Black Chalk (22 page)

I browsed through the book until we finished dinner. Then, stating that the book was interesting in as convincing a way as I could, I smiled mischievously, and to my relief, she answered in kind. Rising, I looked at her green dress, at all the furniture we still hadn't made our own, and I pushed her down on the sofa. When she started pulling her dress up, I stopped her hands at her hips and bundled the cloth on her warm stomach.

Later that long evening, when we were lying down on the bed, and I had a bare leg dangling down its side, I asked her whether she liked champagne.

‘I love it,' she said. She turned towards me and studied my face. ‘Why?'

‘It'd be nice to have champagne right now. We'll have it next time we celebrate something.'

‘Like this flat.'

‘Yeah,' I said.

‘Our anniversary.'

‘That's a long way away.'

‘Our six-month anniversary,' she said.

‘That's a long way away.'

‘Four-month anniversary.'

I turned towards her and kissed her.

‘Yes, our four-month anniversary,' I said.

‘Nos quatre mois,' she said.

She had to leave by nine the next morning to get to work on time. She woke up too late to do anything. After she said goodbye, while she was still gathering her things, I lay on my stomach, put a pillow over my head, and called out to her:

‘Leona!'

‘Yes,' she said, sounding fresh.

‘There's a key in the top drawer under the stove.'

‘Alright,' she said. And I fancied I heard a note of awe in that word, but I didn't look up until I heard her leave the flat. Then I turned on my back, threw the blanket off my body, and smiled at the ceiling.

***

Halfway through the morning, while I was trying to tame the hot and cold tap combination so that I could do the dishes, she sent me a text message saying her parents were cooking for all three sisters that night, and that I was welcome to come along.

I'd only met two girlfriends' parents. First, Anna's: her mother had made me hot chocolates and discussed people from school as if they were mutual friends, but her father, with his red bald head, had grabbed my shoulder and told me that whatever his wife said, his daughter was his daughter, and I couldn't stay past dinnertime. And then, years later, Marie's: I'd spent weeks in between seasons at Marie's mother's house, near Lyons, nodding to everything she said even though I only understood half. I thought she liked me until Marie, in between two cigarettes, smiling sardonically, told me that her mother had decided that I was too quiet.

Still, in my imagination, Leona's parents were loving, affable people, who would eventually warm to me. And yes, I thought that having survived the shooting might earn me a few pity points.

Just as the water reached the right temperature, I heard a brief ring. I plugged my sink and fetched my phone.

Great. They are excited! The address is: 18 Churchill Street…

I read the address once and frowned. I read it again and my insides sunk while my body somehow remained upright. The bicycles locked to the fence on Churchill Street, the dark wooden floor in the TV room, the yellow-brick wall we used to kick a ball against, they flashed and then my mind went blank.

There was a tingling feeling in my chest, and the phone in my hand was a strange object. It had a screen and a keypad. For the first time, I noticed that the number nine had four letters under it.

I stood there until I heard a strange noise. I turned to look at the sink: water whooshed out of the tap and fell into a moving mass, making a rich, hollow sound. The sink seemed to swell and breathe, and the strange noise kept on reaching my ears. Following the edges of the sink, I noticed water on the counter. There was a thick lip over the drying rack flowing into a narrow stream and falling. Falling, and splashing on the kitchen tiles. Breaking into islands. Joining islands. All of a sudden, the haze cleared.

‘You fucking idiot!'

The words came out strained by the tension in my throat. I repeated them again and again as I turned the tap off, plunged my hand in the burning water, unplugged the sink, and mopped the floor.

When I finished, I walked around the flat looking for something to hit. I swung at the exercise ball in the small bedroom. The ball bobbed through the air, hit the wall with a deep sound, and came back exactly where it started. There was something about that ball that pissed me off. I kicked it again. And again, for three times was better than two. Then, fetching a knife from the kitchen, I tried to stab it. The blade bounced off the surface.

‘It's just a fucking ball!' I shouted so loud that I realised I had a knife in my hand. Dropping it on the bedroom floor, I left the flat.

The world outside seemed different. There were cracks all over the bitumen. Here was a dented line going across the road, and there was another one, barely twenty yards down. And here was a different type of crack, a sort of necklace following the line of the road – just where a car tyre would roll, I told myself. A bit further down the road, the necklace became a rut, and then it lightened again. Around a traffic light. But why weren't there any cracks on this road, I asked myself, looking at the darker colour of a new road. New roads don't have cracks, I thought, and I nodded to myself.

By the time I noticed my surroundings, I'd walked all the way to the top of South Park. Falling on the grass, I felt my phone in my back pocket, and remembered that Leona expected an answer. I called her.

‘Oh, I have so much work. I just realised. I know it's rude…'

‘Are you alright? You sound a little strange.'

‘Oh, yes, don't worry. Just had a look at an assignment.'

‘Ah, alright.' She sounded sad. ‘Well, I guess I'll call my mother. I don't think she'll mind.'

‘Good, that's good,' I said.

‘Are you outside? I can't hear you very well.'

‘Yes, outside. Just taking a break. I'll get back to it in a minute.'

‘We can do it another night. I can ask my parents if you want.'

‘Yes, you do that. We'll talk about it some other time.'

She strung some more words together: something about work, I think, and we hung up. And then, staring at the Magdalen tower, at the Radcliffe Camera, I punched the ground.

‘You fucking idiot! She even looks like him… Go back to raking sand.'

The gothic towers stared back serenely. A hint of mist and a thin cloud cover softened the warm June light. The colleges' quads and gardens seemed to float happily over the vast red-brick expanse surrounding them.

More softly this time, I asked myself why I hadn't realised that she was Jeffrey's sister. I pictured both of them next to each other: her voice had the same happy tones, and her nose, it was so obvious now that I knew, her nose was a miniature copy of his. Compare her to her mother and it was even clearer: same hair, just about the same height.

And in this calmer state, I felt resigned to the inevitable – there could be no future. I saw her, I saw him, and I shivered. Compared to him, I was the bastard who'd survived, all luck and no merit. But then I thought of the way she'd kissed my back before she left for work, and my head dropped.

With a deep breath, I went over all the times I could have worked it out. When she served me at Georgina's, when she spoke to me, when she gave me her name, when she said which area she lived in, when she told me she knew my brother. The list was damning. Then, with a hint of pride, I answered myself. There was a big difference between an eleven-year-old child and a nineteen-year-old woman. Plus, I'd never really looked at her when she was little. And I could think of at least three other Baker families I knew, who lived, as she did, in the Oxford suburbs. And it was up to her to tell me, I told myself, raising my head and looking at the deep green leaves of a vast, strange tree.

On that thought, I went home and buried myself in my work, forcing my head back into my books whenever I caught myself staring into space.

***

As Jeffrey forced his way back into my mind, Leona as a growing child took her rightful place alongside him. He'd doted on her when she was a baby. I could picture her as a toddler ogling us while we assembled Lego blocks into a pirate fleet. He'd spent days teaching her to respect our edifices, and unlike my little brother, who would take pleasure in seeing me upset, she kept her dangerously jerky baby limbs far from our fortresses.

Until she turned five, she spent every waking hour trying to get close to her brother. So much so that he'd hide under his bed and ask me to tell her he was gone to school when she knocked on his door.

‘School?' I remember her asking me one Sunday, sticking a strand of platinum hair into her quivering mouth so that she wouldn't sob, because her brother had told her that big girls didn't cry in front of boys. And I told her it was a special sort of school that she'd also have to go to when she'd turn eleven.

Jeffrey was more aloof with his other sisters, who were only a little younger than Leona. Being the first, she got all of his attention – the cruel love of a growing boy – and she wanted more. For a whole year, the year my mother drove us to every cricket game because my father was too busy to play and Jeffrey's parents were struggling to keep their flower business afloat, Jeffrey played master to Leona's maid. Ever eager, she made his bed until there wasn't a crease on his sheets, and then asked him to check that everything was to his liking. Most times I witnessed their game, he adopted a critical air, and walked through his room with his chest puffed up and his hands crossed behind his back, nodding and humming his approval at the bed, the toy boxes, the desk, but always finding one detail to bring to her attention – a pillow that wasn't set straight, dust on a shelf. So that she improves, he explained to me. At other times, power made him sadistic: like the times he started dropping fruits so she'd clean them up, and he told her that if she didn't pick them up quickly enough, she'd have to lick them clean with her tongue. I'd like to think that I came to her protection once or twice, that I didn't laugh along with him, but she was a child, and I doubt I spent much time talking to her or thinking about her.

By the time we were seventeen, she was ten and he'd settled into paternal kindness, lavishing her with dashes of his attention, which she lapped up with more dignity than when she was a toddler asking for his hand, his arms, his bed.

The more I recalled her then, the more I grew puzzled. We'd spent ten days together, ten intense days, whispering into the nights, skins sharing warmth, and never did I think that something stood between us. Something as big as Jeffrey, my best friend, her beloved brother.

Something had to show. I rummaged through my memories. Of course, I could attribute every twitch to her dead brother, just as I could say that the postcard on her notebook was really meant to be her sitting over her dead brother. But most likely, twitches were just twitches, and the postcard was nothing but a painting. Short on evidence, my mind sought theories. It was always possible that she'd never thought about him once, that she'd reached a chilly balance with her grief – a deal in which she'd never think of him again and, in return, she'd never feel that half-formed surge of tears that often stopped in my throat when Anna, Jeffrey or Eric flashed forth in a potent light.

The idea was too foreign. I dismissed it and thought about the one time she'd met Eric. I was sixteen and Eric had only been at our school for a few months. After repeatedly trying to sell each one to the other, I wanted my two closest friends to move past their passive mistrust. On a crisp winter day, when the winter sun had us ignoring the snot dripping from the tips of our noses, I called Jeffrey to tell him I was dropping by, omitting the fact that Eric was with me. That was perhaps a mistake. Jeffrey had privately told me he didn't understand why Tom and Paul disliked Eric so much, but Eric had his oddities. It'd taken me a while to get used to his cold unfocused stares, his unexpected moody silences (best ignored), and even longer to pay no attention to the way he'd be caught in his own thoughts one minute, and expounding an opinion as much with his voice as with his hands the next.

Jeffrey wasn't prepared for any of that. He welcomed Eric with a veneer of formality – may I offer you something to drink? Would you mind turning that switch on? I kept on hoping that it would pass, that he'd show him one of his fun-loving smiles. And then, we were in the garden by the apple tree trying to juggle oranges, and Leona came to watch her brother in action. Jeffrey and I, well practised, started with four each and tried to add a fifth. But Eric had never juggled before, and trying to imitate us, he tossed four in the air and ended with three on the floor. Making sure we weren't leering, he put one down behind his back and tried again.

‘Eric,' Jeffrey said, while he was tossing his own set ever higher, ‘perhaps you'd do better if you started with two.'

His tones were slightly condescending, but I'm certain Jeffrey meant well. And I'm sure Eric would have listened if it hadn't been for Leona picking up on her brother's tones and snickering cruelly.

‘Even I can do three,' she said. ‘I could do two with my eyes closed.'

Without saying a word, Eric put down the fruits in an evenly spaced line and charged inside. When I went to look for him, he'd already left Jeffrey's house, intent on walking all the way home if he couldn't find a bus. I managed to calm him and coax him back to Jeffrey's, but from that point on, he never listened to anything Jeffrey told him without thinking that Jeffrey was trying to make fun of him.

‘Why does he even say hello to me?' he asked me two weeks later.

As I struggled to focus on my work, I found it easy to think back to that episode and toy with its significance: it was a turning point, the last time I tried to bring Eric into our crowd, the last time Eric thought he could become friends with the others. If only Leona had stayed quiet, events would have turned out differently. But I was tired, and I was thinking silly thoughts. I knew it instinctively: Leona had struck Eric out of her memories. It was the right thing to do. That way, she wasn't spending her days doubting. That way, she was sleeping soundly.