Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

  I was about to say ‘nothing’, as I usually do when the question comes up, but I felt like talking despite sleep’s pull. So I told her about the course I was going to start.

  ‘My mother’s found me a flat in Cowley. I think it belongs to a colleague who’s on sabbatical in Australia. Apparently, I can have it.’

  ‘What’s it like?’ she murmured.

  ‘I haven’t seen it yet. She told me it was on Stockmore Street, very close to the ice cream shop we didn’t go to last night.’ I felt her eyelashes brushing the skin around my nipple. ‘It sounded big enough.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, her voice distant as if she were in the flat already. ‘We’ll be able to live together.’

  It happened just like that, without a trace of hesitation, with nothing but a contented sort of tiredness. The feeling was contagious – as soon as I heard her say it, I wanted to have her every night, her naked body covered with a single sheet, the same tree-sap smell permeating the air.

  It was that night that she started telling me about her past, the words low and gentle. She told me about her first boyfriend, at the age of fourteen. He went to the same school, two years ahead, and he spent all his money on a Gibson electric. He was the first man she’d kissed, which she’d liked. He was also the first man to touch her breasts, which she’d found rather painful. He wrote her four grungy love songs. The fifth one had a line about her naked and dead, and, despite his artistic disclaimers, she broke up with him.

  Among her soothing words, I remember her mentioning another girl. It was the only girl she ever felt attracted to: tall, with a black father and a white mother, luscious lips and curly black hair. She blew out smoke rings, bit her lips, and watched them dissipate. Leona tried to kiss her once, but the girl turned away and reached for another cigarette.

  I told her about Rebecca, my tempestuous first girlfriend, who I’d kissed properly twice, on our first day, and a month later, on our last day, when I finally managed to slip my tongue past her braces. Besides that, I didn’t say much. My thoughts were as lazy as her words, still spent from the stresses of the day, still calmed by the sex. Her fingers ran circles around my thigh, sending a gentle tingle all over my body. I felt comfortable next to her. A strong image came to mind, in which she stood clear against a warm background, leaning against the railing of a Mediterranean veranda, inviting me up the stairs. The picture was hazy, but I knew that I could let go and trust her. With time, my confusions would clear, and I would reconcile the nympho in the Botanic Gardens with the pupil on my unmade bed.

  The only time she spoke of her family was when she mentioned her grandmother’s death. We’d been speaking of love – death was only a natural extension.

  ‘She said she didn’t want to die bound to a hospital bed. She made sure we were all with her, at her house in Fontaine-le-Bourg. I helped her put the mixture together in the afternoon, when everyone was having a drink in the garden. We had a great big dinner, with her favourite dishes, her favourite wines, and then she took it.’

  There was enough beauty in her words that I asked her more, and she told me about the herbs she added: ‘Thyme, coriander, and dill,’ she said. ‘Her favourites. To mask the bitterness.’

  I nodded, for it made sense. After a few minutes of silence, my hand became more adventurous, and it was right to ask her how the sex had felt.

  ‘Soft,’ she said. ‘And hard. It felt hard and soft at the same time.’

  ***

  Another good night: almost seven hours. In the morning, I asked her not to have a shower until we had breakfast. I wanted to see her hair ruffled for a little longer. My fingers had worked all night, hand in hand with sleep, to bring it into that most private of looks. She wore one of my old t-shirts, one that had always been too big for me but which I’d bought when big and baggy was the fashion. It reached to the middle of her bare thighs. While her tea was cooling down, she unfolded her legs and went to look at the pictures by the counter. She picked up an old frame, studied it, and moved to a newer one.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘James is your brother.’

  It was a matter-of-fact statement, as if she’d thought about it already, and the picture only confirmed the obvious. The quiet joy that had me smiling out of the corners of my mouth suddenly dimmed, becoming almost silly in its new light.

  I should have realised it: a girl growing up so close to Hornsbury would have at least seen my brother a few times. But it only dawned on me then, and with it, I understood that if she knew my brother, she knew who I was. I remembered how tight her face had gone when I’d mentioned Hornsbury on our first date; eight years on, it was still raw enough that it had caused her pain.

  Ever since Sally, whom I couldn’t have told because that would have been telling the whole cruise ship, all of my girlfriends had known, and not one of them had made it an issue. But now that I had trouble sleeping, I felt something around my chest shrink and gather dust. As her index finger traced the inlay of the wooden frame, I realised that there had been a pure kind of hope swelling inside of me, and it was gone already, before I had time to cup it in the fleshy parts of my hand.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked me, in the same tones she’d used all along. I looked up to make sure she wasn’t judging me.

  ‘He’s alright,’ I said automatically.

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, and I heard genuine relief in her voice. Her tones puzzled me: ‘The last time I saw him, he looked very pale. Nothing but skin on his bones. I don’t know if you know, but he used to go out with Debby, one of my school friends. You haven’t met any of my friends yet! We must do something with them one day.’ Her voice went distant for a few words, before coming back to its usual earnestness: ‘Yes, Debby and James. I haven’t seen her for at least a year, but we used to spend a lot of time together a few years ago. Especially two years ago. They’d go and do their thing. I wasn’t into that, so I guess that’s why we drifted apart… Oh, I’m glad to hear he’s better.’

  ‘He’s a little better,’ I said with more feeling. Listening to her clear voice, so full of relief at first, turning wistful at the mention of Debby, and then coming back to the same genuine relief as she concluded he was better, I saw her again on her veranda, an orange, ivy-clad wall behind her. I put my sense of loss aside and focused on my brother: ‘He’s back in London now.’

  She was still holding the picture frame, rotating it between her hands. The morning light shone through the messy strands of her hair, framing the invitation in her eyes, in her mouth as it drifted open. And I told her more. At one point, out of habit, I hesitated. I looked into her face, our gazes crossed, and I realised how strong she seemed at that moment, half naked, her hair ruffled, her eyebrows raised in concern. As if she realised it too, she looked down at our hands and, squeezing mine, urged me on.

  I told her the way he’d cut his potatoes, till they were nothing but mash, the way he’d slammed his bedroom door on my outstretched hand, the way he’d sneaked back to London. Saying it all, I realised that it’d been bothering me, and I started to feel lucky.

  An hour after she’d left, I was still smiling. There was a girl who’d been born good and, for some strange reason, she liked spending time with me.

  ***

  That afternoon, I rode my bike into town and went past a college sports ground full of men in white. I stopped by the midwicket boundary, just as a stocky man bowled a lob to a watchful Indian batsman.

  I hadn’t played cricket since I’d left England, except for a few street games in India, where it was impossible to avoid the game but where I never spent more than a few days at a time, and one pick-up game when I worked in the Alps. The expat community had huddled, and from one man’s trunk, from another’s garage, we’d managed to find two bats and a plastic ball. Then, amongst peaks and cliffs, in a park a few hundred metres below the snowline, we’d played the sixth test of that year’s Ashes. It was a matter
of making the most our limited resources: the wicket was a track, which was still hard enough for the ball to bounce. One of the set of stumps was made of three sticks hammered into the ground, while the other was made of a stack of beer boxes. And it wasn’t about the cricket either: three of the Australians decided they were more interested in David Boon’s record – fifty-two beer cans over a twenty-four-hour period – than in the cricket itself. They passed out a long way before their half-century.

  Putting my bike on the ground, I stood on the boundary, reacquainting myself with the game as it was meant to be played. I watched the batsman bend a long way forward to each innocuous delivery, as if there were some hidden danger in them, while his partner urged him to give him the strike. Their banter carried clearly across the field, and the rest of the batting team, safely sitting on the pavilion steps, sniggered quietly. On the penultimate ball of the over, he stepped out of his crease, reached the ball on the full, and swatted it high and fast in my direction. There was a fielder at deep midwicket, but it eluded him and came right for me. Shuffling, I stretched out one hand and felt it slam into the heel of my thumb, and my fingers curl around it.

  The batting team cheered. Some in the bowling did too, but theirs sounded more ironic. I returned the ball, while the umpire signalled a six by raising both his arms so far behind his head that he looked as though he might fall down. There was one more ball in the over: the batsman blocked it, just as he’d blocked the first four, but this time he called for a single. His partner already had his back turned, clearly waiting for his turn facing. ‘Yes, yes!’ said the Indian, running towards his partner. By the time the non-striker realised what was happening, he was halfway down the pitch, and the keeper was breaking the stumps. Looking at the pavilion, I noticed that the batting team was no longer smiling mockingly, but seemed a little worried now. They all averted their eyes as the non-striker walked in.

  ‘He can’t fucking call!’ I heard, together with another string of ‘fucks’ while his teammates stayed quiet. I didn’t stay to see how the new batsman would do.

  Taking a catch off a six, seeing a farcical run-out, these should have had me yearning to play again, but instead they just made me realise how much I’d changed over the years I’d spent away. As a seventeen-year-old, I would have stayed up all night to watch England take on Australia on Boxing Day, while now, I smiled at the contest but didn’t feel the urge to go and join a team.

  ***

  Leona was helping me sleep. A few hours with her, and I worried less. Her body next to mine, matching my breath to hers, I slept even better. There was something comforting in her steady presence, in her deep unbroken sleep. She had a way of moving when she slept, of touching me just when I needed it.

  But alone and sexless, I could only manage three good hours before I started drifting. In and out of a sort of sleep, of a sort of dream. Lucid hallucinations, memories congealing, evolving into something between the real and the mad.

  By the fifth hour, I was gun in hand, surveying the field. Eric was on the ground, dead, unconscious. And everyone else was fighting between red and black. Or red and white. I pointed the gun at my foot: I could see skin, muscles and bones through the leather of my shoe. And I aimed for the nail of my big toe.

  Before I could pull the trigger and watch a hole form itself between concrete and leather, my heavy eyes flicked open, and there was no chance I could go back to sleep. And I waited in bed, or I rose and wrote.

  One morning, my mother pointed at the pot of coffee I was brewing myself.

  ‘Is that just for you?’ she asked.

  I eyed the pot.

  ‘I drank a lot of coffee in France.’

  She traced lines under her eyes:

  ‘You look a little tired.’ She sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘It’s normal. I’m not a big sleeper. I’ve been this way for a long time,’ I said, looking directly into her eyes. I saw real concern.

  ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to. I don’t like shrinks.’

  ‘Not a shrink, no one is speaking about shrinks,’ she said. ‘Just a GP. There are things you can do, you know, and if they don’t work, they’ll prescribe you sleeping pills.’

  I said I’d look into it, for I could see that my mother wouldn’t let go until she felt I’d listened to her, but I’d already browsed the internet for advice, and I’d tried their relaxation techniques. My case was different. That memories were mingling with dreams was the cost of coming home. A few more weeks, I told myself, and I’d be fine.

  ***

  I moved in to the Stockmore Street apartment the day after my first class. The car was full of everything I thought I needed, comfortably stored in the boot, together with everything my mother thought I needed, which extended all over the back seat.

  ‘You have to feel at home,’ my mother said as she added lamps, sheets, duvets (‘Two, just in case, and you can always store the other one under the bed’), cutlery, plates, two pots and a Teflon pan (‘You’ll be able to cook with less oil’).

  When we first reached the house, the third in a row of eight identical 1950s townhouses, and she pulled out its key, she told me there was a spare and I could leave it with her if I wanted. I gave a non-committal answer, imagining instead Leona’s reaction as I handed her a key. Would she be delighted, or take it in her stride, I asked myself, and I imagined both scenarios. I liked not knowing: whatever she did – I pictured a plethora of smiles and weighed it against a thoughtful cock of her head – I’d discover more of her. But then, as we climbed to the upstairs floor, which the flat occupied, I told myself that I was being silly: it had only been a few days. Surely, I should hand the extra key to my mother.

  I listened to what my mother was telling me. The house, divided into two flats, was empty for the summer. Both of their children had been offered jobs in London within a week of each other, and her colleague being away, hadn’t had time to rent them out yet.

  The upstairs apartment had a put-together feel, as if some architect had decided to add each room independently of the others, and the furniture had followed the same logic. The main bedroom stood four steps above the rest of the flat, as if it needed the extra height, while the other bedroom, empty but for a desk and a exercise ball, was almost too small to be lived in. The kitchen, with its purples and bright greens, looked as though the architect had decided to turn a corridor into a psychedelic statement. And the living area, with its flowery sofa and its transparent plastic table, had a window facing the garden so high up the wall that I had to stand on a chair to see the top of the garden’s shrubbery.

  ‘We didn’t bring anything to put on the walls,’ my mother said, and before I had time to say that I’d only be living there for a few months, she told me that I must come and take some posters and paintings from the garage. ‘Do you remember the big one with the church your grandmother did? It would fit well on this wall. But of course, you can take whatever you want.’

  After I agreed, she left me and I called Leona. While I waited, I noticed that my mother had left the spare set of keys on the kitchen counter. Don’t rush into anything, I told myself. But the scene I’d already constructed came to my mind, and this time I pictured a gentle, naïve smile as I handed her the keys. This expression felt so right that I forgot all the other scenarios, and I winced. Such innocence, and me, dirt peeling from my arms!

  Rather than keep on thinking, I made myself busy, unpacking a few boxes, making the bed. When Leona arrived, I walked down to open the door feeling only slightly uneasy. But even that vanished when I saw her, the strap of her light blue bra toying with the strap of her green summer dress, and my hands, my nose, my lips followed impulses of their own. Feeling giddy, I made a show of covering her eyes until she was inside the flat.

  When I took my hands from her eyes in the living area, she swivelled even slower than I’d ever seen her do before, her gaze taking in everything from the floor to the ceiling: ‘Do you
think that chimney works? It’d be nice in winter… I like the polka dots on those curtains… How would you close the ones on that high window? … Nathan, there’s even a washing machine. Oh, look at this vase!’

  I listened, sharing in her delight.

  ‘Nathan, this is perfect.’ Running her fingers along the wall, she found a door I’d glanced over, and peeked in. ‘There’s even a hoover.’ Opening the bedroom, she told me how much she liked the bedding.

  ‘That’s my mother’s,’ I said.

  ‘She has a lovely eye for detail. I’d really like to meet her. You must come and meet my parents too. We have a little vegetable garden. I can pick some tomatoes, and soon I’ll be able to pick blackberries, and that’ll make a great salad.’

  Her voice, light and happy, suddenly became urgent: ‘There’s a spider,’ she said and before I had time to react, she added: ‘I’ll get it.’ Bemused, I watched her as she took off one shoe, held it by the toe, climbed on a chair, and swung her weapon into the web. ‘Missed it.’ She coiled her arm back again, pointing at the spider with her other hand, one foot balancing on the chair, the other on the kitchen counter, and she swung.

  ‘Here we go. Dead.’ She came down from her chair, beaming. She showed me the flattened spider glued to the sole of her shoe.

  ‘How about next week? Could you come then?’ she asked.

  As we haggled over a date, I thought back to the way she’d wedged the chair against the kitchen counter, to her glee at the small spider’s crushed body, and I felt oddly comforted.

  ***

  While tomato sauce simmered in one pot, and pasta boiled in another, Leona remembered that she’d brought me a book. She handed it to me with a worried fold between her eyebrows. ‘I hope you’ll like it,’ she said. It was a well-worn paperback with a black cover. In its centre was a white star that looked like a Star of David gone curvy. Thoughts on Thought, I read, and hid a wince. The author’s name, Kuraetsokov, only made me more worried.

  ‘He led a very interesting life,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘He was born a prince in nineteenth-century Russia, but when he was in his twenties, he had a revelation, and he gave all he had to an orphanage. He started teaching all over Europe, and then in America.’