Dot. Araminta Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ her as they ate their incongruous supper of pork chops, sitting in their brown dining room, even though the evening was still warm and the air was as light as a kiss.

      ‘Oh, I’ve been lying on the grass outside college at lunchtime with some of the other girls,’ answered Alice, amazed at how easily lies now tripped off her tongue. Like everything else, lying seemed to be simply a matter of practice.

      Clarice nodded. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you finish?’

      ‘I suppose get a job in Cartertown.’ Even the words tasted stale to Alice.

      ‘It’s funny’, said Clarice, ‘to see you growing up. There were times when you were younger that I thought it would never happen and now it’s happened so suddenly.’

      Alice had no idea what her mother was talking about and so she took a sip of water and the conversation stopped.

      The next day was their last and Tony seemed as jittery as Alice. She felt him staring at her as she ran to the sea and his hands shook as he touched her body in the cool water.

      ‘You really are so beautiful,’ he said as they stood waist-deep in the ocean. ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.’

      But there won’t ever be anyone else, Alice wanted to shout, please don’t say that.

      After lunch they went to their favourite rock where Alice lay back into the sand but Tony stayed sitting, hugging his knees. ‘Have you told your mother about me yet?’ he asked, letting sand run idly between his fingers.

      ‘No, she wouldn’t understand.’ Alice didn’t want to talk, she just wanted him to lie next to her. But his next question shocked her.

      ‘Is there someone else? You can tell me, you know, I wouldn’t mind.’

      ‘Wouldn’t you?’

      ‘I’d rather know.’

      ‘Of course there isn’t. Why, have you got a girlfriend or something?’ Alice imagined a string of girls trailing Tony like confetti wherever he went.

      He smiled over his shoulder at her. ‘No, no. Only you.’

      Alice sat up as well and wondered if they were stuck not because of her, but because of him. I have approached this whole encounter like a job interview, she realised, all the time worried that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe he is feeling the exact same way. Maybe the fact that I haven’t asked him anything about himself is troubling him, not soothing him. It was the first time that Alice had considered herself from the outside and this new perspective shamed her. She placed her hand on his bony back, curved and dotted by the ridges in his spine and he felt warm and sticky from the salt. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked simply.

      ‘Manchester.’

      ‘What are you doing here?’

      He shrugged under her hand and the movement pained her in its loneliness. ‘Just had to get away. My dad’s a wanker and my mum’s what you might call harassed. I’m the fourth boy and she never made any bones about the fact that she wanted a girl. Not that she didn’t love us, but she was pretty spent by the time it got to me.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice and she didn’t think she’d ever spoken truer words.

      ‘What about your dad? Why’s it just you and your weird mother?’

      ‘He died when I was nine. He had a boat and got caught in a storm. Swept overboard. They never found his body.’

      Tony turned round at this. ‘No, really? That’s shit.’

      And it was shit, shitter than Alice had perhaps realised before. She saw herself standing next to her mother at her father’s memorial, in her black dress and little white gloves, swallowing her tears, desperate for a shred of comfort from Clarice, who just looked forward, a veil over her eyes, her hands clasped in front of her.

      ‘Don’t cry,’ Tony said and she felt the tears on her cheeks.

      ‘Sorry.’

      ‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ He leant forward and kissed the tracks they had made on her face. ‘Look at the two of us,’ he said. ‘I’m never having kids. Parents just fuck you up.’

      And as much to stop him from saying words that Alice could not bear to hear as anything else, she pulled him towards her and something about the way she kissed him or the pitch of the seagulls’ screeches or maybe just the way the planets were moving round the earth gave Tony the courage to take the movement as far as they both wanted.

      Sometimes you can feel summer ending in the whip of the wind or the coolness of a morning or a cloud passing over the sun. The news was filled with stories of their Indian summer, blown to them like a piece of magic from a mystical land, but still it happened two weeks after their holiday and, with the season’s change, Alice felt a terror which she didn’t know how to articulate. Sooner or later she would have to stop going into Cartertown for pretend interviews and actually get a job. In just a few weeks it would be too cold to meet on Conniton Hill and the boarding house Tony lived in didn’t allow visitors. Their meetings would have to take place in pubs and cinemas, crowded with other people, and eventually he would lose interest and meet a girl who was less complicated and happy to introduce him to her parents.

      By November it was as if the summer had never happened and Tony shivered in the wind. Alice felt him slipping from her with every meeting until one day, on Conniton Hill, he wouldn’t meet her eye and so she grabbed and thrashed with her conversation. ‘I wish we could meet more often,’ she said, longing for him to ask her to run away with him.

      He lit a cigarette and she could see frown lines between his eyes. ‘It’s hard, what with your mother, my shitty room, no money, sodding life.’

      ‘But maybe it doesn’t have to be hard.’

      Tony grunted. ‘Life’s always hard, Alice. Maybe not in your fairy tale castle, but for the rest of us it is.’ His voice sounded gruff and something curdled in her stomach.

      Besides, the insult had stung her and she felt tears popping at the side of her eyes, which she wiped furiously away. Somehow, somewhere, she’d always known that it could end this way and everything about the fact that she would die without him gave her courage. ‘Come on,’ she said, pulling him up and leading him into one of the many thickets on the east side of the hill. Once there she started to take off her clothes, pulling at his, standing on tiptoe to reach his mouth.

      ‘Steady on!’ Tony laughed. ‘What’s got into you?’ But Alice didn’t answer, kneeling before him instead and taking him into her mouth, feeling him harden against her tongue. ‘Fuck,’ he said from somewhere above her. Now she pulled him down so that he was on top of her, panting with the same desire that she felt. ‘Wait a second,’ he moaned, fishing a condom out of his pocket and every second that he wasn’t inside her was too long so she pushed her hips towards him. But once he was she found that nothing was enough, he could not get far enough inside her so that she was almost crying with rage at the inadequacy of the human body’s inability to turn itself inside out. She sucked him into her, pulling all of him, wanting part of him inside her for ever.

      He came with a cry. ‘Fuck,’ he shouted, ‘fuck, where did you learn to do that?’ But he was laughing as well СКАЧАТЬ