Black Chalk (29 page)

It made her vulnerable, to show so much so quickly. My mother was nodding, thoughts lengthening her long face. I imagined her in her college office: Leona, her student, formulating answers on the spot, and my mother, the tutor, nudging Leona closer to the right answer with every question.

‘That's important. What do you want to do with it?'

‘I'm not sure yet.' Leona's voice went small with the possibilities. ‘I was thinking of the Foreign Office. But I'd also like to live in France for a few years. Maybe I can do both.' And then her voice perked up: ‘But I'll get an idea when the time comes.'

‘That's wise,' my mother said. ‘It's good to know your options, but it's even more important to know that things won't stay the way they are today.'

Leona, in her own way, was passing my mother's test. Sitting back, eating more than the two of them combined, I watched my mother's questions run out and Leona's start – career choices, life in academia, women in science, she was probing into my mother's secret world, the one she'd kept hidden behind stacks of dry papers and the decorum of obligations.

‘Are you interested in academia?'

‘I like teaching,' Leona answered.

‘If you like teaching, become a teacher. To be a professor, you have to like research.'

‘Ah, yes.' Leona stopped to think for a moment. ‘But you have students, you said, in your lab.'

‘That's in the sciences,' my mother started, and she was telling Leona about the humanities and the loneliness of theses, the toil of publishing, the importance of tagging on to a school of thought, and Leona was agreeing, commenting, exploring.

It was five to two and my mother wouldn't let Leona help her clean up.

‘You go back to work, I'll tidy up. It's nothing, I said. Go! Nate will help me, won't you, Nate?'

I walked Leona out, all the way to her bike, sensing her excitement. She grabbed the bike's handle and let it go just as quickly.

‘Oh, Nathan, thank you.' She looked over at the house, as if to judge whether her voice would carry. ‘After all I heard, I thought she was amazing, Nathan…' she started, and she went thoughtful:

‘She looks like an important woman,' she finally said.

Despite myself, I breathed in, proud. My mother's calmness, the evenness in her voice, yes, Leona was right. A soothing breeze carried a leaf into the spokes of Leona's front wheel.

‘You know,' Leona said, ‘I wish Mum had been a bit more demanding when we were little. Like with the piano. I just wish I'd stuck to it.'

I chuckled: ‘I wish my mother had left me alone.'

Leona looked at me seriously:

‘What do you mean?' she said.

‘I don't know, I was just joking.'

Reproach marred the remnants of her joy.

‘It must have been hard for her,' she said. ‘You know. Your
brother was getting high and you were overseas, don't you think?'

‘Yeah.' I grabbed her hips and brought her to me until all I could see was the line of her neck. In the moment it took to make her think about something else, I knew that I ought to give her all that she asked for.

Back inside, my mother was wiping the table. The sink was clean, the dishwasher was purring, the salt and pepper shakers were back on their shelves.

‘Let me do that, Mum.'

She pushed a cluster of breadcrumbs into the hollow of her hand, and, leaving the sponge on the table so I could feel like I'd contributed, she opened the kitchen window to feed her summer birds.

‘She's a nice girl,' she said.

I wiped the table waiting for the rest. She washed her hands.

‘That's all?' I said.

She dried her hands, and hung the tea towel on the oven handle.

‘Lovely girl. Such a sweet smile… Yes, she is nice. And it looks like she's got her head on her shoulders. When a girl's as pretty as that, I don't imagine that's something you think about. But believe me, Nate, that's the most important thing.' She closed her eyes and frowned. ‘Can't do anything about her family.' Her face smoothening out, she gave me a sad smile. ‘I'm happy for you.'

It was buried in the words, but I could hear the same warning that Amanda had given me twice. Coming from both of them, it was easier to dismiss – it was a mother's protective instinct, not a real insight into Leona's character. My doubts, our mothers' doubts, it wasn't my job to put them above Leona's wishes.

***

I laid the last of my fears aside on a day that had all that I loved her for. I'd waited for her on a bench in Christchurch Meadow. For the first time that summer, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Between me and the water, there was the path, its stream of amblers, and a dozen little ducklings circling their mother. Then there was the sun glittering on patches of the river, and a cry of ‘Catch it!' coming from the Queens sports ground beyond the water.

I didn't need to look to know that it was her sitting next to me. She put her hand in mine.

‘It's been three months,' she said, a gentle glee in her voice.

I smiled.

‘One more month and it's nos quatre mois,' she said.

‘We should celebrate.' I looked at her.

‘No, that's just for nos quatre mois.' She smiled at the river.

‘We have to do something,' I said, but I liked where we were.

We watched a punt struggling upriver, a young man in shorts and a boat hat dropping his pole to the deep bottom, bending to his knees to push the punt a few yards, while two girls sat in the back, nibbling on jammed-up scones.

‘Let's go punting,' I said.

We stood up.

‘Can you come up with a poem?' I asked her. ‘A punting poem?'

We spent the rest of the afternoon between our punt and the banks of the Cherwell. An afternoon in the sun, my fingers stroking her forearms, my hand sliding over the fabric of her dress, and above all, her perpetual smile – not the one she had in pictures, but the one she had in bed, when her mouth approached mine, when her upper lip lifted above her gum, when her teeth looked small, her eyes became long, and her pupils shone.

I took a picture of her, at the back of the punt, dripping pole sliding between her fingers, her eyes on the river ahead. And, despite the focus on her face, she couldn't hide the smile she'd had for me a second before.

Later, when clouds appeared and the sun quietened, we walked to the George Street cinema, turning into Cornmarket from the High Street. We pushed our way through a Saturday crowd: teenagers in twos and tens, a busker singing ‘Hallelujah!' to the sky, couples drifting in and out of chain stores.

Halfway down, in between the two music outlets, my eyes passed over a man and a young girl. I looked at the man again. A large forehead, a ponderous walk, thick square glasses, and underneath these glasses, dark eyes darting left, darting right, over me, at me. They stopped for a second, his eyes in mine, and then they were looking at something ahead. For that second, I felt like I'd been thrown into a gigantic copper pot on a slow boil, filled to the brim with eight years of fears. I remembered when he'd come to my house to taunt me, and I remembered his challenge. Oh, I knew what he'd wanted to do: poke the folds of my brain with his dirty fingers, so that he could show everyone else how much tar I'd concealed.

I caught up to Leona. When we were in the cinema, sitting around a bucket of popcorn, she cocked her head and studied me:

‘Are you alright? You're a little pale.' She stroked my cheek with the back of her fingers.

‘Yeah, it's just…' I looked at her.

‘What? You can tell me.'

‘Just saw someone, that's all. In the street, I mean.'

‘Oh,' she said.

‘No, not an ex.'

‘Who?'

‘Just someone…'

She reached for some popcorn and turned to face the screen.

‘Don't take it like that,' I said.

‘I'm not. If you want to talk about it, I'm here.'

‘Leona,' I sighed, building up courage. ‘Andrew Hill, do you know who he is?'

She shook her head.

‘He was in charge of the investigation when… When I got shot. He was the one who came to ask me a lot of questions. It wasn't easy, that's all.'

She looped her arm in mine, kissed my shoulder, and rested her warm head against me.

‘Yeah, that must have been hard,' she said.

My eyes on the top of her head, I expected her nails to dig into my arms, but instead I watched her crown fall and rise slowly, steadily. A cuddle to thank me – I'd opened up. When the first preview ended, an action thriller full of testosterone and helicopters, she looked at me with a big smile:

‘Let's go see that! Do you want to see it?'

The movie flashed and banged, and I saw actors kiss and kill, but I didn't follow the story. My mind was all about the inspector, his challenge echoing within the confines of my skull. And I thought of Leona's easy reaction, I watched her enjoy the movie, as if I'd said nothing out of the ordinary. With a girl like that, I could say anything.

***

Three weeks ago, it started raining that soft Oxford rain. Never much more than a dampness in the air; clouds never fully open, never fully closed; the water table steadily rising. Most of the time, we pretended it wasn't there, our umbrella either in my pocket or in her bag. My clothes became wet and then they dried. It never took long. By Saturday, thirteen days ago to the day, the soles of my shoes squelched on the grass at the front of the house, and water seeped through the sides. It started raining harder, and there was standing water on the path to Iffley. The river swelled and rippled, its bottom following the current, its surface following the winds.

That evening, Leona came home with water dripping from her hair. I grabbed a towel and asked her why she hadn't used her umbrella. She said she didn't know.

I laid the towel over her head, covered her skull with my hands, and, in slow circles, I felt the masses of her hair through the cloth. She stood, her arms hanging limp, like a daughter with her father. ‘Don't stop,' she said. I kissed where I thought her forehead was. Then I dried her hair some more. And I kissed where I thought her nose was – it was her nose; I knew that bump, even through fluff and threads. Are you dry? I said. I don't know, she said. I put a hand under the towel, through her hair. Then I took my damp fingers to my lips, to my nose. You're not dry, I said. I rubbed harder, and she laughed. Your shirt is wet, I said. What are you going to do? she said. I'm afraid you'll have to take it off, I said.

I took the towel off her head and pulled her shirt up. For a second I held my breath: she stood with her hair ruffled and wet, her eyes closed, leaning back, and the skin of her stomach stretched warm and taut, swelling with her slow breaths, from the hem of her skirt to the frill of her crimson bra. Then she opened her eyes and she turned the lights off.

‘You're so dry, so warm,' she said. ‘That's not fair.'

She opened the bedroom door and a draught swept past our feet. The door slammed closed behind us. The only light in the room came from the moon through clouds, water, and night. I lay on my back, and I watched water rustle a new path down the window. We moved in a slow, purposeful way. I understood what she was doing when she rubbed her bra against my bare skin, and she understood me when I ran my teeth along her sides. We didn't come the first time. It didn't matter. She had Sunday and Monday off and it was raining.

‘I feel like I'm floating,' she said.

‘Yeah.'

We floated together, our bed carrying us above the rains.

‘What's the thing you feel worst about in your life?' she said.

‘My whole life?'

‘Yes.'

I studied her. She lay on her back, the sheet covering most of her legs: the one raised knee, the other foot brushing my calf. Her eyes were hazy with dreams. From the first pubic hairs to the hand softly tapping the window, she was naked, all mine.

‘What about you?' I asked.

‘Me? Let me think about it…' She started singing in that soothing way of hers; in her own language, to her own melody. She'd only sung that way once before, when our natural distance had crumbled into a pretty heap. Afterwards, while she'd been getting ready for work, I'd replayed her voice and the beauty of her flat notes in my head.

‘Vicki,' she said. ‘The way I am with her. I can't help it, I try, but sometimes I'm a bitch to her…'

‘Bitch how?'

‘Well, I don't know how to explain it. When she doesn't do something my mother asks her to do, like watering the herb garden.' Her words focused in a gentle, forgiving way. ‘That's her job, you know, but she forgets, or she pretends to forget, and then my father comes home, and it's eleven at night, but he's not going to bed, no, he's watering the plants instead. She doesn't mean any harm, she really doesn't. It's just the way she is. And when my mother asks her, and she doesn't even turn her music down to listen, then I shouldn't, but I do. I get really upset, like she was doing something to me, personally. And I shouldn't, but I did it the other day. I went to her room and… And I asked her what was wrong with her, why she didn't just get it like others do.'

She went quiet.

‘That's not so bad.'

‘I said it in a really mean way. Like I was just repeating what everyone else says. And you know, the worst is, people do say that. She's never quite with it. She doesn't have many friends, and I know she finds it hard.'

I grimaced as I thought of how much I disliked Vicki.

‘Sometimes, it's good to be tough.'

‘Yeah, but she's… fragile. All of last year, she wasn't eating properly. Scary how thin she was! But now that that's over, she doesn't need me bringing her down.'

‘Oh,' I said, and I glanced at her, looking for a counterweight to the conversation's flow. But nothing had moved except for her eyes. They were looking at her fingers against the window.