by Albert Alla
‘It’s not to the good balls that I got out. No. It was to high full tosses or double bouncers, when I bent low, played a perfect straight drive, and held the pose as I heard the death rattle.’
She laughed along with me.
‘But at least I could go back to my father and tell him all about the beauty of my shot. That I’d been bowled was a minor detail.’
‘My father played too,’ she said.
I waited for her to say more, perhaps that he was a batsman or a bowler, but she pursed her lips, as though she were caught in a recollection. A girl who’d grown up in the Oxfordshire countryside and who liked cricket enough to bring it up – a good thing could only go so far. I couldn’t expect her to ask me whether I knew how to bowl a slider.
‘The problem with my father was that he was Hornsbury’s star batsman. A hard act to follow…’ I trailed off.
Her face had changed, as if she were fighting a cramp. Puzzled, I thought back over what I’d said.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
She nodded tightly. ‘Just remembered something,’ she let out.
‘Well, I guess I won’t talk about cricket then.’ I smiled broadly. ‘That’s all I thought about when I was a kid. That and girls.’ She didn’t smile. I felt like I’d poked a long needle in her thigh, and that I was pumping blood out with every one of my jokes. ‘But now I haven’t watched a game for eight years. Proof that men can change!’
She rose, nodding curtly at the bathroom. I’d done something, and now she was going to leave without saying goodbye. It had to be the cricket chat. But she’d looked interested. Hard to read a woman, I consoled myself. A minute later, she walked out of the bathroom, her arms swinging freely, the colour back in her face.
‘So tell me about France,’ she said as she sat down.
France fascinated her. She wanted to know why I’d moved there, what my first job was, whether the mountain glare hurt my eyes, the reasons behind my Antibes boss’s barbed comments, how I’d felt when she’d been fired.
‘How can you care about people when you move so much?’ she asked, leaning towards me, genuinely interested in my answer.
I answered her questions as best I could, watering down my justified cynicism to match her rosier vision of the country.
Her lips clasped into a pensive pout.
‘Do you smoke? Everyone smokes there.’
‘I tried but I don’t like it.’
‘Me neither,’ she smiled and I felt like I’d passed a test. ‘Ah well, you’ll have to tell more another day. Do you speak French?’
The question made me chuckle. ‘Well, I tried. Most locals didn’t speak any English, so I had to.’ I thought back to my first few attempts at French slang and smiled. ‘Do you speak French?’
‘Tu es un peu mystérieux,’ she said, sounding delighted.
‘Oui, il faut bien.’
She seemed happy in French. If sometimes she emphasised the wrong vowel, I liked the charm she lent the words. For the first time, I was seeing her a little self-conscious. Looking at her smile even more than before, I felt like I had a say in where we were going.
‘Allons prendre une glace,’ I said.
We never made it to the ice cream shop. My laces having come undone, I kneeled and she didn’t wait. I stared at her arse, the cloth of her dress fondling a cheek at a time, until I caught up to her. At the corner of Temple Street and Cowley Road, I grabbed her arm and she turned towards me, her eyes large with seriousness and curiosity. This time, I pushed my fears aside and our noses brushed and our eyes stared at each other’s mouths. I paused. From above, I saw her bite her lower lip, teeth breaking the arc, and I desired them more. Her hands laced around my shoulders; my fingers rode down the wave of her back. I would have waited and built on that last ounce of doubt, but she crossed the gap, and my tongue tickled her upper lip. My world narrowed to the softness of her cheeks, the strand of hair following the line of her nose, her lips, sometimes dry, sometimes wet, and to my suddenly sensitive cock, twitching every time her stomach came too close to mine. For a nineteen-year-old, she knew what she was doing.
We must have stood there, next to one of Oxford’s busiest roads, clogging the pavement as lips met lips, and hands bundled flesh, for close to ten minutes. When it got too much, I held out my hand and she took it. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew we had to go somewhere, or my balls would ache all night. My own room wasn’t far, but my parents were home. As we crossed the Cherwell, I remembered sneaking into the Botanic Gardens when I was fourteen. We walked down Rose Lane and into the rose garden by the day entrance.
‘I love white roses,’ she said.
‘Follow me.’
There were two cameras fixed to the residential building overseeing the gardens. I took her straight through their beam, out of their sight, and stopped by the shed abutting the main door. With my fingers, I mimed what we had to do. I went first, raising myself onto the shed’s low roof, and, crouching down, I helped her up. Peering over the garden’s wall, I saw that the bench was still there. I scrambled over the wall and lowered myself onto it first, and then helped her down. I looked at her dress, at the bench, at the wall.
‘You might…’ I mimicked a tear.
‘It’s only a dress,’ she beamed, her voice growing louder.
‘Shh… Security does rounds here and…’ I pointed at three dark buildings giving onto the gardens.
Again, I took her hand, and on the little memory I had of the place, I made my way towards some dense shrubs next to Rose Lane. Action sharpened my focus, and the damp warmth of her fingers elated me. Skipping over a flower bed, we slipped behind waist-high ferns, and found an enclave of clear earth between the wall and the ferns.
We were on the ground kissing, and she was pushing me down, and there was a rock poking me between the ribs, and it was gone, and her hips were grinding through denim and cotton, and my hands were soft and my hands were tight. They explored, groped, scratched, caressed, and I was delighted with everything they found. I reached for a condom inside my jacket and struggled with the buttons of my jeans, while she looked on as if she were caught in a dream. While I fumbled, she sat on my thighs, cutting off the circulation to my legs, a hazy smile on her lips, a crackly silence in the air. And then I had the condom on, and she lined her hips with mine as if there hadn’t been an interruption. Such flow, I thought. She still had her underwear on, but I ripped the elastic and it felt right. As she bore down on me, I felt a certain resistance, as though I hadn’t positioned myself right. I tried again and the same thing happened. The third time, she laid one hand on my chest, the other on my cock, and pushed, and pushed, until she was down and her pupils were dilated. The fingers on my chest were clawing through my t-shirt.
I could hear something, maybe a voice, maybe someone singing, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the feel of her sliding up and down. ‘There’s a bit of noise coming from that wall.’ This time I could make out the words: it was a voice and there was also the beam of a torchlight. I pulled Leona against me and hushed in her ear. She kept moving her hips.
‘Look at you, checking everything tonight. What did the missus slip in your tea?’ a gruffer voice said.
I could hear their footsteps on the other side of the ferns, and I could feel Leona’s flesh parting around mine. I tried to force her hips still, but she was too strong for me. Light reflected off their jackets and pierced through the leaves. I held my breath and covered her groans with my hand. Wet and hard, her tongue dug into my palm. I looked through a gap in the leaves, and for a second, I was looking right into the grey eyes of a bald man. He had a boxer’s broken nose. And then he’d moved towards me, into the ferns, and I couldn’t see him anymore.
Just as I was racking up excuses – deny or appeal for privacy, I’d choose on the spot – a chorus of boastful voices drowned the sound of their shuffling steps. They were all speaking, laughing, shouting at the same time, but what was important
was that they were on the other side of the wall.
‘Oh mate, you’ve got no idea!’ one boasted loud enough that I could hear him.
‘Not after what Cecilia told everyone about your little… habits,’ a different voice, with something like a German accent, shouted back so strongly that his words drowned out our wet slurps and slaps, and the ensuing laughter overpowered the security men’s chuckle. I was certain that that boxer of a security guard had seen me, but now both groups were moving away from us, one further into the gardens, the other along the road, and I relaxed. The ground felt soft and we were proud and we giggled. Although I stayed in her for a while, it was no longer about the sex.
Later, as we had our clothes back on, as we lay with our backs to the soil’s dew, and I had my jacket over us, I noticed her tearing petals out of a white rose. Every time she flicked one onto the ground, she brought the flower close and inhaled deeply. Propped on my elbows, I looked at my crotch. I lay down and stared at a gap between the clouds.
‘Was it your…’ I asked.
She nudged her head between my arm and chest. I gathered her closer and felt glad she hadn’t told me. I would have fretted and she would have obliged my worries. Instead, she kissed my neck, I burrowed my nose into her hair, and I wanted to laugh in awe. At that moment, I felt like I could say anything, like I didn’t need to say anything.
***
That night, I had my best sleep since my return: seven solid, dreamless hours. In the morning, I spurted half-formed plans as water broke over my back and sheathed my body. But thoughts of Leona kept on surfacing, wiping away my best designs and leaving me with a contented, perplexed smile. Her stifled moans as the warmth of her breath condensed against my palm, the shape of her straightened arm when she sat and rested her hand by her thigh, the few rebellious hairs stroking my forehead as she pressed on me, the tempo and steadiness of her voice as she told me about her sister, and her quivering upper lip as the security guards walked away from our hiding place. There were doubts too but they didn’t stick. So that by the time I walked down to the kitchen, my emotions had settled and I felt as though nothing could move me from my high: life back home was taking a good turn.
My mother walked into the kitchen and started making herself a cup of tea, while I was sitting on the knotted kitchen table, halfway through my porridge.
‘I’m making you one too,’ she said. Her hand stopped inside a bag of loose leaves, and she looked at me. ‘Do you want one?’
There was a hint of deference in her question, as if she expected me to say no. The mother I’d left would have thrust a cup of tea underneath my nose, and she would have looked on sternly until I had some. Now, she was striving to bring her maternal authority in check.
Seeing her changed moved me. Even if I appreciated the spirit behind her efforts, I felt uneasy at the thought that the mother I’d left wasn’t the one I’d come back to. A voice within told me that I was responsible for this. Her firstborn disappears and avoids her for eight years – how else was she supposed to react? I was trying to make amends by giving more of myself, but my attempts always seemed forced, as if, by making them, I were acknowledging that there was something wrong.
She’d told me about the problems she’d had with my father on my third day back. ‘They’re over now, but it was hard while it lasted.’ Her confessional tones made me instantly uncomfortable. I listened, split between turning away as I would have done, and gently asking her for more as I wished I could have done. In the end, I fought with my face and said: ‘Oh, really.’ When she added more, I looked at a book on a shelf, and I said: ‘Oh, that must have been tough.’ And just as I uttered the word ‘tough’, she went silent, suddenly looking embarrassed.
But this time, when she asked me whether I wanted tea, I felt a strong instinct building inside of my relaxed self, and I asked for Earl Grey as kindly as I could before I went back to my newspaper. The article I was reading had anecdotes about a Southern Governor who sang songs and read from the Bible at town hall meetings. A man who could play a role in a Republican administration. There was a photo of him, guitar in hand, wearing jeans and a chequered shirt, surrounded by a cheerful crowd.
‘How was your meeting yesterday?’
I looked up, as she sat and laid a spotty mug down by my left hand. It had an uneven rim and a lip halfway around its handle – the last surviving member of a set she’d shaped herself before I was born.
‘He thinks I have a good chance to get into the summer programme.’
‘Oh.’ She looked like she was going to say more, but she blew her tea cold instead.
‘I’m thinking about it. It’s not a big commitment.’
She smiled, and I saw how tense her face had been.
‘Oh, I’m proud of you. Do you have everything you need to apply? If… you decide to apply.’
‘Let me think,’ I said and she stood up.
She paced as I listed what I needed, nodding with every item, whispering to herself loud enough that I could hear her, that she had that document upstairs, she just had to find it, or that she’d call her colleague and work something out. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told me as she frowned and pinched her chin between her thumb and forefinger, and the words seemed more aimed at her than at me.
Up to that point, I felt that my mother and I had reached a new, steady sort of understanding. And then, just as she was about to walk out with a straight back, I made a passing comment which had her sitting down. Of course, I should have coated it in niceties, but I was caught in logistics, and this was one integral element.
‘I’ll have to find a place to live,’ I said.
It was as if those words unplugged a leak, and her entire resolve drained down her spine. Her jaw sunk and the skin of her cheeks seemed to sag down to her neck.
‘A place to stay, yes…’ she said, tapping her finger on the table. It was the only thing I could see, that finger. ‘You know you can stay here, if you want.’
A single image of Leona flashed through my mind – a receptive turn of her eyes, bare shoulders, bare chest – and I was back in my high.
‘Thanks.’ I reached across the table and grabbed her hand. ‘But I’m used to living by myself.’
‘Yes, of course you are,’ she said and smiled a brave smile. ‘You’re used to it, that’s only normal at your age. I und—’
I interrupted her: ‘I don’t have to live far.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said, and her eyes brightened. Once again, she started murmuring, to herself at first, but then the murmurs grew, and I recognised the names of colleagues, of friends. ‘Let me make a few phone calls,’ she said. Her voice was strong.
***
That night, Leona wanted to go for an evening stroll in Port Meadow. She was in a contemplative mood, the previous night’s passion replaced by a quiet calm. We crossed the expanse of grass and she unfurled a blanket halfway between the path and the river. There were three horses ruminating to our right. While the clouds held together, the horses were dingy silhouettes against the faraway trees. But they came into our lives when the moon broke through. Then, we could see their piebald patterns, their tails swinging gently, their mouths skimming the grass. When the light first shone on their coats, Leona went silent and pointed at them, a delighted look on her face.
By 11 p.m., the temperature had dropped and I suggested going to my parents’ house. They’d gone out for a romantic getaway, a night out in a bed and breakfast down in Somerset. That was how my mother put it while I’d smiled in what I hoped was an encouraging fashion. Leona nodded with a calm smile, and we gathered our things.
We didn’t linger in the common parts of the house – it was too soon for that. My hand on her lower back, I guided her straight to my room. Once inside, we piled our things over my desk chair. She went to turn the light on, but I caught her hand at the switch, and I took her in my arms. The sex was different the second time around. It was a more serious affair, and I was the older lover. The ease
she’d had the night before was gone. She kept her top on and lay down on the bed, waiting for my next move. I obliged her, whispering instructions, unclasping her bra, helping clothes off, but all the while I was waiting for the sort of impulses that had pinned me to the earth and left a red mark on my side.
I guided her hands, ran a finger over her lips, nibbled her ear in the way that had her almost throwing me off the previous night, all the time prepared to feel her fingers dig into my flesh. But Leona smiled, groaned. She followed my instructions, all of them, dutifully, asking me whether what she was doing was right, and soon I was taking my role more seriously. I slipped a pillow under her waist and, with thoughtful pleasure, she said she liked it better that way.
When we were finished – I was lying on my back, and she had her arm over my chest – I thought over the Leona I’d just encountered. Brain-spun ideas were telling me that I ought to be disappointed, but deep down, I felt that I liked this other Leona very much. A bottle of wine, skipping a wall – she’d gone headlong into the previous night’s rush. Tonight, we’d spent an evening alone in an open field, and an inquisitive calm had taken hold of her. It was pure, the way she followed the moment.
Her sleepy voice diverted my musings:
‘When you walked into my café yesterday, I thought you were French.’
I ran my fingers through her hair and asked her why.
‘I don’t know, I just thought you looked French. You had a French accent at first.’
‘Did I?’ I asked, worried. Having an English accent in France was hard enough. I didn’t want an accent in my own language.
‘When you gave me euros, you counted them in a French way.’
‘Do I ’ave a Frrench accent?’ I whispered.
She laughed a quiet laugh, and I rearranged the sheets for she was cold and I was hot. The air was just right for my exposed skin, and I felt myself drifting off to sleep. Leona’s breath was slowing. I could smell sweat and sex; I could feel her arm weigh gently across my chest.