Innocents (7 page)

Snorting with disbelief, you complied, sliding, a little awkwardly, beneath the sheets.

Now that we were two bodies in the same medium, so to speak, you abandoned yourself to the experience.

I lay on my back, and you propped yourself on your elbows above me, looking down. Your body seemed to understand mine, to mirror its actions through the activity of some force as natural as gravity. When I wriggled free of my clothes, a snake shedding her skin, you did the same without a word. We ejected our clothing onto the floor.

Big-eyed, you touched me so delicately it tickled.

Your lips closed around my nipple and it felt warm, reassuring. You touched my thighs lightly, with the whole inside of your hand. You stroked the curve between my hip and my underarm.

‘Is that … nice?’ You blushed, smiling a little, ruefully, at your own discomfort.

‘It's lovely.’

‘Are you sure you want to—’

‘Yes! You boring man! Stop asking me that!’

‘I can't believe this.’ You were staring at me, amazed.

The ghost of a thousand American movies made me say, as I kissed you briefly, fiercely, on the mouth, ‘Believe it!’

You found in my nakedness a miracle, a sacred trust.

I found yours very interesting.

I had never seen adult male genitalia, and I told you so.

‘Well?’ you wanted to know, squinting with embarrassment and delight. ‘What d'you reckon?’

I was surprised by all the hair. Reaching below the covers, I touched your penis, tentatively. I saw your eyes close, your mouth twitch, helpless as my hand closed around it.

‘It's very silky,’ I whispered, without letting go.

You nodded, and said with an effort, ‘If you want to stop—’

‘I don't want to stop.’

‘…
just say so
. I won't be. I don't expect.’

Lifting the blankets, I peered down, intrigued, at the seat of your desire. ‘Balls are bigger than I thought.’

In the midst of your profound discomfort, you laughed. ‘Are they?’

‘Can I touch?’

‘Be very gentle.’

I touched. The sacks of skin in which they hung were wrinkly, prickly with hair. ‘They're like eyeballs,’ I pronounced with childish solemnity, cupping one carefully. ‘Or mushy eggs.’

Your skin seemed to tremble around your flesh. ‘Are they just?’

Sitting up, I pulled the covers back, doubling them over our legs. As I bent forward, you explored my spine with one heavy finger.

‘You're so
little
,’ you told me, approvingly.

I nestled back down beside you, my face a few inches below yours, my toes against your calves. ‘You're so big.’

We lay for ages, side by side. Your hips moved backwards and forwards. Your face above your body was strained, abashed at the antics going on down below.

It's funny, isn't it? I'd never once fantasised about having sex with a man, yet I knew what to do by instinct. I knew where to touch you and when to kiss you, even though all of this was completely foreign to my experience, alien to my imagination.

Gradually—I forget quite how, it all blurs into a general impression of milky skin and fuzzes of hair—I found myself underneath you. You balanced on straight arms. Your face was a foot from mine, but I could feel your breath hot on my forehead, as though I'd opened an oven.

You said, red-faced, ‘You're sure, aren't you?’

I felt your penis at the door, a strange bulbous stem.

‘Oh—I don't want to hurt you.’

It seemed like something far too big to ever fit inside.

‘Don't worry.’ I pulled my legs right up, my knees by my ears.

Closing your eyes, fumbling with one hand—I felt your curled fingers against my thigh, very high up—you forced yourself inside.

And with that thrust, you dealt the death-blow to those battalions of tortured bodies in my mind. The chains fell from their wrists and ankles. They pulled on cloaks and walked out of me, away into the night.

Your eyes were closed. I winced. Withdrawing, you opened your eyes, and watched my face as you came sliding back in. I smiled, biting the inside of my lip surreptitiously.

‘I'm trying to be gentle,’ you told me, anxiously. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ I lied, smiling wider, patting your forehead affectionately with my child's hands. ‘It's
lovely
.’

My hands on your broad back enjoyed the sweat that welled there.

My ears enjoyed your laboured breathing, the little grunted half-words that broke from your throat against your will.

My eyes, turning downwards, feasted on the sight of your stomach, as it tensed and scrunched itself repeatedly, shivering down towards my flat belly, then gathering itself away, pulling back for another approach.

Your face was bestial, lips drawn back over your teeth in a chimpanzee's grimace of aggression. Shifting rednesses beneath your skin grew and burst like supernovas. And your eyes were bright like bits of glass with the sun shining through them.

‘I love you,’ you hissed between your teeth. You lowered your head onto my shoulder, your breath like fire in my ear. ‘
I love you!
’

I wondered how long this usually took.

More desperate now, you raised your head, arching back your neck, breathing like a horse. I felt a new, stiffened determination pulsing inside me.

On either side of my face, the insides of your arms were streaked with coiling tendons, bulging veins.

I stretched my arms above my head, showing you my chest more clearly. You gasped, shaking your head, and bit your lip.

With fascination, I watched your face. It was you who was incoherent now. It was you who were helpless and speechless and without hope. Faster you slammed into me and faster, impotent before the urgency of your body's demands.

At last, you tensed and shuddered and your eyes went wide and glazed like a dead man's. You seemed to flutter and fall, your big body deflating down over mine, melting onto me, welding itself to my skin.

I presumed that was the end.

Your collapse left your curly head on my shoulder. I could feel your hot fast breath blowing over my breasts.

I said, tenderly, ‘Oh, you
darling
.’ Snaking my arms beneath yours, I folded them around your exposed back. Enclosing you like that felt so primordially right that I almost giggled with triumph. Controlling myself, I pressed my lips against the crown of your head.

As though it were bowed down by a great weight, you lifted your head.

Looking up at me—looking
up
, from your reduced condition—you told me: ‘Oh.’

In a forlorn gesture of compassion, reaching down between our four legs, you patted my pubic hair softly. ‘I've hurt you, haven't I?’ You looked worried and upset and helpless.

‘Don't be silly.’ I reassured you. I did feel sort of scraped—grated-up—inside, and there was a sharp stinging pain like a deep papercut where my legs met, which throbbed with every beat of my heart. But this evaporated into nothing beside the steady, reassuring weight of your body on mine.

‘Am I squashing you?’

‘No.’

‘I must be heavy!’

‘It's all right.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘
Yes!
You're like a blanket.’

‘I must have hurt you.’ There was a film of moisture, brought on by pity, glazing your exhausted eyes. ‘I'm so sorry.’

I said, ‘It's all right. It's all right.’

Comforting you against my pain, I knew that it was I who was old and weary and corrupt. I knew that you were the child.

Lying on your stomach, one of your hands cupped over one of mine, you wove in and out of sleep. Several times, I heard you forget yourself and begin to breathe raspingly, unconsciously, but I found that the slightest involuntary movement of my hand under yours prompted a reassuring ‘I'm still here’ squeeze of your fingers. You stroked my wrist with your index finger. Your warm hip nudged against mine, that sticky contact undulating with each breath either of us took.

I lay tensed with strangeness, remembering you as you were half an hour before, powerless before the onslaught of—as it seemed to me—an uncontrollable madness. Beside me, your skin a gentle gold in the lamplight, you began gently to snore.

When I woke up, I was alone. There was a rumpled look to the sheets next to me. They seemed compressed, dimpled. They were warm and they smelt faintly of sweat, in a comforting way.

I'd never slept naked before. The smooth cotton against my skin felt good. I wriggled luxuriously.

I couldn't hear you. I hoped you hadn't panicked and run off somewhere, leaving me to face the morning alone.

I dressed quickly in the pyjamas I'd worn the night before. It was cold. The sky beyond the window was still festooned with the shreds of last night's storm.

Afraid to stomp in your churchlike house, I tiptoed out the door (turning the handle gently, slowly, silently) and along the corridor.

I used the toilet, and found a long bright smear of blood on the toilet paper. I assessed the damage, and found no great cause for worry. It stung a little, but on the whole I didn't feel too bad.

Flushing the toilet to announce my approach, I headed down the stairs.

You sat, all dressed, at the glass-topped dining table, reading the newspaper.

‘Heya,’ I said. ‘Is there any breakfast?’

There was a miserable edge to you, though you smiled widely in welcome. Mournful-eyed, you said, ‘There's cornflakes. Or toast. You can have some muesli if you like.’ You didn't meet my gaze. You were shadowed with worry, outlined in edginess.

I wondered if this was a one-night stand dismissal. Measured against the holy intensity of the night before, your standoffishness seemed very odd.

In the kitchen alone I fixed myself breakfast. In the lounge room with you I ate it in silence. I sat chewing, a demure two places away from you. I swung my legs back and forward. You didn't look up once from your paper. The cornflakes turned to cardboard in my mouth.

I was deathly afraid that you didn't want me.

Finishing my food and laying down my spoon, I said, ‘Do you want me to go?’

Your answer was too quick. It overlapped with mine. ‘I think you'd better. Come on.’ And you led me upstairs again.

We stood in the bedroom, our dishevelled nest still unmade, the faint salty whiff of sex rising from the sheets. The space between us seemed to echo with emptiness. I didn't quite know where to put my body. I sat it on the foot of the bed, out of harm's way. Standing alone, you seemed stooped, diminished, bowed down by a terrible weight.

I wanted to feel sorry for you, but I didn't know where I stood.

‘Now …’ you murmured, avoiding my eye. ‘What are we going to dress you in?’

‘I can wear my uniform,’ I suggested helpfully, hugging myself.

‘It was filthy. I put it in the washing machine. It's still wet.’ In the end, you loaned me jeans, a T-shirt, and a grey cardigan. Everything was far too big for me.

At the doorstep, I turned and kissed you on the cheek.

‘Thanks for everything,’ I said lightly, willing you to make some declaration, tell me how you felt, tell me what was going to happen.

You said nothing, strangled by guilt. There were tears on your cheeks and fear in your eyes. You squeezed my hand and, snatching it to your mouth, kissed it fiercely, silently declaring everything:
I love you, but we can't, we can't
…

You slammed the door—so you thought—on your One True Love, and went to do the crossword, your heart breaking.

My heart sang with certainty.

Walking home, I was conscious of a palpable absence.

In the winter cold of my small bedroom, I used to sit with my back against the wall and my knees raised over the central-heating grate, letting the warm air gradually bake my legs. The temperatures were set by my uncle. They were not mean; I didn't freeze. Nevertheless I was conscious, whenever the heat shuddered and wavered and died, of a middle-class moderation; an economy where I would have preferred excess. So it was with this sudden deletion of your hands from my waist and my hips, the vast expanse of your warmth from my side.

The fact that, as far as home life went, I had nothing left to me, soon became painfully obvious. My aunt and uncle simply withdrew themselves from me; turned from solid presences into vague whispering abstracts: a distant slamming of doors; a television murmuring to itself in another room; faint smells of aftershave and garlic lingering in the air. I could have been the only live being in a houseful of phantoms. Every space I stepped into seemed newly vacated.

Throughout that interminable weekend, we managed ourselves so that I didn't once set eyes on either my aunt or my uncle. I might as well have been a leper, shuffling around, cowled, waving a bell to warn of my approach.

I stayed in my room as much as possible, dreaming the hours away.

You owned carved trunks of dark, deeply waxed wood. Strange angular sculptures marched along the shelves. Antique books with mysterious inscriptions sat in orderly rows. It was like a museum. Or a chapel. It made me feel reverent.

Everything in your house seemed beautiful to me. It was a rare, exotic world; a whole other aesthetic. I wanted terribly to belong to it. I thought it would free me from the faded linoleum and bright plastic mugs of my upbringing.

I went downstairs once or twice, to use the bathroom and to make myself sandwiches. The tension fizzed in the air. I slid along keeping close to the walls, listening all the time for foot-falls or the uneasy mutter of conversation. Sparks of anxiety flew in through my nose, electrifying the muscles in my stomach, making me twitch all over. I stood behind doors, tense as a cat, trying to work out if the room beyond was empty of menace or not.

In my bedroom, I lay on my back on the carpet by the window, looking at the silver shadows thrown onto the ceiling by a couple of CDs I'd left lying on my bedside table.

I swam through my recollections of you.

I remembered size; size and also colour. Always in comparison to me; like the way you could frame one of my hands, outline it, with one of yours. I loved the rougher tones of your face, your arms, against my paleness. You were all tans and browns and glimmering hairs, and I was all opaque and painted in just one colour.