Black Chalk (31 page)

I focused on the paper, on the grid and nothing else. Nine rows, nine columns, nine boxes, eighty-one numbers. Ones, twos and nines, I ordered them around. No, you can't go there! Only a three in here. A foreign object (a yellow pencil, hardly more than a stub) appeared on my page, and started to scribble a two where there could only be a six or an eight. I flicked it away: its point broke as it hit the floor.

‘Voil
à
,' I said, and I realised I'd just interrupted her.

She looked at me like I'd said something strange.

‘That was quick,' she said. ‘Let's try this other one.'

‘Let's try it in bed,' I said, and I bundled all the sections of the paper under my arm. She picked up a bowl and held it at arm's length, staring at it, seemingly frozen. Just as I opened the bedroom door, I heard it shatter behind me. Leona looked shocked: her fingers still open, her eyes on the cheap white china shards littering the ground.

‘Don't worry about it,' I said, and gathered her into my arms. Her body went loose. ‘Accidents happen,' I said.

‘No, they don't,' she said.

‘Come, we'll clean it up later.'

She stumbled heavily behind me.

‘Have you sorted out the recycling?' she asked me as I pulled her into the room.

‘We'll do it later,' I said. I propped myself against the window, and I beamed at her. The duvet covering my feet, I felt liberated all of a sudden. I wanted to laugh, cry, and most of all, I wanted to talk. Through watering eyes, she stared at the point of my chin. Lest she became caught in a dumb silence, I poked her, I tickled her. A faint smile played with the edges of her lips.

‘Last night… Are you happy we talked?' I said.

‘Of course,' she answered immediately. Her face grew firm and I realised how slack it'd been. Her whole demeanour sharpened, as if she'd finally stopped daydreaming, and her hands reached for my side, tickling me as I'd been tickling her, but more insistently, her fingers clumsy enough that they hurt me. Pushing my t-shirt up to my chest, she laid her head and her warm hair on the skin of my stomach, and tapped my crotch through my jeans.

‘No, wait,' I said, embarrassed and limp. There were a hundred impatient images going through my mind – they'd waited long enough, now they wanted out – and not one of them involved sex. She undid my buttons and stroked it.

‘No,' I whispered.

‘Yes,' she said. She took me small in her mouth, and I blushed. She worked on me, while I told myself to shut up and enjoy. Then, constricting the base of my cock with one hand, she positioned herself over me, lined me up, and pushed me inside her. By the third stroke, I was limp and crying.

‘Let's…' I started, but I didn't know how to finish.

Her face turned to the ceiling, she pivoted on top of me for a whole minute, before her head came down and her hair followed. Our gazes crossed and I had her back with me. Lying down, she burrowed her face into my armpit.

She groaned softly, questioningly, I thought.

‘No…' I said, ‘sorry…'

‘No,' she repeated, her voice trailing off.

‘It's here,' I said, jabbing my chest with the point of my fingers. ‘And, it needs to…' I threw my hand at the air, as if I were tossing away a rib and a fistful of flesh. I didn't know what she could have said but I waited anyway. Then I added:

‘Are you judging me?'

‘No, of course not.' Her voice came out sanitised through my armpit.

‘You're allowed to.'

She started to say something but all that emerged was a weak groan.

‘You think I'm a monster,' I said.

‘No!' she said immediately this time, tilting her head so that I could hear her. ‘I don't. I'm not judging you.'

‘Do you love me?'

She paused.

‘Yes, I really do.'

It was the first we'd mentioned love. Up to now, I'd thought it too obvious to tell her.

‘I need you,' I said. ‘As long as you love me, you're allowed to hate me.'

‘I really do.'

‘Can I tell you more?'

‘Yes,' she said, her voice ashen with the rain. I tried to look at her face but she tilted it down again so that all I could see was the point of her jaw. I hesitated, but then, with a deep breath, she added: ‘Yes, I want to know.'

That was all I needed. I turned on my side and enclosed her in my arms until I could feel parts of her comforting me from my toes to my chin. Tilting my head just so, I could see her as I'd seen her the night before. I inhaled: yes, she even smelled the same. And I was relieved, for I was back in the previous night's space, that guilty refuge.

‘I'm a bad man, I'm a terrible man. That's what it is. You can't be friends with everyone. My father always told me so, and he's a compass on those things. You see, I should have done more. So much more! But there I was, talking one day to Tom, the next to Eric, like there was a bridge between them as big as that space between my eyes. You see, if I hadn't been there, what would Eric have done? Nothing, that's what. He couldn't, he wouldn't have had a clue. He'd have been on his own planet, consumed as he was with his own problems, and he'd have never thought of them. But with me telling him how bitchy Anna was, with me repeating Tom's latest prank, with me telling him how Jeffrey fancied Beth' – the words came out so fast that I didn't think about them, that I noticed Leona getting tenser but I ignored her all the same; to do justice to the past, I had to hound her with my words – ‘with me telling him how we were all fascinated by Jayvanti's rack, well, with all of that, how could he not relate? How could he not hate? It's not that he wasn't in, no, it's that he was excluded from a world he knew everything about. Because he was curious in his own way. Of course, he always had more to say about the latest advance in nanotechnology, or whatever it was back then, but when I told him that Anna hadn't let me sign Josh's birthday card, oh, he listened alright. Are you beginning to see how bad I was?' I paused. ‘Are you?'

Except for the word ‘no', I couldn't make out what she answered. She shifted, her forehead slipping down my torso, catching my chest hair between our skins, until all I could see of her was the back of her head. I preferred her that way: it was easier to believe what she said if I didn't see her.

‘I'm terrible, but that's the least of it. It gets worse, and you can judge me, you should judge me. Someone should… All that everyone cared about is what happened that one morning. Rubbish that. Why does it matter? It's out! Everyone's dead, except for me, fuck justice, and that's the end of it. Isn't it? And you tell me, what about the evenings when he was thinking about it, the nights when he was planning every step? You see, there were days he talked about it, and I was there, in that ankle-high bean bag, or in his tree-house, looking at the next hill like I was its long-gone master. And you know what, I listened to what he said, I nodded my head, I asked the odd question like I did for everything else he said. Except that this wasn't everything else. Two fourteen-year-olds open fire in some far-gone American state, that's not quite the same as talking about the best way of tying three ropes into a bridge, now, is it?

‘But look, after Columbine, what else were we going to speak about? And when he said he understood them, of course I said I understood them too. It's never hard to understand anger. Especially when I was sharing his three days a week.'

A picture of the two of us talking, scheming even, came to mind and the words grew heavier. But I needed to finish what I'd started:

‘After the first shooting, he told me he understood why. He explained it to me – fairness, respect, he had every right to expect both. But a month later, he'd forgotten about it. That energy of his, that power he had, it was focused on smaller things, better things. And then there was another shooting, and this time he talked about it in a different way. It wasn't so much the why that interested him – it was like he'd already established it was right, and he didn't need to prove it again. Mathematical mind, he had – he wanted to be an engineer, and he would have been a great one, but you need to be dull to study. He was never that. Too intense, too strong. Yes, this time it wasn't the why that interested him, but the how. How they did it: what they needed, how they planned it, how they carried it out, where they failed. And on every item, he told me how he'd improve it. Sometimes, it was like we were talking about it together: in Arkansas, they pulled the fire alarm, watched their classmates file out, and took aim at the whole school from a row of trees, he said, and we analysed the pros and cons of doing that. Pro: confusion. People don't know what's going on. Con: inefficiency. You'd get more people if you were closer. But some other times, he'd thought everything out beforehand, and he was merely presenting me with an executive summary. Like guns: given how easy it was to get guns in the US, he found it disappointing that they only used what their parents already had. He'd read reports of sixteen-year-olds buying assault rifles with no ID checks. Assault rifles, he told me. Nate, assault rifles. Can you imagine what we could do with assault rifles, he told me.

‘And then I don't know exactly what happened. He didn't tell me much, you know. In some ways, he told me everything, but in others, he said almost nothing. I think he had a fight with his mother or with his stepfather. That wasn't unusual. And that was also when he had his second fight with Paul. This time, it was Eric's fault, from what I could put together. He told me that I should have seen the way Paul looked at him. Like he wouldn't even piss on his foot, he said. So he punched him. Hardly worth calling it a fight, when Paul didn't have time to fight back. Still, it was decent of Paul, and decent of Tom too who saw everything, to keep their mouths shut when teachers started asking questions. After that, though, people kept well clear of Eric.'

Leona shifted for the first time since I'd started speaking. She squirmed, one hand rising until it covered her ear. But her fingers were open: she could still hear me.

‘And there was another shooting, or people started talking about one of the old ones. Whatever it was, the subject came back, and this time Eric started to wonder how one could do it in the UK. Very general at first. I told him you couldn't find a gun out here, and he said that if some random gang up North had them, he could get them too. If you put your mind to it, he said, you can get anything. I told him that there were so many CCTV cameras that the police would know right away. He just laughed. And then he saw that I was serious so he explained it to me – no one watches the tapes live, he said, and besides, what does it matter if they do? I'm not going to be alive to face them, he said. And you know what, I just kept on asking questions, bouncing off his energy, like he hadn't said anything wrong. Not alive? He was adamant about that: there was no way he could do something like that and still be alive afterwards. It'd be a travesty, he said. Travesty, that's the word he used.

‘That's when he leaned towards me, very quiet all of a sudden. It was pretty cold so we'd left the tree-house, and we were in his shed. Two bodies in there, and after ten minutes it was warm enough to take our jackets off. So he said that he couldn't kill himself. Couldn't live, but couldn't kill himself. Can you imagine what that would do to my mother, he said. Her son commits suicide. It would break her. So he leaned towards me, and with all that intensity of his, he asked me whether I'd kill him in that case. He asked me whether I could look at him and pull the trigger. He'd do the same, don't worry. At the same time, count down from three. Three, two, one, bang, and his mother doesn't have to suffer so much.

‘I told you I was a terrible man. Terrible. I guess I thought it was all academic. No, that's not even true. I have no idea what I thought. All I know is that I said yes, and that he seemed relieved, and that I was happy to be doing him and his mother a favour.' I paused. ‘Do you think I'm a bad man?' I asked Leona.

She didn't answer. In fact, I couldn't even hear her breathing.

‘Do you think I'm a bad man?'

I grabbed her tighter and shook her. Her head bobbed twice against my chest.

‘Do you think I'm a bad man?'

‘No,' she said weakly.

‘Tell me the truth, I'm a terrible man.' I shook her again. This time her body went rigid and she tried to push herself off me. My arms like a clamp, I held her close.

‘No,' she said louder this time, ‘you didn't realise,' and she stopped struggling. For a moment, I compared my brutish arms and her limp body and I hated my own strength. I couldn't go on, I was hurting her. But then I heard her clearly:

‘It's not your fault,' she said, and I forgot my doubts.

‘You don't believe that. I did realise. I'm not sure what I realised, but I realised something. And when he walked into the classroom with his chains, I realised I'd realised. That's how bad I am. And you know what, he looked at me, and he realised that I'd realised. Yes, he did. Because he didn't shoot me. It's hard not to shoot someone. In a small space like that, when you're shooting everyone else, it's very hard. And then – oh, for fuck's sake – no, I'll say it. Yes, he called my name. I was hiding. When he called me, that's when the adrenaline really kicked in, that's when my mind sharpened until all I could see was the two of us. Before that, and isn't that the worst of it, before that, I'd watched it all as if we were throwing paint at a canvas. Here's a little blue, and here's a whole bunch of red! But when he called me, I forgot everyone else, all of my friends screaming, spilling their guts on the floor, and I thought of me, me and me. Fuck, I was afraid. Nate, he said, hurry up. He was still businesslike then' – Leona pushed her elbows deep into my stomach, and it stopped me short for a second, but I knew it: she wanted to hear more. I held her tighter, and her body became loose again – ‘I went to him, he handed me one of his guns, carefully and everything, handle first, careful where you point it, and then I saw it in him. He was afraid too. It caught up to him, but there was no point in trying to stop it. You don't start something like that and not finish it. Before, he'd looked like a prophet, the sort of man who would have stood in the middle of a crowd, and everyone would have gone to their knees. But now, he looked like a little boy. And that's what saved me. With a prophet, I'd be dead like him. You can't resist that sort of charisma. But with a little boy, I became very angry, oh so fucking angry. Angry like I'd never been before. Not thoughts-swimming hazy angry. No! Very, very, sharp angry, like I could see the muscles around his eyes twitch, and I wanted to cut them up with my nails. Gritting my teeth, how am I going to smash your face to pulp angry. You ready, he said, and oh boy, I didn't know what I was going to do then, but I was thinking hard. He raised it, I raised it, and he started counting. Three, it was weak the way he said it, maybe he was thinking about his mother, maybe he was imagining the police knocking on her door, but then he said two, and he said it with more strength, like he was thinking about his stepfather, like he imagined all the people he hated, like he'd shown them what justice was really about, and I could see it in him, he was in it, deep in the mechanics of his death, and just when he said two, I knew what I was going to do. He said one, and I'd already pulled the trigger, right at his head. We were so close it was hard to miss. His hand was already falling when he shot me. He missed my head, got me in the stomach, but he was already dead… You're allowed to miss when you're dead.'