Sweet Sorrow(83)

‘What do you think?’

‘Beautiful,’ I said and wondered if I ought to kiss her. But already she had dropped her bicycle, plucked off her trainers and, still walking, grabbed the hem of her dress and peeled it from her damp back and over her head. Eyes fixed forward, she unhooked her bra and at the water’s edge, pulled down and stepped carefully out of her underwear. With a gasp, she took two, three long steps into the water and stood there for a moment, one hand at the small of her back, the other arm across her breasts. Then both arms were above her head and she fell forward, yelped at the cold and was gone, silently and entirely, just a white shape against the green, carried downstream with the current. In all of this, I’d not spoken and perhaps not breathed and now I could only say, ‘Oh, God,’ before she resurfaced again, some way downstream, squinting and pinching her nose.

‘Why aren’t you in yet?’

‘I’m really sorry, I don’t have my trunks with me.’

‘“Trunks!”’ She laughed. ‘Well, you can’t ride a bike in wet underpants, you’ll chafe! I’ll count to ten.’ In a spirit of discretion, she turned her back and disappeared beneath the water and I took the moment to quickly pull off my clothes. The pebbles were agony underfoot as I ran bow-legged into the river, stumbling and spinning with a huge splash and gasping at the slap of the cold water that caused my genitals to contract like a snail into its shell. You’ll warm up, I told myself and half swam, half stumbled to the deepest part, the river-bed, here peaty and black-brown with a half-pleasant vegetable smell. The current carried me through patches of warm, then cold, then warm water down to where Fran now stood, in a sunlit patch at the far bank, crouching so that her chin touched the water, her shoulders brown, her breasts white triangles beneath the surface. She caught me as I floated past, tangling together, and we kissed, tasting the river water on her lips and mouth, and I pulled her towards me so that our legs were interlocked, and we wriggled our toes into the silk of the mud for anchorage and stayed like this until the water felt warm between us and our fingers pruned, until Fran pulled her feet from the mud, lifted herself and locked her legs around my hips.

But this was too much and, gasping, she pushed herself away suddenly, laughing then turning and swimming back upstream. I watched her leave the water, crouching, clutching her clothes to her body and disappearing up the bank and into the field above. I stood for a moment, then, like a drunk trying to sober up, submerged myself completely. I clambered out, untangled my clothes, dressed and followed.

I found her lying in the long grass, her arms out to the side, her underwear bunched in her left hand, her dress still wet and clinging to her like seaweed on a rock. She didn’t look at me as I approached and I had a notion that I’d offended her – she was still breathing deeply, as if she’d been crying – but she patted the spot at her side and I joined her, holding hands, drying out as best we could in the low, tired sun.

After some time had passed, she turned on her side and kissed me lightly. ‘That thing we almost did. The sex thing.’

‘Hm.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it and I want to wait.’

‘Okay. Until when?’

‘Until you’re twenty-one.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Or the weekend.’

‘This weekend?’

‘I thought so.’ She started to laugh and shifted onto her side. ‘Your face. Twenty-one?!’

‘Yes, that was really funny.’

‘But the weekend, you can manage?’

‘Me and you?’

‘I think that was implied.’

‘This weekend?’

‘Want to look at your diary?’

‘No, no, I’m good.’

‘Good.’

‘I mean, I’ll have to check the Radio Times.’

‘See what’s on?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s if you want to do it with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to take anything for granted.’

‘Well, I was saving it for someone I liked …’

‘But in the meantime? As a stop-gap?’

‘It’s more or less the only thing I think about.’

She laughed. ‘I mean what we do now, the … fooling around, that’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’

‘We’d just be taking it to—’

‘—the next stage.’

‘Well, then it’s fixed,’ she said. ‘Think of it as the ultimate line-run.’

‘Good.’

‘Good. It’s on.’ She kissed me and lay back down. ‘Anyway, sex underwater doesn’t work. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. You’d be fine but I’m the one who’d get frogspawn and pondweed up there.’

‘Sticklebacks.’

‘Pond skaters. Fanny like a classroom aquarium. I don’t want to miss my period then find out I’m going to have a perch. Also, we’d have needed a condom.’

I had one in my wallet, one of a set of three – a lifetime’s supply, I’d thought – that I’d purchased, heart racing, in the toilets of the golf club where Mum worked. I’d selected ‘ribbed’, a powerful word, like the walls of a log cabin or the tyres of a monster truck. If they’d sold ‘corrugated’ I’d have bought those. Instead, I was alarmed at the gossamer flimsiness of the thing. To reassure myself, the first had been squandered on what I thought of as a ‘dry run’; the second, ‘the spare tyre’, was stashed in the cardboard sleeve of the Stone Roses’ second LP, because I knew no one would ever look there. The third of the trilogy I’d take with me on evenings that had seemed ripe with promise – trips to the funfair for some reason, or to parties in Harper’s den. I carried it now, the ring showing through the burnished wrapper like a brass rubbing. We might have used that in the river, but it would have meant swimming to shore to get it, walking back across the pebbles and perhaps holding it in my mouth as I swam back like a dog with a tennis ball. No, it was not the right time. It would have made a good story, I suppose, to have done it for the first time in the middle of a moving river, but I was glad we’d stopped because— ‘What I really want,’ she said, ‘is a bed.’