Sweet Sorrow(11)

‘I’m just … Look, I’m reading! Look!’ And I scrambled back to my foxhole to retrieve the paperback and hold it out. She examined the cover, checking it against my face as if it were a passport. Satisfied, she tried to get to her feet, winced and collapsed back down and I wondered if I ought to offer my hand, like a handshake, but the gesture seemed absurd and instead I knelt at her feet and, scarcely less absurd, took her foot as if trying on a glass slipper: Adidas shell-tops with blue stripes, no socks, a pale, mottled shin. I felt the slight prickle of new stubble, black like iron filings.

‘You all right down there?’ she said, eyes fixed on the sky.

‘Yes, just wondering if—’ I’d assumed a surgeon’s air, probing with skilled thumbs.

‘Ow!’

‘Sorry!’

‘Tell me, Doctor, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘I’m looking for the bit that hurts, then I’m prodding it. Basically, I’m seeing if there’s bone sticking out through flesh.’

‘Is there?’

‘No, you’re fine. It’s a sprain.’

‘And will I ever dance again?’

‘You will,’ I said, ‘but only if you really want it.’

She laughed up at the sky and I felt so debonair and pleased with myself that I laughed too. ‘Serves me right for wearing this,’ she said, tugging the denim skirt down towards her knees. ‘Vanity. What an idiot. I’d better get back. You can let go of my foot now.’ Too abruptly, I dropped it and stood by stupidly while she attempted to haul herself into an upright position.

‘Any chance that you could …?’

I hauled her to her feet and held her hand as she tested the ground with her pointed toe, winced again, tested again, and I tried to take her in while looking the other way. She was a little shorter than me but not much, her skin pale, her hair black and short but with a longer fringe that she now stowed away behind her ear, and which was carefully shaved at the nape of her neck in a way that exaggerated the curve of her skull, so that it was somehow austere and glamorous at the same time, Joan of Arc just leaving the salon. I don’t think I’d ever noticed the back of someone’s head before. Tiny black studs in each ear, with two extra holes for special occasions. Because I was sixteen, I let my eyes slip out of focus to disguise the fact that I was looking at her breasts, confident that no girl had spotted this trick. Adidas, they said, on a bright yellow T-shirt with very short sleeves so that, in the soft flesh at the top of her arm, I could make out her BCG scar, dimpled like the markings on a Roman coin.

‘Hello? I’m going to need your help.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘I can hop, but that’s not going to work.’

‘D’you want a piggy-back?’ I said, regretting ‘piggy-back’. There had to be a tougher term. ‘Or a, you know, fireman’s lift?’ She looked at me and I stood a little straighter.

‘Are you a fireman?’

‘I’m taller than you!’

‘But I’m …’ She tugged her skirt down. ‘… denser. Can you lift your own weight?’

‘Sure!’ I said, and turned and offered up my sweaty back with a hitchhiker’s flick of the thumb.

‘No. No, that would be really weird. But if you don’t mind me leaning on you …’

In a further gesture that I’ve never made before or since, I cocked my elbow to the side and sort of nodded towards it, hand on hip like a country dancer.

‘Why, thank ’ee,’ she said, and we began to walk.

The swish of the long grass seemed unreasonably loud and searching for a clear path meant there were few opportunities to turn and look at her, though it now felt like a compulsion. She walked with her fringe obscuring her face, her eyes fixed on the ground, but in flashes I could see they were blue, a ridiculous blue – had I noticed the colour of anyone’s eyes quite so acutely before? – and the skin around them had a bluish tinge too, like the remnants of last night’s make-up, creased with laughter lines, or a wince as— ‘Ow! Ow, ow, ow.’

‘Are you sure I can’t carry you?’

‘You are really keen to carry someone.’

There were a few spots on her forehead and one on her chin, picked or worried at, and her mouth seemed very wide and red against the pale skin, with a small raised seam in her lower lip, a fold, as if there’d been some repair, the mouth held in tension as if she was about to laugh, or swear, or both, as she did now, her ankle folding sideways like a hinge.

‘I really could carry you.’

‘I believe you.’

Soon the gate to the formal garden was in sight, the absurd house now grander and more intimidating, and I wondered: ‘Do you live here?’

‘Here?’ She laughed with her whole face, unselfconsciously. One of my smaller prejudices was a suspicion and resentment of people with very good teeth; all that health and vigour seemed like a kind of showing-off. This girl’s teeth, I noticed, were saved from perfection by a chip on her left front tooth, like the folded corner of a page. ‘No, I don’t live here.’

‘I thought maybe they were your family, the people chasing you.’

‘Yeah, they do that a lot, me and Mum and Dad, whenever we see a field—’