Homing (7 page)

And even at that moment, reaching out to touch his face, she could not tell exactly what she was: leopard or hunter. The one inside the box of stones, or the one who stands and watches as the trap falls closed, over and over again.

Really, Erin couldn’t stand these things. It was only because of Alice that she was here at all – Alice with her schemes.

“A
singles
weekend? Madness.”

“Come and keep me company, at least,” Alice had said. “No pressure. And if you do meet someone, bonus. I mean, when last?”

Truth was, an extremely long time.

And so here they were, Friday afternoon, driving up to the gates of the wine farm for a Getting-to-Know-You Weekend. The place turned out to be luxurious: a Cape Dutch farmhouse with a steep backdrop of mountainside vineyards. Below were a sloping lawn, a pool and what the brochure called a “Dining Pavilion”.

After they’d unpacked their bags, the two friends drifted down through the landscaped lawns towards the pavilion, where, according to the programme, cocktails would be served and they’d meet a likely crop of single men. As they walked, they were joined by two or three other women, also in their mid-thirties. They smiled a little tensely at each other, and Erin felt more than a touch of embarrassment at sharing their purpose.

“God, I’m so not in the mood,” she muttered to Alice, who rolled her eyes and pointedly started chatting with the others.

But, actually, Erin was pleased to be out of the city, and the gardens were really rather nice – meadowy, and patched with shade and sun. The late-afternoon warmth put a layer of down between her summer dress and skin, and she wished she could skip the Getting-to-Know-You part and stay outside. She dawdled, letting a gap open up on the path between herself and the group. Her eyes slid away from their smiles and their carefully chosen, cautiously sexy clothes. Only a few hours into the weekend, and already she could feel herself pulling back into her thoughts, into familiar silence. And she hadn’t even met the men yet.

It was the weather, too; the air pressed gently against her face, making it hard to release words. She walked with one hand held up against the sun, allowing her eyes to float from the pleasant contours of the lawn to the duller green corduroy of the vineyards. Ah well, at least there’d be cocktails.

The gardens tempted her. They reminded her of the sloping lawns at Kirstenbosch, irresistible to her when she was a little girl. She’d make her parents wait while she rolled down the hill like a log, over and over, until the skin of her arms and legs was red and her head spun. But later, trying the same thing when she was older, a student playing at kids’ games, she’d felt merely queasy. Same with the playground swings – that stomach-flip moment at the top of the swing, exhilarating up until the age when it suddenly became nauseating; which was about the same age you found you were too big to squeeze into the car-tyre seats. Free flight and dizziness and sick-making thrill … when did one stop
wanting
that feeling?

Down the slope, beyond a stand of bamboo, a topaz glint caught her eye. A teenage boy stood at the edge of a swimming pool, staring into the water. As the women passed by on the path above him, he glanced up. Too far away for much detail, Erin saw only that his hair was white-blond, cut so close to his head he looked shorn, and that he wore jeans. A white towel was draped over his bare shoulders.

She slowed, nameless recognition flaring with the scent of cut grass. Then the bamboo came between her and the vision of the boy.

It was hot, and she suddenly felt the wire of her bra stiff against her body, the elastic of her panties – reminding her that she was older, with womanly flesh that sat on her back and belly and hips. Her lips were sticky with too much lipstick. She walked on.

It was a long time ago now, more than twenty-five years. The swimming pool. The boy.

The air was hot with sound: cheers and screams, churned water, the starter’s gun. Bored and sweating in her school uniform, she’d edged away from the roar and gone to stand in the shade under the shaking stand. A bubble of furtive silence. Here were other skulkers – boys chatting up girls from different schools, someone with a cigarette in the darkest corner. The gun cracked for a new race and above her the shouts began again. Unnerved – one of the planks seemed about to give way – she stepped back into the sun to watch the race, hand shading her eyes, squinting into the spray and light.

Suddenly she was tackled, almost knocked off her feet. A bewildering body-check of limbs and skin and breath; it was several heartbeats before she untangled things enough to find that she’d been drawn into a one-armed embrace by a tall boy – older, from another school, almost naked in a black Speedo – and was now being rocked back and forth as he gripped her and yelled encouragement to the swimmers. Dark blond, deep tan. His right arm was slung around her neck and his hand, astonishingly big and male, lay casually across the top of her chest, thumbnail pressing into her skin. Coarse damp hairs from his armpit pushed against her cheek and ear. Everyone was shouting, the pool thrashed into a glittering tumult:
Give us an A give us an R …
She pressed closer and breathed him in. Slipping her arm shyly around his waist, she felt his skin along the whole length of her body: smooth across his back, goosebumped on his arms and thighs, still cool from swimming. The gooseflesh left his skin and swarmed over hers. A jolt passed through her stomach, her chest and throat, all the way up the back of her neck and into her scalp.

It was over soon. As the race ended, he mashed her nose into his chest in a full-body hug, then pulled away and left her burning.

Afterwards, she couldn’t find him in the crowd or in the press for the school buses. But for weeks afterwards, she could close her eyes and smell his sweat, feel the prickle of his hair. Spiky, with that snaky tail at the nape – not a style that would be tolerated at her own rather prim school. It was enough to shake her, sitting in class; to make the whole left side of her body tingle with confusing heat and coolness.

The men were, of course, disappointing. There were only seven of them to the ten women, and the one obvious catch, a tall photographer with cheekbones, was already looking bored and restless. There was a red-faced man with a Father Christmas beard, who’d had too many cocktails by the time they arrived; a worn ex-surfer who kept making nervous, risqué puns; a pointy-featured stockbroker who seemed angry to be there at all. The others were unobjectionable but bland. One, a doctor, had features so unmemorable that every time Erin tried to focus on them his face seemed to blur and swim. There was a swarthy guy whose blunt, forceful build was not, in theory, unattractive, but when she approached him she met a blank in his eyes, as if she were a boulder blocking some more interesting view. After the two of them had stood for a minute or two staring sightless over each other’s shoulders, she drifted on with an acid smile.

Erin noted with fatigue that a certain amount of pre-selection had occurred for this event: everyone was white, middle class, of an age. That was, she supposed, what people requested. She’d known these people all her life.

Alice gave her an encouraging wink – clearly, man number seven was one she thought Erin would like. So he had the disadvantage, like all set-ups, of demonstrating much too clearly the kind of man one’s friends think one deserves. Nobody, that is, they might actually want for themselves. This one was a round, reddish guy with no straight edges in his tight-packed body. As they stood at the braai, she watched his plump Elvis lips and felt herself sinking into wordlessness. Her mouth glued shut and she had to take sips of beer just to keep it from sealing over completely. It wasn’t shyness, as it had been when she was a girl – just a terrible sense of predictability that made all words seem already spoken.

Erin sighed. These men were probably pleasant enough, but who could tell? She was so often wrong about people.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember with her body: the fizzing anticipation, the ache at the back of the throat, the need to touch.

My god, she thought, I used to
tremble with desire
.

Laughing quietly at herself, she looked down at the glass of beer growing warm in her hand. If she drank enough she’d be able to pretend, to read her body’s blurred and softened boundaries as something like lust. But right now, here with these people, she didn’t want to allow that. So she backed away from the scene, moving to the edge of the deck. The air was cool there, beyond the glow from the fire.

“Are you that bored?” Alice joined her, and together they stared out at the darkening lawns. Erin could hear frogs, nightbirds; she’d forgotten that they were in the countryside.

“Not your type, then? That Michael,” Alice ventured, lighting up a cigarette.

“Is that his name? The round guy? No … you know. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice.”

Alice laughed. It was an old catchphrase between them.

“I don’t know, Al,” Erin sighed, putting the empty beer glass down at her feet. “I mean, when last did you really,
really
find yourself attracted to someone? Overpoweringly, on first sight? So that you’d do anything, go anywhere, without another thought?”

Alice released smoke thoughtfully. “Oh, about twenty minutes ago, I suppose,” she said. “But it didn’t last. You?”

Erin smiled into the dark. “There was this boy … when I was thirteen.”

“First love? Really? You never told me. How long did that go on?”

Erin laughed. “Two laps, I think it was. At a gala.” She held out her hands before her, pale and steady against the dark. “Can you believe it, Al? I used to
tremble
.”

Erin was the first to leave the party. She walked barefoot across the cool, clipped grass, sandals in hand, away from the glow and the tipsy voices. A fork in the path led her, perhaps by accident, down towards the swimming pool.

She stood at one end, where the blond boy had stood, the bamboo faintly rustling between her and the distant pavilion. Underwater lights had transformed the pool into a block of green-blue luminescence, and wavelets on the surface caught flecks of white from a standing lamp. Shivering light.

Thirteen years old! She smiled as she lowered herself down on the edge of the pool and dangled her legs in the water. And all over some hyperactive kid with a rat-tail in his hair.

Her head jerked up at the deep liquid crash at the far end; a swell lapped over the edge and wet her skirt. At first she didn’t see anything, just a froth of bubbles. Then a pale figure slid out from under the turbulence, gliding submerged towards her. Something touched her foot and the figure did a perfect turn, streaking to the far end without coming up for air, then back again. When it arrived at her feet, rippling fingers reached out and touched the wall, and a boy burst through the surface of the water and stood, gasping. The pool was shallower than she’d thought, only waist deep. He vaulted up onto the edge, twisting to sit next to her.

A white smile, almost too big for his lean face; short hair so pale it seemed transparent, flattened against his head; pale eyes; and all tinted strangely by the underwater light. Young – seventeen or eighteen – but a head taller than Erin. He rubbed a hand across his scalp, making the hair stand up in little spikes and spraying her with droplets. A cool breath of cut grass and chlorine.

“Hi,” he said. Cocky. Grinning.

She returned his smile warily: “Hello.”

He pursed his lips, as if to restrain that knowing smile. She could see he was shivering, goosebumps on his thighs below the black swimsuit. “You’re cold,” she said.

“Flippin’ freezing.” He rubbed his arms with an exaggerated shudder and shuffled his thighs a little closer to hers. Gave her a jokey nudge.

She laughed. Impulsively, she put her arm around him and rubbed his back, amazed at the feel of such young, elastic flesh. He was beautiful, broad-shouldered with flat, hard muscles in his arms and chest and thighs. He leant in closer, putting his wet chin on her shoulder.

Erin stiffened.

It was a kind of kiss. She could feel his lips and nose and eyelashes, pressed against the side of her face. His clean breath. He felt very cool, and for a moment she wondered whether this really was a boy in her arms or something made from water, from grass. She almost turned to find his mouth, almost laid a hand on his thigh.

But she pulled back, lifted her feet from the pool and stood up, graceless. He watched her, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. A rapacious gesture. No longer boyish. His skin was evenly bathed in blue, but his eyes were even lighter, as if they weren’t eyes at all but small windows through which sunlit water shone.

“You should have a towel,” she said. “Warm yourself up.”

She stood a moment longer, then turned and walked away, half-blinded by the lanterns that led up the slope into the dark. The flush in her cheeks felt like sunburn.

In the morning she woke from dreams of damp, blue light. For a while she stared up at the ceiling … had it even happened? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d risen from sleep with dream and reality dissolving in her mind. But when she covered her face with her hands she smelt grass and chlorine, and found she was smiling. The clock next to the bed said ten thirty, way too late for breakfast. Erin hadn’t slept so long in years.

In the Dining Pavilion she found coffee, and the round man. The others were all off on a “vineyard ramble”.

“Matthew, hi!”

“Um, Michael.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

Her gaze slid away from him and out of the window, into the air beyond. The lawns sloped down in invitation, down to where the golden bamboo nodded over the pool. The vineyards stretched to touch the feet of the mountain, and was that a pair of hawks in the sky? She smiled apologetically at Michael and slipped out onto the deck.

Clouds were rolling in low, hiding the mountain. Like the weather, Erin felt reckless, changeable. She walked down the sloping grass – steeper, it seemed, than before; she could barely keep up with her feet, and broke into a little trot.