by Guy Burt
And thinking of Anna, and Jamie, and how they’ve changed, brings a new thought. Jamie and I have talked about what happens between men and women when you’re older, lots of times, and I know how the bodies fit together; I’ve imagined how you’d do it. But again, it’s seemed an impossibly long way off from me. But now Jamie and Anna – I can see them, at once, in my head. They’re old enough, now; they could do it. I think of Jamie, pressed up against Anna’s body – all of him naked against her. I’ve only dared think as far as stretching out a hand and putting it on one of her breasts, but Jamie could – I know he could – be on top of her, like grown-ups do it. I can see them in my head, and see how good they would look together – how right. It hurts me right to the locked-away part of myself where I admit in secret that I love Anna, love her desperately; that I want it to be me there with her, not Jamie. And yet at the same time that it hurts me, it stirs something deep down in me. Thoughts of Anna and Jamie naked together whirl in my head.
Jamie’s hand is on my shoulder, holding onto me tightly. I’m still moving my hand like he’s shown me, and when I look at his face, I see he’s still looking at me. His lips have parted slightly and I can feel his breath hot on my cheek. Then he clutches my shoulder tighter, almost hurting me.
‘Alex – Alex—’
His whole body jerks as though he’s been punched, and he gives a kind of gasp. I feel his fingers on my shoulder dig in hard for a second, and then very slowly relax. I’m scared for a moment, but then I see in his eyes that he’s not hurt. He blinks, slowly, as if dazed. A few droplets of something hot have scattered across my belly. He shivers, and blinks again, and looks at me. In my hand, I can feel the hardness start to ebb away.
‘That was weird,’ I say. I’m a little concerned still that I’ve hurt him in some way, but although he’s out of breath, like he’s run a race, I still can’t see any pain in his face. After a second, he grins at me – a slightly shy, nervous grin. I say, ‘Is that what always happens?’
He nods, still breathless.
‘Something came out,’ I say, still.
‘Yeah.’
‘Is that what’s supposed to happen?’
‘I think so. Yeah,’ he says.
‘Oh.’ His breathing’s slowing a bit. ‘What’s it feel like?’ It must have felt like something very strong, from the way he was when it happened.
‘It’s – it’s good,’ he says. ‘It’s like—’
He looks down at me.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You too.’
He’s right. The swirling images of Anna and him haven’t worn off yet. I shrug, slightly embarrassed myself now. Compared to Jamie’s, mine doesn’t look like much.
‘I could show you,’ he says. ‘How it feels, I mean.’ Then shyly, ‘If you want.’
‘Would it work for me?’ I say, taken aback. It hasn’t crossed my mind that I could do what Jamie does.
‘I don’t know. We could try.’
I think for a moment. ‘OK,’ I say.
As Jamie touches me, I think of him with Anna, how their bodies would look if they were joined together; and I remember how it felt when she kissed me, among the lemon trees, that quick hot touch of her mouth against mine; and I think of how she grins, and of the smell of her hair, and sometimes even that it’s her hand that’s touching me down there. I’m looking up past Jamie’s face at the stars when it happens, and it’s like an earthquake – like an avalanche – like the whole sky lurches sideways and I’m falling away into it, and Jamie and Anna with me, our bodies tumbling and full of light and wonder.
We swim again afterwards, and the water feels cooler now against me, but still not so cool as to make you cold. Inside, a strange, deep warmth comes from what we’ve done, as though nothing is going to make me cold ever again. I can see it in Jamie, too: there’s something bright and alive in his eyes, and the way he looks reminds me of Anna, of her aliveness. I watch him as if I’ve never seen him before, like this is the first time.
Our clothes are still scattered around the flat rock when the sky starts to lighten over the cliffs. We lie on the beach and crane our heads back to see it: far out, across the sea, the stars are still out, but the moon has been down for a long time now. The early dawn is full of colours: rose-petal pinks and eggshell blues and greens. It spreads slowly, silently through the sky, swallowing the stars; a gauze of light drawn gradually across the roof of the world.
Jamie stirs beside me. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
‘I used to watch it from the belltower,’ he says. ‘Back when – you know.’
‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘Really?’
‘Sometimes.’
We’re quiet for a while. Then he says, ‘I didn’t know you felt the same way.’
‘What about?’ I know he doesn’t mean the belltower any more, or the sunrise.
He says, ‘You know. About – you and me, and stuff.’
I’m still not sure what he means. I say, ‘Like what?’
‘Well – like what we did.’
‘Oh, that,’ I say. I haven’t really thought about it. I say, ‘It was strange.’
‘Yeah. But … it was good, too.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I say.
He smiles at me: a wonderful smile that lights up his whole face. ‘I don’t mind going away,’ he says. ‘Not now.’
I’m glad. I say, ‘Good.’ I’m still going to miss him, I know, but I’m glad he feels better about it.
‘I’ll see you again at Christmas,’ he says. ‘And then later—’
‘Later I’ll come to England, too,’ I say.
‘You really will? You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘I don’t think I mind anything, now,’ he says. His voice is dreamy again, as if he’s thinking of something in his head. I wonder what it is. Then he turns back to me. ‘Alex?’
‘Yeah?’
‘We should keep together,’ he says. ‘Always.’
I nod. ‘We will.’
He’s quiet for a long time, while the light eases its way across the curve of the sky.
‘Alex?’
‘Mm?’
‘You know what it feels like, when you – when you look at someone, and they make you feel all – I don’t know. Like you were alive inside, in your tummy. And like you want to be with them for ever?’
I know exactly what he means. ‘Yeah,’ I say softly. I’m thinking of her with her hand on my face, the moment before she leans in to kiss me.
‘And how you just want to – to hold them.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do you think that is?’
I know what I think it is, but I can’t bring myself to say it. I’m scared that saying the word will somehow diminish the feeling, will make what I have inside in some way less strong, less important. I say, ‘I don’t know.’
Jamie says, ‘I think maybe it’s love.’ His voice is very low and quiet, and the way he says it makes it sound beautiful. What I feel inside doesn’t diminish at all, and I feel a surge of gratitude to him for saying it for me. I wonder how he’s understood what’s in me so well.
I say, ‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
Jamie says, ‘I think I love you.’
It makes no sense to me for a moment, and then I understand: it’s a joke, a kind of weird, mad, joke. I clap my hand to my mouth and hoot with laughter. ‘Yeah!’ I say, when I’ve got my breath back a bit. ‘You and me. We could get married. Neat.’ A fresh wave of giggles catches me, and it takes me a moment to recover. ‘That’s good, Jamie,’ I say, grinning at him. ‘That’s really good.’ I slap his arm, the way we do sometimes, to let him know I get it. But Jamie isn’t laughing with me; there’s a kind of weird expression on his face, like it might come apart suddenly. I say, ‘Hey. What is it?’
He doesn’t say anything. He’s just staring at me, and his mouth is open slightly, his eyes fixed on mi
ne.
I don’t feel like laughing any more. I say, ‘Hey, Jamie. What is it?’ And when he’s still silent, still just staring at me, I say – desperately – ‘It was a good joke. Really. What’s – what’s wrong?’
He sits up, hugging his knees to himself. ‘Nothing.’
I reach out, uncertainly, and touch his back. ‘You’re shivering.’
‘I’m cold,’ he says. His voice is shivering too.
‘You should get dressed,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to catch cold.’
‘No.’ But he doesn’t move.
I look up at the sky. It’s lightening more and more now; the day is going to be here soon. I start to cast about me for my clothes, and scrape together T-shirt and jeans and pants. As I pull them on, Jamie still sits there, shivering, hugging his knees, looking out at the water. I keep expecting him to start getting dressed too, but he doesn’t; and in the end, when I sit back on the rock to do up my shoelaces, he’s still naked. He looks strangely vulnerable, now that I’m dressed. I don’t understand why. I’ve never thought of Jamie as vulnerable before.
‘We should go,’ I say quietly.
‘I know.’
‘Come on, then.’
He shakes his head. ‘You go. I want to stay for a bit.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘No. Really, Alex. You go.’
‘I’m not going back on my own,’ I say.
‘Please.’
I don’t understand this. He sits there, rocking very slightly back and forth, heels drawn up, his back making a smooth curve up to his shoulders. His eyes are dark and focused on the faraway darkness of the sea.
I say, ‘Jamie? What is it?’
A long breath comes out of him, the ghost of a sigh. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll wait for you, if you want,’ I say. My voice sounds small in the emptiness of the beach.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I want to.’
‘Why?’
It’s the strangest question. I frown. ‘So we can walk back together.’
‘Oh,’ he says.
He doesn’t move for a long, long time; just looks out over the water. Then a breath escapes him – long and quiet, almost silent. He picks his T-shirt up from beside the flat rock, and towels his hair with it roughly to get the worst of the water out of it, and then pulls on his trousers and socks and shoes. The wet T-shirt he drapes over one shoulder.
‘I’m ready.’
Along the cliff path, I dart quick glances at him every so often. Something’s happened, I think, but I don’t really know what. Jamie seems to have hidden something away inside him, something which I feel I might almost have seen, if only I’d had longer to think about it. But it’s gone again now.
I know it’s my fault. I’ve done something, but I don’t know what. I want to take it back – or at least say something – but I don’t understand; I can’t understand. It’s impossible.
As we crest the last hill, and can look down on the lights of the town, he says, ‘You shouldn’t come to England.’
It takes me completely by surprise. I say, ‘Why not?’
‘You don’t have to. I have to, so I’ve got to. But you can stay here. You should stay. I would, if they’d let me.’
‘What, even if I was going?’
He nods, almost angrily. ‘Yes.’
‘Jamie—’
‘I would. I wouldn’t go to England just because you were going, not if—’
‘Not if what?’
But he doesn’t answer. Instead, after a long silence, he says, ‘What we did – on the beach. It was wrong. We shouldn’t have done it.’
‘Why not?’
‘We just shouldn’t have, OK? It was a mistake. It was – it was wrong.’
Hearing him say this is like a cold knife going into me. I say, ‘It didn’t feel like it was wrong. It felt – nice.’
‘No it didn’t,’ he says. ‘Maybe it did to you, but it didn’t to me.’
‘Jamie—’
‘Stop it. Don’t talk to me.’
‘Why not? I don’t understand. Why’re you—’
But he doesn’t hear me. I think maybe there are tears on his face, but I don’t see them clearly; he starts to run, brushing past me hard, the T-shirt dropping from his shoulder. I grab it up from the ground and hurry after him, but he’s running fast, his elbows jabbing back in short, vicious stabs, his legs eating up the distance eagerly. I can’t match him. I run as best I can, but I keep tripping and stumbling over the uneven ground. I shout after him.
‘Jamie!’
He doesn’t turn; he doesn’t even slow. It’s like he doesn’t hear me.
When my breath deserts me, I come staggering to a halt. He’s half a mile away, it seems, still on the coast path into town, but quickly falling away from view. I hold his T-shirt in one hand as I stand, bent over, gasping for air. I have a stitch in one side. I stare after Jamie, but I’ve lost him now among the dark patches of scrub that line the way. He’ll be home long before me.
Slowly, wearily, I start after him, just walking. Nothing makes sense. Anna cries when she takes the bus, as though something’s ended; and I’ve felt in the air of the summer that things are changing. But I’ve always known that Jamie and I would understand each other. Now even that’s been taken away.
I trudge onwards. It will be an hour or more before I’m home.
I wait all morning for him to come and see me. I know he will; his train is at one, and it’s an hour at least into Salerno by car. I sit in my room, and wait.
When it’s twelve, I go round to his house. Mrs Anderson is downstairs.
‘Where’s Jamie?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You’ve missed him, Alex. He’s gone to get the train. They took the car.’ She stops, and looks at me more closely. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘He said you two had said goodbye. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I say, numbly. ‘We – we said it earlier.’
‘Oh, good.’ She still seems to be worried by something in my expression, because she smiles at me. ‘He’ll be back before long,’ she says. ‘Christmas will be here before you know.’
‘I know,’ I say.
There’s a silence. Then, surprisingly, she says, ‘You know, I’ll miss him too.’
My eyes are suddenly hot with tears. I turn, running out of the room, leaving her standing there helplessly.
As the final days of the summer pass away, I’m completely alone for the first time in six years. Jamie’s not just up the road; I can’t signal to him from my bedroom window any more. It’s not even that he’s gone to England; it’s worse than that. Something between us is gone, too, and I can’t even find what it is.
As the days pass, I find that something else is gone, too. When I let myself drift, and wait to fall away into times when Jamie was still with me, nothing happens any more. Sometimes there are vague, slight impressions; but it’s like a door has closed. I can’t be on the roof at night with him, or hunting lizards, or trying beer for the first time. It’s all gone, closed off somehow. I panic, and try to force myself to break through whatever it is that’s walled these things off from me, but it’s no good. They’ve vanished. It’s as though that moment when the sky shudders and spins and I feel myself tumbling into it has set things tumbling in my head as well, and the way into the past has been swept away, lost under an avalanche.
When I’m alone in bed at night, I try to remember how it all was. But just remembering isn’t enough. It’s not the same. I want things to be the way they were, and I can’t get them back that way no matter how hard I try.
Christmas comes. All the trembling changes have come down on the valley, now; the bedrock has shifted and the terraces and old olive fields are all falling and dying. Jamie stays in England. His family have moved out there; for good, it seems. We are supposed to have to wait only one term, until Christmas comes and we are together again; but
the months and then weeks and days go by, and at the end of it – I’ve known it was coming, but it still pierces me like ice – there is nothing. No Jamie; no reunion. The house at the end of the row is empty, and they are looking for another family to fill it. Weeds grow in the driveway, and the windows are blank and dusty. From my bedroom, when I look, the house seems dead, as though it’s never been alive. I can’t even fall away and lose myself in how things used to be. Too many avalanches have settled over the valley for that.
I write to Jamie, just like I promised. My mother says letters from England will take a while to reach me, so I wait patiently, but they don’t come. After a while, I stop writing. There’s nothing to tell in any case.
Slowly, I take my fingers from the wall. The ends of them are white and numb from pressing against it so long, and my arm is stiff, tired. The boy in the painting is poised, caught in the moment on the edge of the boundary between one place and another.
Jamie gets to Italy, in the end. He does what he says: makes a stake in the London clubs and bars, and buys a ticket out there. I have a postcard, somewhere, from Rome: just a scribbled note. Offer still stands. Knew this was where I was supposed to be. Love to Anna. Jamie.
When they tell me he’s dead, I don’t believe it to begin with. He’s too good a swimmer, and the water there isn’t fast or dangerous. It’s as if they’ve made up some ridiculous story out of shreds, a patchwork. No, I want to say; that’s where we used to swim when we were kids. He wouldn’t go there now. But he does. He goes back to see the valley, to see the old places, just like he said we should. Maybe he gets tired of waiting for me to join him, and just decides to do it alone. I don’t know; there’s nothing to tell me. And somehow, in the still, calm water of the little cove, it happens.