Innocents (22 page)

My breathing became shallow and incomplete. When I stood still, I swayed slightly. I sometimes thought I was hyperventilating.

I was sick. I was mad. I was like someone in love.

In Art, I was supposed to be working on my major painting. I couldn't concentrate. I stared into nothing, mentally creating situations for the two of us, instead. Absently, I painted my hands, just delicately dabbling the brush against my fingers. I traced broken bracelets on my wrists.

I forgot to wash it off.

At home, when you saw my hands, you said, ‘We'd better get you cleaned up before dinner.’ Taking me by the wrist, you led me into the bathroom.

Giving me baths had become a routine. You used to enjoy clucking at me when I splashed water out onto the tiles. You'd squat, fully dressed, by the side of the bath, pursing your lips with officious concentration as you soaped each limb in turn.

You turned the water on, and then went to check the pasta you were cooking.

I took off my clothes. I noticed splashes of paint on my knees. I made kissing faces at the mirror. I twisted seductively against the air.

I turned the cold tap off completely, and let the white tub fill with water that was far too hot. When the water was lapping halfway up the tub, I stepped inside.

My feet felt as if they were burning, at first. I stayed very still, as any movement of the water against my skin made it too hot to bear. Slowly, slowly I lowered myself down. I glowed pink. It hurt like sunburn. It made me urinate a tiny bit, involuntarily.

You bustled back in, wiping your hands briskly on your shirt, and reached for the floating sponge.

‘Ow! That's too hot!’ You sucked your fingers like a toddler.

‘I like it,’ I said, reclining like a mermaid, sinking my shoulders underneath. The sharp sting was sweet.

‘You'll burn!’

I was feverish. Desire like maggots consumed me. The hot water made me shiver.

‘It's fine.’ I held one arm out imperiously, dangling my dirty hand. ‘Come on.’

Shaking your head, you soaped me up, rubbing at the paint.

The heat made my nerves expand. Your touch felt fuzzier but more real. Through the steam, I watched you concentrating on your task. You bit your lip, like you did when you were driving in the rain.

I splashed at you, giggling. The water made big dark maps on your blue shirt. You recoiled. ‘Shit!’ The heat shocked you. ‘It's all over the
floor
!’ you cried.

‘I'm sorry.’ I was so drunk that it was hard to sound sincere. I giggled again.

You regarded the wet floor on either side with impotent dismay. ‘You can be so
selfish
,’ you muttered.

‘I didn't mean to get the floor!’ I cried in protest, before subsiding into giggles once more. ‘I was trying to get
you
!’

Your pursed face collapsed, after that. You couldn't do anything but smile in reluctant indulgence, and kiss the crown of my head.

Languorously, I regarded my pink body. ‘I'm hairy,’ I said.

‘You're perfect,’ you replied, briskly rinsing my arm.

I fetched one of your disposable razors down off the sink. ‘Give me the soap.’

I lathered my leg, pointing the toe. While you watched, I began to scrape away the hairs.

I didn't mean to cut myself. I was watching your trousers out of the corner of my eye.

‘Shit!’ you cried. It was as though I'd sliced
your
leg open under the knee. ‘Be careful!’

It wasn't such a big cut. Maybe five centimetres across. But it was clean and crisp and blood welled up immediately.

‘Are you all right? Should I get a band-aid?’

‘Doesn't hurt,’ I said. At first, it didn't.

I caught a look in your eyes, a surreptitiousness like guilt. Pink, bloody water flowed over my shin, into the tub. I lowered my leg until the cut was underwater. It hurt then, hotly, pulsingly. I drew my breath in between my teeth.

The water between my legs was murky. The colours of the paint and blood had all dissolved together, settling to the bottom. I eyed you from inside this greying, steamy bath. I was like a creature who belonged to another element. ‘Kiss it better?’ I asked, making the kissing face that I'd been practising in the mirror.

You obeyed. I was high on steam and on the curve of your neck as you bent your head.

I think you sucked my blood. Your eyes were big and puppyish. Your fringe stuck to your face. You clamped your mouth across the cut as though you could bandage it with your lips.

‘Come in,’ I whined. You submitting, peeling your shirt and trousers off clumsily. Your lips were parted. You were so powerfully focussed that you forgot to bite your lip.

You planted your feet between my knees.

‘Ssss!’ you went, at the sudden heat.

The redness crept up your legs, between the hairs.

I pulled at your knees. ‘Come down.’

You crouched. I closed my hot palm around your penis, pulling very gently.

Then I had you.

You had your eyes closed, and on your face there was this expression of tense concentration. I thought this must be what you'd look like masturbating. It was such a wonderful sight that I didn't want to blink. I held my eyes wide open until the tears came sliding out of them.

‘I'm gunna!’ you said. ‘I'm gunna!’ And then just as you came, I jerked you down and forward. You slipped and almost lost your balance. Flailing for the side of the bath, you immersed your balls in the hot water.

‘
Jesus!
’ The word was high and girlish. Your stomach twitched violently as you finished coming.

‘Sorry,’ I said, smiling with narrowed eyes.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ you said, your voice subsiding into a sigh.

I drank in the last precious moments of stillness, as you breathed deeply, head bowed, trying to retain your poise.

Then I pulled the plug out, sending blood and paint and sperm all spiralling away.

*

I made you conquer me, darling. I set bait you could not refuse.

‘I need you so terribly,’ I'd make you confess, night after intimate night. I cultivated in you an addiction for me, a physical dependency.

With the movements of my body, which you still assumed were spontaneous, uncontrived, I hypnotised you. I led you a slow, terrible dance. I became more dangerously passive, day by day. I retreated further and further, enticing you after me, into my personal inferno. And like the good, trusting man you are, you came always stumbling after.

Your guilt was still a powerful enemy. It was immensely strong in you. At times—like when I tried tickling your crotch as you read to me and you slapped my hand away—saying, ‘Stop that!’—I feared I'd never be able to overcome it.

You tried to fight my onslaught in many ways. I could only conjure the demon in you every so often. I had to put up with hours of gentle, sincere lovemaking from you, in order that you wouldn't get suspicious. I lay there and let you tickle me with kisses.

Your overwhelming concern for my sexual pleasure began about this time. You were awkward about discussing it, at first. ‘Do you …’ you said. ‘Are you? I mean, is it … okay? For you?’

‘Of course!’ I reassured you. I stayed very still, hoping that the top I'd just put on wouldn't rearrange itself as I moved around and ride upwards, covering the specifically calculated area of cleavage I had decided to display.

‘I mean,’ you went on wretchedly, ‘you're very young. You know, sometimes couples have to
work
at. I mean. I mean. Is there anything you'd like to try?’

I demurred. I denied. I rejected the idea that I wasn't satisfied. I scratched the top of my chest pointedly, to draw attention to the visible tops of my breasts, and smiled a charming invitation.

Half an hour later, the cleavage had done its work. But you still insisted, rather awkwardly, on going down on me.

You'd done it before. I found it hard to contain my boredom. ‘Mmmm,’ I said. ‘That's lovely.’ And I stretched out my arms to you, beckoning you upwards, away.

‘You're not getting bored, are you?’ I inquired, trying not to sound too hopeful.

‘I could do this all
day
,’ you assured me.

I saw only your pixie's eyes between my knees, surrounded by the wrinkled skin that suggested you were grinning.

I smiled fondly down at you, to mask my own boredom.

In the end, however, I managed to harness your concern for my purposes.

It was just a matter of turning your generous intentions into something sordid. It's surprising, really, how easy it was. I can't believe it took me so long to figure out what to do.

That night I'd been petulant at dinner, just to stir you up.

‘You're not eating much,’ you pointed out.

‘I never go
out
.’ I was digging aimlessly at my food with the fork.

‘I take you out.’

‘With my
friends
, I mean.’ I had no desire, of course, to waste my time with a bunch of teenagers. ‘With people my
age
.’

‘I know, I know.’ You stopped eating, though your meal was only half-consumed, and laid your knife and fork across the plate. ‘You shouldn't just spend your time with an old man.’

I flashed my most beautiful smile, to reward you for your deference. Then I ate a huge forkful of your special mashed potato. ‘It's okay,’ I said, speaking with my mouth full. ‘I like your record collection. It's expensive to buy that stuff second-hand.’

You laughed ruefully. You were laughing at yourself, with me. I loved it when you did that. ‘You like the eighties stuff, don't you?’

‘Eighties? There's more seventies than eighties.’

You laughed again, but you didn't take up your fork.

I always teased you about your age when I felt bored, when I needed a reaction from you. It was such an easy thing. It was a perfectly natural thing for me to do. After all, I held all the aces—youth, beauty and cuteness. You were lucky I consented to live with you at all. But you were sensitive about it. The sense of urgency to make up for wasted time was everywhere about you. There was an edge to your indulgence of my jokes.

So I think maybe that's where the challenge in your eyes, later that night, came from.

We were lying together naked on the bed. I'd resigned myself to yet another dull, tender lovemaking session.

You slipped your hand between my thighs, as you always did.

‘Mmmm,’ I said, looking over your shoulder and counting the books on your bedside table.

I can remember when your fingers moved so gently I thought you were reluctant to touch me there, until I saw your eyes. They were always alight with hope. There was always a shy expectant smile on your face.

This wasn't like that at all. It wasn't that coaxing, hopeful tickling with which you'd first approached me. You were watching my face every second. But when I tried to meet your eyes, you'd flicker them away and watch the counterpane instead.

With a flash of inspiration, I changed tactics.

From that point on, when I was overcome with desire—or rather, when I wanted you to
think
I was overcome with desire—I pretended I was losing a battle. I acted as though you were making me get turned on. It seemed to you that I couldn't help myself, that I was relinquishing some control of myself to you. And, despite yourself, you found that hopelessly arousing.

I deceived you by such subtle means!

As you tried to arouse me, I made all the facial expressions that accompany blushes.

I winced, just slightly, at my wriggles of excitement.

As you kissed my nipples and made them hard, I lowered my eyes, flicking my gaze coyly into corners of the room, as the disconcerted do.

When you slipped fingers between my legs and found wetness, I rolled my eyes and pursed my lips and looked embarrassed.

Oh, darling, it made you mad! Mad for me, I mean, with that distressed, embarrassed lust I so much loved to see.

Thus, I made you master. Thus, I enslaved you.

When we actually fucked, you closed your eyes, unable to deal with the sight of what you thought you'd created. That was great. It gave my eyes free rein over your face, and I drank in every detail.

And the sounds! The sounds you made were exquisite to me. You breathed audibly, faster and faster, as though trying to drown out my own feigned whimpers of submission. And the smooth stream of your eloquence was churned and shattered by harsh rocks of words.

‘I'm gonna—’

‘I've gotta—’

‘I'm fucken—’

Sometimes you'd loose even those last threads of sophistication, and descend wholly into guttural, staccato mumblings, devoid of all sense but a fierce animal appetite. You bayed and rumbled. These howls were broken with sharp splinters of obscenity.

‘Fuck!’

Summer began. Everyone started coming to school in shorts. I noticed the tanned legs walking around me only in passing, and with derision. I felt myself to be magically pale, a nymph of the twilight. I wore my whiteness like a sorceress wears her robes. The stray light of the city came creeping even into our dark, curtained bedroom. I managed always to shimmer, to shine.

Under the electric light, I became hard and white and fluorescent. My palms and the soles of my feet were bright pink, like a mouse's paws.

But you softened that artificial light, lying on our bed with your bum in the air. You glowed yellow. Your skin was a pale olive colour. You made electric light seem like candlelight.

During the day, people started complaining about the heat. Mr Harrison saw me one sweltering day—I suppose it must have been a sweltering day—in stockings and a long-sleeved top. ‘Bit warm for all that, isn't it?’ he asked me, his lips pursed as if this were the punchline to a very clever joke.

I didn't reply. I hadn't even noticed the temperature.

It was hot but I felt cold. I was always cold, lately. My hands were always freezing. You used to clasp my fingers between your palms.

‘Cold little hands,’ you'd say, rubbing them, blowing on them. ‘You need some sun.’

Sunshine had become strange to me. I was a creature who worked in small and intimate spaces. I liked to live in tents under blankets, in nests made of cushions, behind walls made of your limbs, under the roof of your chin. Whenever I went outside, I blinked in irritation.