Black Chalk (25 page)

‘He hasn't done anything like that for years now, thank God. But it was too much for his parents. They split up last year,' she said.

And there was Josh, who'd gone to Cambridge, got a first, and found a job in the City, or Jeremy who was now working for the Foreign Office.

‘Like nothing happened,' she said, and she looked at my father. ‘Very different, aren't they?'

The more we talked about the others and their turnabouts, their failures, their unnatural rectitude, the more we, the Dillinghams, felt like a normal family. I'd gone away for a while, James had done a lot of drugs, my parents had nearly split up, but all in all, we were alright.

My mother kept on speaking: Eric's mother had moved to New Zealand, and she'd stopped answering her emails months after she'd arrived. And Jayvanti's family had moved to India at the end of the 1999–2000 school year, but they were back in England now. ‘That's what Charlotte told me anyway. Do you remember Charlotte?'

When I said I ought to go home, my mother escorted me out. She walked with me all the way to Banbury Road.

‘Leona…' she started. We took a few more steps. ‘Do you think that Leona is a wise choice?' she said, her voice taking on her tutorial tones.

‘I didn't choose her because she's Jeffrey's sister, Mum. She's just really nice.'

She nodded thoughtfully. We crossed a road and she started again:

‘With her, will you be able to leave what happened behind?'

‘I've done that already, Mum. It's been eight years.'

She nodded again, and walked silently with me for a few minutes. Then she grabbed my arm, and said she was going to go back home.

‘Give your mother a hug. You've grown so much. Not my little boy anymore.' She reached up and flicked a strand of my hair into place. Then she turned back.

***

Three days before our one-month anniversary, I bought a bottle of Cava and put it in the Cowley flat fridge.

‘Champagne!' Leona said, when she found it.

I put my brush down and came out of the smaller bedroom, the room Leona had labelled my studio.

‘You bought champagne! What for?' she asked with a smile.

‘For our first month.'

‘But we said we'd only get champagne for nos quatre mois.'

‘It's not champagne, it's Cava.'

She studied the label and smiled. But then a worried expression came over her face.

‘Oh no, we have to keep it for some other occasion.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘I thought we'd go to my house for dinner that night.'

I could hear it in her words, I could see it in her frown – this time, there was no point in changing the topic. So, as though I'd yearned to see her parents all along, I told her that I could skip class for one night. There was an uneasy lump stopping me from smiling fully. It stayed with me as the date approached – the Bakers were nice people, I knew, but I hadn't spoken to them since Jeffrey had died, and I could feel it deep inside: that had changed everything. To them, I was the one who'd seen him last. To me, I was the one who'd failed their darling, my best friend.

The day before our one-month anniversary, when we were sitting on the sofa, her head on my lap, my hand in her hair, I asked her whether her mother knew who I was.

‘Yes, I told her.'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘That you were funny, good-looking, that you were called Nathan, that you were doing a bridging course. Everything!'

I shook my head.

‘Tell her my full name, Leona. Please.'

The next day, hours before the dinner, we spoke on the phone and I asked her the same question.

‘Don't worry, she knows.'

‘Leona,' I said, enunciating every syllable, ‘let me know when you've told her.'

‘Yes, yes, she knows.'

‘You're at home now, aren't you?'

‘I am.' She sounded cornered.

‘Then do it now, and let me know what she says.'

Forty-five minutes later, I received a text: Done. Come at 7, x.

***

Amanda Baker was a young mother. She was twenty-two when she had Jeffrey, twenty-seven when I first met her, and thirty-one when I came across her bare-breasted in the Churchill Street sunroom. I pretended not to stare, but I still see her reclining, wearing only a bikini bottom, the rest of her body offered to my lust. She saw me through half-opened eyelids, she asked me how I was, and she went back to the sun.

I loved her breasts. They were still big with milk, sitting on her ribcage with a life of their own. They seemed to spread every time she breathed out, to perk up every time she breathed in. I don't know which I liked best. All I know is that I wanted to touch them, to put my mouth on their broad nipples. I imagined them dangling in front of my wagging tongue, and I blushed. For almost a year, until I came across my first
Playboy
, I stole glances at her breasts, clad in a simple t-shirt, blouse, white button-up shirt, in the grey-blue shirt that fitted her so well, or underneath a winter jacket, and I remembered them as I'd once seen them in the sunroom.

I remember David, her husband, flattening her breasts against his chest once, and me, little me, not listening to what Jeffrey had to tell me, but asking myself whether she felt any pain. Years later, when I first kissed a girl, I brought her to me in that same embrace. And an instant before our lips touched, I asked myself whether I was hurting her breasts.

Three or four times, Amanda told me how shy and quiet I'd been when I first came to their house. I must have been five. ‘But one day, I was making raspberry jam, and you came into the kitchen all wide-eyed. I asked you what you wanted, and you just stayed there, all quiet, looking at me stirring my jam.' She laughed her slow laugh. ‘So I went to the fridge, and I took out a jar of blackberry jam I'd made the previous night. When I turned around, you didn't know what to look at: the jam in my hand, or the one on the stove. I opened the jar, and I waved you closer. Smell it, I said, smell it. And your eyes! “Do you want some?” I said, and your eyes went even bigger. Half your face, they were. You were very cute, tall as that, you were.' She chuckled. ‘You couldn't say yes, you were so shy. So I handed you a big spoonful. You took it with both hands, you did, and you were all serious, licking every last bit off the spoon. Then you handed it back to me, and I said “Do you want more?”, and you nodded, and I said “Do you want more?”, and this time you spoke. You said “Yes, please”.'

Amanda was a stay-at-home mother. For a few years, while David was persisting with his flower shop, she worked behind the counter in the afternoons. But then, as his organic restaurant took off, she went back to minding house and children. When I was six, I asked my mother why she wasn't at home more.

‘Jeffrey's mum is always at home,' I said.

‘But Jeffrey's mum doesn't work. Mummy works.'

‘Why?'

‘Because working is important.'

‘But Jeffrey's mum doesn't work!'

‘Of course, she works. She cleans, she makes meals. Who makes you food when you go to see Jeffrey?'

‘You do that too. I don't want you to work! I want you to be like her.'

For many years afterwards, before administrative duties forced her back into her office, my mother came home in the afternoons, and, keeping an eye on James and me, she worked in the corner room until dinner time.

Even though we had a bigger house, a bigger garden, and a ping-pong table, Jeffrey and I still spent most of our time at his house. There was something about the place and it wasn't just his mother. Something about its age: an old farmhouse that Oxford had swallowed as it grew. Everything in it seemed right. The mattress on the floor, which we could easily stand upright to play Lego. The high yellow-brick wall at the back, around which we must have invented fifty games. The apple tree in the corner and its waist-high branches, which we could use to climb the wall and retrieve the ball. The sunroom to play Uno in winter. And the plastic table in the garden, when we were older and we had to talk girls and cricket over a ginger ale.

When I rang the bell for the first time since Jeffrey's death, Leona greeted me in her green summer dress, the one which left her tanned shoulders bare, a handful of silver bracelets tinging from her wrist to the heel of her palm. She kissed me on the porch, took my hand, and dragged me into the house. I listened to her with one ear – her sixteen-year-old sister was spending the night at her boyfriend's – while I looked around. At first, nothing seemed to have changed: there were still the dog's basket, shelves crammed full of multi-coloured books, magazines, pamphlets, and a door-less cabinet full of shoes, with four pairs of wellies overspilling on its side. But then, some details stood out: there never used to be a fish bowl on that console in the living room; that blue sofa was new, yes, it'd replaced that patched-up orange divan I'd found so disquieting; and that Labrador sniffing my leg wasn't Robyn.

‘Come!' Leona said. ‘Mum's in the kitchen, Dad's outside. Let's go say hi.'

Amanda Baker was busy chopping an onion, her back turned to me. With that first glimpse, I asked myself whether I should call her Amanda, as I used to, or Mrs Baker. She turned around and wiped her hands on her apron. There were obvious signs of age: wrinkles around her mouth, the pink in her skin gone grey, a stone around her waist. Yet, she was the woman I'd known: thick blonde hair stood an inch above her skull; the curves of my boyish fantasies had become bigger. I didn't know why, but that made them more comforting.

‘Nate, glad to see you. Come in, come in. Give me a second, I'll wash my hands first, and then I'll come and give you a kiss.' After a cursory rinse, she took hold of my elbows and studied my face. ‘You'd look better shaved. You have a nice chin, don't you hide it. Well, how are you?'

‘Fine, and you, Amanda?'

‘Fine. Splendid. Sit down, sit down. You've become quite the man now, Nate. Not the boy I knew. Isn't he handsome, Leona?'

Standing on an arched leg, Leona smiled at her mother.

‘Yes, she told me that you go by Nathan now. But old habits, you know how it is.'

‘It doesn't matter. Nate, Nathan, it's all the same… The house looks nice.'

Leona grabbed my hand:

‘Do you want a tour?'

I looked at her awkwardly. Then I turned towards her mother, unsure of what I should say.

‘Nothing's changed,' said Amanda. ‘You can show him later, darling. Why don't you take him to see your father instead? And tell your sister we'll be eating in a few minutes. She still hasn't set the table.'

Leona rolled her eyes and shook her head. I followed her to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Vicki! Mum wants you!' she had to shout three times before we heard an answer. In the meantime, I looked at the family photos by the staircase. There was a haphazard progression going left to right, as time added more and more frames: at first, the wedding picture, black and white grandparents shots. Then a St-Maxime holiday with friends and no children. And further right, baby shots, family reunions, the girls dancing, a picture of Leona in a ball gown, the three sisters hugging each other. I looked more attentively: there was a picture of a baby in a young Amanda's arms. And a group shot of the family in the Alps, Jeffrey to the right of the frame, buried beneath a bright green ski parka and a red hat. Besides these two pictures, there was no other sign left of my friend.

‘Is she coming down?' I asked.

‘She'll come down when she feels like it. Let's go see Dad,' she said and she loped away.

There was a new hedge against the garden's back wall – the yellow bricks only broke through in glimpses. David was busy watering plants in a little patch where the apple tree had stood. When he saw me, he squinted hard.

‘Dad, come and say hi!'

He poured a little water into his palms, rubbed them together vigorously, flicked the water off, and offered me his large hand. It was our first handshake. Before, he'd always taken my presence for granted. If anything, he'd pat me on the shoulder and hurry away. By the time I was old enough to form my own impression of the man, he'd become too busy to play cricket: there was his shop, his employees, tax returns, his restaurant, a problem with his suppliers. But, from the titbits Leona had divulged, I understood that his organic business had taken off, and that the family had finally come into a stable financial situation.

‘The garden's changed a lot,' I said.

He frowned.

‘Yes.' He went silent. ‘So you're having dinner with us tonight?'

I glanced at Leona. She was bending down by the tomato plants.

‘Yes.'

‘Good.' He turned to his daughter. ‘How long until dinner's ready?'

We went back to the kitchen. Looking for something to do, I set the table. At first, Leona grumbled it was her sister's duty, but then she helped me, and soon we were exchanging smiles over forks and knifes. Vicki came down just as we were finishing. ‘Typical,' Leona whispered. There was something in her statement. I had almost no memory of Vicki, but on seeing her, I recalled how she used to make me feel.

‘I remember you,' Vicki said just before dinner. ‘You had big pimples on your nose. They're gone now. How did you get rid of them?'

She sounded like she really wanted to know – perhaps out of mere curiosity, or perhaps so that she could deal with the clusters on her own temples. It took me a second to react.

It happened again over dinner, when Amanda left the table to fetch more wine, and Vicki asked me what I was doing. I told her about my summer course.

‘But why haven't you finished school?' she asked, just as her mother was walking back into the dining room.

‘Darling, the sort of questions you ask!' Amanda said.

‘Was I being insensitive?'