With a Zero at its Heart. Charles Lambert
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу With a Zero at its Heart - Charles Lambert страница 3
Название: With a Zero at its Heart
Автор: Charles Lambert
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007545520
isbn:
6
He gets a Saturday morning job at Skinner’s hardware store, selling garden implements, screws and nails, buckets and brooms, household objects of various kinds. When he’s saved enough he buys a pair of genuine Levi 501s, a size too large because they’re supposed to shrink to fit. He gets them home and locks himself in the bathroom, fills the bathtub with water as hot as he can bear, strips to his skin, then puts on the jeans. They’re hard and stiff, and so is he. He eases himself into the water, wincing at the heat. When he’s lying in a cold bath, he gets out. The lower half of his body is stained indigo. The 501s hang from his hips.
7
At university he opens an account in a bookshop and another one at Austin Reed’s, gentlemen’s outfitters. The first things he buys with his cards are a book about the cultural revolution and a long green cashmere scarf. He twists the scarf twice round his neck, the fringed ends trailing like dangling vines. His hair is long and catches in the scarf; at night he picks out teasels of bright-green cashmere from the curls at the back of his neck, like decadent angel down. He’s sitting in the college bar and saying how much he would prefer to live in China. You don’t see people dressed like you in China, someone says. Really? he says, put down but also flattered.
8
Each Saturday afternoon they leave their cold water flat by the Arco della Pace. They cross the park, walking past De Chirico’s stranded figures in the drained pool. They leave the Castle with the room they call the knotted room behind them and cross the square until the Duomo is to their right and they are walking into Rinascente, and Fiorucci, and the smaller shops of the Galleria, and along Via Montenapoleone. It is summer and people are dressed in the colours of sorbet and ice-cream cups in small provincial cinemas from his childhood. Pistachio. Lilac. They shop for T-shirts and jeans and belts and sweaters. It is hot, and so are they, and they have no idea how hot.
9
The night he meets his true love he’s wearing a jacket he bought in a second-hand shop in Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s blue check, unlined cotton, and has a retro American feel about it that makes him feel sexy and ironic. He’s wearing it with a baby-blue Lacoste and a pair of chinos, the same beige as the beige in the jacket check, and Timberland boat shoes, without socks. It’s a warm evening, and he’s pulled up his jacket sleeves to show off his tan. It’s late April. Decades later, his only memory of what his lover is wearing is a cap, the kind people wear in Greece, and a smile, and the cap will be a false memory.
10
He visits the second-hand clothes market every Sunday morning, returning home with bargains he never wears, discovering them months later behind the sofa or under the bed, still stuffed into pastel-coloured plastic bags. A woman from Naples has a stall of suits, and he goes through a period of imagining himself as the type of man who wears nothing else, filling a section of his wardrobe with suits that are too small, too large, too formal, too spiv-like, too dull to wear. One day he finds a suit made by Valentino, a grey so dark it’s black, a wool so light it floats from the hand, the pockets still sewn shut. Weeks later, he wears it to his father’s funeral.
1
He sits in the middle of the living-room carpet, piling up wooden blocks that have letters pasted on their sides while his mother watches Emergency Ward Ten on the black-and-white set. He’s spelling out his name when one of the nurses says something about sex rearing its ugly head. He doesn’t know what this means but he can tell from the odd way his mother shifts in her armchair and glances down at him that it’s something bad. He waits for a moment, and then asks her why sex has an ugly head and what rearing means. She tells him he’s too young to understand. When he spells the word SEKS with his blocks she takes them away from him.
2
Visiting his aunt’s house, he plays with the daughter of the family two houses down. She drags him out of the house and into the outdoor lavatory, then lifts up her skirt and pulls down her knickers. They’re supposed to be where someone can see them, he says, but she reaches for his shorts and quickly, as though she’s done this before, unzips them and pushes them round his knees, then makes him sit on the lavatory. She squats on his lap, her shoulders against his jumper, and wriggles. He can’t see over her head. His face is pressed into the cotton of her dress as she leans back into him. Do you like it? she says. No, he says.
3
They’re in the greenhouse. It’s tomato season and they’re surrounded by tomatoes when his best friend suggests they play nudist camps. They take their clothes off and then stand there not sure what to do next. They don’t touch. It’s hot and the smell of the tomatoes is almost overpoweringly strong. After a while, she suggests they play charades. He watches her growl, her chest as flat as his, then mount the handle of a spade the gardener has left in the corner and run with it pressed between her thighs. She puts the spade down and mimes the opening of a door. I’m a book, she says, but he can’t guess which one. He feels faint. Everything looks red.
4
Some weeks later they’re in her playroom, at the top of the house. This time they both take off their clothes and get into bed. It’s a single bed, beneath the window. They lie there, shivery at first and then hot. She pushes his head down under the sheets until his mouth is on her tummy, then further down. There’s a sprinkling of hair he doesn’t expect, which tickles him and makes him want to laugh, but he’s scared as well. Kiss me, she says, and he does. Harder, she says, but he doesn’t know what she means. He struggles back up until he can see his watch. It’s time for Five O’Clock Club, he says. I have to go.
5
They stand in the tent his father bought for him, a tall square tent like the kind you see in films about knights in armour. They all have their jeans around their ankles. The tent is made of some orange material. One of them has a handful of pigeon feathers. The boys push the hard end of the feathers into the ends of their dicks until they stick. The girls put the hard ends into their slits. They wriggle their hips to make the feathers move from side to side. He’s told them it’s what Red Indians do, to show they belong to the tribe. Their skins are bathed in orange. They’re sweating. One of the girls starts to cry.
6
It’s a sleepover with one of his friends from school. They’ve been put in the same bed, a double bed, with a bolster and a quilted eiderdown. They start off in their pyjamas, but his friend waits until the house is quiet, then asks him if he’s still asleep. No, he says. Neither am I, says his friend. They lie together, listening to each other breathe. It’s hot, his friend says, and takes off his pyjama jacket. He sits up to do it, his slim bare chest turned silver by the moonlight. That’s better, he says. He gets out of bed and slips his pyjama trousers off, then gets back in. Aren’t you hot? he says. His hand is hard.
7
It’s СКАЧАТЬ