by Cathy Bussey
‘Do I look like a clown?’ she asked, feeling that her already full lip was considerably swollen.
He smiled. ‘No. You look as beautiful as ever.’
It was ridiculously nice to be told she was beautiful, especially by him. He was looking pretty beautiful himself, his dark eyes soulful and soft with concern, and her nostrils were full of his scent, which seemed to be making her a dizzy again in a far more pleasant and exciting way.
She ran her tongue over her lip tentatively, tasting the TCP and the metallic tang of blood. His eyes followed the movement and she saw that his pupils had dilated. Her heart began to pound insistently.
‘It looks better already,’ he said, moving towards her. ‘Do you want me to make you some tea? Does it hurt too much for me to kiss you?’
What hurts, she thought, suddenly remembering what she had conveniently forgotten, is the idea you might go off and snog Sophie Barnes again. All her disappointment and rage and humiliation came surging back and she scowled at him furiously. ‘We are not doing that.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m going now,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘so you can ring Sophie right now as she’s much more your type.’
‘What?’ He looked horrified. ‘That was all rubbish, you know — I thought you knew. You were doing it too, weren’t you?’
‘Didn’t sound like rubbish to me.’
‘I thought you wanted to keep us quiet?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t just going to stand there and take it from you, that would have made Minel more suspicious than ever.’
He was right, she thought. Minel would have smelled a rat a mile off if Rik’s quick wit and killer put-downs had suddenly deserted him.
‘You didn’t have to go that far,’ she said, weak with relief.
‘Sorry,’ he said instantly. ‘Of course it wasn’t true. I just thought you’d give it straight back, you said it was awful,’ he reminded her, ‘I was expecting you to say I’d drowned you in saliva or something.’ He pushed at her shoulders gently to sit her back down, and crouched down in front of her. ‘Have I still not convinced you that I’m crazy about you?’ He leaned forwards and kissed her very gently, mindful of her sore lip, and Faith felt herself beginning to melt. ‘I have been,’ he said, ‘since the second I met you and there is literally nothing I wouldn’t do to be with you, so you can stop worrying about anything like that right now.’
She thought when he was this close to her and looking at her like this there was pretty much nothing she ever could worry about, except maybe —
‘You haven’t told anybody, have you?’
‘Not even Jason. I did tell Tackle,’ he admitted, ‘but he can’t talk, so that’s OK. Oh and my mum knows,’ he said absently.
‘What?’ Faith sat bolt upright and winced as her head swirled threateningly. ‘You told her what we got up to? Jesus, Rik.’
‘Not that,’ he said, still sounding patient. ‘I told her a while ago I had a thing for you. Or rather, that I’d always had a thing for you and I didn’t really know what to do about it. And she was all, you know my mum,’ he imitated a breathy sort of voice, ‘but how do you feel, Rik? On the inside?’ He looked a little distracted for a second, then seemed to pull himself together, ‘So I said you make me laugh more than anybody I know, and no matter how much time we spend together we always have lots to say to each other, and I never get bored of being with you, and any time you fall off your bike I just want to look after you,’ he smiled unselfconsciously, ‘and you just seem to get me and you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and I fancy you rotten, or words to that effect.’ He raised his eyebrows and Faith giggled, feeling unbelievably touched. ‘I said we seemed to click and you just make me really happy.’
‘What did she say?’ Faith asked, fascinated at the idea of such an open and frank conversation with a parental figure. She had thought it was practically obligatory to hide absolutely everything remotely approaching genuine emotion from her parents, the way they did from her.
‘She said it sounded like you might be the right girl for me,’ he said, putting his hands on her knees, and she stroked his hair absently. ‘And that she would be very happy if you were, although if you didn’t feel the same way about me I should just accept it, but there must be a reason you wanted to spend so much time with me, so I should be patient.’ Faith felt her heart swelling again. ‘And then she lectured me for about half an hour about being careful and gave me the facts of life speech again.’
‘My mother is not a fan of the facts of life,’ Faith sighed, thinking how nice it would be if Judith ever seemed interested in her feelings or even recognised that she might have them. ‘Her entire spiel is basically that if I ever let one of those things near me I will become pregnant and die of an STD instantaneously. I learned everything I know about sex,’ which wasn’t much, she acknowledged, ‘from magazines and Sara and my mother’s Mills and Boons.’
Rik leaned forwards and kissed her again and a surge of that primal energy rose up in her and she pulled him to her and urged him to kiss her much harder, feeling him trembling as he did so.
‘Do you want to go upstairs?’ he asked.
‘Don’t get your hopes up.’
‘It’s not my hopes that’s up,’ he grumbled and they both shook with laughter. ‘Of course I won’t. Whatever you want.’
‘Yes.’ She felt a thrill of anticipation as he took her hand and led her up to his room, which was covered with comics and magazines and piles of clothes and loose bits of paper with scribbles and drawings all over them. Tackle plodded in after them.
‘He can’t watch!’ Faith squeaked.
‘Look what I taught him. Only took a couple of weeks.’ Rik looked ridiculously pleased with himself. ‘Face the wall,’ he instructed and Tackle obediently lay down with his head underneath the window.
‘That’s brilliant,’ Faith said, delighted. Rik was never normally shy of discussing his own brilliance with her in exhaustive detail but he clearly had other things on his mind. He shoved another pile of assorted junk off his bed and pulled her down next to him. Faith thought again how unbelievably exciting this was with him, in a completely different league to any of the snogging sessions in which she had partaken before. Rik was so obviously and unashamedly enjoying himself that it was impossible for her to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed about anything, and the thorny little details like what to do about all the saliva and teeth-clashing and the weirdly exciting muffled noises they were making, or the occasional awkwardness of things getting tangled or snagged or pressed up against, just didn’t seem to matter in the slightest.
‘You are really turning me on,’ he said after a while. ‘You are just the best kisser and you look,’ he had pulled her top off at lightning speed and fumbled his way around the fastening of her bra for considerably longer but finally managed to get that off too, and his eyes were like saucers as he stared at her. ‘You look so gorgeous,’ he said.
‘You’re really gorgeous too,’ she said, looking at him so unselfconsciously dishevelled in just his shorts, his hair sticking up all over the place from where she’d been grabbing and tugging at it. ‘But I meant it earlier. I’m not going to have sex with you. We can just do, um,’ she didn’t want to use any of the phrases the kids at school threw around, they were all so clinical or revoltingly euphemistic and made everything sound so soulless.
‘Foreplay,’ Rik said in a doctorly voice. ‘Titillation.’
‘I’ll titillate you,’ she said. ‘With my not quite a handful.’
‘Perfect, perfect handful,’ he said. ‘I think I like them more than I like you.’
‘You’re not really winning me over here, Rikki. That’s technically an insult.’
‘Come here,’ he said, reaching out for her, ‘and I’ll make it up to you.’
Faith’s mother, alerted by the dreamy state her daughter returned in, not to mention the cut lip and the inevitable lateness, went berserk. S
he wasn’t even mollified by the fact Faith was so completely blissed out after an afternoon with Rik she couldn’t even pepper her protests with choice words and snarky insults.
The following day she told her mother she was meeting Minel and shot off to Hollyhocks looking for Rik but he wasn’t there or at the quarry.
Faith was busy with gardening jobs most days, but Minel invited her over for dinner on Wednesday night and Faith squirmed a little awkwardly at the table, staring at Rik for as long as she felt was reasonable without arousing any suspicion. Afterwards they went back to the cottage and she sat and willed Minel to go to the toilet, even making her friend a cup of tea in the hope it would prompt her, but her bladder held firm. Then, just as she was about to give up hope completely, Minel finally excused herself and she threw herself at Rik.
‘Can’t we just tell Minel?’ Rik asked. ‘This is stupid, sneaking around.’
‘No! We can’t tell her yet,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘She won’t mind. She’ll probably find it funny.’
Faith still couldn’t bear the idea of being a laughing stock among her friends. She shook her head. ‘Just wait a bit,’ she said.
‘That’s all I do, wait around for you,’ Rik said indignantly and she was worried he really was annoyed and kissed him as hard as she could, and he seized the back of her head, pulling her to him. ‘Luckily for you,’ he said softly, ‘I’d wait for ever.’
Minel returned and she and Rik leaped guiltily apart, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of her mother’s car, revving on the drive.
Chapter 9
‘Morning sunshine,’ Paul bellowed as Faith scurried past the site on Monday, ducking her head and hoping this would magically conceal the rest of her.
‘Morning big guy,’ she said quickly. ‘Morning, whatever your names are.’ She waved in the general direction of the mob of teenagers.
‘Morning sexy,’ one of the teenagers yelled back.
‘Knock it off,’ Paul rumbled. ‘Good weekend, Faith?’
‘Not really.’ She’d spent all of Sunday torturing herself alternately about the magnificent splendour of Lucinda, and the impending conversation she was going to have to somehow manage with Rik. At least he wasn’t currently on site, and she could be on her merry way and bury herself — literally — in the pond until she’d finally come up with a plan of action.
‘Get to work then,’ Paul said. ‘Good to catch up, pleasantries are now officially over. Back to it, you lot.’ He turned to the teenagers and Faith sped off to the pond.
‘One week down, six to go,’ Paul roared after her.
It had only been one week. Or several lifetimes, depending on how you looked at it. Faith picked up her shovel and began to dig, ignoring the bags of slurry she’d set aside on Saturday. She could worry about them later. She could worry about all of it later, including how she was supposed to relandscape an entire garden in just six weeks when she’d done practically nothing other than create a gigantic mess in one-seventh of her allotted time.
When to talk to Rik, and where to talk to Rik, was the order of the morning. Actually when wasn’t really an issue, it had to be today, because she’d barely slept a wink since Friday and she couldn’t cope with yet another night of lucid, sweaty dreams in the brief intervals in between lying resolutely awake, staring at the ceiling and going through it all again and again, the confrontation ahead of her each time becoming greater and more terrible than ever before. And she didn’t want to risk her theory about Hollyhocks hating her turning out to be true, and finding out what new and messy or life-threatening punishments it had in store for her.
So today it must be, which led to the rather more difficult question of where. It couldn’t be on the site in front of Paul and the garden gang, but that was basically the only place she saw Rik.
She could go and bash the other door of the haybarn down, and hope he once again came to her aid and then hit him with it while he was temporarily jolted out of his usual blankness, but then he’d realise she’d done it on purpose and she doubted he’d be so forgiving of her a second time. And the kitchen was out of the question because the walls would loom in on her, and Minel might be there and Paul would probably come in and the last thing she needed was an audience while she stammered and gulped and cried and whatever the hell else she was going to do.
I need to get him away from Hollyhocks, she decided. She could try and run into him on his lunchtime bike ride, assuming he was going out today, but she didn’t actually know where he went and she’d probably just end up roaming around fruitlessly.
So the only possible scenario was to go down to the site just before lunch and ask him to come out on the bike with her.
Which would involve some degree of persuasion, she was willing to bet, and that would have to happen in front of Paul and the boys.
However I look at this, she concluded, it’s going to be a rocky road. As if on cue, she unearthed another massive boulder, and she dropped her spade and heaved at it with both hands, pitching her weight back and forcing it out of its earthy prison, then dropped it on the small but ever-growing pile at her side.
By half past twelve Faith could stand it no more and she dropped her shovel with a loud clang onto the now significant pile of rocks and dusted herself down.
She shot out of the garden towards the side of the barn, where her bike was leaning with her helmet dangling from the handlebars, and shoved it on her head firmly then grabbed the bike and wheeled it down to the site.
‘Off for a ride?’ one of the boys smirked. He made it sound moderately smutty. Those teenagers could make anything sound moderately smutty. Rik had his back to her over by the cement mixer and was laughing at something Paul must have said. Good, she thought, Paul’s softened him up, time to go in for the kill.
‘Rik.’
He mustn’t have heard her, because he said something in response to Paul and they both laughed again. What’s so funny, Faith thought irritably. Doesn’t he realise he has better things to do than just stand around laughing like he hasn’t a care in the world?
‘Rik!’ Faith practically screamed. Several of the boys closest to her winced and giggled. Rik, finally, turned and looked at her. His eyes, still softened and lit from the laughter, fixed on her for a moment and she felt her cheeks warming, then they slid seamlessly back into that distant expression. ‘Oh, hi Faith,’ he said, just a shade short of tonelessly. ‘Didn’t see you over there.’
‘You had your back to me,’ she said pointlessly.
Rik’s eyes slipped to her bike. ‘Going for a ride.’ It wasn’t a question, he wasn’t inviting an answer, and he made to turn back to Paul.
‘You’re coming too.’ Perhaps taking a very authoritative tone would work.
‘I’m good, thanks,’ he said, still in that disinterested tone. ‘See you later.’
Evidently it would not work.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
She sighed heavily. ‘Not here.’
‘What’s wrong?’ one of the teenagers yelled. ‘Did he not return your calls?’
More like I didn’t return his, Faith thought.
‘I don’t think they need to hear this,’ she said to Rik, nodding at the teenagers who all looked thoroughly interested.
‘I’m sure it can wait then.’ Rik had apparently decided the conversation, such as it was, was over and he turned back to Paul.
Faith dropped her bike and marched straight over to him. She put both hands on his shoulders and yanked him round to face her. Her palms tingled at the contact. A few of the teenagers whooped and cheered.
‘Go and get your bike,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘right now, or I swear, I will spill my guts here on the site after all.’
‘You’d better go, mate,’ Paul rumbled. ‘She’s got one hell of a bug up her arse about something.’
‘Well?’ Faith asked, her eyes fixed on Rik. Her fingers were digging into his shoulders
and she could feel his muscles underneath. She dropped her hands quickly.
‘All right, come on then,’ Rik sighed. He scowled at her and stormed off across the site and she went back and picked up her bike and leaned against it for a moment, weak with relief. Thank god that was over.
Now she just had to somehow manage the rest of it. She got on her bike and freewheeled down to the drive, taking her hands off the handlebars to do up her helmet. Rik came out of the barn and her bike lurched threateningly to the right and she grabbed frantically for the handlebars.
‘Well that was embarrassing,’ Rik grumbled as he joined her and they rolled down the drive together. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know,’ she snapped back. Was she supposed to have thought of that too? ‘Where did you go last week?’
‘I did some hill reps.’
‘Let’s go up Fox Hill then,’ she said. ‘We can stop at the top. And don’t even think about putting those in or I’ll snap them in half.’ He had reached into his pocket for his headphones.
She set off, spinning her legs determinedly but Rik overtook her instantly and soon they were climbing the winding hill. The sun shone brightly overhead, sending brilliant rays through gaps in the lush canopy. Workmen had cut back the sections nearest the road but above them the trees were free to spread and grow as they saw fit. Gnarled branches were reaching towards one other, drawn perhaps by a primal knowledge of a kindred, until at certain points they touched, creating a living roof over the dead grey tarmac.
Rik reached the top considerably ahead of her and he put his bike down. She stood up on her pedals to get herself up the final slope and rolled to a halt in front of him.
‘What is it then?’ His eyes were as flinty as the rocks she’d spent all morning digging up. He should never look at me like that, she thought and a surge of grief shot through her, hot and visceral.
She put her own bike down and sat on the grass verge. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’