Innocents (4 page)

I suppose I could just blame hormones. But it seemed to me at the time that I was somehow becoming badder, more depraved. I was falling further, every time I found myself alone, into the dark depths of my spirit.

My burden weighed more and more heavily on me. I felt ancient, twisted, withered.

My very youth came as a sharp surprise whenever I found myself confronted with it. I lived under such a constant weight of obsession that my smooth cheeks and brown baby's eyes in the bathroom mirror seemed a mask. The mirror thought me worried—and perhaps a little severe, with my plain yellowish-blonde ponytail and unpierced ears—but not evil. What a blatant deception!

I wasn't born innocent.

My instincts were vicious, predatory, from the start. When I met you, I had been a voyeur as long as I'd had eyes. My very reflexes were sadistic. The ascent of my reason from the animal ways of infanthood served only to give a form to my state, as a painter gives shape to a colour. It seemed I learned to think in order to fantasise.

Unformed wisps of violently coloured fantasy, dating from when I was six or seven, survive inside this adult mind. I remember sitting belted into the back of the car, on the way to or from some errand. My aunt and uncle were silent in the front. I stared out the window, and in my child's head I tied my friends up with skipping ropes from the sports cupboard. My heart beat wildly.

The victims were always my peers. In those days, I went to school with boys. In those days, there were boys in my fantasies.

My fantasies appeared before my conscience began to form. My secret attacks resulted from as natural an instinct as eating.

There were no mitigating circumstances.

There were no excuses.

The ideas were never inspired by anything
.

Do you see, darling? It was my personal evil—nothing to do with any outside factors. I wasn't young and malleable and suffering from an overdose of Hannibal the Cannibal. I wasn't a victim of child sexual abuse. I didn't grow up in a civil war zone.

My uncle didn't beat me. I don't even have the excuse of neglect—I can't say he ignored me, either. If anything, he was faintly indulgent, though taciturn. I can clearly remember him letting me win at Scrabble every night for weeks when, at thirteen or so, I decided I liked the game.

I met you in town, once, when my aunt sent me in to buy bread and milk.

It was supposed to be winter, but the day was still and sunny. It was too hot, really, for a dufflecoat, but I wore one anyway, trying to ignore the damp patches under my arms. My sweaty hands twisted into tight fists, sunk deep in the pockets.

I hated walking past groups of boys my own age. Five or six of them, baggy-jeaned and boisterous, were hanging around outside a video arcade. When I heard them laugh, I felt mortified. I sizzled with embarrassment. I didn't even know if it was me they were laughing at, if my insignificance and paleness had attracted their derision (it must have, it must have—think how ridiculous I looked in that shop-window reflection, my mouth so laughably tight with the effort of trying to compose a mask of indifference with which to meet the world) or if I was, to them, like the passing buses. Just moving scenery, unworthy of comment.

You came out of the supermarket as I was passing, weighed down with shopping. I saw you first, standing directly in my path, and knew I'd have to speak to you.

‘Heya,’ I said.

‘Oh …’ You fiddled about, transferring bags from one hand to the other, so that your burden was evenly distributed. ‘How're you?’

‘Oh, y'know.’ Nearly mad with rage and unconsummateable, abstract desire. ‘Can't complain.’

‘Good. Good. Going shopping, are you?’

‘Shopping? That's old news.’ I displayed my plastic bag. ‘Been there, done that.’

‘I see. Do you, er? D'you want a lift home? I'm all finished here …’ You shrugged, as well as a man with three grocery bags on each wrist can shrug.

Inside my dufflecoat, my sweaty body told me tersely to accept. ‘Yeah, that'd be great! Are you going now?’

You nodded.

I've read a passage in your diary, describing how intensely ludicrous you felt at that moment, how incapable of being interesting or charming, how your lower back ached faintly and you thought, ‘I'm old. I'm old.’

‘And is your car a limousine?’ I wanted flippantly to know, as you set off and I came trotting at your heels.

‘Well … it all depends on your definition of limousine. If your definition of the word matches the actual car, then yes, it is a limousine.’ Coughing apprehensively, you added, ‘Semiotics, you see.’

‘Excellent! Concepts and symbols, yeah?’

Nodding, you seemed very pleased. You were about to reply when I interrupted. ‘So was it an expensive limousine?’

‘Oh, yes. Nothing but the best.

‘A stretch one? One of those ones with a fridge full of champagne and a big video screen and velvet lounge chairs to sit on?’

‘Mmmm.’ You stopped by an ancient, weathered Fiat, fumbling in your pocket for the keys.

‘Cool,’ I said. Then I touched you for the first time, there on the pavement outside the newsagent's. (‘Her skin was so incredibly soft,’ you told your diary later. ‘Her hands are those white little baby's hands, like the hands on porcelain dolls.’) You couldn't seem to manage, with those bags braceleting your arm, to extract your car-keys from your trouser pocket. So I tried to take the bags off your right hand, but the handles had all twisted round, garrotting your wrist. I had to tug and tug, holding the bag handles in one hand and your arm in the other, to get them off. ‘Sorry!’ I said, laughing.

‘That's all right,’ you said, and you said it very quickly, your nervousness apparent.

In the car, you asked pointedly for directions, though I think you already knew the way. The yellow hairs on the backs of your hands were beaded with sweat. They shone in the afternoon sun.

In the passenger seat, I sat cross-legged, pointing out the quickest way through the few streets to my house.

It was too short a journey for conversation. I covered the silence by winding down my window and dabbling my fingers in the streaming air. I'd never done that before. I think I saw it in a movie. It felt weird: very cold, like running water. I wasn't sure I liked it.

At the bottom of my street, you asked me, ‘Do you always sit like that?’

I answered, ‘Yeah! Don't you?’

Your laugh seemed visceral, drawn from you by force. ‘Wouldn't be able to reach the brakes.’ I liked that, the sudden, explosive quality of it, the way it seemed to take you by surprise.

At my place, I grabbed my shopping and was out in a second. ‘Thanks heaps!’

You stuttered, seemed about to ask me some further question. ‘That's fine,’ was what you managed, before driving off, ears burning.

One winter morning I walked through the mist to school. My stockinged ankles got wet from the ice-studded dew. The lane behind my house would have been eerie, all shrouded in cold smoke, except for the screech of nearby traffic.

There was quite a little crowd around the fence near the school bus stop. A schoolgirl rugby scrum, all backs curved inwards. They were all peering down, looking at something.

I'm human. I wanted to see. I scooted round to the side of the crowd, seeking entry.

I recognised your car straight away. It was parked in the street at a jerky, panicked angle.

‘Yuck!’ said Rachel, loudly.

‘What's happening?’ I asked her elbow. I couldn't see. I was too short.

‘He's
touching
it! It's gross!’

All those tartan backs provoked me into a frenzy of curiosity.

‘What is it?’ No-one answered.

‘Yuck! It's bleeding!’ I heard, and: ‘That is
so
foul!’

Scooting out into the gutter, I squeezed between Rachel and another girl, and along beside the car. Now I was, suddenly, on centre stage, in the middle of the half-moon of protesting girls.

I saw you, kneeling awkwardly on grass between the path and the road. You were surrounded by curtains and panels of red and white tartan, barred in by endless red-stockinged legs. From here, behind you, I could only see the arc of your back, suited in brown tweed, and the bottom of one shoe. You rested your backside on your ankle.

In a flash of movement, I saw blood gleaming dully on one of your hands. A chorus of disgust hummed out through the crowd.

‘Sir! Gross!’

One girl flung her hands before her face.

‘Just
leave
it!’

‘Urck, he's getting it all over his
hands
!’

I heard a kind of whimper, a kind of quiet yowl. I thought for a second that you might have made the noise. Approaching closer, caught in the gravitational pull of curiosity, I sidled round in front of several taller girls.

And then I saw.

I saw that you were kneeling over some matted, blood-flecked creature that lay in the sandy mud. I saw your hands extended, literally at arm's length, as you tried to offer comfort without causing more pain.

At first, I thought it might be a rabbit. The fur was that dull rabbit pale brown, where it wasn't torn or stained.

Then it yowled again. You flinched away, wincing.

I saw the ears. ‘Oh, it's a cat,’ I said.

‘Not for long!’ said someone behind me.

It lay shivering, complaining feebly. Its head seemed to lie at a strange limp angle. Your hands were poised just above it, in an agony of uncertainty. A horrible flattened gash in the bottom of its stomach gave glimpses of brown visceral things.

‘Sir, that is
disgusting
! Just leave it here.’

You wiped at your forehead distractedly, and, oh, my darling, you painted yourself with the cat's blood in the process. A long red-brown streak stretched across your temples. ‘I can't just leave it here! It'll die!’

‘It's gonna die anyway,’ decided Rachel. She snapped her gum with finality.

In protest, the cat whined again, pumping a front paw weakly back and forth.

‘Its eyes are weird,’ said someone.

They were; all white and membranous, as though someone had stretched plastic bags over the irises.

People started to notice your forehead. A whispered giggle rippled through the crowd. You squatted like an incompetent Christ, garlanded with cat's blood. In the distance, the school bell rang out like a bomb siren.

‘We should get a vet,’ you said, patting the dying animal gingerly. It spasmed, mouth stretched open in a catastrophic yawn.

Rachel replied, ‘We should go in.’

‘I can't … I can't quite pick it up.’ You moved your hands towards its sides, through the mud, but flinched away from the raw surface of the wound at the last moment.

‘
Don't
pick it up,’ she ordered. ‘It's foul.’

There were nods of agreement. Girls began to retreat towards the big iron-crested gates, staring behind with contempt and fascination.

‘Just leave it,’ said Rachel, and turned on her heel.

And there you were, within thirty seconds, a martyr, kneeling in the mud without even an audience.

I put my bag down in the gutter. I crouched beside you, putting down one hand to steady myself and muddying my palm.

‘I'll pick it up …’ I said. ‘If you drive.’

The look on your face was like wild hope.

Rachel and two stragglers saw me as they passed in through the gates. ‘Just
leave
it!’ she shouted once more, and was gone.

We worked efficiently together, you and I.

I bundled the cat, as best I could, onto an improvised plastic-bag stretcher, and then picked it up from underneath, scraping my hands through the mud in an effort to make the transition from the ground to the air as smooth as possible. The cat felt warm, even through the plastic. It mewed pathetically, working one paw in the air, trying feebly to knock away its pain.

‘Hop in, hop in!’ you told me, wrenching open the door for me like a fumbling chauffeur. Jumping into the driver's seat, you asked breathlessly, ‘D'you know where there's a vet?’

‘Yep,’ I said confidently. Something warm and wet was leaking into my lap. ‘Near the dentist's. Up from the supermarket. We used to take our cat there.’ Before it was run over.

‘Right,’ you said, hunching forwards with concentration. As we pulled away, I realised that you were doing your best to drive smoothly, so as not to cause the cat any more pain than was necessary. As we rounded the corner, you needed to know: ‘How's he doing? Do you think he'll be all right?’

The animal had stopped whimpering, and lay panting gutturally, its face averted. Something sopped through my uniform and ran in droplets down between my thighs. ‘Yeah, he'll be all right,’ I assured you. ‘He just needs to be stitched up.’

‘I didn't see him,’ you explained, accelerating down a wide empty street. ‘I just felt this
bump
!’

‘It's okay,’ I said. ‘It can happen to anyone.’

‘I hope he isn't in too much pain. I didn't see him.’

‘It's just down this street. On the left there.’

We found a park easily. ‘Thank God for that!’ You jumped out and slammed your door emphatically, before running around the car to yank mine open.

We took our pathetic, dripping bundle into the vet's waiting room.

The receptionist—an overweight, middle-aged, well-meaning woman—was impressed by your sense of urgency, and called the vet over the intercom.

The vet was a small pointy man with wire-rimmed glasses. He opened his surgery door to its full extent, and stood in the doorway like a portrait in a frame, his arms folded. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘He's been run over!’ you said, hustling the man and me and the cat back through the door of the surgery.

You shook the little man's hand, uncertainly, and he looked down in sudden acute distaste at the mess of congealed blood which he took away with him.

On the operating table, the vet unwrapped our unsavoury parcel, and eyed the broken cat. ‘She'll have to be put down, I think,’ he murmured. ‘Is she yours?’

You shook your head as the vet drew an efficient syringe. ‘No, I don't know whose he is. I just felt this
bump
, and I stopped straight away…’