Black Chalk (32 page)

With those words, I realised I'd finished speaking. I felt spent. My brain was a long blank, and every single one of my muscles felt like it was melting into the sheets. Leona was still in my arms, a lump my limbs folded over. She could have been jabbing me in the gut and I wouldn't have felt it. For a while, I stared at one of my grandmother's paintings – at least, that's what I think I did, for all I can remember is that my eyes wouldn't move, and that they were looking at a shape on the wall.

***

I woke up at four in the morning, when the rain beat hard against the glass panes. I'd slept ten dreamless hours. Ten hours gone and not a smudge on my mind. Leona was lying on the edge of the bed, cocooned inside her duvet. I drifted out of bed into my studio. The street lamp outside mixed in with the low clouds to give the room a metallic tinge. My spaceship looked like a pigeon: the cabin dominating the hull like a pigeon's head dominates its body. Even my revolutionary piecemeal design, with its disposable elements, looked like simple feathers. Still, my pigeon was white, and my pigeon was big.

Armed with this insight, I went back to bed, and I lay on my back, focusing on deep slow breaths, the sort that stretched my lungs into my stomach, the sort that made me as light as the last of my breath, and I felt myself rock from side to side, as if I were on a pirate's board, ready to be tossed to the sharks. I slipped and I was standing in the room, dark while Leona was asleep and blue. I decided to visit my old school, to see whether I'd recognised the stones under the gigantic glass belly, and I was there, walking over the clean sports ground, towards the Kemp Annexe they had razed, and the glass structure they had erected in its stead. The place was silent. There was no light but a dim pulse that came from me. I walked through the glass, towards my old physics classroom. When I reached it, I stood tall, and looked at the darkness around me. And then I saw a pair of shiny white scissors on the ground, the only other bit of light in space. I bent down to pick them up, but before I could curl my fingers through their handle, I left my new reality and its soothing calm, and I slept some more.

At one stage, just before the sun rose, I thought that I saw Leona in the doorway, a long object in hand. My mind captured her shape, nothing more than a shadow, decided she was holding a sword, lumped it into my sleep and accepted its sentence.

When I opened my eyes next, it was nine in the morning, and Leona was no longer in bed. I went looking for her, shouting her name.

That was when it all changed. After what I told her, it had to change, and yet, the coward within kept on hoping. I hoped until I tried her mobile and it went directly to voicemail. Until I thought of calling her parents, and I didn't dare, because I didn't want to have to tell Amanda that I was looking for her daughter, for the same daughter who'd slept naked in my bed for over three months, when she'd warned me, when she'd spelt out the issues as far as a mother could condemn a child.

It must have been noon when I picked up the receiver and started dialling Amanda's number, when I let it ring once, and when I hung up, disgusted with myself. What would I do, speaking to Amanda? I couldn't influence the jury while it was deliberating. No, I had to wait. It had been my choice, and now I had to wait for her verdict.

I made myself a tidy lunch: two slices of brown bread, one buttered, the other coated with onion chutney, two leaves of lettuce, a square of spiced Gouda, and half a tomato. Then I wasn't hungry anymore, but I had half a tomato left, so I made myself the same sandwich again. There was a lettuce leaf black with wrinkles on my plate. I traced one of its creases with my fingers and found it sticky. Like Leona must find me. And suddenly I wanted to rinse my hands, to scrub them clean.

Before I tried her mobile a fourth time, I asked myself whether she'd get a missed call for all of my attempts. Surely not. Not when it didn't even ring. The eighth time, I let the message run until it beeped, and then, faced with the crackly silence, I left her three hurried words: call me back.

She didn't call. Not that day, nor the next. It was Monday and thankfully I had an assignment to hand in the following morning. She might come back, I thought, and I waited. It was 11 a.m. by the time I'd become too disgusted with myself to remain alone. I went to the library. There, I met a few friends going for lunch and I took them, as if by chance, to Georgina's, where Leona was meant to work. But she wasn't there and there were no free tables. Every time a vibration travelled to my thigh, every time I heard someone else receive a message, I pulled out my phone and checked it. It remained resolutely message-free.

She'd found me guilty and this waiting, like a cold vice pressing and twisting into my chest, was the start of my punishment.

***

On Tuesday morning, I clutched at her side of the bed and found it cold. Before my thoughts could thicken into a vile paste, I heard the house crackle, and I told myself that it could be her in the living room being considerate, unaware that I was already awake. Or that she could have come back during the night, seen me in bed, remembered how much I disgusted her, and opted for the sofa instead. These images were too inviting. I walked to the living room, a morbid sort of hope hanging from my lip. It was despairingly empty, except for three darkened banana skins: remnants of the previous night's dinner.

To shake myself awake, I went to hand in my assignment. When I came back, I looked at my empty flat, I listened to my steps resonate, and I sat down on the sofa. There was a cushion tilting my hips, hurting my lower back, but it didn't matter. My mind was thinking over questions it couldn't answer, all variants of the one worry: how would Leona react to my story? The more I thought about it, the more I saw signs of repulsion in her behaviour, in the way she hid her face, in her tears, in the way she tried to push herself off me. Repulsion silenced by compassion. And I asked myself what she would do, how she would judge me, whether she'd see me one more time, whether she'd wait until I fell asleep before she cut my cock off. Thinking did no good but I couldn't stop it.

There were noises coming from outside, noises on the steps, more tricks I was playing on myself. The noises sharpened, defying my fears: the sound of a key sliding into a lock. The door opened and Leona appeared.

She shuffled into the flat and the light cast harsh shadows, the sound of my pen tapping on the coffee table rang hollow. From my sofa, I turned to look at her. She looked the same, and yet she didn't. Her usual daintiness had made way for an aggressive lean. For the first time since I'd met her, she was wearing a pair of old jeans and trainers. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like her nose and eyes had tightened, as if she'd brooded so much they'd folded on themselves. And yet, her cheeks, her forehead had become slack, as if shock had grappled with only half her face. It was a frightful contrast: all I could do was stare and wait.

‘Fix your tyre. Let's go for a ride,' she said, and I didn't argue. Twenty minutes later, I was following her around South Parks Road, as her calves and her thighs pushed her narrow-tyred, aluminium-framed bike ever further away from mine. I caught her just as we came off Banbury Road, when she rode through another red light. She was laughing.

‘Where are we going?' I said.

She looked at me as if I'd asked her whether the moon had a sister, and she pushed hard against her pedal, speeding away, laughing at the road ahead.

It should have been a stormy morning. Instead, the skies had whisked together three lonely clouds. I wanted them to gather, darken, and break, so that Leona would slip and stop. I'd pick her up and nurse her grazed elbow, kiss the wound, lap her blood. But the clouds weren't even capable of covering us with their shadows for more than two minutes.

We reached Wytham and Leona rode around the pub, up the narrow lane that leads to Wytham Woods. Seeing her lock her bike to the outside gate relaxed me for some reason – the way she looped her lock through both her front and back wheels especially. When we'd walked to the top of the hill, after twenty minutes of the lonely sound of feet on gravel, twenty minutes of questions I couldn't answer by myself, I ignored the curious focus etched over her face and grabbed her wrist. I had to pull hard to bring her to a halt.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘What's what?' She looked confused.

‘Why are we here?'

‘Can't you just enjoy the woods? Look,' she pointed at one side of the ridge, ‘on this side, there's still dew on the spider webs, and on that side, the grass is dry. How beautiful is that?'

‘Don't you have work today?'

She turned her face away:

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘It doesn't?'

‘No, but this' – she waved her arm around her – ‘this matters.'

She turned around, and I grabbed her wrist before she could walk away. I had to know what it would be.

‘After what I said the other night…'

‘Yes?' She looked at me defiantly.

‘You left so… abruptly. That's it, isn't it? You hate me.'

For a second, she looked truly annoyed.

‘I don't, didn't I say that already? Why do you keep on asking?'

‘I thought…' and I didn't know what I thought anymore.

I studied her face as if it held the answer I needed. And her expression changed, its rightful disdain making way for the artifice of virtue.

‘Don't think,' she tapped her temple, ‘in here, all I have is forgiveness. You didn't know, that's alright. You didn't know…' Her voice trailed off, and her eyes were on the path ahead.

At that moment, I wanted to tell her that I did, but I knew that it wouldn't matter, that she'd talk forgiveness just the same, and I hated her for it. But then I looked at her closer, and I saw the fold between her eyes, that new fold, lush with youth, deep with anger, and I stopped believing her: she'd judged me and she'd found me guilty on all counts: treachery, deceit, cowardice, I listed word after word in my head as I walked behind her – duplicity, pretence, passivity – and I felt better for every new label.

She walked on until the path curled left and down. Then she left the path and strolled towards a knoll in the meadow, an athletic sort of beauty taking hold of her – her legs hardened through the denim with every stride, her bare arms tightened at the triceps with every swing – a beauty so different to the softness that had pulled me towards her in the first place that I both wanted to be ordered to the ground, and to seek asylum in the gothic manor at the bottom of the hill. She took a blanket out of her bag and tossed it open.

‘This is my favourite spot in the world,' she said.

I looked around. We stood in a green field, a hedge of trees masking the path on the hill's crest, grass flowing down to a creek and a sun-kissed manor, and in the distance, Oxford and its colleges, its halls, its chapels. We were alone, and yet behind those trees, there could be a class of eight-year-olds scrutinising the different types of weed endemic to Oxfordshire. I turned back to Leona. She was unbuttoning her jeans.

‘What are you doing?' I said.

She pulled her trousers down.

‘Lie down here.' She pointed at the ground. ‘Your head this way, I want to see the view.'

Her arm stretched imperious, her knuckle sharp against the trees in the distance. Against my will, I moved to where she wanted me to be. She took her pants off. Just as they reached her ankles, her knees barely bent, her back almost flat, I looked at the soft flesh of her arse, that flesh I'd caressed, fondled, slapped, and I saw a hard muscle I'd never noticed before. It started halfway up her thigh and rose up the one buttock like a wave crashing against a wall. That moment, that strength she'd hidden from me, that single image of Leona squatting, a band bulging out of the back of her thigh, changed the way I saw her, and I became afraid of her. She was no longer my Leona. I didn't think about singing her a lullaby while she nursed an imaginary wound, but I looked at her bare legs, those legs I'd kissed most nights, and I saw how they could grab my neck and twist until my skull popped out of my spine.

And there was still that lone finger pointing at the blanket on the ground, that order I couldn't rebel against, despite my one clear thought, the word ‘no', murmured, and then shouted, and then whispered, but only ever within the confines of my head because my mouth wouldn't do what a mouth is supposed to do. I lay down and she reached for my jeans. Nothing but that finger, nothing but the promise of those muscles, and I was hard. It made me cry. She never saw those tears. When her head bent towards me, her eyes were closed. They only opened when she looked at the view, ecstatic. I didn't want to like the feel of her wet flesh on my taut skin. I didn't want to like the way her bones ground into my pelvis. And yet, pleasure and pain, they all felt acutely wonderful. There was a stick with a pointy knob driving into my kidney every time she pressed down, and another where my head could have rested. I liked those pains: I deserved them. But I hated my body for enjoying itself – I didn't want to stay erect, I didn't want to feel the start of an orgasm gathering my guts into a knot.

I saw something move on the path. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it was two men running. It didn't matter. We weren't five minutes into it before I came so hard that my legs twitched. Then she put her clothes back on and lay alongside my body to catch her breath, her eyes closed. To the runners, to the class of eight-year-olds, we were once again nothing but a loving couple taking in the view. Her eyes finally fell on me, and I hated the genuine concern that spread over her.

‘I'll make you that pumpkin curry you like so much when we get home,' she said.

Despite myself, I looked forward to that curry for the whole journey back. If I couldn't speak now, I'd be able to say what I felt with that medley of spices. Such was the power of food.

While we ate, every time I chewed through a cumin seed, every time a dice of pumpkin melted on my tongue, I thought about talking – telling her that I needed to know what she thought, telling her that I hadn't wanted her in Wytham Woods, telling her that there was a weight dragging me down as surely as if two hands were pulling my shoulders down to the ground, and that she, her and no one else, only had to say the word and I'd be free – but then I remembered the power in her legs, and I noticed the confused intensity in her face, as if she were struggling with a knife and its blunt side, and I told myself that I'd wait until we were in the bedroom, that I'd give her a massage and kiss her neck in that way she liked, until she sang to her own melody, to her own language, and that then, I'd be brave because she'd look weak.

I chewed and chewed, but there was only a plateful of curry, and I'd finished it. She grabbed her things and told me she had to go home.

‘You don't want to stay here tonight?' I asked.

‘No,' she said, and she left.

***

Two days later, a week before nos quatre mois, when I was becoming resigned to the idea that I would never understand her, I came home one afternoon to find her huddled on the sofa, her arms enclosing her legs, her chin resting on her knees, and a trail of her things (tissues, keys, a notepad, two inch-high pencils dented with teeth marks) tracing a path between her and her bag on the coffee table. When I first saw her, I felt myself lift, but then, before I had time to dwell on my happiness, a trickle of apprehension tainted my pleasure. She was intently watching television. It took me a second to think it through: we didn't have a television. She was watching it so intently that she barely noticed me, her attention on an insurance man with a cheerful voice.

Slumped on the sofa, she looked withdrawn enough that I dared walk towards her and kiss her on the cheek.

‘Hey,' she said and she went back to the screen.

For a second I thought of sitting next to her, but the second lapsed and I went to the fridge instead, as if that were what I'd intended to do all along.

‘Where did you get the TV?' I asked. I hadn't seen one in the flat before, but I hadn't looked through the mess in the staircase cupboard. There hadn't been one at Leona's either. In fact, we'd had a few conversations talking about how we didn't like television – Leona because it excited her too much, and me because I never cared enough.