51
“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody”
—Mark Twain
He didn’t want to be there. In fact, if he really thought about it, he didn’t want to be anywhere, not feeling how he did. He wanted to be gone, to be other, to feel something real and hard and true. To feel the thing that was out of his reach, sharp-edged and glittering. Sometimes he’d almost felt it, lurking hidden in the crush of bone or the acrid singe of fur, just out of his reach.
He’d tried cutting himself to see if it would release the nameless something he felt inside. It didn’t help. Once he’d bitten his own arm so hard he’d drawn blood. He’d tasted the iron and the salt of himself but nothing brought the release he craved.
Sometimes the way he felt and the thoughts that came unbidden into his mind frightened him but there was nothing he could do; it had always been so.
Once he’d craved to be like them, his parents and his sister. Instead he was always on the outside watching, observing, trying to make sense of what they were and what they felt. And he knew that they knew or at least sensed his otherness. Now they circled the wagons and kept him at bay, the coyote in their midst.
He’d heard his mother that morning, her tone all hushed and urgent.
“Please take him with you Richard, I can’t deal with him this morning. You don’t know what it’s like when you’re not here, he watches me. I know it sounds silly, but he unnerves me so.”
He’d pictured her face, all pinched and nervous, her fingers anxiously twisting a strand of her white-blonde hair.
His father had sighed, his voice heavy with defeat. “Eleanor, I’m sorry but you’re being ridiculous. I know he can be a bit, oh I don’t know, intense sometimes but it’s just his age. He’s seventeen going on eighteen, boys are all a bit odd at that age. You make too much of it.”
So that’s how they saw him, an oddity, some kind of weirdo.
“Please Richard, just for today. I’ve got to go out at ten anyway, I’ve got that hospital appointment, remember?”
He’d heard the whine in her voice. Plaintive, on the point of begging.
“You’ll only be a few hours. He can sit in the library and do some revision. God knows he needs to do more than he’s doing at the moment if he wants to be sure of a place. If he stays here while I’m out he’ll only flop about in his room all day listening to music.”
A place, the place, his place, always going on about the fucking place. He didn’t want to go to King’s anyway. He didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. Why did they all think he wanted to be like them? He was nothing like them, he was a changeling and so much for the better.
As usual she’d got her way. He’d been sent off with his father with a can of Coke and a bag of crisps like some fucking kid. He was seventeen not seven and there was no way he was spending his morning in the library of some fucking girls’ school while his father got off on their little white teeth.
The thought of their moist little mouths, all pink and visceral, almost made him hard for a moment but that didn’t work anymore. It didn’t provide the release he needed. It made him think of his mother and the sounds that she made in the night. It left him feeling dirty and squirming inside. She’d always made him feel odd. When he was little she’d cuddle him and stroke his hair, when all he wanted was for her to leave him alone. Her touching him made him feel strange and wrong somehow. Sometimes he wanted to hurt her. He didn’t know why but he did and sometimes he thought she sensed it too.
Today he’d persuaded his father to drop him off in the village, promising he’d walk back to the school afterward and wait in the car. He’d happily sit there and look through his books. He was not going to the library, no way. His father had relented and given him the keys to the Jag, “under no account are you to drive it,” and they now sat heavy with promise in his pocket. His father always gave in; he seeped weakness like pus.
The village had been shit, so now he was sitting on the grass by the playing fields listening to his Walkman. The Smiths’ Meat is Murder, the best-ever album in the universe, totally mega.
His father had parked miles away from the school. You couldn’t even see the buildings from there, hidden beyond the pitches and the stand of trees. Probably wanted it where no one would touch it, the “Jaguar XJ6 X-300, air-conditioning and tinted power windows,” his father’s pride and joy. A scratch or a dent and he’d probably slit his wrists. Now there was a thought.
A red admiral settled on the grass nearby and he cupped it with his hand, feeling the flutter of its wings against his palm. He pressed his hand into the ground until the movement stopped, crushing the butterfly into the soil. The iridescent dust of its wings shimmered like gold in the sunlight and he ran his tongue across the glimmer on his thumb. God he was bored; existence was boring and fleeting and pointless. He lay back and looked up at the sky, staring into the bleached infinity until his eyes ached with the need to focus.
He sat up and saw a girl had appeared by the pavilion. She was dark haired and elfin, aimlessly scuffing her shoes in the dirt. She looked about as bored as he was. He sat very still and watched her. She seemed to be looking for something in the grass.
Isabel had seen the boy but she pretended not to. She kept her head down, watching him from under the length of her lashes; watching him watching her. In her innocence she saw only that he was beautiful so missed his air of menace and mistook the predatory nature of his gaze.
God, she so wished Maria was there. There were never boys at the school, certainly not ones like that. This was like totally weird. She scuffed around in the grass looking for her bracelet, keeping one eye on the boy. He really was cool-looking, with dark jeans, a tight white T-shirt and a Walkman plugged into his ears. His black leather jacket was rolled up on the grass where he’d been using it as a pillow. She wondered if he would speak to her and felt a shiver of excitement. She moved a bit nearer to him, trying to appear as though she hadn’t seen him yet.
He slowly stood up, unfolding his long legs, and strolled toward her. Oh my God, he was probably the most gorgeous boy she’d ever seen. He was like someone out of a magazine.
He leaned against the side of the school pavilion, arms folded, and watched her for a while. He inspected her from head to toe, noting her dark hair loosely wound in a clip, the too-short skirt and the tie carelessly knotted over an open neck. He watched her bend to pick something up from the grass and let his eyes linger on the dark V shadowing the top of her bare thighs. A word hissed into his mind, “gusset,”and he liked the dirty feel of it. He felt the thrill of something slowly uncoiling inside him.
Eventually he spoke, “Hey there, what you looking for?”
She looked directly into his eyes, gray meeting brown. “Hi,” she said.
He had the most incredible eyes, the darkest brown so that the black of the pupils bled into the irises. They were discs of fathomless obsidian that could see right into her. She felt the color blooming up her neck.
“Just looking for a bracelet I lost, that’s all. Thought I’d found it but I haven’t.”
“You at the school or what?”
He knew he was asking the bleeding obvious but just wanted a way to talk to her. Alleviate his boredom for a while and maybe have a bit of fun with her.
“Yeah, ’course, otherwise I wouldn’t be wearing this would I,” she said, indicating her uniform with a gesture of contempt.
He liked her attitude. She made him want to rise to the challenge. Of quite what he wasn’t sure but she interested him.
“Cool. I’m away at St. Bart’s doing my As but I hate it. It’s like total shit and I can’t wait to get out. What’s it like being here?”
“S’alright I suppose. Can be dead boring sometimes though. We have to board and it’s okay if you’re sharing with someone cool, like me with my mate Maria, but not if you get put with one of the saddos. And if you end up getting stuck here all summer like I’m going to be, then it really sucks.”
Maria was never going to believe this. Isabel tried to take in every detail to tell her friend. He was tall and lean with dark hair flopping forward in his eyes, and he gave off an edgy electric energy.
“Anyway,” she said, “what’re you doing here?”
He realized from the way she spoke that she was younger than him, fifteen at most. He switched his tone to match hers, the better to win her over. He ignored her question. He was hardly going to tell her he was there waiting for daddy like some baby.
“God, that really sucks. Why can’t you go home for the summer?”
“My parents are in America and they don’t want me with them. I wanted to go but there was no way they were taking me. You ever been there?”
“Yeah, once when we were kids,” he said, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “Smoke?”
“Wow, that’s so cool, what was it like?”
She casually took a cigarette from his hand. No big deal, she and Maria smoked all the time.
He bent forward to light her, his dark head almost touching hers, his eyes carefully watching.
“Loads better than here, we went to Disney World and did all that kids’ shit but went to Miami as well and down on the Keys. That was dead cool. Did scuba diving, saw where Hemingway hung out and everything. I didn’t ever want to come home.”
They flopped down on the grass together, her head resting on his jacket.
“God, I’d die to go there. My Dad’s got shed loads of money and everything but I never get to go anywhere. They’re always too busy. They let me come to Boston once on a business trip. That was cool but mostly they leave me here and do their own shit.”
She leaned back, amazed at her own daring. She’d wished for something to happen, something out of the ordinary to break up the dull monotony of the summer. Perhaps he was it.
“What’s that on your T-shirt?” she asked, more to prolong the moment than anything else. She stretched out a hand as though to touch him but bottled it at the last moment.
“What, you mean you’ve never heard of The Smiths? Best band ever. They were, like, so nihilistic. They really got it.”
She laughed up at him. “But they’re ancient, even my dad likes them.”
Her teasing annoyed him but he didn’t let it show, instead he thrust his chest toward her to show her his T-shirt, daring her to touch him.
“It’s one of their album covers, the title’s on his helmet, Meat is Murder and anyway, they’re not ancient,” he said, “they’re iconic. Morrissey’s had an album in the charts this year. Better than the shit you probably listen to.”
He nudged her, hard but disguised as playful. “Bet you love Take That and Boyzone. Here, listen to some real music.”
He leaned across and pushed one of the earbuds into her ear, his hand deliberately brushing the soft skin of her face. Probing the dusky velvet of her lobe. He smiled to himself as he registered her involuntary shiver.
They lay back together on the grass and listened to the crooning cadence of the lead singer’s voice as it echoed their private rebellions. There in the sun they talked of old bands and new. Of The Damned and The Style Council, of Oasis and Blur. He found himself oddly at peace, as though she could push the dark feelings aside for a while.
He turned to her. “We don’t even know each other’s name,” he said, “I’m Grant,” and he held out his hand.
“Hello Grant, I’m Isabel, Izzy Weir,” she replied, calmly placing her small hand in his.
“Tell you what Izzy Weir, let’s go for a drive. We can stop off at mine and I’ll put The Smiths on and we can watch TV or something.”
On the “or something” he raised his eyebrows at her, his eyes both hard and humorous.
“Come on, I’ve got the car, you’ll be back before anyone misses you.” He enticingly waggled the keys to the Jag and nudged her on the arm. “Come on, unless of course you’re scared.”
Isabel paused. This was all a bit too much. She’d never bunked off without Maria. Then again this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened every day. The thought of it frightened her a bit but after the briefest of hesitations she answered, “Yeah, shit why not.”
They didn’t know it then, but they stood on the sun-baked banks of the Rubicon and the crossing they were about to take would change both of their lives forever.