Innocents (18 page)

I shut the door firmly, and snapped the deadlock on.

In silent triumph, I went back to you. All hail the conquering hero.

You hadn't moved.

Kneeling, I said levelly, ‘Okay.’ I was so close that I could feel the warmth of your body on my face. I didn't touch you. ‘Do you want me to leave you on your own for a bit?’

Still staring at your open hand, you shook your head. Just barely.

‘I'll tell you what I want to do,’ I said, my voice still level and sensible. ‘I want to take you to bed and hold you all night.’

You crumpled, my darling, bobbing your face forwards onto your knee. A sob like a hiccup twitched you.

I saw you reduced and humiliated. Unaccustomed infant's sobs breached all your manliness. You shuddered and wheezed with them.

I saw you reduced to nothing and I exploited it for all it was worth. God forgive me.

‘Come on. Stand up.’ I knew the steps of the dance now. I was leading.

You stood like a trained chimp, and took my hand.

In respectful silence, I led you up the stairs.

In the bedroom, I stood you before me like a toddler, systematically undressing you. Suit shirt underpants fell unregarded to the floor. Standing before you—you still looked at the ground—I removed my own clothes as clinically as before a medical examination.

Then flinging back the covers I climbed into the bed, manhandling you down with me, and lay on my back. Pulling and poking, I arranged you above me, your face on my breast, and cemented you in place with the blankets. Arms and legs around you I enveloped you. I pulled the blankets over our heads, locking us together into the smallest darkest space two bodies could occupy.

My voice in that tiny cathedral was hushed and reverent. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

I felt nothing, angel. I had just pulled a holy ritual out of the air, and I felt nothing. I was officiating at a sacred ceremony, and I felt
nothing
.

You told me, of course, almost immediately.

His name was Clarry. He was a distant uncle who'd stayed with your family twice, once when you were seven and once when you were ten. He'd come creeping, in a haze of whisky, down the corridor to your room. He'd paused like a boogeyman over your bed. Pulling back the covers, he'd touched your trembling skinny body with his fat hands.

I felt a little bit silly for you, listening to those honest revelations. I smirked with my brain.

‘My love,’ I said, tightening my grip with every limb. You shuddered against me, the ancient horror re-awoken.

‘My love.’ I said it convincingly.

I said it, conveying,
There is nothing more I can say, but my love, my love
.

Holding this new, childed man, my mind ticked over rapturously with the fresh possibilities before me. The whole of you encircled by the whole of me. My spirit sang with a powerful ecstasy as you wept.

‘What did he do?’ My voice dripped with honeyed concern. I had to know specifics.

These were the most difficult words you'd ever had to utter. ‘He never actually … y'know.’

I see. Penetration did not take place. ‘Oh, darling,’ I wailed under my breath.

I called you ‘my darling’ or ‘my love’ with difficulty, like an honest man obliged to lie. The sweet names tried to stick in my throat, because you spoke them with such sincerity. But I forced them out. I had to.

‘He made me hold … it.’

Hand jobs. That's it? ‘Oh, my baby.’ My hands tightened on your sides, squeezing reassurance and support.

You choked it out. ‘He said I had to … in my mouth.’

Oh, darling, you were incoherent. Your tears soaked my shoulder. I was delirious. I was enchanted.

‘My love,’ I said. It was a litany, a mantra of false succour. ‘My love. My love. My love.’

With racking sobs and fists contracting violently, like heartbeats, against my shoulders, you gave your pain to me. It trickled down over my skin. It came in wheezing at my ears. It fluttered desperately through my pupils. I took it and I shaped it to my pleasure.

I'm damned for that. My love.

We both fell asleep.

I shouldn't have had the duvet pulled up over myself. I always have weird dreams when I'm too hot.

It wasn't really a dream. More of an idea with a soundtrack.

The thumping on the door went through my head, the thud thud thud of a deliberate fist on hardwood. Inside this dream, this sweaty sleeping idea, a long thin line of panic spouted between my stomach and my head. I knew I was in trouble.

Thud thud thud, and it's me he's after.

Thud thud thud, and there's nowhere to hide.

And the idea that floated like a cloud of steam into my mind was this: it's
my
uncle out there, banging on the door. It's
my
uncle, gone to seed and smashing bottles. It's
my
uncle, come to claim me back for childhood and powerlessness.

Thud thud thud, on the wooden door.

It took me ages to wake up, even after I realised I was asleep and dreaming. I had to try and shake dead limbs, open sleeping eyes, think with a numb mind. I slipped in and out of the idea, trying to shrug it off. It lay all along me, pinning me to the bed so I couldn't move.

Finally some twitch of mine flicked the duvet off my upper body, and I woke up to a rush of cold air and silence.

You were sound asleep.

I sat up and put the bedlamp on. All my skin was pink and flushed and traced with creases to show how I'd lain. My hair stuck to the side of my face.

I sat very still and waited for the idea to dissipate completely.

I hardly ever thought about my uncle these days. As far as I knew, he'd never made an effort to contact me. I was glad about that. I couldn't think of anything worse than having to speak to him, trying to address my convoluted self to that unasailable simplicity and worthiness. Trying to answer his elementary question: why?

I thought of him, crumpled at the kitchen table where I saw him last.

I don't doubt I've left some shadow on him: a bad taste in his mouth, a nervous twitch. I imagine he thinks of me when he reads the awful newspaper in the evening, and knows the world to be spinning too fast, skew-whiff.

You were edgy when you woke. At dinner, you talked and laughed with a slight manic intensity, eating barely a morsel.

You got up three times in the night after we went back to bed, pacing the house on mysterious errands. You sat up next to me, bedlamp blazing, reading instead of sleeping.

At midnight, I woke. Your eyes bored into the paper with furious concentration.

I put my hand on your knee. I kissed your side, at the spot where the skin stretched taut over your hip bone, showing delicate latticeworked veins.

Snapping the book shut, you wanted to know, ‘Am I keeping you awake? Do you want me to read downstairs?’

A periwinkle clinging to your side, I deepened my kiss, drawing my arm around your waist.

In the crook of my elbow I felt you stirring. Looking up, I saw your eyes were closed, your face haggard, hollow-eyed, grey with anxiety.

I hypnotised you with my eyes.

At that moment, in that place, all the world seemed like an extension of my logical, scheming mind. All events and people were like chess pieces I set down where I chose.

I wanted you as you had been that afternoon—craven, reduced, abased. And with a tear and a swish of limbs through bedlinen, you were.

We reassumed our position of the afternoon. I took you into me. As you took up that familiar attitude, I asked in your ear, ‘Is that better?’

Melodramatically husky, you confided, ‘I feel very safe, here.’

I liked being your refuge, the only port in the storm. I put my hands on your slim flanks and told you, ‘I feel safe, too.’

Uncle Clarry never turned up again.

I was disappointed. Protected by my knowledge of what he was, I could have fought him off endlessly. I daydreamed, for a little while, about coming home and finding him in the house, bailing you up against the wall. I'd force him off, trip him up, kick his fat face.

Then I'd gather you to me. I'd swallow you whole. I'd absorb you into my bloodstream, and you'd circle around inside me, endlessly.

Ruthlessly, I invented confidences of my own. I rejoiced at the strange blindness that let you take them in exchange for yours, like Monopoly money for real gold.

I lay in the submissive emotional position, curled against your chest with your reassuring arm around my waist, your hand on my head.

‘I have dreams sometimes,’ I said.

‘You can tell me.’

‘They're horrible.’

‘It's all right.’ Your big eyes promised to stand between me and any great horror.

‘I dream … that there's a
thing
in bed with me.’ A pause, so you could wonder: What thing? I made my breath come heavily, squinting my eyes with the effort of speech.

‘It's all burned,’ I explained, squeezing your hand convulsively. ‘All blackened.’

Another pause. You were intent, silent, your lips parted in concentration. You were willing me to be healed from this awful psychic scar. I was delighted.

I went on. ‘I notice—just gradually—that this
thing
… it's like, a big lump of melted plastic. All dripping. Shrivelled. It's awful. It's my
mother
.’ I turned my face into your chest. I was crying real tears. I didn't feel anything. I don't know how I did that. Sometimes I surprise myself.

‘Oh, darling,’ you said, your hand on my head. You were quivering with the force of what I'd told you. ‘Oh, my darling!’

You were enthralled. You were mine.

I pushed my advantage. ‘And I wonder … like, I wish I knew … I can't remember the …
crash
…’ I sniffed away the tears briskly, like someone well used to facing ingrained grief with stoicism. I was rewarded with that melting look, that flowing compassion of yours. ‘But I wish I knew what was going through her mind as it happened.’

You spoke gently, the way that parents do when coating some truth in illusion to make it palatable to young children. ‘She must have worried about you. She must have thought that she loved you very much and that she hoped someone would look after you.’

I found this thought distasteful. I hate feeling pity for people's vulnerability, their patheticness. It's too much of a liability. There are so many pathetic people.

I suppose she wasn't to know what I would be like. All babies are the same. But something in me thought irritably, More fool her.

‘Oh, that's beautiful!’ I exclaimed with sincerity. I angled my head upwards and kissed your thumb, smiling up at you from between your fingers. ‘And now I've got you.’

I used to watch you sleep, every night.

I've always slept lightly. I always wake up at least two or three times in a night. Much more of late. I'm nearly completely insomniac.

But I loved waking up in the night when it meant I could watch you when you were alseep.

When you were awake you often moved jerkily. It could be quite frustrating. I'd have you in my sights, in some perfect pose, at an ideal viewing distance, with the light just right and your expression just exactly what I needed. And then you'd suddenly shift, shrug, scratch, sneeze; and the image would dissipate jaggedly away.

But asleep, you were much better. I could stare unreservedly, because you couldn't see me.

I savoured your face the most, the thing I could least afford to stare at too hard when you were awake. The curve of your nose, the hollows of your eyes, the tiny holes your beard squeezed itself out of. And the expressions! Naked, open, unguarded. Delicious. You'd dream anxiety and your face would pinch and crumple like a toddler's. You'd dream something funny and smile beamishly at the air. And your movements became slow and irregular with the heaviness of sleep. Your whole body was diffuse in the lamplight, like some Impressionist character all made of splodges.

I miss you terribly.

I lounge about in your dressing-gown, sometimes. It's too long for me. It trails on the floor behind me, and I have to gather the hems in my hands as I go down the stairs. I sit on the couch, drinking red wine from one of your long-stemmed glasses. I don't know if they're officially the correct glasses for wine, but they suit my purposes. I remind myself of an ancient, forgotten diva, who, denied the stage and love affairs with foreign royalty, employs her thwarted theatrical tendencies in kicking the cat and bullying the servants.

What do I miss? I miss losing myself in you. I was like the diva in her prime then, performing her most celebrated role, so passionately involved in her part that she lost herself entirely; or afterwards, whisked between lovers, received princes in boudoirs hung with red exotic drapery and studded with silver candlesticks.

I miss the blueness of the night-time bedroom and the bigness of the curtainless window and the silvered incandescence of your skin and mine. I miss the animal warmth of your body beside mine.

I remember (this breaks my heart) one morning—or several, everything blurs—when I woke before you did. You snored gently, your hands curled under your head, your hair arrayed in dishevelled kiss-curls over your forehead.

I made a sudden movement. You woke abruptly. Your eyes opened, and you saw my face opposite yours. You mumbled something incoherent. Your voice still had sleep in it. Out your arms stretched, like a reflex. Insistently, inarguably, you encircled me, pulled me to you, like an enormous baby searching single-mindedly for milk.

You were swollen with the necessity of immediate love-making, irrational with it; still groggy. You cleared your throat. ‘Oh …’ you said, as if beginning to explain:
Oh, by the way
. ‘Um …’ Nodding downwards, you indicated your dilemma, turning towards me unfeignedly big, pleading, hungry eyes.

I took you into me without a word.

‘Oh, you're a dream,’ you said between your teeth, as the convulsions of orgasm shook you (carnal, uncontrollable convulsions, like vomiting or shivering). ‘You're a dream. You're a dream.’