Justin went back to school.
Rumours as to the reason for his absence had spread and despite – or perhaps because of – their vagueness, attracted new interest. One or two classmates swore they’d seen him in a photograph of the Luton air crash, but the newspaper pictures were small and badly printed, and it was impossible to be sure. A few teachers eyed him nervously and he wondered what excuse his parents had come up with. Mental incompetence would at least have the benefit of being accurate.
He gave up any pretence of listening in class. He arrived when everyone else did, composed his features into an expression that just managed to look conscious and, while his teachers droned on about the Boer War and gravitational force, he thought about Agnes.
Occasionally he was singled out.
‘Hey, goat boy.’
‘Mental case.’
But the majority of his peers couldn’t be bothered.
Peter and Boy accompanied him nearly everywhere within school boundaries, and he was glad of the company. Peter had a kind of diplomatic immunity from harassment based on his intellect and his good nature, and Justin hoped some of it would rub off.
It was Peter who noticed that it was mostly the boys who saw Justin as a victim. The girls had gone uncharacteristically quiet.
Instead, they stared at him.
They stared at the black hollows around his eyes. They stared at his clothes, his indifferent way of wearing them, his haunted expression. They drifted towards him, towards his plane-crash glamour and air of tragic sexuality.
And so he developed a following. Girls hovered near him from the moment he arrived at school each morning until the moment he left.
Justin noticed them milling about in his general vicinity. He eyed them suspiciously, expecting abuse. Instead, their eyes slid over him, paused, then flicked back again, alarmed and attracted by how much he wasn’t like anyone else they knew.
They preened for him, rolled their hips, aimed newly grown breasts in his direction. They smouldered at him from flat, expressionless eyes.
He enjoyed the attention almost as much as he feared it.
‘Hey,’ said a leggy, world-weary fifteen-year-old.
Having no idea how to respond, he ignored her.
They interpreted his silence as mystery, imagined him tortured, passionate.
The fact of their interest aroused him. He had erections so often and so randomly that sexual desire became something to be endured, outlasted. He longed to give in to these girls, to the powerful certainty of their indifference. He longed to surrender to the intimacy of their cool, cruel hands.
And yet everything he knew about sex suggested it would only invite more humiliation. Another trap. It didn’t take much to imagine himself ensnared by lust. He was three-quarters there already.
Walking from one class to another he looked up and saw Shireen and Alex, arms linked, parading through the corridors with the absolute authority of Prime Minister and Lord High Chancellor.
We run this principality, their hip-rolling, sexually satisfied strut said.
As they passed him, Shireen stopped. Then she turned slowly, as to the lowliest serf in the filthiest hovel in the darkest of the Dark Ages, and with a single flash of her perfect almond-shaped eyes, and a flare of her exquisite nostrils, she annihilated him, turned her phasers on the space he occupied and – Zap! – made it empty.
He drifted, vaporized, to the library, found the gloomiest, most uninhabited corner and settled, a few random molecules with a wounded soul. He didn’t take up much space.
All around, people of average density came and went – walking near him, through him, hiding for a quick snog, swapping cigarettes or spliffs, sending illicit texts. One actually glanced at a book.
He noticed that one girl had followed him, was watching him.
Another fan, he thought bitterly, and drifted away through a wall of books before he had a chance to see that she had ventured, ever-so-slightly, to smile at him. It was a good smile, without subtext.
Sliding down into a tiny heap by a pile of daily broadsheets, he closed his dematerialized eyes and tried to console himself with his relatively privileged position in the world order. He knew from the headlines beside him that people were starving in countries with few natural resources. That earthquakes and freak storms killed thousands, while despots and fanatics turned their people into slaves, murdered children, tortured doctors.
Peter was right. Compared to them, he was the luckiest person on earth. Unloved and unlovable perhaps, but comfortable, well-fed, in command of his faculties. Not blind, not lame, not culturally handicapped in any way. Unless you counted the rubber circus ball on which he constantly scrambled for balance; the perpetually shifting, rolling ground beneath him.
He gathered himself up and left the library.
If only he could run away, cruise through the boundaries where neighbourhoods became outskirts and outskirts became farms; where pavements became verges became hedgerows and the ground beneath him turned soft and springy with leaf mould. He needed proof of the density of his bones and the elasticity of his muscles. He needed a regular driving pace to strengthen his spirit, to set up an orderly percussion in his brain.
He ran alone, faster, harder and longer; racing his libido to kingdom come and back again. He ran in order to wring the lust from his limbs, exhaust his brain of terror and desire. He ran to stop thinking of silky hair and silky thighs, of bleeding stumps and icy lips, of screams and moans and whispered threats. He ran so that exhaustion would permit him to sleep. He ran to escape the inexorably, terrifyingly natural path of his fate.
It didn’t work, of course, but at least he was too tired to stay awake all night whacking off.