Black Chalk (27 page)

I thought I did, but I couldn't quite put it into the right words.

‘Leona doesn't like it when Jeffrey comes up,' I tried, ‘and I'm… Well, I'm me.'

‘No, it's not that. Not just that. But yes,' she said and she smiled strangely. It was a sad yet affectionate smile. ‘But she's been so sweet about everything else. Think of it, Nate, all of a sudden, she was the responsible one. And the girls love her. Of course they fight, who doesn't, but they'd give their right arm for her. You should have seen her just before the flower business folded. She wanted to give us all of her savings, all eighty-nine pounds of them! What, she was twelve, and she'd spent years putting every spare coin into her little box. We said no, of course, but she wouldn't hear it. One night, she snuck it under our pillow. That's the sort of heart she has, my little girl.'

She pulled a chair and sat across from me. ‘With you, though… What's she like with you?'

‘She's fine,' I said, and I went quiet, thinking about what I should say. Then I remembered the previous night's screams.

She chuckled in that slow way of hers: ‘You're blushing. Are you in love then?' She stood up and smiled her strange smile. ‘I'm happy, I am. Eat as much as you want, I can make you more. It only takes a minute.' She got up and went to her cutting board. Then she turned to me, a thoughtful look over her face:

‘Was Leona getting up? She might like some fruits in her muesli. I tell you, children can be complicated sometimes. You'll see when yours start dating.'

***

My nights deteriorated until Leona's warmth no longer helped. My pattern was always the same: I watched Leona sleep, until her slow breath became mine, my eyes fell dark, and three hours had gone. Three solid hours before I started to feel my body, hear my thoughts. It was half past two, and dread was building in the gum below my lower teeth. It was four, my mind was too close to that grey heat, and I had to get up. Until daybreak, I sat hunched over my exercise ball in my grand atelier, staring at my A3-sized sketches, hesitating over every stroke. When one proved particularly difficult, I thought half-formed thoughts. Fancy toyed with facts, and Hillary Clinton had won Super Tuesday, Obama was rousing a crowd, and Mike had completed our group's entire assignment, and he was asking me the same question, again and again, and there was Amanda too, in the background, holding a basket of fruit, while she spoke and spoke, a stream of well-formed sentences, each rejoining the other.

I always understood her. After all, she'd only concretised what I'd thought before. But at the same time, there was Leona's raised fist, my fear one second, and my excitement the next, and I was telling myself off. Whenever someone heard my name, saw me as the hero-boy who survived, and twisted me into a five-legged lab rat, my every movement became a mechanical sort of squirm. And there I was, burdening Leona with the same rubbish. Let her be, I thought, and I clung on to the words until they became slick as glass and my fears slid off them.

By daybreak, I was in control but Leona slept on. So I worked and fretted and time passed in its slow swings. In those twilight hours, I was idle and I thought too much – curtailed movements, abstract summaries, sweeping judgements. More than anything, I thought about myself and I came up short. Eight loose years, an atrophied mind, a sagging body… At twenty-six, I had a deep crease across my forehead, a forest drawing its boundaries around my eyes, and a handful of flab around my hips.

Two weeks after I first visited the Bakers, when I'd resigned myself to the drone and drops of many sleepless nights, I decided that I'd use the most wakeful of my pre-Leona day to tackle the one problem I could fix. A pair of shiny yellow running shoes on, my feet thudded and skimmed and thudded Oxford's streets, swerving around the early morning traffic, threading down the white lines splitting one row of houses from another, until my breath ran out and rushed back, and my mouth ballooned into a smile. I came home and showered, and Leona was awake ready to leave for work.

Of course, I should have known how she'd feel. But running was making me happy and blind. She waited until the morning of my sixth run before she put her foot down and asked for a bit of her own. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can put two and two together and come close to four.

In our first week, she'd seen the best of me – a happy man gone bold with passion, tickling and teasing like there never was a dull moment. With that man, she'd shared body and late-night murmurs. She'd kneeled to his side so he could talk of his brother, and gently, with a caress and a loving word, she'd helped him talk past a stutter, until his emotions aligned themselves with his confessions. How quickly that all changed! The day she invited me to meet her parents was when it started slipping away. She noticed the silences, she heard the distress in my voice, but she read me right – push and I'd flee. She started to wait. She was good at waiting. Her parents had gone through hard times – they could never fully hide them from her – and she'd seen their trust, their love in each other, in the belief that things would improve. To wait was to build. I wasn't answering her calls, but that was alright: it was her duty to walk alongside me until her love had smoothed my hurts. So she walked and we went to London, and she was happy to see me happy. I never said it out loud (I never had to) but every time I held her in my arms, tightly so I could feel her breasts push against my chest with each of my breaths, I was thanking her, I was rewarding her, and she kept on putting up with my irritable mornings, my sudden vacant stares.

Such moments mattered. Opening her eyes in the mornings and finding me lying next to her, or sitting on the pile of cushions we'd stacked on top of the flat's gardening books, eyes adoringly resting on her shapes (she was getting up, finally!). With her slow smile, pulling me into bed alongside her. Even I knew that of all our little rituals, this was the most important – sleep almost overtaking me while it left her, her possessive hand resting on my groin, close but far from my subdued arousal, her limbs gradually stretching, her lips moaning with the last of their haze, until the little hand ticked over the I and the X and she had to go to work. It was like a hinted vow, those mornings, and right after the past had come closest to the surface, in Jeffrey's old room, when she needed it most, I'd taken it away from her just so that I could indulge in a runner's high.

On the morning of my first run, sweat dripping down my temples, I'd thrust my chest out and, with a dominant laugh, told her to look at the time. There was life to be lived, and she was moping around in bed. I was being bullish, oafish, all in the name of a better night's sleep.

***

I was so good at ignoring the signs that when she grabbed my freshly showered wrist on the morning of my sixth run, I felt nothing but blind worry. There was the girl who'd forgiven me everything finally telling me that something was wrong (in me, I knew, even if she was too diplomatic to say it), and all of my self-preserving thoughts were probing into the dark.

‘What is it?' I said.

‘We haven't…' She hesitated.

I thought about sex, which we certainly had.

‘What haven't we done?' I sat on the bed.

‘We don't talk as much as before.'

She looked away, only furtively glancing at me, as if there were shame to her concern. I winced. It was serious. And to make it worse, it wasn't the first time a girlfriend had made that complaint. Marie had said the same thing the first time we'd followed the seasons, and moved from mountains to sea. Then, I'd tried talking work – my boss fighting with the manager he couldn't fire. I'd tried talking ex-girlfriends – Sally and the rosy catalogue in which she documented the torsos of all the men she'd slept with. But nothing worked: Marie's reproach hung in the air for a whole month, until she took a day off and dropped in on me unannounced at work. In a flimsy summer dress, the sort I wanted her to wear all the time, she strolled between two rows of Russian models tanning topless, grabbed my arse and stuck her tongue in my mouth. After that day, I put my English sensibilities to the side and embraced public displays of affection.

But with Leona, it was different. She wasn't the jealous type. All of the friends she'd presented to me had been girls. When we were at the White Horse one evening and a colleague called to see whether Leona could cover her shift, she'd left me with a full pint and the prettiest of her friends.

I was sitting on the bed, a sock on my left foot, the other in my hands. She was lying down behind me. Casually, I threw my legs on the bed.

‘Have we run out of things to say?' I said playfully. Playful was best. ‘Because you know, if you want, I can read you my books to sleep. Plenty of things to say in there.' I grabbed one by the bedside and, lying next to her, I opened it. ‘You ready?'

She smiled feebly.

‘No,' she said.

‘What, you don't want to hear about World War II Britain?'

‘Not right now,' she said.

I threw one arm over her and brought her closer.

‘Well then, what shall we talk about?'

She smiled with tight lips and laughed through her nose. A little wistfully, it seemed.

‘I don't know,' she whispered, looking at me. Now I was certain of it, the buried wistfulness.

She reached for my other arm, placing it pillow-flat under her head. Her hair safely disentangled, she turned to face the ceiling.

‘How about I tell you a story?' I said. ‘I'll make one up. Are you ready?' I cleared my throat. ‘Once upon a time, there was a princess. All over the world, people talked of her beauty and intelligence. Every little girl dreamed of having her rich blonde hair and kind blue eyes. Every father dreamed of hearing her advice. But her heart was already taken. By a great prince, mind you, very handsome, and also pretty funny, in case you hadn't guessed. So, I forgot to tell you, but this story is pretty short. Beautiful princess, very, let me repeat, very handsome prince. No need for a happy ending, I've given you a happy beginning.'

To my relief, her muted smile seemed to loosen. A few seconds into my story, my mind had gone back to my post-run blank, and I'd had to wriggle away with more warmth than wit. Now, it would take another minute of play, and I'd be able to start my day.

‘Is Brian working today?' I asked her. The question didn't seem to register. ‘Or is it just the two of you?'

‘Yes.' She glanced at me. ‘The two of us,' she said and she went back to her thoughts. Her head, with its spoiled contentment, kept on nailing me to the bed.

‘I think that's my phone,' I said, and I pulled free to fetch it. As I bent down and felt for it on the bedside table, I noticed that I had only one sock on. I'd been awake for hours, and I didn't even have my socks on.

‘It's my mother,' I said, and read the text out loud: James is in town. Give him a call. I know he'd like to see you. Mum. I turned towards the bed. ‘Can you believe it?'

‘What?' Leona suddenly sounded more interested.

‘She knows how to send texts. I spent a good hour last month teaching her.'

‘That's so nice of you…'

My sock was next to my shoes, where it should be. I sat down on the gardening books and put it on. I'd taken off my right shoe, white leather gone dirty with too many dusty walks, without undoing the laces, and they needed some picking.

‘What about your brother?'

I looked up. Eyebrows barely lifted, Leona had shifted closer and turned one ear towards me, as if she expected me to whisper. We weren't talking as much as before.

‘What? He's the one coming to town. He should be contacting me.'

‘He sent me a message,' she said.

‘When? You didn't say anything.'

‘I haven't had time to say anything. Here…' she grabbed her phone, thumbed through her messages: ‘… 2.17 a.m.'

My fingers strained, my nails picked, but the laces resisted. I looked up:

‘Well, he didn't send me one,' and I picked harder, smarter. This end was probably feeding into this loop. I just needed a moment of leverage, and then it would all come undone.

‘Don't you want to know what he said?'

‘Not really,' I said too quickly. Her eyes had widened. ‘Oh, alright, tell me.'

She hesitated.

‘What did he say?' I asked. My nail was mindlessly searching for purchase.

She looked at me for another second. ‘Just that he wanted to see us.'

‘Us? What did he actually say, Leona?'

She looked at the message. ‘That he's in town and it'd be nice to see us.'

‘He said you. He meant just you, not me.'

‘Why do you say that?'

There it was, the catch I was after. Suddenly, I was pulling and the knot was loosening, and an instant later, I had my foot well shod.

‘It's obvious. You saw the way he's with you and the way he's with me.'

I stood up and picked up my history book. It was well past nine. I hadn't walked two steps before Leona called out:

‘Don't you want to see him?'

I turned around. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her British Telecom t-shirt folding around her thighs, her elbows resting on her knees.

‘You're going to be late.' I made a show of looking at my watch.

‘It's alright, I'll call work. He won't mind. I'm always early anyway.'

I studied my watch again.

‘Come and sit here.' She tapped the bed in front of her. ‘Come, I'll give you a massage. After your run, you need one.'

I could hardly walk out of the room now. Churlishly, I followed her instructions. Her fingers soon found their own knots. In circles, jabs, and gentle thrusts, she set to loosen them. Her hands adding to my debt, she remained patiently silent, in her airy humming way.

‘You saw the way he treated me in London.' I let my voice trail off, imbuing it with meaning.