by Tim Connolly
“… so you might as well enjoy it,” she had concluded.
“Might as well,” Ellis had replied unconvincingly.
Chrissie had agreed to tell their dad where Ellis was on the condition that Ellis called home within two days. He was looking ahead with dread to that phone call when a woman in her late twenties laid a mattress down alongside his.
“Bit of a latecomer,” she whispered, with a twang in her voice.
Ellis smiled and lay back, resting the back of his head in his clasped hands. The woman laid a white sheet on the mattress and removed her clothes, lying down on the mattress in her underwear. She smelt of suntan lotion. Ellis became aware of his own breathing. His toes tensed up and he wiggled his ankles.
“Mind if I have a smoke?” the woman said, sitting up on her side.
Ellis smiled and shook his head. He stole a glance. She was tanned and had long, straight, straggly blond hair. Her face was angular. She wasn’t pretty but she was handsome and healthy-looking and almost her entire body was visible and lying inches away from him. He forgot his fears. He forgot his home. The woman offered him a cigarette. He declined and pulled out his tin box and rolled one. She approved of this.
“Where you from?” she whispered.
“England. Kent,” he said, shyly.
“New Zealand. I’ve been travelling for three years.”
Ellis’s mouth dropped open. Three years! She smoked one of Ellis’s roll-ups after she’d smoked her cigarette and then she turned on to her back and slept. When the cathedral chimed for three o’clock, she moved in her sleep and her foot came to rest across Ellis’s calf muscle. He savoured the sensation and soon afterwards he fell asleep.
Mostly, they lay on the beach and read and went swimming, taking it in turns to watch each other’s belongings. She sunbathed topless and asked Ellis to rub lotion into her back, which he did with growing confidence. They swam together some of the time and he grew accustomed to the sight of her breasts. Accustomed, but not blasé. They were as magical and wonderful to him on their third day together as the first. Her thighs were strong and her calves defined. She could have been an athlete or a swimmer, or a manual labourer. A farmer, even. Her skin was extraordinarily tanned. He didn’t feel the need to speak much. She wanted to do the talking. After three years away she was feeling homesick and was thinking of going home. On their last evening, they ate a picnic on the beach at Menton and got blind drunk whilst she told him what she called “her life story”.
“Ours is a perfect friendship,” she said. “After tomorrow, nothing can ever damage it.”
To his surprise, Ellis realised that he wasn’t in love with her, even though he’d rubbed oil into her back. He didn’t idolise her, even though she was prepared to give him the time of day. He wasn’t aching with sexual desire for her. He just liked being with her. They slept side by side on the beach in sleeping bags that last night. The stars spun above Ellis’s head. He heard the woman crying to herself. She laid her head on Ellis’s chest and slept there. The weight of her body against him brought sobering stabs of joy to him. They swam in the morning, before they said a word, and their hangovers eased. Ellis swam only briefly, deliberately, so that he could sit on the beach and watch the woman from New Zealand walk out of the sea towards him one final time. He locked the image away for keeps, where it remained more fresh and magical than many of the more intimate moments since.
At the train station she said that they should not exchange addresses, that they would part now with their friendship untainted. They hugged tight but they didn’t kiss.
“Have a wonderful life,” she said.
He couldn’t speak.
She climbed the steps to the station and he watched until she was taken by the crowd. He made a wish for happiness to be with her all her life and as he walked down the Boulevard Gambetta towards the hostel, he felt lonely and burst into tears.
The phone call was made from a train station concourse.
“Dad, it’s me. I’m in Italy and I’m fine. Please don’t be angry.”
“Where in Italy?”
“Verona.”
“Is it nice?” his dad asked, in a disarming, clipped monotone.
“Yes …” Ellis faltered.
“Are you safe?”
“I’m safe and well and I’m planning to …” Ellis heard the receiver being laid down on the small bureau desk by the front door. He waited for something to happen. There were footsteps and then his dad spoke in the same foreign monotone.
“I was looking for Mafi so she could talk to you but she’s gone for a drive with Chrissie.”
Silence fell between them.
“Right then …” Ellis said, after some while.
“I want you to do something for me, Ellis,” Denny said.
“Yes? Anything.”
“I want you to ring Mafi every other day so that she knows you’re safe. She worries about you and that’s not fair on her.”
His voice was taut and brittle in its show of strength.
“You can call during the day, there’s no need to wait until I’m back from work. It’s your great-aunt who worries.”
“OK.”
There was no fight. No argument. None of the things Ellis had prepared for. Just coldness.
He’s good at this, Ellis thought.
The finest part of Ellis’s adventure was already over. No one and nothing would quite compare to his friend from New Zealand. He didn’t care too much. All that mattered to him was that he had gone away. He had had an adventure. He had done something that Tim hadn’t, and that Chloe might want to. But, for all the new ground broken, Ellis also discovered that it was still his father he wanted to share this with. In the evenings, it was Denny he imagined talking to about the day, and in moments of awe and adventure it was Denny he wished could see him there.
He rang Mafi every few days and she asked him excitedly about where he was. He saw Florence and Siena and got knocked over by a moped in Lucca. He slept in the giant tent in the botanical gardens in Munich with hundreds of others like him. He got so drunk in Munich that he boarded a night-train to Vienna and woke in Koblenz. He walked in the mountains above Innsbruck and stood at the top of the Olympic ski jump in its snowless state. He slept in a meadow of long grass and wild flowers where the temperature dropped and breathing felt like drinking fresh water. There, he felt a yearning which has been in him ever since, which never dilutes, never increases, but is ever-present, sometimes gentle, other times desperate. The possibility of fulfilment? The promise of joy? A glimpse of heaven? He doesn’t know. Perhaps it was no more than the clean mountain air.
11
The village looked small and altered. It would take a day or two for it all to look familiar again. William Rutton the butcher waved. Denny’s bedroom curtains were drawn against the sunlight. Ellis saw him peer out and withdraw again. Mafi rained kisses on him. The stairs seemed shallower and the cottage smaller.
Ellis sat beside his dad on the bed and touched his arm. Denny feigned waking and put on his glasses. His breathing was loud and slow, through his nose. He raised Ellis’s hand into the air and let it drop limply on to the bed. He got up and walked out of the room, shutting the door gently behind him. Ellis listened to him descend the stairs and his eyes settled on the imprint of his father’s body on the sheets.
Chrissie came home for the weekend. “You look like George Michael with that tan.”
“Why thank you,” Ellis said courteously.
“Wasn’t a compliment,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“He’s not talking to me.”
“What? Not much? Not at all?”
“Not a word,” Ellis said.
She found out for herself at dinner. “This is ridiculous,” she told her dad. “You can’t just not talk to someone.”
“What would you like me to talk about?” Denny asked.
“Anything,” Ellis said.
“Shall we talk about trust?”
&n
bsp; Ellis looked away. “No.”
“Lying to my face. Shall we talk about that?”
He got no answer.
“OK then, Ellis. Shall we talk about what it feels like to lie awake for twenty-nine nights waiting for the phone to ring with a foreign voice on a distant line telling me where I can come and identify my son’s body? Let’s talk about worrying myself sick about you, and losing the ability to eat or think straight. Let’s talk about my happiness being at the mercy of whether or not you’ve managed to spare five minutes of your precious time to call Mafi to let her know how you are.”
“You didn’t want me to call you!”
“Which of those things do you want to talk about, Ellis?”
Ellis shook his head.
“WHICH OF THOSE?” his dad raged.
“I don’t want to talk about any of them,” Ellis whispered.
“Well, there’s nothing else I’m interested in talking about with you.”
Ellis went to his room and emptied his rucksack, in the hope that his perfect friend had broken her own rules and left him a note with her number in New Zealand, amongst his belongings. But she had not.
Denny began renovating the dining room walls. It gave him reason to shut himself away. He cut out areas of rotten lath and plaster and pinned in new strips of chestnut which Terry Jay had split for him. Two post-beams were rotten. Dark slithers of wood crumbled between Denny’s fingers.
“Can’t make that out …” he muttered.
The wheat at Longspring Farm had been harvested. Ellis sat in the east field and admired the farmhouse. In the half-light, further down the track, he thought he saw Chloe Purcell step out of the herdsman’s house into the shadows of the lime trees. He told himself it couldn’t be her. Whoever it was standing in the shade, she rubbed her neck wearily and returned inside, leaving the door open for Michael Finsey’s return.
Ellis wandered aimlessly away. Back on the village green, he sat on a bench in front of the primary school. He ate an ice cream then drank a can of lager and contemplated how poorly the two mixed in the palate. Katie Morton appeared from the top of Wickhurst Lane and joined him.
“Look!” she said, flashing him a toothy, white smile. “Braces off!”
Ellis nodded his approval.
She looked impatiently at the darkening sky and asked, matter-of-factly, “So, did you lose your cherry on your travels?”
“No,” said Ellis.
“Isn’t that what these trips are for?” she asked.
“Why aren’t you at work?” he retaliated.
She pulled a face at the clouds. “Came home early to sunbathe but that’s buggered.” She settled down next to him. “At a loss what to do now,” she said. “Might go for a dip.”
“Where do you go?” Ellis asked.
“The pond at that farm on the hill, whatever it’s called.”
“Dale Farm. I wouldn’t.”
“I’ve swum there before.”
“I hope not. There’s an open pipe goes into that pond, full of you know what.”
“Is there?” Katie pulled a face. “Bloody hell …”
Ellis looked blankly across the village green. Katie Morton studied the sky and watched her hopes of a tan evaporate.
“I wouldn’t know how to lose my virginity,” Ellis murmured.
She didn’t respond and Ellis became more self-conscious the longer they sat in silence.
“Well …” Katie Morton said, eventually, with the pragmatic air of someone who didn’t want to waste an afternoon, “you’re not going to lose your virginity to me, Ellis, but if you like I’ll give you a guided tour.”
Ellis kept his eyes fixed on the grass and wondered what she meant. Katie Morton stood up and offered him her hand. “I’m taking you home …” she said.
She stirred because Ellis had moved in his sleep, muttering someone’s name.
“Who’s Jo?” she whispered. “Not that I’m bothered.”
“Uh?” Ellis moaned sleepily. His head swam in a syrupy daylight. Semi-conscious, he dragged the sheet up to cover their naked bodies. Beneath that sheet, his body felt the indelible touch of another naked human being lying warm beside him for the very first time. Katie Morton pulled the sheet away again and placed Ellis’s hand on her tummy. He breathed the strange and subtle aroma of her unperfumed skin and he drank in the sight of her pale stomach and the wiry hair, unable to fully take in how wonderful life was becoming this summer.
“You said ‘Jo’ in your sleep,” she said.
“She was from New Zealand,” he said. “Rotorua.”
“The woman you didn’t lose your virginity to?” she teased.
He shut his eyes. “I think you know full well by now that I’ve never made love to a woman.”
This made her smile. “Yes,” she said.
He breathed in lazily and she moved her head across to his chest. She pressed her feet against his and they flexed their toes against each other’s. Then the bedroom door opened. Ellis was not aware of the door but of Katie’s body becoming rigid against his. She sat bolt upright. The middle-aged woman standing at the foot of the bed was shaking and her shoulders started to heave. She was a strong woman, Ellis soon learned, with her daughter’s height and the added bulk of middle age.
Ellis’s passage out of the house bore the sensation of being propelled without touching the floor. It happened too fast for him to become concerned. He was aware only of the strength of Mrs Morton’s hands as they somehow made a handle out of the flesh on his shoulders with which she threw him out.
He found himself standing on the Mortons’ lawn. The front door slammed shut with a thick, substantial thud. On a day of new experiences, the latest was that of being naked outdoors. In itself, it was possibly a lovely sensation, he thought, but weighed against it right now were some powerful negatives; chiefly, that the most populated part of the village lay between his naked body and home. He heard footsteps on Wickhurst Lane. Miss Spinazi, the primary school infants teacher, was walking home. The wiry spinster stopped and stared.
This, Ellis told himself, is probably the only adult in Kent less sexually experienced than me. It had to be her who came along.
“I got kicked out,” he explained weakly, thumbing towards the Mortons’ house behind him.
Miss Spinazi’s mouth dropped open.
“It was like going through a wormhole,” Ellis added. “Are you on your way home, Miss?”
She nodded and swallowed fearfully. Ellis pointed in the direction of her small, terraced cottage and nodded encouragingly.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that I could …”
And at this she scurried away. Ellis returned to the Mortons’ front door and called through the letter box.
“Please could I have my things?”
He could hear nothing from inside. He stepped away and looked for a place to hide in the garden until he was reunited with his clothing. The front door burst open. Mrs Morton marched towards him and sent him down the driveway with a series of rough pushes to the chest.
“You are not getting any clothes back, you beast! If you don’t leave immediately I shall get the PC.”
The last shove sent Ellis sprawling on to the loose gravel of the lane Katie had led him along a few hours earlier. He landed badly, cutting the palms of his hands and grazing his knees. He stood up, dusted the clinging stones off his skin and watched Mrs Morton march back into the house. Now he was shaken up, not so much by the playground cuts and grazes as by the realisation that he was going home naked. He was also alarmed by how small his penis suddenly seemed to be. He had two choices. To hack across the fields to Longspring Farm or to cross the village green to the cottage. The latter option was infinitely quicker. In fact, if he put his head down and ran, he could do it in two minutes. But it meant going through the centre of the village. The route to Reardon’s was comparatively long but it was possible that Ellis could get there without being seen by another human being. Better still, he re
alised, and closer, would be to cut across the fields to Tim Wickham’s house. Then his heart sank as he realised that neither Reardon’s nor Tim Wickham’s was an option. If Ellis had to list the three people he could least afford to be seen naked by, they would be, first, Tim’s mum – due to an adolescence filled by fantasies of her which still had the potential to stir an ill-appreciated erection. Second, Chloe, who could well be at the Wickhams’ house or Reardon’s and would probably have the opposite effect on Ellis’s penis precisely because he wouldn’t want her to; and, third, the goat-lady, whose cottage Ellis would have to pass by. It was just too scary to contemplate being seen by her. She might ask him inside, offering to help. He’d be scared of entering her house with armour on. Naked didn’t bear thinking about.
“Shit!”
Another sub-dilemma presented itself. Did he run freely and go for speed, thereby allowing his genitals to move however genitals moved when unsupported by underwear, or did he hold on to them with one hand? Freestyle, he decided. Because speed was paramount. And realising that his situation was not going to improve whilst he stood there, he started to run. And the faster he ran the more free he felt, and he understood that if he chose not to care then he didn’t care; if he chose not to be embarrassed then he wasn’t; if he chose not to feel the pain on the soles of his feet then he didn’t feel it. He stuck two fingers up to his own instincts and ran, leaving Wickhurst Lane behind and fixing his sights on the far side of the village green as he stormed across it, oblivious of everything and everyone outside his tunnel vision. He ran faster than he had ever run. To do so in bare feet felt wonderful. Natural. Easy. To do so naked changed him, in the course of a few hundred yards, from a circumspect boy to a young man. For the first time in his life, that part of his brain that had often whispered, “You’d better not, Ellis,” now murmured, “Fuck it, Ellis, why not?”