by Albert Alla
I caught up to Leona. When we were in the cinema, sitting around a bucket of popcorn, she cocked her head and studied me:
‘Are you alright? You’re a little pale.’ She stroked my cheek with the back of her fingers.
‘Yeah, it’s just…’ I looked at her.
‘What? You can tell me.’
‘Just saw someone, that’s all. In the street, I mean.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘No, not an ex.’
‘Who?’
‘Just someone…’
She reached for some popcorn and turned to face the screen.
‘Don’t take it like that,’ I said.
‘I’m not. If you want to talk about it, I’m here.’
‘Leona,’ I sighed, building up courage. ‘Andrew Hill, do you know who he is?’
She shook her head.
‘He was in charge of the investigation when… When I got shot. He was the one who came to ask me a lot of questions. It wasn’t easy, that’s all.’
She looped her arm in mine, kissed my shoulder, and rested her warm head against me.
‘Yeah, that must have been hard,’ she said.
My eyes on the top of her head, I expected her nails to dig into my arms, but instead I watched her crown fall and rise slowly, steadily. A cuddle to thank me – I’d opened up. When the first preview ended, an action thriller full of testosterone and helicopters, she looked at me with a big smile:
‘Let’s go see that! Do you want to see it?’
The movie flashed and banged, and I saw actors kiss and kill, but I didn’t follow the story. My mind was all about the inspector, his challenge echoing within the confines of my skull. And I thought of Leona’s easy reaction, I watched her enjoy the movie, as if I’d said nothing out of the ordinary. With a girl like that, I could say anything.
***
Three weeks ago, it started raining that soft Oxford rain. Never much more than a dampness in the air; clouds never fully open, never fully closed; the water table steadily rising. Most of the time, we pretended it wasn’t there, our umbrella either in my pocket or in her bag. My clothes became wet and then they dried. It never took long. By Saturday, thirteen days ago to the day, the soles of my shoes squelched on the grass at the front of the house, and water seeped through the sides. It started raining harder, and there was standing water on the path to Iffley. The river swelled and rippled, its bottom following the current, its surface following the winds.
That evening, Leona came home with water dripping from her hair. I grabbed a towel and asked her why she hadn’t used her umbrella. She said she didn’t know.
I laid the towel over her head, covered her skull with my hands, and, in slow circles, I felt the masses of her hair through the cloth. She stood, her arms hanging limp, like a daughter with her father. ‘Don’t stop,’ she said. I kissed where I thought her forehead was. Then I dried her hair some more. And I kissed where I thought her nose was – it was her nose; I knew that bump, even through fluff and threads. Are you dry? I said. I don’t know, she said. I put a hand under the towel, through her hair. Then I took my damp fingers to my lips, to my nose. You’re not dry, I said. I rubbed harder, and she laughed. Your shirt is wet, I said. What are you going to do? she said. I’m afraid you’ll have to take it off, I said.
I took the towel off her head and pulled her shirt up. For a second I held my breath: she stood with her hair ruffled and wet, her eyes closed, leaning back, and the skin of her stomach stretched warm and taut, swelling with her slow breaths, from the hem of her skirt to the frill of her crimson bra. Then she opened her eyes and she turned the lights off.
‘You’re so dry, so warm,’ she said. ‘That’s not fair.’
She opened the bedroom door and a draught swept past our feet. The door slammed closed behind us. The only light in the room came from the moon through clouds, water, and night. I lay on my back, and I watched water rustle a new path down the window. We moved in a slow, purposeful way. I understood what she was doing when she rubbed her bra against my bare skin, and she understood me when I ran my teeth along her sides. We didn’t come the first time. It didn’t matter. She had Sunday and Monday off and it was raining.
‘I feel like I’m floating,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
We floated together, our bed carrying us above the rains.
‘What’s the thing you feel worst about in your life?’ she said.
‘My whole life?’
‘Yes.’
I studied her. She lay on her back, the sheet covering most of her legs: the one raised knee, the other foot brushing my calf. Her eyes were hazy with dreams. From the first pubic hairs to the hand softly tapping the window, she was naked, all mine.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘Me? Let me think about it…’ She started singing in that soothing way of hers; in her own language, to her own melody. She’d only sung that way once before, when our natural distance had crumbled into a pretty heap. Afterwards, while she’d been getting ready for work, I’d replayed her voice and the beauty of her flat notes in my head.
‘Vicki,’ she said. ‘The way I am with her. I can’t help it, I try, but sometimes I’m a bitch to her…’
‘Bitch how?’
‘Well, I don’t know how to explain it. When she doesn’t do something my mother asks her to do, like watering the herb garden.’ Her words focused in a gentle, forgiving way. ‘That’s her job, you know, but she forgets, or she pretends to forget, and then my father comes home, and it’s eleven at night, but he’s not going to bed, no, he’s watering the plants instead. She doesn’t mean any harm, she really doesn’t. It’s just the way she is. And when my mother asks her, and she doesn’t even turn her music down to listen, then I shouldn’t, but I do. I get really upset, like she was doing something to me, personally. And I shouldn’t, but I did it the other day. I went to her room and… And I asked her what was wrong with her, why she didn’t just get it like others do.’
She went quiet.
‘That’s not so bad.’
‘I said it in a really mean way. Like I was just repeating what everyone else says. And you know, the worst is, people do say that. She’s never quite with it. She doesn’t have many friends, and I know she finds it hard.’
I grimaced as I thought of how much I disliked Vicki.
‘Sometimes, it’s good to be tough.’
‘Yeah, but she’s… fragile. All of last year, she wasn’t eating properly. Scary how thin she was! But now that that’s over, she doesn’t need me bringing her down.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and I glanced at her, looking for a counterweight to the conversation’s flow. But nothing had moved except for her eyes. They were looking at her fingers against the window.
‘And you?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. It sounded true when I said it. But in our silence, cushioned by the rain’s murmur, a face came to mind. Leona’s finger started drawing lines in the fog. First a figure of eight, then a house. Reaching up, I drew a tree next to the house. ‘A friend,’ I said. ‘You don’t know him. He’s dead. I should…’
‘What?’ she said, and I detected nothing but quiet curiosity.
‘I should have done more.’
She didn’t say anything. I drew a square and a cross in its middle, and I rubbed it out. My fingers lingered by hers for a minute. Then our fingers met, and she held hers still while I followed the line of her arm to the goosebumps around her nipple. I turned onto my hip, and I reached for her legs with my other hand. It started with her mischievous smile – her languor broke and we moved faster the second time, each following muted signs, perhaps in the way she shifted her hips, or in the pitch of my breaths, in unison, from position to position. And that dialogue, unseen and unheard, was enough. We didn’t talk. There was the sound of wet flesh on wet flesh, and there was the sound of the rain on the glass panels. She came twice; the second time with me, her body heavy on mine, mine heavy on the bed. I
t was the first time we’d come together.
The smell of sex in the air, she lay on her back with one arm over my stomach. I looked at her and I thought of the way Marie used to smoke after sex. She would lie on her back much like Leona, bringing cigarette to lips, blowing smoke. And yet, they were nothing alike; on the one side, Marie’s perfectly composed features, her breasts hanging in the way that suited them best; and on the other, Leona’s contentment, the skin folding between breast and stomach. I didn’t know how I’d managed to stay with Marie for so long.
‘The friend you talked about earlier.’ She spoke as if she were asking a question.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘What was his story?’
I hesitated, but I was too relaxed to think.
‘He was messed up,’ I said.
Her arm was warm on my stomach, so I kept on speaking:
‘He had a lot of anger inside of him, and he didn’t have much luck. With his family, with friends. It’s complicated. He…’ I wanted to do him justice but a part of me held on tight. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘he had too many ideas. About what was right, what was wrong. But he forgot what mattered.’
‘What’s that?’
‘People. You, me, everyone else. The bloke was brilliant. Probably the smartest person I ever met.’
‘What did he do?’ she asked, and all of a sudden, I realised that I’d drifted far into the forbidden. I panicked:
‘Something stupid.’ I could turn the conversation around. It wasn’t too late. All I had to do was find someone else who fitted the description. Or invent someone. I could kill Denret. He was probably dead anyway.
‘You’re talking about Eric Knight, aren’t you?’
I froze, expecting her hands to plough into my stomach, to curl into fists. She barely moved. The back of her hand was still warm, still resting against my hip. Her head tilted a fraction towards me, and on it I could detect nothing but an avid sort of curiosity.
‘Have you forgiven him?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she answered immediately.
‘Like you forgive everyone?’
‘Yes.’
I didn’t know what else to add. She didn’t seem to mind. I relaxed. She’d just worked six days straight. Perhaps she was too tired to react, I thought, and the gloom lightened for an instant. She got up to go to the bathroom. I listened to the door close, to the door open, and then I heard nothing. I waited for ten minutes before I called out. I didn’t hear a response.
She was running home in the rain, naked.
The door opened. It was her, a tray of food in hand.
‘Your stomach was rumbling,’ she said.
We ate, and it was 10 p.m. and I was hard again. Three times in the one evening, it was unusual. But it was raining and she looked beautiful. This time it was about her. For once, she listened to her urges and she told me exactly what she wanted.
‘What was he like?’ she asked me when the sex had drained the last of her body, and she covered my body with a leg and an arm.
‘You don’t remember him?’ I asked, thinking of the time we’d juggled fruits in the Bakers’ garden.
‘No,’ she said and I believed her. If she didn’t think of her brother, there was no reason she’d remember Eric’s visit.
Her initial question in the air, I took a deep breath and remembered the inspector’s words on the day of my eighteenth birthday, Leona’s easy reaction when I’d mentioned seeing him on the street. Mothers’ misgivings, my early doubts, it was easy to stoke fears. What mattered was Leona now: she wanted to know and the words wanted to come out.
‘Well, he was tall, taller than me. Curly dark hair and piercing blue eyes. You haven’t seen any pictures?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Alright. I guess he was a bit strange. That’s what a lot of people said. Not everyone.’ I couldn’t tell her that her brother was nice to him. ‘But most people thought he was strange.’
‘But what was he like with you?’
Eric was in his shed fixing my bat until one in the morning; in his room, showing me how to differentiate logs; high in his tree-house late one afternoon, telling me about his old football team, about his primary school, until the sun had set and it’d grown cold; and before any other image pushed through, I bit my lip till it leaked blood.
‘With me,’ I said, calmer, ‘he was different. He was nice, he liked me. I don’t know why, that’s how it was.’ I sighed and my body felt light. ‘He was very kind to me. I think he could have been that way with everyone, if only…’ I stopped myself, but the words were gathering a dangerous momentum.
‘But you were his friend. That’s got to be enough, no?’
The moment of his death flashed very bright: his body collapsing, and frozen on his face, the hint of a betrayed expression stopped short by death. For the first time in six years, it occupied the whole of my mind, the image truer for I was awake, and I opened my mouth because I had to. Nothing came out. What had I done? I was a bloody traitor, a selfish twat, and next to that, Eric, he… All of a sudden, there was too much to feel, too much to say, and the words, the space didn’t exist. My lips were loose, my tongue thick, and I blabbered.
‘I could have…’ I repeated the words three times, each time seeing another thing I could have done. ‘I could have done something. For him, for everyone else. I could have known. I should have…’ and I couldn’t speak anymore.
Leona enclosed my head in her arms, in the way I’d held her head so many times before. I smelled the skin around her collar-bone and I closed my eyes, caught in between two rushes: the words, pervasive, accruing behind the images, violent. Both were moving too fast to comprehend.
I woke up at four in the morning with a hard-on and an urgent need to go to the bathroom. When I came back, she was awake, smiling. A new urge pulsed through my limbs, and I put my cock by her mouth. Her lips opened and closed around it, and I realised she was still asleep. Seeing her dutiful in sleep, persistent as she woke up, aroused me more than I’d ever been. When I came, I felt a deep pain spreading from my loins to my chest, and I shivered as it echoed through my guts. I curled into a ball by her side, until I felt I could breathe comfortably. She grabbed my arms and pulled, until I stretched out a little, and she snuck in, blanketing my body with hers. She was so close that I could feel her every breath but I couldn’t see her face. It felt like a blind sort of acceptance, her embrace. I rested my chin on her head, tasted her smell, and surrendered.
‘There were so many shootings back then,’ my mouth spoke through her hair. ‘It was always on the news. In America, of course, but we heard about every single one of them.’ My thoughts couldn’t explain the dull pain, the feverish pleasure that words and images were bringing forth. But why was I resisting the glow of release? Open up.
‘Eric, he liked to talk about them, but only when we were up in his tree-house. He’d built this bridge, and there was this platform…’ The bridge and the platform captured me for a few instants. She was rubbing my back with her damp hands, and my feet were dangling over the great oaks. The crown of her head was hiding her from my eyes, and yet I knew it: her body loved me. We were already sharing skin, mouth, nose. We were ready to share everything. I spoke faster: ‘He smoked whenever he talked about them. There was Columbine, but there were others too. Heritage, and I forget the names of the others. I should remember. The first time he said he understood them, and I… well, I agreed. He had that effect on me. Yes, I said it made sense. But I didn’t really think about it, while he… well, he spoke about them often. And I guess I was interested. It’s morbid, but it’s interesting. That’s why they’re on the news so much, right?’ Her grip was getting tighter, but I didn’t wait for her answer. ‘Well, I was! So I wanted to know why they did it, how, what happened to them, pretty much everything! But I shouldn’t have done that, should I? I should have disagreed, I should have thrown his little pack of cigarettes overboard.’ The pain in my chest lessened as I raised my voice. ‘I shou
ld have pushed him off the platform!’ Hearing myself shout, I went silent and I listened to the sound of the rain on the window, to Leona’s breathing. ‘That’s what I should have done, right?’ I said.
I felt something warm tickle down my chest, leaving a cold, salty trail behind.
‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘You’re too sweet.’
I tried to look at her but she shrivelled into herself, masking her face with her hair. Kind as always, she didn’t seem to mind me holding her. Every time she exhaled, she whispered something to herself, but soon it was lost in her breath and she sounded better. Her skin felt cool to the touch, while, every few seconds, a new wave of heat started in my skull and coursed down to my toes. I wanted to give her all of my heat but she stayed cool, and I sweated. Naked, I climbed out of bed, pulled the second duvet from beneath the bed, and covered her with it. Then, lying around her, I rubbed her body through the down until she fell asleep.
***
It was ten in the morning when I woke up. It was still raining and I was hungry. I went to the fridge and found a few bananas. When I brought them back, Leona was starting to stir. I sat with my pillow against the window, and I ate slowly.
With the dull light, she looked like a black and white movie, her hair big with sleep. Silent, I watched her for half an hour. Her eyes eventually betrayed her: they turned from the rain to my grounded eyes, and the connection brought her down from her dreamland. She stretched and held a hand out for me.
‘Are you hungry?’ I said.
‘Shh.’
She pulled me closer and laid a silencing finger over my lips. I kneeled up and looked out the window.
‘I’ll get the paper,’ I said.
There was no one in the streets. Nothing but water on the ground, water in the sky. In the corner store on Iffley Road, the shopkeeper, a Bangladeshi, had his radio on. I handed him the Observer with my two pounds. He pointed to a stool and asked me what I was doing out on a morning like this.