Tideline (7 page)

I find the mouth organ in its slim red box. Running my fingers over the holes Seb’s breath passed through, I feel a deep satisfaction at the thought of Jez’s doing the same.

I take the mouth organ up to Jez on a tray with some warm soup and a roll, and a big jug of iced water. I place it on the floor outside the door while I turn the key. As I step into the music
room, something knocks into me from the right, the impact forcing me sideways against the bookshelf, leaving the door swinging open. I grasp the shelves, trying to steady myself, but am unable to
get a purchase on the books which slither away. I stagger and fall and find myself on the floor, the door gaping.

‘Jez, no, please.’

He’s disappeared through the doorway before I can get into a sitting position.

‘I’ve brought the mouth organ for you! Wait for me!’

My voice sounds pathetic even to myself, as I struggle amongst the books that have tumbled all about me, feeling the world draining of colour, dismay filling my head, my heart.

‘Please, please, I’ll do anything. Don’t go.’

Then there’s a crash, the sound of glass breaking, and something tumbling down the steep stairs followed by a howl. At last I manage to right myself, and, pushing the books aside, lurch
for the door.

Jez sprawls across the top of the stairs. There’s a mess of water and broken glass all over the landing. He twists around and stares up at me as I move towards him. It’s the look on
his face that upsets me more than anything.

Sheer terror.

He shuffles away from me, clutching his right ankle in one hand. In the other I see he’s picked up the soup bowl and is holding it above his head, as if he is taking aim, is about to hurl
it at me. I make a grab for his wrist, and he lets the bowl fly but it misses me and shatters on the door jamb.

After a few seconds’ silence I go and squat in front of him, gazing at him with all the loving kindness I can express.

‘Jez, you’ve hurt yourself. You must let me help you.’

‘I want to go home.’ He shrinks back, whimpering.

‘You will go home. But you need to let me take a look at your ankle. I’ve got some gel in the bathroom and a bandage. Let’s just get it sorted, and we can take it from
there.’

‘It’s fucking agony.’

I can see he’s trying hard to be brave. I tell him he needs to put his foot up on a cushion, that it’d be better for him to go back to the bed.

‘Jez. Come on. Let me take a look.’

He tries to get up, winces again.

‘Jez,’ I say, trying to make eye contact with him. ‘There was no need for that. I was bringing you the things you asked for. I only want to keep you safe, to make you
happy.’

‘I don’t like it,’ he says. ‘I don’t like being locked up in there.’ His face contorts in pain or maybe, though I hate to think it, in fear.

‘Well you’re not going anywhere in this state. You’ll have to let me sort you out.’

He lets me help him up and limps back to the music room, recognizing after all that he really has no choice.

When he’s settled on the bed, I lift the leg of his jeans. His ankle is swelling and turning a nasty colour. There’s no break that I can detect, but my guess is he’s sprained
it badly.

I lock the door and go down for the first-aid box and some ibuprofen for the pain. I’m trembling as I gather the things together. I fill another bowl with soup, make up his lunch again,
and take up the new tray, kicking aside fragments of broken jug and bowl on the stairs to clear up later. I’m careful to sidle in the door, all my senses alert. But this time he’s
acquiescent, in too much pain, or perhaps feeling too ashamed, to try anything silly again. He lets me lift his foot, remove his sock, apply the soothing gel to the swelling. I smooth it on, taking
my time, being as gentle as I can. I take the bandage and wind it softly, softly, around his ankle, until it is swaddled in white cloth.

‘Is that better?’ I ask.

He sighs, lies back, and nods. He drinks a little water with the painkillers. We don’t speak.

I’m still shaking as I lock the door and go downstairs. I don’t like what happened, it shows me that Jez doesn’t trust me yet, after all. In the kitchen, I lean on the
windowsill for a while. Stare out at the full river, trying to let its gentle undulations soothe me. But my chest heaves and I feel a sob rise into my throat.

It’s some time before my weeping subsides. I wipe my eyes, then wrap myself up in my coat and head out of the door.

There’s still a spring tide and though it is ebbing now, the water has come over the footpath in places. Tourists tiptoe along beside the railings of the university,
trying not to get their feet wet. It seems astonishing to me that they can chatter and laugh together as if nothing has happened, while I have been through an emotional ordeal that leaves me weak
and trembling.

In spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, I want to make sure there is a nourishing meal for Jez this evening.

I get to the market and fill my basket quickly with focaccia, cheeses, and some bits and pieces from the Italian and Greek stalls, then hurry back along the river. The sun is very low in the sky
behind me. My shadow stretches east from the alley, where my feet tread the dark path, almost as far as the coaling pier where my head brushes the barbed wire at the top of the wall. I have become
a giant.

I decide to walk for a little longer, beyond the River House, as lights flicker on around the O2, letting the smell of the river as the tide retreats rinse my thoughts away, before the gathering
darkness drives me back to the door in the wall.

Sonia

By the time I get back, the light outside’s completely gone. I take care to look in through the high windows before opening Jez’s door. He’s sitting on the
bed, blowing at the mouth organ, his bad foot propped up on the cushion, so I open the door and slide in, locking it behind me and pushing the key deep into my trouser pocket. I’m prepared
for tears or sulks or even anger, so I’m taken aback when he speaks.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says the minute he sees me. ‘About the way you’re taking care of me. About locking the door, and that you’re Helen’s friend and
all that. I think it’s something you’re planning between you for my birthday on Wednesday.’

He looks at me with a triumphant half smile on his lips and I see that he’s expecting me not to let on. That he assumes I am under oath to Helen not to tell him. So I just give a little
knowing smile back. He shrugs, grins. ‘I won’t tell,’ he says.

I look at him. I don’t want to lie to you, I think. But when you came to me at that time on a February afternoon as the light was dying, as if it were meant, you made me feel a strange
calm deep down in my soul that has been lost to me for so long I barely remember it existed. I need to keep you here, safe in the music room and I cannot let you go just yet.

I stop. Look up, expecting a response from Jez, and realize that after all I have not voiced any of this, though the thoughts were as lucid as if I’d spoken them.

I put his meal on the table by his bed. It’s a lovely supper, though the juice is laced with more of my mother’s pills. I don’t feel any compunction about this, I know the
drugs will help Jez relax, to sleep.

‘Let’s get you better,’ I say quietly. ‘Look, I’m lending you my laptop. What film would you like to watch?’

When he’s settled, satisfied with the explanation he’s come up with, and drowsy with the pills, I go down to lie on my own bed. Overcome with exhaustion, I listen to the sounds
outside.

There’s the harsh whoop of a police launch bounding east along the river, the drone of a plane coming in to City Airport. The shriek of a car alarm out on the road. How I miss the soft,
guttural blasts of the foghorns. You used to hear them on winters’ nights out there, long and low, one answering another, call and response, as if those enormous ships were playing together.
The house felt safe when I heard that sound. A haven away from the storms and the ravings of the world down below.

The thought of the foghorns conjures a memory. I’m not sure, as this scene comes back to me, whether it happened once, or many times. What I do know is the feeling. The sensation of the
silk around my wrists and ankles, accompanied by the bass sound of the foghorns on the river, vibrating through the room, through the springs of the old iron bed.

My mother originally used the music room as a dressing room. It’s why it has its own en suite with a shower and a bidet (very chic in the seventies when it was installed). In those days
the room was full of coat racks, hat boxes and scarves, and there was a cupboard full of my mother’s dresses, coats and fur wraps.

That night, my parents were out. I must have been fourteen. Seb was with me. He and I stood on chairs staring out of the high windows, watching ships, lit up in the dark, move lugubriously
upriver towards Tower Bridge. The light was dying, there was a drab mist. Occasionally a foghorn would boom from the river, long, deep and mournful. A fire was alight in the wood burner. At some
point I must have annoyed Seb. I don’t remember what I said but I do remember the Chinese burn he gave me, taking my forearm between his hands, twisting the skin until I cried out at the
sweetness of the pain. He forced my arm around my back, dragged me to him, and stuck his tongue in my mouth. After a while he pushed me down on to the bed kept in there for rare guests. He told me
to take off my clothes. I obeyed him. I always obeyed Seb eventually even if I made a show of protesting before doing so. While I peeled off my jeans and struggled with the buttons of my
cheesecloth top, he rummaged about in one of the hat boxes and unearthed a pile of silk scarves.

‘All of them,’ he said. ‘Everything off, come on.’

Taking a wrist in turn he tied my hands above my head to the bedstead. Then he fastened scarves around my ankles and pulled them tight around the frame. I struggled and swore at him and he
laughed and said I’d asked for it.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, making for the door.

‘It’s cold. You can’t leave me like this.’ At this point I didn’t believe he really would. I was enjoying the game.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Got to go.’

‘What’ll I do if they come back? Untie me!’

He shrugged.

‘Seb!’

He went to the door. Turned back. Grinned.

‘Have a good night!’ he said. Then he turned the handle, went out, shut the door behind him. I could hear his feet on the steep wooden stairs that led down to the main floor below. I
struggled. Began to panic. Suppose Seb walked out of the house and left me like this all night? What if my parents came in and my mother wanted to shower and change? I tried to hear what he was
doing downstairs. There was a sound from the bottom floor – the slam of the door on to the courtyard.

Footsteps on the stairs. I struggled to sit up. Strained to work out whose they were. When the door opened I braced myself, grappling for words of explanation.

‘What are you doing naked on the bed like that?’ Seb asked.

‘You git!’ I hissed. ‘You bastard. Let me go.’

‘What did you say? I didn’t hear!’

‘Seb, it’s not funny any more. I was scared.’

‘You want me to let you go?’

‘Yes, please, please.’

He leant over me then and I struggled, writhed, reached up and bit him hard on the neck.

‘Ouch. Vicious!’ he said, laughing, pushing my face back with his hand. Then he pushed his jeans down, unleashed my ankles and lay on top of me.

I turn over. I can’t stop thinking of Jez above me, drugged again and asleep on the old iron bed. I can’t relax. I remember the silk scarves in my wardrobe.

I get out of bed, pull on my kimono, snatch a bundle of silk and go up to the music room.

I take the opportunity to examine him properly. I pull back the duvet. He’s half undressed himself, is wearing a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. He must have fallen asleep as he pulled his
hoodie off, he’s still got one arm in the sleeve. I watch the way his Adam’s apple moves up and down as he breathes, the rise and fall of his ribcage. His navel is not even sunken, but
lies in a perfect shallow dip amongst his stomach muscles, three little cushions between two tiny creases. His boxers hang so loose around his narrow pelvis, legs long and smooth and muscular as a
horse’s. I’d like to freeze him the way Seb is frozen at this very age in my memory.

Instead, I take the first scarf and tie it firmly round his right wrist. Then I wrap it tight around the iron bedpost, the way Seb wrapped mine. I know the exact moves, the exact knots to make
him secure. I do the same with his left hand and then his good foot. When he’s fully bound, I lie on the bed next to him, stretch my hand across his pelvis, rest it on his hip bone. I feel
the warm skin under my palm.

He doesn’t stir. I wriggle down the bed, and let myself kiss his stomach. I can’t help it. It’s perfect: the colour, the contours, the texture. His skin is taut, it springs
back into place if you pinch it. I taste salt, and something briney, elemental. Even close up it’s flawless. I look carefully at the crystalline surface, examine it to see if I can find a
blemish. None. I lap at it, as if it were a bowl of thick hot chocolate, letting myself take advantage of the moment, while he sleeps peacefully, his breath warm and regular above my head.

The silence is broken by the ridiculous high-pitched ring of the phone downstairs. I feel things slide, go a bit out of focus. See myself as if from above, squatting here over this boy’s
body, my hair trailing over his hip bones. Shocked by this image, I leave Jez alone, still tied to the bed.

The stairway is dark after the subdued light from the moon in his room. I creep down, holding onto the bannister, shivering a little. I stand in the living room and listen. The phone continues
to ring. I’m not going to answer it. I’m afraid I’ll betray myself, in my heightened state. The machine clicks on to voicemail. After the beep comes the disembodied voice of a
grown woman. The girl I brought into the world sounds like someone I barely know.