You

by Joanna Briscoe

  She watched the collective breath sweat down the walls, wondering about the composition of DNA that swarmed in a sole drop. She skimmed the auditorium to establish where he was, relieved that she could look straight ahead at the stage without her gaze splashing against his. He was a blur pulsing on the other side of the room to the right of her eye line. He spoke to Elisabeth, both of them gazing abstractedly ahead, her nodding, listening and occasionally commenting.

  He was wearing a chambray shirt without a tie beneath a jacket: his version of relaxed Friday night dressing. He looked tall, wide-shouldered, noticeably large sitting on the steps, his legs sharply bent. Elisabeth, so much smaller, sat beside him, her grey-black head indefinably challenging. Her gaze was occluded, as though she had no need to meet anyone’s eye.

  Two trumpets sounded and a boy entered the stage talking about ‘the theatre of the bourgeoisie’ in tones of privilege softened by the standard mock-London accent favoured by Haye House. Cecilia groaned internally. Her misery seemed composed of physical pain. She had spent the remainder of the Christmas holidays waiting for a call, a sign, a visit from the man who had kissed her. As time ground past unoiled by sleep, she had picked at sections of her body – scalp, heels, nails, cuticles – excavating and attacking. She wandered, sometimes, with Gabriel Sardo when he returned from his parents’ house, telling him nothing yet soothed by his talk, up to the frozen moors where she thought James Dahl’s old navy Saab might appear over the horizon.

  A girl dressed as a puppet now sat embroidering on the stage. She sewed each stitch with loose jolting movements. The audience laughed. Cecilia remained silent. He had never driven on to the moor that Christmas. She had cut more holly in the woods, pricking her fingers, bringing branches home cradled in wool-gloved hands itchy with blood. Dora and some neighbours arranged a wassailing tour with lanterns for their children while she stayed at home listening for the phone. She had conversations with him in her mind with the frequency of a nervous tic: her thoughts tugged and flickered that way, so that she was forever talking to him, explaining herself, even as she railed against his silence.

  The puppet-girl on the stage referred to her desire to be married, her head tick-tocking from side to side, and Cecilia froze, sliding her eyes further from where James Dahl sat.

  Days had gone by. Dora had stuffed stockings with presents, welcomed her children’s friends, cooked wholemeal mince pies, completed jigsaw puzzles with Tom while yanking Barnaby from the electric sockets. Gales poured along the valley. The phone cables were down for two days. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Dora had asked as though incidentally, eclipsed by the demands of Barnaby.

  The puppet was now singing, rolling her eyes, lifting her patched layers of skirt as she sang about breezes and sighs in a pure voice. Children in the front joined the chorus. On some days, Cecilia had woken in terrible excitement. The light was white on the curving plaster of her walls, the morning late and warm – they put the central heating on at Christmas, her parents; the only time because of the cost – and she was drugged with brief sleep after an interrupted night, and she woke and thought, he kissed me. She hugged it to herself in her bed.

  Children from the younger classes now scattered glitter on to the audience’s heads from a platform above, its drift scored with the heavier fall of cigarette ends and lollipop sticks and pellets of paper hankie.

  He had written her a letter. The third of January, it arrived: a formal typed letter on Haye House paper that could have been written by a teacher regarding schoolwork, requesting that she phone him at three o’clock that Thursday.

  She waited until three and a half minutes past three and rang from the phone in her parents’ room. She trembled violently as she dialled.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telephoning me. I should –’

  He was silent.

  ‘Yes –’ said Cecilia, interrupting him as he began to speak again.

  ‘– felt I should call you to find out – establish how you are.’

  As she absorbed the formality of his tone, she felt as though sand sank through her chest cavity, dark and sludgy, falling and falling and leaving an empty space.

  ‘Oh!’ she said breathily, audibly a teenager. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad.’

  He paused.

  ‘So . . .’ he said.

  He stopped. He seemed to be about to terminate the call.

  No, thought Cecilia, clinging on to the phone connection with knuckles and nails in her mind, knowing the self-lacerating regret that would ensue if she said nothing.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked simply.

  The audience was clapping now as Time, represented by a boy dressed in a yellow bustled frock, skipped on stage and sounded the hour. Cecilia caught sight of a flash of blue shirt, an electric imprint of familiar features facing the stage from the other side of the room.

  ‘How are you?’ she had said on the phone, and he had hesitated, and she heard his breathing change.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said, audibly coughing hesitation from his throat. ‘I do regret – I wholeheartedly apologise to you for –’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice dull.

  ‘I do. I’m very concerned that –’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘That you should be all right. In fact. Not upset. I mean –’

  ‘Oh I – Can. When –’ When can we meet? she wanted to say, but the sand was now at the pit of her body, almost weighting her to the ground and unbalancing her, and she could say nothing after a little further hesitant exchange but a polite goodbye. She cried against her parents’ bedside table, knocking her head on its side several times intentionally.

  Skeletons in luminous body suits darted on and off the stage as a boy stood playing cymbals attached to his knees, the performance veering further away from Lorca’s text into the realms of the experimental.

  He was never in Elliott Hall gardens any more: he kept away, just as she, to avoid him at school, a twist of hope still tormenting her, routinely went there.

  The stage darkened as a group of smugglers carrying balsawood blunderbusses over-acted, inspiring faintly embarrassed merriment among the audience.

  She could barely work; she could do nothing but work. Her essays were stiff, her handwriting altered; her reading was obsessive. She had lost weight. She sat in his classes, said nothing, and was not addressed. Rage rose inside her.

  Children playing urchins now rushed from the stage on to the steps dabbing powder on to the audience’s faces with brushes to screaming hilarity.

  He had talked directly to her just once, on the stairs that led to the room where she studied French.

  He had paused. He seemed to be about to say something. ‘I –’

  She smiled at him, fearing that she was baring her teeth into a grotesque grin. Her gaze alighted on the curves of a mouth that had touched hers, the jaw with its shaving shadow, and confusion coloured her face.

  ‘I hope – you’re well, Cecilia,’ was all he managed to say. He looked tired. He looked more poignantly beautiful to her in his strained state. He smiled slightly and turned, hesitated, then went off to teach a class, his head lowered.

  Speedy’s laugh was now sounding through the auditorium among mounting hysteria as Furry the school dog tore round the stage with wings attached, representing a bird. Pupils screamed and called his name, whistling and competitively beckoning him. A parent from a formerly celebrated rock outfit sauntered on stage apparently unbidden and performed a drum solo to further appreciation.

  How was she supposed to hand in essays referring to love in Shakespeare? He had smiled at her courteously as she passed him in the corridor. He smiled with similar restraint at Nicola and Nick.

  A drama teacher wound the handle of a hurdy-gurdy as the skeletons launched into a dance of death on stilts, the audience whooping without reserve. Cecilia groaned, and at that moment her gaze met James Dahl’s across the auditorium. They rolled their
eyes to the ceiling in simultaneous derision. They smiled. Time halted. They looked at each other in a tunnel. It was a violet tunnel, filled with bright dusk. No one else was there. The raucous cheering was outside. She laughed. He broke into a bigger smile, looking directly at her. They glanced back at the stage again at the same time, Cecilia’s mouth still twitching.

  Nicola, sitting beside Cecilia, remained unaware.

  The audience fell into a frenzy as the play ended and children cartwheeled across the stage with Furry storming among them.

  ‘I’m going to stay with Zeno,’ said Cecilia decisively, struggling down the steps, weaving through parents and touching her mother’s arm.

  ‘Oh!’ said Dora. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’ll call you tomorrow,’ said Cecilia, and kissed Dora. She detected the exhaustion in the thinness of her face against her lips and felt a pang.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Dora, and smiled at her.

  Cecilia walked from the damp heat into the contrast of night where students gathered in groups shivering and chattering loudly. Lights went on in boarders’ rooms. Guitars could be heard. Solipsistic hysteria still reigned, thinning out in the cold.

  Cecilia walked across the lawn, faces bobbing palely over the night grass, and there was camaraderie in the exchange of half-smiles with people who were still linked by the same recent experience. Voices sounded louder outside, clustered shadows walking, their delivery a controlled hush in the expanse of night. Laughter broke out across the lawns; two bicycles wobbled through the darkness. Cars were starting up on the drive in a clatter of exhaust.

  She entered the main school building where corridors were lit and classrooms long-darkened, and pupils ran, skidding with their arms in surfing positions, around the hall. She walked unthinkingly from room to room, an unspecific sense of purpose driving her. Teachers and parents chatted, their children lingering in groups and unwilling to leave. She walked along corridors, glimpsing the lights of the boarding houses and the spread of trees through windows; she passed Idris talking to Speedy, Annalisa’s parents, and her French teacher Lavinie. Further lights snapped blinkingly off, making her jolt, and the school became quieter, its daytime atmosphere shifted.

  She entered the corridor containing the cupboard in which she had so often sat in earlier days with Nicola and Zeno, and James Dahl appeared from the other direction. He almost passed her with the speed of his gait. He stopped, his footfall ringing on the linoleum as he paused mid-step. He turned, and his hand rested spontaneously, fleetingly, on her arm.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, surprise in his voice.

  ‘Hello,’ said Cecilia with a smile she couldn’t repress.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He smiled at her. Lines fanned pleasingly from the top of his nose, as they did when he smiled, his eyes catching hers.

  ‘Just walking,’ said Cecilia. ‘Where are you –?’

  ‘Walking. Thinking – I’ve been thinking about that performance.’

  ‘What wankers.’

  ‘What wankers.’

  She snorted. He laughed quite openly. She laughed more, hysteria rising inside her. He looked at her, slightly wonderingly, hesitating.

  The bell of the church outside Wedstone sounded from a long distance.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said.

  She could hear all the colours of his voice, the workings of air and tendons close up in the quietness of the building.

  ‘I used to look at it sometimes during – Oxbridge. You could just see the tip of the spire from where I sat,’ she said.

  ‘Could you?’

  ‘Yes. Just the highest point, right in the sky. I used to see clouds near it and think they were snagging.’

  ‘That’s lovely. I never noticed.’

  ‘Your back was to it. I’ll show you,’ she said with a rush of boldness.

  ‘Oh –’ he said almost sharply, pausing. He stood still. The strangeness of being in the school building at night with its festive sense of abandoned routine dissolved the constraints of the day. Cecilia began to walk, and he walked beside her. He stopped; she walked on, then he walked again.

  They went up the main staircase, darkness interspersed by the intermittent buzzing of lights. A door slammed below. A sole guitar sounded from somewhere across the grounds. It was an old route: left, right, a bank of lockers shimmering in the gloom, past the high window at the turn of the staircase on whose sill you could sit and be animated, profile arranged becomingly, in case of James Dahl passing; up further flights of stairs to the top of the building and right again, its details followed in her head so many times.

  The room was dark. The tables in the centre, regrouped since the previous term, formed a grey bulk, the area by the door illuminated by the glass-shaded bulb on the landing. The plant curled down the wall from the sill.

  ‘You see,’ she said, pressing her face against the window, but nothing was clear in the blackness. He cast a shadow over her that spilled into the corner of her vision. The scent of him came to her in twists twined with radiator dust. They stood there.

  He said nothing. She listened to him breathe.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  He was silent. There was a click in his throat.

  She heard herself with a delay, echo of sound lapping echo.

  He drew in his breath.

  ‘You don’t,’ he said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You can’t,’ he said in the same tone.

  ‘I know,’ said Cecilia blankly. She was cold.

  She stood stiffly. She lowered her face. She was motionless, leached of thought or movement. Nothing more mattered: she could die, she could escape.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said eventually. He shook her shoulders lightly and placed his hands just below them on her back, reassuring her or comforting her.

  ‘Silly girl,’ he said. ‘Lovely girl –’

  ‘I –’

  ‘– don’t waste it on me.’

  ‘It’s not a waste,’ she said in a thread of a voice. She looked at the floor. Her hair fell over her face.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  She stood still.

  ‘I have to see that you’re all right,’ he said.

  She looked up at him, his face lit by the hall and the spill of lights on the drive. She could feel the mobile warmth of his breath about her. The plant floated gently with radiator heat.

  Her face tilted minutely, instinctively, towards his mouth. She stopped. She emitted a small sound; she stayed still, humiliated.

  ‘You’re very – fine,’ he said. He frowned. ‘That’s not the right–’

  He caught his breath with a snaggle of air.

  ‘I think you have to keep away from me,’ he said.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘You – I think you should.’

  She moved nearer him, or he pulled her further towards him, an adult comforting her, the side of her face pressed against his chest, his shoulder, and tentatively he stroked her hair. They stood still by the window. The Klimt was golden in the night. She rested there, his heart pulsing warmth into her ear from beneath his shirt, the size of his chest remarkable to her: he was the widest and tallest person she had ever felt. She tried to steady her breathing. The stroke of his hand on her hair was so rhythmic, so constant, she could barely absorb it; she was suspended by the movement into a state of milky tranquillity, past and future obliterated.

  She felt the varying pace of his heart. She stared at the darkness that welled and retreated in the corner of the room when she focused on it.

  ‘It makes me very miserable,’ she said eventually.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know what you feel.’

  She paused. She detected the acceleration of his heartbeat again. She nearly spoke.

  ‘Do you?’ she said after too much silence.

  He was silent.r />
  ‘I think you – I think you should go down now,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  His hand was still on her back. She turned her head and she pressed her mouth to his chest like a small creature seeking comfort with a gesture in which pride threaded supplication. He bent down and eased her away from him and as he did so she looked at him, and they kissed.

  They paused. They pulled away, their mouths open; she glimpsed the reflection of light on his pupils as he looked at her, his eyes dark, almost unfocused; then they kissed again, the cool movement of his tongue against hers shocking, the realisation of what was happening surging to her head.

  He was so much taller that in kissing her he half lifted her, his hand on the small of her back, her waist, his body bent to meet hers, and she pressed herself against him, kissing him fast, searching for breath, clutching at him for salvation after such grief: frantic, almost tearful in her need to eradicate that despair. Sharp spurts of anger at all that suffering rose, surfaced, made her faster. His hands moved down to her hips. She shivered. Her coat fell down one arm, his palm meeting her shoulder, her untouched skin flaring to sensation, and she pressed against his chest, finding his skin, his clavicle. They stumbled together round the desks: he backed, still kissing her, holding her as she moved with him, and they sank on to the small sofa on which he had once stacked books, moving in a slow awkward fall towards the arm. She kissed him faster, still startled by the rougher harder planes of a man, by the bristle and searching tongue.

  ‘Slowly,’ he said gently, his voice low.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, kissing him, playing with his ear, tracing the line of his jaw with her finger. Memories from films, from books, twitched through her mind informing her, making her momentarily conscious of cliché, of stock images that could either instruct her or humiliate her, but now he was kissing her, his mouth on her temple, cheekbone, lips, his body so hard and male-scented against her that extreme excitement edged with fear mounted inside her. He kissed her neck; he pulled her coat from her, her jumper, his own jacket, and she, her mind still flickering with cinematic sequences, unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her lips there.