Well of course I hated her. There was no justification. She was polite enough to me—the real nastiness always came from Leon himself. But I hated their whispers; that shared heads-together laughter that excluded me and ringed them with intimacy.
Then it was the touching. They were always touching. Not just kissing, not making love, but a thousand little touches; a hand on the shoulder; a brush of knee against knee; her hair on his cheek like silk snagging Velcro. And I could feel them, every one; like static in the air; stinging me, making me electric, making me combustible.
It was a delight worse than any torture. After a week of playing gooseberry to Leon and Francesca, I was ready to scream with boredom, and yet at the same time my heart pounded with a desperate rhythm. I dreaded our outings but lay awake every night, going over every small detail with agonizing care. It was like a disease. I smoked more than I wanted to; I bit my nails until they bled. I stopped eating; my face developed an ugly rash; every step I took felt like walking on glass.
The worst was that Leon knew. He couldn’t have failed to see it; played me like a tomcat showing off his mouse, with the same carefree cruelty.
Look! Look what I got! Watch me!
“So what d’you think?” A brief moment out of earshot—Francesca behind us, picking flowers or having a pee, I can’t remember which.
“What about?”
“Frankie, you moron. What do you think?”
Early days; still stunned by developments. I flushed. “She’s nice.”
“Nice.” Leon grinned.
“Yeah.”
“You‘d have some, wouldn’t you? You’d have some, given half a chance?” His eyes were gleaming with malice.
I shook my head. “Dunno,” I said, not meeting his gaze.
“Dunno? What are you, Pinchbeck, a queer or something?”
“Fuck off, Leon.” The flush deepened. I looked away.
Leon watched me, still grinning. “Come on, I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you watching when we were in the clubhouse. You never talk to her. Never say a word. But you do look, don’t you? Look and learn, right?”
He thought I wanted her, I realized with a jolt; he thought I wanted her for myself. I almost laughed. He was so wrong, so cosmically, hilariously wrong. “Look, she’s okay,” I said. “Just—not my type, that’s all.”
“Your type?” But the edge had gone from his voice now. His laughter was infectious. He yelled, “Hey, Frankie! Pinchbeck says you’re not his type!” then he turned to me and touched my face, almost intimately, with the tips of his fingers. “Give it five years, mate,” he said with mocking sincerity. “If they haven’t dropped by then, see me.”
And then he was off, running through the wood with his hair flying out behind him and the grass whipping crazily against his bare ankles. Not to escape me, not this time; but simply running for the sheer exuberance of being alive, and fourteen, and randy as hell. To me he looked almost insubstantial, half-disintegrated in the light-and-shade from the leaf-canopy, a boy of air and sunshine, an immortal, beautiful boy. I could not keep up; I followed at a distance with Francesca protesting behind and Leon running ahead, shouting and running in great impossible bounds across the white hemlock-mist into the darkness.
I remember that moment so very clearly. A fragment of pure joy, like a shard of dream, untouched by logic or events. In that moment I could believe we would live forever. Nothing mattered; not my mother; not my father; not even Francesca. I had glimpsed something, there in the woods, and though I could never hope to keep up with it, I knew it would stay with me forever.
“I love you, Leon,” I whispered as I struggled through the weeds. And that, for the moment, was more than enough.
4
It was hopeless, I knew. Leon would never see me as I saw him, or feel anything for me but kindly contempt. And yet I was happy, in my way, with the crumbs of his affection; a slap on the arm, a grin, a few words—You’re all right, Pinchbeck—were enough to lift me, sometimes for hours. I was not Francesca; but soon, I knew, Francesca would be back at her convent school, and I—I—
Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it? In the fortnight that had followed my father’s revelation, Sharon Snyde had phoned every other night. I had refused to talk to her, locking myself in my room. Her letters too remained unanswered, her presents unacknowledged.
But the adult world cannot be shut out forever. However high I turned up my radio, however many hours I spent away from home, I could not escape Sharon’s machinations.
My father, who could perhaps have saved me, was a spent force; drinking beers and shoveling pizza in front of the television while his duties remained undone and my time—my precious time—ran out. Dear Munchkin, Did you like the clothes I sent you? I wasn’t sure what size to buy, but your father says you’re small for your age. I hope I got it right. I do so want things to be perfect when we meet again. I can’t believe you’re going to be thirteen. It won’t be long, now, will it, darling? Your plane ticket should arrive in the next few days. Are you looking forward to your visit as much as I am? Xavier is very excited to be meeting you at last, even though he’s a bit nervous too. I expect he’s afraid of being left out, while we catch up on the last five years! Your loving mother,Sharon
It was impossible. She believed it, you see; really believed that nothing had changed, that she could pick up our life where she had left it; that I could be her Munchkin, her darling, her little dress-up doll. Worse still, my father believed it. Wanted it, encouraged it in some perverse way, as if by letting me go he might somehow alter his own course, like ballast thrown from a sinking ship.
“Give it a chance.” Conciliatory now, an indulgent parent with a recalcitrant child. He had not raised his voice since the day he struck me. “Give it a chance, kid. You might even enjoy yourself.”
“I’m not going. I won’t see her.”
“I tell you. You’ll like Paris.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I fucking won’t. Anyway, it’s just a visit. I’m not going to live there or anything.”
Silence.
“I said it’s just a visit.”
Silence.
“Dad?”
Oh, I tried to encourage him. But something in him was broken. Aggression and violence had given way to indifference. His weight increased still further; he was careless with his keys; the lawns grew ragged with neglect; the cricket pitch, denied its daily dose of the sprinklers, grew brown and bare. His lethargy—his failure—seemed designed to ensure to remove any choice I might still have had between remaining in England and embracing the new life Sharon and Xavier had planned so carefully on my behalf.
And so I was torn between my loyalty to Leon and the increasing need to cover for my father. I took to watering the cricket pitch at night; I even tried to mow the lawns. But the Mean Machine had ideas of its own, and I only succeeded in scalping the grass, which made it worse than ever, whilst the cricket pitch, despite my best efforts, refused to flourish.
It was inevitable that sooner or later, someone would notice. One Sunday I came home from the woods to find Pat Bishop in our living room, sitting uncomfortably on one of the good chairs, and my father, on the sofa, facing him. I could almost feel the static in the air. He turned as I came in; I was about to apologize and leave at once, but the look on Bishop’s face stopped me dead. I saw guilt there—and pity, and anger—but most of all I saw profound relief. It was the look of a man willing to seize upon any diversion to get away from an unpleasant scene, and though his smile was as broad as ever and his cheeks were just as pink as he greeted me, I was not fooled for a moment.