Black Chalk (5 page)

Four years after putting down my last sketch, two years after giving away my old kit, I sat in a hospital bed, pencil in hand, looking at the old man in front of me. He was sitting on a chair to the right of his bed, wearing a white and blue hospital robe, his brown legs naked, white slippers hanging off his feet, his head drooping towards the nurses' station.

Immobile. My subject.

I started with the head, with the curly white hair, short and barely receding. I moved to the neck and shoulders. The shoulders were key: they stooped but their strength was obvious. Dejected yet able. Atrophy settling in. Pencil in hand, I could understand the man in an instant. I ignored his loose torso and worked on the arms, smudging his right forearm around his tattoo, darkening sinews and bulges. His hands came together into a single fist. My touch lightened as I moved towards his legs. I didn't need his feet to ground him. He was a picture of stability.

***

My brother looked back towards my mother. He stopped at the foot of my bed, his smile mirroring mine. A hand on his shoulder, words in his ear, she guided him closer.

‘I like to see the two of you spending time together. In times like this, all we've got is family.' She looked at her watch: ‘James, I have to make a few phone calls.'

We watched her leave and turned to each other. I reached for the controls of my bed and raised my torso so our eyes could be level. He seemed changed beyond the week we'd spent apart. He reminded me of the last time we'd come to blows, when I was twelve and he was eight. In Avoriaz, on the Thursday of a week-long ski trip, after three days of lessons, when I'd petitioned my parents to let me go and ski alone, on the slopes of course, and she'd told me that I could as long as I took my brother. I tried to negotiate a compromise – he wants to spend time with the two of you, not with me – but she didn't budge. James couldn't do a parallel turn, but he thought himself as good a skier as me. Whatever I went down, he could go down. Shutting his mouth, an obstinate look in his eyes, he pointed his skis right down the slope, and off he went, always trying to beat me to the bottom.

‘Did you see that lady?' I told him. ‘You made her fall. Look. Look!' I grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to look a hundred yards up the slope. Dazed from her fall, one ski ten yards back, she slipped back on the other every time she tried to get up. ‘Be careful!' I slapped him on the shoulder.

He pushed me back.

‘It wasn't me,' he said, and he jumped down the slope, his thin skis trembling under him.

I rushed after him, howling as I overtook him. If he was going to be that way, I'd show him.

‘We're not going up this chair this time. We're going up the big one. Are you scared?' I said.

He shook his head and followed me up to the top of the expert zone. There, looking at the first drop, he seemed a little hesitant.

‘So easy,' I said and I went first. My instructor had taken my group down moguls for the first time this year. After the first fifty yards, my legs were burning but I'd managed not to fall. I looked up. James was stopped halfway down the slope, looking longingly at the safety of the chair.

‘Come on!' I shouted. ‘Hurry up.'

Hesitantly, he launched himself across the slope, rising and dropping with every bump, somehow keeping his balance, until he got too close to the trees and he realised that he'd eat bark if he didn't stop. Instinctively, he pointed his skis uphill until he came to a halt. There, facing the wrong way, he started to slip backwards, down the hill, gathering speed, until the top of a mogul flipped him the way he should have been, and he was rising and dropping with every bump, again somehow keeping his balance, towards the other line of trees.

He turned once more, this time the right way, and then he skied past me, bolder and faster. Thirty yards later, he was flying over a mogul, and his skis had come off, and his head was full of snow. He'd learned his lesson, I thought, and I went down to help. Juggling his skis in my arms, one of my poles slipped out of my hands before I reached him. It slid down until it hit him, face down in the snow.

‘That'll teach you to be careful,' I said.

‘Shut up,' he said, his head rising from the snow.

‘Can't you be nice for once? I'm bringing you your skis. You could say thank you.'

He stood up, yanked the skis from my hands, and glared at me.

‘Well, come on,' I said, ‘put your skis on and give me my pole.'

‘No,' he said.

‘What! I just brought you your skis. The least you could do is give me back my pole.'

He turned away, hiding his face, and I knew it from experience: despite the day I'd spent nannying him, despite me picking up his skis for him, he'd decided that he had a right to be angry with me. My thoughts swam, and I shuffled up to push him down:

‘Give me my pole!'

He staggered up and pushed me.

‘I hate you.'

Pushing me, the little weasel! I couldn't believe it. I shoved and pushed until he was sprawled in the snow, lesson learned, and I had my pole back, and I left him alone with the moguls. When I reached the bottom of the black run, where it met the green slope ambling down to base, I pictured my mother, and I told myself I'd better wait for my brother. There, I plotted my revenge, looked at my watch, thought he'd hiked back up and chaired it down, that he'd broken something, until half an hour had passed, and he emerged over a crest, getting closer one slow mogul at a time.

When he came to the bottom of the run, he looked different. Up to that day, we'd fought often, twice a day it felt like sometimes, but we'd always made peace half an hour after he wanted to kill me. This time though, he kept his lips in a hard line for a whole day, and he looked distant for days afterwards. My mother sided with him as she always did – because he was younger, I was meant to be responsible, she said. But more than her reaction, it was his distance that stayed with me for years afterwards, that resurfaced and cooled me down whenever we were on the verge of a fight.

And it was this distance that I thought about when he stood by my hospital bed. He looked changed; it was in the way he held himself. But a week was too little time for change. The mere idea of it was ludicrous. If anyone had undergone change, it was meant to be me. I could hear experts say it: what I'd gone through, it was only natural. And yet, after days spent within myself, I could tell them that I was the same person I'd been a week before.

I decided to trust my first impression: he looked different. I was finding him awkward, almost shifty. I asked him about cricket training.

‘We've got a new coach. He's making me change my grip.'

‘Your grip was fine,' I said. ‘What's he showing you? The Vs?' I parted my thumbs and index fingers into a V and held out both hands with the Vs aligned.

‘Yeah.'

‘They always want people to do that, but Atherton holds his bat the way you do, and didn't that serve him well? And you scored runs last season. He should just accept your way works.'

‘He reckons it's better against the swinging ball.'

‘Pff, don't worry about that. If the ball's swinging, you need to be able to play late and straight. And that's the key for all batting, swing, spin, all of it. If you can do that already, don't go changing your grip.'

He nodded and looked down.

‘How's your bowling coming along?' I asked him.

‘Good.'

‘Is he changing anything there?'

‘He's making me work on my left arm. Use it more.'

‘That's good,' I said. ‘I'm sure he's a good coach.' I paused. ‘And how's school?'

‘Fine.'

‘Just fine?'

‘Well… Yeah, I guess.'

‘Okay. What are the other kids saying?'

‘They… Nothing. Everyone's just, you know?'

‘Yeah,' I said, because yeah was what I had to say. ‘And home?'

‘Fine,' he said, and he looked up, searching my face. ‘Mum's being annoying.' He gazed at me for a second before he started to speak very quickly: ‘Dad says it's because she's stressed, but she annoys him too. I know, I heard them fight.' He stopped and studied me again.

‘What about?' I asked.

‘You. Dad says Mum is spending too much time talking to everyone, and Mum says she has to, for you she says, but Dad thinks she should let the police do their job, and Mum says she doesn't want them to get it wrong.' He paused. ‘And Dad's not happy,' he finished, looking satisfied.

I nodded for a few moments while I pictured the scene. Then, as I started to grimace, I changed the topic:

‘Mum says Dad's taking care of you. What's he cooking? Eggs and beans on toast?'

James smiled.

***

My relationship with Anna ended strangely. I broke it off because it had come to that. Even though I still wanted to be with her, I had to bow to the inevitable.

It was a summer romance, strung through parties and gatherings, at first when we were drunk and high, strings weaving away from the public eye, with stolen moments in smaller outings, and then with just us two, alone and together. I approached her full of confidence. A month earlier, I'd had sex for the first time, at a friend of a friend's party in Oxford, and ever since, I'd eyed every woman with a newfound understanding: years of
Playboy
, pictures downloaded over dial-up, it suddenly made so much sense. When Anna started talking to me, my thoughts went beyond the mirage of my cock in her pussy. I wanted to put my nose in her navel, to count how many fingers I could put around her thigh.

She was coming out of an eight-month relationship with a nineteen-year-old boy – an aspiring plumber who was at a technical college on the outskirts of Oxford. After each of our first two booze-fuelled make-out sessions, I tried calling her, emailing her, all in vain. By the time of the party on Old Road, when thirty of us invaded the park that straddled the top of the hill, I'd had enough. Jeffrey agreed – she was acting like a spoiled brat. To avoid her, I shifted from one group to another until long after the sun had set, and we were all drifting into drunkenness.

‘So,' she said, standing above me, ‘how are you today?' She pushed my bag aside and sat next to me. Her arm accidentally touched my thigh, and I asked myself why I hadn't sought her out earlier. It brushed my thigh again, and it stayed there, and I felt happy.

Late one night, we looked back on our beginnings, and decided we'd started being a couple after our second drunken full night. Unlike the night up Old Road, we'd spent the morning together, as couples ought to do. It was as sensible a guess of a starting date as we could come up with.

Part of me, the romantic part, wanted her to say the relationship had started earlier, in our GCSE history class, when I'd spent all my spare time turning back and talking to her. But when I mentioned those months, she told me she'd been in love with Jeffrey then, much like half the girls of my class. She said it like she was sharing an old joke: all the girls had been in love with him then, and now they all wondered why.

Over a year later, we were safely out of Jeffrey's shadow and together. And we went on bike rides, and we watched movies, and she came to mine, and I went to hers. I liked to think of her, to call her, to talk about her – in all, love made me rather content. And yet, it was never an intense relationship. It never felt like it had to be. When school resumed, we spent most of our time with each other in and around class, perhaps meeting out of school once a week. I didn't own a mobile phone at the time; there were no late night calls, no texting flurries.

It was emails that brought it down. I'd gone to Cornwall with my family for the first week of the holidays, to visit my father's parents, as we'd done for many years. There was no internet there, and my grandfather had no intention to install it, even a dial-up modem. For six days then, I read novels into the afternoons, went for short walks in the countryside, and came back to Grandma's mulled wine.

Back in Hornsbury, I didn't feel the need to check my emails until the second morning after my return. When I opened my inbox, I found five emails from Anna. I started with the most recent one, in which she asked me to ignore her earlier emails, hoped I'd had a great time with my grandparents, and told me not to break up with her. Puzzled, I went back through the earlier messages. I don't think I ever read the third and fourth in their entirety. It was too much, the outpour. She was asking me to stay with her, and she was repeating it, and I was reading it again and again, and I was no longer paying attention, and I was thinking of us broken up. I closed the browser, left my desk and went for a walk. And I went to bed with my sword and sorcerer book, finishing it the next morning. Then I watched a movie, called Jeffrey and talked about nothing in particular. It was the next day I called her: our conversation didn't flow. We met in a park – I had no plan in mind, but when I saw her, it was there, in her already wide eyes, in the head she didn't dare raise, in the way she flinched when I asked her how she was. With a misplaced sort of sympathy, I understood that, to her, the relationship was already dead. Much like I'd accepted her hand on my thigh, I accepted her expression then.

‘It's a pity,' I told her, and she seemed relieved. Everything we said after that took the break-up as a given, and I felt like we'd done the right thing.

It didn't have to make sense.

My days split between video games and a series of novels, the holidays dragged on. When school resumed, I was expecting a return to normal, if not in our intimacy, at least in our preceding friendship. Instead, she ignored me in the halls. She organised gatherings with my friends without inviting me. She went as far as to install her friend Laura in my old physics seat. When I challenged her over it, she looked away, pointing me towards Laura. Telling me I could take her seat, Laura's mannerisms mimicked Anna's in their disdain.