Life: An Exploded Diagram

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “What?” Clem asked thickly.

  Frankie groped under the coat and produced from its pocket a small flat bottle. She twisted the top off it.

  “Brandy,” she said. “For Dutch courage. Strictly speaking, Dutch courage should be gin, I suppose. Do you like brandy?”

  He was fixated on the little display of flesh between her knickers and the rucked-up edge of her sweater, and the two dimples above her bum.

  “I dunno. Never had any.”

  Frankie took a swig and inhaled through her nose while swallowing, like someone in pain. She held the bottle out toward him. He sat up and drank. His throat and then his chest caught fire, and he coughed, spluttering spit and spirit into the palm of his hand. She laughed and took the little bottle back.

  “Do you have any ciggies? I’d like one. The Condemned Woman Smoked a Last Cigarette sort of thing.”

  “Frankie . . .”

  “Please, Clem.”

  He crawled over to his jeans and fumbled the cigarettes and matches from the pocket. They lit up and smoked in silence for a while. Then she took another swig from the bottle and passed it to him, shuddering.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You must. You have to have the same as me.”

  “Why?”

  “You just do.”

  He drank, this time keeping the brandy down, and felt a shelf of heat form itself at his diaphragm. When he turned to her, she was smiling and serious. She threw her ciggie away and then plucked his from his fingers and threw it away also. Before he could get on top of her she rolled away, then back to him. Like a conjurer, she displayed something in her fingers that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. A little packet.

  “Ta-daa!” she said.

  Clem frowned at it. “What’s that?”

  “A johnny.” She bit her lip. “Just in case the end of the world doesn’t happen.”

  He lifted his gaze to her face. His mouth was hot and dry.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You didn’t get it from Griffin’s, did you?”

  “Lord, no. Are you nuts?”

  When he continued to goggle at her, she put the thing in his hand and lay back on the coat sacrificially, closing her eyes.

  “I pinched it from Daddy’s bedside cabinet, if you really must know.”

  She pulled him down onto her.

  “If you like, I’ll close my eyes when you’re ready to pop it on.”

  We were hopeless, of course. Inept, frantic, silent, shamefully quick. How could we not be?

  It’s one of life’s countless little cruelties that you never forget your first time. So instead of forgetting, we have to forgive ourselves, which is a far more difficult thing to do. I’ve never achieved it. But I guess that in my case there were special circumstances.

  Anyway, we managed it, Frankie and I. She helped me, showed me what to do. And my response was to suspect her: how come she knew?

  But what nearly ended it before it had begun, what almost deflated and unmanned me, was the grotesque fact that we were using one of Gerard Mortimer’s condoms. Even as her marvelous body gave way to me and let me in, I couldn’t help picturing her furious father’s moist mustache.

  “Dunt drive into the square,” Ruth said. “Park round the back of the church.”

  “I was going to,” George said.

  He was tense with the anticipation of shame. He parked the Land Rover on Vicarage Street and followed Ruth through the kissing gate into the churchyard. She hurried past the gravestones and the church porch and out into the square, where she stopped, speechless, and put a hand to her bosom.

  “Ruddy hell,” George said.

  All sides of the square were now lined with people. It was quiet but not silent. A murmuration of onlookers. A voice rising and falling but not pausing. Ruth recognized her almost unrecognizable mother among the circle of robed figures and almost fainted.

  “Oh, George,” she cried, and hid her flushed face against his shoulder.

  Win’s slumped old breasts and belly and buttocks were clearly discernible through the thin white cotton. Her cropped gray head was lifted, and she was smiling bitterly at the sky with her eyes closed. Her mouth was working silently.

  “Christ on a bike,” George said, and, as if in response, Police Constable Neville Newby cycled slowly into view.

  P.C. Newby was a large man who believed his physique represented the weight of the law and therefore ate to sustain it. His uniform was not quite correctly buttoned, and he had the look of a man whose lengthy Sunday breakfast had been rudely interrupted. He dismounted, laboriously, outside Cubitt and Lark’s and propped his bicycle against a lamppost. He assessed the situation while removing his bicycle clips, then advanced upon the Brethren, who paid him no attention. He surveyed the circle slowly, nodding to announce that he recognized each of its members. He came full circle back to Hoseason.

  “Enoch,” he said loudly. “Enoch, what in God’s name do yer think yer doin?”

  Hoseason continued to read from the book.

  “‘And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’”

  “This wunt do at all, Enoch. Come along, man. I dunt want to hev to arrest you all.”

  “‘And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth; and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’”

  “Dunt you push yer luck, Enoch,” Newby barked, adjusting his helmet, “and dunt call me a scorpion. You take yer people away nice and decent and get yer clothes back on, and I wunt hev to call Norwich for a van to take yer all away. ’Cos I can do that, you know.”

  “‘And it was said unto them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth . . .’”

  Newby hissed his impatience and turned to Enoch’s brother.

  “Amos, what in hell is all this about?”

  “The hour is at hand, Neville.”

  “Don’t you bleddy Neville me,” Newby said fiercely. “Thas Constable Newby to you, Amos.”

  “All office is cleansed away,” Amos said beatifically.

  “What?”

  Amos said (while his brother announced, “‘And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared for war’”), “We’re doing nothun illegal. Is it against the law to declare our love of the Lord? Or to surrender ourself to his unimaginable mercy? Strip off the trappuns of earthly power, Neville Newby. Take off thy helmut and stand with us. Even at this moment it ent too late.”

  By now the constable was so hot with anger that it seemed his abundant nostril hair might spontaneously ignite.

  “You ent right in the head.” He glared around the circle of saints. “None of yer is.”

  “‘And they had breastplates,’” Enoch declared, his voice rising, “‘as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses rushing to war.’”

  “I’ll give yer bleddy chariots,” Newby declared. “I’m off to phone Norwich. If yer still here when they come, be that on yer own head.”

  He strode back to his bicycle, but didn’t risk the ungainly act of mounting it in the full gaze of the public. Instead, he marched it back through the square, as if it were a young vandal he’d nabbed by the collar. At the church gates, he caught sight of Ruth’s stricken face, and halted.

  “I’m sorry to see yer mother here, Ruth,” he said. “She dint seem as mental as the rest of that lot. Why don’t yer see if yer can’t talk some sense inter her?”

  He noted the mackintosh over George’s arm.

  “An see if yer can’t get that coat on her. That ent a pretty sight, is it?”

  And with that, he plodded on his way.

  Ruth looked at the faces around the square. There were none she didn’t know, hadn’t spent her life among. The idea of them all w
atching her as she made the long walk to her mad mother, the shame of it, brought her to the edge of nausea, of swooning. She burst into tears, noisily, and stumbled back into the churchyard. Reaching the bench where, in her long-gone age of innocence, she’d shared lunch with poor soft Stanley, she sat down, took off her spectacles, and wept.

  George came to her and, after a moment or two of hesitation, sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” Clem whispered.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t spoil it.”

  They were lying on their sides with their arms around each other. He could feel Frankie’s breath on his neck. His fingers trembled in her hair.

  “It was nice,” she said.

  “Was it?”

  He remembered her short hiss of pain, or anger, her lips pulled back from her teeth. It had shocked him.

  The light had changed, brightened. A wind they could not feel rattled the gorse above them. He wondered about the tide, how high it might come, and when. Stupid holidaymakers were always getting cut off by high tides, all along the coast. Having to be rescued. If he and Frankie were . . . God. He quelled a ripple of panic.

  She said quietly, seriously, “I expect it’s something one gets better at with practice. Like the violin. Or anything, really.”

  He sort of laughed, or scoffed. He couldn’t help it. She lifted her head and looked at him gravely. Her eyes were so dark and liquid and lovely. He forgot this, sometimes, because he thought so much about her other parts.

  “What? Don’t you think so?”

  “Yeah. I spose.”

  “You spose,” she said, mocking him. “Well, let me tell you, Clement Ackroyd, we are going to find out. We are going to put in lots of practice.”

  She kissed him.

  “Lots and lots. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  She propped her head on one hand. “You don’t sound too sure.”

  He was in a state of sticky wilt. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

  “Frankie, leave off.”

  “Or are you one of those boys who lose interest in a girl once they’ve had her? Are you going to finish with me now that you’ve made me a tart?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You read me like a book, Frankie.”

  “Or a poem.”

  “Or a poem,” he agreed.

  “Tell me you love me,” she said.

  But before he could speak, she pressed two fingers onto his lips.

  “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t, honestly. Don’t say it just because we’ve, you know. Had sex.”

  “I love you, Frankie.”

  “More than before, or the same?”

  “More.”

  “Good,” she said, and lowered her head onto his chest.

  He looked up at the colorless sky, where gulls drifted, scolding and mewling.

  We’ve done it, he told himself. We’ve actually done it. Yes!

  Yet what he felt was worryingly familiar and childish: something like getting caught stealing fruit from someone else’s garden.

  They walked back along the beach, making silly dramas of dodging the slow overlaps of low surf.

  She said, “We’ve never done this before.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “No, not that. I mean, we’ve never walked anywhere holding hands. I really like it.”

  Something, a slight catch in her voice, made him look at her. She was nearly crying.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, c’mon, Frankie.”

  They stopped, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly.

  “Hey. Whassup?”

  She sniffled into the folds of his jacket, shaking her head.

  “I hate everything. I really do, actually. All I want is to be with you. Everything else is such absolute shit. So boring. D’you know what I wish?”

  “What?”

  “That the world would end right now. That Kennedy or thingy, the Communist, would blow us all up. I expect it would hurt. It would be ghastly for a minute or so. But then it would be all over. I wouldn’t have to go back to Mummy and Daddy and tell lies about where I’ve been and then think up more lies so I can meet you next time. I don’t want to do that anymore. I really don’t. I can’t bear it. It’s all so mucky.”

  He thought, She’s ending it. Because I was no good.

  Suddenly he was exhausted by the very thought of the long ride back. Sickened, as though he’d already smelled the warmed-up and congealed Sunday dinner waiting for him. As though he’d already tasted the lies that he, too, would tell.

  Frankie seemed to have read his thoughts somehow.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said, so childishly, so innocently, that it made Clem laugh.

  “I don’t,” she said more fiercely. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

  “Nor can’t I,” he said. “Come on. The tide’s coming in.”

  When they could see the rooftops of Hazeborough hunched at the cliff top, they heard voices. Yells ripped meaningless by the wind and the surf. At some distance ahead of them, an ancient timber jetty sloped into the sea, sand and shingle banked up against it. Two — no, three — young boys, their shapes made indistinct by sea glitter, shouting and throwing stones. As he and Frankie drew nearer, Clem saw that the boys were not stoning the jetty but something close to it, half buried. Something rusty black and spherical with stumpy little legs.

  Clem would never be sure if he’d recognized it in that last instant. Whether he’d yelled a warning just before everything stopped making sense, before all memory turned false. Before all that had been separate and different — sea and stones, wind and sand, his and Frankie’s place among them — erupted into the same thing: a silent roar with huge rough hands that picked him up and changed him terribly and threw him away. It all seemed to take a long, long time. Something was happening to his arms and legs and face, but those parts of him were far away, floating by themselves. He wondered where Frankie had gone, thinking that he should be looking after her, that she would be frightened.

  Then something big thumped into his back and he was still.

  Just before he went to sleep, he heard a pattern of sound: ssshh-tick-tock, ssshh-tick-tock. Like someone kind, a nurse perhaps, trying to persuade a clock to stop.

  When he woke up, he was dreaming. His head was in a bubble through which he could see the empty sky. The bubble was the glass cab of a big machine, but nothing would obey the controls. He sent urgent blurred messages out to its limbs. After a while he saw, at the corner of his eye, something come alive and lift itself out of the sand. It looked a bit like a hand at the end of a ragged tube. It seemed to be pointing. He looked beyond it and saw a pair of legs, splayed and painted red, sticking up out of a drift of sand, close to a dummy’s head wearing a red mask and a black wig.

  He could not understand why he couldn’t hear anything while at the same time his head was full of noise.

  Frankie?

  The word came from nowhere.

  His eyes refocused on the hand at the end of his arm. Actually, it looked more like a red knitted glove that hadn’t been put on properly. Then fiery fingers that were colder than ice pressed themselves against the side of his face and ushered him down into a merciful and fathomless darkness.

  IAWOKE BRIEFLY on days five, six, and seven and spoke her name before sliding back under the surface.

  Ruth, who’d sat beside me all that time, must have been deeply disappointed. Sons are supposed to call out “Mother!” when Death comes to visit. I didn’t.

  My first coherent question was, “If she alive?”

  Ruth said, “Who?”

  “Frankie.” It seemed to take the better part of an hour for my crippled mouth to form her name.

  “That Mortimer gal?”

  “Yef.”

  “She’s alive.”

  “If she orright?”

  “I dunt know,” my mother said. “I hent asked.”

  For whi
ch, God forgive me, I never forgave her, even though she’d been crying for a week.

  They’d identified me by the label (which I had been at pains to conceal from Frankie) stitched to the waistband of my underpants.

  Rule 19: All items of clothing, including socks and underwear, are to be clearly labeled with the pupil’s full name.

  I don’t know how they identified Frankie.

  Goz came to see me in Norwich sometime between my second and third operations. Not that there was much of me to see. I was bandaged like a mummy, just the right side of my face — eye, nose, and half mouth — showing. My white-packaged left arm was propped up on a sort of cradle. My white-parceled left leg hung from a wire attached to something like a gallows. Goz, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He sat down on a chair where I could see him by swiveling my eye.

  “It probly don’t look that way to you,” he said, “but you are a lucky sod. That mine blew a hole in the beach you could park a bus in. Two buses. You heard about the three kids, I spose?”

  I had, yes. George had told me, shakily.

  “During the war,” he’d said, as though talking to himself, “we’d sometimes put stones in the coffins when we couldn’t find all their bits. To make up the weight, like.”

  Goz said, “You were in all the papers. There was even a bit on the telly.”

  I knew that, too.

  “Frankie,” I managed to say.

  Goz seemed to see something interesting on the floor.

  With difficulty, slurping the words, I said, “D’yer know how sher if? No one’ll tell me anyfing. Gof?”

  “She’s gone, comrade.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “London, so I’m told. Some private hospital. A week ago.”

  “Yer know how sher if?”

  “No,” Goz said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, neither. I said I was her cousin, but they didn’t believe me.”

  It was Goz who told me, some days later, about Win and the Brethren. He’d been there, stayed to the bitter end. He hadn’t found out about me and Frankie until the following day.