Black Chalk (30 page)

‘And you?' she said.

‘I don't know,' I said. It sounded true when I said it. But in our silence, cushioned by the rain's murmur, a face came to mind. Leona's finger started drawing lines in the fog. First a figure of eight, then a house. Reaching up, I drew a tree next to the house. ‘A friend,' I said. ‘You don't know him. He's dead. I should…'

‘What?' she said, and I detected nothing but quiet curiosity.

‘I should have done more.'

She didn't say anything. I drew a square and a cross in its middle, and I rubbed it out. My fingers lingered by hers for a minute. Then our fingers met, and she held hers still while I followed the line of her arm to the goosebumps around her nipple. I turned onto my hip, and I reached for her legs with my other hand. It started with her mischievous smile – her languor broke and we moved faster the second time, each following muted signs, perhaps in the way she shifted her hips, or in the pitch of my breaths, in unison, from position to position. And that dialogue, unseen and unheard, was enough. We didn't talk. There was the sound of wet flesh on wet flesh, and there was the sound of the rain on the glass panels. She came twice; the second time with me, her body heavy on mine, mine heavy on the bed. It was the first time we'd come together.

The smell of sex in the air, she lay on her back with one arm over my stomach. I looked at her and I thought of the way Marie used to smoke after sex. She would lie on her back much like Leona, bringing cigarette to lips, blowing smoke. And yet, they were nothing alike; on the one side, Marie's perfectly composed features, her breasts hanging in the way that suited them best; and on the other, Leona's contentment, the skin folding between breast and stomach. I didn't know how I'd managed to stay with Marie for so long.

‘The friend you talked about earlier.' She spoke as if she were asking a question.

‘Yeah,' I said.

‘What was his story?'

I hesitated, but I was too relaxed to think.

‘He was messed up,' I said.

Her arm was warm on my stomach, so I kept on speaking:

‘He had a lot of anger inside of him, and he didn't have much luck. With his family, with friends. It's complicated. He…' I wanted to do him justice but a part of me held on tight. ‘You know,' I said, ‘he had too many ideas. About what was right, what was wrong. But he forgot what mattered.'

‘What's that?'

‘People. You, me, everyone else. The bloke was brilliant. Probably the smartest person I ever met.'

‘What did he do?' she asked, and all of a sudden, I realised that I'd drifted far into the forbidden. I panicked:

‘Something stupid.' I could turn the conversation around. It wasn't too late. All I had to do was find someone else who fitted the description. Or invent someone. I could kill Denret. He was probably dead anyway.

‘You're talking about Eric Knight, aren't you?'

I froze, expecting her hands to plough into my stomach, to curl into fists. She barely moved. The back of her hand was still warm, still resting against my hip. Her head tilted a fraction towards me, and on it I could detect nothing but an avid sort of curiosity.

‘Have you forgiven him?' I said.

‘Yes,' she answered immediately.

‘Like you forgive everyone?'

‘Yes.'

I didn't know what else to add. She didn't seem to mind. I relaxed. She'd just worked six days straight. Perhaps she was too tired to react, I thought, and the gloom lightened for an instant. She got up to go to the bathroom. I listened to the door close, to the door open, and then I heard nothing. I waited for ten minutes before I called out. I didn't hear a response.

She was running home in the rain, naked.

The door opened. It was her, a tray of food in hand.

‘Your stomach was rumbling,' she said.

We ate, and it was 10 p.m. and I was hard again. Three times in the one evening, it was unusual. But it was raining and she looked beautiful. This time it was about her. For once, she listened to her urges and she told me exactly what she wanted.

‘What was he like?' she asked me when the sex had drained the last of her body, and she covered my body with a leg and an arm.

‘You don't remember him?' I asked, thinking of the time we'd juggled fruits in the Bakers' garden.

‘No,' she said and I believed her. If she didn't think of her brother, there was no reason she'd remember Eric's visit.

Her initial question in the air, I took a deep breath and remembered the inspector's words on the day of my eighteenth birthday, Leona's easy reaction when I'd mentioned seeing him on the street. Mothers' misgivings, my early doubts, it was easy to stoke fears. What mattered was Leona now: she wanted to know and the words wanted to come out.

‘Well, he was tall, taller than me. Curly dark hair and piercing blue eyes. You haven't seen any pictures?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Alright. I guess he was a bit strange. That's what a lot of people said. Not everyone.' I couldn't tell her that her brother was nice to him. ‘But most people thought he was strange.'

‘But what was he like with you?'

Eric was in his shed fixing my bat until one in the morning; in his room, showing me how to differentiate logs; high in his tree-house late one afternoon, telling me about his old football team, about his primary school, until the sun had set and it'd grown cold; and before any other image pushed through, I bit my lip till it leaked blood.

‘With me,' I said, calmer, ‘he was different. He was nice, he liked me. I don't know why, that's how it was.' I sighed and my body felt light. ‘He was very kind to me. I think he could have been that way with everyone, if only…' I stopped myself, but the words were gathering a dangerous momentum.

‘But you were his friend. That's got to be enough, no?'

The moment of his death flashed very bright: his body collapsing, and frozen on his face, the hint of a betrayed expression stopped short by death. For the first time in six years, it occupied the whole of my mind, the image truer for I was awake, and I opened my mouth because I had to. Nothing came out. What had I done? I was a bloody traitor, a selfish twat, and next to that, Eric, he… All of a sudden, there was too much to feel, too much to say, and the words, the space didn't exist. My lips were loose, my tongue thick, and I blabbered.

‘I could have…' I repeated the words three times, each time seeing another thing I could have done. ‘I could have done something. For him, for everyone else. I could have known. I should have…' and I couldn't speak anymore.

Leona enclosed my head in her arms, in the way I'd held her head so many times before. I smelled the skin around her collar-bone and I closed my eyes, caught in between two rushes: the words, pervasive, accruing behind the images, violent. Both were moving too fast to comprehend.

I woke up at four in the morning with a hard-on and an urgent need to go to the bathroom. When I came back, she was awake, smiling. A new urge pulsed through my limbs, and I put my cock by her mouth. Her lips opened and closed around it, and I realised she was still asleep. Seeing her dutiful in sleep, persistent as she woke up, aroused me more than I'd ever been. When I came, I felt a deep pain spreading from my loins to my chest, and I shivered as it echoed through my guts. I curled into a ball by her side, until I felt I could breathe comfortably. She grabbed my arms and pulled, until I stretched out a little, and she snuck in, blanketing my body with hers. She was so close that I could feel her every breath but I couldn't see her face. It felt like a blind sort of acceptance, her embrace. I rested my chin on her head, tasted her smell, and surrendered.

‘There were so many shootings back then,' my mouth spoke through her hair. ‘It was always on the news. In America, of course, but we heard about every single one of them.' My thoughts couldn't explain the dull pain, the feverish pleasure that words and images were bringing forth. But why was I resisting the glow of release? Open up.

‘Eric, he liked to talk about them, but only when we were up in his tree-house. He'd built this bridge, and there was this platform…' The bridge and the platform captured me for a few instants. She was rubbing my back with her damp hands, and my feet were dangling over the great oaks. The crown of her head was hiding her from my eyes, and yet I knew it: her body loved me. We were already sharing skin, mouth, nose. We were ready to share everything. I spoke faster: ‘He smoked whenever he talked about them. There was Columbine, but there were others too. Heritage, and I forget the names of the others. I should remember. The first time he said he understood them, and I… well, I agreed. He had that effect on me. Yes, I said it made sense. But I didn't really think about it, while he… well, he spoke about them often. And I guess I was interested. It's morbid, but it's interesting. That's why they're on the news so much, right?' Her grip was getting tighter, but I didn't wait for her answer. ‘Well, I was! So I wanted to know why they did it, how, what happened to them, pretty much everything! But I shouldn't have done that, should I? I should have disagreed, I should have thrown his little pack of cigarettes overboard.' The pain in my chest lessened as I raised my voice. ‘I should have pushed him off the platform!' Hearing myself shout, I went silent and I listened to the sound of the rain on the window, to Leona's breathing. ‘That's what I should have done, right?' I said.

I felt something warm tickle down my chest, leaving a cold, salty trail behind.

‘Don't cry,' I said. ‘You're too sweet.'

I tried to look at her but she shrivelled into herself, masking her face with her hair. Kind as always, she didn't seem to mind me holding her. Every time she exhaled, she whispered something to herself, but soon it was lost in her breath and she sounded better. Her skin felt cool to the touch, while, every few seconds, a new wave of heat started in my skull and coursed down to my toes. I wanted to give her all of my heat but she stayed cool, and I sweated. Naked, I climbed out of bed, pulled the second duvet from beneath the bed, and covered her with it. Then, lying around her, I rubbed her body through the down until she fell asleep.

***

It was ten in the morning when I woke up. It was still raining and I was hungry. I went to the fridge and found a few bananas. When I brought them back, Leona was starting to stir. I sat with my pillow against the window, and I ate slowly.

With the dull light, she looked like a black and white movie, her hair big with sleep. Silent, I watched her for half an hour. Her eyes eventually betrayed her: they turned from the rain to my grounded eyes, and the connection brought her down from her dreamland. She stretched and held a hand out for me.

‘Are you hungry?' I said.

‘Shh.'

She pulled me closer and laid a silencing finger over my lips. I kneeled up and looked out the window.

‘I'll get the paper,' I said.

There was no one in the streets. Nothing but water on the ground, water in the sky. In the corner store on Iffley Road, the shopkeeper, a Bangladeshi, had his radio on. I handed him the
Observer
with my two pounds. He pointed to a stool and asked me what I was doing out on a morning like this.

‘Wait five minutes,' he said, ‘it's raining hard.'

I sat on the stool, and listened to the voice on the radio. Inshallah, the rain will stop.

‘Big night out?' he said, waving at my face.

‘Big night in,' I said.

We spoke cricket – his afternoon game was cancelled already, and Bangladesh were rubbish.

‘Coke?' he said, miming the lines around my eyes.

‘No,' I said, and I looked closer. He had a beard that wisped down his neck, a pianist's fingers.

‘You want some weed?' he said.

I said no, and we sat in silence until the rain thinned. Then I stood up, he put my coin through the till, and bid me goodbye.

***

‘Come to the kitchen, you won't believe what he told me.'

Leona was still in bed, lying on her back, her eyes jumping all over the room. She was holding the sheet between her fists, pressing it tightly against the skin above her breasts. Yes, she'd barely said a word all morning, but I didn't have time to think about it. I could feel it deep inside: I had to get us back to the previous night's space.

It took my Bangladeshi story and the promise of a brunch to drag her out of bed. Blade in hand, she slit the paper's plastic wrapping open and found Obama on the front page. Ever since he'd wrestled control of the party from Hillary Clinton's hands, Leona had become interested in the American election. His picture, thumb and middle finger touching, an index finger raised at the camera, woke her up and her voice rose hoarse. It smoothened as she expanded on his problems with Hispanic voters. Once she started speaking, words rushed out of her so fast that I hardly had time to answer, and she took control of the moment. While I pressed oranges and chopped chives for the omelette, she summarised each article for me: a problem with mortgages; Bush said something silly; Brown looked sullen. Whenever I tried to string two sentences together, she threw another story at me. Our plates were empty by the time she came to the sports section. Reaching for one of the supplements, she asked me whether I knew a five-letter word for a springy wood.

‘Isn't this nice?' she said. ‘Spending a Sunday doing the crosswords?'

A muscle running down my back started a slow ache.

‘Should we go back to bed?' I said.

‘No, it's nice here.'

‘It'd be nicer in bed.'

‘No,' she said, and she focused on the next word. When we finished the crossword, she found the Sudoku, and the muscle down my back tensed up some more.

‘I thought you didn't like Sudokus,' I said.

‘But you do,' she said.

‘Alright, one Sudoku.'