The Story of My Face (23 page)

‘This is my favourite.' I said and drank steadily with my eyes closed. He was watching me again – catching a glimpse of the paleness beneath the edges of my clothes. The bottle gasped when I took it away from my mouth, and a new crop of bubbles rushed through it.

‘Are they going to throw me out, then?' I asked as handed it to him. I tried to say it lightly, but my voice and the way I kept looking at him, searching for clues, betrayed me.

‘I don't know,' Mark said, sipping at the sweet, warm stuff. Clearly, he was beginning to feel in charge of the situation. No doubt that made it easier for him to keep on staring at me like that, taking me in, frowning a bit, as if he was trying to think of a name for what I was: a creature of some kind that hadn't existed before, a name from the encyclopaedia suddenly made flesh.

One of my eyes was just a little bigger than the other. There were purplish shadows beneath them. The lids were pale, unfreckled. My lips were cracked, dry beneath the temporary coating of drink, which had stained their margins orange. The corners of my mouth had dirt in them. If looking at me used to frighten Mark, now it was having the opposite effect. The more he looked, the more he felt equal to me, even superior. He was guessing what I might say or do next, getting it right. Nothing I said seemed to surprise him any more.

‘Your mother wants me to stay,' I said, ‘and your father. He's going to show me the books. But then, she wouldn't come with me. You didn't vote –' Mark shrugged. He put the bottle down. ‘So?' he asked. A broad grin settled on his face.

‘Do you still hate me?' I asked, and regretted it immediately. I could see him thinking how all along I wanted something from him, and now I was wanting it even more. And now that the worst had already happened (or so he thought), my wanting gave him, in exact proportion to its strength, power. He could feel it, a new fluid flowing in his veins. He had no idea what to do with it; it just rushed through him, spread itself everywhere.

The smile stretched further across his face. He said nothing to reassure me.

‘Are you ever going to stop it, then?' I asked, my voice rising. And when he just stared at me, I sprang to my feet. I wanted to hit him.

‘You're supposed to love your enemy!' I said. ‘You're a hypocrite. It's a sin not to!'

He started to laugh. Soon he was shaking helplessly.

‘You're supposed to forgive them!' His laugh, almost without his knowing it, sharpened, but by now he couldn't have spoken even if he'd wanted to.

I turned my back on him, took a few steps towards the ragged edge of the cliff, sat on it with my legs dangling down into the void, perfectly relaxed, as if it were a chair. A gust of wind blew my hair upwards, pulling the remains of the plait with it. I looked down at the drop, more of a very steep slope really, the beach below. Then, with no warning, I pressed down with my hands, eased myself over the edge, and let myself disappear.

23

I follow Heikki about forty kilometres, roughly south, and end up in the car-park of some small blocks of flats, which are surrounded with trees. Heikki shows me a small boat which he over-winters under a tarpaulin in the car-park. Then we take the stairs to the fourth floor. The flat, Heikki says, is not his natural habitat: the traditional wooden house they once shared went to his temperamental ex-wife, Maria, who has Kirsi during the week.

Even so, the flat seems homely enough to me: a large entrance hall, with a coat-stand and deep cupboards, a living-room lined along one wall with books. Heikki opens the door to the neat kitchen, a miniature shower-room, and the two bedrooms, again, small but well-cupboarded. It's like a boat, I'm thinking, full of vital and unexpected things, with everything stowed properly away. Then I remember him showing me Tuomas' house, how he looked inside everything – and I take hold of his hand before he can start.

How did he lose his finger? I ask.

When he was fourteen. Slightly drunk, gutting a pike. Impatient –

But now
, I think,
in the middle of your life, you don't hurry; you
seem to be someone who can wait. A man who puts away clothes,
replaces implements in their correct places after use, knows how to refold
a map, is patient enough to mend things.

He's been waiting a while. Now, he pulls me to him, holds tight.

‘Only in the dark,' I tell him, and reach for the switch. ‘It's better in the dark.' Of course, I need to hide. To be there and not be seen being there. But also I find that darkness makes skin the only sense and, invisible, I can live my nakedness from inside.

24

I'd taken off my jeans and stood in the watery lace at the edge of the sea, prodding a piece of seaweed with a stick. I watched Mark slither down the cliff, a hundred yards or so to the right. When he was close enough for me to hear him, he stopped and called out: ‘That was really stupid! What do you think you're doing? Now come home –'

‘No. Not until you like me,' I told him. ‘I don't even mind believing in it all,' I said a moment later, ‘if someone will tell me properly what it is.' We were talking just as if I had never slipped over the cliff and made him follow me, as if we were picking up on the previous conversation. The breeze and the soft splash of the waves muffled the edges of our words. The thin strip of sand I stood on stretched for miles in either direction, with small clots of sunbathers and swimmers gathered where it made deeper bays and coves. He came a few steps closer.

‘You can't just say that,' he said. ‘You have to mean it. God comes to you. You attend Service. You study. You practise. You experience conversion. Eventually you make a profession of faith, and then you must share in our communion, bread and wine which is the
literal
body and blood of Christ. And you have to really mean that too, or it is sin to partake. And then, afterwards, you'd have to be different, really different. But you –' He licked his lips, and I followed suit, tasting salt, ‘I don't believe you could be different,' he said. ‘I'm not sure,' he added, sounding relieved suddenly, ‘that I'd ever like you very much, whatever you did –' All the same, it must have been as clear to him as it was to me that he knew he did not feel exactly as he used to. A wave went over his feet, without him noticing it.

‘Your shoes are wet,' I told him. ‘There is another thing,' I said.

‘What other thing?'

‘I can't shout it,' I said. I went over to him. At least, he was probably telling himself, she's moving in the right direction now – if I can just get her off the beach and onto a road, there might be a bus to take us home, or maybe we could even stop a car, get a lift – But before we could leave, something else had to happen, here on the beach where the wind baffled softly around our ears. I knew it and he did too, but he didn't know what. Was I going to touch him? Did he even want me to?

I squatted down next to him, with my back to the sea, and indicated for him to do the same. The damp sand spread about us, interrupted only occasionally by a tiny shell or stone and the depression behind it. ‘Mark, look,' I said, and pressed the tip of my finger into the sand by my feet.

Slowly, I pulled my finger along, leaving a furrow of disturbed sand behind. Sea-water seeped from below. Did he know what it was? I asked, and he said no, but it was a lie, and even before the line made a little jump and then curved over itself, and began to come back the way it had come, before it could be called, by any stretch of the imagination except his, an image, the thing itself had started to happen in his own body, and kept him there, watching, horrified, hypnotised as I pressed my finger in to make a hole in the top:

‘A man's cock,' I said, ‘sticking up.'

‘That's enough!' Before I could do the woman's parts, he'd grabbed my arm and pulled us both to our feet, saying we must go straight home. But then, of course, we were touching and he was in fact pulling me along with him, at a half run, while he looked for a place where no one would see.

Soon we lay side by side, in a raised hollow where the cliff had collapsed long ago and grass and bushes grew. Mark stared fixedly into my face as if he must not look down, at the rest of me, or at his own crotch, where the
man's cock
pushed at cotton and twill, yearned towards Natalie Baron, the girl who had drawn it. He must look only at my face, at the landscape of it, at the column of fine, red-gold hairs moving in an elongated triangle from my eyebrows up the centre of my forehead to the hairline, another gathering of them on my upper lip. Back then, there were even tinier hairs, almost white, on my cheeks; it was like a finer version of the ground we lay on, except that when he came to them, my eyes were looking back at him out of it, alert, curious – and there in the dark middle of them, was a tiny picture of himself.

He gripped both my arms: to stop me from doing anything, I suppose he would have said. But by holding me he also stopped himself from moving, especially from moving his legs. He knew he should not lift the left one and push with the right until he was lying on top, which was what he kept wanting, obstinately, to do. So instead, his fingers dug into my arm, and holding on, of course, also prevented him from going away.

‘Let go of me,' I said; my excitement was of a different kind. ‘I haven't before, but I know what to do,' I informed him.

‘So do I!' he said. ‘But it's sinful. Stop it. Stop doing this to me.'

‘Let go,' I repeated. ‘Do what I tell you.' And clearly, his brain told him, siding momentarily with the force that was about to overcome it, we could not stay stuck like this for ever. So he relaxed the hands he had been studying hours ago in the meeting-field, and which before that had set out the chairs. It was useless to pretend, or to try to return to what had been before. Clumsily, he did what I told him:

‘Take off your shorts. And your pants. And your shoes!' The laces defeated his fingers and reduced him to something midway between tears and laughter, and all the time, there it was, the new fifth limb of his body, that he could see and I could see; it made him move differently, as if his body was there just to carry it.

I, giving the orders, lay still, my knees filthy, my feet clean from the sea. I propped myself up on my elbows and watched him. His body was muscular and pale. I noticed with interest and relief that hair gathered around his cock but there was none on his chest and not so very much elsewhere, not even on his legs. He wasn't exactly a man, I thought. He probably couldn't make me have a baby. My own legs were plump and white at the top, my underpants were white cotton with pink dots; there was a pale strip of skin between them and the hem of my blouse.

‘It has to be good for the woman,' I informed him, when finally the shoes and socks were off, ‘or it won't work. You have to stroke me all over.'

‘Well, take your things off, or I can't.' For a moment we were both equally afraid. Now it was his turn to watch my fingers struggling as his had done with mother-of-pearl buttons and with the tiny brass safety pin Barbara had fastened where one of them was missing. Of course, my skin was perfect then. Beneath the open blouse freckles scattered away from my neckline and then the smooth glow of it was interrupted only by two nipples, the pale pink of strawberry ice-cream, and the landscape of the body beneath, intricate, soft, completely different from Mark's.

‘Go on, then,' I told him, ‘touch me,' and then, to my surprise, everything was skin.

I remember I talked all through it, telling him ‘like that' or ‘not like that' and what might happen next and what his face looked like, and sometimes I laughed. ‘Go on then, now, go on!' I told him, and then for a few moments I was in a delicious place, held between desire and the promise of its satisfaction. Then the whole of me gathered together and hurtled away, obliterating everything. Then it was all over for both of us.

‘I love you,' Mark told me, in those last, otherworldly moments. He was fourteen. His eyes were shut, his face screwed tight. He was pushed entirely inside me. He meant something by it, certainly, and a few moments afterwards he returned deliciously to himself, to the salty air and the sky above us, so new and astounding, the gold stuff that sprang out of my head and blew into his face and the dappled skin that had frightened him before.