‘Tomorrow?’ he asks then. Seeing my look of incomprehension, he points to his watch and makes a circling movement on it. ‘Tomorrow,’ that same gesture again, ‘you’, a finger in my direction, ‘me’, a finger towards himself and then he makes steering movements.
Tomorrow, I think, another ride, and I hesitate. Nice though it is, I don’t really want any more.
‘Tomorrow-tomorrow,’ two little turns around the watch, ‘Jerome, Walt, yes?’
When I act as if I don’t understand, he points in answer to his mouth and makes a gesture of despair. He tries again, but I am suddenly tired and feel limp and listless. All I want right now is to go back.
He takes a map from a small compartment and studies it, then lays it open on my knees. We are again driving along stretches of road that seem to have no end, houses, woods, a patch of water. Is this the right way back to Warns? As we take a narrow side-turning, the soldier gives a whistle. Between the trees a small building comes into view that bears a slight resemblance to our Sunday school. He drives the car to one side of the house, jumps out and helps me down.
‘Come,’ he says when I hesitate, and lifts me to the ground like a little child, carries me to the side of the house where it is dry under a protruding eave, and gestures ‘wait’. From the back of the car he fetches a few tins and disappears with them round the corner. The car makes ticking noises, hard and dry, an accompaniment to the leaves that are rustling in the falling rain. I wish I knew what time it was…
A moment later loud voices come from the upper floor, interrupted by short bursts of laughter. I recognise Walt’s voice. There is no one to be seen anywhere. A twig snaps and every so often the smell of damp moss, earth and mushrooms drift across to me. I listen in surprise to the bursts of jollity in the house: has the soldier forgotten all this time that I am waiting for him and want to get back home?
I walk to the back of the house. The rain has stopped, but water continues to drip from the edge of the roof and there are puddles in the drive. A bright patch of sunlight appears on the wall and at that very moment someone flings open a window upstairs, casting a glaring reflection of light over the rain-soaked treetops. Is he still up there, how long is he going to be?
Behind the house a few neglected shrubs are growing and in a dark corner a lone hyacinth adds a shimmer of blue.
There is a wooden barn and a bit further away sits another car coloured the same green. A railway track runs behind the barn, looking as if it has not been used for a long time, grass and tall weeds growing between the sleepers. Beyond that, trees and silence. Carefully, so as not to make too much noise, I move back across the crunching gravel and go and sit down on the running-board. Should I just run away by myself?
The sounds upstairs have ceased. All I can hear now is a rhythmical, slight knocking noise, mingled with the sound of a tinkling bell.
‘Jerome?’ The soldier is standing at the back of the house and beckons to me. We walk around to the back of the barn. It is raining again. I press up against the wooden wall while the soldier steps onto the rails and smokes a cigarette, balancing on one leg. Swaying, he keeps his body poised, looking straight at me while he does so. What are we hanging about for, what is the point of this childish game? I feel a mixture of impatience and boredom.
Suddenly he sets his cigarette flying into the bushes in a wide arc and squats down in front of me. I can’t avoid his gaze, try to smile, but can only feel a nervous, uncertain tug around my mouth. What is he up to, is he teasing me? Then, moving fast, he stands up, looks around the side of the barn and with a quick grab pulls me to him. Paralysing fear shoots through me, my fingers tingle and a blindingly bright white veil is drawn over everything. My body is clenched as if a scream were about to burst out, but nothing happens. I feel the hard fabric of the uniform jacket against my forehead and smell a bitter tang of rain and metal. Awkwardly and tensely I stand there in his harsh embrace. He could kill me, here, behind the barn, he could throttle me or rip me apart without my uttering a sound, breathless and paralysed as I am. I’ll just let it happen.
From far, far away, I hear his hoarse voice: ‘Jerome, you okay?’ and feel something warm on my hair and then against the side of my face. He is kissing me. I do not move a muscle, hoping I might disappear and dissolve into nothing.
When he lifts my head I can see his eyes close to mine, a fierce, haunted look. His breath is coming fast, as if he is anxious. Then I am aware of real fear, a panic that pierces straight through me: I should never have gone with him. I ought to have known that something would happen. Unspoken and formless, it had been present from the very start, it had been lying in wait all along and now it had pounced…
His mouth moves over my face. I begin to tremble, uncontrollably and convulsively, and lose my balance so that he has to push me against the barn to keep me on my feet. Did I fight back without realising? There is brute force in any case, my body bangs several times against the clapboard and my elbows and shoulder-blades hurt. My head is bent backwards and I can feel rain on my face and then his face which seems to melt into mine. I seem to be drowning slowly, his suffocating weight enveloping me and pulling me down. I claw my fingers into the wood of the barn until my nails tear and I try vainly to push myself high up against the clapboard wall as my clogs slip away in the soft mud.
His hand gropes in my clothes. Restlessly and feverishly, he tugs at my coat and pushes his fingers up my trouser leg. Like an empty, helpless object I am glued to his mouth, an empty balloon, a trickle of slime. The grating surface of his jaw rasps across my skin, crushing my eyes and tearing my mouth. I try to jerk away and to make a noise, but all I can produce is a furious gasping.
The tip of his tongue moves between my lips, which he keeps parting stubbornly every time I press them tight together, slipping like a fish into my mouth. Then, when I relax my jaw a little, he suddenly pushes his tongue between my teeth and fills my mouth. We melt and fuse together, he turns liquid and streams into me. I look into strange, wild eyes right up close to my own, searching me. I am being turned inside out, shaken empty.
He breathes words against my face and when he lifts me out of my clogs I hear them clatter against each other with a dry, no bright sound. ‘Listen,’ he hisses and twists me awkwardly against him, ‘listen. Is good, is…’
Voices sound from the house, footsteps pass over the gravel, for a moment I am free and catch my breath as if coming up from deep water. Then he pushes me against the wall by my shoulders and tilts his head to listen. Nearby an engine starts, but the sound moves away from us and disappears.
Gently he wipes away a thread of spittle running down my chin, as if to console me. I am standing in the mud in my socks looking for a clog. Everything feels grubby to me, wet and filthy.
‘Jerome,’ he asks, ‘Jerome, okay?’
It happens all over again, the mouth, the hands, his taste which penetrates me, which I can’t shake off, and the rough lunges that suddenly turn gentle. I feel cold, my face is burning and hurts; from my throat comes a strange, strangled sound. I am afraid that if he lets go of me I shall fall down and will never be able to get up again, that I shall die here in the mud and the rain, forgotten behind an old barn.
He puts an arm around my waist and pushes me quickly through the wet shrubs alongside the barn. His car starts silently and quickly. A little further along the road he stops and pulls me to him. I start to cry, softly at first then harder and harder, my shoulder-blades, back, arms, knees, everything shaking and trembling.
Why is he smiling, how can he be so friendly and act so ordinarily? Why didn’t he do what I thought he was sure to do, leave me behind trampled flat in the mud?