Innocents (9 page)

Your expression reminded me of something. I puzzled over this for a brief second, until I recognised it, with a shock of pleasure, as the same rebellious, half-fearful look my friends used to give teachers when they were caught doing something wrong.

‘I don't want to be part of the problem,’ you told me.

I thought, My God, he thinks I've been abused!

I picked up this misunderstanding, and ran with it. Eyes alight with childish hope, I asked, ‘You mean …’ A tremulous stutter, just for effect. ‘You mean … I can come and live with you?’

‘No!’ You took your hands away from my face, and buried your face in them, comforting yourself.

I feigned embarrassment. ‘Sorry!’ Sniggering my nasal snigger, I pretended to distance myself. ‘No. That's okay. I understand. It's cool.’

Subtext:
I'll just go home to the nameless shadows that prey on me, never you mind
.

I smiled bravely in the face of your distress. ‘It's okay.’

‘It's not okay! I
can't
let you. But … I don't want to get you into trouble.’

‘I'm sixteen,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full, slight sitting-height. ‘I can leave if I want. Only if I've got somewhere to go, though! I mean, it'd be worse than home, just living on the streets, wouldn't it?’

This worldly pragmatism melted you. You were a pool of pumping blood and vivid passions, churning at my feet.

‘Oh, my darling,’ you said. ‘Won't you come to my house?’

And I did, remember?

We did it.

We did it in the front room.

We did it in the purpling light of the end of the day.

We did it on the sofa, with the curtains open wide to the world.

I'm sorry to reduce what was, for you, a holy act, to ‘we did it’. I should say:

You came to me with anxiety creasing your forehead.

Your hands trembled over my skin.

Your lips quivered as you kissed me.

You were too shy to take my top off. You just coughed and averted your eyes demurely. I had to do it myself.

Neither could you manage my bra-clasp. ‘Um,’ you told me. ‘I can't. Um.’

‘
I
manage it. Every night!’ The power of my bare chest swept away any sting from my words.

You looked at me with dark eyes full of mingling shame and desire. Your erection seemed to you like overkill, embarrassing over-enthusiasm.

You said, ‘Are you sure?’

I devoured you with my eyes. I had you on a plate. I said, ‘Of course.’

And
then
we did it.

‘Oh!’ you said. ‘Oh, God!’ Your voice was high and pleading, your features hopelessly contorted.

I had another hit of that drug, your face screwing and scrunching and wincing with pleasure so intense it burned you.

Like an opiate, it was addictive. Like an opiate, my tolerance grew with every shot, so that over the ensuing months, I needed bigger and bigger hits to feed my addiction.

Like an addict, I came to live for my drug.

I lay like a thin rag doll beneath you.

Your voice was exhausted. Your words dripped steam and sweat onto my limp cheek. ‘Did you come?’

I hadn't. Not even close.

I pleaded virginal ignorance. ‘I don't know.’

Your hands burrowed into my armpit, swept along my thigh. ‘You didn't sweat. I don't think you did.’ You looked concerned. ‘God, you'd know, if you did.’

I swear your lower lip trembled, almost imperceptibly.

‘It was nice, though.’ My voice held just the faintest whiff of look-on-the-bright-side, determined cheerfulness. I knew how to make you insist your love, now.

‘Yes, but—’ You struggled to explain yourself. ‘Every time we do this, I have the most
intense
… it's spiritual, it's … the best thing imaginable. But I want you to experience it too, or else it's just … meaningless.’

Kissing your damp forehead, splaying a comforting hand over one of your buttocks, I suggested, ‘Maybe it's just a matter of time. I think it's more complicated for girls. From what I've read.’

‘Maybe,’ you agreed, hopefully.

‘Well now.’ You rested your elbows on the arm of the couch and regarded me from between your forearms. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

‘I'll move in. I'll be your mistress.’

Mistress. The word itself seduced me. Looking at your wide eyes, I willed myself mistress of all I surveyed.

‘
Mistress?
’ Your voice was half-hysterical with the possibility of it. You winced with the naughtiness it seemed to convey.

My heart caught, fluttering, in my throat.

‘Well? Can I stay?’ I tried to say it casually, as though you could decide either way and I, fatalistic china doll that I was, would shrug and agree and go my way. But I, too, was struck dizzy with hope. I, too, was winded with the promise of escape.

Breathlessly agog, you reminded me: ‘There's
eighteen years
between us!’

I kissed the milky, sweat-glossed skin of your chest, and then let my lips hover there. ‘There's half an inch between us.’

‘Oh, love.’ You sank down onto me, like a wet warm blanket. ‘There,’ you said. ‘Now there's nothing between us, at all.’

*

I stayed the night.

We watched television together, intertwined on the couch like snakes in their basket, waiting for the flute song.

We slept together. Naked.

‘I like this,’ I said, with the sheets pulled up beneath my pearl of a chin. ‘Being naked in bed. It's like being a grown-up.’

Agog at the fact of your own actions, you laughed violently through your nose.

‘Like being a—!’

I curled into you, fitting myself to your inside curves. ‘It's nice!’ I pretended to be offended ‘I
like
it!’

Guttural with emotion, you rasped into my ear, ‘I like it too.’

I lay still in your embrace, long after cramps wracked my bent legs, and my folded arms grew stiff and sore.

You slept restlessly. You were dreaming intensely. You wriggled, whispering urgent nonsense aloud.

The next morning, I picked my wrinkled, musty school uniform up from off the bathroom floor, and put it on again.

You went to the bakery for croissants, and came back restless with worry.

‘I
can't
give you a lift to school!’ you told me.

‘'S all right,’ I said, wiping crumbs from round my mouth. ‘I'll walk.’

‘You won't get tired? Oh, I'm so sorry!’ Leaning over the table, you flicked with your thumb at a large crumb I had purposely left untouched for you to wipe away. ‘Messy girl! … I just … we can't be seen … can we?’

‘It's okay,’ I said. ‘Where's my bag?’

‘Under the couch. Where you left it.’

You retrieved it for me.

Swinging one leg up onto the table, I unrolled a white sock slowly upwards over my foot. You watched me surreptitiously from behind the pile of breakfast things you were clearing away. Clearing your throat, you seemed about to speak. But, instead, you disappeared into the kitchen, the honey-jar rattling against the plates as your hands shook.

I put my other sock on briskly and without ceremony. Without your watching eyes, there was no need for delicacy.

‘Here,’ you said, returning with a paper bag in your hands. ‘I've made your lunch.’

In the open doorway, you pecked my cheek with your lips.

‘Be careful,’ you told me. Your fingers were five fiery points burning the skin of my shoulders with the heat of your concern.

I twisted, like a tiptoeing snake, and pressed my open lips against yours. ‘I'm always careful,’ I said.

Looking back, I saw you wiping at your chin with the back of one hand. Your mouth was still half-open, but whether from surprise or passion, it was impossible to tell.

Passing by my house—my aunt and uncle's house—I let myself in. The smells of the hallway already had a nostalgic quality. Like a song remembered from kindergarten, they were obvious but strange at the same time.

In my room, I loaded up my schoolbag. I grabbed a few bits of underwear, my other school uniforms. There wasn't really much else I needed to take. None of the myriad little china things-for-putting-things-in that I'd acquired had the slightest sentimental value to me. Nor did the fading stuffed frog or his threadbare monkey companion. I'd be relieved to leave the technicolour clutter behind.

I was just about finished packing when I heard a noise downstairs. It was a sharp creak, like the ones our kitchen chairs made when you shifted position.

I froze. My uncle and aunt should both have been at work.

I stretched my ears wide, listening furiously. I wasn't sure if I was listening for a burglar; or because I felt like one myself and didn't fancy a confrontation. But the noise came again, along with a chink of metal on ceramic.

I decided that it must be my aunt or my uncle. A burglar was unlikely to be making himself a cup of tea.

Whoever it was must have heard me come in. The front door was right near the kitchen. It was making me restless, sitting here, straining to be quiet. I just wanted to get back to you.

What the hell, I thought, and zipped up my bag.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that the kitchen door was now wide open.

‘Hello?’ called out a voice suddenly from inside. It was my uncle, but it took me a second or two to recognise his voice; it sounded high-pitched and strained.

I hesitated in the hallway. I couldn't just ignore him. But I was afraid of him, too, as if he were a big dark octopus that might drag me to some murky place away from you.

‘Hello?’ came that call again, quicker and more tense than he ever sounded.

Making myself as casual as possible, I strolled into the kitchen. ‘Hi,’ I said.

My uncle was sitting at the kitchen table. He hadn't left for work yet. He had his suit jacket on but it was sort of clumsily pushed up at the elbows.

I stood in the doorway and we looked at each other. He looked sort of crumpled all over, like someone had scrunched him up and thrown him in the bin. His eyes were very slightly red, though he regarded me inscrutably for a long moment.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

‘I just came back to get some of my stuff,’ I said after a while. My voice sounded uncomfortably small and thin in the space between us.

Again, he paused for a long time, and seemed to be reaching a long way inside himself for a reply. He nodded heavily.

‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said.

Standing there, unable to run away (I wasn't allowed, it was obvious), my grip tightened on the handles of my bag.

His voice was thick with some potent emotion. ‘Thinking about how we used to go down to the beach and you'd always draw a big face in the sand for me with your feet.’

I made a face now. A very slight one, to myself rather than to him. I had no wish to remember being so vulnerable a thing as a child who draws faces in the sand.

He smiled to himself, shaking his head a little.

‘Do you remember?’ he asked me.

I said nothing. Of course I remembered. Holding his hand and being bought ice-cream with bubble-gum in it which I always forgot was bubble-gum and swallowed and half-choked on. Getting sand all through the car and leaving it to him to clean up.

He asked again, ‘Do you remember?’

There was a very heavy question in the air now. He wasn't pleading with me. He was too dignified a man for that. But he was asking me, as strongly as he could, to acknowledge this child, this little blonde girl running around like a fool in the shallows, blowing bubbles underwater with her hands clamped over her eyes for fear of salty water.

‘Hmmm?’ he prompted, his eyes troubled. ‘Down the coast?’

‘No,’ I said. I couldn't stand the thought. I wanted you. I wanted safe ground, not these sandy dangerous memories. ‘I've got to go.’

I turned and left. He didn't call after me as I went. He just sat there at the kitchen table, thinking of another girl.

I loved those days.

I lived them in a silver-filtered daze. An acute daze, a daze of heightened sensations and ecstatic hyper-awarenesses.

All I can think of is the sweep of linen sheets against my skin and the infinite different postures that a man can adopt when he is pretending not to look at something.

I loved the constant, silken touch of your eyes, sweeping endlessly over my yellow hair, and the curve of my belly, and the white arches of my bare feet.

It seemed that I had succeeded in giving myself away. I had foisted responsibility for myself onto someone else. My little-girlness, my thousand-and-one charms, were a sugar-coating which enticed you to swallow me whole.

I flaunted my smallness as other people flaunt bare flesh. I measured my hands against yours, making them slimmer, more delicate; childlike. All my height left my head three inches below your shoulder. All my weight left me light enough for you to carry me easily to bed, when I fell asleep on the couch where we read, where we watched television.

I felt I owned the big hand I held, the big body to which it was attached, the rough cheeks which needed shaving every day, the deep voice. The strength of your desire made you mine.

Orchestrating reactions from you became my overriding concern.

It was all about erections.

You have to understand that my pleasure in our physical contact was, at first, utterly psychological.

Your desire for me was like a physiological weakness, a sort of epilepsy. I needed to see you in its grip more than I needed to eat. But physical desire was quite another thing.

I soon learnt that the faintest indication of arousal on my part drove you into a convulsive frenzy. If I closed my eyes; if I made myself seem spaced-out, abstracted; if my breath came more heavily and louder, I could force you to a fever pitch.

At first, it hurt terribly.

It seems awful to say it now, but I promised you the whole truth, my darling, and you shall have it.

I opened to you, always. But there were times, in those first few weeks, when a dull stinging pain threatened to overwhelm me. All my smiles were grimaces transmogrified.