Life: An Exploded Diagram (19 page)

I
N ALL, HE
made five drawings of her. The best one, in his opinion, was of her naked back.

He asked her to sit facing the window, cross-legged, with her hands in her lap.

She said, “I’m cold.”

“Wait,” Clem said. He lit the remains of three candles glued by their own wax on to a short plank of wood, then closed the shutters.

“Is that all right?”

“As long as you’re quick.”

He’d added five sticks of pastel to his kit. He used one to yellow the central area of the paper into candlelight. Her right side was slightly uplit from the open doorway, and he chalked the curve of it, highlighting the shoulder blade, marveling at the swell of her hips. As always, he blacked out everything surrounding her, then, with a soft pencil, devoted himself to the delicacy of her flesh. Again, he made her a glowing abstraction. He could hardly see what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. Drawing her had become an act of love, of seduction. A ritual.

He showed her his work, disowning it.

Still studying it, she sighed and dragged him down onto her. Parting for him. Letting him do almost everything.

Pulling away at the last fevered moment because —

“We mustn’t. I can’t. . . . You know I . . .”

He rolled onto his back. She watched his chest rise and fall to his quickened breathing.

“Clem?”

“Yeah. I know. Sorry.”

“You’re not angry, are you?”

“No.”

“You are.”

He turned his face to hers, touched it with the backs of his fingers.

“I’m not. I love you, Frankie. It don’t matter.”

“It does, actually.” She bit her lip. “It’s not that I . . .”

“I know. It’s all right.”

Then everything diminished. Clem went back to school. The autumn evenings dwindled and chilled. Now they had only weekends and could not rely on those.

They lost the second to savage rain.

He sat through classes a lummox.

“Ackroyd?
Ackroyd!
”

“Sir?”

Tash Harmsworth was glaring at him.

“You are, I believe, reading the part of the Fool?”

“Sir.”

“King Lear’s Fool is a
jester,
a
wit,
not an idiot. Therefore it is not necessary for you to adopt the facial expression of a demented sheep. It is, however, necessary that you read the lines aloud.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Goz slid a helpful finger onto the page.

Clem cleared his throat, if not his mind.

“‘Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?’”

On the morning of the third Friday of term, he knew that he couldn’t get through the day. It had been eleven days since he’d been with her. The effort of hiding his dejection, let alone his anguished tumescence, from his parents was exhausting him. He was terribly afraid that if he did not regularly tend the fire of Frankie’s love, it would go out. Eleven days! Ashes, ashes. He wanted to be alone to grieve.

At the corner of Norwich Road, he said, “Goz, wait a minute.”

Goz braked and came back.

“What?”

“I’m gorna skive off for the day.”

“And why is that, comrade?”

“I just am.”

Goz cocked his head.

“Art thou meeting thine own true love, where a ‘willow grows aslant a brook’?”

It was a morning of shifting drizzle. They both wore the awful and compulsory school raincoats.

“There’s no need to take the piss. Anyway, no.”

“Anything you want me to say, if they ask?”

Clem shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t care. Whatever you like.”

“Right. Please, sir, when I called for Ackroyd, there was a cross crudely painted on the front door. I assumed the Plague had spread to Lovelace Road, so I hastened by with a bunch of medicinal herbs pressed to my nose. I expect they’re shoveling quicklime onto his bloated corpse as we speak.”

“Yeah. Ideal.”

“I’ll drop the homework round later, then, shall I? Fiveish?”

The weather was in two minds. Behind the veils of mizzle, the sky was a white glare. Half a mile along the Gunston road, Clem, sweating, stopped and took off the raincoat. He rolled it up and belted it to his handlebars, then stood gazing into the blurred ocher distance. His moment of liberation had passed; now the thought of the lonely and silent day ahead was dreadful. Instantly, he was overwhelmed by self-pity, dizzied by it. He leaned his forearms on the bundled raincoat and lowered his head, gasping in air, fighting back tears.

He couldn’t go home. The house would be empty, but some nosy bleddy neighbor would see him and be around as soon as his mother came home, pretending concern for his health.

Onward to Franklins, then. There was nowhere else.

The approach to the remains of the house was carpeted with big five-pointed sycamore leaves: stars cut out of yellow paper by inexpert children. They attached themselves to his wet shoes. He trudged around the corner of the barn, then, at the doorway, recoiled in shock when he found himself face-to-face with Marron. The horse was alarmed, too, throwing its head up and backing away.

“Frankie?”

A small frightened cry from above. A scuffling.

He thought, She’s here with somebody else.

Her face, all eyes, appeared below the rail of the loft.

“Clem?” It was not much more than a whisper.

He eased past Marron and stumbled up the stairs. The shutters were only slightly ajar, and he stood unsighted for several seconds, holding on to the stair post. Neither of them spoke; they stared at each other almost as if each had trespassed onto the other’s private space. Caught each other out.

She was alone. Thank God, thank God. Kneeling. Wearing a black turtleneck sweater and brown cord trousers. A heavy-looking waterproof jacket was spread over the sleeping bag.

At last she said, “I’ve never seen you in your school uniform. It’s terribly smart.”

“Frankie.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. I just . . .”

“You just knew.”

She lifted her arms toward him, and he stumbled over to her and knelt and held her.

After a while he sensed that she was hiding from him. He lifted his hands to her shoulders and pushed her gently back.

“You’ve been crying.”

She snuffled.

“Haven’t.”

“Have.”

She unbuttoned his blazer and slid her hands inside it. She pressed the side of her face against his shirt.

“Yes, all right, I have. I’ve been here a couple of times for a jolly good cry.”

“Hev you? Why?”

“Because, you idiot, it’s not exactly possible to do it at home. It might just arouse suspicion if I traipsed about the house in tears, wailing your name.”

Shamefully, he exulted in the thought, the image, of her doing it.

“And,” she said, “when I come here and wrap the bag around me, it’s almost like you’re here, too. I can smell you. I mean that in the nicest possible way, actually.”

“I think about you all the time, Frankie. All the time. I’ve been going nuts.”

For some reason this made her giggle.

“What?”

She didn’t explain. She lifted her face to his.

Halfway through the long kiss, they let themselves fall sideways onto the floor.

“How long’ve we got?”

She propped her head on her hand and looked down at him.

“I have to be home for lunch at one o’clock.”

“What about this afternoon? I’ll wait here for you.”

“No. Tomorrow afternoon should be all right, though. Unless the weather is beastly.”

She lifted herself up and knelt over him. She pulled the turtleneck off over her head and threw it away. Loosened his green-and-gold tie, pulled it off him, and draped it around her own neck. Looked down at him coquettishly.

And for him it was as though everything had fallen apart, rearranged itself according to some pattern beyond his imagining or courage. The dark tumble of her hair, her teasing eyes, the stupid school tie with its pseudo-mythic crest hanging between her lace-cupped breasts, the fact that he should not be there, the fact that he was there, lost, that this rich, beautiful girl would take off most or all of her clothes for him, that a dirty dream was real, his dreadful uniform hurled off and strewn in a dim and trespassed space, that it was all incredibly dangerous, that they could get killed for love, that his gropy imaginings had resolved into adoration, that her nipples were discernable through the skinny fabric, that her groin was lowering onto his, that his parents and his gran would go gaping into death not knowing what they’d missed, that there was an impatient horse downstairs, that instead of being in history he was in love, that all shyness was gone, that cold was irrelevant, that everything was against them, that she was against him, pressing herself against him, that it was all, like art, outrageously delicate and exultantly poised in the void, her wonderful flesh in the dimness, his breath her breath, her hands taking his hands wherever they wanted.

Like this, forever. Please, forever and ever. A prayer. A jointing of their bodies in and against the dark. Amen.

“No. Clem. No. Please.”

“You want us to.”

“Yes. I do. You know I do.”

“Frankie.”

She rolled onto her side, her back to him.

After a long silence she said, “I know it must be awful for you.”

“It’s not that. It’s just . . .”

“What?”

“You and me, the way we feel . . . it just seems wrong not to.”

Again she was silent for a long moment. Rooks croaked at one another. He shivered as the sweat cooled on his skin.

Then she said, “Yes. It does. It
is
wrong.”

She turned onto him and teased the tip of his nose with hers.

“Do you think you could get a sheath from somewhere?”

“A what?”

She bit her lip.

“A rubber johnny.”

O
R, TO BE
more precise, in Borstead.

There were two options:

1. Scott’s, the barber’s

2. Griffin’s, the chemist’s

The small window of Albert Scott’s shop on Church Street featured four photographs of handsome, smiling men sporting oiled but different hairstyles, none of which was available to clients on the premises. Scott did only one kind of haircut, the kind that he had been inflicting on the men and boys of Borstead since 1936. It involved ten minutes’ smart work with comb and scissors, followed by several runs up the back of the neck with manual clippers that clacked like a mad dog’s teeth. The window also displayed a dusty collection of combs, brushes, and gentlemen’s shaving requisites, and, down in one corner, a little yellow plastic sign shaped like a tent. On it, the almost-word
ONA
above the word
LUBRICATED. ONA
was also printed on the small packages that Scott would supply to men who nodded when he murmured, brushing the hair from their lapels, “Something for the weekend, sir?”

Scott had been murdering Clem’s hair, and his father’s, since Clem was five. So it would be perfectly fine if he marched in there and requested, “A packet of three Ona, Mr. Scott, please. No, on second thoughts, make that two packets. I’ve got a lively weekend coming up.”

No, it wouldn’t.

And his mum worked in Griffin’s.

So that was that.