What happened? I don't remember.’

Like a Disney father, with scripted, chisel-featured tenderness, you informed me. ‘You had a bad dream. You were crying.’

With my fingers I found my tears, a layer of slime between my cheek and your chest. ‘Oh! Darling, I'm sorry, I've got you all wet!’

With your fingers you shushed my lips. ‘Don't be silly; don't be
sorry
. What were you dreaming about?’

‘I can't remember.’

You whispered, ‘You can tell me.’ I understood in a second that you loved this, all your compassionate instincts swollen to fill you. I clasped you tightly to me, my lips pursed, rigid, in a kiss frozen against your collarbone.

‘It's all right,’ you said.

Sometimes, I cried. I didn't know why.

Oh, how hard I used to desire to be like the crowds of people I saw in shopping malls! I wanted so much to be like those who can restrict their tears to appropriate places—funerals and sad movies. My tears used to burst from me at the oddest times.

It disconcerted you.

After breakfast one morning, I followed you into the bedroom. I knelt by your knees as you stood knotting your tie. I leant my head against your calf, tracing the crease of your trouser-leg idly with my forefinger.

Tie tied, you stood back, smiled at me in passing, and sat on the bed, pulling on your shoes.

Abruptly, I found myself choked by violent sobs. They shot from my lips like hacking coughs.

A second saw you knelt by me. ‘My darling, my darling, my darling …!’ You tried to cradle me to you, but I was lost in my gushing eyes and tear-dampened hair. A kind of cramp seized my insides. Doubling over, I clutched at my stomach with one hand.

‘Angel, what's wrong? What's the matter?’

I could not speak. I heard your panic but had no time for it. I made motions like one vomiting, but I was spewing sobs. It hurt terribly.